After becoming dissatisfied with the investment vehicles available to him, Paul Green decided to switch strategy
Growing up with a mother and father who were both self-made entrepreneurs it was little surprise that Paul Green developed an interest in all things business from an early age. So, when his father developed an interest in investing, he involved Paul, and while other 11-year-olds were playing with action figures, Green was sitting with his dad talking about the stock market.
After finishing high school, Green attended Bowling Green State University where he earned a Bachelor of Science in Finance. But despite his passion for investments, he didn’t enter the business straight after graduating.
“I started out in 1992 with an insurance company learning how to produce; how to get out there and find clients,” says Green, who is now the head of the Green Private Wealth Counsel Team. “But in 1994, I decided to leave the firm and go it alone in financial planning. I noticed that most people I bumped into didn’t have an overall financial game plan; they didn’t have anyone to pull everything together. I saw that as a real opportunity to help people, especially business owners who typically don’t have a lot of time on their hands.”
Green went on to become a certified financial planner in 1998 and focused on providing a cross section of insurance products and mutual funds during his early years in the industry. Green was satisfied with his strategy for the most part, but that changed in 2009. He’d noticed the performance of products on offer suffer in early 2000 and the same thing happen in 2008 – 2009. Green was frustrated and decided to change his business model and manage the investment piece on his own, something he’d never planned on doing.
“I didn’t want to be distracted from all of the other areas I though clients really needed help with, but I was let down by the funds in our portfolios; the protection wasn’t there,” Green says. “I finally said I can’t really rely on the industry, I need to do it on my own, to use technical analysis to be able to move in and out of the markets.”
Between 2009 and 2012, Green searched for an alternative strategy or product, but to no avail. In 2012, he moved over to the IIROC side of the business to work toward the chartered investment manager accreditation, which he received in 2014. “Then, in the summer of 2015, we became portfolio managers, which meant we could do all of the investment work ourselves,” Green says. “It took a long time to accomplish that ambition; it took a lot of work.”
It’s been move that has proved fruitful for Green who was able to increase his assets under management by $30 million in 2016, something he puts down to the multi-faceted nature of his team’s skill set. “When you put together the discretionary portfolio management with the certified financial planning, we tend to stand out a little bit from the typical advisor and people see that value,” Green says. “We also do proper risk management, and are a shop that can be 100% cash at any time. A lot of people talk a big game in terms of risk management, but don’t necessarily deliver when it hits the fan.”
Paul Green
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