Episode 42: $4B Family Office Co-Founder Khaled Said on Entrepreneurship | Why Story Is a Differentiator | How Collaboration, Creativity, and Courage Are Key to Serving Clients Well

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The second generation in wealthy families could choose a safe path within the family business. But today's guest, Khaled Said, dared to pave his own way, co-founding Capital Generation Partners, a $4B London-based family office.

While his choice to take the leap paid off, he didn’t gain success overnight. His backstory is filled with twists and turns and valuable lessons for any boutique founder. 

Listen in as Khaled and Stacy discuss:

●     His backstory — from searching for the perfect-fit firm to manage his family’s assets in Europe to coming up short and filling the gap by setting up his own shop

●     What nobody tells you about the slow burn of starting up in asset management

●     His tried-and-true litmus test for keeping integrity at the forefront of client service at CapGen

●     CapGen’s differentiation playbook: how they’re writing a new narrative in serving ultra-high net worth families

About Khaled Said:

Khaled is Managing Partner of Capital Generation Partners, a wealth management business based in London.  Khaled is the voice of the client within CapGen setting the standards he believes clients deserve.

Having managed his own family money, Khaled is an experienced investor and has particular insight into the problems families face when trying to get the best from the investment management industry. Clients benefit hugely from Khaled’s principled and commercial approach to investing and his commitment to ensuring that client portfolios are managed by people who think like principals not agents.

Khaled chairs the Client Portfolio Committee which is tasked with making the final decisions on the content of client portfolios and sits on the Asset Allocation, Investment and Risk Committees. Khaled started his career as a strategy consultant at Bain & Company where he specialised in private equity. Khaled is involved with various charities: he sits on the Boards of Saïd Foundation and Turquoise Mountain.  He has a degree in Law from Oxford University, a Masters in History from Harvard and an MBA (Dean’s List) from INSEAD.

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

Songs: Pixies - Here Comes Your Man , Lou Reed - Vicious, Fugazi - Waiting Room

Books: King: A Life by Jonathan Eig, Same As Ever by Morgan Housel

TRANSCRIPT

Below is an AI-generated transcript and therefore it may contain errors.

Khaled Said: [00:00:00] With this industry, what you come to realize is it's a bit like a friendship or trust relationship where it takes a few years to build a trust. And then once you have the trust, it's like an open door.

Stacy Havener: Hey, my name is Stacey Havener. I'm obsessed with startups, stories, and sales. Storytelling has fueled my success as a female founder in the toughest boys club, wall street.

I've raised over 8 billion that has led to 30 billion in follow on assets for investment. You could say against the odds, yeah. Understatement. I share stories of the people behind the portfolios while teaching you how to use story to shape outcomes. It's real talk here. Money. Authenticity. Growth.

Setbacks. Sales and marketing are all topics we discuss. Think of this as the capital raising class you wish you had in college mixed with happy hour, pull up a seat, grab your [00:01:00] notebook and get ready to be inspired and challenged while you learn. This is the billion dollar backstory podcast.

Entrepreneurs have a certain mindset. It's knowledge and skill. Yes. It's hard work and hustle. Also. Yes. It's the art of the start. It's the passion for the journey. It's true collaboration. Today's guest Khalid Saeed grew up in an entrepreneurial family that achieved amazing success. Now, Khalid has embarked on his own entrepreneurial journey, along with his co founders and their team at 4 billion London based family office Capital Generation Partners.

Khalid is writing a new narrative in serving ultra high net worth families. CapGen is challenging the status quo with courage and creativity. This episode is a [00:02:00] story, and it highlights the power of story in so many ways. It's also a reminder that at the end of the day, people are people. We share common struggles, we share common goals, and that is what unites us.

Let's dive in. Meet my friend Khaled. Khaled, thank you so much for being in the Billion Dollar Backstory podcast studio today. This is an honor for me because we are new friends and to invite our podcast listeners to be flies on the wall in this conversation. So really appreciate your time.

Khaled Said: Thank you very much for having me, Stacey.

Really appreciate it.

Stacy Havener: So where to start? Oh, I don't know. Backstory because it's my favorite thing. Let's do that. And I'm going to let you take this in whatever direction you want. I think the big thing for our listeners is really getting to see the people behind the portfolio, so to speak, and to really understand your [00:03:00] journey and maybe some of the unexpected things that happened along the way.

So I will pass the mic to you, my friend.

Khaled Said: Great. Absolutely. So I'm going to start you in 2005. So back in 2005, Ian, Charlotte and I, who are the founding partners of Capgen, we were huddled in a small office in New York, and we were taking a very big decision together, which was whether or not we wanted to start this business Capgen.

So we'd worked together for about two and a half, three years before that for my family. So I had gone back to work for my family after having been at Bain, having gone to business school, and And it really felt like a sense of obligation that I would serve my family. My father's a successful self made man, and I wanted to do something in that space.

I built a team around Ian and Charlotte, and we were busy building a portfolio for my own family. And we approached it really from first principles as in. What is the best thing we can do to help my family manage a significant portion of their [00:04:00] wealth in these financial investment assets of asset management.

And we expected to find something in Europe that was transparent, that was innovative, that was super aligned. And candidly, it kind of came up short. We were kind of quite surprised in a way that there wasn't something there to cater for sort of sophisticated, large families. We saw it over the, over the pond in the U S we saw these, this nascent business evolving and actually one of the investment committee members of my family's investment company, a fantastic business investor called Barton Biggs, who was a very senior guy, Morgan Stanley.

He'd gone off to create his own hedge fund. He also was quite surprised that there wasn't anything like that in Europe. So about two or three years into our working relationship, we sat down and we said, is this something that we want to do? And I suppose thinking about it, my business partners were taking a huge risk and they had worked with me and my family for a couple of years, but really we just had a blank sheet of paper.

Neither of them came from the wealth management space. [00:05:00] So one had been advising the treasury, the government here, and the other had been an investment banker. So we came at it from this sort of new place, which was to say, what would we want? This business to look like if we were a client and we were facing this business.

For me, this was in a way, perfect way to marry this sense of duty that I had to my family and this need to do something meaningful for them, but also fulfill a kind of entrepreneurial need of my own and find a way of carving out my own destiny within the family. I'm very, very, sort of, pleased and proud that my family were very open to the idea of it.

