Young At Heart And Age

Ken Schapiro has discovered the secret to staying young for registered investment advisors.

Schapiro, 53, the president and founder of Martinsville, N.J.-based Condor Capital Management, has stayed young at heart himself through his recreational activities. He’s an aficionado of backcountry skiing, particularly “heli-skiing,” which involves being dropped off by a helicopter on a remote, undeveloped slope to ski on virgin snow.

His youthful outlook is also inspired by a staff of 20 advisors and support personnel whose average age falls in the low 30s, and by the company’s zeal for growth, teamwork and technology.

Schapiro helped found Condor when he was 23 years old, right after finishing graduate school at the University of Colorado in 1988. A family friend with a thriving insurance and pension administration business in North Plainfield, N.J., Alfred Gelfond, was interested in getting into the wealth management and investment advisory business.

“He sent me around the country looking at different firms; they were all high-commission-based, Integrated Resources-type firms,” says Schapiro. (Integrated Resources was one of the largest independent brokerages and limited partnership sponsors in the 1980s before it went bankrupt in 1989.) “I came back to New Jersey and said ‘Alf, this isn’t what we really want to do. I want to start an investment firm that’s fee-only. We did, and it quickly grew.”

That firm became Condor Capital, a fledgling advisory practice operating alongside Gelfond’s insurance business. In 1996, the partners moved the firm to the site of a former school in Martinsville.

Soon after, in 1998, Schapiro took over a growing Condor Capital Management from Gelfond via a planned buyout, and he’s led the firm ever since. “I’ve never worked in another place as far as the financial business is concerned,” he says.

Today, Condor is 30 years old and boasts more than $1 billion in assets under management for wealth management clients, small business 401(k)s and some traditional pension clients. Yet the firm is only a few years younger than its average staff member.

Schapiro has hired young throughout Condor’s existence, mining local universities like Rutgers, William Paterson and Montclair State for emerging talent and discovering hardworking millennials in the hilly northern New Jersey suburbs to round out the staff.