Mohamed Elzomor — a co-founder of Nines, a household and estate management software platform — spoke with Crain Currency about how the company addresses the challenges of the “wealth spiral” and explores best practices for managing household risks.
How did your time as a personal trainer to high-net-worth individuals help lead to your starting Nines?
When you achieve a certain level of wealth, you expect to live with ease. But in reality, most high-net-worth individuals and families end up facing what we call the wealth spiral: As wealth grows, so, too, does the complexity of managing your homes, your assets and your personal life. No one wants to feel like they’re running a business in their homes, but it often feels this way without the right structure in place. My co-founder, Jacco de Bruijn, and I founded Nines with the goal of helping people live the life they imagined.
Before we had the idea for Nines, I spent a decade as a personal trainer coaching CEOs, billionaires, royal families and celebrities. As a trainer, you have a very interesting relationship with your clients — you tell them to get on the floor and give you 20, when they spend the rest of the day leading 50,000 employees. That’s a vulnerable position for them to be in.
They share things with their trainers that they don’t share with anyone else, and you learn a lot about the way these ultra-high-performing individuals think. And what I saw over and over again is that they’re just people, with all of the same problems as everyone else. But because their world is bigger, their problems are often bigger as well. You might think they’ve already made it, but in their own eyes, they haven’t, and they’re working with you because they have a goal. So it’s important to lead with empathy and understand where they’re coming from, which is what we do at Nines as well.
Who are the varying clients of Nines, and how does their usage differ?
More than 250 families, family offices and luxury-property management companies use Nines to manage their properties and everything that comes with them, from daily housekeeping tasks and dining inventories to annual property maintenance and major renovation projects. Most of our clients turn to Nines because they’re tired of digging through spreadsheets, binders and emails to find the information they need; and they want to bring a level of professionalism, security and ease to their household management. Our household management software gives them one place to manage all their properties, people and projects, so they can simplify the complexity.
Our power users are the people who feel the frustration of managing properties. That might be the estate manager who oversees seven properties and a full team of household staff and vendors, who desperately needs more hours in the day. It might be the family office exec who wants more insight into what’s happening across a multi-generational estate, or the luxury property manager who oversees properties for 50 different clients in Aspen. Or, it might be the tech founder who just bought two new properties, who needs a go-to place for communicating with the housekeeper and the nanny, managing the family calendar and keeping track of everything going on.
Each account is unique in how they share information, and because we have layered permissions, we can look very different to different users. For example, on one account, the estate manager might see a bird's-eye view of everything, the housekeeper sees only her own task list, and the principal sees a focused view of the projects they care most about. The goal is to give everyone exactly the information they need, without unnecessary distraction, so you can create efficiency, accountability and clarity.
What was behind your early decision to pivot Nines from staffing to software?
Getting back to the concept of the wealth spiral, the first step for many families who want to calm the chaos is to hire household staff. At Nines, we started with this as well, hiring private service professionals, placing them in clients’ homes and managing them remotely. In the process, we noticed an underlying challenge across all of the households we served: Without the right support systems, both the staff and the families were set up to fail.
A family might hire a housekeeper, and within weeks it doesn’t work out. They have to start all over again and end up in a constant state of hiring. Rapid turnover happens because of a mismatch in expectations. Families think they’re hiring a housekeeping expert, so she should understand what’s expected. But each household is different; every family has different preferences; and every home has different fixtures, surfaces, assets, etc. Instead, that new staff member needs an understanding of the family’s needs and preferences, a detailed job description and a clear set of standards and expectations.
The homes of many of the world’s most successful people are in disarray, operating without any structure or guidance and running on a mix of Excel spreadsheets and binders that no one has the time to read. They would never run their businesses this way, and yet because there wasn’t previously a better system, everyone’s been living in chaos trying to figure it out on their own.
We pivoted from staffing to tech to build that better system, and we drew insights from our past staffing clients as well as hundreds of other ultra-high-net-worth individuals, family offices and private service professionals to design a household management software platform specifically tailored to their needs.
