Winston Justice, an NFL player turned financial advisor, who was appointed CEO of SageSpring Private Wealth in November, was preparing for life in finance during his time playing professional football.
While with the Philadelphia Eagles, Justice pursued a master's degree in finance.
Justice began as a portfolio analyst at Wells Fargo and most recently was a investment manager at AllianceBernstein before becoming CEO of SageSpring, based in Nashville, Tennessee.
“I think at Bernstein it was a great opportunity, but I wanted to really help people more,” Justice told ThinkAdvisor in a recent interview. “I wanted to do something that was more significant or more purposeful than just building a book of business. I really wanted to live lives with the families that we have the honor to work with, but also I wanted to live lives and help advisors accomplish their goals.”
In the interview with Justice, an offensive lineman with three NFL teams from 2006 to 2013, he talked about SageSpring's growth outlook and his goals for the firm.
THINKADVISOR: What’s happening at SageSpring, in terms of growth?
WINSTON JUSTICE: We're doing a lot. We're going to grow. I keep telling the team that we want to get from $7 billion to $50 billion. And how we're going to get there is one — pouring into the advisors that are on the platform now, equipping them with the tools to service the clients they have now, but then giving them the tools to actually go upmarket and actually service ultra-high-net-worth clients and also service institutional clients too.
The other way is we're going to grow through acquisition. And acquisition to me is a really transactional word, because we definitely don't want it to be a transaction. ... We definitely want to have a deeper relationship with advisors. When we do bring [the advisors] on to the platform, it's important for them to have the same mission and values and purpose in the business that like we do. And so I think that's naturally going to weed out a lot of advisors that don't really need that.
Any acquisition prospects now?
We recently brought on a team out of Orlando, to kick us off in January, and it was an awesome opportunity. This was a younger group around $200 million in assets that really bought into the mission and values of SageSpring, and they saw the opportunity for them to grow. They took less to come onto our platform because they think with our platform and the tools that we could give them, they could grow their business to be a billion-dollar book of business.
You’re looking at three other firms?
We're looking at a local firm here, also looking at [one in] South Carolina and another one in Florida.
How large are the firms?
A lot of them are younger advisors. What I mean, younger, like below 50 [advisors] that are still in growing mode. …These are firms that are below $500 million in AUM that very much want to grow still.
What advice would you give to firms that are looking to partner or grow the business?
It'd be great to partner with a group that you find purpose in and significance. I think anything that you do in life, you're not going to like it all of the time. Some of it's going be really monotonous. And you're going to wake up and you don't want do it. But if you have something that's bigger than yourself and actually purposeful and significant, I think you'd be able to work towards that and bring, like, your best self.
What about the tradeoffs? If you’re making this change, how much time is it going to take away from your family for making this change? How is that going to affect your clients?
And then timing. When is the best time to do it? Is it: Should you stay with the firm you're at and should you build your business more? Or should you do it before you really want to build your business? So timing's really important too.
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