In her nearly 14-year tenure at Mt. Vernon Investments, Meredith Liner has helped steer the family office through two closely linked transitions: modernizing its technology and reconfiguring its investment operations.
Liner is chief financial officer of Mt. Vernon Investments, the single family office for Kenny and Lisa Troutt, founder of Excel Communications. The office serves eight family members across three generations, and the team oversees an investment portfolio of more than $1 billion.
Liner is part of a team of 10 family office professionals at Mt. Vernon who are split between operations and investments. She is the primary contact for the G2 family members. Along with the chief operating officer and general counsel, she also manages the family’s private trust company and develops financial forecasting models for family members’ trusts.
Accelerating Beyond Excel
The family office’s technology transition has gone hand-in-hand with an effort to institutionalize the investment function over the past dozen years.
“From the beginning of the family office in 2002 until 2013, we were doing all of our reporting manually in Excel,” Liner says. “We spent so many hours and so much energy trying to report and manipulate data in Excel.”
In 2013, they implemented an accounting solution from Cogency Software, which helped them automate the weekly reports requested by the patriarch and family office president.
“It was phenomenal on the reporting side. That was great for us. But what we realized we lacked was an opportunity to use that reporting analytically, to use it to help us make better decisions on the investment side of things,” Liner says.
In 2020, they implemented Addepar and Archway, which enabled them to bring more of their accounting work in house. (All their tax work continues to be done externally.) It also allowed for the first direct connection between their liquid investments and their accounting system.
“We were pulling the data instead of manually entering it,” Liner says. “That was an amazing change for our team from an hours standpoint — and, over time, from an analytical standpoint, because Addepar is a software that’s incredibly easy to manipulate and run reports from.”
In 2023, they added Arch to incorporate information from their alternative investments, which make up at least 60% of the portfolio.
“Since that time, we have had over 3,000 transactions automatically pulled via the Arch-to-Addepar API, and I can’t even tell you the amount of time that has saved,” Liner says.
The team and family have also appreciated the AI summaries Arch provides for each investment.
“It is our first use case of AI in our family office, and it has gone phenomenally well,” Liner says.
An Across-the-Board Upgrade
The upgrades to the family office’s technology have enabled a parallel move toward a more sophisticated family office investment structure. Until about 2015, Liner says, the family office was primarily focused on estate planning and wealth transfer. Once those plans were in place, the family office shifted to focus on asset allocation and the internal organizational structure.
“The last 10 to 12 years have been really focused on making sure the family stays together through the private trust company, and also institutionalizing our investment structure,” Liner says.
As part of the restructuring of the family office, the family set up a private trust company in 2018.
The family office also put in place a master limited partnership structure: “We are now invested across every single asset class, from very aggressive down to conservative. All of our trusts — and thereby the underlying beneficiaries of those trusts, our family members — are invested across all of those asset classes together,” Liner says.
This helps with family unity by making sure all family members are in all investments together.
“We are very intentional that if there’s a large win, every single family member has a piece of that,” Liner says. “It’s not just Gen 2, or just a generation-skipping trust. We are now structured so that everybody has a piece of the pie.”
The professionals in the family office recommend investment allocations to each family member depending on their risk tolerance and age. Each family member has their own investment policy statement.
“Even though everyone is invested in the same assets, it is to varying percentages based on their asset allocation,” Liner says. “Our patriarch and matriarch, at their age, may have a higher allocation to our very conservative, conservative or moderate buckets, whereas the second generation may have a larger percentage of invested assets in the very aggressive bucket — because they are targeting, obviously, a longer time horizon and a higher return.”
Liner’s career with the family office has been enhanced by engagement with others in the family office ecosystem. She serves on Arch’s client advisory board, for example, and participates in a number of family office forums and groups, both locally in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area and across the U.S.
“A lot of family offices have the same pain points,” Liner says. “Most of us have small teams as well, so I think it’s incredibly important for us to share best practices. This is a niche job – it’s not something that, when I received my accounting and finance degree, I even knew would be possible for my career. So learning from others in this space is really important to me.”