The Archetypical Journey of UHNW Families: Complexity, Cohorts & the Federated Family Office

Welcome to the Mac podcast. I'm your host Brian Adams. Join us every Tuesdays we dive into compelling conversations with world-class family office leaders and explore topics crucial to your success. To learn more about our show or to get connected with our firm Mac International, head to www.MacInternational.com. A federated family office does not have any asset gathering, you know, needs or ambitions. They are basically looking to put together the capabilities and leverage their investments in a way that that provides kind of multiplies the benefit to each each family. Hello and welcome to the Mac podcast. Tadev with me, Peter Moose-Dakersky is a CEO and family office exchange fox, which is the leading resource for families managing private enterprises and wealth across generations. With more than 25 years as a strategist, an executive and wealth management capital markets and technology, Peter has served as a family office executive management consultant entrepreneur and growth leader for both private and public companies. So Peter, I want to start with what I refer to as the hero's journey. We're in a lot about it, but you have this lens of 100 to 150 years, which is a big time frame, a different horizon than most people operate under. Can you walk me through what that actually looks like in your experience for families? Yeah, that's something that we had fox sort of thought a lot about. And finally, sort of put down on paper in this past year, we even organized our membership community based on the phases of this journey. But essentially the revelation that we reached and and as an aside, I would mention that we've been thinking a lot, and I think the industry's been thinking a lot about how do you segment this space? Like how do you, you know, cutting this space by AUM doesn't really make a lot of sense because sometimes AUM is not the main driver of what families decide to do together or how they do it. I'm cutting it by the size of the office is not the right thing because that's more of an outcome of what drives the difference between families. So there's hasn't been a very satisfying segmentation framework for our space that could connect with the reality of what we see with families and their needs and their behaviors and what they end up building together and how they use it and how they use expertise and technology and all these other things. So so the revelation we sort of reached was like, hey, a family is just like a human and a human has archetypical arc, so to speak, that of life, you know, you're born, you're a child, you're a young adult, you're in your prime and then you're in your golden years and there's sort of somewhat predictable things that happen there because of the shared biology and just experience that we all have despite our very, very stark differences as you know, as individuals. And so families equally we say they're very, very different, which is true. Every family is extremely unique and you can't assume that you know, you have the recipe for success just because you're kind of meeting them and they seem to be in a certain segment. But at the same time, it's also true that with all that uniqueness, there is an archetypical sort of clustering that exists. And so what we observed through our, you know, 36 years of experience and many case studies and continued conversations with families that the archetypical life cycle, so to speak, of a family has three branches. And so it's almost like a fork. It has an early stage is the first fork, sorry, the first part of it. Then it forks into two potential branches. And then eventually at the end of those branches, it cycles back to the beginning and a new sort of family is born out of that earlier version of the family. So the first stage of the journey is what we call the business owning stage. So most enterprise families come from the origins of a successful business of an entrepreneur or entrepreneurial family. And in the very early stages of that of that branch of the lifetime of a family of a life cycle of family, it's all about the business. It's it's all about the shared identity is the business, the primary focus of what family members do together as a larger family is around the business. It's either working in the business, it's either growing the business, maybe it's at some point it's selling the business and things like that, but it is all about the business. Very often when we meet those families, I would say somewhere between 30 and 50% of the time, they are in the first generation, early stage, maybe first a second generation, but it's like the original founders are still there, the original culture, the way that they make decisions, the sort of quasi-governments. Often there is no formalized governance at this stage for the family, but there is a way to make decisions together and usually is very much to do with how the original founder or founders have run the business for many, many years. And so that's the first we call the first cohort, the first type of family is the early stage founder led business family. Then the second, as the business evolves and the family evolves, many, not all, but many go to that next phase of that first branch, which is the multi-generational or more complex business family. So you've got the business passing once, twice, maybe three times from generations and there's already that governance and structure in place to ensure the continuity, the shared decision making, the ongoing kind of attachment and glue to keep the family around the business, but it's still a business family, it's still largely what they're, you know, bound together by is that shared asset that is an operating business. So as that first kind of branch of the life cycle comes to its natural and usually it has to do with a liquidity event. So usually there's a business is sold or some other major event happens that creates usually this liquidity pool and all these options for the family. And here's where we see a fork like one, the second branch, one trajectory you