Welcome everyone! Welcome to the 405th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!
My guest on today’s podcast is Gaetano Sacco. Gaetano is a partner and senior financial advisor at Fountainhead Advisors, an RIA based in Warren, New Jersey, that oversees approximately $900 million in assets under management for 1,000 client households.
What’s unique about Gaetano, though, is how after breaking away from an insurance broker-dealer with barely $5M in assets under management, he has been able to quickly build his practice to $75 million in AUM in just 5 years in part by turning what was originally a liability for him in his 20s – being a ‘young’ advisor who prospective clients didn’t always think was credible – into an asset, where Gaetano is now quickly growing his client base of retirees by highlighting how his ‘youthfulness’ as a 30-something means he’s been around long enough to show that he’s going to be a financial advisor for the long run, and still young enough that he can do this for another 30 years and actually be their financial advisor for their entire retirement (or basically, the last advisor they’ll have to worry about picking in their lifetime).
In this episode, we talk in-depth about Gaetano’s experience working in insurance sales starting soon after he graduated from college, including why the need to cold-call for business as a relative newcomer was both a challenge and a confidence-builder as he started to gain traction selling insurance products and some standalone financial plans, the factors that ultimately led Gaetano to decide to make the switch from insurance to the RIA channel and leave friends and mentors he had made in the insurance world despite the success he was having there after winning “Financial Planner of the Year” in his region of the company, and how Gaetano, now in his late 30s, has found his age to be an asset, as getting married and having kids has given him new perspectives in life to be able to better related to his clients and prospects, his years of experience shows that he has credible success, and his relatively young age helps him reassure his older clients that he can really be there for them in the long run.
We also talk about how Gaetano has built his current practice up to $75 million in just 5 years in part through client referrals that came after he got really proactive in addressing client concerns (from phone calls to webinars to additional written commentary and even crafting an expertise on PPP loans while they were available) during the COVID-induced market downturn, how Gaetano has since used in-person client appreciation events, including restaurant crawls and entertaining clients at a popular horse race, to both build loyalty among his current clients and to generate warm introductions to the friends that his existing clients bring to these events, and how Gaetano expanded his capable to be able to serve his 150 clients in part by empowering a newer advisor to take on plan-building and client-facing tasks while building his own book of business.
And be certain to listen to the end, where Gaetano shares how joining an advisor study group, and its structured cadence of 2 multi-day meetings every year, has guided him through multiple changes that allowed him to level up his own practice, why Gaetano turned down his first potentially lucrative job offer with an RIA because of the bad vibes he got from the firm and its leadership, and how Gaetano’s realization that he wanted to work in the financial advice business for the long run influenced his decision to pursue a more planning-centric career path… that gives him the opportunity to wake up every day excited to meet with his clients (while still being able to maintain a strong work-life balance).
So, whether you’re interested in learning about gaining credibility as a ‘young’ advisor, driving client referrals through a proactive service experience, or the professional benefits of participating in an advisor study group, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, with Gaetano Sacco.
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