Since being named to his current role as Merrill Lynch's retail chief in June 2005, Robert J. McCann has seen his firm take a variety of paths to pursue growth. Those have ranged from acquiring regional firm Advest to rolling out a new, high-tech workstation for financial advisors. Today, McCann's unit--the Global Private Client group--is at the top of its class, with more than 15,800 financial advisors and the highest retention rate in the industry. But how has the firm achieved its success, and how does it plan to stay on top? In an effort to find out, OWS tapped industry recruiter Carri Degenhardt-Burke to interview McCann at the firm's 3 World Financial Center offices in New York. Most of the questions she asked him came straight from the troops, either inside or outside the company. And his answers? Here's a hint: It all starts with reinvestment, continuing strategy and client focus.

CARRI DEGENHARDT-BURKE: Between selective recruitment, reinvestment and internal growth of Merrill advisors, acquisitions, and the opening of international offices, what are your priorities for growth right now?

ROBERT J. McCANN: Whenever I think about growth at Merrill Lynch, I start with the advisors that we have. Over 90% of our production comes from the advisors who started their careers at Merrill. Therefore, re-recruiting the advisors that we have starts driving strong retention numbers. That's my No. 1 priority for growth, because if we keep them happy, and they're here and they're productive, that's going to be a big, important step toward growth. So that's first and foremost.

Second of all, training advisors from the ground up is a big part of who we've been as a company. We will continue to hire and develop advisors from the ground up at Merrill. Recruiting has been an important initiative of ours now for three and a half years, and we're having great success. Identifying the right kind of advisor, bringing them into Merrill in a way that they--and their clients--are comfortable with is also an important way that we think about growth.

We've done acquisitions--we've done two since I've been president of private client. One was Advest. Another we announced [in January]: First Republic. So I can't say that acquisitions aren't on our radar screen.

CDB: Now, describe for me your ideal financial advisor.

RM: I don't know if there is an ideal advisor. The kind of advisors that we are looking for here are people who--whether they're early in their careers or deeper into their careers--still have an interest in growing their practices and their businesses. They also need to be people who are client-centric in their approach. We recruit advisors who are million-dollar-plus producers, and we recruit advisors who are $300,000 to $500,000 [producers]. So I don't know that there is an ideal, but there are certain characteristics that we look for, and that's more the way that I think about that.

CDB: How are you reinvesting into your own advisors?

RM: First and foremost is technology. We think technology is already a differentiator at Merrill, and we want to add to that.

And the technology is on the front and the back end. About a year and a half ago, we rolled out our new workstation, our wealth-management technology platform, and now we're in the process of coupling that with three other things. First, we have something called the client-experience data program. We're trying to do a better job of having all the important data about our clients in one central place that's easily accessible and manageable, and that can be analyzed and manipulated through technology. Account numbers all in one central place--no matter what kind of an account it is. That will allow account openings to be easier.

We have a process being tested in the field that we'll be rolling out later this year that will shrink the amount of time it takes advisors and their client associates to open a new account from 30 minutes to nine minutes.

So back-end technology is important, as well as front-end. On the back end, it's all about making our advisors more efficient. Advisors can't work harder. They can't work longer and they can't work harder, so we want to use technology as a way to make them more efficient. So that's on the back end.

On the front end, we have that workstation and then we're also working on two different things. One is salesforce.com, where we outsource our client-relationship management. And then we have a new phone system now. It's a Cisco phone. When all three pieces are out; the phone, the workstation and the client-relationship-management system are all going to be integrated.