By Steve Garmhausen

A good financial advisor helps clients organize their financial life according to their priorities. One of the keys to Ned Gibbons' success has been recognizing that priorities can change over time, and helping clients make the necessary adjustments. "Shifts in priorities are not unusual," says Gibbons, a founding partner of Morgan Stanley Private Wealth Management's The 173 Group, a 10-person team based in Menlo Park, Calif., "in fact, they're common."

Speaking with Barron's Advisor, Gibbons, whose $6 billion-asset group is one of Barron's 250 top private wealth management teams for 2025, reveals how working in the manufacturing industry years ago helped prepare him for wealth management. He explains why his team is bullish on public and private markets over the next 12 months. And he shares the qualities that don't show up on résumés but can make for the best hires.

You worked in sales roles outside of wealth management early in your career, for printing companies and a technology company. How did you end up in this industry? About 18 years ago I concluded it was time for a change. I spent a lot of time exploring different areas of financial services, and private wealth management interested me. It's the ultimate client-facing business because everything's so personal. I'd always been attracted to complexity, and it was clear even then that client complexity was growing rapidly. I'm also motivated to work in a team structure, and it was pretty clear to me that the most successful founders, executives and investors have dynamic motivations and need a team to support them and scale with them. And through my early career I had learned that working with the most driven, smartest, motivated, high-quality people was most satisfying. I just love the challenge that working with such great people brings.

Were there ways in which your first career prepared you for your second? Yes. One was the ability to work well with people in good times and bad times, being able to work on complex scenarios with lots of people involved to get things done. And that is the case today, where rarely is what we're working on just a one-on-one interaction. I also learned a lot about how to get things done inside larger organizations. I certainly learned a lot about clients and customers and what matters to them. There was a lot of trial by fire earlier in my career, but I learned a ton of lessons in that way.

Your dad was also a financial advisor. What did you learn from him? He was a financial advisor for nearly 60 years, and he loved the business, especially the client interaction. I learned two things from him: The client comes first, and earnings matter. These are two simple but profound ideas that have kept me grounded in how I think about the client relationship in the business.

Can you talk about The 173 Group's mission? Our mission is two-pronged. We understand that our clients are on a wealth journey, and that this wealth journey rarely goes in a straight line with preset answers. Our commitment is to support each client on his or her journey by constantly providing deep expertise and best practices and innovation.

In addition to the client-facing piece, our mission is to create the strongest team possible, one capable of serving the most complex families in a highly collaborative culture that encourages personal and professional development. How do we do that? There are three principles that guide our mission. We're always looking to earn and build trust for clients and each other. We want to build expertise through curiosity and process improvement. And we want to provide measurable value by always working to understand what clients are looking for. Some of this is soft, but some of it's valuable for us to use as an anchor.

You are one of more than 100 Morgan Stanley advisors with the "founders specialist" designation. What's that all about? It's a new designation, and it's important. It was created in part because of some of the success that private wealth management and Morgan Stanley more broadly have had in the past two decades or more working with founders [of private companies]. From a private wealth standpoint that means working with a founder and that founder's family and ultimately multiple family generations. Founders go through a unique perspective and experience, and part of the reason the designation was created is that it signifies experience working with founders, in this case on the private wealth management side where we sit. But founders' situations are always complex, and so the founder designation for Morgan Stanley is a recognition of experience, of coordinating across different business groups to provide that full suite of services and solutions to them.

How do you define success for your clients? One way we define success for our clients is, are we meeting their priorities, whatever they may be, in a measurable way? That means two things. One is that we understand their priorities -- and it's our responsibility to confirm that over and over and to work with them as those priorities shift. Shifts in priorities are not unusual; in fact, they're common. The other part of client success is that we work hard to earn their trust. We've earned the trust of a lot of successful families and clients such that they know we're working on their behalf even when we're not talking to them constantly. That's something that's earned over time, and it's an important part of what we do.

Can you share a key lesson from your career that changed the way you serve clients? Very early in my career, when I worked in manufacturing, I was asked to cover a significant customer early on. I felt unprepared for that, so I just dove in and spent time working in the manufacturing area with the crews, learning about how everything worked. I was learning a ton, and I was trying to figure out where the bottlenecks were and what actions I could take to affect the outcome. Not long after that, a colleague who worked on the floor came up to me after a meeting and said he was surprised to learn that I worked for the company and was not the customer. He couldn't imagine anyone caring as much about the process and the product as the customer would. That was an important lesson in the value of putting yourself in the client's shoes for the client's benefit.

Can you say a few words about how you approach the balance between seeking growth and protecting capital in a client investment portfolio? We work with clients on their long-term expectations for their wealth's growth. Is it from hypergrowth? Is it consistent growth over time? Is it income-derived growth? We work with them on developing priorities. Then we apply that to constructive quantitative analysis of what those forecasts might look like, and we work with them on what that might mean in terms of volatility. We work with them on how to think through what could happen in a down cycle, and the degree to which they want to protect against it. We also talk about liquidity and flexibility and income as a part of managing through volatility.

What is your market outlook? It's been an extraordinary year so far. Looking forward, we still see public and private markets being positive for at least 12 months from now. And that's in part because we have a combination of falling interest rates and lots of excess investment capital on the sidelines. So there's an opportunity for more money to be invested. On the fundamentals side, there's still good growth of earnings. There's still good economic growth out there, which allows companies to find ways to grow their earnings. There's uncertainty out there, but what is fascinating is how companies are dealing with this uncertainty. While we are constructive on the next 12 months, we also fully expect some bumps along the road.

What are some of the things that your clients are concerned about these days? On the investment side, there's more concern about missing out on opportunities, because everything is changing dramatically, especially in the technology and AI world. So clients are looking for more access to investments. On the more qualitative side, as much as clients want to create more wealth, they're also worried about how that wealth will impact their lives and their families. So we spend more time than ever talking with them about their multigenerational plans, how this might impact children, how it might impact their lives, and how it might impact their charitable intent. It's rewarding for us to have those conversations because it's so personal and there is no single answer. We all recognize that you can change along the way, but we spend time trying to help everyone get grounded in what matters the most to them at that time.

What do you look for beyond the résumé when hiring new team members? A few things matter most when building and supporting a high-performing team. I would argue the most important is a love of being in a client-facing business. You have to love working with people, and that includes having an inclination to develop relationships with clients and team members. Second is the ability to complete jobs, projects, and tasks. Getting comfortable with how to move things forward is critical. The third is comfort working interactively with team members. What's fun is finding people who get energy from this. We want this energy to be shared with the team. Having it makes it easier to share credit for successes and makes it more enjoyable working with each other to get better outcomes.

What's one habit or practice that you think has helped to drive your success? People who know me well would probably say that I grind it out a lot: I work hard and am focused. Being a rower in college has influenced me. But what drives success in our business is our ability to put ourselves in our clients' shoes. That is an important habit to develop.

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