Building Wealth and Scaling Strategies With Richard Wilson of Family Office Club

Richard Wilson is the Founder and CEO of the Family Office Club, the largest association in the family office wealth management industry with over 100,000 current members. He has authored multiple #1 bestselling books on family offices, including The Single Family Office: Creating, Operating & Managing Investments of a Single Family Office. Richard has spoken at over 250 conferences in more than 14 countries, sharing his expertise on family office insights and case studies. He holds a MBA from the University of Portland.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [04:11] Richard Wilson discusses an overview of the Family Office Club and its membership structure
• [08:42] How Richard started with a blog before scaling to a global investor network
• [11:30] The power of “brute force reciprocation” in business and networking
• [14:35] Strategies for acquiring premium domain names
• [18:21] The value of studying billionaire-authored books and insights
• [24:37] Key lessons from interviews with billionaires like Mark Cuban and Tony Robbins
• [28:38] Why in-person networking is 16x more effective for closing deals
• [34:02] How Richard structures investment deals to de-risk and protect investors
• [40:24] The role of family offices in wealth management and asset protection
• [43:48] Richard shares the billionaire mindsets

In this episode…

Many entrepreneurs and investors struggle to build lasting relationships with ultra-wealthy individuals and secure high-level deals. The world of billionaires and family offices can feel like an exclusive club, with unclear rules on how to break in and thrive. So, how do you gain access, establish trust, and leverage opportunities in a space dominated by the world’s wealthiest investors?

Richard Wilson, an expert in family offices and billionaire investment strategies, shares key insights on navigating and succeeding in this exclusive world. He emphasizes the power of brute force reciprocation — offering value first and building trust through consistent, high-quality interactions. He also highlights the importance of structuring deals in a way that de-risks investments for investors while ensuring long-term success. Additionally, Richard discusses the mindsets of billionaires, the advantages of in-person networking, and how to position yourself for high-level partnerships effectively.

In this episode of Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz interviews Richard Wilson, Founder and CEO of the Family Office Club, about breaking into the ultra-wealthy investor space. Richard shares his approach to building trust with billionaires, structuring investment deals, and leveraging networking for long-term success. He also discusses key lessons from billionaire-authored books, insights from high-profile interviews, and strategies for acquiring premium digital assets.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Richard Wilson on LinkedIn
• Family Office Club
• Billionaires.com

Special Mention(s):

• Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It by Chris Voss and Tahl Raz
• The Success Principles(TM) – 10th Anniversary Edition: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be by Jack Canfield and Janet Switzer 
• Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life by Arnold Schwarzenegger
• Am I Being Too Subtle?: Straight Talk From a Business Rebel by Sam Zell
• Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters 
• 80/20 Sales and Marketing: The Definitive Guide to Working Less and Making More by Perry Marshall
• The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less by Richard Koch

Related episode(s):

• “Negotiation Tactics From FBI Agent Christopher Voss, Founder of Black Swan Ltd” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “The Pixar Story: The Letter of a lifetime That Started Everything With Alvy Ray Smith, Co-Founder of Pixar” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Sweet and Snack Show Series] Creating a Positive Impact with Rob Nelson Founder of Big League Chew” on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable Moments:

• “Big checks require big trust, and you have to meet in person and develop that trust over time.”
• “Brute force reciprocation is aggressively adding value first — it’s hard for people to say no to that.”
• “If you outwork everyone in a niche, it’ll be hard for anyone to catch up.”
• “The structure of your deal should sweat for you, not just sit there doing nothing.”
• “Proximity is power. One relationship can be worth $400 million if you’re around the right people.”

Action Steps:

1. Offer value first through “brute force reciprocation”: Actively provide value by helping others for free to build goodwill and form long-term business relationships.
2. Leverage in-person networking for deal-making: Meeting investors and partners face-to-face makes closing deals 16x more likely by fostering trust and credibility.
3. Structure investment deals to minimize risk: Ensuring investors receive their capital back first de-risks investments and makes opportunities more attractive to wealthy investors.
4. Adopt billionaire mental models for problem-solving: Question industry norms and pursue challenges others believe impossible to uncover high-value opportunities.
5. Study books written by billionaires to refine your strategy: Learning directly from those who built billion-dollar empires provides invaluable insights on scaling businesses and making high-stakes decisions.

