Richard Wilson, the CEO of the Wilson Family Office has been doing a fantastic job at providing family office education for years now. Below is from a recent email that I received that discusses how one Single Family Office wants someone to go about contacting her.
In the following recent interview Richard Wilson shared his conversation that he conducted with Elizabeth Hammack who has worked for the single family office C.M. Capital for a number of years and now serves as Executive Director of the C.M. Capital Foundation. Elizabeth shared some great advice for anyone who is looking to partner with family offices, raise capital, or just know how to contact a single family office when you don't already have the relationship.
Richard Wilson: How do you deal with the overwhelming amount of inquiries you undoubtedly receive from those trying to raise capital from your family office for their investment fund or private offering?
Elizabeth Hammack: Well, first we are pretty proactive, so we do our research and usually have a target list of managers that we want to get to know and possibly invest in, so we might have a list of say 15 or 20, of our top target list.
For other e-mails or cold calls that we get that are not in our target list, we have a variety of ways of dealing with that depending on if they have come in via the private equity director or to a hedge fund director. If it's a relationship that we have already established or we know them through another relationship, they get priority.
That's just the way it is. If it's someone we don't know, we generally do research, as we spoke about before. If assets under management are too small, we just pretty much cross them off the list because we don't want someone too small.
Richard Wilson: Sure that makes sense.
Elizabeth Hammack: We do tend to go through every email and phone call, though; we don't just delete or not respond.
Richard Wilson: Do you have any best practices to share here for fund managers who are reading this, maybe a few best practices they should follow while contacting family offices like yours?
Elizabeth Hammack: At least one comes to mind because it's a constant complaint I hear among the portfolio managers and our fund directors, and that is how the fund managers are not responsive to our questions. I am not saying that they don't respond to our email or a voice mail, but their response doesn't address the issue that needs to be addressed.
They always seem to be in sales pitch mode and so we might ask a particular question and they will come back with you know another little pitch, but they don't actually answer our question. It's like they are not listening to us. As a fund manager, listen to the question, and answer the question. Give the sales pitch afterward, but answer the question; otherwise, we will just hit the delete button and just say "forget it if the guy is not listening to us".
I would rather deal with someone who is listening to me than not. Our best practice is be communicative, but mostly in your communications, be responsive to the questions we asked. I know people want to get across with they want to get across and that's great, but we want our answers or we just get frustrated.
Richard Wilson: Right. That reminds me of Steven Covey. He says to influence others you must first be influenced. Actually listen first, understand, and be influenced by that other person potentially before replying. I think it's an excellent piece of advice because, even though it is something that sounds basic on the surface, like a procedure or processes document and sounds like the most boring thing in the world. Listening very carefully can make a huge difference, as you have mentioned two or three times. If you get to a billion dollars in assets and you stop listening to your investors, you are probably going to lose them even if your performance is great, right?
Elizabeth Hammack: Right.
Richard Wilson: Well thank you for your time today, Elizabeth. I think everyone reading this probably learned something from your experience.
Elizabeth Hammack: Thank you very much Richard. I have enjoyed speaking with you.
---------------------------------------------------------
Richard C. Wilson: CEO
Richard C. Wilson helps $100M+ net worth families create and manage their single family offices and currently manages 14 clients including mandates with three billionaire families and as the CEO of a $500M+ single family office and Head of Direct Investments for another with $200M+ in assets. Richard is also the founder of the Family Office Club, the largest membership-based family office association (FamilyOffices.com), along with equity holdings in the training, single family office management (SingleFamilyOffices.com), investment conference, search, data research, physical bullion, private equity (PrivatEquity.com), food, and energy industries which do over $10M a year in combined revenue.
Through operating the Family Office Club Association Richard has created the first platform business focused on the family office industry. He has spoken at over 150 conferences in 17 countries and has the #1 bestselling book in the family office industry, The Single Family Office: Creating, Operating, and Managing the Investments of a Single Family Office. Richard has his undergraduate degree from Oregon State University, his M.B.A. from University of Portland, and has studied master’s level psychology through Harvard’s ALM program while previously residing in Boston. Richard currently resides 10 minutes from downtown Miami on the island of Key Biscayne, Florida with his wife and two daughters.
Comments
Post a Comment