IMD Leading Your Family Office

Leading your Family Office is a five-day programme run by IMD, the business school in Lausanne, on its own campus. It is not a conference. It is executive education, with faculty, a curriculum, case studies and a cohort that stays together for the week, and it belongs in this directory because for many families it does the job a conference is supposed to do and does it better.

Who attends

The programme is built for the owners, future owners and principals of single family offices, and for the non-family executives who work for one family. IMD recommends that families attend as a team rather than sending one person, and says so explicitly: several generations, siblings, cousins and the senior non-family executives together.

That recommendation is the heart of it. The problems a family office has are rarely one person's to solve, and sending the chief executive alone to learn about governance leaves them explaining it to the family afterwards. Recent cohorts have averaged 48 years of age and eighteen years of experience, and have drawn nineteen nationalities across ten industries.

How access works

You apply through IMD rather than registering. The school selects the cohort, and describes it as a carefully chosen group of business-owning families facing similar issues, which is what makes the peer element work.

Tuition is published at CHF 12,400. That is more than most conference tickets and less than a week of consultancy, and it should be judged against the second of those rather than the first. Travel and accommodation in Lausanne are extra.

What attendees get

The curriculum runs through setting up and overseeing a single family office structure, preserving wealth and passing it between generations, family governance and how families communicate, planning business succession and handling liquidity events, developing roles for the next generation, and aligning what the family wants with what the office does.

Sessions are interactive and case-based rather than lectures, and the programme is led by IMD faculty who research this field rather than by practitioners selling services. Nobody in the room is trying to sell you anything, which is a rarer condition than it should be.

The trade against a conference is straightforward. A conference gives you two days, many speakers, a wide sweep of subjects and a large number of shallow contacts. This gives you five days, one faculty team, a structured curriculum and a small group of families you will know properly by the end. For an office that is being built, restructured or handed over, the second is usually the better use of the money.