I'd kind of invested in it, I'd worked for them, and I'd shown them that I, what I was doing was very sensible, and so I think it wasn't a huge leap of faith for them, but nevertheless, they agreed to be an arm's length, First client for our business, but even so, we had this client, we had this idea, it was a bit of a gamble and I think candidly for my business partners, I think they were sitting there [00:06:00] saying it's hard.

I'm going to wake up in a couple of years and decide he wanted to do something to be different. Or maybe I had the luxury that they didn't have. But in that meeting we did. Sit down and say to ourselves, this is something we want to do, and we promised ourselves that we would sort of set out some guiding principles that we would live by in the way we wanted to serve our clients, and it's very simple.

Really, it's just three things, and they're not particularly unique, but they're very hard to follow. Religiously. So the one was invest in excellence, invest in excellent people, look for excellence everywhere we go, find hire, attract, retain excellence, excellent people. The second was alignment. We had to find a way of building a business that was truly aligned.

I think wealth management is a, is a complicated space because the incentives are often misaligned. Banks have to find ways of, you know, being paid, which is completely right and fair, but often they do it in ways that are not entirely aligned. They're selling [00:07:00] rather than advising. It's a difficult relationship.

And then the final one was transparency. We wanted to be completely transparent with our clients, with our partners, how we work, how we were paid, what we did. And so those were the sort of three guiding principles. And I'm sort of proud to say that we. We stuck to those principles. Now, it hasn't been a straight line journey, or if it was, it wouldn't be an interesting, exciting journey, right?

So, there have been a lot of challenges along the way. I mean, the first, in a way, when I think about the challenges, I, there are sort of professional challenges, and then there are obviously personal challenges, right? Because if you've worked with someone for 15 years or so, or even 20 years, You see everything, right?

It's a journey. So on the industry side, I think one of the things I think we kidded ourselves off would be that we would build this great idea that we'd go around the European market in London and abroad. We'd meet all these interesting lawyers, accountants, trustees. We would tell them what we're doing and then instantly go.

You guys are [00:08:00] amazing. We're going to work with you. This is amazing. Right? So what they would do is they would take our meeting and they would, I think more out of curiosity than anything, and they'd be interested in what we did. And in typical English, like British ways, they were terribly polite to us.

And powerfully kind of, you know, generous in their sort of praise, but then there would be complete radio silence. So for the first couple of years, it was crickets. You know, we were very, very under the radar. And, but the funny thing about it is, with this industry, is what you come to realize, Is it's a bit like a friendship or trust relationship where it takes a few years to build a trust And then once you have the trust, it's like an open door And so what we felt was there was a sort of period of two or three years Where there was very little business frankly And then suddenly the kind of gatekeepers or our industry felt comfortable in trusting us with their clients and Suddenly the doors were open.

We felt like we were in, in almost [00:09:00] like the garden of Eden. Then we get referencing, then we get referrals, then we get new clients. The clients then introduce us to other clients and off we go. So that was quite an exciting discovery for us. And the first few years, the sort of lean years, um, we didn't like sit back on our.

on our hands and just say, you know, well, let's just wait and see what happens. We use that time efficiently to build out the team, build out the infrastructure, but I don't think I realized at the beginning that it would be quite as long to do as I had thought. That was quite a challenge for us.

Stacy Havener: I love the honesty around it because everything takes longer than we think.

Everything takes longer than we think and your candor around what those meetings were like, I mean, I, I laugh it with so much heart behind it because it must have been like, so surreal. You're going in with this expectation, people are, you know, obviously happy to have you and [00:10:00] then nothing happens. I mean, we've all lived that as entrepreneurs, right?

It's like, is this working? You're sort of asking yourself, have we built something? Exactly.

Khaled Said: And also we'd gone from the buy side. So we had represented the family. So we were going on meeting the fund management industry. They were bringing us in and we were taking decisions for our capital. And so we moved from being kind of in the power seat to, in a sense, being on the other side of that table.

And it's quite a humbling experience. I say to anyone, you've got to be on the sell side to really be humbled by the reality of what it feels like. When you're on the, I say to people, if you're on the buy side, everyone laughs at your jokes, right? Because you're on the buy side, whereas the minute you're on the sell side, it's a different story.

So that was a really humbling experience for us. And it was, and I think, but I think what it did is it also taught us that there's a level of humility. And the idea of service and the idea of long term relationships. So in [00:11:00] many cases, the relationships we build with our clients now, we now have about 40 clients and we're incredibly lucky and we feel very honored to have each and every client.

But the relationships go at the pace that they want to go at. Some relationships, they start very fast. Everyone's very excited. It moves very quickly. And some just take a very long time. And I've been accused of sometimes almost being. To sort of not commercial enough and actually saying, well, I just think you might need more time to have this thinking and do this and do it at your pace because I've realized that trust is something that takes different people, different amount of time.

And once you have that trust, it then becomes a really exciting relationship. And that's part of why I love what I do.

Stacy Havener: Yeah, I want to talk about the entrepreneurial piece a little bit, because I actually read a quote from an interview of yours where that was something you said you wished you had done.

You went and [00:12:00] did all the schooling and all the amazing things and, you know, had the great jobs. And you referenced that your, your father was really a self made entrepreneur. entrepreneur. And I think about that for you in this part of your journey, because you really are building something from scratch with all the humble moments.

You've switched sides of the table, which is a totally different ballgame. And I, I imagine that it's very rewarding for you to build.

Khaled Said: Yes. So it's very perceptive of you, Stacey. So the entrepreneurial spirit, you know, my father was born in Syria and came from a very educated family, but due to politics, they were all nationalized.

They all lost everything like many, many people at that time of history. And he moved to Europe and he effectively became came in as it as almost as an immigrant in a sense. So we have in our family in a way, some of those Immigrant standards and morals and upbringing around [00:13:00] focus on education, focus on your family values, focus on things that matter to you that are about sort of self improvement and development.

And so I suppose my language to my parents growing up, and I grew up with a lot of sort of privilege and a lot of, a fortune around me due to my father's success. The way I could kind of pay back was by educating and by being working very hard in my studies and proving to myself and to my family that I was, you know, a hardworking person.