go from here is what we call the financial investor type family. So in the early stages of that, this could be what we call either newly liquid or direct investing families. A lot of these families when come out of their original asset or their original operating business, they still have the operating bug, they still have the knowledge and the networks and the hunger to either start or operate new businesses. And so we usually see sort of an investing phase, but it's very much kind of direct investing, building businesses or funding businesses that are in early stage and very much kind of reliving the original entrepreneurial experience. But they are investors at this point, they are not necessarily the same mentality operators that they are in the first branch. Now as they mature along this investor or financial branch, couple of things can happen either they will invest in many, many assets or they will invest and divest them and eventually end up with essentially a financial portfolio. And this phase we call the financial family. So at that point, you're an investor in a broad portfolio of asset classes. Not any one of them is dominating the psyche and the identity of the family. So it's no longer an operating family mentality. It's really the managing the collective assets of the family that are the shared identity and shared activity of the family. So that's one branch post liquidity. The other branch that we see is we call the enterprise branch. So this is where a family decides that either intentionally through a strategic process and sort of talking to the individual and collective members or just gradually organically reaches this conclusion that they are going to be more complex. They're going to do different things, not just the business or just investing, but they will have philanthropies. They would have land development projects, real estate projects. They would have new businesses, they would have investment portfolios, they might have impact projects and impact activities that are outside of philanthropies. And so essentially the family starts to develop into a much more complex ecosystem of activities and assets and entities that different family members might be differently engaged with. So some may be more inclined to participate in a philanthropist, some may be more interested in the financial portfolio, some may be more interested in the direct or impact investing aspects. And the family in the family office, and by the way, that's little asterisk here. The family office along each of these stages of evolution takes a very different form. And so this is why we actually developed this framework in the first place because when people say I need a family office, you have to ask yourself, you need a family office to support what kind of family and what kind of activities. It's not just like one family office that you build and it somehow works for everything. And so in this enterprise phase, again, we see sort of two stages. One stage is kind of the early, almost like the primordial gas formation of the enterprise. So there's the beginnings of an enterprise. There's maybe the first attempts to start creating shared governance and shared structures and then to build the capabilities to support those structures. And then what we see is as this mature is over time and maybe passes through one or two generations it reaches what we call the advanced or developed or mature enterprise or established enterprise phase where a lot of the large well-known family offices that we all know out there have gone through this journey and have eventually ended up there in the established enterprise phase and so usually when you have a family office of you know 50, 150 and more employees that's usually the kind of enterprise family office that has multifaceted services that is supporting the family and its activities across a very different set of areas whether it's philanthropy direct investments real estate development etc etc. So and what happens is as as as the family matures into either of those two branches the financial or the enterprise at some point could be second third generation could be fifth seven eighth generation another sort of entrepreneur is born that starts essentially the cycle all over again so one investment or one new operating company sort of supernovas into this new cycle of creating essentially a new first generation for a family and you can think of it as the cycle sort of going again following a very similar trajectory except obviously that next family is going to end up some more differently from where the original family landed and so to think about you know first of all to simplify a very complex world is is the purpose of this framework number one number two it allows you to figure out that generally speaking despite all the intricacies and all the complexity and uniqueness of each family there's sort of like three stages that you might find yourself you're either a business family or your financial family or you know enterprise family and there are some common characteristics and a lot of commonalities then dictate what probably would make sense for you from a standpoint of family office expertise governance structures to organize yourself technologies you end up using partners you end up working with things you end up in sourcing versus outsourcing for your office those are all all things that end up flowing from from where you are on that on that journey and then finally if you look zoom into each of the branches you see that there's maybe six or so stages you know you've got the early stage founder led business family you've got the multi-generational business family then you've got the early stage investing direct investing in liquid family or the more mature financial investing family and on the enterprise branch you've got the early stage enterprises and then finally the mature established enterprises and so we've ended up basically organizing our own thinking and our own membership community this year into these five or six cohorts which has really resonated well with our members because in the past it's