Many different roads lead to successful financial planning.
In Vietnam, Jerry P. Boisseau commanded a 105 mm
Howitzer field artillery battery and, on a second tour of duty during a
20-year career in the military, advised Vietnamese soldiers in the
Mekong Delta along the Cambodian border. These days, he applies that
take-charge discipline to the asset allocation advice he gives clients
implementing modern portfolio theory.
Advisors like Boisseau bring a whole other layer of
experiences when they change careers and move into financial planning.
Of course, formal education and professional credentials are always the
necessary prerequisites. But these planners are part of a cadre of
investment professionals who have come to money management by a more
circuitous route. Their earlier experiences in entirely different
careers have enriched and strengthened their planning practices.
"People who come to financial planning from other
walks of life bring a tableau of rich life experiences," says Dr.
Barbara Moses, a career self-management guru and author of What Next?
The Complete Guide to Taking Control of Your Working Life. "They
understand what people need and value at different life stages and can
relate meaningfully to those needs."
Below are profiles of five such individuals,
who have come to financial planning from other occupations. The human
impulse is to seek new challenges.
The Soldier
Boisseau pursued the spit and polish of a career in
the U.S. Army for the first two decades of his adult life before
putting aside his uniform and retiring in 1981 as a lieutenant colonel.
"While serving my country, I grew and matured and once I had no more to
give it was time to move on," says the 65-year-old ex-military man.
Deciding to take his field artillery experience into
business, he became a broker at Prudential-Bache Securities (now
Prudential Securities) in Springfield, Mass. But, he soon realized, "I
wasn't a stock and bond jockey. I enjoyed working with people and
helping them solve their financial investment dilemmas."
This broader viewpoint brought him into financial
planning. He picked up his Certified Financial Planner certification,
to go along with the three former academic degrees earned while serving
the military.
The desire to answer to his clients only and
establish his own business prompted a move to Toms River, N.J., in
1991, where Boisseau established Amherst Financial Services. Starting
initially with fees and commissions, it eventually evolved into a
fee-only practice. Boisseau manages in excess of $20 million with a
support staff of two, including his daughter, Lisa.
Boisseau does modular planning (rather than
comprehensive planning) in the areas of investment planning, retirement
planning and estate planning. Though his clientele is primarily in the
area of the New Jersey coast, he also has clients in Massachusetts,
Virginia, Florida and Ohio. "I have some military clients, and through
these relationships I have engaged new clients," he notes.
He credits the military for the foundation, values
and discipline in his approach to financial planning for clients. "In
the military," says Boisseau, " you develop a structured thought
process. That is, you identify the problem, research options, determine
a course of action, and then implement. In financial planning, we use a
six-step process, which is much the same as in the military.
"Any successful investor must have a discipline and
must stay with that discipline," Boisseau adds. "My discipline is asset
allocation, implementing modern portfolio theory. If a person strays
from their discipline, it's like trying to sail a boat without a rudder
or wandering aimlessly because you're going to have no direction or
plan.
"When I retired from the military I never looked
back to second-guess my decision as to what direction my career would
take."
The Home Economist
For some people, financial planning is a second
career. But for Luisa Nemati, a native of Costa Rica, it's her fourth
and best.
With degrees in home economics and business
administration, Nemati, 48, started her career in the hospitality and
hospital industries, first going from a job in cafeteria management for
a national cafeteria chain from Lubbock, Texas, to being a nutritionist
and dietary department supervisor in a Dallas hospital. Rankled by low
pay and being in a "woman's field," as she put it, Nemati next worked
in finance capacities for several engineering consulting firms in
Dallas.
Nemati was first drawn to financial planning in the
mid-1990s, when she and her husband sought financial advice from
advisors at American Express. But it was not the appropriate time for
drastic career change number four. "I had a small child at home and a
husband who traveled 75% of the time," Nemati says.
The spark was there, however, and she went to work
for the giant insurance company AXA in Dallas. She went through the
training and licensing process, but once again, insurance wasn't the
right fit; nor was a bank job afterwards. Neither focused on financial
planning, notes Nemati. The work was mainly transactional. She became
disillusioned and bored.
Nemati maintained her membership in the Financial
Planning Association, however, and completed her CFP certification. She
is now happily ensconced, she says, at Weaver and Tidwell Financial
Advisors in Dallas, the financial planning group of a Dallas-Fort Worth
CPA firm.
"Our group has been in business four years," relates
Nemati. "We have taken the team approach; we see our clients as our
families. We do multigenerational modular and comprehensive planning
and work very closely with our clients' other advisorsæfor example,
CPAs and lawyers.
"When I started in mid-2002 we serviced 27 families.
We now service over 110, with a staff of eight and two part-timers."
The firm's AUM have grown nearly fourfold, from $40-plus million to
more than $140 million.
"We all have varied experiences and backgrounds,"
says Nemati. "I bring to the table the female factor and the
multi-cultural and bilingual factor, and fully communicate in Spanish
when clients prefer their native language. I feel changing course into
financial planning completes my carrier circle, my natural evolution. I
started in home economics and finance, picked up many other experiences
along the way, and now I'm full circle into family financial planning
and loving it."
The Engineer
Peter Lengsfeld thought he was destined to follow in
his father's footsteps and the family tradition. All were either
engineers or scientists. So Lengsfeld also became an engineer, and in
1993 went to work as a mechanical engineer at a manufacturing firm
creating powder metallurgy parts.
