The WealthTech Podcast

Host: Mark Wickersham

Guest: Shaun Parkin, Hall Road Capital and The Family Office Sherpa

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Mark Wickersham: Alright, let's get started. All right, Sean Park, and welcome to the Wealth Tech Podcast. I am happy to have you.

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Mark Wickersham: on the pod, given that you're, you're half, half a world away, and, literally 12 hours, in a different time zone, I appreciate you making the time. Welcome to the podcast.

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Shaun Parkin: Thanks, Mark, appreciate it. Great to be here.

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Mark Wickersham: I wonder if you could just, for the guests, just kind of give a brief overview. You're the creator of the Family Office Sherpa podcast, which is a great educational resource for family office executives, as well as Hall Road Investments. Could you just… would you mind giving a brief intro of your roles?

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Shaun Parkin: Yeah, of course. So, I'm the founder and managing director of Hall Road Investments, which is a boutique consulting firm for single-family officers, specialising in investment governance and operations and technology.

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Shaun Parkin: Like you said, I have the Family Off the Sherpa podcast, which was…

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Shaun Parkin: born out of the idea of being a guide, and that was born out of the newsletter. The newsletter that I have has been going for six and a half years, which is the same name, so we're up to number 161.

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Shaun Parkin: It goes out every, what we call a fortnight, or two weeks, and the podcast comes out every two weeks as well. Yeah, so it's been a really good, sort of.

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Shaun Parkin: Like you said, it's more educational, it's, the podcast itself is no guests, unlike yours, but, it's just me for 20 to 30 minutes, just, giving a bit of a download of what the family offices out there are looking at and challenged by a lot of the time.

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Mark Wickersham: Yeah, I have it a little bit easier. I get to bring on really smart people and just try to get out of the way, where you're… you are the content, so congrats. Where did the Family Office Sherpa name come from?

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Shaun Parkin: It actually came from, a guy in Perth here. I was being introduced on a panel, I think, and it was myself and a gentleman called Peter Shanley from Accordant Global, and Peter is…

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Shaun Parkin: ex-SAS, you know, in the army, very…

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Shaun Parkin: you know, accomplished military person, and he was introduced as the… as the bodyguard, right? So that person that would, potentially help you get helicoptered out of, I don't know, Belize….

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Mark Wickersham: Extractions, that kind of thing.

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Shaun Parkin: Yeah, extraction or something. And then, I was introduced as…

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Shaun Parkin: as the Sherpa. Like, Hall Road, or myself, was the Sherpa, you know, I'm a guide. I'm in that respect.

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Shaun Parkin: And admittedly, at the time, I was like, well, it's not quite as cool as being called the, you know, the bodyguard sort of person, but I really leant into that, which is, you know, the Sherpa, as it sort of intimates, is a guide, is someone there that advocates for clients, in this case.

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Shaun Parkin: family offices and families, and so I've lent relatively heavily into that, and … that's… that's the two businesses. So you've got Hall Road Investments, which I sit within…

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Shaun Parkin: Investment committees, predominantly within single-family offices, and then you've got, yeah, the Family Office Sherpa, which is the brand for the newsletter and the podcast.

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Mark Wickersham: Well, I love it. I think it's… I think it's great. One is it kind of catchy, but it's… I think it, you know, it also kind of talks about…

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Mark Wickersham: you know, somebody… a guide that shows the way, that has the, you know, the experience, that has kind of gone through that trail before, and that path, and has set the ropes, so… I think it's, outstanding. Obviously, given that you're…

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Mark Wickersham: role with, Hall Road Investments and around investment governance, so that they'll be a little bit more of our focus today. But want to be… before we dive directly into…

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Mark Wickersham: that subject, I'd love to just talk a little bit broader. You just had a recent…

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Mark Wickersham: podcasts and blog posts that I thought was really insightful and spot-on about some of the common mistakes that family offices make. Would you mind sharing some of the top ones that you've seen?

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Shaun Parkin: Yeah, so as you mentioned, it was…

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Shaun Parkin: It was an episode of the podcast.

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Shaun Parkin: that was actually requested, like, sometimes I get requests from people around, sort of, if you could cover, sort of, the things that we should…

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Shaun Parkin: you know, potentially look out for it, you know, and the title was the… you know, it's a bit listicle, it's a bit clickbaity, but, you know, the whole idea….

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Mark Wickersham: Yeah, true.

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Shaun Parkin: and…

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Shaun Parkin: And I'm sure there'll be another 10 that come up at some point, right? But it was sort of the 10, …

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Shaun Parkin: you know, mistakes that I see single-family officers make, and how to avoid them, or how to fix them, right? So, ideally, like I said, it's educational, so we're trying to circumvent a lot of these. I would say…

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Shaun Parkin: The… of the 10, the top 5 tend to be focused around… well, the number one being

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Shaun Parkin: And you know this just as well as I do, that families have… well, family offices have a propensity to… to use workarounds outside of… instead of… or instead of improvement. Like, that tends to be, like, a really…

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Shaun Parkin: a challenging piece, which is to say, we'll patch this up, we'll kick the can down the road a little bit, and we'll work around it. And that's not good for the family, certainly not good for the people that work in the family, because it's like, well.

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Shaun Parkin: I know that there's a potentially better way of doing this, but we continue to patch over it. And I think that's… like I said, the podcast was either to avoid it or to fix it.

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Shaun Parkin: And I think that's one of the best ones to be able to avoid, because once you get that challenge, once you see that something's not working properly, I think looking for solution rather than…

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Shaun Parkin: You know, and you had Ray, you know, D'Anizio on previously, and it was, you know, he's… he hates the words, you know.

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Shaun Parkin: Good is the enemy of great.

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Mark Wickersham: Yeah. Great as your good, sorry. And, you know, he doesn't like that term, but it's… it's….

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Shaun Parkin: It's because you do see so many workarounds in this space, so many people kicking that down the road. The other one is price over value.

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Shaun Parkin: people really… you know, in… for this podcast, I think it's incredibly important because it is around technology, and people look at headline figures, or they get a bit of sticker shock, and sort of go, well, that's… that seems like a really expensive version of

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Shaun Parkin: But we can use Excel, or we can use, you know, a really inexpensive version of it, and, you know, no one's going to question it. But the actual value of something is very hard for a lot of family officers to make that determination. So a lot of the work that I do is around, sort of, making sure that we…

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Shaun Parkin: we do that… that value prop, or that cost versus value add. And particularly on the infrastructure piece, I think it's an incredibly important one.

