Mark Smith
BeManaged provides investment advisory solutions designed to help investors reach their financial goals. Our holistic do-it-for-you approach gives investors a partner through their financial journey with the insight, knowledge and expertise to navigate investments and maximize their financial outcomes.
BeManaged was founded in 2006 with the belief that everyone should have access to high-level investment management and advice at a fair value. As an independent fee-only advisor, we hold ourselves to the highest fiduciary standard of care. We are committed to helping investors create, optimize, and execute their financial plan without the sales products that can lead to conflicts of interest.
Tell us about yourself?
This is a family business. My father has been in Finance for 30+ years and after working with business/individuals of all sizes, he wanted to start a business dedicated to helping the every-day retiree. I joined the team while in law school, initially providing Compliance support, but soon became an adviser myself after enjoying the process of getting someone to retirement.
If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
Buy Gamestop!
The real piece of advice that I would give myself is to refine our sales practice. A lot of Advisors that we compete with use traditional sales tactics (shady!) to sign new clients/take clients from BeManaged. We have created a new sales message that more directly demonstrates our value compared to other advisers or robo-advisers.
What problem does your business solve?
When pensions were the favored method for retirement savings, committees had access to
a range of experts to help make plan decisions.
Defined Contribution Plans, which have largely replaced the pension, shifted responsibility for retirement investing onto individual employees.
Unfortunately, most individuals do not have the time/understanding to effectively design a path to retirement, construct portfolio strategies, monitor market conditions, and revise the plan as life dictates.
BeManaged was formed in 2006 to help address this expertise deficiency!
What is the inspiration behind your business?
We were tired of seeing smaller investors, who perhaps need the most help, being ignored by the traditional investment adviser. We want to provide them with the same level of advice and expertise that someone with $1 million enjoys. By providing a low-cost, conflict free advisory service, we can bring investment advice to everyone.
What is your magic sauce?
No sales products! We are 100% conflict free, which means we will never collect a commissioned fee, and will not sell investors anything they do not need (like an annuity or whole-life insurance). Our success is based on your success.
Our fees are also ~50% lower than the typical advisory fee.
What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?
We want to expand our advisory business and create more brand recognition. We know that our service is as good, and generally better, than any service you can receive from a large investment advisor. We just need to make sure investors recognize the value of our service and avoid getting sold on a product they do not need.
We want to revolutionize the investment advisory industry one investor at a time.
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?
We are a small fish in a big ocean. There area a lot of large advisors in our field competing for the same dollars that we are. The biggest change we have made is to target individual investors as opposed to working with employer groups. With large employers, we have access to all of the employees…but there are also a lot of moving parts when working with a large business.
While we still enjoy a number of these relationships, we have shifted a lot of our focus to signing individual/family investors. By bringing our message directly to them, we can more clearly define our advantage, without the gatekeeper.
How do people get involved/buy into your vision?
We aim to work with employers that want to provide their employees with high-level investment advice, and protect them from the salespeople that populate our industry. Our service is FREE to employers and we are confident that, after meeting with us, any executive/HR representative will be happy with the service we can provide.
You can go to https://bemanaged.com/empower-your-company/ for more information or email [email protected]
For individuals who would like a free investment consultation, they can visit www.BeManaged.com or email [email protected]
