How I Protect My Time and Energy: Audio Messages, 4 a.m. Mornings and Billionaire Time Rules

Some people at our first event this week in Dallas were like, "Oh yeah, but I thought developing relationships is the core of raising capital." Yeah, it is. But it's your responsibility to add value to the other party, to be a contributor, and to realize that the flow and the fire hose of things coming at a lot of investors and family offices is so intense that almost nobody is going to say yes to just meeting to catch up for an hour, or to pick your brain, or to brainstorm, in my experience.

A lot of the family offices that speak at our events, and were at our event earlier this week, were saying the exact same thing. The time pressure on them is great. So you have to be super concise and make sure it's productive.

Why most meetings could be an audio message

I heard one Silicon Valley CEO say that 90% of meetings could be done via text or email, and the last 10% that were left could have been done via audio messages. It's only the super critical meetings that need to be done in person.

So I stay super connected to my team. I've sent several hundred thousand Slack messages. Every week I send hundreds of audio messages. My team hears from me in audio messages all the time. They can hear my tone of voice. They know what I'm thinking. I over-communicate sometimes in audio messages. I try to. We're virtual, so sometimes I have to really try to. But it catches the tone of voice.

And I haven't found a polite way of asking someone on a phone call, "Can you please speak at 2x speed right now? Because I'm very busy today." But on an audio message, you can hit 2x, or listen to it four times, or forward it to somebody else, or listen to it a week later, or refer to it and search for the transcript in Slack. It's amazingly productive. So I love using that stuff.

It allows me to get a message from someone at an event today and respond while on the airplane tonight. I can't schedule a phone call when I'm on an airplane at 11 p.m. flying up to Oregon, but I can get back to you right away. So it's not about not connecting. By the time someone else has scheduled a Zoom call for eight days from now, one that someone shows up four minutes late to or misses completely, we've already solved the communication today, got back to you, got you the link and got you moved on your way.

So for us, it works really well operating that way. But just like anything in life, it does put off 5% or 10% of people, and you can't really help that sometimes. Lots of times you'll see this referred to as asynchronous communication.

Owner mode vs operator mode

There's two types of pain: short-term and long-term. You decide which type of pain you want when it comes to ending something that's not working.

Tony Robbins said when I interviewed him for billionaires.com that there are two ways to operate: owner mode and operator mode. He said when he was in operator mode, he worked harder at $10 million in revenue than he does now with hundreds of millions in revenue and 110 companies that he's an owner in, because now he's in owner mode.

And so there's all different forms. It's the evolution of working in a business, to on a business, to working on your businesses. And that is how family offices operate.

I've hired over 100 people on Upwork.com. We're probably closer to a million dollars spent there now. We have four full-time employees in the Philippines and three in Colombia. They help us run our private equity deal origination process. They help me email every billionaire on planet Earth several times to get the interviews done. They help us get things done in a very thorough, systematic way. So I have to architect it, and then they carry out all the hundreds of hours of work to get it done. There are a lot of lessons learned on what to do and not do with virtual help.

My 4 a.m. schedule and the rules around it

For me, I find it's most productive to get up early and knock out all my work. A lot of times people say, "Oh, well, if you're working all the time, didn't you say being healthy is important? Didn't you say being happy is important? Sounds like you're just a workaholic, Richard." It's like, yeah, pretty much. And that's why I married my wife, who is much more relaxed and social. But I put some rules around it.

So basically, I get up really early. I'm out in the middle of the ocean, the perfect place for an introvert to live. It's like the most remote island chain in the world. I get up early and start working at like 4 a.m. Then I take a break for breakfast with the kids, and I'm done with my work by 1 p.m. or so. I've worked eight, nine hours, and then I get my workout done. And when the kids pull in the driveway at 3:30, I'm free, or I can go get them from school. That works out well for me in my schedule.

I did just about the exact same thing when I was in Arizona, maybe started at 4:45 or 5 more often. But it's massively productive for me as a CEO and business owner, because I get going when it's usually more quiet. The house is quiet, Slack channels can be quiet, et cetera, and it helps.

