Meet Matt Heller of Willner Heller

Unknown Speaker 0:00
From Los Angeles, this is the Echelon Radio Network.

Brian Hemsworth 0:17
Hey, everybody, it is Brian Hemsworth. We are here at the Echelon Radio Podcast. And we got Matt Heller in seeing us today. Welcome, Matt. Thanks for not only coming by, but coming back.

Matt Heller 0:29
Brian, it’s my pleasure. Thanks very much for having me.

Brian Hemsworth 0:31
Matt is the first one from the Echelon ranks to actually come to our podcast studios a second time. We think he’s a secret agent because somehow his first podcast mysteriously self-destructed after we after we did recording, so I appreciate your coming back and spending a little more time with us.

Matt Heller 0:50
Yeah, I thought maybe I needed a practice round first.

Brian Hemsworth 0:52
You actually did a great job. But I felt bad that we didn’t get it. But we’re gonna get some good stuff today. I think the one of the things that I just love hearing you talk about is your journey in getting into wealth management. And one thing we didn’t touch base on last time, you talked about how you were born back east, but you went to college out here. And so we kind of missed that middle part of your journey. So why don’t you pick up from college. Where do you go to college? And how did you get into financial management in the first place?

Matt Heller 1:29
Well, I grew up in New York, just outside Manhattan, Westchester County in a city called New Rochelle. And I decided at the end of my high school career there, it was time for a change. I wanted to get out of Northeast and I visited Southern California a couple of times, and I thought, Hey, you know what, that’s not a bad place to be. So I attended the University of Southern California. Trojan, fight on. Absolutely loved it. Had a tremendous experience there. And I really wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. When I was in college, I sort of thought I would become a lawyer, because my dad thought that was a good idea. And I didn’t have a whole lot of better options at the time that I thought would be good career choices. But ultimately, I at the end of my college career, I was already heavily in student debt. I was on financial aid. My parents were not wealthy, despite the reputation of the university’s undergraduate students. So I thought, all right, well, I need to get a job and started out in sales and marketing and ultimately took a job a couple years out of college with a small financial planning firm in the South Bay. And that was my entrance into the world of financial services.

Brian Hemsworth 2:44
So you were living in the South Bay at the time, working for a small firm, but you did make a jump to some of the bigger firms?

Matt Heller 2:51
I did. Yes, I realized two things very quickly when I first got into the industry. One was I really loved what I was doing. I really liked the idea of working with clients to help them build wealth to educate their children to retire, to you know, build their dream home. But the second thing was nobody had heard of the little firm that I was working for. So fortunately, USC is very famous for its networking. I ended up getting a position with Wells Fargo securities through a fraternity brother from USC, who was at Wells at the time. And this was back in the early 1990s when commercial banks were getting into the retail investment arena. In Wells’s case, they’re losing about $45 million a week in deposits going out to mutual funds and two brokerage houses. So like any good business, they said, Well, if we can’t beat them, let’s join them. So they went around hiring individual Investment Advisors like myself, and that was how I transitioned from the small firm to the large firm.

Brian Hemsworth 3:55
So what was the best thing about working for the big firms?

Matt Heller 3:58
The best thing is if you work for a large financial institution and services, true of any large company, they have resources. They’re able to train you, they’re able to spend time, mentoring you and giving you an opportunity to really learn and protect, you know, perfect your craft, if you will. And Wells was at the time very much into training, and they were, you know, very concerned about is having the proper licenses and the proper training to be able to engage with their clients and to be able to effectively work with high net worth individuals to market securities.

Brian Hemsworth 4:35
So let’s look at the opposite end of that. What What did you like least about working for the big firms?

Matt Heller 4:41
Well, for me, at least, I always had the concept in my mind that I was working for my clients. That they were really the people who I was there to serve and it was their goals that became my goals. However, if you’re working for a large institution, it doesn’t really work that way. I was reminded more than once, during my tenure, and not just with Wells, but with other large banks and brokerage firms I worked with previously that, no, no, you don’t work for your clients, you work for them. They’re the ones who pay you they set the agenda, they create the approved selling list of securities. And yeah, to know, you know, whose side you are on, and it wasn’t necessarily the client’s side.

