FOXcast

This week, I’m speaking with Josh Kanter, Principal at Josh Kanter Wealth Advisory Services and Founder of leafplanner. Over the past 20 years, Josh has been an “owner-operator”, leading his family’s family office and consulting with other families. He is a long-time FOX member and an active and valued contributor to the FOX community – especially by generously and frequently sharing his knowledge, connections, and insights with his fellow FOX members on our popular member-only peer-chat application, FOXChat.

Josh starts by sharing the very personal story of how he came into his current leadership role within his family enterprise at a difficult time for the family when his father’s health was deteriorating – and the lessons he drew from this transformative experience about what it means to be fully prepared or to be able to pass down all the knowledge the family needs. From these lessons, Josh synthesizes some of the common challenges faced by owners during such times of family transition or untimely disruption.

Josh describes the importance of having a 360-degree view of the family’s information and introduces the concept of a “family owner’s manual” that can allow a family to identify blind spots, educate family members and advisors, and prepare a family for an effective, comprehensive, and efficient succession. He talks about the different approaches and tools in the marketplace to create and maintain this kind of single-source family knowledge and information hub and shares the reasons he decided to create leafplanner, first as a solution for his own family’s needs and now as a comprehensive digital platform for other families to benefit from.

Enjoy this informative and practical conversation with one of the most active and generous members of the FOX community and a leading expert on family governance, estate planning, and family information management.

Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with our very own Jeff Strese, a human capital expert and executive coach focused on family-owned business leaders and senior wealth advisors. He works as consultant at FOX to develop transformational leadership programs and support our councils with thought leadership on human capital, generational transitions, and family dynamics. Jeff also teaches in the Executive Education program at SMU’s COX School of Business based in Dallas, TX.

In this podcast, Jeff shares his definition and scope of human capital and offers insights into why so many organizations struggle to understand and manage the unique challenges of finding, retaining, and growing talented professionals. He talks about the role and importance of culture in retaining and developing human capital and offers his views into how organizations can take a “diagnostic” approach to culture and human capital.

Jeff’s background is truly unique, combining several fields of people management expertise, including HR, organizational development, and family systems. He talks about how he integrates these distinct disciplines when working with leaders and advisors from SFOs and MFOs. The role of culture and the scope of people management in the family office space is uniquely expanded, compared to the regular corporate world, since traditional human resource topics and skillsets are often intermingled with family psychology and interpersonal dynamics that arise only when working with or supporting multigenerational families of wealth and their complex enterprises.

Finally, Jeff talks about some of the most important – and maybe neglected – skills and abilities that families and their advisors need to develop to best cultivate their human capital, both within the family and its family office and across its broader ecosystem of advisor firms. Jeff provides a practical overview of the tools and resources that exist today for families, family offices, and family wealth advisors to grow, enhance, and retain their human capital, while equipping the family and the family enterprise with the right mindset, education, and capabilities to succeed and flourish across generations.

Please enjoy this enlightening conversation with one of the experienced, connected, and well-liked human capital professionals the family learning and family wealth management space.

This week, I am excited to speak with Ken Franasiak, Chairman & CEO at Calamar Enterprises – a major privately owned full-service, vertically integrated real estate organization comprised of finance, development, construction, and asset management divisions with over 100 separate LLC’s under its umbrella. The topic of our discussion is the current state and likely future of commercial real estate both as an investment asset class and as an operating business sector.

As a third-generation family enterprise leader, 30-year veteran investor and operator in commercial real estate, and former advisor to the New York Federal Reserve Board, Ken brings a unique perspective to this conversation. He shares his views on the economic, demographic, and behavioral trends that are currently reshaping commercial real estate and their effects on investors, developers, and operators.

Ken also offers valuable insights into the impact of these current trends on the financial and operating ecosystem that surrounds commercial real estate, especially the state of the credit markets and the financial institutions that fuel and support the industry.

To his fellow direct-investing families and family offices, who are active investors in real estate as an asset class, Ken extends his views on what to watch out for right now and how to protect their investment portfolios against the adverse trends impacting commercial real estate. But he also makes it clear that not all is doom and gloom and offers his tips on the sub-sectors where he sees bright spots and attractive opportunities for families to invest in commercial real estate – something Ken and his family enterprise, Calamar, have been doing successfully for over three decades.

If you are even remotely interested in commercial real estate, you would not want to miss this enlightening conversation with one of the most experienced and thoughtful family investors in this sector.

I am speaking today with Dan Tarlas, Senior Managing Director at Asset Consulting Group (ACG) – a seasoned investment consultant who has provided comprehensive investment expertise to multigenerational families for over 30 years. Dan, along with his firm, ACG, is also a long-time member of the FOX Thought Leaders Council.

