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When perhaps the most well-known retirement plan advisor in the industry makes a big move, that industry takes notice.

Such was the case when Jania Stout sold Fiduciary Plan Advisors, the highly successful Maryland-based retirement plan firm she built, to Atlanta-based OneDigital back in 2021 and subsequently joined as senior vice president of retirement and wealth. If that move sent some shockwaves through the retirement industry, her next move caused a veritable earthquake.

Last November, it was announced that Stout was leaving OneDigital to become the President of Prime Capital Financial’s retirement plan consulting business, Prime Capital Retirement (formerly Qualified Plan Advisors) and its financial wellness company, Prime Capital Wellness (formerly Financial Fitness for Life).

But there’s plenty more to the story of how the move came about and the new direction it is charting for both Stout and Prime Capital Retirement. Scott Colangelo, the founder, chairman and managing partner of Prime Capital Financial, knew the day would come when he and Stout would be working together. From the first time he met her, actually.

About 15 years ago, Colangelo and Stout happened to be on a panel together at Fidelity Investments’ national sales meeting, sharing ideas and thought leadership.

“I’d never known Scott before and he was sitting there talking about the models and basically his version of managed accounts, and I was taking notes because I’d never heard of this before. Nobody was doing that,” Stout said.

Colangelo was also impressed with what he heard from Stout that day. “Everything Jania said I agreed with, and I felt like everything I said she agreed with. It was so weird. I’ve just never heard anybody so in alignment with the things I believe,” Colangelo said.

“Scott said to me, ‘You know, one day we’re going to work together.’ And I just kind of laughed and walked away,” Stout said.

Both being high-profile pros in the retirement plan market, their paths crossed frequently over the years. But it wasn’t until Matthew J. Eickman, J.D., decided he wanted to get back to focusing on the law that the wheels really started turning toward this move.

Eickman, who had a very successful 12-year run leading Qualified Plan Advisors, decided to join Jason Roberts at the Fiduciary Law Center. “Matthew did a great job for us, but he really missed the legal side,” Colangelo said. He added that Eickman’s departure provided an opportunity to go out and search for the person that could take Prime Capital Retirement to the next level, “and we hit an absolute Grand Slam with Jania joining us.”

“We had a list of over 40 professionals nationally and Jania was easily our first choice.”

Prime Capital Financial CEO Glenn Spencer

Still, bringing Stout to PCR wasn’t a foregone conclusion.

“At first I’ll be honest, it was just like, I’ll chat with them,” Stout said. “But there’s no way this could happen, right? How would I leave my team, my clients, everything I built, put blood, sweat and tears into?”

It was a months-long process, with Zoom calls, and occasional lunches or dinners with Colangelo and Prime Capital Financial CEO Glenn A. Spencer, who was also instrumental in the process.

“When we began our search for a President of our Retirement Practice, we had a list of over 40 professionals nationally and Jania was easily our first choice,” Spencer said. “In my opinion, she was the No. 1 candidate to lead our Retirement Consulting and Financial Wellness business. Prime Capital is blessed to have Jania on our team.”

Decision About Emotion, Not Math

Many facets are involved in such a big decision—and plenty of trepidation.

“I had for 30 years been an advisor building a book of business where I knew that I was really good at that, so knowing that I was going to walk away from that was really scary,” Stout said. “And leaving my team was really hard because I love and adore and have mentored every single one of them.”

Her husband, Daniel Morris, helped her think it through. “He was the one that was constantly in my ear saying, ‘Jania, don’t be afraid—you can do this.’ He helped me see this strength that I had in believing in myself as a leader, not just an advisor,” she said.

“If you look at any decision I’ve ever made, it’s never been about math—it’s about emotion,” she said. “I’m just bold and fearless enough to go ahead and follow my heart. My heart was telling me that Prime Capital had a place for me to tap into everything.”

And that’s just what Colangelo and Spencer are counting on her to do.

