Cory Ross, left, and Riley Pratt of Prairie Capital
A Kansas City wealth management firm wants to expand its business from the Midwest to the Mountain West.
Prairie Capital has had Denver clientele dating back a decade, but recently has doubled down on growing its services here. The firm, founded nearly 30 years ago in Kansas City, has slowly grown in the decades since, generally serving clients between Chicago and Dallas to the north and south, and from Denver to St. Louis to the west and east.
“Denver is becoming a hub,” said Cory Ross, managing director at Prairie Capital. “It’s becoming a hub for investment. It’s becoming a hub for technology. It’s becoming a hub for entrepreneurs who are moving their operations to Denver. For us, it makes sense to be front and center to that commerce.”
Prairie employs about 40 people and manages $6 billion in total assets across hundreds of clients, which includes families and institutions. Founded in 1995 by childhood friends Curtis Krizek, Rob Schneider and Brian Kaufman, the firm specializes in “alternative investments” — those that fall outside traditional stocks, bonds and cash. That can include clients pooling their capital together to buy real estate or businesses.
Ross, along with counterpart Riley Pratt, is leading the company’s foray into Denver. The pair say that Prairie’s flexibility in managing assets is what gives it an edge against others.
“We have no model portfolios, everything is completely built from the ground up, completely customized for every single client that we work with,” said Pratt, who is also a managing director at Prairie. “It’s probably not the most efficient business model in the world, but we think it’s what you have to do for people who have attained that level of wealth. It really demands a level of customization.”
That level of wealth varies, the duo said. But the minimum requirement for their services is around $5 million in “investable assets.”
“We have clients that range in size from, on the low end — probably $10 million, on the high end — multiple hundreds of millions of dollars,” Pratt said.
And while the firm sets out to attract more Denverites to invest with them, it’ll have some home-field advantage working in its favor. That’s because Ross is a Denver native.
“If you’re a native like I am, to have a front-row seat to the growth of Denver and witness what it’s transformed itself into. It’s an exciting place to be,” he said.
Ross, 42, grew up in Littleton and graduated from Kent Denver School in Cherry Hills Village. He went on to pursue professional tennis, first as a student at Louisiana State University and later in his 20s when he won all four of Colorado’s major men’s open singles events in the same year. He was inducted into the Colorado Tennis Hall of Fame in 2014. Ross joined Prairie Capital in 2022 after over a decade at Marsico Capital Management, a Denver investment management firm.
“It just made sense to take the skill set and some of the attributes I learned in sports and translate them over to the investment world,” he said.
His counterpart, Pratt, 36, hails from Michigan. He moved to Colorado about a year ago to “get the flywheel up and running here for our Denver presence” and has been at Prairie since 2019, having previously worked in wealth management at Morgan Stanley.
“The way we work together, it’s a little bit different than a lot of investment management firms,” he said. “We consider any client of our firm to be a client of Prairie Capital, not a client of Riley or a client of Cory’s. It’s much more of a company relationship … we’re doing everything together, which is unique.”
Cory Ross, left, and Riley Pratt of Prairie Capital
A Kansas City wealth management firm wants to expand its business from the Midwest to the Mountain West.
Prairie Capital has had Denver clientele dating back a decade, but recently has doubled down on growing its services here. The firm, founded nearly 30 years ago in Kansas City, has slowly grown in the decades since, generally serving clients between Chicago and Dallas to the north and south, and from Denver to St. Louis to the west and east.
“Denver is becoming a hub,” said Cory Ross, managing director at Prairie Capital. “It’s becoming a hub for investment. It’s becoming a hub for technology. It’s becoming a hub for entrepreneurs who are moving their operations to Denver. For us, it makes sense to be front and center to that commerce.”
Prairie employs about 40 people and manages $6 billion in total assets across hundreds of clients, which includes families and institutions. Founded in 1995 by childhood friends Curtis Krizek, Rob Schneider and Brian Kaufman, the firm specializes in “alternative investments” — those that fall outside traditional stocks, bonds and cash. That can include clients pooling their capital together to buy real estate or businesses.
Ross, along with counterpart Riley Pratt, is leading the company’s foray into Denver. The pair say that Prairie’s flexibility in managing assets is what gives it an edge against others.
“We have no model portfolios, everything is completely built from the ground up, completely customized for every single client that we work with,” said Pratt, who is also a managing director at Prairie. “It’s probably not the most efficient business model in the world, but we think it’s what you have to do for people who have attained that level of wealth. It really demands a level of customization.”
That level of wealth varies, the duo said. But the minimum requirement for their services is around $5 million in “investable assets.”
“We have clients that range in size from, on the low end — probably $10 million, on the high end — multiple hundreds of millions of dollars,” Pratt said.
And while the firm sets out to attract more Denverites to invest with them, it’ll have some home-field advantage working in its favor. That’s because Ross is a Denver native.
“If you’re a native like I am, to have a front-row seat to the growth of Denver and witness what it’s transformed itself into. It’s an exciting place to be,” he said.
Ross, 42, grew up in Littleton and graduated from Kent Denver School in Cherry Hills Village. He went on to pursue professional tennis, first as a student at Louisiana State University and later in his 20s when he won all four of Colorado’s major men’s open singles events in the same year. He was inducted into the Colorado Tennis Hall of Fame in 2014. Ross joined Prairie Capital in 2022 after over a decade at Marsico Capital Management, a Denver investment management firm.
“It just made sense to take the skill set and some of the attributes I learned in sports and translate them over to the investment world,” he said.
His counterpart, Pratt, 36, hails from Michigan. He moved to Colorado about a year ago to “get the flywheel up and running here for our Denver presence” and has been at Prairie since 2019, having previously worked in wealth management at Morgan Stanley.
“The way we work together, it’s a little bit different than a lot of investment management firms,” he said. “We consider any client of our firm to be a client of Prairie Capital, not a client of Riley or a client of Cory’s. It’s much more of a company relationship … we’re doing everything together, which is unique.”
