How to Run a Micro Family Office & Manage Your Wealth Like the Ultra-Rich

I'm very livid at the financial education that's out there because I think that it really teaches powerlessness. You have to give your wealth a purpose that's greater than yourself. My career was ascending and I realized that I was building all this wealth, but I wasn't doing the thing that my heart really was calling me to do, which was spending extra time with my sons, helping shape them into young men.

This month we attended the Best Ever conference and got to sit down with Chris Nelson, a 3x IPO tech executive and founder of WealthOps. We dig into what happens when you suddenly have millions of dollars. How do you manage it? How do you give it a purpose and even build a family office without being a billionaire? Let's dive in. This is something that's so needed for, uh, people as they're hearing about the word family office, the idea of it.

Yeah.

And tell a little bit about your story. You know, you, uh, lived a dream a lot of people wish they could live. You know, you went, we had some IPOs working for different tech companies. You had some liquidity events. You you got this money in your account and then all of a sudden you're like, what do I do?

I'm—

now this is the new problem. That's a great problem, but it is a problem.

It is a great— yeah. And so I think that the thing most people don't realize is like the IPO event is incredibly surreal because you have all of these pieces of paper and these contracts that they tell you it's worth this and that. And then one morning you wake up, really early if you're on the West Coast and you go into the office and they have this big television and then they're setting up omelet bars. They're setting up all these sorts of tables full of numerous types of booze. And then you watch this screen. And for us, if the stock was scheduled to go out at $17 a share, and that would've made everybody multimillionaires at that point, the people who had gotten in early.

right?

And then what happened is when it was supposed to go out, nothing happened. So we're watching live on the NASDAQ, this private feed, nothing happened. And then, uh, we wait 5 minutes and we start texting the team that's in New York. What's going on? It's like, it's not trading because they're pushing the value up. And so then in that instance, all of a sudden, 2 minutes later from when you thought, oh, I'm going to make you know, maybe $2 million in an instance, all of a sudden starts trading at $34, it's $4 million. So what happens is then everybody's ecstatic. You have this amazing party. And then for me, I go home, you know, and then my wife just asked me a couple of really focused questions. She's pregnant at the time and she goes, okay, when do we get the money? When can we buy the house? And I didn't have concrete answers for those, right? Because I knew we're in a lockout period. I wasn't sure because I'd fought so hard to get to that point. I didn't know what was going to happen. And I think like many people who go through these sudden wealth events, whether it's inheritance or a lottery or a football contract, all of a sudden I started feeling very alone because I was expected to know the answers to these questions. I didn't know them. And so that was truly the start of my journey is I I realized that I'd made it up to one hill becoming a multimillionaire, but I realized I had this whole other hill to climb of education to figure out, okay, now how do I manage this money? Right.

Yes. You've had this journey of going from moneymaker to money manager and all the things that people don't think about because they're so focused on obtaining it that they don't think about what happens when I actually get it. Right. That's right.

You chase the car, you never expect you're going to catch the car. You don't know what to do when you catch it.

Exactly. And so many people people don't understand it, that there's a moment. And so, that was what really started me on this whole other path because I felt this conviction that, okay, now I have this wealth, I want to steward it responsibly, not just for myself, but I had this firm belief that I should be able to preserve this and grow this in a way where it can change the direction of our family for generations.

Yeah. So what was that process for you? Like, what was the problems you encountered or the things you didn't think about and realize? And then all of a sudden you have to go figure this out. What was that first step?

Well, I think, I think the first problem that I didn't really understand is what do you do when you're over-concentrated in a single stock, right? Is you're in an over-concentrated position.

Diversify. Right.

Well, no, diversify. But then, you know, from what happens is what many people don't understand is then I started getting all these inbounds from, you know, these big names, you know, Oh yeah. And so, so I went and I took a meeting with Morgan Stanley and I was thinking to myself, they're going to start talking family office. They're going to have this strategy. And all they had at that point, their strategy was, you know, sell it to us or sorry, when the trading window opens in 6 months, sell half, give it to us and we'll get you in a, you know, 60/40 portfolio. And, and my heart sunk. I said, That's it. But that was the moment to me that I thought if I wanted to really learn how to do this, how the ultra wealthy do, I'm on my own. Like, I knew that was my burn the ships moment. Like, there's no going back. I don't want to go that direction because I know that's, you know, what they preach to personal finance. I know that if I want to figure out how do I get into private equity or do anything, I have to move forward.

