Arthur's Round Table Podcast with Dr. Kirby Rosplock.

0:01 Hello, Welcome everybody to another episode of Arthur's Round Table. Super happy to do the podcast with lots of interesting folks here, including Kirby and I I think we've known each other for what, 10 years on some level, right, for that period of time and really interesting business. Yes, for sure. Yeah, thank you for saying that. So this is family office related subject matter. So super happy for everybody to tune in and listen. And thank you for joining us today. So Kirby, let's do a little like beginning of the journey and how this all came about, how you formed the two companies.

0:41 There might even be more that I don't know about. And then we can get a little bit more into the detail of of not only what those companies do, but what you're learning as you're in the crossroads of very interesting people in the family office world. So thanks for doing this. Oh, it's my pleasure and I just feel really lucky to spend this time with you today. Wow. My journey is complicated, like probably many of your guests, but sometimes I say I won the DNA lottery and that I was born into a pretty successful enterprising family and had no hand right and their success. I just sort of SAT table stakes and sort of learned by osmosis. My dad worked for his pretty much his whole career as a married in and it was a timber business that went back to the late 1800s, so kind of old money. And so, you know, I grew up sort of observing complicated family business dynamics, complicated estate planning and trust and wealth transfer plans.

1:52 Of course, I didn't like know that as a young person. I still think of myself as a young person even though I'm really not that young anymore. And. Me too, but. I know right? So I I vicariously lived through my younger self. So when I was growing up, I probably wanted to get as far actually from the family business, like vernacular as possible. And then as I got older, college and Graduate School, I sort of was trying to figure out where was my place. And there wasn't a place, to be perfectly honest, in our family business.

2:33 And I was sort of like frustrated by that, but at the same time, like, I'm going to prove yourself, prove myself that I can do all these other great things independently. But I kept coming back to like, what is my relationship to my family members as owners, to my family, as stakeholders, to this family legacy that I never built, I never created. I can't take any ownership of. But like, how do I own who I'm going to be vis A vis what I came from? And I think that's a very common like situation for families and family members who are trying to understand, you know, where am I pointing? And so I ended up, you know, doing an MBA and and degree in psychology with Dennis Jaffe and went on to work through the financial track broker dealer, RAA multi family office, really thinking like I'm going to be something different than what I came from.

3:28 And interestingly enough, it all ended up like pointing me back to that sort of origin of like complexity of family, family dynamics, ownership structures that go around wealth, business ownership. And I in 2013 wrote the complete Family Office Handbook coming out of this multi family office that I worked for. And you know, honestly, I wrote that book not really knowing what it would start for me, but it ended up starting a decade long consulting business, Tamron Partners. People say Kirby.

4:09 Why Tamarind? It's such a weird name. And I was like, well, because I didn't want my. Name. Yeah, I was going to ask you that. Yeah. Yeah, I was like, I didn't want my name on the business and I didn't know if I'd have partners and I didn't know what that would look like. But tamarind itself is a very strange. Is it a fruit? Is it a spice? And depending if you're from the east part of the country or world or the West, you think of it in very different ways. And I thought of it as a perfect metaphor for family office because you've heard the, if you've seen one family office, you've seen one family office. Well, it's true. The interpretation of like tamarind means very different things depending on where you sit, where you're from. So that's how Tamarind got into the name Tamarind Partners. And I didn't really.

4:57 Know, thanks for explaining that because I was wondering it too, yeah. Yeah, I had no idea that the phone would start ringing. So they wrote the handbook and wanted to like come at it differently because I felt like so much of the education in the early 2000s, 2010 time frame was only coming from commercial sources. So you only learned about a family office at, you know, at some level from provider that was family office service delivery motivated. And I'm like, well, what if, what if you could just get unfettered information around what family offices are doing the.

5:38 Research. Yeah, so independent and with nothing to sell, like there wasn't some ulterior motive. And then the phone started ringing asking, hey, could you help us, Kirby, We're curious. We need some help on everything from how to think about setting and starting up and do we need an office to. Boy, we have some complicated planning considerations and how should we be approaching and thinking about the critical issues to work through complicated decision making to we want to have a more robust governance structure. We're not sure what that looks like even all the way to the transformation of offices.

