Families often fail to make their wealth creation story and its meaning clear to everyone.

[20:25]

"So many families don't put enough value on actually being cleared everyone in the family about what the family wealth creation story is and why the wealth is there and what it means and what it represents."

[21:29]

"Or maybe a son or daughter is put in charge of the family business and the other son or daughter might never have been formally asked or invited. Maybe they would have liked to have been, but they didn't respect speak up about it."

[13:26]

"But one of the biggest mistakes that families make over and over again is getting liquid and then buying a house that they believe is gonna be their dream house, like one family I know just sold their company for close to a billion dollars and then they bought a house that was over twenty million dollars"

Full transcript

All right, cool, thank you for us, thanks for having me here. Everyone hear me. Okay, all right, and they go through 30 or 40 slides here in the next hour. But, more importantly, I want to have a lot of interaction and questions if possible, and I'm gonna give a lot of examples, case studies, things that we're doing right now with families who have seen families, too, in the family office club.

I think that's the most important thing is to keep it practical and also everything to talk about here. It could be applied to the word private investor. You can say the word family office. That just means a private investor has formalized how they're doing their investing, to make it a little bit more holistic, and there's two types of family offices, if you haven't heard that term before.

There's a single family office, which means, like I say, Dave stack builds up a big portfolio of real estate, sells it to a REIT and you or Dave's family is worth X amount, usually, let's say, a hundred or two hundred million dollars. You might want your own team then managing your wealth, not just saying, hey, Goldman Sachs or multifamily office or wealth management firm here, manage my wealth for me, and then sometimes those levels want your own dedicated team to manage part of your wealth, and a multi-family office is really where it might be serving 10, 20, 50 or 200 clients that are ultra wealthy. So if you hear me reference that word, that's what it means. But everything on here can be applied to private investors and to almost everybody here in the room.

So disclaimer, just like you saw earlier in the day, you know where your jurisdiction is or what vehicle you have or how you interpret what we say. Obviously you know seek counsel before running off and taking a bunch of actions based on anything in here at the event. The ideas come today from me starting the family office club twelve years ago. It would now run 120 conferences and live events that I've put on.

I've spoken at 250 events and we've had over 2,000 face-to-face meetings personally with family offices and 250 of them speak at our events each year. We've had 34 investors on stage speaking at our private investor summit, a few hundred people there on Thursday this week in San Francisco. And then you know it's interesting is looking at all the families do, who are highly effective and doing very well, versus what all the families do, which are mistakes when they first become liquid, when they're first figuring out what to do, or when they come to me and say we're having a painful experience doing this. What should we do differently?

There's a lot of commonalities between family offices have been around for a decade or more and the figured things out, and there's a lot of commonalities of family offices that are new and it's where people are trying to formalize things and figure things out. And for those of you here in the room that are raising capital for something, if a slide here is for more of the private investors, the better you can understand those investors, the better you can work with them, add value to them, etc. So hopefully it's helpful to to everybody here. We work with clients of all different sizes.

We just closed a healthcare family at 16 million. We're working the oil and gas family that's at 50 million net worth. A lot of our clients are in 100 million dollar-plus level. I've had three. They're over a billion, but essentially we don't raise capital for things. We don't do investment banking, placement agent work.

But the family office Club puts out a lot of thought leadership. I've written 13 books and recorded 1,800 videos and recorded 400 interviews and recorded those with family offices and we just help families, not in wealth management in a traditional sense and we don't have an investor club like forest does. On the other side of it, we charge membership fees to the ones who are not family offices and we do advisory work, just helping set up single family offices in helping originate direct investment deal flow. And the reason we built the family office club is like Forest has found the way you get the best ideas is to create a system that attracts good deal flow and filters it and you can share great ideas with each other on stage.

So there's a good litigation financing conversation. Linden came up today and I agreed Lending's one of the best places to be and every family should probably have something in the lending area over time at some point in your investment portfolio. So just the interactions and the cross-pollination of ideas and deal flow and work, innovation like this can make a huge difference and how you can progress as a private investor and make sure your family is preserved and your capital is preserved. You know, hopefully in in that order.

So we do a bunch of events, just like for us, we do 25 a year investor summits and then workshops for people in investor relations as the second part of it, and that's where some of the ideas come from, as well as the clientele that I just showed you. There's just a couple of interesting facts that there are over. There's two hundred and eleven thousand people that are worth thirty million dollars or more. Fifty five thousand that are worth 100 million dollars or more in.

Three thousand that we know of that are billionaires. So it's a very large marketplace out there. So there's a lot of people to be networking with and finding similar people just like yourselves. And I think a decade from now, you know, this room is gonna be just as packed, but ten times larger for forests, because there's so much demand for groups like this and I feel like it's just getting started, these types of communities.

What's interesting about all the numbers you see from anyone is they're all very wrong. I just like Dave said, like all statistics and forecasts are, but these are wrong in one very predictable direction. If you live in Brazil or Russia or China or Malaysia, your kids get kidnapped and the government confiscates your assets and you get audited more and your family could get murdered. If you're in a place like Brazil, if people find out you're ultra wealthy.

So nobody wants to know, no one wants to be on the radar. That's why a lot of them move to the US, Australia, etc. So it's just interesting to look at how big the industry is. Most people have never heard the word family office who are all chil wealthy. One thing I want to bring up here early on is just that a lot of families very early on get liquid and then the people who have access to them is who they allocate through and it's almost a an automatic, immediate thing that starts happening and right away, within a month or 2 or 3 of being liquid, they start spreading the money into mobile apps, enter their friends website idea, usually in very early stage.

Stuff all over the place. Because they don't have a community like this, they don't have a strike zone they're aiming for, they don't have a strategic plan, they don't have a dashboard for their family, they don't have many things that would allow them to focus on where they're gonna get the best return and what their family would enjoy spending their time on. So they don't know what to outsourced to a best-in-class fund manager or real estate developer versus do themselves. So the money just gets spread out based on who has access to them and who has a natural trusted relationship with them.

And in traditional wealth management, its beaten into the brain of every wealth manager that you diversify to an extreme commodities, try to get things not correlated, and its diversify all over the place and because everyone only talks about that, especially untell, you're ultra wealthy. When you suddenly become ultra wealthy, you just think, oh, I need to apply that same thing to direct investments, let's be safe, but putting money all over the place and try to be in control and be our own little VC private equity shop, but then you end up investing in a lot of areas that you don't know too well, and I really think you'd get diversification. So for every family it's different, but typically you need to choose your battles: where you want really full control in your portfolio versus diversifying, and I'll get to why in just a minute. All right.

