For Sales: Family offices aren’t just a significant source of capital, they’re a stepping stone for an impressive network and valuable business advice. Once you successfully establish a relationship with a family office, that partnership is likely to pay dividends for years to come.
Now in its 21th year, Family Office List continues to prove itself as a profitable and time-saving tool to our clients. Our family office lists are packed with hard-to-find information – the information needed to lay the groundwork for successful relationship building and valuable lead generation. Our family office lists serve as a solid base for you to continue research based on your requirements and needs, begin initial contact, and develop your own internal database.
Working a contact list takes work and perseverance. With our experience in the Family Office space, though, we know what works and what doesn’t. Having such a large platform of contacts can be daunting — but with the right guidance, it can provide unheard-of value.
Contents
- How to Use Our Family Office Lists at Every Phase
- Phase 1: Research
- Phase 2: Prepare Your Pitch
- Phase 3: Outreach
- Phase 4: Nurture and Maintain Relationships
- How to Use Our Lists for Data and Research
- How to Run an Email Campaign
- Additional Resources
How to Use Our Family Office Lists at Every Phase
Phase 1: Research
Our search and filter tools can help you find contacts in your industry so that you can narrow down a targeted list of the most advantageous family office contacts for your goals.
Make sure to do as much research as possible on each individual family office before crafting your pitch. Our lists provide you with the information you need to get your search started, like LinkedIn links, websites, and historic investment history.
No two Family Offices are the same. Do your research to understand what makes them unique and customize your pitch so they see the value of your opportunity. You want to know exactly what they’re interested in, who they serve, and why working with you will add value.
Tips for Research:
- With younger generations being included in the investment decisions, we are seeing a shift in tradition. Millennials that find themselves responsible for family offices are taking a new approach when it comes to helming the businesses founded by their parents or grandparents or managing their wealth: they’re more interested in building real, long-term relationships and making purposeful investments in causes they feel strongly about, including within the communities where they live and work. We’re finding they are more open to direct investments outside of their “trusted networks” and that they utilize technology more than ever. We’ve had great success communicating through Linkedin and have therefore recently added a column for contact profiles.
Phase 2: Prepare Your Pitch
Craft a pitch that’s short and to the point. Different investors prefer to be approached in different ways, so there definitely aren’t many one-size-fits-all rules. But as a general guideline, no one likes to have their time wasted.
Briefly describe who you are, what you are offering, why they may be interested, how much you need (or want), when the investor may get the investment back, and/or what the expected return will be. If you are a fund manager, briefly state your past returns, draw-downs, and experience.
Tips for Pitching:
- Before contacting a potential investor, make sure your offering documents are in order and your pitch or presentation is clear and concise. The last thing you want to do is waste your time and theirs. We offer customers of Family Office preferred pricing on our sister company’s professionally prepared private placement memorandums.
Phase 3: Outreach
It’s best to contact the investor in a direct personalized LinkedIn message or email. Make it short and to the point. Briefly describe who you are, what you are offering, why they may be interested, how much you need (or want), when the investor may get the investment back and/or what the expected return will be. If you are a fund manager, briefly state your past returns, draw-downs, and experience.
Tips for Outreach:
- You should never use a family office list in a mass mailing. This will not only damage the integrity of the list but will most likely classify your server as spam and block any of your future contact efforts.
- Carefully construct a concise email explaining your unique offering and what sets you apart from your competition.
- Focus on ways you can add value to each Family Office you approach. Align yourself in a way that you can first and foremost build a relationship before asking for an investment.
- Family Offices receive lots of solicitation. They are open to well-suited deal flow, but you need to be “to-the-point” in relaying how your opportunity uniquely benefits them.
Phase 4: Nurture and Maintain Relationships
Next, make sure to follow up. Even if a family office says no at first, it might be worth your time to continue to nurture the relationship, get to know the family office better, and develop a tighter relationship built on trust. This can open up opportunities with the family office or they may recommend you to a peer family office.
Tips for Nurturing & Maintaining Relationships:
- The best way to raise capital is through personal relationships founded on trust and confidence. Your approach will either begin to build the relationship or break it.
- Initiate an opportunity to meet face-to-face instead of simply pitching over email or the phone. We find trust-building through video calls or emails with invitations to meet in person to get more responses.
How to Use Our Lists for Data and Research
Family Office List isn’t just a great resource for individuals and companies looking for investors, it’s also a rich treasure trove of data. We offer a few different ways for you to comb through all of the data so that it can be more relevant for you, no matter your needs.
With Family Office List, you can view key data points for each family office, including:
- Assets Under Management (AUM): This is the total market value of the assets that are controlled by the family office.
- Source of Wealth: Whose wealth is represented by the family office and how it was earned. This can tell you a lot about the types of investments that the family office might be interested in.
- Investment Criteria: Some family offices simply don’t perform certain deals, whether that’s because they’re too expensive or they aren’t expensive enough. It’s good to know their parameters before you pitch them your investment.
- Investment History: See what deals a family office has made in the past to predicts the deals they’ll be interested in for the future
- Sectors/Industries of Interest: In ever-changing markets, Family Offices prefer to remain open to emerging opportunities. We constantly survey the contacts within our database and have rarely been asked to unsubscribe, in which we adhere. Deal flow is essential and as successful business owners, they know a good deal when they see one.
In addition to the above, there are search and filter tools built into our list that make it easier to find family offices that are the most relevant to you. That way, you can create targeted lists of potential clients. It might feel like the best strategy is to cast a wide net, but that’s definitely not always the case with family offices. You likely only need a handful of contacts to completely change the trajectory of your investment and career.
How to Run an Email Campaign with a Family Office List
After you’ve done your research, you need to craft a remarkable pitch. Since we’ve been able to see so many outreach attempts over the years, we’ve distilled certain lessons, but the key takeaway is to always understand your client’s needs and business. No one likes to feel like they aren’t being heard. If they aren’t in the market for a certain investment, it can be a waste of time and resources for both parties.