Oplu runs family office personal assistant recruitment for UHNW principals and private offices where privacy, continuity, and lifestyle execution matter.
In this market, CVs converge quickly. What separates the best is judgement under pressure and pace without noise.
Oplu runs discreet, controlled searches for PAs in Family Offices, including replacement and transition hires where confidentiality is non-negotiable. We recruit office-based, hybrid, travelling, and rota PAs internationally.
Related roles
Hire when the principal's time and privacy are being lost to coordination, follow-ups, and avoidable interruptions.
Typical triggers:
If you want out-of-hours responsiveness, define escalation rules, not vague expectations. "Flexible hours" means something different to every candidate. If you cannot define what urgent means at 10pm on a Saturday, you will lose this hire within a year.
| Role | Focus | Typical mandate | Key difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Personal Assistant | Lifestyle, travel, household coordination | Principal's personal continuity | Manages the private sphere |
| Executive Assistant | Executive workflow, diary, stakeholder gating | Principal's professional rhythm | Controls time and information flow |
| Chief of Staff | Delivery, decision cadence, cross-stakeholder | Operating rhythm across workstreams | Needs authority to close decisions |
If you need both EA and PA coverage, we usually recommend splitting the lanes or designing a layered model. Merging both into one hire works only when the scope is genuinely small enough for one person. Most principals underestimate the hours.
PA roles vary widely: office-based, hybrid, travelling, rota, or 24/7 coverage. We define working pattern and boundaries in the brief because the right candidate for a Monday-to-Friday office PA is rarely the right candidate for a travelling rota PA. These are different people with different motivations.
We scope PA hires by separating personal support, household coordination, and any office overlap. Then we define authority and information boundaries in each lane. Most mis-hires happen when coverage is implied rather than agreed, especially across travel, time zones, and out-of-hours requests.
The family is relocating from London to the South of France for the summer. Four properties need opening. The children's school transport changes. Vehicles need moving. The insurance broker needs updated addresses. Medical registrations need transferring. The dog's vet records need forwarding. The PA has a checklist from last year, updated and started three weeks early. The family arrives and everything works.
The principal's wife asks the PA to book a restaurant for twelve on Saturday. Two guests have dietary requirements. One guest is someone the principal is in litigation with, but the wife does not know. The PA flags the conflict discreetly to the principal, suggests an alternative seating arrangement, and handles it without involving the wife or creating a scene.
A PA who cannot hold a boundary under pressure will eventually lose the principal's trust. That is the skill that matters most and the hardest to interview for.
PA compensation in a family office depends on coverage, travel, authority, and working pattern. In our experience, UK packages typically range from £40,000 to £75,000 for office-based PAs, with travelling and rota PAs reaching significantly higher depending on hours and complexity. We have placed PAs at £180,000 in roles with extensive travel and round-the-clock coverage. US packages typically range from $80,000 to $250,000 in UHNW environments, with New York, the Hamptons, and the Bay Area benchmarking at the upper end. In senior support roles, salary follows contribution, not a career ladder. A PA who has spent five years with a principal and holds every relationship is worth far more than the open market would pay. They know it. So does the principal. That is why these roles rarely come to market.
The hours in these roles are long and there is no overtime structure. The salary covers everything. Candidates who thrive know this before they accept.
Key drivers include: number of residences, travel frequency, out-of-hours expectations, rota structure, and whether the PA has any household coordination authority.
Oplu shares detailed ranges and benchmarks once the brief is scoped.
Strong PAs in UHNW environments do not leave for salary. They leave because the boundaries disappeared. The role that started as personal support absorbed household management, office admin, childcare logistics, and vendor oversight until every part was done poorly and nothing was protected. The best PAs have seen this pattern and they interview for structure as much as chemistry.
What keeps them is a principal who respects the role. That means defined lanes, realistic coverage hours, and acknowledgment that the PA cannot be the single point of failure for an entire household, family, and office. They want to know what happens when the scope expands, whether it gets resourced or just absorbed.
During interviews, they assess the principal's communication style directly. A PA who thrives on structured briefs will fail with a principal who sends half-finished voice notes at 11pm. A PA who works well in that chaos will feel stifled by rigid processes. Fit here is not about warmth. It is about operating rhythm.
Red flags they watch for: a brief that describes one role but the interview reveals three. A principal who cannot describe what the previous PA did without contradicting themselves. An office where the PA reports to the Chief of Staff on paper but takes instructions from the spouse, the nanny, and the accountant in practice. Any sign that loyalty is expected but authority is withheld.
We assess working style fit alongside skills: pace, communication preferences, boundary handling, and resilience under pressure. We test through realistic scenarios, not competency grids. Travel disruption, conflicting family requests, a vendor issue with privacy implications.
Referencing is handled discreetly, validating how candidates managed sensitive personal information, what happened when expectations shifted, and how they maintained boundaries under social pressure.
What you receive
They own the principal's personal rhythm: diary, travel, household coordination, personal administration, and vendor management. Scope varies, but the common thread is privacy, continuity, and calm execution across the principal's private life.
13 min
8 min
9 min