FMS FinPub Pro

A Private Equity Education & Investing Membership Model

• John Newtson

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What happens when your wealth manager fires you after losing your money? For Graham Rowan, it became the catalyst for moving into private equity investing before founding The Inside Investor Club.

His club typically invests in companies valued between $20-80 million, making $500k-$2M raises accessible to its community of about 200 high net worth families.

Graham's business model represents the growing direct to investor businesses models proliferating in many different forms. In this one we see investor education merging with exclusive direct investment opportunities

FinPub Pro is produced by The Financial Marketing Summit, the #1 networking and marketing conference for financial newsletter publishers, trader educators, and digital financial media.

John Newtson, host and founder of The Financial Marketing Summit can be reached via LinkedIn at John Newtson

Speaker 1:

All right. Hey everyone, I'm here today with both Graham Rowan, who's the CEO of Inside Investor Club, and Nick Rathwald. I'm sorry, nick, I said your name wrong. Nick Rathwald, director of Business Development. Welcome guys, thanks for being here. Thanks. Joel.

Speaker 3:

Great to be here. Thank you for inviting us.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so, nick, I've known you for 20 years. Yeah, we go way back to Clayton Make Pieces Conference, where I, that's right, yes.

Speaker 1:

And it's been so great to see your career kind of evolve here. And, graham, you have quite the interesting background here. So what we're going to be doing today is talking about the Inside Investor Club. But I mean you've written a book Diary of a High Net Worth Investor. You've had three TV series on sky TV. Is that right Like make your money work finding financial freedom, money in me? You've also spoken at a variety of places including working with.

Speaker 3:

What is it?

Speaker 1:

Beaufort private equity, yeah, yeah, yeah, so educating basically hundreds of high net worth investors about private equity investing, correct?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, that's right, it's. I mean, the background really is that I came originally from a corporate background. I was a director of Texas Instruments that many of your viewers will know, your viewers will know and I had a professional wealth manager who put all my money into the NASDAQ and then left it in there when it crashed and burned at the beginning of the 2001. And then they said that the losses meant that my net worth was below the level at which they looked after clients, so they would have to let me go. So I got fired by my own wealth manager for the losses they made in my account, and that was the start of my journey to taking personal control of my financial future.

Speaker 3:

And eventually that led me into making lots of investments, some of which worked, some of which didn't, and really, because of the losses they'd made, I was kind of behind the ball.

Speaker 3:

I was already in my mid-40s, I was not where I needed to be, so I kept looking for how I could play catch up to find something that would give me good above average returns. Because if you look at something like the S&P 500, it averages just over 7% a year, net of inflation, which is great if you've compounded that across three or four decades. But if you're in the position I was in, that wasn't going to be enough. So eventually, that's what, I guess, lured me towards direct private equity, where you can get 3x, 5x, 10x returns in a relatively short period of time. So, having kind of found that solution myself, friends and family and so on just kept asking me what you're doing, and that eventually led me to forming, you know, investment clubs where I could help them to do the same thing. And that's really the current mutation of that, if you like, is inside investor club that you mentioned.

Speaker 1:

Interesting. So private equity is a broad term, right, it means it means lots of things. When you're talking about private equity investments, what's kind of the range of opportunities that you are bringing to people right now?

Speaker 3:

or KKL or anything like that. We are looking at direct investing into growing but relatively young companies. So I have a whole bunch of criteria I look at. I certainly want them to be solving a real problem in the real world, ideally with some unique technology or intellectual property that can be protected, so, for example, through patents. I'm looking for the size of the addressable market to see if they've got the potential to be, if not a unicorn, at least to be 10x bigger than they are today. I'm looking for the quality and background of the founders and I'm looking for some decent skin in the game from the founders so that they're going to really be focused on making this particular business work. So typically we would probably come into firms that have an enterprise value of anything from 20 to maybe 80 million. We'd be looking to do anything from a half million to a two million raise at those kind of values. It's not actually uncommon for us to do several raises at different enterprise values across a two or three year period. As the company grows, the story gets better. People are prepared to come in at higher value. So typically we're looking for something that would 5 to 10x in a period of anything from three to seven years.

Speaker 3:

And I also try and get some clarity on the exit, because every pitch deck you read says it's going to be a trade sale or an IPO. Well, I want to dig a bit deeper than that. Have they already got a target in mind? Because these days fewer and fewer companies use IPO. For the exit there's usually either a trade sale or perhaps a sale to a private equity fund. So I want to see how switched on the founders are to that, because some of them the really cool ones they're grooming the business for only two or three potential buyers even from when they very first begin, because they can see if they build it to this level, it'll be such a perfect strategic acquisition for that company.

