Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders, MBA - Interview with Mark Miller, President and CEO of Hilton Wealth

Episode Date: August 8, 2026

With nearly 40 years in tax and wealth management, Mark Miller helps business owners, executives, and high-net-worth individuals build, protect, and sustain their wealth. As a best-selling author, his book Hilton Wealth: How to Invest Like an American Dynasty reveals the investment and tax strategies used by Fortune 500 firms and the Hilton family.Featured in over 200 major publications, including Kiplinger’s, The New York Times, and Money Magazine, Mark has also appeared as a financial expert on Fox News and national media. Recognized as a Presidential Businessman of the Year, he received a personal commendation from President George W. Bush.Miller is the Managing Director of the Hilton Family office and CEO of Hilton Tax and Wealth Advisors, partnered with J. Bradley Hilton , the grandson of the legendary Hotelier Conrad Hilton. Via their Hilton TruWealth Portfolios™, Mark empowers clients with Smart Money level wealth-building strategies, ensuring financial security and lasting legacies. Hilton’s mission is to help clients invest and grow wealth like an American DynastyLearn More: https://www.hiltonwealth.comInfluential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-mark-miller-president-and-ceo-of-hilton-wealth

Welcome to influential entrepreneurs, bringing you interviews with elite business leaders and experts, sharing tips and strategies for elevating your business to the next level. Here's your host, Mike Saunders. Hello and welcome to this episode of Influential Entrepreneurs. This is Mike Saunders, the authority positioning coach. Today we have with us Mark Miller, who's president and CEO of Hilton Wealth, and we'll be talking about his book and his approach to serving his clients, Mark, welcome to the program.

Well, I sure appreciate being here. Thanks for having me. You are welcome. I always love hearing thought leaders bring new perspectives to concepts that sometimes people would brush off and go, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know about that. Well, sometimes they don't. So give us a little bit of, before we dive into your work and your books, give us a little bit of your story, your background. How did you get into the industry in the first place? Well, sure.

So now I'm the director of the Hilton family office. and that is the Hilton family that everybody knows. We have a spinoff company called Hilton Tax and Wealth Advisors. That's more teaching people how the wealthiest of wealthy invest. That is Brad. Brad Hilton is my main partner, and he is the grandson of Conrad Hilton. So that's what I do now. When I started off out of college and that little tiny company called American Express, and actually did very well there, introduced me to the financial,

services world. And then in the 90s, I wrote some nationally published books, a few bestsellers on personal finance and actually had a international newsletter on investing and saving money. And then early in the 2000s, I started my, well, I had a publishing company in the 90s, but then I really started to ramp things up and started to build companies, financial services companies. I was still kind of on the retail side of the business. And what I mean by that is more what people see every day, all the commercials on television and then the Fidelity's, the vanguard, the Edward Jones and USBs of the world and learn kind of the brokerage world. But I was fortunate to have exposure to some super wealthy, ultra wealthy individuals that taught me there's a lot better way to

invest in a lot, what a better way to build wealth over time and started to get into that world. You know, technically you'd probably say what's most dear to my heart is being a business financial consultant working with business owners and learning a lot about that world. But I also just learned about the world of kind of the smart money world or what in our industry we call that the institutional side and how what they do is so much better than what the majority of all people do on the retail side and how they invest. So that led me to meeting a lot of people on the institutional, the smart money side, and including the Hilton's and met Brad Hilton and known him for years and years. And we've done a lot of different things together, but they asked us to come

on board, asked me to come on board or as the manager of the Hilton family office. And then Brad and I put together Hilton tax and wealth advisors that I mentioned earlier, just to help people that maybe don't have $20 or $30 million plus to be able to still tie into the strategies that the wealthiest use every day. Yeah, I think that a lot of times many people have not fully understood what a family office is, but like to your point there, like 20, 30 million, if you don't have that, then these specific strategies, you know, you can't take advantage of. You only have this paltry, whatever, five million or nine million. So talk a little bit about how you mentioned.

