I receive a great many e-mails and phone calls from people asking me to meet them for a variety of reasons (see "Lunch With The Cryptozoologist," Private Wealth, March/April 2011). When interesting opportunities come along, I take the meetings. One recent example of this was two young men who wanted to get together with me after reading my book, The Family Office.
In their e-mails, they made a huge effort to emphasize that they were numbers 84 and 86. While this was clearly supposed to impress me, I had no idea what they were talking about. But I took the meeting anyway because-after doing a little research-I had a fairly good idea of how much each of them was worth.
We agreed to meet at an office building in New York City. They arrived before I did. When I entered the conference room they remained seated, as one said, "I'm 84 and he's 86." I still didn't know what that meant and said so. With great pride and satisfaction, they explained that they were the 84th and 86th employees of a very well known, successful technology company. As early hires, they were given boatloads of options. Today those options, as well as the subsequent options and stock they've received over the years, have proved to be extraordinarily valuable.
What's important to recognize is that 84 and 86 are, aside from their wealth and exceptional computer programming skills, somewhat ordinary. Both are in their late 30s. One still lives at home with his mother and the other is proud to have had his own apartment sans roommate for almost a year now. During our three-hour meeting, they were incessantly texting on their smart phones. Later, I discovered they were texting each other about the meeting.
This was their first trip to New York. They flew coach after getting a good deal on Orbitz. (We did discuss the advantages and disadvantages, but mostly the advantages, of owning a private jet-an idea they warmed to immediately.) They were dazzled by the intensity of New York and were very excited to recount how amazed they were when a pregnant woman "beat them up" at the airport so she could take their taxi.
We spent most of the meeting talking about what they wanted and why. It was fairly easy to get a good read on them: their interests, goals and concerns. For example, when the topic of women came up-every time the topic of women came up-they giggled or smiled and blushed. Along the same lines, each one of them has an enormous number of "friends" that he has never met in person.
Why did they want to talk to me? They wanted to understand what a family office is and what it could do for them. They wanted to know the various family office options that were available and what I would recommend. I knew walking into the meeting that each of them had the financial wherewithal to either have their own single-family office or work with a boutique multifamily office. With the multitude of specialists who would happily assist them, the family office option is undoubtedly the direction they'll end up going.
While members of the plutocracy are choosing one variation or another of family offices to help them address their financial and personal affairs, what's more telling is the growing cohort of wealthy individuals who would never be considered part of the plutocracy-such as 84 and 86-that are just as firmly focused on being able to access and benefit from the broad array of family office services. It's from this dynamic and expanding cadre of personal wealth creators-significantly more so than from the ranks of the plutocracy writ large-that we'll see the greatest number of single-family offices being established and much of the client growth for high-caliber multifamily offices.
As an aside, one of the really big ad- vantages of working with 84 and 86 is that they've shown me some smart-phone tricks that I've used to impress my hard-to-impress tech support staff: my teenage son.