An estate manager for the wealthy shares some of the outlandish and intimate requests she's received from clients

• Emily Webb-Doskow opened Webb & Baker, an LA home- and estate-management company, in 2019.
• She and her team coordinate service providers, from gardeners to party planners, for her clients.
• The job comes with outlandish and sometimes somber requests, but she loves meeting people through it.

Emily Webb-Doskow, an estate manager, receives strange requests from wealthy clients. Once, a client requested a pair of pregnant cows because their new passion was regenerative farming, in which composting is key.

The client wanted two cows because one might be lonely, and if they were pregnant, there would be the added benefit of milk. Webb-Doskow scored the cows after a few phone calls to local farmers and poring over Craigslist. Her team now helps look after the in-residence bovines.

Requests like these don't faze her.

"So much of what I do is totally unexpected, seemingly random requests — ones that make you wonder, 'How do you bring that to life?'" Webb-Doskow told Business Insider.

The 51-year-old founder of the LA firm Webb & Baker offers a service akin to a family chief operations officer: equal parts facilities manager, personal assistant, and head of admin. She manages every aspect of her clients' nonfinancial lives, focused on all things related to their one or more homes around the world. Her seven-person firm supports between six and 10 families at any one time.

Estate management is a growing field

Webb-Doskow was born in New York City and worked in production and public relations before switching to working at family offices — the admin arms of wealthy families, where staffers oversee and maintain their money and lifestyle.

She spent over a decade in senior roles at such operations, where she first encountered estate managers. Webb-Doskow was overseeing and coordinating their work in her family-office role and noticed an unmet need.

Estate managers were once the preserve of a few ultrawealthy families. Rich Americans have consistently been growing richer —billionaires saw a 62% increase in their net worth over the pandemic. More people with more money live more complicated lives, split between various homes and locales. These shifts expanded the prospective client base of families who could benefit from an estate manager.

"It's just like we're seeing in private aviation, which has become fractionalized," she said. "I saw the same opportunity to start doing that for estate management and household services. Married couples don't want to spend the weekend arguing about who will tell the gardener to take out the dead rosebush."

She established her firm in 2019 and brought along a deep bench of service providers and vendors from her previous role. She also took classes in accounting and finance, mechanical engineering, plumbing primers, and ones hosted by Estate Management Solutions.

"I totally went to watch YouTube, too," she said.

An estate manager is a human Google Search for great vendors

When a family hires Webb & Baker, Webb-Doskow and her team coordinate service providers, from gardeners and plumbers to party planners and closet organizers. She bills her clients hourly with a minimum of four hours a week, allowing them to scale their services as their needs fluctuate. The typical rate is between $75 and $250 an hour.

Her skillset combines discretion, resourcefulness, and a Rolodex of suppliers at the top end of their profession. Webb-Doskow typically works 40 to 50 hours a week.

"It's a relationships business, and honestly, that's why I enjoy it so much — I've met so many extraordinary people at the peak of their game," she said.

She's always looking for new vendors and suppliers, often via unlikely sources — the Nines podcast, for example, which is aimed at people like Webb-Doskow who work in private service.

"They interview someone you might consider hiring, like a closet organizer," she said.

Her role sometimes includes parties

Though the day-to-day of her firm's remit is often home maintenance, a homeowner once had Webb-Doskow and her team wield clipboards at the entrance to a party. The guest list was about 200, and she assumed the owner was keen to keep out riffraff, but she was to get the names of anyone who wasn't on the list so they could be shared later with gossip columns.

After the event, news of those in attendance appeared in the media.

"That was a mind bender for me," she said.

Webb-Doskow had another family who owned a glass-sided mansion in St. Barths, which they used a few weeks a year and rented out when they weren't there. Her employer sent her to the island before she took over rental admin to throw a catered cocktail party for all the service providers.

"It was to help me develop a relationship with them and for them to develop a relationship with the house — if they'd been there as guests themselves, they'd be much more effective ambassadors," she said.

When one client's relative died, Webb-Doskow handled everything

Not all her gigs are joyous. A novelist once hired Webb & Baker with several provisions: No one on staff was to speak with her until after 5 p.m., no emails could be sent to her except on Tuesday and Thursday, and should she enter a room where someone was working, that staffer should exit and return only once she had left.

"We had literally no interaction with her," Webb-Doskow said. "She cares about the quality of what she's trying to put together, and we became part of that by keeping the silence for her."

In another instance, she was contacted by a client whose primary residence was overseas. One of their relatives, whom Webb-Doskow had not met, had died unexpectedly in America, and they asked her if she could handle the aftermath. Her team handled the coroner's office communication, burial rites, and emptying of the dead person's possessions.

It's a 6-figure gig for the right person with the right attitude

Though her firm is an independent contractor, full-time positions are available in the field. She said a starting salary for a full-time estate or house manager could be about $150,000. She noted EstateJobs.com as the key clearinghouse for new roles.

The ideal candidates, she said, have a service mindset and are always willing to drop everything to support their client, whatever their need might be.

"It's about understanding the use needs of a house and whoever lives there," she said. "Our primary objective is helping a family enjoy the full nights and weekends — they're not sitting around in their free time changing the filter on the refrigerator but in their hot tub."