Whitney & Company

Whitney & Company

Whitney & Company opened in Rochester in 1975 under founder Bill Shaheen, one of a generation of Main Street advisory shops built on personal relationships rather than institutional distribution. The firm never sold to a consolidator. Today the team includes the founder's son Billy Shaheen as Partner for Business Development and daughter Danielle Shaheen as Director of Operations, alongside non-family partners who run investments and wealth planning — a structure that mixes lineage with professional management. The firm operates as a fee-based RIA across three practice lines: investment management, wealth planning, and 401(k) consulting. CIO Robert Pickels and Portfolio Managers William Moore and Christopher Radigan run a centralized equity research process — Pickels joined in 2017 after two decades at Manning & Napier, where he had been a partner and member of the Senior Research Group. The firm does not disclose specific portfolio holdings, but its investment team selects individual securities based on internal analysis for client portfolios rather than allocating to third-party funds, and wealth planners led by Adam Magee layer tax, estate, and retirement strategies on top. The client base spans individuals, high-net-worth families, pension plans, and foundations, all served from the single Rochester office. In 2025, Steven Charles Capital — a separate family-founded firm started by Steven Braverman in 1986 — merged into Whitney & Company, bringing CEO Jeff Braverman on as Senior Vice President and deepening the firm's bench in the Pittsford and greater Rochester market. The transaction combined two multi-generational RIAs under one roof without introducing outside capital. The firm does not disclose total assets under management, but the 2025 combination suggests an advisory book large enough to absorb another established practice while keeping ownership within the founding families. What distinguishes the firm structurally is its refusal to adopt the platform model that now dominates the RIA industry. Whitney & Company does not acquire practices for roll-up economics, does not centralize portfolios into model strategies dictated by a home office, and does not employ a distributed advisor force. It remains a single-location partnership where investment decisions, planning methodology, and client relationships sit in the same room — an architecture that is steadily vanishing among US wealth managers of comparable vintage.