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Shaun Parkin: So I'll just go through two more. So the other one… the other one that always comes up is keeping things in their heads. Like, and I'm sure you've seen this, I'm sure everyone listening to this has seen the same thing, which is…

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Shaun Parkin: we understand how we're doing things. It's like, okay, well…

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Shaun Parkin: what's the… how is the decision made? How's the process made? What does the decision tree look like? What's the process? And things like that. Oh, no, it's all up here. No, we got it. Don't worry.

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Shaun Parkin: We've been doing this for a long time, this is how we make decisions, and that often works really well with operating businesses, especially, sort of, you know, operating businesses that are run off the back of an individual and make their good decision process. But just being able to articulate it and write it down

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Shaun Parkin: So the next generation can look at it, so executives can see it, so understanding… and really, that's the first time, a lot of the time, that people have articulated and written down things like purpose, things like investment policy, things like…

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Shaun Parkin: Risk expectation, what, you know, all these sorts of things. So, my idea a lot of the time is to try and get people to say, if someone came into this office that had no idea around what was going on, what would they say? And sometimes it's just a whiteboard in the corner, and I don't think that's enough a lot of the time. So, I think that's one of the other big ones.

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Shaun Parkin: And I think…

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Shaun Parkin: The last one I'll cover, and, you know, if everyone's interested, there's, you know, 6… there's 10 of them, right?

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Mark Wickersham: No, I'll put a link in the podcast, because I thought they were all great and spot on.

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Shaun Parkin: Yeah, so the last one which comes up a lot, and this is that they think that they're the only ones that have gone through these challenges before.

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Shaun Parkin: As much as everyone thinks they're a unique snowflake, and individually they are, and there's idiosyncratic and, you know, things about family offices that are unique, but very rarely in the work that I do, do family… are family offices going through something that someone hasn't gone through before. And this could be…

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Shaun Parkin: about the investment policy. It could be about

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Shaun Parkin: you know, engaging the next generation. It could be about the investments that they're doing, or, you know, the challenges they're having with distribution policy, all these sorts of things.

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Shaun Parkin: Everyone has had a version of that. And one of the things I love doing more than anything is introducing families to other families that I recognize as going, you know what? The challenge that you're talking about here is not necessarily something that you need my help with.

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Shaun Parkin: it's worth having the conversation with a family that's gone through exactly the same thing, and you can have a really meaningful, important, and valuable conversation with them, which can reduce the stress, reduce the risk, all these sorts of things. You just have to… you just have to ask the question.

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Shaun Parkin: So, maybe they're my top, what was it, 4 or 5.

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Mark Wickersham: Yeah, I think those are great. I do, you know, there is that saying, like, you've seen one family office, you've seen one family office, but to your point, they're not all unique snowflakes. There are certain commonalities that….

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Shaun Parkin: Actually, yeah.

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Mark Wickersham: Absolutely. Which is where I work, right? So I work in structure.

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Shaun Parkin: and structure… you've seen…

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Shaun Parkin: I've seen what good looks like, right? And I think that's what I'm trying to do when I talk to clients, which is we can move towards what good looks like, rather than trying to, you know, move around in the dark.

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Mark Wickersham: Yeah, there are best practices, right? And there's only so many ways you can do a capital call, right? So….

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Shaun Parkin: Yeah, and the technology in particular, yeah, I mean, technology's a great example, because

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Shaun Parkin: you know, we live in Australia, right, so there's some platforms that people think will work, and I go, well.

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Shaun Parkin: it's potentially not going to because of this and this, and the only reason I know that is because I've helped install it, or I've talked to a client that has that exact challenge. So, these sort of things can really help, for sure.

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Mark Wickersham: I do see that with the workarounds in particular, you know, the technical debt, I think that they kind of put off and accumulated. A lot of it's because they are a cost center, so it is a little bit, maybe more of a difficult conversation to have.

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Mark Wickersham: When you talk about some of these capital upgrades to modernize. To Ray's point, I love his quote there, his Rayism.

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Mark Wickersham: You can't out-software a bad process, right? So I think that's some of it. Even when they spend the money, they don't get the results.

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Mark Wickersham: That they want, and you see it, because they're not following these best practices,

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Mark Wickersham: Necessarily. So I think those are… those are great. Those are… thanks for sharing those, Sean. Let's be… now we kind of dive in on, your particular domain. Talk to me a little bit about the difference

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Mark Wickersham: Between governance and portfolio management, just to kind of set that kind of high-level framework before we kind of get into the nitty-gritty.

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Shaun Parkin: Yeah, for sure. I mean, the best way I can describe that is…

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Shaun Parkin: govern… and this is on the investment side. Investment governance is, if you can imagine, and not to kill a metaphor, but, you know, the investment governance are the rules of the game.

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Shaun Parkin: Right? They're the rules of the game that we're…

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Shaun Parkin: Trying to win, to a certain degree.

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Shaun Parkin: And portfolio management are the players. They're the ones that are, you know, investment management is the implementation, and for one of a better, you know, term, it's playing the game. So you've got rules that are set by the investment governance, investment committee, because the investment committee is an investment governance structure, it's not an investment management structure.

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Shaun Parkin: Then, the implementation of that is the way that those rules are… Articulated, interpreted.

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Shaun Parkin: And then implemented. And then there's constant…

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Shaun Parkin: again, not to belabor the metaphor too much, but, you know, there's referees, or there's umpires, or some version of it, which is, you know, a big part of what I do, which is not… I'm not there to question people's advice. That's certainly not my role, and I'm certainly not there to be a bottleneck for family officers seeking to invest the way that they want to invest.

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Shaun Parkin: It's more, we've set the rules of the game, we've set the rules of how we want to implement and manage the portfolio, or have the portfolios managed.

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Shaun Parkin: And now we need to monitor the efficacy of it. And blow the whistle.

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Shaun Parkin: If it's not. And, you know, that's… that's really a lot of the work that I do. I, you know, some version of a critical friend.

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Shaun Parkin: You know, that person that sits within the investment committee that is independent of the family, independent of the advisor, independent… I have no…

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Shaun Parkin: dog in the fight, as it were, in terms of transactions, or funds under advice, or administration. I get paid a retainer, and I'm paid to be an advocate. And maybe it circles back to that whole idea of Sherpa.

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Shaun Parkin: Because that's really what it turns out to be, which is my role is to be the guide and the advocate for the family as we face off against the greater financial services market in the investment team.

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Mark Wickersham: That makes sense. I think sometimes, …

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Mark Wickersham: family offices can be a little insular. Any group can end up with that group think you breathe your own gas, and you need that kind of outside perspective to kind of give you a little bit more clarity.

