Welcome to Inside the Family Office, live investor panel. In this episode, keeping
the family together, family offices under 300 million. Dr. Cook sits down with multi
-family office principle to talk about what it really takes to serve families in the
$25 to $300 million range. You're going to hear how his firm allocates across public
markets, real estate, and alternatives, why also he sees the family itself as his
primary investment and how tools like family foundations and boots on the ground
philanthropy keep the next generation grounded. Let's jump on into this conversation.
So I'd like to invite up Dr. Cook. She has a background as a CPA. She also has
her C -G -M -A -C -F -F -F -A -I -A, Prince II practitioner, and she's from Sunburst
Ventures. She has family office experience for over three decades now,
as associated with the Cooper Family Office, as well as Family Office work for, I
believe, her own family's single family office, if I remember correctly. And she
always has a great job here on stage moderating the panel, so I'm sure you're going
to enjoy this next panel of investors. Let's welcome them all up to the stage.
Testing? Ha -ha! There we go. Well, Glad to see everyone again this afternoon.
Thank you for those who joined earlier this morning. And thank you, Richard, for the
introduction. Totally spot on, as always, and the great event. So it's my pleasure
to moderate this panel. This panel is one of the speed panels,
so it's the ones where we have some celebrated experts who have very interesting
projects going on, giving them an opportunity to take several minutes and explain
about what they're doing and why it might be of interest to you and where there
could be potential synergies here and in the room and with each other. So I will
let them do self -introductions and they will each take approximately five minutes and
discuss not only themselves but what they're investing in the exciting projects that
they particularly would like to share about if they have any particular structures
that they put around these things and like the number one kind of thing they're
they're looking to get out of today if if they had the genie coming out of the
bottle so so let's go ahead and begin first with Kip to my left I have a firm
along with my son called family wealth leadership. We are a multifamily office.
We focus on families that are under 300 million, and the reason for that is if
they go over 300 million, they think single family, and we can provide all the
services that the family needs at a much more cost -effective basis.
So what we're trying to do is identify those families. And When I say 300 million,
it could be anywhere from 25 million to 50 million to 150 million. So that's part
of our focus. I'll go down my list of questions here. What do you typically invest
in? And the answer is we're pretty much across the board. Because, again, of the
size of the families that we're dealing with, sometimes they're not going to be able
to put a million dollars into a deal, but they can certainly maybe put $200 or
$250 ,000 into it. We do everything from the normal marketable securities to all of
the real estate stuff that we've been talking about. Usually we're going to do it
in a fun format because that gives the clients some diversification.
And that real estate could be obviously the multifamily, self -storage,
in some cases student housing,
then we do life settlements, we do currency trading. We've been doing, in the last
couple of years, we were doing a lot of what is called structured settlements. And
those structured settlements, we've been getting somewhere between 10 to 17 % on them.
We're not in any right now because the rates have gone down. So again, for our
clients, we have to have a lot of diversification because they cannot afford to be
putting tons of money in one deal. Let's see, what, any preferred investment
structures? The way I'm going to answer that question is a little different.
Again, our focus and prime mission in life is to keep a family together and not
let the wealth destroy the family. And we've all heard stories about what happens in
wealthy families. So the structures that we talk about as far as investments are
exactly what we're talking about here today. Family office. So we're helping our
clients create and operate their family office and their family foundation. We really
like the family foundation. It can be something like a donor advice fund. It doesn't
have to be a full loan foundation. But the foundation is a way to bring the family
together around potentially common goals, values, and purpose.
And I always like to encourage our families to get involved in what I call boots
on the ground philanthropy. So rather than just writing a check, and the example I
always use is, why don't you take the whole family to, let's say, Africa, and go
drill a water well, build a hospital, a school, a church,
whatever. Because I can tell you that 20 years from now,
last year the family went to Disney World, and then this year they go to Africa to
do whatever I just described, 20 years from now, you already know which vacation
they're going to be talking about, and it's not going to be Disney World, right?
Let's see. Types of investments you're looking for? Well, again, I'm a little
different here. My investment is in families. And so my purpose for coming to these
meetings, and I've been coming now for, I think, six or seven years, is to just
hopefully identify a family that needs what we can do. And again, because I'm
focused on, I'll call it the lower end, a lot of those families don't even know
what a family office is. So that's our goal. And then your number one most valuable
suggestion.
Mike Scott hit it a little bit this morning, and my answer to that question is
don't make decisions based on emotions. And that goes in two words.
On the wealth side and investments, If you're making decisions on just emotion,
you're probably going to make a lot of mistakes. On the family side, on the
people's side, it's the same thing. Emotions run really high in families. We have a
saying that every time you give something to your children, you take something else
away. What are you depriving your children of when you give them something? And the
answer to that question is, potentially you're going to deprive them on self -respect
there's a lot of kids in today's world that being in a wealthy family is really
difficult for them so you've got to be really careful so that's my my wisdom for
the day thank you so much several points resonating there just quick follow -up
before we continue on you mentioned such a diverse range of asset classes and assets
that your clients are involved in, you help diligence these, you help source these,
or what exactly is your role in that? And then with respect to the soft side and
the skills that you mentioned and the family is getting along, and do you have
counselors or is it more strategy or how do you approach that? Very briefly,
but still I'd like to know those answers. Yeah, The answer is we try to act as
what we call the FEO, the family enterprise officer. And in doing that, the first
side on the financial side, there are some of the things we can provide as far as
the assets. But a lot of it, again, we have to go out to other sponsors. So
that's why I said earlier we use funds for a lot of that stuff like life
settlements. We don't do that. We've got to go out to somebody else to do that.
And on the family dynamics? And on the family side, we, the way I put it is,
we're there like the orchestra conductor. Our job is to identify what is needed at
any given moment in time and then bring the right resource to the table. So to
answer your question, yes, we have to use a lot of outside resources because I'm
not a psychologist. I can't deal with Issues like alcohol or drug addictions or so
forth. So we have those people that we bring to the table. Understood. You're an
expert quarterback there.
You've been listening to Inside the Family Office, Live Investor Panel, Episode 1,
keeping the family together, multifamily offices under 300 million. In this
conversation, Kip showed us how a well -run multifamily office can give sub -300
million plus families that single family office level support while still protecting
both the balance sheet and the family relationships behind it. If you found this
helpful, follow the show, share it with another founder or family office, and stay
tuned for episode two, where we dive into infrastructure, secondaries, and saying no
to FOMO deals with another multi -family office CIO.