Welcome everyone! Welcome to the 371st episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!
My guest on today’s podcast is David Savir. David is the Co-Founder and CEO of Element Pointe Family Office, a Fee-Only RIA based in Miami, Florida that oversees almost $1.6 billion in assets under advisement for 50 client households.
What’s unique about David, though, is that through his 8 years building Element Pointe and focusing exclusively on high and ultra-high-net-worth clients, he and his partner Carlos Dominguez have created an Equity Appreciation Rights plan to enable the members of their team to participate in the growth of the firm, and key team members can then use the cash they earn (after a 3-4 year vesting period) to help fund the buy-in to become future partners, where they get outright equity, voting rights, and a seat at the proverbial (or actual) management team table.
In this episode, we talk in-depth about how David not only works with ultra-high-net-worth clients with 10s of millions of dollars but has found such success with that core clientele that they’ve dialed back on working with more “emerging wealth” clients to just focus on the type of clientele to whom they deliver the most value, how David and his partner Carlos have increasingly adopted an investment approach utilizing both public and private market investments but have found it more beneficial to develop relationships with private equity and private credit firms directly on behalf of their clients and minimize their use of popular alternative investments platforms, and how Element Pointe has increasingly expanded its services beyond its original investment management capabilities to provide more financial planning and family office services… to the point that now in 2024, despite all the industry buzz about fee compression, they’re actually raising their advisory fees to better reflect the real value they’re providing .
We also talk about David’s journey from an MBA and law background to joining Goldman Sachs, and later JPMorgan, where he initially built with ultra-high net worth clients used his firms’ premium brands, until he was ready to break out on his own as an independent, the way David built a team around him to support the hyper-customized portfolio needs of his complex clientele who have to align investment decisions with navigating the timing of cash flows out of GRATs and note payments on IDGTs, and how the growth of what’s become an 11-person team at his independent firm made David and his co-founder Carlos realize that they needed both a path to partnership for their next generation advisors and a way to make that path affordable, which led them to an equity appreciation rights plan to allow key team members to participate in the financial growth of the firm until they were offered a chance to outright buy in as equity partners.
And be certain to listen to the end, where David shares struggles with relinquishing control and how a key mentor cautioned him that it wouldn’t be enough to ‘just’ compensate his team well while trying to keep all the firm’s equity to himself, the way David balanced his goals of building and expanding a network of professional COIs that could provide him referrals and the sheer need to cold-call in his early years just to get any new clients on board when he was first getting started, and how David handled the challenges when he discovered that being an independent wasn’t just about having more control and autonomy, it also meant figuring out everything from team and hiring to trade order management systems and technology APIs, and how it took a full 3 years before he finally felt like the challenges he faced in the business were no longer about the existential threat to survive but simply the strategic opportunities they would have to navigate to reach the next level of success.
So, whether you’re interested in learning about David’s focused strategy with ultra-high-net-worth clients, how David and his partner implemented an equity appreciation rights plan at the firm, or how he hires team members to support hyper-customized needs of clients, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, with David Savir.Read More…
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