When the third and fourth generations of the Bush family — owners of the manufactured food company Bush Brothers & Company — decided in 2012 to open a private trust company, Bush Brothers already had about 60 shareholders.
“There was no matriarch or patriarch at that time saying, ‘You’re going to have to use this trust company,’” says John Seckman, president of Shoebox Private Trust Company, who joined Shoebox in 2016 and has overseen its evolution into a full-fledged family office. “We had to earn the business one shareholder at a time. Over time, we’ve been able to win the hearts of 90% or more of the family. It’s a unique thing when you can combine a family-owned corporate trustee who also is a trusted advisor.”
Today, Shoebox serves 90 family members in 47 households as both a private trust company and a family office. The family has owned Bush Brothers since 1908, and in the early 2000s, they started encouraging family members to put their stock into trusts that could protect the business for generations to come.
“It was working very well, but they were having a difficult time finding appropriate trustees,” Seckman says. “When you get to significant scale, having a family member as a trustee is just not a good idea for a long-term legacy trust with significant assets. And their experience with traditional bank-owned corporate trustees was poor.”
By 2012, they had decided to open a private trust company in Tennessee, where the company is based.
“The goal up front was to provide family-owned corporate trustee sponsorship that could oversee the trusts that were getting created,” Seckman says.
The private trust company started with about a dozen trusts and didn’t hire a full-time employee until Seckman joined in 2016. The early years were spent laying the foundation for success, including developing mission and vision statements and a robust governance structure.
Evolution of a family office
Although Shoebox started with trust administration as its primary focus, its mission statement always described broader goals, including providing excellent trust services, offering financial and estate planning support, providing family education, and being a trusted advisor to the family.
“Starting with the nucleus of the trusts, we began to broaden our focus with the family members,” Seckman says. “We started working with our beneficiaries to help them manage their overall financial situation, but it became more than that over time. We became a family office.”
Shoebox is set up to have a fairly limited staff, with just seven employees. They don’t do accounting in-house for family members, for example, but instead work with family members’ accountants or a regional tax preparer with whom they have a relationship. Likewise, they support family members who need legal documents drafted, but they use outside counsel to draft them. Shoebox handles investment management for the liquid assets that are held in the trusts. Many of the trusts allow the dividends from the company stock to accumulate.
“Over a long period of time, you build up liquid assets that are independent from the operating company,” Seckman says. Most of the households Shoebox works with also have their own independent investments.
“We have been very careful not to get into lifestyle or concierge services,” Seckman says. “We don’t walk dogs, wash yachts or get tickets to the Super Bowl.”
A key part of the mission is to instill a sense of stewardship in the family members.
“This has always been a cultural aspect of the Bush family,” Seckman says. “One of the reasons that they wanted the trusts to be established was so that they could maintain family ownership and continue to be stewards of this company.”
Shoebox operates in many ways like a wealth management company, but without the profit motive.
“We can allocate our resources in a manner that suits the needs of the family,” Seckman says. “That means we’ve put a lot of resources into our relationships with our family members. We have a lot of family meetings at the household level. It’s been, for me, quite rewarding to see what you can do when you don’t have that profit motive in your way and you can really work with people at a deep level and earn their trust over time.”
They also coach family members as they work to establish their priorities in life beyond the money.
“We’re uniquely positioned to serve this family in a very holistic way that goes well beyond just administering the trusts,” Seckman says.
Building the vision
Shoebox, a wholly owned subsidiary of Bush Brothers, operates under the Tennessee Department of Financial Institutions, serving the heirs of AJ and Sally Bush. It is the trustee over a majority of Bush Brothers stock. Being embedded within the corporate office offers operational efficiencies since they can leverage corporate resources such as technology and payroll.
“We have a pretty intricate setup, with committees and independent committee members to make sure that we’re never allowing family to make decisions about distributions or to change our operating agreement,” Seckman says.’
Shoebox is part of a well-developed family enterprise that also includes the operating company, a family senate and a family education team.
The journey from pure trust administration to the built-out family office was both planned and organic, Seckman says.
“When they put that mission statement together, they had a broader vision, even then, of what this might be able to do,” Seckman says. “How it actually evolved was organic based on the needs of the family.”
The process took time.
“It took years working with the family, understanding who they were, how they worked, what went on, to really start to understand what the need was and what Shoebox could do to serve the family,” Seckman says. “To me, that’s the fun of it, the adventure of it all: You have a rough idea of where you want to go, but then you just let it play organically and see what emerges.”
The Shoebox team is also working to create a culture that will allow it to support the family for generations to come.
“It won’t be me at the seat, it’ll be someone else,” Seckman says, “This is the culture we’re building, a little heirloom that we’re building for the Bush family.”