Brian Hemsworth 5:22
Gotcha. So walk us through briefly how you made the transition away from those firms and started up your own.

Matt Heller 5:32
Well, Brian, it was a process. Like any good investment advisor, I would read the Wall Street Journal, voraciously. And in the mid 1990s, after I’d been in the industry for a couple of years, I was still new and I was still learning, I started reading about the concept of fee based wealth management. Now, at the time I got into the investment services industry, it was very much a product driven commission based platform. Essentially, advisors would sell a financial product or service to an end user, they would receive a commission—

Brian Hemsworth 6:06
The commission was on the transaction itself?

Matt Heller 6:08
Correct.

Brian Hemsworth 6:08
So if you didn’t transact, no commission?

Matt Heller 6:11
If you didn’t sell, he didn’t eat. It was abundantly clear from day one. And this was how it had been done for generations. You know, I kind of walked into the industry when I did, and that was how compensation was structured. However, I began reading articles in the Journal about being fee based. And essentially what that meant is, rather than charging a commission for a product sale, you charged a fee on the whole of the wealth that you managed. So if you had a million dollars, rather than putting that million dollars into a mutual fund and getting a commission, you would charge a fee, perhaps 1% annually, where you would get paid $10,000 a year in recurring revenue on that million dollars. And what I found most intriguing about that concept was financially it put me on the same side of the table as my client. So typically, a client sits down with you, they have a million dollars, they want to make 2 million, they want to make 4 million they want to make as much as they can make, they don’t want to lose. Well, if you’re on a commission based structure, financially, you don’t really care if your client makes money. Now, you might have a moral and ethical obligation that you want to help your client, but financially, it doesn’t add up. But the fee based model really does. Because if a client starts with a million, and then you move them to 2 million, they’re happy you doubled their money. Well, you’re happy you just doubled your fee. Conversely, if you start with a million and you lose half of it, client isn’t happy, they lost half a million dollars, you’re not happy, you lost half of your fee. So I started becoming aware of this concept. And that was very forward thinking at the time. Ultimately, by the time I left the big firms to start my company, the large banks and brokerage firms are dipping their toes, I would say, into the fee based concept, but they did it with their own package product. And they did it with high fees. And it wasn’t how I envisioned it. So I couldn’t do it where I was. If I was going to make this jump, I had to become an entrepreneur and do it for myself.

Brian Hemsworth 8:14
We had a little direct experience with that after my father passed away. And my mother was very shortly after was quite ill for about a year or so. And she she ended up recovering and doing well. But I kind of stepped in to help them. And there’s not a mess, but my father had, he had a lot of allegiance to the brokers that he’d worked with. So he sort of never got rid of them. He just kind of opened up a new account with somebody else. And then he just leave, you know, a small amount, you know, with somebody. And he had a couple of accounts. Not super sizable, but a couple accounts with a couple of the big firms. And I went to see them. And I think they understood that I wasn’t interested in a lot of the transactions that they had done. They’d purchased a lot of you know B class shares of things and a lot of really high fee. And so I sort of hinted that I wasn’t real happy with the performance that they had had. And they were very quickly trying to push me towards their fee. I didn’t really know much at the time. It just sounded like a lot. And I was right because as soon as I started looking elsewhere, and this was about 2004, 2005, I found I was getting taken for a ride. So that’s exactly what you were seeing on the inside is that the transactions had been working well, the big wire houses were starting to do their own thing but you started to do your own thing. You open up your own shop.

Matt Heller 9:49
I did and that was right around the time I started my company. My partner Ken Willner and I founded Willner Heller at the end of 2003. And we really kind of got going in 2004. The concept behind it was because I really couldn’t serve my clients the way I wanted to working for a large firm, if you’re a small cog in a very big wheel, you don’t typically have a lot of say in the strategy and the structure of how your organization operates. And I really wanted that freedom. That was important to me. And to be able to have that gave me the opportunity to say, well, you know what, rather than using proprietary research that’s produced by the company that’s creating these products and services that they’re marketing at a commission or on a fee only basis, we’re going to utilize independent research. Why use independent research? Well, if we’re going to buy somebody’s independent research, they’d better be right most of the time, or you’re not going to pay for it. Because, you know, I wanted a very agnostic approach to serving my clients and being able to provide the best possible research, the best possible portfolio diversification and management fees that made sense. Made sense for the client, made sense for us. And where it was structured in a way so that, you know, both the client as well as our firm would benefit from a relationship. And fortunately, we’ve been pretty successful with that over the years.

