Beneath a pine-fringed park in Gig Harbor, Washington, on the banks of Puget Sound, George Russell is hunting for the very rich.
Russell, 73, runs Threshold Group, an investment boutique catering to some of the most exclusive and sought after clients in private banking: families worth more than $100 million.
The street-level park, with waterfalls and a reflecting pool, is actually the roof of Threshold’s headquarters. Russell commissioned the environmentally friendly building, builtof recycled steel and wind-felled timber, after making his own fortune at Frank Russell, the pension adviser famous for the Russell stock indexes. He sold that firm, which was founded by his grandfather, for about $1 billion in 1998.
For generations, family offices, as firms like Threshold are known, have quietly minded the personal fortunes of Mellons and Rockefellers. Now, a growing number of them are stepping out of the drawing room to try to grab business – and profits – from Wall Street.
