TPW is not a dedicated SRI firm. When Staley founded it 11 years ago, she did so because a client at a previous firm asked her if she was interested in running her own multi-family office, and she saw a chance to imprint her own personality and broad background on a company culture. She grew up in Delhi, India, and came to the U.S. for college, originally studying environmental biology (her career forged during the culture of the early ’70s anti-war era). She worked in the environmental field for six years until funding for environmental studies started to dry up, she says.
After that, money became an important topic to her and she went back to school for her MBA.
“In India where I grew up,” she says, “back then the caste system was very much a part of people’s lives, and the caste that our family came from, we were supposed to be the ‘learned’ people, so we didn’t go into business. Everybody, my father for instance, was in the university system. … So none of them understood what the heck I was doing.”
Later, after working at firms like Trillium and Mintz Levin, she set out in 2004 to make a new firm that was globally focused with a diverse clientele—and where her environmental background would find a new expression through SRI investments.
“The opportunity was attractive because it really meant now that I could drive the firm’s culture and philosophy,” she says.
“We’re both immigrants,” says Mathers, who is from Northern Ireland and came to the U.S. in 1994 to be a priest. “I came over here for the summer to a seminary near Boston College and met my wife. So I’m here for love, not for money.” He joined a mentor in life insurance at LPL, enjoyed the on-the-job training of a wirehouse and then went to start his own LPL branch in August 1999. “Just in time for the worst bear market since the depression.” It made him better, he says.
TPW’s focus is now financial planning first. That behooves Beacon Pointe, which Cooper says is not looking for stock pickers for its RIA acquisition arm but for planners with strong relationships.
Mathers says Staley, whom he’s known for several years, walks the environmentally conscious talk.
“Good luck finding a plastic bottle in this office,” he says.
Beacon Pointe was founded in 2002 by the father-daughter team of Garth Flint, an institutional investment consultant, and Shannon Eusey, who were joined by Cooper. (See Financial Advisor magazine's September 2015 profile of the firm.) It was Cooper who hatched the idea of the Beacon Pointe Wealth Advisors arm in 2011 as a rollup firm that gives advisors nearing retirement a succession plan.
The firm offers buyouts with equity shares, Cooper says. The offer includes a floor on the target firm’s value (appraised by a third party) if an advisor wants to retire and sell. He says Beacon Pointe has no plan to do an IPO.