Eric Becker: Cresset’s Bold 100-Year Vision

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When your clients face a moment of truth, is your firm the first call? Hi everyone, I'm business coach Steve Sandusky for Barron's Advisor, The Way Forward Podcast. My guest today is Eric Becker. Eric is the co-founder and co-chairman of Crescent, which is a multifamily office with more than $40 billion in assets under management. In today's conversation, We begin with the origin story of Crescent and how Eric and his team methodically built the firm from its launch in 2017 to today, where it's widely recognized as one of the top multifamily offices in the country. It's an amazing story of a company built by clients for clients and supported by clear values, strong business execution, and a 100-year vision. With that, please enjoy my conversation with Eric Becker. I'd love to start with you just sharing the origin story.

Sure. I think one of the things that is very unusual about Cresset is that it was started by clients for clients. Avi Stein, my co-founder, had been clients for many years of other firms, but really wirehouse firms. And so that really speaks to our origins. Avi had grown up and had some entrepreneurial beginnings like me came from humble beginnings and then ended up starting a private equity firm and having a successful career, not just as an entrepreneur building some businesses, but also as an investor. When I think about the origins of Cresset, one of the things that was in my mind was my dad's late life after he sold his business. And he did not have access to the wonderful the RIA world that we're so familiar with and did not have access to great financial planning or an expert advisor. And it really affected his retirement years. And my brother and I were so proud as entrepreneurs who had some success and felt that we had learned from our dad. We were so proud to help him, but he really didn't want that help. He wanted to have been able to do everything himself. And so, seeing how important great planning is, and how it really took some of the joy from his later years was one of the things in my mind. And what happened was is that Avi had a life event, and he had developed stage 4 lymphoma and successfully overcame that and went into remission. He had recovered, and he had retired after that and was living near me in Florida. Mutual friends introduced us. For me, I had this entrepreneurial career following in my dad's footsteps, starting my first company when I was a student at University of Chicago and selling it to Blue Cross Blue Shield. And I had a wonderful career starting and building businesses. But I too had a life event. My wonderful wife Jill and I had 3 children, 2 boys and a wonderful daughter in the middle. And sadly, when she was 21 in 2012, our daughter Kara developed leukemia. And we took her to Johns Hopkins. And they said that she had great prospects But tragically and sadly, she passed 4 months later, really almost unexpectedly because her prospects were so good. And so, it was a terrible life event for Jill and for me. I was 50 years old. I just celebrated my 50th birthday and now faced a family tragedy. And so, I retired from my business, but really at least decades before what I had ever thought. And now suddenly I was faced with understanding a bit like my dad, the results of all my planning and investing and everything through my life. And so, Abby and I decided we would start investing together in private investments, which is where both of our family's wealth had come from as first-generation wealth creators. And we were investing together. And one day we were talking about our experiences as clients of wealth management firms. And he had been with one of the big wirehouses and was expressing some disappointment around some elements of the experience, access to private investments being one. But he also really was looking for a family office type of experience and didn't feel that he had received that. And I too had been with one advisor for 25 years and I was frustrated feeling that I needed those family office services too. So we took a year and studied the industry trying to find a firm that we could become clients of. And if we'd found one at the time, we might have said, listen, can we strategically invest in your business and buy 10% or 20% and be enthusiastic clients? It really was about trying to find a place for our families that checked all the boxes. And when a year went by and we just didn't find anything that looked like Crescent— and we'll dig into what Crescent is— our entrepreneurial roots and energy took over and we launched Crescent for our own families. Just 6 years ago. We just celebrated Crescent's 6th birthday about a week ago. It's a great entrepreneurial story, and I think that when we go through the different elements of Crescent and the Crescent story, you'll see this thread of being able to see things through the client eyes. And I think that was what Avi and I brought to the table, was that client perspective of what we were looking for our own families, but not just our families at this current age and state of life and wealth. But we were really trying to solve for, was there a solution, a platform that was out there that actually could have served us through the different seasons of life? Where was the crescent of when we were in our 20s and 30s and 40s? And when you're starting something and you're illiquid and you have all the complexity around growth and scaling your career or your business, whatever it might be, and then hitting those more middle-aged years and suddenly philanthropy and other kinds of things, parenting and kids and all the things around that become really paramount. And then getting into the next chapter of life. So, could we find something like that? And that's really what we've endeavored to do with Crescent.

