What was your major at Trinity?
I graduated from Trinity with a degree in Mathematics and a decent background in finance. 

What was your first job?
My first job was strictly selling insurance.  I worked for New York Life and lasted there less than a year.  I branched out into financial planning, selling insurance as well as investment planning.

How do you believe Trinity prepared you for your future?
Ironically enough, the mathematics degree has helped me more that I thought.  It made me understand concepts more easily.  At first I thought that if I didn’t become an actuarial what good was a degree in math going to do?  But the irony of it is that math really helped a lot in understanding concepts, being able to interpret things and so on.  It has also helped me when new people come on board.  I train them and my experience as a math major has gotten me to understand things much more in depth and much more quickly.

Are there any extra-curricular activities that you did at Trinity?
I would say the thing that helped me most was being part of a fraternity.  Just from a leadership role I learned how to relate with different personalities, I learned how to motivate people and how to take action.  Strong people skills were also a big help.  In any kind of sales you have to be able to work with the public – it is crucial.

Can you give a brief overview of your company’s operations?
My particular company, M.W. Financial Group, does integrated financial planning for individuals and for businesses.  Most of us have become certified financial planners.  Even though we get paid on a commission basis, on investment products and insurance products, we hold ourselves out as financial planners.  We do the same type of job that a fee-based financial planner would do, but unlike a financial planner gets paid $125 an hour, we get paid only if the clients like what we tell them.  We can do that because we offer a variety of products across the spectrum.  We work with a variety of businesses, and that helps when new people are coming in.  It is hard to have a 22-year-old employee come in and get a 50+ year-old business owner to write a check.  But if you can come in and say, “Hey, I know I can help you, it isn’t going to cost you anything, if you don’t like what I have to say you can walk away and it only cost you some time, if you do we are in a win-win situation.”  That is a much easier sale.  It is much easier to get clients early on.

What are the trends that are currently affecting your industry?
On the positive side, the stock market has been going up and that always helps us. It seems that when the stock market goes up, you are the good guy and when it goes down you are an idiot.  Even though you can tell people ten times over it is going to happen, when they see their statement shows earnings lower than last quarter they start questioning things.  What has made it harder yet easier in a way is computerization that has made a lot of “do-it- yourself-ers” now.  You can make trades online and you can pull research from almost anywhere.  All of this has given us a whole new kind of competition, not against other financial planners, but against the clients themselves.  That may sound negative, but it is actually a positive.  What is has done is taken a lot of the mediocre people in our career and they have gotten out.  This means that there is less competition in our field and the cream has floated to the top.  The people who are doing well are making more money than ever, and the people who were just doing ok and were a nuisance from a competition stand-point have switched careers.

How do you sell yourself as a financial planner with all this competition from technology?
It is actually really easy when you can sit down with a client because all too often the online systems give people just enough information to be dangerous.  90% of the people doing it themselves shouldn’t be.  There is that 10% that know enough and are sharp enough to do a great job but people often lose a lot because they do not have the necessary expertise.   I can sit down with them for a half an hour introductory meeting and I find out what they are doing and I have the knowledge to show them where they are losing.  You do get some people who like to go it alone and don’t trust anyone and for those people that is fine because they don’t make good clients anyway.   I am really just a coach, a financial coach, helping clients realize their financial goals.

Do you mainly work with stocks or mutual funds?
We do some individual stocks and all of that but we work mainly with mutual funds.  Because we are doing strategic financial planning – we are helping people with their estate planning, income taxes, pension plans, and all those types of things.  We work with the big picture of financial planning.  It is kind of like when you build a house. You have a general contractor then you have someone that does the foundation, you have a roofer, you have a plumber, and an electrician, and we are kind of like the general contractor.