So when I go through six of the top headaches of families that I work with, these are headaches that come up very often and they can cause a lot of pain in terms of lost time and cost, and we have written a book on this, and we go through what the headaches are and different tools and examples of how to solve them. If anyone wants access to this book or the how to start a family off this book of written or the book on single family offices, you can just email me at Richard at family offices calm and I'll just send you the PDF for the book. We've got five of our books in PDF format. The first pain, though, is blurred vision.

So when somebody becomes liquid, oftentimes they don't know what new reality they want to live in, and because of that, they start buying private jets, very expensive houses that are then very hard to sell. They travel non-stop, they invest the money all over the place, like we're talking about on this slide, and it causes a lot of confusion around. If they do start hiring a team, who should they hire? They usually are not sure, so they get a CPA, they get someone with the CFA designation or they get an analyst of some type, and again, it happens almost through osmosis, not through careful planning, which sounds strange, but most 100 million dollar-plus knew liquid individuals have a private banker and a CPA that they trust, but they have no plan for their balance sheet and they have no strategies.

Many have no estate planning or tax optimization plans in place, which sounds kind of shocking and l, but it's true. So the remedies to this headache of having blurred vision is multifold. Many of these. We don't sell inexpensive software implementation. We don't offer $300,000 a year consulting. These are things that cost you nothing but intentionality.

You get almost no families do this. So the first thing is to document your core values for your team so that you can make decisions on who you're hiring and why, what you're saying yes and no - and why, et cetera. Define your top objectives and figure out what new reality do you want to live in. Do you want to be working 50 hours a week?

I have a client who's worth over four hundred million dollars and he works 70, 80 hours a week non-stop. He has a Bluetooth in his ear and he's literally running through the office space getting deals done, closing multiple deals a week, and he has over 100 LLC's, etc. If you want to live and you just love the game of it and you're excited by it, that might be your passion. Other people want to sit on a beach and all they want to do is trade their long term stock holdings because that's how they made their wealth or that's their passion, etc.

But knowing what reality you want is important. Otherwise someone else is going to instruct you on what they think your reality should be and that might be - their bias, and that's one challenge a lot of families have is that they get advice on complicated matters, usually from people selling them a solution on that matter, like who knows life insurance best, the person who wants to sell you a big life insurance policy. So families are very careful about that. They want to trust the counterparties they work with more than anything and make sure that they're aligned with who they are and where they're going and that they understand this.

But the trouble is that it's very hard for your service providers and everyone around you to know where you're going and why. If you don't know, or maybe you know and it's deep in the recesses of your brain but your own spouse doesn't know, or your kids don't know and your team doesn't know. If they do know, then they can protect your time, they can protect your money, they can say no to 95% of things for you and just let things that go through the filter that meet everything you're looking for with the type of people you actually want to engaged with and doing business with, that's really important, and identify and look for strategies that are very related to these core values and your area of focus. Many times families say, well, made our money in manufacturing, we might want to invest in real estate, but we also do other types of direct investments and usually after talking to them for a while, they'll conclude that's not just manufacturing, it's a niche within manufacturing and that of all the real estate investments they could do, there's probably one type, that with a property manager, that maybe they could pull off, but otherwise they should find a best-in-class independent sponsor or a fund manager over time, etc.

And other families say, well, we made our wealth and healthcare, but we want to invest in real estate as well now. So how do we use that expertise so they could invest in medical office buildings or they get invest in housing that's near hospital or the Senior Living idea that Jean was talking about. It's healthcare related. So it's figuring out how do you use your DNA and your background and your expertise and where you're based and your balance sheet to play a unique game that's highly integral with who you are and who you want to be going forward.

It could be you don't like the industry you came from at all and you think auto dealerships is now not a place to be, that you're excited about stem cells and you're gonna go to ten stem cell events per year, only read books and publications in that area and only look at deals in that area, and within three to five years, you're gonna know a lot about investing in stem cells versus somebody who invests in mobile apps, some online e-commerce, direct-to-consumer companies, some Amazon companies, single-family homes, multifamily themselves. You're moving up seven different learning curves at once just in your investment portfolio. Plus you have to manage the family overall. It's almost impossible to do that.

You know you're only one human being and even if you hire, at $300,000 a year, person with a lot of experience, they're only one human being. You have to build out a real big team if you want control of everything, and we're gonna get to that in a slide or two, but you need to really spend a lot of time about being intentional about exactly what reality you want to live in, because most families do not do that. So you can change the number on this. It could be a five million dollar residents, it could be ten million, it could be twenty million.

But one of the biggest mistakes that families make over and over again is getting liquid and then buying a house that they believe is gonna be their dream house, like one family I know just sold their company for close to a billion dollars and then they bought a house that was over twenty million dollars and then lifted the whole thing up and rotated at forty feet for a better water view, and many clients do this, and then two years later they're bored and they have five other houses by then. They're spending 12 days a year in this residence. They spent a million dollars renovating and it was on the market for eight years when they bought it. Now they want to put it on the market and they have to take a haircut and wait a decade for some other guy to have a liquidity event and want to buy that specific house in that neighborhood etc.

So I have to be very careful if you know someone going through a liquidity event or if you're just nearly liquid yourself, just to put the brakes on a big purchase that's hard to get out of. If it's not an investment, because it's probably not going to be your dream house in two to four years you're probably going to be traveling a lot, most people that's what they do when they become ultra wealthy or start earning multiple seven figures per year. So it's a mistake that can be easily avoided. You can always buy that house two or three years from now.

You negotiate over that long period of time. You're gonna get a better price rather than just trying to rush into it, and they can feel your urgency and know that you don't care about the price too much. I think some of you can relate with this headache and it is really the control conflict that's embedded within a lot of us. If you are entrepreneurial, if you've owned your own dental practice or medical practice, you're used to controlling your own destiny.

You're in this room because you've been successful, because of business decisions, you've made hires, you've made strategies, you've applied, and so there's a conflict there. And how do you decide what to outsource versus not? And how do you trust others with parts of your portfolio? How do you get to that conviction level, trust wise. Being at an event like this can't help.

If others have invested with someone in the room, they can be a really good reference point. But many times you feel alone as an investor and even if you come to this event once or twice, you might need to come for two, three years. So you see who else has been here for two or three years. You get to really know them and kind of trust them.

You've seen them go in out of things, be consistent in what they're saying. You need to build that confidence through, in part, a network and understanding of where you should have the most control. And the reason why we we call this books into millionaire migraines, is that the headaches are very common and really what we're trying to do is provide, etc. And for these different specific flavors of headaches that are so common, because many times families are going through it for the first time but a thousand other families are going through the same headaches right now and it shouldn't be that.

