IronGate Partners may be a Wilmington-based wealth management firm, but its focus is not limited to Wilmington.
“We want to be the biggest, largest wealth management firm in Wilmington – biggest in team members, biggest in assets under management,” said Christopher Jones, the firm’s COO and one of its three founding partners.

As one means of achieving that goal, the firm is building relationships that extend all over the country – relationships that expand IronGate’s marketing reach and augment its capabilities.

Jones, Stephen Coggins and David Hartness established IronGate in October 2004 as an independent wealth management firm serving individuals and families. They say their founding premise came from two assumptions: That it’s possible to operate a company serving clients’ best interests rather than the traditional model of merely selling financial products, and that investors benefit from a whole-team approach rather than the typical model of one advisor trying to handle all aspects of a client’s portfolio.

To validate their second assumption, Coggins, Hartness and Jones have built their advisory staff with an emphasis on professional diversity.

“Our clients are clients of the firm, and, depending on what they need at the time, they get advice from advisors who specialize in different areas,” Jones said.

As time went on, Jones said, other opportunities presented themselves – opportunities the young firm was in a good position to seize. In 2011, the firm launched a division focused on managing the assets of company retirement plans and foundations. It became a 3(38) investment manager, able to take control of retirement plans and foundation assets, deciding how to invest the money as well as monitoring the funds and assuming fiduciary responsibility for them.

“That’s not something you find everywhere,” Jones said. “We are the only active 3(38) in Wilmington that I know of.”

A natural outgrowth of becoming a 3(38) investment manager was IronGate’s affiliation in 2012 with Newfound Research, an investment research firm in Boston. The goal was to optimize clients’ investments.

“We developed a suite of investment strategies that seek to participate in up markets and protect in down markets,” Jones said.

IronGate’s strategies, which company officials named Managed Volatility Strategies, give financial advisors a set of rules to guide them in piloting clients’ portfolios through bull and bear markets. Investors can choose among three levels of risk: conservative, moderate and growth. Each strategy is based on an algorhythm.

“They bring balance to the portfolio and stop the roller coaster,” Coggins said. “We want to change the nature of how people invest.”

“Our tagline is ‘Volatility needs guardrails,’ ” Jones added.

Giving investors opportunities to increase their risk and return potential, while protecting them from the jaws and paws of the bears, means expanding options beyond U.S. stocks and bonds to more continents and more asset classes such as commodities like precious metals, energy and agriculture, Jones said.

“Our Managed Volatility Strategies are global in nature,” he said.

Global investment opportunities in developing economies will likely proliferate as those gross domestic products levels begin to exceed those of developed economies.

Coggins said that IronGate and Newfound Research have tested and refined their “guardrail” rules to ensure that wealth advisors can truly base their decisions on facts.

“This approach is similar to methods employed by the better hedge funds,” he said.

IronGate Partners created a new entity, IronGate Investment Management, to direct the index strategies.

The entity was incorporated in 2012, but its Managed Volatility Strategies officially launched a month ago after months of work with Newfound Research on the development and backtesting.

IronGate brought in a fourth partner for the new endeavor – investment management veteran Michael Boggio, who serves as chief investment strategist.

Mark Bentley, who recently came on board as executive vice president of IronGate Investment Management, is in charge of business development. He heads a national marketing effort, building relationships with other wealth advisory firms and independent investment advisors and fiduciary entities – banks and annuity companies – that are potential customers.

Among IronGate’s new index clients is Fidelity, which will make Managed Volatility indexes available to its agents.
There’s staff overlap between the two IronGate entities, but that is deliberate.

“What we are creating and continue to refine is a firm with two separate entities but with a common goal: to achieve the best outcome for the client,” Jones said.

Investment advisors who use the Managed Volatility indexes will receive support from IronGate through such educational services as webinars.

IronGate Investment Management will add capacity as demand grows from these client advisors, officials said. Clients pay IronGate a management fee to use its managed volatility platform.

“There have never been investment strategies developed and launched out of Wilmington,” Coggins said. “We think that’s huge.”

Coggins said IronGate has been inspired by the success of Wilmington-based Live Oak Bank, which developed its own banking model and spun off a proprietary software system.

“We want to be like Live Oak – based in Wilmington but offering products and services that are used by firms all over the country,” Coggins said. “Like Live Oak, we want to show that there can be very successful firms on national level even in little old Wilmington.”

Meanwhile, IronGate Partners continues to grow.

In April, it formed an affiliation with Raleigh-based Capital Investment, an arrangement that allows it to deal in real estate investment trusts (REITs) and securities transactions that involve commissions.

IronGate Partners has a staff of 14 and manages about $200 million in assets, Jones said, adding that IronGate Partners’ CFO and Investment Committee develop the firm’s own portfolios and strategies.

In keeping with its affirmation that clients, not products, can be the center of an investment firm’s universe, IronGate emphasizes consistent and frequent contact between advisors and clients. It has designed what Jones terms a “high-touch client services model” for its personal wealth management clients.

“Over a 12-month period, we touch [a client] 72 times,” he said. “We know when and why to make these contacts, which are important, since clients are why we are in business.”

Clients receive a weekly market commentary from the firm. They hear from advisors periodically by phone or email.
At heart an entrepreneurial organization, IronGate is focused on continuing to improve what it does and increasing its services to clients and team members. At the same time, however, the organization is looking at logical growth of its capabilities to support that growth. 

Jones said the firm was in hiring mode, looking for advisors and support people with skills that would enhance its functions and advance its mission.

“Being entrepreneurial minded, we wake up each day striving to be better, to differentiate ourselves,” he said, “to be on the leading edge of ideas and to continue to foster an environment for success and growth for everyone involved, whether they be client or team member.”