It sounds like Crescent was almost born to some extent out of the tragic circumstances of your daughter passing unexpectedly. And here you are today. What a wonderful recognition of what has come out of that and what you've built here today and the amount of people that you're impacting, additional resources you've created to probably help a foundation that might, you know, solve the issue that she had at some point.

Absolutely. In fact, my wife and I, right after her passing, started Karma for Cara, which provides microgrants to 12 to 18-year-old children across the US to do service in their communities. And that is something that our daughter was very passionate about. She loved the underdog, somebody who was struggling and trying to overcome something. She loved kids and she loved service. I remember after 9/11, she got on her bicycle and started collecting from our neighbors to be able to donate and help. So you're absolutely right. I went from retired and certainly dealing with all of the complexities of a family tragedy. We have two sons and they were impacted, my wife Jill. And now this beautiful thing of having the opportunity to start Cresset, to work with other families. I love being a counselor and advisor to other families on some of these issues because I do believe that it's our job as parents to keep the family together and to be highly functioning as a family. There's just too much suffering around issues with money and families when it's not planned for and handled and you don't have the right education and culture around it. And so, I do feel that our top job is to help families thrive, stay together, and be highly functioning.

I was at your session at Schwab IMPACT, and that was one of the things that I took away, many things, two of which were, number one, just the genuineness of what you have built here and the thoughtfulness and the intention of what you put into it and the impact that you want to have. And then second, I wrote down, you said the greatest wealth is keeping the family together, which is what you've just indicated here as well. And I was moved to tears, you know, as you were, as you were talking. That day. And I'm probably going to tear up again here as well as we're having our conversation. Well, thank you.

I'll try and stop myself, but it's a beautiful sentiment and it's very, it is very important. It's very important. And I think all of your listeners, what that will resonate. And anyone who has a family, we all came from families, knows exactly what I'm talking about. So it is really important. And what good is it if you're fortunate enough to have created some wealth or inherited some wealth, wherever it came from, the joy that can be part of all of this when things are working, when you have the right planning and you you have the right advisor who's working with you and you're talking to your kids about important issues and have everything knit together in a holistic, integrated way, it can bring joy and positivity as opposed to some of the other challenges that we all know the terrible statistics on, shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves, and all the statistics around people that have not been successful generationally.

And that was one of the things that so impressed me about you is that all the success that you've had, all the money that you've made, all the companies that you started, that you still get back to the family and you've kept it together despite the challenges that you faced over the years. And so that to me is so impressive. And thank you. So what I'd love to talk about is how you put that into Crescent. And if I understand it correctly, you really have 4 pillars to your business.

Yeah.

So one of them is wealth management, private investments, family office services, and community. I'd love for you to take a moment.

Yeah.

And talk about each of those 4 and why those 4 versus something else as you were building Sure.

