Hawthorn Family Wealth provides asset management services for family offices with over $20 million in net worth and directly oversaw almost $31 billion as of 2017.
(meta data) TITLE:  Family Lessons Learned, From Hawthorn, PNC Family Wealth's Nicole Perkins - Barron's (meta data) AUTHOR: Abby Schultz (meta data) PUBLISHER: PENTA We've detected you are on Internet Explorer. For the best Barrons.com experience, please update to a modern browser. This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers visit http://www.djreprints.com. # Family Lessons Learned, From Hawthorn, PNC Family Wealth's Nicole Perkins Abby Schultz December 16, 2017 Order Reprints Print Article Gene Smirnov Text size Nicole Perkins got her first inkling of what it takes to run a successful business watching her parents, Henry and Gail Perkins, expand their corner candy shop into a diner-style coffee shop and then a thriving jazz club that hosted the likes of Count Basie in its heyday. But Perk's was more than a jazz club. It was a Harlem institution where customers came as much to see her mother and father as to enjoy jazz served up with great soul food. Their success, says Perkins, who now heads Hawthorn, PNC Family Wealth, was built on "their willingness to open themselves up to people, to be truly authentic." Perkins' parents never spoke with her or her older sister, Karen, about what would happen to the business when they no longer ran it. Would they sell? Would one of their daughters want it? Or both? The questions were never asked. The sisters pursued their own careers, not realizing their parents probably took it as a blow. "Not even having that discussion put us in the dark about business succession for our own family business," she says. (Her parents sold the business in 2004, when they retired.) As the head of Hawthorn, PNC's multifamily-office practice for families with at least $20 million in assets, Perkins, now 51, finds herself drawn to families like her own, those that really don't want to broach the topic of business succession. These are the families she goes back to when they hesitate, to try to get that conversation started. #### PNC: At a Glance • Parent: PNC Financial Services Group (ticker: PNC) • Wealth assets under management: $52.5 billion for clients with $5 million or more • PNC Wealth Management: Serves clients with at least $1 million • Hawthorn, PNC Family Wealth: Serves clients with at least $20 million • Hawthorn advisor/client ratio: 1 to 15 on average Less than five years after she left her private legal practice to become a fiduciary advisor at Hawthorn, Perkins was tapped in December 2015 to oversee the wealth of some 700 families with assets totaling about $31 billion, in accounts that average $50 million. That's about 60% of the $52.5 billion in wealth management assets at PNC in accounts of $5 million or more. The rest are housed at PNC Wealth Management under Alistair Jessiman. Orlando Esposito, 59, head of PNC Financial Services ' Asset Management Group, which oversees Hawthorn and PNC Wealth, says Perkins is "the type of leader who helps all those around her achieve more than they thought possible." Hawthorn, around since 1991, was among the first multifamily-office providers to have a separate boutique-like identity within a large bank—PNC Financial Services Group in this case. One way Perkins fosters achievement at Hawthorn is by ensuring that its leadership doesn't lose touch with clients. PNC has a philosophy of promoting from within and moving execs from one division to another. "You really learn by emulating those who you see doing it very well," Perkins says from PNC's offices in Philadelphia. Running a high-end wealth management practice seems a far cry from running a jazz club, but like her parents, Perkins likes working with people, which drew her to trust and estate law and, eventually, to wealth management. "I love to give advice and figure out what the issues and challenges are, and to listen," Perkins says. "It's who I am," and "that was given to me by my parents." ### Family Lessons Learned, From Hawthorn, PNC Family Wealth's Nicole Perkins Nicole Perkins got her first inkling of what it takes to run a successful business watching her parents, Henry and Gail Perkins, expand their corner candy shop into a diner-style coffee shop and then a thriving jazz club that hosted the likes of Count Basie in its heyday. An error has occurred, please try again later. Thank you This article has been sent to
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PNC Financial Services
Current operations.:Asset Management Group.
PNC Asset Management Group (AMG) provides Institutional Asset Management and Wealth Management services to high-net-worth individuals and has approximately $282 billion in assets under administration, of which $151 billion is directly under management. PNC Wealth Management is the 16th largest wealth management firm with $48.8 billion in private client assets under management.