Scott Gelbard's Blogger

Something significant has been happening quietly at the top of the private wealth world, and most business owners outside that circle have no idea it's occurring. Over the past decade, ultra-high-net-worth families — the kind with eight and nine figures of investable capital — have been dismantling their relationships with private banks, pulling assets from traditional wealth managers, and building something entirely different: sovereign-style family offices with the infrastructure, deal flow, and institutional sophistication of a mid-sized asset manager. I've watched this shift unfold across multiple continents. What began as a trend among the most sophisticated American and European family dynasties has now gone global. Families in Southeast Asia, the Gulf states, Latin America, and Canada are all asking the same question: Why are we paying institutions to do what we could do ourselves, better, and at a fraction of the cost? The answer is reshaping private wealth — and it h...

Somewhere between the first venture and the fifth, something changes in how a serious entrepreneur thinks about business. The mental shift isn't always visible from the outside, but it's dramatic on the inside. You stop thinking about each business as a standalone universe with its own gravity and start thinking like a portfolio manager — watching how your attention, capital, relationships, and risk are distributed across the whole, not just optimizing one piece at a time. This shift, when it happens consciously, is one of the most powerful transitions in a business owner's career. When it doesn't happen — when founders accumulate ventures without ever developing the portfolio mindset — the results can be quietly catastrophic. I've advised and built businesses across multiple continents over 25 years, and I've watched both play out. The entrepreneurs who thrive across multiple ventures share a specific set of mental disciplines that most business education does...

I’ve sat in boardrooms across three continents and watched two very different kinds of deals get done. The first kind — the institutional kind — follows the script. Bankers prepare books, advisors file memoranda, lawyers exchange redlines, and the process unfolds in a structured, visible, and largely predictable way. The second kind happens differently. A dinner in Singapore. A conversation on the margins of a private conference in Zurich. A phone call between two people who trust each other because someone they both trust made the introduction. Both pathways produce transactions. But in my experience, the second kind — the informal kind — produces the better ones. They close faster, encounter fewer surprises, and leave both parties with something beyond the deal itself: a relationship that continues to generate value long after the papers are signed. Understanding how informal international networks actually function, and learning to operate within them, may be the most underapprecia...

Most business owners think of due diligence as something that happens to them. A buyer shows up, sends a list, and suddenly you’re scrambling to locate five-year-old contracts, explain a revenue dip, and justify why your top customer represents 40% of sales. That scramble — reactive, defensive, and almost always painful — is entirely avoidable. The most sophisticated sellers I’ve worked with over the past 25 years understand a fundamental truth: the best time to run due diligence on your own business is years before you plan to sell it. Selling a Business Isn’t an Event — It’s a Culmination Here is what I’ve observed across dozens of transactions across North America, Europe, and Asia: the businesses that command premium valuations and close cleanly don’t just have good fundamentals. They have documented good fundamentals. There is a profound difference between a healthy business and one that reads as healthy to an outsider working through a data room. Both matter. But the second ...

Most business planning is optimistic by design. Founders project growth. Leaders set stretch targets. Boards approve budgets built on assumptions that, taken together, require nearly everything to go right. This is not irrationality — it is the fuel that builds businesses. Ambition requires optimism. But after 25 years of advising businesses through recessions, geopolitical shocks, sector disruptions, and unexpected leadership crises, I have come to believe that the single most underinvested discipline in private business management is structured downside thinking. The companies I have watched endure the longest — the ones that are still thriving after 30 or 40 years, that survive leadership transitions and market upheavals, that somehow emerge from every economic cycle stronger — all share one distinguishing habit: they are just as rigorous about their downside scenarios as they are about their growth plans. They do not plan to fail. They plan for the possibility of adversity, metho...

I want to be clear about something at the outset: I am not a tax attorney, and this is not tax advice. What I am is a business advisor who has spent 25 years watching private business owners make the same mistake over and over again — and the most expensive version of that mistake, repeated more often than almost anything else I see, is treating tax strategy as a compliance function rather than a business strategy. The owners who outperform over the long run are not necessarily smarter, better capitalized, or operating in better markets. Many of them simply understand that after-tax returns are the only returns that matter — and they have built their business strategy accordingly. The Compliance Mindset vs. the Strategy Mindset Most private business owners think about taxes once a year. They gather documents, meet with their accountant, and pay what they owe. Some push back a little, find some deductions, and feel they have done the work. Then they go back to running their business....