Advisors interested in devoting their attention on clients’ needs and concerns, while helping select the right asset managers and products, can benefit by using Turnkey Asset Management Programs or TAMPs.
Finding listings of the best TAMP providers may be difficult unless you reach out to trusted sources.
With $2.8B under management, Beacon Capital Management isn’t the size of an Envestnet, SEI, or AssetMark yet, but its system elegantly builds portfolios to fit concrete client demands and advisory needs with exceptional advisor and client support.
The crown jewel revolves around retirement income solutions that actually respond to market conditions, pivoting out of risk assets early in a downswing and then rebalancing when the cycle improves.
It’s disciplined, rules-based and easy to explain. Clients know exactly where the “bottom” will come for them personally, and you can tell them that’s the limit.
And it isn’t Monte Carlo. These are real outcomes. In an increasingly brittle market, simply being able to show retired prospects how safe they are is a huge competitive edge.
For one thing, it’s the opposite of everyone else beating the “stay the course” drum the minute clouds form on Wall Street.
Clients of advisors who use Beacon portfolios know that they’ll ride out a truly bad bear market in relative safety.
“Those are times when we step in and trigger a stop loss,” Beacon CEO Chris Cook says. “When that portfolio drops by 10%, we will step in and protect the client, get them out of their equity investments. Then we go over to bonds, almost exclusively Treasuries and, essentially, we hide.”
In the meantime, the equity allocation keeps generating a whole lot more income than the Treasury bonds clogging standard retirement portfolios and still paying 2% yields a decade after the crash.
Beacon has all the math to show investors exactly what kind of glide paths to expect. Since it’s proprietary, I can’t show it to you here, but you can reach out via their TAMP Dashboard Messenger.
Ultimately, it turns into something like a traditional defined benefit experience without the headaches of integrating annuity contracts into a planning framework designed for other asset classes.
But Beacon supports annuities too if that’s where your clients’ risk questionnaires point you. This is all about the end-level investor’s comfort. If they want to be sure you won’t lose your money, you become the hero here.
Above and beyond red carpet “customer service”
And that effort to make the people at the front end of the process happy and secure is visible throughout the conversation.
A lot of “me too” portfolio programs revolve around their own inner workings as though trying to dazzle advisors with the possibilities around every toy in the box.
They’re talking face-to-face to technocrats. The rest of us aren’t as interested in engineering our own systems as finding tools to plug into specific aspects of our practice.
The Beacon retirement income system is just one of those tools. Prospects can see the benefit right away. If they respond, you’re on your way.
You’ll have a lot more time to get in front of those prospects. While the portfolio designs are unique, the platform itself has all the convenience we’ve come to associate with the outsourced approach.
Everything is integrated, from onboarding through custody and trades all the way to billing, reporting and ultimately client distributions. They can handle the entire back office. They’ll even bill your client monthly to better fit your cash flow needs.
“We try to make it as easy as possible, so the advisor is just talking to clients, spending their time on what they’re good at,” Cook says. “We try to help them as much as we can with the business side of the business.”
That’s always been the promise of the turnkey model, so I had to push back a little. What does this particular firm do that’s so helpful? Are they just doing what everyone else does and awarding themselves a trophy?
As it turns out, they’ve invested a lot of resources into making sure they can back up their talk.
Beacon has 15 wholesaler offices around the country to get as close to every advisor as they can and provide local coaching.
They’re happy to sit down with clients with you. Maybe they answer questions. Maybe they just absorb the way you operate so they can help you better.
In a world where most portfolio providers are really still software companies that never pick up the phone, that’s a refreshingly high level of touch.
When I talked to Cook, he was on his way to Philadelphia to help an advisor put on a client marketing event. Anyone can put bytes on the screen. Beacon puts boots on the ground.
If you want to test that proposition or simply figure out how to integrate new portfolios into your practice, reach out to Beacon and they’ll take it from there.
Most of the advisors they talk to are busy and ambitious people. They don’t have a lot of time to make a lot of repetitive calls simply to satisfy their own sense of due diligence.
People Beacon works with are already successful and hungry to get bigger. What they want is time and the closest thing to instant ROI as it gets.
