In a case study, GensSpring Family Offices discusses why the firm went through a major rebranding exercise four years ago and reflects on its subsequent impact.

Steve Barimo, chief marketing officer at GenSpring Family Offices, the Florida-headquartered multi-family office, discusses the rationale behind his firm’s 2007 rebrand and how it is positioning itself as a leader in the “pure” advisory space.

Background

GenSpring Family Offices, the Florida-headquartered multi-family office firm, was founded in 1989 as Asset Management Advisors, with that name having been chosen to reflect the firm’s concern with the management of broader assets such as intellectual capital. Over time the firm’s founding families and senior executives felt that the name Asset Management Advisors was too reductive and implied that the firm focused on asset management in the narrow sense of the word, meaning that the firm’s staff had to clarify their wider value proposition “countless times”, said Barimo. “We wanted something to convey our full proposition and who we are, which is a family office”, he continued.

The rebranding process

1. At the core of the rebranding process was a values survey taken by all employees in order to identify what they saw as the firm’s core values. These emerged as:

·        Advising families

·        Advising families broadly

·        Having a responsibility to the client families only

·        Continuous improvement and learning for families (i.e. not just giving them enough knowledge to make them comfortable buying a product)

Employees also highlighted the aim of making sure clients can “have fun and not be worried, stressed or overwhelmed by the complexities of wealth”, said Barimo.

2. Next, the firm carried out interviews with 30 client families to find out what they thought its core values were – and one of these insights actually formed the rationale behind the new name.

The firm discovered that client families viewed the firm generationally, as in they wanted to sustain their wealth via the multi-family office’s infrastructure, thus giving rise to the “Gen” part of the new name.

The “Spring” part of the name actually came from a concept brought up by one client in particular, who said that family wealth is like a spring, in that “you can’t dam it up and you can’t let it go dry either,” explained Barimo. Thus, the firm arrived at a name which encapsulated the dual concept of a generational spring, he said, with the addition of “Family Offices” giving even more clarity.

The “Family Offices” part of the new name was essential, said Barimo: “We wanted to put a stake in the ground as a family office is different [to other types of wealth manager]… being a family office is a really critical part of our identity.”

He also pointed out that the green sprig element of the firm’s brand identity reinforces the exponent position of GenSpring, that of continual growth, of both family wealth and of knowledge.

A “pure” advisory firm

GenSpring is very keen to emphasise its status as a “pure” advisory institution and sees itself as perhaps the only such provider which is nationally and globally branded as such. “We envision being the key player in this [pure advisory for the UHNW] space,” said Barimo. But clarifying what your offer is as a pure advisory multi-family office can at times be difficult, he concedes, as “frankly, you have nothing to sell except the value proposition of a family office which separates advice from products and solutions.”

Instead, Barimo explains that GenSpring has built its offering around:

·        Being independent and having no agendas other than the client’s best interest

·        Being agnostic as to product or solution

·        Aiming to fully leverage the collective buying power of its client families (with some $23 billion in collective client assets scale is able to both drive access up and costs down)

·        Aiming to fully leverage the collective intellectual capital across its network

He also highlights the fact that the firm advises on non-financial issues as well as financial ones, and that this way, “you don’t have just one arrow in your quiver, you have unlimited resources.”

“Both big and small”

Although being a pure advisory firm is what GenSpring views as its key differentiator and an “anchor” for its brand, Barimo also points to the fact that the firm maintains a “balance of being both big and small.”

On the “small” side of things, conversations with clients take place in a small local family office (which is decorated in the style of a family home, with photographs of clients, for example), with “closeness and intimacy” front of mind. This is because serving clients “has to be done locally with staff completely entwined with their lives,” he explained, adding that the use of home-inspired décor is “all about ensuring they feel it’s their family office.”

On the “large” side of things, Barimo notes that the firm holds hundreds of investment manager meetings around the world each year and assiduously tracks developments in international tax law and family governance issues, for example. Balancing being both big and small, adding an international platform to an intimate approach, GenSpring aims to “provide the best the world has to offer across the whole wealth management universe”, he said.

Standing out from the global banks

When asked how GenSpring differentiates itself from the family office arms of the global banks, Barimo is sceptical as to whether a like-for-like comparison can even be made, as many institutions merely define a family office client as one with more than $50 million in assets. Moreover, the big players aren’t family offices by any true definition, he said, explaining that a “real” family office “works only for the family and are paid only by the family. The clearest distinction between family offices and global banks that market themselves as family offices is that purely objective advisors work under the fiduciary standard, as does GenSpring, which requires acting in the best interest of clients at all times.”

GenSpring’s target client base

Barimo explains that a typical client is one who might want a single family office but is constrained by a lack of scale. These may be very wealthy clients indeed, but lack the critical mass of an asset base of $200-300 million required to make a single family office “make sense” in terms of the infrastructure and regulatory provisions which will have to be put in place. Attracting industry-leading talent without this scale is also a concern as is the fact that a single family office can actually add to clients’ worries as “it’s another business to be managed”, he said.

Barimo also points out that single family offices can be very isolating for clients, inducing them to wonder “how do I know I’m doing the best thing?” This is where GenSpring’s “hybrid” model is intended to come to the fore. “We help them [clients] to be a smart buyer… we assess strategic and tactical asset allocation, helping them to buy at a competitive price,” he explained.

Marketing strategy – advertising doesn’t work

Despite having put such work into its rebrand, GenSpring completely eschews advertising as it views it unlikely that traditional mass marketing channels will be efficient in reaching out to its target client segment. “A very small sliver of the population are ultra high net worth…advertising doesn’t make sense,” he said.

As might be expected, client referrals are GenSpring’s “biggest source of new clients”, but the firm has also placed raising brand awareness through thought-leadership at the centre of its marketing strategy. The firm’s staff write and speak on key issues as well as presenting at learning events which are focused on families and how to solve the issues that keep them awake at night.

“The hard sell doesn’t really work with this segment”, said Barimo, “moreover, it violates our brand values and value proposition – this is not a transaction business, you’re selling a long-standing relationship. We don’t have anything to offer other than our integrated advice and comprehensive service.”

In Barimo’s view, “at the heart of being an advisor is education… teaching clients about choices and their implications.” In this way, the firm’s learning programmes are designed to give prospective clients a taste of what it is like to have an unbiased advisor to help them through these complexities. “It’s all about enabling clients to make really good decisions for their families,” he concludes.