When the financial world was melting in 2008, financial advisor Scott Leonard was telling his clients he was going to take three years off to sail around the world with his wife and three sons.

Leonard, CEO of Navigoe LLC, a wealth management firm in Redondo Beach, Calif. with more than $200 million in assets under management, offered his clients a guarantee before he left. He said if anyone was unhappy because of his absence, he would return their fees for the time he was absent and help them find a new financial advisor. No one left.

Leonard spent four years preparing his firm for the trip, which he says has left him reinvigorated and ready to grow. Leonard started his company from scratch in 1996 and four years before he was ready to embark on his around-the-world trip, he hired Eric Toya as the second financial advisor in the firm. The hire was made with the idea in mind that Toya would take over while Leonard was sailing the world.

“I started that far ahead of time because I wanted to work with the person at least two years before I left. If the first hire did not work out, I wanted enough time to find and work with someone else,” Leonard says. “But Eric worked out perfectly, so I did not have to look for anyone else.”

Toya met all of the clients and worked with them. The preparations for the trip served a dual purpose of also allowing Leonard to transition his clients into thinking of the firm as their home rather than looking only to him.

“We shared with the clients the fact that they were safer because of the preparations we made for me leaving than they would have been otherwise. There would be no gaps in their service if I were hit by the proverbial bus,” he says. The trip preparations helped with succession planning for the 46-year-old CEO.

To make the trip work, Leonard says, he had to have people in the firm he could rely on who were trained and compensated sufficiently to take over the day-to-day operations.

Technology also made it possible for Leonard to leave with his family while still maintaining contact. Work went to the cloud so it could be accessed from anywhere and

 

e-mails and telephone calls made contact easy.

Leonard did not unplug himself completely from Navigoe. He worked about 20 hours a week from the 50-foot catamaran where he and his family lived, and he returned to Southern California for a week each quarter to meet with clients.

“When I came back to meet with clients, the schedule was intense,” he says. Leonard saw more of the clients during this period than he sometimes does when he is working full time. “If I had it to do over again, I would add one more day to the time in California and reserve it for meetings with staff.”

The staff back in the office kept the operation running and made all but the big decisions, Toya says. “Scott’s absence went at least as well as we expected. The volume of organic growth the firm underwent while Scott was away was better than expected.” The five-person firm has $220 million in AUM.

The idea of being left in charge of the office was one of the drawing points for the job when Toya interviewed for the position, he says. “The opportunity to run the day-to-day client relationships sped up my development as a financial advisor,” Toya says.

Leonard, the author of The Liberated CEO, is a big proponent of not letting work consume a person’s entire life. He and his wife and three sons now live in a ski resort near Lake Tahoe. The most precious memory from the trip are the extended dinner hours the family shared on the back of the boat, dubbed the Three Little Birds, a name taken from a Bob Marley song and to honor the three children.

Leonard says he and his wife, Mandi, wanted the boys to be as old as possible for the trip but that they wanted to have them back in the United States for high school. The boys, Griffin, 14; Jacob or Jake, 12, and Luke 8, were home schooled by Mandi while they were away. The family returned last November and the boys returned to their regular classes.

Leonard says he is a serviceable sailor but not a champion. However, he has always loved the water. The Three Little Birds was docked most of the time they were away, allowing the family to live in places like French Polynesia for months at a time and get to know the people and the culture.

Every financial advisor should take a sabbatical to recharge, says Leonard. “Maybe not for three years, but for three or six months because when you come back the business gets better. The entrepreneur in me has been rekindled by the trip.”

Navigoe’s marketing efforts were put on hold while Leonard was sailing and he says the firm now has to start a full marketing campaign to get the firm’s name out to the public. Leonard has now set his sights on 20 percent growth for the firm for each of the next 10 years so he can reach approximately $2 billion in AUM.