Everything people ask, answered plainly.

Circle 26 is the professional home for Lean Family Offices: the standard for how they are run, the method for building one, and a capped peer circle for the people who run them. We set the standard and equip our members to work to it.

No. We do not manage assets, take custody, sell products, or charge on assets. Your advisors stay yours; your money stays yours. What becomes yours is the office.

Not in the usual sense. A consultancy sells you its opinion by the hour. We publish a standard, teach a method, and — where a family wants it built rather than learned — build it once and hand it over. Success is your team running the office without us.

No, and that is deliberate. We keep the standard; your people run the office. For families with nobody to fill the coordination role, we offer a build service, limited to a few engagements a year.

Membership fees, the Wealth Clarity Session, and a small number of fixed-fee implementation engagements. That is the complete list — no basis points, no referral income, no product margin, no data monetisation.

Never. No fee, rebate or commission from any advisor, bank or provider we organise. Independence declared is a claim; independence built into the revenue model is a fact.

Senior practitioners who have built and run family office infrastructure — as directors, operators and engineers inside the structures themselves. Every engagement is led by them rather than delegated to junior staff.

A way of structuring and running complex family wealth without the cost of a full institution — the governance, registers and coordination of a family office, built once and owned by the family.

There is no threshold. The trigger is complexity, not capital: multiple entities, more than one jurisdiction, a bench of advisors nobody coordinates. That can happen at $50M or at $500M.

A virtual family office outsources the coordination function to a provider, who then owns the systems and the institutional memory. A Lean Family Office keeps coordination inside the family, and every artefact belongs to the family outright. Lean is a design philosophy; virtual is a delivery model.

Usually one to three. The internal core is one person — often the principal at first, later a chief of staff or family office manager — supported by fractional specialists rather than employees.

A staffed single family office runs to roughly $3 million a year, mostly personnel. A Lean Family Office costs the family's own coordination resource, whatever software they choose, and the specialists they already pay — an order of magnitude below a staffed office.

The Wealth Clarity Session as onboarding, the Lean Family Office Blueprint™ and its templates, the operating system, monthly sessions, and the Peer Circle.

One fixed annual fee per family office, covering three seats, with the facilitated Wealth Clarity Session included in year one. Renewal is lower. It is never linked to your assets or the size of your portfolio.

Because the coordination of a family office is rarely one person for long. A principal, whoever supports them, and one more. The seat belongs to the office, not to an individual.

Yes. Most offices send whoever runs the coordination day to day; many principals attend only the sessions where decisions are genuinely theirs.

Not yet, and we will not claim one before it exists. The standard comes first; a credential only means something once the practice behind it is proven.

At any renewal, and everything you have built stays yours — the workbook, the application, every template you have deployed. There is nothing to hand back.

Then the Wealth Clarity Session will show it, and where the genuine gaps are. Several members joined precisely to test what they had built against a standard. If the assessment shows your office is well governed, the report says so.

The free assessment is a five-minute self-assessment that scores what you report. The Wealth Clarity Session is a facilitated 90-minute assessment in which the scores are set by an assessor, based on what you describe, what you evidence, and what is notably absent.

Yes. It can be booked entirely on its own, and the fee is credited in full against membership or an implementation within 90 days.

A written report within seven days: a domain-by-domain assessment, your position against five archetypes, findings ranked by severity, anything urgent escalated, and a phased roadmap with an owner and an output for every action.

Then that is what the report says. Not yet is one of the five outcomes, and we would rather tell you informal governance still suits your complexity than sell you a structure you do not need.

No. The operating system holds the record — entities, advisors, obligations, decisions, documents — not live account feeds. It is the governance layer, not an aggregator.

On infrastructure the family controls: your own machine or a server you choose, in your own jurisdiction. Not in a Circle 26 tenancy.

You own it. Open formats, on infrastructure you control, working with or without us.

Yes. It is your system. Families regularly adapt registers and add their own fields — that is expected rather than discouraged.

Nothing payable to us. Whatever you choose to run it on is your own cost, and typically modest.

When you want the office professionalised now rather than learned — a dated event ahead, no capacity to build while the office keeps running, or a preference for it being done right the first time.

Usually more so. A team gives you capacity; implementation adds the standard, the architecture and the senior experience of having done it before. Your people run it afterwards.

A fixed fee against a defined scope, agreed before any work begins. Never a retainer, and never a percentage of assets. Fees are set by complexity — entities, jurisdictions, advisors, obligations — not by portfolio size.

The diagnosis takes two to three weeks. The governance stage runs about thirty days. The operating layer follows in eight to twelve weeks once the structure is settled.

Your team takes it over, with membership behind them — or Circle 26 holds the standard with you through Continuity. Many families use both.

With the free assessment. Five minutes, and an honest read on where your office stands before any conversation about cost or scope.

Often. The team is distributed across Singapore, London and Stockholm, and deployments are hosted in the family's own jurisdiction. Cross-border complexity is the norm rather than the exception.

Yes. Lawyers, accountants and investment advisors refer families whose coordination has outgrown what any single advisor can hold. We do not compete for their mandate — we make the family easier to advise.

We do not manage assets, take custody, sell products, or give tax or legal advice. We do not run your office day to day, and we do not stay indispensable.