Attorneys
You keep the drafting, the opinion on whether a company should be formed at all, the tax position, and the call on who falls inside Wyoming's definition of family. Once you and the board have decided there is a company, what we can usefully do is keep the minute book, the instrument file, and the dates those instruments set, and be the person your office calls when it needs something out of that file.
Please don't send a draft for us to "just look at," and don't put trust instruments in the contact form. If you want us in a meeting, it works better after you have already told the family what we are not going to do.
Wealth planners
If the instrument names you to direct the investments, that direction still runs to the trustee, which is the family's company, not to us. We record that the direction came in and that the company acted on it, and we reconcile the custodian's statements to that record. We do not have an investment platform, and we are not going to suggest that the family move the portfolio onto someone else's.
The question that actually matters for you is whether the document gives you that direction in the first place. That is a reading for counsel. We can tell you what is in the file. We cannot tell you what the clause means.
Family offices
A family office that already prepares the minutes, reconciles the custodian, and keeps up with distribution paperwork may not need us at all, and there is nothing wrong with that answer. An outside administrator tends to be useful when the office wants the trust company's file kept by someone who is not also the person deciding, or when a small group is spending its time on the company's calendar instead of on the work the family actually hired it to do.
Even then we do not become the office. We do not hire the staff, pay the household, or decide what the family does next. If you are already doing the administration well, keep doing it, and don't hire us to sit beside a process that is working.
Accountants
You prepare the returns. We keep the books of the company and of each trust in a form you can use, and we send you that package rather than leaving you to rebuild the year from custodian statements. We do not sign the return, we do not take a tax position, and we are not trying to take the engagement.
If something in the books does not tie, that is a question for you and for counsel. We will not "fix" a number so that it looks tidy.