Baird expands in the oil patch

Robert W. Baird & Co. Inc. is expanding its wealth management operations in Texas, recruiting seven former Wells Fargo financial advisers and hiring veteran UBS manager John Hantak to open an office in Houston. All seven previously worked at A.G. Edwards & Sons Inc., which was acquired by Wells Fargo Advisors in 2008. They manage a cumulative $770 million in client assets and will all work out of a second office that Baird is opening in Houston. The advisers joining Baird are Andrew Atkinson, J. Gillette Burns, Thomas Davis, Matthew Leatherwood, Orlando Montesino, Richard Pfeil and C. Nelson Shields.

ATTRACTIVE MARKET

Mr. Hantak, a Houston native who worked for Citigroup Global Markets Inc. and Morgan Stanley Smith Barney LLC, has been a complex director for UBS Financial Services Inc. in Connecticut for the past three and a half years. He oversaw more than 50 UBS advisers in Greenwich and Stamford, Conn. The Houston market, one of the fastest in the country to recover from the recession, thanks to the boom in domestic energy production, is an increasingly attractive market for advisers. All the advisers joining Baird focus to varying degrees on professionals in the oil and gas industry.

THREE CITIES

“We think there's a very good opportunity in the Houston area and, in fact, all of Texas,” said John Mabee, vice chairman of Baird Private Wealth Management. “We've expanded in Dallas and Fort Worth, and expect to see more growth in those three cities going forward.” Baird has been quietly establishing a bigger presence in wealth management since the financial crisis. The firm has hired 275 new advisers since 2009 and now has a brokerage force of about 700. It managed more than $77 billion in client assets at the end of last year. Mr. Mabee attributed Baird's recent recruiting success to the turmoil in the industry since the financial crisis. “The landscape has changed so much in the last three to five years. A lot of advisers have ended up at firms they didn't sign up with, and they're looking for a place to come to,” said Mr. Mabee, who has been with Baird since 1994. “A large majority of people who have joined us are from firms that were bought by other big firms,” he said.