Mark’s contribution to the fiduciary advice business cannot be measured. On a personal level, Mark gave me the encouragement and confidence to build Advisor Growth Strategies. I am forever grateful for his partnership and friendship. Thank you, Mark.
—John Furey, Founder and Managing Partner, Advisor Growth Strategies
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Mark Tibergien will always be remembered as the man who started the practice management conversation in the planning/financial services profession. I remember how, in his early career, he would run preconference sessions at industry conferences, teaching a roomful of advisors how to read their own accounting statements. Gradually, incrementally, he managed to shift the professional conversation from only talking about best practices for serving the client, to how to run an effective advisory business and create a strong platform for those services. He was the first person I ever talked with who believed that advisory firms would eventually build transferable value for their founders.
In his middle career, Mark put together the leading consulting team in the advisory space, and business by business, practice by practice, he helped the profession think through the thorniest of issues around managing advisory practices like a real business. He introduced the first profession-wide compensation surveys, and the first surveys on profitability and business metrics, which established benchmarks for firms to use when they made management decisions.
In Mark’s late career, he did the bravest thing a consultant can do: he switched from telling advisors what to do, to actually following his own advice. It must have been effective; under his leadership, Pershing Advisor Solutions grew significantly and is now in a position of leadership and prominence.
If Mark Tibergien had followed another career, I suspect that the profession as a whole would be much further behind in its business metrics than we are today. Through it all, he remained accessible, humble and quite funny and personable whenever he and I found a free moment to relax together.
—Bob Veres, Founder, Inside Information
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Summary
Any attempt to sum the career and influence that Mark Tibergien has wielded these many years is doomed to fall short. With that, on behalf of the financial planning profession: Therefore, we simply say, "Thank you, Mark Tibergien."
Stephanie Bogan is a business strategist and success coach and founder of Limitless Adviser Coaching. Suzanne Siracuse is CEO of Suzanne Siracuse Consulting Services LLC.