Hart pollack should know a thing or two about starting from scratch. After all, he has had to do it twice now.

The 27-year-old investment executive at ScotiaMcLeod Inc. in Winnipeg started out as a marketing assistant at Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. in Orlando, Fla., in 2000. Three years later, he’d worked his way up to become an advisor, building his book by cold calling and cold marketing in a city in which he knew just a handful of people.

But six months into his new career, he and his wife Nancy decided to move back to their hometown of Winnipeg. She had run into some immigration issues that had made it difficult for her to find work.

For Nancy, the move to the Manitoba capital was painless. She quickly found a marketing position. But for Pollack, it was a different story. All the clients and contacts he had gathered were left behind. “I bit the bullet and decided to leave,” he says. “It was tough because I was three years into the business — and I had to start all over again as a rookie.”

It took him five months to obtain the necessary licensing north of the border, including the Canadian securities course and the professional financial planning course. But this time around, he had well-established friends and family. Instead of travelling the cold-call route, he focused on networking.

“Reputation is extremely important in such a small community as Winnipeg,” he says. “If I was cold-calling people at eight o’clock at night, that would hurt my reputation. I think it’s more important to build that reputation through networking and by being on boards.
My family has a lot of contacts here; I’ve leveraged that. And I’m not scared to ask people for referrals if I’m servicing them well.”

Top tennis player

Pollack makes a concerted effort to get out in the community, meet new people and talk to them about what he does for a living. He’s a board member of the Shaarey Zedek synagogue in Winnipeg, sitting on its membership and investment committees, and he’s also treasurer of the Manitoba Tennis Association and a member of its high-performance committee.

As well, he lends his expertise as one of the province’s top players to an annual tennis clinic for inner-city children in the spring.

“If you’re on 10 boards and nobody knows what you do for a living, there’s no business benefit of being on those boards. Of course, you’re not only on the boards because of business — you have charity interests, too,” he says.

One of the lessons he learned while in Florida is to take your two or three best relationships and try to duplicate them. “I look at who my best clients are, whom I like working with, and talk to them about getting referrals,” he says. “I make sure I’m servicing them well and their accounts are doing well beforehand.” In his case, he says, his Winnipeg relationships are in the Jewish community and with lawyers, radiologists and anesthesiologists.

Rather than using money-management programs, Pollack prefers modelled portfolios in which the various investment vehicles are selected by ScotiaMcLeod’s portfolio advisory group to meet each investor’s individual profile. This leaves him free to focus on the financial planning side of things.

“I tell my clients to think of me as the [chief operating officer] for their company. I’m the delegator, the point man. I’ll gather their information, put together what’s necessary and I’ll bring in the appropriate facets, whether that’s estate planning, insurance, professional money managers or our analysts in Toronto, from within ScotiaMcLeod to help service their needs.”

Pollack, who graduated from Jacksonville University in Florida with a finance major, doesn’t feel comfortable doing the legwork on why a client should buy or sell a particular stock or bond when that’s not his strength.

“I’m not an expert in stock-picking, and I don’t present myself that way,” he says. “I say to clients: ‘It’s not in your best interests if I’m also choosing your investments when we have access to money managers who do nothing but that’.”

A 10,000-foot view

Pollack looks at each client’s situation from a “10,000-foot view” and tries to find a way to facilitate all of their needs. Service, he says, is huge. “If in an initial meeting with a prospect, you show him or her a written service agreement that says how many times you will meet and your signature is on it — prospects really love that,” he says.
“They know they’re going to get service. It’s written down and they know what to expect.
[Proper] service is something a lot of people are looking for. It’s one reason why people change brokers.”