Everyone loves to judge what rich people do with their money, and no one has a better front-row seat than those they keep closest: their personal assistants. For decades, Brian Daniel worked as a PA for ultrawealthy clients; now, he helps recruit and train other high-level PAs for some of the world’s richest families and top-earning CEOs and has built a deep network of people in the private-service industry along the way. Here, 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.”
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. So we were getting these big villas that were very quiet. Each person would go to their own wing, with their own kitchenette and fridge, and we’d keep it stocked with what they wanted and they wouldn’t have to see anybody. Sometimes they would give me their phone and be like, “I don’t want to talk to anybody. If anything important comes in, deal with it.” And that might go on for days.
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.
Figuratively, it’s like a marriage, a professional marriage. These CEOs and billionaires, they spend more time with their PAs than they do with their spouses. It’s 12 hours a day, six days a week sometimes, and they’re on call 24/7. These assistants, they’re running the show and they should be compensated for it.
If you’re jetting around and want a lifestyle manager who travels with you, an ultra-experienced personal assistant handling everything as you go from place to place, that’s going to cost you even more, like $10,000–$20,000 a week just in that person’s salary. Of course, you also need to pay for their hotel rooms, they’ve got to eat, they’ve got to have their clothes cleaned. The numbers get astronomical. When I was with one royal family and we were traveling with these big entourages, we would get two full floors of rooms — can you imagine two floors? The bill was in the millions because the cheapest rooms at these hotels are $1,200 a night. The suites are $5,000–$10,000 a night, and they’re ordering room service, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and going to the salon and getting massages. I would have the hotel print the bill so that I could go through it meticulously looking at all the charges, and it was like a phone book.
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. When you hire people who are gawkers, who are opportunistic, who don’t have a lot of experience and will work for $80,000 to be in proximity to fame, you’re guaranteed to have problems down the line. Eventually, everything falls apart and people start suing. And when a celebrity or billionaire gets sued, they never win. They lose every single time. The case never goes to court because nobody wants their dirty laundry out there.
Another reason these people get stingy is that there’s some kind of psychological distortion that happens when everyone fawns over you all the time. The VIP’s mentality is, “Hey, this person should be paying me, because they get to be around greatness.” They’re used to having people want a piece of them. So they think that the job is such an amazing opportunity that they shouldn’t have to pay the person what they’re actually worth. They live in a bubble and their reality is warped.
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. That’s very important. There’s a manner that you need to have.
So I go down to the restaurant, I meet the maître d’ or the general manager. I literally point at the table and say, “We’ll be back in 45 minutes. That’s the table I want, and I want the best server in the restaurant.” And I spread a bunch of money around. At the very minimum, you have to be spreading hundreds — I wouldn’t dream of offering $20s or $50s, because they’d be insulted. Most of my clients have understood that I need tip money if I’m going to do my job. Then I get the VIP, I come back, and I tell the GM when we’re a minute away. And then, before the VIP gets out of the car, I go in and make sure the table is clear, because you don’t want to be standing there for seven minutes while they’re finishing the table. Then I escort the VIP in, they sit down, the server’s right there, the drink he wants is already on the table.
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. Most people don’t know about these private suites. They’re for heads of state. They’re behind bulletproof glass, and nobody else can be in there. We got the whole wing and it was over a million dollars a month. That doesn’t even count the entourage. We had hotels and private homes rented too. We were housing all the chefs and the drivers. It’s a lot of logistics.
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”?
The most important thing is that you understand the way that the client wants things to be run. When they come home, they want the towels folded this certain way, rolled up like sushi. They want to be addressed in this manner. They want staff everywhere, or they don’t want to see staff at all. We create house manuals with pictures, and it’s all digitized so that it’s the same rules across all their homes, and there’s no confusion.
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!”
I got a job working at a gym in Beverly Hills, right down the street from 20th Century Fox. A lot of actors and producers and agents and publicity people would go there, so I just started meeting people. Then I started working at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and that’s how I met my first boss, who was an extended member of the Johnson & Johnson family. That was my first real PA gig.
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. Especially these huge mega-estates that are like 50,000 square feet — they’re like college campuses or little cities.
Also, you’d be surprised at how these billionaires hire people. They’ll hire a friend of a friend, or their neighbor’s niece, or they’ll see someone at Starbucks and be like, “Oh, she’s young, she’s cute, she’s got a lot of energy, she seems like she’d be a good assistant,” and they just bring people in with no experience. Suddenly, that person is in charge of world-class butlers that have worked for princes, and the respect isn’t there. You have these tricky dynamics about the way things should be done.
