Anthony R. Contrucci leads the family office for the Schrage family, owners of First Bancshares, Inc. and Centier Bank, headquartered in Merrillville, Indiana. Contrucci is a married-in member of the fifth generation of the family — the generation that led the effort to put in place a family office and strengthen family governance. He talks about the past, present and future of the family office:
How and when did you launch your family office?
A little over a decade ago, we started talking as a family about succession: in particular, the ‘not for sale’ promise that my in-laws (G4) made as it pertains to our legacy operating business, Centier Bank. Our entire family, both G4 and G5, are very proud of our promise, and we share it proudly across all our mediums, including proudly displaying it in and on our branches. However, I recognized early on that a goal without a strategy is just a wish — which prompted the question: How do we really honor this promise and achieve this goal in perpetuity?
This was the catalyst for my and our family’s learning journey. Among other things, we joined a family business center in Chicago, started attending conferences and spoke with other families that were further along on the journey. To distill down a decade of learning, we recognized the following foundational takeaways:
- We needed to adopt a family enterprise mindset.
- We needed to create a structure to operate and govern our family enterprise comprising our family office and family governance.
- We needed to develop a family strategy.
- We needed to ensure that we leaned into family cohesion dynamics, ensuring that our family strategy had tactical elements that addressed all four components of cohesion: family emotional, family financial, business emotional and business financial.
We realized that we had never really adopted an enterprise mindset. We were incredibly proud and passionate about our family’s legacy operating business. However, we were often more focused on working in the business rather than working on it, on the family and creating the infrastructure to ensure success for generations to come. It struck me that working hard — and we all work really hard — in the business, and financial success in a vacuum, weren’t going to be enough to honor our promise of remaining ‘not for sale’ forever.
We asked ourselves several additional questions, including: Why do we want to be a family business? What are we good at? Where are our blind spots? What is missing and what do we need to build?

As we reflected, we acknowledged that we were missing operational and governance structure. Our legacy operating business had these in spades, and our corporate governance was very mature; however, we needed to build it for our broader family enterprise.
This is where I have spent a lot of my time over the last decade-plus. We started creating our family governance and then transitioned into the work of building the family office, which was created about seven years ago.
How is your family office set up?
Currently, the family office serves our core family: my father- and mother-in-law, Mike and Jill Schrage, and their three heirs and their respective spouses and dependents. It serves four family branches across three generations. We have built something that is as unique as we are — and that honors our family, including our family values and culture.
We have a variety of shared family assets, including our ownership in First Bancshares, Inc., the parent company of both Centier Bank and our private investment arm, 119th Street Capital. As we deploy capital as a collective family and at the individual family branch level, we tend to focus on what we know best and do best: financial services and commercial real estate.
We have a structure that really works for us: a decentralized wealth ownership structure. Although we have shared family assets that we own, govern and manage together, it is important to us that each family branch also has discretion over a material percentage of their own assets. We can and do pool capital; however, we are conscious of not becoming overly enmeshed.
We also have an amazing family assembly, which includes my father-in-law’s sister and her family. We have a wonderful relationship. In addition to getting together throughout the year, we have an annual family meeting.
What family office services do you offer, and which do you insource and outsource?
When we started talking about this eight or so years ago, I created a survey that was basically an itemized list of every service a family office can provide. We decided that for service offerings that received a majority vote, we will pay for those as a family. If there are services that did not receive a majority vote, then each family branch would be responsible for them on an a la carte basis if they desired them.
At first, we decided to work with an MFO [multifamily office] and were outsourcing everything, as we had to build the infrastructure.
Fast forward to today, and we have embraced a hybrid model. I’m really focused on our family’s family office expense ratio. We frequently ask: What is most efficient and effective to insource vs. what is more efficient and effective to outsource?
Like many families, we have a robust network of third-party advisors, including accounting, legal, investment management and property management. We also still utilize a multifamily office for strategic wealth and estate planning and for technical support to our internal family office team. They also handle the financial side of next-generation education.
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What we insource includes: operations and administration, bookkeeping and reporting, advisor coordination, risk management, direct investments, family governance (operational and administrative), next-generation education on the emotional side and family and corporate heritage. The family office currently consists of seven people, including me.
How did you get the family to buy in to the idea of having a family office?
For so many generations, our family has prided ourselves on the fact that nobody is going to outwork us — that nothing is too big or too small for us to do ourselves. At first, I don’t think my in-laws were comfortable with the concept of a family office. I feel in many ways it felt to them as though it was not honoring our culture and values — prompted by the question, ‘Why do we need people helping us do things that we should be doing ourselves?’
Then it got to the point where the complexity and volume of work had outgrown us, especially given our full-time day jobs within the various operating entities, including governance roles. We ultimately recognized the need to provide the resources that the family needed to operate efficiently and effectively, in a manner that honored our values and culture and would not result in creating entitlement or enablement.
What do you see as the future of the family office?
Although things are always evolving, I don’t see any major changes in the next two to three years — I feel like we’re in a good spot with both our family governance and our family office.
People often discuss the concept of ‘shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations.’ One of the things our family loses sleep over is: How do we ensure that we are people with purpose, [who will be] passionate and productive for generations to come — that future generations don’t become entitled and complacent? That current and future generations always recognize that, although we will all hopefully leave our unique mark on the legacy, much of what we have was the result of immense sacrifice and hard work of the preceding generations? How do we create a structure and framework that honors that? How do we combat entropy strategically and intentionally?
I don’t think we’ve done it perfectly or that there is a destination — it’s always evolving. All I know is that we will continue to strive to honor our forefathers and strike the right balance.