Brian Vendig of MJP Wealth Advisors: 5 Things To Look For When Hiring a Financial Planner or Financial Adviser

An Interview With Jason Hartman

Understand your personal objectives for your career and be realistic about what you can accomplish. Establish boundaries with your clients to ensure that you can have reasonable work-life balance over time. Take care of yourself and make good choices — that makes you accessible as a leader when your colleagues ask for your help.

As part of our series about what one should look for when hiring a financial planner or adviser, I had the pleasure of interviewing Brian Vendig.

Brian Vendig is president of MJP Wealth Advisors, an independent wealth management and financial planning advisory firm, based in Westport and Farmington, Connecticut. He is responsible for managing all aspects of the firm’s strategic development and operations. He is a member of the MJP Wealth Advisors Investment Committee, which develops the firm’s investment strategies and portfolios. Vendig has over 25 years of experience in the finance and accounting industries.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Our readers would love to ‘get to know you’ a bit more. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

Throughout my career, I’ve worked at large global organizations in the finance and accounting industries, as well as boutique organizations. In these organizations, you were working for shareholders of the businesses. However, you never truly met the shareholders or got to know many of them intimately. Reflecting on that traditional corporate experience, I wanted to make more of an impact. Consequently, transitioning my career to wealth management and running an established firm helped me leverage my professional experience, but more importantly, have a direct positive and productive impact on my clients’ lives that is measurable and rewarding. Now my shareholders are our firm’s clients. This is extremely gratifying — to be able to work directly with clients to help them achieve their financial goals. That is our mission at MJP Wealth Advisors.

Can you share a story about the most humorous mistake you made when you were first starting in the industry? Can you tell us what lesson or takeaway you learned from that?

Thinking about business acronyms used in the workplace as part of a prior employer’s company is always humorous. Needing to know what the acronyms meant and how to appropriately use them was always key. Whether it was during a routine business meeting or a more formal business presentation, trying to decode the meaning of various acronyms, while at the same time, pretending you know what everyone else is discussing, is always a funny business situation to go through.

Moving forward in my career, this taught me that communication and culture is powerful in an organization. It is important to always be clear and transparent within the organization, but there is no need to make things more complicated than they need to be in conveying good ideas or collaborating with your team.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

At MJP Wealth Advisors, we are focused on continuing to expand our investment capabilities for our clients. We are bringing bespoke and unique alternative investment offerings to our clients that democratize the institutional investment approach for the retail client.

We are actively reviewing and collaborating with solutions experts about direct indexing investment management approaches that will allow for a more tax-efficient, but at the same time, tailored strategic asset management capability that is personalized to clients’ values and interests.

We are also augmenting our technological capabilities at the firm to allow for a better client experience and enhancing our ability to be even more intelligent in our data analytics to deliver on a positive, efficient and effective client experience.

Are you able to identify a “tipping point” in your career when you started to see success? Did you start doing anything different? Is there a takeaway or lesson that others can learn from that?

Having an intellectual curiosity to learn has always been important to me. Asking lots of questions and trying to understand how different variables connect across different processes is something that has become invaluable for me over my career. Some of my past roles involved managing an organization’s processes — these were incredibly important moments in my career because it allowed me to gain insight into the results that are cultivated over time.

What three pieces of advice would you give to your colleagues in the finance field to thrive and avoid burnout? Can you give a story or example?

Understand your personal objectives for your career and be realistic about what you can accomplish. Establish boundaries with your clients to ensure that you can have reasonable work-life balance over time. Take care of yourself and make good choices — that makes you accessible as a leader when your colleagues ask for your help.

Ok. Thank you for all of that. Let’s now move to the core focus of our interview. As an “finance insider”, you know much more about the finance industry than most consumers. If your loved one wanted to hire a financial advisor (not you), which 5 things would you advise them to find out about before committing? Can you give an example or story for each?

I would suggest asking about the following:

1. What influenced the individual to be an advisor? What do they find interesting about the role?
2. What is their process of communication with clients?
3. What is the most impactful way they help their clients?
4. Are there restrictions in the type of advice that they can give due to requirements from the firm that the advisor is affiliated with or capabilities that the advisor offers?
5. What is their compensation structure and how does that best serve the interests of clients?

I think most people think that financial advisors are for very wealthy people. This is likely not actually true. Can you explain who would most benefit from hiring a financial advisor and why? Can you give an example?

The following types of individuals usually gain the most measurable immediate impact when working with an advisor:

1. Young professionals eager to learn about wealth management and accumulation objectives
2. People going through life transitions that need additional ongoing advice and lifecycle planning support such death, divorce, change in career, business succession and transitioning to retirement
3. Small to medium business owners that need an independent perspective to help them manage risk and capture opportunities tax efficiently

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

My father, Richard Vendig, encouraged me to get an education and be open to a diverse career path to learn about business and how different businesses work, operate and evolve. My father-in-law, Mort Potoff, founded our firm over 40 years ago and was my mentor and my initial business partner when I moved into the wealth management industry. Mort gave me an opportunity to learn how noble this profession is. He supported my growth and development as a professional and let me have a chance to earn the respect of others to eventually be able to run a successful advisory firm.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

At MJP Wealth Advisors, financial literacy is at our core. I believe there needs to be a greater focus on financial education in schools. Simply understanding the basics of money, debt, credit card and investing is bound to pay strong dividends in the future. Finance is a topic that everyone must interact with and knowledge is power!

How can our readers follow you on social media?

People can follow me on LinkedIn personally at:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianvendig/

Follow our firm on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, plus visit our firm news page:

https://www.mjpwealthadvisors.com/blog/category/MJP+News

Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.