Managing $525 Billion by Rethinking Wealth Management | Kurt MacAlpine, Corient

How do you describe what you do?

I’m a partner and the CEO of Corient, which is the largest multi-family office in the world and the largest non-bank wealth manager serving ultra-high-net-worth clients. Today, we’re managing about $525 billion of assets on behalf of clients across 15 jurisdictions globally.

We hung out in Miami a few weeks ago, and at the end of that meeting I was like, “Damn it, I wish we’d just recorded this.” It would’ve been one of the best episodes I’d be capable of creating, because it’s not only that you’re the largest in the world—you have $525 billion of assets under management on behalf of clients, right? It’s the fact that you came from almost the outside and re-engineered the incentive structure of an existing industry. The way you thought about doing this was fascinating.

I’d step back, too. At 39 years old, I don’t think you’d ever been a CEO at that point.

Correct.

So can we start the story from when you were 39, getting recruited to be the CEO of this Canadian company, and then bring us up to where you are today?

Sure. CI was a publicly traded Canadian asset manager on the Toronto Stock Exchange. It had been public for about 25 years at that point. The primary business was Canadian asset management. There was a small wealth management business in Canada, small relative to the size of the asset manager, but economically, the entire profitability of the firm was effectively derived from the Canadian mutual fund business.

And how much were they making at the time?

Several hundred million a year of EBITDA.

Okay. So why did they need a new CEO?

The mutual fund industry, like all industries, goes through ebbs and flows. I think the go-forward growth prospects for mutual funds as a structure—the rise of ETFs, the increasing importance of alternatives, and the expected growth trends we were seeing in mutual funds—started to taper off relative to other areas. So the company was looking for a new strategic direction for the business. They decided to do an executive search, and I was fortunate enough to be the candidate they selected as part of that search process.

But you came in with a rather aggressive plan. Where did that aggressive plan come from?

A couple of different things. I had an opportunity to spend my entire career in the industry through a couple of different lenses. I spent 10 years in an advisory capacity, working as a management consultant. After that, I spent about four to four and a half years as an operator inside an asset management business. Through that, you build points of view and perspectives. You see things that work really well, and you see things that you think are ripe for improvement.

In the case of this particular business, I saw tremendous benefits to globalizing and diversifying the company. I had a very strong point of view that I wanted to do that by launching an ultra-high-net-worth wealth management business, first in the U.S., hopefully generating enough success to be able to globalize that business.

Why was that the most interesting idea to you?

It was interesting for a few different reasons. There were really 3 things that stood out to me. The first one was that wealth management, and ultra-high-net-worth wealth management in particular, is an industry with tremendous tailwinds. There’s more wealth being created today than ever. That wealth is more concentrated than ever, there’s more complexity tied to that wealth than ever, it’s transitioning generations faster than ever, and it’s more global than ever. All of those things support the underlying need for advice.

The second piece was that I felt it was an industry ripe for disruption along a couple of different dimensions. The first one is the industry structure. Think of our industry as a giant barbell. On one end of that barbell, you have large banks that theoretically can do everything for clients, or certainly have the resources to do so. But whether it’s governance, bureaucracy, or internal conflicts, in my opinion, they give back a lot of the scale benefits that clients should ultimately be benefiting from.

Wait, what does that mean?

From a size perspective, they have access to capital and resources, and they can theoretically make strategic investments. It’s challenging sometimes to align and mobilize all of those things in ways that ultimately benefit clients. Over time, governance, internal policies, and bureaucracy can prevent clients from getting the full underlying benefits of the firm. That could be a result of how the business is structured, how compensation plans work—which I’ll come back to—or just how information flows and how teams are ultimately constructed.

On the other end of that barbell, you have small local firms that exist all throughout the country, literally all around the world. Many of those firms are doing exceptional things for clients. The challenge is that scale becomes an issue. It may limit your ability to get access to world-class managers who have capacity constraints, negotiate purchasing power on behalf of your clients, or provide the services you’re ultimately able to offer them. You start to run into limitations around what you can do for clients as a result of scale.

1. Why wealth management’s incentives are broken

In between these two ends of the barbell, there’s a tremendous amount of white space that creates opportunities for disruptive new entrants. The third piece is that I felt very strongly that the industry was built on a flawed structure, and I’ll explain what I mean by that. Regardless of the firm or the market, almost all advisory businesses are built the same way. In wealth advisory businesses, advisers are independent contractors sharing somebody’s brand, somebody’s technology, and somebody’s office space.

Those advisers not only compete with one another for the next new client, but they can literally take clients from one another inside the same firm. That creates a tremendous amount of isolation, not collaboration.

So if I’m a customer of JPMorgan Wealth Management, I’m tied to one person, right? I’m actually a customer of that person, not JPMorgan, because they’re not working as a team?

Correct. Depending on the firm, the client’s experience is tied to the adviser who originates the relationship with them. Think of it this way: most wealth businesses are built to serve advisers. We wanted to build a wealth business that was built to serve clients, with the advisers, the firm, and the resources supporting those clients.

Yeah. There’s all this incentive misalignment. When we were talking in Miami, you were saying that, let’s say you need an expert to come to a meeting, and one hour of that expert’s time is $10,000. Can you tell that story?

That was the first piece: you have this adviser-to-adviser tension, which creates silos or isolation. That starts to limit the expertise that can be delivered to the end client, just because of the structure of the business. The second piece is how the advisers and the other front-office capabilities or services work together. That could be tax professionals, financial planning, wealth transfer, or family office. In most instances, those services act as a cost center to the adviser.

Ideally, the client would benefit from the full expertise. But there’s a limitation around the adviser sitting there and asking, “Do I need to bring this person in? It’s going to have a negative impact on me personally to bring them into the conversation. Or can I work around that?” In my opinion, there’s tension between the advisers and the front-office staff that ultimately support them.

The third area of tension is that advisers are paid for doing 2 things: generating as much revenue or as many commissions from clients as they can, and then determining how much of that they can hoard and not share with other people. When you’re paid under those structures, you’re incentivized not only to aggregate, but the more you share, the less you ultimately earn. That creates tension between advisers, as I mentioned. Everybody who supports the advisers typically gets paid on the financial success of the business, and often those 2 things don’t converge. It creates a lot of underlying tension.

My whole view was that if you step back and say your advisers have tension, your advisers and the front office have tension, and your advisers and the middle and back office have tension, the big loser is the client. The client doesn’t get access to the full benefits of the firm. The client is marginalized down to the individual person or team that originated the relationship with them.

The second big loser, in my opinion, is actually the firm, because these businesses don’t end up becoming companies. They become platforms where individuals plug into the businesses for some period of time. But you’re not really building a team or a culture. You’re not collaborating and problem-solving together across the firm.

That’s limited based on the silo that you ultimately work in. When I step back and look at those 3 things—a tremendous amount of tailwinds, an industry with a barbell-like structure that’s ripe for disruption, and an operating model that I believe to be fundamentally flawed—it creates an opportunity, in my opinion, for somebody to come in and disrupt that, with the goal of doing more things for clients.

