There are many things coming together to change the industry and formalize it. In this video, Richard C. Wilson, CEO of The Family Offices Group talks about how the industry has changed and what is still yet to come for single family offices. To learn more about the single family office industry please visit SingleFamilyOffices.com and FamilyOfficesGroup.com Hello, this is Richard Wilson. I’m coming to you from Buckingham Palace here in London and I wanted to record a short video on the new single family office industry. Now I know that single family offices have been around for hundreds of years, or I guess you could say over a thousand, depending on how you define them. But when I talk about the new single family office industry, I’m talking about many things coming together which are changing the shape of this industry, formalizing it, making it more of a real industry in and of itself. And I think these are important trends to watch. One thing is, in the old single family office industry, no single family offices ever really wanted to be known. They’re very secretive, they stayed under the radar, and they didn’t want politicians, governments, taxing organizations, or their competitors really knowing who they are. In the future, more single family offices are going to be more public, do more marketing, because they want better deal flow, better talent for their teams, better access to resources that come with being a well respected and known single family office. Not all of them, but some of them will, and that’s a big change. In the old single family office industry, to learn anything, you had to join a $20,000 a year association, you had to buy a $700 white paper, maybe you’re lucky to find one book for $300 or $200. Well, in the new single family office industry, you know that’s not true. You can buy a book for under $40. You can watch a webinar for free or for $20. You can come to live conferences and to learn about family offices for 1500 or $1,900, and you can join associations and networking groups like ours for free. You can join the family offices group. We have 74,000 members globally making us the largest family office association, that’s at familyofficesgroup.com, or possibly more powerfully, you could join our single family office syndicate, a global network of over 600 single family offices. You can learn more about that at singlefamilyoffices.com. The other thing that’s changing in the industry is really how everything operates. In the old single family office industry, it was about your local inner city network. It was about your network of industry specific contacts. It was usually specific to commodities or real estate or maybe technology. Well in the future as single family offices develop and formalize, they’re working with each other more often, they’re forming informal global networks. There are connectors like myself that are growing global organizations and really creating a fabric of single family offices that just couldn’t exist before without ease of global travel, technology, knowledge and distribution platforms such as Google, LinkedIn, Amazon. The ability for me to put out a new book, like A Single Family Office, that I’m releasing in just a couple of weeks, and have that available digitally, globally to hundreds of thousands of people and offer online webinars, et cetera, just wasn’t available 10 years ago. Or you’d have to spend an enormous amount of money to get that same reach, so that’s something that’s really changing the whole industry. And then the last thing I wanted to mention was that in this new single family office industry, a lot of these single family offices are heavily commercializing everything they do in a pretty aggressive way. They’re looking to formalize what they do as a single family office, but also become a technology incubator.
The New Single Family Office Industry
