How do family offices get their names? Some names are deliberately obscure to preserve the family’s anonymity. In other cases — particularly when the family also has an operating company — the family’s name may be more prominent.
This dichotomy is not the only way to look at family office names, though. A Forbes article examines family office names in the broader context of branding, for example. And some families use the family office name as a way to build family cohesion or honor their history.
Here is the first in an occasional series on how families name their family offices.
50 State LLC
Eric Allyn, the former chairman of Welch Allyn Inc., a medical device maker that his family sold in 2015, is chief investment officer of 50 State LLC, the family office.
Allyn explains how the name of the family office and the name of the family’s pooled investment vehicle pay tribute to the family history: “Our family office is named 50 State LLC. This name comes from the address of our old family home, where two generations of my family lived in our small town of Skaneateles, N.Y., from approximately 1940 to 2005. The address is 50 State Street, and we shortened up the name to 50 State LLC.
“The other interesting name we have in our family is the major pooled investment vehicle, which holds the majority of the investments. We named it Nolan-Jones LLC. Those two names — Nolan and Jones — are the maiden names of my mother and my aunt, both of whom married Allyn “boys” in the 1960s. We have many things in our small town named for Allyns, ranging from our former family business (Welch Allyn), to the Allyn Family Foundation, to hockey rinks, rec centers, university buildings, etc. We realized that my generation was shaped very much by our mothers, so we decided to name the largest pooled investment vehicle for our moms. Hence, Nolan Jones LLC.”
K&S LLC
K&S LLC is the family office of the John and Dyan Smith family, which owns and operates trucking company CRST, The Transportation Solution, Inc. The family office name, K&S, is based on their names: K is for Kach, Dyan Smith’s maiden name, and S is for Smith.
“My parents had a company called A&S, for Armstrong and Smith, and I mimicked that,” says John Smith.
Hillcrest, their holding company, is named for the street in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where the Smiths lived for 30 years.
“The Hillcrest house was where our family developed – we started there with no kids, and we ended up there with kids going to college,” says John Smith.
Downtown Capital Partners, LLC
“In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the ‘industrial downtown’ of Manhattan consisting primarily of Tribeca (“Triangle Below Canal Street”), the meatpacking district, SoHo, etc., had mostly abandoned formerly industrial building, says Gary Katz of Downtown Capital Partners .
“My dad had no capital or ability to borrow when he started building his parking business and had his lots mostly on month-to-month leases, so he would offer to demolish existing buildings in exchange for a longer-term lease to operate the site as a parking lot. Sometimes, he would believe the empty manufacturing buildings were too architecturally beautiful to tear down, or that he could otherwise manage to reposition the building as retail or commercial, and he would offer to buy the empty building for no money down and seller financing. Again, these were the only deal structures my dad could afford.
“Since this only worked in the abandoned downtown industrial sections of lower Manhattan, my dad named his company Downtown Realty Management, which among insiders in the business, everyone knew meant ‘property no one else wanted,’ but which also reflected his belief (which certainly came true by the late mid-1990s and 2000s) that this area of New York would one day come to symbolize a highly desirable and valuable area.
”After I left the hedge fund where I was a partner, called Delaware Street Capital, to form my family office, I named my business Downtown Capital Partners — to both honor my father and indicate the broader areas of investment beyond real estate that had become my focus.”
If you’d like to share the story behind your family office’s name, please email me at msteen@thefopro.com.