You have to spend half a million a year in consulting to learn the very basics of what mistakes almost all ultra wealthy families make when they get to that point. All right, so there's some difference. There's different reasons why. Obviously, this control need is in place, but some of the ways to adapt to it that I'm sure some of you already are is looking at independent sponsors which you can choose deals, deal by deal, instead of saying, okay, private equity fund, I'm gonna, you know, write your check for 250,000 or million dollars.

I hope you do invest in great companies, like what you promised in your PowerPoint. Based on your track record, you know it looks like you will. Many families want to choose the deals and they might see five deals from a private equity fund or a real estate fund and choose one or two that they're also high conviction on and otherwise pass until they see something they really love. That's one way that they approach it.

Another way is to create a family bank, which is a non formal bank but it has some formal rules to it for the family. So it might be that a son or daughter, instead of inheriting or getting you know, a million dollars inheritance, maybe instead they get college paid for, maybe a graduate degree, maybe help with the first-time house or medical emergency, and otherwise maybe they don't get an extra you know, a big check or inheritance to buy a condo in Miami Beach or a $50,000 Mercedes. You know, when they're 22 years old, maybe they only get additional capital from the family if they applied to the elders in the family and say: I have this business idea, I want to start this company and going direct to consumer and do organic cosmetics on Amazon. Or I want to buy this company that's been growing via their website, directed consumer, and they take it to Amazon and we could buy it for $300,000.

And then their inheritance comes through the hard work and the learning and the lessons, through a pre-approved business idea by the elders, who can act as kind of a Board of Advisors to the next generation. And that way they learn by doing in a small basis, and they'll learn more that way than going to school and getting their MBA from Wharton probably. And it's a way that entrepreneurial families can say: we're gonna support you to do whatever you'd like to do, but not give you so much money that you don't have that you're able to do nothing, you know. And I think that that's a balancing act that a lot of families try to try to figure out is how to communicate those ideas and how to be supportive to what the kids want to do.

Other families will say: well, some people, for some people, money is much more of a priority and they choose a career path based on money, potentially without labeling that good or bad. Other people, you know, couldn't care less. So some families set up something really say: if you choose to be a history teacher or if you choose to be a you know PhD and you know petrol engineering. Either way, we'll just match your salary and then that way you're making double.

Let you choose to make, but we're not making it. So you have millions of dollars in your bank account because there's people obviously there within family office families. They get spoiled by such things. Clear communications is really important. What I found is that a lot of families feel better about not having control, as long as there's transparency and reporting and accountability and there's metrics in place so that the accountability and transparency is automatic and it's always there and it's not weird to ask for it if your service providers thinks that it's strange or they act put off that you want transparency on exactly what their fees are or what the costs are or what's going on in your account, and then I would find someone else to work with in that area, because that level of control you should desire and you should always have and there might be a reason why they don't want you to know otherwise.

Having a trust set up so it's flexible in case things change. They've got forbid someone in the family gets into a drug problem or gets into bad marital situation that you know is going to end in a certain type of inheritance. It's gonna end poorly for the family financially with someone who's not being, you know, a good spouse to one of your sibling, one of your kids. Having a trust that's flexible enough to adjust for that is something that families like to have in place, and then having governance and family meetings can be really helpful.

So many families don't put enough value on actually being cleared everyone in the family about what the family wealth creation story is and why the wealth is there and what it means and what it represents. And when I got started 12 years ago in the space, I used to think, oh yeah, it's nice. Okay, values, values. If one talks about values, like everyone says, the team is most important.

But I realized over time is that the wealth will all dissipate and be destroyed if it's not based and carried forward and protected by the values. So the values is what created the wealth and it's what's going to protect the wealth through the next generation. It also protects the next generation from kind of destroying themselves or having a non-productive life. And further than that, if you don't have the values, then even worse.

Then the family could just stop talking to each other because of mismanaged expectations. And no one's talked about the money, or even if it's a small or moderate amount of money, there could be an expectation of something and then it doesn't happen. And then someone might be put off, but they never say it out loud. Or maybe a son or daughter is put in charge of the family business and the other son or daughter might never have been formally asked or invited.

Maybe they would have liked to have been, but they didn't respect speak up about it. Sometimes a son might hire his roommate from college. He might have been a valid, excellent hire. But if the family is not familiar with their background, someone in the family might think that they're just handing out favors to friends and wanting a fun job by working with all their friends.

And if the family loses money or the business goes under, now nobody talks to that family member again because they lost the family business. So all of these things need to be governed with some rules. So you could say, when we hire someone, they have to be vetted by X, Y & Z, or, if we do this, it has to be disclosed. Or if there's a potential conflict of interest and you want to invest in but it happens to be your friend's apartment building who's selling, or your friend's duplex, it has to be disclosed, due diligence, appraised, etc.

So for those of you who are most concerned about family relations, having those governance policies and is having good communication and in a quarterly fun family event like we heard Jean talk about, you know the family vacations are like the best memories and that's a perfect time to be talking about what's going on in the family business from a young age, what's happening next, what's the opportunity for the future. So it's not about the money, it's about the value creation process and about the learning and the fulfillment that comes from that. We use a lot of tools inside of our team for accountability. We use HubSpot for our CRM so you can see what our team is doing.

We something called hub staff, so every person on our team when they get into work, even when they're traveling, they log in on the computer and then it tracks their actions and it takes random screenshots of their computer and if someone has a problem with that, then they can work at a place where they get paid but no one knows what they're doing and that's fine with me. But we take screenshots the computer while they're working and I never look at it. I don't have time, but if there's trouble with someone and their sales numbers are way down, I'll look at their sent emails and print off 30 of them. All looking at hub staff, seeing if they're buying sporting tickets or on Fandango or eBay and like, okay, maybe they're disinterested or there's compensation issue or they're about to leave, etc.

But it's very helpful to have that because it sets an expectation to the team that you know and I pay for every hour you work here. But we also expect you to work every hour that you're here and not be on your mobile phone and not be, you know, buying stuff online etc. And we've caught someone embezzling money before using that, paying that rent through our bank account from the company. So that was super helpful and it was on, and she still did it on the company computer.

You know, it's a little bit of an IQ test built into it. And then we have, yeah, need better screening, I guess. But I, we also use slack, which is really helpful. If you run a family business or a family office or you have an investor team, especially if your investor team is not local to you, slack allows you to chat with them all day long.