So I almost sometimes feel like I sort of slightly over educated myself at a certain point. And that what I really wanted to do, what I really needed to do was to go and do something. Much more entrepreneurial with much more risk associated with it in a sense from a kind of risk of failure and that came really around the time of business school after business school, I came to the realization that, you know, just to go and work for my family effectively could have been an option.

It could have been way forward. But I think both my father and I realized that it was in Yeah. [00:14:00] Both of our interests actually to create this relationship that's more like a client relationship rather than the relationship from generational relationships. So the way I see, I actually think the best type of relationships are very strong client relationships because they have the boundaries that you have respect and a little bit of distance to create the space you need to be able to serve really, really well.

And my family realized that they couldn't have. Replicated what we've done here at CapGen if it had just been my family. So, you know, we have a team of 50 people, brilliant people from all different parts of the asset management industry have come here to work together at CapGen, we couldn't have replicated that as a family.

So they appreciated the value of having many families joining us as a self management business. So, and that took them as well, I suppose, a humility and a sense of understanding that I really respect. from them as well. So in a way that entrepreneurial, my entrepreneurial need [00:15:00] was quenched by setting up this business and also the pain of it, because I think sometimes the challenge for the children of very successful people is they don't quite appreciate that actually the sense of achievement comes from the pain and the challenge and the difficulty of life.

It's not from the easy bits, actually. And so you only get to sort of feel good about something if you've had it. It's a difficulty to get there and you get that in things like sports. You get that in other places, but I think you get it in business as well.

Stacy Havener: Gosh, I just want to throw my mic on the, on the floor. That is so good. And it's so true. And it's so true. And something tells me that the clients, and this is a good dovetail into kind of attract and repel and the whole thing about, you know, you're owning your uniques, but something tells me that the families that gravitate to CapGen.

Probably have some of this vibe to them as well, [00:16:00] right? Because you built this firm for yourselves. You couldn't find what you wanted. And when you think about the typical players that would serve families of ultra ultra high net worth families, it's not what you've built, right? It's a totally different vibe.

And the vibe you have Is refreshing and probably really resonates with your clients and at the same time probably repels for, you know, families, potential clients as well. Do you want to speak to that a little bit?

Khaled Said: That's a great question. Actually, I do find I can tell pretty quickly now when I meet a family or a family principal, whether there's a reality that this is actually going to manifest into a meaningful relationship.

It's usually about how they view their wealth. What they see the purpose of their wealth being what they see themselves doing and what the kind of relationship they need from a group, you know, normally, what we find is that there are those who [00:17:00] really identify with the actual wealth that we're managing and those people tend to be people who actually really want to do it themselves and they want to have more of a kind of private banking thrusting relationship that's based quite an adversarial relationship.

Quite a sales driven relationship. They're great relationships, but they're different to what we're doing. And I think we tend to serve families where what the portion of wealth we're managing is not what defines them. If you ask them, what do you do? They wouldn't say the piece of wealth we serve them on.

They would tell you that they run a business. They are in philanthropy. They are doing something completely unrelated to what we're doing. So once I meet those kind of families and I understand their purpose, if they have a pool of capital that feels close to what we're doing, then I think it really resonates.

And then a lot of the value out of us around alignment and around transparency and around sort of these incentives, these will make a lot of sense because suddenly they understand the sort of responsibility of stewardship, what [00:18:00] we're trying to achieve for them and what success looks like. Because obviously a huge amount of success is about investment returns.

They want those returns. We have to give them the returns. They pay us for that, but actually we're a service provider. We're not a product. Okay. We invest in investment products. We invest in the best and the brightest asset managers out there. Hedge funds, private equity, real estate managers, you name it.

They're there doing very specific service and they're paid well for that. We are there to provide this wealth management service. That means we need to be thinking about how they're planning for the next generation, how they're planning their structuring, how they're making sure that it's aligned with their own ESG and ethical.

Requirements and desires and how these things have all over time, you know, we have relationships now with us that have been with us for over 10 years and the family has grown and they've grown even generation to generation or indeed they've found additional success or in some cases, even they've had various difficulties [00:19:00] in their commercial professional careers, but regardless, we go along with them along the way.

And so we cannot be thinking about it in a product sales approach. It has to be seen in this holistic service.

Stacy Havener: I agreed. And I think a lot of people talk that talk in our industry, like, Oh, you know, all the things you've said, it's different to walk the walk, which you do really well. I think when you build a business for yourself, Where your family is the first client that adds something, you know, it's kind of like on the asset management side when you ask a fund manager, well, how much of your net worth is in the thing you're running?

And if they say, well, none, you're like, this is a big red flag, right? If they say every dollar I have is in this, it gives you another level of confidence. So just knowing that you're, you're building the business, but you're also a client of the business. I think adds something special.

Khaled Said: Yes. I do think that's something that differentiates us here in Europe.[00:20:00]

I think there are a number of firms out there that have a family name on the door But actually when you scratch under the surface desk, they're so Big now and they're perhaps so distant from the actual family themselves that actually it really doesn't make a difference I think the difference here is what we've tried to do With my both myself and also my chairman who's also a client of the firm Is that we have tried to make sure that What we add, the value that we add is really about understanding what clients want, understanding what they need.

And also frankly, the sniff test of integrity and ensuring that everything we do, everything we say, how we interact and how we work with our clients is aligned with this. Principle of integrity and the kind of litmus test acid test that I use is, I imagine I'm speaking to a really old family friend or a sibling and they're asking me advice.

What would the advice be that I give them? And actually, it's really interesting because during that [00:21:00] time when we were very, very quiet and we were finding it very hard to find some business, actually, one of our first clients was this friend of mine introduced me to someone who had come into a large amount of wealth.

And she needed advice and he said, well, I know you're in this space. Why don't you ask her for some, you know, give her some advice. So she came to my offices and I remember I sat down with her and she was about the same age as me. And I said to her, look, I'm just going to be completely straight with you.

I'm actually conflicted because I'm trying to sell an asset management business. I'm studying wealth management. What you really need before anything is independent advice. And I recommend that you go away and find a fantastic person who can be your independent counsel. And then if that relationship works and you want to come back and talk to us, I would love to be part of your solution.

