The
area of high-finance is horribly inefficient, but that is good news for
those who can correct that inefficiency because there is value in doing
so. We got our start by providing 1,000+ articles and videos on the
family office industry, speaking at 100+ events in 23 countries and
building a large family office community in the process.Our mission at the Wilson Holding Company is to correct the inefficiency which is rampant across high-finance, the areas of investment banking, mergers & acquisitions, private equity, family offices, and hedge funds operate and sometimes feed upon the lack of transparency, consistency, and ease of communication which is a global challenge. While some crowd funding and accredited investor aggregation platforms are helping cure 1% of the problem it is still everywhere. Consider the following:
- Why do hedge fund managers need to hire placement agents and third party marketers, even when they have $1B, enough capital under management to afford building their own teams? Because many investors don't make public what they are looking to invest in right now, don't or can't speak publicly about their investments, or rely upon a single database for their fund manager searches. To show how non-transparent our industry is, I actually met someone who hire third party marketers for hedge fund managers...so in this case the hedge fund manager not only doesn't know what investors to go to so they have to turn to a third party marketer, but now has found the third party marketing world so opaque that they hire someone else to find the third party marketer. When I first I heard this I immediately though "this type of professional shouldn't exist" but they so and they make a living performing this function because the market demands it.
- Why do conferences like our division which offers such exist? To connect peers who may have been working down the street from each other but besides a LinkedIn Group which can be filled with 100,000+ other professionals it is hard to figure out who is real, who is closing actual deals, raising capital, and is credible enough to invest time in getting to know.
- How is it that our small team has been able to make any progress in the field of family offices, starting with no capital and just by providing education? Why were we able to make Endowments.com the #1 most visited website on endowment funds in the first week of acquiring it? The truth is that education in our industry is risky to provide, it could be construed as a compliance risk, as investment advice, and a regulator may fine or suspend your licenses if you make one wrong step in giving away the wrong type of advice publicly that appears to be a solicitation or lacks a needed disclosure. In a way by providing education consistently we are picking up pennies in front of a regulatory steamroller, you hope you never get tripped up....and that is why the approach is not taken by many.
- Finally, why do family offices hire us to find them deal flow, to find companies to invest in. Mostly because investment bankers, M&A brokers, and private business owners don't have relationships with family offices, many times they don't even know they exist. To make it more challenging many single family offices don't have websites, don't want to be "known" yet at the same time are frustrated by lack of deal flow.
