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Our guest is COO Alliance Member Andrew Gregory, COO of Freedom Street Partners.
With over thirteen years of experience as a financial advisor, Andrew has expertise in comprehensive financial planning services to help clients thoughtfully pursue their goals. In this episode, Andrew talks about understanding and playing to strengths, checking egos at the door, and when and why it is OK to be bluntly honest. He also dives into building out the client, the experience and things you can do to set yourself apart and keep them happy. Lastly, Andrew shares his insights on life and wealth optimization, and what this process means at Freedom Street Partners.
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With several years of experience as a financial advisor, Andrew has expertise in comprehensive financial planning services to help clients thoughtfully pursue their goals. He also plays a key role in Freedom Street Partners recruiting and client experience efforts ensuring they deliver on the first-class service that fosters lasting relationships with the families and individuals they serve. Andrew serves as the Chief Operating Officer with a primary focus on advisor operations and recruiting. He works diligently to make sure that the current advisors have the tools and resources they need to run their practice. He’s constantly sharing the firm’s story with advisors looking to retire or make a change. Formerly a teacher, Andrew sought a career change and moved into financial services that would enable him to continue his practice of helping and guiding others. He aims to not only provide sound advice to help clients, for them to also understand why this advice is so important.
Andrew is previously a financial advisor with Edward Jones. While there, he also served as a recruiting leader, mentor, and coach for his team members and earned his Bachelor’s degree in Recreation Sport and Wellness Management from Christopher Newport University. His mother taught him to surround yourself with good people and good things will happen. That’s proven true. His love of educating and helping others has always been at the forefront of his professional life both as a teacher and later is a financial advisor. He’s also one of our newest members of the COO Alliance.
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Andrew, welcome to the show.
Thanks, Cameron. I appreciate you having me on.
Tell me a little bit about how you got started in your career and where your experience is coming from. I’d like to know a little bit about the sport and wellness management and what you learned from that part of your career as well.
My career track is not the typical track for somebody who is in the field that I’m in. You could tell maybe from that bio I started off as a high school teacher. I taught Health, Driver’s Ed, and Physical Education. I coached three sports. I played baseball in college and wanted to be a baseball coach. That was my passion. Teaching was the easiest avenue to get to that passion. After a few years in the education field and leaving my home at 6:00 in the morning and not getting home until 8:00 at night, making around $40,000 a year and having a young son at home that I barely saw awake. I knew I needed a career change. Coaching translated well to this profession. As a coach, you’re constantly trying to mentor your athletes and help them accomplish their goals. Help them get the most out of their potential and financial planning was not all that different from that.
It wasn’t all that different from teaching. I still feel at home on my whiteboard explaining things to clients and also explaining our story to other advisors and advisors that are looking to get out of the business. It was a smooth transition, but I look at every experience as a building block. Teaching prepared me for this career. It gave me the skillset to talk to people, to educate and to help clients accomplish their goals and do what they’re looking to do with our assistance.
I had written down the words coaching and teaching to dive into. I’m glad you kind of mentioned both of those so seriously as well. Before we dive into talking about Freedom Street Partners, I want to find out a little bit more about your methodologies in coaching and some of what you learned from coaching in baseball. Also, what you bring into the coaching practice and coaching employees. Talk to us a little bit about coaching and some of the methodologies.
One of the things that coaching taught me is that everybody responds differently to how you deliver information. The phraseology that I used to say is, “Some players you need to kick in the butt and other players you would pat on the butt.†Meaning, some players don’t respond well if you try to jump on them and be critical, but there are other players that needed that. They needed that direction, they needed a little bit more of a firm voice that let them know that they weren’t on track. What I took from that is we do personalities. We do disc assessments for some of our top-level clients. We want to know how they think and how they respond to information so we can deliver it the best way possible. We almost took some of that coaching acumen and tried to put some science behind it and it served us well. It showed that we don’t just care about the clients’ money, we care about them, their personality and who they are as people. In an industry where it’s difficult to set yourself apart because we’re commoditized, unfortunately. That’s one of the things that we’ve taken to heart and what I do personally to interact with clients that way.
Coaching is the number one skill that a leadership team needs to have overall the other soft skills and executive functioning. Our job as leaders is to get results through people and the only way to do that is to coach them. Talk about teaching. I’d love to know what you learned from teaching kids in high school and what applies to teaching adults and teaching in the companies. There’s got to be some lessons there for sure.