6:22 If we've seen family offices that have been more private equity motivated and driven and you can imagine the people who work inside of those offices are paid differently then say a lifestyle services admin office. And even to families that get to this place where they're like, boy, we need to reinvent. Our office really made sense for the founder generation, but moving into G2 and G3 it, it doesn't have the same gravitas. We need to reinvent, reinvigorate, re inspire our raison d'etre, like why are we doing this for the family to even offices that say, you know what, we don't need to be anymore. So winding down an office is probably equally as challenging as setting one up because you got to have the integrity of the services all the way until that office actually no longer exists.

7:21 So those are like some of the crazy interesting kinds of families and family office structures that I've gotten to work those scenarios over the last decade. And then around 2016 time frame, we had a really fascinating family we worked with who was facing a lot of owner beneficial owner education needs. And there was a first family and a second family. And there was a need to provide bespoke education, but safe, secure, like giving them more time to learn, not just in bite size boardroom moments when education gets jammed down your throat and then you're like, oh, now you have to react to the education and make a decision.

8:12 So that's sort of what inspired Tamron Learning, which is the Edtech separate company from Tamron Partners and to develop bespoke curated education that really helps adult learners. Let's be clear, we don't teach anybody's, you know, we think there's a lot of great consultants and advisors who do that work. At this point, our education is really geared towards, I would say the 182535 even I've had 6070 year olds go through it, but it's really more around stewardship, wealth transfer. What does it mean to be a good beneficiary? How does trustees operate?

8:53 What are their duties, responsibilities? What do they do from a trust administration standpoint to how does the state planning really work to me as a layperson versus somebody as a drafter or an attorney giving estate planning advice? How do taxes work? All, all kinds of taxes, not just estate plan like estate tax to income tax, but you know, basics of foundation tax, all that kind of stuff to investments, finance, working with advisors. So we have course on a family office. So there's just a whole broad scope of what I would call the foundational things that you need to know if you're born in like I was into a complicated family, or if you're, you're, you grow up in a family that builds wealth. And then you realize I have actually different choices that I can make, maybe because I don't necessarily have to have a traditional career path.

9:59 And so you know, that's it's really important to understand how you fit in. And so back to one of my early story about like how did I get started? It's interesting because I never knew where I fit with our family. I did, it did, interestingly enough, get put on our board of directors towards the end of our operating companies lifetime. And then we eventually sold several operating business companies that netted the family a lot of liquidity. And that actually that transition of my family going through a massive liquidity event was also what inspired me to write the Family Office Handbook. So again, it's sort of circular of coming back to this desire to educate and empower owners to be good responsible stewards, but also to be like thoughtful and the intention and the design and the direction that they really want their families to go. Kirby, Did the incentive to create the learning component come from the Next Gen. which is often called Next Gen. Or was it mostly the married in beneficiaries or the subsequent family members that asked for it? Or was it the the founding family patriarch of matriarch saying, listen, we need to to,

11:33 to work on this and give, give our beneficiaries, let me just call it that for a minute, some guidance on what's really going on here and it doesn't have to come from us. Really great question and I would say yes, yes to most all of those contingents. But I will tell you it was our vision to implement it through technology because I don't know that they had a vision for how to deploy it. But I think what became crystal clear in that first case was, and again, this is pre COVID, right? So Ed tech was not like that exciting pre COVID?

12:17 Nobody really. Wanted like you could actually get, you can actually have a meeting, right? Yeah, so. For us, I think the motivation was this family was all over the map physically, like they were on all these different jurisdictions and locations. Then there was like the level of learning, like the knowledge level was we had JDL. LMS and accountants to we had people who barely, you know, scraped through high school or college and then we, so we had a huge learning curve. And I know that at the founder level, there was tremendous urgency to make sure that family members as owners were really clear on some of these complicated pieces of estate planning and trust and ownership.

13:07 And we just didn't feel like we could spend enough time in person. To get all that communicated. In in a succinct form, what what subsequently has mushroomed, I think from that first client is we've learned from hundreds of families now how they want to adapt what we've built to, to work for them. So whether it's cousins coming together saying we're going to learn together and have a spark plug like a learning champion inspired from the family, or it's the advisor saying I don't want to build a curriculum, but I want to ride shotgun and be there to mentor and advise on bespoke pieces like you know, this, this lesson is critically important and and you're learning.

13:56 About how to read a trust, I'm going to upload your trust instrument so we can talk about your actual trust and it's dispositive provisions. So why was it, in the case of the first engagement that it was urgent to the founder or family member? So they were going through. Estate planning stuff and learning, Yeah, there's a little delay. Sorry about that. No, no, that's OK. So there was there this urgency arose because they needed actually owners to sign off on certain things, certain transfers.

