Guests: Jim Gold, CEO, Founding Partner, Board Member, and member of the Executive Leadership Team at Steward Partners Global Advisory.
In a nutshell: In a recent article, one of Jim Gold’s colleagues described his leadership style as “fun, fair, but firm.” When I asked Jim about that quote and his firm’s culture, he swapped in “flexible.” All four of those words speak to how intentional Jim has been about creating a firm whose employees love where they work and deliver major value to their clients.
On today’s show, Jim Gold shares the story behind the founding of Steward Partners and how the firm’s equity ownership structure fosters a culture of accountability, collaboration, and innovation. We also discuss Jim’s perspective on how the training and mentorship of new advisors has changed during his 30 years in the industry.
.Jim Gold and I discuss:
- How bad leadership starts with arrogance.
- Why equity ownership is a cornerstone of Steward’s culture and how the program works for everyone from new advisors and support staff to retirees.
- Why Jim decided to take on private equity and how he maximized its value to the whole firm.
- Using team-building, training, and mentorship to develop advisors and culture.
- Why Jim believes the firm comes last in successful relationships with clients.
- The truths about our industry that Jim believes most people don’t see until they’re working with a great advisor.
. Quotes:
Jim Gold on sharing equity to strengthen culture:
“ We felt like to do this right, there should be no one here that doesn’t have equity in the company. So, when a team joins us from the outside, the advisors have equity as part of their transition package and their administrative colleagues have their own transition package, including equity, and then there’s ongoing opportunity for advisors who are growing to earn more equity. There’s ongoing opportunity for administrative colleagues to share in those bonuses as their teams grow. So it really is a cornerstone. We have over 500 equity partners today. And from a financial perspective, all the equity everyone holds, including myself and the other co-founder, Hy Saporta, we all have the same financial upside. There’s no special privileges that Jim Gold or Hy Saporta enjoy as the founders of the firm.”
Jim Gold on developing and deploying his “bench” of advisors:
“Newer advisors need to have a period of time where they’re more of an apprentice, if you will, and then you really can build this next-gen advisor profile. So I think the advisors coming in absolutely have the best success joining an existing team where they don’t have to be the advisor. They don’t have to go from, I was in another business, I took the Series 7, now I’m supposed to be a market expert, a marketing expert, run my own business. We have a lot of younger advisors, many of them are folks that started in different roles and graduated into being an advisor. Almost all of them are on teams. And I think that’s really the best way for everyone. An interesting parallel in sports, franchises do this where they draft a quarterback, but they don’t start them for 2 or 3 years and they let them learn behind the starting quarterback. And then that tends to develop someone who’s more ready to take on the enormity of the task ahead of them. But the core of being an advisor hasn’t changed. Clients want honest advice, good advice. They want you to be unconflicted. And that’s one of the key things we do at Steward. Whenever someone asks me, ‘What’s your market outlook?’ I say, ‘I don’t have one.’ Clients should get the market outlook from their advisor. The clients and the advisors should have that conversation, not Steward. So we never want to put ourselves in between our advisor and their client, whether it’s product, whether it’s research, whether it’s opinion. That’s not the firm’s role. What’s gone out of whack in the industry is very simple: the client is the most important entity this relationship. The second most important is the advisor because they serve that client. The least important is the firm. All these firms have turned the hourglass upside down and they put the firm first, which is absolutely wrong in my opinion.”
Jim Gold on his drive to be “extraordinary”:
“ I’ve always thought, personally, your goal should be to be extraordinary. Any job I ever took, I would say to my boss, ‘Tell me what the best person you ever hired did, because I’m going to do more than that.’ So that is an outlook and an attitude that our management team shares. We’re not here to be ordinary. We’re here to be extraordinary. We embrace that so heavily. And I always say, ‘We’ll all slow down when the race is over.’ When ‘someday’ comes and you retire, you can slow down. But for now, you’re going to run at full speed until you get there. The simplest thing in the world is you never stop if you keep increasing your goal. So the original goal, 10 years ago was, what if we could build a firm with 10 branches that did $100 million in revenue.? If we stopped there, I would have retired six years ago. So we keep increasing the goal. So now the goal is $1 billion in revenue and probably $120 billion in assets. That helps you stay very focused on the road ahead, not the road or the accomplishments behind you.”
Resources Related to This Episode
- Jim Gold on LinkedIn
- 3 Ways to Cultivate an Organic Growth Culture Just like a forest needs the right soil, nutrients, neighbors, and climate to thrive, your business needs to cultivate the right environment for organic growth tactics to flourish.