Family Office Foundations: Financial Fluency & Investing
Build the financial fluency, investment judgment, and practical tools to take a more informed role in your family’s business and capital. This three-month private coaching program applies financial and investment concepts directly to your family’s circumstances. Work with Andrew Glaze, CFA—a Columbia MBA, former family-office investment executive, investment banker, and public-company director—to understand the business, evaluate opportunities, and develop a repeatable decision-making process. WHAT’S INCLUDED • Six private 75-minute lessons, approximately twice monthly. • 7.5 additional hours of personalized preparation, assignment review, written feedback, and AI-tool development support. • Financial-model, investment-memo, and portfolio-monitoring templates. • One main book each month, with practical applications. • Guided development of an initial AI-assisted investment monitoring tool and learning repository that you retain after the program. MONTH 1 — UNDERSTAND AND FORECAST THE FAMILY BUSINESS Lesson 1: Build the financial statements. Use your family business to construct and understand a balance sheet, income statement, and cash-flow statement. Learn what each relevant line represents, where the information comes from, and how the statements connect. We can begin with one property or entity before expanding to a broader view. Lesson 2: Forecast the business. Develop a forecast based on operating assumptions, capital expenditures, debt payments, and distributions. Test different scenarios and learn to compare actual results against expectations. The goal is to become increasingly fluent in reading, creating, and updating these statements so you can identify inconsistencies, emerging cash needs, and potential opportunities earlier. Main book: The Little Book That Beats the Market. Working reference: Financial Statements by Thomas Ittelson. MONTH 2 — BUILD A FAMILY-OFFICE INVESTMENT FRAMEWORK Lesson 3: Map the family’s capital. Examine assets, liabilities, ownership, liquidity needs, commitments, and existing concentrations. Establish the objectives and constraints that should guide investment decisions. Lesson 4: Design a model portfolio. Develop a simplified, diversified portfolio inspired by endowment investing and adapted to your family’s circumstances. Evaluate the roles of public-market investments, external managers, co-investments, selected best ideas, and direct investments. Consider how a core operating, capital-markets, or real estate business fits within the overall picture. Learn to compare investment processes, fees, incentives, liquidity, valuation, and downside risk. Main book: A Random Walk Down Wall Street. MONTH 3 — PRACTICE INVESTMENT DECISIONS AND MONITORING Lesson 5: Evaluate real opportunities. Prepare short investment memos across selected sectors and investment types. Explain the investment case, valuation, risks, and portfolio fit. Use paper investments or review small investments independently chosen by you and your family as learning cases. Lesson 6: Present your framework. Present and defend your proposed portfolio. Establish a monitoring routine, an annual allocation and rebalancing review, and criteria for investigating developments sooner. Account for the practical constraints of private investments and real estate. Main book: The Emotionally Intelligent Investor. BUILD YOUR OWN AI-ASSISTED TOOL Throughout the program, we’ll work together on an initial monitoring tool using accounts you control. Depending on your priorities, it can organize research, track selected investments and indicators, and highlight questions for further investigation. It will also serve as a repository for your financial models, investment memos, reading takeaways, and decision journal. You’ll learn how to update it, check its data and outputs, and maintain and extend it after the lessons end. The initial scope will be agreed at the outset and matched to your technical experience, available tools, and the program’s included time. TURN READING INTO A PERSONAL PLAYBOOK For each monthly book, capture 25 ideas worth keeping, explain why they matter, and select three to apply. We’ll also incorporate selected chapters from How to Win Friends and Influence People into your conversations with family members, lenders, partners, and investment managers. You complete practical assignments between lessons, with guidance and feedback. The objective is to finish with useful working materials and the ability to explain, challenge, and update them yourself. Total program price: $4,500 for all six lessons and the included preparation and support over three months.
What's included
My approach is personal, practical, and hands-on. We use your family’s business and investments as the starting point, adapting the pace to both your current experience and future responsibilities. Each session follows a clear process: review your work, explore a new concept, apply it together, and agree on being ready to move onto the next focus area. I explain the reasoning behind the numbers and ask you to explain it back in your own words. Questions, disagreements, counter theories, suggested experiments are greatly encouraged. My ultimate goal is to get you to think for yourself in all things related to financial matters. We begin with financial statements and forecasting because you need to understand how the family’s existing business generates cash, uses capital, and carries risk before evaluating what to do next. From there, we develop investment memos, a model portfolio, and a monitoring routine. You’ll build the models and analyses with my guidance. I’ll review your assumptions, help you identify mistakes, and challenge your conclusions so you become more confident making and defending decisions independently. We’ll also develop an initial AI-assisted monitoring tool that you keep. It will organize your research, models, reading takeaways, and decision journal. You’ll practice maintaining it and checking its outputs, giving you a foundation to expand after our lessons end. I bring experience across family-office investing, investment banking, public-company boards, entrepreneurship, and applied AI. That combination lets us connect financial concepts to the decisions owners and investors actually face. Expect direct feedback, thoughtful discussion, and practical work between sessions—with the goal of building judgment and useful tools you can carry forward.
- Financial statements and a business forecast you have helped build and can increasingly explain, update, and question.
- A working investment framework that connects the family’s existing business, liquidity needs, objectives, and risk exposures.
- An initial AI-assisted monitoring tool and organized learning repository that you retain, with guidance for maintaining and expanding it.
- A proposed diversified model portfolio with a clear purpose and rationale for each component.
- everal investment memos that articulate the opportunity, valuation, downside, and portfolio fit.
- A practical monitoring and annual portfolio-review process, supported by a personal investment playbook and decision journal and greater confidence discussing financial decisions with family members, managers, lenders, and advisers.
Meet your expert
Andrew G.
Asset Management Coach | CFA, Columbia MBA & Hedge Fund/Family Office
My background is a combination of military leadership, institutional finance, entrepreneurship, and coaching. I graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point, served as an Army officer, earned my MBA from Columbia Business School, and became a CFA charterholder. Professionally, I have worked across investment banking, hedge funds, private equity, family office investing, capital markets, and public-company board service. I have also founded and built businesses, advised companies, raised capital, evaluated investments, and worked with executives, entrepreneurs, investors, and students at different stages of their careers.
