Beverly Hills Wealth Management (BHWM), an RIA started earlier this year by a former Morgan Stanley executive, is setting its sights on attaining a wider profile.
Founded by Margaret "Mag" Black-Scott, former vice chairman of global wealth management at Morgan Stanley, the firm currently consists of four employees, including an advisor with more than two decades of wealth advisory experience who recently came from Merrill Lynch.
Black-Scott says her goal is to hire seasoned advisors with at least ten years' experience and good compliance records from wirehouse and RIA firms who serve her firm's target client base of high-net-worth and ultra-high-net worth individuals, along with corporations and institutions.
In return, Black-Scott says BHWM will offer advisors an ownership stake, an increased payout and an independent platform with access to providers of institutional-level investment products.
"We'll have growth opportunities in different kinds of specialty areas to offer clients," she says. "A lot of that stems from my background and knowing people in a variety of industries."
Black-Scott says BHWM is custodially agnostic, but that Fidelity is its primary custodian thus far.
A native of England who is married to David Scott, a former NASA astronaut who walked on the moon as part of the Apollo 15 mission, Black-Scott was a 30-year veteran of Morgan Stanley who began as a broker and then worked her way up through the advisory ranks to become a division director for the western U.S. responsible for more than 3,000 employees and revenue of $1.5 billion. She was appointed to her vice chairman role in early 2008, and retired at the end of that year.
Black-Scott said after a half-year of retirement she got the bug to start an advisory firm that she says emphasizes trust and transparency. "We want to take the business back to where clients and advisors want the business to be," she says.
And she believes there are a lot of advisors who want to do the same. "I think there are many people and many [advisor] teams that are frustrated for a lot of reasons with where they work," Black-Scott says. "And we believe there's a great opportunity in this space based on the fund flows going from wirehouses to RIAs."
Black-Scott says BHWM is trying to replicate the playbook used by Hightower, a Chicago-based, advisor-owned company with a growing national footprint of advisors that serves high-net-worth and institutional clients.