I mean, there really isn't any education for this, right? It's like You know, yeah, we're taught entrepreneurialism or go make a buck, but it's like, what do you do? And I mean, it's really the reason we wrote the book Invest Like a Billionaire. It's that no one teaches how to steward wealth. And what you— what I love, what you've done is you've taken it. You know, my book is focused on just the money. How do you manage the money to keep it safe and to multiply it safely faster than, than everybody else. And that's great. But, but there's all these other dimensions to managing wealth. And maybe you could give us some of the things that you need to think about. What are these things that people don't think about that are kind of the key building blocks besides just managing the money?

Well, I think the key thing that I came to discover is that the foundational difference between people who manage generational wealth and those who don't is you have to give yourself, your wealth, a purpose that's greater than yourself. And that's encapsulated in a legacy statement.

So give your wealth a purpose.

Give your wealth a purpose, right?

How do you do that?

Well, asking some really hard questions. I mean, is— so, so for example, asking the question, so now if wealth is no longer an issue, like, where— how do you want to spend your life? Or how do you want to see the impact of this wealth on your family in 2 or 3 generations? Right? Do you want— you know, and then you have to sort of play out some scenarios in that— those questions asking, like, do you want this to be than a trust fund that your kids live off of and they don't learn the hard work ethic you do? Or do you want it to be a tool to show them how to work hard the way that you did?

I want all my kids and grandkids to have Lamborghinis and to live lives on the beach, right? Never have to work and never work and never learn character.

Yeah, but I think, like, you know, that's— I think it is a hard thing for people to do and why people love to skip past that and go straight to the investing, the exciting stuff, because giving your wealth a purpose means that you have to reflect and you have to understand, you know, in part of that process is understanding the values and principles that got you to where you are today. And I can look to you, you know, Bob and Ben, and know you guys are principal guys and you guys have values. But when you're able to reflect and say, okay, the value of integrity, the value of ownership, the value of respect, like those are things that then I want to be able to put into a mission statement that's around my micro-family office.

I mean, everybody's got values, but honestly, very few people know what they are or can articulate them right into a meaningful, powerful statement. So you help people digest this.

And I do. I mean, a part of, part of our program and our process is to try and create frictionless processes so that people can understand this. How do they, you know, speak questions into like a transcription tool and then throw it into, you know, some type of an AI agent to get a first draft very quickly? Because what I found is that when, when you can reduce you reduce the barriers and people can see words that have personal meaning to them, it's had life breathed into it and all of a sudden it becomes something different. I know for myself, like one of the things, you know, my first legacy statement was really a sentence as I— my career was ascending and I realized that I was building all this wealth, but I wasn't doing the thing that my heart really was calling me to do, which was spending extra time with my sons, helping shape them into, young men, I just really scrawled on a piece of paper like, I want financial freedom so I can walk with my sons from Boys to Men. And that all of a sudden gave meaning to my wealth that was greater than me. And that is what helped me start then thinking, okay, what else do I have to do? I have to obviously invest. I want to have it in tax-efficient entities, and I truly want to run it like a business where I want to take everything that I've learned how to run startup technology businesses, and I want to surround my wealth with those same structures.

I mean, it's such a powerful idea because what I've seen from a lot of people that, you know, work with us as investors is they have liquidity event and then they just start investing in every deal that comes across the email, right? Let me invest in this, you know, deal I got from my uncle here. And then my cousin's doing this little flip over here. And I saw these guys on television program and all of a sudden you have this very haphazard portfolio that has no purpose. It's probably not serving what your goals are, but they're not, you know, you're having to find those. And I mean, did you skip all that and avoid all that and go straight to the purpose?

No, no, no.

These like critical moments where you're like, okay, I got to like reset a little bit.

