While other boys in the schoolyard were dreaming about being astronauts, firefighters or police officers, Greg Thompson wanted to be a financial advisor.
Now a portfolio manager and wealth advisor with RBC Dominion Securities Inc. (DS) in Winnipeg, Thompson recalls that he first became fascinated by this business when his grandfather would tell him stories of buying shares in Hudson Bay Mining & Smelting Co. Ltd., then making enough money from the investment to buy a new boat.
“I looked up and down the stock pages when I was a little kid,” Thompson says. “I always had an interest in the investment world, and I knew what I wanted to do [for a career] when I was nine or 10 years old.”
It would be more than a decade later that Thompson would get his actual start in this business. In 1988, he obtained his mutual fund licence while working at Toronto-Dominion Bank. He started working at branches in Geraldton and Dryden in northwestern Ontario, then in Thompson, Man., before being transferred to Winnipeg.
Part of Thompson’s duties at the bank was to decide every morning whether to let cheques clear for clients who were overdrawn. “I felt like a square peg in a round hole,” Thompson says. “But the bank was very good at teaching me client relationships and learning the business of customer management.
“I did lending on one side and investments on the other,” he adds. “But investments was what I always loved.”
Thompson cut his teeth as an advisor with BMO Nesbitt Burns Inc., then moved to DS in November 2002.
“I always wanted to be a discretionary portfolio manager,” Thompson says. “I felt DS had the best platform and they had more portfolio managers there. I thought [going to DS] was my best opportunity. I’ve been very happy with the change.”
Today, Thompson runs a book of about $138 million in assets under management. He holds the chartered investment management designation and also is licensed to sell life insurance.
Thompson runs three discretionary portfolios: a dividend growth fund that invests in North American companies that are growing their dividends; a North American income portfolio, which is geared toward retirees and focuses on maintaining income and hedging against inflation; and a more aggressive, quantitative growth portfolio, which uses DS’s quantitative research and is geared toward younger clients and those with larger accounts.
Thompson invests monies for many of his clients in one of these three portfolios, although it’s not uncommon for some clients to have holdings in two. But not everybody wants complete discretionary management. Some of Thompson’s clients want to be involved in all of the decisions involving their portfolios, so Thompson works in partnership with them.
“They’ll do their research,” he says. “I’ll give them my opinion; we’ll make a decision and go forward.”
Thompson begins a client relationship by creating a “financial snapshot” or infographic that shows the client’s overall situation before giving advice on asset allocation and portfolio-management style.
“The most important thing I need to find is what they need to make,” he says. “Normally, what they want to make is much higher than what they need.”
Financial snapshots were particularly helpful in 1999 and 2000, when many people wanted to take on additional risk in their portfolios by abandoning fixed-income instruments and blue-chip stocks to take a more aggressive stance. The snapshots helped bring these clients back to reality. The tool, he adds, still is effective today.
“I wasn’t comfortable with [the aggressive approach],” Thompson says. “People are normally very visual. So, to see something on paper is much easier to [comprehend] than to have it hanging in the air. A financial snapshot shows them on paper what they need.”
Thompson likes to start with conservative investments for his new clients. He won’t let them become aggressive until he has seen them through a couple of market peaks and valleys.
“There’s a difference between what they do and what they say that’s discovered only over time and through the different stages of a market cycle,” Thompson says. “It’s always easier to move from a more conservative approach to a more growth-oriented approach, as opposed to the other way around.”
New clients typically are referred to Thompson by current clients or his centres of influence, which include accountants, bankers and lawyers. Still, he is not above making the occasional cold call.
“I made one not that long ago,” Thompson says of the tried-and-true marketing method. “I still do it once in a while. You have to if you want to continue to grow your business. That’s how I built my business to begin with, calling plumbers at six o’clock in the morning. That wasn’t unheard of when I started.”
Today, Thompson frequently updates his website and sends out an email to his clients every Saturday, which often includes links to articles he has read during the week. He also writes his own quarterly newsletter and has a Twitter account, which he uses to follow other portfolio managers and news outlets such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
Thompson is active in his community. He sits on the board of the foundation for the Riverview Health Centre, a long-term care facility, and is the founder of an annual charity croquet tournament that raises money for at-risk youth. In Thompson’s spare time, he plays hockey at the Winter Club and, in the summer, goes to the family cottage on Caddy Lake (east of the city) with his sons, Zachary, 19, Dylan, 15, and his wife of 24 years, Heather.
The Thompsons love to travel, too, particularly to Hawaii, Mexico and Costa Rica. This past winter, they swam with sea lions near Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.
Make a list, then check it often
A veteran of more than a quarter-century as a financial advisor, Greg Thompson has been through enough market ups and downs to know there’s no substitute for hard work. He offers the following advice to his fellow advisors:
1. Don’t take shortcuts
You can’t build a good business on short-term trading and “hot” stocks. Take a holistic approach to managing money.
“Money management isn’t just making sure the dollars go in the right direction,” Thompson says. “We give clients the help and guidance to make sure their wills and insurance are up to date and that they have an estate plan. Once they make the money, they can hang on to it and it goes to the next generation in the manner they want and that, hopefully, is the most tax-efficient.”
2. Talk to the people who have come before you
Spend time with advisors who have been through the various market cycles – and learn from them.
“I still talk to some of the guys who helped me when I was coming into the business,” he says. “You can’t be afraid to ask stupid questions. I learned more from these guys sitting around having a pop than I ever did from a book.”
3. Start your day by making a list of things to do
“It keeps you on track for what you have to do that day,” Thompson says. “When you cross something off, it gives you positive reinforcement that you’re getting things accomplished. I love my list of things to do.”
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