Steigerwald, Gordon & Koch

The three named partners—Michael Steigerwald, Arthur Gordon, and Stefan Koch—govern investment decisions collectively. Each partner typically maintains direct relationship oversight for a subset of client families, with asset allocation and manager selection reviewed at the partnership level. The firm does not publish a dedicated CIO title, suggesting investment authority is distributed among the principals rather than concentrated in a single portfolio-management executive.

SGK relies on long-term relationships with institutional fund managers rather than placement-agent intermediaries or platform distribution. The firm conducts its own due diligence, evaluating GPs across public and private markets on factors beyond performance—including operational infrastructure, alignment of terms, and cultural fit with family capital. Because SGK does not operate a commingled fund, families can access individual managers at minimums that might otherwise be inaccessible without aggregation.

SGK operates as a multi-family office in function but retains structural characteristics more common among elite single-family offices. Each client family receives fully customized portfolio construction, consolidated reporting, and tax-coordination support without being blended into pooled investment vehicles. The partnership deliberately limits its client count to preserve this bespoke architecture, distinguishing it from scaled multi-family offices that standardize offerings across hundreds of families.

SGK accesses investments across the full lifecycle spectrum—early-stage venture capital, growth equity, buyout, and real asset development—primarily through commitments to external general partners rather than direct deal-making. The firm's public-market exposure includes both long-only equity and hedged strategies, allowing families to modulate liquidity profiles based on near-term cash needs and long-term return targets simultaneously.

SGK integrates estate-planning coordination, trust-structure oversight, and family-governance education into its core service model rather than treating them as ancillary referrals. The partnership works alongside each family's external counsel and tax advisors to ensure investment strategy aligns with generational transition timelines, including the gradual inclusion of rising-generation family members in portfolio discussions tailored to their financial fluency.

SGK does not publicly promote co-investment capabilities as a standalone feature, which distinguishes it from family offices that emphasize direct deal-by-deal participation. When co-investment opportunities arise through existing GP relationships, the firm evaluates them on a case-by-case basis for interested families, but it does not maintain a dedicated direct-investment team or proprietary deal-sourcing engine.

The Reston location reflects a deliberate preference for operating away from the competitive noise and cost structure of Manhattan or San Francisco. This geography allows the partnership to maintain lower overhead while serving families concentrated in the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast, though client relationships are not geographically constrained. The suburban Washington, D.C. location also places the firm near the legal and regulatory infrastructure relevant to trust and tax complexity without embedding it in a sales-driven wealth management corridor.