I believe authenticity takes time. I also believe authenticity is lacking in so many areas these days. Experts keep telling us that we do not have the attention span to read things, so it is best to share photos or bullet points or communicate in 140 characters or less. I don’t think you get authenticity it from bullet points, nor do you get it from a bio and website that is the same as every other advisor. The reason I took the time to share my story is so you are able to get a sense of who I am and my experiences, which ultimately shaped RockWealth into what it is today.
Have you ever gone to multiple advisors’ websites, looked around and read their bios? I have, and what stands out to me the most is how similar they tend to be. I thought I would go in a different direction and share meaningful stories about my career, my life and RockWealth for those who want to learn more about us. In my opinion, if you are going to trust someone with such an important relationship, don’t you want to really know about that person? If you just want some bullet points that don’t really mean anything, sorry, but that isn’t the spirit of RockWealth. I believe you deserve better.
I am going to discuss the multiple financial firms I have worked at during my career but I am not going to use their names. You can click here to see the previous firm’s I have worked at which line up with the different positions I have held in this industry.
My journey through financial services and beyond has been a winding road that has ultimately led to RockWealth. In November 2008, I finally had the opportunity to date the woman that became the love of my life, Julia. As our relationship progressed throughout the next year or so, I was ready to take our relationship to the next level and to get married. However, there was only one problem. I had only been out of college for a short time, and I was still looking for my “career.” I knew that I wanted to be in finance and investments, but I didn’t know exactly where to start. Throughout college I had been working at a country club where I developed many relationships with financial advisors and their leaders. One of these relationships launched my career in 2010 with a large wirehouse firm. This was the first of many blessings to come as my career took me around the industry in a manner most do not have the privilege to experience.
The next stop of my journey came in July of 2012. My wife Julia was completing her PhD in Psychology at Loma Linda University. One of the criteria for completing the program was to complete an “internship” which is usually the 6th year of the doctoral program. The internship is designed to allow doctoral candidates the opportunity to gain additional exposure and experience outside of their primary university. The process to determine where students go for this year is done through what is referred to as “match day” which happens on the second Friday each February. The matching process is unique. Julia spent months leading up to match day applying to different schools all around the country. She applied to local universities such as USC and UCLA as our goal was to stay in Southern California near both of our families. She also applied to universities across the country including Dartmouth and the University of Alabama to name a few. Match day itself is a very stressful day for all applicants. On match day, candidates find out whether they matched or didn’t match. There is no disputing the results or requesting a different site. Candidates are thrilled and relieved to match regardless of the site and location because for those who unfortunately do not match, they must participate in another matching process. If candidates still don’t match after the second round, they must wait an entire year and repeat the process all over again. Julia matched at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. This created a bit of a conundrum for my career. I was now a licensed financial advisor, part of a team and was settling into my role. I was comfortable where I was and felt like I was on the right path. However, given that we were married for less than a year at that point, the solution was obvious. If I wanted to protect my marriage, I was going to have to move with Julia to Nashville.
Shortly after match day, I started to look for options that would be a natural continuation of the path I was on. This is when I experienced the next blessing in my professional journey. A large insurance company whose products I was using with our clients recently opened a new sales desk just outside of Nashville in Franklin, TN. Through our working relationship, I became friends with the local wholesaler (aka employee) of the insurance company. After I explained the situation to him, he was able to get me in touch with the right folks and long story short, I was hired with a start date shortly after we arrived in Nashville. Thus began the second chapter of my journey in financial services.
Working for this company allowed me to learn how product distribution works in financial services. I was part of the internal wholesale (sales) desk selling annuities to the banking channel (financial advisors typically segmented into 1 of 3 channels; banks, wirehouses, or independents). When I was a financial advisor at the wirehouse, I would regularly receive calls from wholesalers informing me about their products. This is true about mutual funds, ETFs, insurance and annuities, and even outside money managers called SMA’s (separately managed accounts). So, while I had been used to receiving these types of calls for the past 1-2 years, I was now on the other side of the phone making the same type of calls to advisors. This was a great experience as I learned about distribution, marketing, and investment strategies. During my time with the company, I was also able to develop relationships with the product development team who were creating the different products we were selling. When I first joined the insurance company, I thought I had a good handle on how the industry worked but I was clearly naïve. Distribution (selling to advisors with the hope of them using your product with their clients) opened my eyes and allowed me to see an entirely different side of the industry, a glimpse most advisors aren’t afforded. I was afforded a front row seat that would only continue to expand as my journey was about to take another turn.
