Ep 102: Transitioning From Wirehouse To Independence with Michael Henley: Is The Grass Really Greener?

Financial Advisor Success

Michael Kitces

News, Business, Entrepreneurship, Business News

4.8 • 696 Ratings

🗓️ 11 December 2018

⏱️ 111 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

There has been a lot of buzz over the past couple of years about the breakaway trend that has seen sizeable advisory firms moving away from wirehouses, and my guest today very recently went through that process himself. After spending the first decade of his career at Merrill Lynch, Michael Henley moved on to become co-founder and CEO of Brandywine Oak Private Wealth, an independent advisory firm that manages more than $500 million of client assets, at just thirty-four years old.

In this episode, Michael shares what made him decide to go independent after he’d been so loyal to Merrill Lynch that he had a bull-shaped wedding cake, as well as how he handled the breakaway transition not quite going the way he expected. Listen in to hear what it was like for him to build an advisory firm in the wirehouse environment, the unique way he created the necessary startup capital to fund his transition, and how the grass is—and isn’t—greener in the independent channel.

For show notes and more visit: https://www.kitces.com/102

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome to the Financial Advisor Success Podcast, where you go behind the scenes with
0:07.2	financial planner, speaker, and consultant Michael Kitsis to hear stories of how leading financial
0:13.0	advisors navigated the inevitable challenges that arise on the path to success and get insight
0:18.6	from leading industry consultants about how to break through to the next
0:22.3	level in your advisory business. And now here's your host, Michael Kitsis. Welcome, everyone. Welcome to the
0:29.2	1002nd episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast. My guest on today's podcast is Michael Henley.
0:36.2	Michael is the co-founder and CEO of Brandywine Oak
0:39.0	Private Wealth, an independent advisory firm in the Brandywine Valley of southeastern Pennsylvania
0:44.1	that manages more than $500 million of client assets. What's unique about Michael, though,
0:49.4	is that he's a 34-year-old millennial who only just recently founded his independent advisory firm a few months ago as a breakaway from Merrill Lynch, where he had spent the first decade of his career and until he recently was so loyal to the firm that he even had his wedding cake shaped like a bull.
1:05.7	In this episode, we talk in depth about what it's like to build an advisory firm in the wirehouse environment,
1:11.6	how the culture of wirehouses and the value of the wirehouse brand itself has begun to change in
1:16.1	recent years. The way the wirehouses have increasingly de-emphasize the role of commissions,
1:21.4	but have adopted forms of integrated grids that require minimum production levels in certain
1:26.6	product categories just to maintain
1:28.8	current grid payouts.
1:30.3	And the way that once dominant wirehouse technology is now struggling to keep pace with the
1:35.3	growth of independent technology firms instead.
1:38.4	We also talk about the breakaway transition itself, how Michael and his team really did have
1:43.3	to resign late on a Friday afternoon
1:45.0	and then spend the weekend frantically calling clients to come with them. The reason he's chosen to
1:49.8	build his client portal around eMoney advisor and eschew a standard portfolio performance reporting
	...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in -2299 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Michael Kitces, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Michael Kitces and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.