Yes, I definitely. So I traveled some of that journey like everybody else because I focused really first on becoming a really good investor and really understanding how do I start deploying capital into private equity with doing rigorous underwriting and partner vetting and And I started then, to your point, Ben, is I started having this hodgepodge portfolio that wasn't serving me. And what, that was my moment of realizing I had to do something different to get a different result was when I saw my career was taking off. And that was the more I made, was getting more successful at making money, the more it was pulling me away from my family. So, I realized, okay, I have to become good at managing the money. And so, there was purpose number one, and then there's second was, okay, how do I start architecting a portfolio that's going to give me the lifestyle that I want. And it's interesting that so many people come in the program with the very similar problem where, you know, they're deploying a lot of capital and they're having some level of success, but it's not unlocking the lifestyle. And I call this, you know, the high net worth paradox where the more money you make, sort of like Biggie Smalls says, the more problems you have. Because again, you know, the realization that I had is, wait, the same skills that I have that have allowed me to build successful startup companies can actually be applied to my wealth.

So you talk about the idea of becoming the CEO of your wealth, and what does that really mean? And how have you kind of developed and architect— architected this process for people?

Well, to me, being the CEO of my wealth means that I want to set the vision and the strategy the same way any other CEO would. And then I need to look around and analyze my businesses I'm building in and saying, what are the different functions just like you would any business, right? So I think of, you know, broadly, right? If you're going to run a business, you're going to need sales, you're going to need finance, right? Because if you're going to go sell something, you're going to, you know, have the team that understands then that sales is going to be the growth of the business. So I think that's my investment. Then I look at my finance and it's like, I have to have this all anchored with great bookkeeping, right? And then usually in finance department, usually have somebody who's doing tax. Okay, I really need to optimize my taxes. So to me, I kept it really simple is 'Cause I took a course with an MBA professor from the Haas Business School at Cal, and he really sort of broke down how simple business really is. And so I just sort of applied some of those same methodologies and saying, okay, what are the pieces that I need to really turn this into a business? And as the CEO, I wanna own the vision and I wanna manage and monitor the execution. That was always my mindset is, is I want to work my way out of the smaller jobs, but I want to be the one who's reviewing the data, reviewing things, setting the strategy, and really overseeing sales and growth of the company.

Man, I love that. I mean, it's such a powerful mindset shift. We talk a lot about that in our book too, of running your investments in your portfolio like a business because you approach it very differently. And I think a lot of people, the financial education they receive is, hey, just hand the keys over to the kingdom of Morgan Stanley or whoever. And it's, we do it all for you. You It's too hard for you to figure out, you know, let us take it from here kind of a thing. And it's— that doesn't serve you, right? You're smart. You can figure it out. You've made— you've figured out how to make money. You know how to— you can train yourself to manage money. And I think having that mindset shift is a very, very important part of this whole thing.

It is. And this is the one thing I find about— and this is so one of the reasons that I made the decision to build an education-only business. You know, not selling any investment products is because I am angry. I am very livid at the financial education that's out there because I think that it, it really teaches powerlessness. It does teach like, oh, this is really complicated. You know, you want to turn it over to us, you want to give us control. And that lack of control then I think gets them into, again, a scarcity mindset of of this middle-class mindset where I'm going to build my wealth, I'm going to draw down against it, and then whatever's left over, I'm just going to throw a few coins at my kids. But it's not, it's not in the, in, you know, and this is where I really enjoyed the conversation with Bob Fraser earlier, but that's not how the ultra-wealthy think. They, they think the foundational thing is, was they built this wealth. They think this is a legacy business that I want to live for generations. That's a huge mindset shift. So education only because I think the gap where people get stuck and they end up turning things over to, you know, these different, you know, investment advisors is because they don't know where they can get educated to understand what's the playing field, who are the players, and how do I play to win.

That's so powerful. So talk a little more specific on kind of your process. You talk, you start with the purpose of your wealth, and I'd imagine that's probably not challenging for some people, but they never thought about that. And so once that's kind of been defined, and it's probably a pretty revelatory thing for a lot of people, I'm assuming. Oh yeah. And then it kind of creates this framework of, okay, now here's what we are going to go do to serve this vision. Like, how do you then translate that into practical steps? And this idea we haven't talked about yet, but we were calling a micro-family office, where you were expecting that to kind of be opened up for you with JP Morgan's and, um, you know, but it's, it's something that's becoming more accessible to people as there's education is getting out there.

