How many of you, even advisors, have ever sat at your desk and dreamed you were somewhere else—perhaps singing standards in a Broadway play, tapping your feet on the desk?

Now imagine you’re Pearce Wegener, who achieved those Broadway dreams by age 22—before deciding he’d rather be doing what you’re doing.

Sounds strange, but it’s true. Wegener just seven years ago was a young song and dance man from Columbia, Mo. Almost straight out of college, he won a Broadway role in Gypsy working alongside Patti LuPone. Now he’s a wealth management advisor at Summit Place Financial Advisors in New Jersey. 

Many people’s careers are crooked lines, but it’s hard to imagine one crookeder than this one. 

Breathtaking, Quick Success

The life of an actor often involves years between projects, time attending acting schools, waiting tables, attending cattle calls and open auditions, paying for head shots, trying to get managers or agents, or maybe trying to book a five-line contract on a soap opera. But Wegener, the son of hardware store owners, and a graduate from the University of Cincinnati in 2007, had enough talent to skip all that. 

“I had an audition for a production of Gypsy starring Patti LuPone and directed by its author, Arthur Laurents, and I booked the show on my second day in New York City,” Wegener says. “And it was supposed to originally be a summertime role, a summertime job.” Instead, the off-Broadway show went to Broadway, and he was with it for 2008 and 2009. He played the role of Yonkers, one the “news boys” in Mama Rose’s vaudeville act, but he also understudied for the bigger role of Tulsa, the boy who steals away child star June. That allowed him a star turn singing “All I Need Is The Girl.” Wegener got to rub elbows with Stephen Sondheim and the show was showered with Tonys. The dream of a lifetime achieved right out of school.

But with outrageous success there often comes philosophy and wisdom. Wegener, after reaching the summit, realized he was on the wrong mountain.

“I did that basically for two years, and for me I knew I was in theater for the wrong reasons,” he says. “I wanted to be on Broadway. I didn’t want to be a working actor. And those are two totally separate things. When I did it, it was kind of like a bucket list check mark. Once I had done it, I had no desire to do it again. … It was everything a person could ever dream of.”

He did one more stint in Gypsy with another company outside Boston, then left acting, realizing he could be anywhere in the world, and that “I want to do so much more than sing and dance for a living. So right in the middle of the show, I decided it was time to make a change.” 

After Broadway, he went into arts administration, running the Buck Hill Skytop Music Festival in Pennsylvania’s Monroe County in the Poconos, from 2011 to 2013. There, he got to serve both the extremely wealthy as well as the impoverished. 

“It gave me an opportunity to help people. The two communities [it served] were very wealthy, in what I call third and fourth home communities, and we put on all types of performances for them in the summertime.” The county also contained two school districts millions of dollars in debt, he says. The festival catered to them as well.

“So I got an opportunity to do what I knew but also help people,” he says. “It was also the first time I had dealt with people of significant wealth. Growing up in College Town USA, Columbia, Mo., I never talked with or had any chance of running into people of significant wealth.” At the festival, he raised money for and socialized with them and found out, he says, that people are people no matter how much they have. “Everybody had problems and everybody has wants and needs and desires and dreams and struggles, and once you realize that, you put a personal touch on everybody. They have a human side. No one had a perfect life, no matter how much money they had.” 

“It opened my eyes to how much I appreciate helping people and solving problems.” 

And that eventually led to his new career.

A New Tune

Liz Miller, the founder of financial advisory firm Summit Place, met Wegener working at the music festival; she was the treasurer while he was its general manager, she says.

“I had a very pleasurable experience working with him … when he was doing very many jobs.” After about a year, she says she was introducing him to higher level analytics to teach him how to communicate financial information to the festival’s board. “Most of the people around the table [at a nonprofit] can easily get overwhelmed, perhaps don’t know how to read a profit and loss statement.” Wegener, she says, caught on right away.

After a time, though, he announced he was not going to be able to stay with the organization because he was moving in the fall of 2013. His future husband had just gotten into medical school in New Orleans and Wegener was going with him.

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