The first thing that I loved about transitioning into this career was I was able to teach and only worry about the teaching aspect. I didn’t have to discipline any of my clients. I don’t have to refer my clients to the principal’s office. I definitely didn’t have to write them up or chastise them in any way. From an education standpoint, a lot of advisors in our industry only focus on just telling their clients what to do. As a teacher, if I told my students what to know without giving them the why, the background and building them from step A to step B to step C. Instead of saying, “Here’s where we’re starting and here’s where we’re landing.†It probably gives the teaching industry a disservice. We focus on helping our clients understand why we’re doing what we’re doing and not saying, “We’re smarter than you. You need to do what we say.†There are a ton of people in our business that will do that. You can find five of them on every corner but taking the time to give the why is definitely a foundational principle that we focus on.
I learned something years ago in teaching, it was, “The student controls the learning environment and if the student’s not ready to learn they won’t learn.†It doesn’t matter how good the teacher is, you need to get them excited. At least on the financial side, your clients want to learn. How do you take some of those teaching principles and coaching principles with your employees and internally?
For me, that started with my previous employer. I spent a lot of time training advisors and teaching them how to do the job. It’s not only the numbers but asking the right questions and asking open-ended questions. Instead of getting a yes or no, you’re engaging the client to respond and give you something about what they’re thinking and where their thought processes are. That was important. From a team perspective, number one as a teacher. I always got a lot from my students and my players almost as much as I gave. As a team, even though, yes, we’re all teaching, we’re all trying to get everybody trained on our systems, our platforms and everything that we use. We’re constantly finding ways to get better learning. We call it to fail forward a bit like a startup. You’re going to fail forward and you’re going to learn from your mistakes. We’ve been able to do that well and our team appreciates that approach.
Do you take that concept of a team from sports into the business world as well?
Very much, it’s better together. That’s a mantra that we espouse quite a bit maybe we stole it from Jack Johnson. At the end of the day, understanding strengths, playing to strengths of the team and checking egos at the door and making sure it’s okay to be bluntly honest especially when you’re in a leadership team meeting. Our CEO was not worried about hurting my feelings by letting me know something that he feels like it isn’t my best lane and vice versa. One thing I have learned as a COO is that when you’re giving feedback to the CEO, there’s a right time and the right place to give that. Make sure that you’re doing it in the right avenue and in the right setting. Our leadership team, in general, is open, it’s like a good Italian family. You’re going to tell it like it is and everybody’s going to be okay with that.
Do you guys use the family analogy or the team analogy more?
I would say team for sure. Even though we are like family because we’ve grown up in the business together at least our partners have. From a team perspective, we all work together well in that way everybody has roles. We are all in our proper lanes which took a little while. One of the growing pains that we had was everybody was trying to do a little bit of everything. We were busy but there’s a difference between being busy and being efficient and we’ve improved over the last few years with efficiency. I think that’s cool.
I was talking to a friend, another CEO, and we were saying that we don’t want to use the term family in business anymore because some people had dysfunctional and rough families growing up. It’s true. I was like, “You’re right. I didn’t even think about this.†I have that leave it to Beaver family. We’re a family. We do vacations. I feel like I never went on vacation. I hated my mom and my dad, it’s crazy.
As athletes, we were all on some bad teams at some point too.
It’s different from a team because team members can be replaced. You get a record deal always up-leveling. I like the team analogy a lot more. Who is the CEO of Freedom Street partners?
Freedom Street Partners: A teaching background gives you the skill set to talk to people, to educate, and to help your clients accomplish their goals.
Our CEO is Scott Danner. Scott’s our visionary. Scott has done a great job of leading from the front and definitely sets our course. Nobody works harder than Scott. I do my best to keep up with him, but he has a passion for this business and that is tough to replicate. He’s more than a CEO to me. He’s like a brother. We grew up in the business together at Edward Jones we made each other better. I’m proud to be on the team with him. He’s great. He’s been a great leader for our group.
You touched on something saying that Scott is the CEO that controls the vision, forward-thinking and passion that he’s always transferring. How did you get on the same page? How long have you been with Freedom Street Partners?
