People on the Move: Spotlight on Matt McGinness

Matt McGinness has a reputation for producing heavy hitting research in practice management.

He’s also been schooled in the ways of consulting with advisory firms to help them grow their businesses. That’s why San Diego-based First Allied Securities tapped him as its new managing director to runs its advisory consulting services division.

First Allied has been among this industry’s leading independent broker/dealers for several years. Since 2007, it has consistently ranked between 20 and 24 on Financial Planning’s list of the biggest and fastest growing independent broker dealerss.

But that’s not enough. The firm wants to break out and do business on a much higher level, according to executives at the company.

“Mr. McGinness will play an instrumental role in helping position First Allied as a world-class independent broker-dealer committed to providing objective guidance and help advisors attain their financial goals,” said First Allied President Adam Antoniades.

In a phone interview Wednesday, McGinness said First Allied aggressively tries to help advisors grow their business, and it goes beyond providing service and technology. Many advisors often struggle with successfully managing two sets of skills: Drumming up business and managing it on the back end, he said. They bring in plenty of revenue, but don’t understand why they are not taking home more. They say they feel like they are running a successful business, but don’t understand why working on it is so taxing.

And so McGinness, 36, caught the company’s eye. For 12 years, he has worked in consulting and marketing capacities, developing solid expertise in compensation, staffing, financial management, client surveys, customer experience design, marketing strategy and tactics, as well as client service and satisfaction. He was an associate director at the respected research firm Cerulli Associates, based in Boston.

While there, he wrote studies on topics including the adoption of fee-based pricing, wholesaling and alternative investments for the Cerulli Report series.

LPL Financial Services, the industry’s largest independent broker-dealer, hired McGinness from Cerulli. There, he was vice president of business consulting and delivered business analysis to its top advisers.

MGinness left LPL to launch Best Practice Research, a research and consulting firm. While there, he authored the 2009 Moss Adams/Investment News Advisor Compensation and Study, and co-authored reports for Pershing.

“On an industry level, it totally makes sense,” said Tim Welsh, president of Nexus Strategy in Larkspur, Calif. “I think be able to relate to [advisers] because he’s been in their business and can speak their common language.”

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