Advisor Success Story–Michael Cohen

Financial advisor and CPA Michael Cohen is a builder in the field of wealth management. He founded his own accounting practice before partnering with another entrepreneurial accountant to build Glass Jacobson Investment Advisors—the wealth management arm of accounting firm Glass Jacobson, one of the most prestigious financial management groups in Maryland. In the process, Cohen has specialized in serving successful businesspeople and entrepreneurs.

Cohen, who has more than 30 years of professional experience in public accounting, points out that businesses often are run by entrepreneurs who never implement formal processes or procedures for targeting their goals. For these companies, Glass Jacobson initiates a process that requires the business owner to look at the business objectively, focus on the challenges, and uncover opportunities for improvement and growth.

As a multidisciplined firm with tax, accounting and financial services inhouse, Glass Jacobson is able to develop comprehensive strategies that wouldn't be available through a traditional accounting firm or investment house. Cohen attributes much of his firm's success to this holistic approach, which emphasizes business owners'wealth management issues to provide a larger vision for business consulting.

The firm's wealth management approach seeks to closely align clients' resources with their values and life goals. When it comes to investment services, the firm has adopted a unique strategy, which includes a passive asset-class investing approach. Asset-class investing provides customized, highly diversified portfolios that offer the ability to effectively manage overall risk and volatility while maximizing potential reward in any given market environment. "We believe wealth management and asset-class investing constitute best practices when it comes to financial planning and asset allocation," Cohen explains. "They've given us the strategic foundation necessary to construct a total client solution that brings together accounting, legal support and financial planning."

Cohen says his entrepreneurial instincts were honed working with his mother and father, who owned a grocery store. He observed both the positives and negatives of a "mom and pop" business. The largest negative— the inability to leverage costs and profitability by achieving critical mass—influenced his thinking considerably as he embarked on his own career. "I was always aware not only that I wanted to build a business, but that I wanted to avoid the trap that many small businesses have—a lack of systems and an inability to grow despite good products and services," he says.

Cohen majored in accounting at Towson State College, then joined a prestigious Maryland accounting firm to gain experience. "I was fortunate enough to join a top group right off the bat," he explains. "The contacts and the methodologies are invaluable in the sense that you are trained by the best. I knew I needed this sort of training if I was to make it on my own."

True to his word, Cohen never abandoned his entrepreneurial ambitions. After seven years he left to found an independent operation, and in 1990 merged with accounting firm Glass Jacobson. Throughout his career, and especially at Glass Jacobson, Cohen says he has added to his skill set to provide numerous important services to clients that surround the firm's wealth management core. These services include business consulting in the areas of profitability, business growth management, financing, and mergers and acquisitions. Cohen even plays a leading role in the firm's internal technology strategies and implementation.

His specialties seem to be paying off. Cohen was awarded SmartCEO magazine's Smart CPA Award in 2005, 2006 and again in 2008. As the firm's wealth management solution has garnered attention, assets (currently around $250 million) have grown rapidly.

Cohen is generous when it comes to assessing credit for the firm's growth, saying he would not have joined the firm at all had it not been for meeting Ed Jacobson and seeing that their joint vision was remarkably similar. Jacobson has helped guide the accounting practice since 1980 and currently serves as president. Both principals have focused of late on acquisitions, as this seems an opportunistic way to grow in a time of slow economic expansion. Values are good and principals of otherwise successful businesses are willing to talk and consider mergers. Glass Jacobson, well positioned with the kind of critical mass that Cohen dreamed of when he started out, has recently brought on two wealth management firms— Finkelstein & Geser, and GRA Financial Advisors LLP. These additions have substantially added to Glass Jacobson's in-house expert team model. Cohen believes the firm is now "in the right place at the right time."

One key step in getting to that place was the firm's relationship with CEG Worldwide, the industry's leading wealth management coaching group. "CEG Worldwide is phenomenal in terms of its understanding of the entrepreneurial process and how to position yourself to put the client first in every aspect of the financial process," says Cohen. "If CEG Worldwide had been around for my parents and specialized in general business rather than finance, I might be running a chain of supermarkets right now. Their process is that powerful."

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