Episode Transcript

Intro: 00:00

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 00:22

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here founder of InspiredInsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is no different. I have Richard C. Wilson and Richard runs family offices com and billionaires com which we’ll go into before I formally introduce you, Richard, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out. People always ask like, which one should I check out?

I mean, there’s so many good ones. Chris Voss was a good one. If someone’s listening, never split the difference. He’s ex-FBI hostage negotiator a phenomenal stories in his book. That was a really good one.

Along that realm, we had the co-founder of Pixar, Alvy Ray Smith, and he talked about some George Lucas stories, Steve Jobs stories, and just starting Pixar from the beginning. It was fascinating. And Big League Chew, the founder of Big League Chew, talked about how that came about. You know, Richard is interesting. A lot of these interviews, it’s an overnight success after 20 years.

Right. And we’ll talk about some of these things. That was the only interview I think I’ve done out of thousands. The Big League Chew, where it was actually literally an overnight success. And part of it was because he licensed it.

He licensed it and got a royalty. I think it was a royalty. And so he also we’re going to talk about this because you there’s a $15 million investor. This kind of relates to that. But he didn’t do.

He just everything else manufacturing, distribution, everything else was handled. And he came up with the idea. And this is like lightning in a he called it lightning in a pouch. That’s what he said. So anyways, check out those episodes and more on inspired Insider.com.

This episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25, we help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. We do that in two ways. We help companies launch and run a podcast, or an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. And we’re also an easy button for a company to do corporate gifting.

So you give us the list of people you want to, you know, follow up with and keep in touch with, whether it’s clients, partners, and we do everything else from there. So for me, you know, Richard, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways on how I can give to my best relationships, and I found no better way by having them on my podcast, featuring them, profiling them, and also sending follow up gifts to people like people. If I send, you know, someone chocolates, they’re not like, oh, screw you, Jeremy. But like, you know, you’re like, thank you.

Hopefully it doesn’t melt. You know, we don’t send them in the summer to Scottsdale, but, you know, other things that are delicious and the family can enjoy. So if you thought about either of those things go to rise 25.com or email us at support at rise 25.com. I’m excited to introduce Richard C Wilson. You know he’s got a lot of accolades.

But the most impressive thing he’s got three girls that he’s raising and he’s a husband of over 15 years at this point a third-generation Eagle Scout. But he owns the number one website on billionaires, mental models and scaling strategies. As I mentioned, billionaires.com has 17 million social media group members. He leads the Family Office Club, the only investor club of 1000 plus Deca millionaires sent to millionaires and billionaires and meets monthly in person and via mobile app, live stream platform. And Richard, thanks for joining me.

Richard C. Wilson: 03:56

Yeah. Appreciate you having me here.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 03:58

So I just want to start off, you know, we’ll kind of talk about family offices and billionaires. Com but start off with family offices. Com and what you do and as you do that I’m going to pull up the website so people can check it out.

Richard C. Wilson: 04:11

Sure. Awesome. Yeah. So I started Family Office Club in 2007. So it was 18 years ago.

And I started it because there were no trail guides to help me navigate the family office, which is the ultra-wealthy investor space. So since then we’ve interviewed, you know, Mark Cuban, Tony Robbins, you know, Mike Tyson, and we’ve had, you know, hundreds of billion dollar plus family offices on stage, but more importantly, just investors you would never hear about otherwise. They’re not the famous ones you’d read in the Wall Street Journal all the time. They’re typically people who are well known in their industry, whether it’s car washes or dry cleaners or a self-storage platform they sold for $100 million is one of the speakers we just confirmed recently, for example. And then we put them on stage.

We interview them, we create AI tools related to their expertise and knowledge, and we meet every month, 16 times a year. We meet in person to create relationships, and then we have a mobile app that has 1250 titles in it, essentially that you can stream, which are all investor interviews, investor workshops, mastermind summits. And that’s what Family Office Club is, is all about. And just like you, we believe in giving value first. And we’ve got about, I don’t know, 1100 videos on our YouTube channel, a million subscribers there.

And we’ve got the number one podcast in the family office space as well. So that’s kind of what we do in a nutshell over the last 18 years.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 05:38

Talk about Family Office. We’re at Family Office Club here and the membership, how the membership works and what’s included. You know, because I know that you do events, but there’s also deals that are going on as well.

