Shaun Tucker
Hello, and welcome to the PracticeLab podcast, where we talk with top advisors about what makes them successful so that you can apply those lessons in your own business. I’m Shaun Tucker, the Director of Practice Management here at Capital Group.
You know, there’s a ton of advice out there about how to get younger clients. Tips on how to engage the next generation. Which makes sense, because of course you want to grow your assets, and avoid losing them when they’re passed on and have something to pass on to your successor or make your book attractive for acquisition.
But there’s one practice out in Connecticut with nearly $300 million in assets under management that’s taken a unique approach. My colleague Winston Chang recently spoke with Eliot Weissberg, president at The Investors Center. The firm has an aging book and clients in distribution – some even dropping below the firm’s asset minimum. But Eliot and his team have doubled down on their clients instead of going all-out to get younger ones. How they got there, and the results they’re seeing, might surprise you.
So let’s dive in with Winston and Eliot.
Winston Chang
Hey thanks for being on the podcast, Eliot. Just for our listeners, could you give us a quick intro to yourself and your firm?
Eliot Weissberg
Sure. Hi, and thank you for allowing me to join you today. My name is Eliot Weissberg. I’m 65 years old, I have a practice in Avon, Connecticut. We've been here for about 25 years with Raymond James as our broker dealer. I've been a CFP since 1982. We manage about $280 million with a team of five full time and one part time.
Winston Chang
Excellent. And Eliot, could you give us a kind of a brief history, you're you know, you've had a long career, you know how you got your start and the stops along the way till you got to where you are?
Eliot Weissberg
Sure. So, I like to chunk this up by decade, because it rolls kind of nice.
1983 I got my principal's license and opened up an OSJ branch office for a very small local broker dealer. I built that up to about 85 men and then merged in with a small over the counter market making firm in Hartford and became their head of managed product.
In ‘90, I left there and did a startup broker dealer RIA with two partners. We grew that with a succession of three additional partners to about a billion in assets and 141 people on the entire team advisors and staff etc.
In 1998, I looked around and realized that we didn't have the risk controls that I was comfortable with and made a decision to become no longer be managing partner of that group. And leave there and hang out a shingle. And so, I left my firm and joined Raymond James and hung out a shingle here as The Investors Center in 1999, as a brand-new startup with zero assets.
The big difference I would say between my career in the ‘90s versus my practice today is something that my mother always chided me about which was on my second-grade report card, which is Eliot does not play well with others, or said differently, I kind of needed to be in charge of me and didn't want anybody else in charge of me. And that was really the big change in joining Raymond James.
Winston Chang
Great, thanks Eliot. So tell us about The Investors Center. There’s a lot about aging on your website, the homepage, it says, “Plan Confidently, Live Fully” and “What you care about will be cared for.” Can you tell us a little more about that?
Eliot Weissberg
About two years ago now, right in the middle of COVID, we completely rebranded our firm into a financial planning and longevity planning firm. And that was a result of my work with the MIT AgeLab, which I am now actively involved with. I'm on one of their advisory boards. And so we've really developed this niche around working with people who are not just retirees, but retirees who really want to plan for kind of what retirement is going to look like, from a lifestyle from a health perspective, from literally a longevity perspective, and taking on that responsibility with our clients of all right now, we got you here, how are we going to help you finish it up? And that's been very rewarding work. And now clients or prospects, I should say, are coming to us for those efforts, specifically, which is very rewarding.
Winston Chang
Yeah, Eliot, I love this. We're looking at your website and we know you have partnerships, you know, MIT aging lab, you also have the CAP: Certified Aging in Place designation. So you've clearly carved out a niche, as you say, in this, can you tell us about the genesis of that, like what led to the decision? Hey, we're gonna you know, specialize in this. Is it something that you saw in your book and market opportunity for something that you were hearing from clients? Tell us about where that all came from?
Eliot Weissberg
Sure. So I'll call it the light bulb, and then the work, aright. So the light bulb was I went to a, we're going to call it a competing firm’s meeting. And they had a speaker, and that speaker was Dr. Joseph Coughlin, who today is the head and founder of the MIT AgeLab, because he had just released a book. And the title of the book is “The Longevity Economy.” And the nexus of the book or the general thesis, excuse me of the book is that there are a lot of old people. There are a lot of baby boomers who are getting older and they want to spend money on themselves. And they're a lot less interested than wealth transfer than what you would think. And it's a giant opportunity that no one is really paying any attention to.
