{"id":648883,"date":"2026-11-02T16:16:10","date_gmt":"2026-11-02T16:16:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/648883\/"},"modified":"2026-11-02T16:16:10","modified_gmt":"2026-11-02T16:16:10","slug":"raising-capital-brighton-jones-jon-jones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/648883\/","title":{"rendered":"Raising Capital: Brighton Jones’ Jon Jones"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jon Jones had a vision for his wealth management firm that was unique when he co-founded it 26 years ago: manage the client\u2019s entire balance sheet, not just investments.<\/p>\n

He and his business partner, Charles Brighton, left the Big Four accountancy firm Deloitte to start their firm, offering a \u201cpersonal CFO\u201d service that could manage clients\u2019 full financial lives<\/a>. That idea is more common now. But it helped Brighton Jones grow to $30 billion in assets under management across 28 markets, with over 135 employees who are also owners in the business.<\/p>\n

Another strategy the firm is holding to that is becoming less common for large RIAs? Keep growing solely with employee ownership<\/a>, no private equity or other forms of external investment. Jones said that if the firm can continue to bring on the right advisors and support staff, it can maintain its strategy for another 26 years and beyond.<\/p>\n

Wealth Management recently spoke with Jones about the firm\u2019s roots, structure and plans to be a 100-year firm.<\/p>\n

Related:Prime Capital: Private Equity-Backed But Advisor-Controlled<\/a><\/p>\n

The following has been edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n

Wealth Management: Can you take me back to the roots of Brighton Jones’s founding?<\/p>\n

Jon Jones: I met my business partner at Deloitte, and we were doing similar work there, but really felt like there was a better way to do it, which was more of a retainer-based fee, playing the role of a client\u2019s personal CFO. We were really focused on the whole balance sheet because I felt like there was just a gap in the marketplace. Certainly, there were no firms of any type doing balance sheet management.<\/p>\n

In fact, someone just sent me an article from Goldman Sachs\u2014I think it was October of 2024\u2014in which they announced they were going to start a new line of business called Personal CFO. That\u2019s 25 years into our business of saying that, of playing the role of the client\u2019s personal CFO. That\u2019s exciting for me because when the incumbents that are at maturity start to do what you do, you\u2019re like, okay, good, we\u2019re on a new growth trajectory.<\/p>\n

WM: What made you see that need early on, before it became a trend?<\/p>\n

JJ: I was working with corporate executives who really didn\u2019t understand their benefits<\/a>. There are stock options, restricted stock, ISOs and non-quals, which are taxed differently; there are things called a SERP\u2014Supplemental Employee Retirement Plans\u2014deferred comps and sophisticated, smart executives at companies that would give them these benefits, but they wouldn\u2019t really know how to utilize them.<\/p>\n

These executives were great at making money and spending money\u2014the income statement\u2014but they just didn\u2019t know how to maximize and leverage all of the assets and liabilities to their benefit\u2014the balance sheet. In fact, that\u2019s where the core of our client base came from: bankers. They really understood the difference between us and the marketplace, so it was pretty easy to differentiate yourself back then.<\/p>\n

Related:How Baker Street Advisors Built a $21B RIA Through Organic Growth, Client Focus<\/a><\/p>\n

WM: How did you seed the firm initially?<\/p>\n

JJ: It was just us. We were 28 years old, and we had just become fathers. I would say the real seed capital is probably our wives, honestly, because they had incomes and we didn\u2019t. That was the capital that we had\u2014a pretty low burn rate at 28. It\u2019s just kind of like taking the money that we would have and just investing it back into the business and back into growth.<\/p>\n

WM: What were some of the first moments of growth where you started adding other advisors?<\/p>\n

JJ: I\u2019m a CPA, and I really care about consistency and process. I\u2019m definitely never the smartest person in the room, and I think this idea of collective wisdom is much better than anyone\u2019s individual wisdom. I always felt like, man, I got to build a team. We need to build a team to make better decisions for our clients and, ultimately, for our people, too.<\/p>\n

As Charles and I were getting clients, we\u2019d look over the cube at each other, saying, \u201cHey, how are you doing this?\u201d Let\u2019s start to build some consistency. When we hired our first employee, the training program was sitting right beside us, doing things the way we did them.<\/p>\n

Related:Fidelis Capital on Breaking Away to a ‘Different Path’<\/a><\/p>\n

Today, we have Richer Life University, which has advisor academies. Each layer goes through an academy that must be passed to get promoted to the next level. That just really helps drive this collective wisdom, collective thinking and consistent client outcomes.<\/p>\n

\"Brighton-Jones-card_(1).jpg\"<\/p>\n

WM: You\u2019ve built out a broad array of services\u2014tax, estate planning and more. Was that always the plan?<\/p>\n

JJ: Yeah, for sure. You kind of think of buy, build or partner within all those areas. Ultimately, I want those in-house. When you\u2019re one team, and you\u2019re aligned on the outcomes, the better you can align everybody\u2019s interests, the better outcomes you get. That\u2019s why I want all of our people to be owners.<\/p>\n

The first thing we wanted to build out in-house was investments; secondly, taxes; then estate planning; and then we just continued to build out more of the private side of our business, private investment, and the impact work that we do for clients.<\/p>\n

