The Private Reserve Office.
The client-service architecture of Hard Asset Reserve. Four tiers of engagement, directly led by the founding partners, scaled to allocation size and complexity — and built around a single deliverable, the reviewed Physical Reserve Strategy Brief.
What the Office is
A client-service apparatus organized around the brief.
The four tiers
Engagement depth, shaped by allocation and complexity.
Service areas
The domains of work the Office covers.
Who you work with
Founder-led. Specific about scope.
Who this is for
And, plainly, who it is not.
Engagement economics
Two transparent line items, brief included. Full pricing on /pricing.
Frequently asked
Tiers, minimums, advisor coordination, custody.
A client-service apparatus, organized around the brief.
The Private Reserve Office is how Hard Asset Reserve is organized to serve clients — the practice apparatus through which every engagement runs. Intake, review, consultation, implementation, and ongoing stewardship are the work; the brief is the document under which it runs.
The deliverable is the reviewed Physical Reserve Strategy Brief. The mode of work is founder-led, documentary, and deliberately paced. The intended relationship is multi-year — a reserve built with intent needs stewardship, not a transaction and a handshake.
Engagement depth, shaped by the work.
Every tier begins with the same reviewed Strategy Brief. What differs is the depth of implementation, the reach of the custody architecture, and the cadence of ongoing stewardship. Allocation size is the primary input; complexity is the secondary one.
Foundation Reserve
$250K – $499K reserve allocation
The same architecture in a streamlined envelope.
- Private Reserve Strategy Intake
- Reviewed Physical Reserve Strategy Brief
- Single-facility custody default at the Utah-based Precious Metals Vault; IDS or Brinks available on request
- Purchase executed on your behalf; titling named in writing for your counsel
- First-year written review
Households building their first directly-titled physical precious-metals reserve at $250K–$499K. The engagement grows into Strategic Reserve when the allocation crosses $500K — no re-start.
Engagement plus a first-year review. Annual review thereafter.
Strategic Reserve
$500K – $1M reserve allocation
Reviewed strategy with hands-on implementation coordination.
- Private Reserve Strategy Intake
- Reviewed Physical Reserve Strategy Brief
- Purchase executed on your behalf; custody setup and titling coordinated end-to-end
- Coordination with your financial advisor on request
- First-year written review
Investors building a meaningful reserve layer within an existing portfolio. Custody and titling choices begin to matter.
Engagement plus a first-year review. Annual review thereafter.
Private Reserve
$1M – $5M reserve allocation
Private-client engagement with architectural depth.
- All items in Strategic Reserve
- Custody architecture review across multiple storage modes and depositories
- Entity and trust-level titling structures (in coordination with your counsel)
- Exit-path planning across multiple counterparties
- Annual reserve review and documentation refresh
Investors for whom the reserve is a distinct portfolio layer rather than a sleeve — custody, depository selection, and titling become first-class decisions.
Ongoing stewardship. Annual review plus ad-hoc working sessions as circumstances change.
Family Reserve
Above $5M reserve allocation
Multi-entity, multi-generational reserve architecture.
- All items in Private Reserve
- Multi-entity and multi-depository custody design
- Continuity planning across generations and fiduciaries
- Coordination with family office, legal, and tax counsel
- Dedicated review cadence on a schedule set with the family
Families and family offices treating the reserve as a structural, intergenerational asset — with governance and continuity considerations on the table from the start.
Long-run stewardship. Review cadence set with the family; typically semi-annual plus trigger-based reviews.
Six domains, named in the brief.
Reserve work spans six domains the brief addresses individually: reserve strategy · custody architecture · documentation and titling · execution and logistics · ongoing stewardship · exit coordination. Not every engagement touches all six — the brief names the ones that apply and sets the decisions within them.
Three of the six have dedicated public-facing diligence pages for the advisor read: Custody, Documentation & Insurance · Titling & Ownership · Exit Architecture.
For the advisor team reading alongside the client: For Attorneys · For CPAs · For Trustees. The operational rhythm of year one is on Engagement Timeline.
