Family Offices for Searchers: A Primer

I think so much is, is, is reliant on, on a trusted network. And so if you see a deal from someone you want to say, okay, well how do you know this person? Have you worked with this person before who's in the deal?

And then if they're like, well, you know, we've done three or four things with this person. You know, Bob, Gary and Tina are all in the deal as well. They know him as well because they did a deal with him previously.

It's just like a guy in a truck, right, who's like just here and has like an loi. I mean just like a lot of your, a lot, you know, a lot of your amazing guests, like they're people that have discovered an amazing business. So how do you vet that?

You vet it sort of through, through sort of trust and, and, and conversations like that. I think to your point, there's, there is not a lot of, there's more collaboration than there is competition. Now sometimes a deal is really good.

You're like, and let's say there's only $20 million left and you're, you're trying to deploy a hundred a year. Like sometimes you want to be careful, like you want to be a good collaborator and share. There can be capacity constraints sometimes that you want to sort of take all of it.

But generally it's a very collaborative meaning because you also, you feel better if your partners are investing with you because you know and trust them. You've done deals together as well and you can compare notes, you can compare sort of the diligence process.

You can sort of think creatively together when you're doing the diligence, you know, so families love to invest alongside other families because they're coming at it with a similar, you know, a similar thought process and how they're yes, long term compounding trust, good alignment, you know, flexible. And what will often happen is families will kind of naturally club up.

So there'll be three or four, like if you go to Chicago for example, there's a lot of huge well known family offices there. There's like three or four that will love to do deals together because they've known each other for a hundred years, right? Like the kids have known each other and they've done deals together and they invest similarly and they have similar philosophies and the teams all know…

So they're going to invest in sort of deals together. So it becomes a very naturally like communicative, like you know, like community, which is great. It makes it a lot of fun.

So that's why there's a lot of like comparing of notes amongst family office people. And again a lot of it is just because it's like you have to like there's no published list of all the information. You have to rely on trust.

That's kind of because it is underground. Well, there's also that there's almost a need to do it because of this constraint because there aren't, there aren't, they're not fee generating organizations. And so as you have now said a couple of times there, there's always this capacity problem.