We Create Strategies Around Your Personal Benchmarks.

We meet you where you are and face the future together.

We ask questions to reveal purpose-driven solutions, executing with an integrated team of our advisors and your existing people.

We create a plan to match your specific objectives and reveal the optimal life for you and your family.

Who We Work With

Pulliam works with approximately 40 families in total on bundled and unbundled plans. Our average client has been with us for 11 years.

We serve:

  • Mid-Tier Millionaire Families with $5 million to $30 million in investable income.

  • Ultra-High Net Worth Families with at least $30 million in investable income, specializing in those between $30 million and $100 million.

Who We Are

We employ a diverse range of backgrounds and expertise, including your certified public accountants (CPA), bookkeepers, and other skilled professionals and administrative staff.

We also routinely collaborate with professional advisors across fields like tax law, business law, employment law, trust services, and philanthropy.

Black circular logo with a white stylized 'C' and 'F' inside.

John Pulliam

Managing Director and Founder, PFO Senior Financial Advisor

John grew up in a family of stockbrokers and entered the industry himself in 1990, originally with Smith Barney and then Merrill Lynch, where he led one of the firm’s top 25 branches. In 2006, John began serving as a senior member of the Pulliam Group, and in 2011, he joined UBS, where he served C-suite executives and owners of closely held businesses in 14 states. Today, John leads Pulliam Family Office which he founded in 2019 to maximize the return, impact, and legacy of his clients’ wealth—for generations to come.

John graduated from California Polytechnic State University with a B.S. in city and regional planning and went on to attend the Executive Education Program at Harvard University in 2010. He and his wife, Marlo, and their children, Trent, Tyler, and Logan, live in Crested Butte, Colorado, and Plano, Texas.

John’s Top Five

  • What you count, counts

  • Anti-fragile

  • Untouchables

  • God / bride / pride

  • Adventurism, not tourism
John Pulliam in a dark blue pinstripe suit with a white shirt smiling and posing against a gray background.

Our Values and Approach

We are not simply about managing your money. We work to ensure you have the freedom and comfort to achieve your own independence, fulfillment, and joy.

We do this by:

  • Tailoring a service package to your specific family needs.

  • Merging our multidisciplinary team with your attorneys, accountants, investment professionals, and personal assistants.

  • Identifying leading third-party experts to meet a broad range of needs, including consultants on family money issues and core values.

Pyramid infographic with six levels showing a hierarchy of personal development strategies. From bottom to top: Managing Money, Area of Impact, Achieving Goals, Peace of Mind, Fulfillment, and Joy, with descriptions for each level.

Our Approach To Planning

Our approach is an amalgamation of three key areas of advisory services—managing money, impact planning, and achieving goals.

Managing Money

We start by creating the building blocks for your future. We create a strategy for wealth allocation, not asset allocation. Your family’s unique creed—plus, answers to an important set of questions—will inform your investment strategy and liquidity approach, which fall into three buckets:

  • Safety—preserving your lifestyle

  • Market—maintaining your lifestyle

  • Aspirational—enhancing your lifestyle

Achieving Goals

We guide our approach with a customized list of priorities that outline your goals. You’re kept in the loop through a quarterly reporting process that details your progress toward these objectives, with time and consideration to re-ordering and realigning activity to your purpose.

In our opinion, wealthy families tend to take one of three shapes. They practice avoidance, holding onto their heritage middle-class culture. They practice assimilation, embracing a new culture of wealth and abandoning their past selves. Or, they practice integration, blending the old life with the new, stepping into a fresh identity and set of behaviors and attitudes.

We push you toward the third option, constructing an integration framework that fills your proverbial box, embraces adversity rather than runs from it, chooses values over temptation, and enhances the core relationships of your life. When it all comes together, you’re left with confidence and reassurance, overtaken by occasional waves of fulfillment and joy—evidence of a life well-lived.

Areas of Impact Planning

To follow their purpose and potential with intention, families must connect where they came from to where they’re going. We help you step into your future by exploring nine areas of impact.

  • Wealth has become synonymous with finances, but the origins of the term speak to well-being that extends beyond material resources. We help you re-frame money as a tool to inspire peace of mind and fulfillment.

  • We can’t move forward without understanding what got us here. Our goal is to create better frameworks with faster feedback loops. We can’t do so without first assessing your family capital, in four parts:

    • Financial capital: Not only your collection of assets, but your objectives for it.

    • Social capital: The way your family members engage with society and connect with their communities.

    • Intellectual capital: How family members learn and interact, including decision-making, conflict resolution, and mentorship.

    • Human capital: Who individual family members are and what they’re called to do.

  • The ideal portfolio provides three things: protection from anxiety, a high probability of maintaining financial standing, and the possibility of substantially moving upwards along the spectrum of wealth. Accordingly, we assess three dimensions of risk:

    1. Personal: The risk required to protect yourself from the possibility of a dramatic decrease in lifestyle.

    2. Market: The risk required to grow with your wealth segment, after tax and inflation, so you can maintain your lifestyle.

    3. Aspirational: The risk required to break away from your wealth segment and enhance your lifestyle.

    To piece together the right risk and investment picture for your family, we first need to understand your leanings toward passive (inexpensive) and active (expensive) investments. Investors can’t take the same actions as everyone else and expect to outperform. We engage to understand how you’re allocated to:

    • Liquid, unleveraged, long-only active management (most difficult to outperform)

    • Illiquid, private, mispriced assets (can offer premium performance)

    • Leverage (provides multiples of outperformance on upside and downside)

    • Velocity (identifies short-term mispriced assets, trades monthly)

    • Concentration, specialization, and active share

  • For enterprise families, success is in raising kids who meld their own individual identity with that of the family, and who are responsible and independent—never entitled. That takes deep thinking on tough questions. How much money should you leave your children, and when? How can you avoid the negative impacts of giving to family members? How can you encourage financial literacy? We help you answer these questions and fold your family strategy into your overall goals and objectives. The guiding principles:

    • Self-sufficiency breeds joy and freedom.

    • Fulfilling work is a lifelong gift.

    • Having money doesn’t mean having to spend money.

    • If we spend, let’s spend well.

    • Cultivate gratitude for opportunities.

  • Families should promote a consistent approach to making decisions, even as the involved parties will vary by the occasion. Transparency, accountability, and participation are key. We help you master the art of the family meeting, understand how to start all manner of conversations, and improve overall communication.

  • Families that wish to preserve a major operating business beyond the founding generation take on added challenges—but the rewards can include a greater sense of identity, commitment, collaboration, and impact.

    Doing it successfully takes investing resources not only in sustaining wealth, but in developing the skills and capabilities of the new generation. We bring in expert advisors, as needed, to help with all aspects of this planned transition.

  • Your family is your greatest legacy. But the impact you make on the greater good will live on, as well. Our path to strategizing your giving begins with an exploration of four key areas:

    1. Charity: Providing resources directly to individuals or organizations in response to short-term needs (often rescue or relief).

    2. Philanthropy: Moving beyond the short-term and giving to causes that look to improve long-term outcomes—often targeted at a specific population, problem, or place.

    3. Strategic philanthropy: Giving with a focus on the root causes of societal issues, placing problems within the context of larger systems.

    4. Impact investing: Investing in companies, organizations, and funds with the dual-purpose of generating social or environmental impact alongside a financial return.

  • To the extent that it’s meaningful to a situation or individual, we bring in counselors, coaches, and facilitators to grant guidance on a range of issues.

  • Our end goal: Help you chart your own path.