Welcome to the Financial Advisor Success Podcast, where you go behind the scenes with

financial planner, speaker, and consultant Michael Kitsis to hear stories of how leading

financial advisors navigated the inevitable challenges that arise on the path to success,

and get insight from leading industry consultants about how to break through to the next

level in your advisory business. And now here's your host, Michael Kitsis. Welcome, everyone.

Welcome to the 284th episode of the Financial Advisory Success Podcast. My guest on today's podcast is

Andy Schwartz. Andy is a partner, a bleakly financial group,

a hybrid advisory firm based in Fairfier, New Jersey that broke away from a major insurance company

and in just a few years nearly tripled its size to over $9 billion in assets across more than

50 advisors at the firm. What's unique about Andy, though, is how he and his partners have built

their firm into a platform that gives advisors the opportunity to leverage centralized large-form support services from marketing to technology, compliance, and human resources, while still maintain the freedom to run their own investment book of business, however they see fit for their clients.

In this episode, we talk in depth about how Andy and his partners run their firm as a form of cooperative with advisors sharing resources and additional services to provide space and capacity to grow and scale their own practices and even including such services as an in-house life coach for both their advisors and their clients.

How anti and his partners purposefully do not receive any compensation

as equity owners and make a living purely from their own practices, P&L, to instead be able

to reinvest all the money generated by the firm back into the business to provide even more

services their advisors can leverage. And how Andy attracts new top talent by not only trying to

offer capacity and scale that's aligned to

their advisors, but doing so while supporting a wide breadth of R.A. custodians to give their

advisors flexibility. We also talk about how Andy accidentally started his financial services

career in college by selling insurance to college seniors after looking for a way to pay for his

own education. How, after working a large insurance broker-dealer for over 30 years and becoming frustrated

with corporate constraints, and he made the difficult decision to walk away with this $3 billion

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