14:40 And so they didn't want family to like go into it blindly and unknowingly. And I think what's interesting when people get to that age of majority is that. It's hard, right to treat them in the adult capacity to make decisions if they really have never had experience, haven't had training, aren't necessarily operators. And So what a lot of families don't think about is that they're rising. Jen may be put into positions early in adulthood where they don't actually have the chops, like they don't have any requisite experience or training to be able to make pretty sophisticated decisions.

15:28 And I always look at it like, Oh my gosh, you de risk your portfolio 'cause you talk to your investment people about hedging or like how to make sure you're perfect protected on downside risk, right? But then these family members don't look at their family in the same capacity where they don't think about de risking situations as as they know. They're aging, no. Yeah. And so I, I give a lot of props to this family because one, they trusted us to do something that was really out-of-the-box at the time. And then 2, they had the wherewithal to say we really need to prepare all the family owners regardless of how knowledgeable, how experienced, how seasoned so that when they're signing off and like making these decisions and agreeing to certain contracts and changes in the trust structures.

16:26 That they really unders, they're informed, they're informed owners and and you think about it from a liability standpoint, right? You know when you sign something and you don't know what you're signing? Not good. Yeah, yeah, there's always a little crack in the door, right? Yeah, exactly. So how did that evolve to not how, because we understand how, but what does it look like now if somebody said to you, OK, we understand what your services are, explain that to us a little bit more and how do we engage you?

17:10 And, and part of my question, Kirby, forgive me, but it's in the context of assuming you have to make money at this. And I'm not trying to be a smart ass, but in your business, this construct for the education has to be funded for you to do the work, right. So give us a, give us a a view of how that works. Sure. So you know, Tamron Learning is now five years old, which is a huge milestone. We're excited that we've survived COVID because honestly, we launched as COVID started in 2020 and adoption wasn't. I mean, people were like, oh, this is novel. This is interesting.

17:53 But everyone was like hunker down into trying to solve for their immediate, you know, concerns with what was going on. So what is it? Oh, it's saying it can't access my video. Can you see me or am I frozen? I can see you, but you're not moving, but just keep on, OK, Keep on going if you can hear me because it usually fixes itself. OK. So if it doesn't tell me because then I can always turn it on and off. OK, there we go. So what it looks like today is very different than what we built for that first family.

18:38 That first family, we really built a bespoke system and we said, how can we democratize learning? Because we knew that there's an inordinate amount of expense to build a a custom learning management system for that one family. So we said, is there a way to learn a lot from that first family and make this accessible? And what is it that every beneficial owner, be it of wealth or business or multiple businesses, what do they need to know to be prepared to be good stewards or just to be good activated citizens in the world? So that first family gave us the gift of inspiration, but also the gift of saying how do we bring this down? How do we make it more accessible? And so we ended up building our technology and we built a more sophisticated tech stack.

19:36 So we included things like a document repository. A discussion board, the ability to have an online notebook, all these sort of features that honestly, when you go to our big box Ed tech competitors, it's it's much more geared towards like a high school or college kind of student engagement. And so ours is more accustomed to call it the high net worth, ultra high net worth sort of tech stack. And it's more sophisticated in that, you know. It provides a lot more interactive and multimodal learning. So instead of like a talking head with pictures of like slideshow going by, we don't have that type of learning. We have a much more we have animated case studies. We have the ability to read or listen to every page that you see in your learning experience.

20:33 And that's, that becomes a much richer experience for someone going through it because if I'm a visual learner and auditory learner, a kinesthetic learner, like I'm going to be able to get that information differently. And so today what's really markedly different is now you can assess where you are in terms of all these different learning areas. You can create a custom learning path and sort of pick and choose the courses you want to go through and which order. You can decide if you want to have your advisor be the person mentoring you through the coursework if that's what you want. So we don't like disintermediate, A banker, a financial planner, an estate planning attorney, a tax advisor, your family office professional. So that makes it like, oh, the professionals of the world can use our system and now have a, a solid curriculum that, by the way, has no sponsorship, no ads, no one pays to be in our system and we don't pay anyone to be in our system. So then that creates a very ivory snow. There's no, there's no ulterior motive. We're not trying to sell you something. Yeah, right.

21:48 So who pays for it at that point? Yeah. So our primary clients are high net worth or ultra high net worth families, family offices. We have some professional service firms who see this as an adjunct to support the service for their clients. And then we do have some institutional clients that white label our stack, our tech stack and then they use it as another adjunct to service or another even line of business in some cases where they're saying education is a service that we provide for families. That we work with.

