Jonathan Nolan

Vice President - Investment Consulting Services, Francis LLC

Business at a Glance as of 12/31/24

• Location: Brookfield, Wisconsin
• How many retirement plan assets do you have under advisement? $4.2B
• What is your median plan size (in assets)? $30M
• How many plans do you have under administration? 39
• How many participants in total do you serve? 50,000
• Parent firm: Not applicable

PLANADVISER: How is your team unique in the marketplace? How do you differentiate yourself from others?

Nolan: Francis was founded over 20 years ago with the sole purpose of serving retirement plan sponsors and their valued employees. In doing so, we’ve structured the firm in strict compliance with ERISA and eliminated the conflicts of interest that too often plague our industry and the quality of advice it provides.

We are steadfastly independent, maintain no broker affiliations, have no private wealth management practice, and sell no investment products in either direct or indirect fashion. We contract exclusively with plan sponsors, and our clients pay us on a fixed-fee basis, compensating us strictly for our time and advice.

This conflict-free structure naturally differentiates us from the broader advisory community in two key ways:

First, every member of our team is empowered to focus exclusively on what is best for our clients. As the industry increasingly prioritizes scale and standardization to benefit advisers, we isolate our attention where it belongs, serving a diverse group of qualified plan clients with solutions tailored specifically to their unique needs.

Second, not providing individual wealth management services means we are incentivized to deliver education and advice to a massive subset of plan participants the industry generally ignores—those who have not yet accumulated wealth. Our service level is unchanged, whether providing personalized, holistic advice to a company’s executives or to an individual taking the very first step of their financial wellness journey.

PLANADVISER: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received and from whom did it come?

Nolan: So much of the good advice I’ve received throughout my life has come from a single source—my mother. Some of her best advice was her simplest advice: “When people need help, we help them.”

I had the privilege of growing up in a small farm town in northeast Wisconsin, a town where everyone feels like your extended family. Growing up in a place with such a strong sense of community provided endless opportunities to watch my parents live out this advice and to see the tangible difference it made in all our lives.

This simple advice has served as a guiding light for me in many regards, including professionally. The opportunity to work in the service of others is what keeps me excited to come to work each day, and I get to see firsthand how life-changing good financial advice can be when delivered in the best interest of the recipient. I’m extremely grateful to serve clients that care deeply about the well-being of their employees and represent a firm that holds the conflict-free service of others as core to its mission.

PLANADVISER: What type of plan sponsor is your typical client (location, size, industry, design elements, etc.)? Please describe your average service model and deliverables.

Nolan: We serve plans ranging in size from less than $10 million to more than $2 billion, and our typical client isn’t easily defined by participant count, location or industry, but rather by their commitment to their employees. Our typical client is highly motivated to not just offer a retirement benefit, but to maximize the effectiveness of the benefit for employees, knowing that financially secure employees are typically happier, more productive and more easily retained, long-term.

Our clients tend to be highly engaged, and our service model is designed to be high touch in interactions with both plan fiduciaries and plan participants.

Plan fiduciary discussions start with proactive consulting around ERISA fiduciary training, plan governance, plan design, plan fees and investment menu construction. We build on those initial conversations by delivering internally generated investment research through quarterly investment monitor meetings and an annual benchmarking of plan utilization, ERISA compliance and total plan fees. We serve as an ERISA fiduciary in all our work with plan sponsors and strive to be our clients’ first call when there is any question about the retirement benefit or its ongoing administration.

We also serve as an ERISA fiduciary in all our work with plan participants, affording us the opportunity to provide not just general education, but personalized investment advice and holistic financial planning regarding any financial matter impacting a participant or their family.

PLANADVISER: What are three of the most important issues your plan sponsor clients face with their company retirement plans? What actions do you take to assist them in overcoming those issues?

Nolan: One of my favorite things about our industry is the ever-changing nature of the issues facing plan sponsors. It makes lifelong learning imperative for advisers and leaves space for even the most well-run plans to strive for further improvement. I believe the three most important issues plan sponsors face today are:

1. Employee engagement – The success of any plan will always be determined by the success of its participants. Participants are most successful when actively engaged. It’s important to build trusting relationships with participants by communicating in the way they are most comfortable—across platforms, in multiple languages and at all levels of financial literacy.
2. Litigation risk – Lawsuits against plan fiduciaries continue to increase in volume, broadening from excessive fees to the appropriate use of forfeitures. Our conflict-free business model and transparent, fixed-fee structure help clients significantly reduce their litigation risk. We also help clients stay hyper-vigilant on evolving best practices, continuously benchmark plan fees across multiple sources and negotiate fixed fees with plan service providers whenever possible.
3. Regulatory compliance – The passage of both SECURE and SECURE 2.0 have resulted in widespread changes to plan administration, greatly complicating plan sponsors’ efforts to keep their plans compliant. We’ve helped clients navigate this complex environment by serving as a bridge between all parties that touch the plan. This includes plan fiduciaries, payroll providers, recordkeepers, auditors, ERISA attorneys and, ultimately, plan participants.

PLANADVISER: What’s your favorite book or podcast?

Nolan: I’ve spent the bulk of my life fascinated by capital markets and the forces that move them. This includes the cyclical themes that move stock prices on a day-to-day basis, but also the secular forces that shape the global economy. My favorite book is “The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder,” by geopolitical strategist and author Peter Zeihan. The book dives deep into the intersection of geography and demography, the two most powerful forces that shape both the long-term trajectory of the global economy and America’s position within it.