Freedom Street Partners started in July of ‘16. I joined a few months afterward. I started in November of ‘16. I’ll be honest, those first several months in our industry when you leave your previous firm and you’re coming to a new destination, your focus isn’t on the team. Your focus is about announcing to your clients that you’ve made a move, answering their questions and hoping that they ask if it’s okay for them to come with you. You’re spending a lot of time rebuilding and making sure that your individual business is in good order. Going through that process is so important because any advisor that joins us has to go through some semblance of that process or they get their feet back under them and land. It’s more common now than it ever has been. There are advisors who are willing to move than they ever have been. They’re looking out there, looking for options or they want to make sure that they have the best deliverables for their clients and also a good deal for them.
It seems to be a more entrepreneurial industry than it was decades ago. Our business model is almost built on that statement. Independence in this industry used to be scary. Everybody worked for a broker-dealer who was an employer and you were an employee. They handled all the back office stuff and you were the face. You met with the clients and you were more of a client relationship manager, but you didn’t own the business. The corporation owned the business and they compensated you for taking care of the clients. We built out a platform and took the time to build out the infrastructure. We call it independence with support. If an advisor wants to become an independent advisor and own their business, several years ago they had to find healthcare, compliance, and they had to go and get additional licenses. For some advisors, especially if you’re a veteran, you’re not interested in taking a test and sitting for more exams. They don’t have solutions for investment management. We took the time to build out all of those pieces so that somebody can become independent and then plug into our resources. We’ve been able to execute on that and it’s been successful.
How do you stay on the same page as Scott with his vision of where the where he wants to take the company? How do you stay on the same page with vision? How do you keep him on the same page with where and how you want to make it come true with your plans?
My first response would be we meet regularly. Traction has been important for us. We’ve started to be more consistent with that implementation. We do have a weekly meeting every Monday that starts to set the course for that particular week. We do have quarterly off-sites where we can dive deeper into what’s going on and what are some of the things that we need to keep on our radar. Scott and I have a good working relationship. Sometimes when you have a well-functional team, your best ideas, communication and interaction are those. You’re at the beach on a Saturday afternoon with family. You’re sitting next to one another and you’re able to do a brain dump and get back on the same page if there were some things that were lurking that may have fallen through the cracks, accommodation of all those things. Consistency has been key. Communication was a challenge early. We were in two separate locations initially and trying to be on the same page when you’re not right next door to one another at all times was the challenge early on. I spent some time in both offices, which has been a good move and helps us stay in touch.
What else did you do to fix the communication challenges?
We found some electronic avenues to be able to communicate with one another. I’ll be honest with you, some of the best information that we exchange is at 9:30 at night. We’re typing it into an app and checking out information. Sharing it with everybody on the team and then getting immediate feedback. That way we can look at those things. When we’re back face-to-face we can recap and we can figure out what’s the best course of action going forward. That’s been important as well. Everybody’s tired of talking through email. Our email boxes are starting to thin out a little bit, which is great. It’s been liberating
Email is terrible for communication. The feedback you talked about earlier about giving feedback to the CEO and sometimes it’s not easy. How do you deliver that tough feedback? Give us an example of some tough feedback you’ve had to give
One of the challenges is trying to be an independent mind and looking at things from a 40,000-foot view. When you’re the CEO of a company you’re trying to think of everything all the time literally and you’re always on. Sometimes that vision, it’s always forward-looking and it’s always looking for the next roadblock, hurdle, and challenge. Sometimes the execution is difficult to keep up. We’re still solving problems A, B, and C, he’s already five steps ahead. That’s more of an advantage than it is a disadvantage. We would not be as good a company if it wasn’t for that. For me making sure that I, on the side, have that conversation with him not in a meeting.
I don’t think it’s appropriate to call out your CEO in a leadership team meeting and say, “You need to slow down, we haven’t fixed the first two issues before we go into issue four and five.†Making sure he stays grounded and keep some perspective. Plus, he needs to know how the morale and the mindset of staff. Where they stand with everything that they’re responsible for and making sure that they’re on the same page. That they feel good about their value and what they have to accomplish. Without being too specific, it’s important to respect the role of the CEO and to make sure that everybody always sees that I have his back. At the end of the day, you can’t rely on your, “Right-hand man,†or, “Right-hand person,†if you don’t know 100% of the time that they’re on the same page with you.
It’s interesting you talk about the feedback and doing it privately versus publicly. It’s the same as with any of your key employees. The CEOs want us to give them the hard feedback, but they want it privately because our job is to make them iconic. If we do it in front of everybody else, it tears them down. It doesn’t do anything. They want us to tell them the bad stuff and the critical or any of the uncomfortable stuff that nobody else really does. You mentioned quarterly offsite. How do you run those? What are they like?
