Our prime mission is to keep a family together and not let wealth destroy it.

[00:00]

"We focus on families that are under 300 million and the reason for that is if they go over 300 million they think single family and we can provide all the services that the family needs at a much more cost-effective basis."

[04:21]

"Our again our our focus and prime mission in life is to keep a family together and not let the wealth destroy the family. And we all heard we've all heard stories about what happens in wealthy families."

[05:11]

"So rather than just writing a check and the example I always use is why don't you take the whole family to let's say Africa and go drill drill a water well, build a hospital, a school, a church, whatever"

Full transcript

We focus on families that are under 300 million and the reason for that is if they go over 300 million they think single family and we can provide all the services that the family needs at a much more cost-effective basis. Our again our our focus and prime mission in life is to keep a family together and not let the wealth destroy the family. But the foundation is a way to bring the family together around potentially common goals, values, and purpose. In this episode our speakers break down what it takes to serve families in the 25 to 300 million dollar range and how family foundations and hands-on philanthropy keep the next generation grounded.

Let's dive in. I'd like to invite up Dr. Cook. She has a background as a CPA, she also has a CGMA CFF FAIA Prince II practitioner and she's from Sunburst Ventures. She has family office experience for over three decades now as associated with the Cooper Family Office as well as family office work for I believe her own family as single family office if I remember correctly and she always does a great job here on stage moderating the panel so I'm sure you're going to enjoy this next panel of investors.

Let's welcome them all up to the stage. Testing. Haha. There we go. Well, glad to glad to see everyone again this afternoon. Thank you for those who who joined earlier this morning.

And thank you Richard for the introduction totally spot on as always and the great event. So it's my pleasure to moderate this panel. This panel is one of the speed panels. So it's the ones where we have uh some celebrated experts who have very interesting projects going on giving them an opportunity to take several minutes and explain about what they're doing and why it might be of interest to you and where there could be potential synergies here and in the room and with each other.

[snorts] So I will let them do self-introductions and they will each take approximately five minutes and discuss you know them not only themselves but what they're investing in, the exciting projects that they particularly would like to share about, if they have any particular structures that they put around these things and like the number one kind of thing they're they're looking to get out of today if if they had the genie coming out of the bottle. So So let's go ahead and begin first with Kip. Who am I what? I have a firm along with my son called Family Wealth Leadership.

We are a multi-family office. We focus on families that are under 300 million and the reason for that is if they go over 300 million they think single family and we can provide all the services that the family needs at [clears throat] a much more cost-effective basis. So what we're trying to do is identify those families and when I say 300 million it could be anywhere from 25 million to 50 million to 150 million. [clears throat] So so that's part of our focus and I'll go down my list of questions here.

[clears throat] What do you typically invest in and the answer is we're pretty much across the board because again of the size of the families that we're dealing with sometimes they're not going to be able to put a million dollars into a deal but they can certainly maybe put 200 or 250,000 dollars into it. We do everything from the normal marketable securities to all of the real estate stuff that we've been talking about. Usually we're going to do it in a fund format cuz that gives the client some diversification and that real estate could be obviously the multi-family, self-storage, in some cases student housing and we we do life settlements, we do currency trading. We've been doing in the last couple of years we were doing a lot of what is called structured settlements and those structured settlements we've been getting somewhere between 10 to 17% on them.

We're not in any right now cuz the rates have gone down. So so for again for our clients we have to have a lot of diversification cuz they cannot afford to be putting tons of money in one deal. Let's see what any preferred investment structures. The way I'm going to answer that question is a little different. Our again our our focus and prime mission in life is to keep a family together and not let the wealth destroy the family.

And we all heard we've all heard stories about what happens in wealthy families. So the structures that we talk about as far as investments are exactly what we're talking about here today, family office. So we're helping our clients create and operate their family office and their family foundation. We really like the family foundation. It can be something like a donor advised fund.

It doesn't have to be a full-blown foundation but the foundation is a way to bring the family together around potentially common goals, values, and purpose and I always like to encourage our families to get involved in what I call boots on the ground philanthropy. So rather than just writing a check and the example I always use is why don't you take the whole family to let's say Africa and [clears throat] go drill drill a water well, build a hospital, a school, a church, whatever because I [clears throat] I can tell tell you that 20 years from now if last year the family went to Disney World and then this year they go to Africa to do whatever I just described, 20 years from now you already know which vacation they're going to be talking about and it's not going to be Disney World, right? Let's [clears throat] see. Types of investments you're looking for?

Well, again I'm a little different here. My investment is in families and so my purpose for coming to these meetings and I've been coming now for I think six or seven years is to just hopefully identify a family that needs what we can do. And again because I'm focused on I'll call it the lower end, a lot of those families don't even know what a family office is. So that's our our goal.

And [clears throat] then your number one most valuable suggestion? Mike Scott hit it a little bit this morning and my answer to that question is don't make decisions based on emotions and that goes in two ways. [clears throat] On the wealth side and in investments if you're making decisions on just emotion you're probably going to make a lot of mistakes. On the family side, on the people side it's the same thing.

Emotions run really high in families. We have a saying that every time you give something to your children you take something else away. What are you depriving your children of when you give them something? And the answer to that question is potentially you're going to deprive them on self-respect. There's a lot of kids in today's world that being in a wealthy family is really difficult for them.

So you've got to be really careful. So that's my my wisdom for the day. Thank you so much. Several points resonating there. Just quick follow-up before we continue on. You mentioned such a diverse range of asset classes and assets that your clients are involved in.

You help diligence these? You help source these or or what exactly is your role in that? And and then with respect to the soft side and the skills that you mentioned and and the families getting along and and do you have counselors or is it more strategy or how how do you approach that? Very briefly but still I'd like to know those answers.

Yeah, the answer is we try to act as what we call the FEO, the family enterprise officer. And in doing that the first side on the financial side there are some of the things we can provide as far as the the assets but a lot of it again we have to go out to other sponsors. So that's why I said earlier we use funds for a lot of that stuff like life settlements. We don't do that, we've got to go out to somebody else to do that.

And on the family dynamics? The family side we the way I put it is we're there like the the your orchestra conductor. Our job is to identify what is needed at any given moment in time and then bring the right resources to the table. So to answer your question, yes we have to use a lot of outside resources cuz I'm not a psychologist.

I can't deal with issues like alcohol or drug addictions or so forth. So we have those people that we bring to the table. Understood. You're an expert quarterback there. Join the Family Office Club by visiting familyoffices.com. We look forward to seeing you at our next live event.