Hello, it’s Richard Wilson coming to you from downtown Singapore. I’m here to speak at a private equity conference tomorrow on family offices. Here’s the downtown skyline. Here’s the Sands Marina resort. I’ve recorded some videos from up there before that you might have seen. And what I wanted to talk to you today was about the future of the single family office industry. This is something that I’ve never really heard anybody talk about before and it kind of blows me away how little education there is on single family offices and it’s something our team’s really focused on. We acquired singlefamilyoffices.com recently, we’re about to come out with a single family office book with interviews with single family offices, and it’s just a huge area of focus for us. We consult and advise single family offices. Right now we’re working with one in The Bahamas as well as one here in Malaysia… are also speaking to a $850 million, you know, family in the United States about how they set up their single family office as well as a couple of brothers worth about 400 million on how they’re setting up their single family office in the future. And it’s just something that we’re focused on every single day. So in this video I just wanted to share with you my vision of where the single family office industry is going. And after thinking about it every day for several years and working with family offices for about 10 years, I thought I might be able to share some insights of what the single family offices themselves are saying and where are the evidence points the industry is going. So the biggest thing is just that the industry is growing very rapidly in a place like here in Singapore. The whole term of family office is growing rapidly and wealthier is growing rapidly. In places like Turkey, and Brazil, and Indonesia the whole use of a family office structure is a bit more behind in the times. United States and Europe kind of leads the way with having the most formally formed single family offices and multifamily offices in the world. And so the whole trend of actually creating a family office to manage your wealth is very much on the rise still. So in five to seven years, I expect the industry to be three times larger than it is now. In 15 years, you know 20 years, I expect it to be literally 10 times larger than it is now. That is the single family office industry. Because the industry is growing, that means each segment will grow. Just like when the hedge fund industry went from a thousand hedge funds to 10,000 that means that the number of global macro hedge funds went up. The same goes for single family offices. The number of single family offices that use a virtual family office model is going up. The number that use an outsourced chief investment officer is going up. The number of single family offices that only have 40 to 50 million dollars and one full time person, oftentimes a son, running the money is going up as well. And so I think that you’re not only going to see these 300 million and $5 billion type single family offices from somebody like Boone Pickens, you know, being started up, you’re going to be seeing these small, more nimble, more agile and flexible single family offices, or single quasi multifamily offices that serve two or three families popping up all over the place. I think that in the future there’ll be several platforms dedicated to single family offices. There’ll be whole conferences and events dedicated just to single family offices and not, you know, the whole family office industry. I also, you know, kind of biased, but I predict that the family offices group, you know, right now we’re about a top three brand in the family office industry and they have… one of my optimistic predictions is that we’ll be the number one brand for single family offices.
The Future of the Single Family Office Industry