Speaker 1:

There's two thoughts that I have on that related to what we've seen in the publishing space and other sides.

Speaker 1:

One you have the founders, who understand the business of the business, and then you have the founders who also understand the business of the money and that once you start getting into the world of looking into businesses and investable asset, the knowledge of the business of the money side of the business is critical in that even great businesses otherwise are ruined because the founder didn't understand the financing side and kind of what the opportunities were.

Speaker 1:

And then the other part of that is that in the publishing space we've seen, especially on the kind of the crowdfunding product side, places where people were trying to invest in private deals, the issue of the lack of liquidity for subscribers has been a real problem for folks, the fact that things a lot of times things were not going to have an exit, that even in kind of a more of a venture capital kind of product model, you know that most of those companies aren't going to work, especially if they're just scraped off of crowdfunding platforms, and so a lot of the money kind of became dead money because there was no exit plan and the analysts weren't really looking at what had a real exit plan, and so that became a real problem in the business for a lot of reasons, but most fundamentally because it ended up not being good for the customer.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I think there's two points to pick up on there. I think and the first one is very definitely part of the evaluations of founders is, as I say, they're not just a bunch of tech head students who had a great idea. I look for a bit of maturity and people who've been around the block a few times. But also what we find is that we inside Investor Club often end up having to help them to tell their story in investor speak. You know they can talk all day about their technology, but they can't talk about, you know, how they're going to increase enterprise value, how we're going to get to these milestones, where the exit's going to come from, what's plan B if that exit doesn't work out. So we end up really, you know, holding their toes to the fire on those things so that we can actually strengthen the story and go out to our investors. Because you know I have a bunch of about 200 high net worth families who are in the club and you know they are gray haired, a little bit cynical, been around the block, had the kind of problems you've talked about. So you know you can't pull the wool over their eyes. You've got to be clear that this is how we believe it's going to work. This is the proposed exit strategy, but the other thing I would say is we're very definitely not the kind of venture capital spray and pray let's invest in 100 in the hope that five or six will work approach. I very much take the Warren Buffett approach that he has in the public markets and apply that in the private markets. I only want people to make four or five decisions in their portfolio and to be clear.

Speaker 3:

We have a kind of model portfolio we share with our members where private equity would be maybe 20 to 25% of it. We're not saying put all the chips on red. We're looking at yes, have some of the public stock markets, have some dividend paying shares, have some rental real estate, have some Bitcoin, have some gold definitely keen on that but for that 20, 25% of your portfolio. That's where you're going to move the dial, and I just published a white paper that I'll send across to you after the call, where one of the things I point out is there's this artificial wealth effect. I called it. I'm a millionaire, so why do I feel poor?

Speaker 3:

And it's all about the fact that, really, if you look at real estate the S&P 500, all they've actually done in recent years is keep pace with the increase in the money supply.

Speaker 3:

So, in a fiat currency world, if you double the amount of dollars in existence and there's still the same number of shares or houses, all you've done is double the number of dollars you need to buy that amount of house or share. You haven't actually got wealthier. So, whilst it's way better than holding it in cash, because at least you've kept pace with a combination of inflation and currency debasing, to make real progress and move the dial you need something like private equity that can go way above and beyond that. Otherwise, frankly, you need something like private equity that can go way above and beyond that. Otherwise, frankly, you're just marking time, and a great way of doing that is to compare the Dow Jones to the price of gold, and you'll see that today we're exactly where we were just before the Wall Street crash of 1929. So you get a very different perspective on where either your home or your investment portfolio is at when you come out of the fiat world and compare it to something real like the price of gold.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So let's step back then and talk about the Inside Investor Club as a publishing platform. So it seems to me that, if I understand it correctly, then you have there's a membership and then you have coaching, but the membership is the core business and that you have. In that membership, like you said, you have your modern portfolio and you're bringing unique deals. The tone and everything of the business seems to me, and the goal of acquiring customers is that kind of high net worth, like you said, family high net order to be able to put 20% of your portfolio into a deal like that where you're looking at maybe a $50,000 to $100,000 investment.