The standing rules of the Office are on Standards of Practice; the architectural lane the Office occupies is mapped against the adjacent categories on The Comparison Class.
Founder-led, across every tier.
At this stage of the firm, engagements are led directly by the founding partners. The brief is written and reviewed by the same hands that carry it through the consultation and the implementation. Continuity across intake, brief, consultation, and ongoing review is the point.
Your financial advisor, attorney, and tax professional can be invited into the consultation; the brief is prepared to be read alongside them. Titling and tax structures are framed as questions for your counsel to resolve.
A full introduction to the founding partners is on the About page.
A reserve built with intent needs stewardship, not a handshake.
Clarity, in both directions.
The Office serves a specific kind of client, working on a specific kind of problem. Naming both sides of the fit is more useful than implying universal applicability.
- Investors who have already decided the reserve layer is a different job than the exposure layer.
- Portfolios where custody architecture and titling actually matter.
- Families and family offices thinking in multi-decade time horizons.
- Clients who want the reasoning on the page and the decisions kept close.
- Anyone comparing a physical reserve strategy to an ETF position for a specific, sized allocation.
- Traders seeking short-dated tactical gold or silver exposure.
- Clients seeking transactional product quotes — the Office does not operate that way.
- Anyone seeking tax preparation, portfolio management, or fiduciary account services. Those belong with the professionals who already serve you.
- Requests for speculative products, leveraged structures, or digital-asset strategies.
Two transparent line items. The brief is included.
A competitive wholesale spread on the metal (buy and sell, by format), plus a vaulting rate at the chosen facility (negotiated at company level, passed through to the client without markup). The reviewed Strategy Brief and end-to-end implementation are included with every qualified engagement.
The full pricing model — published spread ranges by format, vaulting rates, worked examples at $500K / $1.25M / $5M+, and the architectural commitments table — lives canonically on the Pricing page.
The questions that come up.
- How is the right tier determined?
- The tier follows the allocation size at engagement and the complexity of the situation. The intake captures both, and the reviewed brief names the tier on the first page. Movement between tiers is straightforward as allocations and needs evolve — the structure is designed to accommodate growth without re-starting the relationship.
- Are the allocation ranges hard thresholds?
- Directionally yes. The $250K floor at Foundation Reserve preserves the minimum scale at which the architectural treatment is the same brief at full depth. The upper boundaries reflect where the work meaningfully changes — a $5M family reserve involves governance and continuity questions that a $1M strategic reserve does not. Edge cases are handled case-by-case.
- Is the Office a registered investment adviser or fiduciary?
- No. The Private Reserve Office provides strategic and implementation services for physical precious-metals reserves. It is not an investment adviser, broker-dealer, fiduciary, or tax professional, and does not replace those relationships. The brief is designed to be read alongside them.
- Where is custody actually held?
- Custody runs at one of three US-domestic institutional depositories on the Office's panel: the Utah-based Precious Metals Vault, IDS, and Brinks. The brief names the facility (or facilities, where multi-depository splits are appropriate to scale) and the operational tradeoffs — withdrawal terms, rate, operational responsiveness — before any metal is purchased. The client selects from the panel.
- What about below the $250K minimum?
- Intake is still accepted, and the firm responds — the response is a lighter-touch educational reply rather than the full Strategy Brief workflow. The $250K Foundation Reserve floor preserves the depth of the core engagement; intakes below it are not discarded.
Know the exit before you enter.
A reserve exists when the document does.
The intake captures your situation. The reviewed brief follows. The private consultation comes after you have had time with it. Until the brief, the bars, and the depository agreement exist together, the household has the structural argument but not the structural position.
The metal is yours — not a fund’s, not a claim on any counterparty.
Reviewed brief delivered in five business days of intake. The engagement structure is named in the brief — you proceed only if both fit your situation.
The Office accepts a small number of new engagements each quarter. Selection is by considered fit, not by pace of inbound.