Right. And so, you know, so our processes is at the highest level. We, we try to lay out this concept that you want to architect, you want to build, and then you want to run, and then you want to have succession. You want to then, like any business, you want to start thinking about your succession plan. But in the architect phase, you know, what you've broken down is the first thing is really vision and strategy. And part of that is laying out the legacy statement, but then starting to translate that legacy statement. Then what does that mean to very tangible goals?

Rules. And that you have a family office at the higher levels where a family says maybe has $100 million, $1 billion, they can go and hire experts in certain fields like accountants, like investment managers, attorneys, and bring them on staff and they run their wealth. But how do you translate that at a lower level where you don't have— maybe you have $5 million or $10 million, how do you get those types of resources and those types of inputs into the conversation as well?

Well, so what many people don't realize is that there's this interesting revolution happening, I'd say, in service providers for, you know, high net worth. So if we're going to say that high net worth is somewhere between, let's say, $1 million and $20 million net worth right now in the United States, there's on average— I know in 2025 there was 500,000 new millionaires minted. A lot of these are coming out of tech, a lot of these IPOs, small businesses, etc. But the service providers is you're having a lot of people that worked in ultra-wealthy offices that are opening up their own practices that are fractional experts.

Yeah.

And so, and so this is one of the things that we do in our program is we, we vet these fractional experts and make it very accessible with the right education and understanding.

Okay.

Oh, here's the service that I need for the level that I'm at. You can go and engage fractional certified tax planners that get you strategic strategically planning your taxes every year instead of proactively just sort of doing compliance and sort of paying the bill. You can also find really great, nimble bookkeeping firms that are able to understand what it means to manage multiple entities and do consolidated reporting. You can also find now estate planning attorneys that they'll do your estate plan for a fixed fee, but then they'll also have a very nominal annual fee so that if you want to make changes to your estate plan as you go, It's there. So this is where I see that this, this micro family office revolution is really led in education. But there's all these service providers that allow you to, to scale it. And what I'm finding now is that there's, there's people that have a net worth of $40, $50, even $60 million that could go to multifamily offices that are choosing the micro model because they have more control.

So what are the other steps of implementation you create the plan, you have the vision and the purpose statement.

And then the next thing actually sort of steps right into your alley. It's like, so then let's look at the portfolio structure because ultimately when you think about architecture is you have to then start, you know, and we take people through comprehensive exercises of let's take your net worth. If you have, you know, these broader asset category goals, then where are you actually going to deploy those dollars? Like, let's start looking at, you know, different asset classes. Where do you want to deploy it? You know, how do you look at the risk versus reward? How much risk do you want in your portfolio? Because one of the things that I've discovered with, you know, some of my peers inside of tech is, you know, they think, oh, I've made all this money working through companies that have gone through IPO. Now I'm just going to take my, my winnings and I'm going to go invest in a lot of venture capital. And a lot of those stories I see end very poorly.

Yeah.

As you know. And so this is the next thing is helping people understand What is really good portfolio structure, you know, that can be sustainable and then also helps you sleep at night, right? And then, and then usually then once they complete that, it's really then going through a complete assessment like where are you now in this journey? And then it's— then we go into entity setup. How do you set up your entities? How do you set up then your, your core processes are going to run your business? Wealth Ops is wealth management and business operations. The core is to build a solid foundation of simple business operations that you can manage in, you know, a couple hours a month, maybe more quarterly and more intensely annually as you're doing more of your deeper reviews. But you want to minimize and automate what you're doing in business operations so you can spend more time in the wealth management area. And then it's really team and advisors. And then we go through at the end governance, like how do you as the CEO not just manage this, you know, as a, as a functioning business, but also how do you start really involving the next generation? How do you run family board meetings? How do you start making sure that it's not just one single point of success, single point of failure, but somebody who's truly a CEO who is, is leading their, their family and everyone through this?

You paint a picture of that for us. You know, what does succession look like in bringing kids in? Of course, I know it's Totally. The age difference, the ages of the kids matters a ton, right? You may have people that their kids are grown, married, and gone, and they don't even cross paths that much to— you got a bunch of young kids. I mean, so kind of paint a, paint a couple different pictures for us.