Brian Hemsworth 11:12
So So tell us now, fast forwarding, 15, 17 years, something like that. What is it like now? How are things different? How’s your shop different? What’s your philosophy now?

Matt Heller 11:28
Well, I think, Brian, any entrepreneur you talk to, well talk about their own unique entrepreneurial journey. And when I have the opportunity to speak to young entrepreneurs and people starting out, I always tell them two things. One is it’s going to take longer than you think it will. And it’s going to be a lot harder than it should be. You can’t anticipate all the pitfalls and all the things that occur, but where there’s uncertainty, there’s also opportunity. And in my time, in business, we’ve faced a financial crisis, a flash crash, a global pandemic. And those are just to the name the big ones. Now, there were a lot of little ones in there, too. But each time something like that happened, we looked at that as an opportunity to not only educate and work with our clients to put them in a better position than they were in before the calamity occurred. But also hopefully to educate other people’s clients about what we can do. And we’ve been able to gather a lot of assets that way. So to fast forward to where we are now, when Ken and I started our company, we didn’t have any money to manage. Like my parents were the first account that I opened when they were still alive. And now we manage $125 million, which sometimes I have to pinch myself because we’ve come a long way. And in terms of when we started, what I didn’t understand about being an entrepreneur versus being an employee of a large firm, is when you work for a big bank or brokerage firm, their name on the wall matters. And people are mainly looking at that. They’re happy to work with you, but they’re looking at the firm’s name. When it’s your name on the door. Not a lot of people really know you and you don’t have a track record and you’re not on TV and you don’t sponsor golf tournaments. And you don’t have that kind of name recognition, which I think really helps for large firms to gather assets. However, now, about 18 years since we got started, now we do have some name recognition. And now it is easier to gain new clients and we’ve got the trust of a lot of advisors in and around Los Angeles whose clients we’ve helped over the years and it’s made it a lot easier to prospect.

Brian Hemsworth 13:33
And where’s the office?

Matt Heller 13:34
Our office is in Encino. We’re in the Wells Fargo building near wherever the 101 and the 405 cross.

Brian Hemsworth 13:41
So the Echelon studios are here in Woodland Hills, and I’ve used, as a barometer during the pandemic, traffic. And actually the commute to Encino has been my my best gauge. Prior to the pandemic, to go that seven miles would take about 40 minutes. So if I was going to lunch, I’d leave almost an hour in advance just to get to Encino. And during the pandemic, I was able to make that same drive in about 17 minutes. I was able to just shoot down even if I had to take surface streets, I could do it. We’re back to about 40 minutes. I noticed just a few weeks ago. So that’s that’s how I can tell the pandemic is easing up a bit is that the the freeway noise, the freeway traffic is a lot busier than it was. What are you seeing right now as we sort of thaw and and come out? market seems to be doing pretty well. Is there a more positive sentiment you’re seeing in clients? Are they kind of feeling good that they weathered this last storm? And this was potentially a very scary storm. I don’t think any of us really knew what we were getting into with the pandemic but we’re now a year or so later. What do you see with your clients?