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Mark Wickersham: Let's talk about the technology needs for investment oversight. I know family offices can really struggle. I mean, they obviously have a multi-asset class portfolio with even hard assets and operating companies and alternative investments and marketable securities.

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Mark Wickersham: I can kind of struggle to bring that total portfolio view together. What are some of the…

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Mark Wickersham: technology capabilities that families need to be able to have clear investment oversight? Where do you see them falling down?

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Shaun Parkin: Yeah, so, I mean, part of my role is investment policy, like, building the investment policy, right, and the implementation of that. But it's very hard to be…

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Shaun Parkin: You know, from a… you know, from a…

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Shaun Parkin: the cadence that we develop, right? It might be a monthly investment committee or a quarterly investment committee. You need some version of

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Shaun Parkin: aggregation, and then being able to, you know, have a top-down view of the portfolio. So I think the biggest thing that I talk to families officers about is

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Shaun Parkin: how comfortable are we with the accuracy of the data? How easy it is to access? But really, a lot of the time, it's like, what's the output that we're looking for? And you've got multiple stakeholders there, right? So you've got the investment community.

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Shaun Parkin: Now, I'm… I'm a big fan of double-clicking on stuff, right? And I can be that person on the investment committee that's like, I'm not a massive fan of static reporting, which is that I get given it, and I don't get an ability to dig deeper into certain things that I see.

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Shaun Parkin: transactions, things like that. Get an understanding of, okay, you know, I see this, it looks…

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Shaun Parkin: you know, it doesn't look the same as I would expect it to do, so I need to dig into it, as opposed to waiting till the meeting, and then… then asking the investment management team, or the investment manager.

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Shaun Parkin: So, but then other family offices, investment communities are very happy with that. I know a lot of family members are really happy with static, okay, this is our balance, this is our portfolio, this is what the return has been, just being comfortable with the fact that the people that have been given the stewardship of the assets are actually performing as expected.

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Shaun Parkin: So, I would say there's different things for different stakeholders.

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Shaun Parkin: The… but ultimately, what we're really looking for is accurate.

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Shaun Parkin: And accessible data, in terms of what have we got, do we understand what we have, do we understand what the portfolio in total looks like, and can we dig into asset classes if needed?

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Shaun Parkin: And that's, you know, if you think about it from a bell curve perspective, especially in, you know, the families that I work with, we're not looking for portfolio management-style reporting, you know? We're not looking at, really.

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Shaun Parkin: you know, sophisticated… well, complex….

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Mark Wickersham: Distribution analysis, or something like that.

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Shaun Parkin: Yeah, we're not, you know, we're not looking for that. What we're looking for is what we're looking for, and a lot of the time, it's…

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Shaun Parkin: Do we know what the bank balance looks like? Do we know what the total P&L looks like? Do we know what our counterparties have done? Do we know what trades have been done to a certain degree? But a lot of people don't really want to get deep in that weeds, and I think that's the difference. It's sort of a bifurcation between

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Shaun Parkin: You know, those family offices that have an internal investment team.

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Shaun Parkin: And those investment team members really want to dig deeper into the analytics, because a lot of the time they come from a…

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Shaun Parkin: an institutional or a wealth manager or an investment banking sort of background, and they want to be comfortable that they've been tasked with managing a portfolio, and they need to be able to make sure that they can with the information they need. And then you've got those family offices that really outsource it.

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Shaun Parkin: And they don't necessarily need to get, like, an OCIO structure, or they might give a lot of it to their private bank, or wealth manager, or whatever that looks like. And that's less around, sort of, digging deep into the weeds of that portfolio. It's more, okay, what do we have?

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Shaun Parkin: what's happened over this period? What's…

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Shaun Parkin: happened over the year, over the six months, or something like that. So, it does really… it's determined by the principles and determined by the family office board and a few others, but, you know, my clients range, really… it's a broad church, and across all contacts that I have.

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Shaun Parkin: It's very different, but again, that's kind of the point, right? Which is, you know, people have different expectations for reporting, and unfortunately, a lot of the time, there's no silver bullet that sort of goes, oh, okay, we'll just…

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Shaun Parkin: We'll use that one, because that's perfect.

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Mark Wickersham: Have you seen the expectations shift over time?

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Shaun Parkin: Expectations for reporting structures, or…? Yeah.

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Mark Wickersham: Families' expectations around what information they should be able to see, and when they should be able to see it, and how they should be able to see it.

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Shaun Parkin: Yeah, I think now… I think in the… now that AI and some of those more natural language models

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Shaun Parkin: Can you hear me, Matt?

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Shaun Parkin: Oh, can you hear me now?

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Mark Wickersham: Oh, you're back. Let me re-ask you the question, and then we'll kind of get into it.

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Mark Wickersham: So, Sean, have you seen the family offices' expectations shift around reporting in terms of the experience, what's available, when it's available?

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Shaun Parkin: Yeah, I think with the…

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Shaun Parkin: now that AI and that sort of more natural language or ability to interrogate data in a more natural language way.

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Shaun Parkin: Nope.

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Shaun Parkin: Nope. I'm right back here.

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Mark Wickersham: Alright.

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Shaun Parkin: So we're stuck.

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Mark Wickersham: That's a really short answer, I don't….

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Shaun Parkin: Yeah, that's… Yup.

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Shaun Parkin: Okay, should we try again?

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Mark Wickersham: Nope.

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Shaun Parkin: Okay.

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Shaun Parkin: I think now that there's…

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Shaun Parkin: natural language that a lot of clients are using with the way they interact with, you know, ChatGPT, or Claude, or whatever it ends up being.

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Shaun Parkin: some of the platforms in particular are going quite heavily into that, or they're hearing that that's what they're doing, right? Which is that there's an ability now to just ask or interrogate

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Shaun Parkin: Quite complex data sets, and… and really give it sort of a natural language, sort of.

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Shaun Parkin: request, right? And I think what they've… people tend to forget about is you still need the data.

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Shaun Parkin: Right? You still need that data set. And so, I think there's almost a mismatch between the expectation of being able to get the information you need really, really quickly, but still being, you know, accurate, and reconciled, and all these sorts of things. So, I think there is an expectation that it should be easier.

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Shaun Parkin: And cheaper, and all these sorts of things.

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Shaun Parkin: … But I think they do forget the fact that, you know, there still needs to be…

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Shaun Parkin: robust reconciliation. There needs to be something there that's going to make sure that the information that's getting spat out, or the information that you're using, is accurate and, you know, usable.

