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.

“Hiring young people was part of an evolutionary process,” says Schapiro. “I’ve always preferred training people right out of school. I’m most successful with those types of employees.”

Also part of Condor’s success, he says, is that he’s hired the right young people. The firm finds promising students at nearby schools and offers them what essentially becomes a part-time job. Many of the staff start working at the firm as interns before they graduate.

“Hiring is never easy,” says Michael Walliser, the firm’s chief operations officer, “so we do our best to hire smart, young people and give them exposure to real work. If our interns aren’t calling clients or talking to them on the phone, they’re at least in the back office, but the work they’re doing is real client work.”

Interns are never asked to do cold-calling, to make photocopies or to fetch coffee, says Walliser. They’re instead placed in hands-on positions.

Schapiro gives some of his interns a niche within Condor in which to develop their skills and their career. “I had one intern who was in technology as an entry level employee, and now he manages our whole IT department,” he says.

That intern, Prateek Malhotra, currently serves as the firm’s vice president of information technology. He started as an intern at Condor Capital in November 2007, joining the firm full time in January 2012 after graduating from Rutgers.

Another Rutger’s grad and former intern, Hiren Shah, 29, joined the firm full time as a portfolio manager. “Young people want to be challenged,” Schapiro says. “They’re not afraid to work hard, but they also need to see the fruits of their work. They also need an environment that rewards their efforts.”

In turn, Schapiro and his staff can train young people in Condor’s ways of doing business and don’t have to worry about the staff learning bad habits at other places. To make sure they fit into Condor’s culture, potential new hires are required to undergo a personality test and the “Wonderlic Test,” a timed examination of intelligence.

“We’re really looking for people who want to find ways to do things better,” says Schapiro.

Two of his greatest hiring coups are Michael and Tanya Walliser. Michael, 37, joined Condor in 2003 after graduating from Rutgers in nearby New Brunswick.

After school, Michael knew he wanted to work in finance, but was turned off by the opacity of the brokerage model and the slow trajectory of the typical career path for young people in the industry. “Out of college, I went on a bunch of interviews, but most of them were not fee-only firms,” says Michael. “There weren’t a lot of fee-only opportunities out of college.”

Tanya Walliser, on the other hand, joined Condor in 2008 after graduating from the University of Maryland—an outlier among the firm’s New Jersey grads. Her connections to the firm were personal: As a young woman, she babysat Schapiro’s children.

When Michael and Tanya Walliser began at Condor, they were immediately placed into roles of responsibility and allowed to shadow Schapiro and more senior advisors in client meetings. Today, while Michael serves as COO, Tanya is the executive vice president of client services and financial planning.

Hiring young has its complications, however: Young adults are often in periods of disruption and change; they advance in their careers, fall in love, get married, have children, move, settle down, perhaps move again. But the Wallisers offered a special test of Schapiro’s approach.

After Tanya was hired in 2008, “We started dating a year or two later,” says Michael. “It wasn’t really intended, one thing just kind of led to another.”

Soon after they started dating, they told their superiors. Schapiro himself was uncomfortable with the arrangement. Michael, who had risen quickly through the ranks, was managing much of Condor’s young staff, including Tanya, presenting a conflict of interest only resolved when Schapiro himself decided to take responsibility for managing her.

“I did have concerns at first, but they didn’t last very long,” says Schapiro. “Something like this was bound to happen eventually.”

That kind of flexibility and support is key to retaining young staff as they become more experienced, Schapiro says. Since Condor has a staff of 20 professionals and a client-to-advisor ratio of nearly 80 to 1, well above the industry’s average, the firm has to stress teamwork. So the staff comes with a blend of certifications and expertise.

“Generally, people will call us asking to talk to the service person they’re accustomed to working with, but we’ll all take the calls whether or not we’re the person they expect to help them,” says Tanya Walliser. “We all listen to each other.”

Clients, then, are encouraged not to think of any one staff member as their personal advisor, but to think of Condor Capital as a firm. Many clients are medical professionals or small business owners. Though the client asset minimum is only $250,000, the firm typically works with those who have $1 million or more in net worth. The clientele also reflects the company’s workforce by skewing younger than the national average. About one-third come from out of state.