You can have different channels for different conversations. Not every family member needs to see every conversation, not every business team member does. And then every day when my team gets to work, they do an S OD a start of day and say these are the tangible things I'm getting done today. And at the end of the day they do an EOD and say this is what I got done today and it's self reporting, so they're not just like I'm working on conferences or working on new client onboarding or clearing out emails.

That's meaningless. You don't know whether you did it or not. That's like a work in progress could go on forever. It's not measurable, so it's not a good goal. The goal would be get my email inbox from 111 to 50 emails or book the venue for Singapore conference in November, and they have those goals. It might not get to them.

Something else might come up. That's more important. That's totally fine. I really don't care. But it's self reporting in this transparency. So when I'm traveling, I can look at my phone while walking into a room like this, see what all my team is doing, and if one team member is about to work on a project for a client that just upgraded their package or just sold an asset and now we don't need to do a certain project, I can say, oh well, just don't do number four until I have my next phone call with that client because things have changed for them.

Or make sure you meet with Luis on the team first, because I we need to make sure you guys are on the same page and not duplicating efforts, so it gives me transparency, accountability, and then every team member has a set goal for the day and it makes a kind of automatic accountability and transparency. So that's good, hopefully from any of you in a room that they don't have that in place yet, and then we do that type of daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual planning and that gives us a sense of control and it gives our clients that as well. The last thing I'll mention is that we use asana and I have an asana app on my phone and also on the computer. That's all synced up.

My executive assistant has one, so I can see her list every day. She sees mine, and then we use a sign up for clients as well for tracking projects, status on due diligence, etc. So we've got thousands of notes in checklists and operational processes within asana for project management throughout our company. And if you're a private investor, it's a great thing to be using for looking at deals and organize in your family office, and I can tell you that almost no family offices use that.

They all have Dropbox and maybe the Excel spreadsheet, and then most of it is in people's brains and if you're relying upon someone and you know they have a lot of stuff in their head and you don't even know exactly how they do certain things or reconcile some things, then you should get them to put it in the sonics. It D risks them leaving or something happening to them health-wise, or you know if they got another job offer somewhere, etc. So just makes your companies stronger by having that documented and gives you a sense of control. This is one of the most important slides for the day, I think I mean for this speech.

I don't know what's coming later, so I'm sure there's better stuff coming later in the day, but basically, when people think about investing, before they were worth more than two or three or four to five million dollars. They usually just had their investments in the stock market or with a wealth advisor typically, and I've done just a couple real estate investments, that's what I typically hear, and then they have their own business. Many business owners just have a high cash flow business making half a million a year, maybe much more, and they have no other investments but their own house and then some stocks or ETF. So it's very common, even for people that are at at 10, 20 million plus net worth levels.

And so what happens is that if you carry that forward, it becomes very hard to manage the complexity and you feel pull, pulled in different directions and confuse sometimes. But it really helps to think about it. Three different categories. So the first category is diversified market exposure. That's traditional wealth management. Unless you've made your money and stocks and bonds and commodities, you're probably not the person to be analyzing them and looking at charts and looking at all the earning reports and being on the earnings calls and in choosing stocks etc.

You probably should be outsourcing that. So the outsourcing level is very high usually. The second category is real estate, usually cash flowing real estate. It could be lending, it could be residential, it could be senior living, etc. The important part here is that you can say, okay, well, for single-family rentals in my area that I know well, maybe we'll manage those ourselves.

For everything else, let's find the best-in-class independant sponsor. And if we love one of the sponsors and they'll Fair fun, maybe we'll go into their phone eventually, etc. But the point is that you can choose things deal by deal. You don't have to say okay, well, I'm just going to say okay, invest all my money in real estate.

You know, mr. Smith, and please do a good job. You can meet five, ten, twenty different, infinite sponsors or much more, and each one will show you two to eight deals, some times more, per year. And you just choose the one or two that your highest conviction on, because you know rally North Carolina, or you're from Boston, or you understand Senior Living, or you really like the team, and they seem to be have really good research on an idea they have.

So this is a moderate level of control. Down here is usually the operating business you're in. It could be that you own dental practices or medical practices and you're looking to sell that and you're like I don't want to ever be in that business again. But then you might say, okay, but I think the opportunity is in dental equipment or a medical device that I want to start up next, or a solution for the space that maybe as a treatment type that you could then license to dentists across the nation, but so that next area where you can have full control: you could hire the whole team.

You could have full decision-making day-to-day as a CEO or chairman of that company. This is the area where other people will think you're taking the most risk, perhaps, but you'll probably get the best return. Here. You're basically trying to track the market, hopefully lose a bit less than the average person does when it goes down, but mostly track the market and be diversified here is typically hard asset.

So you're sleeping at night. Usually decent, moderate income, but not not really high income off of it. Buy it good over the over the 5, 10, 15 year period will probably serve you well if you're diversified, with a few different providers with good strategies etc. Usually this alone doesn't propel someone from being worth 2 million to 20 million over, say, 10 years.

It definitely could over time and it could over 10 years, but usually not. This, you know, can have a real exponential return and we all know that and that's why most of you got into the room. You have some expertise or some business that got you to that level of success. And so when you look at, oh, I want control over I don't know if I can trust this investment partner, because we like to have control.

That's how we created our wealth, it doesn't really mean a lot. It's like Dave talking about the u.s. Real estate market. It's meaningless to talk about that because it's not nearly annular enough. So when you talk about the three areas, there's diversified a real-estate and then there's operating businesses where you create, you know your energy and focus your energy.

So you have to decide how much control you want in each of these three. Even a five billion dollar family office, I've never seen one that has full control in all of these areas they all leverage. Some outsource providers, consultants and services for at least the due diligence, part or part of the management or the exit of it, and one brain. You can't possibly be managed in these three areas because even billion dollar plus family offices with 300 people on their team don't.

So the point is to figure out in this worksheet: where do you, where do you fit with a diversified portfolio like traditional wealth management? Is it just meeting with someone like forest or wealth advisor and making sure they understand your values and where you want to go see? It helped them devise the strategy a little bit. You give them inputs, but then they are carrying out the sourcing, screening, due diligence, negotiation and management.

On real estate, how involved do you really want to be? You can use a property manager or independent sponsor or you just want to hand it to someone who's just going to allocate into different types of real estate. Usually families like to do the strategy and some of the sourcing meaning picking the deals deal by deal. Most families don't enjoy doing walkthroughs and looking at the roofs of multifamily properties and checking out the plumbing and managing contractors for innovations.

