Strategic Approaches for Family Offices: Insights on Structure, Governance, and Investment

In this episode, we dive into a dynamic panel discussion focused on strategies and communication approaches that are shaping family offices today.  
This conversation brings together industry experts from both single and multifamily offices, who share their insights on how family offices are adapting to the current environment. 

The discussion touches on everything from family office structure—whether single-family, multifamily, or virtual offices—to the importance of governance, succession planning, and family dynamics. Panelists explore innovative ways to balance investments in real estate, technology, and fintech, while emphasizing the importance of cultivating a sustainable family culture for the long term. 

Tune in for valuable takeaways on building effective family office strategies in today’s fast-paced financial landscape.

Transcript

>> Thanks, everybody, for your time. So with this panel, we're just going to focus
on preferred structure strategies and communications that are working in today's
environment for multi -family, single -family, virtual family offices. And,
you know, there's a lot of ways of skinning the cat here, but before going into
it, I'd love for everyone to just take two minutes and introduce yourself and your
group and who you're with. Do you want to start off on on this side? - Yeah, sure,
hi. Hi, everybody, thank you for the opportunity to be here tonight under the bright
lights and great community here. Our foundation focuses on archival and history of
our family legacy as well as mentoring as a means to social and economic good.
We have a 20 year legacy of doing that and really going back to the origins of my
family, Wilhelm Maybach in the late mid 1800s and the first Mercedes,
first modern car. Family office wise, we're probably 50 % real estate and then as
I'm based out of the Silicon Valley, we spent a lot of time in that space as
well. Anyway, a pleasure to be here. - I am a second generation family office and
we started our own family office in America which is very the family office. We did
that after a very successful exit with my dad in a gas storage facility in about
2014 I think and our focus here right now is really focusing on technologies in
safety and security center that helps our world to be a safer place for our
children. We are getting into, we are actually in and defense sector as well. And
looking forward to speaking with everybody today.
- The way I would describe that is what we do is we're looking for families under
$250 million and a simple typical situation is a family with a business.
They got four kids, some in -laws are involved in the business, two of the kids are
involved in the business, business to them or not. They're starting to think about
what's going to happen when mom and dad die. They're 80 years old and they go down
to the attorney and they do their typical wills and trusts, divide everything by
four and you can imagine what's going to happen to the family. We try to keep that
from happening and one of the ways we do that is by helping them build and operate
their family office and a family
>> Hi, I'm Sahil, based here in beautiful Beverly Hills, just a few minutes up the
road. I run a multifamily office here, which really runs the gamut from real estate
to further larger investment advice, tax advice, asset protection, philanthropy,
fleet management, whatever it is you name it, both here and abroad. Investments -wise,
are mostly focused on real estate, both on the equity side and on the debt side,
particularly private credits, a great place to be right now, but also in this crazy
world where anything can happen and inflation is at 8 % is not crazy.
We're also chasing those larger asymmetric returns that can beat that, and that often
comes from venture, but we're always open to unique and interesting structures. >>
I'm a three -time tech founder and exited all three times, most recently to Bank of
America about a year ago. We mostly focus on FinTech and SaaS.
That's half of our company. And the other half of our company loves retail and
multifamily commercial real estate. So if you have a tech startup or any kind of
software company here in the audience we'd love to hear from you or if you're
looking for a GP on a partnership we'd also like to talk to you on the real
estate side.
I was a wireless guy for a number of years I was an operator for T -Mobile
independent operator I built up a network of 150 of my own stores I sold that in
2017 and set up a family office in Utah where I'm from, with my two older sons,
and we've been focused on primarily two areas, cash flowing real estate and a number
of asset classes, multi -family assisted living, manufactured housing,
a number of things, and then also in private equity, in independent sponsored smaller
deals, cash flowing, typically roll -ups. We like seeing child care,
dental care, age vac, a number of opportunities where you can take a small cash
flowing business and bring a bunch of them together and get a nice arbitrage on the
cash flow multiple. So that's what we're focused on. Great, great. Now,
when we're going into preferred family structures, there's, you know, multi multi
-family, single -family, virtual -family office, centralized, decentralized. I would love
