Family Offices for Searchers: A Primer

But you know, that's just one kind of side to look at it. Whereas I think if you build a great business that sort of you own, you can go to family office capital or you know, family offices and say, look, buy it, buy a stake in my business, have a longer duration, be more flexible as the family Office. Like we'll be there when you need us.

Like we're professionals. So like we're we, we can be as helpful as we as we want. If you want to introductions or need a new CEO or need whatever.

And some of that is minority versus majority. And there's both flavors in the private equity world. Some families are only going to do majority deals they want to, but a lot of them will just buy a business with a great management team, leave them alone and hold the business for 20 or 30 years.

So I guess what I would encourage of your audience is when they're, when they get to that level and, and they start getting calls inbounds like hey, you know, this is Michael and I'm from name your bush and your color capital in whatever, you know, tertiary city, you know, they should start thinking, okay, like private equity is, is like I'm on the radar of private equity now.

And, and instead of just getting the inbounds as the business owner, you can start to think, well like what, what do I ideally want? What's the best sort of capital partner for me? And think about like family office capital as a solution for the next 10, 20 years of your business.

You're finding the right partner. Because what I love about the like the family to family thing is so cool is you know, you like a family office is someone that built a business, right, and made it and then a searcher is someone that has bought and built a business right? It's like very relatable.

And because the money is not tied up in a fund, like it doesn't sort of require this come in, put a bunch of debt on it, change the business strip and flip it, sell it, exit in seven years. Like that's going to disrupt the business. You can, you can, you can like there's just a better like fit a lot of times for capital.

And what will the expectations of the family office be for such an investment? If they're, you know, what, what are they going to be?

What are their, is the pro forma going to look like? How are they going to expect to get value from this business? Are they going to expect a liquidity event just like private equity just later, 20 or 30 years later?

Or is it basically just collecting dividends. Off the business indefinitely? What, what are their financial expectations?

The long termism sounds great, but there's still got to be some expectation. So some people will actually, some, some entities will invest exactly like private equity on, on that same time frame. And that can often be driven by the team as well.