Speaker 3:

This is not somebody who has $20,000 or $100,000 in their yeah, no, absolutely, and we are constrained by regulation, so we can only deal with accredited or high net worth investors. Obviously, the rules for that specifically vary from country to country, but it's quite a low bar. In the UK it's an income of 100,000 a year or a quarter of a million investable assets. I know it's a bit higher than that in the States, but, yeah, we just want to deal with people who are comfortable with this kind of investment where it's not going to make them lose sleep at night. You know, to be frank, we found that the people at the lower end are often the ones that are the hardest the highest maintenance, if you like.

Speaker 3:

So, yeah, we only want to deal with people who are accredited and within that we only want to talk about 20% 25% of their portfolio. So typically we'd be looking at somebody with a low seven-figure net worth, something like that. Usually they've been an entrepreneur or a big real estate investor, something like that, and certainly in the UK there are even tax breaks when you move from real estate into some of these smaller companies, because the government's trying to encourage this sort of investment to get growth in the economy. So, yeah, the starting point is very definitely, uh, we're not the at the biz op end of the market or the. You know that perhaps some of the trading platforms where they come in with a low initial stake and try to build it, we're looking for people who've already achieved something like that success low seven figure net worth upwards and that's where we find our sweet spot.

Speaker 1:

And so what's the customer experience like when they join the club? What is it that they get? What do you do? Because it seems like you seem to have some events that you do as well. So what's that look like from a customer?

Speaker 3:

experience. I think what makes us pretty unique, I think, is that we combine the kind of coaching and mentoring that we think is needed to make somebody a confident private equity investor with the access to a small number of these opportunities where we've done all the hard work on due diligence. Now we can't give financial or investment advice, so we always have to leave it to the individual member to make a decision, but what we're trying to do is empower them to make those kind of decisions through having had some training and coaching. We also do quite regular market updates. We have a twice weekly newsletter that keeps them up to speed, not just with our own content but all other stuff around there on what's happening in the world. You know wider in the wider world.

Speaker 3:

And then, yeah, we have online events and we have live events, because one of the things you find is that people really value meeting and networking with like-minded folks. Because there's so few places you do that and if you are into this kind of investing, the chances are most of your own friends and family are not. You know we always find we're fishing in a small pool here. You know we always find we're fishing in a small pool here. You know, it's like 3% of the population that seems to care about their financial future more than their next iPhone or their next holiday. So when you can get 100, 150 people of these people in the same room, it's frankly, for me, is the kind of master of ceremonies. It's quite hard to keep them under control because they wanted to talk to each other so much.

Speaker 3:

So it's a combination of the. It's printed information, you know, it's emails, it's live updates online. We do a monthly Zoom call where people can ask me anything about wealth creation or wealth protection, and if I can't answer it, I'll get them in touch with someone who can. And then there's the whole kind of investment portfolio side. So it's it's really we do try to create this sense of community. We are quite exclusive, as I say, less than 200 members at the moment, but we are. We're seeing we have some members in america already. We're seeing a lot of interest from america and also, obviously, we're seeing lots of private equity things happening there. The next couple of raises that I'm doing are for companies who are already strong in places like Singapore, india, the UK, but are also going to migrate into America because they can see the opportunities there. So you know, I would think, if we're having this conversation, in a couple of years time we'll probably have as many members in America as we do in Europe.

Speaker 1:

Very interesting. That's very interesting. I like this approach that is a little bit more comprehensive, right. It's not like here's a trading strategy or here's trades, it's a more comprehensive look at wealth building for somebody. It kind of reminds me a little bit of the not exactly, obviously, but the Tiger 21 model where, um, they have high net worth and it's basically like you get together with peer groups to kind of look at, like, what you're doing with your money, um, to make sure that you're, you know, not not ruining your portfolio, um, and that I think it's a very attractive piece that you have for that higher net worth person Because, like you said, the tradition of what they have, or they have their wealth advisors, a lot of whom are really just asset gatherers, they're salesmen, and so having a peer group and having the expertise to kind of say let's look at this a little bit more comprehensively.

Speaker 1:

But you're not so you have a model portfolio. I'm assuming, then, that you're not so you have a model portfolio. I'm assuming, then, that you're talking about some of the larger trends in kind of the general markets at any given time. I think there's something going on with tariffs, I'm not sure right now. Oh, wow, yeah, I tell you.

Speaker 3:

I mean, I don't know about you, but certainly for any of us who've been around the block a few times, I think the 2020s are turning into one of the most challenging decades.

