By Steve Garmhausen
After nearly four decades helping clients plan and invest, Barron's Hall of Fame advisor Geri Eisenman Pell recently found another way to take care of them: She merged her $1.2 billion-asset practice with a fellow Ameriprise team to form a $4.3 billion-asset business under the Rise Private Wealth Management moniker. The move adds expertise for her 1,000 client households, but also assuring continuity. "I've been doing this for 38 years," says Eisenman Pell. "I'm looking toward my legacy and taking care of my clients and making sure that I really think carefully about the succession."
Speaking with Barron's Advisor, Eisenman Pell, who is based an hour north of Manhattan in Rye Brook, N.Y., reveals that fearlessness and resilience -- hard won in her case -- have been the keys to a successful career. She explains how she became a meditation instructor and why it's "silly" to avoid asking clients for referrals.
Where are you from and how did you get your start in the wealth management business? I grew up on Long Island. I have an undergraduate degree in accounting and then an M.B.A. in finance from NYU, and I started on a traditional path of working in corporate finance for seven years at companies like Bristol Myers Squibb and Hoffman-La Roche and General Foods. But I was really bored because I wasn't helping people. I just was tearing my hair out.
I had heard about this career, though, and everybody was always asking me to help them with their finances. Even my friends at Bristol Myers, who all had M.B.A.s like I did, were always talking about what they should do with their 401(k)s and how should they get mortgages. They were asking me questions, and I thought, I should be a financial advisor. Sounds like something that would be interesting. I went to a career seminar, and it just was like, oh my God, this would be the best career in the world, if I could help people and use my financial background at the same time.
After college I had spent a couple of years living on a kibbutz in Israel, which was really all about working together and helping people, and it just seemed to me to be the perfect thing to do. And I came from an entrepreneurial family, so I knew I wanted to do something entrepreneurial. I really did not enjoy working for other people. So I took the leap.
What business was your family in? It was retail optical and jewelry stores in Manhattan. So nothing really related to finance, but I worked in the accounting area, ran the books, and learned a lot about being an entrepreneur.
You broke in with IDS Financial Services in 1986 and built a thriving business that recently had $1.2 billion of assets under management. But you just took a big step. Yes, I just went through a huge transition. Pell Wealth Partners is now Rise Private Wealth Management. We merged on Aug. 1 with Rise, which is another top Ameriprise firm. There are now 85 members on our team. There are about 24 financial advisors, almost 50% of whom are women, which I'm really excited and proud about.
The reason I did that was twofold. I was looking for a way to enhance the client experience through having more experts and expertise on the team and just broadening our offerings. Rise was able to bring some of their unique abilities to my team, and I was able to bring some of my unique abilities to Rise. The second reason is that this is my second career, and I've been doing it for 38 years. I'm looking toward my legacy and taking care of my clients and making sure that I really think carefully about the succession. So this is my plan and my future. I didn't sell; we did a stock swap so now I'm one of 15 partners and a larger executive team in the company. I'm no longer the CEO. The CEO, Brent Kiley, is a good 20 years younger than I am.
What is an example of expertise that Rise gains through your group and vice versa? I think the expertise we bring to the table is working with ultrahigh-net-worth clients. We have a lot more exposure to them, particularly in our New York and California market groups. We have corporate executive experience. We have expertise working with divorced women and women making financial decisions alone, and a lot of experience in the LGBTQ markets.
Rise is based in Bedford, N.H., with offices throughout New England and in Kansas. We have offices in California, New York. So it's kind of different, although, interestingly, New Hampshire is, depending on where you look, the fifth or seventh highest-net-worth state. They have an on-staff insurance specialist, estate-planning specialist, a dedicated chief investment officer, a tax specialist. They had a larger service team and a person who leads the service team. I felt they could help us deliver a better client experience.
Clients are asking more and more for deeper services and more expertise. They're asking for their primary advisor to have relationship experience and to bring in experts. There's just so much that an advisor can be an expert in, and it's too much to ask the advisor to both run the relationship and to be an expert in everything. It becomes overwhelming, and then you have to limit the number of relationships.
What are your clients most concerned about these days? You're asking this a week before the election, and people are concerned about that, about the geopolitical situation -- Ukraine and the Middle East, the possibility of China invading Taiwan -- and I guess inflation.
How do you reassure clients concerned about election results? We have all kinds of charts and graphs. And we've been doing seminars with the title, "People Care About Elections, Markets Don't." But what you hear from people is, "But this time is different."
How do you respond to that? Well, I think you can also make a case for well, World War II was different. The Civil War was different. Isolationism was different. There is just a certain percentage of people who are still going to feel that this time is different. I had a conversation with a client this morning who is in the bell curve of people who are feeling really nervous. She said her risk tolerance had shifted because of her fear of a certain person getting elected. I told her, look, your financial plan is based around an average annual rate of return of 4.5%. You've averaged 18.5% over the past year. So if you want to back out of the market for a year or two, you can do that.
We decided she wasn't going to touch her IRAs for 10 years, so we left that in the 50% equity position it was in. She had annuities with guarantees around that, so we left those in the positions they were in. It turned out that only 25% of her portfolio was in a 50/50, position, and we decided to move that to 80% bonds and 20% equities, because that made her feel comfortable, and it wasn't going to affect if she was financially independent. I'm not going to comment on whether I thought it was the right thing, but it's what made the client feel comfortable, and she's still going to be financially independent.
Over the years what have you looked at as the most important business metric for your firm? I think the most important is net flows. You have to keep your eye on the ball: How many assets are you bringing in, and are you bringing in more assets than you're losing?
Do you do a lot of marketing, or do you depend on client referrals? Well, 70% of new clients come from referrals. I think that's pretty standard across the industry. We certainly have done client events, although I don't think we do anything that's that unique. We do dinners for clients. We do events with clients. We do seminars for clients.
What's your position on asking clients for referrals? It's really a question of, if there's anyone that you know or care about who would like a second opinion, or could use some advice or help, we'd love to talk to them. It's that simple. Most advisors don't ask. They feel uncomfortable asking, they don't think it's appropriate. I believe that's really silly. Nobody dies when you ask.
What do you think are some of the biggest challenges the industry faces? We know there are so many advisors my age who are going to be retiring. It's a wave, and that's fine. The challenge is to hire, train and prepare the next generation of advisors to be great, to be stewards of and guardians of the huge amount of wealth that's transferring, and just to take care of clients. And we know that women make amazing financial advisors, and that less than 20% of the industry are female financial advisors. So the challenge is how to help women enter this industry and to raise the next generation of female financial advisors. It's to bring the women to parity so that they're at least 50% of advisors. That's my passion and my legacy. It was hard as a woman to get into this industry and to grow, and I'm proud of having done that.
What would you say have been a couple of keys to your career success? The No. 1 thing is to be resilient. You can't let anybody make you feel bad or make you feel rejected. You can't let anybody have that power over you. Two is to be fearless. Fear will kill you in this career. I've had the great privilege of mentoring 30 or 40 people, mostly women. I've also trained hundreds of advisors, and the people who have succeeded have been resilient, and they've been fearless, and they've taken my advice and just stepped into a situation, taken a deep breath and asked for the check, asked for the opportunity to help someone. They've been confident and not been afraid to brag about themselves a little, or to find a wing person to brag about them.
Did you have those qualities at the beginning of your career? Or did you develop them? I was fortunate enough to have had enough knocks in life as a child that I turned it into a positive and I came into this career being resilient and fearless.
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