“This is an organizational commitment to Jania. Every single consultant and advisor I’ve talked to that’s talked to Jania is excited and re-energized, and that’s a gift,” Colangelo said.

Spencer added that it’s clear Stout will push the company to continue to innovate in both the retirement plan advisory and financial wellness space. “Her passion around serving retirement plan participants and providing individual financial advisory services to each and every participant is perfectly aligned with Prime Capital’s values as an organization,” he said.

While admitting it’s a little scary to be “pure overhead” in her new leadership role instead of building a book and directly generating revenue, to date she has been impressed with the leeway provided to start making decisions and investing in technology and people to make strides toward reaching that next level.

More Sponsor than Mentor

“She believed she could, so she did” is a popular phrase taken from an R.S. Grey book, Scoring Wilder. In this instance, Stout said perhaps it’s more like, “She believed she could, so THEY did.”

Stout said Colangelo’s belief in her ability to take Prime Capital Retirement to the next level is a powerful motivator, and reflected about the difference between a sponsor—which she sees Colangelo as—and a mentor.

“I think a sponsor can be way more powerful than a mentor,” she said. While a mentor typically provides advice along the way, a sponsor takes a bolder step.

“A sponsor truly takes a bold move, puts a spotlight on you and believes in you so much that they will put you in front of them, which I think is clearly what Scott has done,” Stout said.

“Women need to recognize that they need to find sponsors—and sponsors don’t have to be female,” she continued. “If I look at my career path, because I’ve worked in a male-dominated industry, I really had nowhere to go but to find male mentors, right? There weren’t many female mentors out there. Having male mentors and male sponsors can be just as powerful if not more powerful than having female ones.”

For his part, Colangelo said, “It’s not hard to want to sponsor Jania. I mean she’s a unique talent.” He likens the company to being his baby—something he built out of nothing for nearly a quarter of a century because he believed there was a massive need for help in this space.

“We’ve had a lot of success and I’m very proud of it. That being said, I have zero qualms with Jania running it and making changes and taking it to a new level because she’s that good. I think she’s the best advisor in the industry,” he said. “You have to be able to remove your own ego and just look at someone for what they are, and go, ‘God we need to get behind that individual.’”

Bridging Wealth and Retirement

Coming into a new role at a different company, you are bound to discover things you didn’t realize about that company. For Stout, that might be a realization of Prime Capital’s depth in the wealth management space.

“I didn’t realize coming in here how important it is to have a strong wealth management and investment team,” she said, noting that Prime Capital is a wealth management company with a solid footprint in the retirement space.

While many retirement-focused firms are trying to gain a foothold in wealth management, “We’ve already got wealth. Now we’re just working on the bridge, whereas others have to build the bridge and the wealth management division. And a bridge is a lot easier to build than the wealth management side,” Stout said.

“Both sides of our business grew up together—wealth and retirement,” Colangelo added.

“Think about where we’re at today where companies have retirement shops and they’re trying to buy wealth companies and sort of duct-tape them together, and then have them work with retirement,” he said. “And everyone wonders why it’s not working.”

If you go out and acquire 10 wealth management firms, all 10 of them may be doing things differently. “At the same time you’re trying to build that bridge that Jania referenced from retirement to wealth,” he said. “Just building the bridge takes 10 years!”

Colangelo said having the wealth and retirement sides grow up together over more than 20 years has been a big advantage—one Stout said she didn’t realize was such a big deal until her arrival. 

“Everyone else is trying to recreate it just through acquisition alone. It’s very complicated to do that,” Colangelo said. “And I understand why they’re trying to do it and over time it will work. Don’t get me wrong—I think it’s the right model. Not everyone’s going to do it our way.”

Aiming at Targets

In terms of goals, the firm is looking for aggressive growth in the workplace retirement plan market. While approaching 1,000 retirement plans in early 2025, there is a milestone Stout has her eye on.

“I would say $100 billion [assets under advisement] would be a good goal to get to, and I think we can get there within 5 years.”

