Family Offices for Searchers: A Primer

It's all kind of private equity individuals that are now working at family offices. So the types of activities that family offices and private equity are doing can actually be quite similar in some cases, it's just a different Type of capital that makes sense. That's great. That's great. Well, you said a lot of things there that we're gonna return to later and over the course of the conversation,…

James, who, who are we talking to and what, how does somebody end up working in family, a family office? It's a great, great question. I'll preface with I, I don't have the typical sort of, you know, historical track is into getting into a, into a family office role, although it can be very non traditional and how people end up in these seats.

And I, and I sold it to an individual who's a wealthy guy that had a large perfume business. What I now know is a family office. I didn't hear that term in 20, whatever, 16 when we heard it or when we sold it.

But now if you look at it like that was a small, you know, two or $300 million family office in Miami. So that was my first experience interacting with this base. I then spent a handful of years in sort of advisory, working on sort of structure and capital raising and all these different things across different alternative asset management businesses, across inland marine leasing and rail car…

And then I went in house at a family investment firm, family office out of Boston. I worked for the Christensen family, Dr. Clay Christiansen, who wrote the Innovator's Dilemma.

And then so that was my first sort of like pure family office role. And then I worked, I came here about three years ago to join a longtime friend and mentor of mine to, to work at Belzberg and Co, which I can get into. So that, that's sort of a quick background on me.

So some entrepreneurial stuff, some sort of straight finance stuff, fits and stops along the way and you know, happy to be here. Great. Awesome. Thank you, James.

Let's start. So what we're going to do, audience, is go through kind of the, the real basics of family office. I mean, I'm about to ask James for literally what it means with the definition of family office. And we're going to build on that foundation and get more and more nuanced as we go.

And James, we're going to end the conversation With James giving us really a kind of current trends and, and really the subtleties of how family offices work. So just to lay the groundwork there, as I said, basics. First, define family office for us, James.

Yeah, it's, it's, it's a loose definition, but essentially it is just somebody's money. It's a, it's, it's a rich person or a rich family. Right.

It's a pocket of capital. Usually what we associate kind of over the hundred million dollar mark right now would be a very small family office. But it's a dedicated pool of capital that really exists to sort of invest and compound and to diversify and belongs to the person or entity that is actually investing.