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. I don’t want a world-class estate manager to quit their existing job for a new one and then walk into a complete surprise like that. That’s why I like to go on location and see things for myself.
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 — I mean, it’s an art. You’re working for people who are not used to hearing no.
One example: I was working for a prince, and in the Middle East, he’s a pretty big deal. But outside of that world, nobody knows who he is; he’s just another wealthy guy. So he got this crazy idea that he wanted to meet this big-deal Hollywood celebrity. I got on the phone with the right person who worked in that celebrity’s inner circle. And they said, “We might be able to do it, but here’s the set of circumstances under which it could happen.” So when I explained to the VIP that, if he wanted to meet this celebrity, he would need to make a donation to the celebrity’s favorite charity and do these other things, he exploded in anger. It went on for two days. He was running around screaming, “No, people pay to meet me.” He lost his mind.
So I learned an important lesson: It would’ve just been better for me to say that I couldn’t do it. You have to get to know the rhythms of the person you’re working for, and there’s certain ways that you have to say things. And you have to know when it’s better to not say anything or tell little fibs. The use of collective pronouns is very important — saying “we” instead of you or I. Sometimes when you’re working with people who have inherited wealth — they just walk into money and never had a job and don’t understand how the real world works — they’ll ask you to do something profoundly ridiculous, and you can’t tell them how dumb the idea is.
I’m sure that offering money for favors can be useful, but in other cases people might find it insulting. How do you avoid offending people?
You have to gauge the situation. For example, once I was in Vegas with a client who had a very big entourage. We were driving by In-N-Out Burger, and it had just closed. And with corporate places like that, the rules are the rules. They’re closed, the register’s off, the door is locked. But the client wanted In-N-Out. So I ran over to the drive-through window. They were serving the last person, and I put my body in the window so they couldn’t close it. And I gave the guy a $100 bill and said, “Go get your manager right away and tell him it’s a business emergency.” So the manager came over and I was like, “We need to come in.” And they’re like, “We are closed.” And I said, “You see that whole line of Rolls-Royces and Lamborghinis and Ferraris?” And I pulled out a whole lot of money and said, “I’ll cover the overtime. It’s all off the clock. The corporate office won’t find out. Open the front door and let us in.” It probably cost $10,000 for those hamburgers, including the payoff money and the cost of the food. But it worked.
Sometimes you need to offer more than money, though. There was another situation a number of years ago when a celebrity client wanted to go see a movie. It was opening weekend, seven o’clock on Friday. The movie was sold out in every theater, and the client wanted to see it privately. So I went to the movie theater and I talked to the GM and I said, “Listen, I’m prepared to pay you $5,000 for the favor, and I will buy every seat.” When I’m making a request like that, I pay very close attention to the reaction. What’s he feeling while I’m proposing this to him? I know that my manner, my physicality, my intonation, all of that matters. I have to stay one step ahead with solutions to any problems. I said, “We can put a sign on the door that says ‘Out of Order,’ and you can tell people the projector broke down. We will sneak the VIP in through the emergency exit so he can see the movie.” Then I watched his facial movements. I could tell he was almost there, but he was doubting it. So I said, “On top of that, as the movie’s ending, we’ll bring you in and you can meet the VIP and his family.” And the guy says, “Okay, I’ll do it.” I knew that that would close it. It wasn’t just about the money. Now he’s got a great story too, and he’ll be telling it forever. Good PAs, they’re doing stuff like this every day. They’re moving mountains for a living.
How do you deal with boundaries, personally, when clients cross them?
It’s hard. You get sucked in, and the water becomes very muddy. A lot of these people are lonely. They’re in their megamansion all alone with you, and then they’ve had a couple lines, and then they’re telling you all their problems, and you become like a psychiatrist. It’s tricky.
Personally, I know other people in the business, and I would sometimes call them and say, “What do you do in this situation?” And we’d give each other advice. The big stars, they have a whole army of people that work for them, the agents and the managers and the doctors and the lawyers. But those people are only interacting with them intermittently at best. The PA is the one that’s there in the trench, day in and day out, year in and year out. You have to know your place, though, too. A lot of VIPs are obsessive about the people around them. They’re constantly in a state of mental torture because they think other people want something from them — usually their money. So you want to make sure you keep both feet on the ground, because it can all be taken away.
How do you keep from being starstruck or intimidated by the people you work with?
You get used to it. It’s a business. And when you meet these people, most of the time, you’re going to be disappointed. Either because they’re mean, or they’re just not like what you thought they were going to be like. The Hollywood publicity machine creates a certain image, and it’s very rare to meet a celebrity who is genuinely an amazing, brilliant, kind, humane person to everyone all the time. Once you’ve been around it enough, those butterflies start to go away.
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