It's like, hey, we need to grow wealth. But then at the same time, we don't want to have wealth flowing out the bucket through the back door in taxes. So how do the ultra wealthy reduce their taxes legally without making the ultra wealthy worried that would have been doing something wrong? So first of all, we do have a lot of people that we talk to and they think, oh, too good to be true. that, yeah, I see those wealthy people don't pay taxes, but that can't be me because I don't have

enough money to do not pay taxes. Well, the reality is the codes are designed if you know where to go, 180,000 pages. And honestly, the regular everyday CPA uses just a small handful of those strategies, the ones we all know about, you know, like, you know, interest deduction on your mortgage and home office deduction and things like that. kind of normal ones we know when in reality like in our arsenal we have over a hundred different strategies and it's from a deep dive into the codes private letter rulings case case law rulings that allow us to go deep and the hiltons are kind of known on the smart money side as being the best tax mitigators really really in the country and excuse me so so there's things out there

it's about having access and, you know, the old adage, you don't know what you don't know until you know it, right? So that's, again, part of why I'm on with you today and why we're promoting Hilton Tax and Wealth Advisors so much because we're, again, bringing these strategies that people just don't know about that are kind of more in the venue of home or, excuse me, family offices and bringing it a little more down the main street. Yeah. So folks that maybe have a portfolio of, you know, 500,000 above, people that are making, you know, two or 300,000 a year can plug into these strategies. And you don't have to be making millions of dollars a year or have tens of millions in the bank to be able to do these things. Yeah. You can just do it at scale, at a smaller scale, but it's the same concept and strategy that has that proven track record. Right, right.

Absolutely. So what is the top 1% doing differently? So, you know, a lot of times people are like, oh, well, they're just, well, sometimes, you know, you hear the old adage, you know, they put their pants on one leg at a time, same as everyone else. But there are some differences in the way that they are managing and putting those strategies in place. What does that look like? So, so first and foremost, so on the wealth side, the biggest thing that wealthy people do that people that aren't so wealthy are trying to get there or struggling to get there is they tend to focus more. on safety and security than you would think. We all see the Forbes 500 or 100,

well-deas people in the world and we're like, oh, gosh, those guys are all big gamblers. They all have these big companies and they're making all this money. Well, often maybe their companies are one part of their portfolio. And if they're smart, they're well-diversified. And they also have their own portfolios. And most of those portfolios are pretty, are pretty boring.

Maybe 40, 50, 60% of their money is very safe and very secure, by the way, Warren Buffett. In fact, the greatest investor that ever lived, arguably. Yeah, rule number one, don't lose money. Rule number two, refer back to rule number one. Absolutely, absolutely. And he's not just saying that. It's not just, that's what he does. Right now, Warren Buffett, I just in my podcast, Hilton True Wealth, I just did.

We just dropped it. about why is Warren Buffett sitting on a half a trillion dollars in cash? That's crazy when you think about. Well, there's a bunch of people out there. If you watch CNBC, they're like, he's an idiot. He's a fool. His days are gone. He's 95.

He's stupid. He's dumb. They said the same thing in 1999. And it wasn't that he was sitting there. It wasn't. It was because of his philosophy. He happened to be positioned in the right place. And then it just so happened that there was a big fall.

after that in 99. Well, why is he so much or why is Berkshire so much in cash right now and him personally? It's because there's not a lot of opportunity out there. In his system, the way he invest, there isn't a lot of discounts. Warren Buffett's not going to pay at premium levels so he can get into an AI stock right now. He's just not going to do it. And by the way, he also, people are like, well, he doesn't like technology. Again, he's an old fool, right?

The reality is he has big position in Google's one of their biggest position. They had a lot of position in Apple. They've since sold out of that a little bit. They've made their money in it. They've made some profits in it. But the wealthy, they understand, though, that there needs to be, you need to buy everything, and you need to do everything at a discount. You buy it at a discount, and then you let time do the rest of the work,

which is really how he's gotten so massively. wealthy as just an investor. He didn't, I mean, he had Berkshire Hathaway. You can say that's a company. I mean, technically it's a basket. It's a pool of investments, right? It's not Tesla. You know, it's not, you know, Oracle or something like that.

He didn't become, he became wealthy just from investing. So I would say the biggest thing is understanding to really understanding how important it is safety and security and less volatility and long-term wealth building really is, which we can learn from him and a lot of others, and the Hilton's too. Yeah. We can learn from them that we could have larger than we would think, very safe positions to guarantee our legacy to help us build our wealth. And then over time, that will make us a lot more money because we're not sitting around for two or three or four years, waiting for our money to get back to even because we just lost 20 or 30 percent. You know, two things jump into my mind with what you just said there. One is the tortoise and the hair.

