Cr?me de la Cr?me

He often accompanies advisors on calls to demonstrate "that we're there as a firm to put our arms around the client." And he hosts wealth management conferences for clients — private meetings featuring a variety of experts — as well as takes small client groups and prospects to the Los Angeles Opera, one of this target market's favorite diversions.

Individual investors with heavy intergenerational wealth-transfer needs, clients with $10 million or more have the "size characteristics" of institutions, according to Rogers. At the level of $50 million trades, they require access to more sophisticated trading.

"You have to be very careful and get traders to understand the stock. You've got to understand the research. We need all these different components of the firm to come together to win and keep this kind of sophisticated business. In the end," says Rogers, "it turns out to be a very profitable target market."

Once a super-affluent prospect is identified, the most effective way to pursue them, he says, is to "try to connect the dots: What clients do we have that might know that client? Or is there somebody in our network that has a good connection?"

He liaises too with other branches and advisors to help bring in and serve UHNW clients when opportunities arise. That way, he says, "the firm can win this market share across the board."

Born in York, Pa., where his dad was in the military, Rogers was reared mostly in Southern California and for six years in Mexico City. After graduating from the University of California with a BS in Business Administration, in 1981 he joined Bank of America, in Los Angeles, arranging small-business loans for five years.

There, he realized that career longevity lay in face-to-face financial advisory and "plopped [himself] into Wall Street," as he puts it, at New York University's school of business. He took an interest in private banking and in 1988, MBA in hand, went to work as a senior relationship manager with Chemical Bank in New York.

Eight years later, intent on gaining exposure to the international investment scene, he returned to Bank of America, where, from L.A., he covered private banking in Mexico.

In 1998, when, he says, Merrill Lynch wanted to become "more adept" with the high-net-worth market, Rogers joined the firm as a strategist. Three years later he helped establish the Private Wealth Management group and became its sales director.

After a total eight years, Rogers left to take over Morgan Stanley's southwest region, only to return to Merrill shortly thereafter to head a significantly larger one.

As for his newest big opportunity, Rogers says: "I'd spent years helping to put the [Private Wealth Group] together, and then they called to say that because of management changes, the opportunity was presenting itself for somebody to run it — and they thought I'd be a good fit. It was fantastic."

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Freelance writer Jane Wollman Rusoff is a Los Angeles-based contributing editor of Research and is the founder of Family Star Productions.