CV Advisors, an Aventura, Fla.-based registered investment advisor with $11 billion in assets under management, has hired Ari Hadida, who’s bringing with him a limited number of client families with about $800 million in assets. Hadida joins from Valor Advisors, a Miami-based multi-family office, and will serve as a portfolio manager and a member of CV Advisors’ Investment Committee.
The addition is part of CV’s strategy of building a single-family office at scale, said Elliot Dornbusch, founding partner and CEO of CV Advisors. Hadida was attracted to CV’s single-family office capabilities, including its deep research bench.
“What he encountered in the multi-family office is that larger families are looking for a lot more detailed research process, which is what we tend to do,” Dornbusch said.
He said Hadida considered several other firms, but none had the same level of services and reporting as CV.
The fact that CV has brought in an advisor from the outside validates the scalability of the firm’s single-family office model, Dornbusch said.
“To be honest, we’re not going to be able to scale if we don’t bring somebody from the outside," he said "The fact that we can bring somebody, and he brings a handful of clients and he can take 10 or 15 more, it allows us to believe that we can bring somebody else after him. And then the scalability becomes a reality.”
CV was launched in its current form in 2009 with new partners, under the main idea of managing the wealth of ultra-high-net-worth individuals. The firm manages that wealth directly, skipping money managers, in most cases. To do so, it has built a research team to buy equity and fixed-income securities. The firm does use some third-party managers for a minority of strategies.
The RIA has grown by word of mouth and now serves about 115 clients, including families, institutions, endowments, foundations, insurance companies and Treasury of several banks, across $11 billion in AUM and $16 billion in assets under advisement. The average client has about $150 million in assets.
As the firm grew, the families it served would ask them to do research on other things, such as their own private deals, Dornbusch said.
“Because we are their team—their entire team—they would ask us to do research on anything they would want,” he said. “They would treat us as their only source of information even though they are custodying at first-tier banks. They would ask us to underwrite a hotel, underwrite a farm, underwrite whatever private deal that would come through their plate.”
Prior to working at Valor, Hadida was vice president and global investment specialist at J.P. Morgan Private Bank, advising some of the bank’s ultra-high-net-worth clients.
His hire follows news in May that CV sold a minority stake in the firm to Constellation Wealth Capital, the private equity company created by former Emigrant Partners CEO Karl Heckenberg late last year to invest in the growing channel.
Dornbusch said Constellation’s investment has allowed CV to offer phantom equity to current and future employees. “That’s going to help us hire and retain great people.”