A billion dollars under management didn’t happen overnight in Martinsville, New Jersey. It happened one client relationship at a time, over more than three decades, and this week two of the people responsible for a meaningful share of that growth got recognized on a national stage for it.
Tanya Walliser, a Certified Financial Planner, and Jeanette Lucas, who holds credentials as a CFP, Chartered Special Needs Consultant, and Certified Divorce Financial Analyst, were both named to InvestmentNews’ Top Female Financial Advisors $100 Million Club. That’s not a participation trophy list. It’s a national recognition specifically reserved for advisors managing serious individual books of business, and having two advisors from the same firm land on it simultaneously says something real about the culture that firm has built around developing talent rather than just hiring it.
That firm is Condor Capital Wealth Management, an independent, employee-owned registered investment advisory founded back in 1988 by CEO Ken Schapiro. Thirty-five-plus years is a genuinely long time to survive in an industry that eats firms alive during every recession, market crash, and regulatory shift that comes along, and Condor hasn’t just survived that stretch, it’s grown into a firm managing over a billion dollars in assets for clients spread across the entire country from a single New Jersey headquarters.
The firm’s structural DNA explains a lot about why it’s lasted this long without drifting from its founding principles. Condor operates on a strict fee-only model, meaning it earns nothing from trade commissions and sells no third-party financial products whatsoever. Every dollar the firm makes ties directly back to total assets under management, which eliminates an entire category of conflict of interest that quietly plagues plenty of advisory relationships elsewhere in the industry. When an advisor’s compensation is linked purely to growing your portfolio’s value rather than to which specific product they happen to be pushing that quarter, the incentives actually point in the same direction as the client’s.
One genuinely distinctive piece of Condor’s offering deserves real attention rather than a passing mention. The firm provides unlimited, complimentary financial planning advice as a built-in part of standard investment management, not an upsell, not a separate line item, not something reserved for a premium tier of clients paying extra. That’s a meaningfully different business philosophy than the industry norm, where comprehensive planning conversations often get metered out or priced separately from portfolio management itself. Baking that access in for everyone signals a firm that sees planning and investing as one continuous conversation rather than two separate revenue streams competing for a client’s wallet.
Condor’s client base reflects a genuinely broad cross-section of financial lives rather than one narrow niche. Retirees, corporate executives, young professionals building their first real investment strategy, small business owners juggling personal and company finances simultaneously, and non-profit organizations managing institutional funds all show up in the firm’s client mix. Serving that range well requires real flexibility in how a team approaches each relationship, since a retiree drawing down assets and a young professional accumulating them for the first time need fundamentally different guidance, not a one-size-fits-all playbook stretched to fit everyone.
On the investment side, Condor’s committee builds diversified portfolios blending active and passive management, leaning heavily toward efficient, low-cost index funds among its top institutional holdings, including substantial allocations across various Vanguard and iShares ETF products. That’s a disciplined, cost-conscious approach rather than one chasing flashy, high-fee alternative products for the sake of appearing sophisticated, and it tends to be exactly the kind of strategy that compounds well for clients over genuinely long time horizons rather than just looking good in a single strong quarter.
Leadership at the firm runs deep too. Schapiro still actively leads the company alongside President Michael Walliser, and Schapiro himself has repeatedly landed on major industry recognition lists, including placement among Barron’s Top Financial Advisors in New Jersey. That’s the kind of individual accolade that tends to follow founders who’ve stayed hands-on with their firm’s direction rather than stepping back once the business reached a comfortable size.
What makes this week’s recognition of Walliser and Lucas genuinely meaningful, though, is what it says about the next generation of leadership Condor has actually built underneath its founder rather than just talked about building. The $100 Million Club distinction specifically honors advisors managing serious individual client relationships at scale, and having two women from the same Martinsville firm earn that recognition together suggests Condor isn’t just retaining talented advisors, it’s actively developing them into the kind of professionals capable of building substantial books of business on their own. That’s a meaningfully harder thing for a firm to cultivate than simply hiring credentialed people and hoping for the best, and it’s exactly the kind of organizational depth that tends to separate advisory firms built to last another thirty-five years from ones that quietly fade once their founder eventually steps back.
