Episode 47: The Pursuit of Continuous Improvement with TJ Van Gerven

My guest on today’s podcast is TJ Van Gerven. TJ is the founder of Modern Wealth Builders, a financial planning and wealth management firm for high-earning millennial couples. In this episode TJ shares his story of entrepreneurship from starting off in a corporate setting to taking the leap of starting his own firm in the hopes of providing deeper value to the people he serves, at a lower cost, while still being able to provide a great living for himself. He discusses how he made some moves that weren’t the “right financial planning” move, but were the right entrepreneurial move and how sometimes financial planning strategies and entrepreneurial strategies can be different. I loved this episode because TJ’s story is very similar to my own, and we think very similarly in how to provide value to the people we serve in the financial planning space. And be sure to listen to the end as TJ explains how he defines success to include constant improvement- not from a comparison to others perspective, but a comparison to his former self. So with that introduction, I hope you enjoy this episode of the Self-Employment Success Podcast with TJ Van Gerven.

Transcript:

Leland Gross CFP EA (00:07)

Of course, I'm excited for today's conversation. One, because I like you and I think your business is fascinating, and two, because your business is a lot like mine, so I think it'll be a really fun conversation. But go ahead and tell the listeners who you are, what your business is, and what you do and who you serve.

T.J. van Gerven (00:26)

Yeah, absolutely. So I launched my firm, Modern Wealth Builders, back in 2018. So I serve millennial couples, specifically when one person has some type of equity compensation. So that's usually the way that people come to me is maybe they're working for a private company and they have stock options and they're anticipating going public and they're trying to figure out the tax planning behind it and ultimately what they want to do with that money. So that's usually the initial kind of pain point that brings people in.

But then beyond that, it really transitions into a financial planning and wealth management relationship. So like ultimately figuring out like what do you want to use your resources for? Like actually living your life, right? Because that's the point of actually using your money. And so, you know, my story was I've always been interested in personal finance and investing in college. I studied economics and actuarial science. So I was always into kind of like the math side of things, but I didn't really know a lot about the personal finance and financial planning.

And after college or my senior year of college, I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do. And I got introduced to the idea of personal, you know, financial planning. And I ended up working for a practice through Ameriprise, working for a really great advisor who had been there for a long time. And she kind of showed me the ropes. I got all my licenses and CFP designation, those kind of things. But I, you know, was always following Michael Kitsis, if you're not familiar, Michael Kitsis is kind of like our, you know, industry leader for financial planning and

really discovered the independent side of things. And so I kind of knew pretty early at a college that what I wanted to do was build my own independent financial planning practice, serving my generation just because most of the industry was geared towards serving retirees with a million dollars or more of investable assets. And I really wanted to figure out a way how I could serve people who aren't there quite yet, but really are making like those big decisions early on.