Transcript

Michael Palumbos (01:00.004)

Welcome everybody to the Family Biz Show. I am your host, Michael Palumbos with Family Wealth and Legacy in Rochester, New York. And we have a very exciting show for you today with Kirby Rosblock from Tamarind Learning. Very excited to have you here, Kirby. 

Michael Palumbos (01:18.776)

Thanks for joining us. 

Kirby Rosblock (01:21.07)

I'm super excited to be here, Michael. Thanks so much. 

Michael Palumbos (01:24.108)

Got it. our kickoff tradition is to ask people to tell their story. What was your journey that got you working in the family business? And you, you know, if I, I get this correctly, you worked in the family business and now you run the family business and you serve family businesses along other families, know, successful families, correct? Did I get that right? 

Kirby Rosblock (01:52.47)

in a roundabout kind of way, I will tell you that that our family's business is so far before me. So I oftentimes tell people I won the DNA lottery, right? Because I had no idea I would be born into the multi generational enterprising family, not with one business, not with 10 businesses, probably with hundreds of businesses over 100 plus years. So that's 

Kirby Rosblock (02:22.284)

becomes a very rich pattern that when you get born into something like that, you can't necessarily get your arms around. But my mom's side of the family, her grandfather, my great grandfather started a timber company in upstate New York and then moved the headquarters to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1880. 

Michael Palumbos (02:45.676)

Wait, 

Michael Palumbos (02:46.076)

I gotta stop. We're in upstate New York. 

Kirby Rosblock (02:49.27)

so probably the Schenectady kind of area. so that's, mean, literally when I do like look back at the family fact pattern, that's where they all kind of settled the Babcock clan. and the wonderful thing about her side of the family or my side of the family is that they kept really good records. So there's like tremendous genealogy records. And so. 

Kirby Rosblock (03:17.794)

you know, I can sort of go, we can trace all the way back to when they came over on various boats. And so there's a long, long lineage, Pennsylvania, Dutch, German, and basically Edward Vos Babcock, E.V. as he went by, and his brother Fred and Oscar, they timbered from upstate New York all along the Eastern seaboard. 

Kirby Rosblock (03:46.894)

to Miami, Florida. So when people say, well, what kinds of businesses did you own? I have to explain. Well, to timber back then, there wasn't the 95 corridor that we know today, that beautiful highway that runs all along the Eastern seaboard. In fact, that became the 95 corridor because in the late 1800s, they bought coke mines, coal mines and railroads and literally would lay track, set up a town. 

Kirby Rosblock (04:14.87)

timber 10, 15, 20,000 acres move the next settlers down the line and start another partnership and set up the next track line and the next town. And they did that all the way to Miami. So hundreds and hundreds of thousands of acres of land and timber and industry was started way, way back then. And then over the, gosh, the ensuing decades, 

Kirby Rosblock (04:44.75)

we diversified. like many family businesses, management consultants came in and said, oh, the best way to maintain your wealth is to diversify. So bought up agribusinesses, we had peanut plantation, sugar cane property, citrus groves, organic farming, and then a whole host of other kinds of different 

Kirby Rosblock (05:10.882)

businesses from hotels to car dealerships and lots of other things in between. So I got to sit table stakes while growing up. So youngest in my family, have two older siblings and really sort of got to learn at a distance like most good inheritors do by observing and had a lot of formative memories as a child at the 

Kirby Rosblock (05:39.566)

the lumber company picnics and helping run games and events and bingo and competitions like, know, tug of war and corn and all this kind of different kind of stuff. And so really grew up feeling connected, but not involved in a lot of the businesses that the family owned and managed. And so it wasn't till I moved abroad. 

Kirby Rosblock (06:09.434)

and lived abroad for a while and then decided to come back to the United States that I sort of was wondering like, do I have a place? I remember a very distinct formative conversation with an uncle of mine who was like, well, why would we ever ask you to come into the family business? We have all these other much more qualified family members. And I remember thinking, what do I say to that? And so I responded, well, that's great. But, you know, 

Kirby Rosblock (06:38.804)

he was mentioning his children, by the way, I was like, but your children are like 20 years older than me. So of course they have a lot more skills and qualifications than I do. And I'm not asking for status. I would be like low person on the food chain, happy to clean toilets if that was what was required. Nonetheless, I realized very early on in my family that the business was very patriarchal. 

Kirby Rosblock (07:05.056)

So women weren't necessarily like supported and invited and expected to play any kind of role. And so I kind of knew early on that I was probably going to have to figure something else out. Well, fast forward, 2006 timeframe, my family decided to sell a very large operating entity that probably had 25, 30 different businesses on it, piece of property. And I knew then, 

Kirby Rosblock (07:35.426)

that my family was actually gonna be dismantling a lot of the shared operating businesses that had been endured for so many years. And at that point is actually when I got put on the Family Business Board. And I had a day job at the time, I was working in an RIA. I had built out a lot of skills and acumen. Interestingly enough, it wasn't until myself and my aunt joined the board, we became the first women. 

Kirby Rosblock (08:04.748)

to represent owners on the board. And that was the first time they decided they should have board requirements for who was allowed to be on the board. So again, I always sort of felt this tension around men and women and ownership and family wealth and family business. And so fast forward, I ended up writing my dissertation on women and wealth and finished my PhD in 2007. Right around the time I got... 

Kirby Rosblock (08:33.39)

on the family business board. And that actually was the waning years. So I actually was on the board while we were unwinding several different operating companies, selling off and divesting assets and closing down entities. So it was a really cathartic period to be involved in the family business because it was an end of an era, right? It was an end of a very massive era of my. 

