Ameriprise’s lead recruiter sees future in advisor training

When it comes to bringing more young people into the industry, Brian Mora has found that nothing succeeds like referrals — from other professionals and even from clients.

To support that contention, the senior vice president of experienced advisor recruiting for Ameriprise points to his own experience. In 2000, the year before he graduated college, Mora had proclaimed at a family Thanksgiving dinner that he wanted to become a financial advisor.

His aunt said she was working with an advisor and offered to make a call.

“She said that somewhat jokingly,” Mora said. “Well, she actually called her advisor, and he was in a management role, and he brought me in for an interview. And you know, as they say, the rest is history.” 

The next year, Mora started working at American Express, which later spun off Ameriprise as a separate company, and he’s been with the firm ever since.

READ MORE:Top Merrill brokers credit firm’s training program for career successNew programs aim to train fresh advisors for small RIAsAmeriprise looks inward for new head of experienced advisor recruitingHow a multi-stage training program could bridge the advisor talent gapTraining advisors wish they had when they entered the profession

Like many people responsible for recruiting advisors, Mora is worried that too few young people are coming into the industry to replace older colleagues who are retiring. The consulting giant McKinsey has predicted that, by 2034, wealth managers will need 100,000 more advisors to meet the demand for their services.

Ameriprise is among a small number of firms trying to combat the projected shortage with training programs for industry newcomers. Mora said both freshly minted college graduates and career changers can join the firm as solo advisors and be coached on how to build a book of business on their own. An even more successful system, though, is to have them join teams and lean on colleagues.

Mora acknowledged that the dropout rate in many advisor training programs is notoriously high. Ameriprise, he said, has beat the averages in part by being selective about its new recruits and making sure they have support and resources.

“You go back 25 years, when you had that stand-alone type of hiring and many firms were doing it in large volumes — almost throwing things against the wall to see what sticks — that had about a 10% success rate.” Mora said. “Ours is closer to 50%. And in the program where people join a team, it spikes to about 75%.”

Mora, who was promoted to his current position in 2024, said his interest in financial planning was piqued by a probability and statistics teacher who was in the habit of handing out copies of The Wall Street Journal to her classes on Fridays.

“And her teaching us about the stock market, and me following the stock market during her class, that made me go to college and study finance and want to get into this,” he said.

Now Mora is intent on ensuring more young people can tread a similar path. He recently sat down with Financial Planning to discuss Ameriprise’s training programs, the best ways to catch young people’s interest and the biggest obstacles to bringing more of them into the industry.

This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

Financial Planning: How are you bringing newcomers into the industry?

Brian Mora: I think one of the biggest things that’s changed from 24 years ago, when I joined [Ameriprise], is that we weren’t the only company running a large-scale training program where you would have classes of new people hired, getting their Series 7, and firms were doing big group trainings. 

While some firms still do that, many have moved away from group hiring of young people or college grads. But what’s emerged over the last 10 or 20 years are these really large advisor teams. And they have a desire for a couple of different things. 

They have a desire for the expansion of their team with a younger person that could relate to their clients. Some of the clients are referring their kids and their grandkids into the practice. And a lot of financial advisors are saying it would be really great to have somebody on the team that’s of a similar age and generation of these clients. 

Then the second reason is that some of these advisors, as they’re getting into their 20th, 30th, 40th or 50th year, have identified a good strategy for their own succession, but many of them haven’t. So they’re thinking about hiring somebody, either as a career changer into the field, or a young person out of college. They’re thinking about hiring and developing them as part of their long-term succession strategy so that they can step away one day and transition out of the business.

FP: How are you reaching out to possible candidates? Are you going to college campuses?

BM: Like anything you’re ever trying to do in life, the best, highest propensity of success is a referral from somebody that you know.

But you brought up college campuses. I go back to one of my very first jobs in leadership, when we were hiring big classes of college kids. I stood on college campuses at their job fairs, in the cafeteria or the auditorium or the gymnasium, and people would walk by with their résumés. We don’t really take that approach anymore. 