And to her credit, she was like, that's a really good idea. She went off, she found this fantastic independent advisor and they came back and we were one of the managers [00:22:00] for their money. So what I suppose I'm saying about that is that actually, I do think that if you do things for the right reasons, then in the long run, you get paid back.

And it would have been very easy for me at that moment to try to sell what we're doing. But I think, candidly, we probably wouldn't have won the client. We would have, I would have tried and I would have probably failed. To go in with the right answer usually gets you in the right place.

Stacy Havener: Life and business advice.

Uh, right. I mean, so true. Let's talk about some of the differentiators because you and I have chatted about this a bit and There's something you do at CapGen that I love, and I'm going to let you tell the story of it, but the reason I love it is because it almost has nothing to do with investment management or wealth management.

And to me, it has everything to do with people. Finding each other. So will you talk about summer [00:23:00] notes?

Khaled Said: I'll start by saying that I think what it comes back to is this idea that we were outsiders in the market. So I think one of our key differentiators is we were outsiders. So we were coming to everything from first principles and really saying what do our clients want?

What do they need and want? We were working closely together and Actually, it was Charles and I, we were like, what do you think our clients would enjoy reading over the summer or at a specific point in their lives? And we were kind of laughing and comparing to what you typically get from private banks, which is these sort of really, of heavy, sturdy, sturgy kind of things around interest rates and investment management.

And it, they all basically say the same thing, right? They're on the outlook for 2024 and you read it and it doesn't really tell you very much. So we were like, we're not going to go there at all. It's like completely different. And so we imagined this idea that our clients would go away in the summer and they'd want something to read that they could just sit quietly and read for two hours.

And it would [00:24:00] inform them of. Lots of very interesting different ideas that are completely unrelated to investment management, but in some way they are relevant to investment because everything's relevant to investment, right? So we coined this term summer notes, which was this idea, and Charlotte, to her credit, ran with it because she's very inquisitorial person.

She's highly literate. She reads a huge amount, much more than I do, and so she really ended up producing it and managing and we started it back in 2011. So we now have a really large. And what we've done is we have a, it's really a collection of ideas and thoughts that are written into these short essays that we collate once a year and share with our friends and with our clients.

And actually, I was thinking about it reminiscing a little bit because there are a few interesting anecdotes I thought I could share because along the way, I'm not saying we've predicted, but we've certainly Signposted interesting things. So, for instance, we wrote a piece about [00:25:00] pandemics in 2013. So, that was quite, you know, strange looking back and understanding the risk of pandemics.

We wrote about Ukraine and its importance in Europe in 2015. And then it's a little bit more of a tech over investment, heavy one. We wrote a piece about how Japanese earthquakes have a very big influence on Japanese politics. And if you go back in history, they've had two or three very big earthquakes.

And every time they've had these big ones, Regime changes and it was just before the big reflation investment of 2012 2013. So we have had these moments which are quite closely linked to investing or to macro thinking, but also we've written silly pieces about. What makes style? There's a great one we wrote about randomness.

So Charlotte reminded me of this. Actually, basically, when the iPod was first created, do you remember the iPod? I mean, it feels like a million miles ago. Okay, of course. Yeah. So when the iPod was created, they had a shuffle [00:26:00] mode. And apparently if you listen to music on shuffle, you might get three songs from the same artist because that's genuinely what randomness looks like.

So apparently a lot of feedback from people saying this isn't random. This is can't be random. You can't have three songs from one artist and call it random. So they actually had to redesign the randomness of random because people could see a pattern where there was no pattern. And so in a funny way, you know, Bye.

Investment management is like that, right? You could say that people see patterns in Bitcoin. People see patterns in algorithms when there aren't necessarily patterns. So we've written about lots of different things. And what's also very encouraging is that we get a lot of really nice feedback from people who we.

We respect immensely and people we revere, so we send it to some of these kind of, I don't know, industry titans and they write back and say, that's fantastic. I really enjoyed that. That was really interesting in a way that I don't think they would. If we wrote about our view on interest [00:27:00] rates, right?

They're never going to write to me and say, Oh, you were so right. Interest rates aren't going to be cut for the next six months. Well done. You appreciate it. So

Stacy Havener: there are so many lessons in this. I mean, there are so many lessons. I just want everyone who's listening to like, sit with this because it's a lesson in doing things other people aren't doing.

It's a lesson in tapping into the people side of business of any kind. It's a lesson in attract and repel because you are so intellectually curious as a group. That these are the types of things that you think about and talk about. And when you put that out in the world, it attracts clients who share that intellectual curiosity.

There are so many lessons in it and it's cool. Let's not forget that. It's just cool.

Khaled Said: I tell you, it's been a. Really fun journey, and it's nice because the community that receive it now begin to look forward to it. They ask us when it's coming out, or they feel like they've been [00:28:00] dropped and they haven't been sent in.

Of course, they're going to get sent in for this. And also, and it does, as you said, it sort of portrays who we are in a sense that we are kind of socialized nerds in a sense. And, but that we are actually also got personality. We get on very well as a group. So Ian, Charlotte and I have worked together. For over 20 years, you know, still, and it's a great relationship and it's built on sharing ideas and thoughts.

So in a way, as you said, it encapsulates a lot about ourselves without being explicit.

Stacy Havener: I mean, I could spend the whole conversation talking about summer notes, but I won't. But I have a question though, just because when you see it and it's completed form, it's all that you can imagine. It's like little mini Ted talks or something.

I don't even know how to, with these fantastic drawings and things that, and images that go with it. But how do you decide what goes into Summer Notes? Like, is there an official Summer Notes meeting and everybody pitches an idea? Like, what's the process?

Khaled Said: So the way it works is, it's very [00:29:00] much now Charlotte's baby.

So what happens is, Charlotte goes away and she reads a ton, like a year in advance. And then she comes back and like, I'm gonna say, November. And she says, you know, I think this year it's going to be about, and then she gives a double dot. So this year it's about census. So different kinds of senses, touch, taste.

Okay. What it feels like to not have any senses, what makes the sense of that? So one year we did sports. We actually did that to coincide with 2012 Olympics. One year we did it about risk. We've done it on style. So she comes back in like November, December, and she says, I think this is what we're going to do.

