Return on Investment

I'll never forget, I had a meeting with the head of Wealth Management at the time, a guy named Dan Sontag, after my first 18 months at Merrill, and keep in mind that he ran all of Wealth Management which was about 60,000 people, 16,000 of them were financial advisors just like me and I was 24, 25 at the time, just two or three years ago, and I was able to actually put together a deck and a document for him to basically say, "Look, I was able to do this in 12 months just by myself. Merrill Lynch has an opportunity to make this a national opportunity," and I need a quarter million dollars to do that, and I'd like to do that and he actually gave me the investment, and the deal was that I had to report back to him once a quarter on the return on his investment, which included two things. One, not just assets under management, but other financial advisors who were leveraging my idea and who I was supporting, and then each quarter, I would sit down with him and sort of go through those numbers. I later found out that in 27 years at Merrill Lynch, he had never given another financial advisor, as I mentioned, over 16,000 of us, he never gave another financial advisor a dollar, but he gave me a quarter of a million each year, and he got a lot out of it, so it was a very successful opportunity, and the resistance, like I said, really did fade away as we grew to becoming a sustainable business opportunity.

That's a great story, so what do you think was the differentiating factor here? Because like you said, he had never given money to any of the advisors to carry out their projects. Was it because you had proven ROI, you did your research, and you had specific metrics were performance built-in as well?

I think that's exactly it. I was able to say not only should we do this but I had proven on my own dime because keep in mind, financial advisors are treated as W2 employees but we're also treated as individual consultants. Everything that I did to build my business, I had to pay for out of my own pocket with post-tax dollars, so if it proved out that it worked for me, then that was a really good selling point for me to sell out to him, and then I think he also saw the opportunity to be first in the market, to be first among Wall Street firm, to make an impact, he was passionate about equality as well, which helped, and it was, I think, the right place, the right time, I'd like to think that I was the right guy to do it, and we proved the impact, and he invested in it.