Family Business Audiocast | Episode 34 | Brandon Henry | Mosaic

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About Our Guest:

Brandon Henry has extensive experience advising high-net-worth business owners and their families on business, tax, and succession planning, gained through roles at leading financial institutions. He now leads Mosaic, a wealth advisory firm serving entrepreneurial families, billionaires, and family offices, with a focus on managing and preserving wealth tied to illiquid holdings like operating companies and real estate. Mosaic emphasizes holistic solutions for wealth preservation, legacy planning, and generational transitions, integrating expertise in tax, legal, investment, and insurance. Brandon also speaks at family office conferences and mentors entrepreneurs through initiatives like the SURE program.

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[Transcript]

R. Adam Smith: [Intro] Welcome to the Family Business Audiocast on LinkedIn. I am R. Adam Smith, creator of this audiocast series. As an entrepreneur, investor, founder, investment banker, and board leader the last 25 years, I am fortunate for my many experiences within the family firm industry. 

A warm thank you to our live audience on LinkedIn today – and for those listening in the future.

A brief comment on why I created this broadcast: private companies are a passion of mine, having grown up in a family of entrepreneurs, and having engaged for two decades in deals, strategic transformations, investments, and boards, with an array of fascinating family enterprises, family firms, and family offices. I founded this series to offer a useful platform for listeners to hear from veterans, academics, and leaders in the vast family firm ecosystem. Whether you are a family business owner, building, running, or advising a family office, or just expanding your family office activities, I hope these conversations are useful and enlightening. And now, it is time to turn our attention [01:00] to our accomplished guest on today’s episode.

I'm very pleased today to host you, Brandon Henry, my friend in Texas. Great to have you on the show today.

Brandon Henry: Thanks, Adam. I'm happy to be here.

R. Adam Smith: We're going to talk a bit about you and then we'll dig into about a half hour of conversation, and then, of course, this will be released globally on many channels for a broader audience to listen to.

So, you have many accolades and titles to your name, so we won't go over those—that might take a bit. But I am going to talk about your bio and your expertise in the family enterprise and family office space. And then, we can talk a bit about that background as it relates to Mosaic and the unique wealth advisory business you have.

So, before Mosaic, Brandon had extensive experience in some of the nation's largest financial institutions where he advised hundreds of high-net-worth business owners and also their families on complex matters including business, [02:00] tax, and succession planning. And now today, Mosaic serves a very select group of entrepreneurial families and billionaires, including super entrepreneurs and other non-entrepreneurial family offices, primarily around their illiquid holdings and how that relates to their wealth and the management and preservation of that wealth.

These clients are mostly first-generation founders [whose] wealth is tied to their primary operating company or operating companies and often extensive real estate portfolios, bringing unique challenges in wealth preservation, legacy planning, and also the transitions within the generations. Understanding those families requires really holistic solutions, which Mosaic provides as you see within these types of sophisticated wealth management or private banking type organizations—you know, covering tax, [03:00] legal, investment, and insurance as a holistic ecosystem.

It's very interesting, and also very relevant to the multi-family office and virtual family office world today. So, we'll talk a bit about that on the call.

Mosaic's philosophy centers around providing the family, without bias, towards a family's net worth, insurability, and liquid assets, and also Brandon speaks frequently on these topics nationally and in a range of family office environments and conferences.

Before, he was a professor at Southern Methodist University and also University of Houston, where he does mentor entrepreneurs through the SURE program, the nonprofit initiative supporting the next gen of innovators. And he's also an advisor to several Texas-based family companies.

As we talked about before, he's originally from Southern California, but now he is in Texas. So, now we have you coming from [04:00] Texas today.

So, first of all, tell us about Mosaic, and then we'll dig right into the conversation.

Brandon Henry: Thank you. That was overly generous and warm.

I'd summarize our organization as providing the general contractor approach to closely held family businesses and family offices. There are about 35 families that we serve, one-on-one full-time team members. And the through line is to describe them as founders. They build things. Many of our clients have got what they would describe as drive-by businesses. And they're looking for somebody to help not just organize their affairs, but to provide direction and guidance to their internal family office efforts and their outsourced teams.

These families tend to outsource most of the tax, legal, investment, and insurance work, and they need somebody to coach, monitor, [05:00] and mentor those advisors. We do it for a fixed fee. So, we have nothing to sell. And if clients don't like us, or we're not adding value, they can cancel the relationship at any time.

