The start of Erin Hulse’s professional career was unfulfilling.
After college, she got a job doing taxes at an accounting firm in Chicago. She lasted a year. “I did not love that,” Hulse said caustically.
A recruiter found her a job in fund accounting at Bank of America, which was a better fit for her. Hulse supported a group making private-equity investments for clients, learning a lot about the process while handling capital calls, distributions, and other tasks. She worked there for almost five years until the financial crisis, when she and many others were laid off.
Hulse’s enthusiasm for Chicago had waned, so when a colleague from the bank asked if she would join him at the Indiana Public Retirement System (INPRS) to do fund accounting, she took the offer. Returning to her native Indianapolis was nice, but the bureaucratic public sector was a poor fit for the expeditious accountant. Hulse, often outspoken, said the government job “sucked.”
In 2010, Hulse unknowingly began her current career path at Archway, a growing fund administration company in Indianapolis, which, among its typical customers, found work with family offices. Unlike the bank or the government jobs, there were few opportunities to slack off. She was one of only about 20 employees and the clients and job were demanding. (SEI acquired Archway in 2017 and sold it earlier this year to the private equity firm Aquiline for $120 million.)
“I remember the first couple of days there, I was like, ‘I'm going to have to quit. There's no way. There's no way I'm going to figure out how to use this software.’ Obviously, I figured it out and it was fine,” Hulse said.
She became part of the short list of professionals with experience in helping family offices set up critical software for their operations, and in 2015, she started Deviate Consulting.
It was never Hulse’s plan for Deviate to employ as many as 20 people (including some part-time staff as needed) and be in the business of helping billionaires choose software. Initially, she was a lone professional for hire, assisting offices with setting up new general ledgers, investment performance reporting, and other software. But the opportunities for Deviate have proliferated during the past 10 years, as hundreds more single-family offices have been established in North America and existing ones try to improve.
“It just kind of evolved. Then we had five people, then we had seven people. And then I got to the point where I was finally able to hire a couple of non-revenue-producing people so that they could take on some of the other stuff; I didn't have to work 80 hours a week anymore,” Hulse said.
Deviate has done about 150 implementations for family offices. Clients typically have at least $500 million in assets, but the firm has also worked with those as small as $150 million and others responsible for billions of dollars in wealth. It charges clients hourly for implementations and ongoing back-office work, at rates that vary depending on the complexity of the work. Those take an average of five months to complete. Some take much longer than others; if an office is managing hundreds of different entities, that transition is done in phases.
Implementation work keeps the firm busy, but the project-based software selection is “just off the chain. That is our busiest piece of business,” Hulse said. Helping offices evaluate their needs, conduct due diligence on software, and make recommendations is highly needed now, as the number of software providers targeting family offices as clients has grown.
Neither Hulse nor Deviate owns or invests in any software companies used by family offices, and they do not receive any compensation or kickbacks related to their recommendations.
The growing ecosystem is great for family offices. “That gives the smaller family offices an option because they don't have to pay a hundred thousand dollars a year,” Hulse said.
The number of family offices is expected to continue growing, but there will never be very many. An expanding list of software companies is competing for the approximately 10,000 single-family offices expected to exist by 2030. (Although many of the software companies are also selling to independent wealth management firms, a far larger group of customers).
“I feel like there are still new firms starting all the time that people are introducing me to. In the next five years, maybe that slows down and then people start getting acquired or they fail. I don't know if people are just trying for the cash grab and they know that this is a popular space right now. There's so much noise. And, more than ever, people don't even know where to start,” Hulse said.
Every office has to weigh whether it wants a tried and tested solution that’s been around for years, which is likely improving more slowly, or try something new with greater uncertainty.
“There are new companies where, hey, maybe you want to invest in it, but you're going to be the Guinea pig. On the positive side, you're getting to build out the system,” Hulse said.