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2. Bringing the partnership model to wealth management

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Before we get back to the existing structure and this idea that you’re not building a company, you’re building a platform, what’s the history of this? Where did it come from? Why was it set up that way to begin with?

It’s a great question, and I don’t know why it was set up that way to begin with. It’s the business model that all large wealth managers seemingly have taken. If I step back and put aside the structure of wealth management, what are wealth advisers ultimately doing for clients, and what service are they providing? I think about the role wealth advisers play as the ultimate human capital business. To be good at the job, you need a tremendous amount of EQ and a tremendous amount of IQ. How those advisers pair that together to work with clients is ultimately what defines success.

If I set aside the structure the industry has chosen and look at how other human capital businesses are structured, they all have the same underlying structure. As I mentioned, I was a partner at McKinsey & Company. Every management consulting firm is a partnership. Every law firm is a partnership. Every accounting firm, and many of the most successful investment businesses, advisory businesses, and operating companies, are partnerships.

But wait, the wealth managers weren’t—

They weren’t. To wildly oversimplify the Corient structure, we created the first true professional services partnership and applied it to the wealth management industry. The goal was to use that structure to create a fundamentally different experience for clients and, ideally, a much more attractive collaborative environment for colleagues and, given it’s a partnership, ultimately the owners of the business as well.

Okay, so let’s go back. You have this idea. You’re like, “I’ll take the job, but I have a super-aggressive plan.”

Yeah.

What was the response from the company?

That was part of my pitch to the board during the interview process. They had asked for my opinions on the future and how I saw the future direction of the company. I outlined a strategy, and one of its core pillars was to effectively launch the business that’s core today. Fortunately for me, I had a phenomenal board. The board was comprised of significant owners of the business who had a tremendous amount of vested interest in the company, but were also great at delegating, collaborating, and providing advice. Because we had such a transparent conversation about what the strategy would look like during my interview process, we were able to hit the ground running from the day I started.

Weren’t you running a similar idea or playbook to the original founder of that company, too?

You know, it’s interesting. You’re probably referring to Bill Holland, who was a previous CEO and the chairman of the company. So, Bill Holland and Ray Chang, and Ray’s daughter, who was ultimately on the board with us as well, had done a tremendous job of building scale in the Canadian asset management industry. At that point in time, they saw an industry that was subscale and ripe for disruption, and took advantage.

They did that through acquisition?

Through acquisition, through a series of acquisitions in the Canadian marketplace, focused on the mutual fund industry. They did an amazing job with it, and a lot of that put CI in the privileged position the company was in at that point in time.

Something you repeated when we spoke previously is that you think the most dangerous thing you can do is stand still. I don’t remember the exact line, but basically, you think the biggest risk is taking no risk.

Yeah.

So they’re in a dwindling business, or what sounds like a dwindling business.

Yeah.

Are you going to just sit here and take less money every year, or are you going to do something drastically different?

Yeah. I always tell people that they often get comfort when things aren’t changing. That’s when you should be the most uncomfortable. Look at the business you’re in: everything is changing around us at all times. I’m most nervous when things aren’t changing. Ideally, change is happening. Then the question is: are you leading the change, participating in the change, or disrupting the change? I think you’re always better off being the one pushing change forward on behalf of the firm or the industry.

Before we get into how you go from CI to Corient, you seem wildly ambitious. Every time I’ve talked to you, you say you want to be the best in the world at what you do.

Yeah.

You’d never been a CEO until you were 39, right? Did that ambition come later in life? Were you like that when you were younger?

No.

That’s very unusual—to be like, “Hey, I’ve had 2 decades of professional experience, and I’m going to jump in like Genghis Khan and try to take over this industry.”

Yeah, I’ve always been personally ambitious. I’m also a huge proponent of doing things you’re genuinely passionate about. I love the wealth management industry. I love human capital businesses. Again, I thought there was a tremendous opportunity for disruption. My whole thing is that, as you mentioned about change, you should feel uncomfortable if you’re not changing, if you’re not constantly pushing yourself.

The other firm belief I have is that people really benefit from deep, specialized expertise. Just think of all the folks you’re interviewing and having conversations with. They’ve positioned themselves to be deeper and better at something, whatever that ultimately is, and that typically leads to outsized returns and outcomes for them. In many instances, human nature guides people toward optionality. People get a little more comfort in optionality: “I want to be able to do this, this, this, and then this.” You can be fine at a bunch of those things, but it’s very hard to be world-class at something. The focus was on how we push ourselves to build the best business for clients in ultra-high-net-worth management globally. That’s been the aspiration for the business since we started.

Okay, so you become CEO of this company. You have this plan. You’ve clearly thought about all the things you want to do, which you just laid out for us. What are the assets that you have? You have a couple hundred million in cash flow that you can deploy, and then your idea is, like, “We’re going to essentially empty the tank. We’re going to take all that money and—”

Leverage up on day 1 on the job.

What are you doing?

There are a couple of things that I guess you’re getting at.

So, as it relates to building the Corient business, I had this point of view around both the opportunity set in ultra-high-net-worth wealth management and the disruptive structure that we wanted to put in place from an industry perspective. The first thing, like any idea or business that you're trying to get off the ground, is: Is what you're proposing going to resonate? Is this structure, which is fundamentally different from how other wealth managers operate, going to resonate with great entrepreneurs in wealth management who see and align with this vision? The first objective is to find out whether this is filling a void in the marketplace, both for clients and wealth advisory professionals, and whether that will resonate in a way that ultimately makes the business successful. Then, as the concept starts to take off, you start to think about capital prioritization, trade-offs, and things like that.

Actually, you know what? Let's talk about the way your business is structured and run, and then we'll talk about how you did it. This is what I was trying to understand when you were explaining the barbell strategy to me before. I was like, why are all these things in place? You're growing by acquisition, so why would they sell? You were explaining the benefits and what you do. If you want to lay it out, you had a disruptive idea. What is that idea?

I thought there was a tremendous opportunity for somebody to come in and disrupt the ultra-high-net-worth wealth management industry. The way that we sought to achieve that was to get the structure right. I felt like the industry was built on a fundamentally flawed structure that does not facilitate the best outcomes for clients, nor does it facilitate collaboration internally. If you could get the structure right, then you could optimize the business in a way that makes sense for clients and ultimately employees.

The way that we want to position ourselves to be the best is as the most comprehensive provider of wealth management services to ultra-high-net-worth families globally. Shortly after launching the business, as we were trying to prove out the structure and the concept around the partnership model relative to the industry norm, we started thinking about what the business would look like as we scaled. You set a high bar for yourself: We want to be able to do more. Anyone who's joining Corient, I have this conversation with them: By joining, you should make us better. We should make you better, and we should collectively be able to do more for clients than we could on our independent paths.

The way we set out to build that was by creating a more comprehensive service offering for ultra-high-net-worth families. Here's what we've built. We have a wealth advisory function, with individuals who oversee and manage client relationships. Think of them as the relationship quarterbacks. They are supported by global financial planning capabilities, for everything associated with your lifetime, and global wealth transfer capabilities, for everything that extends beyond your natural life.