Kirby Rosblock (09:00.62)

my family and its business. And then I watched as my family all became very liquid and very wealthy and now had to figure out what was next. And so that's part of the journey. And that's part of why like the books behind me, ended up writing books on family office and direct investing and everything else. Sorry, Michael, that was probably a longer of a story than you anticipated. 

Michael Palumbos (09:22.678)

No, so I have lots of questions that are coming from that now. So that's very helpful. So some people that are listening to this, they're first or second generation and though they've had some wonderful success, we're not talking about the kind of success that your family has encountered. So I wanna just unpack that a little bit if that's okay. Cause I think it's helpful as we start to... 

Michael Palumbos (09:51.266)

talk about where we're going with this conversation, it'll be helpful as a frame of reference. And some people might listen to this and say, I don't need that right now, but man, I've got really good friends that they gotta be listening to this right now. And I wanna be able to help with that perspective. go back, the business was started how many years ago? 

Kirby Rosblock (10:15.358)

1887. yeah, to put in perspective, my great grandfather was mayor of from 1918 to 1922, which was a timeframe of our first pandemic, right? Right. 100 years ago, it's hard to believe this, but we went through what we're going through today, but 

Michael Palumbos (10:17.366)

Yeah! 

Kirby Rosblock (10:41.26)

in a very different, scary kind of way because we didn't know what the Spanish flu was. We didn't know why so many people were dying. We didn't know how it was transmitted. So he had to lead a city through a really hairy, precarious, devastating medical catastrophe. So, I mean, a lot was going on. So he was involved in politics. He was involved in business. He was really one of those sort 

Kirby Rosblock (11:10.868)

early entrepreneurs of the industrial age. 

Michael Palumbos (11:14.83)

Yeah. And so when we look at fast forward to when you started, you know, to get on involved, there was enough wealth there. was enough operating businesses that the family controlled many, many, know, like you said, thousands, you know, 10 or 15, but hundreds of businesses. You had a family board of directors, which some people 

Michael Palumbos (11:42.562)

that they never get to the point where we need a family board of directors. let me let me do, you know, I know we're going to have more conversations about this, but why would you need a family board of directors? I, that doesn't make sense to a lot of people as I'm running my very successful, you know, I do 30, I do 80, I do a hundred million dollars a year of revenue in my business. Where, where does a board of directors come in for the family? 

Kirby Rosblock (12:08.746)

So the board of directors, I can't tell you when it first originated, but I know it originated very early on in our family's corporate history. And a lot of it was because, again, we had a lot of different businesses that were owned, but not always completely owned equally. So there was shared ownership across not one branch, but multiple branches. Right. If I'm the fourth generation and 

Kirby Rosblock (12:39.114)

Evie has Fred and Oscar as brothers and he's got lineal owners. So now they're shared owners across different generations, different cousins, distant cousins. And so the board became a really important structure for governance and ownership oversight and decision-making. And we would have shareholder meetings. So we would bring, you know, family stakeholders together and discuss things in a broader forum. 

Kirby Rosblock (13:09.41)

But our board was really responsible for oversight of the management, the leadership and all these different companies, overseeing things like compensation and planning, budgeting. So there was finance, there's a lot of different things that the board had oversight on. And so we needed a family business board fairly early on because of how ownership got 

Kirby Rosblock (13:39.264)

Spread and you know another thing that happens quite frequently in multi generational family businesses is not all family want to remain engaged right so some families were saying you know what I kind of want to get out of that entity or that partnership and so the board also played a very important role in sort of managing owner interests and always trying to consolidate so that you know there was not you know. 

Kirby Rosblock (14:08.75)

very thin amounts of ownership across 200, 400, whatever number of family members, but keeping, trying to always consolidate ownership around entities to make it more simplified. If that makes sense. 

Michael Palumbos (14:23.042)

Yeah, a hundred percent. mean, so I had a, that previous guest on the show was Lodge Cast Iron. And they talked about on the show where there was, you know, over 50 family members that all owned a piece of the company. And they didn't have that family board of directors. They did have the family board of directors, but they didn't have the governance and they didn't have, you know, some of the other pieces to connect those non-family owners. 

Michael Palumbos (14:52.718)

who the business, the business had a board of directors. There was no family board of directors. That's what it was. And so was there. What you're talking about is the family now getting together to talk about what does this all look like for the future for these different businesses and how do we guide them? That's really interesting. And I think that's really helpful for a lot of people to paint the picture to say, my business, now that we have, you know, 

Michael Palumbos (15:20.238)

10 different operating companies and we have different ownership levels and we're in the fifth or the sixth generation or even the third or the fourth, depending on where you're at. This might be how we simplify our lives a little bit is the board, the family board of directors, you know, helps to organize this stuff. And my gut would say there's different, you know, different branches of the family might have somebody that they would. 

Michael Palumbos (15:49.228)

put forward to be on that board to represent that different branches. 

Kirby Rosblock (15:53.74)

Yeah. So for example, I was the whole reason I was put on the board was because my family, like other branches of the family, provided some additional capital and liquidity for certain businesses. And I said we would like a family member to participate on the board on our behalf. so truth be told, Michael, I was interviewing Catherine McCarthy for the first edition of the Complete Family Office Handbook. 

Kirby Rosblock (16:22.358)

And I missed the shareholder meeting. didn't zoom in or call in virtually. And so while I'm interviewing Catherine, my sister is texting me saying, they're talking about adding board seats. mom just asked if my brother Chad or cricket wanted to be on the board. And they said politely, no. So they said, Kirby, Kirby will have to do it. So that 

Kirby Rosblock (16:50.826)

That is honestly the lesson I learned is never be a shell holder meeting, especially when the board might be under construction and you end up getting assigned a board seat. 

