W. Allen Morris is the chairman and CEO of the Allen Morris Co., a real estate developer and a Florida-based Realtor. He spoke with Crain Currency about the three pieces of advice he gives to next-gen family members and the business lessons he has learned from driving race cars and flying planes.
You're known for mentoring a lot of next-gen leaders and future leaders. What are the three key pieces of advice that you give them?
The most important things that I focus on with next-gen leaders are what I call the three C's. The first “C” is commitment. Make an outrageous commitment to becoming more knowledgeable, more expert, more conversant on that particular topic that you're interested in — go after it, in other words. Go all in, if that's what you're interested in.
Second is creativity. Don't get locked in a box of only one area of interest, because all the diverse things that I have learned in my life, I know, have all contributed to my ability to be creative. Studying the architecture in unusual places like Switzerland, as well as the famous places like Paris and London and Singapore, I always stay interested in wanting to learn new things because it is my creativity.
And the third is communication. To learn how to be a good communicator; to work at it; to get training in it; to study communication; to study how to write, how to communicate in writing; how to communicate verbally and how to communicate one-on-one and how to communicate with an audience. Because you can have people that are brilliant and expert at what they're committed to, but nobody understands what they're talking about.
You have a very substantial real estate empire. What are the trends you see in that sector this year?
I think we're going to see increased office absorption; creative office spaces can continue to be the highest in-demand products at the highest price. By the way, with all those other cost increases, we ended up increasing our rental rates by, like, 50% of what we perform at. Our headquarters building in Miami and our other major office building in Orlando are all at 98% lease, so I feel really grateful for that.
Part of it is being very tenant-oriented. Our mission is a really simple mission. It's just three words: inspire, impress and improve. We want to inspire people with every building that we build. We want to impress them with the excellence of their experience, whether they're a resident in our apartments, a guest in our hotel or a tenant in our office building or a visitor to those properties. And we want to improve the lives of everyone we touch.
What would you advise, let's say, a next-gen family office member who wants to get into real estate for the first time?
I think that there's nothing that compares to mentorship — it's the only way of really learning. And I think it's important to start at the bottom and learn the nuts and bolts and the basics.
When I came into the company originally, my father put me in the accounting department doing spreadsheets and cash flow projections, big green pages and a really big eraser. Back in the days before it was all digitized. So I learned the financial fundamentals and the accounting fundamentals. And then I worked in property management. I worked as an on-site building manager — fixing air-conditioning drip pans that were making a mess and working with locksmiths to change locks, and cleaning companies and landscapers and dealing with all that; to moving into office leasing and brokerage. And then I went to went to work in our development operation. I discovered that that's what I really loved.
I love creating and being able to paint on a huge canvas, building new buildings that would hopefully inspire people and hopefully be an asset in the community where we build them and not be an eyesore.
I wanted to ask you about your 2022 book, All In: How to Risk Everything for Everything That Matters. I can imagine that's a scary prospect for many family office members who can be risk-averse, because they're trying to preserve their family's legacy. How do you help or how would you advise them to overcome those fears?
I don't suggest that you risk everything, but when you do step out of your comfort zone, it feels like you're risking everything. It feels uncomfortable. It felt scary and uncomfortable when I stepped into residential development for the first time in, like, 2013. I had never done any residential development, only office buildings and industrial and retail. And, you know, our first project was a 58-story luxury condominium on Brickell Avenue and a luxury apartment building in St. Petersburg. And both of those worked out really well because we had some really talented people working on it.
In the book, it's primarily about risking stepping out of your comfort zone in your personal life, to take a look at things that you may not have ever looked at in your personal life — your personal relationships, your personal priorities. And the reward is that it can be hugely transformative, especially if you've come to a place in your career where you've lost the joy of what you're doing.
I know you are a race car driver and love extreme sports. What lessons have you learned from those experiences that can be applied to business?
I'm a scuba diver and I drive race cars, but my real love is flying. There's a lot of similarities in flying and running a business in a highly competitive environment. They say that flying is just hours and hours of sheer boredom with an occasional instant of stark terror. I talk about one of those instances of stark terror in my book, where I had a catastrophic engine failure right after takeoff one night with six passengers on board. And what happens is, when you are prepared, when you've done your homework, when you stay on top of things, then when things go wrong, the number-one thing is you don't panic. Panic kills people.
