Why I Left the Corporate Finance World in My 20s
In my mid-20s, I was on a traditional track inside large financial institutions.
Clear ladder.
Recognizable brand names.
Predictable income.
From the outside, it looked stable.
But the longer I worked inside that structure, the more I realized something.
The job was not primarily about advice.
It was about asset gathering.
The Asset Gathering Model
Inside large firms, success is often measured by:
Assets brought in
Revenue generated
Growth metrics
Once assets are gathered, portfolio management is typically outsourced to pre-built models.
These models are packaged as sophisticated.
Institutional.
Diversified.
Research-backed.
But when I began analyzing them more closely, two things stood out.
They were expensive.
And the outcomes were often unremarkable.
A significant portion of the complexity seemed unnecessary.
Not because wealthy clients needed complexity.
But because complexity allows fees to be layered in ways that feel justified.
More moving parts.
More sub-managers.
More strategies.
It can look advanced.
That doesn’t automatically mean it’s better.
Complexity vs Clarity
The more I reviewed these portfolios, the more I questioned whether the complexity was serving the client or the firm.
Wealthy families do not need layers of opacity.
They need:
Clear allocation
Tax coordination
Income durability
Estate alignment
Instead, I saw portfolios that felt engineered to justify their own existence.
That did not sit well with me.
The Client Volume Reality
There was another issue.
To earn the income I wanted inside a large firm, I would have needed to manage nearly three times the number of households.
That means:
More meetings
Less depth
Less precision
More standardization
I did not want to build a practice where I was responsible for hundreds of families and forced into a model-driven approach.
I would rather work with fewer households and go deeper.
Precision requires time.
Time requires focus.
Pricing Freedom
Another constraint inside large firms is pricing.
You work within a prescribed structure.
Fee caps are rare.
Customization is limited.
Internal economics dictate the boundaries.
When I went independent, I could design my own pricing.
That’s why I cap my advisory fee.
Large firms would not dream of doing that.
But once you remove corporate overhead and internal payout layers, you gain flexibility.
And flexibility allows alignment.
What Independence Actually Changed
Going independent was not about rebellion.
It was about alignment.
It gave me the ability to:
Build portfolios intentionally instead of defaulting to pre-built models
Integrate tax planning into investment strategy
Stage income deliberately before retirement
Structure guardrails instead of relying on averages
Limit the number of families I serve
Independence reduced pressure to scale.
It increased freedom to think.
Why That Matters for Clients
In affluent communities like Grosse Pointe, families do not need more products.
They need structure.
They need clarity.
They need someone who can say:
“We don’t need to make this more complicated than it has to be.”
They also deserve to know how their advisor is incentivized.
When compensation depends on gathering assets into proprietary structures, advice can drift.
When compensation is transparent and capped, incentives align more cleanly.
The Tradeoff I Accepted
Leaving corporate finance in my 20s meant:
Less security
More risk
No institutional brand behind me
But it also meant:
No quotas
No model mandates
No complexity for the sake of justification
I chose fewer clients.
I chose deeper work.
I chose structure over scale.
Because long-term planning is not a volume business.
It is an architectural one.
