David Wells works as an advisor to individuals, families, and organizations to help them wrestle with and answer the strategic questions they face to grow and succeed into the future. With over 15 years' experience, David leverages his background as an equity analyst, 4x entrepreneur, and Board member to collaborate with senior leaders across the US.

[EPISODE]

[00:00:29] BA: Hello, and welcome to The Conversation on Colloquium. Today, I've got an old friend of mine, David Wells, with me. David, how are you today?

[00:00:36] DW: I'm doing well, Brian. Doing well.

[00:00:38] BA: Thanks for joining us. David and I have known each other for, gosh, longer than I probably care to admit. But he is always been exceedingly thoughtful, smart, hardworking, and I am so happy for him that he is doing well with his consulting business. And he is put together this book, which I think is really needed right now.

So, before we get into the conversation, I'm going to do a little bit of background. David is the founder and CEO of Family Capital Strategy, which is a boutique consultancy, that provides strategic insight, investment, governance, development, and family office design for families facing liquidity events, generational transitions and other significant changes.

Prior to founding the firm, David has an extensive background conducting strategic and investment analysis. And he served as a partner and Portfolio Manager at a 20-year-old asset management firm, co-founded a long short hedge fund, and was also a senior equity analyst working with large hedge fund and private equity clients. So, a very diverse background and I think given all of that, this will be a very compelling conversation.

Before we get into it, the biggest takeaway I had from reading your book, which is called When Anything Is Possible, and I encourage anybody listening to go check it out. And I'm sure we’ll, at the end of this, provide you some opportunities to connect with David and also access the book. But this is a light motif throughout your book, which is it's all about the why. So, maybe before we get into the guts of the book itself, why did you sit down and write this thing?

[00:02:11] DW: Yeah, great question. I think it comes down to a couple of things, appreciate the bit of bio on my end and I've been very fortunate over the course of my career to work with a lot of different types of investors, a lot of different types of families. And I think what I was struck with was, we would have conversations and even when I was was a portfolio manager, managing portfolios for clients, you would sit down and have a conversation with someone and as a portfolio manager, you're kind of like a chef, where you've got a bunch of different ingredients that you can put together to build a portfolio. But until you know whether the client wants Chinese food, Italian, or hamburger, it's really tough to put something out there that's going to be aligned. And what I found was, you would get into a conversation with a client, begin to start walking down this path of what are you trying to accomplish with your wealth? What's really the priority set? It's a really squishy nebulous kind of ephemeral concept. And the challenge was that almost to a tee, that conversation would be something that families would say, “I want to make sure that I can travel”, in which pre-COVID, such an important part of modern life is, it's so easy to get around the world, they want to see their grandkids, and they may have a few philanthropic causes that they care about. But that was it, that was kind of the full total of the conversation.

And really whatever level of net worth you are, I think you've got a pretty broad range of choices, especially once you start getting into what's called kind of the ultra-high net worth category, which is typically kind of around the $25 million mark, especially as you go from there on up into the multi...