Michael Palumbos (17:04.77)

That's right. Quick, everybody touch their nose and last one to do it. Kirby's not here. You're it. That's hilarious. Well, thank you for that. I think it's just helpful for many people that have not heard, you know, about those things before. And as families grow, it's important to understand that there are, you know, our ways of doing this that have been done before you already. Interesting. Interesting. So talk about 

Kirby Rosblock (17:10.476)

Exactly. 

Michael Palumbos (17:34.71)

I know how the businesses made money in the past and what do you do today? 

Kirby Rosblock (17:42.444)

Yeah. So now that we don't have operating entities, Individual family members have set up family offices. Some have decided to manage their wealth through outsourced CIOs. Others have decided to go work and be clients of multifamily offices. And some are what I call do it yourselfers who kind of might have a quasi or a virtual office. 

Kirby Rosblock (18:09.59)

or kind of a hybrid office where they have one or two staff members dedicated to them, but then the investment management, their estate planning trust and tax work is all outsourced to third parties that the one or two people inside their office oversee. So now my family is largely liquid, but I say that with a caveat that now inheritors and successors, myself included, are extraordinarily entrepreneurial. 

Kirby Rosblock (18:39.692)

You know, I would say I have one cousin who has built a pretty massive fashion design maternity wear company that Kate Middleton and several other folks have picked up on and she's wildly successful. I have a sister who has her own business at her own art conservation business. I have two businesses and we both, my husband and I both 

Kirby Rosblock (19:08.034)

work in Tamron Partners, our consulting firm for family offices and Tamron Learning, our educational technology business for inheritors, successors, trustees and advisors. So it's interesting how once our family went from being bound by corporate stock and once those ties that bound us together, closely held securities. 

Kirby Rosblock (19:34.626)

that now there's been sort of a renaissance and a rebirth. And there's a lot of family members who have ranches. I have a cousin, if you've ever heard of the Moon Pie, so that's one of my cousins who started the whole Moon Pie company in Tennessee. So there's a lot of different businesses that have spun out. Some are sort of family oriented, some are not so much. So it's all. 

Kirby Rosblock (20:02.774)

All different for all different branches of the family. 

Michael Palumbos (20:06.03)

That's interesting. that brings up a really interesting point. Just in your family alone, there's no one right way to when we have a liquidity event, you know, we try to share with people. It's really hard for most of America to understand what you're talking about. And the reason why, because we're on such a broad platform, I wanna make sure that we get that. I think the number today is somewhere around 17. 

Michael Palumbos (20:34.99)

million dollars and 17 million dollars and below puts you, know, 17 above 17 million you're in the top quarter of 1 % of America's and I don't have it exact, but it's data from the Census Bureau does these things on a pretty regular basis. 88 % of America has a net worth under a million dollars. And so, you know, when 

Michael Palumbos (21:01.774)

When you get above that $17 million and you start going into the 50 and a hundred and $250 million, there's just different levels of services available because the complexity of managing all of that money becomes, becomes a job. You could be managing money and the estate and the taxes and all that stuff as a full-time job. And that's why there are family offices and why people create them because 

Michael Palumbos (21:32.406)

You know, it's a lot. I, know, for one, I would consider myself to be an outsourced family office when we do that work and we do it, we do it for family owned businesses because we're this specialty company that we help them with their strategy and their people issues and culture. And so we do the business coaching as well as estate and investments and personal financial planning. 

Michael Palumbos (22:01.29)

It's really interesting to have seen all of the different, everybody in the family doing something different. I love that. So you have Tamron Partners and Tamron Learning and why were they created? Where did they come from? 

Kirby Rosblock (22:21.25)

Yeah, so 10 years working in a multifamily office and I realized that I was done. Like I was sort of done working in corporate America. Like I was not incented by the hierarchy or climbing the ladder. And I realized very clearly too, cause I've worked in the wealth management and the financial services for 20 years. And I realized 

Kirby Rosblock (22:48.62)

Gosh, I'm really not motivated by money. Like I don't really care how many zeros are behind my name. I care about my contribution. I care about knowledge, creation. I care about creativity and inventing new things. so as you probably know, corporate America is not the most inspiring place for filling that cup that I was looking for. 

Kirby Rosblock (23:18.07)

And, you know, I felt like, you know, put in almost 10 years of my life into a very like reg regimented nine to five, wealth men, wealth management job. And I was ready. And so I had helped write a book internally, at the company and Jay Hughes was part of that book experience. And I said, Jay, 

Kirby Rosblock (23:45.078)

I think I have some other book ideas. What do you think? And he said, well, I think you should talk to Bloomberg press, which subsequently got acquired by Wiley. So I pitched some ideas to Wiley and they said, great. So I went and wrote the book and I took an unpaid leave of absence from my day job. And quite honestly, when I came back, I realized that it was time for me to go, that it was just too much to try to integrate. Now this whole independent book project. 

Kirby Rosblock (24:14.894)

the company signed off on and to stay where I was. So I made the leap and I left at the end of 2013, not really sure what I was going to do, but I just knew I was releasing this book in 2014. And Michael, you can imagine how happy compliance was that I was leaving because I was the biggest pain in their backside for outside business activities. 

