Question for those successful PWM advisors
Is there anything you wish you knew when you first started out / would do differently? I’m in serious talking in joining a team and plan to leave banking to start a hard grind as a PWM advisor. Any tips / tricks?
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I can add a bit here. Was in wealth management at a large player for several years ultimately jumping to CB. I think WM is great but it is so drastically different day to day relative to banking or any technical finance role. It’s a people person job but if you can bring in clients, you are running essentially your own ship. It’s essentially starting your own business and if you are able to build a strong book into retirement, you can sell it for 1-1.5x revenue but I mean that could change by then. It’s also a steady stream of income from clients and if you build up your book, you are very isolated from economic downturns such as getting fired. You would be an owner of a business.
let me shift gears here and talk a bit about the downsides. First off, if you join a team, you could be sitting around clicking buttons sending checks out to clients, creating financial plans (not very fun if the client isn’t really UNHW), and just doing service items. Some people bite through this until a partner retires and then become partners. Pay is low for support roles. You could join a team that deals with large clients $10mm+ only and have more of an investor type of role. Now, if you go down the solo route or join a team with the notion you will bring assets in…it’s going to be very hard. Network must be strong, must be very very outgoing, and know how to sell yourself. Clients at wire houses usually need at least $250k plus for you to get production. It’s doable but again, hard.
edit: I want to add that based on your profile, if you already spent 3 years doing IB (which I think is a great thing for WM as you can play that to your strengths when crafting your story to prospects), just realize the day to day is very different. You aren’t really concerned with businesses and strategy but more so how to find new clients. Understanding their needs, crafting a story. There is a creative component involved and there usually aren’t “referrals” unless at a private bank or a branch advisor role.
Plan to join a team that understands I’m a junior partner and my job is to hunt and get clients. There are supportive role people they have already and that won’t be my job, joining to learn how to close and build a business. But I have been told what you mentioned could happen. I’ve been very focused on joining the right team, I haven’t found it yet but in serious talks with one and think it will happen, but that’s been a huge topic of conversation with teams. I’m joining to build a book, not do wires
Wouldn’t do it unless you know for a fact you can bring in $30m+ of assets in your first 1-3 years and $100m+ long term. Even if you’re charging 1%, that will equate in real comp to $120k and $500k respectively MAX.
I was an FA for 3 years and it is a near impossible business unless you have a built in client base / pipeline. Intelligence and finance acumen gets you next to nowhere. Of the largest producers at my firm, ones dad was a successful CPA and referred clients all day, one’s brother was a big time Hollywood agent, and one had a corporate relationship with a few of the large law firms and was fed business through educational seminars.
You will not spend much time developing investment theses or even creating financial plans. You’ll be cold calling, networking, spamming LinkedIn requests, and harassing your friends and family. Give it some serious thought, because there are also zero correlated exit ops aside from sales roles.
Join a successful team and have them offload their lower end clients while you get going... once you get your footing and start getting things rolling, referrals should start rolling in (this was the structure that I was in when I started in PWM). I'd argue that networking with CPA's, Attorney's & IB's is more important than cold calling etc... but this is of course at the higher levels of PWM (true UHNW advisory).
I'll also note that people don't realize most jobs turn into some version of PWM at the highest levels... if you truly want to reach the highest levels of IB, PE, RE.. you're going to mostly be doing some form of sales. PWM just starts you earlier, which in theory makes it "harder."
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