Family Office Club Hot Seat Webinar Featuring Live Strategy Sessions with Investors & Founders

0:00Alright, welcome everybody to the Family Office Club Hot Seat webinar. Today we are going to talk with members, long-term members, we're going to talk with some past sponsors, folks, folks, all right? email list. I wanted to join us for the webinar today. My name is Richard C. Wilson. I started this investor club. It's really an investor community 19 years ago in 2007. I started it in my basement apartment in Harvard Square and I had less money in my bank account than I had due for rent that month and a rickety cheap$15 desk that I got. And I really built everything up by studying family offices, learning from them, emulating them, interviewing them, identifying how the industry was growing.

0:43I bought familyoffices.com back when people told me I was wasting my time and it would never amount to anything. And then I was able to speak at over 700 live events in 20 countries. I've written 13 books, like my capital raising book, my how to start a family office book, the Centimillionaire Strategies book, I don't know why it's getting blurry on the camera, and my Single Family Office book. You can get a lot of our materials at capitalraising.com or of course familyoffices.com. Most of you know most of that stuff or you wouldn't be here on the webinar, but it's a, depending on who you ask, a$3 trillion to a$14 trillion industry, most conservative estimates are probably around$5 trillion and change, but nobody really knows because if you're a multifamily office, you're often regulated, almost always.

1:31If you're a single family office, you don't have to report the fact that you have a certain amount of wealth that you've formalized a single family office. So the industry is only growing in size though. And it's been a lot of fun because most people who become ultra wealthy are just really good at doing business. And they're just super founders and entrepreneurs that have had an exit, gone public, built up a real estate portfolio. They're almost always super sharp. They're almost always very generous, very high energy, getting a lot more done than most people, more optimistic than most people, big action takers.

2:03They're fun to interview on stage. We interviewed someone earlier this year, has 900 million a year in revenue, and he's under 50 years old. We interviewed someone in December last year that manages$12 billion, and they grew by a billion dollars last year. And we have hundreds of examples of those. So that's what makes my job fun running the community. We've hosted 300 plus of our own events. I've been to every single event so far. We had to cancel only one because of a blizzard and nobody got to that event because New York was shut down. Airports were shut down, etc. But it's a lot of fun seeing everyone in person.

2:37We're typically doing 15 to 30 in-person events a year. We do monthly webinars. We're doing some family office masterminds virtually next year, four different times. So appreciate you being here today. And I will show just maybe two, three slides. Let's jump into questions and hot seats. Really, this is unscripted and pretty unstructured. I've got 170 slides to show diagrams or visuals as needed, but I'm not really going to go through too many slides today. And so let me share just real quick a couple of visuals to kick us off. And if you want to start submitting your questions or that you'd like to be called upon, feel free to do so.

3:15So every year now going forward, we're doing a Silicon Valley Summit next month, that's September 24th. But then our annual, and that's a one-day event, our annual Family Office Super Summit is in Fort Lauderdale, December 15th to 17th. And it'll have 112 speakers on stage over three days, 650 to 800 participants, one of the largest family office events in the world. and going forward we're going to be doing four big epic family office super summits. Dallas, Los Angeles, New York City, Fort Lauderdale. So if you decide to come to one of our super summits it's going to be more than worth it. It's going to be tons of connections, firehose of information, a lot of insights directly from family offices, directly from heads of other investor clubs, investor platforms, pro athletes, etc.

4:02So I'm really excited about that. We're also doing 12 in-person family office masterminds a year going forward and we've built out 50 of our own AI tools including 10 clawed skills and an AI operating system that we're actually rebranding to be called a hyper intelligent which is basically creating intelligence centers for each person on your team and we have a deployment kit on that so you can deploy it yourself we if you want help implementing we do that for some big family offices but we really made it so our members can benefit from it without needing to hire a consultant. One little bit of context on myself in case this is the first time you've ever heard of us.

4:42I've closed 43 deals off my own balance sheet. We've structured probably just under 200 deals with clients over time. One of our clients is a publicly traded company. We've done just under two dozen deals with them. We've done four deals with the$800 million family office. We've done deals with people have sold their medical practices. We sold and had an exit from a$28 million a year in revenue dental platform with 12 locations last year. We capitalized and tripled the revenue of a consumer products company. And we have a lot of experience seeing over a billion dollars of transactions getting done in our club.

5:18And so what's important to note about that is that all of the AI tools and what you hear today, it's all informed by what really gets deals done. How do family offices allocate? How do they decide? And being able to see it from an allocator perspective. Like I'm not out there raising capital for fund managers and working as a placement agent or a cap intro professional. I'm out there helping run and set up family offices. We've set up a couple hundred family offices and helped formalize, run, act as outsourced CIO to those, etc. We don't do too much of that work. I only have time to work with about five families on like a super close retained basis.

5:56Otherwise, we're just trying to be helpful to 1 ,000-plus investors at our live events and connect them with folks at our events, put them on stage at our events, etc. So Deep Due Diligence Investors is a subgroup that represents several dozen peer-to-peer analytical investors who like to read every word of PPM, conduct due diligence together ad hoc. There's no SPVs. There's no fund. There's nothing you're forced to invest into at all. It's just self-formed due diligence groups. So like we have an obstetrician as part of this group. So if a delivery clinic deal came up, you'd want an obstetrician to take a look at it or you want the analytical brain of a PhD in chemical engineering to take a look at it.

6:36So if you wanna learn more about that or submit your deal, just go to due diligenceclub.com. If you want to join it as an investor, learn more about due diligence and conduct due diligence with peers, it's just$99 a month. No more upfront fees with that, just a clean$99 a month. no long-term contracts on it, but we hope you do join and stay for a long time, of course. And you can learn more about submitting your deal or joining at due diligence club.com. The other subgroup we have is Doctors Investor Club. We have just under 150 doctors and dentists who have joined now. And I'm excited to announce that today, this morning, we're releasing Dr.

7:12Dewey, which is our Dewey instant due diligence tool adopted for doctors. It looks at things through like a doctor's point of view it's uh hyper specialized and being able to help you look at medical and health care deals or any type of deal the doctor would get pitched so it incorporates instant partner insights forensic accounting ai tool our vetty real estate stress testing tool and our dewey instant due diligence tool all into one tool called dr dewey instant due diligence vitals and so um we're excited about that if you need a link to that just shoot me an email richard at familyoffices.com.

7:46I'll shoot you back the link. As long as you're a member of Doctors Investor Club, which is totally free, the only cost is that you spent a decade of your life in school as a dentist or a doctor, and that you have a credential and you are in fact a doctor who's not raising capital for an AI startup or syndicating real estate or running a fund, et cetera. So we hope you'll join Doctors Investor Club. If you are a doctor or your sister's one or a family member, friend, then please do send them over. We have 50 AI tools. I'm not gonna go over them all here. they'll come up naturally throughout the webinar I'm sure and if we need to change up the pace later I'll go over what's new in 2026.

8:22I had prepared eight or nine slides on that that we presented at Capitore using boot camp last week and I think they'll be important to cover at some point just for four minutes during the webinar today but I don't want to bore everybody and tell you it's a hot seat webinar and just drone on a PowerPoint slide so we're just going to jump right into questions and we're going to see what comments are here and who I could call upon. And Paul, good to see you on here. Appreciate you being at the boot camp last week. And yeah, it's a picture of my family there. Kind of fuzzy because my webcam's focused on my face, of course.

8:53But I've got three girls and a wife I've been married to for 16 years now. And that's a picture of them and our family values. And we go over at breakfast time, our family values, a one-page cheat sheet and a little bit of physics so we did that this morning and it's kind of a daily routine that we like to do each morning. Let's see here what other questions we have. I see that Jean and Tina are here. That's awesome. Appreciate you being here and let me look through some of the participants here. We've got a full full webinar today in terms of participants which is awesome so no shortage just rename yourself as a verified member if you are one I see Al McGowan's on here Al I don't know if you have a hot seat question and would like to be a volunteer to go and we can just chat about how things are going but I just invited you to unmute as one potential first hot seat here and then I will scroll down here and see who else is on the list here.

10:02We've got Bill Cox as well, in case you wanted to ask a question. I'll allow you to unmute as well here. And then feel free just to speak up if you do want to. And I see Brian Burke on here from Praxis. So I'd be happy to call on you, Brian, if the other two don't speak up here in a second. Hey, Richard. Al McAllen here. Hey, Al. How are you doing? Doing great, doing great. Yeah, I just really wanted to jump in because I love listening to your viewpoints and the information you always have to share is valuable, so I always try to make these calls. I've only been a member since Fort Lauderdale last year at the summit, which was great, and really see the value and what you guys are bringing to the table every day, so I really appreciate it.

10:50Sure. As you know, we're out raising some capital, have raised some capital right now for a protein business that's very different than probably anything on this platform. So not really pertinent to a lot of the stuff that you guys do right now, but I'm getting a lot of great insights. And I love the tools, the AI tools that you guys bring to the table, use them practically every day. So yeah, I really just want to say thanks and really a pleasure being part of this program. Yeah, no, I appreciate you saying that. I didn't tell him to get on and just say nice things so everyone knows. But like what's like your number one challenge or number one opportunity or number one bottleneck right now that I could just be helpful on before you?

11:29Yeah, that's great. So it's interesting. The business is really a couple of different businesses under one umbrella, one holding company. And one is really what we're doing is is changing the way people view and buy beef. Right. Right. traceable from birth to table and adding nutritional and real transparency, which really doesn't exist because of the industry today and the consolidation. It's been in a lot for most of you guys. So getting that, the harvesting, and we're going to start with about 2 million pounds a month of beef that we're processing at a brand new facility in North Platte, Nebraska.

12:12But the second part of the business, which maybe you could be helpful with, is we're also looking at opening a distribution center or fabrication facility where we add value to the beef itself. We cut them up into portion sizes. And it seems like there'd be a whole other set of investors that would be interested in that and how to carve that out from the overall business or raise capital for that specific function, the fabrication and distribution of the beef itself. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. A couple of things there I'm happy to comment on. So first of last week at our capital raising boot camps we held them in four cities we went over and we showed this chart and a shortcut to raising capital is really to look at one of four things one thing is if there are three types of trust to determine if a deal gets done and one might be like people understand the industry or trust the industry it's not too confusing you know like blockchain is more confusing than the beef industry but probably people don't know the nitty-gritty of exactly how the beef industry works right so there's probably some education needed.

13:16Do they trust and know you already? Meaning you already have that relationship. That's probably where you already started with your capital raise. And then can you get them to the factory or can you meet them in person easily either at one of our events or because they're local to you? So because of that, I would look at like, like what city are you based in personally? Are you in Texas? I'm actually in Naples, Florida, but the business is headquartered out in Omaha, Nebraska. Oh, cool. Yeah. My grandparents were from there. So we used to go to Omaha like every summer and go out to my grandpa's farm out there.

13:46And so I know it pretty well. And there is wealth out there, obviously. And so figuring out like in more farmland America, Midwest America, what are the one to two cities in addition to Omaha? Because I would try to look up every investor club, major investment group. It could be a multifamily office that's in Omaha. And then one or two cities that are very nearby and not foreign to, you know, agricultural farming business lines, because people there are more likely to know the industry cold because they made their money there and they make up the leaders of those investment clubs and those investors and family offices in that region.