The other rule I've set up that's been helpful for me getting more done is on the weekends. I only work from like 4 to 7 a.m., or 4:30 to 7:30 a.m., before anyone in the house is awake. They're unconscious. They don't really care that you're working. Then they wake up, they have breakfast, and we have a fun weekend together.

I do no client dinners the whole year. I don't drink alcohol, so I don't really want to watch other people enjoy wine for three hours. And my brain doesn't work too well after 4 p.m. if I got up early in the morning. I know a lot of you are like this too. But those rules around how to not let work invade family time are probably the main point there.

Move fast and only do exciting work

David Rubenstein is a billionaire, and he's written several books, and he talks about fast moving and always being quick, agile, right on top of things. He'll be at an MLB game right behind the dugout on national TV, and an email will hit the inbox of like five different $100 billion plus private equity firms, all copied on this one email from like a pension fund or someone: does anyone have access to shares of this? Or can anyone get us into an infrastructure deal here?

David gets an alert on his phone or pulls out his phone, checks it, replies back. And before anyone else has replied, he's like, "Yep, we do. Here's the details. My assistant will set up the call for you Monday morning, 7 a.m." He's responded almost instantly, and everyone else takes a day to five days to reply. Because of that, David changes the whole direction of a conversation. Other people have not even had a chance to reply yet, and he's on top of it. And it's because he loves what he does.

The Home Depot founders see it as an exciting adventure. Other people might be like, "Oh, they work so much." Well, if you only work on exciting, exponential things, then you enjoy the work, and you get rid of the stressful parts of it. So that's why exciting only is important.

Billionaire time rules and speed of implementation

Some of the billionaire time rules I've seen are just to have the expectation of excellence around you. Anything less than excellence is not good, not acceptable. Ruthlessly prioritize your time and say no to just about everything that's coming at you.

I just wrote a book on this as a core value for my employees. We don't really sell it, but essentially, speed of implementation is something I got from listening to seven or eight decamillionaires at one event. All the decamillionaires gave hour-long talks, but they only said one thing in common, and that was that speed of implementation was key.

So you learn, you put it in place, you learn something else, you put it in place, and you learn faster. You might not know when your breakthrough progress will be, but if you know these are the first three steps, you have to execute on those as fast as you can, because you learn. And like Sun Tzu says, opportunities multiply as they're seized. By getting those things done, the next thing unfolds.

So it's something that we really teach every new employee that comes into our company, and it's really core to who we are as an organization.

Takeaway

• It's your responsibility to add value to the other party. Almost nobody is going to say yes to just meeting to catch up for an hour.
• 90% of meetings could be done via text or email, and the rest could be audio messages. Only the super critical ones need to be in person.
• Get out of operator mode and into owner mode: from working in a business, to on a business, to working on your businesses.
• Put rules around your work so it doesn't invade family time.
• If you only work on exciting, exponential things, you enjoy the work.
• Have the expectation of excellence, ruthlessly prioritize, say no to just about everything, and move with speed of implementation

The Part of Estate Planning That Costs Nothing

I grew up in the Boy Scouts. My dad was an Eagle Scout. My grandpa was an Eagle Scout. I grew up "brainwashed in a positive way with the values of the Boy Scouts," and I mean that as a good thing.

Then I had three girls. And I realized my girls weren't getting that same exposure.

At the Family Office Club, the investor club I've run for nearly two decades, we already had core values for the company. And I realized every family should have core values too. So we came up with our own family values. It cost nothing.

I want to start this estate planning post there, because I think it's the part a lot of families skip.

What this looks like in our house

We came up with 12 family values. I thought about narrowing them down to three or four. But then I realized the family crest we grew up with on the wall at home already said it: "actions, not words." So we kept the list and put more weight on that phrase. To me it ties into integrity, being strong, being healthy, being bold and having courage.

The values hang on the wall above our kitchen table. Our last one was getting outdated, so we had a new version made with a metal backing. And we reward and punish our kids based on those values. We make them live by them as much as we can.

Then I added one more thing: a one-pager for the kids. Our family values sit at the top. Under that are summaries of two books.