What are common home management struggles you hear from wealthy families?
For so many families, home is central to their idea of success. Home is a reflection of who you are and what you’ve achieved, a safe haven to relax and unwind and be your most authentic self, a way to enjoy everything you’ve worked so hard for, a place where you can focus on what matters most — in a lot of ways, it’s the setting for the why behind your financial goals.
But if you’re home isn’t fulfilling your vision — whether your air conditioning is out, or you simply don’t feel the way you want to feel in your free time — that's a problem. We hear a few of the same questions over and over:
- We just want to live a normal life. How do we manage all this without everything becoming so complicated?
- We have all these people here, but what are they doing?
- We thought our lives would get easier — so why is everything actually getting harder?
We’ve gotten calls from homeowners who are distressed because their house manager left after 10 years, taking a decade of historical knowledge about their properties with her. Once, we heard from a psychologist who wanted to refer Nines to his clients, so they could focus their sessions on childhood trauma rather than household maintenance frustrations. It all stems back to a disconnect between expectations and reality, and the way to bridge that gap is to put the right structure and guidance in place.
What tips do you have for effectively hiring and maintaining household staff?
If you want to hire and retain the best private service professionals, you have to have the right systems in place. It starts with a professional, purposeful approach to household management. One of the most common mistakes families make is managing their homes and their household staff too casually — which makes sense, since this is their own most casual, comfortable environment. But if you standardize your hiring process, professionalize job descriptions, follow HR best practices, and pay fairly and competitively with benefits, you’ll reduce risk and minimize turnover.
Next, it’s critical to give staff the guidance, tools and support they deserve. The goal of any private service professional is to make their principals’ lives easier, but they can’t read their principals’ minds. Give staff members a road map and all the tools they need to provide the best possible service, including documented preferences, task lists and maintenance calendars, clear priorities and reporting lines, regular feedback, professional development opportunities, and a centralized household manual where staff members can find guidance and answers to questions — ideally, one where you can control which pieces of information each person is allowed to see.
Can you share the story of how you trained billionaire Marc Lore, a Nines investor, to race NFL legend Jerry Rice and how your relationship with Lore has evolved?
Marc Lore hired me to get him ready for the 40-yard dash at the NFL Combine — which is not a typical request I get from clients. He had run it before in 5.3 seconds, which is pretty good, but he wanted to get faster. Playing football in the NFL as a wide receiver had been my own dream growing up, and I had given up all my clients twice to go to speed camp and train alongside NFL players. So I had trained for the 40-yard dash for months, and I could relate so strongly to his goal.
Then, two months into training, he made a quarter-million-dollar bet with Michael Rubin [founder and CEO of Fanatics] that he would beat Jerry Rice in the 40-yard dash. Eight months later, Marc beat Jerry Rice by half of a tenth of a second.
Two weeks later, COVID hit, and my training business went from 40 clients to two overnight, and one of them was Marc. We were training virtually, talking about the challenges he was facing, and this opportunity presented itself. He was living that wealth spiral, and he wanted life to be easier. The next day, he introduced me to my co-founder, de Bruijn, who has a background in tech and startups, and we set out to solve this problem.
Are there any additional features in the road map for Nines?
As we look ahead to 2025, we’re excited to introduce connected payments and syncing with platforms like QuickBooks to make it easier to keep track of household budgets and spending. We’re also actively exploring use cases for AI, but we’ll only introduce solutions that are aligned with our high standard of security.
Beyond that, we’re constantly talking to our clients about how they’re using Nines and iterating based on their feedback. We just launched a robust project management feature, and we’re always making improvements to our core features like managing tasks, lists and calendars.
Harnessing the power of gravity for family offices
By STERLING SNEED
Family offices generate a massive amount of gravity. Investment opportunities, innovations, trends and professional networks orbit a family office like stars and planets swirling around black holes at the galaxy’s center.