Speaker 3:

I think I would perhaps compare the 1970s to it, but I just had access to some research which isn't going to be officially published until July, so I'll share a couple of things from it with you.

Speaker 3:

This is all about.

Speaker 3:

You know, this massive wealth transfer that has just about started between my kind of baby boomer generation and then the gen x and the millennials I mean it's around about 80 trillion dollars is going to change hands, and there's a survey done of the family offices where this is happening and 81 of those next generation inheritors are saying they're going to change their wealth management company because they don't like the job being done by the one their parents are using, and 51% of them are saying the biggest thing that's missing is access to direct private equity.

Speaker 3:

So I think we're seeing a generational shift between the patriarchs who kind of went for, I guess, for real estate and bonds and all that kind of more conservative stuff, the next generation of saying hold on, there's all these other opportunities that we're not even getting access to from our conventional wealth management companies. So I'm kind of thinking well, that's very much the space we're in, so maybe the opportunity is there to partner with some of these organizations to fill a gap that they clearly are not providing at the moment. That could cost them a lot of business as those kind of wealth transfers start to really take off in the coming years.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's very interesting. I think that we've seen that definitely over the last, I guess, 12 to 15 years, that most I mean so much money has moved out of the public market into the private markets and there's, you know, kind of the sense that the public markets have almost become kind of a mutual fund, in that it's just everything tracks and that a lot of the alpha is in the private markets. And, like to your point earlier, like fewer and fewer companies are using an IPO as their kind of exit strategy or even part of their path. And then you kind of add to that that there's so much restrictions on who can invest. And we've seen things like in the US with, like the rise of the crowdfunding market and I know this in the reggae market raises. But and obviously this week we had a big I think it was Newsmax Um, you know they, they had a reggae earlier on that people were able to invest in and they had a very large IPO. But it's very rare for really successful companies to offer any type of investor participation, um, to retail investors in any way at this point and they stay private longer and most of the exits, like you say, are to other companies.

Speaker 1:

And so it's definitely an area that's grown across the board and, from a publishing standpoint, we've seen a shrinking of the number of stocks over the last 25 years, and that means the number of opportunities to choose and how much interest has moved towards that.

Speaker 1:

Private markets and one of the messaging things that I see, and I'm seeing it this week, and how much interest has moved towards that private markets and one of the messaging things that I see, and I'm seeing it this week and very much, is that one of the kind of sales points that I see the salesmen and the bankers and stuff using these days is oh look, the market's in free fall, but the value of these private deals hasn't changed, and so it's being positioned correctly and in some cases incorrectly as being disconnected from the market as a whole and so it's not as volatile. Now there's different issues, obviously, besides that, but it is an interesting dynamic to see the conversation go in that direction, where it's, like you know, public markets are very tricky, especially in times like this. Private markets offer some stability to the value of the investment that we're not seeing in a more volatile market.

Speaker 3:

Yeah well, I think this is definitely true of private equity because it's not mark to market in a kind of real time basis, the way the S&P 500 is. It means you can sleep at night when it goes through a period like this. Now, obviously it doesn't mean that they're completely isolated from economic developments and economic reality, but they do have control over when there's going to be a capital event. So you know they will only issue more shares if they need more money, and they would only and they would time any exit for a good period in the market. So we shan't know the impact of all these tariffs for at least a couple of years. So we've got time to sit back see how that's going to evolve. Of course there'll be winners and losers, and I think some of them will be quite unexpected, if you like, in terms of the way things will be tweaking around. So this is a good time to not be in the public market from a volatility perspective. And yes, obviously at some point you will become relevant to that if you're going to IPO. But if you're just going to sell to another private equity company, you're not going to find that problem. And there has been a view because some of the private equity funds have been trading at a discount to their net asset value. So there's been a kind of a rumor that they were overvalued and if they did actually come to market they'd be a lot lower. Well, that hasn't actually been the case. Where the big funds have been exiting companies, it's been at or above the net asset value on which they were being held on the balance sheet. So that's one point to bear in mind.

Speaker 3:

The other thing to bear in mind about the wider private equity sector is that the fastest growing area now is what they call secondary funds, where you perhaps invested in a company early doors. It's now gone into two or three years. And then there's a possibility. There's, for example, a platform in London called jenkins where you can go on there and buy private equity shares from the original owner, if you like, um, and that means they can get liquidity but at a higher price than they originally paid. You come in kind of halfway through the journey, so they might be going to an ipo or a trade sale and you effectively pay more than you would have done, but you also save three or four years of time.