We have a location of a building that has a huge room that we own but we don’t operate out of per se. We run some events out of that particular building and it’s a great spot. We’ve got easels, a huge TV, and all the technology that we would need to put numbers up. We tend to be pretty low-key, there is a set agenda, but it’s informal. It provides the platform to where the team can be a little bit more outspoken. They can speak with candor and go into much more detail. Those quarterly off-sites give us the ability not to feel rushed.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in an hour-long meeting where I felt like there were still things hanging out there that we had a little bit more time. Those quarterly off-sites have been instrumental in doing those. When we first started the company, we have some six to eight-hour planning meetings. That was the impetus of where we are today. If we didn’t have those meetings, we wouldn’t have had a lot of the great ideas that we came up with, how to get this thing started and grow as fast as we have.
What other meeting rhythms do you have in place?
We do an annual meeting which includes our entire company. We do what I call regional meetings. That’s where we share our vision with everybody that’s a part of our company so they can see. We also recognize, we highlight the folks within our business who are doing well or excelling, they’re bringing in business, and they’re growing their practice. We definitely want to recognize folks when they do that. We’re actually fortunate our parent company, our affiliate broker-dealer Raymond James provides a national conference each year that is second to none. That gives us an ability to take our group to Las Vegas, Orlando, Washington, DC to some different places throughout the country and spend some time with them. Break bread, celebrate them out of town and give them an opportunity to take a mini-break, which has been very good.
You also talked about EOS Traction. When did you guys start using Traction? What do you like about it?
I love EOS Traction. We started after I attended our first COO Alliance meeting. It’s probably one of the best values that I got from that particular meeting in Arizona. There was another CEO who was there who had been implementing it for some time and they were talking about it. I said, “I need to see this. I need this book. I need to read it.†I need to understand what the heck you’re doing. It’s solving all the problems that I see that we have, that we need to try to fix from a communication standpoint and finding a rhythm to what we do. That’s been good. We still have a couple of pieces to go. The scorecard is something that we have needed to get a hold of for a long time. We’re starting to wrap our arms around that which is great. The concept of if I was on a deserted island and I could only have eight to ten pieces of data to understand whether or not my business was doing well or not. It was so simple but so effective. It made us look at our business a little differently which was good.
Freedom Street Partners: A CEO of a company thinks of everything all the time, always forward-looking, and always looking for the next roadblock, hurdle, and challenge. Sometimes the execution is difficult to keep up.
It’ll take you time to put each of those systems in place. Don’t get discouraged that it usually takes a year to two years to have the systems. Two to three years to have them deeply ingrained and tapping on autopilot to love change. Talk about growing your team and tell us a little bit about Freedom Street Partners. How many employees have you got? What markets do you operate in?
We started obviously with three advisers and a couple of support staff when we first began. We now have a total of twelve advisors and we have a total of eight support staff. Keep in mind all of our advisors run their own independent LLCs. They’re affiliated with us. They’re not employees of our company, but they are a part of our group which is advantageous to us. We like being able not to have to deal with their payroll and some of the things that they have to take care of internally.
We’ve grown from $180 million of assets under management to under $700 million in the course of about 2.5 years. We’re right at under $6 million of revenue on trailing twelve. We’re growing fast, which is awesome and scary all at the same time. We’re very grounded. We took our time in year one building out the infrastructure instead of just growing as fast as humanly possible and taking on anyone and everyone. We’ve grown the right way. We haven’t added a single adviser that we have been tickled to death that they’re a part of our group a year later two years later. That’s important.
There’s been no buyer’s remorse. There are three ways that people work with us. Either affiliates, affiliates are people maybe they’re in their 30s to 50s. They’re not going to retire anytime soon from this business. They know that they need more and they want to own their business. They’re tired of being an employee somewhere else. They want to own their practice, but they want to do it with some support. That’s one way that people work with us. Number two is succession, think of the advisor who doesn’t want to leave tomorrow, but knows that they’re close. Maybe a few years from now, they want to get out of the business, but they want to do it on their terms and on their time schedule.
We work with those advisors as well to have a built-in succession plan for their practice. Lastly are acquisitions. The advisor who has hit the last chapter and they’re ready to go within the next several months. They want to phase out fairly quickly and they want to sell their practice. Those are the three main groups of advisers that we look to work with. Everything we do revolves around the end client. Every process, platform and all of our investment management revolves around how do we deliver an ideal client experience to the end client to the folks that we’re serving on a day-to-day basis? Not letting that get lost on us has been important and making sure that we keep that in mind with every decision that we make.
