PLANADVISER - Summer 2023 - 22

Cover Story
Retirement Plan Adviser of the Year
Mentorship
Strategic Retirement Partners
Shorewood, Illinois
PLANADVISER: Tell us about your practice and how you
got into advising retirement plans.
Strategic Retirement Partners: Jeff Cullen is our CEO. His
family wholesale business was slowly being gobbled up by
the Walmart machine, so on college graduation, he helped
his dad sell the business. He then learned the trust department
at their hometown bank had been churning his dad's,
grandfather's and uncle's profit-sharing account for more
than 20 years, leaving them with a negative 20-year annual
return and keeping his father from retiring for another
decade. These events fueled Jeff's desire to make a positive
impact on the retirement plan space by helping employers
take care of their people.
Today, SRP is a nationwide, independent team of retirement
plan geeks dedicated to helping workers sift through
their complex financial lives to achieve financial freedom.
Since inception, we've been intentional about changing the
face of financial services. Jeff's first hire, Deane Mayerhofer,
was brought in as COO [chief operating officer] and equity
partner. They were aligned about changing financial services
and wanted to build a firm their respective daughters would
choose to work at-and both do. Accomplishing this required
solid training programs, ongoing mentorship, empathy,
emotional availability, transparency and clear vision.
PA: How is your team/process/structure unique? How has
it evolved? Where will you be in five years?
SRP: The firm was created in 2015 with $111,000 of capital
and one idea: Build a company where advisers achieve
operational efficiencies in a shared service model and apply
technology at scale, thereby giving advisers time to focus
on what truly matters: helping Americans achieve financial
independence. We recruited a small group of advisers with
a collective 400 retirement plans and $5 million of gross
revenue. SRP now services over 1,085 retirement plans and
has over $22 million of gross revenue. We highlight the
Mentorship Finalists
* Finspire, LLC, Schaumburg, Illinois
* Rehmann Financial, Troy, Michigan
* David Reiniger, Reiniger and Associates, LLC,
Westerville, Ohio
* Jeffrey Sharp, Hub Investment Advisors, Inc.,
Omaha, Nebraska
Jeff Cullen
initial investment because we've never had a capital call
and have never taken outside money. We've boot-strapped
our way to success, and that start-up, can-do, innovative
spirit still permeates the organization.
Our vision of a shared service model is a growth engine
by design. It lets advisers outsource marketing, compliance,
IT,
relationship management,
investment research,
etc., to SRP, so their most precious commodity-time-can
be laser-focused on value creation by meeting with clients,
prospects and centers of influence. This is the foundation
on which we built our teams.
PA: Tell us about an important experience you've had as
either a mentor or mentee.
SRP: As we built SRP, our leaning to develop people who had
low to no experience in financial services was intentional. We
recruited interns, individuals who didn't get to go to college,
parents who left the workforce to raise their children and
individuals from various nonfinancial services industries.
This type of recruiting can only work with strong training
and mentorship programs. The reason these team members
have been successful is because of their raw, maybe even
unknown to them, talent. A seasoned mentor can bring out
those talents and help these team members apply them. We
took a different strategic approach to mentorship, coupled
with training and professional development. Then we expose
our staff to opportunities that may be perceived as above
their skill set or experience level, with a safety net of their
mentor relationships and our operational processes.
One example comes from a member of our management
team: our director of participant experience and WELLth
[wealth management]. She came to SRP from a national
payroll provider, with limited retirement, wealth management
and people leadership experience. She was looking for
something different, and we had an opening in one of our
regional practices for a participant education specialist. Due
to her success in that role, she was promoted to a nationallevel
role as our director, participant experience. Through
continued mentorship, she developed strong project management
and people leadership skills and was asked to help
us build our wealth management business unit. We gave
her assignments that stretched her skill set and provided
ongoing mentoring on her journey to being the exceptional
leader she is today. Because we built SRP on a people-first
chassis, coupled with a mentorship foundation, she is now a
mentor to the next generation of SRP employees.
22 planadviser.com | Summer 2023 | Awards & Innovation
Photography by Anthony Collins
http://www.planadviser.com
PLANADVISER - Summer 2023

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