We have 175 people on our investment team, split about 70% traditional investments and 30% alternative investments. We own and operate several trust companies. We use South Dakota here in the U.S., but we work in lots of different jurisdictions around the world. We have a tax practice with over 100 full-time accountants working at Corient. They provide tax advice and tax implementation for clients, and we embed those experts on the wealth advisory teams. They're working on everything from the financial plan and wealth transfer conversations to trust structuring. They're actively involved in investment conversations around harvesting losses.

That really starts to show how, when you mobilize these resources, you can do more for clients. We have a full family office. We pay people's bills, provide outsourced CFO services and customized reporting, and offer concierge lending. We manage complex residential real estate projects. We have an aviation business and an art management business. The goal was to figure out how we can do more for clients across the firm, given that we have no limitations to internal collaboration. I think that's a huge competitive advantage for us.

3. Sharing the benefits of scale with clients

Say more about the aviation business. We were talking about this before we started recording.

As I mentioned, we're serving ultra-high-net-worth clients across a variety of different markets around the world. We have tremendous scale in terms of the size of the business, but also in the relationships and the families that we ultimately have access to. We thought there was an opportunity to provide a service to them—or multiple services—with aviation being one example. Through the size and scale of Corient and the relationships we have, perhaps by taking a different approach, we could provide a relatively unique service.

We effectively have an aviation business where we own aircraft on behalf of our clients for their collective use. We take the balance sheet risk from buying the asset. We take the risk associated with the monthly management fee, and clients pay for the use of the aircraft depending on how they use it. So it's really given us a unique opportunity.

But this is not a profit center for you. This is the most interesting thing, because I was trying to wrap my head around all this the last time we met. The model I had in mind was that you have this Costco shared-economy model, scaled to what you're doing.

Yeah.

Can you go into that a little bit?

The way that I like to position the business is that I think we've built what I deem to be the only truly conflict-free business in wealth management. But let me define that. I think businesses get conflicted in 2 different ways. The first is based on the structure of the business or how they ultimately govern themselves. Think of it as 2 different standards of care: a fiduciary standard of care, where you're operating in the client's best interest at all times and are obligated to do so, or a suitability standard, which is effectively: Is the product or service you're offering good enough to extend to the client?

We've built the entire business to be a fee-only fiduciary business, operating essentially at the highest standard of care. We're the largest business in the world that operates under that standard of care. Anyone larger than us has the ability to operate at a lower standard of care.

4. One compensation plan, one P&L, no exceptions

The second piece is the business model that you ultimately put in place, and this ties to how we serve clients and work together. When we launched the business, I wanted to make sure there were no structural impediments to collaboration from the onset. In my opinion, we've removed every possible barrier that could prevent collaboration.

I'll give you 2 examples. We have about 3,000 people inside the Corient business today. We have one compensation plan, with no exceptions. Once you start to put exceptions in place—let's say you and I work together, and you're paid one way while I'm paid another—it is very hard for us to objectively serve a client with different outcomes or objectives. That's true across the different elements of the business.

The second example is that I run one P&L across the firm, and I don't do any form of chargebacks. You want to get great experts in front of clients as quickly as possible, with relevant expertise. Once you start to put silos in place, segment your P&L, or run chargebacks, you're inherently creating friction in the business. By operating the business that way—with a fee-only fiduciary standard and a structure that maximizes collaboration, with no restrictions on it happening—you can think about delivering services for clients that are different from and outside the norm of traditional wealth management or wealth advisory.

This is what I was trying to get to: You're not concerned about what other people in your industry are doing. Your North Star is that you just want to keep serving clients better.

Correct. Exactly.

So if we can offer a service that ultra-high-net-worth people would benefit from, it doesn't matter if other people in the industry aren't doing that.

Correct.

That is the only thing we're focused on.

Absolutely. We want to be the best in the world at serving ultra-high-net-worth clients, and we think we can do that through deep, specialized expertise. Advisors love to play on optionality: I can serve a tech entrepreneur, I can serve a small business owner, I can serve a corporate executive. Those are all very different skills. So we push ourselves toward deep, specialized expertise, starting with the clients that you ultimately serve.

I’m always encouraging people to be as specialized as possible. The more specialized you are, the more relevant you are, and the better advice you can ultimately give your clients. It extends beyond the service offering. The goal is that by pairing all of these pieces together, we can do more for clients because we’re helping connect the dots.

A lot of the services I mentioned are services that clients need, want, or ultimately use. If we’re not piecing it together for them, we’re putting that burden on them. By managing someone’s financial plan and wealth transfer, managing their investments, overseeing their tax, and executing their trusts, we can think about that as a collective problem instead of five or six individual decisions. I think that leads to meaningfully better outcomes.

5. Why independent wealth managers join Corient

But you can’t do that if you have a structure in place that prevents you from achieving it. That’s why it was so important to launch the private partnership: to align objectives and create a fundamentally different experience. Then we audit every possible area of the business model to ensure there’s nothing internally that would create tensions, silos, or conflicts that limit the client experience.

Okay, I’m glad you said that, because it’s about 45 minutes into our last conversation where I was like, “Oh, shit.” I started to grasp the flywheel you have. I’m going to extend this shared-economies-of-scale metaphor: you’re doing that for your customers. You’re taking care of their aviation, art management, and all these other things they could go to other places for.

You don’t need to make money off that; you just want to serve them better, and you know they’ll stay with you. There’s a compounding effect: not only is there very low customer turnover, but in some cases the relationship continues into the next generation, and even multiple generations.

You also create shared economies of scale with the wealth managers you’re acquiring. If you’re a small boutique—explain the benefits of how you take the scale you have at Corient and approach someone who might have 2 or 3 people in an office. You want to acquire them. Why would they come and agree to do it with you?

There are a lot of different reasons people might contemplate transacting. If you look at it first from a client perspective, then you can work your way back. Scale creates benefits if it’s applied in the right manner. Our scale creates a number of different things for us. I’ll give a few examples.

Access to certain managers. Some managers are capacity-constrained and harder to get access to. Having scale and being a more meaningful investor for them creates opportunities and access points that otherwise might not have existed.

I don’t think I understand that point.

On the investment side, there are 2 things. First, are you able to get invested in the best managers in a given discipline or asset class? Second, does your scale create purchasing-power benefits? In other words, does the volume you’re investing allow you to negotiate better rates on behalf of your underlying clients as a fee-only fiduciary?

Whenever we negotiate better rates for our clients, we pass those rates on to them for their collective benefit. That extends in a lot of different ways. The lending rates we’re able to get for clients tend to be better because of our size and scale and the broader institutional relationships we have.

Then there are the services we offer. If you’re a $5 billion, $10 billion, or $15 billion wealth manager, it’s virtually impossible to offer things like tax, trust, family office, aviation, and art management at scale. Clients ultimately benefit from that, too.

More products and services to give to their clients.

And a way better cost structure than they can get themselves at the business level.

So you’re getting better access, ideally, better pricing, and more services. If you’re in the shoes of the entrepreneur running the business, what’s in it for them?

The way I think about Corient is that we’re not buying people’s firms. People are coming to be partners at Corient. They’re coming to own and operate the business alongside me and the other equity partners of the firm.

