Rebecca Foster, AIF • Edmond, OK
NFA Wealth Management • LPL Financial
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Steve Romano, CEP, AIF • Edmond, OK
NFA Wealth Management • LPL Financial
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Proactive Advisor Magazine: Rebecca and Steve, please tell us about how you see your role in working with clients.

Rebecca Foster: I joined NFA Wealth Management in January of this year and have many years of experience working with both individual and business clients. Steve and I work as a team, although we both also have clients of our own.

I am focused on helping business owners and individuals fully understand the gaps in many areas of their financial planning. Client education, in my opinion, is critical. Business owners are focused on operational matters and making their businesses successful—and individuals or couples on their careers and families. I enjoy working with motivated people who realize that planning for the future is far too serious to handle on their own.

See Related Article: Why goals-based investing makes sense

I believe a financial advisor should work as the financial quarterback for each client, engaging where appropriate other specialists such as CPAs, attorneys, and other advisors to fully develop and implement plans. I strive to develop a comprehensive approach to financial and estate planning and business strategy, addressing areas of concern, educating clients, and bringing all of their needs and aspirations into the planning process. The ultimate goal is to help clients accumulate, protect, and preserve their net worth—or the vitality and growth of their business.

For individual clients, we address areas such as retirement-income planning, protecting clients and their families from loss of income, insuring assets for retirement, or helping seniors with Social Security claiming or Medicare supplement plans and alternatives. Working with business owners, we provide guidance in many areas, including succession planning, business valuations, corporate retirement plans, insurance strategies, and employee and executive benefits planning. I greatly enjoy working with the owners of family businesses and have specialized training in that area.

For many of our business owners and top executive clients, we provide a specialized, concierge-level service that coordinates all of the professionals they have on their team to maximize efficiency and results. We take the time to create one master financial plan and then act as the team’s quarterback for oversight and implementation of the plan. Steve and I are part of a dedicated team at NFA that can work to streamline the installation, operation, and administration of benefit programs for businesses and financial institutions. This can include wealth-management services, defined contribution plans, Supplemental Executive Retirement Plans, bank-owned life insurance, group life insurance, disability plans, and many other services.

Steve Romano: I have a personal vision statement that is appropriate for all of our clients, especially those on the individual side who are most concerned with managing, growing, and protecting their assets and looking for guidance on retirement-income planning. My objective is to help the underserved investor, providing straightforward guidance and striving to protect our clients from irrational markets by using results-based investing. I want to serve people and the community in a values-oriented manner.

We employ a holistic approach to financial and estate planning, taking into account not only each client’s present position and mid- and long-range financial goals but also his or her life goals. Once we are confident that we fully understand a client’s worldview, we can develop practical, specific solutions and an easy-to-understand implementation plan.

Adding to Rebecca’s comments, I think we are very skilled in helping business owners integrate their business and personal financial lives. Their financial programs can often be fractured. People may have a business plan and a personal financial plan, but often they do not work together cohesively. Our programs can help bridge that gap, with a focus on tax efficiency. For the business owner, this can include business continuity and succession planning, cash-flow management, retirement planning, and other services.

Rebecca: The first stage with a new client relationship is really educating the client about our firm and how we work while also establishing a rapport. Our longer-term goal is to build a foundation of mutual trust for the relationship. We spend a good amount of time on discovery and are committed to fully understanding a client’s personality, preferences, and goals. Working over several meetings, the data we gather in the discovery process is used to develop a custom financial plan designed to help the client achieve their specific vision of financial success. Our guidance is informed by a client or client couple’s financial and life objectives, time horizon, available assets, potential income streams, legacy goals, and risk preferences.

We have a process framework we call the Synergy Circle that outlines critical areas in the planning process. It starts with our team approach to serving clients, backed by the full resources and specialists within our firm. The four main aspects of the circle include (1) planning for health care, disability, and long-term-care needs into the future; (2) building protection and risk management in terms of property and casualty insurance, life insurance, and income protection; (3) exploring wealth solutions for both the accumulation and distribution phases of life; and (4) coordinating with other advisors. The last point is especially important as we address legacy-planning objectives. Our goal is to provide clients with analytical and comprehensive planning based on specific goals and objectives, and then excellence in implementation.

Steve: Our firm takes pride in operating from a position of strength in the arena of wealth management. We have access to many investment resources within our firm and from our custodians and third-party resources. We work hard to be industry innovators and proactively seek new approaches to both financial planning and investment strategies. On a personal level, I think of myself as an investment coach and, in a sense, a behavioral psychologist. I believe that educating clients and helping them take emotion out of the investment process are very important tasks in the advisor-client relationship.

We always start with a questionnaire that drills down into managing client expectations. How have they perceived their experiences in both bull markets and bear markets? How did that line up with their expectations? We talk about ways we can enhance their investment planning, both experientially and from a performance standpoint—with everything always relating back to their goals. We also emphasize client education, introducing concepts such as longevity risk, the sequence of returns, dollar cost averaging, and the compounded mathematics of portfolio gains and losses.

We have the ability to use several third-party managers as part of our investment planning and implementation process. With access to many types of strategies, we can formulate investment plans and asset-allocation approaches to address the needs of clients all along the risk spectrum.

I have some clients who are most concerned with alpha generation—they have a long time frame and high risk tolerance. The majority of my clients do not fall in that camp. They are more likely to be risk averse and are more concerned with the preservation of capital than return on capital. While we have many options in these situations, we often use a strategic approach from one of our third-party managers that I will call a risk-aware strategy. While it seeks competitive returns, it is more focused on managing downside risk and generating those competitive returns throughout a full market cycle. The philosophy here is very different from “buy and hold” passive management. There are times when it is sound strategy to adjust exposure to the market, or to be out altogether.

The important point to emphasize is that we do not have one singular investment approach or philosophy. Clients’ investment plans are goals-based and customized to their objectives. In line with my mission statement, we are focused on results-based investing and risk management, using institutional-strength strategies on behalf of our clients. I think that is a truly added-value benefit of working with our team and our firm.