Meet Advisor of the Year finalist Sean Lee

How his baseball background impacts his practice I’m not the biggest guy. I always tell the storythat I hit one home run in my life. In 25 years of playing, Ihit one, and it was an in-the-park home run. I was a singlesand doubles type player. But what I found was that a highbatting average leads to a lot of runs being scored. You hit alot of singles and doubles and you’re going to score a lot ofruns. So inside our practice, we’re not a home run type offirm. We’re not going to try and hit one out of the park andget massive returns. We’re just going to try to hit singlesand doubles and try to score a lot of runs. If you score a lotof runs, you’re usually going to be successful.

On challenges in his career I’ve been told twice that I would never make it in this industry. Being told by someone that I’m not going to succeed has driven me to succeed.

Another challenge was when I folded a partnership in a firm in December 2011 to start the firm that we have today. We opened our doors June 2012, and my wife had our son a month later. So moving from a pretty secure partnership to creating something from scratch during a time where our personal lives were changing was scary. My wife stays at home to take care of the kids. I don’t want to say it put a tremendous amount of pressure on me, but we had to be certain that we were going to make it work.

But it was the best decision. We can practice the way that we want. We can teach, educate and inform. Our practice is getting to the point where we want it to be.

His best advice Follow the fiduciary standard. In my opinion, our industry is built upon the FINRA suitability standard. Not following the fiduciary standard is putting the advisor’s best interests before the client’s. It’s imperative that advisors understand the fiduciary standard (and what it entails) as soon as they enter the industry. We became a much better planning firm when we put the fiduciary standards in place in our practice.