Brent Brodeski joined Savant Wealth Management in 1992 as a co-founder, and has since grown the firm to about $30.6 billion in assets under management. This year, the firm will do $100 million in Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization.
But the journey was not always rosy.
“This is the only job I’ve had,” he said, speaking at the Wealth Management EDGE conference on Wednesday at The Boca Raton resort in Boca Raton, Fla. “What I didn’t realize until 8 1/2 years ago is, we had a wildly dysfunctional business. It was a mess, and I didn’t even know it.”
The board was “horrible,” he said. The co-founder of the firm, who was 17 years older than Brodeski, wouldn’t even talk to him. “My co-founder was the biggest swamp monster.”
Another partner was a peacemaker, and didn’t want to make any decisions.
At that time, Brodeski wanted to figure out a way to retire a couple of those people and align the rest around a common mission and vision for the future.
In 2016, he did just that, raising over $50 million through a combination of outside capital and employee investments to address shareholder liquidity and create a new capital structure.
Since then, Savant has grown 15x. Now, the firm has 205 employee owners, representing almost a third of its workforce, which, Brodeski argues, has created an “alignment of interest” across the firm.
Brodeski outlined six different models in the wealth management business: the founder/entrepreneur model; family business; partnership; public company model; private equity in the form of a majority stake; and private equity in the form of a minority stake.
Each of these models has its pluses and minuses, but he said Savant has been successful taking the best of each one.
At Savant, he said ownership control with minority investment is part of a good path for what he sees as a sustainable model for the decades ahead.
“I don’t ever want to be public, but we have a great board and we have great governance,” he said. “We have access to capital. We have the best of those, without having Sarbanes–Oxley, without quarterly earnings.
“Think about the value you can create if you find the right balance between those six different business models, and then be patient.”
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