Charles Skorina & Company

A conversation with Stuart Lucas: wealth manager, educator, and family scion

Stuart Lucas has double-barreled credentials as a wealth manager.

He's a Harvard MBA who worked for years with top-shelf financial firms including Wellington Management Company and Banc One (now JP Morgan Chase), where he led their Ultra HNW unit.

And, he is himself an heir to family money by way of his great-grandfather, E. A. Stuart, who founded the Carnation Company.  In 1985, the closely-held business was sold to Nestle, and the proceeds were distributed among Mr. Stuart's descendants.

In 2004, Mr. Lucas merged his professional and personal worlds by founding Wealth Strategist Partners, which continues today as the investment advisor to his and selected other family offices.

He has gone on to design and lead a Private Wealth Management executive education program, designed specifically for wealthy families at the University of Chicago Booth School, now in its 12th year.  And, as an adjunct professor, he has taught a Wealth and Family Enterprise Management course at the MBA level.

All this experience has also been distilled into his widely-read book, Wealth: Grow It and Protect It, for general readers; and into academic-quality papers for The Journal of Wealth Management.

We're delighted that he made some time to talk to us.

Keeping it in the family

It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.

- Oscar Wilde

Skorina: Stuart, where do you begin with a new client who has to deal with all of this for the first time?

Lucas: Charles, a family office with significant wealth has many moving parts.  There's money-management per se, which you focus on; and it's crucial.

But, there are also the structural, legal, and tax issues.  And there are opaque but vital intra-familial and cultural issues that have to be dealt with.  They're all important, and all inter-related.

The laws and tax rates keep changing, so do markets, and so do the families themselves.  We try to design and execute an integrated strategy that balances all these elements.

Skorina: So, how do you start the conversation with a new client?

Lucas: When we sit down with a family who's thinking about hiring a wealth manager or setting up a family office, my top discussion points are:

• What do you want to accomplish with your wealth?
• What's the right structure for managing your family money? How will it be governed?
• How will your family members be educated about their wealth and held accountable to each other?
• Do you understand that taxes affect everything? Tax-planning is critical for wealth-preservation.
• You will need help: a wealth advisor, an attorney, an accountant, and perhaps a family-office or outsourced chief investment officer.