You can afford a $10 million house but you’re treating household employment like hiring a babysitter off Craigslist. You’re shocked it’s not working out.
Wealthy families make specific, predictable mistakes when hiring household staff. Not because they’re bad people. Because they assume household employment works like corporate employment. It doesn’t.
At Seaside Staffing Company, we work with high-net-worth families in Los Angeles and across the country every day. The families who struggle with household staff aren’t struggling because they can’t afford good people. They’re struggling because money doesn’t fix fundamental misunderstandings about how this type of employment works.
Here’s what wealthy families consistently get wrong, and what it costs them in turnover, frustration, and household chaos.
Treating Household Staff Like Corporate Employees
This is the biggest mistake. You’re a CEO, a partner at a law firm, a successful entrepreneur. You know how to manage employees in a professional setting. So you apply those same principles to your house manager or private chef.
It doesn’t work.
Corporate employment has structure, hierarchy, HR departments, clear job descriptions, performance reviews, promotion paths. Household employment is intimate, personal, flexible, and doesn’t fit into corporate frameworks.
You can’t treat your estate manager like you’d treat a VP at your company. She’s not gunning for a promotion to Senior Vice President of Estate Management. There’s no org chart. There’s no formal performance review process. The relationship is fundamentally different.
Wealthy families try to professionalize household employment in ways that make it worse, not better. They create complicated employment contracts that cover every possible scenario. They implement formal review processes that feel absurd in a household setting. They try to establish reporting structures that don’t make sense when you have three people working in your home.
A family in Los Angeles’s Brentwood hired an estate manager and immediately tried to implement quarterly performance reviews with metrics and KPIs. The estate manager lasted six months. She felt like she was being managed by someone who’d never worked in a household before and didn’t understand the job. She was right.
The best household employment relationships are professional but personal. Structured but flexible. They have clear expectations but recognize that household work requires adaptability and judgment that doesn’t fit into corporate metrics.
Assuming Money Solves Everything
When you have money, you’re used to money solving problems. Need something done? Pay for it. Want the best? Pay more.
That logic doesn’t fully apply to household staff. Yes, compensation matters. But it’s not the only thing that matters, and past a certain point it’s not even the main thing.
We see wealthy families offer enormous salaries and then can’t understand why they’re still losing people. They assume if they pay enough, staff should be willing to tolerate anything. Bad boundaries, unreasonable hours, chaotic households, unclear expectations, disrespectful treatment.
An estate manager making $150,000 with terrible work-life balance and a family that treats her poorly will leave for a $130,000 job with a family that respects her. Every time.
At Seaside Staffing Company, we’ve had candidates turn down higher-paying positions because the family gave off bad vibes in the interview. Money doesn’t override everything else.
A family in Beverly Hills couldn’t keep a house manager for more than a year despite paying well above market rate. The problem wasn’t money. The problem was that both parents traveled constantly and expected the house manager to be available 24/7 with no notice. They texted at midnight, called during her days off, and never respected boundaries. No amount of money was worth it.
Money gets you in the door. Respect, clear expectations, reasonable boundaries, and professional treatment keep people there.
Expecting Blind Loyalty
Wealthy families often expect household staff to be deeply loyal to them personally. They want staff who prioritize the family above everything else, who’ll work weekends without complaint, who’ll drop personal plans when the family needs something.
This expectation is unreasonable and frankly weird.
Your house manager has her own life, her own family, her own priorities. She’s your employee, not your servant. She’s not personally devoted to you just because you pay her salary.
Yes, professional household staff take their work seriously. They care about doing a good job. They’re reliable and committed. But that’s different from the kind of loyalty some families expect, which borders on subservience.
We worked with a family in Los Angeles who got angry when their private chef took a vacation that overlapped with a dinner party they wanted to host. They felt betrayed. “How could she prioritize her vacation over us?”
Easily. Because she’s a person with a life who gave them three months notice about the vacation and they could have planned around it or hired temporary coverage.
Loyalty in household employment should be mutual. If you want staff to be reliable and committed, you need to be a reliable and committed employer. You need to respect their time off, honor your agreements, and treat them like professionals.
Expecting one-sided loyalty where staff sacrifice everything but employers give nothing creates resentment and turnover.
The “You’re Like Family” Problem
This is the phrase that makes experienced household staff cringe. “You’re like family to us!”
No, they’re not. They’re your employees.
Wealthy families say this with good intentions. They want staff to feel valued and included. But what it actually does is blur boundaries in ways that create problems.
