Want to Build Your Business? Hire an Intern: TD Ameritrade LINC
“We underestimate how talented these young people are," said XY Planning co-founder Alan Moore.
Generation Next “is all about bringing that new generation into your offices as both advisors and clients,” Kate Healy, managing director of Generation Next at TD Ameritrade Institutional, told attendees Wednesday as she kicked off a session at National LINC on business building ideas for emerging advisors.
Healy said that she uses a “broad umbrella” when defining GenNext — which she said includes Gen Z, more women and diversity, those returning to the workforce and people in the military.
Healy was joined on the panel by Alan Moore, co-founder of XY Planning Network, along with Marjorie Wentz, retirement plan advisor at Trinity Wealth Management, and Kelly Bradley, a financial planning specialist at Trinity Wealth.
As Healy noted, this year is the 10th that students majoring in financial planning at various universities are attending LINC. Wentz met Bradley two years ago at the conference.
“Kelly did such a great job of reaching out and connecting with me on LinkedIn. She was bold enough to ask me if I had any internships … we decided to develop an internship because I met Kelly and she helped me,” Wentz said. “It was so great for us as a firm. I encourage you to speak to the students and you can find a real gem like we did.”
Temple University “sent me here” to LINC, Bradley, 23, said. She joined Trinity Wealth as an intern in May 2017. Bradley went on to receive her degree in financial planning from Temple, and joined Trinity Wealth full time in May 2018.
Thirty universities with financial planning majors are represented at LINC.
“For students in the room,” Wentz said, “Kelly was willing to do anything” even filling in when the firm’s operations manager left. “Kelly was so good that we didn’t fill the spot for six months … she was a sponge, young people are very good at technology,” she continued. “Don’t sell [interns] short, they’re amazing.”
Added Moore: “We underestimate how talented these young people are … it’s a shame.”
Relaying a job experience at 24, Moore said that he was fired from a planning firm because he was asked “to go find $1 million clients. So I sucked at my job. … what did I know” about $1 million prospects/? Moore counseled to allow interns to work with “their peers or put them on a non-rainmaker track. Figure out their skill sets.”
Trinity Wealth doesn’t “have young people come into our firm and expect them to be rainmakers,” Wentz said. “We will have to teach them how to rain-make. But the more that they can take off our plate, the more time we have to rain-make.”
Another piece of advice, Moore said: “Variable comp for young people will not work. Outside of this room, most firms are eat what you kill. It has to be a salaried position coming out of school.”
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