Advice on Sourcing Family Office info to help secure LP's

You're in a tough spot.

It's going to take you one or both of the following to make any headway on this task: a) years (probably 2-4) spent building relationships, or b) money, either (i) to pay for all the lists you mentioned (which tend to be inaccurate, outdated, or otherwise useless) or (ii) to offer a retainer or fee-sharing agreement with someone who's already plugged into that community.

It took me probably three years of active effort to build a halfway decent network in the family office space.

I found that the general function of success in this was getting introduced to someone by a person who they trust, respect, or know well enough to take you seriously. There's then a compounding effect or 'ratcheting up', where over time you're able to take the best people you were introduced to, develop relationships and build enough mutual credibility with them where they eventually offer unprompted introductions for you, and then figure out who the best of those introductions were in order to repeat the process.

Add in the factors where people aren't in any rush (because at that level of wealth, just the passive returns are enough to keep the lights on and maintain your standard of living), people travel a lot (reviewing various investments, attending networking retreats or seminars, visiting family or living the wealthy lifestyle), and they want to really get to know you before they do anything with you, and that compounding process legitimately takes years.

How do you develop that relationship or build credibility? By being articulate and informed / coming from a respectable pedigree / having strong performance history / executing sound deals that make your counterparts money.

Let's unpack each of those.

(i) "Articulate and informed" doesn't simply mean being well-spoken. It means knowing the hard-to-know stuff: how family offices allocate capital, the difference between a single family office and multifamily office, the difference between a first-generation office or a third-generation office, who the well-regarded service providers (trust and estate, OCIO, asset servicing, concierge and procurement, etc.) are, and so forth.

Failing on this is a quick way to put your foot in your mouth, close the door with whoever you're meeting, and maybe even suffer broader reputational harm if that person ends up talking about you as somebody who's not worth knowing. (And you'd be surprised at how insular the family office community is; people host events to do nothing other than get together and talk about the landscape and how to further ring-fence the bullshit out.)

For example, if someone in your first meeting tells you they're managing wealth for the fourth generation of some European industrial family, blindly launching into your pitch for a blind pool fund for early stage technology deals in America will get them to silently write you off, thank you for the meeting, and never answer an email again.

Winning on this means knowing how to pull the meaning behind someone's words, then deliver them value on that meaning over time. No one is in a rush in this world.

(ii) "Coming from a respectable pedigree" doesn't mean that you're from a background of family wealth. It refers to whether you have credible experience that immediately signals to someone that you're intelligent, competent, and skilled.

Someone introducing you as "John Sixpack who used to work at Carlyle and has some interesting direct deals you might find relevant" is really different from 'Dave Dadbod' walking up at a 'family office mixer event' in the city and not being able to point to a strong institution where employees develop a portable skill-set.

(iii) "Strong performance history" means an attributable track record deploying capital. If you have caliber dealflow and a proven history of monetizing it, people will want to meet you regardless of where you went to school or worked.

I met a guy once who was pretty unkempt (30-50 overweight, dressed pretty haphazardly, not the most pleasant personality), but who grilled me about why I was charging the economic structure on the thing I was. He went on to talk about the five years he spent at a TCV/NEA/GA/Summit type shop before moving on to be an independent player, and how he was able to charge 30% promotes on anything cool he found to three families who backed him on deals.

Regardless of how distasteful I (or anyone else) might find him, he had flow and he was able to monetize it. Performance matters; put it up and people will work with you.

(iv) "Executing sound deals" means don't peddle shit, simply put. Some of the most respected guys I've met in the space were really up front about either having not enough bandwidth to diligence the thing I had on the table or not enough domain expertise to know where to start. As a result, they didn't want to put it in their office's pipeline, or if they were an independent guy, walk it into their capital sources. I learned a lot from that; reputation really matters.

Let's wrap this up. I think you're up against an unrealistic task.

Combing LinkedIn or any other online resource (can't think of another one besides LinkedIn) won't work. The principals of these offices are legitimately never online (seriously, I've met less than a dozen who were, and it tended to be the son/grandson/nephew who wasn't really a decision-maker and was out trying to make a career of their own), and the CIOs tend to be way older and made an account once and never updated it.

Paying for the various lists that are floating around is a waste of money unless money is legitimately not a factor for you, which seems unlikely to be the case if it's a first fund with brand new GPs. The hit rate (in terms of contact info being real or live) from them is so low, and from those that are live, you aren't even smart to pursue: cold emailing is not the move.

In short: I'd recommend you show your bosses this post and tell them that since they don't have time [(a) from my first paragraph], they need to go with (b) money. They should spend their energy finding either the independent guys who are plugged into the community of credible, check-writing, deal-oriented offices and make a living helping people like you get your fund closed or deal financed in exchange for a slice of the economics, or the name-brand placement shops that will do the same thing in exchange for a placement fee structured in a multi-year payout.

Pick your poison.

The lone wolves will want probably 50-150 basis points on anything they raise you, plus 250-500 points out of the carry. Anyone who asks you for a chunk of the GP entity or for the carry participation to roll over into a future fund is someone you should tell to pound sand.

The shops will ask for a 2-6% placement fee on any assets raised, but break it into payments that probably won't be higher than 75 bps a year (meaning they know you have a business to run and don't want to eat into too much of your annual management fee).

The levers that control how the fee will vary are how strong the track record is (if any exists), how much you've raised so far, and how strong your materials are. If it's anything decent of a track record, someone will be interested. If you've done a first close or are at least one-third of the way to your target and thus could do a first close today, someone will be interested. If your materials exist and aren't a mess (meaning they don't have to spend the weeks interviewing you for the info, coaching, and revising them), someone will be interested.

The more you can pull each of those levers in your favor, the cheaper getting someone to help you will be. Doing this on your first fund is really worth it if you get someone good. They can knock out in three months what would otherwise take you three years. Too often I see people choose to not sacrifice $750k/year for four years in management fee income (on a hypothetical $100m fund) over giving up some basis points today but be able to quickly get to work, develop the track record, deploy capital that will yield carry, and raise a $300m fund three years later.

Look, I just saved you a couple hundred hours of tedious work and gave your bosses invaluable advice. Feel free to tell them to wire me a million or two.