Kirby Rosblock (24:44.03)

Meanwhile, in the back noise, I still had other company interests. I was being asked to sit on other people's boards. So I had a lot of outside involvement in other extracurriculars that were just constantly frustrating to the firm I worked for. So that's essentially how Tamron Partners got started, not because I thought I was creating a consulting firm, but because I was sort of closing up, leaving my 

Kirby Rosblock (25:12.65)

institutional day job and wrote a book. And then, then the phone started ringing and then I didn't really know, what I was selling. Cause I wasn't really selling anything. just thought, you know, I bet you people would want to know really good objective advice that was not tied to product, not tied to investment advice. and it was really independent. And that was my like thesis of a consulting job. 

Kirby Rosblock (25:42.594)

And here I am, you know, 10 years later and it had proofed out and by three years into my consulting work, not knowing what I was going to be consulting on per se, exactly, family office, obviously, I realized the net worth of just the three or four families that I was working with was larger than the net worth of all the 300 plus families I worked with combined at GenSpring. 

Kirby Rosblock (26:11.54)

So all of a sudden there was this moment of like, okay, now I've just sort of leveled up. and I felt like that beautiful beginner mind again of kind of rediscovering how complex and how interesting and how fascinating. And I think another thing you and I share is that a lot of the families that reached out to me tended to be more operating in orientation. So they weren't necessarily fully. 

Kirby Rosblock (26:41.47)

liquid. But they had multi-generational ownership interests and then they also had to have a lot of very complicated estate planning, trust and tax planning that was thoughtful and prudent and had to take into effect a lot of different jurisdictions. So I'm not an attorney, I don't give legal advice, but it was great for them to be able to have someone with 

Kirby Rosblock (27:09.204)

knowledge, review certain materials and opine and say what about this. So just to kind of keep the advisors that they were all working with, I won't say honest, but knowing that they weren't doing stuff in the vacuum. 

Michael Palumbos (27:23.01)

Yeah. It's such a great guy. It's one of my favorites, knowing that they're not doing work in a vacuum. I tell all the families that I serve that in a minimum of once a year. And again, I'm not serving families at the size that you were talking about. Okay. My families are, know, 40 million, know, 20 million to a hundred million dollars. A lot of them would fit inside a gen spring. But 

Michael Palumbos (27:52.8)

When you get to that level of wealth, there is a lot of complexity. There are trusts, there's insurance, there's LLCs and S-Corps and C-Corps, and there's a lot of different things going on. And every single time that the attorney pushes a button or the accountant pushes a button or the wealth manager pushes a button, there's an effect. There's shockwaves in different areas and you need to understand 

Kirby Rosblock (28:15.107)

Yes. 

Michael Palumbos (28:21.442)

all of those things, you know, and that's without even putting philanthropy into the, into the mix of things. Yeah. So you and I met through an organization called the purposeful planning Institute. And I met Jay Hughes and Jay was just on my show. We recorded two episodes. really excited to have them come out. Yeah. That exactly. It sounds like the same reason, which is we're trying to better serve the families. 

Michael Palumbos (28:51.276)

that we're involved with. so surrounding ourselves with people like J. Hughes, like John A. Warnick and all the others, it's just, keeps you grounded. It keeps you reminding why we're doing what we're doing, right? 

Michael Palumbos (29:11.468)

I love what you're doing. So you went through my family, had a family office. We did all of these things. I was on the family board of directors and you tell them reminder. So you have several books today, but what was the first one? 

Kirby Rosblock (29:29.846)

So the very, very first one was inside of GenSpring and that wasn't a commercial book, but it was a thought leaders guide to family wealth. And Jay Hughes is one of the key thought leaders that had inspired and influenced Hap Perry who founded GenSpring. And after that, the first independent book I wrote was the complete family office handbook. And it's sort of the... 

Kirby Rosblock (29:59.02)

This one right here. So I was the first one and then they all kind of look similar after that. But then I wrote a direct investing handbook because I realized in my family, like so many other families that there's like one core business that generated a lot of wealth. And then we invested in all these other businesses or we started all these other businesses. And there's one thing to be an active engaged 

Kirby Rosblock (30:28.032)

owner and it's another thing to be a direct investor investing into privately held or closely held businesses. And so, you know, there's a joke that's something like, you know, a good way to take an extraordinarily large fortune and make it much more manageable is to invest in direct investments. Why? Because a lot of people don't recognize the following capital required, the intensity 

Kirby Rosblock (30:56.866)

to be engaged as an owner of a direct investment, the time, the energy and the duration, right? It's a long time to own something that may or may not work out depending on where you get in. Are you at seed, angel stage? Are you at mez, like later stage? So I wrote that book and then I just, at the end of 2021, released the second edition of the complete family office handbook. So these two are, 

Kirby Rosblock (31:26.542)

actually brother and sister. I don't know which one goes first, but the red edition now is second edition. So, and about 80, 85 % revised. So I scrubbed a lot of data that was dated and I added a bunch of new cases. So, yeah. 

Michael Palumbos (31:46.016)

So basically this is your life experience of being part of a family business, winding down those family businesses, being on the family board, seeing and running the family office and then working in a multifamily office for years. So you have personal background and what you wish somebody had taught you, plus all the things that you learned and what you've been teaching other people for many, many years. 

Kirby Rosblock (32:16.62)

Yeah, and the handbooks are really like, you know, typical handbook, which I don't know all things tax or all things estate planning or all things legal structure. So where I don't have the expertise, we have great thought leaders who come in and written bespoke chapters on sort of all the different areas of family office. I wrote about, I would say, 60 percent of both of the handbooks. 

