Upticks: Falcon Wealth Advisors NEW Team Structure

By Jake Falcon on November 11, 2021

As many listeners know, Falcon Wealth Advisors is growing rapidly. With all these new clients and the desire to provide everyone with excellent service, we’ve been busy hiring new team members and growing the roster. On this episode of Upticks, Jake highlights the team, and shares details about their roles, so clients know who’s helping manage their financial plan and achieve their goals.

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As many listeners know, our practice is growing rapidly. Even in the midst of the pandemic, 100 new clients chose to work with Falcon Wealth Advisors in 2020. And in 2021, we’re on pace to welcome more than 100 new clients.

With all these new clients and our desire to provide each and every one with excellent service, we’ve been busy hiring new team members and growing our roster at Falcon Wealth Advisors. That’s also one of the reasons we recently did a reorganization: our mission is to deliver our clients even better service than what they’ve grown accustomed to receiving.

Today I would like to tell you about everyone on our team and share details about their roles, so you can best understand who’s helping you manage your financial plan and achieve your goals.

Client Operations

Our Client Operations team is the heartbeat of our organization. Samantha Waters leads this team; many clients know Sam and understand how important she is to the workflow of our practice. She oversees daily activity requests and tasks, and still handles certain, not all, – often complicated – client requests.

Abbie Musson also serves on the Client Operations team and she is our Onboarding Specialist. With so many new clients, Falcon Wealth Advisors Cory Bittner, CRPC, and I identified the necessity for a team member whose sole role would be to work with new clients and help them with opening accounts, executing rollovers and transfers, and more. I’ve received some excellent feedback about Abbie from new clients. And by the way, if you’re a current client and you need to open a new account, Abbie can help with that too.

Mari McGraw joined our Client Operations team after working at a large insurance company. Mari works alongside Sam, answering inbound phone calls and handling daily requests from clients. Mari is a hard worker and loves helping clients with day-to-day account activity.

Maddie Crawford, FPQP™, has been on our team for nearly four years. She handles daily requests from clients and helps onboard new clients. Maddie also plays a big role in helping us produce Upticks, In The Money Insight, and all of our educational content. She also organized our Pickleball Social, which has become a client favorite!

Luke Sullivan and Abby Kurt, two part time teammates, help with scheduling client meetings. They proactively reach out to clients and help set appointments for a review of your financial plan.

I’m so pleased with the efficiency and productivity of our Client Operations team. They strive every day to make being a Falcon Wealth Advisors client a terrific experience and aim to deliver a level of service second to none.

Research and Trading

At Falcon Wealth Advisors, our priority is to standardize the service and customize the advice. For Sam and her team, standardization is the expectation – every client should be onboarded the same way, distributions should be handled the same way, etc.

This same goal of standardization holds true for our Research and Trading group, made up of Abby Stockman, AAMS®, and Matthew Navickas, AAMS®. They trade all day, every day for our clients. I meet with them each week to discuss the current environment and how we see certain stocks and bonds.

The three of us have an internal investment policy statement we follow. This “rules of the road” document provides guardrails to stay within when trading for our clients. Whether it’s a rebalancing of your portfolio or reinvesting cash from a matured bond or any number of other important actions, Abby and Matthew take care of this for you and are happy to answer any questions about your portfolio strategy.

Again, we strive for standardization on the Research and Trading team. Don’t be mistaken, each clients’ portfolio is designed to align with his or her unique financial goals, it doesn’t mean that we can’t standardize and systematize the way we trade. Our expectation is for a consistent investment experience for our clients.

Financial Planning and the Wealth Advisors

While standardization is important to our Client Operations and Research and Trading teams, customization is the goal for our Financial Planning and Wealth Advisor groups. We’ve worked to add strength to our Financial Planning offering in recent years. We currently have three key professionals in our Financial Planning group.

Matthew Tomlin, CFP®, is a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ and he’s been trained on retirement planning, tax strategies, estate planning, investments, insurance, and more – the full gamut as it pertains to wealth management. In my opinion, the CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ designation that Matthew earned is the cream of the crop in this industry.

Joe Ibarra, CPA, is also part of this team. Joe is a Certified Public Accountant and it’s a welcome addition to have a team member with a tax background. While we are not tax advisors – we can’t file your taxes, and you’ll still need to work with a tax advisor – having Joe on the team helps enhance our tax planning services.

Jake Cross, a new team member at Falcon Wealth Advisors, has worked as a financial advisor at a previous firm. Like Matthew and Joe, he works directly with clients delivering customized advice based on each client’s unique situation.

The Financial Planning team is basically an extension of me and Cory. Matthew Tomlin, CFP® and Jake Cross work with me and my clients, while Joe Ibarra, CPA works with Cory and his clients. Clients can expect Matthew, Jake, or Joe to call and check in, and they will even meet with you directly to review your financial plan, especially if you’re a client whose financial plan is not overly complex. This is part of our NEW process and we are excited to offer more sets of eyes and ears to consider each client’s unique financial plan.  Meanwhile, Cory and I will continue to meet with clients who have more complexities in their financial plans. And we also meet with new clients to make sure they understand all our services.

With that being said, Cory and I are the only two wealth advisors at Falcon Wealth Advisors, and what I like about our new structure is that we – the founders of Falcon Wealth Advisors – are involved with each and every client.

Our new structure is considered an “ensemble practice” where the entire team shares in the workload of serving our clients. This is a contrast from the dated, stodgy structure in which the financial advisor handles everything. These days, I think a client is best served well from a team approach.

Our plan for 2022 is to continue to bulk up our team as we add more clients. As fiduciaries, it’s our legal obligation to act only in the best interests of our clients, and we think our new approach does just that. We’re hiring team members for both Client Operations and Financial Planning.

We love serving our clients. If you have any questions about our new team structure, or are interested in learning more about Falcon Wealth Advisors, you can reach me directly at Jake@falconwealthadvisors.com.

And by the way, if you’re a current client with a question and aren’t sure who to contact, I’m pleased to share that we have an email address you can use to reach our entire team. After emailing service@falconwealthadvisors.com, a team member will contact you to answer your question or resolve your issue. Our team looks forward to continuing to help our clients retire and succeed with confidence.

Clients choose to work with us to enhance their financial literacy and explain exactly what their financial plan means to them.

-Jake Falcon, CRPC®

Hightower Advisors, LLC is an SEC registered investment adviser. Securities are offered through Hightower Securities, LLC member FINRA and SIPC. Hightower Advisors, LLC or any of its affiliates do not provide tax or legal advice. This material is not intended or written to provide and should not be relied upon or used as a substitute for tax or legal advice. Information contained herein does not consider an individual’s or entity’s specific circumstances or applicable governing law, which may vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and be subject to change. Clients are urged to consult their tax or legal advisor for related questions.