The families who thrive and survive are the ones who learn how to harness that power for the good of the family, philanthropic causes, innovation sectors and the investors that fund them, as well as for people and communities. The ones who don’t learn how to harness that immense gravity are the ones who eventually turn into a black hole, having consumed all resources, familial relationships and purpose.
You cannot invest today without considering the zenith known as AI — which has the tech and investing world buzzing with possibilities, many of which seem significant. One parlor trick, though, is to ask someone raving about it to explain what AI is and what it truly technically offers, and often we receive one of two responses: “machines that think like humans” or just immense silence.
When you break it down, three things are commonly referred to as AI:
- Machine learning (ML): While this is in a similar field and the baby brother of AI, this is not what technologists consider AI. ML is a computer ingesting 10,000 images of a hot dog to see whether it can recognize a hot dog. Machine learning has immense strength and value, but be aware of entities selling ML as fully formed AI.
- Massively trained large language models (LLMS): Massively trained LLMs are where the big boys of Silicon Valley are currently playing. We see models trained around 7 million to 9 billion parameters — yes, with a "B." This means that they have the appearance of being highly functional.
The problem with this structure is that quantity is not always quality. Look at Gemini from Google. While remarkable, it also told users that part of a complete diet was “eating rocks.” Or to use nontoxic glue on pizza to make the cheese stick better. Entities like ChatGPT, while an exceptionally powerful LLM, have many issues with where they source their data and still some problems with accuracy and permissions. Open AI Whisper, which has transcribed millions of medical conversations, has been found to “hallucinate” in around 1% of conversations, especially during long periods of silences. These models will continue to be a significant part of AI in the future but also a big part of our discussion on ethics, liability and bubbles of investing. - Correctly trained LLMs: What do I mean by correct? When you break down the training of data, especially that of an AI model, you get semantics. Not how we conversationally use the word but what is also called semantic web, ontologies, taxonomies and knowledge graphs. Unbelievably, ontologies or the mapping of information and knowledge are usually attributed to around 2,300 years ago, when philosophers like Aristotle tried to start labeling life and everything around us. Well, guess what? That methodology came in handy when starting to create really specific databases. Knowledge mapping and ontologies are the secret sauce to making AI extremely good and making a lot of money. Do you know how Amazon makes its product recommendations with unerring accuracy based on your purchase history? Knowledge graphs and ontologies. Do you know how to create an amazing AI? Create an amazing knowledge graph and ontology first.
So, what does this mean for family offices? Well, there are two essential things:
- The better the knowledge graphs and ontologies, the better the AI; the better it helps cancer treatment outcomes, investing strategies, and business growth; and thus the more revenue and social good it can do. So do not be fooled by machine learning wearing a mask as AI. Pop the hood and check out the engine or have a mechanic (technologist) you trust to do the same.
- As many researchers have noted, many models have limits, data bias or developer bias. As AI becomes more widespread and adopted by mainstream companies and consumers, the statistical risk of derailing the long-term goals of a family office grows, not only from implementing possibly faulty AI solutions but also from competitors. If single- or multi-family offices are not yet working on an AI operations (AIOps) plan, they are behind institutional investors and corporations.
So, what happens when two black holes collide? They entwine and can become a supermassive black hole. Whether that jump-starts a new rich galaxy or a massive spot devoid of all light depends on the right conditions. Family offices have some conditions needed to create or assist with this AI development. Just a few categorical sectors of family offices that would benefit from a proper AIOps department, service or plan are:
- Portfolio growth and planning assistance
- Asset tracking and management
- Inheritance strategy
- Generational training and assistance
- Smart health care and longevity assistance
- Philanthropic strategy and management
This leads us to the question: How can my family office create the right conditions? The answer is adaptive — no, seriously, adaptivity. Personal informatics is the study of all data categories about a human being. It is about how we can map, store and analyze every scrap of data on a human being to help improve quality of life. The same applies to family offices. Think about it like family office informatics (FOI), a topic for a future article.