Richard C. Wilson: 05:53

Sure. Yeah. So we don’t push deals like a fund or SPV. We’re not syndicators or cap and trade placement agents. What we do is have a community.

We find that unless you’re raising $1,000 or $10,000 at a time, big checks require big trust, and you have to meet in person and develop that trust over time. And so it organically through genuine meeting face to face through multiple events over time, you create the best relationships. So we’re really on one side. We have founders who are raising money, and then we have super founders who already have made a lot of money, are liquid or make seven, eight, nine figures a year in profits. And the super founders can be mentors to the founders, also investors with them, joint venture partners, etc. and so the membership allows you to tap into that platform.

And as far as we know, I believe we’re the only platform where you can meet with monthly in person, you know, 1,000-plus Deca millionaires into millionaires, billionaires that are coming to these different events, webinars, etc. so that’s what the membership is all about. So we’ve got a few options there. If people want to take a look and get involved. We host all of our events in Dallas, Beverly Hills, New York City and South Florida right now, meaning that we’re in all four of those places every quarter, so you don’t have to fly across the country to come to our events. We’re probably in your region, you know, fairly often.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 07:16

So do people typically join virtually sometimes to those live events or is it strictly. Yeah.

Richard C. Wilson: 07:22

Yeah, we do live stream them as well. So out of the 16 events, most of our members come to 3 to 5 a year and they’ll come to most of them in their region. They’ll come to 1 or 2 on the other coast where it’s a big investor summit, and they don’t want to miss, you know, usually we’ll have in a three day event, 125 speakers on stage in three days. And at a two day summit, we’ll have 75 speakers on stage. And so it’s a great chance for someone to maybe bring their son or daughter or their spouse or a team member sometimes.

And so but usually, you know, 4 to 6 events a year is what most of our members attend out of the 16, because they’re busy. We’re usually attracting founders who have a serious business and have a dozen or several dozen employees. But we have some early stage groups, too, that just want to learn and grow their capital network at the same time.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 08:09

Yeah. Yeah. I know you have you know, you have a lot of free resources on YouTube. I watched a bunch of the videos are really good. You can check it out.

And then obviously you have some other resources here, like pitch decks and, other items people can check out as well. I’m curious, you know, Richard, this I’m sure this business evolved like when you first started. Compared to now, I’m sure when you first started, you weren’t doing 16 events across the country. I’m curious, when you first started it, what was the idea and what did it look like?

Richard C. Wilson: 08:42

Right when I first started, it was a blog, and the blog was just providing the most helpful insights and information available on the family office industry. So it quickly took off and got 3000, 5000, 7000 hits a day of organic traffic of people reading my blog posts. So we started selling advertising on the blog. We started getting paid for speaking at different events. So I spoke a couple hundred times in 14 countries and then realized that people hosting the events didn’t really know much about the family office space.

They were a big media company, or it was like musical chairs, and the head of it didn’t really know the industry that well. So then we started, you know, hosting our own cocktail hours, half day events, full day events. And then it’s evolved since then into what it is today.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 09:30

How did you get into this family office arena in the first place?

Richard C. Wilson: 09:34

Well, I had started 7 or 8 businesses before I got out of high school, and then in college I had a successful business. I had a 9,000 textbook inventory of selling used textbooks online. And then when I got out of college, I got paid a lot of money to do financial risk control consulting, and so it paid for my MBA in cash. And I looked around at age 22 with my MBA and I said, who’s going to pay me $100,000 plus a year? Like almost nobody.

So I better do something where it’s eat what you kill and go into commercial real estate or raising capital. So I went into raising capital and worked for free until the person would pay me to do it, to break into the industry. And then when I was doing that, I said, okay, well, who should I raise capital from? And then I stumbled across one lead who said, oh, I’m a family office. I just work with the ultra-wealthy only.

And since I was raising capital for a hedge fund at the beginning, I had told myself like, well, why should I waste the time with anyone else? I should only call on the ultra-wealthy so I could raise a whole bunch of more capital that way. And I found that very hard to do. Nobody wanted to be helpful to me, and the only people writing on the industry in 2006 and seven were journalists who had never worked a day in their life in the industry. So I said, well, this is backwards.

