You guys get a ton of deals probably every day. Your inbox must be filled. I want the audience to
understand what is your filtering process? How do you look at deals from what vantage point? Do you
mostly stay in your lane? DJ, let's start off with you. Well, you do get an awful lot of deals.
It's like you have a bullseye at the time.
fortunately we do have parameters that we look for so if it fits in our box unfortunately a lot of
families don't have something like that so because we do we're able to decipher what we want to
look at more and what you know what we're just going to pass on and and you know go from there if
there's something that we know that another family maybe is looking in a certain area then we'll
ask them if it's okay if they want to meet this person so we'll help other families too if we know
that they're looking at something that we're not do you do you look at every om that's sent to you
or do you do you look at om's i guess from a trusted source first
uh well you're always going to go with the trusted source but from our perspective it's all we'll
go to the to the person or the company implementing what they're trying to implement right because
if you don't have a good operator for whatever it is it doesn't matter what the deal is but first
it's what's the deal you know if we know who they are then it's we don't have to dig as deep um
because we probably already had in the past that's a great resource right there do you want to add
to that Yes, I think our focus in co-investment is also the reason why we do it this way is
because we can share the due diligence with other families. If we have another family who is
already invested in a company or in a fund and they want us to go with them,
we just share. They can give us their insights and vice versa.
So I think the way that we invest with others really accelerate the process and shortens the due
diligence, which is something that's important for us because obviously it costs money and we can
lose opportunities. So that's something that we look at. But other than that, I would say initially
we just reject a lot of opportunities. Because we have our thesis and so we just don't react to
opportunities. It's really like we built our thesis and then we seek investments. One thing I would
say the best I've ever seen is, and this is a number of years ago, it's a group out of Chicago and
they had probably 20 people there and these were all people that had a specialty area in a
different part of the industry where they created their wealth. and so when deals would come in
that person would spearhead it because they would know um because that that's one of the things if
you if some whatever somebody does if they created their wealth they're going to know immediately
right and so i thought that was interesting because families love doing deals with other families
and when you can piggyback off you know somebody that has already done it makes it easier
absolutely absolutely looking at someone else's experience and know how much easier to underwrite a
deal Sasha, I want to get to you. What do you see as the biggest red flags when you encounter
someone giving you a deal or even a service provider? What are the biggest red flags you see that
kills a deal immediately off the bat?
That's a good question. I think for us, really finding a sense of humility with people.
and i'll give you an example of a group that we actually decided that we're going to test out you
know we were we were giving this person an interview and um he said to us um that he was going to
be converting this 230 unit uh project in providence um it was a textile mill and you know we had
never done anything in textile mills it sounded crazy and at At first I said no,
I rejected it, but I knew the person really well that recommended me to this person because we
started doing industrial outdoor storage. through one of his contacts and they've done really well.
So we focused on what we call emerging. They're new, they don't have a track record, but we think
that with our help, we can help them convert to that. And one of the questions we asked them was,
you know, you've converted. a 30 unit textile mill you're now jumping to 230 like how do you how do
you feel are you nervous right and a lot of the times people are you know they'll say oh my god
we're 100 or and but his answer was i'm scared as hell right and um he's like you know this is the
first time i feel like i can really lose um money and and and all that and um um and then i
remember he told me that his dad was a human rights lawyer and i was like if that was a human
rights lawyer like how are you getting he was putting significant and he was like, look, when I
graduated, I had $30,000. I did this project, and I 3X'd it,
and I did another project, and then I 5X'd it, and he was going all in in this project.
But I think that every step of the way, just talking to him, there was this humility to that
person. We ask questions, and a lot of the times, he's like, look, I'm... I'm going to be learning
a lot of it for the first time because I haven't done it before, right? And so I appreciated the
candor. And when me and my partners were talking, I was like,
look, let's give it a shot because the fact that he was willing to say that I want to learn,
that I'm going to make mistakes, gave us confidence he was worth giving a shot.
In other situations, we've had situations where you could tell that person is not just confident,
but more cocky. They behave like they know everything and that no mistakes. Those are the things,
those are where you get nervous because then those expectations, okay, what happens when it doesn't
go their way?
Do they know how to handle challenges? Can they pivot? Right. right can they pivot and meeting
someone that just said that that came out right away saying look there's going to be a lot of
unknowns because these are textiles i've done 30 ones but the the the risk return was worth giving
it a shot so humility is definitely a major factor when you're looking for a sponsor huge um you
know not that they're uh you know not overly confident You know, you want to make sure that you
have a baseline of competence, right? 90% of the time, the people that you'll screen have
competence, right? Actually, I take that back. I take that back. I'm wrong about that.
That's humility, right? Usually you want to make sure they have some confidence because 90% of the
people that you do get, they don't have the competence. So you want to make sure they can add one
plus one first and then go from there. Hi, I'm Richard C. Wilson. Our community has closed over $1
billion of transactions. We have over 16 million registered members across 100 plus LinkedIn
groups. And I own billionaires.com and run Family Office Club. Over 19 years,
we've hosted 300 live events. built 50 of our own AI tools. And between the billionaires I've
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superintelligence, and scale. That's exactly what we provide at Family Office Club. We host 30
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leave with ai implemented to learn more please go to familyoffices.com and i look forward to
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