Many of the biggest firms provide salary and rewards packages with long-term incentives, said Kim Sheehy, vice president of business administration at the Fidelity unit, which provides custody, brokerage, investments and reporting services to more than 150 single family office clients. Thirty-six percent of firms surveyed said they offer executives co- investment opportunities alongside the family, and about 17 percent provide carried interest, or a slice of the profits, in deals.

Family offices are attracting executives from other types of financial firms. MSD Capital, the office of billionaire Michael Dell, hired Douglas Londal in September to run its private equity investments. Londal was previously president at private equity firm New Mountain Capital. Ashvin Chhabra recently left as CIO of Bank of America Corp.’s Merrill Lynch Wealth Management to help run Euclidean Capital, the family office for hedge fund billionaire James Simons.


CIO Pay


Chhabra’s CIO peers, at family offices with more than $1 billion in assets under management, were paid a median $650,000 last year including salary, cash bonus and long-term incentives, Fidelity said. Chief operating officers at the largest family offices got $500,000 and CFOs earned $398,500.

CIOs at asset management firms and hedge funds have a median salary of $210,000 plus a bonus of $85,000, according to data compiled by Emolument.com. The London-based salary benchmarking site gathered pay on 67 CIOs in 2015 who are mainly based in the New York area.

CEO compensation declined in step with a family office’s assets, according to the Fidelity report, reaching a median of $300,000 for those below $250 million.

Families usually seek someone for a CEO or COO position who has worked at a family office before, but it’s often hard to extract a high-level family office executive from a stable firm, said Spencer Stuart’s Reid.

“Many of these executives become almost like a part of the family,” she said.


Rare Perks


Some of the perks for family members don’t extend to those managing their fortunes. About 6.5 percent of the offices gave executives equity in the family’s business and 4 percent let them use the private aircraft, Fidelity found.