wonderful in the Fox community when you have like 500 you know people in the room to meet all these amazing families but then pretty quickly you realize that maybe you're speaking to someone and you have very few things in common even though you're both members of a family or a family office and then when you find yourself in these more carefully curated cohorts that describe your stage of evolution you realize that the challenges problems opportunities what you want to talk about is very very common with the rest of your peer members and so it's been a great it's been a great element our benefit of our membership community to be able to to to cut it into smaller pieces that are a lot more a lot more cohesive and and relevant to each other it makes a lot of sense and you get kudos for being thoughtful about putting them in the cohorts I think that that is I'm sure does resonate with the community I'm curious how do you help families recognize where they are and I would think especially if they're on one of their earlier stages or phases because they're so I would think focused on the day-to-day the year-to-year the granularity of running the business how do you help them pull out and understand where they are in this longer are yeah well first of all by the time they are either aware of or working with Fox they have most likely kind of poke their head out and outside of the business and started realizing that there's something post the business I mean most most families when they're in the business it's so hard to look beyond the super demanding and an exciting phase of running growing and enjoying that business but various factors whether it's life events or the evolution of the family or just looking outside and seeing the the trajectory of other families usually cause families to think about okay what what should I be thinking about like I'm hearing this thing about a family office do I need a family office should I have one should it be embedded in my family business and so these are the kind of sort of questions and realizations they're almost evolutionary in nature it's like it's like the fish that went to know the beach and now is trying to walk and so so they're they're basically starting to understand that they're going to be very different in the future than they are today and they need to know what's coming their way and so the luxury benefit the honor we have is to have over 36 years been working and helping and being close to so many families who have gone through one or another version of that evolution and so we can spot the various signs so we're like the biologists who are saying okay here's the here's the thing you're developing that's starting to show that you're now on this branch of evolution and so most of the time it's it's a conversation so when we meet with families when they come become members of Fox where they where they get introduced to us we usually have a conversation about what they are and what's on their mind what's important and we often even if they're not thinking about the things they're coming their way we can sort of see most likely based on what we're hearing from you know where the family is what the next generation is where the vernacular what they're talking about what they're worried about is we can sort of see where most likely their trajectory is going and very often we would suggest that they meet and speak with families that maybe were in their shoes 50 years ago and they developed one way or another based on how the family ended up evolving together so they can they can start envisioning what what that journey would look like for them and and then they will decide you know do I is this the time for me to start thinking about and investing in resources should I join a group like this should I take some courses should I or am I just too busy doing investing or doing the business and and those who choose to sort of think about the future invest some time and money and attention capital today about something that's coming to them in the future are the ones we end up working with and helping kind of envision and then engineer that journey and and the most important thing that the biggest value of having that journey ahead of you and some of the resources that you can find through Fox and other organizations is that you have the comfort that you're preparing for what's coming it's not an insurance policy it's like a piece of mine I know what is coming one way or another I know I know the options I know the branches that can can I know the different forks of the road that might come my way and I have at least the decent plan or some options to pursue if we end up you know facing any one of these you do some great writing around complexity and I think you've got a conferee in stance relative to what the market would view and what all the families aspire to which is simplicity um talk me through your own stance on complexity and how families need to think about the type of complexity that will end up destroying them versus ones that will make them more efficient and higher achieving ultimately yeah um well you know one way to think about it is the complexity is the outcome of the family's evolution so if you think about the family evolving along those archetypical trajectories that I was talking about in each of these stages the family collectively or the individual members or even the family office itself with its management start to make choices start to have needs and desires as we know in enterprise families ultra-hundred with families so people don't take no for an answer people don't like to give no as an answer and so you end up saying yes to a lot of things and ideas and desires and and requests and maybe that's the right thing to do because that's the right thing for the family but but at least the the the the eyes wide open knowledge is that everything that you as a family or individual members or components of the enterprise decides to do because of where you are and what you're wanting to do as a as a family that evolves along its archetypical journey results in a lot of complexity and an increasing