Moneta has grown by allowing its client service teams to act as engines of organic growth. With little marketing and almost no acquisitions, client referrals and community involvement were the primary methods of attracting new business.
“At Moneta, the success of the individual teams comes from the fact that you behave differently when you own your own clients, and we feel like it helps to keep the entrepreneurial spirit alive,” says Patrick McGinnis, a partner with the firm. “I’ve heard that many large firms struggle to get advisors to feel the need to develop additional business. The growth is done through mergers and acquisitions versus organic growth. We’ve grown to $20 billion from partners owning their own teams.”
Moneta’s advisors are empowered to be their own decisionmakers and do not often have to look upward for permission to make changes in their practices.
Take, for example, the firm’s Pietroburgo Team. It was founded in 2011 when Linda Pietroburgo, now a team leader and Moneta partner, left a job in finance at the Washington University School of Medicine. Many of her original clients were physicians from the school, clients she still serves today.
“At that point in the firm’s history, we came in at zero,” says Pietroburgo. “You came in, you had an office that they charged you for, and you just started trying to build a business. It was a daunting task … back then, Moneta was a different company. We were more independent individually. There wasn’t a lot of crossover between our teams.”
Now, she has spun off much of her business to other partners and advisors so that she can develop a new service offering oriented around socially responsible investing. She is funding her own training, but will be able to offer her assistance to other Moneta advisors interested in offering socially responsible investing to their clients.
Moneta thrives because its 37 partners have developed their own interests and expertise just as Pietroburgo has.
Moving forward, Moneta’s management has recognized that its entrepreneurial, organic growth will need to be augmented with mergers and acquisitions and a more formal marketing effort as it begins to look beyond the St. Louis area. Hand-in-hand with the firm’s recent rebranding, Moneta updated its web presence with a more modern site, and is exploring additional marketing and advertising opportunities to ensure that it continues growing.
Structure
In preparation for continuing growth, Kittner and Keith Bowles, Moneta’s 44-year-old COO, have focused on shoring up the firm’s enterprise service team.