Strong Bonds

REVIEW SUMMARY
Company. JKMilne Asset Management
Industry. Financial services
Key. Small boutique firms can be more nimble than their goliath competitors.

When John Milne moved his bond-management firm's headquarters to Fort Myers from Pittsburgh in 2010, he wasn't seeking sand and sun.

Milne, whose 14-hour days start at 5 a.m. managing $1.8 billion, says he discovered a large concentration of people from Tampa to Naples who sit on boards of pension funds, endowments and other institutional investors. “Amongst our clients, there are a lot of decision makers in this region,” says Milne, who researched areas as far as Scottsdale, Ariz.