22:31 And so in the spirit of having more people know about this because I knew it existed, but I didn't know what you just told me, which is it's a robust system and has multiple methods of accessing it, is what's the most interesting customer for you or a series of customers? Well, they're all kind of interesting. I don't want to like say that, but I think when when we work with families, I mean, I had a call this morning with a family office professional who's like, I'm trying to figure out how to get to know a whole body of rising Jen, call it in their 20s and 30s.

23:18 And when we started talking, she's like, Oh my gosh, this is the vehicle. Like this is the perfect way for me to create a lot of stickiness and connection with these individual family members, to meet them where they are, to know the issues that they're facing and get to the why of what they need to know more about to be, you know, either more involved with the governance of the family wealth or track to be in some sort of employment capacity. Or you know what? They don't want to have anything to do with the family wealth or family business. They just want to be good stewards and they want to kind of know the boundaries of what they can do and not do. And this helps them be educated. So that's a profile we see a lot. We also see advisors who say, I want to be able to do more with my clients and I'm really excited to find a way to bridge to other family members that my client has in their ecosystem. And they see this as a way that's convenient. It doesn't feel like.

24:21 My bank or my institutions trying to sell them a product, but they can. I can partner with them in this learning experience. And it's safe and, and a lot of times the grantor or the parents feel like, you know what, this is great because they don't want XYZ institution to feel like they're pitching to my kids or my adult children. And I need them to have some independence on what they're learning. So then they can come back and sort of judge what they want to do or not do. But then I'm not forcing them like to follow what we've done. So you know, I've seen it empower advisors, I've seen it empower rising Gen. family members.

25:05 I've seen it empower institutions to say we haven't been able to build this and we're fooling ourselves because compliance gets in the way of a lot of great ideas because they say no, education is marketing. Marketing cannot be, you know, this, this and this. And we because we sit, you know, outside of some of that compliance purview, we often times can do the right education that's needed that doesn't get approved when it's through their exact channels. So how hard is it? I'm super curious about this.

25:47 You've, you've done the heavy lifting of building it. How hard is it as a business to keep it robust and running and up to date? I mean, that's got to be a pretty big task, right? Well, it's it's a every day is a new day and an Ed tech company and I feel really blessed because we built technology is critical to that question. If you don't have good tech, it's not going to, it's not going to last. But we've been able to build a very robust tech stack that allows instantaneous ability to, you know, impact change. So I'll use the the big beautiful bill as an example. You know, when a lot of that got pushed through, we were immediately able to change real time like the same within the same day content in our tax lessons to bring that in and be make those changes.

26:55 So unlike many of the Ed tech companies that will have their technology folks separate from, you know, their content folks, we're able to issue, spot and change things real time because of the way we built our technology. And we can be extremely responsive on, you know, client service issues. I mean, people will call us and say, I think this link is broken. Yes, we do have things that break because that's what happens in tech companies, but we can respond and fix things. Like. Real time. And then I'll also add that we've also, we have an AI initiative that's been going on for almost a year now.

27:41 And so we have launched AI inside of our closed system and that's been a game changer for the client experience and then also for our tech and course development. So I'm, I'm just imagining what the AI can do because it's pretty fascinating and pretty amazing. Let's just call it what it is. It has challenges, but for the most part, I'm just imagining that somebody has a question and rather than calling the customer service desk, they can ask the AI and the AI will produce an answer That at least is sufficient to get them to the next step, right?

28:26 Is that pretty part part of what you're doing? Yeah. So with our, it's called Ask Steward AI and within our platform, when you're going through the courses, whichever course you're in, we have trained the AI to be able to understand like all the learning assets, which we have hundreds and hundreds of, you know, curated content that we have permission to use. And we're able to have it be able to answer more complex questions. If you, you know, want to learn more information about a topic that's in the general category, that course that you're in, it will be able to, you know, give you deeper knowledge. It may be able to.

29:15 Could you restructure or reframe that for? Me in a high school level vocabulary or if you're asking for could you give me a checklist of the key points on what does it mean to be a good trustee? So it will be able to like learn because we've been training it to be able to respond. And then two point O we're not there yet, Arthur, Full disclosure, but two point O will be like Arthur logs in. He is an expert himself. He is an advisor. He leads family office professionals and groups. And it will know you so that when it's going through the, you're going through the curriculum, it will say, Arthur, you should check out XYZ because I know you. So it'll actually be able to help understand you as a persona and be able to engage you in the curriculum and say, this is going to be really meaningful to you or this might be meaningful to your constituents.

