Wilson hangs his family values above the kitchen table and urges every family to do likewise.

[09:07]

"I took what was Boy Scout values for me growing up and created these values for my family, which is above our kitchen table. My kids get punished and rewarded based on acting in line with our family values"

[07:46]

"I identified 500 keywords that people looked for online related to Capital raising and family offices and systematically wrote two blog posts for every single keyword."

[15:31]

"We have someone I just saw here in the room who had never raised Capital, raised 12 million dollars and he just sold his company last year for over 100 million dollars"

Full transcript

Everybody notice that, uh, everyone that came three times or more seems to be sitting on the front and all the new people seem to be sitting on the back, which is interesting to see, um, and they do a different type of talk to start out the day. A lot of times people ask me: how did you get started running the family office Club? So you've got about 28 slides to go over in 15 minutes. I'm just gonna give you a real 20,000 foot overview real quick of how it happened.

A little bit of the background on myself, as Andres mentioned, my name is Richard C Wilson. I started family office Club in 2007.. I believe this is our 197th live event. We do about 15 Live Events per year and, um, really at this point it comes down to our 25 person team: Rachel, Vanessa, Andreas and Charlie and Holly helping me emcee to make everything go smooth.

Definitely appreciate all of their help. All right, so my my brother's here today. This is a picture of me and him growing up um in the backyard there. So we grew up in Portland. Oregon is where I spent most of my childhood, and this is me, in Boy Scouts. I'm actually a third, third generation Eagle Scout, so spend a lot of time growing up being tied.

You know values of being a Boy Scout, Etc, kind of being drilled into your brain and how you're supposed to act in the world. Here's another picture of my younger sister, older sister and again Charlie down there on the end, um, with our dog at that time. And I wanted to point out though, when I was a kid, my, my dad brought me up as a capitalist. A young age would get paid a penny per pine cone, we could get paid a penny for page that we read in books, and so, kind of early on, we kind of oriented us towards like, oh, if you work hard at this or you can work on that, you can earn money.

So if you want money, you need to to earn it, and that was kind of injected early on into my brain along with all the Boy Scout stuff. Um, when you get into Middle School, like sixth grade and on, I started trying for business ideas and starting different businesses. My dad had his own business at the time, raising capital for non-profit organizations, doing Capital campaigns, essentially, um, and so I started a number of businesses: a business, uh, using the Internet, connecting that to radio commercials, selling Christmas, or using the Boy Scouts. I built my own website in the 1990s: sell stereo equipment online.

I drove my dad to different donor meetings where he would pitch a donor on donating a five million endowment or a 10 million dollar gift to a cancer hospital or something of the sort. And then my dad also in high school, bought me a network marketing opportunity where, at Excel Communications, where I basically cold called everybody in the school directory and called their parents and tried to sell them long distance telephone service. I think I sold two people on Switching and one was my girlfriend's parents. Um, and then what I found is that most ideas don't work, most ideas don't scale.

Most ideas I was excited about no one cared about. They didn't work in the real world, or maybe it's because I was 13 years old, nobody took them seriously. Um, so I learned a lot during that time. In high school I was named in the yearbook the most likely to succeed in computers and business, just because of all the stuff.

I was always trying in business and I learned a lot at that time. Later, when I got into college, I had a business that did make money, buying used textbooks and then selling them for five times more than I bought them for online on half.com, amazon.com. But that was some of me growing up playing around as with business ideas, this was one of my advertisements for a landscaping business. I had just my local neighborhood, like many of you had, growing up, uh, nothing Earth shattering, uh there.

But it's just an early, fun example of some marketing that I had. And then one one opportunity that unfolded taught me something really important that led to our growth and some of the stuff that we teach in our workshops. I decided after being a lifeguard, a swim instructor, a personal trainer, et cetera, that wanted to do something in business and do something with computers. So I said, well, I'd like to learn how to build websites and work for a computer related company.

So I opened up the Yellow Pages, which is why people used back then, and I cold called every computer company in the Yellow Pages telling them that I was a high school kid looking for a job. And only one person called me back and he ended up giving me a job. There's a naranjan there who ended up giving me a job. But by being really systematic about it, that opportunity got uncovered and he taught me how to build websites.

He taught me lessons about managing teams and being a good leader of a team, and that made an impact on me in college. That was the textbook business I ran. Also, in college I got a letter from the dean because I had tried starting three different businesses in the computer lab and even though they had a division of entrepreneurism. I got a letter saying that I was caught trying to start a business in the computer lab on school grounds and my computer lab rights would be taken away if I tried to start a business, uh, in the computer lab again.

So I've donated zero dollars to Oregon State University. Uh, while at Oregon State um, I got in a really bad car accident, almost died and decided maybe I should do something faster with my life. So I started taking 23 credits a term. I graduated a year early after that. I said: okay, I don't want to make the average 32,000 a year that an Oregon State University grad would make.

