Welcome back to the 323rd episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!
My guest on today’s podcast is Yonhee Choi Gordon. Yonhee is a Principal and the Chief Operating Officer of JMG Financial Group, an independent RIA based in Chicago, Illinois, that oversees nearly $5 billion in assets under management for close to 1,500 client households.
What’s unique about Yonhee, though, is how, through her nearly 4 decades with JMG Financial Group, Yonhee has been a part of not only the firm’s succession plan to its second generation of owners but now to its third generation of leaders… and along the way, has personally recruited, trained, and retained the majority of the firm’s employees, by implementing stringent assessments in her hiring process to ensure that new employees are in alignment with the firm’s expectations and values to be able to succeed and grow with the firm for the long run.
In this episode, we talk in-depth about how during Yonhee’s 36 years with JMG, she has not only seen the evolution of the firm and its three generations of ownership and leadership, but has been integral in building the hiring, training, and development systems that has allowed the firm to transition to its current generation of partners and owners (most of whom have been with the company for over 20 years, after first being hired and trained by Yonhee herself), why Yonhee creates and implements a unique kind of work sample assessment for all prospective employees based on the actual duties of the position she’s hiring for so that she can evaluate how the candidates think, process information, and approach problem-solving with the actual tasks of the job, and how JMG structures its leadership roles, where Yonhee not only oversees the training and development of newer advisors, but also coordinates and supervises the Accounting, Operations, Human Resources, and IT departments as well as working with the firm’s Chief Talent Officer.
We also talk about how JMG developed their own proprietary CRM internally more than 25 years ago because they realized they would need better capabilities to input tax preparation data than CRM systems had at the time, and in the years since have been able to further customize the software to their precise needs as the firm grew, why JMG implements strict criteria for who can own shares of the firm, including a limit on ownership size with a cap of 20% of shares, and a rule that requires owners over the age of 70 to sell back their shares to keep ownership fresh and more closely connected to the current state of the firm, and why JMG implements a client capacity of 50-80 clients per advisor and how it keeps detailed track of the time it takes for employees to complete clients tasks to both avoid burnout and continually develop better and more efficient processes.
And be certain to listen to the end, where Yonhee shares why she believes that a portion of the industry’s rising level of M&A deals is really a result of inconsistent definitions of advisor titles and insufficient career paths that are failing to nurture newer advisors into the next generation of owners, why Yonhee advises younger, newer advisors to first understand the culture and values they feel are most important to them personally, and then use those standards to find their ideal role at a firm (to ensure it’s a firm that will take the time to support them and help them grow), and why Yonhee’s own definition of success has changed over time, where at this stage it’s less about her personal career growth and more about the impact and value she can provide in the lives of the employees that she leads and the pride she feels knowing she is developing the next generation of leaders in the financial services industry.
So, whether you’re interested in learning about how Yonhee and her firm have remained successful through 3 generations of leaders, the unique way Yonhee thinks about finding the right employees and training them for success, or how Yonhee navigated being a Korean women in a male-dominated field and rose into a partnership role, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, with Yonhee Choi Gordon.
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