30:14 So that's like one example of how we're using AI, but it also might be used almost like as an instructor way. Hey, we see you're having, you're on this page a long time or maybe you want more questions to test your knowledge in an area. So it could also take on that sort of pseudo teacher function because we don't have a traditional teacher and any of our courses, we look to actually the person, the advisor, if they're going to take a person through it, or we look at the learner themselves as being able to drive how they want to engage with the content.

30:56 I think this is super cool, really, really interesting because I can just imagine, besides what you've experienced and shared with us today, how this could apply in so many areas. Because there's life experience is is a great teacher. But if you have some basic knowledge before you embark on something, then that gives you an advantage, right? It gives it gives you an edge. Really fascinating stuff, Kirby. Yeah, and AI is also being. Used OK. No, no, no, go ahead, Go ahead.

31:37 There's just. A little. I wasn't trying to move you along, but. No, it's good. I was going to share that. We have AI on the back end, so we've also trained AI to help us with course development. So you know, another thing on the horizon, Arthur, is like, you know, families come to us all the time and say we want bespoke, like you have to know us and we want like this curated like our information in the system. And we're like, OK, and, and we explained how you can do that to some degree today. But then in the future, again, sort of the next iteration of Tamron learning is using our course builder tool.

32:22 And right now we've trained the AI to know that we have treatments, We call them treatments, like certain things that become part of the learning experience, like deep dives, think about activities. And so imagine that someone comes to us and says we want to create a legacy course around our family. And here are 20 assets. Here's a video of the founder. Here's our biography of XYZ family members or the story of the founding of the company or companies. Here's governance, here's our family charter, here's our mission. Like all this information, right?

33:02 Bespoke. But now we can use that course builder tool to help formulate what would, what would your bespoke family legacy course or whatever you want to call it, what would that look like? And what would be the key learning objectives and what would be the most appropriate things to be activities versus readings versus video versus, you know, gamification and checks around your learning. So that's what's really also exciting with AI is that we're pushing the boundaries of course and course building and online instructional design. And then really in the future, I envision families will be able to want to white label it because then they'll be able to own, to some degree, custom curriculum that they're building.

33:52 What is it fair to describe that as a closed system LLM for the family? Correct. So in that sort of situation, to do the bespoken, the custom, more than likely families will buy their own instance, right, because they'll want their own closed system. And then they would potentially be able to like white label our content if they wanted that additional content, if they wanted just a clean license of our technology and to build everything from scratch on their own. That's a possibility too. And again, this is this is really on the cusp of the future of where we're headed.

34:38 But I think what's really exciting about it is that, you know, in the past, this technology just didn't exist, right? And you couldn't really do this. Through. Corsair or Khan Academy or some of the other Ed tech players out there. So I mean, I think this is where I see families moving, which is they want to have a way to communicate, educate and engage their family members to be part of the evolution because the the family office structures are evolving rapidly and we see all kinds of changes happening real time.

35:18 But it's really hard, especially if you have 2030 fifty, 100 family members. Like how do you keep them all on the same page beneficiary? Yeah, it's wild. Wow, this is super. Can you imagine us having this conversation even five years ago? The amount of man work hours, personal work hours, whatever that would require to create this sort of thing in without the the tech that is existing today. I mean you would have to spend so much time configuring this and building code and tech stack.

36:01 Not that it's simple now, but it's a lot easier. Yeah, it's, it's definitely a lot easier. But I will tell you the devil's in the details. And the challenge that even I think a lot of folks don't realize is that. You know it's. Taken us five years to amass the massive amount of content that we have today and and also keep it current, right, keep it relevant and like spot on. But I think the other challenge is to really curate to this audience. I mean, we talk a lot about financial literacy, but financial literacy, if you are, you know, say in the bottom third of the pyramid towards the middle third of the period pyramid to the top quartile. I mean, and, and a lot of times how you think about financial literacy looks very different.

36:58 If you have no savings and you can barely make ends meet to if you think about what you need for financial literacy, if you are in the top one or 10% who has more than they might ever need in a lifetime or lifetimes. And then how to think about like my relation to it and my, what am I supposed to do with the means that I have? So I really feel blessed because I think it's not been five years that we've been been building Tamron Learning. It's been my lifetime, right? It's been like all this knowledge that between books and white papers and meeting people like yourself and knowing the thought leadership. Because Tamron Learning is not what Kirby Rossbach thinks it is.

