“I’m a really bad employee,” Jeff Cullen said. “I move fast and break things. I don’t fit in with a typical corporate environment where there’s a chain of command, a budget, and you have to ask for permission for everything. I’m just not wired that way.”
Cullen, CEO of Strategic Retirement Partners (SRP), described the firm he co-founded with COO Deane Mayerhofer, and the reasons for doing so.
“When I left the payroll industry, I said, ‘I will never work for anybody else in my life again,’” he said. “I constantly innovate and build things; otherwise, I just get bored, which is like death for me. I lose interest and a part of me dies.”
Melodramatic? Maybe, but his self-awareness checks out with those who know him. Starting with a small investment in 2015, the nationwide firm today has 135 employees in 35 locations, serving over 1,373 retirement plans, 396,000 participants, and more than $26 billion in assets under management.
Impressively, it’s been named a “favorite place to work” in seven of its 10 years.
Echoing Cullen, Mayerhofer called the founding advisors “misfits somewhat” (herself included), not as an insult but to emphasize their different way of thinking, and the passion they bring.
“It was pre-2015, and through some circumstances and events, Jeff, myself, and a few other advisors were looking for a different home,” she said. “We spent time with other firms. What we kept coming back to is that everything was an employer-employee model. We were really struggling because we didn’t fit in anywhere. For instance, we felt like we couldn’t find the right technology solution, so we needed to build it. It was David versus Goliath.”
Not surprisingly, they received a heap of condescension from competitors after striking out on their own.
“The attitude was, ‘Oh, you guys are so cute. That’s so funny. You’re not going to make it,’” Mayerhofer recalled. “But everyone at the firm proved them wrong through grit and raw determination.”
She didn’t hesitate when asked what sets SRP apart.
“It’s our people. If you ask every single person at SRP, they’d all say that. It’s the culture, not only the best of the best advisors, but the way we went about our hiring strategy, our training program, and bringing people in from outside of the industry. Our employee-ownership model reflects a true culture of inclusivity and sharing, not just inside the organization, but outside, as well, with competitors.”
Moving fast and breaking things means “the industry mold,” according to Mayerhofer, with her last point, sharing with competitors, an example. She recently took the stage at conferences hosted by LeafHouse and friendly competitor Prime Capital Financial to share SRP’s “secret sauce,” believing that such coopetition between firms benefits the industry and the workers it serves.
Secret Sauce
That secret sauce has three ingredients — people, process, and technology. Like Mayerhofer, Cullen was especially enthusiastic when describing the first.
“In my opinion, there’s no other firm that a ‘Type A’ producer wants to be a part of,” he said. “They are not designed to attract, retain, reward, or really make for a fun environment for a highly motivated producer. It became all about building a firm that would free a producer to do only three things that matter — meeting with prospects, clients, and centers of influence. If we can optimize a great producer’s calendar and enable them to spend as much time as possible focused on those three things and not administrative distractions, then we’ve really got something.”
Claiming that he wants to be as big and consequential as the largest firms, he noted the frustrating fact that the industry is (still) overwhelmingly male-dominated.
“We wanted to build a firm that our daughters would be proud to work at,” Cullen said. “Here we are 10 years in, and my daughter and Dee’s daughter work for SRP, love it, and are very successful.”
Mentioning its roster of advisors, he specifically named Erin Hall, Jeanne Sutton, and Shannon Maloney as emblematic of the firm’s “Type A, kick [butt] advisors.”
“These women don’t take [crap] from anybody, and they’re with SRP. Why? Because we’re doing what we said, which was to attract, reward, and retain great advisors who also happen to be wonderful people. We’ve walked away from a lot of advisor recruits because we knew they didn’t share our values and would be a net negative to the firm.”
SRP is structured to take full advantage of another key ingredient, technology, both from a strategic standpoint and from necessity.
“What really stuck out — and why we built SRP and our operations chassis — is that other firms didn’t have true back-office support,” Mayerhofer said. “They had technology solutions they offered to their advisors, but not true infrastructure from an operations team that provided participant education, wealth services, HR, payroll, and sales and marketing. It had to free up the advisors’ time.”
The thinking is simple: outsource as many administrative tasks as possible to free the advisors’ time to do what Cullen calls the three essential advisor tasks — meeting with prospects, clients, and centers of influence.
“We’re really good at empowering great advisors to go be themselves and do what they do best and what they were born to do,” he said.
Necessity stemmed from the fact that they never accepted outside investors.
“When starting the firm, we wouldn’t take private equity money, so we had to be gritty and innovative in leveraging technology to save every nickel,” Cullen added. “The dedication to innovation is out of necessity because, as far as I know, we’re the largest independent retirement plan consulting firm in the United States that has no outside funding. We started the firm with a little over $100,000. You can’t build a $100 million company with that amount of money unless you embrace technology and allow it to create efficiencies.”
SRP’s long-term goals reflect Cullen and Mayerhofer’s energy and ambition.
“I want to have a billion-dollar valuation,” Cullen said. “I want to be considered by our peers as the most sophisticated firm in the industry from an AI and automation perspective. We’re definitely on that path. Lastly, I would like to be known as the company that figured out the health, wealth, and retirement convergence and does it better than anybody else.”
A boilerplate question to end the interview brought an all-too-expected response: Are they satisfied with how far they’ve come?
“No, and frankly, we’re way behind where I wanted to be at this stage,” Cullen said. “I’ve learned the hardest thing in this process and why we’re not ‘there’ yet. When your goal is to attract the best advisors, that’s a long process. Great advisors are also really picky. It takes time to win them over and prove to them that we’re the right fit for them.”
“Are we ever satisfied with where we are? Of course not,” Mayerhofer bristled. “We’ll continue our relentless effort on behalf of our advisors, offices, and those whom they support.”