The first thing visitors notice on the firm's website is the tagline. Think bigger. Try harder. Go farther. The second thing — usually after some scrolling — is a smaller line that gets less attention but matters more inside the firm than the tagline does.
Drive. Diligence. Dedication.
Those three words are our operating values. They pre-date Motivant. They were the operating values inside the laboratory services company I helped scale past one-hundred-fifty million dollars in revenue, the operating values inside the telecommunications business I ran before that, and they will be the operating values inside whatever comes after Motivant. They are not branding. They are how we run businesses.
Drive — the cost of conviction
Drive is the value most easily confused for hustle culture. It is not. Drive in our usage means the willingness to be the most committed person in the room about what should happen next, then to be the one accountable for it happening.
This matters in a family office because there is no fund timeline forcing a decision. There is no LP letter due in eight weeks. The temptation, in a structure like ours, is to drift — to study a portfolio company forever, to debate an acquisition forever, to optimize a quarterly model forever, all without anyone in the room being the person who decides.
Drive is the antidote. In every operating meeting we run, on every portfolio company, the question we ask is: who is the driver. Not who is the lead. Who is the person whose week revolves around this thing actually moving forward. If the answer is nobody, we have a problem before we have a strategy.
The firm has principals across diagnostics, regenerative aesthetics, real estate, restaurants, and hospitality. The unifying instinct across those very different businesses is not the sector. It is whether somebody in a chair somewhere is driving.
Diligence — operating diligence, not transactional diligence
The word "diligence" in our world has been hijacked by transactional usage. Due diligence on a deal. Quality of earnings. Market sizing. Reps and warranties.
We mean something different. Diligence in our usage is operating diligence — the work of actually understanding the business in front of you, week after week, after the deal closes and the lawyers go home.
Operating diligence is what most acquirers skip. The model gets built, the deal gets done, the press release gets published, and then six weeks later somebody realizes nobody is reading the operational reports because nobody designed an operational reporting cadence. Diligence in our usage is the discipline of designing that cadence on day one and then sitting through every meeting on it for as long as the firm owns the business.
Diligence is the discipline of designing the operational reporting cadence on day one and then sitting through every meeting on it for as long as the firm owns the business.
The advantage of being a family office is that the timeline is indefinite. The disadvantage is that if you are not careful, the indefinite timeline becomes an excuse not to look closely. Diligence is how we keep looking closely.
Dedication — what an indefinite holding period requires
Dedication is the value that most explicitly distinguishes us from a fund.
A fund holds for five to seven years. A family office holds indefinitely. That sounds like an advantage until you sit with it. An indefinite holding period requires a kind of operating commitment that most institutional investors are not built for: the willingness to keep showing up year fifteen the same way you showed up year one.
Dedication, in our usage, is that commitment. It is the reason we structure ourselves around principals who actually operate inside the businesses, not principals who watch from a board seat. It is the reason we resist co-investment structures that would dilute the operating clarity of who is responsible for a given holding. It is the reason every principal at the firm — Sanjiv, Sarah, Sal, Jeff, me — is named on at least one portfolio company's operating chart, not on an investment committee.
The Beverly Hills Rejuvenation Center acquisition we closed in October is the most public expression of this value. Sarah did not become BHRC's CEO because the firm needed somebody titled CEO. She became CEO because, in the operating posture we hold, an acquisition is a commitment to operate. If the firm is not willing to operate, the firm should not buy.
How these three actually show up in the work
I will be writing more on this site about what these values look like applied inside specific businesses. The integration playbook for a new portfolio company. The operating-finance discipline behind the real-estate book. The diagnostics-to-protocols-to-delivery thread that runs through our life-sciences stack. The franchise relaunch of BHRC.
In each of those, you will find the same three values doing the work. A driver in a chair. A diligence cadence on the calendar. A dedication to seeing the business operate well for the next twenty years, not the next twenty months.
That is what we are building, and how. More to follow.
