Dane Burkholder: 3 Key Skills for Advisors | Next Gen
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I'm not sure if I want to say training minds and muscle. Can we change that? That might be too piffy. Welcome to Barron's Advisor, The Way Forward, Next Generation, a special series spotlighting the emerging leaders shaping the future of financial advice. Twice a month, we'll be digging into the strategies, insights, and game-changing moves that will help you take your practice to the next level. I'm your host, Allison Tucci, and today my special guest is Dane Burkholder. Dane,

Dane is a managing partner at Roseville Wealth Management, powered by Ameriprise Financial Services. He manages a team of 33 people and over $2 billion assets under management. Today, we will discuss financial athletes on and off the field. Welcome.

Welcome to the podcast. Thanks. I'm excited to be here. So for the listener's context, can you break down the numbers for me a little bit? What type of clients do you have? How many clients do you have? What area do you focus in? Yeah, absolutely. So I'm part of Roosevelt Wealth Management Group. I'm one of four partners within our team. Obviously, our bread and butter is the $500,000 to $5 million client, although we work into the ultra high net worth space. We also do some work in what we call the financial athlete space, where we are working with college athletes

who are getting opportunities in the new name, image, and likeness world. We're located primarily in Pennsylvania. We have a couple of offices in Pennsylvania. We have an office in suburban Atlanta, and we also have an office in Destin, Florida. We manage roughly $2 billion in assets, work with clients in 42 states across the country, and have roughly 4,000 clients. So Collegiate Athletes is a focus area. It's a niche.

One, how did you get into this niche? Because I feel like there's going to be a lot of listeners out there, especially former college athletes, that will raise their hand and say, this resonates with me. So how did you break into that? Yeah.

It started as a passion project, quite honestly. So I have some friends who are in the sports world on the broadcasting side. And I go out to Los Angeles a couple of times a year. And it started actually a coffee shop in Los Angeles where we were sitting. Name, image and likeness was really starting to come to fruition. For those who are not familiar with name, image and likeness, it is now affording collegiate athletes the ability to get compensated.

And if you look at our partners, all of our partners were former athletes, many of us college athletes. A lot of our team members were former athletes, many of them college athletes. We have the relationship with the athletic department at Millersville. And we were talking and, you know, I think the same things that make somebody successful,

on the field, those same attributes can be applied off the field, whether that's teamwork, discipline, execution, having a game plan, being resilient when things don't go your way. So that really started the wheels turning. And we developed this concept called being a financial athlete. And it's taking those same skills and applying it to life off the field.

We had an opportunity to interview with the Elite 11. The Elite 11 is the top quarterback camp in all of the country. It's been around for 25 years. If you look across the NFL, Power 4 College football, most quarterbacks that we recognize the names of have all been through the Elite 11 camp.

They were looking for somebody to present to the parents and to the athletes in financial wellness. That's a fantastic opportunity. And we went through the process. We were selected. So we've been part of the Elite 11 process for the last two years. This will be our third year. And it's so rewarding to see the parents and to see the athletes and to talk to them about, in some situations, this life-changing money.

That they can come across. And the thing that we are like pounding the table on is the decisions that you make today, the decisions that you make at 18, at 19, at 20, at 21 years old will give you a significant head start versus virtually 99.5% of the rest of the country. And those...

And the folks that have, you know, a life-changing amount of money up front, it's a very different type of client than ones who maybe would have a steady stream of income for 30, 40 years. And it presents different challenges. Can you break down what those common challenges are and how your team really addresses them? Absolutely. So we've built out what we call a surround sound approach. So we've really tried to create a one-stop shop.

for our clients, whether they're pre-retired clients, whether they're athletic clients. We've tried to almost take the family office type of environment and apply it to athletes and take that family office environment and apply it to, you know, baby boomers. So we have this surround sound approach where we have tax people, we have estate folks on our team, we have insurance people, we have workplace specialists on our team. So a lot of it comes down to education and

And understanding taxes, understanding do you need an LLC, understanding compound interest, understanding having a budget, understanding if you want to buy a car, what is the best way to do that? Yeah, don't go out and get that Lambo right away. Correct. And understanding you mentioned saving. I think establishing a savings rate. We talk about focusing on what you can control. We always tell people, specifically in the athlete world, you can control two things. You can control what you save and you can control what you spend.

