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Horizons: Family Office & Investor Magazine

BeeWyzer: A Masterclass for NextGens

Monday, July 26, 2021

Recently elected as one of the global top 40 family office service consultants by Family Capital. Peter led the EY (Ernst & Young) Family Office Services practice in EMEIA (Europe, Middle East, India, Africa), where he focused on the areas of family office set up and structuring, family governance, holistic wealth management and transfer to the next generation of accounts reaching up to 5 billion US$. He draws a wide spectrum of experience from his previous posts both in corporate finance at HSBC Trinkaus as well as private banking at Sal. Oppenheim.

He is also an expert in entrepreneurial direct investments from evaluation to transaction execution. This unique combination has made Peter the go-to person for small and mid-cap business owners, looking for advice in matters of wealth and succession planning including M&A transactions. He is currently involved in founding the Federal Initiative for Impact Investing in Germany.

Founder of Logos Patrimon, first mover in the GSA region (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) to offer virtual family office services. Based on his professional experience of 25 years Christian helps to shape an innovative form of wealth structuring and management for ultra high net worth individuals (UHNWI) and single family offices. He has long been an asset management expert in controlling, risk management and product selection. In that capacity Christian acted as a German BaFin licensed managing director at HQ Trust, a platform of the Quandt family.

His prior experience includes the UHNWI business at Sal. Oppenheim and Credit Suisse in Zurich. Christian started his career in equity sales and private wealth, heading the International Private Banking Center of Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt.

Christian Stadermann and Peter Brock are the co-founders and managing partners of BeeWyzer, a financial education company and new video learning platform for better wealth structuring.

The BeeWyzer NextGen Masterclass is an independent, holistic and enabling tool for NextGens and families of wealth to learn the most important issues about wealth structuring and wealth transfer across generations, ranging from family governance to strategic asset allocation and controlling / risk management.

Matthias Knab: Congratulations on your newest product, the BeeWyzer NextGen Masterclass. I took a look at your content and think it's truly unique. I haven’t come across anything comparable in terms of the range and quality of content and the concept where apart from online learning your students have also access to tutors – real people – and can attend a yearly live event in Berlin. Could you briefly give us an overview on the Masterclass?

Christian Stadermann: The BeeWyzer NextGen Masterclass has been designed to be a wealth enabling journey for NextGens where they can bridge the gap from investment and asset management knowledge to psychological and structural conundrums of a wealth transfer process. It helps them to become independent from consultants who are not independent.

The Masterclass covers a total of 9 modules plus 3 bonus modules with more general knowledge subjects ranging from liquid and illiquid assets to current trends in the financial services market.

In Module 1 we introduce you to generational conflicts that will inevitably come up in a wealth transfer process. Clearly, it is important what you inherit. It could be your mother’s jewelry collection or Rolex collection. Your father’s stake in a business to stay in those traditional pictures or it could be a huge pile of cash that you are suddenly or overtime confronted with, and you will have to deal with it.

With BeeWyzer we suggest a structured and proven framework to deal with those generational issues. And, don’t forget: the most important thing probably is to communicate. Communicate within your family. Talk about it. Raise any issues that you may have early. Do not sit back and wait until somebody else addresses it. So, don’t be shy – the issues you are confronted with are totally normal in every family of wealth, and it is not rocket science.

Peter Brock: Right, the first module is on generational topics, addressing any possible family conflicts around inheritance. In Module 2 Christian zooms in more into the BeeWyzer Method: this is our innovative holistic balance sheet approach. Besides the value of the family business or any other entrepreneurial activities, we recommend you to add all Private Assets like cash and equity/bond portfolios, but also both your Human and Social Capital, as well as your family value.

YOUR WEALTH BALANCE SHEET

After that I cover a deeply personal issue in Module 3: which journey are you deciding to take within your family context? Do you have the right competencies, and what are you burning for? Would you like to embark on a personal journey managing the company or your family’s entrepreneurial activities or – alternatively – is it your focus to manage your or your family’s wealth? The third alternative would be to spend at least some time outside the activities of the family, so you might want to embark on a more independent journey – at least for some time, possibly returning into the family activities at a later point in your career!?

These thoughts are followed in Module 4 by presenting solutions via a good family governance as well as corporate and wealth governance, structuring your family system. This part is crucially important, as any governance framework provides you and other family members with clarity and structure, as there is no need to reinvent the wheel in every generation.

Christian Stadermann: Having looked at some of the inter-family issues, we guide you through a selection of important issues around structuring your wealth in Module 5. We explain all you need to know about Strategic Asset Allocation and how best to find the right organizational structure to organize your wealth.

Module 6 is about implementation. How to prepare, take and implement decisions, and how to pick good service providers and products. Following on, Module 7 covers sustainable investing approaches from ESG up to impact investing and Module 8 is about controlling, the understanding of performance measurement after cost and risk management.

The final Module 9 in a way sums up your journey so far and covers how you best combine your personal competencies with your personal roadmap in your wealth management journey.

On top of the main modules, you will get two more basic modules on both liquid and illiquid investments, where we describe things like stocks, bonds and ETFs, but also direct shareholdings and private equity / venture capital investments and funds. The third bonus module talks about current trends in the financial markets that you should know.

In sum, the BeeWyzer Masterclass is an independent learning program for better wealth structuring. It is enabling: besides worksheets that allow you do repeat and deepen the knowledge from the videos you find additional, powerful tools. These are designed being applied to your own situation and produce excellent results even without studying financial math. And it’s holistic, covering all asset classes and all dimensions of your wealth.

