Firm’s move only part of equation
Memories of New Haven came back to Joseph Natoli as he drove up from Brooklyn to celebrate the opening of a new office for Aegis Wealth Partners on Long Wharf.
Natoli advises clients on money management and has some business in Connecticut. But his recollections aren’t about finance. They’re about the electronic music scene in the early 2000s — including New Haven.
“I used to play gigs in all kinds of places,” Natoli recalled. “There used to be parties and clubs here.”
So it matters to him that Aegis — a sister firm to his company — has now consolidated offices from Madison, Hamden and Guilford into one location in New Haven, where he can meet his Connecticut clients, now in a suit instead of grungy jeans and a black Tshirt.
And for a similar reason, it matters to the whole state of Connecticut.
Aegis, founded seven years ago by managing partner Brett Amendola, has 25 employees with a goal of reaching 35 in its new space in the next three years. That’s a good sized wealth advisory firm, with hundreds of millions of dollars — Amendola won’t give an exact figure — under management.
Aegis isn’t big enough to move the dial for a $280 billion state economy, of course, certainly not by moving people within a region.
But the firm’s move — with an openhouse for clients and friends earlier this month — takes on heightened importance because under Gov. Ned
Lamont’s economic development strategy, growing cities is paramount. And New Haven, arguably the Connecticut city with the most potential as a magnet, is the fulcrum.
David Lehman, Lamont’s economic development chief, told me recently he’d like to see New Haven’s population double within two or three decades. That may be too much to ask, but clearly the commercial and academic heart of the city — with Yale, YaleNew Haven, a biotech cluster and everything else cities offer — can explode if incoming Mayor Justin Elicker succeeds.
It will happen in small slices if it happens, and Aegis is one of those slices. Actually, it was 320 slices at its open house, as Modern Apizza delivered 40 large pies. It was lost on no one — certainly not Amendola, whose family arrived in New Haven in 1910, that Modern is a local institution.
“This is the culmination of my 28, going on 29 years,” said Amendola, 50. “There’s a vibrant legal and financial community here, they’re in New Haven ... they want to be someplace that’s exciting.”
Aegis taps into that community more than other wealth management firms, perhaps, because it’s well set up to work with business owners and professionals, with a team approach within the office, and within a merged corporate structure.
“If I look at my competitors, they’re in the suburbs,” Amendo
la said. “That’s not maximizing the opportunities.”
Wait a minute, until this month Aegis was itself in the suburbs. Why not move to the city sooner?
Part of the answer, ironically, is a merger with a New York company. Amendola founded Aegis — the name refers to the shield of Zeus — in the summer of 2012. He had worked for UBS, MetLife and other financial services outfits.
“I got sick of working for big companies. I’m entrepreneur, I didn’t want somebody else deciding what I was worth,” he said. “That first day it was just me and a dream.”
Aegis is a general agent for Guardian Life, meaning it sells life and disability from Guardian and uses a Guardian subsidiary as its brokerdealer for financial products from all sources. In 2016, after years of steady growth, Aegis, looking to expand its base beyond Connecticut and Rhode Island, merged with another, larger Guardian general agent — National Financial Network, based in Manhattan.
That company’s general partner is now a partner at Aegis along with Amendola. And that arrangement made the move possible sooner than it might have happened.
Now, when Amendola looks out of the corner windows of his office on the 11th floor of a highrise on Long Wharf, he sees the sweep of the harbor and the city — including the neighborhood where his father grew up on Olive Street, the downtown where he collaborates with lawyers and accountants for his clients and in the distance, Quinnipiac University, where he graduated and is now on the alumni board of governors.
“So I feel home,” said Amendola, who lives in Madison..
It’s one story of thousands that need to happen if New Haven is to become the true magnet city Connecticut needs. Stamford is doing a great job attracting New Yorkers, but overall the state is losing an average of about 22,000 people a year to other states, when we add up the incoming and outgoing moves.
“We see what’s happening in Boston with the tech corridor, and why isn’t that happening in New Haven? New Haven is as vibrant a city as you’d want,” said Joe Ametrano Jr., a Guilford lawyer and client at Aegis, whose wife is office manager at the firm.
None of this is meant to gloss over the problems that New Haven and all other cities have, and, indeed, these guys live in the suburbs. The point is about momentum and whether Connecticut, largely through New Haven, can join the 21st century urban boom — in slices like Aegis.
For Ametrano, whose family owns Ashley’s Ice Cream, another regional institution, the Aegis move will “get us into New Haven more often.”
The move into Class A office space allows the firm to attract talent more easily, said Raymond Bovich, a senior partner who joined Aegis five years ago. Far from just acting as a stock broker and manager of sheltered retirement funds, Aegis manages, for example, multiple definedbenefit plans for physicians and other clients.
“This is already much better for my business,” said Bovich, a chartered financial analyst. “We spent a lot of time traveling between our offices to meet with our reps.”
One client showed up Friday from Springfield, Amendola said, and remarked on the location — six minutes from Portofino’s, the downtown restaurant where they had lunch.
Don’t worry, Connecticut is still a collection of towns at heart. Another client, a business owner in Madison, where Amendola previously had his office, said the city location is fine, but he wanted to make sure Amendola will still come out to see him.
Yes, Amendola said. “I’m still going to go buy him lunch in Madison.”