Zephyr Perspective

Setting up a family office is widely treated as a rite of passage for serious wealth. Running one, it turns out, is rather more like discovering that the rite comes with a standing monthly invoice. The cost of running a family office has surged between 2022 and 2026, driven by a ferocious talent market, mandatory cybersecurity spend, and an ever-expanding compliance perimeter. For principals in the $10 million to $100 million emerging segment, that invoice often looks worse than the returns it was meant to protect. The honest math, across North American benchmarks, runs roughly like this. A traditional single-family office typically consumes 0.5% to 1.5% of assets under management annually, and many arrangements cross 2.0% once external manager fees and bespoke family services are aggregated. At $25 million in assets, a 1.5% drag equals $375,000 per year, which quietly cancels a fair chunk of standard portfolio yield. At $1 billion, the same structure compresses to roughly 35 basis ...

On January 14, 2026, the White House imposed a 25% tariff on certain advanced AI chips, including examples such as Nvidia's H200 and AMD's MI325X, with carve-outs for U.S. data-centre uses and a handful of other applications. The short version of the AI chip tariff story for most small businesses runs like this. Direct hardware costs will rise if you were planning to buy GPU servers. Cloud AI bills may drift upward over the coming quarters. The years-long reshuffle of semiconductor supply chains between Taiwan, the U.S., and the rest of Asia has just been nudged along again. Panic-buying servers tomorrow morning will not help. The useful exercise is understanding which costs in your AI stack are exposed and which are insulated by the exemptions. What the AI chip tariff actually does The duty applies to a defined list of advanced AI accelerators, with the H200 and MI325X cited as headline examples. It is not a blanket tariff on semiconductors generally, which means cons...

There is a particular sort of telephone call that every honest advisor dreads. A founder who has just sold a software company for $28 million rings to announce, with the quiet satisfaction of someone ordering a bespoke suit, that she is establishing her family office. Offices have been viewed, a CIO candidate from a tier-one bank has been shortlisted, letterhead is in design. The problem, which she cannot yet see, is that she has roughly a decade of negative real returns ahead of her before the structure pays for itself, if it ever does. The single family office vs multi-family office decision is the most consequential structural call a newly liquid family will make, and the most commonly botched. Between $10 million and $100 million in investable wealth, the empirical answer is almost always the same: you do not need a single family office. You probably need a multi-family office, a virtual family office, or some hybrid of the two. This article explains why, what the models actual...

The Federal Reserve did something unusual today. It cut rates by 25 basis points, which nobody much argued with, and then spent the next hour telling markets to stop expecting more of them. The dot plot shifted. Seven officials now want zero cuts in 2026. Chair Powell used the phrase "well positioned to wait and see" with the careful emphasis of a man trying to be heard over a room of people making plans he would prefer they did not make. For family offices that have watched three quarter-point cuts land in four months, the important question is no longer what the Fed just did. It is what the Fed has just told you about 2026, and whether your family office investment strategy reflects that message or still reflects the one markets were writing in September. When we wrote about the September cut , the framing was a beginning. This is not. A 9-3 vote, three dissents running in both directions, a median projection of one 2026 cut against market pricing of three, and a Chair ...

There is a particular species of founder who will happily sign off on a $200,000 salary for a new VP of Operations, complete with benefits, equity, and an onboarding period measured in geological time, yet recoil at a $20,000 project fee for an external advisor who could diagnose the same problem in six weeks. If you are asking yourself "do I need a business consultant," you are already past the point of idle curiosity.  The question almost always surfaces when something structural has started to crack: revenue has flatlined, margins are compressing, or the founder's calendar has become the single point of failure for every decision in the building. The short answer is that external advisory is warranted when your growth problems have outgrown your internal expertise and you can articulate a specific outcome you need help achieving. The longer answer involves understanding which symptoms actually signal a structural ceiling, what the intervention costs relative to the alt...