Michael M. Kane and Associates, an NRP member firm
Michael Kane, Mary Kane, Ashley Black, David Robinson (Alpharetta, Georgia)
Reported by PLANADVISER Staff
Although he still has some health and welfare plan clients from those times, today, that is ancillary to his work with retirement plans, because “this requires full-time commitment,” Kane says. “You can’t just play at it if you’re going to be good.”
His daughter, a technology and marketing person, joined him last year, though Kane says he has groomed her for the business since she was a sophomore in high school. He also has a couple of other advisers: one full-time and one part-time (one of whom focuses on wealth management), as well as some part-timers who refer business to him. Kane is in the process of adding one other full-time person to work on retirement plan service.
The firm targets companies with $15 million to $100 million in plan assets and, when it comes to plan service, Kane does his own fiduciary assessment of each plan, along with plan benchmarking that integrates results from Brightscope and Fiduciary Benchmarks. When evaluating the success of a plan, he examines plan participants, deferral rates, plan fees, automatic features, and the investment lineup. One thing he doesn’t do: education, though he and his team supervise the service provider. Instead, Kane says that, he believes that managed accounts and target-date funds are appropriate for most participants.