You guys are in a competitive industry. Most of the clients are sitting with advisors they’ve often been with for years. I’ve been with my financial advisor for several. We don’t change that often. How do you differentiate yourself from the rest of the competition out there?
It’s something that we work hard to achieve every day. We built out a process and we named it and the name of our process is Life and Wealth Optimization. If you think about it on its most basic premise, life comes before wealth in that title and that was intentional. When clients come to see us, the first questions were asked of them are not, “How much money do you have? What investments do you own?†It’s “What lights you up? What are you passionate about? What does the next chapter look like for you? What are you doing?†Not in that hoity-toity, “We’re going to write down all your dreams and goals,†type situation because there are some firms that do preach some of that stuff. Taking an interest in that particular individual, learning about their personality, looking at what’s important to them and then using that as a guide for how we navigate their financial future.
We don’t want a relationship with their money, we want a relationship with them. That’s the only way you can separate yourself in this industry anymore because everybody’s got good investment management. Everybody has relationships with the best mutual funds and they have good research and they can put together a solid investment platform for any of their clients. Beyond that, it’s, “Who cares about me as a person? Who cares about what happens with my money? Who cares whether I’m able to buy that dream house or whether I’m able to buy that boat or go on that vacation that has been my dream trip to Europe or whatever it is?†I think that’s really the premise of how we’ve separated ourselves and then creating a client experience that scalable, repeatable and manageable for any of the advisors that tap into our resources.
There are a lot of advisors who’ve been letting their business run them. Their phone constantly rings off the hook. If the market is down, they constantly have to answer tons of questions. That their clients are scared and they don’t know what’s going on. We try to be proactive and build out our client experience in a way where our phone isn’t as ring much. The reason is that we have a pre-scheduled call with them and they know exactly when it’s going to be. How often it’s going to be because it’s at their convenience and when they want it to happen. If it’s monthly, great. If it’s quarterly, we’ll do it. If it’s only twice a year because they don’t want to talk to us that much.
We’re going to come into another market correction. The market’s correct. What do you guys do to deal with that stress when your customers have that kind of stress? In every business, we have times when our customers are stressed out. When the money’s involved, it’s particularly stressful. What do you guys do to deal with?
One of the main things that we’ve always done has been event-driven. We do monthly Town Halls in all of our locations. When I say Town Hall, I want you to envision that we run out of the room and we’re not in there giving a dog and pony show about the latest greatest investment. We’ll start off and we’ll talk about the backdrop of what’s going on in the universe, with the economy. We’ll give some of the information that is coming from our chief market strategist because they’re smart. They have a lot more letters after their name than I do. I’m always going to share that information. More importantly, we actually talk about the emotional side of investing. The worst investment decisions that are made are always made on emotion and not on logic. I know everybody has heard the old adage that Warren Buffett has used for years, which is, “Buy low and sell high,†or, “Be greedy when others are fearful and be fearful when others are greedy.â€
Human emotion does not do that. When everybody’s scared, everybody gets scared with them and they’re selling at the worst possible time. The other thing we do is we have some principles that we believe in and number one is don’t own an investment today that you wouldn’t want to own in a recession tomorrow. Think about the business model of that particular investment and whether or not you would be nervous about it if the economy started to struggle. There are things like that that you want to make sure that you’re factoring in when you’re making investment decisions.
I can’t wait for the market to have these next big corrections. I’ve been building up cash, waiting to buy back in. You can’t time the market, but I made a pile of money in 2008 and 2009 when everybody was panicking and puking in the streets and I’m like, “Load her up.†I bought about eight stocks and a load. I was up a 107% year one, year over year was great. What do you think you learned in this industry that is helpful for people in other businesses in other industries?
In a service business and you probably agree with this. It is being able to relate to the end client and being able to serve them in a way where they know that you care about them as people and not about the next sale and not about the next transaction. It’s developing long-term relationships, generational relationships. We have clients who are older, but we know who their kids are and their kids are probably clients of ours. If it’s not their kids, then it’s their grandchildren. It’s taking a vested interest in the people. It was in my bio if you surround yourself with good people, good things will happen. I’ve always believed that. That’s something that was instilled in me a long time ago. At the end of the day if we can show empathy and what makes us different, we show up for the retirement party or we’re hosting it we show up at the funeral.