And you need to have a handle on both of them. And if you make good decisions, like I don't know a lot of college athletes, a lot of college people who need, you know, $200,000 a year to live on. So if you can set that money aside for four years, even if you don't make it to the NFL, and you have a couple hundred thousand dollars set aside, you know, think about what that's going to be when you're 50 or when you're 60 and you're ready to retire.

So these individuals as well, I mean, they have a lot of folks that go around them, agents,

It could be a difficult clientele to build trust and credibility with. It's very similar to entertainers in L.A. How do you establish that trust and credibility with that type of clients that kind of can be skeptical for a lot of reasons? Yeah, I think the skepticism is warranted in a lot of situations. And, you know, we talk to athletes and we see all kinds of things happen. So, you know, I think where we've had some success is we approach it purely from an education perspective.

And one of the things that I say up front to all athletes and all families, we are not here to get your business. We are here to provide education to you in this setting. We're here to be a sounding board if you have questions because there's so much information at their fingertips. There are so many people trying to get after these athletes. So the whole platform of being a financial athlete was built with education first and foremost.

And we came into the whole thing. If we never get a client from this and we can educate the next generation of athletes and people who, again, are being presented with life-changing opportunities, then it was a win for us. So I'm going to raise my hand and say, OK, I want to get into the space. I want to educate now, you know, the next group of MLS folks. How do you approach that as a financial advisor? Sure.

You know, I think, again, it comes down to understanding what people want and meeting them there. So in this athlete space, we spend a lot of time on the behavioral side of things. At Elite 11, the quarterbacks, we give them a question. And before we talk about saving strategies or taxes or estate planning or establishing legal documents, we go through a behavioral finance questionnaire. We ask them a couple of things. Number one is what is your definition of wealth?

And think about wealth other than just money. I love that. Number two, who inspires you financially and why?

And we want to see who they look up to from a financial perspective. And listen, you see everything, mom and dad and grandma and grandpa. You see celebrities and entertainers that are listed there. But who inspires you financially and why? And then the last question that we ask them is how will you impact others with your success? We are of the belief to whom much is given, much is expected. And we go through a process to understand how they will impact their community, how they will have a positive impact on people. And we use that as the foundation to begin to build out their game plans.

My experience is it's a different conversation than a lot of people are having with athletes because it's low-hanging fruit. And if Johnny Five Star gets an $800,000 NIL deal, there's advisors coming after that quarterback to get the assets. The assets are a byproduct of doing the right thing, and we never approach these relationships talking money management first. We approach it behavioral finance first.

building out a game plan and understanding the options and providing education. You're listening to Barron's Advisor, The Way Forward, Next Generation. We're going to take a short break. Stay with us. If you are a financial advisor, then you know building a retirement plan practice takes work. Capital Group can make it easier by offering a platform to help you build it. Learn more at capitalgroup.com. Capital Client Group, Inc. Welcome back to Barron's Advisor, The Way Forward, Next Generation.

Let's get back into the conversation. So talking about now teaching the next generation, people talk about it a lot.

But it's not – I haven't really seen a practical case where there's been rubber that meets the road, where folks have actually onboarded and grown these advisors and have them have their own organic revenue growth. It's been very rare. So how do you now onboard these advisors, teach them, train them, especially in the sales process side? Yeah.

Yes. So it really starts in our internship program. So we were actually at a Barron's conference a bunch of years ago, and we heard somebody speaking about their internship program. And one of the things that we implemented from that Barron's conference was we developed an internship program. So specifically for your own business, not for Ameriprise. That's correct. Yeah. So if you think about Roseville, we are affiliated with Ameriprise, but we are an independent practice under the Ameriprise umbrella.

We were in Penn State's backyard in central Pennsylvania. I played football at Millersville University, which is also in central Pennsylvania. So we established a relationship with the Smeal College of Business at Penn State. We established a relationship with Millersville University and their athletic department.

And then Matt, who's one of my partners, is probably one of the most successful high school volleyball coaches in the history of Pennsylvania. There's a lot of his former players. So you just have a pipeline from these colleges. We have a pipeline. That's great. And if you look at a lot of the new hires we've gotten over the last couple of years, many of them have come out of our internship program.

So in our internship program, we spend time with the interns learning the business behind the scenes, sitting in meetings, learning our financial planning tool. I think one of the coolest things that we do, our operations director does an internship challenge where I think interns and young advisors can sit in and listen to a senior advisor talk. But to really learn, you have to do. So we have an internship challenge where we create a fictitious case.

