The Secret to Getting a Gig

The latest data from J.D. Power shows the average age of financial advisers is about 55, and approximately one-fifth are 65 or older. Clearly, the industry needs to attract more young people.

Dominique Henderson, the founder of DJH Capital Management, an independent registered investment adviser (RIA) firm in Dallas, also runs an advisory coaching program called Jumpstart. He commonly gets questions from people of diverse backgrounds about “how to go from learning about being an adviser to getting a real gig.”

“If I only have time to tell people one thing, it’s to find a mentor,” Henderson says. “I tell them to find someone inside the industry who they admire—who they can aspire to be like. That’s not to say it’s easy to find a mentor, but doing that work is very worthwhile. It’s your best single bet to success.”

Through Jumpstart, which began as an informal effort in 2016 before evolving, year over year, into its current formalized coaching framework, Henderson has worked one on one with over 300 college graduates and career changers. For the most part, these are people who have some inkling they would like advising but who lack connections in the industry. Henderson’s program is designed to give them practical and actionable insight about how advisory firms work, what roles are available for people with a given skill set, and more.

“The most rewarding feedback I’ve gotten from people interacting with the Jumpstart community is they are getting something extra beyond what you would get from your degree or your training for designations,” he observes.

Henderson says the process of mentoring or coaching a new adviser often follows a similar pattern. First, people need to learn the basics of getting started, in terms of how their compensation may work and defining what they want their future to look like in terms of work-life balance. Next, they tend to focus on finding the confidence and creating a strategy to actually make the leap, after which their focus turns to more nuanced issues such as choosing between designations.

Lee Bethel, president of Comprehensive Benefit Services Inc., a retirement plan and employee benefits practice centered in the Washington, D.C., area, agrees that mentorship is key to the industry’s future. He encourages firms to think about how their compensation structures affect the ability of young people or career changers to actually enter this space.

“The entire advisory and insurance industry has changed so much compared with the early 1980s, when I was starting out,” he reflects. “We simply do not employ the same mechanisms for providing adequate compensation to people of modest means trying to enter this field and to build a book of business.”

When Bethel, himself, entered the field, it was common to see new associate advisers training under mentors and being paid through “draws” against future commissions. “You don’t find that setup these days very often at all, especially among smaller independent firms,” Bethel says. “Without this type of consideration, it’s so hard for young people of any background to establish themselves.”

Bethel says he was only personally able to make his way into this industry thanks to the generosity and guidance of his mentor—an influential adviser in the D.C. area named Lang Dixon.

“Today, there are plenty of programs to help people get designations, and that’s great. But where are the programs and solutions to help people actually secure employment as an adviser? We all need to do more.”