Matt Heller 14:55
Well, clearly things are a lot better now than they were a year ago. There’s Still a lot of uncertainty. And that’s reflected in the media. That’s reflected in the economic news. But last year was was quite extraordinary. I remember, you know, reading and talking to people after the financial crisis, ’07, ’09, saying, ‘wow, that was a once in a lifetime event, we’re never gonna have to deal with anything like that, again, can’t imagine anything that extraordinary occurring in the foreseeable future.’ And then we had you know, Coronavirus in 2020. That was unusual, because nobody alive today has seen a global pandemic before. The last one was in 1918. And that, obviously, tremendous damage to the country in terms of deaths and economically. And when we’re facing that, at the outset, last March, the markets reacted predictably, horribly, if you will. However, fortunately, we had the financial crisis to use as a template where, you know, basically, you could buy Bank of America stock at $2, Amazon at 40, Apple at 25. I mean, you know, and it didn’t take a genius to figure out that you know, what, we’re probably going to recover from this. As long as the government can print money and raise taxes, we’re going to be fine. So we loaded up on blue chip stocks. And that worked out. So my partner and I sat down at the beginning of March last year and said, All right, well, let’s use the financial crisis template, and let’s start buying. And while that worked out very well, last year, coming into this year, even though, obviously, virus numbers have gotten a lot better, things are reopening, that’s all positive, there’s a lot of concern in economic circles about inflation. And how’s that going to impact economic growth? And aren’t stocks really high right now considering where they were previously? And the truth is, there’s always something. And you’re always going to contend with, ‘oh, my God, the news is terrible. What are we going to do?’ Or like, ‘oh, my God, the news is great, what are we going to do? And really, I think the secret to Wealth Management isn’t about taking snippets of time, it’s about taking a longer view, and deciding how best to allocate your clients’ money, which is customized to them, and which is going to get them where they want to go. There’s always going to be uncertainty, there’s always going to be issues. But you deal with that, and we can react to those pretty quickly.

Brian Hemsworth 17:13
So you’re reading the Wall Street Journal, you’re looking at this independent research. I’m sure every day you’re looking at the markets opening up, you’re watching what’s going on, you field some calls from clients, the markets closed, you make some decisions going forward. But when you’re not doing all that, what does Matt Heller do?

Matt Heller 17:33
Well, you know, I think having a balance in life is very important. Early on, it can be challenging as you’re an entrepreneur, and you’re trying to grow a business. And my kids were very young, when I started my company, my daughter was halfway through kindergarten, and you know, My son was in preschool. You know, now she’s a college graduate, and she works full time and my son is in college. So I’m not spending as much time parenting as I used to, I’m not spending as much time trying to network and get our story out there to people. So it’s opened up a lot more time for me to be able to do things I really enjoy, including reading, traveling, now that places are open again, I’m fully vaccinated. My wife and I have started traveling, we’ve got one international trip under our belt so far. We’ve had a couple more trips planned for later this year. And as you know, I really love music. That’s a big part of my life.

Brian Hemsworth 18:27
Concerts? Are they on the list?

Matt Heller 18:29
Yes, actually, we attended our first invite only indoor concert about a month ago, in a venue that fits about 350 people, they invited about 30, and it was great, you know, just to be able to enjoy that again. And we’re very fortunate, and I tried to remind myself of that, that the pandemic has had such a devastating effect on so many families, then, you know, you’ve got to really keep in mind. Okay, well, I miss traveling, I miss going to concerts. Well, there’s people who missed loved ones who will never see them again. And that’s something I really try to keep in mind.

Brian Hemsworth 19:03
Yeah, we lost to date, nearly 600,000 in this country alone. That’s a that’s a pretty big number.

Matt Heller 19:13
That’s more than we lost in World War Two, Korea and Vietnam combined. Yeah, to put it in a 20th century perspective. So you know, I really do try to appreciate every day and you know, I do try to think, Okay, you know what, I’ve worked long enough today and I’m going to go take my wife to dinner, I’m going to go meet a friend for a beer. You know, I’m going to spend some time with my son before he leaves for college again.

Brian Hemsworth 19:36
And for the sake of full transparency for our Echelon Radio Podcast audience, I’m going to let them know that my first business lunch post pandemic in a restaurant was with you just a few weeks ago. We were both vaccinated. We went and had lunch and it was a little strange. Everybody sort of walks in the restaurant with their masks, and then they take the mask off. So there’s a weird little choreography that we go through. But I have to say it just felt really good. Kind of doing something that felt really normal again.

Matt Heller 20:09
Sure. And you know, when you deal with something, I guess like this never having faced a pandemic before you wonder, will it ever get back to normal? When will it get back to normal? And you know, when you start getting some sense of normalcy returning, you know, I like to think I appreciate stuff like having lunch with you more. I always loved having lunch with you, but now I appreciate it more than ever.

Brian Hemsworth 20:30
And we got to do it inside, you know, I’d done I’d done enough lunches and drinks in outdoor patios and things like that, but yeah, that to me was kind of a mark of Okay, you know, I think we’re moving. Speaking of enjoying things and enjoying days, you mentioned music. So let’s see if we can’t correlate something here. When did you graduate college?

