Pigg's goal is to streamline and simplify the advisory process to reduce the burden on a company's internal administration. Pigg jumped into the role in 2008 as the downturn left many companies short staffed. "Today I feel like this is not even a job," he says. "I'm so passionate about what I do that I wake up every day very excited to face another day with the profession."
— Mason Braswell
4
Thomas Hutson-Wiley, 38
Merrill Lynch / San Francisco
$3.25 billion in assets
This year has been good to Thomas Hutson-Wiley, who ranked number one on On Wall Street's Top 40 list in 2011 and makes the list for the fifth time.
In the past 12 months, Hutson-Wiley has seen his assets under management jump almost $1 billion from $2.33 billion last year. He attributes that spike in growth in part to the success of his entrepreneur, venture capital and private equity general partner clients. And he also credits his team's hard work since the beginning of the financial crisis in 2008 that is now starting to pay off.
That comes as some of Hutson-Wiley's clients have reaped the benefits of a number of successful technology initial public offerings that he says have done "incredibly well" while not inviting the same publicity or scrutiny as Facebook. And it also comes as Hutson-Wiley's team has worked hard to stay out in front of clients when the markets were tough so that they would remember the team when the environment turned around.
"It's our loyalty to our clients and their loyalty to us that really put us in the position to achieve some pretty spectacular growth this year," Hutson-Wiley says. "We're up about 112% on the year, and there's not a lot of businesses in financial services or anywhere that can kind of boast that kind of growth over the last 12 months." Hutson-Wiley's team includes five partners who equally share a business covering about 1,000 total clients. The team has a total of 17 professionals, including client associates and a newly-added derivatives professional. Their practice spans the globe from San Francisco to Seattle, Boston, Paris and Hong Kong.
Serving the team's specific client niche poses unique challenges, Hutson-Wiley says, particularly because it is so transactional. The team specializes in esoteric trades that might include different currencies, countries, or the exchange of one asset for another. It also might include large trades with a lot of public disclosure around them, such as a founder of a business who is trying to achieve liquidity.
And those transactions also have a lot of emotion around them, Hutson-Wiley says, particularly for equity ownership in a 12- to 14-year-old business where an investor was there from day one.
Some of those investments can represent up to 99% of the investor's net worth. That emotion can mean that an investor can change their mind on a trade just five minutes before it is scheduled to go through. But Hutson-Wiley says his team does not dissuade those decisions.
"We don't mind people being passionate about what they're doing. We want to help them just make the right decision, and that changes," Hutson-Wiley says. "And if it changes, it's like, 'Okay, let's cancel that trade, let's not put that through and just talk about what you're trying to achieve here, what your goals are.'"
— Lorie Konish
5
Bradley Cull, 34
Merrill Lynch / Atlanta
$2.93 billion in assets
The story of how Bradley Cull got his start in the financial services industry sounds like the plot from an F. Scott Fitzgerald story, except with a happy ending.
Cull was waiting tables at a country club in North Carolina one summer, paying his way through college in Florida, when one patron caught his eye. They were a "good looking family," Cull recalls, with "nice kids," and it "just seemed like a young guy that was making a good living."
The man turned out to be James Wallace, a very large producer from Merrill Lynch's Atlanta office. Seizing the opportunity, Cull scored an introduction to Wallace and discovered the two had some shared interests. He landed a second meeting, and eventually a job right out of college working at the Merrill Lynch call center in Jacksonville, Fla., in 2003.
"To tell you the truth, I didn't have a clue what he did at Merrill Lynch," Cull admits. "I just knew that he was successful and after sitting down and talking to him, I got a better idea. And what he told me was, 'I didn't come from a lot of money, but I'm used to being around a lot of money.'"