Kirby Rosblock (32:43.338)

And thanks to Wiley, they had me cut it down to, I think, about 450 pages. So it's a heavy book. I can tell you because I'm a sherpa of books and it weighs just about five pounds. So, you know, a lot of what's in the book is actually not my story because of my family, right? Well, when you're connected to a family, you're intensely private and quiet. And so 

Kirby Rosblock (33:12.288)

Maybe if I take a pen name and it shows up in the succession like series, you know, maybe down the road, you'll, because certainly my family was not perfect like most multi-generational families. So, but for right now, all of the work that you see behind me is research primarily from other families, other family businesses, other family offices and institutional data. 

Michael Palumbos (33:38.572)

So when we look at Tamron Learning, what is your platform and why do you exist and what do you bring to the world with Tamron Learning? 

Kirby Rosblock (33:51.33)

Yeah, so that's another interesting origin story for Tamron Learning. About eight or nine years ago, and interestingly enough, I just was able to connect with one of the NextGen members that influenced and inspired Tamron Learning. They're two families, different families, different engagements. But the first family we worked with and mentored three 

Kirby Rosblock (34:20.014)

young adult women sisters as they sort of built more acumen and awareness around what they were going to inherit, what their financial lives look like, what they needed to think about working with their advisors, what their trust said, how to read an investment statement, how to read their financial statements. So we wanted to put the floor of basic financial literacy in, so to speak. 

Kirby Rosblock (34:48.902)

And none of these women had a financial background. they none of them studied business or econ or finance or anything like that. They were more on the classic. I'll call it bachelors of art, you know, creative music, dance, literature. So long story short, we did a very customized learning path. 

Kirby Rosblock (35:15.278)

for each one of them. And then as a sibling team, had stuff that overlapped. And that was really, really rewarding and successful. And we loved doing that kind of work, but we realized we could only do that kind of work with so many families one by one. Fast forward to another family engagement, and that was around circa 2017, 2018. Long story short there, the family was really, really complicated. It was a blended family. 

Kirby Rosblock (35:44.172)

have lots of entities, lots of partnerships, many, operating entities, and a huge dispersion of awareness, knowledge, and involvement in one or a hundred of those entities. And we recognize that they also lived in 27 million different places and they like to travel all the time. So there was no way we were going to be able to one off educate each one of them. So we built a bespoke 

Kirby Rosblock (36:13.186)

learning management system for their family. And we rapid prototype built it out. hired our team hired instructional designers from Harvard. I mean, it was a huge lot left, incredible left to do this work, super rewarding. But in that experience, we realized, you know what, this is not going to be a scalable business if we build one off, one off, one off, right? 

Kirby Rosblock (36:41.378)

So we said, well, what can we learn from this and potentially build 2.0 of what we did for this family? So that's essentially how Tamron Learning came to be launched in 2020, end of 2020. And we actually grew out of the technology we originally were using. So we actually built our technology as well as the content. So that's pretty meaningful because... 

Kirby Rosblock (37:09.166)

There's a lot of incredible learning management systems software out there, but ours is one of the few that real time, we can real time edit content. can real time change up and share things. If we see something, we don't have to go to some development site in Indonesia or India or wherever. And that's no diss on those bigger companies that have those massive programmer sites off, you know, 

Kirby Rosblock (37:38.646)

out of country, but we like to be able to control everything at the tip of our finger. 

Michael Palumbos (37:44.492)

So what kind of things can a family learn? I know you mentioned a few of them, but let's just talk about it again. So there's investment statement reading. What are some of the things that people have come back to you and said, my goodness, I would have never thought to ask you about this, but I'm so glad you taught me. 

Kirby Rosblock (38:06.766)

Yeah. So here's sort of a crazy number. It's something like 80 % of wealth and business interests are transferred in trust. And why do I bring this up? Because we are oftentimes not educated about what that construct really means if you're a beneficiary or the role of your trustee or the intention of the grantor. Or if you're in Canada, we call you the settlor. 

Kirby Rosblock (38:34.72)

And so all of sudden, we think we know a lot about what our family does and our business entities and everything else. But for many inheritors and beneficiaries, they're not really clear about the structure and how it operates and how to read those legal documents or what's my role and responsibility as a beneficiary or what does my trustee really have to do or not do. 

Kirby Rosblock (39:02.83)

How do I know if I know he or she is doing a good job? And so we built the whole learning program with the idea that what if we started from this basis of the trustee beneficiary relationship, the concepts of stewardship and built into technical areas such as estate planning, trust, tax, and then further building on that, looking at financial planning and that's supposed to 

Kirby Rosblock (39:31.672)

personal financial planning, budgeting, to understanding corporate financial statements. So how do you read a balance sheet? What's the difference between the income statement and a net worth statement? To now working with advisors. So I think we're the first platform or program I've seen that actually has coursework dedicated to, do you know how your investment advisor gets paid versus your accountant? Do you understand how to fire? 

Kirby Rosblock (40:01.398)

an advisor if you're in that need to be in that situation. So we provide guidance and education around understanding these working relationships. And yes, we also cover investing as well. But again, we don't lean towards like, what is a stock? What is a bond? I mean, we have that information in our system, but we probably lean more towards do you have an IPS? Do you know what an investment policy statement or an IPS is? 

Kirby Rosblock (40:31.438)

Do you know the components, what goes into an IPS and why, or investment governance and the role of an investment committee? So we probably go to a higher level of investment acumen that again is very bespoke, but all of our learning is actionable and applied. So it's things that really beneficiaries are facing, you know. 

Kirby Rosblock (40:58.06)

Like, do I move to a different state if it has higher taxes and higher cost of living? And how do I think about the tax trade versus maybe the income I might make in a new role? 

