Raising Capital: Brighton Jones' Jon Jones

Jon Jones had a vision for his wealth management firm that was unique when he co-founded it 26 years ago: manage the client’s entire balance sheet, not just investments.

He and his business partner, Charles Brighton, left the Big Four accountancy firm Deloitte to start their firm, offering a “personal CFO” service that could manage clients’ full financial lives. 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.

Another strategy the firm is holding to that is becoming less common for large RIAs? Keep growing solely with employee ownership, 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.

Wealth Management recently spoke with Jones about the firm’s roots, structure and plans to be a 100-year firm.

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

Wealth Management: Can you take me back to the roots of Brighton Jones’s founding?

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’s 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.

In fact, someone just sent me an article from Goldman Sachs—I think it was October of 2024—in which they announced they were going to start a new line of business called Personal CFO. That’s 25 years into our business of saying that, of playing the role of the client’s personal CFO. That’s exciting for me because when the incumbents that are at maturity start to do what you do, you’re like, okay, good, we’re on a new growth trajectory.

WM: What made you see that need early on, before it became a trend?

JJ: I was working with corporate executives who really didn’t understand their benefits. There are stock options, restricted stock, ISOs and non-quals, which are taxed differently; there are things called a SERP—Supplemental Employee Retirement Plans—deferred comps and sophisticated, smart executives at companies that would give them these benefits, but they wouldn’t really know how to utilize them.

These executives were great at making money and spending money—the income statement—but they just didn’t know how to maximize and leverage all of the assets and liabilities to their benefit—the balance sheet. In fact, that’s 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.

WM: How did you seed the firm initially?

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’t. That was the capital that we had—a pretty low burn rate at 28. It’s just kind of like taking the money that we would have and just investing it back into the business and back into growth.

WM: What were some of the first moments of growth where you started adding other advisors?

JJ: I’m a CPA, and I really care about consistency and process. I’m definitely never the smartest person in the room, and I think this idea of collective wisdom is much better than anyone’s 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.

As Charles and I were getting clients, we’d look over the cube at each other, saying, “Hey, how are you doing this?” Let’s 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.

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.

Brighton-Jones-card_(1).jpg

WM: You’ve built out a broad array of services—tax, estate planning and more. Was that always the plan?

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’re one team, and you’re aligned on the outcomes, the better you can align everybody’s interests, the better outcomes you get. That’s why I want all of our people to be owners.

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.

If you have all that in-house and everybody’s in this proverbial boat rowing in the same direction and aligned, you get better outcomes for clients.

WM: How did you come to the employee ownership model, and how did you structure it?

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—making sure that people had to buy in. If you don’t create a system where people buy in, it’s hard to pay people once they’re leaving.

Now it’s 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.

WM: Why did you start offering internal loans rather than having employees go through banks?

JJ: We started with a bank—we 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’t want to worry about my teammates making payments to banks. I decided, why don’t we be the bank? We can be as flexible as we want to be with our owners.

The company will take out a loan from the bank if we need cash to pay departing shareholders, and we’ll use cash flow to do so. It’s a combination of both us borrowing from the bank and cash flows to pay retiring shareholders.

WM: What happens if there’s a recession or something that impacts growth? How do you think about that?

JJ: Winning teams win disproportionately during tougher times. When the markets are at your back, everybody’s doing fine. But when the markets go down, those are great for people like us.

The key to cracking the nut is just servicing clients, because that’s how we have grown. Every single client has an expectation—here 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’s the remarkable experience.

WM: You mentioned teaching empathy. Can you talk about that?

JJ: I literally got an email yesterday from a client who said, “I 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’s just really rare to find in an advisor.

I don’t think it’s rare for our advisors. We teach empathy here. We have a mental fitness program called MESI—Mindful, Emotional and Social Intelligence. It helps people sit with others when they’re going through tough times, ask questions and really understand where they’re coming from.

WM: There’s a lot of outside capital interested in this space right now. How are you thinking about that?

JJ: For me, I like simplicity and long-term thinking. I told the company we’re going to be a 100-year company. We just finished the first quarter, 25 years, which we would call the ‘founders’ phase.’

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’s 10x-ing in 10 years, and we’re one year into that.

I don’t know that all private capital thinks in 100-year terms. They tend to have—especially if it’s a private equity fund—five to seven years. I just don’t know that that’s the pressure that I want. I don’t want to make different decisions for our employees or for our clients.

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?

JJ: As long as our organic growth is there, that’s our plan—to continue to win one client and one employee at a time. As long as we’re growing at something north of 15%, it’s pretty healthy.

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—how 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’re at $135 million in revenue, and that won’t put a dent in our growth.

In this next phase, I’m 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’ve been with us for 15 to 20 years. They’re not going anywhere. That’s my pitch to kids coming out of school.

WM: Are there any particular areas—regionally or service-wise—that you’re looking to build right now?

JJ: We just opened a trust company, so that’s an area we’re going to continue to scale.

I would say technology is a focus—how can technology help scale the non-human parts of our business? And then what’s uniquely human, and how do we double down on investing in building experiences and communities for clients?

And then opening new markets. We have 28 markets today. The goal is to have another 20 over the next three years.