And I thought huh, that's fascinating. And I went home and I kind of got that, wow, because I don't like millennials, no disrespect, there are many lows to work with them. Well, it also sounds like this, I've been doing this a long time, when I started, I was in my 20s. And my average client was in their 40s. Now I'm in my 60s. And I have many of those clients are still clients, and they're in their 80s. And so we have many clients getting old. And, again, I've served these clients for 40 years. And so this is the other kind of genesis, which is, how am I going to, you know, my goal was to get these people to retirement, and then I got them to retirement. And then I got them through the first 10 years of retirement, everything's chugging along just fine. And they're all doing well, except now they're starting to get old, how the heck am I going to help them?
And it's twofold. I want to be clear, selfishly, how do I retain these assets? So they don't go away? How do I help these people to get to their goals, because I've always been a goal-driven advisor, that's my 100% mindset. And reading this book, looking at all my clients getting old, I'm like, yeah, I got to do that. I have to work in this space to help those people. It's easier for me to keep my existing clients than to try to get all new young ones. I'm going to do this for another 20 years. And that is my personal goal is to do this and well into my mid early mid 80s. And this all seems to fit everybody's need. We have a staff that's experienced with these people, we know these people. And don't get me wrong, it's been a lot of work to bring in the resources and the knowledge that we've needed to serve. But that's where it came from.
Winston Chang
Yeah, so I'd like to talk about that part about getting the resources that you needed to serve. I would imagine that doing this involves a lot of networking. I mean, obviously, there's MIT the aging lab, right, but physicians, estate planners, skilled nursing facilities, even like design builders, and interior designers to think about how to help clients, railing in the showers and things like that. I mean, how did you approach that right, getting the right people in your circles, connecting with the right experts, to kind of service your clients?
Eliot Weissberg
You know, what I've really found, and it's, it's a work in progress is not complete, I don't know if it'll ever be complete. Because the most interesting thing is in that space where you have to pull in people. So really, it's just meeting and asking, constantly, hey, you know, a good plumber, you know, a good electrician, you know, a good occupational therapist, you know, a caseworker.
You know, Raymond James has some affiliation, so they've heaped in some stuff. But mostly it's banging on doors and trying to get people to respond. And the biggest challenge by far is that health care workers, and I'm just going to put them in the camp of health care and social workers for a moment. None of them are businesspeople. None. And so the concepts of normal customer service really hard, you know, really hard. And so that's been the sorting mechanism. Believe it or not, it's, you know, do you call the people back? How long does it take? You know, you get a nurse practitioner to do medical advocacy, and then they hit capacity of 20 patients. And you're like, okay, I gotta find another one.
And so that is the hardest part of the job, bar none, is connecting the resources with the people and getting the people to, I would say the other hard part. And this is a little tangential off your question, but it's having people look at a financial planner, or financial advisor, as someone to turn to in the longevity space. There's no, connect the dots. If you ask anybody in the community, who should they turn to? It's their doctor, their neighbors, their nurse friends, you know, dentists, lots of other things. The financial planner isn't going to be on the list, like, never in my career so far has the financial planner been on the list. And I'm going to blame the industry. You know, because the industry has nothing to say, you know, you might want to talk to your financial advisor about that stuff. On the other hand, financial advisors don't want to talk about that stuff. They like to talk about investments and nice, sterile easy things, and getting all touchy feely is not what most financial advisors want to do.
Winston Chang
Right. Right. So you come to a decision that we're going to be different from the industry, we're going to say something to change people's minds so that you know, having a financial planner or advisor to turn to in the longevity space is kind of a first instinct, so you go to this rebrand a couple of years ago. Tell us how you how you went through that process. Did you did you hire someone that you know like with an agency or freelancer and then besides just kind of putting the words longevity planning on your website, how did you really think through holistically how you're going to present your brand in that way?
Eliot Weissberg
No great question. With an expensive answer. Sure. No. So fortunately for me, I've been in the community a while and we were able to identify a firm to help us. And they sat with us in multiple meetings, as a group, and this is each member of our team, one on one, individually. And it started with things like what do you believe? What do you want? What are you trying to accomplish? Not just what are your goals and objectives? What do you stand for? You know, like, hard questions. And we went through multiple, multiple iterations of answering those questions over a period of months.
And then we started to create brand elements, which they helped, they did create brand elements around our brand that connected the dots. And then working on text and visualization, all with the mission of, who are you? What do you believe? And what do you stand for?
