John Rigney, business manager to the stars and a founding partner of Level Four Business Management, belies the popular stereotype of the buttoned-down bean counter whose mind takes in only digits and decimal points.
Fifty percent of Rigney’s job on terra firma is spent in firm management, seeing to the needs and performance of Level Four’s account managers, tax specialists and insurance experts. This includes, as Rigney puts it, “training and keeping good employees, making sure they do their job right. And the other half is doing the same thing, only with clients. Hiring them, training them, firing them — all of those same skills come into play.
Rigney won’t get involved in artistic decisions , and if an actor is torn between two job opportunities, he’ll weigh in on the money aspects only. For the home or boat the wealthy are wont to covet, he’ll perform due diligence. CNB was the logical choice because his specialty is also theirs. “They had all the business managers in town, and they set up systems to deal with business managers,” he shares. “They’d say, ‘We’ll pick up your checks every day.’ I’m like, ‘Really? I don’t have that many checks,’ but they were like, ‘You’re a business manager. You go into this mode and boom, we’re going to start servicing you.’ Whoa, OK! I like that.