With success comes complexity. More homes and collectible assets. Ambitious renovations. A yacht or plane. More staff hired to manage it all.
What often happens next is a wealthy family and their household team operating from endless messaging threads and clunky spreadsheets, amidst a constant search for old printouts.
Enter Nines, a household management platform developed to prevent this chaos.
With security and usability in mind, the software is made for families and the private service professionals that support them.
It offers a centralized household manual and operating system to simplify managing properties, and all the assets, vendors, staff, projects, etc that these inevitably involve.
The two founders that started it brought different backgrounds and experience, but saw the same opportunity in how UHNW family household needs were falling short.
Jacco de Bruijn was a former management consultant turned tech startup entrepreneur, and Mohamed Elzomor a private fitness trainer to the ultra wealthy.
Elzomor says the idea to start Nines came from working with billionaires, royal families, and celebrities, where he spent a lot of time inside their homes.
“One of my clients was Marc Lore, and at the start of COVID he backed me and my cofounder Jacco to go solve a problem in that world.
We started with staffing, hiring, training, and managing household teams for families, and that's where we saw the real gap. There was no system that brought the homes, staff, and information together, so we built one.”
Nines founders Mohamed Elzomor and Jacco de Bruijn.
Elzomor describes Nines as the operating system for the modern family office household.
Their software empowers teams with digital household manuals, and a secure place to manage staff, vendors, tasks, maintenance, inventory, and family and guest preferences.
It also enables real time updates on staff or contractor activities, industry-standard templates, document management features (HR records, NDAs, contracts) and more.
Smart access allows sharing of relevant household information, meaning new staff can be onboarded without compromising security, and even when staff leave the organization, their knowledge and a record of their work stays behind.
Backed by VCP Ventures (Marc Lore and Alex Rodriguez), their team and client roster has grown substantially since launching in 2020.
“We work with 450 plus family offices, including several of the top ten Forbes families, multiple royal families, and former heads of state, all over the globe. We also partner with the institutions that serve them, including banks, wealth managers, insurance carriers/brokers, business managers/accounting firms, MFOs, and RIAs.”
Elzomor says Nines is built for the people who actually run the household, the estate managers, house managers, chiefs of staff, not just the principal, which led to a lesson in risk management.
“The biggest risk in a UHNW household usually isn't the art or the yacht. It's that critical knowledge lives in one person's head. When that person leaves, the family finds out how fragile everything was.”
Household software wasn’t exactly a known category when they set out, which provided some challenges.
“Families didn't think of household management as something software could solve. And because privacy is everything to our clients, we can't lean on the usual case studies and logos. Growth has had to come from trust and referrals.”
Awareness of that inherent security concern has been critical to their success, as Elzomor says “security has been the foundation from day one, not a feature we added later.”
It makes sense that the more complex the family household, the more value Nines delivers. As an example, he refers to a client that was implementing the platform for a family office running 18 households across four generations.
“Just gathering the documents to bring everything into one place showed that a single piece of jewelry was insured under three separate policies. Nobody had caught it, because the information was scattered across people, files, and inboxes, and fixing it meant real savings.”
Elzomor there are still many areas where household management can improve on, but closing the gap between the finance team and the household team is essential.
“Advisors manage the portfolio, but the homes, staff, and assets that drive so much of the cost and risk sit in a blind spot. That's the gap we built Nines to close.
When a family runs their household on Nines, their advisors, business managers, and insurers can finally see the full picture, and that's where the next generation of family office service is headed.”
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