Speaker 3:

So those secondary markets are going to become bigger and bigger, I think, and there are secondary funds out there now that specialize in acquiring companies that are effectively secondhand, as it were. They've gone through two or three years of growth. So that will also, I think, start to address the liquidity issue as we go forward, because there'll be people that want to sell and there'll be people that want to buy into a story. So, for example, you look at something like SpaceX. That's a privately held company Now it's now worth I don't know how many billions, but imagine if you'd been able to get into that when it was worth 50 or 100 million and go on that journey into the mega billions. You'd see a tremendous return from that company. So some of those shares, they do a secondary sale every six months, I think. So you're getting into companies like that on the private secondary markets as a whole new emerging sector as well.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that is an exciting area and I think I'd be curious to know too since you're not a fund here and you're bringing individual investors and you're doing these raises what's the, what's the kind of company perspective on working with? You know, 100 or more retail investors, high net worth, to raise money, like where does? What kind of conversations are you hearing from them? Obviously they're interested in it. They're doing the deals with you. How do they kind of view this versus going to a traditional fund? I mean, I'm assuming they're doing that as well and this is just another kind of tranche of raise for them?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I think the attraction to our investment partners, if you like, is that we are not acting like a VC fund where we're going to try and take control or have voting rights above and beyond our shareholding. We are enablers but we're not controllers. So they're quite like that. Sometimes they're perhaps too small for the private equity funds but perhaps too big for the pure VCs. So we're kind of in the middle of that kind of tier. But, yeah, mostly the founders are looking for the investment and a little bit of support. Sometimes I get asked to join their advisory board and things like that, but they don't want to cede control. Most of them actually like the idea of increasing the spread of their cap table. They've often just got founders, friends and family on there. We are often the first to come in after that stage and before any institution. So one of the things again back to the liquidity point one of the things that we sometimes look for is at what point they'll be ready for an institution, because that can be an exit for us. So, for example, we're just, in fact I'm waiting to hear, hopefully today about an exit from a Swiss-based company that we got into. That's in the aerospace and defense sectors which, as you can imagine, are very hot at the moment and our investors are potentially going to get I think it's going to be an 8.8x exit in three years from that fund. So that's because an institution is coming in to take I don't know 20% of the company and they want to clean up the cap table and take out the early investors.

Speaker 3:

So some of the companies we talked to would prefer it if we came in as a single entity, an SPV company, something like that. Most of them are actually okay with taking in a bunch of investors. Typically it's only about 20 or 30 people that would come in on a given round that we do, so it's not hundreds. But as we get bigger that may also become more relevant. We might look at perhaps co-investing through an entity like an SPV If we were doing a five or 10 million raise. Our direction of travel is upwards. When we first started we were typically averaging a 20K clip size per investor. It's now more like 80K and as that gets up towards quarter of a million, half a million, then I think we may well look at some kind of structure to invest through. But at the moment it's just direct investing. Each person becomes a direct owner of shares in the target company, um, and, and both the company and the investors are very happy with that direct relationship right, so then, obviously, that's.

Speaker 1:

My next question was related to you. You've been doing this long enough, then, to be seeing exits on on these deals. Um, what kind of experiences have you had with those uh kind of exits then?

Speaker 3:

yeah, we've seen a mixture. We've seen exits on the, when an institution comes in. We've seen exits on a secondary platform, um, we're seeing things like middle east sovereign wealth funds wanting to come into some of these technology companies as they grow, um. But we've also, to be fair, we've seen delays. You know. We've seen things where they were. They were hoping to do it.

Speaker 3:

Obviously, covid got in the middle of a lot of things for many companies, and also there's always this trade-off between between timing and value. You know, if you're, if you're just a few months away from some big contract wins that are going to have a major impact on the value, founders tend to be reluctant to press ahead and sell too soon, you know. So there's always this element of negotiation and timing. But yeah, for example, we've just finished a raise for a company that's dealing with the whole area of digital inheritance. You know, we all own so many more digital assets, like crypto, but even things like you know your medical records. I've got eight pages of A4 of usernames and passwords. My wife goes crazy. What happens to me? How am I going to cope if you get run over by a bus? So they've built a platform where you store all these things and you have your trustees who control the handover and your beneficiaries, your children or charities, whatever and that kind of platform is raised there.

