The portfolio is institutional. The team is five people. The risk is key-person.
Most family offices are running books that look like an institutional fund on a team that fits in one room. Capital Refinery gives the small team the same governed operating loop — so the decision basis survives the next hire, the next departure, and the next generation.
Five risks small teams carry that institutional teams do not.
UBS reports that direct deals now account for the largest share of family office private market exposure, with most offices running these books on teams of fewer than ten investment professionals. The structure compresses the entire investment workflow into a handful of people. That is the strength — and it is the structural risk.
UBS Global Family Office Report, 2024
Signal → Scenario → Intervention → Output.
The same four-stage loop that runs for institutional PE and credit, applied to the family office reality: concentrated holdings, small teams, key-person risk, and a governance timeline measured in generations.
See pressure early
Know what needs attention across direct deals and fund commitments in one view.
Direct holdings and LP commitments live in the same structured record. The platform surfaces what is deteriorating, what decisions are stale, and what actions are overdue — without requiring a full-time monitoring team to produce the view.
Understand downside clearly
Run downside on the concentrated book without rebuilding the model.
Shock scenarios propagate across direct deals and fund exposures in the same pass. The family sees, on the positions they actually hold, where the risk is concentrated — before the quarterly GP update arrives.
Act in a governed workflow
Turn signal into structured action on a team of five.
When a holding trips the wire, the platform assigns action, tracks resolution, and records the decision. The workflow does not collapse when the one person who understood the deal is travelling or has moved on.
Defend the decision across generations
The institutional memory does not depend on the person who was in the room.
Every decision is recorded with its reasoning, its alternatives, and what the team knew at the time. When the next generation asks why a position was held, when an advisor asks what changed, the answer is already structured — not living in someone's head.
The research behind this.
- Same engine, five readersFamily offices benefit from the same engine that grades buy-side, sell-side, lender, and LP artifacts — single record, multiple readers.
- Verified Financial ArtifactsFingerprint + public verification URL + refusal discipline. The primitive that makes the artifact portable across investment partners.
- Decision quality vs decision outcomeWhy good decisions can have bad outcomes — and why the small-team family office especially needs the structural distinction.
- The Private Markets Decision Integrity GapThe 6-layer stack and the missing 7th — applied across PE, credit, and direct holdings.
- Your Data Room Dies at CloseWhy diligence infrastructure disconnects at the worst possible moment — and what it means for small teams.
Bring us a position.
A direct holding, an LP commitment, a co-invest. We'll show you the decision validity layer on the position you actually hold.