Building a 100-Year Family Office: Strategies and Insights

Speaker A: Hello and welcome to the Private wealth podcast hosted by the Ultra High Net Worth Institute. I'm Joe Reilly, head of Circulus Group, Family Office Network based in Greenwich, Connecticut. Today we are very pleased to be hosting Kathy Lint. A member of the board of directors at the Institute. Kathy began her financial services career at Chase Manhattan bank in New York City where she helped develop one of the nation's first first financial education and planning programs at the Chase Exchange. This experience inspired her to become an early CFP certificate and build a fee only comprehensive financial planning practice in St. Louis. In 1990, she founded the firm that would become Matter Family Office, growing it into a leading multi family office focused on independent investments, integrated planning, family well being, governance and philanthropy. A lifelong learner with a BA in history from Duke University, Kathy was the recipient of the Family Wealth Report Lifetime achievement award in 2026. Please enjoy my conversation with Kathy Lentz. The easiest place to start is tell us a little bit about your background.

Speaker B: I grew up in Connecticut. When I, uh, went to Duke, I was a history major. So I wasn't interested in finance at that time. But I came back to New York and I started working for Chase Manhattan and they were starting a financial education program targeted to women. And remember back in this time, financial planning was just in its nascent era. So there were very few certified financial planners. Really the financial industry. As a consumer, you could go with a brokerage firm or you could be served by a trust company. There really weren't financial planning firms at this time. So when Chase started an education program targeted to consumers, in particular women in Midtown Manhattan at 48th street in Madison, I raised my hand and I said, I really want to really help educate and prepare regular people around personal finance. And it was called the Chase Exchange. And this really resonated with me because actually my father had passed away when, uh, he was 39, I was only 16 and my mother was 38 and she turned, um, the few hundred thousand dollars of life insurance over to an uncle in a trust company. And it was invested in the 70s in bonds, 25 year bonds that when inflation came really ravaged them. And when Chase was wanting to educate consumers to make good decisions, I thought, gosh, that's a good idea. I really would like to be a part of that. So that's what really moved me into the financial planning field. And then that became a passion project for me, really helping families and individuals make great decisions around their money.

Speaker A: And what was the Chase Exchange? What did you folks actually do?

Speaker B: Yeah, we ran education programs through this center at 48th and Madison, we had people from Wall Street Week, all those great experts come and give seminars. We also did fee only financial planning for Chase consumers. And we did outreach programs at people's workspaces. We would give lunch and learns to consumers at their place of work throughout New York.

Speaker A: Can you tell me a little bit about the founding of KBL and working with athletes and how that led to matter?

Speaker B: When my husband was in business school and when we moved from New York to St. Louis, I started working for a group of sports agents, baseball and football agents. And that was so much fun because every new contract for a young athlete is a blank piece of paper, right? They're new city, new states to play in new terms. And so really as an early CFP planner, I was able to really in essence help these young families create a financial plan in what we call dog years. Because a young athlete every year is so important. If they don't take advantage of each year, then you know their outcomes are going to be very different. The average football player at that time had a four year lifespan in the NFL and the average baseball player was 10 years. And so we really had to drill in and help dig in and help these young families make great decisions in very real time because life was moving fast for these young families.

Speaker A: And how did you come to work with that? Uh, in the first place?

Speaker B: My neighbor in St. Louis was a sports agent and I worked there for six years and needed to separate the financial planning aspects of the work with the agents. I needed to be able to fire clients actually because some of the athletes wouldn't take our advice and I didn't want to work with them anymore. So the agents really couldn't fire the clients because they were negotiating their contracts and their promotional relationships. And so I needed to be able to pick the clients that I wanted to work with. So I started KBL Financial with 22 baseball and football players and two broadcasters. And uh, it was really one of those early, it was in 1990, it was one of the early fee only financial planning firms around. And I had to start it because there really wasn't a firm like us in the market.

Speaker A: And so what would have the choices been back then?

Speaker B: I think a full service brokerage firm, trust company, bank. But many of most of those sell product, investment products or got insurance commissions or, or had huh, some sort of referral fee basis. The fee only financial planning industry really began in the late 80s and early 90s.

Speaker A: And so how did KBL eventually evolve into Matter Family office?

Speaker B: The first 10 years were pretty slow because I took as many clients as I could handle working with, uh, two young children. So I didn't load up my work. But by the end of the 90s we had about 50 baseball and football players and we were, had a significant business. And then in the early 2000s we started taking more business owners, more larger families, more complex families. And by 2002, 2003, we really morphed to a, uh, multi family office. We started hiring people from Pricewaterhouse and Ernst and Young and with law degrees. And our clients got much more complicated. And probably a year or two after that there was a name for what we were, which was a multifamily office.

Speaker A: What are your main types of clients today?

