Family offices are paying executive assistants up to $190,000 a year as demand for talent spikes

 Family offices are paying top dollar to compete with Wall Street, not only for C-suite roles but also for administrative positions.

Executive assistants can command base salaries of as much as $190,000 at family offices with billions in assets.

These well-paid assistants are expected to go above and beyond for these ultra-rich employers.

Good help is hard to find. Family offices, the private investment firms of the ultra-wealthy, are increasingly willing to pay extra for it.

The talent war between family offices and Wall Street has driven up salaries not only for top investment roles but also for administrative staff. While compensation depends on the size and scope of the family office, executive assistants now often command base salaries exceeding $140,000, according to three recruiters who spoke to CNBC. This is well above the industry average of $81,500 for a senior executive assistant post, according to staffing firm Robert Half.

There are about 8,000 single-family offices worldwide, with nearly 3,200 in North America, according to a survey by Deloitte Private. Family office administration roles can come with sweeping responsibilities well beyond typical duties, such as compiling expense reports and managing correspondence. Mandates to organize travel for the entire family or coordinate household staff at multiple personal residences, for example, are frequently fair game. 

“You will have to do anything for this person, and you don’t know what that will be,” said Jonathan Hova, recruiter and senior vice president at Career Group. “If a pipe bursts in Southampton in January, that’s where you’re going.”

The median base salary for executive assistants at family offices is $100,048, according to a survey of 436 family offices and family investment firms by Botoff Consulting.

The larger the family office the more executive assistants can expect to be paid. At family offices with at least $2.5 billion in assets under management, that median pay is about 35% higher, the survey found.

That’s before annual bonuses, which typically range from 10% to 20% of the base salary, according to Botoff.

The top 10% of administrative assistants at family offices regardless of size make $188,800 with a 20% bonus, according to the survey. Among the largest family offices, which are more likely to use long-term incentive plans, the top 10% of assistants can see all-in compensation of up to $240,000.

“Certainly for some families there is going to be some sticker shock,” said Trish Botoff, founder and managing principal of Botoff Consulting. “But I think they also find that when they can control services that are being provided, how it’s being done, who it’s being done by, they’re much happier with the results they get.”

Executive assistants to family offices are often required to travel with the executives they support, both on personal and professional trips. 

Recruiter Dawn Faktor Pincus is looking to hire an executive assistant who will travel with the family office principal at least once a month, including on holidays. She estimated the total compensation for the role would top $200,000 between a $170,000 base salary, travel pay and sign-on and yearly bonuses.

The travel and time commitment are just part of why the role pays so much, said Faktor Pincus, a senior recruiter at Howard-Sloan Search. These ultra-rich employers are often picky, desiring candidates with top-tier or Ivy League degrees or previous experience working with high-net-worth individuals, which comes at a premium, she said. For one family office seeking an executive assistant with a creative background, she placed a graduate of a prestigious university who was an aspiring novelist.

“It’s a small pool,” Faktor Pincus said. 

Most of these family offices seek at least five years of related experience, with some requiring at least eight to 10 years due to the complexity of the role, according to recruiter Fira Yagyaev of Larson Maddox.

“They are really in the weeds of what the family experiences day to day so it is probably one of the most crucial hires,” said Yagyaev, head of wealth management, trust and family office services at the recruiting agency.

At the same time, these accomplished assistants are expected to take on any task, big or small, without complaint. Hova said executive assistants can expect at least 10% of their work to verge on personal assistant duties.

“It is always a service role,” he said.

Plus, the work comes with thorny personalities, said Faktor Pincus. 

“A lot of times the ultra-high-net-worth individuals could be difficult,” she said. “People don’t become as successful as they are by being so nice and sweet.”

His hotel chain is worth over $200 million!

 Growing up, Ho Kwon Ping didn’t think he’d become a businessman, let alone a hotel tycoon.

“I had not always wanted to be an entrepreneur,” he told CNBC Make It. “It’s just that the few times where I started working for other people, it didn’t really work ... I’m quite individualistic. I became an entrepreneur more by the lack of other avenues.” 

Today, the 72-year-old is the founder and executive chairman of Banyan Group, a hospitality company with a portfolio of 12 global brands, more than 80 hotels and resorts, along with spas, galleries and residences spread across more than 20 countries.

The company, which is listed on the Singapore Stock Exchange, brought in about $328 million Singapore dollars (about $242 million) in revenue in 2023. Banyan Group has a market capitalization of SG$300 million, according to LSEG data.

The formative years

Ho shared something about himself that some may find surprising: He was jailed in his youth.