Oh, I'll be glad to, because I mean, this is, this is one of the things that, you know, in our, in our community we, we talk a lot about is how do we get the next generation involved. And so for me, I have, uh, younger kids, probably similar age, I know, to to Ben. And, you know, for me, it's— we have family board meetings where we, we read out at a high level. We always read quarterly, we read our legacy statement so they understand what that is. And then we give them the broad strokes as far as, you know, not that we're getting into the details of the money, but we sort of say, here are some of the assets that we have, here's how we operate them. And then we give them roles to participate. So we have single-family homes. If we're going to turn those single-family homes, who's the cleaning crew? My boys. They're 3 sons. I have 3 sons. We call them the dudes. So it's like, dudes, you're up. You know what I mean? Like, you're going to go clean this house, right? Because this is part of our business. And part of our business is we need to understand how to support and maintain these things. My wife will take them on maintenance runs. Maybe they'll cut the lawn or do other things, but we try a very grassroots effort of these are assets. We nurture and care for them because they provide for us. That's really important. And then we also, to give them the bigger impact, is we do, you know, through our donor advice fund, we do a lot of local giving. So we'll go and work in local soup kitchens and other things where we're actually donating money. We want to work alongside organizations and give time, not just money. And then we also go to—

You're getting ready to head off to DR, right?

We're getting ready to head off to the Dominican Republic where we go and work in in private, in schools down there.

And you're bringing your kids and you're—

Oh, yeah. I mean, because that's the thing is we want to teach them from the ground up that the money is for, is for this greater purpose, which is to really to— we believe that, that all individuals have a God-given talent that they're supposed to be able to bring to life. And we want to help people do that through, through education and through service. We feel that we're called to serve, educate, and connect people across generations. And, and we want to show them how that's done. Practically. And then I'd say like we see this with other members of our group, some of them are getting them involved actually in, you know, whether it's real estate or whether it's a business. I have a guy who joined from Ireland and he said that he runs a staffing business and he had his 16 and 17-year-old daughters, they started working in the summer in the accounts payable department and he didn't give them a lot of instruction. He gave them, you know, here's what you do and then He just made sure that, you know, before things went out, they'd have it double-checked. But he tried to just really, you know, help them figure out the family business from the ground up. And other people I know who have adult children are trying to just start with, let's— let us redo the legacy statement and truly give you the purpose of what this is for and then help understand where do you want to participate in giving them more choice, more agency.

So cool. Yeah, we've got to wrap it up here a little bit. I want to finish with a few kind of more rapid-fire questions.

Let's go.

So what would you say is one popular investment or thing that you've seen people invest in they should stay away from, or they're just starting out?

I would say venture capital. Like, I've seen too many people think, oh, I worked in a VC company, VC-backed company, and made money in IPO. I can now pick them.

Don't do it.

Don't do it.

I concur.

Yeah. If you can only hire one person to help you, manage your wealth, would it be tax, legal, or a bookkeeper who's the most important?

Say the bookkeeper's the foundation. If you do not have good clean books, any business doesn't have good clean books, you're struggling. But I would say a bookkeeper.

Amen to that. We love some good books. All right, last question. What is the one number that you check every week as the CEO of your wealth and to know your wealth machine is actually working?

Ooh, the one number. Uh, I think for us it's really how much are we spending, because, because yeah, because I think where we really look at, you know, what, what we're spending, uh, especially right now we're doing a couple remodels and things on the house. But because what we've come to learn, and, and my wife is really on board with this as well too, is, is we realize that if we manage the spending, then we have more to reinvest and continue to compound. And we're still in this compounding phase of our our portfolio where we want to keep seeing it grow every year. So that's one of the things that we're very focused on, on a week-to-week basis.

Chris Riz is awesome, man. Love what you're doing. What's the best way for people to find out more about what you're doing?

Well, if they want to just get some free education, they could go on YouTube and look at Managing Tech Millions. That is my YouTube channel where they can see all the videos. And if they want to get a webinar and they want to actually come live and build their legacy statement and investment thesis, they can go to wealthops.io. And there you can sign up. We do this every 2 weeks, and they can, they can get in and feel what this feels like.

Amazing. Awesome.

Good stuff.

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