John o’connell isn’t shy about promoting The Harbour Group to fellow investment advisors in the hope of luring the best and the brightest over to the RBC Dominion Securities Inc. boutique, now almost seven years old and poised for growth.

“We’re looking for bright, energetic people,” he says from the firm’s boardroom on the 20th floor of a downtown Toronto high-rise overlooking the harbour.

Case in point: several months ago, O’Connell agreed to speak at a seminar, reasoning that it was a good opportunity to let the investment community in on The Harbour Group’s plans for expansion. “I was very blunt,” he says. “I said we’re looking for people that want to work for our team.”

DS investment advisor John Tracy was in the audience that day. He says O’Connell’s message — revolving around how to build a successful brand within a hugely successful brand — drew him in. “He walked out of the room and I got on my BlackBerry,” says Tracy. “Within probably a week, we had struck a deal to have me come on to the team.”

As the newest member of the 19-employee boutique, Tracy’s goal is to play matchmaker between new clients and the investment advisors in the group — which appears to be as non-territorial a group as you are likely find in the investment industry.

Four advisors form the core of The Harbour Group, launched as a branch of DS in 2000. O’Connell, along with Christopher Newall, Peter Coward and Graeme Mac-Gregor, all worked together at DS in the late ’90s, before opening what they call “the firm within a firm” to serve affluent Canadians. Each brought to the business their own book, which they pooled.

“This is a team,” emphasizes O’Connell. “We all work off the same so-called ‘bottom line’.”

What that means, he says, is that no single founding partner has clout over another. He points to the wide, open-concept office to illustrate how client business is handled. “I know some of the people Chris [Newall] speaks to on a regular basis,” he says. “I can just as easily talk to them about a security and the tone of the market.”

The key, he says, is that the four brokers present a united front to clients. The blue-chip investing style they enforce — to serve clients who are mainly interested in preserving wealth — is one of diligence and discipline. “You have to have a disciplined money market approach to service all of your clients properly,” he says.

He compares the group’s approach to clients to buying a car at a Mercedes Benz dealership: while there are a few choices available, it’s not a matter of building the vehicle from scratch to meet each customer’s specifications. “We’re not trying to sell you something,” he says. “We’re offering something you [can] accept.”

The team exhibits a sense of like values. Each of the four partners — the youngest is 34 and the oldest is 49 — is married, with two or three children. Each has a supportive spouse who understands the time that needs to be devoted to the business. “We spend more time together than we do with our spouses and children,” O’Connell says. “It’s important that we work on the relationship as much as possible.”

They spend what little leisure time they allow themselves playing golf and skiing, and they prefer quiet family weekends to anything else.

That’s not to say it’s all smooth sailing. Newall admits that the four can have conflicting opinions, especially when markets are volatile. But they “band together and discuss and hash out ideas.” Sometimes these discussions can get quite heated, he adds. “But out comes a direction that is thought out, researched, insightful and informative,” he says. “And we’re going to pass that along to our clients.”

O’Connell says the partnership was not born out of like-mindedness, as it applies to investing principles. “One of the biggest mistakes people make when they talk about partnerships is that they often team up with people who are like them,” he says. “That can work, I suppose, but the trick to a partnership is finding people who can bring different things to the table, different personalities.”

He says each of the four has a different personality, and that may well be the partnership’s key to success. “That’s one of the reasons it works so well,” he says. “It’s not easy — we have to work at it.”

@page_break@While the investing team presents itself harmoniously to outsiders, the branch takes a page from political economist Adam Smith’s theories regarding the benefits of dividing labour by specialization when it comes to its administrative staff. Experienced DS office manager Paul Sinel joined the team a little over a year ago. And an individual who has been with the investment dealer for almost 30 years takes care of back-office business.

Two years ago, however, The Harbour Group hired someone on its own dime, from outside DS. John Johnston, a highly regarded foreign exchange and fixed-income analyst joined the team as chief strategist. Having an in-house, big-picture perspective helps the advisors and clients move beyond the headlines, says O’Connell, who also happens to be Johnston’s brother-in-law.

Newall says the hiring of Johnston typifies the group’s philosophy of banding individuals with different strengths together to serve clients better: “We think it gives us that little bit of an extra edge.”

O’Connell says the branch is now moving into a more organic growth phase: “Now we’re trying to grow our business the old-fashioned way, through referrals or business development opportunities.”

The group is reluctant to share client figures, but the business has more than doubled since it opened its doors, from $1.1 billion in assets under management to about $2.4 billion, according to O’Connell. The goal, he says, is to hit $5-billion over the next five years.

And that is why O’Connell made his open pitch for talented advisors. “We’re not at the point at which we’re at capacity,” he says. “We’re nowhere close. We just continue to add more intelligent people to the partnership.” IE