For Sales: With a three-pronged approach focused on real estate, agriculture, and Africa’s booming tech sector, Verdant Frontiers works to create sustainable, life-changing jobs while generating compelling investment returns.
Verdant Frontiers recently turned to Family Office List to help expand its fundraising base and improve fundraising efficiency.
Successful Outcomes
- Improving fundraising efficiency by allowing Verdant to target investors who have expressed interest in its offerings
- Establishing stronger and more significant partner relationships to expand Verdant’s reach to family offices
“We have investment opportunities where investors don’t have to choose between making a life-changing impact and getting financial returns. A lot of people see those as mutually exclusive … we think that the best investments in the best businesses are both.”
Scott Friesen, Founder and CEO of Verdant Frontiers
The Client: Verdant Frontiers
Verdant Frontiers aims to become the Berkshire Hathaway of Africa, with three areas of focus: real estate, agriculture, and technology
Verdant Frontiers began its work in Africa after the U.S. Embassy identified a pressing need for high-security African housing from both a seismic and a safety perspective. Within just a few years, Verdant Frontiers filled this gap by developing a 90-unit compound in Kenya and a 112-unit compound in Ethiopia.
Verdant Frontiers also has acquired two 1000+ acre citrus and avocado farms with a goal of building a portfolio of commercial farms in Africa growing citrus, avocado, and nuts. Over the next decade, Verdant Frontiers hopes to create 30,000 orchard jobs and grow this portfolio to a $1 billion value.
Finally, Verdant Frontiers has deployed a three-prong approach to participate in Africa’s expanding FinTech industry.
- Operating a FinTech venture capital fund
- Operating a startup studio to develop technology to fill gaps in the market
- Acquiring a financial institution to create a middle-class mortgage market
This multifaceted model allows Verdant Frontiers to fully immerse itself in the African industry, creating jobs and generating value for investors.
The Challenge: Improving Efficiency While Continuing Expansion
After raising more than $140 million from investors, Verdant Frontiers found its fundraising and outreach processes were becoming more time-consuming.
And with the increased public interest in social impact investing, Verdant Frontiers knew that to move to the next level, it needed to streamline.
This meant targeting family offices instead of just individual investors to provide a broader distribution of opportunities and create new partner relationships.
The Solution: Joining the Family Office Ecosystem
Family Office List quickly connected Verdant Frontiers to other service partners that were already part of the Family Office List “ecosystem.” With one partner company regularly pitching to family offices, and another specializing in family office digital marketing, these connections have already laid the groundwork for tangible rewards.
One unique benefit Verdant Frontiers quickly realized was that Family Office List’s data allowed the company to shift from “cold pitching” to marketing its unique investments to those who have expressed interest.
According to Scott Friesen, Co-Founder at Verdant Frontiers, “the prospecting comes through our network of relationships, but you just never know, what’s a good fit? Who is interested in investing in Africa? And so, being able to filter the list [of family offices] and have people that have a stated interest in investing in a particular region is really helpful.”
Verdant Frontiers also appreciated getting a detailed list of contacts within each family office. Not only did Family Office List provide Verdant Frontiers with basic office demographics like assets under management and focus areas, but it also allowed the company to review family office contacts to see whether any existing connection points were available. This information helped Verdant Frontiers create relationships with these offices more organically—a good starting point for a long-lasting partnership.
While Verdant Frontiers partnered with Family Office List only recently, its founders remain confident that the relationships they’re building now will help them push their innovative company into the next frontier of social impact investing.
In Summary
Verdant Frontiers reached out to Family Office List with a unique problem—it had raised capital from so many individual investors that its outreach process was becoming less and less efficient. By working with Family Office List, Verdant Frontiers was able to target more family offices and target family offices that have a specific interest in the investments that Verdant Frontiers offers. This strategy will likely allow the company to raise more capital without pitching to more clients.
If you’d like to learn more about Family Office List and how your company can benefit from its well-researched client lists, please contact us today. Our services are uniquely tailored to each partner’s needs, and we’ll work with you to identify your goals and help you achieve them.
Worth Avenue Yachts is a premier yacht brokerage firm that goes beyond selling and listing boats.
“One of the other things that we do as yacht brokers is that we act as consultants,” explains William Baldwin, broker.