The 4 pillars, the first one, wealth management, we all know what that is, but I think that we wanted to have a very strong wealth management program, not only around the advisors that are serving families and also the investment team that is supporting the advisors and having great planning and goals-based planning, which I really believe in. And when I think of my dad having a little bit of a difficult time in his retirement, great planning would've helped him so much. So the first pillar is a very strong wealth management platform, and then also the technology that we've been investing in now for really 6 years to support all those activities. The second pillar, as you said, is private investments. And I think that there are some great ironies to life, which hopefully we'll have time to touch on. But one of them is that many times we receive an inbound or an introduction to someone and they're in the midst of exiting their business. And it's a mid-sized company, it's private, and then they have their exit. Now they have a pool of capital that needs to be managed. And if we do our job, it's tax efficient and we help them through the transaction. And then we're now investing that capital and that capital becomes their business, their future. Maybe they want to start another business or maybe they're retired, but that capital becomes the business. And I think what's so interesting is so much wealth has been created and we actually funded a study on this. Through either owning private real estate or owning businesses. That's where the bulk of wealth in the US has come from over the last 200 years. And so it's ironic that for many investors and families, they don't have access to great private investments after they sell their company. That was the last great private investment that they had. So we knew that we had to design that into this model right from the beginning because we saw what was happening and the way that the largest pension funds and single-family offices in North America have access to an amazing menu of private investment solutions across many different categories. So why was that available to public and private pension funds and, and very large single-family offices and not available to our families and not just available to families that need a family office, but in fact, why wasn't it more broadly available as we were talking about earlier in the different seasons of life? How could I access other diversified private strategies in my 30s? Rather than when I was retired. The third pillar is family office services. Unfortunately, for some other firms, family office services is a little bit of window dressing. It's something that people talk about, but we've really invested in this in a serious way. So our family office services starts off with having a team of what we call wealth strategists who came from top-tier estate tax firms. So they are reformed attorneys and they are able to help our families around this really important issue that what you keep is many times as important or maybe more important than what you earn. So, it starts with our planning and strategy resources. It then moves into what we were talking about earlier about being a highly functioning family. And so, having a team in family governance, family education, how to talk to our kids about money and the responsibilities that go along with this in the future and to help them to succeed and to help families come up with a framework So like in my family, we had weekly family meetings. And then as the kids got older and now that they're adults, we do quarterly family meetings. So assistance around developing your own family culture, your own cadence of how you deal with these issues and the tools to do it. It also means having access to other very unique services. Like we have a fractional CFO service where you can have access to a CFO a half a day or a day a week. You've sold your business and you don't have a CFO anymore. We have two private bankers on staff that will help our clients when they need a mortgage or some sort of a banking solution, and they shop and use our scale to benefit our clients, bring them 3 term sheets that are competitive, and then help them pick the right lender and negotiate for them and with them. So a very robust family office services team. We do have bill paying, we do have family accounting, we have tax compliance. So it's very robust. The way to think about it would be We took what the largest single-family offices in North America have and we fractionalized it in a way where, where even small to midsize business owners can access what they need on that menu when they need it. And then the last pillar, you mentioned community, and I think this is special and different. In my career, I was really fortunate in my late 20s to join YPO, the Young Presidents Organization. Which is described as a peer-to-peer learning group. So you gather and meet other leaders of companies, and you have a trusted environment to share your challenges and hopefully some successes with others so that they can benefit from it. And so from the beginning, we wanted to design into the Crescent platform the idea of community, that we all want to learn together and hopefully learn from each other. So we have a team, an events team that does both live in-person events and then also online events like what we're doing right here today. And they are programming year-round around different topics. These topics range from family, how to be a great parent, dealing with aging parents, issues around health and longevity, brain health, all kinds of really interesting topics that hopefully lead to a higher quality of life. And then there's a second track, which is a financial track, and it's around investments and Jack Abelin talking about economic trends and private investing trends and other very interesting things that are happening globally in the economy or in politics and other areas to help our families be well-informed. And then interestingly, and almost on its own, is this organic connecting of families where now many of our families interact with each other and share ideas. And that's been a wonderful thing. So, 4 pillars to the platform.

I want to start with community here. And we did a podcast a while ago here on Barrons where we talked about the importance of building a community and a community among your clients. I'd love to learn a little bit more about, for example, how many events do you put on per year, per month, or how do you think about that? Are all of your clients invited to all of these events, or do you somehow segment, like, certain clients get access to certain events and others don't? Or how do you think about that?

Sure. We really believe in broad-based access, and the clients all have access to this. We're generally doing 1 to 2 programs per week. Some of these might be held in one of our offices in a hybrid environment. So you might have 50 or 60 people in a room, and then the rest of us are online. And we have great speakers, many of whom have published books on a various topic. We will then make those books available to the clients that are interested in the topic as part of it. And it's an amazing program. All of them have been recorded going back to the first one, which was probably in 2019, if I remember correctly. So the beautiful thing is new clients now have access to an incredible library. And that library over the years has grown to easily a couple of hundred recorded events on various interesting topics. I even remember the very first— speaker that we had, and it was a young man from the UK who had a dream of rowing across the Atlantic Ocean to the United States. And it was a story of a kid who had never actually done anything like this and how he went about his planning and actually accomplished this incredible goal. So that was inspiring, listening to someone in their 20s doing something like that. And that then inspired us to just up our game and to provide our families with access to the top experts in so many different categories in entrepreneurship and leadership and in family and health. And it's been an amazing experience. I recently actually did a program on parenting and had my 89-year-old mom with Ryan Holiday, who's a published author on philosophy and wrote a great book on being a dad. And so, that was a lot of fun to have another generation from my family and then to have our speaker and talking about the importance of parenting.

And I think I saw you had Mark Cuban and other certainly well-known people like him that are part of this.

