Keeping It In-House

Russell served as the primary product vendor for Halbert, but Hill says Halbert started moving away from that arrangement in the early 1990s because it wanted to have an open platform for trading and products. Today, Fidelity is Halbert’s primary custodian, while roughly 40% of Halbert’s assets reside with a Russell product or service. And, of course, Russell’s name is no longer on the doorplate.

Meanwhile, Halbert officially closed its broker-dealer on the final day of 2010. “We had only trail fees left, and we didn’t want the confusion of having the broker-dealer. The RIA never interacted with the broker-dealer.”

Hill says Halbert today is a pure fee business, with most of that coming from assets under management.

Opportunistic Hiring
Most advisory firms probably don’t hire the people who sell them Slim Jims at the local convenience store. Nor are they inclined to hire sharp cookies for a paper-shuffling job they’re clearly overqualified for (nor, for that matter, do sharp cookie-types typically want that kind of job). But two of Halbert’s next-gen directors came to the company in these unorthodox ways.

Cecilia Williams, 30, is the director of investment operations, the chief compliance officer and a relationship manager. Before joining Halbert, she worked the cash register at the ground-floor convenience store in Halbert’s Long Beach office building. A Halbert employee struck up a conversation with her, discovered she was six months away from getting a business degree from Cal State-Long Beach, and was so impressed by Williams that he insisted Abusaid meet with her.

“I wasn’t engaged with the idea,” Abusaid recalls, adding the only opening at the time was for a trader’s position. But he eventually relented to meeting Williams. “We interviewed her, and to date she was the best interview ever at the firm. And our interview process is brutal.”

Williams flourished as a trader, gradually assumed more responsibilities and now is a director.