(As reported in South County Magazine in March 2012)

By: Betsy Sanz

When Mark Van Mourick was a senior vice president at Smith Barney, he was responsible for the financial futures of no less than 1,200 investors and their families. Yikes.

Mark is smart and hardworking (eight years after graduating from USC he reached the rank of SVP at Smith Barney and was their leading retail stock broker in Orange County), but ultimately he lived life by his conscience – and he knew he wasn’t serving his clientele the way they needed to be served. Hard earned wealth, a family’s peace and comfort, the opportunity to impact the world through giving; these are no small things. Mark had worked into a position to manage critical life investments for many families, and he began to believe that they warranted more than a phone call every once in a while and a monthly check for more or less than average.

Something else was possible. Mark looked at famously wealthy families and recognized that they not only had hard-hitting finance and investment managers for every phase of their careers, but knowledge-able advisors for every facet of their lives.

It was “the family office,” where the family’s money was managed like a business, where every investment was customized to the particular priorities and concerns of the family, and where personal pursuits and interests were supported as seriously as business ventures. That’s what Mark wanted to provide for his clients: a family office to advise every part of life.

READ MORE: 03-01-2012 South Coast Magazine Optivest Family Office Article

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