No. 3: Sean Fitzpatrick
AUM: $235 million
Firm: Raymond James
Location: Houston
Age: 33
The first two or three years were some of the most challenging for Raymond James advisor Sean Fitzpatrick. Starting his career straight out of college at 23, he found himself in a cubicle by himself in an office in Houston with no team and no young colleagues before many training programs had really taken off.
“In the beginning it’s all about survival,” Fitzpatrick says. “Everything basically starts with a negative. It’s how you choose to overcome all of that.”
To get his business off the ground, Fitzpatrick designed an ambitious strategy. He had a tally sheet of 500 calls to make every day, set up seminars and networking events, and never left the office on Friday without having 15 meetings set up for the next week.
“You continue to do that system and keep going and going and things start to turn for you,” he says.
Fitzpatrick also turned another potential negative into one of his best assets: “Any time that someone was going to ask about my age, I wasn’t going to make it a negative,” he says.
Fitzpatrick, who read financial magazines and watched CNBC through high school, told prospects that he was well versed in the latest products, understood that it was a different market going into 2002 and wouldn’t just go with strategies because that’s what others had been doing, he says. Fitzpatrick says he also realized that he had something the advisors didn’t; he had to prove himself.
“I’m growing, I’m going to be here, and I’ve got a burden,” he would tell potential clients. “One person is trying to prove themselves and the other is not. That tends to be a benefit to the level of service [for the client].”
He ended up proving himself to enough clients that by his third year, he felt like he was starting to gain momentum. “Looking back, three years in I knew I had something good here,” he says.
His list of retail accounts continued to grow as he invested time into getting to know existing clients and began to draw referrals.
“I like to do a lot of social events, getting together for dinner, lunch, breakfast sometimes or golf or social [activities],” he says. “The more time you’re spending around them, the better you get to know them and the more likely they are to introduce you to friends and colleagues.”
Fitzpatrick’s persistence and competitive spirit continues to drive him even as his assets under management hit $235 million.
“You really have to want to succeed in this business and [have] persistence,” he says. “There are people I still call from my first month in the business and at some point I hope that will pan out.”
No. 2 Adam Estes
AUM: $440 million
Firm: Hilliard Lyons
Location: Bloomington, Ind.
Age: 35
As one of the youngest on this list, Hilliard Lyons advisor Adam Estes is a testament to the benefits of getting an early start.
By his pre-teen years, Estes was busy learning all he could from his father, who has been an advisor at Hilliard Lyons since 1972, and digesting books on the fundamentals of investing.
“While some kids were playing dungeons and dragons, I was learning about investing,” he jokes. “Sadly not as much as Warren Buffet when he was that age, but hopefully somewhere near.”
Estes joined Hilliard Lyons right out of college in 1999. Although he ended up at the same firm as his father, he points out that he only received warm leads from his father and focused on building his own book of business.
“The first couple years you feel like you’re just pounding your head against a wall,” Estes says. “It’s just a numbers game.”
Then one day, the dam broke. One of the big accounts that he had been prospecting monthly for a couple years got back to him. “It’s your lucky day,” he remembers the prospect saying.