Mark was great and actually did two programs. One was very broad-based, and then he did a fireside chat for clients that were specifically focused on starting something new, and they had a lot of questions that related to that. And so we had this wonderful program with him, very broad audience, and then afterwards he took the group that was starting something new and really helped them think some of those issues through, which is cool. We called that a fireside chat.

Now, do you charge your clients to attend this?

They're all free. We do not charge for it. So when I think about Cresset and I think about the things that make Cresset special, the first would be culture. And that is having this amazing culture. We have these characteristics and values that go back to the founding of the business. One would be extreme accountability and being accountable for the things that we say we're going to do and doing them. Another would be think like an owner. Cresset is 65% owned by the employees approximately and 35% owned by clients that were really interested, like me, in having this come into being. And so we not only say think like an owner, we've actually made everyone in the firm and owner. So that strong culture is one of the great assets of the firm, and I think this educational program has not just benefited the clients, interestingly enough, but it has contributed to our culture, a culture around learning and always learning, and then having these shared experiences with our clients because we're learning together. And I think that's been very special.

And so are your team members able to attend these events as well?

Yes, they do.

And we're probably going to zigzag here, but I heard you say all of our team members are owners. So did they buy stock? Did they get awarded stock? How does that work?

So some did invest at various stages along the way, but everyone is awarded equity in the firm. And whether they joined as an individual or we had these wonderful, what I call business combinations, where other firms joined us along the way. And where we equitized employees of those firms who had never had any equity. So we were helping to solve a generational transition from founders of those firms. And then we were able to bring all of their team along and make everyone an owner through that process. So it's individual by individual and then through the business combinations. And of course, mentioning business combinations, I would be remiss if I didn't point out that 50% of Crescent's AUM came from these wonderful business combinations, which would be Pagnato Carp in Reston, Virginia, Berman Capital in Atlanta, and Maristem in Minneapolis. And these 3 wonderful firms joined us, but that's about half. And it shows you out of our $40 billion plus that we're managing right now, that we've had tremendous organic growth. That has gone along with the development of this firm.

Yeah. And I definitely— we're going to talk about organic growth. I want to go there. And you talked about the ownership. So someone like these acquisitions, when you acquired them, did they say, hey, we want to take a lot of our purchase price in stock in Crescent? Or do they say, hey, we really want to take most of it cash up front? How did they think about how much they want in cash versus We want stock in Crescent because we really believe in this company.

So all of our partners who came in through those business combinations took substantial amounts in equity. I wanted long-term alignment, belief in the culture, and to be part of something that's bigger than any one of us.

And I want to touch on the culture here just a little bit too. So when I was at your event at Impact, Liz Nesvold was on the stage with you. She's your president. She was talking about the culture and she pulls out of her pocket a culture card. And she starts talking about the values of the firm, and I thought, okay, that's terrific. And then what do I see? You're sitting next to her, and all of a sudden Eric pulls out his culture card, and it's got the orange colors of Crescent, it's got the branding and the logo. And it was pretty clear that you two did not coordinate this, or at least it didn't appear that you were coordinating this ahead of time. And it just reinforced that not only are you two talking the talk, you're walking the talk. And we don't see that all the time. And so tell me a little bit more about the intention that went into designing the culture and how you continue to reinforce the culture and how the culture is a bit of a moat that you've created around your organization.