Michael Palumbos (41:10.19)

It's fabulous that you undertook that and did that. We must have like a kindred spirit between the two of us. People ask me, what is a wealth manager that has been serving family businesses, coaching businesses? What right do you have to do that? And it's very similar. Somebody said to me, what fed three families is not going to be able to feed eight. 

Michael Palumbos (41:38.87)

And so when they were going from generation two to generation three, there was going to be a big giant in order to have the same lifestyle. They're going to have to do grow the revenue and scale the business. And I just thought that was such an interesting question that I went out and trained myself to, you know, I found the different coaching programs and studied them and looked at them. read hundreds of books and, just said, I'm, and. 

Michael Palumbos (42:08.534)

I love it. That part of my business, don't tell anybody. know this isn't recorded. My favorite part of the business now is the business coaching and really helping them to grow the asset that was the thing that got them where they were in the first place and to really help them with those things. And then when I can wrap in the other pieces of the wealth management side of things, think about that. We were talking about trust before. 

Michael Palumbos (42:37.132)

We're going to about to talk about scaling the business and growing it to X. And if you've already gotten a state tax problem, then are you growing? Why not grow it inside of a trust instead of outside of a trust? And why are we doing the things that we're doing? But now as I'm doing that, Kirby, you and I are going to have to have a closer relationship because there are going to be people that we're going to have to train to say, let me explain to you why this trust. Let me explain to you how the 

Michael Palumbos (43:02.21)

The roles work and you know, why this trust is in South Dakota instead of New York or whatever the things are really super helpful because I'm going to tell you, I'm pretty darn good. I'm, I'm proud of what my father taught me before me and all of my mentors and the work that I've done. I don't take enough time to train and teach. 

Kirby Rosblock (43:09.75)

Yeah. 

Michael Palumbos (43:28.93)

because that's not the next generation. And so, I do tell them, you can ask me anything. Here, will help you. And there are no dumb questions even to the point of let's take some time to go through the statement, but to put curriculum together, I don't have that. 

Kirby Rosblock (43:48.374)

Yeah. Well, listen, you don't have to have that. And I say that honestly, because we built our platform to welcome advisors like yourself and others who say, I have a day job. have like 50 other things I'm doing. But if I had a curriculum that could support my, you know, my clients or my 

Michael Palumbos (44:08.782)

clients or whatever. Yeah. And that's what you that's why you exist today. 

Kirby Rosblock (44:13.378)

That's why we exist because I'm not scalable, you're not scalable. But if we have learning that's anywhere, anytime, asynchronous and accessible, people can actually, you'd be amazed. think there's more evidence now to support that self study is growing leaps and bounds thanks to the pandemic. But the reality is there's this generation of millennials and up and comers are pretty geared at like 

Kirby Rosblock (44:41.922)

they go and find what they want and they do it. And then those that want additional support and mentoring either know who they want that mentoring to come from, or they already have like a system or they have resources to find the right folks. What we're excited about is that we feel like we have a great amount of data and information that's really organized smartly and intuitively. 

Kirby Rosblock (45:07.424)

So you can find it, can go through linearly through our progression, or if you're like, I'm looking for this or looking for that, we have search features. We have a lot of ways to make it accessible and fun. have learning checks, we have quizzes, we have games, we have activities. So it's not just online, it's multimodal. 

Michael Palumbos (45:30.062)

So you should not to be proud of. That's a pretty hefty accomplishment. Nice job. 

Kirby Rosblock (45:36.622)

Well, it's the gift that keeps on giving Michael, because it's honestly never done. And thanks to, you know, everything that happens on a almost daily basis, we can update and add new content, new curriculum, be it cryptocurrency debacle and what can we learn, right? From that whole FTX debacle to, you know, what can we learn from what happened in our banking and regulatory? 

Kirby Rosblock (46:06.144)

environment recently with Silicon Valley Bank. So there's just, there's a lot of opportunity that we like to leverage with real time examples and cases. So we have anonymized cases, but we actually have a lot of stories of real people, real families that's based off of what's publicly available. 

Michael Palumbos (46:26.316)

Yeah, I was just on a recording a show a little while ago and talking about Tony Shea, the founder of Zappos. And it was like, you know, great job of building culture and doing some wonderful things about building a business. No estate plan. And we're, you know, so it's like, and that's all publicly public information. And so, yes, there's tons of examples of why are we doing what we're doing in it's important to learn. 

Michael Palumbos (46:53.186)

We need to learn our blind spots. What don't we know? What are the questions? Like you said earlier, how am I supposed to be judging my advisors? I have no idea whether, most people don't have an idea how they should judge those people. And so to set those parameters up is wonderful. And if you Google on the internet what they say about hiring like a wealth manager, I think that just scratches the scratch of what really you need to know. 

Michael Palumbos (47:22.518)

You know, it's here's the questions to ask. Well, anybody can answer the questions, right? But do they really have the muster to be able to deliver? 

Kirby Rosblock (47:29.358)

Yeah, well similarly with hiring as you know, multifamily office or any institutional advisor. I mean, now in Tamron, I'm in the handbook, we have a whole litany of questions that go so far beyond. And a lot of folks don't sort of realize why it's so important to know if your RIA is also coupled with a broker dealer, which is also coupled with a custodial 

Kirby Rosblock (47:56.694)

relationship, you know, so to understand sort of what you think you are buying and all the different services that might look like, they're not connected. And then you're like, no, they're all under the same parent company or hold co. So, you know, even things like, did you look at the form ADV and people are like, what? And we're like, yeah, you want to read what their disclosures are. Like, have they ever been written up? Are they, have they had a fraudulent activity or 

Kirby Rosblock (48:25.166)

you know, be dinged by the SEC. So again, I think there's a lot of really, really important things, whether it's an advisor or it's actually an institution to know how to be able to really do the diligence. 

