Getting to know your clients’ children is a staple of generational retention, but John Carroll takes it a step further.
He meets with them individually at his office during their senior year of high school. No parents are allowed, and they discuss life, success and the mistakes Carroll made as he was finding and traveling “his path.”
“It’s meant to connect and encourage, and hopefully provide a little bit of wisdom that I didn’t have when I was that age,” he gamely imparts.
It’s part of his persona. As CEO of Louisiana-based Wellspring Advisor Group, Carroll is deeply engaged with his surrounding community—whether it’s playing in his church band, his annual mission trip to Cuba or the various local boards and commissions on which he sits.
We have to wonder how he has time for that whole advisor thing.
“I’m fortunate that I don’t require as much sleep as most people, but nonetheless I have very little downtime,” Carroll, who specializes in working with entrepreneurs and business owners (and their retirement plans), explains. “I’m normally at the office around 6:00 am, and I try to take an early lunch and a late afternoon break to get out of the office.”
He’s also figured out that early evening is the best time to work out and recharge.
“After that, my wife and I try to go out for dinner and see friends or attend a local function. We both tend to work longs hours, so our motto is to work hard and play hard.”
Exhausted yet? So are we.
Aside from the obvious benefits of being of service and experiencing other cultures, the aforementioned trips to Cuba served other less expected purposes.
“I’m off the grid for weeks at a time, so it forced me to design my business more efficiently since I’m unavailable. As a result, I really improved my procedures.”
Carroll has worked with 401ks his entire career, only adding wealth management services later. And his experience fuels his client connection.
“Being part of a start-up at a previous employer that went from just a few employees to over 1,000 in less than three years really changed me and offered experiences that most people only read about. It really helps me to be able to have almost any conversation with my entrepreneurs and business-owner clients. I really think that’s why we get so many great referrals and introductions.”
In fact, he only gets new business from referrals, and current clients introduce him to people they know and like, and the natural synergies work well.
Wellspring uses Fi360 for retirement plan fiduciary analysis, MoneyGuidePro for financial planning, Riskalyze for portfolio analysis and Salesforce for calendar and task management. He recently finished reading 7 Tenets of Taxi Terry: How Every Employee Can Create and Deliver the Ultimate Customer Experience, something that resonated because “office culture is very important to me, I want employees to feel they have the best job ever.”
His health and wellness routine consists of weight lifting, “but cardio not so much.”
Mondays and Tuesdays are “big” weight days with core work on Wednesday. He tends to use smaller weights on Thursday and Friday and take the weekends off.
“Walking our Great Dane with my wife is my idea of cardio,” he says with a smile.
What leadership qualities and skill sets does he feel are essential for advisors?
“When I speak with other advisors that I think of as ‘elite,’ they have common attributes. They all have those that are obvious—an analytical yet friendly disposition—but you find that in most financial advisors.”
Those at the top have something more, Carroll concludes.
“They have ‘presence.’ It’s very hard to quantify, but you recognize it immediately. They are comfortable thinking outside of the box, they are confident without arrogance, and they are disciplined in who they are and how they run their business.”
Ross Marino, CFP, CPFA, CeFT, is the founder and CEO of Advisor 2X | Excel 401(k) and Transitus Wealth Partners. He can be reached at rmarino@rekonintel.com.