Speaker B: My main clients are, I uh, would call them first generation wealth creators. About 60% of our clients have created their wealth during their lifetime. They're multi generational families. We serve two, three and four generations in all of those families. They're really looking for an integrated, non conflicted thought partner to help them think across all of the areas of their lives and help them make great decisions.

Speaker A: Where do you think efficiencies of scale come in with, with ultra high net worth clients?

Speaker B: I think it's such a wonderful position that we're in because we work with maybe 20 fantastic estate attorneys across the country. We work with fantastic accounting, uh, firms, so we work with many of the best thinkers around the country serving ultra high net worth families. So we get a broad perspective on strategies and approaches and communication ways to communicate with families. I don't know if we have efficiencies of scale, but we definitely have a very broad view and a lot of experience in seeing around corners and seeing ahead. Working with a number of families, we can see where they are, but we can also see where they're going because we've had other families that have gone there and we've gone there with them. So we have more perspective and a very rich national network of other firms serving these types of families.

Speaker A: How do you think about branding your firm and how do you distinguish yourselves in a crowded field?

Speaker B: It's a really good question. We rebranded about 12 or 13 years ago and the way we did that is we hired a wonderful firm out of Northern California to help us figure out what our purpose was and be clear about that. And they interviewed our clients, they interviewed our employees, and they interviewed the people in our sphere of influence. And everyone said, uh, a version of the same thing. They said that our team helps families figure out what's important, what matters to them and helps them get there and reach those goals and objectives. So that's how we came up with matter and then Family office is who we are. We've been that really in many ways since the inception over the firm. We're just working with more complex families now than we did at the beginning. And so we think a lot about our purpose and about how to help families realize their purpose.

Speaker A: Working with the families. Do you think there's a difference between stewardship and ownership?

Speaker B: We're working with multi generational families that are looking at one, ah, hundred years ahead. We're a firm that reflects those families. We have 50% women and 50% men. We have multiple generations within our same firm. We're all thinking about stewardship and how to, I would say, respect each generation's needs and create great positive outcomes across the generations. And I think that's really what stewardship is. The ownership of those decisions and the ownership of our firms are also in service to the purpose. And so I think they're in alignment. Ownership and stewardship.

Speaker A: How has your thinking about staffing models changed over the years? You've had this really interesting career. You worked in a big bank and then you started working with clients directly and eventually scaled it into this very large business. So I'm interested in how that has evolved.

Speaker B: Our service lines have evolved. So I would say at first we were, uh, planning shop and an investment shop. Now we really focus on family operations, which, because people's lives have gotten much more complex. They need bill pay, they need recordkeeping, they need consolidated reporting for very complex balance sheets. They need integrated wealth planning, integrating the taxes, the cash flow, the uh, transfer strategies, the estate decision. And then they need crackerjack, best in class investments. In addition, we've really worked for over 25 years in building our family learning and communication service line, which is the overarching umbrella to everything that we do. In other words, what information does each family member need to know and uh, how do their decisions align with their purpose and how do they talk about these issues so that they can together make the right decisions across the generations? So we've spent over 25 years and uh, it really started with the athletes show because the athletes really didn't know a thing, right, about finance. They're 24 years old, they're signing some big contract. So we really started teaching teaching athletes about stocks and bonds and taxes. From our very beginnings. We were sitting at kitchen tables with value lines showing them how to read charts and make great decisions. So over the years, we have evolved that family learning to include communication training, wonderful, robust, honest, authentic family meeting facilitation, mission and vision work. So we're not only doing technical training around finance, but we really have integrated the bigger challenges that multi generational families have to navigate with a very robust and intentional curriculum that we've been working on for over 25 years. So that's a new service line. We need to train our team around all four of those service lines. So when you ask about staffing, it's trickier than it was. We are building expert generalists and we're also building specialists within the firm because it's just a wide array of services that we're providing and we want to do that in the most intentional and best way possible.

Speaker A: And why did you hire an industrial psychologist?

Speaker B: We started working with Courtney 18 years ago to help build out that family learning and communication service line that was related to communication preparation. We had been doing financial literacy work for the 10 years before that, but we needed an industrial psychologist to help us build out specific trainings and, um, family meeting facilitation around the communication and the preparation that families needed to make great decisions in addition to the financial literacy training. So we now integrate both of those into the work. And we have two full time people leading that service line. And we have eight people on the committee on the family learning communication committee that have. Almost all of them have spent at least a decade doing this type of work. So we have an army of, uh, trained financial learning and communication folks.

Speaker A: I know you spend a lot of time focused on family meetings. How do you go about coaching families about how to have good, effective family meetings?

