Building a Sustainable Family Office with Scott Saslow

This week, I am delighted to welcome Scott Saslow, Founder and CEO of Palo Alto, CA-based ONE WORLD Investments Inc., which provides investment capital and advisory services to help organizations scale social impact. Over his career, Scott has been a founder or founding team member of seven start-up businesses. Prior to ONE WORLD, Scott was the Founder & CEO of The Institute of Executive Development, supporting executives in Global 2000 organizations including American Express, Blackrock, Intel, Time Warner, and the US Navy, and earlier in his career, he worked at Siebel Systems and Microsoft Corporation in leadership roles. Scott has authored over twenty-five articles for publications such as Forbes and Directorship and has been interviewed by and quoted in Harvard Business Review, Bloomberg and BusinessWeek.

Scott expounds on the concept of “sustainability” as it pertains to a family office, and he provides his definition of a sustainable family office and explains why sustainability is important in this context. Having emphasized how important this objective is for the family, Scott then talks about how families and family offices pursue sustainability and how they prepare for it and how they achieve it. He outlines the many dimensions and ways to make a family office sustainable.

Scott is just about to release his new book Building a Sustainable Family Office, which is an excellent, and to some extent, autobiographical, compendium of everything families need to know or consider as they create or take over a family office. The book is organized around and culminates in the definition of what Scott refers to as “the five key elements of success.” Scott gives us a sneak peek into what the five elements are and how each of them contributes to the long-term success of the family and its family office.

Sustainability is also often referred to as an investment philosophy and a values system. Scott shares his views about how families can connect their aspiration for sustainable investing with their effort to build and operate a sustainable family office.

Don’t miss this insights-packed conversation with a rising-gen owner of a family enterprise, a successful entrepreneur and wealth creator, and a proponent of family sustainability and positive impact.