What high-net-worth private fertility clients truly need
There is a question that the fertility industry rarely asks.
Not "what does a surrogacy journey involve?" — that question has been answered, at length, by agencies, clinics, and legal professionals across the world.
The question that remains largely unanswered is this: what does a private client — one accustomed to the highest standards of professional advice in every other area of their life — actually need from a fertility journey?
The answer is not simply a better version of what standard agencies offer. It is something structurally different.
Why Standard Surrogacy Agencies Are Not Designed for Private Clients
Most surrogacy agencies were built to serve volume. They operate with case managers handling multiple journeys simultaneously, standardised matching processes, and communication structures designed for efficiency rather than discretion.
This model serves many intended parents well. But for a private client — a family with complex cross-border legal structures, significant privacy requirements, existing professional advisers, or a level of expectation formed by decades of bespoke service — the standard model creates friction at precisely the moments when friction is most costly.
The challenge is not access to expertise. Fertility clinics, reproductive attorneys, embryology laboratories, and psychological specialists all exist at the highest level. The challenge is bringing that expertise together — coherently, continuously, and in a way that protects the family's interests at every stage.
That is a different problem. And it requires a different kind of solution.
What IMA ART Observes Across Private Client Fertility Journeys
In accompanying private clients through fertility and surrogacy journeys, IMA ART has identified five qualities that consistently define what these families need — not as fixed categories, but as dimensions of a standard that the most sophisticated intended parents bring to every significant professional relationship in their lives.
These qualities rarely present in isolation. What IMA ART observes, across the range of journeys it accompanies, is that most private clients reflect several of them — and that the most complex engagements draw on all five simultaneously.
1. The Ability to Delegate — Without Losing Oversight
Private clients are not passive. They are, in most cases, individuals who have built successful lives partly by knowing when to delegate and who to trust.
When they enter a fertility journey, they do not want to become their own project managers. A fertility journey — particularly one involving surrogacy, donor conception, or international coordination — involves a medical team, a legal team, psychological professionals, insurance specialists, escrow management, and logistical coordination across multiple time zones and jurisdictions. The administrative and coordination burden alone can be significant.
What a private client needs is a single principal relationship — someone who holds the full picture, coordinates the professionals involved, and maintains continuity across every stage of the journey. Not a case manager rotating between files, but a principal who remains genuinely engaged throughout.
Delegation, for these clients, means handing the complexity to someone they trust — while remaining appropriately informed, efficiently and without unnecessary involvement in detail that does not require their attention.
2. Trust — Earned Through Consistency, Not Asserted Through Credentials
Trust, in a private client context, is not given because of an agency's stated experience or reputation. It is built through consistent performance over time.
Private clients often arrive at IMA ART having worked with other providers — and having found those providers lacking in follow-through, transparency, or the quality of the professionals they introduced. They ask detailed questions. They want to understand not just what will happen, but why, and what the range of outcomes looks like. They want to know that the person managing their journey has the judgment to handle the unexpected — and the honesty to communicate clearly when circumstances change.
This is not scepticism. It is the standard of due diligence that sophisticated clients apply to every significant professional relationship.
What it requires, in response, is not defensiveness or reassurance. It is the consistent delivery of what was promised, combined with transparent communication that gives the client the information they need — clearly, and without prompting.
Trust, for a private client, is earned one delivered commitment at a time.
3. Access — To the Right Professionals, Selected for the Specific Journey
A fertility journey is only as strong as the professionals involved in it.
For private clients, access means more than a referral to a well-regarded fertility clinic. It means curated introductions to specialists — reproductive endocrinologists, embryologists, reproductive attorneys, genetic counsellors — who are selected for the specific circumstances of this family's journey, not simply because they are available or affiliated.
The distinction matters because fertility care is not homogeneous. Different clinics have different strengths in different areas. Different reproductive attorneys have different expertise across different jurisdictions. Different embryology laboratories have different success profiles across different patient profiles.
A private client expects the professionals surrounding their journey to have been chosen with that level of specificity — and to be coordinated by someone who understands not just the individual capabilities of each, but how they work together across the full arc of the journey.
4. Discretion — As a Design Principle, Not a Policy Statement
For some private clients, privacy is not a preference. It is a prerequisite.
These are individuals — executives, public figures, high-profile families — for whom any unintended disclosure carries real consequence. They are not simply protecting personal information. They are protecting professional reputation, family dynamics, and in some cases, the interests of the child they are working to bring into the world.