This is about founders and partners continuing on the entrepreneurial journey they’ve already been on. We’re just doing it together rather than independently of one another.

Do they see everything? Let’s say you want to acquire me, correct?

Yeah.

And we’re going through this conversation, and I see access to all your books. I see everything.

Yes.

Okay. There’s a great historical equivalent. I think I mentioned this to you when we spoke previously, but Rockefeller essentially built a company of founders. If you look at the partners in Standard Oil, he did a lot of acquisitions, and part of it was just opening up his books. He’s saying, “This is what I can do. I’m obviously superior to what you can do. You can enhance this, and I’m willing to exchange your stock for mine. What would you rather have?” Is that a similar situation here?

It is. Yes, it is. There’s also a natural inflection point that businesses hit. I think you can scale a wealth business to $3 billion, $4 billion, or $5 billion with a limited set of services. It’s not overly limited, but it’s wealth advisory and investment services. Once you start pushing through that scale threshold, clients start to demand more services from you, which creates real challenges.

Let me ask you real quick: Is the demand for more services tied to an increase in wealth?

In many instances, yes. Client expectations also grow as firms continue to grow and evolve, but a lot of it is tied to an increase in wealth.

Okay, continue.

Once you start to hit this inflection point, think about the investments you need to make. You can grow and scale your business up to a certain level, let’s say $3 billion, $4 billion, or $5 billion. Then the investments required to get that business to $50 billion or $100 billion are significant.

In my opinion, for many entrepreneurs in the space, that’s where the risk-reward trade-off gets out of balance. The incremental risk of building all these services, in the hope that the assets will ultimately come in the future, creates that imbalance.

With us, someone can continue on the same entrepreneurial journey they’ve been on and continue to have a phenomenal wealth-creation event for themselves and their families, while immediately benefiting from all these underlying services we’ve already built together. On day one, instead of staying on their own path, making these investments, and seeing how it evolves over the next 1 or 2 decades, they can have access to all these services, extend them to their clients, and continue on that journey themselves.

As a result, we skew very young as a business from a wealth-management perspective. Yes, we’re doing M&A, but we’re not doing M&A to fund retirements. We’re doing M&A to bring on partners who will continue to grow their businesses.

That’s an important distinction. Say more about that.

The median adviser in our industry is probably in their early 60s. Our median partner—our most senior title—is in their mid-40s, and our median employee age is in their 30s.

A lot of that is deliberate on our part in terms of who we’re targeting, but it’s also deliberate on the part of the individuals who are joining us. They’re joining us with a long runway. They want to continue to be owners and to operate in what I think is a fun, dynamic, unique environment, spending the next couple of decades collaborating with great clients as we all build the business together.

There’s a bit of self-selection happening, both in the structure we’ve put in place through the partnership, relative to others, and in the people we’re targeting.

But isn’t it beneficial to you as the owner of the company? Everybody has equity in this. If they’re younger, you have low customer churn, and you want to build a business that compounds. I know you well enough to know you’re not stopping here at $525 billion. You’re not saying, “No, we’re cool, guys. We’re going to stop here.” You want to compound more effectively.

Correct. It’s a combination of the runway the individuals have and their ambitions around building. The industry is almost entirely oriented one way; we’re oriented a different way.

If I’m having a conversation with somebody who’s interested in joining the business, the way I’d describe it is that we tend to be someone’s first choice or their last choice. Do you believe in partnership? Do you want to be an owner of the business? Do you want to collaborate with your colleagues for the ultimate benefit of our clients? Or are you looking to recreate the silo you have at whatever firm you’re contemplating leaving?

So when we’re having conversations, think of it as the ultimate screening mechanism: people will understand and gravitate toward it, latch on, and we’ll be their absolute first choice. Or they’ll say, “That’s just not for me,” and we won’t be their first choice. But it’s rare that we’d come in second, given that the structure is so different, which is fantastic because it creates this ultimate selection bias, or mechanism, around who’s interested in joining.

Again, because we’re oriented and structured the way we are, I need strategic, cultural, and financial alignment across the business in order for us to achieve the ambitions we’ve put in place for the company.

That decision is so important because it fuels every single other advantage you have moving forward.

It does. One of the challenges is that people get comfortable with optionality. Just as an example, we have a fully integrated business.

I find optionality disgusting, by the way.

Yeah, because it starts to create complexity that people, I don’t think, understand. If you’re proposing to acquire a business and then you start to compromise in terms of the structure, the service offering, or how people collaborate, you’re effectively compounding a lot of smaller problems over time. They create a lot of underlying complexity, and at some point businesses get too complicated, making it very hard to reset.

We’ve been very disciplined about the structure, the compensation model, and how people operate. It all has to naturally fit together. My view is that if we’re not advancing toward our objective of being the best in the world at serving ultra-high-net-worth clients, I don’t want to create optionality to get there. I want to focus on what’s not resonating and how we continuously improve those areas so we can get on that pathway.

The complexity we create is in how advisors serve clients, not in how we govern ourselves internally. Hence, one compensation system, which is incredibly important; one P&L, no chargebacks, also incredibly important; a partnership structure where everybody is important; one brand; one offering. As you unpack these decisions, there’s a lot in the structure and the design that I think positions us well to achieve what we’re trying to do.

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6. Staying the course when the stock market disagrees

I think we have an overview of Corient now. We’ll come back to a couple of other things I want to talk about. The day you do the acquisition, the branding, everything is completely integrated. But the story of how you built this is so wild. I want to go back to when you took over the company.

Then we’re going to get into Corient, the acquisition you did, and the fact that the stock market hated what you were doing and you were resolute in the face of this drastically falling stock price. If we go back, it’s like, “Okay, I laid out this plan to this sleepy Canadian company. I’m going, ‘This is what I want to do.’” Can you bring us from that point and explain how you’ve been building Corient?

Yeah, so there are a couple of things. First, you have to have conviction in the business and the idea. As we’ve talked about a lot, I had a tremendous amount of conviction in both the opportunity for the business and, ultimately, what we could do for clients. The second piece, as you mentioned, is volatility. You have to put that in context as well. Public companies don’t typically love transformation stories.

Well, hold on. We’ve got to define volatility. How volatile was your stock when you were doing this?

Sure. In 2021, we were, I think, the best- or second-best-performing financial services stock in North America. In 2022, we were the second worst. So you see a lot of tremendous volatility.

You can unpack that in a couple of layers. One is that public markets don’t necessarily love transformation stories. To be fair to the public markets, we were taking a Canadian asset management business and using the cash flow to build and launch a new ultra-high-net-worth global wealth management business. That was a pretty meaningful departure.

The underlying benefits make sense: you’re creating diversification. You’re diversifying from asset management to wealth management, from more mass affluent to ultra-high-net-worth, and from a single country to multiple geographies. But the journey from the initial conviction in the idea, and how public markets ultimately respond, takes different turns and courses.