At the very beginning, before we had finalized arrangements with our custodians, before the first dollar, even my own assets came over to the firm, we sat down as an early team. There was maybe 10 of us, 8 to 10 of us. And we spent a few days on this topic around culture and leading with culture. And this was something that I think Avi and I brought a very strong perspective to, which was this— the eyes of the clients. What were the characteristics of the firm with which I wanted my family to be served? Someday when my time comes, that I would want my wife to be taken care of by that type of firm and the type of culture they would have. And our boys who are now 29 and 34, and as they interact with Crescent, what would I want for them? And so we really had this strong true north around client first. And, but of course, what's right next to that client first is having an amazing culture that's supportive of the team that's serving the clients, which is why I love the fact that Crescent is owned by the employees and the clients. So it's the clients and the people that are serving them that, that own the firm. So the culture is around this idea that clients deserve better. But culture, what keeps us together, what gets us all fired up when we hop out of bed in the morning, we're getting ready for work, what carries us through on those tough days, whether it be dealing with a challenge that one of our families might have. So many things that happen in life that can be challenging. And so it's great culture that carries us through those days and has us dusting ourselves off and getting ready for tomorrow with positivity and the energy to take things forward. It was interesting when we worked on this, we were struggling around our why and the vision. And we went through a number of different iterations. And finally, Jack Ablyn, who had joined us. He was the CIO at BMO Private Bank, and Jack just blurted it out, because our clients deserve better. And so that became part of the why in the Crescent culture. Interestingly enough, only 3 things have changed in this card, which has probably 20 different characteristics on it, since we were founded 6 years ago. One is the concept of a growth mindset, and so much has been written about this in the If you don't, haven't followed growth mindset, certainly recommend looking it up and reading Carol Dweck's book on the topic. It's the idea that we have the potential to create our future together with intentionality, with resources, with great planning. And so we added growth mindset to this because we have a group of people who have come from many different backgrounds and experiences, but we have worked hard to educate and train around this idea of having a growth mindset. And our clients love that too. The other two that we added were thoughtful efficiency. As a startup at the beginning, Avi and I were basically building things and then seeing if clients wanted those services the way that we did. And over time, we definitely learned that clients wanted us to be very thoughtful with our resources and efficient. And then the third one that was added along the way, again, with great client input, was speed and responsiveness. And we want all of our team members to be highly competent and to be really good humans and also to be highly responsive to the needs of clients and families.

You mentioned there's 20 of those.

Yeah.

And I think you've talked about a few. You also had extreme accountability, think like an owner, maybe a couple other that might stick out to you.

Sure. Yeah. One is cultivate diversity, which I think is so interesting because this is an industry not necessarily known as being a leader over a long period of time. I know there's a lot of efforts going on, but we're 44% women. I think we're 42% female over the director level. So even in leadership, a lot of firms have more gender diversity in the administrative area. We have it across, really across all levels of the firm. And we're 20% diverse on having team members that are BIPOC or people of color. So really worked hard on diversity and that was designed in right from the beginning. Giving back is one of our cultural attributes, which certainly resonates from a client perspective and from my family. Optimistic energy, which my co-founder Avi Stein embodies every day. I think having a sense of optimism for the future is critical for the next generation and for our team members to feel that they have a great future with us and together. And then we believe in great people. So when I was saying earlier that one of the great strengths of Cresset is the culture, The other great strength is our people, just having amazing, talented, driven, motivated team members who appreciate what ownership is about and love our clients.

I want to go back to the third pillar, family office services, and get a little detail on that.

Sure. The best way that I can summarize all of it in one sentence is we want to be the first call. Whatever is important to our clients and their family, we want to be the first call. That is how we measure the relationship and the success that we're having in that relationship. So think of Family Office Services as all the things that a family, an entrepreneur, a CEO founder, a professional athlete or entertainer, anyone who is driving for performance and creating wealth what are the issues that they're dealing with, and they're personal and professional. So it's everything from administrative things like bill paying and family accounting, but it is estate tax planning because having a state-of-the-art tax strategy is really important, particularly in planning for any kind of exit event with a business of any kind. And so it is everything in between. We even have a summer camp where we do a week in San Diego and a week in Oxford in the UK. And we have 12 to 18-year-old kids that are our clients' children and grandchildren. And we teach them about entrepreneurship, leadership, resiliency, what it's like to have successful parents and financial skills. And it ends with a business plan competition at the end. But it's a really wonderful thing that Whitney Webb, who runs our family governance, She developed this summer camp and we adopted it when she joined us. But it just gives you a sense as to how serious we are about it. We also do have concierge services, which are lifestyle related. It can be travel. We've had a couple of amazing things that we were able to pull off for clients. We had a client that had a loved one that found themselves trapped in Ukraine when the war started, and we ended up hiring a private contractor who went to Poland and then found them and took them to safety. We recently had a family who was taking their first trip to Israel. They arrived on a Friday and, and tragically, war broke out the next day. And our team was working 24 hours a day over that weekend, got them to Turkey, got them into a resort in Turkey so that they had a chance to decompress from all of that stress and then repatriated them back to the United States. When they were ready to travel. So it really means being there for our clients in these moments of truth. I've been studying companies and families that have lasted for over 100 years. It's been a bit of a hobby of mine for at least a decade. And two of the things I've learned from interviewing these successful long-term families and long-term businesses is moments of truth and moments of trust. And so a moment of truth is a family has confronted something financial, health-wise, whatever it might be, and they call us and we're there for them. And moments of trust, of course, the relationships that are built between our advisors and the families are just built on a foundation of trust and competency and long-term relationships. It's so critically important.

