By Kenneth Corbin

Pitcairn, a century-old provider of family office services for the ultrawealthy, is moving away from its roots as a trust company and entering the registered investment advisory business as Pitcairn Wealth Advisors.

Coinciding with that move is the acquisition of Brightside Partners, a Baltimore RIA that serves a similarly affluent clientele and specializes in alternative investments.

Pitcairn President and CEO Andy Busser explains that both firms felt they were running into their growth limitations under their previous structures.

Pitcairn formed in 1923 as a family office supporting members of the Pitcairn family, whose wealth derived from the founding of the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company, which now operates as PPG Industries.

It remained a family operation until the late 1980s when it began offering its services to a handful of unrelated wealthy families.

"The idea was to take in three to five new families a year -- not to be a volume operation but to be a super-high-end firm for wealthy families, " Busser says.

Today, Pitcairn serves about 140 families, representing somewhere between 600 and 700 households around the country, Busser says.

Pitcairn had been operating as a Pennsylvania-chartered trust company, but Busser and his team realized that structure "was no longer appropriate for the size and scale that we have, so we formed an RIA."

Pitcairn is based in the Philadelphia suburb of Conshohocken, Pa., and has teams operating in New York, Baltimore, suburban Washington, D.C., and Florida.

After Pitcairn had begun the process of transitioning to an RIA, the firm encountered Brightside, an advisory practice with a specialization in alternative investments that was struggling to build out a more holistic wealth management offering with its small staff.

"They were trying to do more beyond that, and I think they realized they would need to invest in a much larger team," Busser says. "A team of six is too small to do everything they wanted to do well."

The two firms clicked instantly, Busser says, saying they are a neat cultural fit and serve the same type of client -- smart, friendly, motivated, and extremely wealthy.

"It's one of the most natural conversations I've had in my business career because we just liked them so much," he says.

Now that team of six -- five full-time employees and one contractor based in India -- is joining Pitcairn. The deal closed earlier this month, and Pitcairn is in the process of transferring client accounts from the trust company to the RIA. When that process is complete, Pitcairn will have about $9 billion in assets under management, including the accounts overseen by Brightside, which reported $853 million in AUM on its most recent Form ADV regulatory filing.

Pitcairn's staff now includes about 80 people, including roughly 20 equity holders, among them Brightside advisors Pace Kessenich and Ryan Pollard, as well as Justin Bakewell, who had been Brightside's chief compliance officer and now holds that role for the combined entity.

Pitcairn's chairman, Rick Pitcairn, is the great-grandson of PPG co-founder John Pitcairn Jr.

Looking ahead, Busser doesn't rule out future acquisitions but says the firm plans to be "quite intentional" before making another purchase. The Brightside deal was Pitcairn's first acquisition in its 102-year history.

Busser, who joined Pitcairn as managing director from the private-equity world in 2015, says his newly minted RIA plans to stay true to its roots in serving a manageable number of extremely wealthy families. The firm isn't backed by outside money like many of the large RIA aggregators, and Busser says he is happy to keep it that way.

"We are not interested in participating in that at all," he says. "We're not interested in private-equity money and we're not interested in a roll-up strategy."

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January 30, 2025 16:49 ET (21:49 GMT)

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