From Business Owner to Investor:
Building a Portfolio After the Exit with Matt Dattilo, Sakshi Chauhan, and Stephen Walker

You’ve spent decades building something. Every dollar you reinvested, every risk you took, every decision that kept the business moving forward was an act of portfolio management. You just didn’t call it that.

Then the deal closes.

The wire hits.

And for the first time, you aren’t the operator.

You’re the investor.

That transition is one of the least-discussed and most consequential moments in a business owner’s financial life. The skills that made you exceptional at building a company aren’t the same skills that protect and grow what the company produced. The concentration that created your wealth is now the risk you have to manage.

On December 9th, Portus Wealth Advisors brings together a panel of investment professionals to walk through exactly what that transition looks like, what the most common mistakes are, and how to build a portfolio designed for the life on the other side of the exit.

The Panel

Sakshi Chauhan, CFA

CFA/Investment Analyst, Portus Wealth Advisors

Sakshi grew up in Mumbai surrounded by entrepreneurship, watched businesses succeed and struggle up close, and built her career around understanding how capital actually behaves inside a portfolio. She holds a master’s degree in finance from Clark University, earned her CFA charter in 2022 after a journey that included a failed exam, a complete reset of her approach, and five dedicated hours of study every day for six months, and has been with Portus since joining as an Investment Analyst.

Her perspective on the CFP and CFA relationship is worth understanding before the conversation. A CFP starts with your life: what you are saving for, when you want to stop working, how taxes and insurance and estate planning fit together. A CFA starts with the money itself: what’s in the portfolio, what it’s exposed to, what you’re paying for that risk, and whether the expected return justifies it. She describes the two roles this way: the CFP is the architect who designs the house around how you live. The CFA is the structural engineer who makes sure the materials hold. The best advisory teams have both.

Sakshi grew up in a family of entrepreneurs and brings that context directly to how she works with Portus clients. Business owners carry a high willingness to take risks, often alongside a strong need for liquidity. Balancing both, and stress-testing a portfolio against the best and worst scenarios, is core to how she builds.

Matt Dattilo

Director, Investment Solutions, Global Endowment Management (GEM)

Matt Dattilo is a Director on the Investment Solutions Team at GEM, an independent investment management firm that has provided customized multi-asset class solutions for long-term investors since 2007. At GEM, Matt partners with long-term investors to deliver strategies across a broad platform built on disciplined investment research, active portfolio management, and institutional-grade access. Before joining GEM in 2023, he served as Managing Director at Altera Investments and Vice President at State Street Investment Management. He holds a degree in finance from Elon University.

GEM’s model is built around the idea that every investor’s situation is different enough to warrant a genuinely customized approach. That perspective is directly relevant to business owners who come out of an exit with a specific set of goals, timelines, tax considerations, and risk tolerances that a generic allocation doesn’t address.

Stephen Walker

Managing Director, Private Markets Relationship Manager, Nuveen

Stephen Walker leads the strategic development and expansion of Nuveen’s alternative investment solutions, covering private capital, private real estate, and real assets. He works closely with clients to broaden both their knowledge of and access to private investments, an asset class that most business owners have never engaged with formally even though it often looks familiar: owning something real, with real cash flow, that isn’t priced daily on a public exchange.

Before Nuveen, Stephen held roles in capital markets and investor relations at Global Endowment Management, Barings, and Wells Fargo, and began his career at Brown Brothers Harriman working exclusively with ultra-high-net-worth clients. He holds a BA in Global Management from Susquehanna University and an MBA from Wake Forest University.

For business owners moving into wealth management after an exit, private markets often represent an opportunity to remain in a world that feels intuitive while building a diversified portfolio around it. Stephen’s role is to make that access real and to make sure clients understand what they are getting into before they commit.

What This Conversation Covers

The Identity Shift

Selling a business is a financial event and a personal one. Business owners are used to being the decision-maker, the operator, the person who controls outcomes. A diversified portfolio managed by professionals requires a fundamentally different relationship with money. The panel will talk through how to make that transition without either losing the confidence that made you a good operator or carrying it into investment decisions where it creates risk.

What to Do With the Proceeds

The first year after an exit is when the most consequential and sometimes most damaging decisions get made. Sakshi’s approach starts with needs and goals: short-term liquidity, long-term income, family considerations, and tax positioning. Not all of the capital needs to be deployed on day one. Understanding how the portfolio will be structured, and how it connects to what the owner actually wants their life to look like, is what makes the first moves intentional rather than reactive.

Private Markets for Business Owners

Most business owners have spent their careers in private markets without calling it that. Owning an illiquid asset, managing cash flow, making long-horizon bets, being patient with something that isn’t priced daily: that is the business owner’s experience, and it maps directly onto private capital, private real estate, and real assets. Stephen will walk through how Nuveen thinks about access to these strategies for investors coming out of a liquidity event and what to understand before allocating to them.

Institutional Strategies for Individual Investors

GEM was built to serve long-term institutional investors with highly customized multi-asset portfolios. The panel will discuss how those strategies translate to individual business owners with complex situations, significant capital, and specific timelines, and what it means to have a portfolio designed around your actual goals rather than a model allocation built for the average client.

The Risk You Are Already Carrying

For most business owners, the company represents the overwhelming majority of their net worth. That concentration created their wealth. I’s also the risk they are exiting. The panel will discuss what a thoughtful diversification process looks like, how to introduce assets across public and private markets over time, and how to avoid the common mistake of trading business concentration for a different kind of overexposure in the new portfolio.

Who Should Watch This?

This session is for any business owner who is:

• Preparing to exit in the next two to five years and hasn’t thought about where the proceeds will go.
• Recently sold and is navigating what to do with capital that has never been liquid before.
• Curious about private market investing and whether it makes sense alongside a more traditional portfolio.
• Working with advisors who are not coordinating with each other and wants to understand what a unified investment strategy actually looks like.

Sakshi Chauhan, our CFA, will be talking Matt Dattilo, and Stephen Walker for Charting Opportunities on December 9, 2026, at the Triple C Barrel Room in Charlotte