R. Adam Smith: Makes sense, but I hear that your clients are quite sticky, so I don't think you're having a lot of changeovers, which means they tend to like you, and you tend to like them. So that's good, right?

Brandon Henry: That's right. We're very fortunate that the business that we've built is one that there aren't a lot of parallels and, families who we work with, why they're exceedingly complicated. Once they've had the opportunity to outsource some of that complexity, they tend to want to continue that momentum.

R. Adam Smith: And the name Mosaic, I mean, it's kind of an artistic term, thinking about the palette of an ecosystem or a painting or people. Where did you come up with the name Mosaic?

Brandon Henry: I wish I could tell you that we fully appreciated how the name would fit into [06:00] the type of role that we play with families. It was certainly an understanding that a mosaic, in its simplest form, if you think about it, is this collection of different-sized and colored pieces that can be stitched together to make a cohesive picture or painting. And that's the role that we play with all of our clients, and the various advisors and the disciplines that are necessary to support them.

And it also didn't hurt that back in 2011, when we were going out on our own, the website was also available. So, here we are.

R. Adam Smith: I like that.

So, your clients are typically first-gen. They have substantial wealth, which has been built up into an illiquid asset. We have actually some people on the call, Michael [Selfridge], Susan [Lindeque], Ruby [Hugueny], Jamie [Stinson], I think also Adeola [Oladimeji]. They all deal with illiquid, chunky holdings from a first-gen or at least a [07:00] single-operating company.

This is quite a complex dynamic because it involves a lot of time built up in the legacy of that holding and the complexities of government and often the decision-making around not just the management of that asset, but also, let's say, the cash flow management and ultimately the succession planning and/or sale of that asset.

So, just talk a bit about all of that and how you help the families navigate those complexities, particularly when that illiquid asset becomes liquid.

Brandon Henry: So, the average client net worth, the families that we serve, is probably 80% or 90% illiquid, primarily occupied by their operating company. Often, they have a substantial real estate portfolio that supports the operating company. [08:00] And to the extent that they're extracting value from the business and investing passive investments, they tend to invest most extra dollars into illiquid private investments.

These families build this infrastructure to shepherd their wealth from one generation to the next. And there's this cruel irony that the tools that are best at reducing fees via economy of scale and protecting assets from predators and from estate taxes also, by design, require shared ownership and shared decision-making. They don't always require shared contribution.

And so, you have this legacy asset that has a whole host of financial and non-financial considerations. And then, you overlay these complicated tax and legal structures, which then refocus families' attention inward. [09:00] And thinking about planning for those families, the complexity is certainly present. It relates to the technical parts of their life—how do we manage taxes and create a path so that these families can steward wealth from one generation to the next?—but it's ultimately coming to grips with the fact that the biggest challenges of these families aren't found in spreadsheets. There's no Excel formula to look up and try and solve for a specific number. It's how do we get around the Thanksgiving table here in a couple of weeks and enjoy each other's time?

And you can't disentangle the conference room table from the dining room table for these families. So, being aware of that, and taking a patient approach to the fact that families have got financial capital. The technical part of planning is the how, the what, and then family capital, and that's the why. And those are much more complicated, much more involved, [10:00] and take much longer to really develop and mature.

R. Adam Smith: That term "family capital"; talk about that a bit more.

I just met today with David Werdiger from Australia who's in town for the UHNWI conference. And then we had Jim Grubman on a call two weeks ago who's also very involved on the board there, as you know. And it was great to have Jim Grubman on the podcast.

And "family capital" is a term that's growing, I think, as the family enterprises create family offices and then the family businesses create, let's say, a consortium or multiple family businesses. So, for those interested in the terminology of family capital, you know, not just the family office, can you talk a bit about that and how you advise on those elements of family capital?

Brandon Henry: [11:00] So, inspired by originally the work of luminaries like Jay [James] Hughes with the five types of capital, and then advanced by Jim Grubman and Dennis Jaffe and others and the wealth 3.0 movement, is recognition that we have to have a purpose for all of the hard work around the tax, legal, investment, philanthropic properties.

And it takes, in many respects, a different skill set to help facilitate those conversations because the legacy of wealth planning has been around the technical or the hard skills. How do we reduce tax to the lowest dollar amount? How do we eke out implemental and more investment returns? How do we bulletproof assets from predators, or perhaps from our future inheritors, if we don't trust them to be good stewards?

