Family Offices for Searchers: A Primer

But they represent just a sliver of. The Lab success stories. The number of deals across the Lab's cohorts now stands at over 120, with over $300 million in aggregate transaction value.

The Acquisition Lab was founded by Walker Deibel, author of Buy Then Build, the. Book that introduced so many of you to the very idea of buying a business. The Lab offers a month long, intensive, almost daily Q and A sessions with.

Chelsea, then build.com why do they have this affinity for alternatives, especially given their long horizon? That to me strikes me as more of an argument for, for public.

Well, I think they just want, they, they obviously they want the, the, the highest possible return they can for their capital. They have enough, where they can properly risk enough capital for the right return. So alternatives are sort of well suited.

They also don't need the money. So they can take the illiquidity of a seven year, ten year lockup. If you're an individual with 200 grand, like I might need that money, right?

I need to sort of. The argument is it's less of a, less suited to someone unless they have a lot of money. That's why until recently you had to be of a certain level of wealth to even invest into an alternative fund because you're locking up money for a long time. In the case of a very wealthy family, they obviously will never need all their money, right?

They're investing for multiple generations. They're thinking on a, on a two, three decade timeline. And so they're happy to lock up that money to get a higher return than they would in public equities.

Great. And then you have, I guess, I guess taking that a step further, what sort of happened in the last 15 or 20 years is, or maybe even the last 10 is after decades of investing in alternatives and investing in funds, a lot of family offices are sitting around, they're saying, well wait a minute, half our team is ex private equity people. We know what we're doing, we know how to find deals. We…

Like maybe we should just invest directly into a business or invest directly with an operator. Or a sponsor instead of going into a blind pool. So the direct investing practice of the family office world has really percolated and become a big area of a focus in the last sort of two decades.

They don't want to just be put in, you know, seven to 10 year funds whether when it takes, you know, they want to be more control, they want to be closer to the, to the asset themselves. They want to dictate terms more, they want to be part of the underwriting. So that's sort of the last evolution in, in terms of the investment.

And then I guess, you know, other trends in, in family office world. I think one is the single fam to multifam. Like that's one you see, you know, across the board a lot of brand name single family offices, especially of those sort of famous gilded age names.