37:39 It's a whole Symphony of voices, thought leaders, experts from across the field. So that's the other thing. When we think about democratizing learning, you want to have the best and the brightest voices in your system, and you want to hear, hear real examples in real cases. You don't want to just hear what one person thinks. So that that's been another part of my mission, yeah. So super interesting. I'm, I'm so glad we talked about this because I didn't realize how much was really going on here. So thank you for that.

38:21 Can we talk about, and I have an agenda wanting to talk about this subject and it's mostly because I'm often asked for a resource to solve a problem that even though there are people selling things and they have highly developed skill sets to assess and analyze the situation. There is often times people are saying, look, I need somebody where we can just write them a check and we're going to get the real answer independent of what hidden or disclosed agenda might exist. So in your consultancy work, I see that as rare because I mean, there's lots of family office consultants out there, I think. But let's talk about that business model a little bit, if that's OK with you.

39:16 Sounds great. And no, I don't, I don't have any kickbacks or referrals from anyone. So like I'm not on the take secretly to push you to 1 broker or one RIA. And so it's actually been, you know, sort of how foundationally because I think as an owner, like I think as a family member first, I think as a consultant because I don't want to be sold anything myself. And you're right, it's really difficult to get unfettered advice because most of the time the people advising are like selling something else, like selling you an investment product or an insurance product or a financial plan.

40:00 And that's there's nothing wrong with getting getting education from somebody who. I agree. There's nothing wrong with that. Yeah, nothing wrong. But to your point, it's difficult to know what is actually motivating the information being conveyed. And I, I hear you where families will say, you know, can we just get the feedback, the advice, we'll make the decision on like what we're going to buy or what we're going to do and how we're going to proceed. But we don't want you coming with like an embedded product person or you know, and so that is one way that we do operate and function.

40:45 And often times we'll put together curated teams bespoke to, you know, the RFP or the issue at hand. And I, I would, Full disclosure, we're not like Bain or McKenzie or some massive, I don't have 20,000, you know, consultants on, on, on that side of the business. It's small, it's bespoke. We, we spool up and sort of figure out which kinds of families and family office RFP is. In fact, I just declined an RFP this week because I just said I don't have the bandwidth. So I'm, I'm not scalable. I can probably handle anywhere from 36812 mandates in a year. But as Tamron learning has actually grown, I recognize that I'm more scalable on that side and I can help advisors and families go further, farther, faster. And then I can only work hands on with like so many families at a time.

41:49 Yeah, that totally makes sense. The problem with this type of consultancy is exactly what you said, the capacity issue. But let's talk a little bit about what types of things, without disclosing what they are you've been engaged with. And what types of things would it would be if, assuming you had the bandwidth for a project are interesting to you and you could produce a good work product? Yeah. So I will tell you, I've gotten the chance to work with incredibly interesting families and family offices and I learned from every single one. So that's part of what you get when you work with me is that I haven't worked with one.

42:34 I've worked with like hundreds of different types of offices and, you know, from offices with. 34500 people in them like very, very large to family offices that have one or two. So I think the beauty of my background is the issues are all different, some that are motivated by the owners. And I'm being directly engaged by family themselves saying we want an audit of our office. We're not really sure how good we're doing. I've been brought in for those situations to we're in transition and I've been maybe reached out to by a family office executive who's saying the owners are not sure where they're going to take this next.

43:24 And we have our view, as you know, executives of what to do. But what have you seen other families do? Can you help us prepare for a major event? Like I worked for a family for several years preparing for trust termination and they knew that one these mega trust dynastic trust terminated. They had a lot of things that they needed to consider, like would family members leave? Would the PTC still have enough gravitas to, you know, keep it going? How are we going to reinvent the family office structure after that trust termination?

44:06 How do we prepare owners to think like owners versus trust beneficiaries? So these are sort of some of the things you know, don't come to Kirby if you want asset allocation, investment product, insurance strategies. I'm, I'm connected to all those folks, but that's not what I do. I'm not going to spool up an estate plan. I'm not going to do a Monte Carlo simulation, although we have we've done that. But I'm better served at what I call the owner office interface and the need for translating to owners sometimes what the office does.

44:48 And sometimes I'm used by the office executives to help impart to owners, you know, things that they they can't really champion. It might be perceived that they're being too pushy or like they're driving an agenda. So I'm usually like the truth teller between those two realms. If that makes sense. Yeah, totally makes sense. The and this, this question is driven by a current fact pattern that I'm been asked to look at. Have you gotten involved with crisis management consultancy?