Jania Stout

“I would say $100 billion [assets under advisement] would be a good goal to get to, and I think we can get there within 5 years,” Stout said, adding that as more growth occurs, working with bigger plans tends to come with it. With the infrastructure they are building, Colangelo added that it may only take the addition of a couple of hundred additional plans to hit that goal—and it might not take 5 years to get there.

“I certainly believe that we can double the size of our clients and assets in the retirement space in the next probably five years for sure,” Stout said. “If we can double the number of participants we are serving, that means that we’re helping more working Americans, right? The only way to help more people is to get in front of more plan sponsors.”

How will that next level be achieved? A variety of ways. Investing in technology to streamline processes and removing barriers that keep advisors from helping participants.

“We’re going to continue to provide tools and resources for our advisors to do more and to do more plans at a faster rate, because we’re going to have that efficiency built in,” she said. “But we’re also going to bring on new advisors.

“One of my areas of focus is we’ve got some great offices that are maybe wealth management-focused, and I want to recruit retirement advisors that I can plug into some of those wealth teams.”

But don’t expect to hear about a flurry of acquisitions. “I don’t think it has to be a big M&A strategy. I think we can attract retirement advisors that just want to come join Prime Capital,” Stout said.

Still, this is an issue that keeps her up at night—particularly as it pertains to attracting and retaining advisors that have an entrepreneurial mindset who might otherwise entertain putting out their own shingle. “How do we keep really good people? That’s what I think leaders need to be thinking of all the time. How do we keep those people that have that entrepreneurial spirit fulfilled?

“You have to invest in and grow good leadership. You have to make sure that you’re building an environment where people want to work and want to stay there.”

Scott Colangelo

“You have to invest in and grow good leadership,” Colangelo said. “You have to make sure that you’re building an environment where people want to work and want to stay there.”

He hinted that great migrations are happening in the industry—where successful advisors are selling their firms to aggregators, and before long are looking to move on again.

“The first time around, they took the big check,” he said. “The second time around, they’re not going to look for the big check. They’ll say, ‘I think I’m going to look for a place where I could be happy. I just think that’s going to happen.”

Three months in, Stout seems plenty happy in her new leadership role, and Colangelo and Spencer are happy to have her.

“I’ve known Jania for well over a decade and I’ve known her reputation for almost two decades. She is widely recognized for her expertise, innovation, leadership and professionalism throughout the retirement advisory space. She brings an infectious energy and optimism to any environment that she’s in,” Spencer said.

“We’re 100% behind Jania,” Colangelo added. “I view Jania as my partner and I think we’re just we’re just hitting the tip of the iceberg. We’ve had a lot of success up to this point; I think what’s about to come is sort of scary fun.”

Helping Participants

During the interview for this article, Scott Colangelo and Jania Stout repeatedly stressed how important it is to them to make sure they are putting people first—as in retirement plan participants.

“There are so many people in our industry that say, ‘Oh, it’s all about helping participants.’ And they don’t do anything to help the participants. They lean on the recordkeepers to do all the work, but they don’t think of new ways to help participants,” Colangelo said. “That’s not how Jania’s wired, and that’s not how I’m wired.”

With an overarching focus on helping participants become financially prepared for retirement, plan sponsors and their participants remain top of mind throughout the process of analyzing plan data and execution of services provided.

“You have to make sure that in every scenario, the client gets some sort of a win—a lower cost, a better value, more services. Something has to land on their side of the ledger every time,” Colangelo said.

“A big focus is how we’re going to help working America. Yes, we want plan sponsors to hire us as their 401(k) or 403(b) advisor, absolutely,” Stout said. “They’re going to hire us because we’re really good at fiduciary governance and investment advice, but they’re really going to hire us because we will take care of their employees better than anyone else.”

• EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the cover story from Issue 1 2025 of 401(k) Specialist Magazine. To see the article as it appears in the magazine, click here.

SEE ALSO:

• Jania Stout Makes Move to Prime Capital Retirement