After a year or so, however, he decided that the
family tradition was not for him. "It finally occurred to me that the
stock investing I was doing for myself was something I had a passion
for," says Lengsfeld, who took a job as a stockbroker with a firm that
gave him some initial sales training.
But he found cold calling a chore. He survived, he
says, only because "I brought to the table a set of highly developed
analytical skills. Because of my background, not only was I able to
obtain engineers as clients, since I knew what they were looking for in
an advisor, but other brokers in the office were looking to get rid of
their problem clients."
He moved to Presidential Brokerage Inc. in San Diego
in 1996 and a year later to their offices in Denver, where he lives
today with his family. "I liked the fact that the firm had a call-in
radio show that generated interested leads for us," says Lengsfeld.
"Rather than cold calling, it was calling a warm lead."
But the longer he spent as a broker, the more he
realized his skills at that level could only take him so far. So in
1997 he obtained insurance licenses, and then his Certified Financial
Planner's designation three years later. "I realized I needed all these
skills not only to stay competitive but to stay in business."
Today, Lengsfeld, 37, has accounts with
approximately $12 million, most of it transaction-basedæstocks, bonds,
mutual funds and options. "I still enjoy the stock-based business I
have," he says, "but I've added more financial planning business to the
mix. It comprises about 20% of my business, and over time I expect that
number to grow."
What has helped his practice is the analytical
training he received as an engineer. Says Lengsfeld, "I've been able to
keep my perspective that the client's insurmountable problem is just a
problem, something that can be overcome using my experience and
analytical skills."
The Teacher
Choosing to teach in the inner city seemed a
self-evident choice in the late 1960s, the age of Joan Baez, the
Beatles and the Rolling Stones. For Joslyn G. Ewart, it was natural to
want to give back, through education, to urban youth who needed a
better chance in life. "I chose to teach in the inner city because I
was raised in a home that taught the values of love, education and
always going the extra mile for people," says Ewart.
She got a taste of urban life and its travails in
her first job, after graduating from Case Western Reserve University in
1974, when she taught general music to 1,000 inner-city students in
Philadelphia each week. When it was time to move on after 21 years, she
reflected on how she could be helpful to people in a different venue.
Since she had done well with her own investing during her teaching
career, she thought she could replicate her success with clients
interested in professional investing guidance. "I was doing well with
my money, and in my second career I wanted to deal with adults," says
Ewart.
To prepare for her career change, Ewart got her feet
wet in the nonprofit (403 b) marketplace while obtaining the necessary
NASD registration, including her Series 24(General Securities
Principal). She attained her Certified Financial Planner designation in
1999, and a year later launched her own wealth management firm, Entrust
Financial, in Wayne, a Philadelphia suburb. The firm is approaching $50
million under management.
Ewart finds the teaching experience useful, and notes similarities with
her new career. "Music combines the elements of rhythm, harmony, melody
and tone color to give birth to art and expression," she explains.
"Financial planning integrates the elements of goal identification,
protection, preservation, accumulation, and distribution strategies to
create personalized financial blueprints.
"As a successful teacher, I persuaded students
to act in their own best interest. I implemented disciplined strategies
designed to patiently and resolutely help each student achieve
long-range aspirations. These skills are essential to my ability to
deliver customized wealth planning solutions to clients with a wide
variety of life and family circumstances.
"Whether nurturing inner-city students and their
community, or nurturing clients and their extended families, both
require passionate energy, love and going the extra mileæalways."
The Sculptor
In perhaps one of the more unusual career changes,
Stephen F. Lovell, 55, worked as a sculptor after graduating magna cum
laude from McMaster University in Ontario, where he majored in English
and philosophy and went on to get an M.A. in English literature. After
finishing his course work for a Ph.D., he didn't complete work on his
thesis, a process he describes as "moving bones from one elephant
graveyard to another." He quit academics.
He worked for a dozen years as a sculptor in his own
artist's studio in a white pine forest, sculpting by hand small
figurines in clay. The business did well enough that Lovell had two TV
shows done about his lifestyle, and a number of newspaper articles and
radio interviews about his pieces.
Of his sculpting experience, Lovell says,
"Financially I was successful, but I felt isolated from the things that
matter in lifeæpolitics, people, intellectual pursuits. A pleasant
lifestyle was not enough to make up for this shortfall."
In time, he decided to pursue a course more in line
with his upbringing and education. While he earned his M.B.A., he was
also searching for a new direction. This turned out to be more of an
"old" direction. "My dad was an insurance man. He took me to MDRT
(Million Dollar Round Table) conventions from the age of three, and at
the age of 12, told me to become a stockbroker." Lovell also recalls
visiting homes with his father, and was treated graciously by people
whom his dad called "clients."
"I grew up with this pleasant association about clients," Lovell recalls.
As a financial planner and owner of his own
business, Forsythe Heritage, in Walnut Creek, just outside of San
Francisco, Lovell does comprehensive financial planning for well-to-do
clients. He manages $25 million and specializes in estate and business
succession, retirement, education planning and health insurance. With
nine different credentials and two more coming, Lovell maintains a
rigorous education program and subscribes to more than 30 news services.
Unlike the other financial planners, Lovell did not
find his earlier career as an artist helpful. Rather he sees it as an
interruption to the development of his life as a financial planner.
"I believe the attitudes and traits of the artist
and the business person are nearly inimical," Lovell says. "A few
characteristics of my work as an artistæindependence, variety in tasks
and creativityæare also present in my career as a financial advisor,
but this overlap seems immaterial to me."
Lovell's son is now studying to be an actor, and he blames it on his dad.