[Blog] Catching the Wave

Andy Butcher

It takes time to distinguish between a fad and a trend, but you can’t wait until you know for sure how a new thing will turn out, if you want to ride the wave. You have to jump into the water and be ready.

Greg Montejo is confident enough that subscription-based financial services will not just be a passing fancy but—as a Forbes article identified them earlier this year—“the new norm” for the industry that he’s making them a core focus of his Southern California company’s growth plan.

But while he’s building out a business that has one eye on the present and coming changes in consumer practices, the other is firmly set on unchanging principles that have stood the test of time. Hence the name he chose when he went out on his own three years ago: Proverbs Financial & Insurance Services. It comes from chapter four of the Old Testament book of Proverbs: “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.” “It’s a guiding principle,” says Montejo, who counts some old writings among the most valuable to him (see his resources recommendations on pages 91-92).

As a 30-something himself, he knows his generation and those following are different from folks who came before. He and his peers are awash in instant information, which can mean they think they know more than they really do about a topic. And they don’t want to be “sold” something.

Those two distinctions are at the heart of Montejo’s subscription service emphasis. “People want to feel empowered to be able to make a good decision for themselves,” he says. Then there’s Gen Zers’ and Millennials’ familiarity with subscribing to services—everything from music to meals in a box. Taking care of their money is just another subscription option.

“They understand and they recognize [the practice],” says Montejo. “As the industry continues to evolve and change, I think focusing on how people want to consume is probably the most important thing. Having a service-based business model is probably going to be the way of the future.”

Proverbs’ subscription rates run from $75 a month to $500, depending on the complexity of the clients’ needs. Not only is that attractive to some people (“You charge somebody $2,400 for a financial plan versus $100 a month”), but it expands their perception of what Montejo and his team can offer. (“I’m not making a lot on it [yet],” he acknowledges. “There is no standard model for this yet, so there’s not a lot of predictability on how to do this in a profitable way.”)

Subscribers can track their financial health and progress on an app and call for advice. “I get alerts the moment the client has $1 above the account emergency fund,” he explains. “That’s free money we can invest towards goals, so I’m hitting up clients—‘Hey, you’ve got an extra $30; what do you want to do with it?’ Or, ‘You’ve got an extra $30,000; what do you want to do with it?’” He also hosts a Beyond the Meeting podcast which, as the title alludes to, offers additional advice on financial planning issues.

Changing his mindset

For Misty Weltzien, managing partner at Pacific Advisors, with whom Proverbs is affiliated, Montejo’s trajectory is notable for his effective innovation—which, she points out, doesn’t have to be something done on a grand scale.

“In my experience, some of the best ‘innovations’ are just small tweaks to things or processes that already exist,” she tells Korsgaden Insights. “I think the way Greg has built/groomed his team is innovative,” including his early adoption of the protege approach to team building and developing specialists in areas such as investment and long-term care. “Usually, someone is much further in their career before they figure out a model like that and he has done it very early.”

In addition, Weltzien acknowledges Montejo’s commitment to continuing education, earning additional licenses and designations. “As we navigate complex economic and political landscapes, staying abreast of such topics is not just prudent, but essential,” she says.

Growing up as the third of four kids in Southern California’s “909er”-area code inland, Montejo’s family got by “but it wasn’t luxurious by any means.” A big sports fan, he dreamed of making it as a pro first in baseball, then basketball and finally football. An injury in his senior year of school put an end to any chances of that becoming a reality: “I went from thinking I’m the man to feeling like I’m not who I thought I was.”

He took that sense of diffidence to California State University, Long Beach, where he studied business economics. “I didn’t really have a lot of confidence because all my confidence and, I guess, identity were in sports. I’d listen to these kids talk in class and be like, ‘I’m no way near these guys.’ I was really timid.”

That lack of confidence meant he didn’t pursue any internships, settling for a cashier job at Walgreens until he realized he didn’t want to work there for the rest of his life. A conversation with his father, who had a friend who was a successful financial advisor, sparked the thought that maybe he could aspire to more.

Montejo’s first step up out of his rut was to take a job as a bank teller. Getting to meet “regular people” with millions of dollars in their accounts opened his eyes further. “Hearing people talking about real estate or investing and all this, exposed me to thinking that helped me elevate my thoughts. I was like, ‘This is a different kind of way.’”

Montejo followed his younger sister to Northwestern Mutual, which she had joined recently. He chuckles now that she had beaten him to many of the contacts they shared for potential clients—she even sold him a life insurance policy—but the first couple of years were tough as he tried to meet his required minimums. He was barely getting by, refereeing football and driving for Uber on the weekends to help make ends meet.

An advisor told him that if he could just survive, in time things would work out for him. Then he learned what he says is the first lesson in how to make it in the industry: “You can’t be too sensible.”

What that looked like for Montejo was taking on a coach when he was only just making enough to pay the bills, knowing he needed outside help to step up his game. Still, $1,500 a month was a lot of money, “but I decided to trust in his leadership and just do it.” It turned out to be a great decision. “He really helped challenge my mindset,” Montejo says. “He actually helped me have my first breakthrough.”

That came in December 2017, when Montejo faced ending the year not having even halfway made it toward his goal of writing 50 new clients for the year. He called his coach: “Hey, I’m giving up on my goal; we’re going into the holidays [and] I don’t want to disappoint myself.” But his coach wouldn’t let him give up. “We had done a lot of work around my mindset on why I would give up or why I was scared to fail and what the real fear was, so he said, ‘Look, dude, just go for it. What do you have to lose?’”

