About

Two partners. No call center.

Harlow & Voss is a partnership of two people who spent their early careers on Wall Street, on the side of the table that sells things to founders. We started this firm in 2016 to sit on the other side.

A quiet, sunlit room with low sofas, leather ottomans and a long window onto trees.

The firm

Small on purpose.

We’re two partners and two associates, upstairs on Prospect Street in La Jolla. Each partner works with no more than forty client families. When we’re full, we keep a short waiting list rather than hire someone to take the overflow.

Our office looks more like a living room than a bank, because the conversations we have there are closer to the ones you’d have at home. We meet there, at your office, or by video, whichever you prefer.

The partners

Everett Harlow · Founding Partner

Everett Harlow

Founding Partner · CFP®

I spent eleven years in equity capital markets at a large New York investment bank, taking companies public. I sat in a lot of rooms where founders were told what their company was worth, and almost none where anyone asked what they wanted their life to look like afterward.

After that I ran a team in private wealth management. That’s where I learned how much of this industry is built to sell products, and how rarely the people buying them are told. I left in 2015, moved to San Diego, and started this firm with Sturgent the next year.

I still read every client’s plan before it goes out, and I still answer my own phone.

Before
Equity capital markets, New York (11 years); private wealth management (4 years)
Credentials
CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ professional
Education
B.A., Economics; M.B.A.
Outside work
Surfs badly at Windansea, most mornings
Sturgent Voss · Founding Partner

Sturgent Voss

Founding Partner · CFA®

I started in mergers and acquisitions, working for buyers. For nine years my job was to help large companies buy smaller ones for as little as possible. I got good at it, and I learned every trick there is in an earnout, an escrow and a working-capital adjustment.

Then I spent five years at a multi-family office in New York, working with families who had sold a business a generation earlier and were still living with the decisions made that year. Some of those decisions were very good. Many were made in a hurry.

Everett and I had worked across the table from each other on a deal in 2011. When he called about starting a firm for founders, I said yes before he finished the pitch.

Before
Buy-side M&A, New York (9 years); multi-family office (5 years)
Credentials
CFA® charterholder
Education
B.S., Finance; J.D.
Outside work
Coaches a middle-school robotics team in Carmel Valley

Why we started

We’d seen the other side of the table.

Between us we spent twenty-four years being paid by people who wanted something from founders: their company, their IPO fees, their assets under management. We were good at our jobs, and that was the problem.

Founders are sold to constantly around a liquidity event, and almost always by people whose pay depends on the outcome. We wanted to build the firm we’d have wanted on our own side: small, paid only by the client, candid about what we know and what we don’t, and there for the thirty years after the deal, not just the thirty days before it.

That’s the whole idea. Everything else on this site is detail.

Talk to one of us.

Your intro call is with Everett or Sturgent, not a salesperson. Thirty minutes, and an honest answer.

Book an intro call