Russ: This is the PKF Texas Entrepreneur’s Playbook. I’m Russ Capper, this week’s guest host, and I’m here at the Gulf Coast Regional Family Forum with Tom Livergood, Founder and CEO of the Family Wealth Alliance and one of the lead organizers of the event; welcome to the Playbook Tom.

Tom: Thank you Russ, thanks for having me.

Russ: You bet. Tell us about your firm.

Tom: Family Wealth Alliance is a connector of firms and families who share our core value which is we place families first. Russ, we’re known as an innovator and we have three lines of business, chronicle, convene and consult. So we chronicle the industry we do research, we’ve done 21 research reports in the last 11 years, we host events much like this so they’re gatherings that are an event like and experience like none other. And finally we do some consulting work with families in firms to better understand access, service to space. So we’ve been in business 13 years, I founded the firm, we’re North American in scope and we have two rules; we do business with only people that we like and we have to have fun.

Russ: There you go; those are good rules for sure. So your clients then are like the people that attended this event; they’re essentially high net worth families that have businesses that have grown perhaps several generations.

Tom: Well, and we actually serve the firms that serve the families, so primarily B to B. And so we’re serving family wealth firms such as single/multi-family offices, external CIO family wealth firms, vendor firms to them such as client reporting firms, security firms, technology firms, investment firms. So we’re better at serving the firms so they can be better equipped to serve their private clients.

Russ: Okay, share your perspective of the Gulf Coast Regional Family Forum.

Tom: We were invited a little over a year ago to get invited to this thing by the good folks at Kanaly and PKF Texas. I’m very honored to be a part of it; we thought we could bring some outside perspective to the event, bring in some speakers and bring some ideas on how to host events, although apparently these guys are pretty good at doing this.

Russ: Well it seemed very successful to me, that’s for sure.

Tom: The expectations I think were exceeded in a couple ways; first of all, the expectation was exceeded as far as the type of quality that was in the room. The numbers of the people in the room. But I also think it, you know, the event itself kept on time, they were quality speakers, people were engaged; if you looked around the room at 4:30 in the afternoon people were still here. And very engaged. I thought the luncheon speaker on politics was fascinating. I thought Arnette Heintze’s comments on security were awesome. I thought the young panel, the Millennials sharing their perspective on the next generation and taking over the mantel was fun. I thought the outlook on energy was of courser very interesting at a very challenging time.

Russ: Absolutely.

Tom: So I am biased because we were involved in the event and I was able to kick off this morning but I thought we did pretty darn good.

Russ: It was a success.

Tom: Yeah, it was.

Russ: All right, Tom I really appreciate you sharing your perspective with us

Tom: Russ, thank you very much for having me.

Russ: You bet, you bet. This has been another Thought Leader Production brought to you by the PKF Texas Entrepreneur’s Playbook.