Joshua Gottfried and Matthew Somberg have come a long way since opening a retirement and financial planning firm in a 144-square-foot office 20 years ago, shortly after each graduated college.
Today their firm, Gottfried & Somberg, has grown to 20 employees across three adjacent offices on Hebron Avenue in Glastonbury, and more than $900 million in assets under management. Next year, they’ll have a brand new, bigger home office.
The two owners won local approval last month to demolish those three buildings — all former residential homes that are located in a business zone — and construct a 20,000-square-foot, three-story office with an estimated price tag of up to $6 million, Somberg and Gottfried said in an interview.
“We’ve run out of space,” Gottfried said. “We have no space for new workers. We’re on the cusp of hiring three people in the next year.”
The firm acquired the third Hebron Avenue property in mid-2018, which set the table for the long-envisioned project to get underway. Bulldozers will be on-site within the next few months, and the firm expects to debut its new home office in the spring of 2021.
During construction, employees will work from temporary space on Eastern Boulevard.
When the project is complete, Gottfried & Somberg will occupy the top floor. The owners said they will market the Class A space on the first two floors to accounting firms, estate attorneys, insurance agents and other businesses that could assist their own clients.
“We want to have complementary businesses in the building,” Somberg said. “One-stop shopping all within one building.”
The two business partners, both in their early 40s, said their firm’s assets under management grew 27 percent in 2019, and they added 80 families to their client roster.
The firm, they said, is benefiting from an aging population in the region headed towards retirement. They also credit their decision to employ a fee-based business model years ahead of an overall industry shift away from paying commissions, which they said has accelerated since the last recession.
Gottfried & Somberg has remained independent amid lots of private equity activity and acquisitions in the financial-planning sector.
“We’ve been very fortunate for a number of reasons to experience organic growth,” Somberg said. “We’ve been growing 15 to 20 percent a year pretty consistently.”
