From Our CEO
We believe that to help you achieve your financial objectives, we have to know you well. To make a difference for you, we need to engage in thoughtful discussion of what your future might hold. That means talking about more than investments. It means looking at your financial condition holistically and presenting strategies that address your goals and aspirations—and staying engaged as your financial condition and goals evolve over the years. We are committed to working in your best interests, to applying the resources and expertise to address, understand and anticipate your challenges and objectives, to developing comprehensive solutions that put you in the best position to succeed in the way you define success. It’s one thing to create wealth, another to manage and protect wealth. We start with great people, experts in the financial disciplines that impact the accumulation, maintenance and distribution of wealth. And we support them with world-class resources. We seek first to understand you, your needs and objectives—then to develop the financial solutions that accommodate your goals, provide for your future and enable your dreams to become reality.
Christopher M. Allegretti
Managing Principal and CEO
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Our Heritage
We built our firm on the foundation of integrity and trust. HBKS Wealth Advisors was established in 2001 when Hill, Barth & King, one of the nation’s venerable accounting firms, merged with The Sorce Financial Group, an Erie, Pa., based financial advisory firm. The merger addressed a need that both organizations faced in working with their clients.
Long before there was a fiduciary standard of care, Hill, Barth & King had cultivated a culture rooted in keeping clients’ interests first and a history of dependability. The Sorce Financial Group shared similar values. They also knew the importance of tax-wise investing and the benefits they could provide to their clients through an affiliation with an accounting firm that had experts in every corner of the tax code. With The Sorce Financial Group, the CPAs at Hill, Barth & King had found a firm where the financial advisors could be trusted to keep the clients’ interests at the center of every recommendation.
The resulting HBK Sorce Financial Group expanded over the next decade into Ohio, Florida, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania, adding licensed financial professionals in a wide range of disciplines and increasing assets under management to more than $6 billion. Today, HBKS advisors operate from 13 offices with that same family-oriented philosophy, working closely with clients, as neighbors and friends, to holistically address their financial needs, aspirations and goals.
Our Beliefs
We believe successful wealth management is rooted in intelligent planning.
We are our clients’ trusted and experienced advisors, with intimate knowledge of our clients’ and their families’ complex, comprehensive finances.
We know that a disparate network of advisors—each familiar with only a segment of the family’s overall financial condition and with a limited perspective—cannot manage wealth effectively.
We are dedicated to the principle of independence.
We do not offer, promote or accept agreements to sell proprietary services or products.
We are driven and rewarded only by what is in our clients’ best interests.
We are committed to consult and collaborate with our clients, to understand each client’s unique needs and develop holistic solutions based on a panoramic view of the client’s financial landscape.
We are financial experts with skills refined over decades of work with affluent families.
We have the experience and insight to ask the right questions and generate a financial plan to grow and protect wealth.
Our Values
Business Principles
We are fiercely independent.
We seek the highest-quality investment products and services from the broadest range of options.
We are large enough to have deep resources and talent and small enough to provide an intimate client experience.
We understand our client’s entire financial life—the whole picture.
We develop financial and investment plans that reflect a full understanding of the tax, retirement and estate planning, insurance and philanthropy implications.
We are determined to do everything with excellence; we would rather be best than biggest.
We are committed to a culture of greatness: great people operating in a great firm.
Personal Relationships
We build deep personal relationships with clients and associates; a feeling of togetherness and family pervades our firm.
We are straightforward and transparent, the cornerstones of great client relationships.
We treat everyone with dignity and respect.
We talk regularly with our clients to stay current on their lives and their financial conditions, objectives and challenges.
We value most of all integrity and honesty; maintaining high ethical standards in everything we do, in our work with the firm and our personal lives.
Working Together
We demand teamwork of ourselves and our fellow professionals.
We subject our personal interests to the interests of the firm, which are the interests of our clients.
We use our collective expertise to deliver solutions that can resolve our clients’ most complicated and sophisticated issues.
We work collaboratively with our clients to develop solutions that address their challenges and objectives.
We consult with our HBKS professional network to deliver effective, efficient and appropriate solutions.
We partner with our clients’ other advisors for holistic solutions.
We encourage creativity and imagination as keys to a better solution.
We foster an environment of trust and openness.
We deliberate objectively and value contrary opinions.
We think and act like owners.
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Financial Advisor Magazine, August 2023 edition, Top Registered Investment Advisor list ranks registered investment advisor firms by assets under management. HBKS® Wealth Advisors ranked 93.
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The Barron’s Magazine September 2023 edition expanded its ranking this year to 100 advisories, and enhanced its rankings formula by adding new metrics, including technology spending, staff diversity and succession planning to its existing criteria of assets under management, revenue and quality of practice.
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In its recently released 2023 Top Firms by AUM survey, Accounting Today magazine ranks HBKS ninth in assets under management (AUM) among CPA firm’s wealth advisory businesses. The magazine’s 17th annual “Wealth Magnets” survey ranks wealth advisory firms affiliated with CPA firms. The data is restricted to CPA firm’s wealth advisory divisions’ assets under management and is validated by Audit Analytics.