Optimizing the personal finances
of entrepreneurs and investors

We offer our expertise to carefully selected individuals and families. We seek to provide high-quality independent advice on everything that is important to your personal finances, and we take great pride in fulfilling our fiduciary responsibility to our clients.

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Selecting an advisor

We know that it is difficult to create substantial wealth.

It is often the cumulative outcome of many years of early mornings and late nights, of flights and hotel rooms across the globe that blur together, of being your own toughest critic, and of staying confident and resilient in the face of the many obstacles along the way.

We know this world because we live it too.

We believe that the professionals you trust to manage your hard-earned wealth should have the same focus, intensity, and passion for excellence that enabled you to build your wealth in the first place.

Selecting a financial advisor is one of the most important financial decisions you will make. We believe that you should run the same type of thoughtful process for selecting a financial advisor as you would run for filling a critical leadership position in your professional life. Your financial advisor should share your ethics, values, and intensity, and be of your intellectual caliber.

The Problem We Solve

We believe that your personal finances are a complex optimization function, where all of the components are interconnected and every component is important.

Solving this optimization function on an ongoing basis is difficult and time-consuming for individuals to do on their own, and the impact of not being optimized can be substantial, in both direct costs and in foregone opportunities.

Our firm has built the experience to keep your personal finances optimized as life happens.

What we do

When you join Trevian Wealth Management, we endeavor to optimize every part of your personal finances.

On an ongoing basis, we disproportionately invest our time in providing advice when you reach an inflection point in your life. These are the times when you are making major life decisions, which is when our advice can add dramatic value to the ultimate outcomes.


Examples of inflection points include: changing jobs, starting or selling a business, raising capital, buying or selling real estate, marriage, planning for children, deciding when to retire, and negotiating for or selling stock options, private company stock, or carried interest.

The areas across which we optimize include:

Asset allocation
Asset location
Carried interest
Cash management
Education
Estate planning
Healthcare
Insurance
Liability management
Liquidity management
Private company stock
Real estate
Restricted stock
Retirement
Spend analysis
Stock options
Taxes
Trusts

Given our focus on entrepreneurs and investors, we are well-versed in concentrated holdings of private company stock, stock options, restricted stock, carried interest, and GP/LP structures.

In addition to our in-house experience, we have built a network of trusted specialists, to which our clients have full access, and we of course partner with our clients’ existing tax, legal and other advisors.

In short, if it is important to you, it is important to us, and we will leverage our knowledge and network to provide you with expert advice and guidance.

our investing philosophy

Long-term investors outperform short term investors
We have direct familiarity with some of the most sophisticated institutional financial engineering, and understand even the most complex financial instruments.  With that knowledge, we believe that most complexity does not benefit the investor and should be avoided
Risk is the permanent loss of capital, not price volatility
The best way to compound wealth over decades is to maintain a thoughtful asset allocation, remain invested (i.e., not attempt to time the market), and keep costs and fees low
It is very difficult for an active manager to outperform a market index over decades after costs and fees, and it is even more difficult for an investor to correctly predict in advance which small percentage of managers will do so.  Therefore, we favor low-cost index funds and passive ETFs

pricing

We are proud of our fiduciary responsibility to our clients.

We are independent, entirely founder-owned, and we receive compensation only from our clients.  We do not participate in soft dollar programs or wrap fee programs, and we do not accept commissions or 12b-1 fees.

Clients of Trevian Wealth Management pay 1.2% on the first $3 million of assets, 1.0% on the next $3 million, 0.7% on the next $14 million, and 0.5% on the balance above $20 million.

We believe strongly in transparency and in the alignment of interests with our clients. We invest our own capital in the same securities as our clients.

Team

Phil Swisher

Phil Swisher is the founder and CEO of Trevian Wealth Management, a wealth management firm that focuses on optimizing the personal finances of entrepreneurs and investors, with an unlimited scope personal CFO business model. He is also the founder of Trevian Cash.

