Christina Lewis, whose father Reginald Lewis achieved fame and fortune with a $985 million buyout of food conglomerate Beatrice International Foods in 1987, launched a multifamily office called Beatrice Advisors on Thursday to help families like hers.
Beatrice will be the first business of its kind to be owned by a Black woman, and Lewis is bringing in industry veteran Meredith Bowen to be its president and chief investment officer. The firm will launch with a portion of the assets from Lewis’ private family office called BFO21 and other high-net-worth families primarily from Christina Lewis’ personal network. As they plan their expansion, Lewis and Bowen aren’t confining themselves to a specific niche, but Lewis feels she relates best to people in similar situations like next-generation inheritors and entrepreneurs and multiracial families.
Reginald Lewis was the only Black person on the Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans when he first appeared on the list in 1991 with a $340 million fortune, and his estimated net worth rose to $400 million in 1992. But he was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor later that year and died at just 50 years old in January 1993, leaving his estate to his wife Loida Lewis and his daughters Christina and Leslie.
“The next gen can be very under-advised, as I was and as my whole family was when my dad passed away,” says Christina, who was 12 when she lost her father. “He had all the intellectual capital related to investing and financial access, and of course never expected to die at 50 years old.”
Reginald Lewis grew up in Baltimore and went to Virginia State University, and he impressed so much at an elite summer program at Harvard upon graduating that he was offered a spot in its law school’s class of 1968. Lewis cofounded a successful corporate law firm before moving on to buying and selling companies himself, doing smaller deals in the early years of leveraged buyouts. The landmark Beatrice acquisition, backed by Mike Milken’s Drexel Burnham Lambert, became his crowning achievement. It was the first Black-owned billion-dollar company, and Forbes remembered him as the “Jackie Robinson of Wall Street” in a 2021 feature story.
Christina Lewis still carries three maxims from her father—do your homework and follow through, make a plan and execute, and be good at your job—and 12 years of memories. One weekend in Paris, where the family had a home as well as in New York, she remembers stumbling into a meeting in the dining room in a t-shirt and shorts when she was 9 or 10 to find about a dozen men in suits surrounding her dad. She tried to back out of the room, but he insisted she shake everyone at the table’s hand.
“What struck me even then is these men, and they were all white men, showed me so much respect,” says Lewis. “It’s why he’s so revered, that he just figured out the way as a guy born in 1942, Black and in segregated Baltimore to be able to command so much respect, so much so that it was trickling down to me.”
Christina Lewis wound up going to Harvard and worked for a decade as a journalist before founding the nonprofit All Star Code, a high school summer program that has taught coding to more than 1,000 young men of color to prepare them for careers in tech. She also serves as the vice chair of the Reginald F. Lewis Foundation, which has $24 million in assets and recently committed $5 million to the Obama Presidential Center, and she’s also serving as an executive producer on a biopic about her father’s life. The movie, named after his autobiography “Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun?”, is being developed by the film studio Macro.
Now, Lewis’ primary focus is on Beatrice Advisors and giving other next-generation inheritors an avenue for sound financial planning. She stressed the importance of building a tax-efficient portfolio and having a team of investment managers, accountants and lawyers that work together who clients can trust instead of feeling like a target.
Lewis recruited Bowen from Seven Bridges Advisors, a $6.4 billion multifamily office where she primarily advised families with fortunes from sophisticated careers in financial services and saw how the next generation often had different needs and questions. With Beatrice, they’re investing in technology and a front-facing dashboard that will factor in a client’s investment portfolio, hard assets and any intellectual property or other business interests to display an overall net worth figure. They’re starting with a staff of six and a midtown Manhattan office and expect to expand through the rest of the year.
“We’re creating this whole dashboard that says, here are all of the elements of your financial life. And then we go through and we make sure that every element of that picture is as you describe it,” says Bowen. “What we find is, a lot of times when we go through this exercise, there is a disconnect between what people think exists in their financial picture and what actually does.”
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