A Morgan Stanley team with about $600 million in assets left the firm and partnered with an existing Cleveland-based registered investment advisory to launch a new RIA. The goal of the new firm, One Seven, is to provide an ongoing service model for clients and advisors, a model focused not just on financial management, but on their physical and mental health as well.
The firm also wants to help other advisors create independent businesses.
“We really think that there’s a base of advisors out there — whether they’re wirehouse or independent already — that really want to come in and have a turnkey experience where the best in technology is provided to them, the best in asset management is provided to them, and other services that they’re used to are all taken care of for them,” said Todd Resnick, one of the four Morgan Stanley advisors and president of One Seven.
The firm, which will have offices in Cleveland and Park City, Utah, will be run by Resnick and CEO Ron Gross, current chief of MGO Investment Advisors. Gross will continue to run MGO, which has about $650 million in assets primarily in the retirement business. The book of business from Morgan Stanley will now be part of One Seven.
In addition to Resnick and Gross, the principals of the new firm will also include Michael Mawby, Stuart Gertman and Bruce Greenwald from Morgan Stanley, and Richard Gross and Paul Orchosky from MGO.
The team had been at Morgan Stanley since November 2008. All four members were at different phases in their wealth management careers when they decided to make the jump to independence. One partner, for example, is about five years from retiring, while Resnick is about 35 from retiring.
“We’re all in very different positions, but at the end of the day, we knew that we wanted to be in control of our own destiny, our own fate,” Resnick said. “And we believed that going independent and beginning our own business was the best way to do that.”
Most of Resnick’s team’s business is wealth management, while MGO is predominantly a 401(k) business.
“So we thought there was some synergism in — not necessarily merging — but affiliating with each other to cross-refer, to help each other with efficiencies and build something that we think could be pretty special in the wealth management space,” said Ron Gross.
The goal is to eventually make One Seven the wealth management division of MGO.
The firm will go beyond just providing financial back-office services to advisors; it will also provide life coaching, sales coaching, health and wellness and succession planning assistance to FAs who affiliate, Ron Gross said.
