Family Capital
Copyright © 2016 by Gregory Curtis. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Names: Curtis, Gregory, 1947- author.
Title: Family capital: working with wealthy families to manage their money across generations / Gregory Curtis.
Description: 1 | Hoboken: Wiley, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015036772 (print) | LCCN 2015045963 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119094135 (hardback) | ISBN 9781119094111 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781119094128 (ePub)
Subjects: LCSH: Finance, Personal. | Wealth – United States. | Investments – United States. | Finance – United States.
Classification: LCC HG179 .C848 2016 (print) | LCC HG179 (ebook) | DDC 332.02400973 – dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015036772
Cover Design: Wiley
Cover Image: gold tree © Marinamik/iStockphoto
Preface
I've written two investment books —Creative Capital (iUniverse Press, 2004) and The Stewardship of Wealth (John Wiley & Sons, 2013). When I sat down to think about my third book, I naturally considered how it might be improved over the first two. I paged through both books and tried to think what topics I'd overlooked, where advances in our understanding of the investment process had occurred that needed to be addressed. I reviewed many other investment books.
But then I stepped back and asked myself a different question. Suppose, I thought, wealthy families had asked me what the best way was to learn the business of managing capital. Or suppose colleagues in the wealth advisory world had asked me how they might best improve their skills to stay at the top of their professions. What would I have told them?
In both cases, I would have said something like this: “The best way to learn about managing capital or staying at the top of the wealth management business is to observe thoughtful families and skilled advisors meeting and discussing the challenges presented by managing capital.”
But what does that answer have to do with writing a third investment book? At first, I thought the answer was “nothing whatever.” But one day, as I was flying to New York to meet with a family client, I had an epiphany. Wait, I said to myself! Here you are on your way to a client meeting. You attend at least 40 such meetings every year and you've been doing it for nearly 40 years. That's a whole lot of family meetings.
Over the course of those four decades and more than 1,500 meetings, I've learned a huge amount about what tends to work and what doesn't in the wealth management space. I've learned from my wealth management colleagues – especially my partners at Greycourt & Co., Inc. But I've learned even more from all those clients over all those years.
Why not, I thought, reproduce some of the best of those meetings and let my readers come to their own conclusions about what constitutes sound capital management and what constitutes best practices in the wealth advisory business?
The Titan Family
Of course, client confidentiality prevents me from literally reproducing the discussions between families and advisors. So, instead, I've created a fictitious American family – the Titan family. We learn who this family is and how they made their money. We watch as, over the years and across the generations, the family and its advisors grapple with the many challenges involved in managing great wealth. Sometimes the family succeeds and sometimes they fail. Sometimes their advisors do a terrific job and sometimes they let the family down.
Throughout, I don't tell you what happened, I show you what happened. We actually listen in on the meetings the various family members have with their advisors. Some of the conversations are almost verbatim from meetings I've had with my own clients. Others are reproduced based on reports of meetings my partners have had with families they work with. When I'm not reporting conversations exactly as they occurred, it's mainly due either to lapse of memory or to the need to maintain client confidentiality. (I'm quite sure that some of my clients will recognize themselves in these pages, though I hope no one else recognizes them.)
Finally, in some cases I've invented conversations out of whole cloth in order to make a point that seemed important. Even in these cases, I've tried to organize the conversation and the dialogue so that they sound as realistic as possible.
When the Titan family members speak, I've tried to make them speak like real people. They sometimes get things right and they sometimes don't. They lose their patience and they keep their cool. They have individual personalities, and those personalities affect the way they think.
I've tried to make the meetings as realistic as possible, too. Sometimes the family and its advisors stick to their agendas and sometimes they don't. Some of these detours are simply timewasters (I've eliminated most of those), but most are very much the opposite. I've tried to make the point repeatedly that when an agenda is hijacked by the family, it's almost always for a good reason. They are departing from the set agenda because something is on their minds and the advisors in the room need to address that topic.
The net result is that this book may seem to the reader more like a novel – one with a lot of dialogue – or a screenplay than a traditional investment book. Let's face it – investment books can be terminally dry. Trying to tell people how to invest their capital doesn't result in the most riveting prose. I hope that