The first is Be Useful by Arnold Schwarzenegger. I read them every word of it, except for skipping some of the swear words. The second is The Success Principles by Jack Canfield. I read that one to them every year. I used AI to summarize both books so the main points fit on one sheet.

That sheet lives at the breakfast table. While the kids are getting ready for school, we'll read a little from one of the books or go over one of the points.

And here is what I tell them: "You could ignore everything your teachers tell you, everything that people say on TV. You can ignore everything in the world. If you live by this one page, you're going to be ridiculously successful. It just kind of simplifies things."

It's a cheat sheet for life. And as I've said on stage, "it costs nothing, so why not have them, right?"

Why values belong in your estate plan

At our Capital Raiser Bootcamp in January 2026, I made a point I had meant to make earlier: "it's more important to pass on your values to your kids than your money."

If you pass on just the money, you might ruin your kids and take away all their motivation. As I put it that day, "If you pass on just the values, they may make the money. If you pass on both, they may lose the money, but then make it back if they have the right values."

Then I said this: "Everyone worries about trust in estate planning, but then they don't even have values that cost nothing to put above their kitchen table." And yet "they spent $25,000 on their estate plan. ... And the estate plan might do nothing but ruin the kid's motivation to do anything with their lives."

I have found that "whether it's a lottery winner, an inheritance, a pro athlete, if your net worth grows faster than your financial IQ, the world will correct that equation and bring your net worth right back down to wherever your financial IQ is."

Put another way: "Any net worth you have now is only protected by your values, your reputation, your capabilities, your knowledge."

Most companies have values. "It's obvious for a company to have them, not so obvious for a family too." In my view, a lot of wealthy people "don't have them formalized for their family, and I think that's a big mistake."

Where to learn the document side

Documents move assets. Values decide outcomes. You need both.

If you want to learn the document side, a good place to start is EstatePlanner.com, a free educational library I own and built to explain estate planning for business owners and investors. The Start Here page on EstatePlanner.com is the easiest place to begin.

What you can do this month, no lawyer needed

None of this needs a law firm. It needs a parent who decides it matters.

• Write your family values. Start with what you already reward and correct at home. If your company has values, use them as a starting point. Your family list can be different, and that's fine.
• Put them where everyone sees them. Ours hang above the kitchen table.
• Reward and punish by them. When the values are on the wall, you can point to them.
• Make a one-pager. Values at the top, then a few books or principles you want your kids to live by.
• Use the breakfast table. A few minutes and one point at a time.
• Talk about how the money was made. And what you think it's for.
• Prepare your heirs. Help them learn about money before they have a lot of it.
• Hold family meetings. Give the family a regular place to talk and make decisions together.

For more on those last two, read the guides on preparing heirs for wealth and ownership and family governance for shared wealth.

Then get the documents right, in plain English

I'm not an attorney, so I'll keep this part simple. Your attorney handles the technical side. But a few plain points are worth knowing.

Make sure everything lines up. Your will doesn't always control everything. Some assets pass based on how the title is held, and some pass based on the beneficiary form on file. Check that your documents, beneficiary forms and titles actually match your wishes, and ask your attorney to walk through it with you. This infographic on what passes by will, title or designation is a good primer.

Keep the plan current. A plan that's never updated can cause problems. Families change. Assets change. Look at it again when something big happens.

Know what you have. Before you meet your attorney, take inventory with the document readiness checklist, and bring the estate planning discussion checklist to the meeting.

Ask about taxes. There are federal estate taxes, and some states have their own estate or inheritance taxes, which can apply to much smaller estates than the federal tax does. Ask your attorney and CPA how they apply to you.

And put one item on your own checklist that no attorney will bill you for: your family values, written down.

Final thought

I'm not an attorney, and this is my experience and opinion, not legal or tax advice. Work with a qualified estate attorney and CPA on your own plan.

But don't wait on the attorney to start the most important part. Write your values this week. Put them above the kitchen table. Talk about them at breakfast. It costs nothing.

Do you have written family values in your home? And if you do, where do you keep them so your kids see them every day?