And how do you charge for these services? How do you determine what is it that they need? Do they need to have $50 million in liquid assets or do they Do you need to like own a business that's worth $500 million? And yeah, because I think that's an issue that a lot of people struggle with is, okay, like how do you charge to get someone outta Ukraine or out of Israel or that sort of thing? Tell me a little bit if you can about the pricing of those types of services.

The first thing is that again, thinking of it from a very high level, it's actually less than you think when you are operating at scale. It's one of the great challenges of this industry is the fact that the bar keeps getting raised on what client expectations are and what it takes to be successful in this industry consistently and over the long term and how you're adding value in relationships with clients. So whether that's in private investments and accessing private investments, which is extraordinarily important and growing in importance, or whether it's family office services, really important. By operating at scale, we're able to make it remarkably affordable, a fraction. My brother and I had our own single-family office that we shared for over 15 years, and the cost of getting actually a broader menu of services here is actually a fraction of what it cost us to attempt to do these things on our own. So lesson one is scale matters, and two is that it's much more affordable than you would think. Then you were asking about who can access this, and it's actually very broad. We have clients who come to us that have a private company and not a lot of liquidity. And some of them start with family office services in some sort of a retainer-based model where we charge them a retainer, and that retainer can then be credited as they achieve liquidity, whether it's through recaps within their business or an exit or whatever it might be, cash flow growth. As they put assets on the platform, they're then credited in a traditional charging on AUM as most firms do model. It's just very interesting. I could give you the most extreme case, which is someone comes as a family office client without starting on the wealth management part of the platform, all the way through to families like mine that are using all the services and where this is, I believe, a better alternative than trying to build your own family office. I just think that is something that is really challenging. And it brings me to something I referred to earlier, which was I I hope we were going to touch on some of the great ironies of life. So the first great irony of life is the better parent that you were, the more independent your child becomes. And that's so ironic because the more you love your child, the more you'd like to keep them close and protect them from everything. And that takes away from independence. That's a great irony. Here's a second one. If you are a high-performing leader, a CEO, an entrepreneur, a professional athlete or entertainer, anyone, a business owner, anyone driving for results and trying to build something, you are successful because you focused on what it is that you're doing. You're all in. That's why you're successful. And then if you have a family, we talked about that family is everything and staying together as a family and being highly functional is so critical. So, you have this business or your profession or whatever it is, and then you have a family, you've got to deliver there as a parent, as a spouse. All of these things are so important. And then hopefully, you care about your community and you're giving back or engaged in some way within the community to leave this world a little better than we found it. Is there any time after all of that for deep financial planning and revisiting your will and your estate tax program and making sure it's up to date and chatting with your advisor on some new investment strategy or trying to do this yourself? It's ironic, but people sometimes think that they can and they just can't because these other priorities take precedent. Without a business, you're not going to have your wealth. Without your profession, you're not going to have your wealth. If you don't take care of your family, that causes so many problems. And we all have responsibility to do more in our communities. So these services are so needed. And it is great news for this industry because a lot of times you read articles about fee compression and automation. I remember when the robo-advisor thing happened, there's such a need for these services. It's so important and it really impacts people's lives. And there's a third great irony that I'll share, and that is, is that if you work really hard, have a vision and the drive and passion to build something, whether that's a career or whether that's a business of some kind, and you probably got a little bit lucky because luck plays into all of this too, and if all those things come together and you're able to then exit a business and you walk away with $5 million or $50 million or $500 million, and you think that you've made it. The irony is that capital will not manage itself. And so many people who ran these great businesses from $5 million to $1 billion, and they had boards of directors and governance, and they had processes and checks and balances, now suddenly they have a pool of capital and they don't have any of those things. And so, I think it's a dirty secret of the industry. I think a lot of people, there's not things that are written about family offices that are subscale and where they've had someone steal or something's happened or poor investment selection and poor results or a lack of succession where patriarchs of families aren't able to succeed themselves with someone else because the kids aren't interested. So many challenges. And yet it's so ironic that you worked your whole life to build something and now without the right resources, without the right partner to help you manage that in the future, It will not manage itself and you won't get the outcomes that you were able to get when you had a business. That's ironic.

