How advisor’s ‘trial by fire’ taught him about deeper relationships
Looking back to when he started out, Sam Huszczo, founder of registered independent advisor SGH Wealth Management, said his ignorance was something of a superpower.
His first job as a naïve 24-year-old two decades ago was at a commission-based firm where he was thrown, headfirst, into the race for clients. It was sink-or-swim time, but, after a year in the role, Huszczo had a deeper understanding of where he wanted to take his career.
“You don’t learn sales or business development in college,” he recalls. “It was trial by fire to learn all that type of stuff, but I felt like the relationships with clients were really transactional. They weren’t deep. You didn’t have the motivation to contact your existing clients all the time, because you were always looking for that next commission.”
That’s not how Huszczo, who is based in Southfield, Michigan, wanted to work. He took the sales and process skills he learned and started his own business in 2005. He views the industry as “moldable”: The investment landscape has transformed since SGH’s launch, but that also means you must change with it in order to best serve your clients.
At the beginning, SGH invested clients almost exclusively in mutual funds; however, this active management often came with hefty fees. Many investors turned tocheaper, passive ETFs, although that market has matured considerably to now offer many active strategies.
“There’s more offerings today, and client appetite is more sophisticated than [simply] wanting inexpensive investment options,” Huszczo adds. “You can’t just rest on the moniker of it being cheap.”
To navigate this evolving landscape, SGH Wealth Management leans toward the low-expense-ratio side of the ETF industry, incorporating
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