Advisor Success Story–David Turner

Wellington West’s David Turner has a knack for seeing the heart of a business and then building on its strongest parts.

Advisor David Turner once owned and operated a supermarket fran­chise. It may seem like a complex business from the outside, involving numerous merchandising decisions. But to Turner it was simple enough: Put out the products and sell them for more than they cost.

Turner likes to break down complexity this way. These days, he does it for the benefit of his clients. The understanding and knowledge he gained from owning a business has been an asset in working with his chosen market niche: retiring and retired business owners.
Turner actually aspired to be a financial advisor even before he owned the supermarket. “I always enjoyed this field, and after we’d achieved our goals with the supermarket I decided to try the financial business and help invest on behalf of clients.”
Turner got into the industry in the early 1990s. In 2003, he obtained an equity interest in Wellington West and set about organizing his approach around two main components: asset allocation and wealth management.

Turner’s proprietary asset allocation approach takes advantage of modern portfolio theory, which holds that risk can be defined as volatility over time. Turner helps clients select asset classes that can be blended to help reduce overall portfolio volatility while helping to improve performance. He works with such professional investment firms as One Capital Management, placing client funds into separately managed accounts, exchange-traded funds and individual securities.

In addition to offering clients asset allocation services, Turner has adopted cutting-edge wealth management techniques that he believes give clients the highest level of control when it comes to organizing their money and investing. Wealth management calls for the financial advisor to operate as a kind of chief financial officer, organizing and overseeing clients’ full range of financial needs and aligning their wealth with their deepest, most important goals and values.

It’s a financial discipline that has been picking up momentum during the past several years, and it’s the logical culmination of numerous financial trends throughout the last half century of investment industry advancement. Professional investing in both the United States and Canada began with the customer’s man, whose role was to offer clients “hot stock” recommendations that his firm was promoting. As technology evolved, financial advisors increasingly used the personal computer to track investments and offer financial planning. The scope of financial planning continued to advance throughout the last century and grew to include retirement, estate and tax planning. Gradually, the tenets of modern portfolio theory were adopted by the industry, enabling financial planners to add asset allocation to their planning approaches.

Turner’s knowledge of wealth management techniques and how to implement them was advanced by a coaching program he participated in, led by California-based CEG Worldwide. He points out that wealth management works especially well with the retiring and retired business owners with whom he works, because it seeks to align wealth with values and to put money to work in a way that fully supports each client’s lifestyle. Business owners as a group tend to be decisive, independent people who appreciate the reasoning behind the effort to ensure that their assets are appropriately positioned for maximum usefulness within appropriate investment parameters.

Those clients also value the client-centric nature of wealth management. Wealth managers often outsource most if not all of the financial functions of their practices to outside firms, leaving the primary role of client communication intact and in the hands of the wealth manager. “The most critical component of wealth management is communication,” explains Turner. “That’s why wealth management is such a wonderful discipline in times of financial crisis. It’s been organized so that you, the professional, can spend the most time possible with your largest clients. And if you’ve implemented it right, most if not all of your clients will qualify as large.”

Indeed, wealth management, if practiced properly, almost inevitably results in larger and more successful clients because the discipline is set up for this sort of result. From the initial interview to the formulation of an all-encompassing advisor-client relationship, wealth management provides the opportunity for the advisor to offer affluent investors the services that they most need and desire. The entire process is based fundamentally on communication, according to Turner. “Communication is the basic reality of financial advisory work,” he says. “Seek out the best way to communicate and your practice will thrive and your clients will be far calmer and better focused on what’s most important. Wealth management shows us the way.”

Indeed, with more than $70 million under management, some 140 clients and minimums he’s raised several times, Turner’s approach is already showing significant upside for both the business and his investors.

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