Michael Palumbos (48:41.088)

And then Tamron Partners does all the work for the family offices and provides consulting services to help them individually as well, correct? 

Kirby Rosblock (48:53.388)

Yeah. So Tamron partners is interesting. I call myself a translator. So having worked inside of operating family office entities, MFO included, I can translate to owners sometimes things that they don't understand what their people do. Got it. Okay. And vice versa. can hear owners say, this is what I really want. Is my family office doing it or able to do this? And then another major time I get hired is 

Kirby Rosblock (49:23.192)

transitions and I'm not just talking about succession, but I'm talking about like trust termination. I'm talking about retirement of key figures. I'm working for one office right now that's been actually unwinding over several years. And that requires a whole different like skill set to think about uncoupling, but still maintaining certain level of service. 

Kirby Rosblock (49:50.456)

So there's a lot of complexity and guess what? Every family and every family office I walk into, I go to it with again, a beginner lens, thanks to J Hughes. I don't assume anything and people say, well, isn't there a best practice? Shouldn't we always do this or that? And I said, you know what? Every family is gonna have their own bespoke needs and what worked for this family, that might be who you idolize. Well, that may not work for you. 

Kirby Rosblock (50:18.474)

there is a lot of work that has to be done at different ages and stages of both the entity itself, but also of the family. And then I sometimes have to poke the family to say, you've overbuilt or you've underbuilt, like you have too much stuff or maybe you don't have enough infrastructure to help them think about the resourcing paradigm to how to support. 

Kirby Rosblock (50:43.212)

what the mandate is and then, by the way, there's this thing called a budget and like, what does it all cost and who pays for it and how does that get done? And sometimes that is very differently received from, you know, one generation that set up a family office to subsequent generations who are like, I have to pay for this now, or this is how much it really costs. And you're like, yeah, this is how much it really costs. So, you know, nothing is for free. 

Kirby Rosblock (51:12.942)

And, you know, family offices are certainly a paradigm that is not for free. 

Michael Palumbos (51:19.342)

Last thing, and I think it just kind of popped into my head as you're speaking. Remember what I said, a lot of the people that are listening to this show own an operating business right now. So you might have, you know, a business that's worth a hundred million dollars. And if you have a business worth that, the odds are that you have some investments and whatnot that are significant and you have some complexity in your life that's significant. 

Michael Palumbos (51:48.718)

What would be some of, know, but they may not have enough assets to open, even to go to a multifamily office. It's very possible. But the complexity of all of that stuff, what would be some of the, what would advice would you give them to say, you know, where should they be reading? What should they be looking for? How do they take the advice that they're getting to the next level and get ready? Got, know, if they do sell the business and even if they don't, if they decide to leave it in there, but there's things that they need. 

Michael Palumbos (52:18.498)

Is that? What would you say to them? 

Kirby Rosblock (52:20.718)

Yeah. So a couple of things I would just highlight and just make sure that they have a good awareness of is one that the people that work in their operating entity are not necessarily pulled to oversee investments. So it's really, really difficult when you split your people and ask them to have two different allegiances. So it's also a no-no to compensate your operating folks potentially on the 

Kirby Rosblock (52:49.678)

growth of your investment portfolio. No, no, no, don't do that. Try to really start to carve out and separate those two worlds because quite honestly, there's a lot of power that you put in the hands of few if you give them that much access, that much knowledge and which master are they working for? 

Kirby Rosblock (53:10.732)

Are they working to maximize say the trust assets or multiple investment account assets? Are they really maximizing their efforts towards the operating entities? So a good thought process early on is that if you're building wealth in a retirement account, in separate accounts, try to really separate that from the operating day-to-day entity and be mindful that you're thinking about what's that pool of capital for. 

Kirby Rosblock (53:37.486)

Is it an emergency fund? Is it a rainy day fund? Is it for your heirs for the future? Do you want to give it all away? So whatever you're building that wealth for be very purposeful and intentional. So, you know how it should be managed that you don't bet the farm and invest as some angel in something when you really needed that as current income to maintain your lifestyle. No, no. So again, if it's to. 

Kirby Rosblock (54:03.138)

feed the business and to come in for capital infusions for growth or whatever, just be very mindful what that pool of capital is supposed to do. I think the other major question I get a lot is like, well, when do I need to start thinking about a family office or do I need a family office? And I try to remind people that typically the family office becomes 

Kirby Rosblock (54:30.592)

appropriate when you have the scale, but you also know that you will be creating to some degree a separate entity. So, you know, again, don't try to have it all operate under operating holdcos and that at some point you might have a different intention. Some families say I want to create an investment oriented family office where they really want to make money with their money versus a lifestyle. 

Kirby Rosblock (54:58.218)

or services-based family office, which is really to support, right, the state planning trust, tax, compliance, governance, supporting services to a family with a lot of complicated entities. So I think it's really important to start to map out what you think this wealth is for, what you want it to do. And then lastly, two last things. One, how much do you want to pay? Because nobody takes into account the startup costs of a family office. They think 

Kirby Rosblock (55:28.202)

already to the operating expenses of it. So like, you know, it's maybe 50 bits, a hundred bits, you know, 1%, 0.5%. But the reality is there's oftentimes a lot more startup costs associated that are sunk, they're fixed costs. You're not going to recoup these. So it's important to be really clear on how much you want to invest in creating this structure. Because if you're, if you don't anticipate it lasting for at least 

Kirby Rosblock (55:57.344)

a decade plus, don't do it. Don't go down the long arduous process to get that up and running because it's a good one to two year endeavor and sometimes longer if you're a very complicated family. 