And the evolution of family capital applying material role in the planning space is the acknowledgment [12:00] that we're dealing with real humans. One of my favorite quotes is by Richard Feynman, the Nobel laureate in business. He says, "The only way to make physics harder is if electrons have feelings" [sic]. And it's this recognition that we can have the most complicated, hard science in the world, and when you inject people, the messiness of people, and inherently even more messy family systems into the mix, it changes priorities and changes goals.

R. Adam Smith: Right, we'll come back to that topic of the evolving frameworks of the family enterprise ecosystem. You talked about 3.0, which then presumes the Jay Hughes era of 2.0, and then there's the old-school 1.0. So, I'd like to talk about that at some later date, but it's been wonderful to have some of the legends here at the Family Business Audiocast going way back to [13:00] Christina Wing, and then recently talking about next-gen with Jason Ma, Chelsea Toler, Emily Bouchard. And then, we also talked about next-gen, and especially the illiquid asset conundrum, with Valerie Galinskaya from Merrill Lynch, who runs the center there.

This issue of liquidity is tricky because sometimes there are parties within the family that want to keep the illiquidity because it's more simple and more known, and it is very attractive in terms of long-term free cash flow. They also can be tax favorable in terms of tax structuring and generation-skipping trusts, trust and estate planning, and it just kind of keeps a little of the greed factor out of the equation. But then, there are times when that illiquidity has to become liquid either because of a death or a divorce or the G2 or G3 really wants to get that asset liquidated.

[14:00] Can you talk about those conflicts and how you address that, and how you help guide them through that process of, let's say, becoming liquid?

Brandon Henry: Certainly. It reminds me of a family that we're working with currently that has a multi-generational business and there are multiple folks in G3 and G4 [who] were really trained from a very early age on this business. It's their legacy, it's not an asset. And as a consequence, nobody had ever thought about a liquidity event among family members or with third parties as a viable option.

And as the lower generations took leadership roles in the business, it became clear that there were wildly divergent ideas of what this company ought to look like today and in the future. And as a consequence, there was significant tension [15:00] building amongst not just the family members but also the management team, because there was so little alignment from the ownership group as it relates to what this company would do from a risk-taking standpoint, from a growth perspective, what metrics they'll be trying to hit. And then, how are we going to reinvest cash flow?

And it all culminated with one faction of the family, for many of the reasons people subscribe to Adam and others, saying, look, we're going to continue stepping on the gas. We're going to reinvest in this business in a very meaningful way. We're effectively going to turn distribution down by 75% or more for the next several years. And we're going to come out on the other side of this with a much larger, more robust business.

And there was a whole group of other shareholders to their credit that said, what's it all for? If all we're doing is creating balance sheet wealth, the growing enterprise value of this business that we’re never allowed to sell, and I've got to materially change my lifestyle for the next several years [16:00] as a consequence of that, I don't know that the juice is worth the squeeze.

And long story long, we ended up having to implement a redemption plan for those shareholders, and it was wrought with a huge amount of frustration and hurt feelings on both sides that the others didn't recognize where they were coming from. And after about a year, we're on the back side of that now and the family is starting to heal, but it was incredible.

If you and I entered into a business together and we stacked hands in the beginning and said this is an asset that we’re going to grow and you're the exact purpose of that growth and you're going to expect out of the company over some reasonable period of time, we could have entered into the exact same conversation with a very different perspective.

And this family got sideways with each other because they had been trained from an early age to think about the company through one lens and come to find out the company evolved and the ideas around the business did not.

R. Adam Smith: [17:00] I think the separation of wealth versus legacy is huge and it's really important to keep talking about it. Legacy is [the] most calling topic for me personally because there are so many different shades of wealth creation approaches and outcomes and management of the wealth and the purpose and impact of the wealth.

I think every family, let's say family firm, family ecosystem, is pursuing their own version of legacy. And even there are different opinions of legacy within the family office, within your clients, and within the family enterprise. It's such a complex and fascinating topic because there's the original legacy purpose, let's say the family charter, the first gen creating that illiquid wealth, and then you, wealth advisors like you, elite advisors that are advising on the illiquidity—which includes also some of the multi-family offices and the private banks and a bit of the Cambridges and [18:00] Wingspans, Richard Wolkowitz as well, also on our show.

There's the management of the legacy, and then, ultimately there’s the transition event and then the outcome, let's say, the longevity of that legacy, and that changes.

What do you think of that? How do you have a dialogue about legacy over the different stages of the client's life?