What can someone expect from a lifestyle in your career field?
It all depends on what you want to make of it.  I met my wife here seven years ago when our two companies merged together into one office.  We have taken completely different philosophies with the career.  I started and worked as hard as I could and by the third year out of school I dipped into the six-figure range.  I didn’t stop there, I kept going and pushing and trying to get the numbers up and up.  My wife, on the other hand, reached that point and said, “Ok, now my goal is to make the same amount each year and have to work less.”  Now she has gotten to the point where she can work 15 hours a week and make six-figures.  So this job is really what you make of it.  If you want to make unlimited money, there are people in this business making millions and millions of dollars.  On the other hand it is really flexible, if you see a family down the line and you don’t want to miss any of your kids’ little league games you don’t have to because you make your own hours.

I have heard that if you want to be good you have to work 60-100 hours a week.  Is that true?
Yes, and that part can be a little daunting.  You have to do it for the first three years if you want to be successful.   But after that you can back off if you want and if you want to take a day off, no one is going to tell you “no.”  In that way, for people who want flexible hours you can’t beat it.

What traits and skills are you looking for in a new employee?
The academic aspect is less important than the interpersonal skills.  In this business you need to good at three things.  Number one, you have to be a good technician on the financial planning side; number two you have to be a good sales person; and number three you have to have an entrepreneurial spirit.  You have to be able to run your own schedule to accomplish all of this.  The latter two things are things we can’t help teach, you either have it or you don’t.  You know when you have the sales spirit because some students go home over the summer and start side businesses and others would never dream of doing something like that.  The technical skills we can teach you but you have to have a basis for us to start with.  If you graduate from Trinity, you are smart enough to do this job.  We look for what you do for part time work and if you are part of a lot of clubs and other things that show leadership.  I was not in a lot of activities at Trinity because I was a competitive body builder.  I was kind of like the weirdo on campus.  Between my sophomore and junior year I won the national championship and ironically I didn’t know if I should put that on my resume or not.  I did put it on my resume and that is what eventually got me hired.  The employer later said to me that the most exciting thing that he saw on my resume was that I was number 1 in my sport in the country and that showed leadership.  Once he saw that he knew he was going to bring me on board regardless of all the academics and stuff like that.

What opportunities are available for recent graduates if they want to start off in your business?
In this industry usually there is no promotion scale.  Your promotion scale occurs as you build your financial planning clientele in the business.  What you are building is your own business, your own clientele.  Where the promotions come in is that as you build your clientele your income increases.  Also each year it becomes easier and easier because you get repeat business from your past clients and you don’t need to find as many new clients.  Once you have been around for ten years it becomes the easiest business in the world from what is nearly the hardest business in the world when you start off.  There is always a potential to get into management years down the road where you can recruit new people and manage them and help them build their careers and that is open to anyone who has the ambition, but most of the time people don’t do that.  They get into the business and they enjoy it and build their own clientele and that is that.

What is a typical day like for you?
When I started in the business my goal was to make as much money as I could as fast as I could.  It is great when you are single because you don’t have any pressure to be home or keep reasonable hours.   When I started, I would probably begin work around 8:00 every morning and would go home around 11:00 every night.  And I wouldn’t stop. A lot of the time I would work on Saturdays as well. There are better times during the day to make calls, go to meetings, and do research.  In the beginning, there were a lot of after-hour meetings but you eventually get tot the point where you talk people into taking the day off to come in to meet during the day.  Now I actually start earlier, around 7:00, and I get home around 7:00 at night.  I am still putting in 12-hour days, but I don’t have to. I do that by choice, it is just my personality.  For me, it is like working half a day.  When you start off you spend quite a bit of time on the road as well, making appointments and going to meetings.

What advise would you offer someone entering this field?
If you are someone who wants a nine-to-five job, and want the comfort of a steady salary, this is absolutely not the career for you.  If you are the entrepreneurial type who loves working with people, loves helping, who is very competitive in nature, and who loves making unlimited money, for that person, this is the best career in the world.  This job has a lot of stress and rejection associated with it.  You have to go through nine no’s before you get to a yes.  There is no better time to get into this business than right as you graduate from Trinity because you are getting into a business that has no salary and is commission based.  Once you buy a house, have a family and a mortgage, at that point to switch to field like this is much more difficult.