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Shaun Parkin: And so, yeah, I think the expectations are kind of a little bit different, but…

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Shaun Parkin: I think in the region that I sit, which is APAC,

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Shaun Parkin: There is an expectation that reporting should be better.

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Shaun Parkin: And because there are some, sort of, quiet.

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Shaun Parkin: Noticeable improvements in reporting for some, and some are starting to use

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Shaun Parkin: More sophisticated platforms, and they're starting to get non-custodial reporting that looks very… not…

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Shaun Parkin: exactly the same, but quite similar to full custody reporting. They're sort of saying, well, maybe there is a better way of doing this. And to be honest, that's… there's quite a lot of demand there for that expertise, I think, for sure.

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Mark Wickersham: Yeah, I think you've seen a lot of progress around alternative investment data aggregation, that it's

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Mark Wickersham: starting to behave more like custodial data. I think there's an expectation that the clients want it to behave more like that. It's been a long.

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Mark Wickersham: pain point for family offices around this first-mile data aggregation that's been difficult for them to do. It takes a lot of resources, it's….

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Shaun Parkin: you know.

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Mark Wickersham: Just to get to the number, never mind to do something with that analysis, so that… it has been great to see those, you know, the onset of those type of solutions.

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Mark Wickersham: And I think AI is a big part of that. Without AI, I think, you know, the previous technologies just were not accurate enough to be able to… because it's so much document-based and unstructured data.

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Shaun Parkin: Yay!

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Shaun Parkin: And I think, yeah, I think those… those that have… those platforms and software providers that have got a heavy reliance on data, like, in particular on the, …

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Shaun Parkin: document storage and things like that are really benefiting from that. And those that plug in, right, those more open architecture type of platforms that can say, yeah.

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Shaun Parkin: We're here, and you can plug in your, you know, private market aggregation, and your passing tool, and you can plug this in, and you can plug this in, and they kind of create a really…

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Shaun Parkin: Sophisticated, thin line of…

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Shaun Parkin: aggregation, but it's, you know, it's all sort of plugging in. And then you talk to the, you know, the custodian businesses.

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Shaun Parkin: That honestly looked at family offices and just sort of went, well, maybe they're a bit too small, or they're not really….

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Mark Wickersham: They read to all institutional.

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Shaun Parkin: Yeah, and which is when I started Hall Road six and a half years ago.

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Shaun Parkin: it was off the back of the fact that single-family officers that were of decent size, especially for this region, were not getting service by custodians. And so we had to look out at the non-custodian. And then it was…

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Shaun Parkin: And it's almost flipped it now, which is, people ask, well, why don't they have a full custody kind of reporting structure?

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Shaun Parkin: And then you go, well, the reason is, is because we want to own it internally, we want to be able to plug it in, and we don't want to have to rely on our managers

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Shaun Parkin: you know, if we, you know, we would do an SMA or some sort of SEG account.

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Shaun Parkin: to then transfer the ownership from the private bank or the asset manager to the custodian. So it sort of, you know, you don't need to go through that next step of complexity.

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Shaun Parkin: But, you know, obviously, if you had everything in one spot, and everything was, you know, one single source of truth, obviously that's… that's what you would like, but, you know, that's not… not always the case. So, I think it's getting…

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Shaun Parkin: It's getting more interoperable.

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Shaun Parkin: I think that's probably, you know, it's more, you know, plug… I want to plug this in, I want to plug this in, I want pacing software here, I want, you know, cash flow here.

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Shaun Parkin: I want DPI, TVPI, all the good acronyms that we know and love, and we can kind of have those there, but we can customize the reporting structure for who we want it for, and stakeholders.

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Shaun Parkin: And so it's almost… yeah, I think, you know, if you talk about the trends and what it's getting better, it's becoming more malleable, and it's becoming more…

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Shaun Parkin: Interoperable, and all those…

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Shaun Parkin: Able words that, you know, make sense at the software level, and it's an exciting time, it really is. We're still a little way off, but I think we're getting there, for sure.

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Mark Wickersham: Yeah, and we're getting there, it seems like, really quickly. I like to say that the major trends that have been affecting family offices all begin with A, you know, it's around AI, APIs, and alternative investment data management have really.

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Shaun Parkin: Yeah, the reading of… I think the biggest change for me so far has been the fact that we can now rely on aggregators on the private market side, which you just kind of used to throw your hands in the air and go, we're going to have to manually input this, and there's no way around it. So we're starting to get some…

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Shaun Parkin: goods aggregators on private markets that can take the money… take the… take the data out of the portal, even if that portal's very manual.

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Shaun Parkin: And bring it in, and we don't have to touch it again. Which is, you know, obviously the best part of that.

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Mark Wickersham: I think, to the recognition of family offices, I think that the firms are now creating specific products for family offices, which is great. Previously, you had to adapt

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Mark Wickersham: software, maybe from an adjacent industry, and it wasn't quite right, or you see, like, to your point with the service providers and custodians, like, are they a retail client? And then if you're on the retail side of an institution, you're not getting things like custodial data and stuff that you'd expect on the institutional side, so I think firms are finally starting to figure out and tailor

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Mark Wickersham: To the offering, which is fantastic. Talk to me!

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Shaun Parkin: Well, I mean, I used to work for State Street, right?

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Shaun Parkin: you know, Space Tree Global Advisors, which is a big investment manager, but it's also a big custodial business on the bank side.

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Shaun Parkin: And so, you know, it's…

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Shaun Parkin: I've seen what that looks like from the asset owner, institutional asset owner pace. And we are starting to see those bigger businesses, like you said, I mean, across the

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Shaun Parkin: across the, board, looking at family offices and going, well, maybe this is an asset owner that we should be servicing. Maybe we should be putting some effort in. Because, you know, there's… there's a lot of them, so it's almost like this…

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Shaun Parkin: aggregation point now, where it might get institutional size, and there's, you know, there's trillions of dollars in assets within family offices, and if you start to capture some of that, I think that that'll be meaningful, for sure.

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Mark Wickersham: Yeah, I heard that the family office industry is now more assets than the hedge fund industry.

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Mark Wickersham: We, we just.

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Shaun Parkin: Please.

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Mark Wickersham: I remember at Fidelity, we started a family office services group, and we're…

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Mark Wickersham: Going through and trying to figure out what family offices were on the… were our clients already, and…

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Mark Wickersham: You'd run it… they'd often be on the retail platform with, like, some sort of cash management account, and you'd have to tell this, like, retail rep that's servicing account that that $10 million account is just their petty cash, and there's a lot more behind that client, and we need to move that account, and they'd be, like, you know, beside themselves when you do it, but you see these firms are finally recognizing it, putting a proper service model against it.

