Inside the World of Personal Assistants to the Super Rich

An Interview with Brian Daniel

Brian Daniel is a personal assistant to the ultra-wealthy and has built a deep network of people in the private-service industry. He talks about what a typical day of work might entail, how he snags a table at the most in-demand restaurant at the last minute, and what it’s like when your boss has never heard the word “no.” Here’s the conversation.

What do most people not understand about what it’s like to be a personal assistant to very rich people?

A lot of people think, Oh, it’s red carpets and Lamborghinis, but most of your job is sitting behind a desk. Even when you’re on the road with a client, you’re isolated in many ways. One family I was traveling with for three months, they had profound inherited wealth and they just wanted privacy, even from each other.

What kind of salary are we talking, for a personal assistant at a high level?

It’s strange; people are getting stingier and stingier. I had someone, a celebrity in New York, who recently reached out to me, and they only wanted to pay $80,000 for a PA. And I’m like, listen. Do you want to solve your problem? If you want someone who is going to be loyal to you, who will manage your staff and stay with you for ten years and give you peace of mind — which is priceless — we’re talking about $250,000 a year.

Why do you think people get stingy about these salaries when they have so much money?

They delude themselves because when they put out a job opening, and it says $80,000, they get hundreds of applications. What they don’t understand is that it’s not about quantity, it’s about quality.

What’s something difficult that you might have to pull off on the job?

I’m a big believer in having boots on the ground and doing things in person. For example, I was in L.A. and the VIP wanted to go to the hottest restaurant in town that was booked out for three months. It was Friday night, seven o’clock, and they wanted an eight o’clock reservation. So I get in the car, I go down there. I reach out to my network — “Who knows the general manager?” You can’t just call the restaurant. It’ll ring forever. You have to be there in person because they need to see who you are.

What else would your job entail?

It was my job to manage all the yachts and the subordinate assistants and the exotic-car fleets and the nannies. At one point, someone I was working for had a sick family member, and we were at the Mayo Clinic for six months in the private wing.

How do people define “personal assistants” versus executive assistants, or chiefs of staff, or house managers? I’ve heard all those titles used pretty interchangeably.

Every employer has their own language, and you use the language of the employer. Maybe the employer is using the terms wrong, but who cares? What’s the difference between a tutor and a governess? Is it a house manager or an estate manager? Is it a PA or a “strategic business partner”?

How did you get into this field?

I moved to L.A. when I was 19, and I had stars in my eyes. I wanted to be an actor. I grew up in a cornfield in Michigan, so when I first got to California, it was like when Dorothy lands in Oz and all of a sudden, the world is in color. I was like, “Holy cow!”

One job led to another, because a lot of these people are in the same circles. After more than ten years of working for high-net-worth families and individuals, I decided to start my own operation, recruiting and placing PAs for the same type of clients. A lot of other staffing agencies deal primarily with nannies and housekeepers. But finding a highly skilled person who you can trust with all your secrets is incredibly difficult — people want to hire an Ivy League–educated executive assistant who’s worked for a billionaire before and has recommendation letters. And just because someone worked for one billionaire doesn’t mean they’re going to be good in another environment with someone else. We are aligning the hard skills and the soft skills and the personality traits to make a perfect match that’s going to last for 5, 10, or 20 years. The high-net-worth families don’t want to be blowing through assistants every year. They have a lot to lose, and it’s hard for them to trust people.

What’s typically the problem when these families can’t retain their PA?

A few times a year, I will go on location with clients and work as their PA myself to help figure out what they really need. Often these are the families that are having trouble finding or retaining staff. They don’t want to tell me what’s going on behind the scenes, or they don’t know. Being there in person solves a lot of problems. Now I’m meeting all the players. Here’s the security team, here’s the executive housekeeper, here are the people they’re dealing with. What typically happens is you have a bunch of fiefdoms. Just like in big companies, where the departments don’t want to cooperate — the same thing happens in megamansions. There’s backstabbing and infighting, and the clients are totally blind to it. And it’s too much for one PA to manage.

Are there situations where, after you embed yourself with a client, you realize they’re just too much of a nightmare to keep on?

Oh, yes. I learned some very hard lessons. There was this one billionaire who had, it could only be described as a dungeon in his basement, for fetishes and stuff like that. With another client, I literally lied and said I was going to the bathroom, and I just escaped. There are times when I get into the mix and I’m like, “I’m out of here.” I’ve been in a couple situations where I was really worried about people’s behavior, especially with all the drugs and alcohol.

The mix of unlimited money and no responsibilities seems like it could get dark.

I’ve been in a few situations where I’ve had to help people detox. I’ve gotten calls from frantic billionaires saying, “My kid is missing because they’re on a binge. I need help.” These people have their own security teams and stuff, but sometimes they need something special. They can’t go to the police. They can’t go to their publicist. This is outside of everyone’s job description. They call it a “recovery,” as in, “My son has to be recovered.”

So what do you do in that situation? Is it like kidnapping meets luxury rehab?

You have to hire lawyers because you don’t want to be accused of kidnapping people. The recovery team I have worked with, they’re former military special forces, they’ve got a team of private investigators, and they’ve got lawyers all over the country because every state has their own rules about holding people against their will. They have medical professionals who oversee the detox process. These operations are very sensitive and secretive and very expensive. They start at a hundred thousand and go into the millions.

It’s very easy to get in big trouble when you have that kind of money. On more than one occasion, I worked with trust-fund kids whose parents would only give them low-limit credit cards on purpose. That’s how they kept them on a short leash. Other times, the VIPs are just totally oblivious to what’s going on in their own families.

I imagine there’s a lot of secrecy, too.

Of course, everybody signs NDAs. That is standard operating procedure. They won’t even give me the job description unless I’ve signed an NDA. Then I’ll say, “Okay, is there anything else you want to tell me?” And then sometimes that’s when you get very important information. I had one client who was a financial genius, and it turns out he was a nudist. He walks around in his birthday suit. They said the assistant would have to be okay with that because it’s random — you come to work, he opens the door, and voilà. There was this girl who was up for the job, and when I brought this up to her, she was like, “No, not even for a million dollars a year, no.” Which, of course, I understand. These very wealthy people have eccentricities, and not everyone can deal with them.

What are some of the “soft” skills that you mentioned that PAs need to have to be successful?

You have to have thick skin. You’re like a rhinoceros or an armadillo. And you have to have incredible patience. The way you word things is so important. Your intonation and speed of delivery —