And then she does lots and lots of reading. We kind of share ideas. We put our ideas in things we've read, things we've talked about a little bit, sort of that water cooler. conversation. And then around, I think, January, February, March, she says, Oh, it's going to be terrible this time. It's not good. I'm just not getting it this year.

It's not going to be as good as last year's. You'll see. You'll see. [00:30:00] And then by May, brilliant. And it's looking great. And then it's all published and ready for June. It's not a year, but it's a good eight, nine months. And then we use. specialist teams. It's the same team actually that we've used from the beginning.

And actually the owner of and founder of that design company is one of Charlotte's oldest and dearest friends. So it really has a lot of sort of personality in it.

Stacy Havener: The authenticity of Charlotte saying, this is not going to be good. This is, I mean, we all can relate to that. And then it comes out and it's fantastic. That is awesome. I want to switch gears to qualitative due diligence. Actually, it's not really a gear switch cause it's kind of this idea of authenticity.

And so. When you're meeting with these clients, this is a leading question. I'm just going to own the fact that this is a leading question. [00:31:00] Okay. When you're meeting with these clients, do they say to you, okay, Kyle, that's great. Yeah, I'm, I'm evaluating a couple different options here. And what I really want to see is your returns.

Khaled Said: No, that's not how they tend to start the conversation. So what they tend to say is they tend to start the conversation by saying, we have this problem, or we have this need, or we can't find this thing, or we've worked with this group and we're not happy. Not necessarily naming a name, but more like we've worked with this type of manager or this type of advisor.

We're not satisfied. We feel that we need a different type of relationship. It always starts in the human emotion. I mentioned, but then, of course, they want to open the bonnet, open the front of the car, and they want to see a perfectly designed engine. So the process of getting to know us. And building the trust is a sort of delicate balance between [00:32:00] clearly the quantitative.

They want to see our investment returns. They want to see our investment process. They want to meet with our CIO. They want to understand the research that we do and how we do it. But it's always an overlay of that qualitative, emotional understanding as to what are we trying to achieve? What's the purpose?

What's the goal? And then I think if you get both those bits right, then they feed each other very well. You can't have one without the other. So you, we're not a product shop. So we have to be service driven. But on the other hand, it's not just. Talk, they want us, they're paying us very well, and they want us to deliver on the promises that we get our industry is an industry built on promises.

And I say to people that promises that don't have a refund, so we make a promise about how we're going to deliver them the returns, what type of returns we're going to give, but you can't go back in time and say, well, why didn't you give me the return? So you have to deliver on those promises. I think the way we do that is, first of all, by managing expectations, so we don't try and [00:33:00] oversell.

We try and give a realistic approach to what we think we can achieve for the risk taken. And that's, again, a quantitative approach and a qualitative approach, understanding what kind of risks they're willing to take, but then delivering exactly what they've asked us to deliver on. And that means delivering on the returns, but also delivering on the service, and the structuring, and the interface with their family.

So often we're working with the principal and their, and their team, but working with their accountants, with their advisors, with their lawyers, making sure it all looks good. And often we're actually, our job is to make their family office CEO or family office CIO look great. So we are quite low ego. We try to be because we're not necessarily working directly with the family or directly with the principal.

We're often working with their teams.

Stacy Havener: That last part is so important. That last part is so important. I didn't know that. I don't think I realized that until you just shared it. That last part is so important because [00:34:00] your client, you actually have multiple.

Khaled Said: Correct.

Stacy Havener: The ultimate end client is the family, but you also have a client who is the head of their family office or their person running their team.

And I think when you're dealing with this level of, of wealth, people forget because you could easily skip that person, right? Like you could just be doing stuff for the family and without knowing it, undercutting the person who's running their team or doing that is so critical.

Khaled Said: The way we describe it in the firm is we're working for a constellation of people around the family.

It includes their lawyers, who may work for law firms or work directly for them, their accountants, their advisors, their trustees. All of that makes up their client. The client is not just one person or one family.

Stacy Havener: That's big. Is that in your materials that needs to be in your materials? That's really big.

That is such an important point because otherwise you become a threat.

Khaled Said: Exactly. And we're [00:35:00] not there to undermine anyone in that organization. We're there to compliment everyone that's there because they're there for a good reason. And actually we're there to help them and make them look great. So that's where the trust relationship and the way we, I see it as a sort of multidisciplinary environment.

You need lots of different types of skillsets. To deliver the wealth management service and some of them we have some of them the family have in their direct team and some of them are outsourced to expertise

Stacy Havener: And that's a unique ability right there. That's knowing your lane, knowing what you're good at, knowing what you specialize in, and not trying to just land grab and do everything, right?

Khaled Said: Quite. And I think that comes from the fact that we did ourselves serve a family and we have that DNA.

Stacy Havener: Yeah.

Khaled Said: And actually we found it hard to hire and Attract the right kind of relationship managers, because if you take people typically out of the private banking space, they immediately want to go to the [00:36:00] principal.

They want to knock everyone out of the room and they just want that relationship with the principal and it's all about them. And so culturally, it was difficult for us to find the right type of people who understood this service mantra around the whole group. And that winning is not necessarily about.

Being the best friend of the well,

Stacy Havener: that's huge. And you're hiring because you're so right. And then I'm much sort of different scale. I would say this happens for asset managers when they're talking to an allocator because they'll go in. And unknowingly a lot of times, so this is not intentional, but they'll go in and here you have this analyst whose job it is to, you know, find cool ideas to bring to their investment committee and you'll go in and you'll start bashing competitors and you won't realize you're actually bashing.

Potentially bashing something they already own that the analyst has done a lot of work [00:37:00] on and could potentially believe in and it's like they can't see that the job is to make the analyst look like a rock star to their boss. And arm them with all the stuff, not get your ego all wrapped up in it that you want to be the one with all the great ideas.

Make it their idea. Support them. What do they need? It's a huge problem in sales of really understanding who the end clients are and what, and sort of what you're doing. Why you're there, what problems are you solving or what's the goal?

Khaled Said: Correct. And to take that even further, we don't even necessarily see ourselves as competing against the private bank because actually we always say, I always say you need the bank, you need the bank, you need the banks for custody.