amount of complexity actually um because the world around us is getting more complex the risks are getting more complex but technologies are getting more complex the generational dynamics and demographics are getting more complex so there are more people with more value systems more ideas more investment tools more technology tools more geographies with more conflicts and so it's like a super compounding sort of environment that you find yourself and as you're jumping in and wanting to do direct investments and real estate investing or you want to go set up in Singapore and do other things. All of those are great things, but the key to know is that each decision and each operational kind of step that goes to executing that decision has a tremendous amount of complexity behind it. Operational, executional, technological, human capital, like obviously the sphere that you're in, finding the right people with the right skill sets in the right geographies, with the right value system and the right mindset. I mean, all of that is creating a tremendous amount of complexity. And that's just life. I mean, life is complex and we navigate complexity on a daily basis in all our lives, I think for enterprise families, that complexity tends to get compounded because of the level of resources opportunities and speed and scale at which they choose to pursue the family's goals and opportunities. And so often, family offices set up as a unit to help manage that complexity. You start first with things like managing just financial reporting and taxes and things like this, but over time, as the activities and the family's own complexity grows, the family offices being asked to do more and more and more. And it's being asked to do things in areas of expertise and geographies that it doesn't really have a lot of capabilities in. And so that's kind of the challenge, so to speak. The reality and challenge of complexity is that it exists and it has to be dealt with. And it's probably the most important overarching factor that a family office needs to learn how to navigate. Like, how do I? I am working for a client that is infinitely complex and it's only getting more complex. There's no question about that and there's nowhere around that. So how do I then as the executive or the team running a family office for that client, how do I then tame manage that complexity so we can serve them in an excellent way and not just like constantly be running firewalls and falling apart and being substandard. And so one concept that we developed is to say that yes, complexity is omnipresent and it's overwhelming, but it's not not all complexities created equal. So you can you can segment it just like we talked about segmenting clients, segmenting complexity and asking yourself like, what is this coming from? Like, and what should I do about it? The answers would be different for different kind of complexity. And so the concept that we've proposed is if you cut complexity into a kind of a two by two framework and on the one dimension you ask yourself, is this something that's externally driven, like the world regulation, governments, geopolitics, the markets is creating this is among the source of the complexity or is this internally driven? Is this something the family is choosing, deciding, wanting to do arm? And then the second dimension you ask yourself is this topic that is or source of complexity, is it something I consider to be strategic important, really deeply important to us as a family? Or is it something that's tactically kind of like a nuisance that has to be like a necessary evil kind of thing? And if you organize all your complexity, all your risks, all your major projects and activities that create complexity into these four buckets, you can then create four different strategies for how to tackle different kinds of complexity. So for example, if something is an externally driven tactical, not critically important to your test. So for example, regulatory compliance, it's like, you know, if we all had a choice, we wouldn't care about regulatory compliance, but we have to do it, and it's externally driven. And so what should be the strategy? So I would argue there's a set of attitudes and strategies that generally at the end of the day revolve around outsourcing and and handling in the best possible way with the minimal, minimal amount of attention that you can give it, because it's external and it's not something you deeply care about. If it's something that is, for example, internally driven, but it's still not important, this is one of those things you ask yourself, do we need to keep doing this? Like is this actually an important activity? Should we eliminate or minimize it? Because we are creating a lot of complexity. Think of this as pet projects by family members or services that are very seldom used by members, but for some reason the family office thinks that they have to maintain it because there's one member who always asks for it. And so is that something, is that a complexity you want to carry for the entire system, or do you want to minimize or maybe just have that particular family member take care of it outside of the family office and eliminate a whole lot of complexity and cost for the system. By the way, another seaworth for complexity is cost. At the end of the day, complexity is cost in time and money, time for both the principles and the teams that serve them and actual hard dollar costs that go into servicing and eliminating or overcoming that complexity. Now on the strategic side of the quadrant, those are the ones that I think we want families to be thinking about because those are the areas where the family has concluded that's an area that's really important to us for a long from strategy. It's really something we care about. So this could be something around rising gen education or preparing the next generation for their roles or investing in family meetings and living shared traditions and things like that. So those I would call them externally driven but strategically important activities that create complexity are the ones that actually ultimately long-term differentiate and create the essence of the families. That's complexity you want to invest in. You don't want to eliminate that complexity just because it's complicated to organize meetings or to educate family members or to capture the shared history and artifacts. