COVER STORY | YOUNG ADVISORS TO WATCH
Adam Cmejla, CFP
Founder / Integrated Planning & Wealth Management / Carmel, Ind.
How do you build a new RIA business after dropping your broker-dealer affiliation and you have relocated from your home state? Simply announcing you’ re a fiduciary doesn’ t make the phone ring. Adam Cmejla says that when he struck out on his own in 2011, a feeling of imposter syndrome crept in as he tried to figure out what his new firm was going to look like. He started with seminars and cold calls, trying to reach everybody and anybody and promise to do anything for them but mow their lawn.
A premed major and son of a parents who ran a woodworking business in Wisconsin, Cmejla got into personal finance after being lured by a class in college. Afterward he spent time at Waddell & Reed and Cambridge Investment Research but didn’ t like the product focus of the B-D world, which is why he wanted to go independent.
But it was slow going. He eventually focused on serving physicians, dentists, pharmacists and optometrists. But then it dawned on him: The last group all by itself made business sense( optometry was his wife’ s field). The process forced him to learn to articulate
what his value was. He did the math, looked at the nation’ s 34,000 optometrists, decided he needed 80. Not because of their assets, but their cash flow.
“ I know what their income is. And I know what the practices produce. That’ s why we put on our website that we do our best work with practices that are doing at or above $ 1 million in top-line revenue.” He knows what the margins will be, which means the cash flow is there to support his fee model.“ It’ s democratized the business model.”
He eventually started a podcast called“ 20 / 20 Money” that he says has had 400,000 total downloads since it started. He also writes a column for the Review of Optometric Business. And he spent four years coaching other advisors about how to find their own value.
And the ways young advisors unlock value is a critical point, because in the world we live in, Cmejla says, advisors increasingly assume that they must chase only rich people’ s assets and charge by AUM. That means the commodity of advice itself is bundled up in ways that it could be free. And his discovery of this helped him unlock value at his own firm.
Katie Marsden, CFP, CDFA
Wealth Advisor / Focus Partners Wealth / St. Louis
Katie Marsden knew she wanted to work in business from an early age. She felt close to the financial world because her grandmother was an active investor, who ran an investment club in Kansas City, regularly talking about names like Microsoft while working at an early version of an RIA.
“ I grew up where people regularly talked about finance.” Marsden gravitated toward accounting, but she took a personal financial planning elective in her sophomore year at the University of Missouri in Columbia( the course was run by the College of Human Environmental Sciences, of all places).
She also was drawn to the personal nature of the work.“ I’ ve always been kind of a Chatty Cathy, so it’ s a career where I can meet new people and talk with people and help them,” she says.
Marsden was lucky enough to be absorbed into the fee-only world straight away after college by hitting the right job fairs and meeting the right people. She got her feet wet during the financial crisis,
when people’ s emotions were running high as stock values ran low.
She eventually ended up at Buckingham Strategic Wealth, where she said there seemed to be as many females on staff as males.( Buckingham was eventually folded into Focus Financial.) Later, she helped one client with divorce issues— someone whose wealth was mostly in an IRA.“ It got me thinking about her journey through her divorce and who was available to help her think through things.”
Marsden realized there was more the firm could be doing; she became a certified financial divorce analyst in 2016. She realized that this area of planning was so complicated that it could be a business of its own, and there weren’ t many people in St. Louis offering it.
She helped lead the new effort.“ A few years later we started offering consulting services where we would help people without a plan and provide advice without managing anything. … Luckily [ Buckingham ] let me take that and run with it.”
Attorneys and accountants can help with decisions for today when it comes to divorces, but advisors fill a bigger gap, she says: explaining what these decisions will mean in the long term.
MAY 2025 | FINANCIAL ADVISOR MAGAZINE | 37