It's usually the last thing you enjoy doing, and then usually in this category, you'd like doing almost all of it. But even here, in your new reality now, you already are a big success. You don't need to be the rugged individualists and do everything yourself now, the next time around or in the next evolution. So even here, it could be that as a board member, you only need to do a few of these things and you hire people around you and outsource some of this as well.

So, whatever you are most excellent at and passionate at, so as Dan Sullivan would say, as your unique ability, that's where you should maximize your time, and every year, you should be 80/20 in that. So you say, okay, this is all, this is what I'm doing. Where's the 20% that really I'm excellent at? Every hour. I spend time on that every day.

We get massive results because that's what we're best at and we enjoy doing it and it's natural and we excel at it. Other people think that we're amazing at it. But it's just what we're, what we're naturally good at moving forward on, and getting this figured out for your family and for yourself, I think, is really critical, and I don't see this conversation being had. Usually it's kind of: who are you gonna hire if your wealth advisor?

Or, okay, well, who are you working with in real estate? Or you know, do you like control? Do you need control? But it rarely happens at this level of a conversation. Another interesting thing about control is that most people say that team is most important. Everyone talks about team, from an MBA program to our investment conference in San Francisco.

You know, David, you've probably heard on stage people saying that. But what does that really mean? Because it's the most subjective and loose part of due diligence. So the most important thing is just a gut feel. You know doesn't really make sense. You have all these other you know data rooms and a checklist of a hundred things you're looking for, an IRR s and what the returns going to be and what the cap rate is, and every, every market has its own sophisticated statistics that nobody, except for people in that market, understand what all of those metrics mean.

But everyone agrees that team is most important, and so I think there's things to look for when conducting due diligence. You need someone who's really committed to their strategy. If they were doing cannabis last year and this year they're doing blockchain, or if, every time they come to this meeting, they're pitching you something completely different than the last time you know something to, you know watch out for. You want someone who's really committed to what they're doing for the very long term, and signs of that are they're not rushing you, not trying to get you to close right now.

There could be an LOI, there could be a date when the deal is gone if you don't commit, and they could communicate that in a professional way. But if it's very high pressure and either rude or annoying, then I would just obviously have nothing to do with that person. Again. If they're doing things, on the other hand, that you know, for example, you know thought leadership, or helping families with education, with nothing being sold, or just doing things that, like no one in the right mind would do.

If all they cared about was the next six months or their paycheck this month, then that's a sign of being committed to their space. Consistency goes with that. If someone's been doing senior living for 43 years, it's a lot more credible and you can trust in that more than someone who's been doing it for three years can provide references. Obviously, some people, some investors, forget to ask for that.

Being a confident listener on stage, we are talking about how, at our best relation, workshops will tell people that listening is what investors complain about most, that no one listens to them. Buddies come to the office, pitch them on a fun, pitch them on investment, and then ask if there's any questions. They don't really get to know the family, and Nick, on stage in San Francisco, said that his brain just goes dark when someone pitches for more than five or ten minutes straight, like he just shuts off. You know, because it's not dynamic, they don't know him and they're going in the direction he doesn't care about too much.

So it's interesting, though, because when I say eight, those of you raising capital, make sure you listen to investors, you know I can see the blank look on their face like, okay, get to the slide that I care about, because I didn't pay here to you know, I didn't pay to come here to have you tell me these obvious things, yet investors complain about it all the time. So, as an investor, if you look for the person who does actually listen and and focus on that, it can be a sign of a high degree of character, because they're not talking over you because they're so rushed to sell you. It might be a sign that they don't have access to many investors. Now they got in front of you, they're either nervous or they don't know how to be polite and interact with you in a professional way, which might mean that they should be working with other investors for the next five years and just keep in touch until they've evolved to another level, centered as a person.

You know there's some people are much more outgoing and maybe exciting to be around than others, but if they're very extreme, in some ways sometimes it can be a warning sign. If they're very, you know it sounds strange but very unkept or that's like not, it's not really a class act, then that can just be a warning sign and sometimes you can't put your finger on it, but there's something off and you should always listen to that because your subconscious picking up on some little thing that's not aligned. And I think the most important thing, and working with private investors or in personal life or in business, is just high integrity, not just moral integrity, but like integrity of everything in your life, like the food you eat. Who's on your team?

What's your core values? What groups do you belong to? Who do you hang out with on the weekends? What do you do for fun? Where do you live? Where do you go on vacation?

If things are not in line, then there's friction and you can feel that when working with someone else and for some reason you're like: well, never kind of work with this person. He'll politely have coffee with them for the rest of this ten minutes, but you know in your head that you can never work with them, even though sometimes you don't know why. And so I think that's important to listen to and think about and just think: is this person someone who's always going to do things the right way for the long term, or just rush through and just get things done as fast as they can and they're just just go for the short-term profit, which comes to contributing as well, so contributing back to society and contributing to you? Are they offering advice and genuine insights and resources and introductions before you've invested?

That's a very good sign, because that means that they have plenty to give and there's more to give, and so we're holding everything back and say, no, I'm not going to tell you anything and tell you: invest, we have to sign three, three NDA is before, and tell you our secret strategy. You know, like, just go on to the next person who's not scared of losing everything, because if you have a lot of ideas and great strategies and you know the execution over a long period of time is your advantage, then you're not scared of sharing your strategies. Alright, so you can use that tool that we just showed, the 6 C's, to evaluate people and due diligence. You can identify choke points in your space, so strategic strongholds.

For once you acquire that, then everything else goes better and goes faster. And we've got a full webinar on that, so I don't have time to talk about it in depth here. I draft out your three buckets of investments and figure out what brain should be over seeing each of those three buckets, what organization. It usually cannot be one person overseeing all three at a very granular level.

That one person is gonna have to rely upon other providers, or a multitude of providers, to execute on what you're, what you're looking to do. So all deals that get closed can be looked at through the lens of these trust curves, of trust in the team, the industry, in an actual opportunity. So if you are medical doctor and you had a practice in a medical office building, you might understand medical office investments very well. You might not know the team, but maybe the opportunity is local to you and you can drive there in two hours.

You're gonna, you're gonna close on that deal more easily and you'll have more confidence and high conviction. It's gonna be a better use of your time to look at deals that it fit these trust curves. This is why everyone raises money from friends and family first. This is why people want to meet in person at a conference and not just message over LinkedIn or have some you know, Facebook group.

The people are interacting with. You can't really see what people are in a Facebook group to well. It's because people need to move up these trust curves. For those of you raising capital, if you're going to meetings and people are at the bottom, don't even go to the meeting and just cancel it because it's gonna take you two years to educate them and they'll probably never invest.