And it worked. And what I mean by that was, at the end, everybody in our circles said, we ended up where we, we feel like we ended up in a place that was appropriate, if that makes sense. In other words, all the work, all the discovery work, actually was real, about who we were and what we stand for.
Winston Chang
Right.
Eliot Weissberg
So it was really cool, you know, because you can you can get behind it. You don't have to be like, yeah, that's a bunch of crap. You know, all right, I can sell that, you know, because we've all done sales in our life. But this wasn't that. This was a very determined mission, to make a dent in a part of the universe that needs help.
Winston Chang
Yeah.
Eliot Weissberg
And so I continue to rely on skilled people around me. One of the things that I learned in business coaching is, you really only need to be very good at one thing. And as long as you're very good at that one thing, everything else can be, you know, outsourced. And if you're very good at that one thing, you make a lot of money at it. And this is sort of our one thing.
Winston Chang
Yeah. Yeah. And I love that you mentioned that they've helped you along the way that it wasn't just this one moment in time, these tweaks because it sounds like these questions, right? What do you believe? What do you want? What do you stand for? I mean, agency aside, forcing function of a rebrand aside, these are questions that every planner, every manager, every practice should be asking itself, right. And not just at one point in time, but a continual process, of making sure that we know who we are, and stay true to that and present that value proposition to the market.
Eliot Weissberg
Right. And the big advantage of that, from where I sit as a business owner, is you only end up with clients that serve you, as well as you serve them.
Winston Chang
Right.
Eliot Weissberg
Which I think is the big claim to our success and our longevity or my longevity in the industry. You know, we only work with people we like. And we don't take everybody you know, and if people turn out to be different than we thought, then we ask them to leave because life's too short. And we want to go to work every day and serve our clients with, our heart forward, if you will.
Winston Chang
Right. One thing I wanted to ask Eliot about this. This strikes me as different from what a lot of advisors think when it when it comes to aging clients, right? They think about, you know, getting the next generation’s assets, right, I don't want my book to get too old, I want the average age to stay pretty low, I'm going to make a concerted effort to acquire younger clients, as opposed to doubling down on the older ones. How did you think through that?
Eliot Weissberg
You know, my life is finite, I'm very comfortable with that, you know, will my practice survive beyond me, maybe, maybe not. I want it to survive long enough to serve the people that it needs to serve, which would be of course, me and my staff, my team, because if, if we're not still standing, then we can't serve anybody. And so, so that's very important to me.
I mean, I want to be clear, we pay our people well, or I'll go with as much as I can afford to pay them, which is very different. And, so it's really about being clear, I think, being clear about your values. And you know, when is enough, when to share.
And to remember that, you know, I think of it this way -, I'll give you another light bulb moment, you know, the client has been a client 40 years, and they look back and I'm like, damn, they paid my mortgage, this client paid my entire mortgage, you stop and think about that. It's like, I owe these people like, they took care of me. I mean, that's how I lens it. They took care of me, they allowed me to have the life I had, I worked hard, I served them, but they took care of me, it was joint, no question. And so now I get to serve them. Because they need it, they need the help.
And, you know, then they get old, if you don't serve them, they go away. Because either they got taken advantage of, they ran out of money, they did the wrong thing. And, one of the things I mentioned, which is not part of this part of the answer, but we don't fire clients, when they go back down through our minimum, we have a $500,000 legal minimum, we're targeting people for one to 3 million, but our clients at the end, they spend down, I'm want to be clear. And when they go down back through the 500,000, we don't say goodbye, no way. We are with them till the end, okay. And because we are with them to the end one, they get a better outcome for sure.
Number two, their children see the better outcome, I want to be very clear. And that's where the retention comes in. We don't target retention, we target doing all the right things all the way to the end. And as a result of that, we get retention. When the client doesn't spend down, and don't get me wrong, many clients spend down, though, when the client doesn't spend down. The assets stay nine times out of 10 because the kids see like, holy crap, my advisor would never do that. That's right.
Winston Chang
Right, right. Just prove with your work that the next generation is in good hands and to not make some kind of elaborate, shoehorned in effort to acquire them but just to show them by doing for their parents for the older generation that they're in good hands.