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Mark Wickersham: I do need a little higher white touch, …

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Mark Wickersham: white glove service level, because they are complex. But, let's shift gears a little bit, talk about change management, and certainly change management, I think, with technology is a significant problem for families. I see them where they…

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Mark Wickersham: They'll select the right technology or technology that should work, but they don't get the results from it, because often it's the implementation and the basic, you know… change is hard. It's a human thing. But, you had a great blog post on this one as well, the chief of getting stuff done, kind of like a chief implementer.

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Mark Wickersham: Talk to me about why that role's so important, and why, why change can be so hard for family offices.

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Shaun Parkin: Yeah, so that was, … that was inspired by some of the families that I… I work with, or have worked with in the past.

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Shaun Parkin: And… the idea is that there is… there's a… what you probably call a first delegation point, right? And…

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Shaun Parkin: When we… when there's a decision that's made within the office, However that decision comes about.

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Shaun Parkin: who's going to implement it, or, you know, what's the process that we go through? And what I found invariably was there was always one or two people that would be going, right.

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Shaun Parkin: I'm… they'll take ownership of it, or they'll be given ownership of it, because they knew that it would at least start.

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Shaun Parkin: You know, a big part of my business at the beginning was to provide consulting services and say, well, this is how you should do it. You know, this is my recommendation. And then it would sort of sit on someone's desk.

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Shaun Parkin: And you talk to them in years or two's time, and they go… and you go, what happened there? And they go, well, nothing happened. And because…

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Shaun Parkin: and this is why I changed my business model to be a little bit more of a person that sits within the office as more of a fractional person or investment committee member, because you can kind of move it along, right? Especially if the cadence is monthly.

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Shaun Parkin: But within those offices that don't have that, they have a chief of getting stuff done, and people go, well, that must be the CEO. So, no, no, the strategy is decided on.

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Shaun Parkin: Now we have to implement it. And a lot of the time, that's a chief operating officer or someone… a lot of the time, I see CFOs in that position, people that have multiple….

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Mark Wickersham: Staff, CFO….

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Shaun Parkin: But whoever… whoever can see across lines, across silos, you know, I think in particular. And the reason why I like the title is because it kind of implies that it's not the

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Shaun Parkin: there's not a specific title given to someone, but you know them if you… you will recognize them in your office. And the feedback for a lot of people from that blog and that podcast episode was.

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Shaun Parkin: Either that's me, I'm like, okay.

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Shaun Parkin: That's great. Or, I know exactly who that is. And the idea is that if they weren't in the office, then that was… nothing would get done. And I think a lot of the time, change within officers

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Shaun Parkin: is difficult, because… You… you have to give…

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Shaun Parkin: The space and time for someone to do it.

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Shaun Parkin: And a lot of the time, it's given to someone that already has a job.

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Shaun Parkin: You know what I mean? Like, there's this element of, oh, okay, well, this project, particularly on the reporting side, this is what I found a lot, which was, we're going to give it to the CFO, because the CFO owns the data. A lot of the time, if you're using Excel and stuff like that, that's, you know, because there's no fudging cash flow.

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Shaun Parkin: you know, investment reporting is kind of Fugazi, you know, it's a little pixie dusty, but…

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Shaun Parkin: No, there's no fudging cash flow. Cash is either coming in, or it's going out. There's no did it or didn't it, you know what I mean? Like, there's compliance, and there's government regulation, and there's audit, and there's all this kind of cool stuff. So that's why that person tends to hold the responsibility for the source of truth, right?

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Shaun Parkin: And so, what ended up happening was, they're like, oh, here's reporting, and they go, I am the CFO, man. Like, I've got a lot of stuff I gotta deal with. I'm not gonna have to deal with this as well.

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Shaun Parkin: And so, really, what ends up happening is people's capacity gets filled, and all the rest of it. So, what I always recommend for family offices is to get that started, is to get the person that starts things, to get a project in place, and get allocation of resources, and if you're not going to do that, then externalize it.

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Shaun Parkin: But the person that makes that decision to externalize it is the chief of getting stuff done. Because they're the one that goes, you know what, we're not going to do it in-house, we're going to kick the can down the road in 6 months or 12 months' time, we're going to be having the exact conversation that we're having now, and they realize that.

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Shaun Parkin: And they go, I'm going to be able to talk to the principal about this.

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Shaun Parkin: And to your point before, where they talked about line items, about expenses and stuff, they can articulate it really well, the value proposition of doing this.

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Shaun Parkin: They… they know that who to talk to in which way. They know how to…

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Shaun Parkin: bring people together. It's a really specific skill set. It really is, and it's hard to do. But it's… it's something that needs to… needs to be in the office. And you get very good consultants in the space that do that for people, which is they go, right, I'm going to come in, I'm going to dip in.

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Shaun Parkin: we're gonna get this done, I'm gonna allocate resources, because I know what look good looks like, you know, to that point before, and we're going to get some… and then once it's business as usual, we either… I'll bring someone in.

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Shaun Parkin: Or we'll hire for it, or we'll have some permanence here.

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Shaun Parkin: And I think that's… that tends to be the way that I've seen it work well.

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Mark Wickersham: Yeah, I think that this is a great role. I think, you know, family offices can certainly benefit from bringing in outside help and technology consultants, but there still needs to be that buy-in, that person that's internally that's going to be accountable for it and can make….

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Shaun Parkin: And we've all seen it, right? So, if you work with…

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Shaun Parkin: like, Big Four or, you know, a partnership-led kind of firm.

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Shaun Parkin: The difference when you get a partner that… Advocates for something.

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Shaun Parkin: You know, and drives it through, because they know how to navigate the complexity is very different to someone that's not… that can't.

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Shaun Parkin: You know what I mean? Like, you have to be a good navigator, but you have to… you know, there's all these things, and it's… it's always… it's always fun…

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Shaun Parkin: to find that person, especially, like, myself, who comes… I'm external to the office, right? And when you recognise them, and you go, well, that's… that's the person that I need to articulate my… what I reckon we should do to them, because that's going to get it done.

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Mark Wickersham: Yeah, and it's normally that person's busy, right? You want to get something done, give it to somebody that's busy. I think the other thing that you see with, with,

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Mark Wickersham: family offices, just firms in general when it comes to technology change. It's always going to take a little bit longer than you thought. It's always going to be more expensive than you thought. You need to build buffers into the….

