Charles Skorina & Company
● RETAINED EXECUTIVE SEARCH ●
Our Clients: Boards, Asset & Wealth Managers, Family Offices
We recruit CEOs and CIOs, advise on performance and pay, M&A consulting
LATEST NEWSLETTER
If you’re a great entrepreneur, you’re likely a pretty bad investor
Family office survival is no sure bet, according to Josh Baron and Rob Lachenauer, co-founders of BanyanGlobal Advisors. In fact, family-owned companies have a better chance of managing succession than the family investment office. But wealth preservation has never been easy. For those founders facing the perils of passing on the legacy, Messrs. Baron and Lachenauer have a few suggestions that just might help.
Their September 2022 article in Harvard Business Review, Is Your Family Office Built for the Future, highlights internal office tensions, the lack of emotional connections among generations, and unintentional dependencies.
The authors argue that family office founders face five key decisions which determine success or failure. They are:
- Design: How will you own your assets together?
- Decide: How will you structure governance?
- Value: How will you define success for your family office?
- Inform: What will and what won’t you communicate with your family?
- Transfer: How will you handle the transition to the next generation?
Family office clout
It’s tough to get a handle on how many family offices there are in the US, the assets they control, or their objectives because most prefer to stay unnoticed. But no matter how you count them, they are a significant force for investment and philanthropy.
An oft-cited Campden Wealth study estimates roughly 3,100 large single-family offices in North America, 42 percent of the global 7,300.
Forbes reported in 2020 that the top fifty wealthiest US families alone were collectively worth about $1.2 trillion.
Casting a broader net, Credit Suisse counts about 140,000 ultra-high-net-worth individuals in the US with wealth over $50 million.
While endowments and foundations get most of the attention, the family office universe is larger, growing faster, and doing a great deal of good while doing well.
So, what’s on their minds?
Family dynamics, more than money
Read More »NEWS AND COMMENTARY
ABOUT
Edgar Smith, first CIO at Directors Guild of America, Los Angeles
10yrs USC, 3yrs Archstone, 5yrs PAAMCO, 3yrs JPM, MBA, Columbia, BA, Yale
Pasy Wang, first CIO at Cedars-Sinai, Los Angeles
Sonali Dalal, inaugural CIO University of St. Thomas, MN
19yrs Penn State, 5yrs Export Import Bank India, MBA, Penn State, BA, Bombay University
Angela Miller-May, new CIO at Illinois Municipal Retirement Fund (IMRF)
11yrs Chicago Teachers’ Pension, 13 yrs Fiserv, MBA, DePaul, BA Northwestern
SKORINA IN THE NEWS
9-2-21 Forbes: Insiders say Yale missed an opportunity to add diversity to its iconic $31bn endowment.
9-1-21 Institutional Investor: How to Reach the Allocator C-Suite.
5-7-21 BloombergNews: Yale Names Alex Banker Interim Endowment Chief, Plans Search
5-6-21 The New York Times: David Swensen, Who Revolutionized Endowment Investing, Dies at 67
5-6-21 Forbes: Yale Endowment Chief David Swensen Leaves Legacy of Top College Investment Leaders
CHARLES A. SKORINA & COMPANY works with leaders of Endowments, Foundations, and Institutional Asset Managers to recruit Board Members, Executives Officers, Chief Investment Officers and Fund Managers.
Mr. Skorina also publishes THE SKORINA LETTER, a widely-read professional publication providing news, research and analysis on institutional asset managers and tax-exempt funds.
Our Practice:
• We recruit Board Members and Executive Officers, Chief Investment Officers and Senior Asset Managers.
• Our research and analytics are backed by over thirty years of hands-on recruiting experience and an unrivaled personal network.
• We collect performance, compensation, and background data on most senior institutional investment professionals in the U.S. and the funds they manage. We analyze that data to construct profiles of those managers and their funds, identify best-in-class people, and map their career trajectories.
• We share our research and insights in a widely-read professional newsletter – THE SKORINA LETTER – and website – www.charlesskorina.com.
• The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Thompson Reuters, Financial Times (Fundfire), Institutional Investor, Pensions & Investments, Private Equity International, and the institutional investment community use our research and analysis. Skorina has been interviewed on chief investment officer compensation issues on Bloomberg TV.
• Our work is regularly re-printed in Allaboutalpha.com and other industry magazines, blogs, and third- party web postings.
• We focus specifically and effectively on the world we know: Board members and Executive Officers, Chief Investment Officers, and Senior Asset Managers at institutional investment firms and funds – including sovereign wealth funds, endowments, foundations, pension funds, banks, investment banks, outsourced chief investment officer firms (OCIO), and sell-side money managers.
Prior to founding CASCo, Mr. Skorina worked for JP MorganChase in New York City and Chicago and for Ernst & Young in Washington, D.C.
Mr. Skorina graduated from Culver Academies, attended Michigan State University and The Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey where he graduated with a BA, and earned a MBA in Finance from the University of Chicago. He served in the US Army as a Russian Linguist stationed in Japan.
Charles A. Skorina & Co. is based in Tucson, Arizona.
Family Office direct investing: the thrill is gone
No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else. — Bill Joy
Large family offices over $5 billion AUM with five or more years of experience running in-house direct investing programs now have the data to assess their efforts. From what we hear, for many families, it’s just not worth the effort.
Attribution studies conducted recently by a number of family office investment staffs conclude that they would have been better off buying an index.
Our clients and contacts cite three reasons for their disappointment, public market performance, high costs, and competition.
A few caveats. We usually provide data to back up our thesis, but in this case, due to the sensitivity of our sources (i.e., the career limiting nature of any disclosures), our comments will have to be anecdotal.
Also, the SFOs we spoke with on background regarding direct investing made their money from tech, energy, and manufacturing, not finance.
It’s tough to beat public markets
US equities set a particularly high hurdle for performance this past decade and over longer periods remain a hard mark to beat.
Here’s a snapshot of the S&P over the last twelve years along with some international peers.
(S&P 500 12-yr performance 2022)
Lamentably the stock market took a nasty fall this year after capping an extraordinary run in 2021, but for long term investors it’s hard not to embrace public equities.
Since 1945 the S&P increased on average about 11% annually, posting an inflation-adjusted return of 7.14% per year. More than enough to provide comfortable payouts for generations of happy heirs.
High costs
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