BarronKent
Robert Rodriguez, managing partner of BarronKent, explains the name’s origins:
“My wife and business partner came up with the name BarronKent. It’s a tribute to two people – my mother and my eighth-grade math and science teacher. They shared three great gifts with me: the Opportunity to grow and learn, the Belief to see capacity and capability in someone that they might not see in themselves, and the Discipline to harness potential through hard work, grit, and doing what you say you’ll do. Opportunity, belief, and discipline can have a profound impact on an individual, as they did for me – and we at BarronKent strive to create that for ourselves, our team, and the companies we work with.”
Chicago Financial
Josh Kanter, a lawyer by training, is president of Chicago Financial, his family’s family office. Although the family office name is straightforward, the family owns numerous entities that have history-filled names:
“There’s no deep family story here – we’re from Chicago, and it was financial. The family owns lots of entities with names that had some reference to Chicago: We have an entity called Windy City and one called Chicago Holdings.
“When my dad used to name trusts, there were lots of plays on words, or things spelled backward. In retrospect, I’ll bet every single one of them had a story. I wish I knew all of them, but I don’t. But one example – my grandmother’s name was Beatrice Kanter. Her husband died and she remarried a guy named Ritch. So in 1969, my father created a group of 30 trusts called the Bea Ritch Trusts.”
Elmwood Management
Chris Herschend is one of the managing directors of Elmwood Management, the family office of the Herschend family. They operate family entertainment company Herschend Enterprises, which got its start in a small cave tour operation in Branson, Missouri, that later expanded into dozens of family entertainment properties throughout North America.
“We named our family office after Elmwood Avenue, the street in Wilmette, Illinois, where founders Jack and Pete Herschend grew up together,” Herschend says. “That house was sold in 1956, and their newly widowed mother Mary poured the equity into making off-season improvements to the cave. So Elmwood Avenue was truly a foundation both for our family and for our business. Today we think it captures the spirit of our effort to try and create a stable, reliable ‘home’ for our most important family activities.”
