Coordinating between all the vendors and providers that a company has to work with can be difficult work, but there are a certain subset of companies that have made it easier to do the work. Family office servicing companies can be a huge relief on the shoulders of your company when it comes to dealing with all these external providers. Evan Jehle is a partner at Flynn Family Office and LVW Flynn. He talks to Bob Roark about his experience working at a family office servicing company, and what these companies can offer you. Could this be the best way for your business to move forward?
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First, I want to say thank you for having me. FFO is a family office servicing company. What we do is we are a single-family office service provider to multiple families. That's the key to what we do. We're virtual. We can work with a client anywhere they are in the world. There's a lot of different providers that a family would have that they're dealing with, their investment advisor, their attorney. We coordinate between all of those people to make sure that the family is getting whatever services they need. We're essentially the COO and CFO of their personal lives. That's what we're striving to be.
If you were to look across your clientele, what is a client of yours look like? What industries or pursuits do they entail?
We've got an eclectic client group. We do have an entertainment and sports team group of clients. That's probably 20% of our business, but 80% of our clients are business owners. All first-generation wealth creators. It's the actual wealth creator of the family. We don't have multiple generation family offices. We do have some first generation that is now working to pass wealth down to the children, gen two, which is an exciting part of some of the things that we're doing for them. Teaching them about managing money and how they do that. It is across multiple businesses. We have people that are in fashion, we have people that are in the food industry. It's business owners that have a lot of money and need help on the financial side on how to do it and managing all the different vendors, projects and things that are going on. It's eclectic.
What's your background that got you into this field? Weren't you in a family office at one point?
I started at Rothstein Kass, which was a public accounting firm out of Roseland, New Jersey. I did an audit for a couple of years, which was fun. I knew it wasn't going to be my entire career, but I love the firm and I didn't want to leave. I was lucky enough where Rick Flynn, who is my partner in FFO, was a client of Rothstein Kass, then he joined as a partner and started the family office practice. I volunteered to move out of the audit and into the family office group and hadn't looked back. I came up with an audit background where you learn analytics. Why did this change? What's the reason? You're trying to figure those things out. That
