April 25th, 2019 marks Archetype’s two year anniversary as an independent company. Our team started Archetype after spending 25 years at the largest global brokerage firms—including the last 17 years at Morgan Stanley.
We’re often asked “How’s it going?”
What I tell people is that the biggest surprise is how much fun it has been.
“Fun?” you may rightly ask. Yes, fun!
You see, for years, our team had strong opinions about the way the wealth management business should be run. We sat on Advisory Boards at Morgan Stanley and shared our views with management. Change and innovation are slow at big companies. We finally felt compelled to leave, not so much because where we left was terrible, but because we had a vision we simply couldn’t execute where we were.
It is one thing to speculate about how much better you think things would be if you could start with a blank piece of paper. It is another to actually execute on those things!
For me, it has been 10 times more fun than I expected to be able to freely execute on a new vision with no encumbrances.
Fundamentally, our vision is to change the scorecard we use to gauge our success as a team. While at Morgan Stanley, we literally had a tab on our computers called “Scorecard” that was all about assets and revenue. When we founded Archetype, we began using a completely different scorecard: “helping families thrive across generations”.
We are wealth management firm with a relational scorecard.
To execute on our unique scorecard required changes in all key areas: Platform, People and Process.
We founded a wealth advisory company built to serve our clients’ entire family with “complete representation”. What is “complete representation”? It means that we are legally responsible to put our client’s interest first. We do not push products or represent an institution. With complete transparency, we represent our clients. Period. This is not true of the brokerage firms. Advisors there are “registered representatives” of the brokerage firms.
We doubled the size of the team with aligned members who share our vision to pour into the lives of the families we serve. One of our core values is “above and beyond…”-- in everything we do, we are intentional about providing exceptional service. We are in the advice business. Our people are really our product!
We adopted a unique process to facilitate deeper conversations and create space for our families to explore and define what matters most. We work collaboratively to provide sound investment advice and a strategic plan that mitigates the technical and relational risks to their wealth. We then work to align families’ missions with their wealth so that their family can move with greater clarity and confidence.
As we celebrate two years of independence, we want to thank each of our clients and friends for partnering with us! We hope it has been as much fun for you as it has for us!