Authority Is Taken, Not Given

How a Free Blogspot Blog Became the Family Office Club

I found out on accident. I was raising capital in Boston for a separate managed account, hedge fund products, and I would call through the big Standard and Poor's book of institutional investors. (picture of me at my first desk when I launched above)

No one wanted to take my call because I had 30, 40 million in assets in the fund I represented. They all said, call back and get to 100. And I literally called like 400 different people in that book.

The day I first heard the words family office

I then said, okay, let me go after wealth advisors. So I called wealth advisors. A lot of them said, oh, well, we just work with high net worth. They're not all accredited, so we don't really show hedge funds to our clients. So I said, okay, that's not good.

And as I kept on calling, I ran into one who said, well, we ran a multifamily office, so of course our clients are accredited. They're all five, 10 million plus, 20 million plus net worth. And I said, oh, family office. Never heard that word. What does that mean? And he told me. So I said, oh, okay, write that down. It's like, I need to study family offices. Then all my capital raising success will come.

Then I looked online. Okay. Family offices. What are they? How do I find them? Where are they? Is there a list of them? Is there a community of them? And what I found is the only people being helpful to me at all were some journalists from Bloomberg and Financial Times that had never worked a day in their life in the industry. They had written a couple articles, and I was like, oh, that's weird.

Well, whatever I can find or learn in a little corner of the internet, I'll just share on my blog. It was called Hedge Fund Blogger at the time. I'll share it on my free blog from Blogspot. It's like a Google service, and I'll just write a post a week. And what I'm learning about family offices as I try to call them every week, that'll teach me. Selfishly, it'll just make me better at calling family offices.

Delete the blog or quit the job

So as I did that, we started talking about hedge funds, capital raising, family offices, and the blog started taking off. I got 100 hits, 500 hits, a thousand hits a day on the blog. So I was like, oh, maybe I should write two posts a week.

And then people started calling into the office at the capital raising firm where I got hired. The guy running it was 30 years my senior, and I got on the front page of the Boston Globe at age 26. They wanted to interview me, and I had just gotten into the industry.

He's like, why are these people calling? And I told him about the blog. He's like, oh, well, we're FINRA regulated. You probably need to delete that thing. And I didn't want to. It was just taking off. Then it came to a point where he's like, I think you should delete that blog or quit the job.

And I was like, all right, I quit.

And before I could get hired somewhere else, the website took off, and I was making more than what he was paying me before. And then it became Family Office Club.

Authority is taken, not given

Early on in that process, I got invited to speak at the European Business Summit. I was 26 years old, had never been to Europe in my life, and they flew me to Belgium. My wife and I both went, and there were two prime ministers on stage at the same event, and I couldn't even eat. They just had me on some hedge fund discussion panel because they'd seen I'd written 500 blog posts on these three topics of raising capital and hedge funds and family offices. So I'm sure when I walked in, they wondered who brought their kid or their intern to the event.

And I was like, why am I even here? It's just because of the positioning.

Then I went to the GAIM Monaco event soon after. At that event, everyone came up to my wife and said, oh, you're the hedge fund blogger guy. You're the hedge fund blogger guy. And I said to myself, that seems like a stupid thing. I just did that. I made myself a hedge fund blogger guy. It sounds like you're Mr. Journalist Guy. And I was like, I don't want that.

So then I realized you can play with any position you want to. That's why they say authority is taken, not given. No one came to me and said, hey Richard, you now have enough experience to position yourself as a family office thought leader. I just did it at a very young age and didn't care what people thought about it.

People often comment like, oh wow, that was bold of you to do. But honestly, it was just the hunger for something that would work after having businesses that don't work. And so then I gave myself the position of what? Head of the family office network.

So whatever position you want to give yourself, I wouldn't look to anyone else to give you approval or care what they think. I wouldn't do anything unethical or that's not honest. I was just sharing the journey as I went. I wasn't saying I'm the biggest expert on planet Earth at age 26 in family offices. I was just saying this is what I've learned recently.

A desk in Harvard Square and a burrito shop launch

Later in the same talk, someone asked how I went from putting out free content to building this. Normally people never ask that.

When I started, I literally had this little desk that looked crappier than Bezos's famous picture of his first office, in my studio apartment in Harvard Square. And I had less money in my bank account than I did for rent that first month when I quit the job at that capital raising firm.

So basically, I was writing articles for Investopedia, and they would pay me per article that I would write. Then I took on a couple of advertisers on the blog, and then I launched a certification training program on hedge funds.

In Boston, those of you familiar with Boston, there's a burrito shop called Boloco. Sometimes I'd camp out in there for a half day and work on their Wi-Fi, with burritos and a milkshake or something. And I remember the day that we launched the certification. This was literally my $1,100 a month rent, and I didn't have enough money to pay that rent the first month. I sit in the burrito shop and I launch the certification. I remember refreshing PayPal. It was 8,000, then 22,000, and it brought in like $50,000 in the day. And I was like, holy crap.

It's kind of like The Pursuit of Happyness, where he walks out on the sidewalk and he looks out and he's like, oh my God, I got hired.

So I think getting invited to speak at some crazy big event when I was a kid and almost nothing, that was like one light bulb moment.

And then I remember walking to the computer lab in Harvard Square. I was talking with a friend who had kids, a house and his own law firm, and I was telling him, yeah, I quit my job. I'd go work for this other placement agent, capital raising firm. He's raised $1 billion. I'd learn a lot from him. I got the job offer. I think I'm going to take it. I thought about maybe doing my own thing, but I don't know, it seems kind of risky. Maybe I'm too young to do that.

And I remember him saying, well, what do you got to lose? You don't have the mortgage, the kids, the wife, the house. You can always take that job in three months or six months. So you should just go for it.

So that happened first, and then the burrito shop thing happened, and that gave me confidence.

Give away more value than anyone else in your industry

Then I listened to what people were saying. As inquiries came in, the most common inquiries were around a few trends: getting a database of investors, what events they should go to, how to set up their family office.

And it was crazy to me that family offices that had run their family office for a decade were calling me wanting consulting on how they should run their family office. And I was a 27-year-old kid who started a blog a year ago on family offices. But they said, the thing is, we don't talk to 50 of our peers. You're talking to hundreds of our peers. We don't know what they're paying people. We don't know what they're investing in right now. Document the trends. Give us more transparency into what's going on.

One of my mentors taught me that you look at what everyone else in your industry is giving away for free. If everyone else is giving away this much value and you give away that much value, then you just created more good karma, and more businesses are likely to come to you. More people are likely to subscribe. So that was kind of a thing that I stuck to the whole time.

I think putting a lot of mental energy into this has helped: I don't care how much hard work it takes. If I know it's going to be valuable long term, then we should just do that, because no one else is going to want to do it.

A speaker at our last event said something really interesting. He said the things he does that really helped him, some of them are just obnoxious. They're tedious, and no one would want to do them. You have to be insane to want to do some of these things. He had no slides. I had no idea what he was going to say. I just knew he had gotten a lot done. But he brought that up before I brought it up.

You have to be willing to do any part of the task. And the more that it's something that's not very practical or easy, the more that's kind of a moat. What would somebody else do in my position, whether it's a competitor or your former self? What would be a lot more than what most people would do? Then try to do like ten more than that, and no one's going to touch you on that. That's been a lot of our success, because otherwise you end up working hard and it doesn't stand out. And then you just have to work hard on things that don't really work.

Takeaway

Authority is taken, not given. I wouldn't look to anyone else to give you approval or care what they think, and I wouldn't do anything unethical or that's not honest. Just share the journey as you go.

Look at what everyone else in your industry is giving away for free, and give away more.

If I know it's going to be valuable long term, then we should just do that, because no one else is going to want to do it. It's hard either way.

If you want to learn more about what we are up to please join the Family Office Club, we host 16 in-person events a year, have 50 AI tools for our core members, and 2,000 investor talks in our portal. You can also learn more by seeing our websites on capital raising, billionaires, multifamilyoffices, corporate venture capital, and sovereign wealth funds.

How I Get Billionaires Attention by Adding Value First in Many Ways

My dad bought me a multi-level marketing business for $1,500 in high school, selling long distance telephone service back when that was a thing. I cold called everybody in my high school directory. And so that didn't work out, but I learned a lot cold calling.

Cold calling and working for free

And then to get my first job in high school, I cold called everyone in the Yellow Pages. I got the job making websites in college. I had a used textbook business that did pretty well and sold it to some other students when I graduated.

But when I graduated, I called everybody in the Portland, Oregon Chamber of Commerce. One of them was an alum of Oregon State. And she said, well, I can't hire you. You don't have your CPA license. You don't have seven years experience. We can't use you.

And I said, why don't I work for you for free? And then you can fire me in the first hour if I'm horrible. And she said, well, I feel bad doing that. So instead of paying me the $110 an hour that she paid everyone else, she paid me $40 an hour.

I was just willing to put myself out there and say, I'll work for free. I'll prove to them I can figure this out. And it worked out, and I created good luck through hard work, putting myself out there, making offers that have no friction, no risk to the other party.

Brute force reciprocation

And it's the same with Billionaires.com. I poked them for 12 years. I got the asset. I poked Mark Cuban 14 times till he answered my interview questions. And it's about being politely persistent.

So the brute force reciprocation is basically taking the idea that if a hacker tries to guess a password a million times in a second and they get it right, then bad things happen. But try all these combinations to see what works. And in business, like the billionaire we interviewed yesterday said, he spent $100 and basically put that on five experiments. Maybe four of them don't work and you just break even overall, but the one that did work you keep. And then you try four more experiments and then five more experiments. Keep what works and keep on going. That is kind of like a brute force approach, but if you're always adding value first, you build relationships along the way.

And Cialdini has this theory of influence called reciprocation. If you do something for someone and add value to them, they're more likely to help you back, right? And so people automatically want to say thank you or help someone in return.

So the idea of this whole strategy is how do you figure out how to iterate all the time, try a lot of combinations with a laser focus, and you learn faster, because most people don't have a laser focus. They're not playing Monopoly. And you might be the most focused person on planet Earth in that niche who's also trying lots of ways to add value to people first in your niche. That's how we've gotten ahead and jumped ahead many times in our business.

And I just haven't heard other people explain it that way. Once I realized that, I just realized I need to do way more of this. Like, anytime I can, I need to do this, because you just skip years and years or decades of otherwise trying stuff.

I try to think, what would a reasonable person do? Then what would someone do who is less reasonable and more extreme? And then if you're trying to be the most extreme and helpful in a niche, what would that person do, and do even more than that. And then that's a level like no one's going to want to do that, because there's just way too much work.

Like when I had my blog start taking off on capital raising, hedge funds and family offices, I found everyone wanted to learn about family offices, then capital raising, then hedge funds. So I said, okay, what are the 500 keywords related to those niches? Then I started a spreadsheet and wrote two blog posts on all 500 keywords and wrote a thousand blog posts. And I got 7,000 hits a day on the website. We ranked all over Google. And then our business took off from doing that. So there's just a lot of elbow grease in figuring stuff out and trying stuff.

Start with the ways that cost nothing

So the question was, how do you decide what five things to try or how many to try? Part of it is a gut feel. It's like art and science combined.

But the very first example of this was me stuffing all the mailboxes in my neighborhood with flyers saying that I have free time to do lawn work and painting and odd jobs. And the local government called because someone complained about someone illegally stuffing mailboxes. And luckily I answered, so my parents never found out. But that was just the only idea I had. But it worked. I got like a couple of jobs from it.

So part of it is, in other businesses to date, what has worked? For other people in your field, what has worked? And then figuring out how you can get people that are the exact prospect to at least know you exist and make your message super clear in front of them.

So when I started the business, I was paid by Forbes and Investopedia to write articles on the investment industry. Then I had my blog and we had advertising coming in from it. And then I was paid a little bit to speak at different events. So those are the only options in front of me. I didn't have that many options in front of me. And when we started the business, we had no money for advertising. So that wasn't an option. So all of the options change once you get more money. But for a lot of people, when you're starting out, you just have to do things that just require elbow grease, positioning, leadership, adding value first, reaching out to others first.

But at the core of it all, I think, is knowing what are you really trying to do? You're trying to get your three questions answered by 100 billionaires. So what are all the different ways you could approach them? And all the different ways that cost nothing is always where I start, even today. And say, okay, I find every single one on LinkedIn, Facebook, X, and Instagram, and send them all private messages. I'm going to email every single one of them and then follow up once a quarter or more.

So just having to be resourceful and thrifty can be dangerous, because then as you scale, you still have a scarcity mindset, like don't spend any money on stuff if you don't have to. But that's just kind of where my brain goes with this stuff.

500 copies of a billionaire's book

I was trying to think, how do you get it in front of the right person in a way that adds value to them first? And so an example of that is for the billionaires. We went to every billionaire who's ever authored a book and said, we want to buy 500 copies of your book. That was the opening message. Like, how do we buy a bulk version of your book?

Then when they reply, we say, oh great, awesome, that's the price. Okay, I'd like to give it away at our annual event. But oh, by the way, it'll add a lot more context for you. You can just answer these three questions for Billionaires.com. That's really what we wanted, but it was like getting their attention personally. Oh, someone wants to buy 500 copies of my book, amazing. Probably only happens a couple times a year. So that was like a pretty good one.

So I wish every billionaire had authored a book, because we can't use that strategy on everyone, right? But the best strategies add value to the person first, so it's in their best interest to reply.

I actually bought the 500 copies of books with three different billionaires. We did that. One of them, I had the book on Audible and didn't realize it was about as thick as a Bible when it showed up. So the books came on a pallet and were sitting in our garage for quite a while. And my wife's like, what are you doing with all these books? So that wasn't the most fun, but yeah, it worked out. It was fine.

Takeaway

If you're always adding value first, you build relationships along the way. Make offers that have no friction, no risk to the other party. The best strategies add value to the person first, so it's in their best interest to reply.

From a basement apartment in Harvard Square to 19 million followers

We just hit 19 million followers.

I started this business in my basement apartment in Harvard Square, in Boston, back in 2007.

We built it organically, the hard way. One event, one member, one introduction at a time.

Today we have 17 million community members, and we've hosted 340+ live events. Along the way I've helped create, formalize and run 250+ family offices, and today I help run two single family offices. I'm still surprised by those numbers when I write them down.

People ask me what the secret was. Honestly, there wasn't one. We kept showing up and kept hosting the next event.

That's also why we run more than one website. Each site goes deep on one group of people we already work with. Here is how they fit together.

Where it all started

FamilyOffices.com is home base. It's where the Family Office Club lives, along with our events and membership.

Early on I kept getting asked who the wealthiest families were and how they think, so we built Billionaires.com to share interviews and mental models from billionaires.

Members also wanted to know exactly who to call, and FamilyOfficeDatabases.com is our family office investor database.

The most common question I get is how to raise money, so CapitalRaising.com covers the strategies, AI tools and a free book for people raising capital.

InvestorClub.com is where private investors find peers and meet in person at our events.

Family offices and private wealth

After working with 250+ family offices, I saw how many families don't need their own office yet, and MultifamilyOffices.com lets them compare multi-family offices side by side.

Families worth $100M or more have their own set of problems, and Centimillionaires.com is built for them.

EstatePlanner.com has free estate planning guides and calculators for business owners and families.

Selling a business usually means a big tax bill, which is why CapitalGainsTax.com starts right there.

For U.S. families looking at asset protection, OffshoreTrusts.com is a plain guide to offshore trusts.

On the institutional side, SovereignWealthFunds.com goes deep on sovereign wealth funds, and CorporateVentureCapital.com maps corporate venture capital firms and who they back.

If you just need a starting list, FamilyOfficeList.com has free family office lists you can sort by location or type, FamilyOfficeDirectories.com helps you pick the right directory for your search, and InvestorDatabases.com sorts investor databases by investor type.

Doctors Investor Club

Doctors kept showing up at our events with the same questions about investing and running a practice, so we started DoctorsInvestorClub.com, a free community for doctors and dentists only.

Dentists have their own home at DentalClub.com.

Anesthesia group owners can find business resources at Anesthesiologists.com.

Dermatologists.com does the same for dermatology practice owners.

And Obstetricians.com helps OB-GYN practice owners with the business side.