Eliot Weissberg
Yeah. And that's everything from the parents’ housing to the parents’ financial affairs, but then helping them through, you know, like, all right, we gotta go get the powers of attorney now kids, because mom's failing and we make sure that gets done. They're like, what, you know, no one tells them and, you know, we do all those things. And then, yeah, so I'll give you just a recent example, which I'm pretty proud of, you know, a good client $2 million client 20-plus-year relationship, who was at end of life. And when we saw in, you know, we'll call it her affairs were in order. But her kids were the, when the time comes, kids take over, that was part of the plan. And we were approaching that time. And so what did I do? I picked up the phone, and I called their kids and said, kids, you're going to be in charge of mom's stuff soon. So we need to go over what your rights, rules and responsibilities are. Because we haven't done that. And they were like, oh, cool. You know, and we did that, thoroughly. And one of those clients was all one of the kids was already a client. And literally this morning, the other client signed. And so you know, they each ended up with a million, we kept the million plus we picked up their assets, which, we're not insignificant. At no point in time did we ever pitch the kids. They asked, hey, can you be our advisor? Yeah, I can be, I'd be happy to be because you're responsible children, you know. But that's how it came about, you know, that had nothing to do with performance? Right? Yeah. No way.
Winston Chang
You’ve gone from starting with zero assets in ‘99. Starting The Investors Center, and you put together a team now right of half a dozen and so I'd love to know, how you have grown into that kind of CEO role, right? Managing your practice and, and needing to, play at least to some extent well with others and hire the right people and build the practice that way.
Eliot Weissberg
Absolutely. So many years ago, I made the decision, I hired a business coach for me, specifically the Strategic Coach out of Toronto, Canada, Dan Sullivan and his organization. And their focus is entrepreneurial coaching, not financial advisor coaching. It's you know, how to be an entrepreneur how to run a business with how to think strategically about running a business.
I was already a pretty good financial planner. But that really gave me sort of this very high level of what am I doing? How can I go from working 80 hours or 100 hours a week to having a normal life. And it took a lot of time, I was a slow learner, and was very fortunate in my hires. We have a staff planner Ken Nicholas, who will be with me 20 years this coming year. And my personal assistant will be with me 18 years this coming year.
Winston Chang
Take us through that because I think that's a that's a very common experience for advisors, right. I'm overworked, I'm stressed and burnout is, frequent in the industry. What are some of the big takeaways where you're able to go from that 80 to 100 hour per week to having a normal life and, and building productivity and efficiency into the way you do things?
Eliot Weissberg
Okay, so, I'll give a good chunk of credit to the Strategic Coach program. Because in year one, week one, or week two, whatever you learn about time management. And the first thing you learn about time management from Strategic Coach is that if you don't rest, you will run out of energy. And it won't be good. And I know that sounds really stupid, and obvious. But when you're a 40-year-old entrepreneur running as fast as you can to do all the things you need to do. You absolutely lose sight of that. And so I went from working seven days a week, 12 to 14 hours a day, I forced myself, I want to be clear, I forced myself to take a day off. And the day off is a 24-hour period where you do no work. That's the day off. And it took about three years to be comfortable with a day off a week for me.
And then I decided to take control of my health was the other thing because my health was that of a financial advisor who worked 100 hours a week, we'll just leave it at that. You know, I was overweight, it was all terrible. But with that said, you know, you sort of embrace that, and it's like, okay, now we can only work this many hours. So I gotta be more efficient. And now I can only work this many hours, so I got to be more efficient. And so then I learned to hire.
Winston Chang
Right.
Eliot Weissberg
I gotta hire another person.
So now, today, hallelujah, I'm going around 45 hours a week, maybe even a tiny bit less than that. And it's awesome. And now, my metrics are not fin-, they are financial, don't get me wrong, I still have financial objectives. Now, the way we measure my success is going to be by how much I have to work, not by how much money I make, because that's sort of we know. And so I made a decision two years ago that once I hit my money level, as the markets have come back, and COVID has ended, anything excess of my money levels going to my team 100%. And they know that and they know this, but the trade-off is I'm going to work less, so right now, I'm at 45. The next metric is 40, 10 years from now I expect or eight years, seven years from now, I expect to be at about 30 hours a week, when I cross over 80, I'll expect to be 20 hours a week, whatever that means,. And it sounds probably like this 20 hours a week, 20 weeks a year, okay, 30 hours a week, 30 weeks a year, and so on and so forth. So there's a plan in place for that. So that I can continue to work and thrive and meet with the clients that that I need to meet with in order to continue the relationships, it will keep me hopefully thriving and aliving. And I'll be able to pay my staff back for all the years of hard work, which is very important to me, while allowing my clientele to, we'll call it wind down efficiently, as efficiently as we can.
Winston Chang
Right. Right.
Eliot Weissberg
So that's kind of the big holistic view. Yeah.