But if you have meetings where you can just go to people who already know your space very well or her very local to the asset, then that speeds everything up because then I can go see the asset, they can walk through it, get comfortable with it and all of investing is about trust and high conviction. Many of you have experienced this, this headache and as a theme frenzy, that sometimes will people find out that you are wealthy or that you have a business, or even that you are a doctor or a dentist. Then they'll charge you twice as much or four times as much. It just feels that way, probably felt that with contractors who might come to your house.

You know, I live on an island and we call, like the key, biscayne prices because it, you know, anyone who crosses the bridge from Miami to come there, they know that they can just, you know, charge whatever and people think, okay, okay, whatever, just get it done. And there everyone's used to it. You're kind of immune to it cuz everything's more expensive there. Same in the family office world.

What's interesting is families that I work with are not typically cheap people. They just want it to be aligned with the value. They don't want to pay the price of a Mercedes AMG and get a Honda Civic. They want to reward someone handsomely if they do excellent work, maybe more so than the person was expecting, but only when there's excellent work, not for doing mediocre work or average work.

They can get that from the market at a lower price. So it's really just making sure that who you work with is aligned with you, because once you're given money to someone now you have an opportunity cost. They haven't made you money yet. So in some models you need an acquisition fee, you need a management fee. It's the only way either a small team can survive, whether they can conduct proper due diligence or some other area like that, but when possible or as possible, it's always good to have a structure that's more aligned than not.

If you're looking at three options and one looks much more lines than they're wearing their confidence on their sleeve that they're gonna do well for you by making their success aligned with yours. So I would also point out a couple things. Some families, if they get really good and invested in an area like, say you want to invest in other people's dental practices, then you can create your own proprietary structures or ways of making acquisitions. One of my friends has acquired 38 medical therapy practices to date.

His goal is to acquire 180 and he's figured out recently a way to go in and figure out how to boost the revenue, sometimes two to threefold in the first 12 months after acquiring it. So he used to buy it at a multiple and then go in, keep the guy on staff and payment, good salary and a bonus or profits, but you have to pay that multiple going in. That was close to market average. You get a little bit of a good deal because he had credibility doing this 30-plus times.

But now he's figured out that in some of these practices if a doctor is earning, say, 200 thousand dollars a year over 300 thousand a year from their practice, he'll go in and say, hey, we want to buy your business and we're gonna. We're going to give you a salary of 350 instead of 300 because, and you've been taking 300 for the last seven years, so we can give you more than you made last year. And if we don't get to this threshold of revenue and profit growth in three years. Then you get the business back free and clear.

But we think we can double or triple your business and you're going to profit share with us as a co holder in this, in this asset with us. And they've been able to do that and close on several medical practices where they didn't pay anything for it because they came in, guaranteed the income and then boosted it up. It's kind of like an option like the Airbnb idea you had. It's like little option to do it and have been very successful doing that.

That's a proprietary way of acting that uses their strengths. One example for myself is we've made two investments now from my own balance sheet structured as gross revenue royalty deals. So we invest the money, we get a gross revenue royalty off the top and we had equity warrants and the warrants go down after we get all of our money off the table and then we can make another royalty deal and we still have the equity warrants in the past deal and in some cases, a smaller royalty in perpetuity. So for us that works well because I can apply my unique abilities and positioning and branding and marketing and lead gen to them, especially if they're in the family office or capital markets related space or not.

But as you grow as a family, it can be fun to think of these structures because they can either protect your downside by D risking things and you get a test phase first, or you spend less money to acquire an opportunity or you get better terms along the way. And one thing to watch out for with the Fein frenzy is just make sure that you are not your service providers largest client, because that means you are their learning curve and they're making mistakes on your account at your expense, and that might they might be excited to serve you by the end of the day. You need someone who doesn't get scared that you have 10 LLC's or not scared that you have 3 passports and multiple residences in a more complex situation. That should be the norm and hopefully their average client is more complex than you.

In that way it's like, okay, we got this, we'll do this, this, this, this if act highly confused. You know you can always keep your CPA you've had for 12 years. Wait, maybe layer on top of that more high-powered. You know appropriate provider deal flow deficiency is another headache and really it is games super clear and what deal flow you want, not just oh, yeah, we invest in real estate.

It's like coming out of college and saying I'll take any job in business. Well, it's not true. Once you get the accounting job and decide you hate it, then you're gonna say, okay, anything but accounting and then anything with. So families oftentimes spend three to five years to come up with what they could do in three months if they just had the conversations and got to know themselves and their goals and the family's goals and just really was highly intentional about where they want to spend their energy.

So what size of investments do you want to make? What industries, what geography, how large the team need to be? Are you okay being minority or do you need to have full control of what you invest in, what credibility level, etc. The more that you can develop these criteria, the more that your team screens for you and more, that you can be saying no to most things and yes to the ones that are a great fit, but then also you can go backwards and say, okay, we know what the little pinpoint area is.

So like, like what I did one time is: um, we've done this a few times, we're doing it right now in a manufacturing space, is when, a consumer product space, we identified three hundred and seventy five companies that met the strike zone and then we reached out over email to the 375 I got on the phone of seventy of them. We identified eight of them that were invested and we made two investments based on that process. So it's not just being reactive to things in a smart way, it's them being proactive and creating a database of assets you could invest in. For example, a family that I met in the West Coast that only invested in medical office buildings only along one highway.

I said, well, have you looked in the county records and made a database of every medical office building along that highway and then looked who the owners were in the county records or who the lawyer was representing them and they hadn't done that yet, but it would allow them to see the universe of the deals that are most important to their strategy as a family. So you can see, a lot of these ideas are not rocket science, but it's being highly intentional and then being highly focused and then knowing who you're going to use to be smart in what parts of your portfolio. I want start speeding up a little bit to make sure that I have enough time here to get through stuff, but just make sure that you have things systematized for your deal flow. You can use a project management tool like asana so that things are done the right way at each step: when you're hiring someone, when you're doing, when you're doing a site visit at a deal, when you're negotiating for a deal, etc.

And the more focused you can become on where the most power is created, the better, because if you get known for a certain type of yo flow in your space and people know that you had strategic value, that you're going to get more deal flow so you learn faster. You'll get exclusive deal flow. You'll get a first look at deals that others haven't been able to seen yet. He'll bring it to the guy who specialized or the female who's specialized in that area before they bring it to someone who says I invest in everything and you'll get deals at a better valuation because they see that post close, you can take them somewhere faster or take them into a market they wouldn't have gotten to otherwise, or help them avoid risks in the space.

