Cresset’s Motto: Put Clients First and Everything Else Will Take Care of Itself

Paul Tramontano, a Barron’s Hall of Fame advisor, photographed in Greenwich, Conn. (Photograph by Cole Wilson)

Long careers can take unexpected twists and turns and create enduring professional relationships. So it is with Susie Cranston, a San Francisco–based wealth management executive, and Paul Tramontano, a Barron’s Hall of Fame advisor based in Greenwich, Conn.

Both are now part of the leadership team at Cresset, a fast-growing wealth firm with $70.4 billion of assets. They were colleagues at the now defunct First Republic, where Cranston helped recruit Tramontano. In turn, Tramontano, who joined Cresset as First Republic started to teeter, encouraged Cranston to join him after her work overseeing First Republic’s JPMorgan Chase integration was starting to wind down. She is now president at Cresset.

Barron’s spoke with the two about working together and their efforts to steer Cresset’s growth while maintaining its core value of putting clients first.

Barron’s: How did you both come to Cresset?

Paul Tramontano: I came in April of 2023, when First Republic started to wobble, which had nothing to do with our division. Our team really enjoyed First Republic, and I would have finished my career there, but when problems came up, I didn’t like where I thought it was going—into the arms of a big bank. I had come from that space and didn’t think it was the best place for clients. We wanted to find a firm that was truly independent, that cleared and custodied at Pershing, and that had enough scale to take on our $12 billion in client assets we had at that time. We spoke to about 15 firms, and Cresset stuck out.

Susie Cranston: Paul and I have worked together for over a decade now, and he is one of my most trusted mentors. I first got to know Paul and his team when they were acquired by First Republic, and when I was in the running to be chief operating officer, he gave me great advice.

After First Republic failed, I stayed at J.P. Morgan until it made sense for me to make the next move. I spoke to Paul and he said, based on what I was looking for—an independent firm that puts clients first, where the bar is always around the quality and caliber of people you are bringing together, and that has sufficient scale—I should look at Cresset. I joined a little over a year ago, and it has been a really fantastic place to have landed. I’m very grateful to Paul.

Cresset’s Susie Cranston, photographed in San Francisco, Calif. Photo: Photograph by Cayce Clifford

Paul, do you still have clients? I know you also help lead the firm.

Tramontano: I’m on the board, so I have some firmwide responsibility as a player-coach. Susie does most of the hard work, to be honest. I do still have client responsibilities, which I really enjoy. That’s one of the very few things I’m good at.

Cranston: He’s being very modest!

What have you been focusing on lately in your work with clients?

Tramontano: Given the passage of the new tax laws, we’re spending a fair amount of time on estate planning. Some of those exemptions have gone up, and this is a really interesting time to do more planning. We think we could be going into a slower-growth and higher-tax environment in the future, and estate planning laws are very generous right now. So we’re encouraging clients who can afford it to take advantage of that and move their money down a generation.

What about investing?

Tramontano: For 30 years, we’ve been really focused on after-tax returns on behalf of clients. So, every investment we’ve made, whether long only, hedge funds, credit, or private equity, we always think about net returns after tax. Given the tax plan, opportunity-zone investments and real estate will be an area of interest. For our clients, who are at the very high end of net worth, the emphasis will be on private equity, credit, hedge, and real estate, and less so on the public equity markets, which have had an unbelievable move.

But I hate to give advice in a vacuum. For us, investing is very client specific. Some of our clients are immune to the volatility of the market. Others are more focused on shorter-term waves of the market, and we try to tailor their portfolios to their goals. Our overarching goal has been, and remains, making sure our clients’ allocation fits their goals. If we’ve done that, we’ve been successful.

Cresset just did a big deal, acquiring Monticello Associates, which has $124 billion of assets held by endowments, foundations, and family offices. Tell me about the plan there.

Cranston: We had been looking for a firm like Monticello for several years. Many of our clients sit on boards of leading nonprofits and endowments, and advising those organizations hadn’t been an arrow in our quiver. We thought if we could offer those services to clients, it would be a big win.

We were looking for a good cultural fit, and we were really fortunate because the founder and leader of Monticello is a close friend of Avy Stein, one of our founders, and they knew each other really well, so we had a high degree of conviction that this was going to be a cultural fit.

Monticello will continue to operate under that name, and they have been incredibly successful. The immediate lift for Cresset more broadly is on the research side of the house. We already have a great team researching investment managers, but this will take us even further.

Will you do more deals this year?

Cranston: We aren’t serial acquirers. We typically do one, sometimes two, deals a year that are strategic, like Monticello. Last year, we acquired Connable, a trust company that will allow us to have national trust charters, which is really important for our clients.

What is something new you’re focusing on?

Cranston: We’re looking closely at what AI can do. It’s wild, what is being unlocked there. It’s evolving rapidly, and it’s really exciting.

What sets Cresset apart from other firms?

Tramontano: One is true independence. And a really important one is family-office services—tax, estate, trust, bill pay, lifestyle services. It’s hard to offer all that, and it’s a big investment of time and money, and we’ve done it.

I’ve said, for 30 years in our practice, that we want to be all things to some people. That’s what Cresset is. We have a smaller number of wealthy families, and we want to help them do everything.

The other thing I’ll mention that sets us apart is having a very capable management team. As an advisor, I don’t want to worry about making sure the plumbing works or the client reporting works. If you look out five years from now, the firms that succeed are going to be the ones that have a highly motivated, competent management team. And we have it with Susie and her team.

Tell us more about your customers.

Cranston: There are a lot of company founders in our client population, and we believe our clients skew slightly younger due to that founder component. When you’re running around building a company that is potentially worth billions, your ability to plan for all the other parts of your life is constrained. You need a lot of help, and having the ability to help them gives us a real competitive advantage.

To be in this industry and be successful, you need to be myopically focused on clients’ lives. If you are, it is a really virtuous circle. As I always want to emphasize, our true secret sauce as a firm is always putting clients first.

Thank you, Susie and Paul.

Write to Amey Stone at amey.stone@barrons.com