The second thing is that a lot of what happens in public markets ties into the underlying composition of your shareholder base. We had a series of strategic investors—let’s say somewhere around 15% to 17% of the entire float. We had very small index inclusion, given the company and the market we traded in. Let’s say 25% of our float was locked up by strategic investors who didn’t intend to sell, and indexes that effectively had to hold the stock. That left 75% of the float active, which is an unusually high active share.

Who comprises the active share? Hedge funds and mutual funds. Hedge funds are obviously looking to optimize performance. A lot of the volatility came from that. The reason 2021 was such a good year for share price appreciation is that we obviously had a lot of hedge funds piling in. In 2022, a lot of the hedge funds ultimately left, and that created tremendous volatility in the stock.

On the mutual fund side, the public company’s mutual fund holders tended to be value-oriented mutual funds that had been in net redemptions in that category for a number of years. Think of it this way: every single morning, people wake up having to sell your shares to fund redemptions in their underlying mutual funds.

Because there are headwinds in that?

Inside the underlying mutual fund. So again, there are a lot of different factors you can attribute to it, but you have a series of things happening at once: building a brand-new business, creating a massive transformation story inside a public company, and having a shareholder base that doesn’t have 85% of its shares locked up in a small float to dampen volatility. You have the opposite.

But you have to stay true to your convictions. The part that gave me a lot of confidence was that I had tremendous conviction in the opportunity. I was able to see the business and the strategy taking off relatively quickly.

What do you mean you were able to see it taking off relatively quickly?

To walk back from it, I launched Corient around April 2020. Fast-forward 6 years: we have north of $500 billion in assets, 3,000 employees, and we’re operating in 15 different jurisdictions. The underlying strategy resonated really well early on, even though it wasn’t tracking with share price appreciation.

You think about all this progress in the underlying business: the partnership structure we put in place starts to resonate, people want to join, and you’re starting to build momentum. You’re seeing the business itself start to form in the way you’d hoped, but the share price ultimately isn’t tracking.

And so you’re just focusing on the internal measures because you can see the business evolving. This happened with Bezos. I forget the number, but Amazon’s stock in the early days went from something like $180 to $6. He talks about it in his shareholder letters: “Yeah, the stock is dropping, but all the internal metrics of the business are fine.” He would quote Ben Graham. He’s like, “I’m just focused on this. Eventually, the stock will be where it needs to be, but I can’t worry about this short-term drop.”

Yeah, and you get confidence again just seeing the business evolve. As your business continues to evolve, your expectations of success ultimately change, and you continue to push yourself.

Okay. But are you strangling the earnings of the company?

I was using the cash flow and leverage that the business generated to build Corient.

The market didn’t like how much you were doing. What was going on?

Yeah. The part that I think people didn’t understand is that, in my opinion, the business needed to change and transform. A business that was entirely focused economically on Canadian mutual funds was incredibly vulnerable. Given the company’s historical success in building a Canadian mutual fund franchise, that was a very meaningful source of earnings. So, in order to make a dent in those earnings and drive diversification, it required a pretty meaningful pivot.

There was a period of time at CI Financial when a lot of strategic investments ultimately weren’t made. In my opinion, there was an incredible run for the company, followed by a challenging period. I was coming in during that challenging period with ambitions to transform it. To achieve the objectives we saw and capitalize on the momentum we were building, we were doing 2 things: using the free cash flow generated by the Canadian business and putting debt on the business.

How much debt on the business?

We ranged probably from 3 to 3.5 turns of debt.

Okay.

Depending on how you think about it, from a public-market comps perspective, our industry would be compared to asset managers. Most asset managers use about 2 turns of debt as a rule of thumb. Wealth managers tend to have more debt than asset managers. It’s less about the amount of debt you have on the business and more about the composition of that debt.

That was the part I would discuss with investors. It’s not like we had floating-rate debt with covenants. We had fixed-rate debt without covenants, and typically with long durations. We had debt extending out to 30 years: fixed-coupon, no-covenant debt. In my opinion, the way you think about debt composition matters. We weren’t creating a lot of vulnerability from a business perspective. Yes, we were increasing our leverage, but that was very deliberate, to capitalize on the opportunity we saw in building Corient. I was comfortable at all times with where we were, both from a capital allocation policy perspective and from a decision-making perspective.

But when you read about this part, that’s what you hear. It’s almost like you’re being hated, but you’re right, and your comfort level seemed not to change.

Correct.

Right. Were you surprised at the blowback you got, or did you go into it knowing they were going to be pissed off?

It’s a good question. I would have assumed that the underlying business success and the benefits of diversification would have been recognized faster in the share price. But at no point during the journey did I change my conviction about the opportunity.

This is one of the things I find most admirable.

You can see in the M&A and the sequencing that we’ve continued to stay in and hold the course. Looking back on it now, we’re still very early in our journey, but I think the diversification benefits we’ve been able to generate for the business are tremendous.

7. Betting on the business through share buybacks

How many years into this was it, “Hey, maybe we should find a partner and go private”?

We were always going to go private, which I was very transparent about with the market. The way I assumed we were going to go private was through a share buyback program. Throughout my entire tenure at CI, we were doing 2 things: building Corient, diversifying and globalizing the business, while at the same time reducing our share count.

As I’ve described in the media many times, I felt like our shares were, in my opinion, criminally undervalued. I thought there was a tremendous disconnect between the underlying value of the company and what we were ultimately trading at. Part of that was tied to these underlying dynamics. If every single morning you wake up with somebody having to sell your shares for reasons outside of your or their control, that creates a tremendous buying opportunity. Then the question is whether you have conviction in yourself and what you’re doing to transform the business, and whether you buy the shares. We did. You saw us buying a tremendous amount of shares back while transforming the business.

What was the financial outcome of those share buybacks?

So, we took ourselves private.

I know, but how much?

It depends. We were buying over a period of time, but it was a significant return. We were buying a lot of those shares back at $12 or $13 a share, so it was a very meaningful return from a shareholder perspective.

The reason I bring that up is that my friend Adam, the founder of AppLovin and one of my biggest partners, was sitting in that chair where you are today. He has the same kind of conviction you do. He told the story on the podcast: I think every day for about 200 days, his stock price just dropped. I think the company went from about $28 billion down to $3 billion, and he was like, “Well, I’m not running a $3 billion company.” He thought at the time it could be a $100 billion or $200 billion company. Now I think he thinks he can get to a trillion, but he was like, “This thing is worth $100 billion, $200 billion, or it’s nothing.”

Then he was like, “This makes no sense. My stock price is $3 billion, and we’re doing a billion of…” So he wound up taking all the cash flow from that and buying back the stock. I think he borrowed another $5 billion or something, and everybody around him was like, “You’re crazy, dude.”

He said very nonchalantly on the podcast, “Yeah, that worked out very well for the company. We made like $50 billion or $60 billion from that.”

Here’s the interesting thing about the disconnect between public and private markets: in a public market, people have a visceral reaction to what you’re describing. If you describe that to a private equity investor, they would say that’s the standard blueprint under which we operate businesses and extract value. It’s amazing to see the underlying disconnect between how people think about a business as an owner and operator and how they think about it when deciding whether to buy shares in a public company.