So being strategic and focused gives you all those advantages. Plus, it allows you to de-risk the investment because you are gonna work post close on making sure it goes well, versus investing and stuff where you have no idea. You know how to add value and they don't know how to use your intelligence either. In real estate, and sometimes that is a very important part of the portfolio, but I'm talking about for operating businesses, it's just important to have your strategies down so you know why you're investing in something and not just spreading the money out all over the place.

Time, constriction, pains, I think I have nine minutes left right now, so I'm experiencing these, but most of you face this as well. The challenge is that many people think, after they sell their company or they get to a certain level, that that is the level of freedom. But you know, as the the song goes: more money, more problems to deal with, right. So you have more complications.

You have more service providers, you have more team members, you have more Holdings to look after and the trouble is everyone expects you to be running and watching all the trains. That's why the family office industry has emerged, because they're just too much complexity and if you're worth 20 million dollars, or even just 10 million dollars or five million dollars, a mistake that adds five or ten percent taxation to your tax bill could have paid for someone part-time to help you not make those mistakes and be more effective on deal flow and come up with a strategy and document everything. So the wealthier you are, usually the busier you are, unless you're highly intentional about designing it, otherwise it naturally happens. So you're busier than everyone else.

You have potential to make more mistakes than everyone else, and the consequences of those mistakes are times more than everyone else. So that's why it's important to have things more organized, more systematic and be more focused, because otherwise there'll be mistakes all over the place, frustrations and problems within the family. So you really got to work with people who you feel are not just providing a service, but they go above and beyond on the strategic value and they're really adding an extra something. They're also bringing your deal flow on top of being the accountant, or they're also helping you raise capital through their law firm, because some of the other clients are asking them for real estate deal flow, etc.

These are is different parts of a family office infrastructure. Their typical having someone leading the thing. Governance policies usually need some sort of private banking services. Even if you're worth a billion dollars plus, or 30, 50, 100 million dollars plus, you'll still need to use a private bank or a multi-family office, even if you want to build your own team for some of these.

And there's a newer term called a virtual family office, where someone says, hey, I want all the benefits of a family office and I want to have one or two people within it, maybe even just one part-time, and then a family member, and then trust money with a private bank for the diversified bucket, but for our own assets, I need someone helping me. So it's not just the principle wealth creator, there's got all the ideas and strategies in their head and all the intimate knowledge of the deals, also being in charge of making sure that the accountants getting the tax details or the K once on time, or that follow-ups are being done with the 20 people you've invested with. So that's called a virtual family office. That's just a really lean single family office type solution that a lot of people are opening right now and getting to set up a couple of these things where he touched on, such as transparency and not being a firm's learning curve and not being a firm's largest client, but also I found that family offices really want to work with and in private investors, in general specialists.

They want to work with someone who really knows their area extremely well and the whole world is gravitating towards that. Instead of saying we do senior living in ten different countries or we do self-storage, multifamily and office Park investments and we have the best of the best deals in 20 different cities, and, by the way, our team is made up of 10 people, it's much more credible to say we do self storage only in San Diego and that's all we've done for 10 years and our five person team has a handle on the asset owners of all those properties and we know what's below and above market and we can. When somebody moves, we just move them to our other self storage property because they're all in San Diego. So if they move across town, that's fine, we can still keep them as a client.

One is more credible because it's focused and the other one you know. So when you're meeting with people, you have to think about the size of the story they're getting. You know and think with one or two people, is it really credible that they're invested in eight different cities and you really know what's going on, compared to the multifamily group. I know in Kansas City they close seven deals last year and if a property goes on the market in Kansas City, its multifamily, the brokers, are taking it to them first and they can drive across town and value it per door same day.

With their models they're dialed into every suburb in Kansas City and the local lenders will do creative things with them now because they've two hundred million in equity raised. How do you compete with that? If you're a fly-in guy from Chicago who's also invested in five other cities, you're not seeing the deal first. You know this other group is, so I'd think about that when you think about investment managers you're working with.

How focused are they? Family is fighting with each other is a big problem. Document in your family history can help with that. Having a family book like a coffee book that tells the story of your family can help with it. Getting your kids involved in the business at a young age or helping them start their own business, my kids do.

We do lemonade stands and they want to buy a little electric Tesla car and I said, well, you can buy it yourselves, but you're gonna earn it through lemonade stands and we're gonna do it out front of our house. It said, no, we have like no foot traffic. We're gonna go buy the Starbucks and the place where we have our office space and keep asking and do it there. And they're learning about foot traffic.

One of them gets the money, the other one rings the bell when we make a sale, the other one yells out at customers as they're walking by or driving by and gets them to stop, and so they trade different roles and they learn about it and save the money and they can spend a certain amount at CVS that same day, but then they save the rest for the Tesla that they wanted to buy. But I also talked to them and probably bore them with what I'm doing, what I'm negotiating with family offices. When I'm writing on the like with them, when we go to the beach, I tell them what we're doing different in the family office club. I expose them to tons of stuff, like I taught my two-year-old how to say the word cent a millionaire last week.

I don't know that's gonna help her or not, but I I just figure like sharing what we're doing in real time. They come to the office once a month each and do homework and see the team working in there for an hour - in the afternoons, and they can just see what's going on and they understand what what it is. They call it. Being a seller is what they call it when we do a lemonade stand and we had Mitzi Perdue from the Purdue chicken family, who's also from the Hilton family by chance, speak at a couple of our events and she talks about this importance and it just gets discounted by a lot of people.

It especially gets discounted by everyone who I think is under the age 25, just like: yeah, you know, let's get back to the, the fun beach time, but I think it's just the values that made your parents so successful is what can really help you become more successful, more than anything you're going to learn in school, because it's real practical advice from someone who actually wants you to be successful versus someone who knows a lot of theory, and I got hired by a professor to teach you stuff out of a textbook you know. So the Family Values you know can be everything, so make sure you capture those. And Warren Buffett's, the one who had the quote I had a variation of earlier that he wants those kids to be able to do anything but not enough money to do nothing, which I think is a common theme I hear with families. I've got a free governance policy document if you want it.

If you go to Sinta millionaires, calm, actually I have the sense millionaire book, and then a governance policy and ethical policy and a direct investment worksheet we just give away for free on that website. Many people here obviously would like to avoid embarrassment to the family name, but more important than this is just breaking of family relationships. You know, without the communication, without the values documented, without getting your kids involved early and figuring out what's important to you and your spouse and the extended family and having that all be cohesive, then bad things are much more likely to happen. They could still happen, but at least you have done what you can.

