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.