In addition to managing luxury yacht listings, the company also facilitates charters and new yacht construction.
“We also advise comps and other market analyses to price yachts correctly and make informed consultations. This helps us coordinate surveys, sales agreements, and closing documents.”
With yacht prices starting in the low seven figures, these luxury seacrafts require an incredibly targeted strategy that demands heavy networking among high-wealth individuals. Baldwin quickly discovered that he needed a faster, more efficient method for identifying prospects across the country.
Below, we discuss how Family Office List stepped in to help Baldwin identify and build the connections he needed.
Positive Outcomes
- Worth Avenue Yachts secured a number of listings using Family Office Data
- Family Office List helped Worth Avenue Yachts streamline its outreach by providing quick and immediate access to a broader network of high-value individuals
- When contacting family offices, Worth Avenue Yachts was able to craft a personal and more effective outreach with data from Family Office Lists
- Family Office List enabled Worth Avenue Yachts to better leverage their internal marketing data to identify active Yacht Club members within the Family Office community to better contextualize new relationships
“The contacts I made through Family Office List by far paid off more than contacts I made through cold calls.” William Baldwin
The Challenge: Identifying Prospective Customers
The yacht brokerage business, just like any other ultra-high-end real estate brokerage, is all about your contacts.
When a family office wants to purchase or charter a yacht, it’s not by browsing the internet—it’s by leaning on its connections and talking to trusted peers to find the right vendor.
Knowing that personal connections were key to these yacht transactions, Baldwin felt his cold calling and generic research weren’t enough.
He had difficulty gauging potential customers’ interest before reaching out, wasting time and energy. And when he did reach out, he couldn’t access the right information to make a key personal connection.
Furthermore, because family offices tend to keep low profiles, Baldwin found himself reaching out on less formal channels, like social media, which he says isn’t necessarily where his target audience typically conducts business.
The Solution: Immediate Access to Family Office Lists
Clients like Baldwin and others in the luxury service market have found Family Office List’s contact lists incredibly valuable.
Baldwin was able to start his research with a quick search in the database for the term “yacht,” bringing up family offices with an interest in boating.
“There are a lot of fund managers and members of family offices that are very interested and yachting,” said Baldwin.
The platform’s search capability eliminated the need for the “spray and pray” approach that static and less detailed lists encourage. No one enjoys putting others on the defense from irrelevant cold calling, so the invaluable data of these family offices’ interests made outreach better received.
With family offices readily providing referrals to each other, Family Office List’s contact lists allowed Baldwin to make personal connections quickly and significantly expand his universe of potential clients and customers.
More specifically, Family Office List’s data can be filtered by assets under management, allowing Baldwin to target only those with sufficient levels of wealth to support a yacht purchase or charter.
Generally, $100 million is the baseline AUM threshold for single-family offices, while multifamily offices may manage several families’ assets to allow them to reach that $100 million threshold. By focusing on those family offices at the top of the AUM list, Baldwin can ensure that his marketing efforts are landing at their intended targets, freeing up his time to focus on relationship-building instead of scattershot messaging.
The Result: A Fast-Growing Network of Clients
“You’d think that I’d only find potential clients in New York or Newport, but I made a great connection in Chicago and the Midwest through Family Office List,” said Baldwin.
Once Baldwin combined the family office data provided by Family Office List with his own marketing data, he discovered something interesting—at least a dozen of his new family office connections were also yacht club members. This revelation allowed him to deepen and better contextualize these relationships, as well as target a new industry segment.
Another interesting—and unexpected—discovery was the multiple levels of connection that could be built among each family office.
Baldwin found that Worth Avenue’s yachts appeal to members of a family office themselves, but they can also be attractive to family offices’ fund managers and money managers, some of whom can afford yachts in their own right. In other words, even if a particular family office isn’t currently in the market for a yacht, it may know or be affiliated with someone who is.
All in all, Family Office List’s client services have helped Baldwin increase the speed and efficiency with which he builds relationships with his target customer base.
If you’d like to learn more about Family Office List and the benefits you can realize from working with family offices for yacht sales and brokerage, contact us today. Our well-researched and up-to-date client list will provide you with a major advantage over the competition.