Brandon Henry: You're spot on. The challenges are that it's dynamic, not just across generations, but within each generation; thinking about the families that we serve, most of them founding their own companies. We go back and talk to them about their origin story, the business was, in many cases, a necessity. They felt like they needed to be out on their own. In many cases, they were unhirable as part of a large organization. To a large degree, they were craftspeople. They were good at a thing, and they built their business around it. And in some respects, it was almost accidental [19:00] that they had the level of success that they had.

And the organizing principles for the business in the early days, and the way that the family thinks about the business today, the founder thinks about the business today, it is wildly different. And I've seen, in just a matter of a few short years, families be totally sideswiped because they had a static image in their mind that didn't evolve with the real lived experience.

We had a family a couple of years ago who had built and sold many businesses, and they had always held onto the very first company that they had started, and admittedly it was small relative to all of the other family businesses that they’d created. And they tell a story about how they’d lived in a home with wheels on it, came from incredibly modest means, and built this little company, and it really rescued the family.

[20:00] The male patriarch of the family had this image in their mind that his children were going to take this company over and they were going to work together in business and they were going to have a wonderful time together and really appreciate the company's importance for their family story.

And having conversations with dad is this very romantic notion. Having conversations with mom, she was clearly in a different camp, and she was confident her children did not want to be in business together. Fast forward after years of wrestling with dad, we finally had a family meeting. We had individual facilitated conversations with each one of the children, individually and then with their spouses, and none of them wanted to be in business together for different reasons.

So, we come down the next day and present our initial findings and dad is literally clutching his chest. In his mind, he had built this company up as his family's legacy. And in fact, the legacy for his children, which was beautiful to hear, was how he had modeled and demonstrated [21:00] hard work and self-sacrifice, and he created things, and his fingerprints were all over this community that they lived in. And for him, it was that his children would be co-CEOs of this admittedly small business. It was just extraordinary to see what otherwise would be a very sophisticated and rational individual build this whole world up in their mind, and that was how they were defining success.

R. Adam Smith: That's great. I welcome some Q&A from the audience before we finish in about 10 minutes. We're talking about legacy and G1, G2.

Ruby was a former guest on our fifth episode, I think. She has the pleasure of advising some significant billionaires on their passion assets. She helps to source and design and furbish and really create the lifestyle of some of these families [22:00] in their chateaus, which really goes through multi-generations. But having traveled extensively to Europe, and also to some of these chateaus, including a recent wedding with my wife, I can't imagine that the affinity to that original, let's say, 2.0 wealth lasts more than a couple of generations, and then ultimately changes.

So Ruby, what are your thoughts on that?

Ruby Hugueny: I can just talk about my last project here in Switzerland. I have been refurbishing a townhouse here in Lyon near Lausanne for a Croation emir, and he wanted art decoration of his townhouse, a modern decoration melting with oriental decoration as well. So, it has been a mix-up of the [23:00] two, art deco. And it has been a success. I don't know whether you have read my post on LinkedIn lately, I think last week, and I have bought frescoes from Baku for this townhouse, and it was a success.

It's a project of 500,000 Swiss francs and it's great. It's a very successful project, and the garden, as well, has been built in a spirit of oriental and Parisian, I must say, style. Well, it took me six months to complete the whole project.

That's it, that's what I do. [24:00] And like the townhouse that I recently purchased in Paris, which I will start refurbishing in January, it's in the Paris 7th district, Rue de l'Université, and the owner wants a Russian decoration with gold leaf.

So, that's my next project.

R. Adam Smith: I love that. And one of the reasons I like you to be coming on the show is not only do you have such a beautiful accent, but you work on beautiful things. And so, my point to Brandon is, how do you encourage the next generations to appreciate the sweat and the tears and the core business, or let's say the wealth, or could it even be an art collection, to balance that respect of the legacy through generations, [25:00] even if those generations don't really want any part of that, or they don't have any emotional attachment to it.

So then again, there's the tension between the wealth that was hard earned and the lifestyle that is becoming different for the next generation.

Brandon Henry: It's a wonderful question. I have not come across a uniquely effective approach. For the families that we serve, being first-generation founders, there is this almost folklore around the bootstrapping of a business and creating something of nothing that the senior generation is exceedingly proud of.

And they will, when asked, talk about the fact that they didn't have a choice but to be successful, that they had burned the boats and had nothing to fall back on, and having to make those important and hard decisions around what to push off for the future and what to consume today and what to sacrifice, and putting it all on the line. They inoculate the lower generations [26:00] in many cases from those same experiences, but they want them to have the same risk tolerance, and the same work ethic, and the same hunger that they once did.