That doesn't cost any money at all. There's no reason not to do 90% of the stuff I talked about today. I didn't talk about anything that's big, expensive, you know, painful to get into plays whose they're all just little tools. Even all the software tools I talked about would cost you a total of maybe $50 a month to get in place.

Some families like to latch onto a sustainability goal or two, and you know there's 17 of them. The world health or the world health organization, I think it was established and said, something you can look into maybe on your own time. It can help families focus. Sometimes they do want to do something positive in their circles and in their environment, and then I talked about this when the midsi slide was up, but just making sure that the policies you do have are communicated and that you have in-person meetings, not just an email or a, you know, a phone call or something that's real important.

The family gets updated at least twice a year because people move away for college etc. And it's it's hard to communicate clearly over the phone or just email, which happens a lot. So if you're developing your own virtual family office or just curious about this space, we have a free quiz that kind of scores your formalization of it, eight different ways, that single family offices, comm, forward-slash quiz and might help a few of you on where to focus energy next, on getting things matured along the way, and it's just another resource of some some millionaires comm. I think I literally only have one minute so I just want to touch base on one or two things.

Here is that I do think that in the future there'll be more and more debt lending opportunities. I think it's just something that families, especially late in the cycle, are interested in and almost everyone likes. There's collateral with cash coming off of it. So whether that's lending or a type of real estate invest and it has high income, I just see a big hunger for that.

I think the royalty space will grow. Almost nobody is structuring royalties and their investments at this point, and then more performance-based managers, and then you know the whole thing. I'm a. Office space in general is growing, so there's resources being created just for private investors. I, like this organization, you know, ran by forests that didn't exist before, and a decade from now the space is going to be twice as big as it is an in terms of formalization.

A decade ago and it started, nobody knew at a family office was even in the investment industry. Most people had no idea what it was. Last point: here I would just do nothing until you know where you're going and why. Otherwise, every dollar you spend, every person you hire, every service provider you say yes to, all your energy is just going to be dissipated doing a bunch of things that are not confirmed with being integrated with exactly the new reality you want to live in.

If you don't know where you're going and why, then just stop doing anything. Someone on stage, because they had an angel investor mindset in San Francisco, was like: oh yeah, well, investing is like throwing darts. And I got a bactrim. I said: well, I don't know. My opinion, if you feel like you're throwing darts and investing, just stop investing and like, get a plan so that doesn't feel like you're throwing darts.

It should not feel that way. I think some people just live their life going to like a regular type angel club and just hear pitches and random industries and say, oh okay, it sounds like a good guy, I'll put 50k in there, 50k here. You need to know why you're doing something, what you're doing at what level, what your preferences are, what your goals are and what you're doing in your own sandbox versus real estate, versus traditional wealth management. So that is the end of my slides.

I don't know if I burn too much time or if we have time for a question or two for us. Yes, we can't take a few questions. I'd love to have any of the next gens, any of the next gens, have a question, anybody. All right, here we go. Yes, Oh, for that one slide with like the six and it's like a.

It's like a, it's a bomb. There's like a bunch of boxes on it? Uh-huh. Is it a percentage for a beach box with a checkbox for each box? Mostly areas of consideration for like the character analysis is: just think about whether this person is actually listening to you in the meetings. They're really committed.

Are they consistent? One due diligence analyst spoke at our conference and said that he always uses the beer test on people, so he'll meet with someone in the office, just him. If it goes well, I'll bring him back. They'll meet with many people on the team. The third time he'll meet them in the city somewhere, or for cocktails or for a beer or two, and he'll see how much they drink and how they treat the waitress and what they say.

Someone will say, oh, yeah, we're going through in a sale of our firm right now. Or Oh, have you heard about blockchain? I'm investing in my spare time. That's what I really want to do with my life. Do you want to see our investment platform for that? He says he.

Many times, people survived the first two and they failed a beer test because they don't even know it's a test. So just getting to know someone in different contexts over a period of time is what builds trust, I think, and I think that that's one of the most important points of showing that slide that I forgot to bring up earlier. And then he reminded me also that the whole reason why I bring my daughters to the office and talk to them about stuff they don't understand with family offices is my dad did that growing up because he raised capital for hospitals and universities and it take me to donor meetings with someone be donating money to an organization like a Cancer Society. And I started you know five or six businesses before I graduated from high school and all those failed.

I started one in business in college that made money, but it was through failing all those times and then figuring stuff out then, when I saw the fail, my office opportunity, that things went much better. So I think helping the next generation run with ideas that they have, even if it seems like you know arbitrage and selling, you know collectible Nikes off of ebay versus somewhere else, sounds like a silly idea. What they learn. By vine selling.

Did I make money? How do I price that? How do I market? What description gets a sale on eBay? What doesn't? Should I use advertising?

Should I not? Can I buy in bulk and make more money? All that stuff is stuff that you only learn by failing and messing up and getting burned a little bit, and I think that it's better education than anything I learned in school, maybe. Take one more question: is your handle? I think we got one behind it area one, okay.

So do you find that? The well-organized family offices that got all their stuff together? As far as their investment, are they really focused on one market or how much do they diversify? So usually with in real estate, they'll be in two or three different segments and they'll find one, two, three best-in-class providers, or out of the three segments in real estate they'll say: let's take on this ourselves, mobile home parks or self storage or multifamily or something.

If they made their money in tech, maybe it's data warehousing or something, hopefully something that they have expertise in, and then for their own business area. It's usually just one area, but there might be two different sides of it. So they might have a series of dental clinics, but then maybe they also have a dental clinic brokerage business or a dental device business and they use a device in their own clinics and then they roll it out and licenses it to others and by having multiple operating businesses in a niche space like stem cells or some sort of medical therapy, they get an advantage in the marketplace. We can test things out or get early access to things.

So some families are very successful in real estate and they might be, lets say, investing in the self storage, but they also have a self storage brokerage business. So they see a ton of deal flow, they know what the market is and then they get to cherry-pick some of the best deals and invest in it instead of just brokering it. And that can be applied to any business niche here. And operating within the business that you're investing in in a few ways makes it so you have a chess board instead of just one pawn that you're trying to move forward.

So that's what we do at the family office Club. It generates systemic deal flow for us and with family offices, comm capillaries and comm the podcast, etc. But then it also attracts families to us consistently and it produces a profit and then we can use those byproducts to grow our investor relations agency, which is a pitch Dexcom for people raising capital, and sent a millionaire advisors when working with families. So I the best genuine advice is the stuff that's working for us and that works for me, and I see it working for families.