Creative Artists Agency has quietly launched a family office service tailored for its high-profile clients. 

With clients ranging from Pedro Pascal to Joe Biden and Simone Biles, the Los Angeles-headquartered agency is widely considered to be the best talent agency out there. And in a world where having your own family office is not only very necessary for the wealthy but is considered a status symbol, CAA wants to be the first place its clients turn for guidance. The agency doesn't want to set up a family office for them, or manage their money, but to help them work out how to do both.

The agency has hired Julie Zorn, an industry veteran with decades of wealth management, family office and private wealth experience across the U.S., to lead the charge. Instead of developing a multifamily office or investment advisory service, Zorn's goal is an advisory platform to help this very specific breed of high-net-worth individual or family navigate what is, at its essence, a complex process.

For individuals who made their fortunes in private equity or finance, hiring and then working with a CIO to decide on a portfolio allocation may be intuitive. But for people who have spent their career on the baseball field, say, that learning curve may be steep. Learning how to build, scale, and govern a family office from scratch is no mean feat.

“We're really looking to serve as a trusted partner, a strategic advisor,” she said. “The family office is an industry, and families typically did not make their wealth in the family office industry, so it's really about helping guide and educate them on what that structure could and should look like based on their goals, needs, and future expectations.”

Every family is different and no two-family offices are the same. But those ex-finance families that operate in sports ownership or in Hollywood are, to borrow from Orwell, even more different than the others.

Zorn hopes to harness her career-long network to really understand what each family hopes to achieve and accomplish, which always depends on the make-up of the family itself and how it is structured and, of course, the complexity and scope of the mission, financial or otherwise, that they may have. She has worked with hundreds of families during her career already in similar situations and suggested that the crossover of talent and family advisory is more natural than outsiders would expect.

A longer version of this interview originally appeared in Officium, II's weekly family office newsletter. To receive more content just like this in your inbox, you can subscribe here.