14:30I would go really deep on that. And you could use our investor pipeline builder tool to do that. If you're not using that already, it is something that we can get on and have you connect with Jennifer or Daphne on our team have both been with us for a decade plus and show you exactly how to use that to say find me the top 50 investor leads in Omaha Nebraska preferably they have a background in agricultural you know the meat protein business etc and then you're starting with people local to the opportunity and perhaps local to your industry and trust the industry already you know I'd go deep on that and then I would also look at who would be one investor who if they invested, like almost everyone else would follow.

15:13Like, is there a publicly traded company with a corporate venture capital division that looks for innovative protein meat business opportunities? Or is there a recognized kind of titan of the space and you could raise, you know, it could just be 1 % of your capital raise, but people respect them so much that if they invest any money, now everything goes faster. Ideally, though, you offer them custom deal structure terms that are so good they can't refuse and they come in and take 20 or half of the deal and now it gets you down the road and the rest of the money comes in faster and half of your raise is done even if you had to give away more to get that done and the trick with that to not regret it later is you don't want to sell your soul to get it done but you want to like make it so that the terms are so good it's very very good for them but that doesn't mean giving up 60 of your equity It could mean normal terms, but they get their money back faster.

16:06They also get a royalty for the next seven years. They also get negative controls or a board seat or some protections or a different kind of share class and other investors. So with many, having a deal structured so that the big strategic can come in for 1 % or 50 % of the deal can change like your whole trajectory in business. And a lot of people don't get that right. and they robotically go to the market and say, want to be an LP in my fund that's blind pool and I'm going to treat you the same as a million dollar net worth accredited investor even though you're a centimillionaire? Like it doesn't really make any sense to someone who's super sophisticated.

16:44The last thing I'd say, and I'm happy to clarify if you have any questions, is just that if you are going to be starting, like the revenues ramp up so quickly in the protein business, right? And so tens of millions of revenue is very common pretty quickly after you get going. then what I would do is get the initial momentum, get the wheel turning over, and then think about that other sandbox as something that you raise capital separately for, like you said. It could be a separate entity or a different share class within the LLC if you structure it right with an attorney, which the attorney's name should not be Claude, obviously, right?

17:17Like a real attorney. And then basically have it so that on that new opportunity, they are getting maybe a gross revenue royalty off the top line but if that new experiment fails it's not their fault it was your idea to do the value added chopped off beef with the thai seasoning or whatever it is it makes it innovative and if it completely failed then the core business makes them whole over time so there's not big risk but there is upside in helping you start this new part of the business without it being a naked risk they're taking where they might you know get slammed and lose all their money because your value-add approach didn't work.

17:54Does that make sense? No, that's great input, Richard, and kind of rather intuitive, but some of your comments were very helpful, especially about making the deal much sweeter for them than any normal class investor. So that's really helpful. And we actually have somebody in mind already. I think that once we get the harvest piece up and off the ground and start to show some revenues there, I think it'll make it much easier to have that conversation as well. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for being here. I appreciate you being a verified member. And since you are, you know, we already have like the WhatsApp stream and text messages going back and forth.

18:31So like the deal structuring alone can change everything. So anytime that you've got like a huge opportunity in front of you or you want to bounce the deal structure off me, just put some bullet points in there, an audio note, and then I'll try to take a look and I try to try to always reply same day to get back to folks because the deal structure changes everything, you know, so I'm happy to help there. No, that's been really helpful. Thank you. Awesome. Great. Thanks for being here. Bill, I see that you're unmuted. If you want to go next and then Brian Burke after that. Sure. You mentioned something about large companies having like a hunting group.

19:06What's that group called within a large company that would do? Yeah. Like a hunting group, like to find deals, to like to find opportunities. Yeah. mostly if it's a publicly traded company they might have a corporate venture capital it's called a cbc corporate venture capital group that's like 3m or intel or nvidia or google like google make 350 to 500 acquisitions in a single year for example if you can find the equivalent for a publicly traded company and consumer products or grocery or meats etc they might not be public about it. Many times they are because they want to attract that deal flow.

19:46Sometimes it's formalized, it's almost like a venture studio, sometimes not. But the other thing to look for is just even if they don't have that program or even if they're not publicly traded, if they are a massive player in the space then they may have what's called like a deal origination team. That's what private equity platforms call it and they'll have four to twelve people on the team but all they do is knock on doors, call people, and try to uncover deals that their team would have missed if they didn't have this deal origination team. And so they just know that if they see 2 ,000 opportunities, the top 2 % is going to be better than if they saw 20 opportunities.

20:24So they don't want random deal flow from all over the world and all different industries, but they want like maximum flow within their niche so they can prioritize and have many amazing opportunities and go with the one that they trust the CEO the most and has the best terms. Okay. That's very helpful. Yeah. I met with Noah this morning. Okay. Who was at the boot camp last week. Yeah. And had a really great, really great discussion. And so this thing's kind of moving forward. Awesome. That's great. Do you have any other challenges or questions? Like maybe, you know, we presented so much at the boot camp last week.

21:00Like what was your number one takeaway? away and then like like what's a what's still a question lingering on how to apply something we talked about or a challenge related to something we talked about I took I think seven or eight pages of notes so I've got a lot of notes awesome a lot of it was very um um it was self-reinforcing and that I feel like we've done a lot of things right uh going through all of your different points. The big thing now is, of course, just getting in front of people who are on deal origination teams or something like that. They need to find out about us. We're still kind of a diamond in the rough that no one knows about.

21:38Got it. Okay. Yeah. And related to that, if that's one of your goals, I would do a couple of things. One, so much AI slop puts out text-based junk on LinkedIn and other platforms that I would record authentic videos, kind of sharing your insights, sharing what you're doing you know we talked about that at the boot camp as well because i can really see who you are that builds trust faster than anything except for meeting in person or seeing you speak on stage somewhere is like the best form of someone seeing in person um the other thing is taking a data approach and saying like who would my ideal investor be who would be very strategic who if they invested they can open a lot of doors like there's a billionaire uh jock who's spoken to our event several times and someone said once how did how do you know these billionaires he's like well i helped them become billionaires and like but he also is very smart about who he puts on his cap table and he's got like a platform of like a thousand plus physicians right and getting insurance to reimburse physicians is a pretty important thing two of the largest four largest health care insurance companies on planet earth are on his cap table so you're gonna bet that they're gonna reimburse themselves essentially right like that's like super smart right you're on the inside track.

22:51So I would just think like who would change everything if they even invested 1 % of our deal? Who controls all the distribution? And just like more importantly, because we didn't say it already with Al a minute ago, how do you create the 30 or the 200 targets, put them in Excel, do the research, find their LinkedIn profile, figure out their phone number, email, connect with them, reach out to them, add value to them first, and just systematically work that strategic list based on who's local to you, who knows the industry cold, who made their money in the industry, who's strategic. And taking a data approach is something nobody wants to do, because even if they do all of the tedious work of creating the database, actually working it is what creates the magic.

23:36And, you know, we exited that dental practice last year at$26 million. They're at$28 million in revenue now, but that person was on my email list for 11 years before we had a cup of coffee and the publicly traded company I've done 19 deals with I knew him for six years before we did our first deal together and now it's been 14 years and so the point is like some deals most deals take an average of 20 follow-ups to get anything done really to get someone to invest at all but we've had deals that take 188 emails to close the deal and it just takes that follow-up and being systematic and like Tom Brady said when he got put into the Hall of Fame for NFL, he said, being really successful is simple.

24:17You just do the things that nobody wants to do. You work hard, you follow up, and you systematically show up every day and work the plan. And I think that's something that is easier said than done, obviously. That's why most folks don't do it. I like this cap table participation idea. I'm going to focus in on that. A couple of light bulbs have already gone off. Awesome. Cool. We'll reach out anytime if you have questions from the bootcamp. Appreciate you spending the time with us there all day. It was a lot of information to take in, a lot of sitting. Awesome. Great. And then we'll see you at our next event.

24:51And if anyone missed the bootcamp and they want to see it, we recorded the bootcamp. And it's going to go into our membership portal in just a couple of days. We're just editing a couple of few things, like unique guest speakers we had in different cities. and some of our guest speakers have had one has done six billion dollars in transactions across 550 deals one's had a 500 million dollar exit one's done 10 billion dollars of transactions through their broker dealer and they talked about their journey of growing that up over time and that recording will be in the portal shortly if you're a member with us so you can just go to familyoffices.com forward slash enroll and then you can join and become a member real quickly or just go to our homepage.

25:35You can check out all the events we have coming up. If you haven't gone to our homepage recently, we have posted all of the events we intend to host next week with the target week that we're negotiating with for the venues. So if you want to go in your Google Calendar, just kind of like block out a few of those weeks and say, you know, to be decided on exact date, that this is the week of the Family Office Club Super Summit that you don't want to miss just so you don't book something small, like, you know, a baseball game you could have gone to another game to or something like that. it'd be great to just look at our homepage to see those days coming up.

26:07Super. Awesome. Thanks for being here, Bill. And Brian, it's good to see you on here. We haven't spoken in a bit. We've known each other for a long time. So if you want to go next, that'd be awesome. Yeah, it's been a while, Richard. It's great to get to see you again. It's, gosh, I think we've been members now for what, like 15 years, maybe? Right. Yeah, that's awesome. I know. And it's cool that you do these. I don't usually get to attend these live, I usually end up watching them on YouTube after. So I'm, uh, I'm actually glad that, uh, I had the chance to jump on here with you. And Bob's been encouraging me like, you got to get in the hot seat.

26:39He's been telling me that for like a year. So great to be here. Yeah, it's awesome to have you be here. And like, uh, we say at the beginning of our events, like be a real human at value first. We talk later on, sometimes during our events about building a thought leadership funnel, writing a book as you've done. And we talk about don't be an NPC and just be average and boring in every way possible and in too much of a stiff suit and Bob is the only one that always wears a Hawaiian shirt at all of our events so it's easy to pick him out of the crowd and he's just a super nice guy to get to know and work with which always helps and you know at our events last week we had a billionaire on stage that like is very technical he's like literally a cardiologist and he looks at things very detailed very good at structuring deals.

27:23But he also said the tone of your voice matters a lot. And I think that that's like related to building relationships and just showing that you care about what you're doing. So how can I help you? Like what, what questions do you have or what are you facing in terms of challenges or opportunities? Yeah, well, you know, we're, I don't know how much you know about or how much you've been caught up on kind of more current events that you probably know. I bought thousands of units of multifamily back in 2012 and through 2019. We sold out on most of that stuff literally weeks before the market crashed.

28:00I felt pretty good about our timing there. We sold our lending company right before interest rates went through the roof. I felt pretty good about that. I had a nice eight-figure exit and thought, now I can go into semi-retirement mode. So about three years of doing a lot of working on my golf game and that sort of stuff. And then all of a sudden, a friend of mine came to me with this opportunity in senior housing. And he was running a senior housing REIT and was very successful over there running that senior housing REIT. And I took a look at this opportunity in senior housing and saw it as an incredible, just another one of those once in a career opportunities like I've seen a couple times before.

28:46Sure. Had to pounce on it. So we did. We started buying assisted living, memory care, and skilled nursing a little over a year ago. We've closed on$300 million in transactions in the last, I guess, 14 months. I just read today that raising capital from private investors is at a nine-year low. And yet we just had our thickest year. We raised$75 million the hard way from individual investors. And then we even actually just got a nice high eight-figure check from a multi-billionaire family office. So that was pretty remarkable. Well, it tells me that we're onto something and we're doing something right.

