Ramachandran at Brighton Securities guides staff to rapid growth

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At the ripe old age of 33, Jai Ramachandran stepped into his new role as CEO of Brighton Securities, leaving behind his career in Manhattan at Oppenheimer Cos., where he served as director of communications and cloud services investment.

In the five years that have passed, Brighton Securities has doubled in size from $1 billion to $2 billion in assets under management. It was partly organic growth, fostered by growing Brighton Securities’ number of advisors to 26, as well as acquisitions and mergers. Two firms, Saperston Asset Management Inc. in Buffalo and Southern Tier Financial in Falconer are now partners with Brighton Securities, working under the company’s umbrella but keeping their branding. Meanwhile, nine advisers from Brighton Securities are working outside the Rochester market, as far off as Washington D.C., broadening the scope of what clients the firm can attract.

Ramachandran keeps a calculated approach to business growth.

“If you take a myopic view, and only view your market as here, it’s difficult to grow,” Ramachandran said. “Our Rochester office is still growing, but a lot of our leaps and bounds have been out of town while using the intelligent, well-educated workforce we have here in Rochester as the brains of the operation.”

In a business as intimate as wealth management, personality can be everything. It’s an invaluable asset to be personable, engaging and, of most importance, trustworthy. Ramachandran sets that tone. He’s a good conversationalist, so much so that during a 40 minute interview, topics varied from the economic trends of upstate New York, quitting cigarettes, the financial status of Uber, and the relative safety of self-driving cars.

Good connections with people are critical to creating a firm that’s not just treading water but actively growing.

“What we’re really selling here is human capital,” Ramachandran said. “Human capital—the ingenuity, experience and relationship-building our advisors can provide.

“We’re continuing to try and find new and exciting ways to grow, and part of that is always going to be finding new ways to help our clients,” Ramachandran said. “Everything has to ethically, legally and financially make sense for clients, advisors and Brighton Securities.”

Ramachandran became CEO in 2014, following the tenure of Alexandra Conboy, daughter of George Conboy, longtime president of Brighton Securities and currently chairman. The company turned 50 in February, which, for Ramachandran, means there is plenty of history that predates him as well as people who have shouldered the burden.

“I can’t stress that enough actually. Our success is largely due to our employees, our advisors, our senior management,” he said. “I try to take as little credit as possible because, quite honestly, I probably do the least amount of actual work” as the rest of his employees.

Chief of sales Doug Hendee disagrees, painting Ramachandran as a crucial factor in putting ideas into action.

“He certainly (went through) a trial by fire when he came here, because he really didn’t have any experience in the retail brokerage business, and that can be a good or bad thing,” Hendee said. “I like to look at it as good. He didn’t come in here with any preconceived notions about how a retail brokerage firm should be run.

“It’s not as if he came in and said ‘what you guys are doing is wrong;’ it was more ‘what are you guys doing, how do you do it,’ and ‘have you tried doing this?'”

Ramachandran’s background in the investment banking side of the industry is something that Hendee sees as an important piece of Brighton Securities’ focus. That is, Ramachandran thinks outside of the box when it comes to long-term strategy and approaches things from an angle that someone steeped in the consumer wealth management industry may completely overlook.

With “that investment banking background, he’s been able to help us. We’ve made a handful of strategic partnerships and acquisitions, and his background is invaluable on that,” Hendee said. Under Ramachandran, Brighton Securities has started “looking into modeling out cost-benefit, best-case scenario, worst-case scenarios, break-evens, margins, things like that. We didn’t have that level of expertise, and that has been tremendously beneficial to us.”

Ramachandran has emphasized pushing outside of the comfort zone in the Rochester market. That’s partly due to Rochester’s fairly stagnant economy. According to Open Data Network, Rochester’s metropolitan area saw an annual 0.21 percent GDP per capita growth on average between 2001 and 2017. Meanwhile, the state overall grew at 1.8 percent.

“I would say it’s not economic growth that’s the problem, it’s that the per capita wealth here is a little higher than the average for the country, but it’s stagnant,” Ramachandran said. “Which means, for me, if we’re going to find a client with a lot of money, I’m going to have to find somebody who already has a whole bunch of money, compared to Dallas or Austin or San Francisco, where I can find any person and that person has a pretty good chance of making some money, especially if they’re working in financial services or technology.”

Thus, a firm with rapid growth aspirations in an economically flat region has to try something new. Chief Administrative Officer Danielle Wilkins said Ramachandran has excelled at getting everyone on the same page for those changes.

“I’ve been here 20 years, Doug’s been here 12; Jai won’t just jump into something, he will say ‘what do you guys think?'” Wilkins said. “‘How will people react, what are your thoughts on this?’ That’s something we value a lot, because we’ve been here so long and we’ve seen a lot of this before, so it’s really helpful to be able to say ‘this will be great, but that might not be so great, we need to tweak this a little bit.'”

That, in his eyes, is Ramachandran’s role at the company—to foster success by listening, taking ideas into account and building off the structure established by founders Marshall Levine and Alan Calderon in 1969 and built upon by leaders like Conboy.

“Any success I have is probably owed to other people, for their guidance and support,” Ramachandran said. “I can’t, in good conscience, take credit for Brighton Securities’ success. We had great people before I joined here, we still have great people. We have more great people that have now joined the team. But really if it was just me, the company wouldn’t grow.”

[email protected]/585 775-9692

Jai Ramachandran

Title: President, CEO Brighton Securities

Age: 38

Residence: Pittsford

Family: Daughter, Jaida, 18; son, Jonah, 16

Education: Bachelor’s degree, information technology, Rochester Institute of Technology, 2003; MBA, finance, Simon Business School, University of Rochester, 2008

Quote: “Any success I have is probably owed to other people.”