You need the banks for liquidity. You need the banks for treasury, but the asset management piece. Let us do that for you. We'll do it on your banking platform so you can keep that relationship that you've valued. You've had a relationship with an important private bank for 25 years. They've seen [00:38:00] it all.

They've seen the good and the bad. You want to stay with them. We respect that. We're here to go in a way with you together to guide you through asset management. So we often don't even knock the bank out the game. We keep the bank in the relationship because again, we're not pretending that we can do everything.

Okay. We have to be able to work with the existing infrastructure.

Stacy Havener: It's compliment, not compete.

Khaled Said: Right.

Stacy Havener: And it wouldn't even work. I mean, I'm just trying to imagine you going in and just trying to blow out all their other, you know, like, I'm going to blow out the bank and who, you don't need a lot. I mean, like, it would just be silly.

You would never do that. I mean, that's what I think, but yet you see people do that all the time.

Khaled Said: Exactly. Well, I think in the private banking space, it is quite binary and it's quite zero sum. But I think with the wealth management service that we're trying to provide for the type of families we work with and the families we work with, they already have incredible banking relationships.

Of course they do. And they need to foster those. And that's a very important piece of the [00:39:00] jigsaw for a family of wealth. But our job is not to try and replicate that or knock them out, but just work with them.

Stacy Havener: It just crosses all different parts of the ecosystem and really all different just in business in general when you're doing any sort of sales to really think about these elements.

And I'm really interested in the hiring part. Because that's probably been, I can imagine that's been challenging. So is there a certain, how do you find people to join that get what we just described?

Khaled Said: So I think, again, being outsiders, I think you can't pretend that you have all the answers from the outside of the industry.

So what we tend to find works best is people who've worked within The industry, but they've had a sort of enlightened moment and they've realized for whatever reason that the way it's done in the traditional private banks is not making them feel good. They're going home feeling it's just not working for them.

And [00:40:00] those people tend to be the best type of people because they understand the industry. And we've learned a huge amount from the industry. There are many good things about wealth management from the industry that we have emulated and worked, uh, worked on ourselves to be better at. When you have people who come from these established firms, but know that there's another way of doing it.

And they're a little bit more experienced. They understand the pros and the cons. They understand how it's done. Those people tend to be the best. The best type of relationship managers to work with the clients that we work with. And then you want different voices. So you want the, you want someone who's got a little bit more of an entrepreneurial edge.

You want ones who feel probably better with first generation wealth or with the patriarchs and with people like that. So you want a broad group of people with slightly different personalities, different voices, you know.

Stacy Havener: It's interesting. I was asked, I gave a talk. It was for women in the investment space and we were talking about authenticity and a lot of the women who were there were [00:41:00] in sort of client facing roles.

And after the talk, someone said to me, you know, what do I do? Because of course, I'm talking about story and all these things and they said, well, what do I do if like I didn't come from money and my story is very much a blue collar, kind of make your way sort of a story and now I'm in this job where I'm dealing with people who have a much different financial situation and how can I connect with them in an authentic way?

And I wonder what advice you would give her.

Khaled Said: So I would say that I think as long as you can speak truth to power and you can be authentic and you can say what you really feel, I don't think it matters. Look, frankly, most people that work in my, in my firm at Capgen don't have family wealth. And of course they don't, but they still understand, frankly, that we all share so many of the same emotions and feelings and issues.[00:42:00]

Of course, people who have wealth, it solves for many, many of the world's problems. It makes people's lives easier in many ways, but there are some sort of existential problems that everyone goes through. Generational wealth or passing of generations, the idea of security and what security means to you in terms of financial security, of course, at different levels.

But I think what unifies people in our industry is that if you approach it with a level of humility and honesty and authenticity, and you can tell people straight what they really should know, then I think it's an easy conversation.

Stacy Havener: I'm going to have to like send this interview to that association so we can find this woman.

You said that so eloquently, I'm sure I didn't, I didn't come near that at all, but I did say to her a little kernel of what you said, which is everybody has struggles. Everybody struggles to find their way and the struggles may be different, but that sort of shared connection is very real. Like, we're all [00:43:00] trying to find our way.

We're all trying to figure out who we are and. The wealth, I think, can be very intimidating to somebody who doesn't come from it.

Khaled Said: Yes.

Stacy Havener: And so they don't say much, they just sit and

Khaled Said: Yes. I think the feeling of responsibility towards the wealth is something that perhaps can kind of shatter, you know, be kind of oppressing on someone if they feel that we're working for these families with What I would say is when you meet the patriarchs or you meet the wealth owners nine times out of ten, they're very normal people.

I know that sounds a bit trite, but they actually just come in and they're just talking about their lives and their kids and their family and what they're trying to do in their lives. And it's not very glamorous the way they discuss their lives. And actually, if you met our clients, On the street, you wouldn't instantly think they're not like rock stars who necessarily have this aura.

They have the same challenges around family and around what they're trying to achieve. But [00:44:00] of course, they've been successful. They've inherited wealth, or they've done something special that given them this wealth. I suppose. One thing we've noticed as well is the purpose to capital is vital. And we have.

Come to realize that that's very important for the families that we serve. They want their wealth to have purpose and meaning, and especially in this modern day, where people are much more concerned about the environment and about, you know, the social impact that their wealth can do. That becomes very exciting conversations for clients and for families.

And as they look at their next generation, the next generation generation, but sort of in a way. Beneath my one of much more involved in this and they want a closer relationship with the money and understanding exactly where it's going. And so that's a journey that we're going on in line with our families.

Stacy Havener: Yes. It's all those shared connection points, whether they're in your personal life or whether it's around purpose [00:45:00] or impact and just, and really tapping into those, which again, it's just the people parts that I think that give a business of personality. Right. Absolutely. Give a business its own personality.

Okay. Let's talk. You mentioned some lessons. I want to, I want to do a little bit more on lessons on sort of what worked, what didn't I love at the top where you said, gosh, wow. You know, switching sides of the table is a pretty humbling experience. So let's kind of go back. Let's get ourselves back into that mindset.

If you could do it again, what would you definitely do the same? What would you do differently?

Khaled Said: So I think stepping back, I would stick to the principles that we always talk about. Promise ourselves. Those three principles, alignment, transparency and excellence that has helped us. It's helped to define us.

