Leaving The 'Factory' Behind
Rick Michalak owns a Collegewise educational service franchise in Chatham, N.J. The service, which caters to a mainly affluent clientele, prepares and tutors high school students bound for college.

He previously spent 23 years in the for-profit education field, most recently at the Princeton Review, where he worked from 1997 to 2005. At the time Michalak left the company, Princeton Review had sales of $80 million and 45 offices nationwide, with generous benefits, he says.

He gave that up when he started the Collegewise franchise, but Michalak remains happy with the decision. Leaving behind the "factory'' dimensions of the Princeton Review for a more personalized franchise approach appealed to Michalak.

"I made a comfortable living and flew to Europe on vacations with the family in first class from frequent flyer miles from the business," says Michalak, a math tutor who typically puts in a 100-hour week overseeing a staff of 10. "All those lovely perks are gone, including health care coverage. You have to be willing to take those risks on yourself and very aggressively go after the marketplace."

Making Things Happen
Clark M. Blackman II had 26 years experience with firms such as Arthur Andersen, Price Waterhouse and Deloitte Touche when he founded Alpha Wealth Strategies, LLC, an RIA practice, in March 2006.

Located in Kingwood, Texas, it provides family wealth planning with an emphasis on investment strategy. Blackman, a CPA and financial planner, is the sole practitioner. His wife Julie is operations manager. Blackman says he sees more small firms spinning off from big organizations, enabled in part by advancing technology.

"I think this trend will continue," he says. "I find that a lot of financial planner-type people are self-motivated [and] aggressive. They get out there and make things happen.''

Blackman says his career move was motivated in part by his frustration at large firms' resistance to trying alternative approaches.

"It was a constant struggle to get partners in the firm to accept that investments, consulting in particular but even to a degree financial planning as a whole, was a service line that they should support and that could actually make money," he says.

Blackman says his firm has $80 million in assets under management and 13 clients, half of them high-net-worth. He brought all of his clients with him from his former firms, including his longest-term client, the CEO and chairman of a Fortune 500 company. Ironically, he and many of his other clients were originally attracted to the large size and reputation of his former employers.