Many of you know I’m becoming more and more involved in the family office sector, and I just had one of THE industry leaders on the show for a fantastic interview.
This guy basically started the family office service sector. He created and hosts the preeminent events for high net-worth investors, and he’s met with more than 1,000 family offices face-to-face.
He’s Richard C. Wilson, the CEO/CIO of The Miami Family Office, who recently moved to Key Biscayne. He loves it, by the way, and he’s been meeting potential new clients literally every few days.
Wilson works with families that have a net worth of $100 million or more and have discovered they need someone looking out for them “holistically.”
“The whole reason the family office industry exists is that, if you’re worth $100 million, you don’t have the time to remember what your insurance agent said and tell your CPA and your wealth manager and tie it all together. You need somebody playing quarterback for your whole balance sheet,” he said.
I look at it this way. A family office is both a legal structure and an administrative structure to look after somebody’s assets.
As Wilson started investigating the field, he noticed that almost nobody was providing genuine value to the clients. He started blogging on the industry.
In the first two years, those outside the industry began hiring him as a consultant. After two years, $100 million-dollar and billion-dollar families started hiring him.
“It sounds corny, but the more we gave away, the more we got in return. This last book that I wrote, called ‘The Single Family Office‘, is the best-selling book in the whole industry. We spent 700 hours writing it, and you can buy it for $7. We’ve met 60 billionaire families since we released that book,” he said.
Of course, the prospect of starting a family office may seem overwhelming, so I had to ask about the most important service for a family that’s just beginning to investigate the idea.
“The takeaway for anyone here, whether you’re worth $10 million or $100 million, is that you shouldn’t do anything, or spend any money, or listen to anyone’s advice until you’ve gone through about 50 to 70 questions on exactly where you’re going and what your mission and goals and values and objectives are – so you can design a 360-degree, holistic plan,” Wilson said.
Now, some families just want to maintain their wealth, but others want to grow it. Wilson named five basic strategies that family offices can use to become richer:
– Buy up assets in a niche monopoly space.
– Get shown deals faster, before they’re on-market.
– Build a platform business. Buy five different companies that all sell to the same customer.
– Real estate rollups.
– Own the chokepoint. Make all of an industry go through you.
This was great stuff, and there was a lot more of it, including:
– Wilson’s favorite wealth-preservation strategies.
– Where the rich and famous – potential family office clients – like to live.
– The future of the family office industry, including the move toward a more public persona for individual family offices.
You can contact Wilson online at SingleFamilyOffices.com. He is hosting a Family Office Super Summit on Dec. 1-2 at the JW Marriott Miami on Brickell Avenue.
Click here to listen to the full interview with Richard C. Wilson of The Miami Family Office and SingleFamilyOffices.com.
