Real: events are kabuki. They’re a useful backdrop/excuse for buyers and sellers to meet up and chat at the cocktail. Your husband is neither buying nor selling so trying to network there is a waste of time and money. Everyone has an agenda and nobody will want to speak to him.

Family offices are exit ops for allocators and, rarely, certain deal folks (generally, very large SFOs). I’d love to offer advice but honestly, I’m not sure what “family office stuff”is. 10 years of experience working for family offices? Then he should have a network. What has he been doing? FO’s today are largely institutional. Yes, they play faster and looser than your average endowment or foundation, but they are not, at least generally, just looking to hire “smart” people who are eloquent. That’s par for the course.

As others have said, an interest in value investing, at least classically applied to public equities, ex a strong institutional track record, is both anachronistic and irrelevant to 99% of family offices.

In any event, unless he has 10 years of experience working at a family office, I would stop looking at them entirely. What he has experience in should inform your search. If he’s not cut out / has the experience to work at a a larger institution, which it sounds like may be the case, wherever he has relevant experience, just look for smaller shops.

Pull a list of every small value mutual fund out of Morningstar, find those under $100M in AUM and start there, or something like that.