Often, when you’re going through these transformation stories, you have to think about the endgame. Again, we were sitting on, in my opinion, very vulnerable earnings, entirely driven by the Canadian mutual fund industry. Yes, it was a lot of earnings, but that is a very—

But it’s not going to be a lot of earnings in the future.

8. Taking CI Financial private with Mubadala Capital

Correct. And that’s the thing. Everyone wants it to be instantly diversified without the time, investments, or capital required to do it. That’s just not practical. You need to have conviction in yourself. For us, we said, “Look, we want to do 2 things. We think there’s a tremendous opportunity in building Corient, while at the same time, we’re not letting these shares trade the way they are without buying them. There’s no way.” So we were buying and buying and buying and buying.

That gets back to your initial question of going private. I was approached about 2 years ago—actually, right now—by Mubadala Capital. I received an inbound call, and the message was, “We love the business. We love the strategy. We understand exactly what you’re doing and why you’re buying the shares. We think it’s going to take you about 9 years to buy the remaining shares you ultimately want. We also think that along that journey there are going to be trade-offs around your ability to execute the core strategy, given the capital requirements on both sides.”

I agreed with 100% of that. We really hit it off, and our conversations were about how to take this business out of the public markets, deliver a great return for the shareholders, and then put the business in a private context where we could own and operate it outside of a public company.

I felt like CI never belonged in the public markets, even before I showed up. A Canadian mutual fund company never really belonged in the public markets anyway, and this created a phenomenal opportunity for us to do it. The context in which we went private is equally unique. We took ourselves private with no incremental debt on the business. There was actually deleveraging or an equity infusion tied to it. There were no cost synergies and no change of strategic direction. In my opinion, I picked up the best strategic partner on the planet, with an equal amount of ambition to see this thing forward.

From their standpoint, if you take a look at Mubadala Capital, or just Abu Dhabi Inc. more broadly, it is an incredibly ambitious place. They have done a phenomenal job of creating wealth, building wealth, and diversifying wealth. Fortunately for me, the entire team at Mubadala saw what we saw from a business perspective. They saw the endgame and a lot of similarities in how they were building Mubadala Capital.

It was effectively started inside Mubadala Investment Company as a sovereign wealth fund and built into this phenomenal business. They saw a lot of us in them, strategically and in terms of ambition, and it’s been absolutely amazing. We announced that we were taking ourselves private in November 2024, and completed it on August 12, 2025.

On September 2 or 3, 2025, we announced that we were buying the largest ultra-high-net-worth wealth manager in Europe and the second-largest ultra-high-net-worth wealth management business in Europe. If we were still a public company, that would have been an impossible transaction to execute, given a lot of the dynamics you’ve mentioned. In a private context, in my opinion, it was the best possible thing we could have done for the company.

Everything I said about the opportunity in U.S. ultra-high-net-worth wealth management is equally true in the rest of the world. I firmly believe that there are no global ultra-high-net-worth wealth managers in the world today outside of Corient. To me, that was a tremendous opportunity for us to capitalize on.

Why do you think no one else pursued that strategy? It seems obvious in hindsight.

People might disagree with my statement and say, “Of course there are other ultra-high-net-worth or global wealth managers.” My pushback would be that there aren’t. There are a handful of multi-jurisdictional wealth managers—that is, banks that operate in multiple jurisdictions. The reason I say “multi-jurisdictional” rather than “global” is that, if you think about it through a client lens, a firm with offices in multiple jurisdictions is really a series of regional P&Ls.

Client relationships are mapped into an underlying region, and the compensation systems and structures people have in place create, limit, or eliminate the ability to collaborate. Let’s say there’s a billion-dollar family with money across 4 different jurisdictions, and they happen to have those assets at one firm. The family says, “I’m going to take all $1 billion and consolidate those assets in Miami.” In practice, 3 of the P&Ls that are losing assets are negatively impacted, while 1 P&L is very positively impacted.

At the individual advisor level, almost all of those people tend to be commission- or revenue-share-generating advisors. Three people’s pay goes to zero for serving the client, while one person’s pay probably quadruples. The thought that they would put all of that aside and serve clients regardless of those internal tensions or conflicts makes for an impossible situation.

A lot of what we touched on earlier—the private partnership we initially built for the U.S. marketplace—we’ve globalized. I have one compensation plan that applies not only in the U.S., but to everybody around the world, and one P&L. Instead of thinking about clients in terms of which regional silos they access, we think about how we can serve them anywhere in the world.

Okay. The way I think of you—tell me if you disagree—is that you’re kind of obsessed with incentives.

I’m obsessed with alignment. It’s very simple what we want to do: we want to be the best in the world at serving ultra-high-net-worth clients. In a human-capital business, it’s imperative that I have strategic, cultural, and financial alignment to achieve that. Incentives are a huge component of that. They drive a tremendous amount of behavior.

Charlie Munger has this great line: “Incentives rule everything around us.”

Yeah. Once you start to create fractures in the incentives, you run into problems. I feel very strongly that every client of Corient, regardless of where they live or how they entered the business, should have the same opportunity for an equally elevated experience. Similar to clients, I want to make sure all of our employees have the same opportunity, regardless of how they entered the firm.

If you joined through a direct hire in Seattle or an acquisition in San Diego, I want to make sure every person here is treated fairly. To treat somebody fairly, they should be paid for what they deliver for the business, not for whatever historical entry point or position they ultimately had. It’s equally imperative that you pay people for things that drive collaboration and better outcomes, as opposed to things that drive personal, independent, or siloed behavior.

We’ve been very adamant about ensuring that clients can always get the elevated experience and that every employee of Corient is treated fairly. With one compensation plan, I can walk into any one of our offices in the world, and every person knows that for an equal level of performance, they’ll be treated exactly the same as all of their colleagues.

9. Acquiring great partners and building one company

Okay, I love how you summarize that: you’re obsessed with alignment. I want to talk about acquisitions. Since you started, how many acquisitions have you done? There are about 20 or more?

Probably closer to 50.

Closer to 50. As you have more AUM, do the acquisitions have to keep getting bigger, or not? How do you think about this?

It’s a great question. I’m not looking for scale in acquisitions. I’m looking for exceptional people who align. I keep saying the same thing, but it’s important: strategic, cultural, and financial alignment. Whether it’s a $50 billion acquisition, a $500 million acquisition, or anything in between or on either side of those parameters, that’s less relevant to me.

In a partnership model like ours, I need those strategic, cultural, and financial alignment criteria to be true. We never look at it from an AUM or scale perspective. We look at how it’s additive to the business we’re aspiring to build. Given the scale of what we’ve built, I think our model is currently resonating really well, and we’re excited to take advantage of that.

It’s ultimately a screening criterion. If someone sees our model and is looking for something totally different, they’re not going to come here. That’s great for us because we can filter through the structure, and it’s great for them because they have total clarity about what they’re looking for.

Let’s go back to this obsession with alignment. Explain what happens when you acquire my company.

The business is about 6 years old, a little more than 6 years old. There are really 3 phases of building the business to get to where we are. The first phase was acquiring enough scale. This was a proof of concept. I thought there was a tremendous opportunity, but the question was whether it would resonate and take off. So, for the first 18 months or so, we focused on accumulating scale.

