With a wealth of personal experience working in single-family offices, the founding partners of the newly launched Chamberlain Family Office Advisors believe they have a unique edge in the wealth management and advisory marketplace.
“Each and every one of us has worked on the inside—behind the curtain, if you will—and so we bring all the venture capital, private equity, comprehensive reporting and next-generation mentoring,” says Kelly Burke, one of eight partners behind the new Toronto-based firm.
“We have lived the dream that we’re trying to solve for,” he says.
Burke says Chamberlain plans to offer its services throughout Canada, the U.S., Mexico and the Caribbean. One partner, Jordan Frenkel, is based in Los Angeles.
“Our competitive set is across North America, and I am not aware of any firm that’s comprised of former single-office professionals within our competitive set,” says Burke.
Chamberlain aims to enhance the capacity and capability of single-family offices, offering services as diverse as managing direct investments, designing reporting systems, helping with tax and estate planning and evaluating transactions, acquisitions and venture capital opportunities.
The target market includes entrepreneurs at every stage, from pre-sale of the operating business to creating a family office and augmenting the operation of mature family offices.
But that doesn’t mean Chamberlain is itself a variation on a multi-family office.
“One of the key messages we’re delivering to the marketplace is we do not manage public market assets or public market investments,” Burke says. “So we won’t handle your stock portfolio.”
There’s not a lot of margin in handling public market investments, he says, and having to be licensed to deal in market investments in each of the firm’s separate jurisdictions would add further complexity.
This flexibility to work anywhere in North America is a plus, says Burke. “It also allows us to be very friendly with asset management firms. We can work with them to augment their family office service offering.”
Since Chamberlain won’t be billing based on assets under management, it will be flexible in terms of how it is paid, says Burke. Depending on a family’s needs, the fee could be retainer-based or based on specific projects.
While its core team consists of its eight partners, Chamberlain will be able to advise and bring on experts in fields outside the team’s experience, such as lawyers and estate experts.
Burke says the team will be on the road quite a bit; initially, Chamberlain has only a virtual office. “We can do initial client meetings and schedule follow-ups in person, but we expect to execute a reasonable amount of the work remotely,” he says.
Chamberlain partner Mary Hermant is based in Toronto but expects to be doing some work in the U.S. for the new firm. Hermant spent 15 years in New York and worked for Royce Holdings, a firm helmed by small-cap investment guru Chuck Royce.
She stresses the importance of collaboration in the family office sector as an impetus for the creation of Chamberlain.
“Most family offices are dealing with either no or very small staff, and they may not have the specialist expertise in-house. … So that’s how Chamberlain came together. We all recognize that family office problems are varied, complicated, challenging. You need a team.”
Along with experience in start-up ventures, Hermant also brings technology expertise, having launched several tech products, including Frsh Beacons and Social Extract.
Wealthy families and their offices must address tech, she says. For instance, an entrepreneur transitioning from a prime business or one that’s just been exited may find the technology they used there may not work for running a family office.
“There are different levels of comfort with technologies, everything from the basics of running a virtual meeting for family members to knowledge management, and getting all the files and everything that we need to have all in one place, to knowing about technologies that could affect their position and their wealth preservation, like AI and blockchain.”
Discussion on creating Chamberlain began in January. Burke had been working with a single-family office for about three years, leading corporate development and helping the office buy companies.
Given the current interest rate environment, the office decided it wouldn’t be buying any new companies, so “we mutually agreed that we would part company,” says Burke. He reached out to friends in the industry and asked if they would like to join him as a free agent.
“Everyone who has signed on as a partner has had a similar version of the same story, in that our skill set was highly valued for a period of time, and from a family perspective, and then at some point they made a pivot in their approach to doing business and the skill set wasn’t as valued,” he says.
“Each of us having gone through that, we all committed to this sort of outsourced resource—still having the wonderful opportunity to work with very wealthy families, but we control where that long-term compensation for ourselves comes from.”
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