2024 RPAY – Gerald Wernette, Rehmann Financial

Business at a Glance as of 12/31/23

• Location: Troy, Michigan
• How many plan assets do you have under advisement? $1.12B
• What is your median plan size (in assets)? $1.09M
• How many plans do you have under administration? 308
• How many participants in total do you serve? 17,600
• Parent firm: N/A

PLANADVISER: Tell us about your practice and how you got into advising retirement plans.

Wernette: My career began with me practicing as a CPA focusing in the tax area when I joined Rehmann fresh out of college 40 years ago. Early on, I was asked to take care of the Form 5500 returns that some of our clients had to file and soon discovered an opportunity to bring more to our clients by starting a third-party administrator practice. Fifteen years later, Rehmann developed a wealth management practice that also provided investment advisory services to retirement plans. I saw an opportunity to develop the retirement plan advisory side into a robust retirement plan practice that could service plan sponsors from design, consulting, administration, fiduciary oversight, investment advisory and participant engagement. We have grown not only in number and clients and amount of plan assets, but in the depth of the talent that serves our clients and the solutions we can help our clients navigate. I have found the retirement plan space to be both technically challenging and in need of elevated service, and that has helped drive the evolution of our practice and the solutions we can bring to our clients today.

PLANADVISER: How is your team unique/competitive in the marketplace?

Wernette: Having grown up inside a CPA firm and being surrounded by all the service lines that Rehmann has to offer our clients, we stand out from our competition. We have developed our own open MEP (now a PEP) to help serve our smaller employers (but larger plan sponsors are becoming attracted to it). We have put the participants in charge of their future through our efforts to empower every one of them with tools that help highlight their retirement readiness and understand levers they can pull to impact their future. We have the ability to cross boundaries and serve employers in private industry, public or nonprofit and, in turn, understand and cater to their unique needs and challenges. We bring solutions outside of the retirement plan and deal with the challenges of key employee rewards/retention and transition planning for the business owners. As we are surrounded by the resources of a CPA firm, we add expertise in areas such as plan audits, HR consulting, M&A consulting and IT consulting that can all impact the workings of our client’s retirement plans. Our capital management team helps steer our investment advisory oversight, and under the guidance of our CFAs, we map out our fund menus and manage portfolios for our trustee directed plans. The team approach we take across all service lines we bring to a client is truly unique in the industry.

PLANADVISER: How do you grow your business? What changes to your practice or service model are you planning for 2024?

Wernette: We predominantly grow our business through three avenues. One involves follow-up with the business clients from the CPA side of the firm. They come to us in all types and sizes, and we interact with them to help design a plan if they don’t have one, or we perform a plan health review on their existing plan. Our PHRs have driven about a 50% success rate on us taking over as the plan adviser when we are able to show them opportunities for improvement or enlighten them on aspects of managing their plan that they didn’t know existed. The PEP solution (AutoMEP) we built for our smaller and startup plans has created growth opportunities, not only from the CPA side of our firm, but also from external advisers and other relationships, such as a payroll provider, that we have created 360-degree integrations with. We are looking to build more relationships with various client niches we interact with, along with associations that those clients are part of. We also see tremendous growth opportunities from our heightened focus on helping business owners develop a plan for their business transition and, in turn, needing to focus on their key management with rewards and retention strategies. As we are seeing more opportunities to engage on the wealth management side with participants, we are looking at making changes to our service model to put more emphasis on retirement plan-focused advisers taking over more of the heavy lifting and allowing the more traditionally wealth management-focused adviser to deliver more attention at the participant level.

PLANADVISER: How does your firm incorporate mentorship into its practice to advance the next generation of plan advisers?

Wernette: We have three targeted programs that we use to mentor our associates and help develop future leaders. Our strategic training in executive performance program proactively prepares our associates for current and future executive leadership opportunities by providing high potential senior manager associates with the knowledge, skills and abilities to excel in business development, leadership, financial performance, partner effectiveness, team development and client management. Our emerging leader program works to promote the growth and development of high potential managers to ensure that our firm is prepared to run the business of tomorrow by providing enrichment in understanding Rehmann’s strategic direction, executive and social presence, effective coaching and the development of teams and leadership. Our formal mentorship program is all about pairing up mentors who will provide the following benefits to mentees: personal advocate, resource and sounding board and role model. Our mentees gain the following benefits: creating connections, stimulating personal and professional growth, outside perspectives, sharing knowledge and gaining encouragement and support to navigate difficult situations. Our mentees are also given specific training related to their day-to-day job functions and receive cross training from various team members to afford them the ability to have wide perspective on their function and see the field they are playing on today and where they need to grow for the future. When it comes to helping our associates manage that growth, we use a system that allows them to build a personal “grow plan” that helps them focus on firm and personal growth goals across areas of concentration that include the following firm strategies: learning culture, integrated growth, aligned leaders and associates, digital transformation and Rehmann advisory experience.

PLANADVISER: What advice can you give to industry peers about developing successful experiences for both mentors and mentees?

Wernette: Based on where we have failed and succeeded at Rehmann, there needs to be a commitment to some sort of structured approach that can be replicated across multiple associates and where the mentors and mentees can be held accountable. The benefits from successful mentor/mentee experiences can be huge for an organization that puts effort into managing a dedicated program. It all starts for Rehmann with a fabric of our corporate culture that states: “We Put People First.” I have been with Rehmann my entire career and have benefited from the mentorship of leaders around me over the years and have, in turn, built my own team with that dedication to mentorship. It doesn’t evolve by accident. You have to be willing to invest in these experiences and learn from the ones that don’t succeed and keep evolving to improve them for the next generation. The dividends a good mentorship program will pay will far exceed the investment needed to drive the program. Another key is the willingness to involve mentees early in client interactions and let them take the reins and grow from those learning experiences. There is something to be said from learning from your mistakes, but I would push things too far too fast and almost be looking for those mistakes to happen. This has to be a win for the mentor too, so all parties need to be willing to be held accountable for their efforts.