Geller Family Office Services is on the hunt for a new chief executive after the previous post-holder, Jamie McLaughlin, left after only six months in what the firm said was an unsuccessful relationship.

Last week, a spokesperson for Geller is reported to have said: “We agreed with Jamie that our relationship was not a good fit, and that we should amicably part ways. We wish him well in the future.”

Geller had hired Mr McLaughlin to run its wealth management unit. Geller is a New York  financial advisory and accounting firm best known for its most prominent client, New York mayor and billionaire Michael Bloomberg, founder of the eponymous news service.

The plan was to turn Geller Family Office Services into a best-of-class multi-family office for the ultra-wealthy, with a new management team, more wealth managers, and a big name chief investment officer who would preside over a new state-of-the-art investment platform.

At Convergent Wealth Advisors, as a managing director and head of the New York office, Mr McLaughlin helped build that firm into a local powerhouse.

Geller was going to make a bold play for “a large share” of New York and northeast market, Mr McLaughlin said in an interview in September. “We can reach over half of our target market here or by getting on the shuttle to Boston or Washington from LaGuardia,” he said. Steven Fadem, the chief operating office of Geller & Co, said at the time that the parent firm was prepared to give Mr McLaughlin a “significant capital commitment” to build up the investment platform and acquire top talent.

But the relationship between Mr. McLaughlin and the firm did not work out as planned, as the Geller statement indicated.

However, Geller "is fully committed to investing and growing Geller Family Office Services’ position and is moving forward on its plans to do so," a spokseman for the firm said.

Some industry observers believed the two parties got ahead of themselves, without fully airing their philosophical differences about how to build a wealth management business.

In any case, wealth management industry figures said the importance of a seamless cultural fit at the highest levels of a company can’t be overstated.

“I think both sides tried their best to accommodate each other's style, but the cultural gap may have been too wide," said Jeff Spears, chief executive of Sanctuary Wealth Services, a consultancy firm to the wealth management sector, including multi-family offices.