29:33But, you know, as always in this business, there's always challenges. And one thing that I've said this a lot of times on podcasts, you've probably heard me say it before, that I suck at marketing. I am I'm terrible at that. Every every investor that's come to us has come to us, not me reaching out to them. So one of the things I think is probably one of my biggest weaknesses is, you know, I hear you talk a lot about one pagers, about like one liners. You know, we don't have any of that kind of real marketing collateral. Our decks for our investment, it was like 120 pages long. We fed it into your AI and it says, you know, it's too long.

30:14So I broke it up into two and now I got like a 50 page deck and then 120 page due diligence deck to kind of separate the two things apart. I think I might like that better. So I guess I'm I guess what I'm what I'm asking is like, how do you come up with a good one pager that would be useful in the family office space that says enough to get your message across, but doesn't say too much that makes it so nobody reads it? And then how do you get in front of more family offices and RIAs that may have an interest in what you're doing? Because that's the one space that we haven't really concentrated on too much.

30:54Yeah, awesome. Yeah, lots of good questions in there. So first of all, you cannot follow all the things that, you know, all 155 slides we talk about at the Capital Raising Bootcamp. You can ignore like most of those. and like you just said you can still raise 300 million dollars even if you feel like your materials aren't dialed in etc but the whole point of doing it is the stat that you mentioned that's at a nine-year low the stat I always like to show as one of my like what's changed this year slides is that two and a half times as much capital was raised in 23 versus 26 or 25 I mean and so 26 is really no different I think it's the same or slightly lower maybe but that means you just need all these things even more than you did to hit your maximum velocity and if you're closing people already without some of the essential materials that investors ask for, then I think dialing things in on the materials will just speed up.

31:48You might convert them anyways with longer materials, but you might lose one or two people that just never get through the long deck to really see the value you have, right? And so when you're reaching out to people, it's really important that you're concise because the more valuable the person, the busier they are. So that's a theme across everything that we suggest when it comes to materials. And so we have some examples here of materials that that we'd recommend you have things look as as visual as this if not more so I will I'll bring that up here and just share a quick visual so these are four one-pagers I would say they all have 25 % too much text they all need the founder video to be placed on it If you want to see what a founder video is, you can simply look at our website.

32:37And on the join page of our website, we have our one minute video and it's on the right hand side here. So this video here that says 18 years, you can play that and you can see what a one minute video pitching something looks like. It almost always starts with the founder saying like, hey, I'm Brian Burke and I've been running my investment platform for 19 years. and we did this and we did this and then we got out of multifamily and we got out of our loan business and you know now we're we're focused on senior living whatever it is and importantly you just say your name and smile and say who you are and then you go to visuals and you show the multifamily properties and you show your team and you show the mortgage company uh loan company etc and then you show the first senior living property and then the next one etc so it's very visual and only one minute long because then the busiest people on planet earth can look at it and what we found is that things just go faster and your conversion rates go up the more that you are very clear visual and you don't confuse people and like the crazy thing that i keep seeing brian is that um basically most people it's almost like they're trying to confuse everyone they're trying to pitch obviously they're not but it's almost like they're if someone tried to what would you do if you wanted to confuse folks like well you would probably have no one sentence description on what you're doing, which could be in your voicemails, front page of your pitch deck, top of your one pager.

34:02The more credible, the more specific. We have 25 criteria that go into a one-liner. Everyone should have one. It costs nothing but being intentional. And we have an AI tool called the one-liner pitch tool that'll take your pitch deck, PPM, webinars, long emails, take all that, digest it, and write seven one-liners for you. And then you can say, well, it's really what's most important is X and Y because we buy these things with no debt or because we have this collateral in place or whatever. And then it'll create seven more, seven more to have an awesome one-liner. So I would definitely get a one-liner in place.

34:35Most people have a brand name that means nothing. And it's like Wilson Conferences. I don't know if you're holding events for dry cleaners in Zimbabwe or for venture capital in Sydney, Australia. Like, so Family Office Club works better than Wilson Conferences. You should have a brand name that actually sucks people in and means something all else equal. You don't have to. JP Morgan, pretty big bank, pretty successful. Name means nothing. uh on its own it just sits on a shelf but why not have the brand name sweating for you if you can choose any brand name right why would you not name it something that attracts folks versus just sitting on a shelf um like rcw capital like okay like what does that stand for no one knows um and then the last thing i'd say is just like the logo combined with the branch make it very clear and compelling and be institutional quality because no one will take what you're doing more seriously than you do and making sure that your business cards your emails have your picture on it your one-liner etc so those are those are just some quick examples of like materials and things that could get dialed in and you've been a member for ages so if you ever want to shoot me a note and kind of like what you're planning to do for materials and want feedback on that or um or anything just let me know i'm happy to help you brainstorm because a lot of this stuff is not brain surgery it's being intentional about what is everyone saying to my niche what are all capital raisers saying what are investors seeing what do all investors want to see what do they complain about when people pitch them all the time what deal structure just sits on a shelf versus sweating for you what deal structure helps suck investors in and then how can you position yourself so investors find you and are drawn to you and how when you first engage you make it hyper clear what you're doing.

36:16Like, this is what we stand for. This is what we do. Nobody else does this. And this is why it's massively valuable in a sentence that goes in your video as well as your one-liner. So I know that's a long answer, but you're pretty experienced and probably tracked every word I said because you've just been around the block 600 times on working with investors. But does that help at all? 100%. Yeah. Everything you said is absolutely valid and all stuff I need to work some more on. Now, assuming you have that collateral material in place, your one-liners and your founder video and the one-pager, now you want to get in front of an audience that's going to be interested in seeing that material.

36:57What's your best advice on how you get in front of those people or what do you do with all these great materials once you have them? Yeah. So a few things. You wrote a book once, I remember, and you'd come to one of our workshops. You'd probably heard from 92 people that maybe you should write a book one day, but I remember you'd come into one of our workshops, put out a book. If I'm not mistaken, you raised like$25 million in a month or two, and it was like a record amount of a raise soon after, right? It was, yeah, and that book sold like 50 ,000 copies, so it's been a very popular book. That's awesome, yeah.

37:31So we talk about that at our events we talk about building a funnel to attract investors versus chasing them and we talk about trying to be the grizzly bear positioned on a waterfall so folks are jumping towards you and want what you want versus you being at the edge of the lake trying to spear a single fish going by so most importantly is try to position yourself in every industry the meat industry senior living industry there's some associations and groups that cost five ten twenty five thousand dollars to join almost almost like a family office club but for business owners of law firms or manufacturing companies or agriculture or senior living um i would try to identify who's been giving you capital what industries they make their money in and try to identify two to four communities that you could be in ideally one or two communities that are like in your city where you're buying assets or in your city where you live so you're around ultra wealthy or very high net worth accredited investor types hyper locally.

38:31I would try to identify one or two industries where those people are predisposed to investing with you. You know, if it's a litigation hedge fund, you know, which I know it's not in your case, but like just to give an easy example, I'd go and find a law firm partner association group that could give you deal flow and invest. And then I would also, like I told Al, and I was talking to Bill about like create that lead list and create, you know, 100 to 300 leads. And you use our investor pipeline builder tool to find sets of the top 50 in certain cities where you're buying assets or traveling to, but also look at who has bought and exited assets.

39:07Jody, I think it was last week, he's had a$500 million exit and built another platform to$100 million. He said that his advantage is he will go through S1's, RegD filings, nitty gritty data, and go so deep on that and he will find the 1 million and 5 million dollar check writers that are on disclosure forms or on S1s or publicly traded company filings or board members of publicly traded companies like who sits on the board of CoStar or a senior living REIT those types of strategic folks and then have that blended list so it might be 100 to 300 top leads you're targeting but then two to four communities you're in and then reaching out with how do you add value to them first i think that's a mistake a lot of folks make because they say like oh well i've got this killer one-liner now and hopefully you do most people don't have a one-liner at all and we have people read them on stage at our summits and most of them get really bad ratings from the investors when they hold up the cards and most don't have one at all so you're way ahead of the game if you even have one and use our tool dial it in get the one-liner but then the problem is that like I get 800 messages a day right and and I'm not a billionaire you know and so basically if you just imagine billion dollar plus family offices how much deal flow they're getting how many emails but almost no one adds value first they just pitch what they're doing so if you can provide value first and give them a due diligence checklist tool or give them a free AI tool like the Dr.

40:40Dewey tool we talked about at the start of this webinar right like I'm trying to attract a thousand doctors to the doctor's investor club we have 150 now we've gathered over the last year year and a half year so to get to a thousand i was thinking how could i be maximum value to these doctors well giving them access to dr dewey for free as well as our events as well as our member portal now i'm just offering them a warm chocolate chip cookie like on united united airlines when you're in first class and have no willpower at 10 p.m it's hard to resist that versus like hey you want to invest in my senior living deal and it's like i don't know who are you like do we know each other?

41:12Like what, have you done anything in the space? And then they're kind of on their heels a bit versus like wanting that chocolate chip cookie. Right. Yep. Yeah. Really valid advice, Richard, as always. And, uh, it sounds like I'm doing a lot of the things right. Cause, uh, that's kind of been my philosophy too, has been more about getting in front of people and maybe you just talk about who you are and what you do. And then that brings them to you rather than trying to cold sell. I just don't think cold selling works at all, but I will close with just a plug for you. You mentioned earlier the Deep Due Diligence Club.

41:45I wrote a book on how to invest in passive real estate offerings. It's 350 pages of all the stuff you've got to do to determine whether you want to make that investment. The Deep Due Diligence Club does all that for you. They do all that work. I can say that firsthand because they did a deep due diligence dive on us and a lot of their members invested in our offering as a result. But I can testify to the fact that they do their homework. So if anybody is a passive investor is considering whether they should join the Deep Due Diligence Club and questioning whether or not they actually really do Deep Due Diligence, they absolutely do.

42:26So just interesting that you mentioned it. And I thought that they did a great job. Yeah, that's awesome. I actually completely forgot about that. I should have known that. And just so everyone knows, like zero of this is scripted at all. Bob replied yesterday saying, hey, could Brian jump on there? Like, yeah, sure. But like, we don't know what anyone's going to ask on this. And we showed a picture of my book on stage last week and encouraged people to write one for the exact reason that of, you know, why you did it. And the reason why it works is like Dr. Robert Cialdini, we got to interview on raising capital using influence and persuasion.

43:00And it just positions you as an authority. And you sold 55 ,000 copies of the book. You probably gave out a thousand copies. you know if even 10 of those people got massive value and i'm sure it's more than that but like some people don't read a book even if they buy it right let's say it's only 10 somehow that's still you know 6 500 people uh or at least 5 500 people that got huge value and now they might talk about you respect you more refer you to others invest tell their brother-in-law to invest or send you deal flow and like that is what that is the motivation and why you want to put energy into attracting capital and not chasing it and then Brian the other thing that like someone at your level could really leverage that most people can't is you have so much material written and spoken on stage and so many podcasts and such that I would you know try to get on 50 or 100 more podcasts but I would think about out of everything you've put out like infographics articles social media mentions what really did people attach to out of the book why did it sell so much like why do they love what you had to say and if you can dig in on that and create more assets like that but even more importantly poll marketing is putting out value and it pulls investors into your funnel push marketing is oh out of all the poll marketing we attempted to do like let's say it's just 20 assets in one of them or two of them were like the standout best now you want to create 20 more like that but also those one or two is what you push on people now you say you know who invests a lot people with the job title of X with at least 10 employees who are in one of the three cities where we buy assets.

