Savitsky Satin Bacon & Bucci Rebrands as Ground Control Business Management
Elite Hollywood business management firm Savitsky Satin Bacon & Bucci is putting a new name on the door. As of Monday, the 32-year-old firm is Ground Control Business Management.
The firm, which was founded by George Savitsky in 1990, represents top-tier talent across the entertainment industry — including showrunners, stars and digital creators — as well as athletes and other high net-worth individuals. Chris Bucci, who started co-managing the firm with Steve Savitsky in 2017 at the age of 31, will oversee Ground Control as CEO.
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Bucci says the rebrand is an effort to better reflect the company culture and its vision for the future.
“We’ve grown extraordinarily,” he says. “We’ve added a lot of young partners. We’re a very diverse group and we’re team-oriented. We got to a point where I was thinking ‘Why isn’t that person’s name on the door? This is so archaic.'”
Bucci, now 37, has quickly become one of the most respected business managers in the industry, which he credits to the senior partners giving him a seat at the table. “They’ve always allowed people to grow,” he says. “George built something that was so special, and it was easier for me to do what I do because he laid the groundwork and set that path in place.”
Changing the brand, he hopes, sends a similar message to the firm’s younger generation. “There are no names at the top,” says Bucci. “We’re in this together. We’re side-by-side.”
They found the new name with the help of branding and marketing agency Grafik, which consulted with about a dozen employees of the firm. Through those discussions, themes emerged, including loyalty, integrity and being grounded for their clients.
“Ground Control” wasn’t initially one of the finalists, but with a little finessing after nothing else quite hit the mark it clicked.
While many of its peers have rolled into Focus Financial Partners, in 2019 this group opted to form a strategic relationship with NFP, an insurance broker and consultant. In a Monday statement NFP chairman and CEO Doug Hammond said he’s excited about the new brand and the continued growth: “With the relationships we have and the breadth and depth of expertise and capabilities across our company, Ground Control Business Management is in a great position to ensure solutions are integrated and effective so clients have the peace of mind knowing what they care about most is handled.”
Bucci says NFP gave it the resources it needed to grow while also maintaining its autonomy. The team from the former Savitsky Satin Bacon & Bucci is about 90 people, and another approximately 45 employees from Tanner Mainstain Glynn & Johnson, which is also under the NFP umbrella, will become part of Ground Control in January. Bucci says there are more strategic moves on the horizon in the next year that will help it continue to disrupt the business and “create a new path for what business management is.”
“We try to maintain a boutique feel even though we’re no longer a boutique,” he says. “Our vision is to provide the best possible financial service to our clients underneath the large umbrella of our parent company NFP, to have whatever resources they need under one roof without any blurred lines. If we build the right system and we have the right people, we will have something that’s totally unique and different. The sky is the limit.”
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