By Steve Garmhausen
Dane Burkholder always seems to be in motion, whether it's competing in Ironman triathlons, attending his two daughters' swim competitions, or working with his three partners to build the Roseville Wealth Management Group, in Lancaster, Pa. "I'm not a great sit-still-and-do-nothing person," says Burkholder, who is Barron's 28(th) -ranked independent advisor nationally. Burkholder's drive has helped Roseville's assets to grow tenfold from 11 years ago, to about $2 billion.
Speaking with Barron's Advisor, Burkholder says he's "optimistic but realistic" about market expectations for 2025. He explains why he's still not a cryptocurrency fan despite the asset's postelection rally. And he reveals how his Ameriprise-affiliated practice has set up a talent recruiting program from colleges in its central Pennsylvania backyard.
Where did you grow up, and how did you come to be in this field? I grew up in central Pennsylvania, and my career throughout American Express and Ameriprise has all been based here. I actually live across the street from the high school I went to. Both of my parents owned businesses: My dad owned an excavating company, and my mom owned a salon. So I had a good foundation from my parents around successfully running a business and leading people.
I walked on to the football team at the University of Pittsburgh, where I was a business management major, in the late '90s. My goal had been to take over the family excavating business. But my sophomore year I transferred to another school in central Pennsylvania, Millersville University, to play football, and took an investment class there. I just fell in love with investments and behavioral finance. So I started as a financial advisor right after I graduated college at what is now Ameriprise Financial Services. I was in leadership with the company from 2006 to 2010 and ultimately came back to being an advisor. I partnered with one of my current partners, Dave Weinman, and we started with a four-person team, managing roughly $100 million in assets.
Your assets stand at about $2 billion today, and you have 33 team members. What were the keys to that growth? One of the pivot points was in 2013 when we went through an equal-sized merger. Matt Wilson and Michael Hoffman were part of Roseville Wealth Management Group, a business in nearby York, Pa. We made a decision to tear down our houses and build a new house together. When we merged in Roseville we had two offices, 11 employees, and managed a collective $200 million in assets. Today we have 22 advisors, including 12 CFPs, and in addition to Pennsylvania, we have offices in Delaware, suburban Atlanta, and Destin, Fla.
What is the leadership role that you fill? I'm the managing partner across Roseville. Each of the four partners has our own area of expertise and responsibility. I'm in charge of a lot of the operations and leadership of the next-gen advisors, as well as the client-service systems and structures that we have in place.
Describe your clientele. Our bread and butter is those with $500,000 to $5 million in investible assets. [We have] a lot of preretirement clients, and we're doing more work with Gen X and millennials as they get into their higher income earning years. We do a decent amount of work in the high-net-worth space, mainly with small-business owners. And we've started to get more clients in the ultrahigh-net-worth space. Our approach to working with the mass affluent is that we've built out a family office for the everyday American. We bring them the same concepts that ultrahigh-net-worth clients get from working with financial advisory practices, and it's really helped us acquire new clients, including in the ultrahigh-net-worth segment. It's also helped us get our foot in the door in the name, image, and likeness world and the student-athlete space. We're replicating our approach for these college athletes who in some situations are getting life-changing money between the ages of 18 and 22
Can you talk about your next-gen advisor work? This is one of the areas I'm most passionate about. I have never been more excited about the next generation of advisors coming up. My partners and I started out in the business cold calling. That opportunity doesn't really exist today. So we've developed a platform that starts with our internship program, overseen by our operations director. We're in Penn State's backyard, so we have a relationship with the Smeal College of Business. I played football at Millersville University, which is in our backyard, and we have a relationship with the athletic department there.
A lot of the new hires that we've developed over the past five or six years have come directly out of our internship program. It's a great way for people to learn about the business. We've developed an advisory track where new hires start off in an operations and service role to learn the business. Then they'll go into a support-advisor role, where they're working with a senior advisor or partner behind the scenes, observing meetings, helping them with financial planning or asset management, and then going into a servicing-advisor role, where they sit first chair in client meetings, and then to a lead advisor.
It's been so rewarding to see young people develop, because I think our advisors need to look like what our clients look like. As Gen X and millennials enter their higher-income years, a lot of them want to work with their peers. They don't want an older advisor who doesn't speak their language. So we've built out a multigenerational approach, not only with our clients but within our team. We have advisors in their early 20s to advisors in their 70s.
Can you describe the firm's investment approach? We have an investment committee within our team and make all our client-portfolio decisions in-house. We don't rely on third-party money managers to make those decisions for our clients. That stems from 2008-2009, when many third-party money managers who made promises to clients didn't really fulfill those promises in our opinion. Matt Wilson, one of my partners, oversees the investment committee, we always say he's the guy who sits on top of the money. Two partners sit on that investment committee, which includes a CFA and a CIMA and multiple analysts. We still believe that buy-and-hold investing is the most appropriate way to manage money, although I would call ours more of buy-and-adjust.
In our philosophy on how to manage money, you need to remember two words: participate and preserve. When markets are going up, our goal is not to outperform the market, but to participate in the growth. When markets are going down, we have a preservation strategy that minimizes risk. Every single client should ask their financial advisor, whether it's the first meeting or the 50th meeting, what are you doing to protect my wealth?
What do you think the Trump era might be like from an investment standpoint? As we enter 2025, we've come off two really solid years in the market, and markets have built in a pretty rosy outlook for 2025. I think lower interest rates and moderating inflation provide some tailwinds for the stock market. We're optimistic, but we're also realistic. We need to keep in mind that markets can get finicky if expectations with a new administration coming in are too high. I always tell clients we need to focus on what we can control. We cannot control politics; we cannot control policy. We cannot control the markets or the economy. We can control the amount of money that we save while we're working, and we can control the amount of money we spend in retirement. That has a much larger impact on somebody's ability to achieve their goals than worrying about what the administration is going to do or what's the next thing coming down the road.
Cryptocurrencies have soared since the election. Are you a fan? We stay clear. We do not incorporate any crypto into our portfolios. I always tell people to treat it like Las Vegas. If you put money in, hopefully you make a lot of money, but have it be a very small position in your portfolio. Recognize that it is an unregulated investment and it could be highly volatile.
What's your biggest business challenge? I would say it's keeping up with demand. We've been fortunate over the past decade to get a lot of unsolicited referrals and see a significant amount of growth. We're all wired as financial advisors first, but a lot of time needs to be spent actually working on the business and building infrastructure so we can help more people. That means making sure our clients are getting an elite client service experience and training advisors to deliver that experience. So it's taking what we've built collectively as a group over the years, managing that and then making sure we're training that next generation of advisors to deliver the experience that our clients have become accustomed to.
What are your business goals for the next few years? When I think about growth, I think about a couple of things. No. 1 is client satisfaction. It's one of the most important things we need to focus on. If you can couple client satisfaction with net flows coming in to the organization with a high quality of advice, we think that will equal significant growth within our business over the next five years. There's going to continue to be a focus for us on bringing in not only the next generation of advisors, but the next generation of leaders as we have more senior advisors and, potentially, partners begin to retire. We're going to continue to build out services to help families generate and preserve wealth. I think we will become even more active in the financial athlete space as the numbers get significantly bigger in college sports, as they potentially move to a revenue-share model with schools. I think there is a great need for trusted professionals to guide these athletes through the unbelievable opportunities that will be presented to them in the next couple of years. So between all that and just blocking and tackling and doing the right thing, I
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