Brian Spinelli, 34, took his own offbeat path to Halbert. As a financial analyst with aerospace giant Northrop Grumman, he realized he had more interest in talking about people’s finances than the numbers crunching he did at his job. His parents were Halbert clients, and Spinelli talked to their main advisor, Gary Corderman, a regional director, to get a sense of what the advisory industry was about. He learned the differences between broker-dealers and RIAs, and was attracted to Halbert’s business model and company culture.
And Corderman thought it could be a mutual fit. “They didn’t have a job offering, but he [Corderman] told JC, ‘You really should talk to this guy even though we don’t have anything for him.’ So they hired me even though they didn’t have a designated job for me.”
Abusaid says he tried to warn Spinelli that he was overqualified for the only position they could find for him––filling out paperwork as a client service manager. Spinelli didn’t care.
“Sounds cheesy, but this place has some weird gravitational pull for some of us,” Spinelli says. “We can’t explain it. There’s something about this environment that has an entrepreneurial spirit to it and a sense of freedom. It’s not easy starting the way I did, but they gave me an opportunity even though there wasn’t any glamour to it.”
These days, Spinelli is chair of the investment committee and a relationship manager. In the former role, he sets the committee’s overall agenda even though Hill remains the chief investment officer. In a sense, Hill acts more as the captain of the ship, but looks to Spinelli as the navigator who’s charting the committee on a daily basis. In the latter role, he’s on the client service team for managing director Craig Cross, a Halbert employee since 1979.
“I’ve been stepping into a more day-to-day contact with his clients during the past five years by meeting his clients and delivering service,” Spinelli says.
“The relationship manager is an advisory role, but we don’t step on each other’s toes. We occasionally go to the same meetings, but we want to make sure when Craig eventually backs away that the connection isn’t lost and the client isn’t pushed to somebody who doesn’t know who they are.”
These tales fit the mold of the company’s philosophy of opportunistic hiring. “Some people we groom from start to finish; others we bring into the firm for specific roles,” says Kelli Kiemle, 30, the company’s director of marketing and client experience and its event coordinator. “We have hired people even if we don’t have a position because we think they have the potential if they have the characteristics we’re looking for. Sometimes we put them in a position they’re maybe overqualified for, but we see something in them and we want to see how they do and if they can grow with us. I was doing random jobs the first year.”
It’s not always a smooth process, though. “Kelli tried quitting on me a couple of times but I wouldn’t let her,” Abusaid says laughing, though both he and Kiemle say it’s true.