Cerity Partners Family Office (CPFO) can trace its origins to Goldman Sachs so there’s no doubt the investment bank has deeply influenced the firm. But not necessarily the way you might think.
Contrary to rumors about Wall Street powerhouses, CPFO is not particularly interested in pushing investment products on its ultra-high net worth (UHNW) clients. Instead, the challenges of serving as an in-house family office to highly motivated Goldman partners have taught Cerity the value of providing an integrated suite of services to demanding clients who increasingly want more, not less attention.
“We were in charge of (Goldman partners’) holistic balance sheet,” said Justyn Volesko, Partner and Co-Head of CPFO. “We spent a good amount of time trying to figure out Goldman partners, who are some of the brightest, quickest, smartest folks in the industry, and how to meet and exceed their expectations. And with this ability to just focus on making them happy, we kind of honed our skills and figured out how to provide that service offering.”
Fierce Competition For UHNW Clients
Today, competition for UHNW clients is as fierce as ever. According to Altrata, 38% of the world’s UHNW clients reside in the North America alone.
The world’s UHNW clients collectively hold $30 trillion, or 10%, of investable assets. And this group is growing. For the first six months of 2025, the number of UHNW clients in the U.S. grew 6.5% compared to the same period in the prior year.
CPFO has distinguished itself as true multi-family office, not just one in name only. Instead of exclusively promoting wealth accumulation, CPFO prides itself on integrating services like tax optimization, insurance and estate planning. The key, Volesko said, is how to do this kind of integration at scale for multiple families.
“Who is the lead person managing that relationship?” Volesko said. “If it’s an investment person, they’re unlikely a true family office. You see it all the time with these RIAs aspiring to be a family office. They can provide each of these services to the client, but they lack integration.
“If a client says: ‘I want to wire money to buy a piece of art,’ you very easily do that, but you have to think about insurance for that art,” he continued. “You have to think about use tax for that art purchase. You have to think about getting it on the balance sheet. That’s where magic comes to life. That’s why a lot of folks are failing at actually doing this. That’s why there is no clear-cut leader industry leader in the family office space.”
Volesko spent 10 years as a Vice President at the Goldman Sachs Family Office, an exclusive service for the firm’s partners. In 2012, Volesko and Andrew Cooper co-founded AJ Wealth in New York, where Volesko used his background as a tax attorney to efficiently manage wealth for UHNW clients.
Realizing AJ Wealth needed to scale faster, the two men merged the company with Cerity Partners in 2023.
“Partnering with Cerity Partners is a natural evolution of our firm,” Cooper said at the time. “Our clients work with us because we are a true ‘financial planning first’ firm providing a suite of family office services that allow us to handle all aspects of their financial lives.”
Picking Investments
Like many family offices that cater to UHNW clients, CPFO says it offers access to a broad range of investment options, “including exclusive opportunities (to) help maximize potential returns.”
Indeed, private markets, including private equity, debt and venture capital, now occupy a greater portion of overall portfolios, especially UNHW clients. In December, Cerity Partners announced it acquired a stake in Nasdaq Private Markets (NPM), a platform for investors to buy and sell shares in privately owned firms like venture-backed startups.
“The partnership creates new opportunities for our high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth clients to access hard-to-source private company investments through NPM’s platform,” Cerity said of the deal.
Volesko said private investments don’t make sense for everyone.
But Volesko said private investments don’t make sense for everyone. He suggests that many family offices are pushing private assets to generate growth rather than respond to actual demand from clients.
“Maybe it’s a bit of a dirty secret, but when you compare the performance of these private, alternative investments to the S&P 500, often times the S&P 500 is outperforming them,” Volesko said.
“And so why are you going to pick an illiquid, tax inefficient investment?” he said. “It’s because the people that are pitching those products are telling you that their product is better. Over the years, just watching the S&P 500 performance compared to anything else out there, the S&P 500 nine times out of 10 is going to outperform anything else.”
That’s why CPFO prefers a holistic approach to investment management, especially when dealing with UHNW clients.
“First, we come up with the asset allocation based on their risk tolerance, and a large allocation of their portfolio is going to be to U.S. large cap stocks,” Volesko said. “That’s going to be the biggest performer. We then layer a tax loss harvesting strategy that generates tax benefits along the way. So, in our mind, we’re selling the client the financial planning services of a family office.”
“We’re not trying to differentiate on the investments because you really can’t,” he continued. “We can build out a portfolio of exchange traded funds (ETFs) because that’s going to get you the best performance. It’s going to be most tax efficient, lowest cost and liquid versus other advisors who are selling you on their investment acumen. They have to make it look like they’re coming up with an investment offering that is unique, sexy, and that’s going to outperform. It doesn’t ever, but those words usually resonate to prospective clients.”
Beyond Portfolios
Another way to win over UHNW clients, Volesko said, is relatively simple: Give them what they want. Such clients are increasingly demanding concierge services like bill pay, managing payroll expenses of household employees, providing security for homes and other properties and overseeing maintenance for cars, boats and planes.
Give them what they want.
“This client has a need,” Volesko said. “We need to figure out how to do this for the client. It’s not so much about whether these concierge services are profitable. It’s the client as a whole. We’re able to quote fees that are high enough to pay for all of this. A lot of times we’ll lose a prospective client because our fees are too high. But it is what it is to some extent. We know the resources that are going to be required to service this client and the cost of those resources.”
“It’s our ability to just say yes, it’s never no,” he said. “Whatever a client needs, yes, we can help you with that. I got into this business because I like helping people. I like to be able to provide that peace of mind. The greatest compliment I could have is that when a client goes on vacation, they email their family and say ‘God forbid something happens to me, email Justyn. He knows everything. He can help you with everything.’ My heart just warms when that happens.”
Thomas Lee, Senior Editor and Staff Writer at Wealth Solutions Report, can be reached at thomas.lee@wealthsolutionsreport.com.