It is the intern's responsibility to present financial planning recommendations and investment recommendations in front of some of the partners. Oh, wow. And then we ultimately pick the winner of the internship challenge. Okay. Without giving too much away, how do you pick the winner? I haven't been involved in the process. To me, I think what I find with the next generation of advisors, their technical knowledge is amazing. Okay. They...

understand technology, they understand financial planning, they understand investments. I think what is missing in financial services, so when I got started, we had to go to something called advisor college.

And Advisor College talked a little bit about the technical side of the business. But Advisor College spent time on understanding social styles and communicating and following up. I think the soft skills sometimes is what's missing. And that's really what we try to spend a lot of time on is observing those soft skills in that case presentation on the financial plan and the investment recommendations.

I think that's equally as important probably as what the intern is recommending in that process. And especially as AI has been kind of in our field more and more, this quantitative side can be almost outsourced. That soft skills is really important. So break down soft skills for me because I think a lot of people, again, they say soft skills, they say hard skills, but what are you looking for specifically? I tell young advisors you need to do three things and do them very well. Number one is you need to know how to communicate.

And you need to learn how to take hard concepts that not a lot of people understand and how do you have that relate to the client that you're sitting across from. So you need to be able to communicate and communicate effectively with people. Number two is you need to be masterful in building relationships. And I mean that by sitting in client meetings. I mean that in creating relationships with other professionals, because I think the more relationships you can have,

the more satisfied the client will be, but also the more opportunities that you will get through interacting with other professionals.

The last thing I would say is execution is paramount. I always tell people we need to execute with a sense of urgency. People are calling us. People are reaching out to us because they have a question. They want something that is answered. And if we let that go for two or three days, they can very easily go to the Internet and find the answer. They can go to another professional and find the answer. So communicating is.

Having relationships and then executing with a sense of urgency, I think, are three of the best skills that any advisor, whether it be a young advisor or a veteran advisor, can focus on. And how can you teach those skills? So you convinced me I need to know these three things. But how do I go out, especially in this day and age where people are just attached to their phones or they communicate via Zoom or they don't really pick up the phone anymore? How do you teach a newer advisor these three skills? Right.

We do a biweekly class for our advisors that is led by Michael Hoffman, who's one of our partners. He's one of the best advisors I've seen in the industry. So Mike will talk to them about some case stuff, but also some of those soft skills. And I think ultimately, too, it comes back to old leadership principles. So when I spent time in leadership, they talked about demonstrate, observe, and confirm. So if we're anticipating or we're expecting someone to do something, we need to demonstrate that skill.

Do it continuously. Once we demonstrate it, we need to observe them doing it. And it's like in sports. It's a matter of reps. So the more you can observe or the more reps that that person gets and whatever skill that is, whether it's talking to a client, leading a team meeting, presenting in front of people, then you need to confirm that they're doing it to the standards that we set. For someone who is a financial advisor, they're doing pretty well.

They want to continue to succeed. They want a team. They're thinking about now teaching, kind of similar to what you're doing. You're teaching, you're giving back, you're running these internship programs. But they're a little bit nervous about their own client responsibilities. How will they time manage that? And how do you – what advice would you give that person that says, I want to take on more. I'm a little bit nervous, though, about not having the success with the service of my team or whatever that is. What advice would you give them?

I think you need to build a plan around it. I think as advisors, sometimes we think we are better than we are. I think as advisors, sometimes we think we may be more important to the client than we actually are. And I think as long as you build out a game plan and communicate it with your clients, I think in order to grow,

advisors can't be all things to all people. And you need to bring on specialists and client service people and leverage technology and AI. And you need to ultimately decide what is your vision for yourself? Do I want to sit in the client seat and be in front of the client?

Do I want to begin to relinquish some of my client responsibilities and begin to transfer that to the next generation of advisors where I can spend time on leadership? And I don't think there's necessarily a right answer. I think it's based upon what each individual wants. But I do think if an advisor is moving towards establishing a team, building a team or joining a team,

You almost have to go through a time audit and say, OK, where am I spending my time? What can be outsourced? What can be delegated? What can be moved somewhere else? And what is my highest and best use in the practice? And spend all of your time and all of your effort on your highest and best use and train the skills that you want to offload to someone else.

