Jon Henschen, a veteran broker-dealer recruiter and founder of Henschen & Associates in Minnesota, has died at the age of 64. According to his colleagues at the firm, he died on Independence Day after suffering a cardiac arrest several days earlier.

Vern Coates, the senior vice president of business development at the firm, will take over the business, he told Financial Advisor.

Henschen was high-profile name in the broker-dealer industry and very often a vocal critic of the ways the firms operated. He was also an outspoken columnist on broader financial and political issues who penned articles for Financial Advisor and other industry publications and was quoted in The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Barron’s and the Washington Post. As a writer, he liked covering subjects as diverse as crime, diversity hiring and music.

Though he served the independent broker-dealer world, Henschen also took aim at many of its practices and was sometimes skeptical of its motivations, including the secret nature of some of their fees and their desire to move assets onto internal platforms. He was also an invaluable resource to journalists trying to get to the bottom of B-D fees; recruiters complain these fees are often obscure to advisors, who may not know how much extra they’re getting charged on a platform for things little things like technology or E&O insurance.

As he wrote in one Financial Advisor article, “It's true that broker-dealers have parameters for how much their advisors can invest in different investments. For example, they might limit 5% of their clients’ portfolio to alternative investments or REITs. But mostly their reasons for moving assets around have nothing to do with compliance and everything to do with increasing asset flow to their largest profit centers.”

Another time, he pilloried proprietary advisory platforms.

“If you give an advisor a 100% payout for a product that comes from your firm’s proprietary platform—while paying less for something from another advisory platform—that’s a conflict of interest. Broker-dealer RIAs do this. So do some independent RIAs.”

Henschen also criticized the SEC’s Regulation Best Interest, which he said allowed certain types of transactions to fall through the cracks.

According to his colleague Simon Hoyle, because Henschen had once been an advisor himself he saw himself as a consumer rights activist.

“There are a lot of B-D presidents who hated seeing their firm name in his articles because it may not be good news,” Hoyle said, adding that even so, those presidents also respected him and saw that what he was doing was good for the industry overall.

Henschen launched his firm in 2001 in Marine on St. Croix, a town in Minnesota that lies near the Wisconsin border. He had previously been an advisor with a Series 7 license and worked in wholesaling mutual funds and annuities. But there was a niche role for recruiters he perceived in the broker-dealer world.

“He got in and started doing a lot of writing,” Coates said, “commenting on the industry, just building his name and brand and reputation as somebody who was knowledgeable in the space and cared about the advisors, had their interests at heart. Over the years there’s been … I don’t even know how many independent recruiting firms are around now. It seems that’s there’s more every month. It’s certainly gone from a very cottage thing to a pretty widely involved space and a lot of well-known names.”  

“It’s not easy to do what we do and have longevity,” said Jodie Papike, who works for a competing firm, Cross-Search, and sat on some panels with Henschen. “Jon was one of the early people to be a third-party recruiter.”

While his firm’s work often championed the work and ethics of smaller broker-dealers, he also worried privately they were all going to be overwhelmed by the giants and gobbled up. Hoyle said Henschen recently expressed an interest in moving more toward RIA recruiting.

“He was incredibly insightful and not afraid to call things out when they needed to be called out,” Papike said. She noted that such candor is risky in a business that requires a certain amount of diplomacy.

Henschen started his firm in his house and later moved his office to a space above his garage. Hoyle and Coates worked with him remotely, and Henschen’s wife Jackie, who was an English teacher, helped him with his articles. Hoyle and Coates have not counted the firm’s number of job placements, but said it must be more than a thousand. The firm currently has contracts with some 80 firms to recruit advisors, they said.

Coates has been with the firm for three and a half years after collaborating with Henschen before in his recruiting capacity at industry firms.

Hoyle compared Henschen to a “B-D vigilante” and almost like a Yoda figure. As Hoyle wrote in one tribute:

“Jon was an advisor himself, and he thought and acted through the lens of an advisor," Hoyle said, adding that Henschen had a gift for details.

Besides his wife, Henschen also leaves two adult daughters, Hoyle told Financial Advisor. Henschen was also a fan of skiing, fossil collecting, fishing and snowmobiling, according to his bio.

(Correction: An earlier version of this article said that Jon Henschen wrote articles for several newspapers that he was actually simply quoted in.)