So I use my Yellow Pages trick and I went to the Portland Chamber of Commerce cold, called everybody in there to have lunch or a cup of coffee, ended up meeting someone who graduated from the same University as me and Alum, and she said: oh well, we don't hire anyone without seven to ten years experience. And I said, okay, well, I'll work for you for free until you see I can do the work because I know I can. And I did that, ended up making six figures my first year out of a no-name public university, and that paid for my MBA. I lived at home, paid my MBA with cash, living with my parents while working at this consulting job again.

It taught me to systematically work the Chamber of Commerce, build relationships and create opportunities when I really didn't have an opportunity set in front of me and, most importantly, work on a results basis. Jeffrey gettermer taught me about Niche nomination. At that time I didn't know what a family office was at that point. But he taught me if you give away value every week to a set audience that could say yes to you and your industry, in one or two years you'll be a local expert, three or four you'll be a regional expert and then seven years, you'll be a global expert on that Niche.

And I thought to myself: I want to do that one day. I just didn't know what I was going to do it in. And eventually, obviously it's family offices. But I did write up my first book when I was 22 years old. I'm not even going to say the name of it because it's not not a great book, um, but that was one lesson I learned.

I then moved to Boston and in Boston I studied psychology of influence. I really studied Robert cialdini quite a bit, took a lot of classes on psychology through the Harvard Alm Division and again I wanted to to work in something that wasn't boring but paid well, and it turns out that's usually commercial real estate or raising Capital. If you're 22 years old and you don't want to be paid based on your age, you have to be paid on results, right? So I went to a capital raising company.

They said: no, we need someone who's raised 100 million before. You have to have 10 years experience. I said I'll work for you for free three days a week. I'll do my Consulting work two days a week to survive until you believe I'm worth it. I did that, ended up working full-time for that Capital raising firm and I started my blog on hedge funds.

I wrote about hedge funds, Capital raising and family offices. Over time I realized that not many people are writing about family offices, so I zeroed in on that and a little bit on Capital raising the road, a lot less about hedge funds. Over time this was the first picture I have of me starting the business. I got the website up to a thousand hits a day, and then three thousand and eight thousand hits a day.

I identified 500 keywords that people looked for online related to Capital raising and family offices and systematically wrote two blog posts for every single keyword. That boosted our website hits and that got me a lot of attention. I got in the front page of the Boston Globe when I was 24 years old. I ended up speaking in 200 countries and basically just got or ended up speaking over 200 times in 15 countries.

I don't know if it's possible to speak at 200 and 200 countries in the family office space at least, but I just learned a lot while speaking in all these different places. I learned that most people hosting family office events like this they don't work in the industry. They're a big Media Company. I learned that most people writing articles on family offices have no idea what they're talking about.

They're journalists who interview some different people and then try to piece together an article, and it's no offense against the journalist. But if you spend your whole life working in family offices, you know a whole lot more than a journalist who tries to write an interesting article on them or host a interesting event on them, Etc. So the real value of running events is really what you learn: the network effect of absorbing the structures, the strategies, ideas you're going to hear on stage today. Not one of our speakers, out of 70 Plus speakers, was paid here to speak because they're a famous Army general or because we thought it would make you guys happy.

They're all coming here to speak to Source deals and get deals done, so that's important to note. Over the last 16 years I've written 13 books. I took what was Boy Scout values for me growing up and created these values for my family, which is above our kitchen table. My kids get punished and rewarded based on acting in line with our family values and I encourage every family office and every family to have their family values on their wall, because every company does and that's so obvious.

But like we have a show of hands here, how many people here have their family values on their wall at home? One, two, three, four, five, probably six or seven, I probably missed one or two, but that's seven people out of hundreds of people here. But it doesn't cost anything. Now we host a dozen investment masterminds and workshops a year, as well as our four investor Summits, and we've evolved the model over time and grown our team into what it is today.

We've also found the smartest families in the room typically focus on one to three niches, sometimes just one to two. Even if they're worth a couple of billion dollars, they play offense in one or two areas. They still diversify in different parts of cash flow and real estate. They still diversify in the public markets, but for their balance sheet they play offense just in one or two niches.

We decided to do that with medical clinic Capital with multi-location profitable medical practices, and then with investor residences.com, which is our short-term rental property platform. So our fund. With investor residences we have equity in over 80 properties right now in the fund and it's Medical Clinic Capital. We have equity in about 25 medical practices doing about 50 million a year in Revenue.

We bought billionaires.com. Recently we interviewed Jeff Hoffman, Mark Cuban, Larry Namer, Mitzi Purdue, who's going to be speaking at this event, from the Purdue chicken family. We also thanks to Harry Clore who, if you get to meet here in the room, um encourage you. There he is in the middle. He introduced us to, uh, this guy who most of you recognized, Tony Robbins.