Winston Chang
But it kind of naturally lends itself to, a succession plan and empowering other team members and hiring and then growing the right people, right. It's not quite making yourself irrelevant, right. But you know, when you bring down your hours
Eliot Weissberg
But we hope so.
Winston Chang
Right, exactly. Yeah. And you're empowering your team members to to step up in their roles and to expand in their ownership of the practice.
Eliot Weissberg
And that was the scariest part, I want to tell you. The, the guy who was leading that, for me said, this is an easy project, there's only one thing that's going to be hard, and I'm like, what’s that? He goes, you doing less. You know? And at the time, I thought, yeah, sure. But you know, he was right. And it's a learned skill. Because as an advisor who didn't have a life outside of work, you'd have to build that. You know, you have to build going to the gym. You have to build a hobby you have to build outside relationships, you know, and be aware of that and be very proactive.
Winston Chang
Elliot, this has been great. We've talked about niching. And the rebrands. And longevity planning, we've talked about getting from that 80 to 100, to having a normal life and the importance of just personal health and time management and delegating and hiring the right people. Do you feel like there's anything that we've really missed that if as you look back at The Investors Center, in your growth, and the journey that you've taken has made you really successful that you would want to make sure that the advisors who are listening to this episode would want to hear?
Eliot Weissberg
I believe one of the significant keys to our success, other than our attitude, and our detail orientation, has been our investment process. Our investment process is relatively unique to us, to the point where it's copyrighted, and trademarked and patent pending, and all those fun stuff. It's very reminiscent of a recent campaign done by Capital. They did a campaign about two years ago on bucketing strategies, you would probably remember it. But we developed a relatively complex, automated rules-based bucketing system that has worked really well for us from knowing what our investment process is, as well as for our client in developing really good consistent results because most of our clients are in distribution. And as many advisors may be aware, managing for distribution is a very, very, very different exercise than managing for accumulation.
Winston Chang
There are required minimum distribution RMD calculators out there, you know, like there have been versions of this kind of what you're describing an automated rules-based bucketing system. That sounds really hard to build.
Eliot Weissberg
Yeah it took forever. From when I first developed the system, which was in the early 2000s, right after the tech bubble, and then sort of implemented it formally, during and right before the great financial crisis, and then rebranded it, and IP’d it, if you will, in 2014. And I have been working, just to be clear, really actively with Raymond James trading platform people for the past two decades to build this system. And now it's built. And it's 98% now, and probably be within two years, it will be , it could possibly be it would run itself, not quite, but pretty darn close. And so it has been a really long journey and a lot of thought process about how to systematize all those things.
Winston Chang
Yeah, yeah. So for an advisor who's listening to this right what would your kind of practical next step for someone who's like, I really like that idea of automating of something that's rules based? And what is the next step for an advisor?
Eliot Weissberg
Sure. So what I would tell the average advisor who has access to a models-based system, which I believe most advisors do these days is no way should your client have one model, like one model does not fit all, what you need is a bunch of little models with building blocks, and then create the big model out of the building blocks. And over the long term that's way easier, and way more efficient for your client.
Winston Chang
This is great, Eliot, this is fantastic. And I know that we've covered a lot of territory, any last-minute things that you'd want to make sure that our listeners hear for this episode.
Eliot Weissberg
You know, I went to a presentation two weeks ago, and the guy said, anybody know the brand of the engine they flew on to get here. And you know, there's about 1000 people in the room and one hand went up. And then it's like, exactly, your clients don't give a crap, what engine is on the plane. They just want to arrive on time and not die. And people are scared of flying. And your job is to get them not to be scared of flying in. You know?
Winston Chang
Right.
Eliot Weissberg
That's all. And if you do that, they love you.
Shaun Tucker
Well, that’s it for this episode. We really hope you enjoyed this conversation between Eliot and Winston. If you liked what you heard today, hit the subscribe button and consider leaving a rating and a review, because that helps other advisors discover this show.
During this episode, Eliot mentioned a couple acronyms that we need to spell out. OSJ stands for Office of Supervisory Jurisdiction, which is affiliated with a broker dealer and provides supervisory and compliance services for advisors and branch offices. CFP stands for Certified Financial Planner, a professional designation conferred by the CFP Board in the United States upon completion of coursework and an exam.
PracticeLab is brought to you by Capital Group. You can find these episodes and more at practicelab.com.
Investments are not FDIC-insured, nor are they deposits of or guaranteed by a bank or any other entity, so they may lose value.
