By Josh Gottlieb
The Gottlieb Organization was formed six years ago to pull together more than six decades of its affiliates and predecessor companies, spawning ideas and strategies to unite all of our companies under a single brand with a rich history of results and a compelling story.
The Origin of The Gottlieb Organization
Prior to founding The Gottlieb Organization (TGO), I was fortunate to have had more than 40 years of working and becoming expert in several disciplines within the wealth accumulation arena, with place cards in areas of tax management and asset protection. This work bridged my father’s experience and prominence in retirement planning before ERISA was conceived, and the use of life insurance in areas of benefits finance, significantly influenced my path. Ultimately, who we are today is the mosaic of the last 65 years of our companies’ and my family’s expertise and accomplishments in the financial services industry.
We have been a sales organization that created remarkable solutions to financial challenges for our high and ultra-high net worth families and individuals, accelerating savings and wealth development for small businesses, pioneering benefits finance and non-qualified benefit plans for large public and privately held companies and programs to protect and retain assets for some of the most recognizable company and family names in America. I’m proud of our history and have loved the last 45 years of creating new and better client solutions. After doing this work for five decades, I'm looking to the future and building a plan and foundation for the next 65 years of The Gottlieb Organization. I’ve concluded that our core competencies compel TGO to be more and that we can do more.
The Gottlieb Approach
Our approach with clients is often unique. We don’t do things differently just to be different but do so when normal and usual is not enough to achieve client goals. We see things that others do not.
This emerges in our work with a deep intellectual understanding of a broad array of disciplines that moves in an interdisciplinary manner across legal, tax and accounting to finance, human resources and asset protection. This knowledge layered over a multi-faceted reach into research and diligence and practiced with natural comfort with complexity and creativity delivers elegant solutions. Our work often aligns otherwise disparate parties. That achievement is a driver for TGO.
In the last 15 years, I've spent time not just doing “what we do” — but observing it, studying it, articulating it and recognized that what we do today and what we have done for more than a half century follows a consistent process every time that honors our clients’ objectives and constraints, and yields results that we assist them in realizing. This begins with a lot of listening, asking questions, truly understanding these individuals, or sometimes organizations. We learn what they think they want, perhaps what they are seeking and may not yet know or haven't articulated, and we bring those into alignment. First conceptually, then into reality. We analyze the costs, the risks, the certainties, the uncertainties, and we help them see opportunities that they didn’t even know were possible and then develop the solutions — the path from “here” to “there.”
Gottlieb sees itself as a problem-solver and an educator, more than a sales organization. We deeply value our clients and their rightful expectation to be uniquely recognized and understood.
The Gottlieb Culture
When working with Gottlieb, expectations are high.
Observing events in America today — we feel like value is diminished in favor of speed. That in our rush to the next event or experience, we may have high expectations but accept mediocrity. “Good enough” for us never is. We are not suggesting that others are wrong; we are simply holding ourselves to standards that are unyielding in our goal and ethos to do things in a manner we believe to be right.
Within our companies, our people hear our leadership talk often about excellence. We differentiate excellence from perfection. Perfection would suggest that there are never any mistakes and it's always right. Excellence, for us, is being the very best we can be, given where we are at that moment. It is not a destination, it is a journey that does not end; we just improve, become better than before and increase expectations. This involves asking the questions, challenging the status quo, checking our work and then doing that again. Working to be sure that we’re communicating with clarity and advocacy. Whether it's a report, or simply preparation for a phone call or a meeting — being highly prepared is everything about how we move from good to great. Our planning, our solutions, our results. We are not looking for accolades; we just want to know that, internally, we've looked at everything — we've covered every side; we've approached problems from every angle, in order to provide the best possible solution for our clients. This is the expectation for everyone at The Gottlieb Organization — always. Embracing anything less is failure.
Some organizations pride themselves on the 9 to 5, plug-in and plug-out culture. That’s not us. Rather, Gottlieb is a place where there’s passion, there’s opportunity to learn and where people are going to grow. Our people are invited, actually expected, to push themselves further than what’s comfortable — to aspire to more. Our people are called upon to be contributors, difference-makers, not observers and an audience. Each member of our team is expected to impart some of who they are into the fabric that we call The Gottlieb Organization.
Our hope and desire is that through our efforts all members of the Gottlieb team are learning not just about the technical things that we're doing, which are important. But also that they're growing as people, with life lessons. That each member of our team comes away, whenever that “away” may be, whether it's in 10 months or 42 years later, having felt like they are bigger people, whose lives have been enriched and that they each have made a difference for others. I reflect on my past decades in areas and disciplines in which I have focused and I look towards Gottlieb’s future. I realize that I’ve been given some amazing opportunities and had extraordinary people who have helped form my ability to approach things in different ways. There’s a “pay it forward” homage that I owe to my teachers and mentors and clients. And I feel like if I don’t express this knowledge — if I don’t add to it and try to impart it, to impact changes that I see can occur — it is a missed opportunity. We usually end up meeting our clients as someone or some entity that has already tried traditional things and failed. So, if Gottlieb doesn’t take the steps to help each client or institution with whom we work approach their options creatively — to see the same events and facts in a different way that leads to finding their particular solutions, we have not done our job. This is the belief system that’s part of Gottlieb’s DNA, the reason for being here.
Joshua A. Gottlieb is the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of The Gottlieb Organization.