Rising Summit
At the same time, around mid-summer of 2013, Miller’s firm Summit Place Financial was growing so fast that she needed a new advisor, she says. “I was looking through the traditional channels and meeting with people who had backgrounds as a CFP or with a couple of years in financial advisory. And I was not finding someone that I thought was a good fit for our clientele.”
She says Summit Place works exclusively with clients with $5 million to about $25 million in assets. And she found it hard to find people who fit her firm’s culture because of its niche of tech and medical entrepreneurs and highly compensated executives. (The firm, based in Summit, N.J., has about $110 million in AUM, she says.)
Miller began her career as an M&A analyst on Wall Street in the ’80s, and worked with a portfolio management firm for the 14 years before she started Summit Place. When she was still just an asset manager, clients inevitably came to her and asked extracurricular questions—how they might open family foundations or buy starter homes or obtain personal loans. “What I realized was that these clients had reached a certain level of wealth … and they were sort of left by themselves to manage taxes, estate planning, investments. And no one would coordinate it with them.” Brokers and accountants weren’t interested in those high-level abstractions, she says.
She saw money in the trees, and founded her own firm to be quarterback for such clients.
“So we have a very successful clientele and we treat them really with concierge- type service. And [have] a lot of personalized interaction with them.”
So why hire an actor instead of somebody who went through a more traditional route such as a financial degree program? The answer reveals a lot about the structure of the advice industry.
“One of the hardest things,” Miller says, was “to find [an employee] who understood. Most young planners and financial advisors I was talking to really came from a product background, not a solution background. And they have no experience or training into really how to thoughtfully interact with people.
“And while I was going through this, it was really just a light bulb moment after a phone call with Pearce again on something with our [music festival] audit that I thought to myself, for almost three years he’s been interacting exactly with my clients in the fund-raising over the festival and I know he has a great mind for numbers and finances and not just as an accountant but as someone who can interpret and talk about them.
“I called him the next day and said I have an interesting idea that you and I have never talked about. Do you know much about the financial advising industry?”
He didn’t. They got together over breakfast and she broke it down for him.
He was a natural, Miller says, because of his unique blend of talents. He had a thorough understanding of numbers and financial issues, even if it was trying to make enough money last through a non-profit music festival’s season. “That’s not so different in the short-term from what we do with clients to help them understand how their funding will fund their life. It was a jump, but it was a jump [for] which I’d seen he had the raw materials.”
The other unique thing was his emotional ability to communicate with somebody and listen to them and make sure they are the most important person there, she says, “sharing what is often very private information.” Even if a person has a CFP license, it’s difficult to teach that person communicating and listening skills, she says. Wegener had an acting background—a skill in which listening is extremely important. He was also a millennial. No small consideration, says Wegener (now 30).
Wegener himself says the differences among brokers, advisors and salespeople is confusing to people and at first was confusing to him, even at the first interview. He came in thinking it was an insurance salesman job.
“At my job interview, I did not know the difference,” he says, “I was adamant that I did not want to sell stuff to people that didn’t need it and I did not want a job where my salary was based on how much I pulled that day.” He wanted to solve problems the way he had been. What’s more, Miller was increasingly serving more clients around the country, and she was willing to let Wegener travel and work out of New Orleans. He began taking CFP courses after he started and he’s already passed the test. He’s allowed to be a CFP after he’s worked two years in the business (by the end of 2015, he says).
His emotional/listening component has helped him in situations like the market declines of the past few months. The week of his interview with Financial Advisor in late August, the market had just suffered big losses, and he was talking to clients about the cataclysms.
“We have a goal-oriented approach,” says Wegener of the firm. “So they still have the same goals today as they did last week and the week before that. So what the market is doing is not affecting their goal.”
He concedes that it does seem like he’s taken a big leap when talking to clients. He was singing and dancing with Patti LuPone a few years ago and now he’s talking with clients about the Chinese impact on world commodity consumption.
But the listening aspect of acting has also helped him make the transition in surprising ways.
“Being an advisor can also mean being a psychologist, it can also mean being a mediator through family issues,” Wegener says. “So we were taught to morph into whatever role you need us to become. Because I was trained to listen and adapt to my surroundings through improv, through character study, you kind of become a role, I feel I am better able to make those switches naturally.” He doesn’t feel out of his depth, he says, because “Nine times out of 10, it’s not about the money.”
In any case, he says, business has always been part of his blood, even when he was 7, working at his parents’ businesses, doing statements, collecting rent and running the cash register.
“My parents taught me to be very financially sensitive from a super young age.” He says he was interested in credit cards and mortgages and he was fascinated by business, even though theater beckoned first.
“There is more to somebody than just their dreams. You can have lots of dreams, not just one.”