to, maybe, Danny, you could just start off, just describe the org chart and the
structure of your family office right now. - So we've got, I mean, we're less than
10 employees, I would say, we're a little bit more focused, heavier focus on the
tech side, currently just because of the current real estate market.
That's a beauty, we've always been 50 /50 tech real estate for the last 20 years.
One of the benefits of that is when we feel like the real estate market's getting
a little overpriced, we tend to focus more on the SaaS side. When we feel like the
software side's getting a little bit crazy, we tend to focus more on the real
estate side. I can't share the numbers, but we had a 49 .5 time multiple on our
fintech company that we company we sold to the bank. That's why I don't get that
excited when I hear 18 % IRR. When you're used to the software and tech side,
you get used to those kind of multiples. Right now, I would say we're about ten
employees, seven of us are focused more on the fintech SaaS, software side,
AI, et cetera, et cetera. That's sort of our org chart looks. Then we have our own
in -house, on the real estate side we have our own in -house legal council
development team as you want to call it. So we bring a lot to the table but most
of the real estate deals we're doing today are two or three GPs come together, we
take down a project. So we're not really raising capital that often when we do, we
usually get it filled within 24 to 48 hours but the three real estate projects
we're doing right now. It's either just our firm or it's us in one or two other
family offices. - That's great. And Kip, what about you? How is your family office,
like preferred structure right now? - Well, we're a multi -family office is the way I
would describe what we do. And again, because we have families from $30 million up
to nine figures, it's very different for each family. So what we really do is we
focus on not only the financial side of the family but we deal heavily on what's
going on in the family relationships because if you don't solve the family
relationships and all the conflicts that are going on there, it doesn't matter what
you do on the financial side. It's going to go away at some point in time. So
really the answer to your question is we spend so much more time and again we do
all the financial stuff from all the investments but we spend a lot of time time
on governance and uncovering all the family dynamics and getting the family around
the table to have open conversations about what does the family want and again
traditional state planning is like I said earlier mom and dad do it by themselves
and that's going to be disaster we want the kids to be involved in the succession
planning great and Natalia you know yeah so we are a single family office on the
top, it's also a relatively small team. We have a little bit of a different
structure because we're actually utilizing a public vehicle on ODCQB, which a lot of
people don't understand a lot of advantages that it has over NASDAQ and other
boards, because we are not only a majority shareholder, but we have 100 % voting
shares. But what it does, it helps people who wanna participate to provide them some
liquidity. So we use that vehicle as incubator for some of the technologies that we
do, take them to the market. We also have a media company,
that we use to help companies to get to the market, but also we do just
investments in safety and security space. We're always looking for other projects in
this area for porn of roll -ups or investing, because once they graduate and have
the Minimum viable product then we put them in different speeds do roll -ups, you
know do M &As or take them public So that's kind of overall structure. Okay, so I
know I know you you don't with your dad How are you guys set up? What's your
preferred structure? Yeah? I mean we're I mean everything is where our office is
certainly much more virtual than not It really is just me in terms of executive and
I've got two employees both in a separate time zone and well, I'm sure we'll get
to that a little bit later, but touching on what Kib said, the culture part is
really, really important because a family and, you know, a family enterprise is
something that exists even or that should exist even when all the money is gone,
right? What do you have left? You have all the different types of capital that your
family can accrue, whether it's social and to do with a reputation or maybe strong
religious values or whatever. Because everybody always says shirt sleeves to shirt
sleeves in three generations, rags to riches to rags again, but we don't really
think about one level deeper. Well, what does that really mean? It means that,
well, say if you're on your second generation and they're paying their insurance,
their taxes, their rent, whatever, the actual dollar that they're using is likely not
a dollar that was generated in the previous generation because all of those running
operating expenses. What's required is to have that culture of wealth generation,
of accruing value so that things keep flowing in as time goes on,
as the generations goes on, and then you don't have that problem of reverting back
to sort started the financial state your family was originally in. >> Okay. Thank
you. You said that pretty much the way I paid you to do that. [laughter]