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Shaun Parkin: Twice as long, is the way that I generally say. It's gonna take twice as long, yeah. Right, even on conservative estimates, it ends up, … It always ends up being about twice as long as we expect.

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Mark Wickersham: In the case, but … and you know, to try to find those early wins, I think, can be important, too, to get everybody on board.

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Shaun Parkin: Oh, look, and managing expectations, you know? There's… most of the way that I, you know, when I did the tech consulting piece, it was always, like, there's this first bit, which I'm going to be super annoying, because I'm going to be asking a lot of, like, for a lot of data and all that sort of stuff, or the people we bring in is going to, and there's going to be this really messy bit in the middle.

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Shaun Parkin: Where, to be honest, most people are going to go, what are we paying for here? Like, this doesn't look better. This doesn't look…

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Shaun Parkin: Like, an improved system.

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Shaun Parkin: And then there's gonna be this… this point…

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Shaun Parkin: Where everyone goes, oh, oh, okay.

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Shaun Parkin: And that's the fun bit, but there's this messy bit in the middle where everyone… and this is probably where some people throw… throw it out, or throw, you know, just throw their hands up and go, this is… this is terrible, I can't believe we're paying this much money, or we put this much time into it. But I'm like…

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Shaun Parkin: No, there's a process here. We're trying to, you know, you know this, right? It's about reconciliation of the data set, it's about…

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Shaun Parkin: replacing reportage that they're really comfortable with, with new reporting, which looks slightly different, but you still have… and this is why it's so important to have someone, a champion internally, or someone like a, you know, chief of getting stuff done, because they're like, no.

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Shaun Parkin: I know… I recognize which part of this pro… of the process we're in, which is this messy middle bit, but it's gonna get better. It's gonna be really, really good to get through this.

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Mark Wickersham: Yeah, technology's a… it's a messy business, and you kind of have to go through that… that messy middle step.

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Shaun Parkin: And no one likes change, Mark, right. No one likes, I like it this way, I like my Excel dashboard, or I like.

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Mark Wickersham: The way we always did it, right? We always did it this way, that is the harbinger of, you know, you need the change.

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Shaun Parkin: Yeah.

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Mark Wickersham: But then you'll get through the other side, and, you know, they couldn't imagine going back. You know, that's when you end up in a good state.

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Shaun Parkin: Oh, absolutely, yeah. And I think one of the great things about natural language versions of it means that we can get those people that would not normally be engaged with the process engaged.

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Shaun Parkin: like, you can see the way that they're interrogating it, you know? Just, what's my…

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Shaun Parkin: one-year return on this asset, and you start to see them train it a little bit, you know what I mean? And it's starting to the point where it's almost, like, monthly, it's gonna start pinging out really, really good information for them that they are easily accessible, and you just see them light up.

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Shaun Parkin: And that's what I love about operations, you know? Investments are great, but it takes, you know, 3, 5, or 7 years to figure out if you've made the right decision or not. But operations and technology, like, sometimes that can be instantaneous. That can be really a sharp relief between, you know, what was and what is. So, that's what I like that.

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Mark Wickersham: Yeah, especially with the technology today, as to your point, with AI and large language models, the ability to have, like, a conversation with your data? I mean, you don't… in some ways, you're not going to necessarily know how to use the system or how to write that report, but you know what information you want.

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Mark Wickersham: And if we could, you know, articulate that in natural language, that's extremely powerful.

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Shaun Parkin: Hmm.

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Mark Wickersham: I often wonder…

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Mark Wickersham: what will make family offices modernize, and I'm speaking in general terms, there are some very progressive modern family offices out there, but certainly due to the nature of being cost centers, too, that there tends to be, you know, the bell curve tends to be a little bit more towards the laggards.

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Mark Wickersham: And I just think some of the technology out there, especially if they're on legacy systems or not on systems, but re… you know, Excel-based, it's the opportunity to reduce your risk and to be able to enhance your overall, you know.

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Mark Wickersham: Posture, it's too great now with AI.

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Shaun Parkin: Oh, and engagement with the next generation is just a massive thing, right? Because it's very hard to engage with something you can't see, or an Excel spreadsheet, even if it is a really nice pivot table. You know, there is some… I mean, a big part of it is being able to customize reportage to people, and to… and to

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Shaun Parkin: Talk to them and understand what they're looking for.

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Shaun Parkin: and customize it to them, using the same data sets, right? Or have them articulate it themselves, which is even better. But, you know, that's… I think the next generation in particular needs it on their phone.

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Shaun Parkin: You know what I mean? We're not sending spreadsheets here. Like, the engagement of…

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Shaun Parkin: like, if I think about my kids, right? My son's 13.

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Shaun Parkin: And in 5 years' time, potentially, he would be a steward within the family office, if this was a family office, right? And you go, how are you going to see this data? And he'll go, well, it's got to be on my phone, because this is the only thing that I carry with me, this is the only way I interact with stuff. And if it's not, they're like.

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Shaun Parkin: Or that… that I'm out. You know what I mean? Like, I'm not… I'm not part of it. So, if you're not…

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Shaun Parkin: And look at… look around the room when you have family board meetings and stuff like that, and you look at the back of the room, and if they're just on their phone and they're not engaged with it, you have to, you know, you have to think about that. So I think, from a next-gen kind of point of view, it's… it's no longer, like, a good-to-have, it's a must-have, for sure.

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Mark Wickersham: They want it when they want it, and they want it on their device of choice, and their device of choice is their phone, for sure, absolutely.

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Shaun Parkin: Absolutely, yeah. Otherwise, they're just not gonna look at it.

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Mark Wickersham: It doesn't exist. Tell me about some of the regional differences in family offices in Australia and in the Asian market compared to the U.S. For somebody from the U.S, what I might not realize about the differences in those markets?

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Shaun Parkin: Oh, look, I think if anything, if you're from the US, you'd be probably surprised at how similar we are.

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Shaun Parkin: Honestly, in particular around investments. We manage a significant amount of assets that are US-based and US dollar-denominated. For an American, it's kind of interesting to sort of talk about

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Shaun Parkin: the fact that there is other currency out there, apart from the US dollar, is always one of those things. So I'd say the biggest difference is our hedging of currency. Like, the fact that we spend in Aussie dollar, or…

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Shaun Parkin: you know, whatever that ends up being, and… but a lot of our investment's in US dollar, particularly for the more sophisticated family offices, we have a significant amount of offshore investments, and we need to repatriate that, so currency is probably the biggest…

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Shaun Parkin: Difference. And, you know, if you speak to any…

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Shaun Parkin: American asset manager or someone like that that comes to Australia, the fact that there's a currency management piece that's very… at the front of it is probably the biggest difference, so hedging that currency, managing that risk.

