The Mazzucco Group

Private Wealth Advisors

The Mazzucco Group

Private Wealth Advisors
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The Mazzucco Group advises a select group of accomplished clients, helping them advance ambitious goals through purposeful stewardship and intensive focus.

Meet the Team

The private wealth advisors with Merrill Private Wealth Management are rigorously trained to help meet your specialized needs with relationships based on trust and personalized service.

Additional Resources

The following specialists do not make securities recommendations. Please contact your Merrill Private Wealth Advisor if you have questions about how a specialist might be able to assist you.

Paul Stauffer

Wealth Strategies Advisor

Bank of America, N.A.

Bren A Johnson

Division Structured Credit Executive

Bank of America, N.A.

Strategies designed to help you achieve your goals

As a client of Merrill Private Wealth Management, you have access to services and resources ordinarily reserved for the world’s largest institutions. We work with individuals, families spanning multiple generations, business owners and executives. Using a goals-based wealth management approach, we put our clients at the center of every personalized strategy.

Our Approach

Significant wealth requires significant attention. At the Mazzucco Group, we understand that distinction, offering the concerted focus and unwavering loyalty that uncommonly successful clients require. We combine the singular attention and intimate sensibility of a boutique wealth management firm with the strength and solidity of one of the nation’s preeminent banks. We believe this combination results in an unusually effective pairing, helping clients preserve, grow, and transfer their wealth more capably.

We work with a limited number of families by design, allowing us to provide the intensive focus that complex financial needs require. We recognize that “wealth” encompasses multiple aspects of clients’ lives, both quantitative and qualitative. We’re technically adept and analytically rigorous. At the same time, we never lose sight of the fact that all wealth is ultimately personal, involving distinctive family dynamics, intentions, values, and goals.

When your wealth has achieved a certain scale, you appreciate the importance of solidity and stability. You want to know that your financial affairs are managed with rigor, overseen by an enterprise that’s committed to safeguarding your assets and your privacy.

At the Mazzucco Group, we appreciate those concerns. Our founder, Doug Mazzucco, was selected to be one of the first Private Wealth Advisors in the inaugural Private Wealth Management office in Menlo Park, California. Doug has worked exclusively with ultra-high-net-worth clients for more than 25 years, so he appreciates their distinctive concerns relative to risk, reliability of assets, and organizational soundness.

Doug established his practice at Merrill because he believes the firm offers ultra-high-net-worth clients a reliable and enduring structure to address sophisticated needs. He was drawn to the longevity and continuity of the firm, as well as the scale of its capabilities. Doug and his team approach their work soberly and seriously, mindful of the need to help clients preserve their wealth not for a single generation, but for the long arc of clients’ personal and professional aspirations.

Technology Entrepreneur

As a technology entrepreneur, you focus relentlessly on what’s next. Yet as you look ahead to each new venture or cutting-edge innovation, it’s important to maintain the financial foundation that helps power your success and helps you take advantage of potential opportunities as they arise. We have experience helping entrepreneurs and business owners balance their personal lives with their life’s work. We understand the challenges you face every day, whether managing your newly achieved success or gaining access to the liquidity you need as seed capital or for personal expenses. We are dedicated in providing the experience and resources to help support your ongoing success.

Company Founders, Private Business Owners & Entrepreneurs

When you have built your own business, your personal finances and the life of your company are closely intertwined. You may be thinking about how to invest in your company’s growth while also deciding how best to use your personal assets. Helping ensure the future of your business likely involves employee benefits, retirement plans and succession planning. Helping secure your family’s legacy could entail wealth transfer strategies, trusts and philanthropy. Whatever your specific needs, we at Merrill Private Wealth Management can help entrepreneurs and business owners balance their personal financial lives with their life’s work. We are dedicated in providing the experience and resources to help support your ongoing success.

