Do this for five years and you'll learn half of what you need to know to run a family office.
From The Economist's 1843 Magazine, September 13:
Inside the elite college that’s reinventing Jeeves for the 21st century
In the frescoed ballroom of the International Butler Academy (TIBA) in the Netherlands, a gaggle of students shuffled into line. “You may have walked in a certain way for 25 years, but this is not how you do it as a butler,” said their etiquette instructor, addressed by everyone as Mr Munro. He ordered them to slot their arms behind wooden crosses, which they held against their spines – “torture devices” to correct posture. “Now relax!”
The suited students – five men and two women, aged from mid-20s to late-50s – primly waddled across the marble floor. Their crosses were removed and each was handed a book and a silver tray loaded with wine glasses. “This is harder for those that are follically challenged,” said Munro (who is bald). “But if the book is in the right position, I can do almost anything.” He performed a pirouette with a copy of Forum Kritische Psychologie, a German psychology journal, perched on his head. As his students tried to emulate him, the sounds of books slapping the floor and wine glasses smashing echoed around the hall.
As soon as they found their balance, Munro started hurling balls the size of grapefruit at them. The students swerved, with varying degrees of success. The aim of the exercise was not only to protect the glassware but maintain a calm demeanour under bombardment; although butlers are never centre stage, they are, ultimately, performers. “We are working for real people, but it’s still a show,” Munro, a former actor, told me. This was something that his students recognised as well. As one academy graduate put it to me later, “We’re only actors. It’s a role we play.”
Munro’s students were over halfway into a ten-week course at the academy, considered by many in the business to be the most intensive butler-training programme in the world. Students live in a 135-room former monastery and role-play at buttling full time. At a cost of €15,500 ($16,600), the diploma is an expression of commitment, both to a career as a butler and the archaic philosophy of service embodied by the school. Several students told me that the most important skill they gained was an instinct for “pre-emptive service”: knowing in advance what their principal, or employer, may want or require.
The precise theatrics of the job bolster the notion that a butler issomeone who can handle anything with poise and eleganceThat butlers still exist at all is somewhat surprising. The job, which is most associated with the Victorian and Edwardian eras, involves a skillset that seems at odds with the needs and tastes of modern rich households. A traditional English butler would prepare the dining room and serve at least three meals a day; he was responsible for the household china, table linen, wine cellar and managing the junior staff. He may also have acted as his principal’s valet, or personal dresser. (Befitting his status, the butler was, unlike other staff, permitted to use the front door.)
TIBA, which trains 30 to 50 new butlers a year, is a star institution among a small constellation of schools and recruiters that prepares people for this particular form of service. The booming economies of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are a source of great demand, according to staffing agencies; there, the mores of the European aristocracy are highly valued (British and German butlers can command annual salaries of $100,000-200,000). China, too, is home to a growing population of super-rich individuals, who seek high-end staff to match their luxury accommodations. Traditional butlers, schooled in the etiquette of the upper classes, can also help those newly arrived in Europe or America ingratiate themselves to an unfamiliar culture by acting as discreet guardians of good taste.
The precise theatrics of the job – which include wearing white gloves, being able to fold napkins in an array of flamboyant shapes and penning eloquent, last-minute birthday cards on behalf of their principal – bolster the notion that a butler is someone who can handle anything with poise and elegance.
In truth, many clients seem more attracted to this idealised vision of the butler than the skills customarily associated with it. Rich households, particularly in Western countries, now tend to have fewer staff, in part because they prefer to retain a close-knit circle of employees. As a result, the butler’s job description has broadened. Some clients have come to treat their butlers as a nanny-cum-chef-cum-chauffeur, rather than as a sommelier with a knack for buffing silver.
The enduring appeal of having a butler is partly due to the cultural legacy of Jeeves (who is in fact a valet) from P.G. Wodehouse’s novels. Jeeves’s commitment to his principal, Bertie Wooster – which manifests in everything from warding off Wooster’s hangovers with an egg-based concoction to drugging his enemies – is central to his allure. In “Very Good Jeeves”, Wooster conveys his gratitude: “‘Jeeves,’ I said – and I am not ashamed to confess that there was a spot of chokiness in the voice – ‘there is none like you, none.’”
It is not hard to understand why the nouveau riche would want to cement their status with the trappings of manor houses of yore – or why the rich in general would want an even-tempered, well-trained member of staff to attend to their every desire. But I wondered why people still aspire to become butlers. Bryan Boyle, a sociologist at Vrije University in Brussels who is conducting an ethnography of the profession, has studied the paradoxes behind the motivations for pursuing such a career. Butlers, he told me, are “the perfect social intermediary between rich and poor” – required to behave with absolute altruism while working at the apogee of the class hierarchy. When considering that butlers are required to be simultaneously visible and invisible – Jeeves, for example, is known to apparate into the room – one begins to regard them as almost ethereal beings, flitting between two worlds.
Compared with other positions someone might pursue among the super-rich, such as “house manager”, personal assistant or yacht crew member, becoming a butler requires esoteric knowledge and ritualised behaviour.
It requires someone to buy into the same fantasy as their employers – that their job is a calling, the pinnacle of service – even as it carries the financial and personal risks that come from entering an unregulated profession in which your career depends on the whims of a powerful individual. As one recruiter told me, butlers need “almost a demeaning attitude”....
....MUCH MORE
If interested see also:
February 2024
"Are You Fit to Be a Family Office CEO? Work on These Must-Have Qualities"
June 2019
"Superyachts, Mixing Drinks: The Truth About Family Office Jobs"
December 2017
"Family Offices as the Apex Of the New Butler Class"
March 2014
Family Office/Outside Managers Not Quite Cutting It? Maybe What You Need Is A Family Bank
And many, many more.