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Shaun Parkin: Like anyone, there's a lot of home buyers here, you know, a lot of direct property, you know, I think the big difference, potentially, is that, yeah, I mean, we're very global-oriented. Australia and New Zealand, Asia Pacific, so if you're in Singapore and Hong Kong.

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Shaun Parkin: you know, Auckland, or Sydney, or Melbourne, or Perth, like me, you know, you are going to be very global, because you realize that, you know, there's not… not every asset class can be satisfied if you're looking for the best locally.

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Mark Wickersham: In the US, you can just be U.S.-focused, right?

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Shaun Parkin: Yeah, and look…

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Shaun Parkin: Yeah, I sit, you know, I sit on a US-based investment committee, and a lot of that is…

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Shaun Parkin: You know, there's… it's just…

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Shaun Parkin: there's not a lot… there's that exceptionalism piece, but there's good reason for that, you know? There's very deep capital markets, there's a lot of opportunity there. I think, if anything, at the moment, we're kind of looking at, you know, non-US investments.

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Shaun Parkin: a little bit more, potentially, than usual, and getting… and again, that brings in Eurodollar exposure, or, you know, different… different asset classes a little bit. I mean, private markets in particular, I think, are really… they don't have that depth that they do in the States, but yeah, we're starting to see a little bit more diversification across geographies, but…

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Shaun Parkin: Yeah, I think the thing that most people are surprised by, and this is why, to be honest.

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Shaun Parkin: I do talk to a lot of US

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Shaun Parkin: you know, my listeners… the listeners of my podcast is predominantly US, so maybe that gives you an idea of what that, you know, that, is not geographically specific. I think everyone kind of has the same challenges. We have…

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Shaun Parkin: Family dynamic challenges, we have, you know, intergenerational transfer, we have…

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Shaun Parkin: pacing and sequencing and risk and all these sorts of things that are all the same. I think there's no real… this is what I love about family offices, right? They're… they are unique.

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Shaun Parkin: to the family, not necessarily unique to the geography, and I… and I say that because I don't work in tax and legal, right? If you spoke to someone that works in tax and legal, it's a very different question. But from an investment point of view, and from a family dynamics point of view.

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Shaun Parkin: There's… it's not a lot of difference, it's very similar.

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Mark Wickersham: That's great. So, taking a look, …

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Mark Wickersham: I mean, there's been so much change that's going on, and I think the one thing you can say is that that pace of change is probably going to continue, but what does the future hold for the family office market? When you look out, what do you see?

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Shaun Parkin: I see, … I see an increase in…

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Shaun Parkin: I'm not sure if it's the right term, but that professionalization, right? In… in the fact, you know, when I first started Hallow Road, you know, you kind of…

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Shaun Parkin: Family office was a term well used, but you kind of had to explain it a little bit, but you don't have to anymore. If anything, people use family office as a marketing term for…

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Shaun Parkin: Yeah, and it's… it's probably gone all the way to the other side now, which is, oh, you know, we're family office, and look, I'm no gatekeeper here, but the nomenclature has probably been taken over a little bit, but…

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Shaun Parkin: I would say the biggest trend is going to be, and this is the conversation I have almost daily, which is…

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Shaun Parkin: I'm gonna look at family offices as a really viable career move now, and they're not necessarily people at the end of their career, or looking to sort of have a relatively, you know.

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Shaun Parkin: not cruisy, but certainly not as impactful, or whatever they might be when they were 20 or 30, or something like that. We're starting to see people move into this space and go, well, this is a real career opportunity. Like, this is… this is a career that I would like. And it makes a lot of sense, right? You get…

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Shaun Parkin: Coldface, like, you, you know, you get cold face experience with multiple assets.

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Shaun Parkin: you know, you get, really interesting, idiosyncratic kind of investments that you're going to have to be on the fly with. You have to deal with personalities a little bit more, and I think that's a challenge for a lot of people that maybe deal more with committee-based kind of investments.

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Shaun Parkin: But, yeah, the increased nature of… or the increase of people looking at it and going, you know what? I'm not going to wealth management, I'm not going into asset management, I'm going to go in… or asset owners, I'm going to go into the… into the family office space. And I think that's… that's predominantly what we're seeing. For firms like Hall Road.

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Shaun Parkin: there never really was that big… there is a bit of a more of a movement towards going, well, we need someone independent on the… in the office?

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Shaun Parkin: Independent of the family, independent of the suppliers, just to have that governance. And it kind of sounds a little bit boring to a lot of them, which is like, oh, really? Do we need someone that's sort of… are they going to be a handbrake? Are they going to be that person that says, no, it's like…

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Shaun Parkin: well, not a good version of it. A good version is, no, I understand that this is what you do. You might want to put 80% in one asset class, and that's… it's your money. You do with it as you want. But it's more around, sort of, what are the… what are the rules? Again, going back to that investment committee kind of conversation at the beginning.

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Shaun Parkin: Which is, what are the rules of the game that we're trying to play by? And that's a lot of the work that I do. I think there's a move in the wealth management side as well. I think there's this…

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Shaun Parkin: this in-source-outsource conversation that's happening, and I'm not sure if you're finding that as well, which is, what do we want to do ourselves, and what do we want to get other people to do for us? And now that firms are recognizing family offices as a commercially viable client base, all of a sudden, …

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Shaun Parkin: we are starting to see some options sort of come up. You know, do we want to use OCIO? Do we want to use, oh, you know, operations and technologies in outsource? You know, this terminology around what is a multi-family office, you know? This white space of…

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Shaun Parkin: We're not a private bank.

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Shaun Parkin: We're not a classic, sort of, mass market wealth manager.

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Shaun Parkin: we want to take on 10 to 15 clients of certain size, and we can customize, you know, that multi… corporate, multi-family office structure? I think we're starting to see a little bit of that, which is great, because I think that's the missing part for a lot of the…

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Shaun Parkin: the RFPs that I put out for wealth managers, you know, as we try to implement the investment policy, like, I'm trying to find that

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Shaun Parkin: That group that might be a little bit more…

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Shaun Parkin: looking to build a single-family office structure, but an outsourced version of it, you know, and I think that's kind of cool, and that… that lends into the, you know, the technology piece. You know, are they going to do a lot of the heavy lifting on that side, so that operations and tech outsourcing piece?

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Shaun Parkin: I think that's really interesting, and almost to the point where you go, what do we want to do?

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Shaun Parkin: Do we want to do the philanthropic pace?

