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CRE Insights Blog

Forget About Making Money, Its More Profitable.

Richard C. Wilson speaks about his one of his best business practices as a competitive advantage. Hello, this is Richard Wilson coming to you from Seattle, Washington just in front of the Microsoft Headquarters here today, speaking at an investor event on family offices and how to structure them and start them up. I wanted to talk to you about my number one strategy in business lately because it’s very counterintuitive and goes against a lot of advice you might hear. A lot of people say, “Follow the money,” or, “Monetize something and then you grow it.” What I’ve found in the family office space when it comes to raising capital, when it comes to investment management, you’re best off forgetting about monetization and pushing it way down the road and just not caring if you make any money at the beginning when you meet somebody new when you’re starting the new model. The further down the line that you can push the monetization, the more credibility you have, the less desperate you look, the less like a used car salesman trying to close somebody fast, you look. And I find it just builds trust of the counter parties knowing that you don’t need to act in the most expedient way. You’re acting in the way that’s going to add the most value to them longterm. So if you do it right, then you show a family office, “Hey, let’s get to know each other, let me make some introductions, let me show you teasers of the deal flow we have,” before trying to push them into a contract to hire you, in my case. If you’re raising capital for office parks, or life settlements, or self storage, you could say, “Hey, why don’t you come along on some due diligence calls. Let me show you what trends are going on in the industry. Here’s how we compare to others. And Oh, by the way, here’s some ways that we’re growing the NOI on our buildings that you could apply to all of your real estate portfolio, and here’s, here’s the process that we go through and the tools we use to do that. I hope that’s helpful. You know, based on the other assets you have,” and you can add value to them before even asking them to write a check. And you can ask them for advice and you can ask them for strategic input on what you’re doing far before you asked for capital. And I think that a lot of people miss that and it’s been a competitive advantage, I think of mine over the last 10 years since I started the Family Office Club to really push back that monetization and say, “You know what? It’s inevitable that if we become a top thought leader, a top resource, a top community in the family office space, that we’re gonna make a whole lot of money in doing so and have a lot of fun in the process. So who cares what happens right now?” If the bills are being met, payroll is being met, you’re able to put a little bit aside for investment or a rainy day, then who cares about monetizing it to the max? If you’re playing a 30-year game, that’s not your benchmark. You’re not looking at quarterly profits or monthly profits. The more that we’re able to ingrain that in our culture as a company in our strategy and really take the approach, whether it’s working with the Lichtenstein family, who owns their own country and helping them with getting their wine distributed in the US, or whether it’s working with this new $30 million family or my $2 billion family in the food space and helping them get excellent deal flow and not really charging a big retainer, just having to be very performance-based. People would much rather work together that way. And last thing I’ll say is that ironically, sometimes when you act like you don’t care at all about the monetization, it actually gets monetized faster. This is Richard Wilson from the Family Office Club. If you haven’t been to familyoffices.Com, please check it out. Take care.

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Richard Wilson