Intergenerational Family Wealth

As a family that spans multiple generations, you have needs that go beyond preserving assets, tax minimization strategies and designating heirs. Your goals also likely include passing on values and helping the rising generation become effective stewards. We can help with personalized wealth transfer strategies, family wealth education and developing and implementing philanthropic visions. In working with you to create an approach that reflects your family’s intentions and helps ensure your assets are distributed according to your wishes, we proceed in a manner that recognizes the complexities of your life challenges and the unique nature of your goals. Our extensive experience working with other families of significant wealth helps  us to see and share best practices to help you achieve them.

Foundations and Endowments

An investment portfolio tailored to your needs is crucial to advancing your organization’s mission and carrying on its important work. We have extensive experience working with endowments and foundations and have a keen understanding of the requirements and responsibilities of board and committee members for investment management and financial oversight. The strategies we construct are carefully designed to help promote stability, efficiency and growth under a variety of market conditions. We also offer advice on board governance and reporting, and help in meeting regulatory and operating challenges. We provide access to the customized services your organization needs with discretion and skill.

Nonprofit organizations

Your passion drives your organization’s mission, and you depend on an investment portfolio and an effective staff to carry on its important work. As private wealth advisors with Merrill Private Wealth Management, we have experience working with nonprofit organizations. We possess a keen understanding of the challenges you face, including maintaining operational efficiency and productivity through uneven market circumstances, growing competition for donations, and increased fiduciary requirements. Drawing on our extensive capabilities to help you fulfill your organization’s mission, we can provide access to the customized services your organization needs with discretion and skill, such as strategic planning, portfolio management, administrative and board support, and advisory solutions.

We look to address, unify, and smooth wealth in diverse contexts, so that clients can enjoy more satisfying and fulfilling lives. To advance this goal, we follow a clear process grounded in transparency and efficiency:

1. Discovery Process. We spend significant time learning the nuances of each family’s situation so that we can formulate a cohesive plan that includes assets, liabilities, risk parameters, family dynamics, and charitable intentions.

2. Wealth Planning. We perform in-depth scenario analysis and modeling to help clients better understand their financial health.  We integrate specific goals into the analysis to help clients make educated financial decisions regarding the risk and monetization of a concentrated stock holding, the affordability of a second home, modeling for future education expenses and planning for philanthropy.

3. Coordination. We then spearhead in-depth planning and coordination with a client’s external tax and legal advisors, putting the structures in place for tailored legacy design and tax-sensitive investing, wealth transfer, and philanthropy.

4. Allocation. We perform customized asset allocation, mindful of the client’s risk profile, tax status, and estate-planning opportunities identified during the discovery processes.  We look to anticipate and capitalize on short-term tactical opportunities, applying a tax- and fee-sensitive approach.

5. Refinement. We stay closely attuned to each client’s changing needs, global market conditions and US tax legislation, refining our approach as opportunities present themselves.   

6. Reporting. Clients hear from us regularly, both formally and informally. We assess progress toward important goals through customized reporting and reviews on a monthly basis. Communication and transparency are critical to the success of the relationship.






Asset allocation, diversification and rebalancing do not ensure a profit or protect against loss in declining markets.  Rebalancing may pose a tax event.

Merrill, its affiliates, and financial advisors do not provide legal, tax, or accounting advice. You should consult your legal and/or tax advisors before making any financial decisions.

Let's have a conversation

Your dedicated Merrill Private Wealth Management team is ready to help you pursue what’s most important to you.

Our Vision

For clients of substantial means, Merrill Private Wealth Management provides an experience that is both powerful and personal. We are dedicated to helping you pursue your goals for today while developing an approach designed to support your family members for the years to come.

Your private wealth advisor and team of specialists work with a limited number of clients, enabling them to focus their time, training and passion on helping you simplify your personal and business finances and prepare your next generation.

Boutique-like service with the access to the investment resources of Merrill and banking convenience of Bank of America

We combine the personalized attention and feel of a smaller firm with the power and insights of a global financial institution, creating financial strategies tailored to your unique situation.

A relentless commitment to transparency and customized strategies

As our client, know we are working in your best interests, providing goals-based financial strategies designed to anticipate and help meet your evolving financial needs.