We had to interview him for the website as well, and a couple things I'm focusing on now while trying to wrap this up real quick so we can get on with the event, is that it's not that hard to be successful. If you focus on a niche and just work really hard for a decade, you're going to be decently successful. A lot of people switch their focuses and don't have a deep work ethic, but do you really want to be an example to your kids and family that all that matters in the world is making a lot of money? So just work and ignore everything else, including your health, relationships, Etc.

Obviously it's not what most of us want and you don't have to trade off being Ultra healthy instead of being ultra wealthy. It should fuel your ability to be ultra wealthy and attract like-minded people to you. Give, give you more Focus, energy and you know, if you're sick less and feel better, you're probably getting more done than the next person. My wife and I love to go on adventure trips.

We did REM to REM to REM, 45 miles and one day across the Grand Canyon and back. We also just got back from Nepal with my brother, one of my investors, dad, he had my wife and at the end of today I'm going to show you a slideshow of my four takeaways from hiking the Everest Base Camp Trail in Nepal. Is how we're going to close out today on my uh slides and talk at the end of the day: um, striving to be a Class Act human is just good for everyone in your community, everyone in your network. It's good for you getting more business done, um, it's what some of the most successful billionaires do.

Mark Cuban is seen as somewhat harsh on NBA referees, on Shark Tank contestants who have health care products that aren't scientifically tested. He's kind of an in your face person sometimes, but when we interviewed him, he said: if you don't treat people well, no one's going to want to work with you or work for you. So you need to treat people equitably and treat people well along the way, or you're not going to get anything done. Final slide here is that what I've learned is that family office club, for me and I hope for you, is a Perpetual learning machine.

By hearing from 70 Plus speakers over two days just at this one event, and we do four of these a year, and a dozen investment masterminds and workshops a year, it combines a large spectrum of insight, structures, strategies, people who are great at speaking, people who are have a great message and maybe not the best public speaker. But there's things you can take away from these different speakers and use for yourself: JV with someone, partner with someone, invest in something that someone's doing. We have people who are raising capital for their own platform, but they also invest in other platforms. Here in the room we have some people in our room are very humble and you ask what they do and they say, oh, I have a couple car washes and you might assume they're raising capital for it, but maybe they have 110 car washes or maybe they just sold the Goldman Sachs and they're worth 200 million dollars.

They might not have a name tag that says I run a family office, right? So we try to make this a Perpetual learning machine for everyone in the room and a collection of mental models that you pick and choose from different people on stage. Charles Munger says all of us should have 100 models that we collect over time, and your set is different based on your Niche. Where are you playing offense in one or two areas and what are you trying to do?

And your mental models are constructed to serve your goals, but also your background and your strategies for your business being Ultra healthy. We talked about that's an inspiration to go deeper on with the community, as well as documenting the insights from more and more billionaires. Most people have never read more than 10 books from a billionaire, but they've read 100 plus books, 200 plus books in business, and most of us are reading books from people who are really good at marketing their books and not from people who are as good in business. You know, lots of billionaires are not that good at marketing their books and being on the New York best time New York Times bestseller list, so we're sharing those insights on the website and identifying the 240 books written by billionaires and sharing those with our audience as well.

This is my team. I appreciate everything they do. You're going to meet a lot of them throughout the event today and tomorrow. I hope you have a great time here. I hope by the end of the event You Come Away with some new investment structures, some new strategies. You're more High conviction on something you were pretty sure about when you came in here today, and maybe a potential investor or cogp partner or joint venture partner of some type.

You may also meet a new accountability partner up here or something that's going to help you strive and get more done. Maybe a new friend in the industry, and we don't have time to go over all the examples, but we have had 100 plus transactions get done because of this room, including making a manager go from 30 million to 150 million in one year. Somebody taking someone out to dinner after one of these events and give them 30 million dollars in seed Capital. We have someone I just saw here in the room who had never raised Capital, raised 12 million dollars and he just sold his company last year for over 100 million dollars and he randomly thanked us on stage for that um Journey which we didn't know he was going to do, um.

So lots and lots of examples like that. So I hope you have a great time here at the event today and tomorrow, um, and just appreciate everyone's attention and the time that you're spending us with us here today. This event is completely different than our workshops and our masterminds. So if this is your first event with us, make sure you come to our June Dallas investment Mastermind event, and if you can't come to that one, we have three more in October for you to attend.

And for those of you who have been in the community for a while making one change, will no longer host workshops. All of them will be called masterminds and we'll have some Workshop educational content there, but they'll be investor relevant content at every one of the masterminds, and investors will be invited, as well as those who are raising Capital, to make it more productive for everybody. And there'll be five speakers at each of those masterminds: myself and four guest speakers. Usually three of the four guest speakers will be investors.

They'll just make the masterminds more productive and make our community more relevant for all the investors in our community. Thank you.