That outside voice sparked something in him. Montejo wrote more than 30 new clients in that last month of the year, the second-best performance of all Northwestern agents nationwide for that period.

What made the difference? “It was just the focus,” Montejo says. “I learned to lock in, be resourceful. It’s just crazy how your mind works: I’d be driving and [think], ‘OK, there’s 50 people who just drove by me right now. How many of them need insurance and they don’t even know that I sell it?’ So, my mind would start to go in those places, and it just became a treasure hunt—finding the next person who wanted to buy insurance.”

Unboxing new opportunities

Montejo met weekly with his coach—sometimes in person, sometimes remotely—for two years. That input brought Montejo to the place where he wanted the freedom to spread his business wings. At the same time, he wanted to mitigate some of the risk of going solo. The answer for him was founding Proverbs as part of the Guardian Financial network, “a kind of joint venture, if you will, where I can grow autonomously but also get support.”

As an early adopter of subscription-based financial services, Montejo is embracing a model that has its challenges, as that Forbes analysis noted, but which on balance it identified as “not just a smarter way of doing business” but likely “a catalyst for a more responsive, inclusive and dynamic financial ecosystem that can benefit both institutions and the dedicated consumer.”

Importantly, the subscription approach opens the door to new possibilities, says Montejo. “If we don’t get them to consume in the right framework, they’re going to put us in a box, and when they put us in a box, they limit our ability to help them, and that impacts everything else,” he says. This was limiting in his previous situation, he says: “I’d sell someone a life insurance policy, show them the strategy to do it and then I would go back to try to help them manage their money, and they’d be like, ‘Well, I thought you just do insurance.’

“I would see clients literally limit themselves because they looked at me as a life insurance guy, and I’m like, ‘Man, I’ve got strategies X, Y and Z, and they can’t even be open-minded to it because I’m stuck in this box. How do I get them to understand that I’m more than this?’ I want to be creating that environment where we are a strategist for clients and people are buying us for our financial acumen and our capabilities open up the possibilities of what clients can accomplish for themselves.”

While subscription services rely on the latest technology, their success is rooted in long-time best practices, Montejo underscores: “Accountability, saving, not spending more than you make—just the basics that are never going to fail you.” It’s about “not sacrificing the fundamentals to be successful,” he adds. “Times change, techniques change, we’re going to have a new presidency, taxes are potentially going to change—all that’s out of people’s control, [so we] focus on what we can control.”

That means helping clients slow down when they read about some sort of high-return strategy on social media and wonder about implementing it (often pitched by “self-proclaimed billionaires” with a lot of debt, Montejo observes). “Let’s hold up,” he advises them. “You’ll do that in five years; you’re not at that point yet. We’ve got to build on the basics because we want this thing to last. Knowing when to do things is very important for sustained success; you can’t run before you can walk.”

Learning to lead

Proverbs’ clients are in three main clusters—young individuals and families looking to accumulate wealth, older people interested in retirement planning and small business owners. In time, Montejo wants to focus more on this last sector: noting that around 62 million Americans are employed by small businesses, “it’s a one-to-many approach—if you can improve a business, it’s going to impact a lot more people as well.”

Working with business owners also appeals to his entrepreneurial side, though he recognizes this is an area he still needs to grow in. “In the past it was easy to run with the pack,” he says. “Leading is hard . . . I thought since I was a good mentor [in the past], I could be a good leader and I kind of learned the distinction between the two.”

Leading means having to make decisions that are not always popular. “You have to think bigger than just the one person,” he says. “You’ve got to know what you’re willing to tolerate as a business and what you’re not willing to tolerate and stand for that.”

One thing he does know about entrepreneurship is that “you’ve got to have vision. You have got to be willing to skate to the puck before the puck gets there, if you will. You’ve got to see things before people see them.” Subscription services are an example of that: “I know I’m not the only one [doing them, but] I started talking about it before I saw anybody else doing it.”

Family brought Montejo into the industry and continues to be an important aspect of his work. After almost a decade in the health care industry as a doctor of physical therapy, older sister Miranda joined the Proverbs team based in Irvine, California, as a financial representative. Montejo’s wife, Ellie, leads the agency’s recruiting efforts. With an eye to the future, Montejo wants to build his team to 100 advisors: “If each one of those has an average of 200 clients, that’s a lot of people we’re helping.”

Family connections also drive some of Proverbs’ community involvement. Every year, they take part in the Alzheimer’s Association’s The Longest Day fund-raiser to support care, research and advocacy efforts. “I got involved after watching my grandmother battle Alzheimer’s and it was a way for me to honor her after she passed,” says Montejo. “I felt it was important to spread the word around the disease and . . . to help shine light and inspire hope for people who are connected to this terrible disease.”

While Proverbs acknowledges the distinctive makeup of Millennials and Gen Z, the emphasis isn’t a marketing strategy, per se—the company doesn’t position itself as a young people’s financial services center in an effort to stand out from the competition.

“You go into business and you think you need to know your differentiator,” Montejo observes. “I always get asked ‘What makes you different?’ and I don’t know,” he admits, “but I know for a fact what I do really well and I know why I do it. I know what’s important to me. I think if you can just be who you are, you’ll be different by default.”