That’s important because scale drives how you think about integration, the services you integrate, and the providers you use. If you’re going to build a $5 trillion company versus a $500 billion company versus a $50 billion company, how you think about integration is very different. There was a period when we were accumulating the scale to start the integration journey.

The second piece was starting down that integration journey. We had scale, and it became a matter of making the various decisions that drive integration and transform the organization. Some things come faster than others. The third piece is where we are now: a fully integrated state. I think that’s really important.

If you had asked me when I started which of those 3 phases people would be most comfortable with, I would have said the first phase, because it involves the least amount of change at the start. That’s actually not true. People are most comfortable with the current state because they know exactly what they’re getting into, which is interesting.

If you’re selling a firm to us, you’ll know exactly what life is going to look like on the other side. You’ll know from our conversations, but also because there are now 3,000 people you can reach out to and talk with about what life is like here. The people who’ve been through the journey with us tend to be our greatest ambassadors.

I think a lot of our success, and the reinforcement of that success, comes from people who’ve come over. The clients and the people themselves have had a great experience, and they become great ambassadors for the business as we continue to grow.

But what does total integration look like?

Everything. On day 1, you’re on our brand, you’re using our technology, you’re working in our offices, you’re collaborating across the firm, the collateral has been changed, and you’re on our compensation and benefits. So it’s effectively a full integration, with one caveat: this business is all about continuous improvement.

I’m a huge proponent of constantly changing, constantly evolving, and constantly pushing ourselves. So while that state of being integrated is true, every acquisition we make, every hire we make, and every conversation we have creates an opportunity for us to think about how we continuously improve the business. We benefit from these acquisitions in the same way the acquisitions benefit from us.

Explain a little bit more about that.

Yeah, because if I think about it, if you have a business in the space—

The only reason we should work together is if 2 things are true: I make you better, and you make me better. If those aren’t true, in my opinion, then it becomes a financial transaction. That’s fine, but that’s not ultimately the objective we have in place.

We’re looking at what you’re doing for clients and how we benefit from that. What expertise do you bring, and how does that expertise translate to better outcomes for the clients we have? The same goes the other way. Hopefully there are things we’re doing that benefit you, so it immediately becomes a mutually beneficial experience.

I’ll give you an example. When you grow up in management consulting, a lot of the work tends to be high-level strategic work that often skews more confidential in nature. You tend to do a lot of work in a vacuum, to some extent, and then there’s an implementation phase. There are a lot of pros to that, and a lot of challenges around driving adoption.

10. Giving employees a voice in building the brand

I’ll tell you a story that I think is relevant to how I think about integration. We’re building the company, and I need to pick a brand. Picking a brand for the business can be an emotional thing for people, right? Entrepreneurs often name the business after themselves, so it extends beyond just the name. It actually becomes personal.

There are a lot of different ways you can handle it, but let’s say there are 2 extremes. One is that you pick a name and tell people what it is: the fastest pathway to an outcome, but the least collaborative way to do it. The other end of the spectrum is to make the process as broad as possible. I’ll tell you exactly how we picked the name Corient, which I think is a pretty neat story.

I held a town hall across the firm and said, “Look, we’re at a point in our integration journey where we need to name the firm, and I have no idea what the name is going to be. I don’t actually care what the name is going to be, but it’s really important to me that everybody here who wants to be involved in naming the firm has a voice in doing so.”

I said, “We’re going to hire a third-party firm to help us with this. Our chief marketing officer and I are going to facilitate a series of focus groups. Anybody who wants to participate can put their hand up. The goal is to take an infinite list of names and narrow it down to finalists.” The firm was a lot smaller at that point. We had about 75 people participate in the focus groups.

We got all the way down to a list of finalists, then had a firm mock up the names. I ran a town hall with the partner group, and my chief marketing officer presented the names. Branding is fascinating, right? If you like golf and there’s a logo with a golf course behind it, you’re more likely to vote for it than if you don’t like sailing and there’s a logo with sailing behind it. So we mocked everything up under the same brand. I held a partner town hall, presented the names, and ran a live vote. We named the firm together.

That was important because on day 1, every person who wanted a voice in the process had one. It was totally transparent, and everybody knew where we were going. So when people were calling and telling their clients about the firm on day 1, everyone who was here had an opportunity to name the firm and be a part of it.

Those little decisions change how people think about and embrace change. I try to take that concept and apply it wherever we can. I think it leads to way better outcomes because you get more people providing input, and people embrace the change better because they can see their input reflected in whatever you ultimately decide.

Okay, I love that you just told a story about branding and marketing because that’s one of the things I wanted to talk to you about. I want to give some background on how I actually found you, which is kind of hilarious and a twist of fate. It involves our mutual friend Rick Gerson.

I get all these inquiries into my website all the time. Obviously, there’s huge demand for corporate speaking. People are always reaching out: “Will you come speak at this company?” I don’t do any of that. I have a very tight partnership with my partners. There’s one way to work with me: through the podcast. It’s comprehensive. It’s not just ads on the podcast; it’s events, too. That’s the way to do it.

I got a few inquiries from this company called Corient. They were like, “Hey, we listen to your podcast. We’re in Miami, too. Would you do this?” I never responded. I’m essentially embedded in Michael Dell’s merchant bank, and I’m close friends with Greg Lemkau, who’s one of the co-CEOs.

I love Greg. I absolutely love him. We hit it off from day 1. He sent me this interview and said, “Hey, check out this interview Byron and I did. Tell me what you think, because we don’t do much media.” I think it was on CNBC’s “Wealth,” or something like that.

I watched the whole thing, and there were 4 ad breaks with 1 sponsor the entire time: Corient.

I was like, “I know that name.” I searched my email and thought, “Oh, this is the same company. That’s interesting.”

Then I was having breakfast in Miami with our mutual friend. I’d already met you by then, but I didn’t know that. Rick’s in finance, obviously, so I said, “Have you heard of Corient? It’s a very interesting choice to have 4 ad breaks with 1 sponsor. I actually like that a lot. I think it’s really smart, for other reasons we don’t have to get into.”

I said, “Have you heard of this company called Corient?” He said, “Yeah, you met the CEO at my house when we were doing jiu-jitsu.” I was like, “You’re a brown belt or something, right? You’re the guy choking Gee, our mutual instructor—mine and Rick’s, that is.”

Then he was telling me that you’re in Miami, and that’s how we got connected. Ever since I saw that, I see Corient on Bloomberg and everywhere else. I’m very curious: Why sponsor that program? How do you think about branding, advertising, and marketing, and how does it tie into your mission of trying to build this company?

It’s a great question. By brand standards, the brand is new. The company is 6 years old, and the brand isn’t even 6 years old. Part of it is just creating awareness: awareness for clients, potential colleagues, and potential partners. There are a lot of different ways we think about that.

We do lean into marketing. We think it’s an incredibly impactful and powerful tool. The way we choose to lean into it is through 3 or 4 different approaches. One is advertising, a lot of the things you’ve mentioned. Every industry is changing: how people consume television, watch things, and engage with things is totally different. We’re trying to respond and reflect that.