If you have all that in-house and everybody\u2019s in this proverbial boat rowing in the same direction and aligned, you get better outcomes for clients.<\/p>\n

WM: How did you come to the employee ownership model, and how did you structure it?<\/p>\n

JJ: We started early on. It was pretty restrictive in terms of who we were going to give ownership to, who we allowed to buy in, because that was always a principle\u2014making sure that people had to buy in. If you don\u2019t create a system where people buy in, it\u2019s hard to pay people once they\u2019re leaving.<\/p>\n

Now it\u2019s much more programmatic. People have greater transparency into how and when they gain ownership based on their job, role and career at the company. We provide internal loans to them through the company. They pay off those loans over time using whatever means they have plus the dividends from the underlying stock. If they just use the dividends from the stock to pay it off, it usually pays itself off within about seven years.<\/p>\n

WM: Why did you start offering internal loans rather than having employees go through banks?<\/p>\n

JJ: We started with a bank\u2014we would have them go through a third-party bank. But as we opened it up to more people, banks want to get paid on a regular basis, and that was just a little more stress than I wanted. I didn\u2019t want to worry about my teammates making payments to banks. I decided, why don\u2019t we be the bank? We can be as flexible as we want to be with our owners.<\/p>\n

The company will take out a loan from the bank if we need cash to pay departing shareholders, and we\u2019ll use cash flow to do so. It\u2019s a combination of both us borrowing from the bank and cash flows to pay retiring shareholders.<\/p>\n

WM: What happens if there\u2019s a recession or something that impacts growth? How do you think about that?<\/p>\n

JJ: Winning teams win disproportionately during tougher times. When the markets are at your back, everybody\u2019s doing fine. But when the markets go down, those are great for people like us.<\/p>\n

The key to cracking the nut is just servicing clients, because that\u2019s how we have grown. Every single client has an expectation\u2014here is what I expect from you, and we call that the ordinary. If you can deliver something extraordinary, which is something beyond what they expect, they will then remark about you to others. That\u2019s the remarkable experience.<\/p>\n

WM: You mentioned teaching empathy. Can you talk about that?<\/p>\n

JJ: I literally got an email yesterday from a client who said, \u201cI want to let you know that a guy named Jordan at the company is one of your best advisors. My brother died unexpectedly, and he stepped right in and helped all of us, both on the technical side and with empathy. That\u2019s just really rare to find in an advisor.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think it\u2019s rare for our advisors. We teach empathy here. We have a mental fitness program called MESI\u2014Mindful, Emotional and Social Intelligence. It helps people sit with others when they\u2019re going through tough times, ask questions and really understand where they\u2019re coming from.<\/p>\n

WM: There\u2019s a lot of outside capital interested in this space right now. How are you thinking about that?<\/p>\n

JJ: For me, I like simplicity and long-term thinking. I told the company we\u2019re going to be a 100-year company. We just finished the first quarter, 25 years, which we would call the \u2018founders’ phase.\u2019<\/p>\n

All the wealth in the industry seems to be aligning with independent advisors who do more for their clients than just manage investments. All the indications suggest that the next phase of our business is about scaling. We said this next phase is about scaling with the soul that got us here. We created a 10-year plan that\u2019s 10x-ing in 10 years, and we\u2019re one year into that.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know that all private capital thinks in 100-year terms. They tend to have\u2014especially if it\u2019s a private equity fund\u2014five to seven years. I just don\u2019t know that that\u2019s the pressure that I want. I don\u2019t want to make different decisions for our employees or for our clients.<\/p>\n

WM: Given your 10-year plan, do you see any need to change this model? You feel you can continue to scale through organic growth?<\/p>\n

JJ: As long as our organic growth is there, that\u2019s our plan\u2014to continue to win one client and one employee at a time. As long as we’re growing at something north of 15%, it\u2019s pretty healthy.<\/p>\n

I would say the first 10 years were process and scale in client service. The last 15 years were probably really focused on getting clients\u2014how do we systematically get clients beyond the founders? I can go hustle and bring in a million dollars a year, which is really great in years when your revenues are small. But we\u2019re at $135 million in revenue, and that won\u2019t put a dent in our growth.<\/p>\n

In this next phase, I\u2019m finding myself deep-diving into all the people stuff. Systematically, how do we get the right teammates, and then how do we train them and create awesome careers for them where they literally spend their entire career at Brighton Jones? We have several employees who came to us as interns, and they\u2019ve been with us for 15 to 20 years. They\u2019re not going anywhere. That\u2019s my pitch to kids coming out of school.<\/p>\n

WM: Are there any particular areas\u2014regionally or service-wise\u2014that you\u2019re looking to build right now?<\/p>\n

JJ: We just opened a trust company, so that\u2019s an area we\u2019re going to continue to scale.<\/p>\n

I would say technology is a focus\u2014how can technology help scale the non-human parts of our business? And then what\u2019s uniquely human, and how do we double down on investing in building experiences and communities for clients?<\/p>\n

And then opening new markets. We have 28 markets today. The goal is to have another 20 over the next three years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jon Jones had a vision for his wealth management firm that was unique when he co-founded it 26…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":648884,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[138,246,111,139,69,244,245],"class_list":["post-648883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-personal-finance","tag-business","tag-finance","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-personal-finance","tag-personalfinance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/648883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=648883"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/648883\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/648884"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=648883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=648883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=648883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}