And unfortunately, if there is not an ongoing and vibrant dialogue about what it took to get here, and "the values that got me there," quote-unquote, won't continue to be modeled, it's exceedingly challenging for that second generation to even begin to imagine what it once was like. And here in Texas, not a lot of chateaus but some very significant ranches that families invest huge dollars into, enormous time. And they are an opportunity for amazing family cohesion, a place to gather and for families to really enrich each other's lives, but they also represent a land mine for families [27:00] who don't appreciate that these assets can become liabilities in a hurry if not managed appropriately from the beginning.

R. Adam Smith: It's a good contrast.

So, we're going to shift to the multi-family office and virtual family office convo a little bit which is sort of growing out there in the world, as we know, and it's sort of on the outside of what Mosaic does. But I would like to discuss it briefly—the virtuality of family office management or wealth services versus a traditional single-family office approach.

So, just [to] sort of fast-forward to today's world, we have over 10,000 single-family offices in the world. It seems like it's going to go to 15,000 growing at 50% plus a year for various [28:00] reasons, including institutionalization of that wealth into a single-family office. And then, of course, the multi-family office is a conglomeration of those clients, or it can be a circle of family offices. And then, there are experts, like Brandon, [who] are not really a family office or multi-family office as a fiduciary or a wealth manager but are more advising on certain aspects of the wealth as a trusted advisor.

So, just maybe a little bit more on the distinctiveness of Mosaic and your type of firm. What should people know about the particular approach that you take advising the clients? How is that different than a wealth manager? How is it different than a multi-family office?

Brandon Henry: Thank you. The evolution of the term "family office," I think, has certainly left me and others bewildered. What is a family office and what is a marketing term, and phrase, and mark? [29:00] So, most of our families have internal family office functions and many of those family office functions are working with outsourced investment advisors, many of which refer to themselves as multi-family offices.

So, the trend that I'm seeing most consistently for the families that we serve is the outsourcing of much of the technical parts of the family office ecosystem has continued. Many families have even outsourced some of the foundational tenets of a family office, things like accounting and bookkeeping, bill pay functions are certainly being outsourced to groups that specialize in this.

And when looking at the roster of professionals who are actually in the family office, who are providing support and input into the family office, the title of family office, multi-family office, [30:00] or CFO, it's hard to make heads or tails.

The role that we end up playing for families is a fourth multiplier for all of those professions. And so, in the embedded family office space, which is very common in the closely held business owner world, they have a CFO, controller, admin, and others playing double or triple duty in support of the family. They're leaning on outside experts to supplement their expertise around areas that the family needs support in. And the internal professionals are playing triple duty.

They’ve got a day job, and they're also helping the family out. And Mosaic's responsibility is to speak enough taxese and legalese and financese to work collaboratively with these professionals and make sure they have the information that they need so that they can provide as much high-quality advice as possible. And because we charge a fixed fee for advice, [31:00] the families that we support and serve know that we don't have an axe to grind.

If we are cheerleading an idea—which because we know the family intimately, we've done a lot of work and research for other families in similar situations, and as a consequence, they’re more inclined to move forward. And conversely, when we're working with a family and one of their advisors brings up an idea or a concept that we believe is not in the family's best interests, because of that relationship and the trust that the business model has engendered, they typically give us a wide berth to operate. It’s not our job to kneecap or support advisors’ directives but to empower families. And by having this objective relationship, we get to call balls and strikes, but we also get to empower these other advisors, because they have better information than they've ever had before. We've got the top-of-the-mountain view for the very first time, and as a consequence, what was a really good individual contributor now gets to be a superstar [32:00] part of a more comprehensive team. And two plus two now equals five.

R. Adam Smith: That's great. And you're mostly focused on Texas, because that's where the word of mouth and the clients are, but hopefully some families out of Texas might get the benefit of your services at Mosaic as you're growing the firm.

So, back to your previous point, just one last topic in terms of how you give advice to key decisions. Do you do that? Do you find that's useful on an investment committee or is it more of just an ongoing consultative relationship? What's your view of board of directors and investment committees for the family offices that are active in investing in alternative investments, in real estate, in direct deals, co-investing? There's so much of this going on, including within our family office and hundreds of family offices.

What are your thoughts on the decision-making [33:00] venues for these more complex, illiquid investments?