Discretion in this context is not simply the absence of published testimonials or case studies. It is a design principle that shapes every aspect of how the journey is managed — how communications are structured, how third parties are briefed, how logistics are arranged, how documentation is handled, and what information is shared with whom, and when.
IMA ART does not publish client journeys. It does not use client outcomes as marketing material. Intended parents determine who knows about their fertility journey. IMA ART's role is to ensure that the default is always privacy, and that every professional involved in the journey understands and respects that standard.
5. An Experience That Reflects the Significance of the Journey
A fertility journey — particularly one involving surrogacy — is not a transaction.
It is one of the most significant undertakings in a family's life. For many of the families IMA ART works with, it represents the culmination of years of consideration, prior medical experience, and deeply held personal intention.
The quality of the experience matters. Not in the superficial sense of luxury amenities, but in the substantive sense of attentiveness, emotional intelligence, and the consistent sense of being genuinely accompanied rather than administratively processed.
Private clients notice when communication is proactive rather than reactive. They notice when a professional they are introduced to has been genuinely briefed on their circumstances. They notice when a complication is managed before they were aware it existed. They notice — in every interaction — whether the people managing their journey are engaged or merely processing.
The measure of what IMA ART provides is not only what was delivered. It is what it felt like to go through it.
The Fertility Family Office — A Different Model for a Different Standard
These five qualities — the ability to delegate with oversight, trust built through consistency, curated access to appropriate professionals, discretion by design, and an experience that reflects the significance of the journey — are not novel in the context of private client advisory.
They are the standard that sophisticated families already apply to the management of their wealth, their legal affairs, their estates, and their succession planning. They are the principles on which family offices and private client advisory models have been built.
What has been missing, until recently, is their application to fertility and family building.
IMA ART Fertility was founded on the recognition that for UHNW and private clients, a fertility journey requires the same rigour, the same governance thinking, and the same standard of professional oversight that these families apply to every other area of their lives.
The Fertility Family Office model brings those principles directly to bear on one of the most consequential journeys a family can undertake — from the first consultation through every stage of fertility treatment, donor conception, or surrogacy, to the moment a family is complete.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a Fertility Family Office?
A Fertility Family Office applies the principles of private client advisory — strategic oversight, professional coordination, discretion, and continuity — to fertility and family-building journeys. Rather than replacing the specialist professionals involved in a fertility journey (clinics, attorneys, psychologists, insurance specialists), a Fertility Family Office provides a principal-led layer of oversight and coordination across all of them, ensuring that the journey is managed coherently and in the exclusive interest of the intended parent.
How is IMA ART different from a traditional surrogacy agency?
Traditional surrogacy agencies typically coordinate the surrogacy stage of a journey — matching, medical preparation, pregnancy management, and birth. IMA ART provides a broader and more senior form of engagement: principal-led oversight across the full fertility journey, from initial consultation and IVF coordination through to surrogacy and beyond. IMA ART does not operate as a volume agency. Each engagement is managed directly by its principals, with a level of continuity and personalisation that a case-management model cannot replicate.
What does a private fertility concierge provide that a clinic cannot?
A fertility clinic provides specialist medical care. What it cannot provide is the coordination, oversight, and continuity across the full range of professionals involved in a complex fertility journey. A private fertility concierge — or Fertility Family Office — sits across those professionals, ensuring that the intended parent has a single principal relationship that holds the full picture, manages the complexity, and advocates consistently for the family's interests at every stage.
Who are IMA ART's clients?
IMA ART works with private individuals and families — including international clients from Europe, the Middle East, and Asia — who are seeking a level of engagement, discretion, and professional oversight that is not available through standard fertility or surrogacy providers. Many of IMA ART's clients have existing family offices, private attorneys, or wealth advisers, and IMA ART works alongside those structures as the specialist resource for fertility and family-building matters.
Does IMA ART work with existing family offices and private advisers?
Yes. Where a client already has a family office, wealth adviser, or private attorney, IMA ART can work alongside those professionals as the specialist fertility resource — providing the expertise, coordination, and oversight that does not ordinarily sit within a family office's remit, while remaining fully integrated with the client's existing advisory structure.
IMA ART Fertility is a Fertility Family Office based in Beverly Hills, working with private clients throughout the United States and internationally. Every engagement begins with a private conversation.
