Co-founders of Our Family Office bring decades of world-class experience

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In incorporation years, Our Family Office Inc. is a mere youngster. It was launched in 2017 amid a family wealth advisory industry crowded with well-established institutions and boutique firms.

The team’s history, however, points to a depth of experience in investments and finance that goes back at least 50 years to when Neil Nisker – the firm’s executive chairman, chief investment officer and co-founder – led one of the country’s top institutional brokerages.

From there, Nisker continued to build his career, earning a reputation as a steadfast investment manager not swayed easily by the latest trends – such as dot.com stocks and, more recently, cryptocurrency – or by pressure from investors. In 1990, he was tapped to co-manage a global equity fund owned by the legendary British investor, banker and fund manager Sir John Templeton.

“He was my mentor,” says Nisker. “I’m one of the three people in the world he picked to manage his fund.”

Nisker isn’t the only heavy hitter at Our Family Office. Co-founder and CEO Tim Cestnick, who started 34 years ago as an accountant at Deloitte, is a well-known name in taxation and wealth planning, having written five books and hundreds of articles on these topics. He founded one of Canada’s first multi-family offices – from a tax education and consulting firm he had built up, sold and bought back from billionaire Michael Lee Chin – and became director of advanced wealth planning at Scotiabank, where he worked with many of the bank’s wealthiest clients.

Nisker and Cestnick took time recently to talk about their Toronto-based firm, which has grown over the last five years to a team of 12 serving about 40 ultra-high-net-worth families with $3.5 billion in assets under advisement.

You describe Our Family Office as Canada’s first truly integrated shared family office. What exactly does that mean?

Nisker: We’ve put together a team of experts in all facets of family wealth. To illustrate our range of expertise, before COVID I spoke at a family office conference and asked those in the room to please raise their hands if they call themselves a family office. About 13 hands came up. I talked about what we did for our families: investment management, tax planning, family governance, education for the next generation, leadership mentoring, conflict mediation, communication training, business strategy and transition planning, family administration – the list goes on.

Then I asked: “How many of you do all that?” Not one hand was put up.

Aside from your comprehensive services, how else are you different from other family offices?

Cestnick: When you take a look at most multi-family office firms, they’re usually born from one discipline, such as accounting or investment. We’re born out of truly equal parts investment and tax planning. We place equal importance on both and do both equally well at a high level. I’ll boast and say that I don’t think there’s another firm out there that can claim to be as good as we are on the tax side. And on the investment side, our platform has performed exceptionally well under the guidance of Neil.

Another thing that makes us unique is we came up with a new governance model where we’re 50-per-cent owned by our families. I was approached by former clients of mine who knew I was leaving Scotiabank, where I was director of advanced wealth planning. They wanted me to build another family office and said, “By the way, we want to be shareholders.” We started out with them having 15-per-cent ownership, and over time more families told us they’d love to own some of the business.

So does being a fully integrated family office mean you do everything in-house?

Cestnick: I don’t want to outsource critical stuff to other firms. We have tried outsourcing more straightforward things like bookkeeping, but we found it wasn’t a slam dunk, it wasn’t seamless.

We’ll only bring in outside professionals when our capacity is running out or when we need to deal with an issue that’s very specialized. For example, we facilitate conversations with family members, but we’re not going to do marriage counselling.

Nisker: We want to be their most trusted advisor. Families of wealth have their accountants, their lawyers, their estate planner. But when was the last time they had them all at once in the same room? When families work with us, we become that room. We have a very disciplined process of making sure there are no redundancies and that nothing falls through the cracks.

How have you helped your clients preserve their wealth? Are there particular strategies that came into play?

Nisker: We play offence by playing defence, and most of our strategies are non-traditional strategies. When we build our clients’ portfolios we budget for risk, correlation, for future capital gains and returns and for liquidity. Liquidity is important because it allows you to take advantage of the situation if the market goes down.

Does tax planning become even more important when markets are down?

Cestnick: Tax planning is always important. You can know for a fact from tax planning how much you can put into your client’s pocket, how much you’re saving them. We’re very much in tune with all the best ideas out there. Even in 2022, when many Canadians worried about their portfolios, our clients have slept at night because of the tax planning work we’ve done for them.

How would you describe your clients? Are they mostly in Canada or do you also serve families based in other countries?

Nisker: We only take Canadian clients, but our clients have children around the world, so the tax planning we do is international and intergenerational in scope. A lot of our families are immigrants, with children and grandchildren. So we’re educating Generation Two and in some cases Generation Three.

What do these conversations with the next generations sound like?

Cestnick: It all starts with values – what’s important to the family, what are the ground rules for working and for sharing this wealth. We get into issues like conflicts of interest, distribution of wealth, investment policy, the right or privilege to work in the family business, and how to borrow money from the family investment bank. Every family is unique, but there are also a lot of similarities. A lot of our clients’ children – the millennials in particular – are very interested in ESG investing. That seems to be a theme amongst the younger generation.

You both have decades of experience in investment and wealth advisory services. How have affluent families changed over the decades? What do they need today that they didn’t need 50 years ago, for example?

Cestnick: When I started my first family office about 15 years ago, we spent a lot of time educating people what a family office is. Now most wealthy families know what a family office is, and now the question is more about finding the right fit and determining what capacity or skill sets they need to surround themselves with.

On your website, you say you serve only a limited number of families. How do you choose which families to work with?

Nisker: We bring in about 12 families a year, and ideally they have liquid assets in excess of $10 million. We look for families who share the same values we do, who want to make a difference. In fact, every one of our families has set up either a foundation or a donor-advised fund. For their part, families choose us because they believe they can trust us and they like our governance values.

The work you do really pulls you into the inner workings of families. How do you build the relationship of deep trust that you need to be a highly effective family office?

Cestnick: We go through a very detailed discovery process where we talk about what’s important to the family. We have conversations with family members individually as well as their spouses. This could be a five- to seven-hour process, but it’s really important to us to spend the time getting to know our families and for them to get to know us and our process.

As co-founders, you are both the faces of the family office, so compatibility and chemistry are important. How did you decide it was a good idea to partner up and build a family office?

Nisker: Just as we vet families carefully before deciding to work with them, Tim and I took the time to vet each other before co-founding the firm. You might say that we “dated” for a year before making a commitment. We even took psychology tests to make sure we were compatible. We’re now about five years in and it continues to be a great partnership.

Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.

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