He said his early life was largely defined by a strong zeal for social activism.

While working toward his undergraduate degree at Stanford University in the early 1970s, he was an outspoken student activist against the Vietnam War (also called the “American War” in Vietnam).

He joined other protests on campus — notably, one against American inventor and physicist William Shockley, which ultimately got him suspended from the institution.

“I was thrown out because of my attending with the Black Students Union, a protest they had against a guy called William Shockley, who won the Nobel Prize for creating semiconductors, but who also had a strange view about eugenics. He wrote several books saying that Blacks should be sterilized,” said Ho.

As a result, Ho was tried in a campus judicial panel and found guilty of suppressing academic freedom, thus leading to his suspension from the university. Subsequently, he decided to leave Stanford and returned to Singapore, where he completed his national service and restarted his university studies.

“I had to start from zero and it was really boring, so I started writing as a freelance journalist [for] a now-defunct magazine called Far Eastern Economic Review,” he said. “I started writing about Singapore politics, which the government didn’t like. So, I got jailed under the Internal Security Act for being pro-Communist.”

That was in 1977, and he was put into solitary confinement during his two-month prison sentence — a time he describes as being “scary, lonely, depressing and reflective.”

After his release, Ho rejoined the magazine as a journalist and moved to Hong Kong with his wife, Claire Chiang. The newlyweds moved to a small fishing village on Lamma Island there called Yung Shue Wan, which translates to “Banyan Tree Bay.”

“I wasn’t paid very well, so I couldn’t afford to live on Hong Kong Island or Kowloon ... so we had no choice but to live on Lamma Island,” Ho said. “Although we were not rich ... we had three very idyllic years there.”

Ho was born in Hong Kong and spent most of his childhood and adolescence growing up in Thailand before moving to Singapore. His father, Ho Rih Hwa, was a businessman who co-founded the Thai Wah Public Company and headed the Wah Chang Group, conglomerates with operations across Asia.

“Although my parents were pretty well off, I’ve always been a bit rebellious and wanted to be independent and so on,” he said.

An accidental businessman

In 1981, Ho’s father had a stroke. As the eldest son, Ho assumed the responsibility of taking over the family business.

“That business was a real microcosm of overseas Chinese businesses, meaning a jack of all trades but master of none,” said Ho. “We had about 10 to 12 different businesses from construction to contract manufacturing of televisions ... even Adidas shoes, and so on.”

After several major failures and lessons in running the family business, Ho had an epiphany — rather than running a “hodgepodge of businesses,” he wanted to focus on building his own brand.

“I decided then that contract manufacturing is not a long-term solution. You have to own the customer, and you could only do so by owning a brand or owning a technology, and I’m not a technologist, so I decided we had to own a brand,” he said.

When the ‘lightbulb went off’

The stars aligned when one day in 1984, Ho stumbled upon a vast piece of coastal land in Bang Tao Bay in Phuket, Thailand. He decided to purchase the stretch of over 550 acres, which turned out to be an abandoned tin mine, according to an official company statement.

After years of restoration, Ho worked alongside his wife and his brother — who is an architect — to design and develop several hotels and resorts on the property. Laguna Phuket, Asia’s first destination integrated resort, was opened in 1987, according to the statement.

“We designed the first hotel, and we managed to get a Thai company to manage it. A second hotel — Sheraton managed it, and third and fourth and so on,” said Ho. “And then the last piece of land had no beach [so] nobody wanted to manage it.”

“That was when the lightbulb went off, and I said: Well, since nobody wants to manage it ... why don’t we start our own brand?”

To make up for the lack of a beach, Ho decided to build private villas with a pool for each.

“This was 30 years ago, so the notion of an ‘all-pool villa’ hotel didn’t exist ... we’ve also pioneered the ‘tropical spa,’” he said.

In 1994, the group’s flagship luxury resort “Banyan Tree Phuket” opened its doors, including the first Banyan Tree Spa — a name inspired by the blissful years Ho spent with his wife in Hong Kong’s Banyan Tree Bay.

“Innovation doesn’t drop from the sky ... it was a response to a need,” he said.

In 2006, Banyan Tree Holdings Limited debuted on the Singapore Stock Exchange, and in 2024, Banyan Group was launched as an umbrella brand for the multi-branded portfolio, according to a company statement.

“People have asked me whether I sold out or not, and I would say: ‘No, I’ve grown up. The kinds of things I was doing, you can’t keep doing forever. You’ll go to jail permanently, and also you’re not effective,’” said Ho. “But what we wanted to do in terms of social change, I think we’re actually doing through Banyan Tree.”