Tim White of Kaye/Bassman Quoted in FundFire Article, As Industry Grows, SunTrust Revamps Family Office Biz after Tumult

In early summer, before layoffs began sweeping across Wall Street, billboard-sized photos of employees were plastered on the walls, pillars and elevator banks of Credit Suisse Group AG’s offices in the United States and abroad.

The museum-quality prints, depicting workers from administrative assistants to senior executives, were emblazoned with motivational words like “Proactive” and “Partner.” By mid-July, however, the photos disappeared and the Swiss banking giant began laying off 2,000 employees.

Security guards prevented employees from taking cell-phone pictures as the posters were stripped away, according to one employee who was present.

“It sent an entirely wrong message,” said an employee, who was not authorized to speak publicly. “Management literally threw away that kind of money on something so trivial, while planning to cut thousands of jobs.”

A bank spokeswoman declined to comment on the internal campaign or the employee’s comments.

Credit Suisse’s timing illustrates the unanticipated dangers of rampant job-cutting, which tend to run in cycles on Wall Street. Employee morale often plummets at a time when survivors are asked to pick up more responsibility and customer relations can suffer as service and relationships deteriorate.

What’s more, layoffs inartfully constructed can come across to shareholders as Band-Aid solutions that at best temporarily cut expenses and at worst pare away reserves of talented people.

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“They finished cutting the fat and now they’re into the muscle and bone,” said Tim White, a managing partner who specializes in wealth management at the recruiting firm Kaye/Bassman International in Dallas.

GenSpring Family Offices is charting a new course this year after enduring a turbulent period since last summer, when it lost a number of top executives, reset its budget, and closed several office locations. New CEO Thomas Carroll – who came aboard last October after his predecessor, Maria Elena Lagomasino, left – says despite the numerous changes, “business normalcy is on the horizon.”

The multi-family office, in which Atlanta’s SunTrust Banks has a majority stake, runs more than $15 billion in client assets for 450 families served by 14 locations across the country. It had a tumultuous 2012, losing not only Lagomasino, but alsoJean Brunel, the CIO; Michael Zeuner, chief strategy officer; John Elmes, head of investments; and Chris Battifarano, former head of research. Carroll, who came to the post after heading a sports-and-entertainment advisory team within SunTrust, says he aims to preserve much of GenSpring’s core philosophy. “Although we had a change in leadership at the top of the firm, this is not a change of direction in the service we’re delivering,” he says. “We’re continuing to deliver objective, conflict-free service to families.”

Still, the outfit has made various structural and staffing changes, including naming Ernie Dawal, who is already SunTrust’s private wealth and institutional business CIO, to also cover the same role for GenSpring. The multi-family office has trimmed its organizational budgets as well. “It’s kind of a reallocation of capital,” Carroll says. GenSpring also closed its Phoenix and Denver offices, consolidating services for clients in those regions in its Costa Mesa, Calif., location, and in January sold its international-focused affiliate in Miami, as reported. And it is downgrading a strategy of the prior leadership by no longer focusing on acquisitions of high-end independent advisor firms to enter new markets. Instead, GenSpring’s growth will come from new clients, added assets from existing clients, and new advisors and relationship managers bringing business, Carroll says.

The next step is building out the relationship manager and advisor teams, with the early focus on hiring in Southern California and the Northeast, Carroll says. “It’s very safe to assume that over the next six to nine months, we’ll be in the mode of hiring advisors across our [existing] footprint,” he says. The firm will probably face a competitive market, Kruezberger says. “It has definitely been heating up over the last six to 12 months,” he says. The demand for relationship managers who can bring over assets is particularly high, says Richard Risch, CEO of theRisch Group, a New York-based recruiter focused on wealth managers and asset managers. “Whether [multi-family office] firms can compete from a compensation perspective remains to be seen,” he adds. Risch says GenSpring will also find that a certain part of the marketplace takes a “wait and see” approach with firms that have changed ownership and strategy.

The recent changes could play in GenSpring’s favor if candidates are looking for a growth opportunity – and if the compensation is attractive, says Tim White, recruiter and partner at Kaye/Bassman International in Dallas. It won’t be easy, however. “The family office world has a lot of competitive challenges,” he says. “It’s a very expensive business to run.”

Read the full story.

About Kaye/Bassman

Founded in 1981, Kaye/Bassman has grown to become the largest single-site executive search and recruitment firm in the United States with the simple mission of impacting companies and enhancing careers by providing the finest in professional, executive, technical and scientific search. Kaye/Bassman provides strategic recruiting and executive search solutions in over 20 industry practice areas including construction recruiting, healthcare recruiting, banking executive search, energy recruitment and many more. Next Level Recruiting Training, a recruiting training organization, Next Level Exchange, a recruiting training best practices information exchange, and Next Level Marketing Communications are also Kaye/Bassman companies.

For additional information or a sample copy, contact:
Darren McDougal
Kaye/Bassman International
(972) 931.5242
(972) 931.9683
communications@kbic.com

Source: http://www.fundfire.com/c/491481/54901/suntrust_revamps_family_office_after_tumult?referrer_module=emailForwarded&module_order=0