As Julia was completing her internship and preparing to graduate with her PhD, the process of applying to additional training programs was not over. The next step in the process to becoming a licensed psychologist is to apply for and complete a “fellowship” (you probably didn’t expect to learn so much about this process on an advisor’s website!). This is a 1–2-year program, completed after graduation, that allows an individual to accumulate the hours needed to be able to sit for the required licensing exams. These exams must be passed to be able to practice independently as a license psychologist. You cannot take the exams until you have accumulated the required number of clinical hours under the supervision of a licensed psychologist. In the Spring of 2013 while we were still in Nashville, Julia started applying to different fellowship opportunities around the country. Long story short, she was accepted into the fellowship program at UCLA. While working at the insurance company, I learned that the company owned a network of 4 independent broker dealers. A broker-dealer is one type of an investment firm that advisors can work at. In the next blessing of my career, one of those broker-dealers was headquartered in downtown Santa Monica, 2 miles from the UCLA campus. It also happened that the broker-dealer had an opening for a Sr. Insurance and Annuity Specialist. I applied and was hired in what was essentially an internal transfer within the company. I cannot express how blessed I was to have moved across the country and back with jobs lined up that fit into my career.
In the summer of 2013, while we were not back in Orange County as we hoped, we were close enough in Los Angeles where commuting to visit our family and friends was manageable. In my new role, I was able to expand my overall knowledge of the industry. When I first started at the wirehouse, I was in a client facing role as an advisor. Then when I joined the insurance company in Nashville, I moved into a distribution role selling annuities to advisors. Now in this new role at the broker-dealer in Santa Monica, I would be facilitating the relationship between advisors and distribution. The team I joined was responsible for managing and overseeing all the products that advisors could use with a client. This included mutual funds, alternative investments, insurance products, annuities and retirement plan type products such as 401k’s. Each team member was responsible for a different product line, mine being insurance and annuities. Advisors could not use/sell a product until that product was approved by the firm. There was a product approval team that we worked closely with who gave the approval or denial to every product. We would work with the distribution company to negotiate the revenue sharing agreement the broker-dealer would receive as well as marketing plans to roll out new products to our advisors. Advisors would also call me anytime they had a question about any insurance or annuity products. The distribution companies would call me anytime there was an issue with one of their products at our firm. It was in this role where I was exposed to have revenue-sharing agreements work between the distributors and broker-dealers. As an advisor and even when I worked on the distribution side, I never knew this was taking place. These are large, multi-million-dollar revenue-sharing agreements. Our team was the gateway into the broker-dealer in each of our respective areas for firms that wanted our advisors to use their products with their clients.
Julia’s fellowship at UCLA lasted 1 year. As soon as it ended in the summer of 2014, we moved back to Orange County to be closer to our family and friends. This meant I was now commuting from Orange County to downtown Santa Monica 5 days a week. Sometimes it would take over 3 hours to get home. Needless to say, I quickly came to realize that this wasn’t sustainable. One day, my former partner from the wirehouse reached out to me to check in as we had kept in touch since I had left the firm. After a couple of conversations and meetings, in June of 2015, I rejoined the team I had originally started with at the wirehouse.
As the years progressed and our family continued to grow, I had no plans of leaving the team at the wirehouse. Then in 2020, Covid hit. As you remember, in March of 2020, in a matter of days, the entire world shut down and everyone started working from home (“14 days to slow the spread”). My challenge was not only did I start working out of our home but so did Julia. In addition to office being closed, schools were also shut down and our children were now home with us as well. At this point, in the spring of 2020, we had 3 children, 2 of whom were now doing school from our house, and a baby who was born on January 1st, 2020. I don’t really need to explain how stressful this time was for our family. Before Covid, we had help in our home. Now, no one was coming over, not even our family. The conversation between Julia and I quickly turned to sustainability as it became apparent that something needed to change in a hurry.
In 2018, after taking a couple of years off to spend time with our young children after such a long and grueling educational experience, Julia started her own private practice, Brain Wellness Institute (BWI). By this time in 2020, while I don’t remember the exact number, she probably had around 10+ providers working for her. As the conversations continued to evolve, it because apparent that it was going to be easier for me to leave my team as opposed to Julia trying to sell the business or just close it down and walk away. Up until this point, I was already helping her on the back end. I was running payroll, managing the finances and providing backend support. I also knew that if I left my team, our clients’ service would remain intact because the team would still be in place to service the clients. So, in October of 2020, I made the difficult decision and left my team at the wirehouse to work full time with Julia running and building BWI. This was the next chapter of my journey.
The final twist in my journey happened in 2024. As things were humming along at BWI and we had grown to 65+ providers, I began to examined my heart and realized there was something missing in my work life. I realized that I missed the client experience of being an advisor. This is something that I cherished when I was at the wirehouse. It was a time I looked forward to the most. It was also an area that I felt in my heart was not being given the time and effort it truly deserved by advisors. I also realized looking back that the investments were such a small part of what we could have offered but was usually the focus of meetings and our time with clients. I realized that the most impactful work I did with clients had nothing to do with the investments. My most impactful work was helping clients walk through a difficult season in their life, the most difficult being a time of loss of someone they loved. It was during these difficult moments that there is an opportunity to step into the fire and be a support for those who are hurting. When their life was falling down around them, there is an opportunity to be able to know the pieces of their life and help them put it back together when they cannot. It is such a unique and privileged position. It is a position of honor.