We’re trying to advertise in places where people are watching something live, which is why you see us on business television and in sports—places people choose to engage, where they’re sitting in a structured and focused setting. We do a lot of digital marketing, too, really trying to micro-segment and target individuals we want to build and establish relationships with.

And we do a lot around experiences: client experiences, convening people across the business, and collaboration. I don’t think of them as individual silos, because there are lots of different ways people come across Corient. Maybe an ad introduces them to Corient, maybe it’s a friend or a mutual connection, maybe it’s a referral, or maybe it’s a business partner.

And the goal is to help bridge the gap between who Corient is, what we do, and how we can be helpful to people and their families as quickly as possible. By wealth management standards, or at least independent wealth management standards, I think we’ve taken a relatively unique but ambitious approach to advertising.

Today, we’re advertising in every market we’re in globally. You’ll see our ads in the US, Canada, the UK, Paris or France, and across the world. We intend to continue doing that. It’s really helped to short-circuit the discovery process: people say, “Hey, you’re a new company. Yes, you have all this scale.” They can learn about us as quickly as possible, and then hopefully we can start to engage and provide value to them and their families.

It’s shocking because these aren’t new ideas. They’ve been documented for at least 120 years. I’ve read every single biography about the great copywriters and advertising agency founders. They all say the same thing: repetition, repetition, repetition. The idea is that I didn’t just see Corient in one segment of the Greg Lemkau interview. I saw it again and again and again. By the time you get to it, I may not use your services. I might not sell my wealth management firm, but at least I know you exist.

Exactly.

And so this is what we’re doing with our partners. In addition to all my partners on both my podcasts, I also run the podcast strategies for these companies.

Yeah.

It’s just because I’m obsessed with it and I like to do it. You should know where your customers are paying attention. It’s very simple. We just pulled the numbers: there are 446,000 podcasts in the business category, I think, and 300,000-something that are still updating. There are 5 in the world that matter.

Yep.

11. Building a business that lasts for generations

There’s your strategy. It’s very simple: this is how you do it. And once you partner with them, you stay with them forever.

Yeah. But it comes back to the theme around conviction. A lot of times, advertising is one of these areas where, on a relative basis, you’re investing a tremendous amount of capital in advance of any underlying tangible benefit. You’re right: it is a proven strategy over time, but it depends on how people are thinking about their business.

The reason we have the ambitions we do, and the reason we built the business the way we have, is that I think this should be the forever business in ultra-high-net-worth wealth management. If you think about it with a forever time horizon, you’re going to think about brand building very differently than if there’s a temporary lens or a temporary owner. In a lot of areas and industries, particularly financial services and wealth management, there are a lot of temporary owners. They’re thinking about the business in 18- to 36-month increments. They’re not thinking about it across generations.

If you’re thinking about it over that period of time, you’re optimizing for a return and an exit. You’re not optimizing for a client experience, an employee experience, or building a forever brand. I think that’s probably how—

That’s the only thing I’m interested in.

Yeah. So, if you were to segment who you ultimately engage with in your business, it’s probably people, agnostic of industry, who meet those characteristics.

My friend Sam Hinkie has this great line. He’s like, “The person with the longest-term view in the room wins.”

Yeah.

Because it also goes against human nature. I have another question for you. You were in Chicago for the majority of your career, like the last—

Mostly New York. I was born and raised in Canada. Most of my professional career was in New York, and then I moved to Miami.

I want to get to Miami. Why are you so bullish on it? Why did you pick it for the headquarters? You have crazy office space that I went to.

Yeah.

Why Miami?

It’s a great question. I launched the business at the start of COVID.

You said April 2020. I was like, “Oh.”

Yeah. That creates a tremendous amount of challenges, but also a tremendous amount of opportunities. Effectively, the world stopped. Everything about everybody’s normal schedule and agenda halted in March 2020. You can either let that impact you or take advantage of it. That allowed us to accelerate the building of the business, start having those conversations, and lay a great foundation for the company.

As we were building the business, Corient was a separate, distinct, independent entity from CI. I needed a headquarters for the business. Because of how I built it, I had free rein in terms of where to put it. There was no particular transaction or corporate historical tie to any one area. If you think about it with a totally clean slate, where do you ultimately want the headquarters for the business to be? I picked Miami.

I picked Miami for a lot of different reasons. One thing that really stood out, and that I think makes Miami unique not only in America but in the rest of the world, is how engaged people are locally in creating positive reinforcement for building a community. One of my good friends—one of our good friends—is the mayor, or former mayor, of Miami, Francis Suarez. Francis was the ultimate ambassador. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a better ambassador for a city than him: take personal involvement, create connections, build relationships.

You think about it: there’s a decision about where you want the business to be, and then there’s a secondary decision about how you actually establish the business once you’ve made that decision. I find that a lot of times, people will sell the ambition and leave the second part up to the individual. What Francis in particular—and the Miami ecosystem he really created under his tenure as mayor—did was create an incredibly welcoming environment.

So I chose Miami as the headquarters, moved there myself, and effectively built the business. It’s been absolutely amazing because we were by no means pioneers of moving to Miami. I picked the headquarters at the end of 2020, but we were a little bit early relative to the flood of movement that’s happened since. My worry at that point was whether there would be enough local talent to hire as the business continued to grow. The answer was yes, even when we moved, and it’s even more true now given all the great migrations we’ve seen since.

You know this from your time in Miami: once you get there and spend time there, the quality of life is unbelievable. You build momentum around something and continue to reinforce it. I think we’re still in the early days of what we’ll see in South Florida. It’s worked out significantly beyond my expectations across the board: in how we’ve established a presence and operated the business, employee and colleague satisfaction, and what we’ve been able to do.

I love how, when I asked you where you picked your headquarters and how you designed your business, it was the same exact idea: you started from a blank sheet of paper.

You have to. I mean, look, sometimes you end up too far down the path, and it’s very, very hard. So you have to push yourself, right? If you’re going to build something from scratch, how do you avoid pitfalls? You have to learn and study mistakes you’ve made and mistakes other people have made, just as you study successes you’ve had and successes other people have had. How do you really draw on the best of it?

We didn’t really cover it today, but we talk a lot about the partnership. When I launched the partnership, the goal I set for ourselves was that the structure and features of the Corient partnership would be better than those of any partnership that had come before us. The reason I wanted that to be true was that we’re building this thing from scratch.

You want to be able to say, “Look, I’ve drawn on all of these lessons from all these other great partnerships that existed in other industries. How do I take the best of them, improve on the areas I think are ripe for improvement, and use that as a catalyst?” Not only was it a partnership, but when people actually got in and audited it, they were like, “Wow, this is really built in a way that’s friendly.” It’s done that way because you become a student of all the things that have come before you and try to use them to influence your decision-making.

And it should be if you’re going to do this forever.

Exactly. Exactly.

Perfect place. Thanks for taking the time to do this.

Thanks, man.

Awesome.

Appreciate it.

I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review. And make sure you listen to my other podcast, Founders. For almost a decade, I've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through Founders.