Condor manages diversified, optimized and tailored investment portfolios for its clients using seven in-house strategies constructed mostly from efficient, low-cost funds. “We still have a model where we pick stocks, so we do some active, too, but the important piece is that we’re not pigeonholed into one scenario or one strategy,” says Schapiro. “How someone is invested depends on the specific client first, then on our expectations of the economy.”

These clients are served with complimentary, comprehensive financial planning, including retirement planning, life event planning, estate planning blueprints, tax planning, insurance evaluation and risk management, and educational planning.

The Condor work area is a zoo of cubicles where the walls and divisions between workers are virtually nonexistent. Portfolio managers work alongside planners who work alongside client service personnel who work alongside the RIA’s founder and president.

“I’m not bottled up in an office. I’m out there, too, working alongside everyone else,” says Schapiro.

The perks also help preserve the team environment. Schapiro makes sure there are team-building excursions to concerts and events every year, and every day the firm buys lunch for its employees.

Condor also offers an employee stock ownership plan, or ESOP, to staffers as they grow within the company. Schapiro believes that giving them a stake in the firm makes them more productive and will help his firm grow.

“I went around the country and realized that employee stock ownership programs were wildly successful in most places,” he says. “It’s about doing the right thing for the employees so that employees do the right thing for Condor and our clients. I think that is part of what makes us successful.”

NJ Biz, a statewide business magazine, has recognized Condor Capital as one of the best places to work in New Jersey. Part of retaining a youthful office is offering technological benefits and staying ahead of the tech curve, says Schapiro.

“We’ve always believed in technology. I got us a Bloomberg terminal in our second year of business. We might have been ahead of ourselves, spending $18,000 on the Bloomberg when we were still grossing under $100,000, but our accounts were built on those early assets. Our love of technology started right away.”

Several years ago, he initiated a policy that gave employees a smartphone of their choice after they had worked at Condor for three years. The firm pays for the phone, the plan and upgrades every two years.

The firm also houses its technological infrastructure on-site rather than farming it out to a remote location and keeps its own IT department instead of contracting a third-party vendor.

In the past, the firm’s IT professionals have helped it integrate much of its technology and software, so that Condor has been able to seamlessly move among programs—even before the major custodians and software providers seriously focused on developing their own integrations.

In 2017, Condor launched a new client portal for its clients. “Our clients tend to be very hands-on, which may be because so many of them are from New Jersey,” says Michael Walliser. “They want to be able to log onto our portal and see what’s happening and everything that has already happened.”

In recent years, Schapiro has taken his love of technology and his mission of transparency a step further, spinning off a research firm, Backend Benchmarking, to show the results of different investing strategies over time.

He believes that transparency should be the rule across the financial advice industry, and that’s led him to pursue the first in situ research of robo-advisors, the Robo Report, originally launched by Condor Capital in 2015.

“I’m an entrepreneur myself,” he says. “This started out as kind of a garage project initially. It turned into a desire to bring transparency into something I don’t think is very transparent. In fact, advisors in general aren’t as transparent as I think they should be.”

He noticed that robo-advisors were not forthcoming about their investments and performance, so he began funding robo accounts with his personal money and tracking their performance with the help of Condor Capital’s four-person research staff.

To date, Schapiro has invested over $500,000 of his own money into the venture (which evolved into Backend Benchmarking). “We started Backend Benchmarking because there was a need for research into investment strategies and services being offered to the public,” says Schapiro. “We started with robo-advisors because they were largely an unknown. The most robotic thing advisors do is investment management. It can easily be automated away. Advisors need to see the numbers out there in order to make an effective decision about the future of investment management.”

Moving forward, Schapiro wants to use Backend Benchmarking to track the performance of the entire investment industry, making it another idea that, like Condor, could grow into an enterprise that changes many lives.

Apart from skiing slopes that few people have the pleasure of ever seeing, perhaps it’s the privilege of watching something large grow from an idea and watching successful advisors and support staff grow from adults barely over the age of majority that imbues Schapiro with the optimism and openness usually reserved for men half his age.

“I’ve always tried to learn from other people, so it’s good that we have a young office,” says Schapiro. “I want to learn how to adapt in the future and to changes yet to come. This is not a static formula, it’s an evolving formula.”