Speaker 3:

So we've done a raise now and then the founders are saying that in about six months time we got in at 20 million, they're going to, they want to do a partial exit at 50 million.

Speaker 3:

So there'll be a further chance there for us to come out in a few months with a two, two and a half times uplift or indeed to reinvest again if we can see, because we can see a route to a 250 value in a couple of years' time. So where we can try and engineer those kinds of what I call mini exits, we do that as well and we can get a win-win where those who want a quick turnaround and are happy to take 2x now rather than 10x later, we try and accommodate that as well. So it all kind of gets built into whatever the founders are looking to do as well. So it's all kind of get, you know, gets built into whatever the founders are looking to do as well, because clearly they're going to drive it as majority shareholders. But if we can engineer either a secondary, a partial exit or an institution, then we try and work to give that liquidity to our members that's great.

Speaker 1:

Then, are you seeing, um so like from a kind of American publisher standpoint? It's interesting to me that you have the. You're an access point to the European private markets at a time when it would seem that, like you mentioned the defense company that there was a lot of investment starting to happen, like an increase in the volume of investment potentially quite a bit across Europe, with just the nature of the geopolitical situations and the way the world's changing, and so that's an interest there's a lot of. I mean, we've seen the DAX go straight up this year, basically, and so it's really interesting to me that you are a channel for anyone who's interested to kind of get into that market on the private side through a publishing model, either as an affiliate or maybe perhaps more closely aligned. I know you're very open and interested in kind of exploring partnerships with different types of groups here in the US. Obviously, there's wealth managers and things like that and there's all the publishing world that we have here. What kind of alliances or partnerships are you looking to explore? I guess?

Speaker 3:

alliances or partnerships are you looking to explore?

Speaker 3:

I guess, yeah, I think, yeah, ideally anyone who's got access to a database of accredited investors who are interested in investing.

Speaker 3:

The fact that they are subscribing to a publication such as the kind of ones that your ecosystem includes would mean that they are above average interest in investment opportunities.

Speaker 3:

So, yeah, I think there could be a very significant synergy there, both for accessing Europe and also, you know, places like India and Singapore where we also have quite strong links. So there's a lot of stuff going on outside of what's already happening in America. I think they would perhaps want some exposure to and because we have the combination of, you know, being involved in content creation and being involved in actually finding the investment opportunities, then I think, a tie-up with some kind of publisher who wanted a more specialised publication, you know, a direct, even a direct private equity newsletter of some kind, where maybe it's kind of a new opportunity to reuse existing contacts that they have in their database but to make a new kind of offer to them into something that perhaps they hadn't considered before, I think it could be quite credible and therefore, yeah, be more than open to a conversation. We do charge a fee for people joining the club, and we'd be more than happy to share that with whoever could provide us with access to those kinds of people.

Speaker 1:

And are the events deliverable? A membership benefit then? Or are they sold separately, or how do you work that piece?

Speaker 3:

Well, if it's an online event, then yes. So, for example, we have 30 hours of video in our Kajabi platform where anyone that joins gets access to that, so immediately, in their own time, they can start learning about the whole private equity sector. And where we fit in that, they obviously get access to the newsletter that comes twice a week. They get access to the monthly calls. In terms of live events, I'd be more than happy to look at holding any if they wanted to. If they could get a critical mass together, we can do it in America. If they would like to send some people to our european events, um then again, more than happy to discuss that. I actually live in portugal. I'm, I suppose, what you call a tax exile from high tax uk. Uh, nick still has the misfortune of being out there at the moment, but uh he likes time being yeah you just like paying a lot of tax, don't you nick um?

Speaker 3:

so yeah, we would be more than happy to talk about inviting people. I think Lisbon would be a great place for events obviously London, but equally if it's New York or California, whatever, wherever there's a critical mass, I think there's so much benefit from getting people in the same room. I've seen some of the events you run, John, and it's clear that people so value being able to get together face-to-face as well as whatever the content is that you deliver. The networking is priceless.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and I do think that the kind of community event piece is something that's going to be increasingly attractive to people, just as the overwhelm with online content and AI is speeding it up, and so I think the in-person stuff is definitely interesting and I think that obviously in the US, like the one of the things on the investment side that we've seen is a persistent trend, has been that a travel related piece for people is always attractive. I mean, frankly, just people is always attractive.