Working with colleges in a more strategic fashion is still very common. Being connected to the business school, the leaders in the finance department, the fraternity. Also, 20 years ago, it used to just be a degree in finance. Now you can get a degree in financial planning. 

There are other attributes you look for: people that are involved in leadership, student government, athletics. 

Last but not least, we still use a variety of online job boards. And, if it makes sense, we can post the general job description for a financial advisor. 

FP: What about career changers?

BM: The career changer piece is interesting. What typically works out really well is if somebody is well-networked and well-respected as a young adult or an adult in their community. 

To me, it almost doesn’t matter what profession they come from. If they were a really respected engineer, they’re going to do better than a not well-respected teacher, and vice versa. 

What you’re really looking for in the career changer space is people that have a good Rolodex, have a good natural market and have a great reputation. When they go to launch their communication plan about their new career as an advisor, the first place they would want to start is all the people they worked with before.

If they don’t really have that strong brand and reputation and can’t demonstrate that during an interview, they’re likely not going to have a lot of their personal network who want to work with them in this newfound profession. 

FP: One of the biggest obstacles to joining the industry is the need to build a solid book of business. What are you doing to make this easier to overcome for newcomers?

BM: On one hand, it’s easier today than it was 20 or 30 years ago, because so many people entering the profession are joining a large, well-established team that has a lot of clients, and they’re able to refer people to that new advisor. 

On the other hand, if I was trying to build the book just myself, without any support from a team, it’s exponentially harder today than it was 25 years ago or 35 years ago. One of the biggest things that’s changed over the course of many decades is the lack of ability to really cold call. Thirty years ago, if you just had a great work ethic and you were willing to dial the phone a lot, enough contacts would eventually introduce you to enough clientele.

Today, few people have a home phone. And a lot of people, if you get a phone number to your cell phone that you don’t recognize, you just don’t answer it. So I might have all the work ethic in the world, but cold calling isn’t going to bear much fruit. 

So we’re not just screening to decide if we want to hire someone. We’re screening to give that person feedback about their propensity to be successful. I would say, if you have a really robust network and you know a lot of people and are well-respected, you could do really well. 

But if you are a bit more introverted and don’t really network or socialize real well, if that person’s not going to join a team, they might struggle to get off the ground.

FP: If an industry newcomer joins Ameriprise, either as a solo practitioner or a member of a team, how long does it take to complete the firm’s training?

BM: Licensing is one phase. It’s about 90 days. It can be longer if somebody doesn’t pass an exam on the first try.

And we help you start meeting with clients right away. Leadership provides what we call coverage in the meetings. That’s a tried-and-true process dating all the way back to my first year in the business. I didn’t wait very long after licensing to have my first client appointments, but I was with someone else with more experience for many, many months.

There’s no hard and fast rule. But before advisors would start to meet clients completely on their own, you’re talking somewhere in the neighborhood of three to six months of having been in many other client meetings with a more senior person. And they’re probably close to a year before they would be able to make recommendations completely on their own. 

FP: Are there certain performance measures you expect newcomers to hit after being at the firm for a certain amount of time?

BM: Yes, but it varies. Keep in mind that Ameriprise has multiple business platforms.

For example, in our independent platform, the team that an advisor is joining gets to decide if there is any performance standard at all. They could say — which would probably be pretty rare — ‘We have no performance expectations whatsoever.’ That’s how much latitude they get.

In our employee model, we do have some performance standards that change and evolve over the years. They’re typically rooted in what we would call leading indicators, rooted more in the number of clients you’re acquiring. 

Because we know that, with someone early on in the career, as long as they’re acquiring clients, they’re going to continue to grow and progress in the business. So we’re usually setting some client criteria in their first few years to ensure they’re hitting benchmarks and have a solid foundation.