Trolling for the best client fit

O’Connor, the founder and president of Winnipeg-based Blackwood Wealth Planning, serves fewer than 100 high net-worth client families. Life insurance is the firm’s core product, but O’Connor won’t sell a policy to a potential client before going through a disciplined process to ensure there’s a good fit for both sides. At the introductory meeting, O’Connor outlines his recommendations and, if there’s a good fit, the process moves forward.

“We always know what we’re going to do,” O’Connor says. “If you’re going in for heart surgery, you want to know that the heart surgeon has done that before. You don’t want him saying, ‘Let’s go in through the back this time’.”

The most crucial part of the financial planning process is the discovery phase, O’Connor says, which often involves a two- to three-hour meeting with the potential client. Despite the length of the meeting, O’Connor keeps his mouth closed through most of it.

“It’s amazing how many people haven’t had a good listening to in a long time,” O’Connor says. “All too often, our industry doesn’t do a great job at the upfront listening part. We tend to jump to solutions too quickly. If you have a disciplined process, you’re less likely to do that because you’re going to get all the facts up front.”

After the introductory meeting, O’Connor can pull together a customized strategy to fit the client’s needs, which could include developing an estate plan, a retirement plan, a corporate reorganization or succession planning for the family business.

O’Connor often recommends participating permanent life insurance, which pays dividends, when working with families on planning issues that relate to estates or taxation.

O’Connor’s other favourite product is term life insurance, which can work well in time-limited situations. That could include, for example, a shareholders’ agreement that requires funding over a short period of time, such as 10 years.

O’Connor doesn’t work with investments, such as stocks and bonds. When his clients want to jump into the markets, he refers them to Hardev Bains, who runs the Lionridge Capital Management Inc. branch in Winnipeg.

Blackwood has an actuary on staff, so O’Connor can tap into in-house expertise to ensure products are aligned with clients’ long-term, big-picture plans. The financial planning strategies tend to be worked out in conjunction with accountants and lawyers.

O’Connor and his team – junior advisor Sam Parrish, administrators Mary Domitruk and Carrie Wilkins, as well as O’Connor’s wife Jennifer, who handles bookkeeping and office management – hope to expand in the coming months by working with some like-minded associate advisors.

O’Connor, who earns commissions on the policies he sells, started charging fees for planning work back in 2000 – either by the hour or by the project – and he continues to avoid tying his income to clients’ assets. The feedback on this approach has been positive.

“I’ve found,” O’Connor says, “that people are quite prepared to pay a fee if they can get an objective plan put together without that awkward expectation of having to buy a product [in order] for the advisor to get paid for all of his hard work.”

O’Connor, a 30-year veteran of the financial services business, got his start with London Life Insurance Co. in Toronto right after graduating from York University in Toronto. He grew up in Barrie, Ont., seeing the flexibility that his father, Kevin, had as a financial planner, and O’Connor wanted a similar lifestyle. “[Dad] was able to attend the sporting events of my brothers and sister,” O’Connor says, “and it allowed my mom to stay home and raise us.”

O’Connor started off in London Life’s group department and worked with pension and benefit plans, a journey that took him to Regina, Saskatoon, London, Ont., and St. Catharines, Ont.

And while he enjoyed the corporate experience and working in management, he spotted a niche in Winnipeg in 1999 that he didn’t feel was being particularly well served – business owners and high net-worth families.

“I didn’t think,” O’Connor says, “that I would be able to deliver on what I wanted to deliver on [from] inside the corporate world. It was time to get out and do it myself.”

O’Connor, when not at the office or with his family, often can be found at one of the many volunteer jobs he likes to tackle. His highest-profile role right now is as the president of the Corydon Community Centre, the largest community centre in Winnipeg, which services 34,000 people at three sites. O’Connor’s main project for the centre is trying to buy an outdated arena and replace it with a twin-pad facility to help to update the city’s aging rinks.

O’Connor is a director of the Rotary Club of Winnipeg, the Winnipeg Winter Club and the Canadian Association of Gift Planners; he also does some committee work for Ducks Unlimited. “I really feel that it is our responsibility to give back,” O’Connor says. “If you have some skills to be able to offer to volunteer groups, I think you should. I really enjoy it. Other volunteers have a lot of energy, and they’re very positive. You’re surrounding yourself with good people. I want to make a difference in the community.”

O’Connor and Jennifer, who have been married for 28 years, also like to travel. This autumn, they’re going to visit New York for the third time in three years. The couple like to incorporate sporting events, such as professional golf tournaments or the Daytona 500, into their trips.

Fitness is part of O’Connor’s daily routine. He has run 23 marathons over the years, including that little race in Boston, but he’s looking at taking up cycling due to some injuries.

The real passion for the O’Connors – he and Jennifer have raised five girls – is the family cottage at Lake of the Woods, located about two hours east of Winnipeg.

“We spend every possible moment at the lake,” O’Connor says. And if you need an indication of what O’Connor, along with friends and family, does with much of his time there, his fishing boat’s motor has 754 hours on it – and counting.

But if you’re looking for a Wi-Fi connection or to watch the big game on satellite TV, you’ve come to the wrong cottage. “We’ve made an effort to make our cabin the place where you’re playing cards or you’re reading,” O’Connor says. “And you’re not sitting in front of the TV because we don’t have one. It’s a real family place.”

Long hours, going the distance

Success in the financial services business has nothing to do with the luck of the Irish.

Here are three tips for advisors just starting out in the business from Pat O’Connor, president of Blackwood Wealth Planning in Winnipeg:

1. Pick a firm or organization that has great training opportunities, not just for new employees but on an ongoing basis, for sales and products.

“You’re going to need it,” O’Connor says. “You can’t go someplace and be really good with products and not be able to meet people.”

2. Align yourself with a well-established and successful advisor who can mentor you.

Down the road, if the relationship bears fruit, O’Connor says, you may even be able to buy his or her book of business.

“The demographics of our industry are bad,” he says. “We have a lot of advisors who are 55-plus, and not enough new advisors coming in. There is a great opportunity for new advisors to source senior, well-established advisors and develop a succession plan.” (See story on page B4.)

3. Successful people do the things that less successful people don’t like to do. “I try to live by that [motto],” O’Connor says. “Make that extra phone call on Friday, put the extra hours in, take that extra course. There’s no secret to success; you have to work hard.”

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