Over the past 20 years of his investment banking career, including nearly a decade at J.P. Morgan, Nader Afshar has seen progressive specialization. Groups of bankers focused on one sector have grown, been split into more subsectors, and further divided into product experts and sub-product experts.
The evolution might be beneficial to clients and banks alike, but once bankers start down their chosen—or designated—path, they, “unfortunately, just see part of the whole equation,” Afshar told Modus.
According to Afshar, the narrowing breadth of bankers’ experiences earlier in their careers is making a huge potential talent pool less attractive to a growing number of sophisticated investors who want generalists: family offices.
As much as he can, Afshar, the managing partner of Bastiat Partners, a six-banker boutique investment bank founded in 2013 in Los Angeles, wants to solve that problem. Or, at least dent it as much as his firm can.
This summer, the bank is launching what it calls a merchant banking apprenticeship program; a cohort of two or three college sophomores who will work alongside Bastiat’s bankers and learn the fundamentals of investment banking and how family offices invest. Where bankers source their opportunities, how they find and build relationships with family offices, and how they pitch ideas to family offices, are all things the cohort will get rare exposure to.
“Our objective is not simply to offer another internship, but to help cultivate the next generation of leaders within the global family-office ecosystem,” Afshar said.
Bastiat has had interns in the past, who Afshar said were great. But those interns, as well as Bastiat, had concerns about how much they could be replaced by artificial intelligence. Even as large investment banks have performed well in recent years, they have slowed hiring and are reimagining their business with AI in mind.
“That begs the question, what cannot be replaced?” Afshar said. “We are really much more focused on the soft skills: the relationship building, the goodwill building, the reputation and all of that, because that's really the nature of the niche that we cover, which are mostly long-term, permanent sources of capital.”
Most of the cohort's summer will be spent working at Bastiat, but Afshar also hopes to embed the apprentices with some of the bank’s family-office clients for brief stints. Offices are generally good at finding and hiring chief investment officers and other senior roles, but hiring junior investment staff is harder. Bastiat’s apprentices can offer family offices a little operational leverage out of thin air, and they will get to see how different offices operate, according to Afshar. Their processes for evaluating and underwriting opportunities, assessing risk, structuring transactions and allocating capital can widely vary.
Creating a program to build and strengthen relationships with family offices is not new. Most recently, Alumni Ventures, a venture capital firm with about 1,400 portfolio companies and $1.4 billion in assets under management, created a program to teach startup investing to future leaders of family offices. Like the program at Alumni Ventures, Afshar said Bastiat would consider offering an apprenticeship to someone whose family has an office if they qualified.
A ratio of six bankers to three apprentices is a significant undertaking for Bastiat. But if the pilot program goes well, Afshar intends to expand it to as many as five or six apprentices. The need for generalists at family offices, Afshar argues, will not be met anytime soon.
Even large family offices typically have small investment staffs and relatively complicated portfolios.
“We are really putting in time and effort. We're paying them. For a small team of six bankers to invest time in two or three young kids, it takes a big toll on what we could do. There is an opportunity cost. Imagine that sort of ratio at a traditional investment bank,” Afshar said.
“We think of ourselves as craftsmen, similar to how the old merchant banks were in Europe. And who says ‘craftsman’ says ‘apprenticeship.’ We'll teach them a craft. Whether or not they end up enjoying working in that craft over the long run, we don't know, but at least they'll have a craft.”
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- The Picerne Group, an investment company founded by Kenneth Picerne in 1988 that is focused on distressed debt, apartment acquisition, land acquisition, entitlement, and apartment development, is hiring a director of family office accounting in Newport Beach, California. This person will oversee accounting, reporting, and budgeting functions for Ken, the firm’s CEO, and his family. A family-office accountant and accounts payable specialist report to this person. Familiarity with Yardi (of course, given the investment firm) would be a plus.
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Stryde is helping a single-family office hire an M&A tax director in Chicago.
The office, which serves a large, multigenerational family with an extensive portfolio of companies, has a great culture of collaboration and learning.
This is an ideal role for someone stepping into their first director-level position and interested in providing strategic leadership on mergers, acquisitions, other private-equity transactions, tax structuring, and tax-efficient planning.
Candidates should have 10+ years of experience in M&A tax, knowledge of trusts and individual taxation, and a CPA or JD. This hybrid role offers a salary of $250-$270k, plus comprehensive benefits.
For a confidential conversation about the job, reach out to Karen Berry at kb@strydesearch.com.
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