Operating model redesign has shifted from an exceptional event to a recurring management discipline. McKinsey’s June 2025 survey of 757 senior executives at global companies found that two-thirds had redesigned their operating models within the previous two years, and half planned another redesign within the following two. A companion McKinsey survey of 2,000 executives across 16 sectors found that 79% of those redesigns were completed and implemented. The PwC 29th Annual Global CEO Survey, covering 4,454 CEOs across 95 countries, found that nearly four in ten say their company will not be viable in ten years if it stays on its current path. Operating model reinvention is the primary structural response.
These executives are leading the types of businesses family offices analyse, underwrite, and hold. The question is whether family offices are applying the same rigour to their own operations.
The cost pressure is tangible and rising. J.P. Morgan’s 2026 Global Family Office Report puts the average annual operating cost of a family office managing more than $1 billion at $6.6 million — up from $6.1 million in its 2024 edition. The Campden Wealth and AlTi Tiedemann Global Family Office Operational Excellence Report 2025 shows that operating costs average 61 basis points of AUM for smaller family offices, falling to 20 basis points for large ones. The scale effect is real, but it does not arrive automatically. The offices at the lower end of that cost range have not simply grown larger; they have built operating models that do not require proportional increases in headcount to handle proportional increases in complexity.
The Operating Model as Management Discipline
What the McKinsey and PwC data describes is not a response to a crisis. It is a recurring, deliberate practice. The companies in those surveys are redesigning their operating models because they have learned that the allocation of organisational capacity to different types of work requires active maintenance, not passive accumulation.
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The discipline rests on a specific distinction between work that requires human judgement and work that requires human execution. Judgement-intensive work (strategy, relationships, decisions under uncertainty, oversight of complex variables) stays with people. Execution-intensive work (data processing, reconciliation, report assembly, transaction logging) is routed to automated systems wherever possible. The allocation is not permanent. As McKinsey’s research documents, it is revisited as technology capabilities evolve and as the volume and complexity of operational tasks changes.
In business model transformations, technology amplifies both good and bad operations. McKinsey, Bain, and Gartner research consistently shows that 70 to 88% of business transformations fail to meet their objectives when technology is deployed into existing processes without first redesigning how work is organised. Organisations that implement technology first and design their operating model around it tend to replicate existing inefficiencies inside a more expensive system. With regards to investment management firms in particular, Deloitte Switzerland suggests that refining the target operating model should not be a one-time exercise but an ongoing process that keeps firms responsive to industry shifts.
The Family Office Reality
The median family office manages more than $1 billion in assets with 11 total staff, according to the UBS Global Family Office Report 2024. That figure covers investment professionals, operations, compliance, client service, and administration combined. Eleven people responsible for functions that a larger institution would support with purpose-built technology and documented process design at each layer.
The same Campden Wealth report confirmed that the pool of qualified candidates for critical roles continues to tighten, and that family offices frequently feel pressure to compromise on hires or scramble when key team members depart unexpectedly. The report describes the resulting dynamic explicitly as a “reactive approach.” It disrupts operations rather than building structural resilience.
The pattern is consistent with what McKinsey’s research documents across large businesses. Organisations that respond to capacity pressure by adding headcount without first asking whether the work itself is properly designed end up with higher fixed costs and the same structural constraints.
The Redesign Principle
Operational leverage does not mean fewer people. It means ensuring that the people a family office employs are deployed against work that actually requires them.
The starting point is a question most family offices have not formally asked: if every hour spent by every professional over the past month were mapped, what proportion of that time was spent on work requiring the judgement they were hired for? Reconciling custodian statements does not require a CIO. Assembling a performance report does not require a portfolio manager. Chasing missing transaction data does not require a senior investment analyst.
State Street’s 2024 Annual Report documents the institutional approach in practice: the firm accelerated its transition to a platform-based operating model in 2024, centralising and standardising key functions to enhance efficiency and interoperability across its business. The result included a documented increase in client satisfaction across multiple dimensions of service — not despite the operational redesign, but because of it. Operational leverage, pursued systematically, does not degrade service quality. It protects the professional capacity that delivers it.
The technology decisions follow from operating model clarity, not the other way around. A family office that knows precisely which operational tasks it wants to remove from its professionals’ workload will make fundamentally different technology choices than one looking for a platform that handles everything and hoping the time savings follow. As McKinsey notes, changing an asset management operating model after changing a technology platform is extremely costly and difficult.
From Operating Cost to Operating Leverage
Many family offices have accumulated processes, tools, and headcount incrementally. They have been responding to immediate capacity problems without stepping back to ask whether the capacity problem itself is the right problem to solve.
The publicly listed companies in most family office portfolios have been working on this question systematically. They have learned that treating the allocation of organisational capacity as a managed variable — not an outcome of hiring decisions — is the difference between scaling efficiently and scaling expensively. A family office that applies the same logic — asking not “do we have enough people?” but “are our people working on the right things?” — is already thinking differently about its own cost structure.
Purpose-built wealth technology solutions like the Altoo Wealth Platform automate high-volume, low-judgement operational tasks to make a redesigned operating model achievable.
Altoo automates data import and reconciliation across more than 3,500 custodian connections, handles data cleansing and validation as a standing service commitment rather than a user responsibility, and manages institutional account connections on behalf of the family office. Professional staff no longer have the bureaucratic burden of data entry and manual calculations. The technology handles the execution-intensive work and professionals are protected for the judgement-intensive work they were hired to do.
Contact us for a demonstration to see how the Altoo Wealth Platform can help your family office build an operating model to fit your ambitions.
