loader image
CRE Insights Blog

Family Office Chocolate Chip Cookies

Family Office expert, Richard C. Wilson, speaks about the Chocolate Chip Cookie analogy by Dean Jackson, and how you can implement that marketing technique in the Family Office industry. Hello, this is Richard Wilson from the Family Office Club, and today I wanted to talk to you about baking some Family Office chocolate chip cookies. I’m stealing this idea, with credit from a Dean Jackson who has a I love marketing podcast. And he basically says, when you look at marketing or selling anything in the world, you have to look at whether you’re offering something with clear surface value, genuine value that they can recognize and point to. Something that they are looking for, or that you know almost everyone in your segment really likes and wants more of. And Dean always used the example of, if you come into someone’s house and you sit down in their couch and you say, “Hey, do you want to buy this $500 vacuum cleaner? Do you want to invest in this a hundred million dollar hedge fund?” If you say any sort of sales pitch, just imagine the reaction versus walking up to someone on the street, outside your store or having someone into your home, again, is an example he uses. And saying, “Would you like one of these warm chocolate chip cookies?” People want a warm chocolate chip cookie. You offer people what they want, they’ll engage with you, they get more comfortable with you, they see that you’re offering value first. He uses the example, in real estate, of trying to get listings in a certain area, back when he was starting his business. And he said, “Well, I would give a market update in a zip code where no one else was giving that detailed of an analysis. And just send them a one page market update, and people would opt in.” They would ask to be sent his, basically, marketing materials. And if they saw him as the specialists who is really in tune with where the market’s going, how to price something, we need to move quick, what the price of that, et cetera, then he’s going to be the one that you hire to get listings. And that worked for him, and that was his form of chocolate chip cookies. For myself, it is offering a book called How To Start A Family Office, or it’s offering my book called Capital Raising, Five Stages Of How To Systematically Attract Capital From Private Investors. Those are my chocolate chip cookies. And if you don’t have that for your multifamily office, wealth management firm, private investment firm, real estate development company, private operating business … If you don’t have warm chocolate chip cookies to offer your prospects, then it’s going to be very hard to get a good response rate from advertising via social media, or Google, or at events. And it’s going to be hard to get people to engage with you and be referred to you. So I’d really like you to think about what you’re doing to interact with third-party potential clients, and look at it through that lens. And I think you’ll find a lot of value by thinking that over carefully. This is Richard Wilson from the Family Office Club, to learn more about our organization, please visit familyoffices.com.

About the author

Richard Wilson