Our Founder
With more than 30 years in high-end residential design, construction, and estate operations, Kelly Fore Dixon advises ultra-high-net-worth families on the professional governance of their homes.
She holds a degree in landscape architecture and has worked as a licensed landscape and general contractor, an award-winning residential designer, and an estate manager—an uncommon combination that allows her to understand both how homes are built and how they are operated day to day.
Her estate management experience includes overseeing luxury coastal residences and a regenerative ranch portfolio spanning Malibu to London, directing teams of up to 14 full-time staff, and coordinating more than 80 specialty vendors and subcontractors.
This hands-on operational background informs every engagement. Kelly’s work focuses on structure, accountability, documentation, and systems—ensuring household operations function with clarity and continuity, rather than relying on individual personalities or informal knowledge.
How Estate Management Systems Began
Estate Management Systems emerged from direct experience inside complex private households—where critical information lived in text threads, handwritten notes, and fragmented spreadsheets, and where continuity was vulnerable to turnover or distraction.
At the time, there was no operational framework designed specifically for the realities of estate management: multiple properties, layered staffing, constant projects, and the need for discretion, consistency, and control.
Kelly founded Estate Management Systems to address that gap. The firm provides assessment-first advisory services, operational frameworks, and documentation systems that bring order to complexity and reduce risk across people, properties, and processes.
The Dear Billionaire podcast was launched alongside the firm to offer candid, experience-based insight into private household operations—highlighting both best practices and common failures that principals are rarely shown.
Philosophy
The objective is not luxury for its own sake. It is calm, predictable, professionally run homes that support the principal’s life rather than require constant intervention.
Kelly’s approach is intentionally non-financial and non-HR in nature. It centers on operational governance: how work flows, how decisions are tracked, how standards are maintained, and how households continue to function smoothly through growth, change, and transition.
Discretion, systems-thinking, and long-term durability define the work.
