The Pietroburgo Team manages $577 million for 147 clients and has one partner—Pietroburgo—and four additional advisors, with nine additional support staff members.
“We’re not out here on our own,” says Pietroburgo. “Moneta is large enough where if I have any questions, there’s always someone here who knows the answer. … We are that large, with that many tentacles out into the community. The partners here know everybody.”
Through Moneta, Pietroburgo can offer her family office clients some of the concierge services and private placements that ultra-high-net-worth clients often demand. Because it hires CPAs, JDs and other credentialed advisors, Moneta keeps its own stable of estate-planning and tax experts in house, and many of the teams serving family-office-level clients have attorneys and CPAs on board.
The enterprise service team helps each client service team think strategically about building what Moneta calls a “sustainable business,” which means having in place the recruiting, training and development necessary to create a workable succession plan for all of the firm’s teams and clients.
“We use the term ‘sustainable business,’” says Kittner. “A sustainable business is focused on not just taking care of the clients we have and making sure that they have a home, but also on that next generation of partners who are growing the business.”
Youth
Much of Moneta’s staff is young for the financial services industry as a whole, with 30- and 40-somethings populating partner and board positions. McGinnis, who is a partner and on the firm’s board, is 37 years old. He was hired out of the firm’s internship program, which he entered at age 20.
However, Moneta isn’t young for the sake of being young. The youth focus is part of an enterprise-wide focus on sustainability and a desire to instill and maintain the firm’s entrepreneurial culture and collaborative approach to serving clients. Around seven years ago, Moneta began appointing a younger “ad hoc” member to its board to make sure there was some youth representation in the firm’s leadership that developed into a larger concentration on developing and promoting young, successful advisors into positions of influence within the firm.
“That was important in starting to get the board to transition to the next generation,” says Pietroburgo. “Our more tenured partners recognized the value that a different, younger perspective brings to the table.”
Moneta’s leadership needed to be just as sustainable as its client service teams. Thus, many of the firm’s founders and elder partners stepped back to make room for leaders like Kittner.