We know that story. So it's like, you know, steady plotting. But the 20, 30 percent, I think that sometimes people like, oops, the market dipped in 20. So I need to get that 20, 30 percent back. So A, they might make some rash decisions that are overly aggressive that might not be the right decision. And B, sometimes people in their mind think they lost 20 or 30 percent. they need to gain 20, 30% of the market to get back to even.

And that's not the case. The math doesn't work that way, right? Yeah, absolutely. It doesn't work that way. So if you're down 50% in your portfolio, it takes 100% to get back to even. Wow. That's, I mean, look at it that way. Yeah.

So, and by the way, we still have people that come to us every day that their retail investors have made a lot of bad decisions. and they just, you know, did not do the right things for them, and they've lost huge chunks of money over that period of time. So, so anyway, so we just have to be, we just have to be very careful not to make rash decisions. And most of the wealthy of the wealthy don't. I mean, they just, they tend to be a lot more safety focused. And here's, here's the rub there.

Think about it. When you get to certain levels of wealth and we work with these people all day long, you can't afford to lose big chunks of your money. Right. Because there's so many people that rely on you. There's so many systems that you need to be in a preservation mode. And here's the thing. On the retail side, people automatically think, well, and I've had people that came to me and said, well, I've heard what you said about making my portfolio more safe. But, you know, I don't want to do that because I can't afford that. less returns. It's so great because it's the opposite. You'll actually have more returns if you design a well-balanced portfolio. Our portfolios are called the Hilton True Wealth portfolios, and they're basically designed after how the wealthiest of the wealthy design their their portfolios

to again have a great amount of safety and security, their legacy portfolios, but ironically, their portfolios that still grow their money outstandingly over time. Yeah, it's similar to the analogy would be like, I am so stressed that I need to get this thing done, this thing done, and it doesn't get done. But if you go take a walk or a hike or take a two, two day vacation, all of a sudden you're relaxed and that thing, all of a sudden the thing comes to mind because it's like,

you just stop getting a bunched up about it. So sometimes you like release the reins and things work out the way you wanted them to anyway. But the key point in all the things you're saying is, boy, just make sure that you have safety and security dialed in. Yeah. And you've done it right because people can have safety and security in the wrong way. On the retail side, it generally doesn't work well because you don't make any returns. Okay. But on designing a portfolio on the smart money side, that 30 or 40% that you have working that's at risk far makes up for the fact that you have a big percentage of money safe and secure.

And we can still make those returns, 8, 9, 10, you know, in some case you take a little more risk or a little bigger chunk in that at-risk space. and maybe you can make 12 plus. Yeah. And again, the wealthy people do it all day long, and they know how to do it with no, with no fear. And I love what you were talking about, about that, you know, taking a breath and all of that. Well, what would it be like instead of listening to,

and again, I used to be in this world so I could attack this world, listening to your broker or your advisor that's saying, And hey, don't worry, just stay invested. Stay invested. Yeah, yeah, it may very well go bed down. But it's all going to come back. Don't worry. Just stay.

Just, you know, just don't worry about it. Don't worry about. What would it be like when all of a sudden your portfolio is down 30 or 40? What's the difference between that emotional feeling? And maybe in a really bad time, your portfolio is down 2 or 3%. Yeah. So, so. Well, you know, then you tie in the sleep well at night, the piece of

mind and I also know that there is research out there that says when you are less stressed or you know you know that your money is going to last as long as it it needs to be for your retirement because you've got it in your those safe places your lifespan extends I mean that's a big piece of it's not just you'll have your gazillions of dollars it's like you're going to live longer when you're when you're not worried about every time the news comes on and the market took a dip Yeah, we had a, we had kind of an advisory person to come in to kind of take a look at some of our YouTube channels and what we're doing. We've just started Hilton True Wealth podcast. And he was saying, he goes, well, wait a second, you're true wealth.

But you just did this podcast on health. Like we brought out, you know, one of the top doctors in all of Florida in runs United Doctors of America. And we talked about health. but we talked about it in the sense that health is wealth. Well, he was all confused. He was going, I thought you were talking about wealth. Well, that's the whole thing is, and the reason we did it true well, what true wealth truly means to us is balance.