45:29 We're not public relations crisis management, but holy, holy cow, we've got a really big problem here. Our staff is not equipped to look at this and we could go higher outside counsel, which we're going to have to do anyway. But how do we really position this so the outcome is not going to devastate the beneficiaries optically or economically? If you've been involved in all that, how about that for spooling it out? Yeah, so I have been brought in at different crisis points and some it's after like let's call it the nuclear event already happened and it's sort of like I'm. Triaging situations. And helping them come up with like an action plan of like, how do we look at this?

46:18 And no, I'm not going to do like the PR consulting for optics to the public on some kind of snafu, but I'm going to engage with them. I'm not going to be the one putting someone into treatment if it's like an addiction or a crisis of that magnitude. But I have the people to call and I know the best facilities to go to, right? So that, again, being in the middle sometimes means how to know to step up and what role I can play and not play. I don't typically like to be on the Kirby. Can you come mediate moderate like we're about to go to litigation in a family, which I've been in those situations too, where a family are ready to like.

47:07 But I've come in and I've said if you don't cut this out and you go to litigation, this is how much you're going to blow. And This is why solving it either through an arbitrator or mediator or conflict resolution specialist is going to probably preserve your corpus of wealth. Like I've So I've been in those types of situations. I fired families who brought me in at crisis points and saying you're not big enough or complex enough to use my time, like go find these parties to solve that, that, you know, conflict, if it's a conflict between parties. But you know, I don't get called Arthur. I don't nobody calls me because their office is awesome and everything is right and like I so, so truth be told, I only get the calls when like they're taking a big step in a direction that they've never done before and they feel uncomfortable. They have lost integrity in their structure like key people, family members are, you know, succeeding passed away. So it's usually something's dislocated and then they're saying, can you help us think through how to, to manage that transition or that transaction being at a wealth transfer event and IPOA liquidity event.

48:31 And I, I'm also a party to bring in to keep all the other parties honest. Because sometimes, you know, you see the sharky nature of advisors who then want to like, you know, grab hold of a family in their most yeah, their most yeah, their most vulnerable time. And and usually I'm I can help with my Spidey sense ferret out the folks that aren't above bore. So that's super interesting and helpful. Thank you. I have one last question and it's I am often asked to help people who have been in single family offices mostly have a role there to fix stuff, set up the estate planning, fix all the the entities, maybe put some technology in place, but not so much that, but have a highly paid active role to tighten everything up.

49:39 And then once things are tightened up, they depending on the nature of the single family office, they say, well, thanks very much. We don't have anything else for you to do. See you later. I'm purposely being dramatic about that. And so people come to me and say, I'm looking for a role in a family office, single family office and I'm going why? I don't know what that career path is. Explain to me what you hope to get out of this career path wise, aside from maybe making a bunch of money for a little while. Has your experience been the same and if so, can you tell us a little bit about what's going on in that world on the single family office side?

50:24 Multi family office is different I think. I I'm really glad you brought up that reality because I don't know many professionals who are jumping into this space. Understand that the setup and startup, the actual formation years of a family office and getting them up and running is not the same as operating and maintaining and monitoring and shepherding like the day-to-day business of a family. And so depending on the founder ethos around how they think about the family office, your job can feel frenetic and like putting your toes to the fire for those initial years.

51:07 And you might feel like you're King of the hill or Queen of the hill as you're getting everything up and running. But once it gets set up, it, it's usually not as sexy or as exciting to a lot of folks as you know it was when you're in the early stages. The, the monitoring and the maintenance right is if you're, unless you're very active now I'll say the founders that are very active and they, they want to spool up partnerships and they're buying businesses and they're doing. Interesting kinds of investing and those family office folks tend to to last 'cause they're they're constantly being given different mandates.

51:54 But the multi generational offices where we've got a set asset allocation, we're monitoring trusts and trust administration, we're paying taxes. Those are different types of operators than the entrepreneurial setup phase. And so I think you have to sort of know what is your skill set and what are you going to be excited to do because they're not the same people all the time. Very rarely actually do I see the people who do the setup and startups continue on in this expert, generalist and maintain. In maintenance mode, right? So what does that mean for people in the market and in the industry? It means there's a lot of shuffling of deck chairs. There's.

