For nearly two decades, CV Advisors has gradually grown its business in Miami by courting mostly ultra-rich Latin American families looking for ways to shield their fortunes from upheaval.

But as Miami boomed since the pandemic began, with scores of rich Northeasterners moving in, so did the business of serving the well off living in Florida and beyond.

The firm has grown its assets under management 35% this year alone to $13 billion, which includes new money and $1 billion of investment profits, according to founder and Chief Executive Officer Elliot Dornbusch. He said he expects the portion of business it gets from US clients to far outweigh its Latin America exposure in coming years.

“We’ve been lucky that the pandemic has awakened everybody to this area,” Dornbusch, who is also chief investment officer of the 70-person firm, said in an interview. “For years it wasn’t seen as a great location for financial services.”

The huge influx of out-of-state families moving to Florida in search of a better lifestyle and lower taxes is paying off in more ways than one: in addition to new clients, there’s a growing pool of talent to hire from. They’ve added nearly a dozen people in the past few months and are searching for another handful to support the business.

Client Mix
Founded in 2009 and based in Aventura just north of Miami, the firm has about 120 clients with a mix of wealthy families and institutions like insurance firms, endowments and foundations. Currently, half come from Latin America with the rest concentrated in Florida and New York.

Dornbusch refers to CV Advisors’ role as being the “quarterback” for clients, managing their entire portfolio of investable assets and advising on allocations. The firm requires clients have a minimum of $25 million to invest and doesn’t provide family office-type services such as estate planning, trusts and tax advising. 

“We don’t have products, we don’t have funds,” Dornbusch said. “We are an employee of the family at all times, independent without a conflict of interest, end of story.”

While Latin America used to make up about 75% of its clients, Dornbusch expects those in the US to surpass that total “by a landslide” in coming years. CV Advisors has numerous US clients who were founders and sold their businesses with many in the technology industry. He said they also oversee the personal money of some New York-based hedge fund managers who have regulatory restrictions.

Constellation Deal
Dornbusch, 50, was born in Colombia and grew up in Venezuela. He moved to South Florida in 2003 after selling a construction business and becoming unnerved by former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s growing autocratic tendencies. He began to manage his own money before eventually working with the families.

CV Advisors late last year sold a 24.9% stake to Constellation Wealth Capital for an undisclosed amount. While the founders weren’t looking to sell, Constellation, led by Karl Heckenberg, is helping to further “institutionalize” the firm and will be long-term investors, Dornbusch said.

Constellation has taken similar-sized stakes in other US wealth managers in recent years, allowing those firms to pool resources and compete for larger deals, Dornbusch said.

“Now, we’re not investing $100 million, we’re investing $1 billion, but we’re investing across 20 firms,” he said. “So that’s going to become much more interesting in the future.”

This article was provided by Bloomberg News.