Prior to starting Trevian Wealth in 2015, he was the global head of innovation for Brown Brothers Harriman where he built technology products for large banks and asset managers, was part of a team that acquired Northeast Bank in Maine, ran a recycling and trash management startup backed by the Kraft family, and started his career as a financial institutions investment banker and energy investor at Goldman Sachs in New York.

He has a B.A. in economics from Williams College and an M.B.A. from the Harvard Business School. He and his wife live in Weston, MA with their daughter and son.

Cathy Hession

Cathy Hession is a Senior Vice President and leads client service and trading for Trevian Wealth Management. Cathy is also the head trader for Trevian Cash.

Prior to joining the firm, she was the COO of a wealth management firm, a real estate investor, the Head of U.S. Equity Trading for MFS Investment Management, and an Equity Sales Trader at First Boston.

Cathy has a B.S. in Business Administration from Emmanuel College and lives with her husband in Sudbury, MA.

Nat Jovanovic

Nat Jovanovic is a Senior Vice President and leads Business Innovation and is also the firm's Chief Digital Officer.

Prior to joining the firm, she was the Chief Digital Officer of Sanofi Pasteur, Head of Business Solutions for Property and Special Risk at AIG, the Vice President of Innovation at Brown Brothers Harriman, and an Engagement Manager at McKinsey.

Nat is also a co-founder of a medical device startup and is on the scientific advisory council for the Drug Information Agency.  She has a Ph.D. and an M.S. in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois Chicago, where she was class valedictorian.  At MIT, her research focused on designing better parts for nuclear-powered satellites.

Dan Hession

Dan is a Vice President and leads portfolio analysis and strategy for Trevian Wealth Management, and also leads portfolio analysis for Trevian Cash.

Prior to joining the firm, he was a proprietary trader at Gelber Group in Chicago, where he managed his own book across macro asset classes, and before that he was the co-founder of an algorithmic trading startup in San Francisco.

Dan has a B.S. in Business Administration from Carnegie Mellon University and lives in Fort Lauderdale, FL.

Bailey Latte Alias-Swisher

Bailey heads the firm's visitor greeting team, as well as leads the firm's efforts to chase small woodland creatures. He specializes in pursuing rabbits, chipmunks and squirrels, and also chases the occasional deer and wild turkey.

Little is known of his career history prior to joining the firm. He previously lived in Virginia, where we rescued him. He is a mix of terrier, beagle and dachshund, among other breeds.

He can be reached at pup@trevianwealth.com, though would prefer if you contact him in person, particularly if you also bring cheese to share with him.

The Long-Term Vision for Trevian Wealth Management

Trevian Wealth Management is a “forever business” that our founder plans to operate for the rest of his working life. With a time horizon of many decades, strategic decisions that are normally complex become simple.

In building our team, we only hire people who we would want as mentors for our children. For clients, we accept only those who share our values, and with whom we want to partner for decades to come.

As a wholly founder-owned firm, we have no external pressure to grow our team or our client base, and can focus solely on what is in the best long-term interest of our clients.

Contact Us

Phil Swisher, our Founder & CEO, can be reached at: phil.swisher@trevianwealth.com and 847-347-3000

We are headquartered near Boston, and travel the world to see our clients.

Disclosure: This content is provided by Trevian Wealth Management, LLC (“Trevian Wealth Management” or the “Firm”) for informational purposes only. Investing involves the risk of loss and investors should be prepared to bear potential losses. Past performance may not be indicative of future results and may have been impacted by events and economic conditions that will not prevail in the future. No portion of this commentary is to be construed as a solicitation to buy or sell a security or the provision of personalized investment, tax or legal advice.

Trevian Wealth Management is a registered investment advisor. For information about Trevian Wealth Management’s registration status and business operations, please consult the Firm’s Form ADV disclosure documents, the most recent versions of which are available on the SEC’s Investment Advisor Public Disclosure website at www.adviserinfo.sec.gov.

If you have read this far, we admire your attention to detail and focus on gathering all the facts. We always read all the fine print too.