Bazillion Heiress | Family Office Consultant | Mother and Friend
I met Wyoming, before I knew ‘who’ he was, and long before I discovered who he became. I wasn’t myself either, but that was the day I’d start on the path to becoming the woman I always dreamed.
It was at a family office seminar on social impact investing. You might be wondering, ‘what is a family office?’ Well, it’s a concierge investment advisor for families with multigenerational wealth. I know it sounds silly, but you’d be surprised at just how silly it really is. I grew up in this world of one percenters, this gilded cage my grandfather had created from a wealth event that changed the course of our family’s story.
Ever since my days at St. Louis’ Mary Institute, where the families of the ‘wealthiest’ attend, I looked around and saw just what wealth bought you: Materials, but never Meaning. Those decades of questioning what ‘true wealth’ really was, bubbled, then boiled during that family office seminar. The proprietors of stocks and bonds were all selling gains, but not the kind that I was looking for. I already had the materials, but never any meaning.
Wyoming saw I was distraught, and during a break in a series of self-aggrandizing speakers, he asked me: ‘What if you invested less in companies and more in the company you keep?’
It took the lid off all that had been boiling and during the Q&A portion, I stood up. I couldn’t take it anymore: ‘Our family pays you 1% of our net worth to grow our familyʼs financial wealth, but whoʼs in charge of growing our familyʼs social wealth, and emotional health?ʼ
The speaker said, “We arenʼt family therapists, May Dove, but we can refer you to one of the best in the country.”
And I replied, ‘Are you a family office, or a family wealth office?
I needed more family, less wealth. My kids were growing up spoiled and lazy. It wasn’t until I was one of the early cohorts in the ‘The Plot to Save the Soul of Business (with music)’, that I was able to begin rewriting my family’s intergenerational pain and correcting course on this scourge of wealth that had been inflicting it. Because whatʼs the point of passing wealth to future generations, when we havenʼt healed the wounds we passed down too?
And boy, did my family have wounds. My father thought he knew what true wealth was. He had used his money as a tool to give love, and to withhold it. He assumed money would destroy us, just like it destroyed him. He cut himself off from the world, and us, and made sure we stayed in it. But I wanted to be a part of this world, and heal the parts of myself that I’d filled with houses and cars and donations to colleges, to have my family’s name on a building for vanity’s sake.
I’ve stopped feeling any sense of fulfillment from sitting on a foundation’s board or donating to an institution’s endowment. There has to be something more for me, and for my family. I don’t want my children to grow up in the gilded cage that I came of age locked inside of.
I’m going to literally, and figuratively, find my voice and get my family singing together again with other families like Emerson Spelling and Erin Spelling did.
I once heard a quote that Sam Walton supposedly had said on his deathbed, “**Be proud of your silver spoon. Use it to feed the world.**ˮ But I knew before I could change the world, I’d have to change myself — and my family first.
before your very eyes, and ears, at songa.live.