Catching Up With ... Jeff Auld

Q: With where you find yourself now as a company, what attributes are you looking for in an advisor?
A: On one hand, I have producer groups with multiple OSJs that do $8 million or $10 million in production. Our technology and our supervisory platform allow us the scale and payouts that attract large groups of producers. On the other hand, we’ll permit advisors with as little as $250,000 of production to have the choice to either become an OSJ or be a stand-alone satellite office supervised by our home office. Very few firms of our size give advisors that breadth of choice.

Q: How are you separating yourself on the technology front?
A: We’re piloting a product with our advisors to market their practices with social media. It gives the supervision department comfort that they can capture everything they need. In 2010, we rolled out a marketing library. It’s an electronic library with over 3,000 pre-approved marketing pieces and all are filed with FINRA. They are all customizable so when our advisor logs into our website we know who it is.

Q: How is your recruiting this year?
A: We’ve just finished a profitable year and we’re already ahead of our budget for 2011. We recruited almost $10 million in new production in 2010. And almost all of that came in the later half of the year. I’ve already had $3.5 million worth of new producers affiliate with us in the last four to six weeks.

Q: What do you attribute that to?
A: I think an awful lot of it is coming from referrals. I would say at least half of our new advisors are being referred to us by existing happy, satisfied customers. We’ve already had the letters of intent and advisors that have committed to joining us. They’re already scheduling the transition in the next 90 days, and we’ll cross out 2010 total at that time as a result.