Speaker B: We do a lot of listening. So we got to start with listening, right? What's on their mind? What are they worried about? What is the outcome that they want to see? So helping them have a vision around the outcome of any family decision or family meeting or family conversation is such a positive thing because it's pretty clear for families the picture of what they want to achieve. It's the, uh, how do you get there that gets in the way. And so we really work a lot with using the tools of positive psychology on helping families create that vision. And then we can back into the action plan to help them and the skills they need to achieve that vision.

Speaker A: How would you describe the culture at, uh, Matter Family Office and how do you maintain it?

Speaker B: I think what we've tried to do is we tried to create the same culture with the families and the employees and the owners of matter in that if we can all be clear on the vision and the purpose and we can treat each other with positive intent and respect and some fun and some energy. Then we can move mountains together. So we have to take care of our team just as we take care of our families. And then the ownership needs to be cared for as well. Because in order to be a sustainable firm, and we want to meet the promise of a hundred year firm serving 100 year families, we need to also be a profitable firm, be able to provide great opportunity for our team, have the capital we need to grow and invest. And so we're trying to run uh, a firm whose culture and purpose serves the clients, the employees and the owners in a synergistic and collaborative manner. And it's hard. Let's talk about it's hard. Sometimes one gets off kilter. You may grow a little fast and it puts pressure on the team and you have to invest in people. Sometimes it's just hard to keep the balance. But once you have a vision of what you're trying to achieve, we, I think, live there more often than not.

Speaker A: What, uh, sort of competencies does someone in your position need? What makes a good wealth advisor?

Speaker B: I think Tom McCullough's done such a good job and I know you've interviewed him at helping us really m identify what an expert generalist looks like. And it takes somewhere between 10 and 20 years to build one. It's not a short path, but it's someone that can see the full picture and issue spot. They don't have to be an expert in every area, but they have to be able to issue spot and they have to be able to uh, bring resources in at the right moment in the right way for families to feel supported and partnered with and led at the same time.

Speaker A: What do you mean when you say issue spot?

Speaker B: Um, once again we have the opportunity to look across generations so we can see things perhaps that are coming down the pike for a family. And we can help them see that maybe if they invested a little bit of time now in coming up with a strategic vision that it would go better when the time comes to need those skills and that clarity. An example might be, I was sitting with a family just yesterday whose children are between 19 and 23 and they're going to probably want as a family to educate their children on what the benefits of a prenuptial agreement might look like. So we need to have a plan today on what are the core competencies and uh, what's the information that those young people are going to need now. So that when they're 28 or 29 and looking to get married, they're prepared to understand the complexity of what coming together in a marriage looks like in a family with a lot of financial wealth.

Speaker A: And what kind of advice do you generally give them?

Speaker B: We help them figure out what the right path for their own family is. Some families will want an official legal document on a prenup. Other families might want to work on disclosure and transparency and help that young family understand the complexities of their financial futures. And each family is going to choose a different path on what that looks like for them based on how they want to operate.

Speaker A: What's been the most challenging decision in your career and what did you learn from it?

Speaker B: I think the most challenging decision in my career is to realize that we needed an outside capital partner and we needed to figure out exactly what the attributes of that partner were. We decided we wanted a family that had a hundred year time frame. We didn't want some of the, uh, more traditional private equity options. It just wasn't who we were. It's a great fit for others. It just wasn't the right fit for us that it was because we needed investment. I started Matter with literally a $25,000 loan from my husband, 401k, and that was the only capital that had ever come into the business, by the way. I paid him back with a 19, uh, 62 Corvette. And because that was his dream car, we paid back the 25,000 in a different way to his 401k. But I paid him back from the company three years after starting with a classic car. But we were capital constrained. We needed to invest in technology. We had more opportunity than we had resources to manage the opportunity. And so the hardest decision in my career was finding the right partner.

Speaker A: And how is matter adapting to new technology?

Speaker B: Oh my gosh, I'm so excited about the new technology. It's because we're such a qualitative firm that we're going to use the resources and the efficiencies that the technology, uh, improvements are giving us to invest in deeper relationships with our families, more intergenerational work, more education, more time. And so I think it's going to improve the quality of the work for our junior folks who were mired in spreadsheets and reports. They're going to be freed a little bit from that and they're going to have the opportunity to build really fantastic additional skills because we'll be able to use them more directly in client engagements.

Speaker A: What advice would you give someone aspiring to work in a family office or in private wealth management on the family

Speaker B: office side of the house, where we are. It's such an honor. It's a calling, it's a passion. It's hard to put in words how lucky we feel to be able to have your work have meaningful impact on generations of fantastic families that are building amazing companies and helping, uh, to grow our country in a way that never tires for me. I'm never tired of it. I'm always grateful for it. I'm always amazed that we get to do this work every day.

Speaker A: Kathy Lintz, thank you for joining us and sharing your wonderful insights.

Speaker B: Thank you, Jo, so much. Nice to spend time with you.