And many of our wealthiest clients that we can model ourselves after, they have great balance in their lives. They're not worrying about their money every day. They're not worrying about constantly finding the best investment and making money. I'm working with a client we're bringing on board right now. that has been totally stressed. We've been a retail advisor forever. They've made major mistakes.

He has a lot of money. And he's totally stressed every day, barely sleep, because all he's thinking about is what's going on with his money. That is just the opposite. The true wealth concept, in our opinion, has to be a well-rounded concept. So on our podcast, I'm going to have people talking about health, wellness, talk about life-bal,

talk about life management. And on top of talking a lot about money and about accumulating wealth. So let's shift gears and wrap up with this thought. And let's use that gentleman that you just mentioned that's really stressed about money. And he's got plenty of commas and zeros and shouldn't be from the outside, but he is. The point is, when you button things up and he can take that deep breath and go, oh, my goodness, I never knew that I could feel like this. this makes sense. And it's proven because four quarters down the road, three quarters down the road, he's like,

yep, it's gone just the way you said. Doesn't that provide, yes, a wonderful gift to your client? But I know this phrase means a lot to you because it's one of the points in your book, generational impact. When you get him dialed in and his family and legacy and heirs see that, now all of a sudden that has a trickle down effect to impact his family tree. generationally, and that's a whole lot more than just, oh, we'll keep you from losing a bunch of money. Absolutely. And that's so important. And the key word there is legacy. And I even say this to people

that even just have, you know, our minimum usually working with folks is a half a million dollars and maybe they're making two or three hundred thousand a year. Those are minimums. We have clients there. But then we also clients that have lots of money. But legacy equally applies. Because if that person as a half a million dollars, we can work with them over the next 10 to 15 years and put them into a legacy category where they're starting to think that I've got more money than I've never imagined. I need to start thinking about my legacy. So we want to start early. We want to start as early as we possibly can because ultimately, I mean, it gives us a lot of satisfaction to be able to work with folks and give them that peace of mind to know that not only are they doing

thing right, doing things right for themselves and taking care of themselves and having a good life and a good retirement and all of that. But also, whatever is left behind is going to be well taken care of. And what they work so hard for to accumulate is possibly going to last at least one generation. We want that least right. Yeah. But we want maybe two or three if it's a possibility. You know, it seems like a lot of people zero in on that one, certain age, the age they're going to retire, right? Whatever that age is. And it's a moving target for a lot of people. But let's say that someone zeroes in on whatever age. They zero in on that and need a bunch of money to get to that point. But then they really don't take into account, okay, well, you're going to

live another X number of years. Let's make sure that money lasts that long. Oh, okay, that becomes a whole other stage. And then the next stage is, well, we don't want you to die with zero dollars. We want you to die with what you just described, with enough money to have a legacy impact, you know, one or two or three more generations down the road, not just, who, I slid into retirement with two cents left and at least I, you know, covered that, covered that a need. So I think that mindset shift is really huge. Yes, absolutely. And yeah, you say, you say, what I say is paradigm shift. And I, and I'll be honest with you. It is. And, This is a passion of our, of Brad Hilton and I, to kind of bring these kind of advanced concepts a little bit more down to Main Street.

But it's tough sometimes, especially when people have been in the retail and been really in my words, kind of brainwashed to think that this, the only way to us invest is the way they've done it for the last 20 or 25 years. Okay. And the reality is, I mean, nine times out of ten would people come to us and they're in that position, there is a better way to do it. And it really boils down to it building your wealth faster and more efficiently. That's all the wealthy do as opposed to what everyday average investors do. They do it. They do it faster and more efficiently, period. Yep.

Exactly. Well, Mark, it's been great chatting with you. if someone's interested in learning more, picking up a copy of your books and having you take a look at what you can do to help them, what's the best way that they can reach out and connect with you? They can go to HiltonWealth.com. They can read all about our company there, but we also have some links that I would suggest we have a few books on one on taxes and one on wealth in general. I'd probably suggest that you get the Hilton Wealth book, how to invest like an American dynasty. We'll send it to you a complimentary. and hopefully you'll be educated a little better

and be able to learn more about investing in money. Awesome. Well, Mark, thank you so much for coming on. It's been a real pleasure chatting with you. Same here. Appreciate it. You've been listening to Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders. To learn more about the resources mentioned on today's show or listen to past episodes, visit www. influential entrepreneurs

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