Family Offices for Searchers: A Primer

And then I think going forward, I think it's tactical because I think a family office will say like, look, I want to be, I only want to do a deal or meet someone that one is either creative enough to figure out a way into my door or two that was introduced by someone I know and someone I trust. And this is a very important element of family office world. There's an element of trust and…

So I think that's another reason for that. They sort of will stay quiet and they'll stay shadowy because they'll say I want to, like I want to be introduced the right deal. I don't want to be on a bunch of lists because I don't want to get the thousand emails and I want to be.

Are we talking about searchers with an. SBA deal talking to family offices or. No, not really. We're talking about people more independent sponsor.

I've heard you say independent sponsor a few times, taking down 3 and 4 and 5 million dollar EBITDA businesses. Are we talking about maybe the best fit for family offices and searchers or when searchers go to sell and they've grown their business and maybe family offices or buyers. Let's get granular now.

Yeah, there's a lot, a lot in there to unpack and you might have to revisit different parts of the question if I forget to answer it. Yeah. First of all, the best way to sort of get into the world is to develop a relationship with a single family office first.

Right? Because it's all about like building trust with sort of one and have a champion. And again, when I say family office, it could be a high net worth individual as well. Like the, we'll, we'll leave the line sort of blurry.

Someone with $50 million versus $150 million family office or 300, not that different how they're going to sort of to like communicate and work. And so as all sorts, sort of searchers and independent sponsors know, like one introduction leads to another. Right?

So it's like build a line of trust and communication with one individual and they are going to make introductions because everyone likes to discuss good deals with people they know and they trust. Families love to invest together and alongside each other. They rely, we rely heavily on the family office network.

When we're doing a deal we want to vet the other investors in deal. So it's so, it's so reliant on a sort of a trust and network element. So I think the only way you can't break into it, you have to build it.

You have to build your network in the family office world one at a time and it's, you know, one strong contact to another and then you just sort of go from there and you obviously like show up prepared and be honest and be straightforward and show people interesting deals.

I think there is a huge amount of desire, I mentioned before that family offices used to just be sort of passive LPs and they are still passive LPs but I think there's now a huge amount, a huge desire to be co investors as well. So they're, they'll, they'll say our direct program is to invest in a fund and then we'll do 50% in co invest. That has now morphed into okay.