And we are very clear that that is we kind of put everything under that microscope to make sure if it satisfies those three, we'll do it. I think in a sense, the amount of time it took us to build a business. I don't think we could pretend to have shortcut that that's [00:46:00] something that happens in our industry.

And that's because of this The concept of trust and gate and the gatekeeper, the time it taken, I think where we have learned is that we toyed with the idea intentionally and unintentionally of whether we're a product house or a service house. And every time we moved closer to the product side, we lost our way.

We are a service to our clients. We're not a product to our clients. And actually we work with fund managers who have product and those products are Invaluable to our clients in their portfolios, but we are not a product house. We are a service. And so that's been a mantra that we have had to remind ourselves off because it's easy to creep into product space and forget that we ultimately a service.

I think in a way where I, I think we've kind of learned by doing is by the fact that as long as we [00:47:00] have full integrity and we tell our clients exactly what we believe that in the long run, we tend. To get rewarded. So we've had cases where families have come to us over this period of time, right? There's been lots of excitement over different sectors and over different ideas, and in some cases that they've proven right, but in many cases they haven't.

So we've had families come to say, you know, we, we want to get into this specific space in tech, or we really want to get into this Bitcoin trading or, and it's those sorts of conversations where if we can have an honest and open and transparent conversation, whether we're right or wrong, I don't think actually makes.

The big difference is more about them understanding the intentions that we come at it from that. We then end up building relationships stronger. We've seen that in real life with a number of our clients along the way, where there's been a little bit of pull around certain ideas. We've been completely honest and transparent about our opinion.

And then in the long run, that's only built the [00:48:00] relationship and made it stronger. So I would definitely say that. And I think the last thing I'd say about So in a way, what surprised me was, I think, we had this idea in our mind that if we built this perfect solution that was on an Excel spreadsheet back in 2006 that looked absolutely perfect, that somehow that would be the answer.

And we sort of forgot that actually it's about human to human interaction. It's about trust. It's about alignment. It's about saying, The truth and then living to it, keeping going, looking back and saying, we said this, and this is what we've done. This is how we've delivered it. Sometimes we've been right in market.

Sometimes we've been less right. That's okay. As long as we explain ourselves, explain what we're doing, spend our intentions. I think we're getting better and better at that. I think it's something we're always learning on talking to our clients, more interacting with them, more bringing them in, having them come into our offices, get to know the team, things like that.

Stacy Havener: I was basically going like this, which no one [00:49:00] can see, but like keeping myself from talking because that was such a fabulous quote right there, what you said. And I also loved this idea of being slightly challenging. Not in a confrontational way, but just in a way of saying, okay, I absolutely hear where you're coming from.

Let's unpack all the sides to that. And here's my point of view. And have we thought about this? And I imagine, I think that's true everywhere, by the way, like just nobody wants a yes man or woman, right? That doesn't, it's not helpful. Helping people think about all the different sides is just helping them make a decision that's good for them.

And I can imagine at the level of wealth of your clients that they, it must be challenging to not find yourself surrounded by people who just say yes.

Khaled Said: So I think that's very insightful. And I would say that I think that's part of that attract repel thing. I [00:50:00] think the kind of clients that come to us are ones that are willing to be challenged, willing to have the dialogue.

What I would say as well is that we do have different types of clients. So we have some of that are very settled and they have. trustees and they have custodians and they are very distant to the actual running of the money. We're there really just to do a job to get it done, do it very well. There's a lesson in there around how close to your wealth you have to be because we do see families where the family become almost frightened of their own wealth and they almost feel so disconnected.

They don't know, but that's the sort of different conversation. But then we do have, and it's increasingly starting Of people who've been successful themselves, maybe even through financial services themselves. They've made a significant amount of money and what they actually really want is a sparring partner, someone that they can talk to and have an interactive conversation with and really flesh out ideas in a way that is.

Aligned and not sales driven. And so we do have a number of clients [00:51:00] we've had more recent clients, actually, over the past three or four years that have given us a pool of capital to manage, but have also wanted to have this sparring, interactive web dialogue. And that's quite fun. I mean, I think it's fun.

Stacy Havener: That's fine.

Khaled Said: Correct. It's an area where I don't tend to spend my time on. It's our CIO and investment team, the research team. But I think for them, it's, it gives them great interest. And also we learn from our clients because they have been successful in their own areas. So we can learn from them as well.

Stacy Havener: I love that. I think we all learn from our clients. That's an incredible lesson right there. Okay. I want to switch gears a little bit. You've been great and candid and letting us see More of you, kind of the person behind CapGen and kind of the, the brand that you're building and why. I have a couple questions to even go a little, a couple little different directions if that's okay.

Khaled Said: Of course. Shoot.

Stacy Havener: Alright, I'll start, maybe we'll [00:52:00] baby step into it. First question. What book inspires you?

Khaled Said: So, this is a good question because I think this speaks to the authenticity. When I was thinking about myself, I'm not a big reader. So I wasn't as a kid, a big reader as a kid growing up, but I loved ideas.

So I always resonated sort of towards ideas. And actually I found that Malcolm Gladwell as a writer really spoke to me because of the way he writes and who writes these ideas and these themes, I could be very drawn to his books. And there's one book in particular that I think is a very powerful book.

It's called talking to strangers. It's a book by Malcolm Gladwell, and I think it's very insightful because he talks about how people think they know other people, but they don't, and how we are not as good at understanding other people as we might believe, and he, he talks about it with regards to race and race relations, talks about it in terms of history and, and tragedy, and it's, it's fascinating because In me, with me and my business as, [00:53:00] as a people person, I think I know people well, but I think you can always learn how to get to know people better.

And so I take a lot of benefit from having read that book.

Stacy Havener: I love Malcolm Gladwell too. I think he, it just, he's such an engaging writer. It's so interesting and that I have not read that one. So I just made a note to myself that I have to read that this summer after I read summer notes. I'm going to read this.

Okay, so switching gears from books to places, what place inspires you? What's your happy place?

Khaled Said: So as a family, so I'm, I'm married, I have four kids and my wife is from Holland. She's Dutch. And so ever since we've known each other, we've always gone to this beautiful resort in the north of Belgium where Belgium and Holland meet.