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Shaun Parkin: And we want to do direct real estate, and everything else, we're outsourcing. And they go, okay, well, we can do that, right? And we can curate it, we can be a little bit thoughtful around it, so maybe that's… maybe that's the trend. The trend is…

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Shaun Parkin: We can… we can have that in-source-outsource conversation a little bit… with a little bit more thoughtfulness around the curation, because they're starting to get some suppliers there that are… and, you know, if we can have our home base managed by…

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Shaun Parkin: You know, again, thoughtful, Process-driven people that aren't trying to rip the fun out of it.

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Shaun Parkin: All the better.

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Shaun Parkin: Yeah, I think those are all really great points. I think in the States in particular, you're seeing that the multifamily office, the commercial multifamily office is really,

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Mark Wickersham: Kind of a winning business model you're seeing.

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Mark Wickersham: Firms wanting to offer more family office services, and that level of service is coming down to a lower tier, what's used to be just kind of the…

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Mark Wickersham: $500 million, a billion is now, you know, being offered through multifamily offices with.

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Shaun Parkin: Well, maybe that's the trend, right, Mark? Which is that that barrier to entry for people to build an office is getting lower. And… but then it goes back to the whole point, it's like, why do you want to have one? You know what I mean? And if you're fully outsourced, is it a family office, or is it just a portfolio that you're outsourcing? And to be honest.

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Mark Wickersham: Nope.

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Shaun Parkin: I don't care. You can call it whatever you want. I can call a $100,000 portfolio a family office if you want to, but you gotta have purpose, you gotta have some idea around what the expected outcome and returns are gonna be, and…

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Shaun Parkin: Go nuts!

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Mark Wickersham: what's your core competency? What do you want to focus on? And then, you know, try to find thoughtful folks that outsource to. I think, …

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Mark Wickersham: on that MFO side, too, you see them not only servicing individuals, but family offices, which can be really attractive. I mean.

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Mark Wickersham: Family offices need to offer a wide range of complex services, and even a large family office is a small business, right? 50 people would be a large family office, and you look at the portfolio of things that they have to manage and provide to that family.

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Mark Wickersham: You can't do it without outsourcing, so I think it's a really great point that…

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Mark Wickersham: Outsourcing's important. I think the other thing that you see with outsourcing, too, is that

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Mark Wickersham: There's, like, a continuum along most of the services, you know, with technology, that can be from, hey, we're gonna do it all, and you just log in, and you get it done, to, hey, we're just gonna do the data management and reconciliation for you, and then you take care of the rest, so…

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Mark Wickersham: Family offices have really fine-grained capabilities about where they want to outsource, how much they want to outsource to

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Mark Wickersham: Which I think is….

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Shaun Parkin: That's a big part of my role, to be perfectly honest with you, which is to try and figure out what we do ourselves, and what can we get someone else to do the heavy lifting on, to be honest.

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Mark Wickersham: I think there's a whole other podcast here, Sean. So, I like to end these podcasts on a personal note with, you know, three questions that have nothing to do with family office or wealth tech.

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Mark Wickersham: You're based in Perth, in Western Australia. What is something that people might not know about Perth? And if you're visiting Perth, what's the must-see? What's the must-visit?

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Shaun Parkin: Okay, so… the thing about Perth is we are the most isolated capital city in the world, but there's a small island off the coast of Perth called Rotnest, which was discovered by the Dutch, and the reason why it's called Rottenest is because there's a small marsupial called a quokka.

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Shaun Parkin: That is only found there, and in a small patch in… on the… on the south coast, but they're everywhere, so if you ever go there, they're… you're not, like, you're going to a place where you might not find them, they are literally everywhere. And if you Google Quokka.

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Shaun Parkin: you'll… it'll be the happiest animal in the world, or something. Everyone goes there for selfies and stuff. It's the cutest thing in the world. But you gotta go to Rotnest, you gotta see the quokkas, you gotta snorkel, you gotta go for a surf, stuff like that. The other thing that a lot of people really love about Western Australia in particular is it is massive.

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Shaun Parkin: And we have good surfing, good wine, good beer, good beaches.

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Shaun Parkin: You've added… Not a bad… you've added….

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Mark Wickersham: I love it. I've had a chance to do some backpacking in Australia after college. It's really a beautiful country. It is a diverse, huge country. It's as big as the continental U.S, is that?

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Shaun Parkin: Is it bigger? Oh, you've got another spot there. I think… I think it's… it's big. It's, you know….

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Mark Wickersham: size, it's….

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Shaun Parkin: Yeah, Western Australia is three times the size of Texas, I believe, but it's only got, like, it's got very little people. It's got 2.5 million people in it, so it's a lot of… a lot of people on the coast and a lot of nothing in the middle. It's beautiful.

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Mark Wickersham: You've had a chance to live in a few different areas of the globe. What's the most unique place that you lived in?

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Shaun Parkin: Probably out of Mongolia, so Mongolia as the country. So I lived there for 6 months in 2003,

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Shaun Parkin: So, for… well, I was a stockbroker in Sydney, and then I moved… I was moving to London, and … I managed to snail a contract working for a mining services company in the South Gobi Desert, about 80Ks north of the Chinese border.

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Shaun Parkin: called Oyotogoi, which is Turquoise Hill, which is a very big mine site now, but this was 03. Middle of winter, minus 40 degrees Celsius. At one point, my eyelids froze shut, which was a little bit disconcerting. But yeah.

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Shaun Parkin: one of the… one of the stranger, more beautiful, interesting countries that I've lived in. Winter in Mongolia, it's, ….

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Mark Wickersham: There you go.

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Shaun Parkin: Experience, for sure.

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Mark Wickersham: …

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Mark Wickersham: And just to finally wrap it up, what's one skill or hobby that you have that people might not know about?

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Shaun Parkin: Yeah, so I was challenged by this one. I don't really… I mean, the only thing that I… hobby that people are surprised about, for me, is that I really, really enjoy gardening. Like, love gardening. Like, my lawn is…

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Shaun Parkin: pristine, and I live in a very, very hot, dry climate, and we have very heavy water restrictions in summer, and it's… it's a challenge, but it's one that I enjoy. Trying to get things to grow and not die in summer in Perth is, …

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Shaun Parkin: is one of my… you know, when I can get through the summer, I'm a very happy person.

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Mark Wickersham: There you go. Alright, Sean, well, this has been fantastic. I really appreciate you coming on the show.

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Mark Wickersham: Thank you for sharing.

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Shaun Parkin: It's been wonderful. Thanks for having me.