Home > Alumni > Domeisen
Melding Disciplines, Alumnus Becomes Trusted Financial Advisor
Frank Domeisen was already an accomplished veteran of the business world and a certified financial analyst when he and a couple of other partners decided to buy out the owners of Pittsburgh-based investment consulting firm Yanni Partners.
But it was then that he discovered a renewed appreciation for the education he'd received 17 years earlier at the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business.
"A lot of what I took for granted and plodded through [during] my course work came back in gory detail in 1999," says Domeisen, who graduated from the Katz School in 1982 and was named one of the Katz School's distinguished alumni in 2008. "All those courses that were kind of sidebar courses at the time became the main entrée."
Domeisen took on responsibility for the company's investment and consulting platform, and he and his partners took on the day-to-day responsibility of managing the company.
"That was hard, but it was rewarding at the same time, because it was the integration of many different disciplines," he says. "It became much more dynamic trying to synthesize the technical element and the business management of the firm."
For most of his professional life, Domeisen has been fascinated by the marriage of different but complementary skill sets. Initially trained as a mechanical engineer, the New England native-who worked part of his way through an undergraduate degree at the University of Connecticut as a ski instructor-came to Pittsburgh to work for Westinghouse.
He attended night school to earn a master's degree in mechanical engineering at Pitt but became intrigued by the effects that strategic planning and finance could have on the profession. So shortly after obtaining his engineering master's, he enrolled at the Katz School full time.
His engineering background made him a sought-after classmate for study groups because his quantitative focus helped with economic analysis. It was in one such group that he met his wife, Michelle, who also graduated from the Katz School in 1982 with an MBA and worked as a commercial real estate broker for about two decades.
"At the time, the word was if you had an MBA along with an engineering degree, you could write your own ticket," he says. "My thought was that I would be integrating an MBA with my engineering background and get into technical marketing or strategic planning and business development."
But an economic recession made for a tough job market, as did potential employers who could not envision a role for a master's-level engineer who also was trained in finance. Domeisen graduated with two offers: one in engineering and one in finance, at Mellon Bank. He chose the latter, figuring he could build the experience that would help him break free of his engineer label.
Ironically, he wound up back at Westinghouse a few years later, working in corporate finance for Westinghouse Credit. And a few years after that, in 1994, he joined Yanni Partners.
Domeisen, who had resisted pigeon-holing for so long, had finally found the flexibility he sought. His adaptability has helped him to shepherd the business through its many incarnations, including an acquisition in early 2008 by Gallagher Benefit Services, Inc. Today, the firm Yanni Partners, a division of GBS Investment Consulting, LLC, continues to provide investment consulting services to institutional clients representing $17 billion in assets across 22 states.
"It's kind of like the liberal arts of investments," he says. "You have to not be a specialist in any one segment; you've got to be a generalist and know how all the various pieces fit together. It's very much a top-down integration of many different ideas."
The challenges of the current economy test the mettle of the consultant, he adds: "The underlying fundamental is to be a trusted advisor, and these are the times when, hopefully, you can deliver that."