Charles Skorina & Company
● RETAINED EXECUTIVE SEARCH ●
Our clients: visionary families, transformative nonprofits, Wall Street trailblazers
Our vision: build investment preeminence, create opportunity, enrich lives
Our work: provide talent, access, relationships, and insights
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Money, if it does not bring you happiness, will at least help you be miserable in comfort. —Helen Gurley Brown
While family dynamics probably haven’t changed much since Count Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy wrote his famous line about unhappy families, the modern family office has come a long way from 1878 when Anna Karenina was published, adding structure, discipline, academic rigor, and, most importantly, convenience to the management of UHNW affairs.
Ultras place a premium on convenience and they are more than willing to pay for it. Whether it’s a dedicated family office or a cadre of wealth and client service providers, when you’ve made it big, you need a lot of help, as Deloitte explains in a recent report. There are operating companies and investment portfolios, estates and staff, trusts, foundations, donor-advised funds, art collections, cars, boats, and planes, accountants, lawyers, and specialized service providers.
Here to help
We’ve been sifting through this rarefied mix of New York wealth and family service elites, on assignment for a notable Wall Street firm. Our mandate? Recruit a professional client service maven who will make the partners’ lives easier and their balance sheets stronger.
Firms like Goldman Sachs, KKR, and McKinsey have dedicated concierge groups to service their partners. Goldman, in fact, just renamed their partners coverage group the “partners family office.”
One candidate with considerable experience working for billionaires described the work this way:
“My writ was straightforward, Charles: create wealth, reduce taxes, and mitigate risk. But the job was a little more complicated than that.
“Over the years, I’ve worked with experts on investments and allocations, restructured lines of credit, and arranged and refinanced mortgages. I dealt with accountants, attorneys, and realtors, bought and sold property, art, and collectibles, researched state and global tax domiciles, and negotiated loans on assets. Whatever the client wanted, you name it.
“But in this job you also have to read people and be the consummate diplomat. As families grow larger and wives and husbands come and go, competition increases for access and influence. Don’t ever forget who you work for.”
Where are the ultras?
It’s tough to get a handle on the number of ultra-high-net-worth families in the US, the assets they control, or their objectives because most prefer the shadows to the limelight.
In one widely quoted survey, Campden Wealth reckoned there were 3,100 large single-family offices in North America. The Family Office Exchange (FOX), on the other hand, cast a wider net, estimating closer to 10,000 SFOs given the relentless growth in global wealth.
As for billionaires, the Hurun Global Rich List 2024 counts one-hundred-nineteen billionaires in New York while Henley Global’s World’s Wealthiest Cities Report 2024 uncovered a mere sixty.
Chart: US cities with millionaires, centi-millionaires, billionaires
As an aside, of the roughly $83 trillion in wealth transfer over the next twenty years, according to the UBS Global Wealth Report 2024, “a notable amount of this wealth will move horizontally between spouses first, before moving to the next generation. In practice, this means a considerable transfer of wealth to women, considering their comparatively higher life expectancy.”
What’s a client service professional?
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ABOUT
Katharine “K.C.” Krieger, new CIO at The Getty
x CIO, The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation , x Cambridge Associates, BA Colby College
Vincent Tuohey, next president PRINCO
13yrs MITMCo, 2yrs Littlejohn & Co. 4yrs US Army Captain (Iraq), BA & MBA Harvard, MA Cambridge U
Mark L. Baumgartner, new CIO Ray Dalio family office
Edgar Smith, first CIO at Directors Guild of America, Los Angeles
10yrs USC, 3yrs Archstone, 5yrs PAAMCO, 3yrs JPM, MBA, Columbia, BA, Yale
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.
Following Next-Gen Money
When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is. — Oscar Wilde
An exceptional, highly successful family office client and I were discussing the differences in generations a while back and he characterized the divergences this way.
“Charles, my brothers and I slept two to a room in a tract home and sat at the family table each night for dinner. We grew up with a common set of values and beliefs. We have worked together all our adult lives, and I can’t remember the last time we had an argument. But our kids grew up rich, in separate households, with different friends and a diverse mix of views. We got an allowance, our kids have trust accounts.”
Next-gen heir-do-wells
We’ve all heard by now that the next several decades will see the “greatest transfer of wealth in history with $84 trillion expected to pass down to younger generations.” But what are the implications for asset and wealth managers? How are these next-gen heir-do-wells any different than prior generations?
Estimated Wealth to be Inherited
The UHNWs
At the heart of the wealth management mother lode runs the ultra-high-net-worth seam, households with net assets over $30 million. These denizens of El Dorado may represent just a sliver of the population – one half to one percent – but they control almost a third of the investable assets.
Altrata/Wealth-X estimates that about ninety percent of the current North American UHNW contingent are entrepreneurs and hands-on operators, mostly self-made men and women who are accustomed to being in control.
These wildly successful entrepreneurs have a hard time understanding what institutional CIOs do or why anyone would waste their time investing that way. Most would side with Andrew Carnegie, who once advised the students of Curry Commercial College in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to “put all your eggs in one basket, and then watch that basket.”
Different ages, different apps
Capgemini’s latest wealth report 2024, highlights the challenges of servicing this wealth tsunami, describing these next-geners as principled, passionate, and looking for more than just cents on the dollar. They are also comfortable with technology.
These digital immigrants, natives, and nomads want their assets globally accessible, kept safe, and managed well, but unlike prior generations they don’t always need or want human contact.
The London-based KnightFrank Group notes that “we’re talking about a cohort that is seeking a wealth manager who is on their wavelength, if indeed they want to deal with a human at all.”
As an aside, an executive at a major west-coast software company told me recently that technology is moving so fast that age groups (and the firm’s employees) just a few years apart use completely different apps to connect and interact. From text to TikTok in the blink of an eye.
Mission-based, promise driven
Americans by nature are a generous people giving almost half a trillion dollars to charity in 2022. UHNWs topped the list, contributing almost five percent to total individual donations of $319 billion. But that’s not all.
The UHNW cohort cares deeply about their causes and they drive foundation formation which, in turn, gave an additional $105.21bn in 2022. There are well over 100,000 private foundations in the U.S with AUM totaling about $1.4 trillion, 3,300 of these have AUM over $50 million.
The next generation of philanthropists will want help from their advisors as they align their investments with their philanthropy.
Suzanne Brenner, partner and former chief investment officer at Brown Brothers Harriman, puts it this way “research shows millennials are twice as likely to invest in companies that make a positive impact. It’s important that we understand not only what they want to do, but that we all understand what defines success.”
Jon Hirtle, executive chairman of Hirtle Callaghan, describes the commitment to mission-based wealth management as promise driven.
“We promise our families that we will continue to live in a certain way, we promise to support the causes we care for and often we promise to help provide for our children and grandchildren.”
Here’s a breakdown of those promises in the two charts below. Data from the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, Indiana University.
US Charitable Giving in 2022 by Donors/Recipients
Final thoughts
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