44:33Let's target exactly that on LinkedIn. Let's gather data and more people that fit that demographic. And we're going to push this value on them. We're going to push our book on them. And we're going to mail our book to these top 300 prospects. And we're going to target them on three different platforms. Does that make sense? Yeah, it totally makes sense. And you're right. This is completely unscripted. I had no idea you were going to mention the Triple D group. But when you did, I thought, oh, I should talk about that because they did their due diligence on us. But you're absolutely right about writing a book.

45:01I didn't write it because I thought it was going to be a lead funnel. I really wrote it because I had a friend of mine who lost her entire life savings investing in a passive real estate syndication with an operator that turned out to be a crook. And I thought, like, if I can help people avoid that, you know, that would really save people a lot of grief. And then I put the book out there and people started reading it and going like, oh, my gosh, you know, this I want to invest with you. And what was really surprising was I had a lot of sponsors of real estate deals actually encouraging their investors to read it, which I really didn't expect.

45:36I thought that they were going to say like, oh, they want to hide it from them. And, you know, I'm telling where all the skeletons are buried. They don't want people to see this. But, you know, but I think that it turned into a funnel of its own, too. So you're absolutely right when you say about, you know, putting out materials to position yourself. That certainly does work. Yeah, for sure. And just so I know my team is listening here. We use this as training for my own team. It'd be interesting to have you on stage at one of our family office masterminds and just kind of pick your brain on things and just kind of have a dialogue like this at one of the in-person masterminds.

46:11So if it lines up sometime with your schedule, we'd love to follow up on that. and then someone here is asking for your email. Do you mind if I post that in the chat? Is that going to be an annoyance? Would you rather just come through me or do you want me to post the email here in the chat? Don't mind at all. Okay, cool. So if anyone wants to reach out to Brian, just reach out via that email I just posted there. But I appreciate you being on here, Brian. And we'll try to keep in touch a bit more often. I know some of the most valuable people I know are so busy that nine months or two years go by and we don't even touch base once.

46:39But it's exciting to see what you're building. So let's try to catch up a bit more often. Yeah, let's try that. Thanks for having me on. Bob's been telling me I got to come to one of the live events. So I got to make that happen. So hopefully I'll see you soon. Yeah, hopefully at our annual super summit, if not next month. There you go. Thanks, Richard. Good to see you. Likewise. All right, we have a couple of questions here in the chat. And then if there are any other verified members on, if you want to send a chat over directly to me, I'll try to call on you next and then pay charter members after that.

47:09Taylor in the chat is saying he's brand new to Family Office Club. A few takeaways he got from the bootcamp last week was custom structuring your deals and be 100 % unique in what you're offering. Any insight on educating and bringing awareness to my business offering? I would create a LinkedIn newsletter. LinkedIn's algorithm pushes newsletters because it keeps people on LinkedIn and they're trying to really grow newsletters because when you release a newsletter it shoots an email to their inbox from LinkedIn so the deliverability of it's pretty good and it gets people back onto LinkedIn which is good for LinkedIn and it's good for you.

47:45It's like we launched ours you know 18 months ago maybe like 20 months ago now and we're up to 80 ,000 subscribers so it's like another email list and we tested it once and almost the exact same amount of people came from our LinkedIn newsletters as did our 200 ,000 person email list so that was really interesting so that's something. Is there an etiquette to cold calling brick and mortar family offices or they normally turn away people well i think the etiquette is add value to them first many people will not complain if you're like hey i have a client for you mind if i make an intro or like hey i i notice you're growing this way i don't know if you've thought about the deal structure that does this but happy to explain how that would work um or i know a couple of your peers they sometimes cooperate they don't see it as competition just like brian was saying like oh i thought the other sponsors would see me as like you know evil competition and really it was like cooperation got him deal flow made friends in the industry etc so offering value first and making them an offer they can't refuse because it's just pure value for them compared to the pitch from everyone else would be one thing if you're going to say what you're doing then obviously dial in your first liner first right and when you email someone just think of the impact of emailing someone and be like hey I'm the founder of Wilson conferences we put on some great events if you want to come check it out like well um and saying world-class and these other words don't mean anything is completely different than hi i'm from family office club and over 19 years i've hosted 300 events and our members have gotten a billion dollars of transactions done with each other um if you want to come and check out some of our 50 ai tools or whatever right it's like the more specific the more clear the less friction the less confusion the better which i know you heard some of that last week but hopefully that that helps um a couple other questions here all right Rami's here he focuses on media and entertainment Stonehaven awesome appreciate you being here yeah it's like in the movie of Shawshank Redemption you keep on with the letters until you get the money for the library yeah sometimes you just need to follow up and be politely persistent and just because someone doesn't respond at first doesn't mean much I told one of my team members this two days ago we had an hour-long call because they've switched positions in our company and the investor suggested a connection with the wealth creator of the family office or for the investor we are connecting with we followed up once and that didn't happen it was a couple months later and my team member said oh yeah well obviously that path is done obviously i'm not going to push on that because that door is closed but maybe there's another way for us to keep in touch and i told my team member it doesn't mean that door is closed all it means is they were traveling closing a deal maybe their daughter was getting married maybe a deal was blowing up maybe something and exciting was happening.

50:28Maybe they just had too many good things happening at once. Maybe they were trying to apply extreme focus to something that really required it. And you can't take it personally or emotionally or treat it as pure signal that they're not interested now. And we've had people get very upset at family offices before saying, you came to the event, you spoke at Richard's event, you gave me your business card, you had said you'd like to see some materials and then you never replied to my email. Why do you come to events if you're going to ignore people afterwards. You know, we don't get many complaints like that, but we got one, and it's an extreme example that just shines a bright light on no one owes you a reply to your emails.

51:06Everyone's busy, right? Just because they give you a business card or met you, et cetera, it doesn't mean that now they're going to always be replying to you, right? So the onus is on you to have something so unique, so valuable, add value first, make a positive connection, build a relationship, not bore people to death, have the right positioning, but also like billionaire said on stage last week have the right tone of voice have the right passion energy for what you're doing it is competitive if you have the specialized skill of raising capital and knowing how the family office five trillion dollar industry works you will be valuable to other people on planet earth until the end of time like you will be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars a year likely if you have that super dialed in and the harder it gets to raise capital the more valuable you are as a capital raiser right so I wanted to share just a couple like really quick slides and then we've got a couple more questions here we'll get to but this is related to what Brian was saying so it's just super critical that we fly through this for like 90 seconds so first of all the more you grow your business and financial IQ the more you can play defense and not lose your net worth after it goes up the more your business IQ grows the more that you can catch an 80 mile per hour footballs it goes by your face in a meeting, grab that opportunity and take it down and actually do something with it.

52:22Right. And so you want to be always growing your IQ. And recently, every, literally every single passive investor I know that's done 15 or 20 deals got slammed on something. Distributions cut, lost half their money, lost all their money. One of the 20 is in jail or they think they think they belong in jail. They're misled. Right. So these are, this is just a reality of how harsh the environment is right now. I mentioned the stat, two and a half times less capital raised, right? So if you were raising 10 million a year and now you're raising 8 million still, like congratulations, because you're doing amazing compared to how a lot of folks are doing.

53:00And before you could snap your fingers in the right order and raise capital for some sort of deal because no one had lost money for a decade, essentially, like almost no one. If you talked to 100 passive investors that had done 20 deals or more. Maybe a VC deal or a couple of deals had gone sideways on them. But really, the carnage the last two years is greater than the 12 years before it combined. Not per year, but altogether, there's been more carnage the last two years in investor portfolios. And they say you should invest when there's blood on the streets, even if some of that blood is your own and you can still taste it in your mouth.

53:35But not all investors are savvy enough to do what Buffett assess and be greedy when others are fearful and fearful when others are greedy but it's when everyone's beaten up or someone calls a whole industry a dumpster fire is when you can get assets have been written off and are massively valuable right when interest rates go up the bar is higher investors can invest in treasuries or first position collateral back real estate and earn you know 9 10 11 12 13 percent plus a point up front maybe right so investors have more leverage They expect you to get more done with less because of AI. And it just leads to this squeeze because five years ago, people replied to 8.5 % of cold emails.

54:14Last year, 1.9%. I guarantee you, this is going to below 1 % this year or next. Because every second of the day, some AI nerd is spending up 100 ,000 emails a month to shoot out to people that fit a certain demographic. So it gets harder to stand out. So whatever worked before is not going to work as well now, even if it was only for one of these things. Interest rates going up doesn't help. Investors bloodied doesn't help. Banks now lend less on a deal. They want to put out 60, 65%, if anything, on deals. So now you need to raise more equity because there's less debt in the stack. So now you need to raise more capital.

54:48That capital costs you more because you have less leverage. And investors are putting out less money. So kind of a depressing combination of events. But all it means is that you need these strategies more. We all do, including our own investor club. And this is what I am hearing from everybody. and it's not just Brian, it's not just myself. So that is the harsh reality, and the first step of making progress is to admit the truth, look the truth in the eye, and say, okay, what are we gonna do to be better? How do we be sharper? How do we have that one-liner? How do we have a brand that actually means something that doesn't sit on a shelf?

55:23Maybe before we could have something that created friction. Like, why would you want that, though? If you have to put energy into creating an email signature, put your face on it, put a one-liner on it, have a brand that sucks people in, design a deal structure that's amazing and sweats for you right so I want to make sure that gets communicated and things are clear on on that we've got a couple questions here senior living site Jean was saying somebody's own the property for Jean Jean if you want to follow up with me on that that is very interesting um they've owned that property for 53 years and you'd like to potentially work with someone so um my team can help me follow up with gene that would be amazing um because that sounds interesting we've had family offices at our events um one family office that owned the mall of america was sourced to deal so good at one of our events he called the head of the family office on a private airplane and had him turn around in midair and come back to New York City to connect with the owner of an asset.

56:30We've had another family office at our event source a deal where somebody's family for two generations owned a couple blocks of a town in the downtown center of a Midwest town and they didn't want to sell it because they knew that private equity was going to take this thing and make it worth 10x more. They wanted to be part of that success and everyone just wanted to buy it from them at a price that they knew was not a strategic price. So a family office said we can include you in part of that deal would love to that's amazing you guys own that real estate so like that's an example of how family offices are different they're unique they're agile they can be patient and hold an asset for two generations or be faster than others and invest in two weeks or two months instead of taking nine months to write a meaningful seven figure check so just some real quick you know examples that came up from that comment from gene um hansa says the best advice i was ever given was that if you you have to explain it to a 15 year old and they have to understand the core idea 100 true it also reminds me of something that we always tell people when it comes to ai now you can learn so much faster with ai and if anytime you're trying to implement software get something done on the computer create start a new crm start something and you're lost you just tell the ai tool talk to me like a nine-year-old make it super simple what where am i supposed to click right now this is what i'm looking at what are the five steps I should follow and that simplifies everything.

