Cherry Tree Family Office's (CTFO's) philosophy reflects the private family office experience of our professional team as well as our firm's commitment to building long lasting relationships with our client families. In order to position us as an advocate for our client families, it is our policy to be paid solely by our client families for our wealth counsel. As a firm, this means that we will not offer proprietary solutions to client families. We will structure relationships with third party providers to promote independence, separation of responsibilities, and transparency of fees. We are guided by the principles of private family offices with respect to guarding the privacy of our client families and protecting their interests in the marketplace. The marketplace is saturated with firms characterized as multi-family offices that ultimately intend to sell proprietary investment, banking or insurance products. We believe this strict adherence to our family office principles distinguishes CTFO from those firms.
CTFO is in the business of providing wealth counsel — specifically, we offer a service targeted to families of substantial wealth to assist them in building and managing their net worth. Because of our positioning as an advocate for our client families, we are often asked for advice in areas that extend beyond investment management to include legacy planning, tax planning, insurance planning, risk management, or business continuity planning. It is commonplace for our client families to respond to purveyors of financial products and services by saying, "Please contact my family office."
CTFO has a philosophical commitment to strategic open architecture, a framework for integrating optimal components into an overall wealth structure based strictly on the merit of each component. In executing a client family's wealth strategy, CTFO avoids utilizing any related or affiliated components. With this philosophical positioning, we encourage our client families to extend their definition of open architecture beyond investment product to include other areas of wealth counsel, specifically trust, custody, private banking, trading, and risk management. Our professional staff believes that an overall wealth strategy can be made more effective by assisting client families in understanding and managing the inherent conflicts of interest and providing access to the brightest financial minds through our network of relationships with Wall Street firms, investment managers, alternative strategies, private banks and risk management firms. We believe maintaining strict role fidelity among all functional components will greatly enhance the long-term efficacy of a family’s wealth strategy. |
