Bringing the Principal’s Vision to Life: Brent Wouters of the Thompson Family Office

Brent Wouters had never worked for a family office before he met Christy Thompson and — after learning about her family office’s goals and challenges while hiking with her in Colorado — agreed to lead hers.

Today, he has completed his first year as CEO of the Thompson Family Office, which represents the business interests and legacy of Thompson’s father, Texas oil and gas pioneer J. Cleo Thompson Jr.

Wouters’ career had, in fact, prepared him remarkably well for leading the Thompson Family Office. He has an operating background, having held CEO and CFO roles for private equity-backed companies. He also has experience as an equity analyst and as an aerospace engineer, and he has worked in industries including investment management, aviation, aerospace and defense, industrials, automotive, and financial services.

The job combined a lot of the skills and expertise Wouters had gained from his previous roles in a unique way. The Thompson Family Office operates as an investment and operating company platform focused on oil and gas operations, ranch and land management, real estate development, luxury hospitality, and private investments.

“This position requires my unique combination of financial market background and my operating company experience in developing highly engineered global products,” Wouters says.

In addition to having both operating and investment experience, Wouters was equipped to address the challenges the family office faced: “I have a lot of turnaround experience uncovering and addressing weaknesses in operations, and identifying and correcting problems with financial statements and performance.”

When he agreed to take the job, he wanted to ensure alignment between himself and the family. So he told Thompson, the family office principal, “Every investment that I will be recommending to you, I will also be investing my own money. You decide at the end of the year if you want to pay me a bonus.”

Setting goals

The Thompson Family Office, based in Dallas, owns and operates ranches throughout Texas. It also operates a luxury single-family home rental business called Amasé, as well as an oil and gas business.

Wouters’ goals include continuing to grow the office’s energy business with new oil and gas investments as well as emerging energy opportunities; expanding the ranch and luxury home real estate portfolio across the U.S. and international locations; and managing the office’s private company investments and portfolio of public securities.

While Wouters may have been an unconventional choice to lead a family office, this family office is also unusual in that Thompson is the only family member to consider. (Her mother is not active in the business, and she has no other immediate living relatives.) Wouters found this to be a selling point when he was considering the job.

“We don’t have the multigenerational issues to deal with,” Wouters says. “Having dealt with private equity company boards, I thought that was bad enough. I think it would be pretty maddening to have multiple generations of family members that often disagree.”

Mastering the moving parts

People warned Wouters when he took on the role that family offices have a lot of moving parts. But he said it actually feels less complex than some of his previous roles.

“The businesses I have been involved with are very complex. If you’re manufacturing a product, not only is the manufacturing complex, but you have supply chain considerations, sales and global market considerations, and geopolitical considerations — as well as financial, legal, and investment issues,” Wouters says. “Everyone said about the family office, ‘There’s a lot going on here.’ I look at it as a simpler, much less stressful environment.”

That said, there are some challenges inherent in this smaller, more entrepreneurial environment. One of them is recruiting.

“It’s not a traditional corporate environment where someone can see how they’re going to move up,” Wouters says. “You have to work hard to get the right caliber of people.”

Wouters has found that his experience in other industries helps with the investment side of his role — and that his approach to investments differs from that of many family offices he has spoken with. It’s one reason he got the job, he says. His operating and leadership experience in other industries makes him much more comfortable performing due diligence and financial analysis and very capable of understanding the inner workings of direct investments.

“My team has a unique ability because of our industry and operating backgrounds to look at investments totally differently,” Wouters says.

A year of troubleshooting

When Wouters joined the family office, he found that accounting and records were outdated, and the office was recovering from disagreements with some of his predecessors.

“I inherited a situation where the office had been through a tremendous amount of turmoil,” Wouters says. “It took me about six months of digging to come up with a master spreadsheet of every detail of the 130 private company investments we owned at the time.”

The family office’s liquid investments had not been actively managed and were inefficiently allocated, Wouters says, so he devised a tax and allocation strategy and is executing it across more than 100 investment accounts. He also worked on building a team with operating experience who could grow the Amasé brand and operating business.

He is still working to bring order to the family office’s oil and gas portfolio — the industry that was the family’s bread and butter for years and remains its legacy. He brought in a team to digitize those records.

“We had no idea whether we were getting paid what we should be, and no idea of all the mineral assets that we own,” Wouters says. “It’s come a long way, but it’s going to be a multiyear process. We’re ending up with a clear view of our portfolio: the geology, our owner interest, and digitized records of what we own.”

He worked to formalize governance, setting a low dollar limit for decisions he would make without Thompson’s knowledge. He has started giving her detailed monthly statements of her entire portfolio. They are also working on updating her estate plan so it better reflects her interests and values.

“I knew this family office had a lot of problems that I could fix, and then I could grow the operating businesses and investments,” Wouters says. “Now my job has morphed into not only growing those businesses, with some professional management, even more quickly than I anticipated, but also a problem-solving challenge, which is what I love.”

Wouters is enjoying bringing so much of his previous experience together in his new role — and he is looking ahead to ways to make a lasting impact.

“I have a thousand things to do — it’s a tremendous challenge for me,” Wouters says. “What I’d love to accomplish is to think about family offices in a different way: not in a one-dimensional way of serving the family through investments, but by using sophisticated operations to create and execute what the principal wants on a much bigger scale, and bring that vision to life.”