I did not choose this work. It chose me.
When I was young my parents built a real estate empire in Southern California. A brokerage, a mortgage company, rental properties. They were on the cusp of having generational wealth.
By the time I was five it was gone.
I did not understand the full weight of it then. That came later, in a quiet moment that changed everything.
I was thinking about my own children when it hit me. How different would their lives be if my parents had gotten the help they needed? Not just financial help. The right guidance. Someone who understood both the complexity of what they had built and the human dynamics behind it. Someone who could have helped them see clearly before it was too late.
That was my Clarity Point.
I knew something needed to change. I just did not know what. That uncertainty sent me on a journey in two directions simultaneously. Deeper into my faith, which became the foundation everything else would eventually be built on. And deeper into the edges of financial services, exploring what was possible beyond the traditional advisory world I had known.
What I found on that journey became the work I do today.
The work became clearer over time. I spent nearly two decades working in and around family offices, first from the outside as an advisor and later from the inside building, leading, and restructuring family office platforms for multigenerational families. What I learned is simple: families rarely struggle because they lack advice. They struggle because no one is helping them see the whole system clearly.
That is not a career. It is a calling.
Over the past twenty years I have built and led four single family offices for multigenerational families navigating real complexity. Operating families. Liquidity families. International families with assets across multiple jurisdictions. Four completely different situations. One consistent north star. Everything I learned lives inside a platform I call By Design.
I did not build this perspective in a classroom or a consulting practice. I built it inside the offices, boardrooms, and family dining rooms where the real decisions get made.
My career in financial services began in the mail room. I worked my way into a role as a client associate in Merrill Lynch's Institutional Advisory Group, learning the business from the inside before I ever sat across the table from a client.
A few years later I took the risk and moved into a full sales role, where I spent the first nine years on the institutional side advising global corporations and financial institutions on capital markets, investment strategy, and balance sheet management. In 2004 my focus shifted to ultra high net worth families and family offices. For the first time I had a front row seat to how these families operated, how they made decisions, and how they responded to outside advice. It changed how I saw everything.
In 2013 I left Merrill Lynch to build my first single family office from the ground up. It was the first time I was inside the room where family decisions were actually made. And what I saw answered a question that had stayed with me for years. Families do not make decisions based on what is financially optimal. They make decisions based on what the family can absorb. That insight became the foundation of everything I have built since.
Over the past fifteen years I have led the build, restructure, and evolution of four single family offices, each one fundamentally different from the last.
The first was a multigenerational operating family in Dallas where I extracted the family office from the holding company and built the infrastructure and team from the ground up. From there we evolved the platform into a registered investment advisor and launched a full multi-family office with three operating divisions: wealth management, risk and insurance management, and capital advisory. I built the team, developed the client service model, and led the onboarding of 55 families over a three year period. Alongside that growth I developed a comprehensive generational transition plan for the founding family, the value of which became clear years later when the family faced sudden and devastating leadership loss. Because the structure was in place, they moved through it.
The second was a four generation global family enterprise in Des Moines where I formalized governance, built decision frameworks to bring the next generation into leadership, and navigated the complexity of international expansion across multiple entities. The clarity that came from that work ultimately enabled the family to evaluate and execute a major business sale on their own terms.
The third was an international family consolidating assets globally from a US platform, with holdings across three tax jurisdictions and concentrated positions in industries most advisors never encounter including cargo shipping and fine art. I transformed a narrow accounting function into a full scale family office, built the infrastructure for post-liquidity deployment, and helped the family reposition from asset concentration to a diversified and governed platform.
The fourth is where I sit today, serving as Director of Family Office for one of the most recognized family enterprises in Texas, building a next generation platform that translates years of prior generational planning into integrated execution across a complex multi-entity structure.
Alongside that work I consult with emerging wealth families who have outgrown traditional financial services but are not yet ready for a full family office, and with wealth managers and advisory firms who want to build more intentional family office practices.
Everything I have learned across these engagements lives inside a platform I call By Design. Built on one belief. Families that thrive across generations do not get there by accident. They build it that way.
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