Thanks to changes in the economy and the face of wealth management, family office will never look the same.
For one thing, the era of single family offices is essentially over, with a few exceptions, said Lisette Cooper, chief investment officer at Athena Capital Advisors, during the 2017 Invest in Women conference in Dallas on Wednesday.
Such offices, built to manage the wealth of a single wealthy family, have been done in by the growing complexity of issues facing ultra-high-net-worth clients and the demand for differentiated wealth management services.
“I came from the institutional side of the business, working with very wealthy families, and still most of them could not afford a single family office,” said Cooper. “Around the late 1990s and the early 2000s, we witnessed the rise of the multifamily office as the modern version of the family office.”
Speaking at a panel discussion titled “The Modern Family Office,” Cooper explained that for a single-family office to provide access to the diverse universe of asset classes that the ultra-wealthy demand today, the family office would need to manage at least $1 billion—an AUM leve few are able to achieve.
A modern family office, to be successful, must be able to prospect for the ultra-wealthy, even the newly wealthy, explained Whitney Kenter, partner and managing member at Matter Family Office.
“We’re getting a lot of first generation wealth creators,” said Kenter. “It’s difficult for people to manage the psychological change when they’re spinning off a company that they created and converting that into a pile of cash. It turns out they have less fear around the company risk than they do around market risk and managing the volatility that they can now see on a daily basis on their phone.”
Cooper said that Athena becomes involved in similar situations, especially with liquidity events and divorces, where an individual suddenly has to manage a new source of cash or investments.
Creating a sustainable family office, however, requires cultivating generational wealth and working with the children of current clients, said Kenter.
“We have to get to know these individuals and detach them from the family’s wealth,” said Kenter. “A lot of times, we have to help them find ways to individuate their identity from the family.”
This often takes shape in the form of cultivating the philanthropic interests of children in wealthy families, said Cooper.
Cooper and Kenter gave other options for cultivating the children of ultra-wealthy families, like gradually transitioning wealth to younger generations, either monthly or annually as they age, or giving them the ability to control a block of the family’s wealth on their own at a young age to gain a familiarity with money and to develop comfort with affluence.
“There are a lot of pitfalls, trials and tribulations growing up as the successor of a first generation of wealth,” said Cooper. “What the successful cases all share is that the children are growing up happy and well-adjusted because of the values they get from their parents. If they see their parents being grateful, they become grateful. If they see their parents being generous, they become generous.”
Kenter said that there is no hard and fast rule about when to introduce children to information about their family’s extraordinary wealth, but urged for the conversation to take place as soon as possible, within reason.
Cooper urges wealthy families not to introduce children to affluence at an inappropriate age, but to instead wait for children to reach adulthood before explaining the family’s socioeconomic status.
“This needs to be a broader, family conversation,” said Cooper. “Get them working with good advisors as soon as appropriate, too. Ultimately, these children will be responsible for a tremendous amount of wealth. Somebody really ought to help them as a teacher.”
Family offices should cultivate relationships with as many family members as possible to reduce client attrition, said Cooper.
In an era when more than 70 percent of widows seek a new advisor after their spouses die, and many of the children of the affluent change firms after coming into an inheritance, advisors should broaden the relationships among family members to ensure the sustainability of the multifamily office.
The high turnover just shows that the advisors are mostly talking to the wealth creators, said Kenter. “The best way to combat that is to really develop those relationships as deeply as possible.”
While Cooper and Kenter said that they have not faced issues of fee compression as severe as other parts of the industry, family offices also feel pressure from clients eager to reduce the cost of managing their wealth, and a growing contingent of the ultra-wealthy want to try to do it themselves.
“After a time, the do-it-yourselfers do realize that it takes a lot of resources to manage that much wealth,” said Kenter. “I’m happy to let clients give it a whirl, and then come back to talk to me. It’s acting as that sounding board outside of investments that really props the relationships up.”
