PLANADVISER: Tell us about your role at your firm and how you contribute to its growth and progress. How did you end up there?
Schau: I’m currently a partner in my firm and deeply involved in our retirement plan consulting side, as well as our wealth management division. I’ve worked here for 10 years after two years at “big corporate.” Since I’ve joined, we’ve had considerable growth in both our retirement plan consulting and personal wealth management businesses.
I started out at the last seat in the office putting together plan reviews, taking client calls and going to every meeting that my boss would let me join (even if those were outside of normal business hours and technically unpaid).
I wanted to know everything about our clients—how to read an audience, whether in an auditorium or a boardroom; about how my boss operated, since he had become incredibly successful; and about how retirement plans worked (and varied from company to company).
My advice to our new hires now? Your job title is “sponge.” You won’t know everything right away, and you won’t understand everything a year from now, but you can absorb as much information as possible. Nothing trumps experience when it comes to this industry.
PLANADVISER: What steps do you think will help improve the retirement industry and participant outcomes in the future (particularly ways in which your firm can help with that progress)?
Schau: Meeting people where they are in life. In my experience, I’ve found that most advisers (typically older and mostly well-off themselves) provide education to employees like it’s a lecture, instead of as a human. If people want to be told what to do, there’s no shortage of information on the internet. Nowadays, they can even use artificial intelligence. But if they want actual help, then as advisers, we need to level with them about where they are and work with them on how to make small changes now that can have major impacts later.
As humans, we want progress without patience. Real change takes time, though. Most people can’t just save 10% of their paychecks. A lot of them can find a way to save 1%, though. That’s an actionable opportunity to start making a difference for the future and something that can be built on in future years, and it’s something that we can help everyone do if we’re willing to spend the time with them.
PLANADVISER: Have you had mentors or role models? Who are they and what lessons have you learned from them?
Schau: My boss, John Ludwig. He taught me from Day 1: “you don’t have to be the smartest adviser to be successful; you just have to outwork your competition and know your clients.”
In the early years of my career in this industry, everything was about investments. Being an investment manager, it’s easy to focus on the numbers—what are the assets and what fee can we charge?
In 2015, my boss had already made the shift to making retirement plan consulting about the people. The finance industry has tended to leave lower-income clients behind, but with our approach, we made it about educating our clients’ employee bases from the bottom up. We began providing nuanced education, targeted at the proper employees, that met each employee group in their situation. A more educated, financially sound employee base makes for a healthier company and reduces turnover.
Once our pitch became about the people, with measurable results to support it, our ties with our corporate clients became stronger. Employees across all divisions and pay scales sang our praise to upper management because they were finally seen, which became a differentiator in the industry long before the rest finally started to catch on.