How do you approach burnout? Because that's something that financial advisors really talk about all the time, that they're constantly running. And it's something that also athletes are approached with is the burnout. How do you approach that as both a financial advisor and the advice that you're giving your clients that are athletes? Well, if you have any recommendations for me, I am all ears. To me, I love what I do. And I always say I may never have balance, but I have flexibilities.

And to me, flexibility is way more important than balance. So I have two daughters. They're swimmers. And I've never missed a swim meet. That's fantastic. So if I need to leave at 3 o'clock on a Tuesday to go to the swim meet that starts at 4 o'clock, I know that no one's going to be scheduled in that time. I may work at 7 o'clock when I get home, work till 8.30. But something I'm really trying to focus on in 2025 is when I leave the office, I'm

try and leave my work at the office. Because if I'm not a good sit still, do nothing person, and if I'm just sitting around, you know, I have my list of things I need to do, I'll go into my office and probably start plugging away at my list. But personally, I don't balance, not that it's not important to me, but flexibility is so much more important than balance. And as long as I love doing what I'm doing, I like the work.

But I also take enough time to recharge and spend time with my wife and my family and travel. So I do make sure that that is built in. It's in my calendar. I mark it out. It's in my calendar. It's in your calendar to, you know, have time and travel. That's great. It is. It is. That's great. No, but I think what you said is really important because flexibility is very different than balance. And a lot of folks that are even thinking about going into financial advisory, they may not understand that you actually own your own schedule. Correct.

In a lot of ways. So where you might not have balance because you care so much and you're essentially working with your clients, you always want to be on the phone, it's because it's your choice. Correct. You're making that schedule flexible around your daughter's swim meets. It's around certain things. So there are so many advantages to this industry, but I'm going to flip it. What are some of the big disadvantages and how would you want to change them in the industry? Yeah.

That is a great question. Number one is when I think about disadvantages and changing, I think advisors, as I talked about earlier, always go right to the investment management component. I think the investment management component is a byproduct of understanding a client situation and giving them good advice.

So it's easy to jump into a meeting and it's easy to just talk about the portfolio. And I think whether someone is a client or isn't a client yet, it's so easy for an advisor to sit down and tailor their conversation specifically to what they think the client wants. So I would say there needs to be more planning, more advice outside of investment management as advisors interact with clients.

I would say the other thing to change in the industry is just some of the information that's available at people's fingertips. I think you see a lot of people on TV and not to take anything away from that, but there are a lot of people who are making predictions.

And these predictions that are out there, they may be right. They may be wrong. I think a thing that I would love to see is as an analyst or an economist or a strategist is on TV, as they're making a prediction, they should have the last three predictions that they said and have it red or green if it came to fruition or not. I think there's a lot of – there's so much information available at people's fingertips. A lot of it is really, really good. But some of it isn't.

And people can sometimes hear things and perceive things differently than they actually should be perceived. And it creates a lot of fear and anxiety. And I understand money is emotional. And I'm not saying we should take that away. But I think some of the information that's available needs to be honed in. Okay. Well, this has been such a fantastic podcast. And you had so many valuable tidbits that you shared. Is there anything else that you'd want to leave the listeners with as we wrap up?

No, I think it's a great business. It's a great career to have. I can't imagine doing anything else. I originally thought I was going to take over my dad's excavating business, but I've been doing this for 22 years, and it's the only job that I've had outside of college. It's the only job that I will ever have. And, you know, I think any time you can impact people, you can help –

inspire and navigate them through their life's biggest moments. It is so rewarding to see the impact that you're having on people. So, you know, when I started out in the business, they said to be a successful financial advisor, you need the heart of a social worker and the mind of a capitalist. And I think those two approaches have led to fulfillment, success and being part of a team that is so fun and rewarding to be part of. Well, thank you so much for being here today. Thank you.

The production team for Barron's Advisor, The Way Forward, Next Generation is Ellie Ismaladou, Rebecca Bisdale, Paul LeBlanc, Kinga Roy-Jacques, Joseph Lusby, and Alexis Moore. Melissa Haggerty is the executive producer. Jenna Mathis is the director of programming for Barron's Advisor Programs. Greg Bartalas is the editor-in-chief of Barron's Wealth and Asset Management Group. We'll be back soon with another episode. Thanks for listening.

If you are a financial advisor, then you know building a retirement plan practice takes work. Capital Group can make it easier by offering a platform to help you build it. Learn more at capitalgroup.com. Capital Client Group, Inc.