Dan and ACG have worked with numerous enterprise families over the decades, and he shares the insights he has accumulated on the opportunities families have to optimize the returns and costs of their investment portfolios. Often families’ portfolios have been constructed, or in many cases merely accumulated, over time without an overarching strategy or comprehensive oversight, and thus there are redundancies and inefficiencies that are weighing on the net returns.

The opportunities to optimize are not just limited to the costs and returns of the family portfolio but also extend to the risk side. For many families, there are risks inherent in their investment portfolios that they may not even be aware of or are managing sub-optimally. Dan talks about the concept of the family having and managing an “investment program”, rather than just an “investment portfolio”, and how that approach can be essential for optimizing their typically fragmented public investments.

With many enterprise families being very active in private equity and direct investing, Dan also shares his experience helping them and their family offices better understand, manage, and optimize the family’s growing and increasingly complex portfolios of private investments.

Enjoy this enlightening and practical conversation with one of the most experienced and prominent investment consultants in the FOX community who has spent the better part of the last 30 years helping and advising multigenerational families.

In this episode, I have the pleasure of speaking with Leslie Voth, Chairman, Chief Executive Officer & President of Pitcairn. Leslie has been with Pitcairn for 30 years, serving in a variety of leadership roles, and is the first chairman of the board who is not part of the Pitcairn family. She is a prominent senior executive and thought leader in the multifamily-office (MFO) industry.

Leslie shares the story of Pitcairn, which this year celebrates its 100th anniversary, and its evolution from a firm initially established to serve the needs of one family to its status today as a premier player in the fast-evolving MFO space. We discuss the factors that enabled Pitcairn’s continued presence and enduring relevance as a top MFO, and Leslie offers her thoughts on the on the formula for MFO longevity and enduring success.

As the MFO model continues to gain popularity among private wealth clients and companies in this space experience growing interest from families, Leslie offers her perspective on the challenges and opportunities faced by many firms established in this segment as well as those that are transitioning into the MFO model. We talk about growing and developing scarce human capital, building a sustainable and profitable business model and pricing structures, and nurturing an ecosystem of specialized and reputable partners to meet the increasingly complex and niche needs of enterprise families.

Leslie and I also discuss what families need to know and what parameters to evaluate as many of them consider whether to build their own single-family office or outsource their service needs to an established and capable MFO.

Please enjoy this illuminating conversation with one of the most distinguished CEOs in our industry, who is successfully leading one of the most storied MFO brands into its second century of success and prominence.

Today, I sit down with our very own, Mindy Kalinowski Earley, Chief Learning Officer at FOX. Mindy leads the FOX Learning Center and is our in-house expert on all matters pertaining to family learning and rising-gen education and engagement. As one of the leading industry authorities in this field, her work is focused on helping families to be forward-thinking, cohesive, and thriving.

In this conversation, Mindy shares insights from her work with families and their rising-gen members over the past 15 years, delving into the main areas of interest, importance, and concern to younger generations within enterprise families. Rising-gen family members bring their unique perspectives into the family conversations and the enterprise strategy, and integrating these diverse worldviews and ideas is of ever-greater importance to forward-looking families.

And since the topic of the rising-gen is inextricably connected to the topic of education, Mindy talks about how the most sophisticated enterprise families are approaching education as a priority and how they are building robust learning capabilities into their strategy and their enterprise system.

Mindy also unveils some of the key learnings and themes that emerged from a recent research study FOX conducted examining the needs, aspirations, and challenges that are specific to rising-gen family members. She offers some valuable pointers as to the top opportunities for families to motivate, engage, and inspire their younger members.

Finally, Mindy provides a practical overview of the resources and tools that are available to families – both within FOX and more broadly across the industry – to develop programs, initiatives, and strategies aimed at developing, preparing, and engaging rising-gen members to become capable wealth owners, family enterprise leaders, and happy and fulfilled human beings.

Enjoy this insightful conversation with one of the most knowledgeable and best-connected experts in the field of family learning and rising-gen engagement.

This week, I am speaking with Wally Head, founder and principal of Personal Fiduciary Advisors, LLC, founding board member and treasurer of the UHNW Institute, and good friend and former President of FOX. The topic of our conversation is hot in our industry and of great consequence to multigenerational enterprise families – the emergence and importance of integrated wealth advisors.

Wally offers an instructive overview of the definition and role of an integrated wealth advisor, as well as the value of this most advanced discipline of family wealth advice. He describes this emerging discipline in the context of the evolution of the wealth management field and the rise of “Wealth 3.0” as the new paradigm for serving multigenerational families of wealth – a topic I recently discussed with Dr. Jim Grubman.

We explore why and how clients should think about and seek out integrated wealth advisors, what to expect from them, and how to distinguish the truly legitimate integrated wealth firms and practitioners from the inflated marketing claims in the market.