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't be doing it, it should be outsourcing it or those are the kind of things we say that you should actually try to master those services and these complexities. And then similarly, the ones that are important but of more internal, controllable nature like special project or art collections or things that are passion projects. Again, those are things you want to manage within the family office with the best possible expertise but again because they contribute to the long-term essence, happiness and differentiation for the family. That's complexity you most likely want to tame and invest in versus complexity that you want to minimize. And I'm curious when you benchmark these profiles you talk to these families. What typically surprises them the most when you present them with the information or the audit on how their own structures and complexity present? Yeah, we do something which we call the complexity profile for all our members. At any one time we have two to three hundred families who have taken that profile. And so they obviously in an anonymized fashion they are the sort of base lining set. And so when you take your complexity profile there's about 42 factors, questions that you answer. And then depending on how you answer those questions we show you where you are on a percentile basis against that population of 200 plus families. We also split the 42 factors into three to four buckets. There's a bucket that talks about the complexity of the family. So how big is the family? How many generations? What's the oldest generation in power? How many branches of the family there are? So just demographic/behavioral characteristics of the family. Then we have a whole bunch of questions about the shared assets and the structure of ownership, like how many trusts and how many investment vehicles and how many foundations or philanthropic vehicles and things like this. Then we have what we call operational or a family office section that talks about how big is the office? How many members does it service? How many vendors does it have? They do a relies on every day. What's the budget for the office every year for various types of services? And then finally we have the investment portfolio. What's the investment portfolio like? How many percent of it is in illiquids and how many fund managers do you have and things like that? So when you do have a CIO, you have a direct investing team. So when you paint that picture, there are some, first of all, very few families have that picture in front of them in its totality. They just do things and they happen and they pay for it. And then often they don't even stop and think about what's the totality of, sorry, often they don't stop and think about the totality of all their activities, complexity and the cost of those activities. So this complexity profile is often the first time they see the whole picture on one piece of paper and that's stark and startling in many cases. And then what's really powerful is, you know, next to each of these factors, you've got a little bar that says you're in the, say, 20th percentile of complexity here. So let's say your family is small and simple compared to 200 other families. Yet your, let's say, your trust structures or your investment resources are in the 90th percentile. So you're spending for some reason. There's a lot of complexity there. Why is that? Maybe there's a good reason. Maybe there's a very good reason why that complexity is there. Oftentimes there is no good reason that anyone can point to and it's just essentially leakage of time and resources. And so this kind of, diagnostic tool and this ability to compare yourself against others and to ask these questions. This can be used one of several ways. Family leaders, family members can say, why are we spending so much time and resources on these kind of things? If we are quite that simple, conversely, family office leaders and stuff can say, well, listen, see how complex we are over here and yet look at our resources are just in the 30th percentile yet, our complexity, say, on direct investing or philanthropy is in the 90th percentile. So it's a good budget justification tool if you're trying to say, we need more resources for that. So it's a really useful, powerful tool. We've just started, by the way, to connect the two topics together. We've started segmenting that now into the different cohorts. So you can say, I am a multi-generational business family. Now show me how I compare against the other multi-generational because again, if you do this across all types of families across any stage of their revolution, there will be some noise in the data and there will be some things that will be hard to explain. But as you start the narrow, the set against which you're comparing yourself, the sample set, then it becomes even more powerful to say, you know, of the 50 multi-generational business families or early enterprise families, we are so complex or we are so underfunded or with not. You referenced something earlier that I want to revisit, which is it's hard to say no. If you're a professional manager of a family office in Linda always talks about how one of the best skills that a professional manager of family office can have is to artfully and tactfully tell family members and principals no and to do it in a professional manner. How do you help families arrive at that place and understand that we may need to change this culture of always saying yes to everything? I mean our approach at Fox has always been through the education and peer learning lens. So we don't preach or tell people or sell them a particular solution. We try to show them through the knowledge that's been collected from many other families and many other cases, what's there and how they potentially compare and what the options