Eric, I don't think I've heard a more eloquent description of why people need professional financial guidance than what you just delivered there. So I thank you and I can hear the passion in your voice there as well. Let's segue here and talk about the organic growth. So that's been an issue that a lot of people have been talking about in the industry, including myself, in terms of there doesn't seem to be, on average, a lot of organic growth in the advisory business here in recent years, except for you guys and some others. You guys have had phenomenal organic growth. I know you guys do an amazing job on digital marketing. I look at your website and I see some really interesting things that you've done there. Just simple things like, I look at your website and you're very clear when you step onto that website or click on it, it says Reinventing Family Office and Private Wealth. Right below that it says sophisticated services for founders, entrepreneurs, and ultra-high net worth families. So I look at that and I say, I'm gonna know exactly within about 2 or 3 seconds if I'm the right person for your firm. So you've done an incredible job of being very clear of what you do and who you're for. So I'd love for you to share anything about the intentionality of the website and how that plays into who your ideal clients are and some of the digital marketing that you do to drive traffic to the website and maybe some success examples of how your marketing strategies have generated organic growth.

Sometimes these things happen in non-traditional ways, and a lot of this started during COVID The firm had started, I think it was in the fall of 2017. So now we're in the spring of 2020. We're a really young firm. I think we'd opened up 5 offices organically and had hired teams and were building these one client at a time. And then suddenly COVID hit and those teams who hadn't been together for more than 2, 3 years at the most were working from home and we really had to focus in on the things we could control. We couldn't control what was happening with COVID but we could control our digital engagement. And so we really invested in first a platform to communicate our value proposition and to also make access to our resources. You can actually access some of our thinking and our best thinking and white papers. You can access some of our talks that we do for our families in that amazing community and peer-to-peer learning platform we talked about. So that was a big part of it. And then we went further, which was to try and identify on the web where are likely— and prospective clients are likely to be. What are they reading? What are the places that they're going for information? And to then drive a digital engagement that puts all these pieces together. So the things that we publish around important topics, the way we communicate on the website that you pointed out, and then the way that we do our digital engagement, it has proven to be a very powerful combination and has resulted in a brand that in only 6 years is now recognized both by our peers and competitors as well as by clients and prospects. They've heard of Crescent as a result of that work. And what's amazing about it is that these are prospects that do their research online and they come to us very well prepared to engage very well prepared. They know a lot about their own situation. They're very intentional in understanding and communicating what their needs are. And then they're interviewing us to see, can we solve these issues for them? So we have an amazing conversion rate from the families that reach out to us. They're in such a wide variety of different, even scale and stages of life. So at one end of the spectrum, we've had people that are billionaires reach out to us for help in very complex needs. And then we have a program called Crescent Catalyst for first-time founders and first-time entrepreneurs, those seasons of life that we talked about much earlier. And so for folks that might be in their 20s or 30s or just starting out, we even have a program for that cohort as well.

And I think a lot of advisors underestimate the power of the digital presence, the website, the marketing, the SEO, all those types of things. And just some of the little things that you guys have done on your website that people might miss. But it's little things like this that I think are incredible. For example, your calls to action. A lot of people might just say call us or something. You guys say talk to a founder, or you say schedule a founder call, or you say schedule strategy session. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's because your market is like entrepreneurs, founders of companies, and having a talk to a founder. Hey, we're peers, we're founders ourselves of our advisory company. You're a founder. Let's have a peer-to-peer conversation. Let's have a strategy session because all of us entrepreneurs like to talk strategy. So I, I find that really interesting in terms of just the words and the language that you use to communicate the message. Again, it just goes back to the thoughtfulness. Behind what you guys have put together here.

And it goes to the idea of started by clients for clients. So these are all things that we wanted to solve for, and some of it is really just looking at the next generation. So whether it's anyone who's listening, talking to our kids, anyone from a teenager to someone in their 20s and 30s, you're going to see they're expecting everything to be accessible from their mobile device and to be able to do research, to find resources, and to accept and receive services off of a digital platform. For me, I want to interact with my team. I do a lot of things in a non-digital format. So you have to have both. But for the future, it's so important to research and to invest in the tools that can help us serve our clients better, to leverage our time, and to enhance our expertise. Everyone is reading about what's happening in AI. How can we leverage AI to help us be more effective in the way that we're serving our clients and bringing state-of-the-art solutions in a super efficient way. That's our responsibility. So we have to invest in technology and digital engagement for the future. It's what our kids and the next gen expect from us.