Brandon Henry: It's an area that I'm fired up about in general. Governance is a fancy term for, how do we make decisions together? And my experience working with the families that we serve and the families like them is that they have not had a forcing function to take governance, quote-unquote, "seriously." They haven't taken outside dollars from a private equity firm. They have made investment decisions based on their immediate network and not a well-reasoned and researched plan.

And as they reach escape velocity through their net-worth and availability of resources, identifying a decision-making framework around, what is this business supposed to be? Who are we going to be in the future? How much risk are we willing to take? [34:00] How much cash flow do we need to generate? What's the point and purpose around the growth of this organization? Really treating the business like an asset allows us to establish a capital allocation framework, of which, for example, an ITS and an investment committee is one input.

The reality is, for many of the families that we support, if the matriarch and patriarch decide to redeploy every nickel back in the business for the next two years, we can choke off the aspirations and intentions of the chief investment officer and the rest of the investment advisor group without a lot of advanced warning.

And so, if we establish this capital allocation plan, and we're really thoughtful about how we're going to grow and distribute dollars from the economic engine, it becomes a lot easier for us to manage the exhaust, which is frankly all of those passive investments.

And so, I believe boards and governance structures, along with [35:00] effectively an investment committee that features the board around allocating passive assets can be incredibly useful. My experience is that people need to build those slowly. They can get whiplash going from cowboy investment decisions with the business and their personal holdings to a lot of structure. But done right, it allows for not only better decision-making, but it also allows for fast note, and our most valuable commodity is time.

If we've identified who we are, what we're going to accomplish, it allows us to more easily streamline their decision to yes or no, which is valuable for everybody involved.

R. Adam Smith: So, taking it slowly, thoughtfully, moving from the internal focus to the external focus, of course, layering on human capital, hiring externally, external advisors, top vendors, some form of governance. It can be an investment committee, it can be a board of directors, it can be an advisory board, [36:00] outside experts coming in. It's a multi-layered process, of course.

All right, we're going to wrap up.

So, you travel a lot. What’s on your to-do list, or next on your travel list? You’re a big world traveler. I’m curious where you're going next.

Brandon Henry: I mentioned only working with Texas families. It's because before we founded Mosaic, I was on a hundred plus roundtrips a year. And these were airport, cab, conference room, hotel, airport, cab, conference room, hotel; these were not glamorous trips. And so, I’m very fortunate to live in a state like Texas where we can have the opportunity to serve families, most of which are within a 30-minute drive. And so, when I get on a plane, for the most part, it's now for fun. I'll actually be taking off here in about 20 minutes.

We'll go to Manhattan. I'll be attending the Ultra-High-Net-Worth Institute with folks, many of which you've had on your program, like Jim Grubman, to talk about the evolution of [37:00] advising families. And then, a little travel for the holidays and trying to figure out what 2025 looks like.

But for those who are in the planning space, the last quarter of the year is our Super Bowl. Everybody here’s just been back, trying to bring things across the finish line that didn't have the same type of priority early in the year. So, not a lot of fun for the next couple of months.

R. Adam Smith: Well, it makes a lot of sense, and those clients are very fortunate to have you, and it is important to be efficient in your business and to have relationships locally. We're spoiled in New York and the Miami metro area and places like Texas to have density and amazing entrepreneurs and companies being built, but I think things are going more digital, increasingly leveraging technology on both sides of the coin in terms of both deal flow and having access to companies to invest in, and then, of course, the investor side. [38:00] Whether it's your GP relationships or your LP relationships, it doesn't require the laborious travel to meet or find those relationships as it used to be, which is pretty empowering for all of us.

Brandon Henry: I would say that 10 years ago, most of the capital allocation happening for our families came from and around the greater Houston area, certainly Texas-centric. And today, it's so easy to build a portfolio that covers not only asset classes, but multiple geographies. We never have to hop on a plane. We've gotten spoiled.

Unfortunately, most of the work that we do is hand-to-hand emotional combat with people making really difficult decisions around everything they care about, and that still seems to require, and certainly we appreciate, having an eye-to-eye conversation with them as effective as it is.

R. Adam Smith: That's great. Thank you so much, Brandon, for today.

[39:00] You can reach Brandon at Mosaic Advisors on his website, or you can reach him on LinkedIn. I'm really excited to learn more about your company and the distinctive advice that it provides your very elite clients and within the evolving business of the family office and family enterprise space.

So, thank you for today. I'd like to thank also our attendees and Brandon for his time and wisdom today.

This is R. Adam Smith signing off. Stay tuned for the next episode of the Family Business Audiocast on LinkedIn.

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