52:41 The first example that you gave of like the founder saying we don't need you anymore, I'm guessing that that's a pretty type AI want to drive the business? I'm going to run this. I don't really need you. I'll just manage my other providers who sit around me. But here's the kicker with some of those offices, when the founder goes down or when the founder wants to retire, I see often times that that next generation is like, no, that's mom's, that's dad's office. Like I don't really see that as mine. And they have a really hard time transitioning the succession of the office because they didn't really think about beyond the founder phase.

53:25 And so those really struggle to go into G2G3 and beyond and. Quite honestly, guess what? The founders find it difficult to attract the talent to do the transition work and. So we are, yeah, we're in a, we're actually in a really interesting semi crisis phase of families in transition because there's not enough qualified people to do the work. There's not enough families who've actually on boarded their family members to be. Thinking like owners of their office in the future. And so that apathy gap creates attention for a lot of families of like is.

54:10 Our family office relevant, should it endure? And I didn't really think about the problems of my children being owners and how to pass this on. They think about the wealth, right? They think about the business interest that they're passing on, but they don't think about the family office succession issues. Yeah, the the operating company as a family office and the option to go to a multi family office at that juncture is not always available or a good idea, right. Well, I mean, I've worked for a decade inside of one of those outfits and I will just say that their motivations are different and and I try to help owners think that an MFO or multi family office or family office services, whatever type of firm has to make profit.

55:12 Not all family offices make a profit, right? Many of them don't and they're scaling the service offering and a lot of single family offices are doing things one time. And so they don't necessarily think about the efficiencies, but the MFO thinks all about the efficiencies with who they attract as a client. And they are going to like operate within sort of this box and try to have you fit into their box. Whereas the single family office services is not that. It's usually like, what does the family want and need? What do they want to pay for? What do they think is relevant? And they'll like bleed out over those edges if the family says that's important to us.

55:57 Like so you know, when people say, oh, I'll just go to an MFO when we don't need a family office anymore. And I say, OK, well, you don't really control the time of the person who's your client advisor or service provider. And they might have 25 or 50 other families like you. So when you come with them with that urgent issue, right, it may be like 10 levels down before they get to it because they're, they're not the person that is on your payroll that will jump and do whatever you need in that moment. And, and guess what? They also might say no. They might just say we don't do that. We don't do that. Yeah, Yeah.

56:41 So that is also super helpful. This whole thing's been so much fun for me. I have to say that to you, but also very informative. And I would like to ask you in the next iteration, whenever that's stood up and ready for the learning component of the of the company, the term of learning, can we do this again so we can give people an update about how that's all working out? Absolutely. And I mean, I invite you, I invite your listeners, watchers to try it. You know, we have a course that's actually no, no charge.

57:22 We don't ask for any credit card information. If you just want to try it out and see what we're talking about, it's called stewardship. And there's a free trial and we're happy to make that accessible. And we're really, we're happy to share. There's a lot of free resources from free assessments, free links to financial literacy assessments, education planning tools and workbooks. So, you know, at the end of the day, the passion I have for that company stems from the fact that like, I just want folks to be empowered. But we'd be happy to come back and give you an update. And I, I just welcome the feedback, even have you jump in our system and say, what do you think, Arthur?

58:05 What are we missing? What's next? Yeah, I'd love to, yeah. So let's tell everybody how to find it like a website or URL. Yeah, so Tamron learning, so it's just tamronlearning.com. Now, if you're in Canada, we have a a Canadian curriculum as well. So that's Tamron learning.ca and that's spelled TAMARIND and then learning. And so Tamron Partners, you can find us@tamronpartners.com and you'll see more about the consulting side, but lots of lots of great resources that are free and accessible and we just want people to feel empowered.

58:47 Yeah, and I'd encourage everybody to grab the book too, because I have it in a box around here somewhere because we just moved into a new place. But thanks for for writing that. It's been super interesting to read as well. Really. Well, I might, I might be calling on you for some help with the 3rd edition because we're have a first and a second edition and, and I'm sure they'll be a third edition and, and I need your insights to Arthur. More, more, more than happy to contribute. Hope I can make a contribution. Kirby, thank you and thank you for doing this. Really, really appreciate. It's fascinating stuff. Thank you for making the time and joining us today and really appreciate it and please come back.

59:32 Oh, thank you. It's my pleasure. It's really an honour. And thank you, everybody for joining us today. If you were able to listen. And until next time, we'll we'll hope that you enjoyed this. And then also there's lots of other stuff on the Arthur's round table that might be interesting to you as well. Thanks, everybody. Bye. Bye. Yeah, Kirby, you can hang on for a second. That was awesome.