In late 2020, the Saslow family office was in an “unstable” transition period.
The Saslows were restructuring the office that a manager, who wasn’t a member of the clan, had created, and some relatives were simultaneously withdrawing their money. Then the health of its founder began fast deteriorating.
Twenty years after a kidney cancer diagnosis, Scott Saslow’s father decided his treatment had become worse than his ailments. He wanted to live again without tubes, tests, and blood draws, even without knowing how long that might be. The patriarch died peacefully a week later. Then the manager of the family office resigned.
In addition to losing his father, Scott Saslow was suddenly tasked with rebuilding the organization created to manage his family’s wealth. Saslow, who worked at Microsoft and Siebel Systems before founding the Institute of Executive Development and One World, an impact investment firm, spent two years talking to consultants and other family offices while reshaping his own. He made plenty of mistakes along the way. So he wrote a book, hoping to help other families avoid the pitfalls. Building a Sustainable Family Office: An Insider’s Guide to What Works and What Doesn’t was published last week.
“If you do proceed, I think this would be really valuable for a lot of people. You’re willing to open up the kimono on something that just usually isn’t,” one of Saslow’s advisors told him.
What follows is an excerpt from Saslow’s book, which begins with him recounting a story about traveling to visit his ailing father during the pandemic.
“Are you familiar with the Challenger 300?”
The question startled me as I was looking out the window of the plane and onto the tarmac, gazing at other jets and wondering which was Sergey [Brin]’s or Larry [Page]’s. The rumor was that they had invested in this private airport facility in Silicon Valley that I was about to take off from — in a Challenger 300.
“Yes, I’m familiar. Thank you. I’ll get my seat belt on.”
With that click of the buckle, it all started to become more real, even the unreal parts of this day. I was the only passenger on a private jet about to travel from the Bay Area to Florida, with a stopover in the Midwest so that my siblings could hop in. We were traveling to visit my father, who was likely a few weeks from passing. It was also the middle of a global pandemic, when most travel of all types had halted. Oh, and I was going to Florida of all places. Though it’s normally a very pleasant place to visit, Florida in the winter of 2020 was experiencing one of the largest spikes in COVID cases in the country.
Just a few weeks earlier, on a chilly and overcast Saturday in November, I was in the checkout line at the Ace Hardware a few blocks from my home in California with my twelve-year-old daughter. She and I were working on a project to create a giant homemade foosball table requiring some new wooden rods. Waiting in line for a register to open up, I glanced down at my cell to see who was calling. It was my father, and that was a red flag. Speaking with him was a regular weekly occurrence — but it was always on Sundays. Something was not right, and I was a bit concerned, so I answered.
“Hi, Dad. Everything okay?”
“Yeah, all okay. Are you somewhere we can talk?”
Not good. “Let me call you when I am back home,” I said.
When I called back fifteen minutes later, he said, “Look, I just want to let you know that I am going to be stopping my dialysis.” My father had had kidney cancer twenty years earlier, and a remarkable surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic had artfully removed a portion of one of his kidneys, which allowed him many years of good living. Then, about five years ago, the first kidney failed completely, and the second one was not doing so well, so he had started dialysis. Now, with his general health failing, he decided it was time to stop and enjoy his last few weeks without tubes, tests, and blood draws. He said he thought it would be a good idea for me and my siblings to come and visit him. What he didn’t need to say was that this would be our last visit. This was in early December 2020, and for the history buffs out there, it was still the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic; the world was in a most unsettled place, to put it lightly. My poor aging father, off of his dialysis and very immunocompromised, was living in a region with one of the highest numbers of coronavirus cases. I booked my flight immediately.
My father was a sharp and successful businessman, and he was my hero in many ways. He always came up with a creative solution to most problems and could read a room beautifully. This was perhaps due to his military training; he had been an intelligence officer stationed in Korea for a few years right out of college. Over the years, I could go to him for any issue large or small. He was remarkable at remembering the important events in my life — what was up at my work, how my wife or kids were faring in their specific interests. He was also the initial source of wealth for my family. Dad taught me the best he could how to take care of my business, my wealth, and my family. He and I had this saying, “Ojos abiertos,” which loosely translates in Spanish to “eyes open” — a reminder to pay attention, to always be on the ball.
Within a couple of weeks, I realized, I would be losing him as a guiding light, and what I did with my life would truly rest on my shoulders. I’d be accountable only to myself, and also fully accountable for the wealth he had created and passed on to my family line. And to make matters more complicated, our family was in an unstable transition period with our family office, the business entity that cared for our family’s accrued wealth. For several years, we had worked with an external (nonfamily) office manager, hired to create and manage our family office. The last few months had been quite complicated; we were working on a new model of support from the manager, with the added challenge of some family members pulling capital out from the centralized structure. In short, there were a lot of moving parts and uncertainty as we tried to put this new structure in place. Back on the tarmac in San Jose, California, it was almost time for takeoff. I was starting the highly emotional journey of losing my father and the highly challenging journey of rebuilding my family office.
I flew to Florida on a Monday. Exactly one week later, my father passed peacefully, with my stepmother at his side. Approximately two weeks after that, the family received a resignation letter from our family office manager. As bad as the situation was — the emotional upheaval and sadness of losing my father together with the simultaneous family office uncertainty — my siblings and I knew we had to act quickly. When you are part of a wealthy family, even if you create a career path that is separate from the family business or family office, at some point, you can’t ignore the wealth. Believe me, I tried. For the first part of my career, I was keen to work in the technology sector and was employed in fascinating organizations helping to bring the internet and software into the mainstream. I later built a business in the leadership development field. I loved my work, in part because I worked hard to create it on my own. As family capital became available to me later in my career, I was certainly grateful for the position I was in and yet still kept that part of my life separate from my day job, at least for a while. After all, I didn’t think I’d earned the funds, and I didn’t think I was responsible for them, but I was.
I have been a principal in my family’s family office for the last twenty years, the last five of which involved me rebuilding my family line’s family office. This was a huge undertaking, and even with the best consultants and providers, I wish I’d had a book such as this one. I have spoken with dozens of other family principals who don’t feel they are as engaged with their family office as they can be, don’t feel as knowledgeable as they would like to be, and don’t feel their family office is meeting their needs. In many instances, family offices ultimately break apart, causing pain for the families and the broader society that benefits from the offices’ investing and philanthropic activities.
My intent in sharing my own story and what I’ve learned is to help other principals hear in detail, in an open and honest way, how another family office started, grew, and was rebuilt a few times. I want to share with you, the reader, not only what I did but also how I was thinking through the issue. Each family — and, therefore, each family office — is unique, yet some of the themes are universal. I hope that, by sharing my story, I help others think about where they are in relation to their own office.