57:51The Wahanza is saying is like if you can't make what you're doing simple and get down to the core of what makes it unique, simple and unique and different than others in a meaningful way then you really don't know what you're doing or if you can't draw a picture of it like there people are going to think you don't know what you're doing. You want to if a picture says a thousand words and you can look at a picture instantly that's how you want to communicate. That's why your one pager should be mostly visual. that's why the logo for your business should not be clip art or purple and yellow super ugly 1990s style or just a font with an italic slant to it and an interesting color you know my opinion that those are not good things to do people's eyes first go to images and they first go to faces and then they go to images and they read left to right and there are certain words that jump out to people and certain words are massively overused in every industry so i hope that helps with some people working on their marketing materials like Brian.

58:47Paul said he's read Brian's book and it's very good. That's awesome. Mark Halpern, glad to see you here. Mark, maybe I'll call on you at some point, Mark, if you don't mind. And then we will have you share just maybe a couple of tidbits on the due diligence club and just what you see in terms of, you know, top three mistakes people make while pitching you guys. It might be something like interesting or anything you'd like to chat about and is family office club active to members outside the united states yes so if you live in australia or hong kong or dubai how many of our events in the united states are you gonna be able to make maybe zero maybe one you might just want to access our ai tools you might just want to access the live streams and the portal if you're international we do have a 99 a month membership option that's just for virtual only.

59:41It doesn't include coming to any of our in-person events. And if my team wouldn't mind just posting a link to where someone could sign up for that if they want to, that is something to consider if you don't come to the United States already at least once or twice a year. What we've done is taken, you know, if you buy a movie from Amazon Prime and pay$20 for it or from Apple, pay$20 for a movie. But you can pay$20 a month to Netflix and get access to 200 ,000 movies. That's what we've done for the family office industry with Family Office Club. For what it costs to go to one other family office event or 1.3 other family office events, you can get access to 2 ,000 investor talks recorded, 50 AI tools, live stream of our events, come to our in-person masterminds, come to our four super summits a year, and the value equation is way, way better than paying for anyone else's like one-off conference.

1:00:30And our main membership is just$400 a month with no upfront initiation fee for our basic membership. And then we have a verified membership that includes background check and exhibit table and speaking spot on stage on a panel. And we create your one minute video for you, which requires us to make sure your one liner is super dialed in. So I'll put the link there to learn more about that, but I want to get back to hot seat action now. So we will try to find a couple of charter members to call on here let's see here mark if you're ready we could call on you and then i see mark singer on here as well mark singer uh his nickname is mark singer the ringer he's part of the deep due diligence club and uh probably one of the more advanced negotiators uh in the group so why don't we do uh the two marks which are also the only two marks on planet earth i've ever met that spell their first names with a C and they're both two of the 50 some members in the deep due diligence club so imagine that right so um I don't know if uh Mark Singer I think that's you I hear already if you want to go first introduce yourself and then anything that you want to comment on you might not have something that is your top bottleneck or that you want to ask me if you do awesome but otherwise you know maybe the top one or two um complaints from the investor perspective or interesting things that you've learned as an investor for other investors that are listening here today would be helpful.

1:01:57Sure, sure, sure. Thank you, Richard. Great seeing you again. You know, I think that the problem is, for me, there's a lot of noise out there. And it's hard to distinguish and separate the noise from any deal that I'd be interested in looking at. And probably on a numerical basis, over 90 % of the people that approach me for capital raising or deals, I would never be interested in. So, you know, right now, my focus has been on non-correlated assets. I want safety and protection. I was just at an event in Tampa, and I'm actually going back, speaking there again. And then from there, I'm speaking at another event in San Diego.

1:02:44the the question that comes up a lot is what do you look for what do you look for in a sponsor and while everyone has these very detailed algorithmic you know billion AUM 10 years historical historical track track record you know a audited financials. My answer to that question is very simple. I want consistency, reliability, and boring. Right. And I need a sponsor that's able to produce those three things and then I'll get into the details. the IRS all the projections don't matter because they're they're just they're just projections and speculation if the sponsor does it sponsor if I start with a great sponsor the amount of due diligence Richard I don't know if you saw what I what I did the institutional level due diligence I did on that one on that one property in Dallas right yeah okay yeah I produced 25 30 page institutional level due diligence reports and it has become has become easier with AI but it's not an automated it's not an automated process right so before I go through those rigors I want to make sure that this is this is a sponsor that that in five years I wanted I want to continue to do business with and I've watched sponsors for two or three years before I've ever given them a nickel and I'm not looking for I'm not looking for a you know one night stand I'm looking for a long-term long-term relationship where I differ in you know some some aspects are people talk about the risk of concentration I'd rather have my fab five my five great sponsors that I can rinse and repeat and continue to do business with and trust them there's being a single-family office but I run it myself and there's a lot of there's a lot of work in managing passive placements so sometimes if there anything anything but passive so that's why I think I'm comfortable bringing that number I was at 19 at one point down to 12 and I want to bring that number down to five and I want to call it I call it my sleep at night portfolio yeah that's awesome we had a speaker at our hundred million dollar summit that works for a family office in Norway they employ 20 % of the country and they said that they're really just looking to do long-term business with long-term minded folks and it takes a while to build the trust but once you're in you're in and they're backing you and they're going in like relatively heavy and I think that that is just the way when noise increases and you just learn the hard way that like, you know, diversification is insurance against ignorance is what Warren says.

1:05:48Right. And so part of it is just kind of like being high conviction on fewer things that you've vetted very well as kind of part of the purpose of deep due diligence club and part of what you're saying. Right. Well, 100, 100%. I used to, I used to say, um, you know, I'm also a, uh, uh, broker, real estate broker, a commercial realtor. Um, and I say, if you look Look to your right, there's a real estate agent. Look to your left, there's a title company. Look in front of you, there's a mortgage banker. And now look to the side and there's a capital raiser. So it becomes ubiquitous and there's a lot of noise out there.

1:06:28And I've got a really good signal to noise filter. Yeah, totally. 100%. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Awesome. Yeah, I appreciate you being here. And Mark Singer has spoken at several of our family office masterminds and been on stage at, I believe, a couple of our summits as well. And I'd love to have you back again sometimes. You always have a fresh perspective and not afraid to share your opinion on exactly what you're looking for. So I appreciate you being part of the community. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I'm not bashful. My brother is going out to – he's in the Bay Area, and he's going to be going to your event.

1:07:06and you want to ask him for the introduction of Peter Thiel. Awesome. Yeah, I'd love to. What's your brother's first name again? Arthur. Arthur. Okay, cool. I'll take a look for that. And if you don't mind, Daphne or Jennifer, just shooting a note to Tabitha. Just make sure that I've got a reminder for that. That'd be awesome. I appreciate that. Thank you. No problem. Thanks, Mark. My pleasure. Appreciate being here. And just so everybody knows, I bought billionaires.com with a B a few years ago, and we're trying to interview 100 billionaires. not the easiest thing on planet earth but um you know one time i said on stage like if anyone knows tony robbins or friends with him i'd love to interview him and uh some people laughed and then someone came on stage up to the stage afterwards and said that tony's on my board let's let's interview him right now let's send an audio note over to him and we got the interview done that same day with tony and um and so having the chance to interview a ray dalio or peter teal or um you know a michael jordan or i've got three girls if i interviewed taylor swift i would be very popular in my household for a few days so like if anyone is friends with anyone it's almost better if they're not famous because there's so many layers of gatekeepers and um they get pinged up a thousand times per hour sometimes um so for sure we're interviewing mostly non-famous billionaires but if you want to go see who we've interviewed it's at billionaires.com uh mark halpern if you want to go next um just maybe share a couple quick insights and um anything you think that folks need to hear that they haven't heard 100 times before maybe that's most unique to share.

1:08:34We'd love to have you contribute or ask questions too. Well, thank you very much, Richard. I greatly appreciate it. I want to reinforce what Brian Burke said before. I thought that was really cool. We did a deep due diligence. I think we found out everything except his grandmother's shoe size, and a number of us invested, and it was really good. So yeah, we really do perform deep due diligence and just maybe two quick points in our due diligence uh deep due diligence investors club um one is that and first of all i tremendously respect mark singer and i agree with everything he says always with the one exception and that is um i do believe in great diversification because the um in my opinion of course you can't eliminate risk but you can minimize risk and you manage risk and the way that we minimize risk on individual deals is by performing deep due diligence and but the way we manage risk is by diversification at least that's the way that i manage it so that's what i'm saying is that absolute it's uh it's my never humble opinion because i don't believe that i have the ability to predict every macroeconomic factor that's ever going to be there um i don't think i could have predicted a global pandemic and an eviction moratorium in 2018 even though in 1918 there was a global pandemic and i lost all my money in a syndication that i apartment syndication i invested in 1987 when 1989 the soviet union fell and that just wasn't something that i was able to predict so right as much as i can we can perform deep due diligence on individual uh investments diversification is what keeps my portfolio in good shape, even though I have total losses like you were mentioning before.

1:10:23So that's just in general for the investors. And then for the sponsors, I think it's really important to understand that we have 50 to 60 members and we all perform deep due diligence. We have more, but we're very selective in the people that are willing to personally and actively perform the deep due diligence. But if we have 60 members, that's 60 different sets of investment criteria. So people say, well, what do you guys invest in? Well, you have to ask each one of us. And it changes with time. Until May of 2025, like from 2021 to 2025, I made a huge amount of money, for me, a huge amount of money in land development.

1:11:04And then in May of 2025, instead of rolling over the money that I had, I said, well, the interest rates are too high. The prices are too high. i'm gonna i'm going to um exit and the companies that for the one company that i made a lot of money with for four years um including in may of 2025 went bankrupt in uh january of 2026. so you know things change and yeah the market changed the macroeconomics changed then uh i am gonna shift now sometimes you know you get stuck in something for five or seven years the macroeconomics change, you don't have much of a choice. But when it comes to our investment criteria, each one of us has some combination of income and growth.

1:11:50So like, you know, I'm in my 70s. So sometimes I'm looking for income, but if I have enough income, then I might switch over to growth. And many times I'm looking for combinations of income and growth. So I invested in something that I saw from people I managed Family Office Club, and it was 9 % cash on cash return from day one. And I do, even though the 20 % IRR might be fiction, I do believe that the fundamentals are there, that the 20 % IRR is a possibility in five years. So if somebody is doing ground-up construction and I have to be looking for income, please don't complain to me that I'm not investing because you've got the greatest deal in the world because construction means I'm not going to see any money for three years, probably at least.

1:12:39So, yeah, just some of the things that I think it's worth our sponsors to be aware that each investor is looking at something different. We're usually looking for some combination of income and growth. It changes over time. Macroeconomics change over time. And I have to be a big believer in diversification, but I think I'm a minority relative to Richard, you've said before, diversification. and I sort of go the other direction. And I know that when I have, we recently had 100 % loss in an apartment syndication that was, my net worth went up despite the fact that I lost 100 % of that investment.

1:13:17So again, if you guys want to join us, you have to be willing to personally and actively perform deep due diligence on every deal before you invest. Right. And I think like a couple of things I want to mention. I think that everyone should have diversification in some parts of their portfolio for sure, personally. And many times when I talk to family offices, I think in these three buckets I'm showing here visually, they think diversified market exposure, ETFs, fund managers, stocks, et cetera. And that's mostly playing defense, but hopefully slightly beating S &P or whatever you want to choose as your benchmark.

