Hire These Advisors

Reading a story on next-gen advisors, you might expect to learn about how these youthful entrepreneurs push a few buttons on their smart phones and bam—out comes another $100,000 in AUM.

Well, it doesn’t quite work that way. Sure, these advisors know what apps are and how to use them to interact with or find prospects. But that is a generational thing—the demographically average 50-year old advisor will likely never attain that level of comfort with contemporary social media.

But some things span the generations—they are timelessly true—and each of the four young advisors profiled in Jane Wollman Rusoff’s cover story (“Next-Gen Advisors Have Arrived”) touched on what is perhaps the most vital part of success as an advisor: the relationship aspect.

That’s the “advisor” part of the term “next-gen advisor” and while every advisor needs to hone these skills, I would venture to predict that Dmitry Farberov, Sean Muhlstein, Marc Russell and Ashley Warne will be especially successful professionally.

It’s not just that they are highly educated and well trained in their chosen fields, but they all have the “advantage” of having started their careers some time before the devastation of the market crash. As such, they’ve all earned their Ph.D.s in financial psychology early in their careers, and learned that behavioral foibles can upend the most astute investment plan.

As Farberov puts it: “It was a very shocking time. It changed my outlook: not to be a sales person but to be a relationship manager—a financial psychologist of sorts and to approach investing from a long-term perspective. It taught me to take advantage of opportunities in market [downturns], not to run from them.”