One Way to Add Young Clients: Hire a Young Advisor

“We feel the earlier that they start planning and start making financially sound, disciplined decisions, the better off they’ll be down the line,” Mattonelli said, noting that younger people can work on many important financial planning issues even if they haven’t built significant wealth yet.

Not Your Father’s 20-Somethings

Not only are there inherent differences in working with people in their 20s and 30s compared with older clients in general, today’s 20- and 30-somethings face different circumstances than their parents may have at the same age, he noted.

“A lot has changed,” Mattonelli said, with social media and access to information presenting both an opportunity and a potential risk.

“It can become really overwhelming in terms of trying to make a decision or make the right decision with their money,” he said. Clients may be self-educating more than they did in the past, but they’re not always getting high-quality information, he said.

Mattonelli helps clients “sift through what’s correct, what’s not correct,” with a lens on their specific situation. “That’s where we really can be a help to them.”

Older generations had more access to jobs 30 or 40 years ago that offered pensions, which made the retirement planning conversation different, Mattonelli noted. The vast majority of Gen Z members and millennials don’t have much access to pension plans, so their opportunities come from their own planning and an understanding of compound growth, he said.

Many young people now turn to robo-advisors, he noted. “Everything nowadays is an app. … Everything can be done online now,” or people simply do it themselves, which poses a challenge for the advisors, Mattonelli said.

Advisors like those at Van Leeuwen, a small, independent firm, can step in and set themselves apart with more complex planning issues, he added. Robo-advisors may be good for setting up accounts and investing in a simplified manner, while the firm provides value from a financial and goal-planning perspective, Mattonelli said, adding that clients know they have someone they can reach out to anytime for personalized, unbiased advice.

And goal planning is not a linear process, as those clients and their goals evolve over time, he added.

While a robo-advisor may be a barrier for some to engage with an advisor, “once they really see the services that we provide and the value that we can offer them, I think they truly see a night-and-day difference, that personal touch when it comes to financial decision-making, because again, while the numbers are very important, the personal side of our business is also very, very important,” Mattonelli said.

The firm has worked on building its consistent social media presence and meets monthly to discuss the content it wants to run on sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, Mattonelli said.

Even in the social media era, though, Mattonelli said the age-old way of working with clients works the best — providing exceptional service and advice.

Mattonelli, who graduated from The College of New Jersey, seemed like an ideal advisor for Van Leeuwen’s firm.

“Jeff embodied a lot of the characteristics that I look for in a potential advisor,” founder Van Leeuwen said.

“As a former college football player, he portrayed an ambitious, can-do attitude, both of which are important characteristics of a financial advisor,” he said. “Financial advisors experience many challenges, and someone who was a committed college athlete understands the importance of being resilient and capable of picking themselves up when they get knocked down.”

Pictured: Ken Van Leeuwen, left, and Jeff Mattonelli