Patricia Soldano has built a successful career managing the personal finances of some of the country’s wealthiest people, rising to the top levels of the profession in Southern California.
Much of the work—which involves guiding the financial decisions of wealthy families—centers on relationships, and while it may be a stereotype, Soldano embraces the idea that women excel at just that.
Soldano, West Coast president of GenSpring Family Offices LLC, one of the largest registered investment advisers in the U.S., said female financial advisers tend to “gravitate toward the noninvestment side” of the family office industry, while men typically devote themselves exclusively to the “investment world.”
The “noninvestment” work is wide-ranging and includes taxes, insurance, accounting, education and philanthropic giving, according to Soldano.
“We are family first,” she said, “and women, I think, tend to be a little bit more nurturing and understanding of the family side of issues.”
Soldano oversees a team of 15 in the Western U.S. unit of Palm Beach, Fla.-based GenSpring, with 13 professionals based in the company’s Costa Mesa office. They manage the financial needs of 26 high-net-worth families in the West that each are worth at least $25 million. GenSpring overall serves 500 clients and has more than $15 billion in assets under management.
GenSpring’s OC office employs 11 women and two men, and the male employees often have to field playful questions about what it’s like working with an office full of women.
“People ask me that a lot,” said Will Froelich, a relationship manager who works with nine client families. “It’s different, but my colleagues are my colleagues. I respect each and every one of them and like them all. I couldn’t care less if they were male or female. It was weird at first being the only guy, but I hardly notice anymore.”
Stewart Darrell is the other male relationship manager in the Costa Mesa office.
Froelich and Darrell work alongside two female relationship managers: Reem Mas-arani and Sandy Juranich.
“Since we work in teams, there is a male and female serving each client,” Juranich said. “One’s a family investment officer, and the other is a relationship manager. That’s where we get our balance. We just have different points of view and different ways of handling a situation. Honestly, I think that is the best formula for success.”
GenSpring overall has three female presidents out of five, including Soldano.
Nikki Gokey is president over the Florida region, which has five offices. Susan Parsons oversees the operations in Atlanta.
It “means a lot” to Juranich that female leaders make up a significant portion of the company’s management.
“That certainly shows how far women have come,” she said. “In my generation, I think we’ve been able to reap the rewards of the women in Pat’s generation and their hard work in their workplace.”
Soldano, 63, wouldn’t disclose her roster of clients but said she spent eight years running a single-family office in Los Angeles for Ted Field, cofounder of record label Interscope and the heir to the family fortune of Marshall Field, founder of Chicago-based Marshall Field and Co. which Macy’s Inc. acquired in 2005.
She has spent the bulk of her family office career running Cymric Family Office Services, which she started in 1987 in Costa Mesa. The office initially focused on one family but later expanded to serve multiple clients. GenSpring acquired Cymric in 2009 in a bid to establish a West Coast presence and brought on Soldano to head operations there.
The family office business targets a small niche.
“People in America with $25 million or more … that’s 60,000 people,” Soldano said. “That’s a small marketplace in comparison to the institutional market. But we have grown in terms of the number of family offices.”
An estimated 2,500 to 5,000 family offices operate in the U.S., with another 6,000 “informally inside privately controlled businesses,” according to the Family Office Exchange, a Chicago-based network organization for “ultra-wealthy” families and family offices. Soldano serves on the group’s advisory board.
The Family Office Exchange and the Institute for Private Investors in New York are considered “the best-known organizations as a resource to the family office industry,” according to Soldano. They were both established by women—Sara Hamilton and Charlotte Beyer, respectively.
Mark Van Mourick, chief executive of Optivest Inc., a multifamily wealth management office in Dana Point, pointed to an increase in “wealthy families’ assets being moved to the family office environment across the country [since the downturn in 2008], to gain better control, transparency and coordinated activities.”
Other family office businesses in Orange County include Corona del Mar-based H&S Ventures LLC, which manages the family office of Henry Samueli, cofounder of Irvine-based chipmaker Broadcom Corp. and owner of the Anaheim Ducks. Michael Schulman, chief executive of Anaheim Ducks Hockey Club LLC, serves as managing director of H&S.
Female advisers, though typically more focused on the relationship-driven aspects of wealth management, are playing an increasingly substantial role on the investment side, as well, Van Mourick said.
“On the investment-adviser firm ownership level, it is still a male-dominated industry, but women advisers have made a significant impact over the last decade,” he said, citing Soldano as an example.
Optivest serves about 70 clients with investment assets of between $5 million and $50 million each.
Its management team includes Chief Operating Officer and Chief Compliance Officer Leslie Calhoun, who has spent 24 years in the investment field.
“I have read that many women would prefer to deal with a female adviser as opposed to a male,” Van Mourick said. “I have found that they are particularly good at looking at the broad family dynamics and other holistic issues that men sometimes miss.”