Matt Heller 20:51
I graduated from college in 1989. So I’m truly a child of the 80s. I graduated Middle School in ’82, High School in ’85, and college in ’89.

Brian Hemsworth 21:00
So I often say to my seniors at Pepperdine, that who you were sort of in your growing up years begins to change somewhere in high school, and it tends to change pretty dramatically in college. And that really formulates who we are, who we become for the rest of our life. And music is part of what forms during that time. Doesn’t mean that you don’t listen to somebody you listen to before, but we really sort of sculpt our music tastes. And you’re not only a product of the ’80s. But that’s really the music era that you like best, correct?

Matt Heller 21:39
That is absolutely true. In fact, I will say for the rest of my days that the 1980s was the most transcendent time for music in the history of our country, in the history of music, perhaps.

Brian Hemsworth 21:50
So your favorite band from that time?

Matt Heller 21:52
Without a doubt Def Leppard.

Brian Hemsworth 21:54
Def Leppard. Favorite concert of that time frame?

Matt Heller 21:58
You know, I saw Def Leppard in 1988, the Brendan Byrne Arena in New Jersey when I was going into my senior year of college, and it was at the high point of their popularity. And it was incredible because they’re writing some of the best music that they had ever composed and performed. And it was at the top. And it was tremendous. I’ve seen them probably maybe six or eight times since, as recently as a as two years ago in Las Vegas when they did their residency, at Planet Hollywood, and there’s still a tremendous live band, but being able to see your favorite band, band that you consider to be the best band at the height of their popularity, was tremendous.

Brian Hemsworth 22:44
So let’s play a little game. We’re gonna, we’re gonna test Matt on some 80s music. I’m gonna throw out some song titles. And I’d like to see if you can tell me who the artist is. And I happen to have a list of what somebody compiled as the top 100 songs of the 80s. So let’s see if Matt really does have a good working knowledge from that time or if maybe he was enjoying college too much to remember some of that. Let’s see. Let’s see. “Don’t Stop Believing”?

Matt Heller 23:23
Oh, my God, Journey. I mean, if you have a signature song from the escape album, 1981 with the bug on it flying out of a sphere. Yeah, Journey is another one of my favorite bands. And that was a tremendous album.

Brian Hemsworth 23:37
“Love Shack.”

Matt Heller 23:39
You know, at the end of the 80s, UB40 came in with what was really a transcendent album and “Love Shack” from—oh, did I say UB40? I meant B52s. There’s too many numbers. And yeah, sometimes I get jumbled. Yeah, the B52s, and by the way, saw them a few years ago perform “Love Shack” at the Hollywood Bowl. They sound the same, they really sound the same and “Love Shack” just brings down the house. I think the B52s are tremendous.

Brian Hemsworth 24:05
I’m gonna throw you a softball on this one: “Red Red Wine.”

Matt Heller 24:09
That was UB40! Thank you for that. That was more mid 80s and I seem to remember that that was a very popular song among a certain subset of college students who, you know, they weren’t going out partying, they were not hard rockers. They, you know, tend to stay a little closer to home and relaxed and chilled and listen to “Red Red Wine.”

Brian Hemsworth 24:29
How about “Summer of ’69”?

Matt Heller 24:32
You know, Bryan Adams’ 1985 album “Reckless,” and he had four number one hits, including that one, and “Summer of ’69” was great in part because it’s such a tremendous song, but the joke was at the time that he was like four in 1969, or six. Like it wasn’t really his story. It was a songwriter story, who he collaborated with to write it but you know, we listen to satellite radio and Bryan Adams comes out with “Summer of ’69,” you have to turn it up.

Brian Hemsworth 24:59
So, I think I’m losing this battle here. I think you’re winning with your knowledge here. So I’ll just do one or two more just to see if I can throw you a little bit. “Sharp Dressed Man”?

Matt Heller 25:11
“Sharp Dressed Man.” I would sing it if I could sing. Oh, ZZ Top of course. Well, that was also 1985.

Brian Hemsworth 25:20
Wow, you pulled that one out. That’s impressive.

Matt Heller 25:23
I had to think about that one.

