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Matt Sonnen, PFI Advisors

Practice Management > Building Your Business > Leadership

Industry Vet Sonnen Joins Coldstream Wealth as COO

By Jeff Berman

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Industry veteran Matt Sonnen has joined Coldstream Wealth Management as its chief operating officer, the employee-owned, independently operated firm said Monday.

As COO, Sonnen will “continue to build out Coldstream’s operational platform and identify opportunities to scale and systematize its business,” the company said in an announcement.

The firm, a wholly owned subsidiary of Coldstream Holdings, has offices in Bellevue, Seattle and Mercer Island, Washington; Boise, Idaho; Kenai, Alaska; and Portland, Oregon.

Sonnen, a 2022 ThinkAdvisor LUMINARIES award honoree for thought leadership and education, has amassed more than 25 years of industry experience since joining Merrill Lynch as a financial analyst in 1997, according to his LinkedIn profile.

After eight years at Merrill, he was COO and chief compliance officer of Luminous Capital. After Luminous was sold in 2012, he became vice president of strategic operations at Focus Financial Partners, where he worked with breakaway advisors transitioning to independence.

In 2015, he launched the RIA consultancy PFI Advisors with his wife and business partner, Larissa Sonnen. He served as its CEO.

As Coldstream Wealth COO, Sonnen “will work to standardize and optimize back-office operations for the multiple” RIA partners who have joined the firm in the last few years, the company said.

He is also being tasked with “simplifying the onboarding of future merger partners as the firm’s growth accelerates,” it added.

The firm’s operations, information technology, performance reporting, client service and Salesforce CRM teams will report to Sonnen. He will report to Kevin Fitzwilson, the firm’s managing shareholder.

“Based on his experience, reputation and unique leadership skills, he could have joined any firm in the industry, but the fact that he decided to join ours is a further testament to the strength of Coldstream’s culture and the extent to which our employee ownership model has turned heads across the industry,” Fitzwilson said.

The streamlining of the firm’s operations “will not only benefit our current advisors but allow us to more seamlessly incorporate future merger partners as we continue to ramp up our long-term growth strategy,” Fitzwilson said in a statement.

Sonnen said he was “initially intrigued to learn how Coldstream achieved its size, quality and growth prospects without taking on private equity money. “Then, after I began to learn more about Coldstream’s unique vision and values, I became even more interested in becoming a part of the team.”

He said in an emailed statement that while PFI Advisors no longer offers one-on-one consulting services, the COO Society he founded is still active, and his COO Roundtable podcast will continue under the Coldstream brand.

Jeff Berman

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