Today we’d like to introduce you to David DeCelle.
David, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
When I knew I wasn’t going to be an astronaut or a professional baseball player, I knew I wanted to be a financial advisor. I never grew up with money or the wherewithal to know how to save and plan with it. I figured a career as a financial advisor could help fill both of those voids. My chance came in 2011 when I got the opportunity to start building my financial planning practice while finishing my senior year in college. I knew I found something that I loved when I kept catching myself skipping classes to go out on client meetings. I loved the rush of meeting someone new and having an impact on them.
After 5 years of building my practice and coaching other advisors to do the same, I began to experience a burnout. I started to fall out of love with advising and kept falling into the trap of trying to make money rather than trying to help someone. This resulted in another 2 years of struggle.
That change in mindset severed relationships, caused my practice to decline in revenue and led me to explore other careers.
In my journey trying to learn other industries, I realized one main thing – this was fun!
See, I will never go and work for someone else so I wasn’t looking for a job, I was looking to learn a new industry so I could build something great.
Throughout my exploration, I met a lot of great people, bought and took great courses and learned a ton of valuable and transferable information.
The resources that these other entrepreneurial industries have are amazing. They made it fun to learn, easy to follow and gave you a feeling of accomplishment as you progressed through their program.
Here’s the kicker – it all led me back “home.” It led me to the industry I knew the best – financial services.
I realized that our industry demographics are changing, yet the way we learn, train and coach has not. The average advisor is in their 50s and the new wave of advisors are coming in. We learn differently, we work differently and we are motivated differently. It is my goal, better yet, it is my commitment to revamp the way we train advisors and the way we help them grow.
So, I decided to leave my practice and went all in on the Financial Advisors’ Alliance.
I’ve decided to push out a TON of content…for free. That’s right, for free. Oh, and by the way – it’s all on the social media channels we are on most of our day. You can try to tell us not go on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter, but let’s be real – It’s not happening. Don’t fight it, let’s just put the information where our attention already is.
This is my mission, my commitment is to make training fun, engaging and set up to motivate us to learn.
Wait, one more thing I need you to know… I’m not claiming to be the expert here. Well, sort of. I claim to be an expert on getting advisors off the ground to gain traction to grow. I claim to be an expert on building a unit of advisors who are high performing. Basically, I claim to be an expert to anyone who is one chapter or more behind me. I mean that’s really all an expert is, isn’t it?
Aside from that, I am the messenger. I am the one that’s simply documenting my journey about life’s trials and tribulations. I’m the one that is finding the BEST advisors in the marketplace and having them share their story, share their journey.
I believe and I have experienced that there is so much to learn from someone’s story. So I’ll be the one to cultivate all that amazing content, you just make sure you actually do something with it – it’s on you.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
Not at all haha.
There’s been days where I’ve wanted to curl up in a ball and hide from the world, and I did. There’s been days where I wanted to throw in the towel and give up and there’s been times where I thought what I wanted to do was impossible.
I struggled with being consistent, I struggled with follow through, I struggled with holding myself accountable. I struggled with my personal life, professional life and financial life along this journey.
My financial planning practice grew substantially and declined substantially throughout the years. All of these struggles amounted to learning opportunities for me. It built some thick skin, it taught me what I don’t want my life to be like. I’m 27 years old right now, and I’m fortunate and consider myself extremely lucky to have gone through all of that early on in my career.
Please tell us about The Financial Advisors’ Alliance.
The Financial Advisors’ Alliance is a multifaceted training, coaching and consulting company created for advisors by advisors.
We believe that the way advisors learn has changed and it will continue to change as more and more Gen Z and Millennials enter this industry. The old way of training in a classroom setting, listening to people lecture about the business is out of date and the new generation of advisors can easily tune out during this early stage in their career. If we couple that with the fact that they can’t review what they just learned at the touch of their fingertips on platforms they use every single day, it tends to not be conducive to a continual learning experience throughout the years. Our goal is to make training fun and practical in an effort to increase the retention of advisors.
All other coaches and consultants in the financial services industry require you to spend money in exchange for value. I believe that there shouldn’t be a financial hurdle for someone to get better. I believe that if you lead with value, revenue will follow if you’re in it for the long game. So, because of this belief, I give away daily content in our private Facebook group for advisors for FREE. We promote collaboration among advisors in order to share ideas, best practices, help each other grow and impact the clients that we serve in a positive way.
We are a community of like-minded advisors that simply want to help each other. Period.
If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
I wouldn’t do anything differently, actually. I believe that everything I’ve been through, good/bad/indifferent has shaped me to who I am today. If I went back and avoided all of those things, I wouldn’t have learned what I was able to learn in that journey.
All of my “failures” weren’t actually failures, they were learning lessons that I wouldn’t trade for the world.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.daviddecelle.com
- Phone: (978) 314-9995
- Email: david@thefinancialadvisorsalliance.com
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/David_DeCelle
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/thefinancialadvisorsalliance/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/daviddecelle
- Other: https://medium.com/@david_decelle
Image Credit:
Phil Gioia
@pgioia on Instagram
@pg_portraits on Instagram
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