You've certainly done it well, and you've just proved that you can generate new clients through digital strategies that have $10, $20, $50 million or more in assets. And I know I type in something like best founder-led wealth management firms or top multifamily offices, and who do I see? I see Crescent Capital. And now you guys are following me all over the internet. Like wherever I go, there's Crescent Capital. So maybe someday I'll have enough money to become a client of your firm. But anyway, phenomenal job on what you've done there. I want to wrap up here with just one more thing, and I've heard you say that you founded Crescent with a 100-year vision. You want this to be a 100-year company. You mentioned you've just passed the 6-year anniversary. You're entering the 7th year. So I want to flash forward 93 years from now. It's 2117. What does Eric Becker aspire Crescent to be in 2117?

So what's interesting, a lot of people define their business objectives around metrics, which of course are so important. So someone might give an answer of X amount of AUM or X amount of employees or team members and owners, whatever that might be. I want to see Crescent live up to its full potential. This idea of a growth mindset that we talked about on our culture card, I think that there is so much opportunity in this industry for innovation to leverage technology and talent and this employee-owned model which is so powerful, the idea of shared success and shared sacrifice. Going back to COVID, we had a young team that hadn't been together for very long that had to just figure everything out. People were working 7 days a week and having to use skills and things that were new in order to evolve and to thrive. So I'm so excited about this idea of a 100-year journey. It tells everyone who is part of this, that we're committed to the long game, we're committed to the long term, that serving clients is our most important mission and being a best place to work so that being an owner here matters. And the way in which we work with each other and work with our clients really matters. That means having access to the best tools, the best talent. It means that we can grow together. So I think it's aspirational.. And the way that it'll be measured 100 years from now is the clients that we're serving and how long hopefully those families have been with us by then. I hope that there are families that have been with us throughout the transitions of generations, which will really be amazing. One other interesting thing about being a 100-year company is that being a 100-year company doesn't mean that you are tolerating things over the very long term, like I'll get to that, I'll get to that. It's actually quite the opposite. Companies that have survived and thrived for generations, families that have done that, it actually means having high standards and really recognizing when things need to be addressed and doing the things that are necessary to address whatever those are, whether it's changes in the marketplace, whatever it might be that you need to evolve through pivots and all the things that we hear about in the entrepreneurship and innovation world. It's so important to have high standards and to recognize that at the end of the day, if you put the wealth piece aside, because that's fungible, it is what it is, what you're really left with is your reputation and your standards. And so having very high commitment to integrity, um, we did a client study and survey and we made a word cloud out of it. And the number one thing in that word cloud was trust, which I thought was really amazing, especially for a young firm. But it shows how serious we are about that 100-year vision and and how serious we are about doing the right thing for our clients.

Eric, I hope someday you write a book and put all this great wisdom and insight that you've gleaned over your decades of life experience so that we can all profit from it for generations to come.

Thank you, Steve. Actually, I am writing a book. I started it in August. It's been a personal project, and I expect it to be published next year about 100-year businesses and 100-year families. One thing I would be remiss if I didn't mention, we are on this 100-year journey and we're looking for amazing partners. And so, whether one of your listeners is an advisor that is looking for a better way and what we're doing sounds attractive to them, we're looking for great partners, great talent at all levels. And so, if you're listening to this and this interests you, please reach out and explore this as a place that might be right for you. And same thing for owners, firms that are looking at that next generation and looking at achieving that next big milestone and the capital it's going to take to get there and everything that's involved and maybe looking for a great partnership. And if so, please reach out to me. I'm easy to find, whether it's on LinkedIn or on our website, or you know what, press that founder button on our website and see if I pick up the phone. I'd be happy to talk to you.

That's right. Schedule a founder call. Meet with our founder. Yeah, that's excellent. All right. I look forward to the book, and perhaps once that book comes out, we can get you back on the podcast and talk about the book, because I know that'll be another great conversation as well. So again, Eric, thank you very much.

I appreciate it. Thanks for having me, Steve.

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