When you tell your nanny she’s like family, you’re setting up confusing dynamics. Is she family or is she an employee? If she’s family, why are you paying her? If she’s an employee, why are you calling her family?
The “like family” thing gets used to justify asking for more than you should. “Can you work this weekend? You’re like family!” It gets used to avoid difficult conversations. “I don’t want to give formal feedback, we’re like family!”
It creates situations where staff feel obligated to say yes to things they should be able to decline. It makes professional boundaries fuzzy.
At Seaside Staffing Company, when we hear families say “our staff are like family,” we know there’s probably boundary confusion happening. And when staff tell us “the family says I’m like family to them,” we know they’re probably being asked to do things outside their job description.
A family in Pacific Palisades told their house manager she was like family. Then they started asking her to dog-sit when they traveled, run personal errands on weekends, and attend family events. She felt she couldn’t say no because they’d created this “family” dynamic. Eventually she quit because the boundaries had completely dissolved.
Your household staff are professionals doing a job. Treat them well, respect them, appreciate them. But don’t call them family when they’re not.
Boundary Confusion
Wealthy families often struggle with appropriate boundaries around household staff.
You’re not used to having employees in your private space. Corporate employees go to an office. Household employees work in your home, see you in your pajamas, know what’s in your refrigerator, hear your arguments.
The intimacy of the situation makes some families overcorrect in weird ways. They become overly familiar, sharing personal information staff don’t want to know. Or they become awkward and distant, treating staff like they’re invisible.
Both extremes are uncomfortable.
The boundary confusion goes both ways. Some wealthy families treat staff like friends, confiding in them about marital problems or business stress. Others treat them like furniture, talking about them in third person while they’re in the room.
A family in Los Angeles told their estate manager detailed information about their divorce, their financial struggles, their custody battle. The estate manager felt uncomfortable but didn’t know how to shut it down without seeming rude. She ended up as an unwilling therapist when she was just trying to do her job.
Another family in Malibu never spoke to their housekeeper directly. They’d leave notes or text her even when she was in the house. She felt dehumanized.
The right boundary is professional but warm. You can be friendly without being friends. You can be personable without being personal. You acknowledge staff as people, treat them with respect, and maintain appropriate professional distance.
Treating Staff Like Luxury Goods
Some wealthy families view household staff the same way they view their luxury cars or designer handbags. Status symbols to show off.
They hire staff partly for the optics. Having a private chef means you’re doing well. Having an estate manager means you’ve made it. It’s less about the actual work and more about what it signals.
This attitude is obvious to staff and it’s demeaning.
Your house manager knows when you’re introducing her to guests as a flex. Your private chef knows when you’re name-dropping that you have a “personal chef” to impress people. It’s gross.
We’ve had candidates turn down positions with very wealthy families because during the interview it was clear the family wanted staff as status symbols, not because they actually needed the help.
A family in Bel Air wanted an estate manager primarily so they could tell people they had one. They didn’t actually have enough work to justify the role. The estate manager they hired was bored, underutilized, and felt like a prop. She left after four months.
Household staff are professionals who make your life run better. They’re not accessories.
Ignoring Staff as Professionals
This is related to the luxury goods thing but slightly different.
Wealthy families sometimes don’t take household staff seriously as professionals. They think anyone can clean a house, cook a meal, watch kids. They don’t recognize the actual skill involved in professional household work.
An experienced estate manager has specialized knowledge about property management, vendor relationships, project coordination, household systems. That’s a professional skill set that takes years to develop.
A private chef with restaurant training and experience cooking for high-net-worth families has culinary expertise that goes way beyond making dinner.
A professional nanny with childhood development knowledge and years of experience is not the same as a teenage babysitter.
But some wealthy families don’t see the distinction. They hire experienced professionals and then micromanage them like they’re incompetent. They second-guess decisions, override expertise, and don’t trust their staff to do the job they were hired for.
At Seaside Staffing Company, we’ve seen wealthy families hire incredibly qualified estate managers and then question every single decision they make. Why did you choose that contractor? Why did you schedule maintenance that way? Why did you organize the garage like that?
If you hired someone for their expertise, let them use it. You can have preferences and give direction, but constantly undermining professional judgment is insulting and counterproductive.
A family in Manhattan Beach hired a house manager with fifteen years of experience in high-net-worth households. Then they questioned everything she did. She finally told them, “You can hire me for my expertise or you can micromanage me, but you can’t do both.” They didn’t change, so she quit.
Compensation Mistakes Unique to Wealthy Employers
Wealthy families make specific compensation errors that middle-class families don’t.
