Investing in the Future

To put 100 years in perspective, Tim Suffish considered his own time at St. Germain Investment Management.

“It’s crazy to think I’ve been with St. Germain now 20-plus years, so 100 is a lot in our industry. That predates Fidelity Investments and big firms like that. But 20 years here … time flies,” said Suffish, senior vice president and head of equities at the firm.

But St. Germain has seen plenty of evolution, not only since it opened in 1924, but in the two decades Suffish has been on board.

“If you go back 50 years, firms like St. Germain tended to be brokers, and it was very transactional,” he told BusinessWest. “And portfolios were very different back then. St. Germain initially had a focus on bank and insurance stocks, seeing that we were just up the road from Hartford, Connecticut, the insurance capital of the world. That transitioned to being investment managers, managing diversified portfolios for clients, blue-chip stocks based in the U.S., and that was the way we operated through the ’90s.

Tim Suffish

“If someone comes in to us at 60 years old and they’ve got a handful of years left until they’re retiring, it’s going to be a different conversation.”

“But then, starting around the turn of the century in 2000, we in the industry have moved more toward being wealth managers,” Suffish explained. “We call it total financial planning — your retirement assets or your brokerage assets or saving for some big event down the road, like your children’s college tuition or saving for a second home, or whatever it is. We get more involved in all aspects of that, both the planning that goes in beforehand, setting expectations for what the returns might be, and the timing to get to that goal.”

In putting the company’s longevity in historical perspective, St. Germain’s website notes it has survived 17 U.S. presidents, six U.S. wars, a global pandemic, and much more … “and yet, we’ve stuck to one maxim across those years: do what’s in the best interest for our clients.”

“We have advisors that are salaried employees. We don’t sell commissioned products,” Suffish explained. “Our advisors can go into the typical client meeting and give what we think is the right advice, and there’s no conflicts of interest where this thing over here is going to pay me more if I put them in it, versus something else. That’s something that differentiates us a little bit from some of the competition out there.”

Goals at Any Age

Suffish and the team at St. Germain — including President Mike Matty, who has served in that role for the past quarter-century — have stressed that financial planning and financial management are a process, whether an investor is 25 or 75.

For a new client, the first meeting starts with an exchange of information, as the client learns about the firm’s overall approach and generally conservative philosophy, and the team learns about the client’s financial life: assets, liabilities, income, and expenses.

All that is the starting point for developing a strategy, which considers how assets are managed and allocated, beneficiary designations and how they fit within an estate plan, and more. Once in place, the plan isn’t static, but is reviewed and adjusted as needed, as the markets, the economy, and the client’s own life circumstances change.

“On an annual basis, you’ll come in, and we’ll review the plan and assess whether we are on track to meet your goals,” Suffish said. “And the goals can be five, 10, 15, 20 years away. So at the start, let’s set a plan, let’s set an asset allocation, let’s figure out some stocks or ETFs [exchange-traded funds] or mutual funds that are going to be the right tools to get us to that goal. And then, on an annual basis, let’s review the plan, review the assets, review how things are doing, and see if we’re still on track to be where we want to be in 20 years.”

Mike Matty has been president of St. Germain for the past quarter-century.

While clients of all ages and stages of life partner with St. Germain, Suffish noted, “we’re in the business of wealth management, and when you look at demographics in the U.S., the wealth tends to be in the 50-plus-year-olds, not the 20-year-olds, so our client base mirrors that. But everybody has different goals when they come to us.”

For example, a young person just starting out at work, opening up an IRA, might want to be very aggressive because he or she can tolerate the volatility that goes along with that strategy.

“But if someone comes in to us at 60 years old and they’ve got a handful of years left until they’re retiring, it’s going to be a different conversation,” Suffish said. “It’s about replacing the income that they’re getting from their current job and their current salary and building a portfolio around that — building it around income and conservative growth.”

In any case, risk tolerance is important to assess up front, he added, and it does tend to diminish as time goes on, and the client gets ever closer to needing investments, rather than salary, to pay the bills. That’s even more critical at a time when Americans are living longer than ever before, and someone may need to fund 30 post-retirement years, or more.

“If you’re retiring at a traditional, 65-year-old retirement age and we’re doing the planning out to age 95, we do have conversations with our clients about longevity and family history and your personal history and your health — that’s all part of it. But just to be conservative, planning out to age 90 or 95 is something that we all need to do.”

Expanding Footprint

Again, Suffish said, 100 years is something to be celebrated, and even the firm’s growth in just his 20 years there has been impressive. In those two decades, St. Germain has grown from around seven employees to 50, now operating out of four offices — in Springfield, Northampton, Lee, and Plymouth — along with a satellite office in Mississippi and plans to open another office in New Hampshire.

Meanwhile, assets under management have grown from around $600 million 20 years ago to more than $3 billion today.

That’s a lot of investments supporting a lot of goals and plans, and Matty, Suffish, and the rest of the team don’t take the responsibility lightly.

“We’ve been around a long time,” Suffish said, “and it’s because we try to do things right for our clients all the time. It does make a difference.”