When, for instance, we had the financial meltdown of 2007-2008, a lot of people panicked. A lot of people in real estate abandoned their properties. I had just announced a new major development. I had just gone long, closed on the purchase of the best development site in Coral Gables. And everybody defaulted on me. So I want to remember not to panic and just say, “OK, how are we going to get through this?”
Join the movement of health, wealth and legacy

By LINDSEY SICHEL RUBINSTEIN, JOHN SAMUELS and MARISA MESSANA
Family offices are increasingly investing in the health and wellness sector, driven by next-generation interests, advancements in technology, rising awareness of mental health issues and the needs of an aging population.
The market is expanding at a remarkable pace. For example, the global market for body, mind and energy healing was valued at $78.5 billion in 2023 and is projected to grow at an annual rate of 26.2% through 2030, according to a recent report by Grand View Research.
Between July 2023 and June 2024, family offices invested in 391 startups within the LOHAS (lifestyles of health and sustainability) and wellness sector, as noted in PwC’s 2024 Global Family Office Deals study. This marks the first time the sector has been featured in the report, underscoring its growing significance.
Recent activity illustrates this momentum. The Singapore- and Hong Kong-based Raffles Family Office led a funding round for WhiteCoat Global, a digital health care provider specializing in wellness programs. Meanwhile, Tom Brady’s TEB Capital Management relocated its family office to a Miami building designed with spalike wellness amenities including The Well Spa, which features offerings such as craniosacral therapy and a meditative “sound dome.”
This surge in interest underscores the dynamic role that family offices are playing in shaping the future of health and wellness.
The personal perspective
For some family office investors, the issue is personal.
Alex Enchin, who grew up in Toronto and worked as a technology entrepreneur, redirected his life when his mother started struggling with mental health challenges. He took her to many doctors, pharmacologists and psychiatrists and came away “shocked at the inadequacy of what’s available and how these professionals have almost no tools to actually deal with these issues and are almost totally dependent on prescribing pharmaceuticals that really don’t work for the majority of people.”
That put Enchin on a quest to explore other options, such as psychedelic therapy. After his first session six years ago, he “walked out a different version of the person who walked in” and realized “this is going to change millions of people’s lives, and I want to help people get access to this in a high-quality way.”
Enchin and a partner bought 2,200 acres in southwest Costa Rica and built a retreat center, which eventually led to his offering a private psychedelic experience and private curated experiences. Among his clients was a Canadian billionaire who wanted to bring down six of his best friends.
“He had never done psychedelics, and we set up this three-night program for him,” Enchin said. “And he said to me when they were leaving, ‘I’ve done everything you can do, and this was the number-one experience of my life.’ ”
It was also personal for Sterling Snead, a principal in the Oklahoma-based S&S Global Family Office, who started on a journey of transforming digital health out of frustration that he couldn’t get his special-needs son’s “patient data in one place in order to share and collaborate with everyone what was going on.”
That led him to start the Self Research Institute, an organization building a protocol that lets humans decide what personal data to share with health and banking services, among others. The goal is to “create a universal patient record” so someone can be in, say, France or Tanzania and have a record that any doctor can consult. It can also result in better drug trial collaboration, better pharmaceutical training and better outreach of care in remote areas.
“You could basically have access to health care at a level that you never could before,” Snead said.
Overall, he said he’s encouraged that more family offices are switching from a focus on longevity to preventive care because “longevity is kind of a rich person’s game,” whereas preventive care has a much broader impact across the world.
“Family offices can be leading the way and helping create a blueprint for other individuals across many different lifestyles and geographies,” Snead said.
Snead’s advice for those investors interested in applying artificial intelligence in preventive health care is to understand the four steps of data: descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive.
“I’ve seen so many companies buzzing around prescriptive AI for your health care,” he said, “but they’re not even doing level-one descriptive: What’s going on right now?”
Josh Ploch, the founder of the Tulsa, Oklahoma-based Ploch Family Office, said he focuses on “anything that would fall into that betterment category,” such as health and wellness as well as affordable housing initiatives. “Anything we can do to help close the gap, especially socioeconomically,” he said, pointing to an almost 20-year difference in life expectancy from North Tulsa to South Tulsa, which is just 10 miles away.
The Ploch Family Office has invested in Clear, a startup that focuses on injury prevention, and a Norwegian group that concentrates on health optimizing — “non-Big Pharma solutions to health challenges that have been around for a long time,” Ploch said.
Ploch noted the growing distrust in Big Pharma and the resurgence and focus on alternative medicine such as homeopathic treatments.
“I think everybody in that space is pretty excited about the opportunities for things like nondrug solutions.”