Speaker 1:

I mean frankly, just it's always attractive, like it's here's a reason to to go to to Lisbon for like investment purposes related things. It's a nice setup and it was one of those things that I put in one of my state of input presentations a couple of years ago. Was that one of the only areas of overlap from kind of the boomer generation and the millennial generation when it comes to how they spend money is both spend money on travel at a very high rate compared to other groups or other generations, and it was always interesting to me that the you know we've seen that with like conferences, like the money show adding investment cruises and things like that that there is a there was a real appetite, I think, out there for, especially in the higher net worth side of the of the of the market, for traveling to to an event, for something that's interesting, to meet people in person and do it in a great location that they would go to regardless if they had a reason to, just because they, they, they like the vacation.

Speaker 3:

Yeah Well, I mean there's a lot on a on a wider scale of that thinking. There's a lot of Americans relocating to Portugal now. You know there are road shows being held in America talking about it. Yeah, so we've got new direct flights coming in. I'm in the Algarve, in the south of Portugal. We've got new direct flights from, I think from Newark, to Faro now.

Speaker 3:

So there's a huge interest there and I think there's a few coming to the UK as well. So the travel part could be nice and we could also even include, because one of the you know what we do is wealth creation. But once you've created it, the problem becomes protecting it. So that's into tax planning, estate planning, residency planning, citizenship by investment programs, you know. So we can also put people like that onto the agenda so that they could talk about, if you came to UK or Portugal, what are the tax considerations, what are the residency considerations. And then it becomes a slightly more holistic thing because I know you know, depending on where you sit on the spectrum some people are keen to leave America now. Some people are very happy at what's going on there. But whichever side of that divide you're on coming to Europe and having a look at these opportunities from an investment perspective, but also adding a little bit about lifestyle tax et cetera might be quite helpful for people.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, absolutely, and so that's a great thing. If anyone's out there who's interested in maybe exploring a partnership, I'm happy to make connections for you to Graham and Nick. And I think this is an area that we'll see kind of an increase in interest and it's a higher price of an increase in interest and it's a. It's a higher price, higher niche, a higher value part of the market. Um, again, it's not like we're going for 50 000 customers here. Um, it's that like very premium side of the market um which I think there's.

Speaker 3:

There's a lot of room to grow in right now, um, and that's very attractive, I think yeah, yeah, and, and it's true, and I think I just saw the latest family office report from UBS in Switzerland and they were saying that across all the family offices they survey, they're putting 22% of their total assets into private equity.

Speaker 3:

Now, so when you think how well informed they are, I think that does reinforce how important a part of anyone's. I think that does reinforce how important a part of anyone's portfolio this should be. And, yeah, finding the right opportunities obviously is key, but also, I think, being part of the right community, and I think a publishing company is very good at building that kind of long-term relationship with its subscribers. It's a relationship of trust and I think, at the end of the day, any investment decision is based on trust and I think because they would already have built that relationship and then they introduce Inside Investor Club to that as a further trusted component I think that plus meeting together in live events could create a really strong bond between the subscribers, the publisher and the club. Plus meeting together in live events could create a really strong bond between the subscribers, the publisher and the club.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think that's great. I think the idea of maybe co-hosted events and things like that makes a lot of sense, especially as an entry point for people who are interested in exploring it. So, like I said, I'm happy to make these connections for anybody. There's some people I can think of right now that I'd like to talk to specifically about this, to kind of connect you guys with um, but I'll put this out there for everybody to see and um see what kind of interest we have coming back, and I really appreciate you guys coming and talking about this, because this is a very interesting part of the market to me, um, and I do think it's one of those, like I said, one of those areas in the market that I think there's a lot of room for growth. So super interesting what you guys are doing.

Speaker 3:

Right.

Speaker 1:

Well, it's great to have a chance to talk about it.

Speaker 3:

Yes, and thanks for the introduction, nick.

Speaker 2:

Thank you, john as well. I think Graham's covered most of the bases there and, yeah, I think there's some very interesting things we can do. Just thinking back to your FMS conference in September 2019 and all the great guys I met there a lot from the States, obviously you and lots of others as well I think something like a Lisbon event or a London event really could work well on all sorts of levels.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, well, that was probably one of the hardest things that COVID did to me was it killed my London conference for FMS and it's definitely something that I've looked to bring, thought very hard about bringing back in in in either actually Lisbon or London, so that's definitely something to talk about. But thank you very much, guys. This has been great. I will get this out to everybody and, like I said, anybody who has any interest in kind of having a conversation just let me know. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.