For more than two decades, while working as an investment adviser and private banking exec for giant financial institutions like Citibank and Credit Suisse, Barry Sloane dreamed of owning a money management firm. Now, barely three years after co-founding successful boutique Steinberg Priest & Sloane Capital Management, the 49-year-old portfolio manager is leaving the Street behind.
Last month Sloane returned to the tiny hometown bank where he once worked as a teller: Century Bank, in Medford, Massachusetts. Sloane’s father, Marshall, founded the 22-branch bank some 40 years ago. Siblings Jonathan and Linda Kay have spent their entire working lives there. With Marshall Sloane, 78, planning his succession and the $1.6 billion-in-assets bank harboring regional aspirations, the family asked Barry to come home and lend his expertise. He’ll be co-chief operating officer with Jonathan. “I’ve been all over the world and had this wonderful career,” says Barry Sloane. “It’s time to go home and help the family.”
He is turning his back on a compelling success story. The New York firm he formed in the summer of 2001 with veteran value investor Michael Steinberg and former Credit Suisse Asset Management CEO Bill Priest posted returns in the top 10 percent of U.S. small-cap and midcap value managers and quickly amassed $2.1 billion in assets.
Marshall Sloane started Century Bank in a small strip of stores he had bought as an investment while working in his family’s furniture store in Somerville, Massachusetts. “This is a dream come true, really, for my father,” says Sloane, who knows how it feels.
