Business and family have always been closely linked for Tony Pritzker. He grew up watching his father and uncles use their entrepreneurial drive and strong values to build a business empire. Today, he is working to pass these same values on to the next generation, while carrying the business legacy forward.
“I’m blessed to have come from a family of entrepreneurs with a strong set of values and a drive to achieve,” says Pritzker, who is co-founder, chairman and CEO of Pritzker Private Capital. “My grandfather became very good at structuring deals as a lawyer and then took equity positions. This accelerated into my two uncles and my father using that and leveraging that into much broader things.”
Pritzker’s father, the youngest of three sons, found the office of the family business crowded with relatives by the time he was out of school, so he moved to Los Angeles to work in the hotel business that his uncle had started.
“Through entrepreneurism, and my grandfather’s and my uncle’s deal-making and network capability, they were able to accelerate the growth of the Hyatt hotel chain,” he says.
Pritzker’s father passed away when Pritzker was 11, but before that, Pritzker was able to observe how his father built teams and connected with people.
“My father could walk in and talk to the to the doorman, or to the bellman, or to the front desk guys, or to the maid, or to the general manager, and ask, ‘How are the 49ers doing this year?’” he says. “He had a great sensibility, not just from an operations standpoint, but real teamwork.”
Pritzker uses the values he got from his family — honesty, loyalty, integrity — to guide his current companies, Pritzker Private Capital and Pritzker Alternative Strategies.
At a weekly meeting at Pritzker Private Capital to discuss potential investments, everyone joins in.
“Everybody in the firm sits in on that: the executive assistants, the associates. We talk about companies we’re looking at investing in, and everybody participates. That way, everybody’s on the same page and understands how we go about doing business,” Pritzker says. “Similarly, we don’t refer to the companies as a portfolio of companies. We refer to it as a family of companies. We welcome new hires to the family.”
Those family values also come through in Pritzker’s philanthropy, which includes a recent gift to the Family Office Initiative at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. In addition to donating to educational institutions, Pritzker focuses his donations on health and medical, environment, youth programs and community initiatives.
“Part of Jewish tradition is giving: tikkun olam,’” he says. “Giving has always been part of what my family has done. I have always been very involved where I have given — not given just to give.”
Looking to the next generation, Pritzker has focused more on giving his children the right values than on whether they will join him in business.
“My objective is to allow my kids the freedom to be able to pursue what they’re passionate about, with the right kind of diligence, competitiveness and values,” he said. “I’ve never taken the approach that they needed to come into the business, nor that they’re encouraged to necessarily come into the business.”
When it comes to instilling the right values in the next generation, Pritzker considers “not just the values of saying please and thank you, but also values about how to set goals, how to be competitive, how to be inclusive, how to build a team.”
He got these values from his own family, for example, through healthy competition while playing games, and he likewise played a lot of board games with his own children.
Pritzker considers transparency and liquidity to be two essential elements to give the next generation. Giving them liquidity means making sure they have the flexibility when they inherit to not be bound to a particular business.
Regarding transparency, he says parents should realize that their children can probably get a general idea of their net worth on the internet.
“Why not just deal with it head-on and, from the age of 18, educate them about how you think about things, how the numbers work, where the risks are in the business, how you’re investing capital to grow the business, how you justify your capital expenditures?” he says. “That is transparency, and that is a great education mechanism.”
For now, none of his children are working with him in the business.
“Do they have to come into my business? Sure, I’d love it. But they have got to go out and earn their way in from the outside first. They don’t just get an automatic seat at the table,” he says.
There are multiple possible points of entry for them if they want to get involved at some point — but he also wants them to have the freedom to pursue their own interests.
“I hope that some of them want to come in, but if they don’t, that’s fine, too. I want to be a cheerleader for them,” he says.