1:13:55but it's just making sure that you don't lose the wealth you spend so much time building in a very diversified basis. And then the second bucket is usually like very conservative cash flowing real estate. It can be very tax efficient. Usually it does well in tracking inflation. Most families I know don't like to put max debt on their real estate. A couple I work with have zero debt on their real estate assets. That's also not common though. And they usually outsource a lot of this unless it's an asset in their backyard or a single family home. They're usually finding other people to manage their real estate.

1:14:28They usually outsource the diversification layer. And then they will pick some private equity investments and private placements and allocations to invest into to diversify and get cash flow as well. and then the the most successful single family offices i know for investors listening here to grow their wealth and play offense the red circle at the bottom is going really deep into one or two industries where they typically you know if they made their money in auto dealerships it might be auto dealerships and stem cells or whatever it is and go super concentrated there but um the rule of thumb that most people say is that you should never trust four to eight percent of your net worth or cash or investments with any one counterparty, brain trust, etc.

1:15:15People break that rule when it comes to wealth managers, but it is why some people have two to four wealth managers and not just one. But when it comes to individual deals, there is no blanket advice that is smart to give or even responsible to say out loud on a webinar. You really have to work with a professional who's going to ask you 50 questions, know your values, know what you prioritize, is your goal to sit on a beach and never run out of your nest egg or is your goal to become worth 10 times more and you don't care about income at all because of your you know you make three million a year as a surgeon right so like obviously anyone you listen to if they give you a plan and they haven't asked you 30 questions yet and they don't know you yet they are telling you here's my game of monopoly where i get 200 every time you pass go and you want to develop and play your own game and keep score in a way where you win based off of the game you want to be playing so um i appreciate you saying that mark uh because uh i don't want people to get the wrong idea about diversification but um one trend i've seen is just that family offices do more due diligence and then go deep with someone if you're gonna if you expect someone to rush in and like you're trying to raise 25 million dollars in five weeks and you want to raise 10 million dollar check like it's hard to do that it's very hard to do that like with any family office it could be done but pretty challenging and then the other one last thing and then if you have any other comments mark and then we'll move on to um scott and then richard is just that what i found is that you can have brian burke with the senior living deal and that same exact deal represented by someone else without his experience or without his passion or without his focus or without the follow-up or without ever smiling or without ever developing a relationship, the same exact deal, and they may raise no capital while he brings in$300 million.

1:17:07And like super interesting to see. And so when people sometimes randomly email me, I get they're looking for someone for their deal, but like, I don't know them. Pretty hard to make a cold intro. That's why we have in-person investor meetings. You can build a real relationship, add context to the situation. And it's so much about all of the 100 nuances around the credibility and the conviction and the clarity and how they enforce appreciation. It's just really interesting to just think about that when someone said, oh, do you invest in this? Do you invest in that? You might not be at the event to find a deal in the medical space, but when you meet the founder, you might be like, wow, that's the best deal I've heard in six months.

1:17:45Like, I should conduct due diligence on this group. It's just really interesting to see that play out with all different types of investors. and maybe one more comment since you mentioned again uh brian and also yourself one thing that both you and brian have in common is that you create value to people uh without necessarily having a specific uh end game it's just let me just create value right and again there's not so much to be a Brian Burke groupie here, but I was extremely impressed with Brian on a, when he gave a presentation on the state of the state of the market, this was probably about a half a year ago, I think in Columbus.

1:18:28He wasn't, he wasn't pitching Praxis at all. He was just going out there saying, look at this great thing with the market, just look at the marketplace. and I was so impressed with Brian as a person. I said, gee, I really have to figure out more. And the same thing what you do with AI. I mean, you just give out all this incredibly valuable free information. And of course, people, so this is not a, I'm not trying to flatter anybody here. I'm just saying it's a hell of a way of making an impression on somebody is to give away truly valuable information for free. and then all of a sudden people, they want to be in your sphere of influence.

1:19:08Right. Yeah, totally. And that's reciprocation, which is an influence principle of Dr. Robert Cialdini. You can see my interview with him on my YouTube channel called Centimillionaire Strategies. We've got about a million subscribers on there. And the Cialdini interview is one of my favorites. And he talks about that. And if you don't mind a few cuss words in another interview with Jeffrey Gettemer, he's got a pretty good sense of humor. but we talk about the same thing and building authority and adding value first, et cetera. So yeah, appreciate you being on here, Mark, and look forward to seeing you at some of our events later this year.

1:19:41And thank you. And we'll probably move on to Scott now. I think you're already unmuted. If you want to jump into the hot seat and we can see what questions you have. Okay. Well, I can say a couple of comments as well, but. Sure. So I've been a member since VIP member since March of 23. um i've been an investor and a silent partner in a financial advisory firm hello this is mark hi mark this is jennifer from the family office club how are you oops let me try to mute that i think it's already muted so i guess marge connecting with my team member right now so yeah go ahead scott uh so anyway so i've been a silent partner um up until december of last year where I'm now I'm a non-operating partner I don't really represent deals or anything along those lines I would say my focus is really to be creating strategic partnerships and just creating more visibility for our firm okay now having said that I'm just gonna say one of the topics that you were talking about is adding value so I'm trying to create value or you know add these partnerships or create relationships.

1:20:59And since December, I've created some really special relationships and it started with just me offering to add value. Right. So one of your speakers, a very outspoken gentleman, I met him after the panel for maybe all of 15 seconds. I gave him my card and he says, he asked me what I do. I said, I'm just trying to be a better person this year and help anybody I can. I texted him five minutes later. He's just saying we only have 15 seconds, but here's my contact information. He got back to me two days later and said, let's talk. Show me your deal flow and everything like that. So we now have a relationship.

1:21:45Nothing's got, you know, nothing's transacted yet, but it just goes to the concept that you're talking about before add value first. I've created two other relationships by just offering to help. Yeah. awesome doing that yeah it sounds basic but almost nobody does it almost everyone just wants to pitch your thing be like are you investing right now in real estate like here's my deal it's amazing and then it's like there's not much context around it you don't know the person yet and then you're like well i mean i guess maybe i'll take a quick look but there's a lot of people approaching folks like that and um almost nobody approaches with adding value first i find yeah i mean and as simple as making that statement how can i help you you know right and And so it's like I'm talking to a centimillionaire or a centimillionaire or a billionaire, and he's like, you know, he was expecting me to throw deals at him or this or that.

1:22:38I was like, wow, I've got a pretty good network, so let me know how I can help you. Anyway. Yeah, for sure. The other thing is your Claude skills. Yeah. I put those 11 skills into Claude, and it's actually been invaluable to help my team and myself. Awesome. So that's all good stuff. So my question is, I don't really represent any one deal. So it's not necessarily like a one pager or going through due diligence on a pitch deck. I do that for the team. But my question is, I'm just trying to get me out there. Should I have a one pager?

1:23:21You probably should have a one pager. what are the three things that you get hired most for or like how do things get structured? Do you join the board? Do you become an equity partner? Do you get hired as a consultant most often? Like what's the scenario that comes up? So, I mean, it's actually all of the above. It's come up. And I guess I would have to weigh that and go through as to all the deals that we're working at, which is more predominant. Sure. But we've had all of those examples as part of our portfolio. Right. Okay. So one thing I would just, I think what's most important is to have the one liner about what you do and how you add value to folks.

1:24:08And if you look at the three or four things that folks hire you for, then figuring out what moves the needle most or what one skill set makes them think that they have to work with you or what resource you have, et cetera, what benefit they're looking for. and make sure that's in the one-liner, of course, with some credible numbers and use our one-liner tool to dial it in. Beyond that, the next most important is probably the one-minute video and then the one-pager. But if you're already paying for Claude, which sounds like you are, then you can go to Claude Design and like in a airplane flight, you can create a one-pager that explains what you do, how you work with folks, give some case study examples to make it super tangible, visual, put your one minute video on that, put your one liner at the top, have your logo up there and your brand name that sucks them in, etc.

1:24:58So because it's so easy, it's like there's no reason not to have a one pager, I think, as long as like there's not a compliance issue created by putting something on a one pager that, you know, your attorney hasn't blessed or something like that. So for sure, I would have one. And anything from the boot camp last week, or from what we've talked about in the past or on this web this webinar today that leads to a question you have or a challenge um besides that like or some big opportunity or challenge you're facing that's totally totally different and separate than that um no it's always just everything i always get value out of all of them and really so what i did from a boot camp last week is i had a bunch of notes and so to your point what you just said is i scanned all those notes and put it into clod um and broke down of an activity list of things to do and you know it was get a picture you know on your signature email so i did that so it's like creating a check mark of some of the things that you've suggested to do.

1:26:06I started on a one-pager, but I kind of got frustrated with it. That's kind of why I wanted to ask, but you gave me some really good ideas for this. Yeah, okay. Great. Yeah, so always get good stuff out of it. Awesome. Yeah, yeah, no problem. Appreciate you being here and thanks for coming to the events. Richard, if you are ready, we could go with you next. And there's someone from the film industry here and said I should move my stand-up desk up to get my camera at a better angle. So I tried to do that a second ago. Appreciate that comment. But yeah, Richard, if you have any questions or challenges or opportunities that you could help comment on for a couple minutes, happy to.

1:26:43Well, thank you, Richard. It's my pleasure to be here. I just want to say, really appreciate what you're doing. I missed you at the bootcamp last week. And mine is, my focus is very different from the rest of my colleagues. and I have been a member now for coming to, I think, four years and enjoy it. And I have not really at this stage actively capital raising, but I have enjoyed the opportunity to meet with colleagues, create relationships, develop a network. But we are getting into it now because my focus is we are trying to solve major problems in Africa, Specifically, we are going step by step right now.

1:27:31We are looking to be involved in raising capital to finance renewable energy, which is a big, big undertaking. And we are working with the government now of Uganda. And so over the past few weeks, I was personally there trying to meet with the senior leadership as well as the technical people. We're trying to identify the problems. We know what the problem is. The electricity is not sufficient. What exists is also not reliable. So the government cannot attract many industrial development, which are badly needed for, as you know, Africa, SAG region, continent, as the largest young population in the world.

1:28:24and that poses a potential crisis in the future if nothing is addressed. But nothing really works in any country if there is no electricity. Nothing really works. Yeah, so that's what we're going. We're focusing on solar power development now. And over the past, we have formed a very good technical team, engineering team based here and also the local team. so the last week I spent with the government technical people trying to make sure we understand the processes there are regulatory issues there are environmental issues we need to address yeah there are social impacts so that's where we are now so we have moved a lot further and going into pre-development so I will be formally going to ask for funding and the government is open to you know foreign investments and we want to make sure all the legal processes are covered, the investors are protected.

1:29:24So that's what we're working through now. Yeah. Thank you. Awesome. My dad is from the nonprofit side of things. So what you're doing might be for profit. If there's some nonprofit element and you need feedback on something, my dad's brought in over a billion dollars to hospitals and universities and capital campaigns for nonprofits and whatever. So if anyone here needs to bounce ideas off of my father, Tom Wilson happy to to be helpful in that way um the other thing that comes to mind is like meeting meeting in person obviously makes everything go faster but also just looking at demographics like I don't know um what cities folks from Uganda come to the United States and start businesses in like there's a lot of Brazilians in Boston for example but I just know that my wife is from Brazil right And so you might know in what cities people have migrated to within the United to the United States and created wealth and where there's a critical mass of them that understand the issues are not looking at this as some foreign problem, but have a really personal connection to that area.