Brian Hemsworth 25:25
I’ll do one more. How about “Jack and Diane”?

Matt Heller 25:34
You know, in the early 1980s, before he changed his name to john Mellencamp, John Cougar had a tremendous career and there’s a whole cottage industry surrounding his music, who said that it was actually changing his name from the stage name, John Cougar, which he hated, to john Mellencamp, which is his real name. The music got worse when he went to his real name. But “Jack and Diane” was one of the top hits I want to say in 1982 or 1983. And probably next to “Pink Houses,” is one of his biggest hits of all time.

Brian Hemsworth 26:05
Very good. Very impressive. I’m very impressed by that. I have a feeling I could go through a lot more of these and you’d probably nail every one of them.

Matt Heller 26:13
Yeah, well, I confused UB40 with B52s, so it wasn’t perfect.

Brian Hemsworth 26:18
Only for a moment. You caught yourself on that one. I think that’s good. Let’s just rapid fire a couple more quick things that we like to do sometimes at the end of the podcast. Favorite kind of food to eat?

Matt Heller 26:31
You know, I love sushi. It’s not something that we really had growing up in New York and I came out here to California. I was a student at USC and one of my fraternity brothers said I want to take you to Sushi on Sunset, which is a place in the mid 80s. And like, Oh my god, this is raw fish. And first I was scared. And then I was in love and probably still sushi is my favorite.

Brian Hemsworth 26:51
Favorite close-to-LA weekend getaway?

Matt Heller 26:56
You know, probably Santa Barbara. I met my wife several years after we both graduated from college. She went to UCSB. And when we first started dating, she said I wanted to show you where I went to school. And so we’d spend time up in Santa Barbara. And that’s where we got engaged. And that’s, that’s probably an all time favorite weekend getaway for me.

Brian Hemsworth 27:18
Favorite superhero?

Matt Heller 27:22
Favorite superhero? That’s a really good question because I I like the superheroes who tend to be more complex. So I would say probably Peter Parker, Spider-Man. And I think characters like that have become, I think, more complicated and a little deeper and richer in recent years. Whereas early comic book characters, there was good, there was evil, and there wasn’t a lot in between. And even though I work in a very black and white field, you know, financial services, I’m fascinated by gray areas, and I’m fascinated by people who are the sum of their experiences and they’ve been through stuff and rather than succumb to their circumstances, they’ve transcended them and succeeded anyway. And Peter Parker, for me was always the ultimate underdog who was able to get a ton.

Brian Hemsworth 28:15
It’s almost like a more modern Clark Kent.

Matt Heller 28:19
Yes, yes. Although I think the early Superman, you know, they’ve kind of made him out to be sort of a nerd. He wore glasses, but, you know, he was always the Man of Steel, whereas Spider-Man, he had self doubts. And he questioned himself and his morality became an issue. And, you know, when I did read comic books when I was young, that’s what appealed to me about him.

Brian Hemsworth 28:43
So final question. What’s one bucket list thing you haven’t done that you want to do?

Matt Heller 28:50
You know, it’s funny, um, I love cars. I’ve, you know, always loved to go fast. And, you know, speed responsibly. Of course. A number of years ago, I had the chance to test drive some really high end cars up in Willow Springs, and that was a lot of fun. One thing I would like to do at some point is I’d really like to go next level and drive Indy. I would like to get an opportunity to do open wheel and preferably in Europe. You know, there’s ways you can make this happen, and it’s not terribly affordable, but I’d really like to be able to strap on an IndyCar because you really don’t get into it and drive it. You strap it on, and you go, and I’d really like to see how that would be. I’ve gotten to fly airplanes. I’ve scuba dived. I’ve done a lot of really amazing, extreme things. I got pretty far studying martial arts. Rather than being trained by local dojo, I was trained by the military. I’ve done some really fun things. But I thought, Well, you know what, if I could really put the pedal to the metal in the Formula One car that would be a good Capstone

Brian Hemsworth 29:59
Nice. Matt, thanks for joining us. Thanks for coming by. Good to see you again.

Matt Heller 30:02
Brian. Thank you. Good to see you really appreciate this.

Unknown Speaker 30:13
Presented by Echelon Business Development. More than just networking. Way more.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai