<strong>Harold Nickerson</strong>
Most entrepreneurs are the people who have the money. The people who have the money are the people who need the family offices, but most entrepreneurs are not into a lot of detailed, administrative issues. They are into running a business and making money, and in that part of the business, they are usually into the detail and they are good at that. But on the administrative side, they are not necessarily as good.
<strong>Jeannine Domingues</strong>
A family office, in my view, it is kind of a personalized service center. I view it as a group of people, basically, who serve family members and the entities in which they invest themselves. By personalized I mean, basically, that this group of persons are knowledgeable about the family. They know their circumstances, they know their history, and that permits them, basically, to better serve them.
<strong>Harold Nickerson</strong>
The family office often is a place where there is a lot of work done on philanthropic activities, and the family office provides the administrative support and guidance to the family on issues regarding philanthropy, so that is a major role. And it is also a role in helping to keep the family together, helping the family set up a family governance, family council, council of elders, organize family meetings, organize educational events for children. There is almost no end of things that they can do.
A lot of people think of a family office as a fixed, well-defined thing, but I do not think it is that at all. I think it is whatever the family needs, wants, and can afford. I have visited family offices where there is one person and a part-time secretary, and all they do is manage some marketable securities for one individual. I have visited, on the other hand, family offices that serve many generations of the same family, have hundreds of employees in the family office, and they provide a multitude of services. It is a decision that you make as to whether you want more people to do more things on a more timely basis, more confidentially. Those are the things that drive whether you need a family office.
<strong>Jeannine Domingues</strong>
To me it is really the people who make the family office. The physical place, I think, is very secondary. I think most of the time, probably, the physical place would be where members of the family would have their offices and that permits, you know, an exchange face-to-face and that is nice, but I do not think that it is the physical space that makes the family office.
<strong>Harold Nickerson</strong>
The bricks and mortar are not that important. With communications these days, it can be located anywhere, with one proviso, it has to be accessible to the family because any family office, in my view, in order to be successful, there has to be family supervision and the family has to oversee the operation. And if the family is not close to the family office, then that is a serious problem.
I have seen where family offices have helped people tremendously and provided support that not only helped them personally in their personal affairs, but because they had that support in the family office, it enabled them to spend more time in their operating business and make more money and have more fun doing the family operating business because they knew they could count on it to get their bills paid, to get their tax returns filed on time. They did not have to worry about all those details.