1:30:34That might be the fastest way to raise capital because then you don't have to educate them on the problem. and I would also look at those already active in the region of course or those who are maybe the largest of players that maybe have a campaign to leverage their infrastructure to then do good for the world as well whether it's a massive solar company or or some other group there might be grants or there might be ways to work creatively with with the largest of players but you're competing with a lot of people in doing so so I would first dial in and see if you could find a high net worth segment in the United States of people that have connections with Uganda in business, family or spouses, and work that as one initial thing to consider.

1:31:22But anything else really specific related to maybe how to leverage your AI tools for what you're doing or something that you're at this very stage trying to get past in terms of opportunity or bottleneck that would be helpful to discuss? Yes, absolutely. Because, you know, your tools are important. The structuring of the deal is going to be critical. Very, very important because there are so many elements of a project of this nature. Yes, and definitely, since it involves both local and international, either in terms of capital or legal processes, that's also very important. And then we are working through the key things normally the industry looks for is how to do the risk investments like this.

1:32:10So those are things that I'll go through as well with the tools that you have. Yeah, thank you. Right. Sure. Awesome. Yeah. Well, I appreciate you being here. And thanks for being a member of the club. And just reach out at Richard at FamilyOffices.com if you need anything or access to tools as a member or anything like that. I'll just put my email in the chat there. but thanks for being here, Richard. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, thank you. And I've got a couple of other charter members on the line, and then we could take another volunteer to perhaps we might have time for it before we end, but we have some questions coming in via chat.

1:32:46And if you look in the chat in the Zoom window, I shared two of our Claude skills, which are two of our 10 Claude skills, and I also shared for free one of our custom GPTs that scores your pitch deck. that's one of our 50 custom gpt's so hopefully that's helpful um to some people here on the webinar today and i wanted to share something related to the comments we just made is that when i interviewed cialdini he said it's scientifically proven you're 16 times as likely to close someone when you meet in person if you've been a member with us for a few years you're probably tired of hearing that stat but it's just kind of core to like why living in the middle of the ocean I do need to travel a good amount per year because meeting in person is how a lot of things get done you want to build a digital funnel but it's just so you can meet more folks in person and shake higher quality hands and just develop more relationships right and a spread reciprocation by sharing you know ideas that work right and so basically you automatically become like those that you spend time with and so we just try to find legitimate authentic you know deck of millionaires centimillionaires billionaires heads of publicly traded companies heads of other investor clubs sometimes heads of wealth management platforms we have someone who attends our events who literally designs and releases the products that all of the 1 000 wealth advisors at oppenheimer um show to their clients right and so like meeting one person who's head of an investor club with 400 investors it's way more powerful than just meeting one of the 400 investors, right?

1:34:20So meeting in person is super critical. It's just some pictures from some of our events in case you're like totally new to our community. It's just what it looks like, why we host them, et cetera. We have exhibit booths. We do fireside chats. We have discussion panels, super fast moving. Most of our speakers speak for five or 10 minutes. Our discussion panels are just 35 minutes long, four to six people per panel. So it's very quick moving. Try to make it like an F1 race versus watching golf or something on TV. Last thing I'll say on AI, and we'll jump back into questions, is that there's three levels to basically evolving how you use AI, right?

1:34:58People who are brand new at AI, they treat it like Google, like, oh, like, how do I do this thing? Or like, who's the most reputable plumber in the area? They just treat it like a smarter Google, right? But the more you get good at prompt engineering, then you can get two to 10 extra results. If you get really good at prompt engineering, it's great but if it doesn't have context on exactly who you are where you're going history what you don't like what you do like um transcripts from all the calls you've recently done access to your crm access to your member portal if you have one access to history and memory access to emails if you're comfortable with that etc now it'll be 2 to 10x more powerful because you're good at writing a prompt and it has massive rich context tens of millions of data points it can draw upon plus your prompt is 20 times more dialed in and someone has no idea what they're doing and never uses AI right but the third stage is what we have built out as basically we're calling it hyper intelligent going forward our old AI tool called hyper intelligent we're just going to call our instant advisory board because it basically gives you 20 perspectives on something and votes on it but basically what we're doing is building out intelligence centers and we have a deployment kit in case folks want to do this on their own but if you run a company with five to ten million in revenue or your family office or a publicly traded company we can work with you and install it for you and have like a done for you solution with be part of your Claude's team account and install these intelligence centers so like sales intelligence your sales team uses AI massively different than your CTO your chief technology officer right your marketing team uses it different than your event management team your real estate property managers use AI very differently than you do as the founder or CEO.

1:36:44The 10 to 20x jump now from not just prompt engineering, not just rich context, is developing a custom harness. The reason why Claude took off is they built the best reins and saddle for the horse, which is AI, right? They've got the best reins and saddle for corporate enterprise use for AI. We build the harness which means the unique setup for each major role in your company you might have seven to twelve intelligence centers and we are starting to do this for a publicly traded company we're implementing it for a cent millionaire single family office we help run we'll put in place for a 50 million dollar a year home services company that's been a business for 40 years we're putting this in place for a group that manages multiple hundreds of millions of dollars and essentially that is the next level to get to.

1:37:36So whether it's using our deployment kit as one of our members, or if you're a scaled up platform, the premise here is that if your team is how you get things done, and AI can amplify you or someone on your team, then creating that custom harness with rich context and good prompting is what's going to give you the next 10, 20x jump in terms of AI leap forward. This is where things are going right now. It's what we're most excited about when it comes to AI is where we're putting the most time in. And even as a CloudMax user, it's how I max out and run out of tokens is developing these intelligence centers and putting them in place for the family offices and the clients we work with.

1:38:15So I love working on this stuff because you just see the results instantaneously and it's exciting to work on and just see that. John says that CloudTools are great. Awesome. Yeah, appreciate you using it. Jay is here saying he's looking for investment for his company. Jay, if you go to CapitalRaising.com, I've got a free book on capital raising there. Our whole business model is create good karma and probably good things will happen later. Like interview all the experts we can find, learn as much as we can, share as we learn, and then it's just going to create reciprocation and we'll make friends along the way and a percentage of people will really appreciate it.

1:38:56David says, AI is only as good as the person's knowledge using it. You must know your subject and what you're doing. Yeah, I agree. I mean, if you have someone that doesn't know what they're doing and you equip them with a harness and they have rich context, preloaded prompts, seven modes, custom skills installed and turned on, and it basically says, here are the seven ways to leverage me, I think they're going to get 20x more done than someone that knows nothing and doesn't have that harness. They're not sitting in a saddle like that person will not stay on the horse and make it up the mountain um but you always want to be trusting ai in the hands of someone who's smarter than the ai and has things that ai will never have and you know knows the domain cold they're going to be able to you know gallop and leap over things and be able to slap the horse when it starts eating grass and wandering off the trail be like no just told you for the third time don't do that right like ai still does stuff that's not perfect just like humans do so definitely agree all right let me look in the Q &A section apologies I'm seeing 23 Q &A questions here so I'm gonna try to rip through these as fast as I can a few people just pitching their deal here appreciate you being here Karul Rodney saying there's a bit of an echo I don't know if anyone else is hearing a really bad echo let me know and I'll work on that for next time.

1:40:24I'm in the same office as my last webinar so I'm not sure what would create that echo but if anyone needs a new webcam by the way I use this one called the the Ozbot Tiny 3 and I really like it's really great compared to my last webcam so if anyone needs to upgrade what they're using hopefully that's not the cause of the echo so I'm not giving you an echo problem now but that is the webcam I'm using. Alright Michael's here. Your$100 million summit is great. What I learned is that family offices, that most family offices will not invest in venture capital, but some will. How as a venture capital firm do I find family office candidates or family offices a waste of my time?

1:41:06Yeah, really great question, Michael. So first of all, most family offices, like what that means, let's start just with that term. So the word family office means a lot of things to a lot of people. Some people are worth hundreds of millions of dollars. They don't have a formalized family office. Some people think they have a family office because they hear, oh, family offices manage money for other ultra wealthy people. Well, that is a multifamily office, but traditionally it is a wealth management perspective and they're managing the assets, third-party managers that may manage public market assets, but it's typically a wealth advisor that's really geared in to folks that are worth tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars, and look at things more holistically, more long-term, maybe from tax, philanthropy, trust and estate planning, next-gen, and ten other things, right?

1:41:54And so the word gets abused on accident sometimes and folks don't have a family office formalized, still could be ultra wealthy. So who invest in venture capital? The larger a family office, the more they like to have some official allocation of venture capital. Some families don't look for venture capital, but when they meet the right founder and the opportunity is so spot-on with what they also believe in, and they see some of their DNA in you as a founder, meaning like you're cut from the same fabric, they can relate to you, they're high conviction in you, they understand how you add value and they don't want to be behind on this trend that's coming, then they're likely to make an exception and just make an allocation, even though you're early stage, even though it's seed capital.

1:42:34Like, you know what? We don't normally do this, but I can't resist but be part of what you're doing. I could help you open doors or we want to not miss the train. A lot of families have had their eyes open to, okay, well, we didn't agree with sports betting, And so it was at a cut approved in 40 states. We didn't invest in sports betting or like someone like me never tried drugs in my life besides ibuprofen. And I've had alcohol and caffeine. So like, you know, when cannabis took off, like it wasn't part of that industry. And a lot of families are like, all right, I missed the whole cannabis train.

1:43:03I missed the crypto train. Didn't invest in NVIDIA. Didn't invest in sports betting. Missed mobile apps in the early 2000s and the dot com boom. And they keep on missing these huge trends that are coming. So they're keeping their eyes more open on like robotics, quantum computing, or AI, right? And so folks are more attuned and not missing out on that next wave, but there's 100 ,000 AI startups out there. So you get lost in the noise if you don't stand out super unique. So one thing to note is not just that they'll make an exception for the right person who built the trust and has that unique of an offering, but you are way, way more likely to be recognized as the truly valuable offering you have if you can find folks that made their money in your industry.

1:43:46So we cover that at the start of this call. But if you have a startup and you are putting trackers around the necks of cows to track where they are and you can direct where the cows go and that's your AI startup, well, then obviously go to agricultural owners and people that own thousands of cows. They could try the product, see it works. Now you got them and they know that every farmer is going to want this on their cow and then you're off to the races so i would get something shipped show progress find people who could use the product and you win them over as an investor or find people who have sold their business exited now they're on the boards of publicly traded companies or they just had an exit now they're wealthy and then they could be somebody who could vet it quickly and conduct that due diligence swiftly so that's the way i would look at it and just some realities of venture capital raising capital.

1:44:34Joel has a question here. From what you've seen across family offices, when they hold illiquid assets like art, collectibles, and other physical holdings, what's the biggest friction point when it's time to transfer or liquidate them? I think the biggest friction point is that sometimes things like art are not the fastest to liquidate at the right price. If you need to move quickly to sell your art, that usually is going to come with a haircut. So I don't know the families that I know of who have 40 sports cars and five personal homes or millions of dollars in art. They are wealthy enough. They don't find themselves in a liquidity crisis too often.

