Close Close
ThinkAdvisor
Ken Leeuwen and Jeff Mattonelli

Practice Management > Building Your Business > Young Professionals

One Way to Add Young Clients: Hire a Young Advisor

By Dinah Wisenberg Brin

X
Your article was successfully shared with the contacts you provided.

What You Need to Know

  • Van Leeuwen & Co. sought an advisor partly to connect with wealthy clients’ children and other young prospects.
  • Jeff Mattonelli, now 28, was hired for this role while gaining experience with older clients.
  • The needs of clients in their 20s and 30s are different from those of older clients — now or when they were younger.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in finance in 2017, Jeff Mattonelli joined a major investment firm and went to work for two advisors, mostly on administrative activities. After two years, he moved to a client-facing job with Van Leeuwen & Co., which was looking for a young advisor to work with clients and prospects in his age group.

“Things sometimes work out really well in that way,” Mattonelli, now 28 and a self-described tail-end millennial, told ThinkAdvisor recently.

Mattonelli had been looking for an opportunity to work with clients at the same time the firm’s founder and managing director, Ken Van Leeuwen, was looking to add an experienced junior advisor — someone he could mentor and who would attract a younger clientele, the young advisor said.

“It’s worked out really well at this point,” said Mattonelli, the firm’s only millennial advisor, noting he works with the founder’s established clients of all ages while also generating business from clients and prospects in their 20s and 30s.

An Opportunity

“I didn’t specifically hire Jeff because he is a millennial, but as a younger advisor, Jeff fit into our firm’s longer-term vision. Jeff would represent an opportunity to connect with our current clients’ and members’ children, many of which are independently wealthy and successful on their own,” Van Leeuwen, 66, told ThinkAdvisor via email.

“It was also an opportunity to attract a younger client base outside of our clients’ children, by having an advisor who younger people could relate to and feel comfortable working with. Jeff has also had the opportunity to partner with me on my current client relationships and build relationships with existing clients.

“Aside from building relationships with these clients, this has been a great way for him to gain experience working with clients of all generations and understand how the financial planning process has assisted our older clients in reaching their goals,” the firm’s managing director said.

The firm also tapped Mattonelli as part of its succession planning, an outside spokesman confirmed.

Mattonelli’s friends, past colleagues and college network “have become clients and work with us in a variety of different ways,” Mattonelli said, noting he receives significant business through referrals. With a Great Wealth Transfer coming, “there’s a large opportunity out there at some point,” he said, noting he’s starting to build relationships and work with older clients’ children before they inherit.

A recent intelliflo survey suggests millennials and Gen Z members feel they need financial help although most haven’t sought it. More than 80% of people in those generations said there were financial topics for which they needed advice but more than 70% hadn’t looked for it, according to the survey.

Younger clients benefit from founder Van Leeuwen’s wisdom and experience while also working with “someone that maybe is in a similar situation to them personally,” Mattonelli said.

“I think it’s a nice balance between having someone who has a true wealth of experience in financial planning and investment management and then another person on the team that can work with clients that are closer to their age,” he added.

Experience and Youth

That’s something they highlight when prospecting for Gen Z and millennial clients.

Working with clients in their 20s and 30s versus those in their 50s and 60s, “I would say first and foremost there is a bit of an educational component that goes into it,” including introducing them to opportunities and challenges they may face that they haven’t thought about, Mattonelli said.

This may involve talking to clients about building a budget, managing cash flow and getting financially organized, and helping them harness the opportunity they have at their young ages to build wealth through every financial decision and goal.

Mattonelli said he and his young clients also do a lot of goal-planning, which can involve helping them understand ways to lower their income taxes through retirement planning, the tax implications involved in different investment options, the risks with different asset classes and how to maximize their employer benefits.

Younger people might not think much about estate planning, but there are important conversations to have, especially for young parents who need wills to cover guardianship and power of attorney for finances and health care should they become incapacitated.

“We feel the earlier that they start planning and start making financially sound, disciplined decisions, the better off they’ll be down the line,” Mattonelli said, noting that younger people can work on many important financial planning issues even if they haven’t built significant wealth yet.

Not Your Father’s 20-Somethings

Not only are there inherent differences in working with people in their 20s and 30s compared with older clients in general, today’s 20- and 30-somethings face different circumstances than their parents may have at the same age, he noted.

“A lot has changed,” Mattonelli said, with social media and access to information presenting both an opportunity and a potential risk.

“It can become really overwhelming in terms of trying to make a decision or make the right decision with their money,” he said. Clients may be self-educating more than they did in the past, but they’re not always getting high-quality information, he said.

Mattonelli helps clients “sift through what’s correct, what’s not correct,” with a lens on their specific situation. “That’s where we really can be a help to them.”

Older generations had more access to jobs 30 or 40 years ago that offered pensions, which made the retirement planning conversation different, Mattonelli noted. The vast majority of Gen Z members and millennials don’t have much access to pension plans, so their opportunities come from their own planning and an understanding of compound growth, he said.

Many young people now turn to robo-advisors, he noted. “Everything nowadays is an app. … Everything can be done online now,” or people simply do it themselves, which poses a challenge for the advisors, Mattonelli said.

Advisors like those at Van Leeuwen, a small, independent firm, can step in and set themselves apart with more complex planning issues, he added. Robo-advisors may be good for setting up accounts and investing in a simplified manner, while the firm provides value from a financial and goal-planning perspective, Mattonelli said, adding that clients know they have someone they can reach out to anytime for personalized, unbiased advice.

And goal planning is not a linear process, as those clients and their goals evolve over time, he added.

While a robo-advisor may be a barrier for some to engage with an advisor, “once they really see the services that we provide and the value that we can offer them, I think they truly see a night-and-day difference, that personal touch when it comes to financial decision-making, because again, while the numbers are very important, the personal side of our business is also very, very important,” Mattonelli said.

The firm has worked on building its consistent social media presence and meets monthly to discuss the content it wants to run on sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, Mattonelli said.

Even in the social media era, though, Mattonelli said the age-old way of working with clients works the best — providing exceptional service and advice.

Mattonelli, who graduated from The College of New Jersey, seemed like an ideal advisor for Van Leeuwen’s firm.

“Jeff embodied a lot of the characteristics that I look for in a potential advisor,” founder Van Leeuwen said.

“As a former college football player, he portrayed an ambitious, can-do attitude, both of which are important characteristics of a financial advisor,” he said. “Financial advisors experience many challenges, and someone who was a committed college athlete understands the importance of being resilient and capable of picking themselves up when they get knocked down.”

Pictured: Ken Van Leeuwen, left, and Jeff Mattonelli

Dinah Wisenberg Brin

NOT FOR REPRINT

© 2024 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.