They’ll pay a huge salary but offer no benefits because they assume the salary is enough. Wrong. A house manager making $150,000 with no health insurance is worse off than one making $130,000 with full benefits.
They’ll nickel and dime on small things while being extravagant in other areas. They’ll spend $20,000 on a family vacation but refuse to give their estate manager a $2,000 bonus.
They’ll be inconsistent with bonuses and raises. Huge bonus one year, nothing the next, with no explanation. That creates insecurity and resentment.
They’ll pay well but take forever to process payroll because they’re disorganized. Professional staff need to be paid on time consistently. Wealthy families sometimes treat payroll casually because the money isn’t a big deal to them. It’s a big deal to staff.
At Seaside Staffing Company, we’ve worked with families who could easily afford generous compensation but created problems through carelessness. Forgetting to process payroll on time. Not setting up proper tax withholding. Making promises about bonuses and then not following through.
Money isn’t just about the amount. It’s about reliability, consistency, and following through on commitments.
Entitlement Issues
Some wealthy families just act entitled around staff. They expect staff to be grateful for the opportunity to work for them. They expect immediate availability. They expect perfection.
The entitlement shows up in small ways. Not saying please or thank you. Changing schedules last minute without apology. Asking staff to do things outside their role without asking if they’re willing.
It shows up in big ways. Treating staff rudely when they’re stressed. Blaming staff for things that aren’t their fault. Firing people capriciously.
A family in Los Angeles fired their house manager because she was sick for three days and they felt inconvenienced. That’s not professional employment, that’s entitlement.
Wealthy families sometimes forget that staff are doing them a service. Yes, it’s paid employment, but professional household staff have options. If you treat them poorly, they’ll leave.
The families who retain staff long-term are the ones who treat household employment as a professional relationship based on mutual respect, not a power dynamic based on who has more money.
Making Staff Complicit in Bad Behavior
This one’s specific but we see it enough that it needs to be said.
Some wealthy families expect staff to participate in or cover for behavior that’s unethical, illegal, or harmful. Lying to spouses about affairs. Hiding financial information during divorce. Enabling addiction. Covering up abuse.
Staff get put in impossible positions. Say something and lose their job. Stay silent and be complicit.
Professional household staff are not your accomplices. They’re not there to help you cheat, hide things, or break laws. Expecting them to do so is wrong and potentially illegal.
We’ve had candidates leave positions because they were being asked to do things they weren’t comfortable with. Lying about the employer’s whereabouts. Covering for problematic behavior. Witnessing things they felt obligated to report.
If you’re asking your staff to do anything that makes them morally or legally uncomfortable, you’re the problem.
The Control Problem
Wealthy people are often used to controlling everything in their lives. They’ve succeeded by being in charge, making decisions, directing others.
That control instinct doesn’t always translate well to household employment.
You can’t control household staff the way you control business employees. The relationship is too personal, too intimate, and too dependent on mutual respect.
Families who try to exert excessive control create resentment. They want to know exactly where staff are at all times. They monitor communications. They restrict autonomy. They create rules about every little thing.
An estate manager in Los Angeles quit because the family installed cameras everywhere and watched her constantly. Not for security purposes, just to monitor her work. She felt surveilled and didn’t trust them.
Professional staff need autonomy to do their jobs. If you’ve hired someone competent, let them work. Check-ins are fine. Constant monitoring is weird and counterproductive.
What Actually Works
So what do wealthy families who successfully employ household staff do differently?
They hire for fit, not just credentials. They pay well and provide good benefits. They set clear expectations from the beginning. They respect boundaries. They treat staff as professionals. They communicate directly and honestly. They’re consistent and reliable. They appreciate good work. They handle problems promptly and professionally.
They understand that household employment is a professional relationship that happens in a personal setting. That requires balancing professionalism with warmth, structure with flexibility, authority with respect.
At Seaside Staffing Company, the families who have stable, long-term household staff are the ones who figured this out. They have money, yes. But they also have emotional intelligence, respect for others, and understanding that employing people in your home requires more than just writing checks.
A family in Los Angeles has had the same estate manager for twelve years, the same housekeeper for eight years, and the same private chef for six years. They’re not perfect employers, but they’re good ones. They pay well, communicate clearly, respect boundaries, and treat their staff like the professionals they are.
That’s what works. Not throwing money at problems. Not treating staff like accessories or corporate employees or family members. Just basic professional respect combined with appropriate boundaries and fair compensation.
If you’re wealthy and struggling to keep household staff, the problem probably isn’t them. It’s you. And money won’t fix it until you fix the underlying misunderstandings about what this type of employment actually requires.
