The Family Firm

The Family Firm

The Family Firm was established in 1984 by Bradlee Perry as a registered investment advisor based in Bethesda, Maryland. The practice was built to serve individuals, high-net-worth families, and retirement plan sponsors, positioning itself early as a fiduciary advisor — a structure that aligned it with the coming shift toward fee-based wealth management. Perry anchored the firm's identity in financial planning discipline rather than product distribution. The firm advises across public equities, fixed income, and cash management strategies, with allocations driven by individual client plans rather than a centralized house view. It does not operate pooled proprietary funds or direct private investment vehicles, functioning instead as a personalized asset manager. Client portfolios typically reflect a mix of strategic and tactical allocations, with an emphasis on tax-aware rebalancing and retirement-income modeling. The firm's geographic footprint is concentrated in the greater Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. Perry authored "Winning the Money Game" in 2003, a retail-facing personal finance book that further defined the firm's conservative, planning-first philosophy. The team size and current assets under management remain undisclosed, a posture consistent with a closely held advisory practice that does not market to institutional allocators. The firm has maintained a single-office footprint in Bethesda. What structurally distinguishes The Family Firm is its durability as an owner-operated RIA in a market increasingly dominated by aggregators and private-equity-backed platforms. The firm's four-decade run reflects a deliberate choice to remain a planning-centric practice rather than scale into a multi-family office or asset-gathering enterprise. Perry's original fiduciary ethos — articulated well before the Department of Labor's fiduciary rule debates — remains embedded in the firm's identity as a buyer's advocate, not a seller's counterparty.