About this episode
In a new episode of Head to Head, Managing Partners Mike Barry and Kelly Milligan join Co-Heads of Distribution Kirsten Pickens and Ryan Robertson to discuss their decision to go independent after 20+ years at a name brand firm, the unique, team approach they take to working with clients and their secret to building a truly scalable practice.
About Mike Barry
After a 30-plus year career at Merrill Lynch, Mike longed to help create the optimal platform to deliver sound, client-driven, holistically based solutions to the clients he and his partners serve. Mike has decades of experience working closely with his clients, assisting them to put a plan in motion to fulfill the security, legacy and philanthropy they seek. Today, Mike continues to empower his clients, whether they’re successful entrepreneurs who launched new enterprises, key executives leading publicly traded companies or highly skilled professionals in law, finance or healthcare.
About Kelly Milligan
Jeff Kelly Milligan co-founded Quorum Private Wealth with one goal in mind: to put clients’ interests first. Kelly uses his 20+ years of financial advisory experience to help clients achieve their financial goals by providing advice and counsel on a wide range of wealth management topics. These topics include portfolio construction and management, tax minimization, financial planning, wealth transfer, college savings, philanthropic giving and corporate benefits.
Transcript excerpt:
Kirsten Pickens:
Welcome to Head to Head, a podcast by FS Investments where we get personal with the people of financial services. I’m Kirsten Pickens.
Ryan Robertson:
And I’m Ryan Robertson. We are the co-heads of Distribution at FS Investments.
Kirsten Pickens:
Today we’re excited to welcome Mike Barry and Kelly Milligan, managing partners of Quorum Private Wealth.
Ryan Robertson:
Mike and Kelly consider themselves more than just financial advisors to their clients, they’re life advisors.
Kirsten Pickens:
And in this episode, Mike and Kelly discuss their decision to go independent after 20 plus years at a name brand firm, the unique team approach they take to working with clients and their secret to building a truly scalable practice. So, let’s get started. We’re excited for you to hear our conversation today.
Ryan Robertson:
Mike, Kelly, thank you both of you for joining Head to Head. We can’t thank you enough. I guess where we would like to start is, you all have been partners for over 20 years. Marriages don’t last for 20 years sometimes. I guess the question that we would start with is how did you guys meet and then ultimately how did you decide to become business partners?
Kelly Milligan:
Let me start here. So, Mike was, when I came into the firm in 2000, Mike was already an incredibly successful financial advisor. He had really built a practice from absolute nothing from scratch, all on his own, but had a very different kind of transactional practice. And I came in, in 2000 and I came from the consulting world. So, I immediately thought that managed money was kind of a way to go. And so, Mike and I started going on prospecting calls together. I would try to get in front of C-suite executives in Silicon Valley, and this was right at the height of the.com level bursting. So, everybody wanted to talk and needed a second opinion. So, we would start going out on calls together and found that we really had complimentary personalities.
Mike Barry:
Opposites attract.
Kirsten Pickens:
That’s very true.
Kelly Milligan:
And really, we’re able to kind of finish each other’s sentences. So, we decided in 2001 to formally become a team, and obviously Mike had a very successful practice so the team split was skewed towards him. And then when we got to 2008, everything fell apart and we just decided, okay, this is the time to be full partners and let’s try and figure out how to rebuild this from scratch.
Mike Barry:
We had originally designed it so that we would unwind my book. I had about 600 clients at the time and had a good business, but it was entirely transactional and it was at the point where I had a couple kids and everything else, and I woke up every day starting at zero and trying to figure out how am I going to continue. It wasn’t really a repeatable business model. The client looked totally different. It was successful, but it was very stressful at the same time too. I was influenced heavily by Kelly and his institutional approach coming in as a consultant, having a pitch book and doing everything in managed assets much like you would be if you’re an endowment or a trust. And so, I thought that that was where the industry was going to go. And I think in a sense, I did a career change at that point. And so, as Kelly mentioned, we started out disproportionate. We had a 10 year plan to get to equal because I felt this is going to be really important that we are on par with each other if we’re doing this together and developing all these clients together. And then 2008 came, I just said, you know what? We’re not waiting any more years. Let’s do it now. And it tells you a lot about Kelly. He was like, well, no, wait a minute. It should still be disproportionate. That’s the plan. I said, no, from this day going forward, let’s do it. And it was probably the real beginning of our growth and trajectory from that time. Just like when Kelly first got in the business in 2000, he got his license in March of 2000, which was the peak .com bubble so Kelly was very aggressive, was great with calling and getting in front of people, and obviously very intelligent and came across very well with C-suite executives. And no one wanted to talk to their own advisor because they were so upset with them and whatnot. So, he got through with it very well, started out fresh, and we kind of looked at what happened in 2007 and 2008 the same that it was just a huge opportunity when everyone else was freaking out. And from there it really blossomed.
