Crown Wealth Strategies has launched a new practice focused on employee benefits and risk management for the middle-market business community in El Paso, Texas, the firm recently announced.
Elizabeth “Lizzie” Dipp Metzger and her husband and business partner, Brian Metzger, will lead a team of 10 New York Life agents in offering employee benefits and risk management products—a market she feels is underserved by financial advisors.
Dipp Metzger has worked with high-net-worth clients for most of her financial services career and offers estate planning, business planning and insurance. She says she came from a prominent family in the El Paso area, which made her familiar with the subject matter and that helped pave the way for her career path.
While working with HNW clients, she occasionally provided financial planning help for their employees or their adult children. These were folks who usually did not have a $50,000 investment, and working with them made Metzger realize she needed to grow her business in order to profitably serve these types of people.
Her $100 million wealth management firm now has the financial heft to be able to purchase a larger office and launch the Employee Benefit and Protection Practice. To date, the firm has enrolled 600 employees and about 50 individuals, Dipp Metzger said, and clients in this practice get help with evaluating and selecting 401(k)s, health and life insurance, and disability.
“Everyone needs to know what retirement and insurance strategies are available to them,” Dipp Metzger said in a press release. “And we have created a place where they can have a thoughtful conversation about their futures.”
Unlike Crown Wealth’s existing business, which charges a wrapped fee to HNW clients, the new practice will offer two types of fees: commission-based for products and asset-based for mutual funds.
Dipp Metzger, the founder of Crown Wealth, is an independent member agent of New York Life Insurance Company and its registered investment advisor business, Eagle Strategies. Her husband was a partner at New York Life who left the company as an independent member agent to join Crown Wealth and launch the Employee Benefit and Protection Practice. Dipp Metzger said she and her husband worked out a deal with the company to be a partner in its district agent program. The program allows the Metzgers to recruit and mentor a group of agents who they'll earn an additional commission from and help New York Life expand into new markets.
“We didn’t want to break the relationship or lose the relationship [with New York Life],” said Dipp Metzger, who added she likes the company’s products and services. “We just wanted to enhance the way that we were working with these [middle-market] people.”
Brian Metzger brought 10 agents from his prior office to the new practice. The agents will be trained to deliver financial planning first by receiving their life and health insurance registration, and then becoming certified financial planners, Dipp Metzger said.