1:45:14They're like, oh my gosh, I need to fire sale this stuff. So I don't think that comes up too often, but it is a reality that is a downside of, you know, for a collector's car, you know, you could wait for the Scottsdale, you know, famous car auction event that, that happens every spring, but like, and there's probably other ones of those going on, you know, in different parts of the world, I'm just not aware of, but the timing of it is one thing that's a piece of friction. Also not being defrauded, not being tricked. How do you know it's authentic? How do you know it's genuine? They would rather overpay and know it's genuine than get defrauded, right?

1:45:49And so they really work with people that are the most trusted in the whole business to an extreme. Shirley's saying you want to learn more about the Due Diligence Club. We talked about that a lot. I think this came in before that, but just go to due diligence club.com. Doctorsinvestorclub.com is where the doctors group is. I'll put the link in there. And that is co-founded and co-ran by Kyle, who's a orthopedic surgeon. How do you deal with investors giving you big promises and then ghost you when they get too busy? It's hard to trust them but this just happened to me and we had four potential deals in process now i need to pivot yeah it is guaranteed that investors will ghost you because of just the nature of investing and it's it's unfortunate but hopefully they hopefully it doesn't happen in too harsh of a way too many times but i can't count the number of times where someone said they're going to invest and then oh i'm on vacation the time is not going to work oh something else came up um our capital now is locked up oh we just had a deal implode and this company is going bankrupt we have to pull them out of bankruptcy so our funds are taken with one a sense of millionaire we helped create their family office they said they would write a five million dollar check they were on a call with the cfo to form the legal docs to send the money over and the cfo said one sentence that was so off-putting they said you know what the deal is done i'm moving on i'm not going to give you guys any money and the deal is done and the other group is shocked they're like what like what are you talking about like we were basing all of this based off your investment and and they were and they were gone right so it could be something that happened in the deal it could be a risk they uncovered it could be they talked to an advisor who strongly suggested not to do so maybe out of their own self-interest most wealth advisors make money by you putting money under their control and then making a fee off of it so they're very incentivized for you not to do direct deals and to put it all in the public market so their kids can have their college paid for not all the Wealth Advisors are like that, but that is something that's a little bit slanted in the business sometimes.

1:47:48And then the other thing is that many times there are so many deals being pitched to investors that if it's not one of the best deals in front of them right there, and you haven't met in person with them enough, or you're not following up in person, it just might get lost in the noise of things. And you might get like deal exhaustion, right? The deal just might get fatigued and then they end up not closing. But it happens so often that what I would suggest everyone here do is when you're raising money for something, let's just choose an easy number,$4 million. Go out, ask what someone would want to put into the deal.

1:48:24And if you need someone to put in a million, try to have them put in 1.2 million. If you need someone to put in 200K, have them sign up for 240K and raise out of the, instead of 4 million, 4.4, 4.6 million. And then you can always downsize and say, oh, sorry, we got oversubscribed or just bring in a little bit extra bring in 4.2 million when a couple of the 4.6 don't close or downsize a few investors hey sorry we're not able to fill your full allocation because we got oversubscribed but we can come to you first on the next one and make sure you you have a chance to take a look at our next raise that we do that just makes it look like you're a very successful founder to getting a raise done during a very hard time but inevitably you might be like great we just got the last 50 thousand and four four million dollars on the dot we're good to go and then basically you know someone inevitably doesn't come in and then now so you don't have enough money to close so that happens pretty pretty often um let's see here sometimes investors will disclose why they're not investing other times they don't um so yeah i appreciate that comment from the chat as well uh mike what is the current appetite for family offices related to lower middle market pe fund investments.

1:49:37I think that when you can invest directly into a company, it's more popular to most single family offices than into a fund. If you are scaled up in your AUM and track record enough to attract multifamily office capital, they might slightly prefer actually a fund that's more efficient due diligence wise. But having optionality to double down on a deal in the portfolio they like the best may be helpful. If you want to offer both a fund and direct investments, you could allow people to do two direct investments with you then they have to come through the fund unless they're writing big enough checks but the trend is less blind pool nor direct deals when it comes to a large amount of family offices and the whole PE industry is raising less money than it was a couple years ago but there's still appetite money still needs to be put to work there's still a lot of cash out there I think we are a systematic commodity trading advisor at CTA after sustained a drawdown, how would you re-engage with investors and decision makers?

1:50:41I would find a co-GP partner, a JV partner, someone that maybe can give you open access to distribution to a Rolodex of investors or put a lot of capital with you. And let's say that out of a$50 million fund, $3 million is your own capital. I would put up$1 or$2 million of that as risk capital. And if there's a drawdown, you lose your money first before investors get touched at all, or see what type of structure you can provide. So by them helping you get up to a critical mass in AUM, that now they participate in some of your GP fees, or they participate in some of your carrier performance fees.

1:51:15Those would be some traditional ways to get past that situation you're talking about. Carl, I've been contacted by an Israeli company that has a patented revolutionary technology. How difficult will it be for the company to raise up to$5 million in the U.S. or Europe? Well, it's difficult for anyone to raise money for you know for for lots of things right now so i'd put it to moderate to high difficulty for anyone raising money for any startup on planet earth obviously if the founders have a track record of raising money they're more likely to get the money raised if the founders and the inventors have a track record of creating a business scaling it and having an exit then that makes it more likely they're going to raise the money by far um so there's a lot of factors that go into it but But, you know, I wouldn't want to say that it's not going to be a challenge and it'll be very easy, right?

1:52:07Like if you're dealing with technology that's offshore in another country, being comfortable with patent laws there and domestically, how do you prove it works? So how do you make it more likely you are to raise capital? You find a blue chip strategic anchor investor. You find folks that made their money in that industry. you get a prototype working and just create a little bit of revenue and then try to scale that revenue up to hundreds of thousands or a million a year to show this thing's real it exists it works um and i had a question before we started from someone about raising 25 million dollars many times you can't put 25 million dollars to work in a month or two sometimes you need to put that money to work to close a deal i understand that but many times if it's a growth capital situation you couldn't put 25 million dollars to work if you wanted to in a month or two and so i would encourage you to say okay if our valuation is eight million right now or 20 million right now just raise two to four million grow more then raise money at a higher valuation raise another five million at 40 million valuation grow more and then raise money at these higher valuations you're going to give away less of your company the capital raise is going to go faster you're more likely to get oversubscribed you're more likely to get people coming back for more next time keep on showing incremental progress and at the end of the day you'll own 80 of your company instead of 61 % because you didn't give away$25 million worth of equity when you're at a smaller valuation.

1:53:27It doesn't make any sense for you or the investor to do that in the majority of cases that I see, but somebody tells them that they need to raise this huge chunk and they end up giving away too much to their company. Let's see, we've got another five or ten comments here, but we only have four minutes, so that's an interesting challenge. Let me scan through this real quick, And then anyone that had a question and I didn't get to them, I apologize. Let me get my email here in the chat again, richard at family offices.com. If you want to come to our events, our event schedule is there. They are members only events, but something that people get confused on is that if you're a member, it doesn't cost anything else to come to our events besides if you have travel costs to get there.

1:54:12right so like if you're a charter member or a verified member with us or a member of doctors investor club then you can come to our events and there's no per event cost it's included with your membership so um just know that there's no confusion on that in case you want to get involved and our goal is to make it so that our member portal with the 2000 investor talks of 50 ai tools and 10 clod skills rsvp for our events our event recordings our live streams our goal is to make our member portal more valuable than any portal you have access to from anyone at any price so if we are failing that right now then please tell me the three to five things that are bad and how we're failing and who's beating us and then i will get my team to work and we'll do a better job and upgrade our portal in those ways so that is our intent and you should have the same intent for the business you're in for the person you're serving how do you be the most valuable relationship in that industry or for that product type and if you focus on massive value to as many people as possible then probably just good things will happen uh brady's here he's a verified member all i um all i do exceptionally well is pick companies and play the right fullback how do i lead with value uh brady if you want to send me a whatsapp message we're probably connected on there as a verified member then i can give you a audio note answer to that.

1:55:36Adding value first could be giving them due diligence resources. It could be an infographic. It could be an introduction. It could be a deal structure. It could be thought leadership. It could be helping their son or daughter get into a school or give someone an internship because you should have like 20, 30 ways to add value to folks first. All right, let's see here. All right, we have a few other questions here. So please just email me. Look in the chat. You can Email me any other questions you have. And we'll use a couple of these to start out our next hot seat webinar. I'm glad we didn't run out of hot seats.

1:56:08Kind of the opposite problem. Probably could be on here for four hours. But I'm sure all of you have busy days ahead of you. So we will let you go. Reach out to our team if you need anything. And if you have not been part of Family Office Club events before, give us a shot. Probably the fastest moving investment event you've ever been to. our ai tools would compete head-to-head or beat any ai tools you've used that have been created for founders or investors these are the three options for getting involved there's just a straight 400 a month option or for a whole year pay 3 500 and then you renew it only 249 a month so you're saving money up front and long term or the most massive value if you're doing over a million in revenue that probably makes the most sense or you're just a well-capitalized platform is the verified membership.

1:56:57So we do a background check on you. You get a blue check mark on your name badge within the member portal. And you also get on stage at our events. You get exhibit tables. You get a coaching from me on your structure and one liner. We produce your one minute video internally with our own team. And you get access to all of our investor data. If you are a monthly or a charter member to get our data, you have to pay$79 a month. And you just get our US family office database and our investor pipeline builder. if you're a verified member you get all of that plus all the spreadsheets and profiles on all 22 ,000 global investors so the verified membership we try to make ridiculously valuable um for and you're the most vetted type of member in our community which helps build trust faster i would love you to get involved in some way since you spent your time here in the webinar and i see it as an investment of your time so i hope you got a positive roi on your investment of being here and i hope that if you join as a member you'll see a massive positive roi in terms of just being in proximity of Deca Millionaires, Centimillionaires, and Billionaires, being around other founders, other peers that are optimistic, high energy, high action folks that are scaling their platforms to kind of inspire you, source better deals, learn how investors want to do business, learn how to raise capital, meet a few investors who may invest in what you're doing, of course, for sure as well.

1:58:16But also just being in a club of family offices can literally change your whole life. We didn't have time to talk about it today but I love talking about being ultra healthy not just ultra wealthy and that's really impacted a lot of our members as well so that does it for today we got done 30 seconds early so I appreciate everyone's energy and time here and everyone volunteering to do a hot seat if we didn't get to you and you were a member and you're disappointed on that just shoot me an email and I'll get back to you with feedback on what you need it's just richard at family offices.com and we can try to have you go first on the hot seats next time if we didn't make it to you this time.

1:58:51So thanks for being here, everyone. We will see you at one of our live events soon, like Silicon Valley Summit next month or four family office masterminds in October on advanced deal structuring are going to be awesome. And then our family office super summit, December 15th to 17th. See you there. If you are a founder, raising capital, developing real estate, or you're an investor, we'd love for you to get involved in the family office club. I've run this community for 18 years now. We've hosted 300 live events. We have 17 million social media group members and followers. We have the number one YouTube channel on Family Offices.

1:59:28We have the number one most popular podcast on Family Offices. You can learn more about us and our membership options at familyoffices.com. We have 30 in-person events planned in 2026 and another dozen events this year. Please go to familyoffices.com to learn more.