Family businesses and engineering firms

A lot of our members own operating companies, many of them family-owned, and FamilyBusinesses.com gives them playbooks, fireside chats, and a directory for succession, growth capital, and selling.

CivilEngineers.com covers the civil engineering industry for firm owners.

AI for the companies we work with

Every one of these groups asks me about AI now, and Hyperintelligent.com gives you one AI co-worker for every role in your company.

If you own a family office, a practice or a family business, which of these would you want us to go deeper on next?

Richard

3 Billionaire Insights from 25 Interviews Completed

3 Billionaire Insights

From 25 Exclusive Billionaire Interviews

Now that we have collected 75 strategies from 25 billionaires for Billionaires.com here are a few notes from the series:

1) You get exponential results when you only work on highly profitable business models, great partners, great employees, and personally focus on your super abilities. When you don't have just 1-2 of these but you stack all of them on top of each other your potential for explosive growth in the right niche goes up greatly.

2) Develop an octopus strategic business model where various business units inform, serve, provide leads, and make other assets you own more profitable.

3) Acquire strategic choke point assets that give you a sustained edge and lower cost of distribution or capital or customer flow over everyone else, the best of these choke points can't be owned by someone else once you acquire them.

Check out what Jeff Hoffman, Mark Cuban, Tony Robbins and others have to say in our exclusive interviews with them - https://billionaires.com/

Red Flags - Run The Other Way When You See This

After 16+ years of hosting over 190 events and sending 151,000 emails to date over that time, I have developed a series of yellow and red flags I look for to save myself energy. Here are some of them:

 

1. I prefer email, and if some people claim their idea can't possibly be communicated in writing in a simple format, I pass.

 

2.  Anyone who says their investment is guaranteed that is like saying "bomb" on an airplane anyone with a year of experience or any education on regulations knows not to say that.

 

3. When someone says they are buying an island to develop a resort, run the other way. The larger the project is, the more amateur the person hawking it is, and the more daisy chain (not real or great) the project may be in my experience. There are many $1B projects which are excellent, but most great deals are $1M-$100M or $100m-$500M, which are real, direct to the owner, etc. 

 

4. When others get insulted that I would like an agenda for a phone call and review materials before jumping on, I prefer to have my team navigate or try to move on.

 

5. If I am treated in a rude way, or rushed, the person seems highly stressed or follows up 3x over 24 hours, or 5x in a week, I know they will eat whoever I introduce them to alive and make me look bad, so I move on.

 

6. When someone uses ethnic slurs, derogatory language, or things that would get you auto-canceled (many times for good reason) in today's society, if you have that poor of judgment to say such things, I do not want to work together.

 

7. If someone demands to talk to me on the phone, refuses to talk to my team and is rude about it - I move on.

 

8. Not a hard and fast rule, but if you don't take yourself seriously enough not to use a Gmail or yahoo email address, don't have a website, email signature, etc. and haven't invested $100 or $1,000 in these few things, why should we invest our time worth that same amount - we can't take you more seriously than you take yourself.

 

9. Suppose you are doing 9 different things and you do not have 1-3 areas of focus. In that case, it will be hard to work together typically unless those 9 different things are all in one bucket or focus area, such as 9 ventures in the niche of stem cells or dry cleaners or workforce housing.

 

10. If it is not immediately crystal clear what you do and it is not unique, I try to be helpful but I know it is very unlikely I will be able to help a lot.

 

11. When someone takes it personally and gets angry at a client or me and takes it personally that we didn't reply to their email, as if they have us on retainer to reply to their random emails, which come in all shapes and sizes at all times of the day from 1,000's of people, I know we can't work together.

 

12. When an email looks like a high school essay and is super long it makes it harder to figure out what the main point is and I will likely miss it.

There are many more screening criteria I consider, but these are 12 that I wanted to share today. Also, when someone has something very unique in 2-3 compelling ways, is concise, and seems like a great person, then I go out of my way to try to be extra helpful when I can as I'm sure you do as well.

 

I hope a few of these help investors or those raising capital with screening messages or putting out requests for time or capital. Have a great end to your week.