Danny Montesi admits, with a bit of embarrassment, that an episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show played a big role in his decision to leave a successful career in music to become a financial advisor.

One day, many years ago, Montesi happened to catch Oprah interviewing an elderly gentleman who had successfully made six or seven major career changes in his life, moving from jobs as diverse as firefighter to doctor to pilot.

Montesi was inspired by the man’s example and resolved never to let himself go stale or allow fear of failure stop him from pursuing his goals.

“The man had clarity in his eyes and passion in his voice,” says Montesi, 44, during a conversation in his comfortable home in Laval, Que., just north of Montreal. “He said: ‘I live to learn and be passionate about whatever I do.’ I really was impressed by that, and I said, ‘That’s really something I would like to adopt.’ And I did.”

Nine years ago, Montesi was earning $120,000 a year teaching music in Montreal-area schools, developing musical curricula for school boards and teaching privately. He operated his own business, the School of Musical Arts, and was the conductor of a 40-piece youth orchestra that travelled extensively in Eastern Canada and along the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S.

Trained at McGill University’s School of Music, Montesi’s first love is the classical guitar, but he is also big on the piano. He can instantaneously recreate a song on the piano after hearing it just once on the radio.

In addition, Montesi is proficient in a wide range of woodwinds, string and percussion instruments. He mentions the saxophone, cello and most of the percussion section as instruments he plays especially well. “I’ve done everything in music,” he says, “except be a rock star.”

Montesi could have gone on with his music career and flourished until he retired. But after 15 years in that profession, he was restless and looking for a new challenge. That’s when his Investors Group Inc. advisor suggested he give financial planning a try.

Montesi made a deal with himself: one year to earn at least $35,000. He took a year off from his music business and, at the age of 35, set out in Investors Group’s training program.

In Montesi’s first year, he became the top producer in Investors Group’s office in the affluent Montreal enclave of Westmount; he went on to build a successful financial advisory business, with $30 million in mutual fund assets under management.

Montesi, who is licensed to sell mutual funds and insurance products, now works out of Investors Group’s office in the Montreal borough of Anjou. He maintains that his musical background has contributed to his success as an advi-sor in a number of ways.

First, his ear for tone and melody makes him particularly sensitive to the changing moods of clients and prospective clients. That has made him a better communicator. Second, music has improved his mental acuity and helped him to be both happier and more disciplined.

When Montesi began looking for clients, he quickly realized his greatest value to them wasn’t in selling them mutual funds or insurance. Rather, it was in offering them a belief system that would lead them to clarify their goals and put them on a path to achieving success.

Montesi believes many rookies drop out of the industry within the first couple of years because they focus on trying try to sell products that are essentially interchangeable from one firm to another. Instead, advisors should be presenting a vision and a value proposition clients can understand and buy into.

“An advisor who doesn’t have a belief system is just a person who works his or her products and licence,” Montesi says. “It’s not about my product; it’s about achieving goals.”

In meeting with prospective clients, Montesi is a passionate advocate for his belief system, which includes living within your means, managing cash flow and saving for goals while living well in the here and now. He uses himself as a living example of how the right mindset can work for middle-class families.

Once a client has bought into the vision, that client and Montesi agree on a “life plan.” Setting the plan into motion and keeping it on track requires interactions with a series of unrelated professionals. Montesi is there to act as an “integrator” or a “relationship manager” for his clients. He accompanies them, without billing for his time, to their meetings with lawyers, accountants, bankers and any other service providers who might have a role in putting the clients’ plans into action.

@page_break@This both gives clients peace of mind that they are on track and helps to ensure their loyalty to Montesi. The process also builds his network of business contacts and generates referrals.

“As a conductor, I interpret information very differently from the person who’s in the orchestra,” Montesi says. “The same for the client. The consumer doesn’t understand, maybe doesn’t want to understand, the world [of professional services] around him or her. But I understand it, and it’s my job to explain it to the client step by step after he or she has bought into the vision.”

Over the past two years, Montesi and his partners have launched a company called Omentis Corp. and developed a complete sales and training system for advisors based on Montesi’s ideas about financial planning.

The centrepiece of the system is a leather-bound album called the Life Compendium and a copy is given to clients once a year as an evolving record of their progress. Within the album are pictures, graphics and quotes from the specific client that act as reminders of meetings with various professionals and why certain decisions were made.

The album is backed up by an elaborate online training program and process software that leads advisors through the stages necessary to elicit client goals, implement a life plan and produce the compendium, which Omentis manufactures.

“The Life Compendium is the greatest sales tool,” Montesi says, “because it showcases and encapsulates your value proposition in a way that the client can understand without a million words. The system processes the whole thing to guarantee the advisor delivers on that promise.”

The compendium also “acts as a shield” against competitors, Montesi notes, by reminding the client in visual terms of the work that went into making it and the reasons why decisions were made.

Montesi and his partners have invested $6 million to develop the system and have big plans to roll it out, both to individual advi-sors and firms. For now, it’s being tested by advisors in Ontario and Quebec.

It’s an ambitious project, but Montesi, who is married with a nine-year-old daughter and a five-year-old son, calls it “an evolution” of where his life has taken him.

“Whatever I want to do, I will take the risk and do it,” he says. “If it fails, no one can ever say I didn’t do it. I can always go back to music. That’s the way I see my life.”

For all Montesi’s business activities, music still holds a central place in his life. He still plays regularly at his church and for pleasure.

“Music has given me everything,” he says. “I really think that music has inspired me to be passionate and happy. I’m always positive. It’s a great emotional outlet.” IE