Questions for the Hawaii Team

Joseph Lynch, CRPC · Financial Wellness Consultant candidate

Dear Hiring Manager,

Thank you for taking the time to read this. Your recruiter kindly offered to pass along a few questions after our conversation today, and I'm grateful for the chance to ask them directly.

To prepare, I looked through Mosaic's public Form ADV. Here's my understanding of the book:

If I'm reading that correctly, it's very close in scale to the book my team supported at Empower, where my number was bringing in about $50M a year in new assets. Building a book this size this cleanly with a team of eight is impressive. The people in Oahu who built it deserve real credit, and I hope to meet them and contribute to what they've started.

How the Hawaii team will be built

The filing shows no pension or profit-sharing plan clients, so the book appears to be almost entirely individual and business wealth management.

1. Is Creative Planning planning to bring a broader team to the island to serve both the retirement and non-retirement sides of these relationships? In past roles I've worked alongside teams of CPAs, attorneys, CFPs and other specialists, and I'm curious what that support will look like here.
2. What is the anticipated size of the Hawaii team?
3. How does the wellness role fit into that structure? I have experience drawing on resources for after-tax accounts as well as retirement accounts, and I'd like to know whether that work will be part of the role.

How education and resources work

4. How are client education materials created at Creative Planning? At Security Benefit, Empower and Waddell & Reed, participant education was tightly controlled by marketing. What helped us most was getting in front of clients quickly, through an online portal where they could request meetings, and having internal resources on hand for marketing, educational and legal needs.

What success looks like

I have an idea of what it takes to succeed in this work, but I'd like to hear it from management:

5. What have you noticed that greatly increases an associate's chance of success here?
6. Beyond the fundamentals of our industry, how do you define success?
7. What pitfalls or warning signs should someone in this role watch for?

Technology is fun, and so is our work. But I've found that when a group moves past being coworkers and realizes it's one team, that is worth its weight in gold. Please take these questions as what they are: a sincere wish to understand the team, build real working relationships and add value from day one.