My daughter reads our family values, in Vienna

[01:24]

"If I had to do it over again for my family, I wouldn't choose a dozen values. I would choose five that were simpler to memorize."

[01:32]

"It costs nothing to establish family values."

[01:35]

"If everybody knows it's important for a company to have values to operate together and stay on the same page, why would every family not have family values?"

Full transcript

Richard: Hey everyone, Richard C. Wilson. I'm here in Vienna, Austria. We're downtown. I'm putting on an event just for 15 people. First time I've done this. It's only for families that are worth $50 million to $100 million, and it's for families that would put together their family office, help launch their family office, or have us source deals for them. One of the families here, we helped them learn how to raise capital. They bought a company and sold it for $100 million.

The point of this video, though, is I want to talk about family values. In the Boy Scouts growing up, we had to recite the Boy Scout Law, which is basically the values of being a Boy Scout. And I realized my girls were not in the Boy Scouts and didn't have that going into their brains. So we created our own family values. And I wanted my 9-year-old daughter Maya here to share what our family values are.

Maya: Okay. Healthy, bold, brave, clean, cheerful, kind, grit, responsible, respectful.

Richard: Great. Nice job. So we have them above our kitchen table. They get rewarded when they follow the family values. What do you get when you follow the family values?

Maya: Fun tickets.

Richard: What do you get with fun tickets?

Maya: You can get prizes from Target.

Richard: That's right. Or prizes off the shelf in my office. What are the two words that summarize our family values?

Maya: Strength and honor.

Richard: Great. So basically, if I had to do it over again for my family, I wouldn't choose a dozen values. I would choose five that were simpler to memorize, faster for kids to memorize, and easier to keep track of. We summarize the values through strength and honor, because a lot of them roll up to that. But we have about a dozen family values that we try to live by as a family.

This is something that is free to do. It costs nothing to establish family values, and it really doesn't take a lot of time. If everybody knows it's important for a company to have values to operate together and stay on the same page, why would every family not have family values? It's even more important that your family stays together and operates on the same page.

So I just wanted to share that real quick. I thought since I brought my daughter here to this event, it'd be cool to have her show that she'd memorized the values, and that they're important to us. It's not something we just talk about. It's something real. Having her here with me is part of our family values, and part of helping her learn more about our business. Thank you, Maya, for helping me stay clean and healthy there. I appreciate you following our work and watching the video. We're going to be recording about half a dozen more videos of insights from meeting with these families over this whole week that we're here in Austria. Talk soon. Bye.