Advisor explains why he and his partners moved the practice his father built to a new firm
Cliff Steele grew up in the wealth management business. The Financial Planner at The Steele Group of Assante Financial Management Ltd. in Cambridge, On. is the son of the founding advisor, who started The Steele Group back in 1996. That practice began as part of Mutual Life, which became Clarica, which was eventually acquired by Sun Life Financial. Steele’s father built the practice for almost its entire history as part of Sun Life, transitioning with the whole industry from transactional insurance service to the delivery of holistic wealth management.
Steele trained to join his father’s practice, studying financial planning at Wilfrid Laurier university. He joined the practice in 2009, straight out of university and into the fire of the Great Financial Crisis. He worked in close partnership with his dad for seven years before his father retired in 2016 and Steele took ownership over the family practice, eventually bringing in two other Financial Planners, Mario Mota and Mark Wiesel, as partners. Steele and his partners kept growing their business with Sun Life as their firm. Despite all that growth, however, in 2022 Steele and his partners decided it was time for a change.
"As our office and the needs of our clients continued to grow, we observed gaps forming over time. We began to wonder if we would be better suited to a firm whose primary focus aligned more with our business, wealth management and financial planning,” Steele says. “Companies like Sun Life have many avenues they need to focus on, such as insurance, pensions, and benefits. We found this led to gaps in areas like product shelf limitation. Over time, as the gaps grew between what our business needed and what Sun Life could deliver it became apparent, we really needed to consider making a big change.”
Steele and his partners conducted a comprehensive search for a new firm. They talked to the banks but found many of the same constraints and challenges they were encountering at Sun Life. They spoke with a number of independents, as well, who offered them generous transition loans, but found those firms delivered a rapid download of information, without enough time to reflect. Steele says it felt a bit like ‘drinking from a firehose.’ Despite a smaller transition loan, Steele and his partners decided to move their practice to CI Assante Wealth Management.
Assante, Steele says, took them through around six of seven meeting before he and his partners even agreed to join. Steele and his partners met with different departments, one day talking about website capabilities, another day talking about CRM tools and trading platforms. A whole meeting was dedicated to compliance. The care and diligence involved in those meetings convinced Steele and his partners to join.
While Steele was making one of the biggest decisions in his career, he was bound to silence with his father. At his retirement Steele’s dad had been legally separated from any decision making related to the practice. Steele says he would have loved his dad’s advice, but couldn’t tell him anything for contractual reasons. Steele’s dad was so in the dark that he booked the extended family a cottage getaway in Muskoka for the week The Steele Group moved to Assante. Steele says he spent his days talking to clients about the move over the cottage’s less-than-ideal wifi, and his evenings with the family. Thankfully his father fully supported the decision-making process and move once he learned about it.
When he made the move, Steele was worried — as any advisor would be — that his clients might not come with him. He was bound by non-solicitation clauses and had to trust in the strength of his relationships. He’s grateful that many of his long-standing clients chose to make the switch and he says the new infrastructure at Assante has begun another stage of growth for his team.
Within Assante, Steele now says he can spend more time with clients and less time on the ‘overabundance’ of compliance that many advisors struggle with. There’s more efficient administrative follow-up too, and with those capabilities Steele says he and his team can offer more proactive wealth management services. The tech stack, that should be viewed as table stakes, is more efficient and worry free. The fully open product shelf, too, has allowed Steele’s clients to fully discuss and access any product or strategy they want. Steele likes a discursive relationship with his clients and now he can fully discuss ideas and new products with his clients.
Steele is glad he made the change but emphasized that it’s not a decision to be taken lightly. As other advisors consider the firm, they’re with and where they might want to go, Steele’s lesson is that it takes a great deal of work to find the right fit.
“Sometimes advisors make the decisions because they had a bad Friday, because they spilled coffee on their shirt and got a trade rejection” Steele jokes. “That can’t be why, there has to be more of a reason to it. We all have bad days. It’s about making sure you fit where you are. If you don’t feel you do, you need to take the time to find a place where you do fit. That’s something that needs to be done with an appreciation of client expectation, service offering, your practice’s needs and what any potential partner is doing. Really, it’s about taking the time to make sure you make the right decision.”
