Oplu runs family office assistant recruitment for UHNW private offices that need the engine room to run cleanly: admin cadence, follow-through, and information hygiene without drama.
When the engine room is unreliable, senior leadership defaults to chasing updates instead of making decisions. This hire fixes that.
Oplu delivers controlled, private recruitment for offices where documentation, packs, renewals, and coordination across advisers and entities must be reliable. We recruit Family Office Assistants who serve the whole office, not just one individual.
Related roles
Hire when recurring work has outgrown informal tracking and reliability starts to matter more than flexibility.
Common triggers:
A family office can tolerate imperfect systems. It cannot tolerate unreliable ones. This role closes that gap.
| Role | Focus | Typical mandate | Key difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Family Office Assistant | Admin cadence, documentation, coordination | Office-wide follow-through | Serves the office, not one person |
| Executive Assistant | Executive workflow, diary, stakeholder gating | Principal's professional rhythm | Controls time and information flow |
| Personal Assistant | Lifestyle, travel, household coordination | Principal's personal continuity | Manages the private sphere |
| Chief of Staff | Delivery, decision cadence, cross-stakeholder | Operating rhythm across workstreams | Needs authority to close decisions |
The Family Office Assistant is closest to the Director of Administration in function, but operates at a more junior level with less governance authority. If you need someone to set standards and enforce them, that is a Director of Administration. If you need someone to maintain standards already set, that is a Family Office Assistant.
Family Office Assistants handle sensitive documents daily: board packs, adviser correspondence, family records, financial summaries. We assess information handling discipline at interview, not just admin speed. Access protocols, naming conventions, distribution habits, and what they do when something lands in the wrong inbox.
The tax adviser emails on Tuesday asking for three years of trust distribution summaries. The family lawyer needs a signed resolution from last quarter. The property manager wants confirmation of a service contract renewal. The Family Office Assistant pulls the summaries from the filing system in ten minutes, locates the signed resolution, confirms the renewal against the tracker, and sends all three before lunch. Nobody chased. Nobody waited.
It is 4pm on Friday and the Chief of Staff realises the Monday board pack is missing an updated cap table from the investment team. The Family Office Assistant contacts the analyst, confirms the version, checks formatting against previous packs, inserts it, and distributes the final version by end of day. The board meeting starts on time with clean materials.
An office runs on habits. The Family Office Assistant either builds good ones or inherits bad ones. Hire for the former.
Family Office Assistant compensation depends on scope, autonomy, and complexity. In our experience, UK packages typically range from £35,000 to £55,000, with more senior or multi-entity roles reaching higher. US packages typically range from $60,000 to $100,000, with offices managing over $2.5 billion in assets benchmarking higher. New York and California tend to sit 10-15% above the national average.
Key drivers include: number of entities and advisers coordinated, level of autonomy, confidentiality requirements, and whether the role includes any project management responsibilities.
Oplu shares detailed ranges and benchmarks once the brief is scoped.
Family Office Assistants are not looking for glamour. They are looking for a well-run office where their work matters and their reliability is noticed. They leave when the scope is undefined and they become the dumping ground for everything nobody else wants to do. They also leave when there is no progression path and no recognition that the role is the operational backbone of the office.
What motivates them is order. They want clean systems, a weekly rhythm they can own, and a manager who understands that admin discipline is skilled work, not filler. They want to know what the filing structure looks like, whether there is a task management system, and whether anyone will notice when deadlines are met versus when they are missed.
During interviews, they assess whether the office has any existing structure or whether they will be expected to build it from nothing with no authority. They listen for signals about team size, reporting lines, and whether the role has been filled before. If the previous person lasted six months, they want to know whether the problem was the hire or the environment.
Red flags include: a brief that lists responsibilities from five different roles, an office where the Family Office Assistant is expected to serve both the principal personally and the office operationally without boundaries, and any indication that the role is treated as the most junior seat in the room regardless of contribution. Strong candidates at this level know their worth and will not accept a role designed to fail.
We assess admin discipline, information handling, and cultural fit through practical exercises and scenario testing. We check how candidates manage competing deadlines, handle a misfiled document, and coordinate across multiple stakeholders with different communication styles.
Referencing validates reliability and discretion in previous roles, not just task lists.
What you receive
They run the admin cadence: action logs, follow-ups, meeting packs, renewals, expenses, and coordination across advisers and vendors. They are the operational backbone of a well-run office, serving the whole team rather than one individual.
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