This is a very touching service.

Your family office clients must have many expectations. TRUE?

They do. Therefore, the consultant’s understanding of responsibility is different for a family office. For example, on less complex clients the expectation might be:

I have a mortgage; and if interest rates drop, I ask my financial advisor to proactively identify that issue and give me some tips and suggestions on places that can refinance my mortgage.

Now, on the family office side, clients are asking you to go out and find the best (remade) deal, negotiate, fill out the paperwork and bring it to them. And this goes back to management.

The difference is not the strategy part or the proactive advice. It is the responsibility of the administration, including filling out tax returns.

How much tax-related work do you do for non-family office clients?

We do tax strategy for all our clients, such as tax laws and things you should discuss with your tax advisor. But we do not file tax returns.

For a family office, we do all the administration, prepare paperwork, and file returns.

What is Aspiriant’s organic growth strategy?

Because our focus is on both our customers and consultants, most of our organic growth (new business) comes from referrals and external providers.

We work closely with centers of influence. We have a business development team, we have a digital marketing strategy, and we create a lot of content for our website.

We have a podcast called “Money Tales.” This is a place where customers go to hear people’s stories about their relationship with money.

What is your long-term goal as the leader of Aspiriant?

Working as a team to align with our clients (serving) and bringing the collective wisdom of our group of advisors to the (client) relationship.

How about acquiring other companies? Do you currently have any plans in this direction?

Yes. But we don’t make purchases. We do mergers, and we always have from the very beginning.

In our case, we are merging two organizations. Every partner in our firm has the same ownership rights and obligations. We are truly one partnership, an organization where people have different percentages of ownership.

What is your succession strategy?

This is a highly designed “funnel” of partners to keep the organization going. Every year we start new partners, and every year others retire.

So at any given time they have common progeny that are closer to retirement; and there are partners who marry and buy homes early in their careers.

Are there any companies you have in mind as merger candidates?

Yes. There are many large like-minded organizations and we are in ongoing discussions about combining them.

There are probably 75 firms that remain 100% employee-owned and could benefit from merging for more competitive growth.

This is a conversation we have all the time.

Please give me a historical summary of your merger activity.

We had our first merger in 2008. This was the largest RIA merger in the industry and was very attractive to other like-minded firms.

We made many other agreements until 2018. What changed was that private capital drove the value of an organization to a level never before possible.

This puts pressure on our merger model, which has struggled because of this, even though we’ve had a few mergers in the last few years.