We are more than a financial planner or financial advisor. That can carry through to any business. People know if you’re genuine, they can read whether you care or whether you talk well about what you do. Lip service doesn’t do any good for anybody. We want to make sure that our actions are always aligned with our words. If you can do that and whatever business you’re running, whether it’s your employees or whether it’s your clients, your culture will be second to none and nobody will ever leave you.
Talk to me about advisors, the war on talent and you’re in a competitive industry. Why do you think the advisors join you? What is it that you do on the recruiting side to bring them over? To not scare them away when you’re interviewing them?
Almost all of the advisors that were talking to at some point they’ve known that they were different and that they weren’t in the right place. They’re scared of, they want to own the business, but they don’t want to own all of the headaches that come with owning a business. What’s easy to tell about our story is you could go independent and be your own person, don’t even affiliate with us. Go be your own guy or gal. You’re going to take on 100% of all those headaches and those responsibilities. With our platform, you’re going to be paid exactly the same way as if you were by yourself, on your own on that island but you get all the resources that we’ve built out and what we provide. That’s been an easy story to tell. You almost have not to like us not to want to join with us if you’re considering independence, but the other thing is we’ve all done what we’re asking these advisors to do. We’ve made a change; we’ve gone through it and we’ve lived it.
From a teaching perspective, we all had the administrator who told us how we should teach what we should teach and what format we should teach it. When you ask, “When was the last time you were in a classroom?†“I was never in the classroom.†It really takes away a lot of credibility from the administrator. Not to say that there can’t be some good administrators that were never in the classroom but nine times out of ten they’re not. We are the administrator who has been in the weeds, who has been in the classroom and has done the teaching, has done the hard work. Being able to share our experience with that and share of mistakes that we made that we improved upon because we’ve already screwed it up. The fact we’re going to keep them from making those same mistakes. It’s comforting to the advisors that are considering making that change.
Freedom Street Partners: Developing long-term relationships is about relating to the end client and serving them in a way that they know you care about them as people and not just about their money.
Andrew, if you were to look back at yourself at 21 years old and you were to give yourself some advice, stuff that you know now to be true, but you wish you’d known at 21. What do you think it would be?
I would have pulled the trigger on starting in this business sooner. I was this close to making that change at 22, 23 and didn’t do it. That five-year period that I lost there was a lot of growth. That would have been exponentially different now. Number two, we get so caught up in our education and our degree and what we’re doing. That wedges us down a path that we have to follow and we have to go with. At the end of the day, if something calls your name and something speaks to you and you feel like it’s the right direction. It’s okay to change course. It’s okay to deviate from what you thought some predestined path was for you. That would be follow your heart. I know that sounds very cliché.
At the end of the day, if you’re not passionate about it, you’re not going to be happy and you’re not going to be able to be successful in whatever it is that you’re doing. I still believe this day if they would pay me the same amount of money to be a baseball coach. I’d be on a bench somewhere doing it, but it doesn’t pay the bills. That’ll be my retirement job. After I retire and sail off into the sunset, I’m going to be an assistant college baseball coach somewhere, wherever it is.
I’ll come and watch your team. You clearly love what you do. Andrew Gregory, the Chief Operating Officer from Freedom Street Partners. Thanks very much for sharing with us.
Cameron thanks. I appreciate it.
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About Andrew Gregory
With over thirteen years of experience as a financial advisor, Andrew has expertise in comprehensive financial planning services to help clients thoughtfully pursue their goals. He also plays a key role in Freedom Street Partners’s recruiting and client experience efforts, ensuring they deliver on the first-class service that fosters lasting relationships with the families and individuals they serve.
Andrew serves as the COO, with a primary focus on advisor operations and recruiting. He works diligently to make sure that the current advisors have the tools and resources they need to run their practice, and he is constantly sharing the firm’s “story†with advisors looking to retire or make a change.
Formerly a teacher, Andrew sought a career in financial services that would enable him to continue his practice of helping and guiding others. He aims to not only provide sound advice to help clients but for them to also understand why that advice is important.
Andrew was previously a financial advisor with Edward Jones. While there, he also served as a recruiting leader, mentor, and coach for his team members. Andrew earned a bachelor’s degree in recreation, sport and wellness management from Christopher Newport University.
His mother taught him: surround yourself with good people and good things will happen – and so far that’s proven true. His love of educating and helping others has always been at the forefront of his professional life, both as a teacher and later as a financial advisor.
