“Staffing challenges have been a significant issue for everyone, and that includes the family office. This is further exacerbated as we are located in a rural environment. We have widened the geographic area we use for searches and are accepting purely remote workers in order to secure the best talent.”
— Jerry J. Harrison, Jr., Chief Strategy Officer, 1st Franklin Financial
“The past five years there has been a greater focus on private markets and alts, and family offices were struggling to compete for talent with funds where the compensation could be a lot higher. There was a lot of interest in hiring specialists around that space and increasing allocations to it at the same time that part of the market has been booming. The air has significantly come out of especially early-stage venture capital and some parts of private equity on the institutional side, which means some institutional investors are cutting staff quite heavily. With the broader competition for talent such as tech companies doing mass layoffs, I think there isn’t going to be that big a shortage, especially at the mid to lower levels of staffing. It’s always hard to source talent at the top levels – the candidate search is often very specific.”
— Hugo King-Oakley, Head of Private Markets & Community at GPFO
“There are absolutely labor market challenges: How can we continue to attract the best people, those who can work and interact in a manner that is productive and maintains our corporate culture? Post COVID, the equity markets had unbelievably strong performance in 2020 and 2021. Many older, more seasoned investment professionals made their number and could retire – retiring earlier relative to when they might otherwise have retired, so we lost many skilled individuals at the top end of the market. At the lower to middle end, it’s hard to find as many skilled analysts. During the two-year period of COVID, they missed a lot of the positive mentoring and relationship building that normally happens in an interactive office environment. Sure, these analysts have been in the industry for three to five years, but they don’t really have three to five years of experience.”
Nathan Sonnenberg, Chief Investment Officer, Pitcairn
