'The Winner's Circle

Entering the business in 1981, Lee’s resum? includes model, teacher and a legislative union representative for the railroad. Dail was an Air Force pilot before joining his wife’s business. And their junior partner, Gianni Giordano, played professional soccer before entering the industry in 1998.

Diversity Brings Perspective

“Our diversity enriches the services and the perspective that we have to offer our clients,” Corey says.

Any successful team of advisors will talk about the importance of diversity and bringing together different skills to provide comprehensive client solutions. But it’s hard to find a more diverse group than Lee Corey’s team.

Structurally, Lee, who holds a CIMA designation, is the general “because every team needs one,” she laughs. Her expertise is in overall financial planning, wealth management and building personal relationships. Turner is a CFP who has graduate degrees from both Georgetown and George Washington universities. His strengths include analyzing and distilling global economics and complicated income issues. Giordano focuses on solutions for corporate clients, such as developing cashless exercise stock option programs, employee stock purchase plans and pre-planned disposition programs, also known as 10b5-1 plans.

That broad range of professional expertise creates a 360-degree view from which the team analyzes each client’s entire financial picture. During the first meeting, Corey and Turner collect every piece of data. Working from a checklist, they gather information on everything from mortgages to family relationships. Then they gather every document available, from bank statements to wills.

“We go through every aspect of their life,” Corey says. “We don’t just look at what they own, we look at how they use it to guide asset and liability matching.”

From there, Karin McLaughlin, the team’s wealth management analyst, x-rays the paperwork, compiling a comprehensive list of every asset and every liability. It’s her job to pinpoint areas of concern. For instance, she’ll spot if the client’s asset allocation is off balance or red-flag a balloon payment coming up. The entire team, including the lead assistant, Kristin Rascona, meet together to develop a strategy to help the clients achieve not only their financial goals, but their life goals.

“We take a very disciplined, broad-based approach to ensure each client’s intentions and plans become reality,” she says. “It’s great to have a plan, but a plan is just a document. Most people need someone to provide discipline and objective advice to help them get from point A to point B.”

“From the very first interview, every one of our clients understands that this is a partnership,” she says. “We are very passionate about what we do.”

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The Chiavacci Group

Merrill Lynch

Coral Gables, Florida

Several years ago, an entrepreneur was ready to sell his business, but wasn’t sure whether to take it public himself through an initial public offering or sell out to a larger firm. He engaged the Chiavacci team six months prior to making his move to work with his accountant and attorneys, and the team crunched every number, analyzing the situation from every perspective, incorporating income-tax issues, estate implications, insurance and other investment considerations.

After reviewing all of his choices, the client implemented an installment sale to a defective grantor trust coupled with a family limited partnership and an irrevocable life insurance trust. On a present-value basis, the family ended up saving about $80 million that could have been lost to taxes.

That level of planning and service simply wouldn’t be possible without the team he has in place, Chiavacci says.

A Revelation

In 1997, Louis Chiavacci had a revelation when he first looked at Merrill Lynch’s then-new comprehensive Family Office Group platform.

“In the late 1990s, I felt there was going to be a period of reckoning for our industry as securities prices, especially in the technology and telecommunications sectors, were highly extended and possibly going to come down in value,” Chiavacci remembers. “I felt we could gain meaningful market share through that period if we had a service offering superior to what is generally available.”

Through the Merrill Lynch platform, he could see the value he could bring to the ultra-high-net-worth families he worked with by integrating financial planning, estate planning and cash-flow planning into an overarching investment strategy.

That’s when he started building a team, pulling together different strengths to complement his own expertise in client service and investment management. First on board was Michael Beckerman, a financial planning specialist from Ernst & Young who had already built a successful career providing comprehensive financial planning and wealth management services to wealthy families.

“He brought a completely new skill set into the team,” Chiavacci says. “The integration of financial planning into overall investment planning has been a very powerful competitive differentiator for us.”

So powerful that since Chiavacci restructured his solo broker business into a wealth management team, assets under management have grown eight-fold, he says. And through that growth, new skills were required to manage specific client needs, particularly around fixed-income. That’s when he brought Mark Malone on board.

A 14-year veteran of Merrill’s bond division, Mark headed up the Tampa, Fla., municipal bond trading desk for 11 years, and joined the team a year ago as a partner.

Backing up the three partners are two financial analysts, Belkys Pereda and Joseph Chan, as well as an equity research and analytics specialist, F. Ken Chan. Client services are handled by Kim Lemmon and Sana Fuerth, both of whom have more than 20 years of experience in financial services. As a vertical team with a broad reach of experience, they can handle virtually anything ultra-high-net-worth clients bring them.

“Because we only work with about 50 families, everyone on the team knows each client very well, which allows us to provide a highly personalized level of service.”

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R.J. Shook, President and founder of The Winner’s Circle organization, released his eighth book, The Winner’s Circle IV. His rankings also appear in dozens of annual cover stories in publications such as Barron’s, Boston Magazine, California CEO, Minneapolis Business and more. To nominate an advisor and to find more information on the program, visit WCorg.com. The Winner’s Circle is a registered trademark of The Winner’s Circle, LLC.