And they have these incredible beaches that are very, I was thinking about, they're very similar to the beaches you have on the east coast of America, like very large white dunes. I'll tell you why I like it. And that kind of [00:54:00] speaks to me as an outsider. So a lot of people would imagine that I would resonate towards going to the south of France or somewhere very glamorous.

And in, in a way this place does have glamor and it has sophistication and charm, but it's also very different and unusual. So when I tell a lot of my friends and colleagues, I go there, I get these sort of slightly sort of raised eyebrows. They're like, what the hell are you doing there? But the truth is it's the most beautiful part of Europe and it has these incredible beaches and the kids absolutely adore going there and it is definitely a happy place for me.

Stacy Havener: The story behind it is everything and don't you find too whenever I'm by the waters or the ocean, there's something about being able to see so far like the horizon and it's so hopeful and it's just, there's nothing like it for me. So I relate very much to all of what you said there.

Khaled Said: Good. You have to come and visit.

Stacy Havener: Yes. It sounds fantastic. Okay. Now we're really switching gears. Cause now we're talking about music, [00:55:00] but I'm going to paint a picture for you. So you're going to go into a stadium. You're going to walk out onto a stage to a thousand of, you know, Cap Jen's adoring fans, and you're going to give a talk, but before you walk out, they're going to play your hype song.

They're going to play a walkout anthem. What is it?

Khaled Said: Well, I think, you see, there's, there's the heart and the head here, because if you know me, you know that I'm not that good at the walkout anthem, Go Go. So I would have naturally gone towards a sort of Billy Joel.

Stacy Havener: Oh, okay. Yeah.

Khaled Said: Kind of piano theme. What I would say is that when I want to get my kids really G'd up, we often play the Eye of the Tiger, you know that song.

So I think if I was around the team, I'd probably want the Eye of the Tiger to get me out there onto the boxing ring. But I would probably more realistically be a sort of piano man,

Stacy Havener: Billy

Khaled Said: Joel guy.

Stacy Havener: They would both work.

Khaled Said: Yes.

Stacy Havener: But you know, if we put ourselves in the shoes of the crowd, the Eye of the Tiger is probably gonna, I mean, [00:56:00] that's gonna work.

And I love that it's like such an 80s throwback and you're still Well, that's the thing. Yeah, it's great. Okay, what profession other than your own would you like to attempt?

Khaled Said: I've always loved chemistry and as a kid, I always loved mixing cocktails. So I think I'd probably make quite a good bartender. And I think for two reasons, one for curls, I love mixing stuff and like making potions and like shaking the thing.

And the other is I think of myself as quite a good listener. And so I can imagine I can be that bar guy who at the end of the night sits and listens to the guy who's giving his life story. And I'm sitting there. On the other side of the table, listening carefully.

Stacy Havener: So good. The image is great.

Khaled Said: I think I'd be an okay bartender.

Stacy Havener: So are we thinking like bartender, like Tom Cruise and cocktail where you're flipping the martini shaker? Or are we thinking like hipster bartender in a craft cocktail where you're [00:57:00] stirring and lighting things on fire and?

Khaled Said: I think I'm more like the old school guy who sits there with his sort

Stacy Havener: of, sort

Khaled Said: of elbow on the, on the counter for another whiskey listens to the sorrows of my clients.

I think I can do a little bit of that cocktail flipping thing. I've definitely, probably more of a Tom Cruise cocktail guy than the hipster. I don't think I'm cool enough to be a hipster.

Stacy Havener: Okay, so good. Okay. What profession would you not like to do?

Khaled Said: So, as I think you might appreciate now, I like to talk. So, I, it has to be a, I have to be in a professional way to talk.

So, I was thinking I would be a terrible librarian, because I just don't see myself sitting in silence in a very quiet library, stacking books, and not being able to say anything for hours on end. My worst case scenario would be that. The other one I think I wouldn't be terribly good at would be something like [00:58:00] brain surgeon or something.

I think that that the stakes are way too high and I would just be too concerned that I hadn't done an absolutely perfect job every single time and I'd be racked with this sense of, you know.

Stacy Havener: I mean, talk about no refunds on brain surgery. That's serious. So, last question. What do you want people to say about you after you've retired or left the industry?

And I'm going to add a little asterisk to this, which is let's do this in the context of you building CapGen.

Khaled Said: Sure. So I think when I reflect on the business and now we've been around for a while, one of the things that gives me a sense of pride is the fact that we have brought people in at a fairly young stage of their careers and they've stayed with us for a significant time and they've grown And so I always wanted this business to be not about me [00:59:00] and not about my family, but be a business of its own sustainable business.

So I think I get a real kick out of the feeling that I would come back and I'd see that some of the more junior members of the team are now partners of the firm and it's sort of their firm and they have built the business and they've evolved the business. I try very hard to keep the ego out of it.

Out and see the firm as a collection of people. And so I would be really happy if people were to say, Oh yeah, Hull had left CapGen in very, very good hands. And it's as good, if not a better business with the new group, people who have taken over. Not for a while, don't worry. But one day when I've left the business.

Stacy Havener: Yeah. Not that this is happening soon.

Khaled Said: Correct.

Stacy Havener: It's great to hear you say that. And I think. From an entrepreneur's perspective, it's awesome to see you building something that will have its own legacy.

Khaled Said: I think it's interesting because I've grown in this business now, [01:00:00] so there are patriarchs that are older than me, but there are some self made people who are my generation who are clients of ours.

And so they see the younger people in the firm as being the people who will take the business From me and build the business on so that's what we want to build here sustainable business

Stacy Havener: Well, I'm cheering for you on the journey. I love the story. I love all you, your team. It's fantastic. Thank you so much for spending time with us today, Khalid.

Khaled Said: Thank you very much, Stacey. I've really enjoyed this.

Stacy Havener: This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. The information is not an offer, solicitation, or recommendation of any of the funds, services, or products, or to adopt any investment strategy.

Investment values may fluctuate and past performance is not a guide to future performance. All opinions expressed by guests on the show are solely their own opinion and do not necessarily reflect those at their firm. Manager's appearance on the show does not [01:01:00] constitute an endorsement by Stacey Havener or Havener Capital Partners.

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