are for them. And so we definitely try to educate both family principals and family office executives to understand the implications of when you're asking for something, what is the real implication for that? What is the implication of the yes and the implication of the no and how to best self-regulate for that? On the obviously the challenge is even larger on the family office side because they are hired to serve the family and they are people with kind of white glove service mentality and the tendency is to say yes and do it and maybe that's what's expected most of the time. But what we try to do is equip them with tools like the complexity profile and the knowledge of different kinds of complexity and the knowledge of what other families are doing to overcome and manage this complexity and sort of have a data and knowledge based approach to saying yes or no, not a ideological sort of spec line. It's trying to equip them with knowledge to say we can say yes but here's a few things to consider and here's what happens and here's what I like the implications and maybe the cost of the office is going to go from two million to six million if we go down this path and because we can see the data from the Fox studies that an office of that size and that kind of complexity that does direct investments and blah blah blah ends up costing that much. And so what we try to equip them with is the data knowledge and the connections with other families to compare notes so that they can sort of ask themselves do I really want to do this or if I do this what are the implications and if I don't do it this way what are the options of doing it some other way and really equip them with options. So let me understand that the federated family office model I understand by versus build there's you know the holistic full scope family office model there's the digital virtual outsourced family office model but I'm not familiar with the federated model walk me through that. That's a term we kind of coined to describe this new relatively new variety that we're seeing more and more which is not quite a multifamily office in the traditional way that we've come to know multifamily offices you know the multifamily offices kind of like emerge one of two ways I call it the top down or bottom down sorry the top up top down bottom up way so the the top down is is where an institution like a bank or a wealth management firm decides like we're going to be in the family office space we're going to create a group and eventually that group becomes essentially a multifamily office business a group and it starts go to market as a multifamily office firm the bottom up is is when one family I like the pitcaran family creates a family office for themselves and maybe there's more and more members come in and then over time it it meets maybe some friends and another like-minded families and eventually becomes an institution serving multiple families and no longer technically can qualify for the exemption the SEC exemption and becomes a multifamily office now there's more and more I see this variety of a family offices where a family builds a family office for their for their immediate needs and maybe along the way discovers either they have close friends or someone they get introduced to or they meet at a Fox event or something that there's like-minded and they want to pursue similar kinds of activities but they also let's say it's a very often it's a direct investing office because direct investing is essentially you're choosing to be a mini PE firm but you don't have the scale resources people knowledge connectivity of the large PE firm so you're competing with in a very kind of substandard way in a very competitive market that's very professionalized and so so by combining with one or two families or three or so usually it's a small number of families you can have sort of a somewhat cohesive go-to-market strategy because you still can have like-minded views on what you want to invest in or what activities you want to do but you can leverage the fixed cost investment in infrastructure and essentially share that fixed cost among several families so that's one point of leverage where you don't have to invest in the same fixed assets the same choices of technology and outsource providers and building essentially the infrastructure of the office and our research shows a lot of the data we we we use to populate the complexity profile comes from our family office benchmarking study that we do every two years and and the data shows that you know even the most basic family office infrastructure can cost you anywhere between you know 800,000 to 200 million to two million so 800 does it to two million is your basic basic infrastructure every year to to run run a family office and in most cases could be could be more than that and that's before you start spending money on outsource activities advisors and before obviously spending any any investment based fees and things like this just just the cost of the infrastructure so by combining with a couple of families you leverage that the second thing which is even more interesting and often overlooked is that each family comes with a lot of social and intellectual capital like they come with their networks their knowledge in particular in particular industries you know they have connectivity to key people around different networks or industries and so by combining those resources or this knowledge into one unit you essentially multiply the social and intellectual capital of the family and so you may have one family that's super well connected and experienced in manufacturing as someone else who's in technology or someone who's in biotech and by coming together you're bringing all these expertise in-house without having to go buy it or hire it or outsource and so a federated office is essentially not a commercially active MFO so they're not in the business of trying to gather assets and grow their asset based which is what a traditional MFO would be would be doing a traditional MFO would be acting similar to any other wealth management firm except obviously