Regardless of which path they choose, Hulse continues to tell offices the same things she has for years. When it comes to swapping out their technology, they need to be serious about the task. “If you're not ready to be staffed up, spend the money, hire consultants, hire somebody internally to do this work and to focus on this work, you're going to fail and you're going to lose time and you're going to lose money, and you might lose employees if this thing drags on forever and they become miserable,” she said.
For family offices, “it's the longest sales cycle ever,” but that can make successful changes especially rewarding. At one office, 10 years passed between the first conversation about a new software and a huge shift finally happening, Hulse recalled.
“I will say, when they did, they took the advice of us, of the vendor, and they killed it. They had an awesome implementation. They were ready to go. They consulted with us. They knew what they needed. They listened to us. They knew what they were going to have to spend, and it was probably one of the biggest, most successful implementations that we've done because they were so engaged.”
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Other News
- At the beginning of every summer, big banks start publishing their annual reports about single-family offices. The reports are always similar to each other, but sometimes they have intriguing differences. Here’s an example: BNY Mellon’s 2025 report showed that offices were allocating 7% of their portfolios to cryptocurrencies and other digital assets — a significant portion compared to this year’s UBS report, which doesn’t mention the asset class a single time. That doesn’t mean none of the offices surveyed by UBS invest in crypto. Those allocations could be folded into another portfolio category in the UBS report, such as hedge funds or fund of funds.
- Bain & Company’s 2025 global private equity report says investors have cautiously exhaled, as interest rates and inflation have come down, economic growth remains stable (for now), and companies are selling for higher prices. But the same monkeys are on everyone’s backs. It’s been harder for asset managers to be able to sell companies and return capital to investors, and, in turn, their investors have less to reinvest in new funds. “The real culprit behind lackluster fundraising is a persistent liquidity situation for global limited partners (LPs). While exits grew, distributions as a portion of net asset value sank to the lowest rate in over a decade,” Hugh MacArthur, chairman of Bain’s global private equity practice, explained.
- Guggenheim Partners CEO Mark Walter bought the NBA’s Los Angeles Lakers for $10 billion, making it the most valuable sports franchise in the world. Jeanie Buss and her family have owned the Los Angeles Lakers since Jerry Buss bought the team in 1979. Walter also owns MLB’s Los Angeles Dodgers and is co-owner of Chelsea in the English Premier League, the WNBA’s Los Angeles Sparks, and the newly formed Cadillac Formula One team.
- The U.S. added more than 1,000 millionaires every day last year, bringing the total number of them to more than 24 million (more than Western Europe and Greater China combined), according to the 2025 UBS Global Wealth Report released this week.
- Never Say Goodbye.
- Touring the Gold Coast Mansions That Inspired ‘The Great Gatsby’.
Jobs
- The Siddle Family Office, a family office recently established in Sydney, Australia, is hiring an investment operations professional. This person will work closely with the COO and CIO to build new infrastructure and systems required to manage the office’s evolving in-house investment activities.
- Ballmer Group Philanthropy is hiring a communication manager to join it in Bellevue, Washington. This is “a key role in crafting communications that inform, inspire, and connect colleagues at all levels,” and the person will work closely with leadership. Additionally, this person will be a “hands-on content creator – crafting compelling copy, integrating AI tools to enhance storytelling, and producing content for web and digital platforms.”
- PEAK6 Co-Founders Jenny Just and Matt Hulsizer are hiring an executive assistant in Austin, Texas, to support them and the managing directors at the firm. The person will be responsible for high-level scheduling, meeting preparation, workflow organization, and coordinating travel and communication. They will work closely with two other personal assistants and the chief of staff. The posting has no compensation details.
Other Stuff
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I am...
- Trying to cope with the Oilers' loss to the NHL’s pre-eminent dirtbags.
- Celebrating my 5-year wedding anniversary by a pool in Tarrytown, New York, today and tomorrow. Cheers to me for marrying Steph, who is nicer, funnier, smarter, and better looking!
- Back in NYC, melting.
- Northeast Ohio later this month.