As you know, the financial services industry doesn’t always look at your wealth on a holistic basis. But we would want to stress the point that it’s important to look at your wealth on a holistic basis as a NextGen or a modern wealthy individual. We at BeeWyzer are totally and truly unbiased and independent with no intention to offer you anything else than this opportunity to invest in yourself with this Masterclass.

Christian Stadermann: n our process and our materials, we mix hard facts with emotional and psychological issues because the two go together – without touching on both of them, the generational wealth transfer process will never work out nicely.

Matthias Knab: Tell me, how long is each module, are they all equally long or what’s the kind of median? And how long is the whole course?

Christian Stadermann: Overall across all the 12 modules (9 plus 3 bonus modules), our participants can access more than 25 videos, with each video having an easily digestible length of 10-15 minutes. In aggregate this is around 5 hours of video content, and then you’ll also get the worksheets for additional reading together with additional tools that allow you to apply the knowledge you’ve just learned to your individual situation.

Some of these tools allow you to type in your own figures, for example when you create your own wealth balance sheet and strategic asset allocation. Other applications include checklists how to deal with service providers in a practical way. Remember that we at BeeWyzer do not intend to replace your current or future advisers – we have no intention to pinch the work from them. We simply want to make you more knowledgeable, empowered and in a controlling position when dealing with them.

The whole journey will take about 2 to 3 months to complete by just spending some time every week, as we release the material week after week. ...it is a true learning journey – a wealth enabling journey!

Matthias Knab: All right. I understand – sounds like a very thought-through program.

Peter Brock: And it’s self-contained. That is really important. We are offering a complete and practical learning experience. We do not want to sell advice that costs extra at the very end, as for example some youtube bloggers do. Therefore, interactive and live Zoom sessions are already included during the Masterclass in order to help students and, of course, get feedback.

The course can be done either individually or in a group starting all at the same time. Our intention is to start the course / a cohort twice a year. So it is even possible to get to know other participants and share experiences in a confidential environment, for example during Zoom session or webinar.

Matthias Knab: Why have you started BeeWyzer in the first place?

Christian Stadermann: Yeah, the main reason that we founded BeeWyzer is because there was no BeeWyzer ;-)). If you look at the financial training market, there are enabling trainings usually only for a very limited subjects from the financial markets and specific investment themes, like “How to become a good ETF trader”, or so. Any more detailed courses on holistic wealth and organizational matters are usually done via in-classroom teaching for some days in a row. This was already inflexible before the Covid pandemic, as there is a lot of stuff normally in such courses where you just sit-in but read messages on your mobile. These trainings are usually rather academic and not enabling.

BeeWyzer is designed completely differently: Holistic, independent and enabling. It really brings wealth owners back into the driver seat of steering their wealth, allowing them to talk to professionals on an equal footing.

Peter Brock: We are sharing our more than 50 years of experience in banking and the financial services industry, and we simply wanted to share this know- how with interested people.

The financial services industry is not ideally structured to reinvent itself and respond to new demands and trends, no? As we are freely operating as individual family office advisers, with BeeWyzer we can share our experience with a lot more people and make a contribution to financial education that is still lacking across the board globally.

Matthias Knab: Since the dot com boom of the late 1990 until today we have seen a lot of people who have become centi-millionaires and billionaires. You could could assume that if they have managed to get rich, they should also have be able to organize their wealth. What can go wrong?

Christian Stadermann: There are actually two dimensions where things can go wrong when you look at long term financial success. One is the entrepreneurial side of things: when you are a successful entrepreneur, of course, you know how to get on with your finances generally. But you will be an expert in your industry and normally not know about the ins and outs of the financial services industry. Even if you are a good negotiator about fees with bankers, you do not really understand the cost-side of your counterparty and either be too tough or too generous.

And the other thing is the emotional side: transfer of wealth across generations by definition takes time and patience. And it’s often being said that families of wealth constantly have to take decisions in the Bermuda Triangle of wealth, power and love. And that’s really a Bermuda Triangle, because once you’re in, you will always stay in. Then you need the ability to look upon your situation from above and understand structural issues in order to take wise decisions – otherwise you might lose a lot of time and money in legal issues and you will destroy wealth without having to.

Peter Brock: And also, not every great entrepreneur is also a good stock picker or investor, you know? And regarding the NextGens, they are also not always talented wealth managers – some prefer to be artists or be in very different professions. But still they will be confronted with the wealth and simply will have to deal with it. Clearly wealth also comes with a duty, with a duty to care. For many NextGens this increasingly means that they want to invest sustainably and preserve the wealth for the family across generations. Simply put, any NextGens in a family of wealth need to know the basics in order to deal with the financial services industry and use it to their advantage. The BeeWyzer Masterclass helps you to achieve this goal and prevents you from being fooled.

Matthias Knab: Can you specify a bit further who target with this Masterclass?

Christian Stadermann: The ideal target client is a NextGen, but aren’t we all NextGens ? ... well... he or she may be 20, 30, 40, 50 or sometimes 60 years of age, whenever you are about to inherit or have just received a pile of cash or assets. There is clearly a lot of demand for this kind of training all around the world, as we spoke to many family offices that could need it. Even employed family officers of large families like it, as it assists them in their NextGen education work. For smaller families it may be the number one program to get this done.

Peter Brock: If you think about it, some people spend more analytical skills and endeavour in picking their new car than in organizing their wealth – this has to stop, and so we invite everyone who sees value investing in your own wealth enabling journey to join us at the BeeWyzer NextGen Masterclass.

Christian Stadermann: Right, the financial industry is undergoing heavy changes and in the future also from their side the realization will come that it is much better to deal with knowledgeable clients rather than staying a secretive club-style community.

 
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