Wally also outlines the challenges and opportunities wealth management firms and providers face as they look to evolve into true integrated wealth advisors and the capabilities they need to build or acquire as they seek to elevate their talent, their processes, and their business models to deliver on their clients’ ever-rising needs and expectations for integrated wealth advice and holistic wealth management.

Enjoy this insightful conversation with one of the leading thinkers and practitioners in the family wealth space.

This week, I sit down with Scott Helfstein, Head of Thematic Solutions at Global X, to discuss where the economy and markets are headed and what investment themes are emerging as the most attractive long-term bets for families and family offices to pursue. Scott offers valuable insights on the interplay between growth and value opportunities for investors, particularly for patient long-term investors, such as families, their offices, and their enterprises. He highlights the sectors that hold the most potential and shares his views on how families can best position themselves and their portfolios for long-term success and impact.

To bring the different investment themes to life, Scott describes the ecosystem of opportunities he sees across a targeted subset of attractive market sectors, which include frontier themes, such as AI, robotics, IoT, data storage, and cybersecurity, as well as exciting traditional sectors, such as infrastructure and health care. Global X is a leader and innovator in manufacturing and deploying thematic exchange traded funds (ETFs), and Scott offers his views on how family investors and family offices can best make use of ETFs as an efficient vehicle to pursue thematic investing, as well as on what to watch out for and examine when choosing ETFs for their thematic strategies.

Enjoy this insightful and instructive conversation with one of the foremost thought leaders in the field of thematic investing.

Global X ETFs was founded in 2008. Over the past 15 years, our mission has remained unchanged: Empowering investors with unexplored and intelligent solutions. Learn about our full product lineup, which includes over a 100 Thematic Growth Equity Funds, Commodity and Income ETFs with thoroughly researched perspectives and commentary on the trends shaping global markets, and more at globalxetfs.com.

Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Jim Grubman, a prominent thought leader, researcher, and advisor to multigenerational families in our industry. Jim and his equally prominent co-authors, Dennis Jaffe and Kristin Keffeler, have just published their latest book, Wealth 3.0.

Jim and I discuss the Wealth 3.0 concept and the new paradigm it introduces for our field of private wealth management and family wealth advising. We talk about how Wealth 3.0 thinking and practices fundamentally differ from the established practices of the past 3-4 decades.

The change in mindset and behaviors this future paradigm entails will have a broad and far-reaching impact on the wealth management industry at large, and will outright transform the more niche, specialized, and fast-growing field of family wealth advisory services. Everything from how the industry organizes itself to how it conducts research to how advisors are trained and certified to the language and terminology they use in day-to-day conversations with their ultra-high-net-worth (UHNW) clients.

The book is a quick and fascinating read, and will likely become an important manifesto, and required reading, for future generations of family wealth advisors. Clients can also benefit greatly from this concept, which can help them evolve their own thinking, their interactions within their family, and their expectations of their trusted family advisors.

Enjoy this conversation, and look for the Wealth 3.0 book, which just came out this week on Amazon.

I am delighted today to speak with Bob Jordan, retired Emmy-Award-winning TV journalist and owner of Jordan & Jordan Communications, Inc. Bob has spent his distinguished career as a journalist reporting on the stories that shaped the news of the day for over 5 decades. But over the last 25 years, he has also taken on the worthy task of helping enterprising multigenerational families capture the stories of their ancestors and pass on their defining values and legacy to their descendants.

For all of us in the private wealth and family office space, it is becoming increasingly apparent how important it is to be nurturing and building the human capital of the families we serve. Ensuring the people within the family, across all its generations, are engaged and flourishing is often more important – and more difficult – than securing and growing the family’s financial capital. As FOX founder, Sara Hamilton, recently wrote, “Families have come to realize over time that preserving the family in the midst of wealth is more difficult than preserving the wealth.”

There are many ways to engage and energize the family’s human capital – family purpose and values, robust governance, formalized learning and education, and regular family meetings are just some of the established and reliable tools sophisticated families employ. Through his creative and profound experiences as a family videographer, Bob highlights the galvanizing and unifying power of one still relatively underused tool – family histories.

Tune in to learn about the many ways and formats families can capture and pass on the stories of their origins and of their ancestors’ formative journeys – from books to videography to heirlooms and artifacts to DNA analysis. Bob shares invaluable insights on how to get started recording family stories and how to select the service providers who can help guide the family through these complex, emotional, and sometimes even difficult discovery and storytelling projects. He offers priceless hard-learned lessons and proven recipes for overcoming the many challenges families face as they embark on the path of recording and passing the stories that comprise their family heritage. Most importantly, Bob illustrates with multiple examples from his long career as a family videographer, that the ultimate reward families enjoy as they successfully capture and convey their family histories is the shared purpose and meaning these stories instill among their family members across generations.