Every other thing I’ve studied my whole life, there’s 400 experts or 50 experts trying to be like the guru of the niche, and no one’s being helpful. So just me as like a 27 year old kid, I mean, pretty quickly became one of the more helpful people on the internet when it came to the family office space and it just took off from there.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 11:01

There’s a couple of things, Richard, that I find interesting to unpack here. Okay. One is you said worked for free. Okay, right. Talk about your approach to that piece and why.

Richard C. Wilson: 11:15

Right, yeah.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 11:16

I think, you know, Napoleon, I can’t remember. It’s in Napoleon Hill. Think and grow rich or or one of the, one of the books. He talks about this exact thing as an example. So I’d love to hear what you did.

Richard C. Wilson: 11:30

Yeah. So in college, I picked up a strategy of making my resume look amazing by just offering to do projects that sounded and were really cool for a cool companies and just pitch them on like, hey, if I do all this research for free, are you cool with that? And they’re like, yeah, sure. And I got my resume to look like amazing, right? And then when I got out of college, I didn’t want to take a job making $30,000 a year.

So I cold called everybody in the Portland, Oregon Chamber of Commerce, found someone who graduated from Oregon State who was trying to hire people with a CPA designation and seven years of accounting experience. And I said, no, you should hire me instead. She said, no, I can’t. You really have to have the experience. I said, okay, well, I’ll work for free.

Fire me in the first hour. If I suck, I can learn quickly. I’ll get this down. And I got it down. And my first year out of school, after graduating early from my undergrad, my professors telling me not to rush, I was making more money than the professors who criticized me the month before and threatened to ban me from the computer lab in the School of Business, which has an entrepreneurship division, because I was trying to start a business in the computer lab, and I was like, I will never donate a dollar to you guys.

And because I had to figure out how business got done on my own by experimenting, working for free, putting out lots of lines in the water. And that’s just how business goes. And that’s what a business school should be promoting, not restricting. So it’s really key to like our whole strategy. We call it a brute force reciprocation because it’s like you’re breaking your way into the industry and creating goodwill.

And it’s hard for people to say no to, can I help you for free? And then try to do that in 20 different ways, like something’s going to work, you know.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 13:07

I mean, it’s a couple of things I think of. It’s obviously an irresistible offer, right? Partially irresistible offer. And it’s also just a give, right. Like, what do they have to lose?

Right. If again, you present yourself in a professional way, sort of like I don’t want to deal with this person, but I like the brute force reciprocation. I’ve never heard that before.

Richard C. Wilson: 13:29

Yeah, because reciprocation is all about adding value first, but you aggressively add value first. So when I started my blog, I saw there were 500 keywords people looked for related to raising capital and family offices and family office investors. So the brute force part of adding value. First was I wrote two blog posts on all 500 of those keywords and put out 1,000 blog posts, and no one else wanted to take that 1,000 ping approach to adding value first. So it’s being hyper aggressive at being generous is kind of like the duality that makes it work.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 14:04

I feel like there’s a new book. Your next book is like hyper aggressive generosity or something like that. Brute brute force reciprocation. What are some. So I love the listen.

And that’s I love this conversation because I, I try and live by that and just try and give and you know, you offer to work for free. What are some other examples throughout in like the blog. What other examples with family offices or billionaires. Com. Yeah.

Kind of fall into this category.

Richard C. Wilson: 14:35

Oh so many. So I’ll say them pretty quickly. One is in high school I wanted to learn how to make web pages, and back then people actually used the yellow pages. So I cold called every computer in the yellow, every computer company in the yellow pages and said, hey, this local 17 year old, I want to come work with you. I’m happy to do it for free.

And I got hired by this Indian fellow who had a software programming business, but he made websites for Indian business owners in his local community. So I ended up learning how to program websites in HTML and Notepad before front page and Dreamweaver and WordPress existed. And that’s how I developed my web skills. And to this day it helps me. We have 30 different websites on the internet, you know, and so that’s one example.

The other one more recently is billionaires.com it took us 12 years to buy it. To buy it. I followed up over 170 times via email by snoozing the email every 2 to 4 months and just poking them to death until they caved and gave it to me for half of what they started. Price wise, at.

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