targeting the very top of the wealth pyramid a federated family office does not have any asset gathering you know needs or ambitions they're basically looking to put together the capabilities and leverage their investments in a way that that provides kind of multiplies the benefit to each each family and then of course they look to and create a sleeve for each family to the extent that each family might have a slightly different preference in terms of their returns or their risk or some other aspects of the result and the return that the family office is driving but the overarching sort of infrastructure that's built both from hard investments and the soft kind of intellectual and social capital that the different families bring together is shared so Peter this has been great I want to thank you for coming on the show been a big fan of Fox for a long time Linda has been involved for a very long time but you're doing great work there I want to end with what are families prioritizing right now what's keeping them up at night that you're hearing and seeing from the families you work with day and day out yeah I mean first I would say that you know go back to the initial conversation we had about the different kinds of stages, you know, based on where you're you are, the answer to that question might be different. Some early stage business families might be very focused on the business, enterprise families might be focused on very different priorities. So there's definitely the answer with very based on where the family is. And that's one of the things we try to impart on all of our members and everyone who speaks to us is that your answer, your solutions, the way you think about whether you're on the by side as a client or you're on the sales side as a provider, you really need to look at the family and where they are before you start answering questions or building things. Because what you're building, how you're building it, either for yourself or for the family as a provider, would be very different based on where the family is in its journey. So understanding that journey and what the needs at each phase are is super important. I would say if we look above all that and sort of look at all families we work with and what to the extent that they are common denominator topics. I think right now in this moment, a lot of almost all of our families are thinking about risk differently and more often. I think they are concerned about all the dislocations in the market, in the markets in the geopolitics of the world, the philanthropies and the philanthropic world. They are concerned about some of the potential changes or loss of trust in institutions and data if you're talking about how we think about the labor statistics and things like this, like all these things that sort of take the predictability and security of the system that we've been used to and sort of do away with it or shake it up in a way that's unpredictable, that's concerning and so that's creating a lot of risk and complexity from there that families are trying to mitigate and respond to. As a result, there's obviously a lot of changes in how folks are allocating their investments, how they're structuring their offices, where they're setting up, where they're choosing to live. So there's a lot of conversation about jurisdiction, domicile strategies, both internationally and in the US. There's this tremendous amount of movement more so than we've seen ever, especially among developed markets. Traditionally, the jurisdictional movements have been more developing or emerging market concern and now you're having the UK and the US stopping the lists of sort of wealthy families who are making cross-uristictional moves and decisions. So that's definitely on top and of course, technology and especially AI is top of mind for everyone. I mean, technology has been a hot topic in the family of space for at least a decade and we had folks developed very successfully a kind of a sleeve of our membership that's composed of all the technology vendors that service family offices. That's one of the most active corners of our community because people are constantly trying to evaluate and decide and then deploy technologies and technology mistakes are some of the costiest mistakes you can make. Those are million dollar, multimillion dollar mistakes. By the time you deploy the wrong platform and you realize three years later that now you've got to redo the whole thing. And now overlay AI and everything it's doing, that is a big topic. As an extension of that kind of cyber security and privacy, both AI and just technology advances have really accelerated that topic a lot and there's a lot of work and a lot of investment and a lot of questions around how to protect privacy, security, discretion of the family and then I would say finally the insurance space, the insurance markets have been continued to sort of dislocate and be very challenging for families both in terms of the different kinds of options that they have to protect their homes or their businesses or to ensure their employees, cyber protection being another area. So insurance is a hot topic that you know, it used to be much more of a somewhat boring topic. Now it's a really exciting topic because of all the risks and all these locations in the markets. - Well Peter, thanks so much for coming on and keep up the great work that you all are doing at Fox. If people are just in connecting with you and learning more about the work that you all do and how you work with family offices, what's the best way for them to get engaged? - Well, certainly come visit our website familyoffice.com fairly easy to remember. You know, certainly connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm pretty active on that platform. Or speak to other families, you know who many of whom are most likely going to be Fox members and you know, our members come to us almost 90% of the time through referrals and warm connections. So all of these channels are fine and we look forward to being of help and service. - Peter, thanks so much. Take care, talk soon. (upbeat music) [music]