Michael Palumbos (56:12.078)

And when you put it into framework of it, when you say expensive, we're not talking about 25 grand or 30 grand or 50 grand, correct? 

Kirby Rosblock (56:22.87)

No, I'm talking like, you know, one mil, two mil, three mil, like I'm talking a much bigger expense depending on the complexity. I mean, I know folks who spend, you know, a million dollars on estate planning. So that's why I'm like, just be mindful of what you what you think you need. And again, 

Kirby Rosblock (56:48.526)

A lot of attorneys will say, oh, can, I can create you. can set up a structure for you and maybe they can do it for 50 or a hundred or $200,000 per rate. But at the end of the day, it doesn't mean it works. It means you've the legal documents drafted and submitted, but now you've got to hire the people. Now you've got to create compensation plans. Now you've got to create an operating budget. Now you've got to create risk controls. So there is a ton of work, just like any other kind of operating company. 

Kirby Rosblock (57:18.57)

that's required and don't underestimate that, not to scare anyone away from doing it, because there's tremendous obvious reasons to do it. I just always find that many folks imagine what it's like to be having it versus getting it up and running. And there's oftentimes an on-ramp to scaling up a family office. 

Michael Palumbos (57:42.978)

That is the first time anybody's talked to me on this show about that. So I really want to say thank you for that. Cause it's, you know, we don't think that there's any right or wrong for any family. I mean, let's say if you're, you know, $10 million, you're not opening up a family office. You're not joining a multifamily office. But there are, know, virtual family office, you need to have somebody or an outsource family office. You need somebody that understands 

Michael Palumbos (58:12.462)

that interconnection of all of those pieces. And a lot of people, know, I've had the question, when should I start a family office? When should I, you know, move away from just you, Mike, or, you know, you and the team that I have right now? And my answer was always, you know, somewhere around a hundred million dollars is probably the right time to be thinking about that. But based on what you just said in terms of 

Michael Palumbos (58:40.714)

to have a million, two, three million just to get startup going, at a hundred million, that would scare a few people to say a multifamily office might be good. 

Kirby Rosblock (58:53.856)

Yeah, I mean, the people that build a family office control, control, control, customization, customization, customization. They're not afraid of costs because typically they have in their minds how they're making up that money or they're making so much more money. The cost is not necessarily the driver, but they want the dedicated resources. They want the privacy. 

Kirby Rosblock (59:22.2)

They want the customization. Yeah, that's, those are the big drivers for building it out. And then they also have this idea that this is an entity that outlives them and not in a control, like dead hand way, but in a way that's about how do we create a structure that allows for smooth and seamless wealth transfer? How do we think about asset protection and 

Kirby Rosblock (59:50.75)

know, soft landings for future generations who don't have to come up and figure out how to be successful and, you know, in their career or anything else. mean, I think there's a lot of reasons why multi-generational family offices exist, but don't kid yourself. There's a lot of planning. There's continual improvement. And, you know, I'm a big believer that they're always learning and evolving. 

Michael Palumbos (01:00:16.75)

I have loved this conversation and you just reminded me, it's seventh generation thinking is kind of why you might be doing this. that, Jay Hughes, pounds on that regularly. And then one of my other mentors always said, Michael, when we're talking about transition planning, whether it's a business or an estate, think of two things, smooth and orderly, cost and tax efficient. 

Michael Palumbos (01:00:44.014)

And though the family office may not be cost and tax efficient to begin with over seven generations, that makes a lot more smooth and orderly and a lot more cost and tax efficient probably. 

Kirby Rosblock (01:00:57.356)

Yeah, and let's not let's give our hats off to all the family businesses and operating businesses out there because the shared ownership and the discounting that happens with closely held businesses is another huge tax saver. And I really believe that we need to help fortify the fabric of family firms as much as we can, since we have a lot of pressure. 

Kirby Rosblock (01:01:24.684)

right from these massive conglomerations that quite honestly are sort of consuming and chewing up a lot of these family run companies that either are first generation, second generation or beyond. So I do think that the family office can be a complimentary structure to operating families who want to figure out how to keep it in the family or keep it going beyond one generation or the next. 

Michael Palumbos (01:01:53.912)

Great. All right. You and I could talk for the next three hours and probably not get winded because this is just, love this stuff and we love serving and helping the families that we do serve on a regular basis. So Kirby Ross Block from Tamron Partners, Tamron Learning. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for sharing your wealth of knowledge. And I know that, you know, if anybody wants more of what you've heard today, go grab your book. 

Michael Palumbos (01:02:22.862)

You can go to Tamron Partners, Tamron Learnings and tamronpartners.com is out there. You can connect with Kirby, I'm sure on LinkedIn and a number of different ways, but thank you so much for sharing today. 

Kirby Rosblock (01:02:38.926)

Hey, Michael, it's my pleasure. It's just great to be in your company. And I hope we've left your listeners and viewers with something they didn't know. 

Michael Palumbos (01:02:47.95)

100%. Thank you everybody for joining us today. I'm Michael Palumbos with Family Wealth and Legacy in Rochester, New York, and you've been listening to the Family Biz Show. If you've enjoyed this episode and know somebody that might also like it, feel free to share it with them. But more importantly, if you know of a family business that you think would be a great guest and would like to share their story, make sure that you tap them and let them know about us. We'd love to have them on the show. Thank you everybody and have a great day.