Jeff Motske advocates a special kind of date with your spouse—“a financial date night” to discuss the family’s finances.
It’s the type of folksy, homespun advice he’s likely to give during an hourlong radio broadcast from a studio he built in Huntington Beach.
Buy something with a credit card? Double the sales price if you don’t immediately pay the bill, he said. With the wild swings of the stock markets, don’t panic.
“The biggest factor in achieving and maintaining financial independence is based on the financial decisions that you make, not what happens to the Dow Jones or the S&P next week or the next year,” Motske said.
While the size of the audience for his radio show, fewer than 20,000, is a far cry from the millions who listen to financial guru Dave Ramsey, Motske does have a flare for encouragements like, “Dream big, work hard, laugh often.”
Furthermore, he’s done something Ramsey hasn’t—in 1999 he started Trilogy Financial Services Inc., which now manages almost $3 billion for 20,000 clients.
“Ramsey is a great marketer. He keeps it real simple,” Motske said. “We dive into much deeper projects.”
Now Hiring
Motske, 51, has built his firm to 10 branches, with offices ranging from Woodland Hills to Del Mar and eastward to Arizona, Denver and Boston, in addition to his Huntington Beach headquarters.
Trilogy, which now has 200 employees, is on an expansion path, planning to hire about 30 this year and looking for strategic opportunities to acquire other firms, Motske said.
The wealth management firm targets the lower end of the market, accepting clients with assets as low as $200,000, in contrast to many financial planners who seek a minimum of $500,000.
“The person who has $200,000 in assets needs our help the most,” Motske said. “They’re the ones who need good financial advice, because if they don’t get it, they’ll make poor financial decisions.”
Trilogy uses risk-tolerance models to help clients decide where to invest. It pairs a client with two to three experts in areas such as tax or estate planning. He said the pooling of expertise gives his firm an edge over solo practitioners who don’t have the resources. It employs the “Decision Coach,” which Motske described as a program to provide concierge financial services.
“We want to be the go-to financial service for a family. We are on call for them.”
Field of Dreams
Motske was an all-star baseball player at Huntington Beach’s Edison High School and Newport Christian High School. He played baseball while earning a degree at Vanguard University, a Christian college in Costa Mesa, and was on the 1985 team Vanguard named to its hall of fame for making it to a college baseball World Series championship.
“I was definitely a .300 hitter in college,” he said. “I had a great career. Then I realized that my opportunity to make the big leagues was limited, so I better hit the books hard.”
His fondness for sports spills into the workplace. He likes to hire athletes, believing they bring skills honed in college: the ability to juggle class hours, study needs and practice times.
“When you’re a college athlete, you need discipline,” he said. “Competitive athletics teaches you successes and failures. It teaches you teamwork and camaraderie.”
After college, he prepared retirement plans at SunAmerica Inc., a mutual fund company bought in 1999 by American International Group Inc. About that time, Motske said he believed a more comprehensive approach to financial planning would provide better advice, so he started his firm, joining with a minority partner, Kevin Mackintosh.
Even though he debuted with $50 million in client assets he brought from his previous firm, Motske said the beginning was the toughest.
“We were just two guys in an office. It was like ‘Field of Dreams.’ If you build it, they will come,” said Motske, who mused that it was extra stressful because his wife, Kendra, was pregnant at the time.
He said he’s built his team by coaching advisers on how to deal with clients and prepare them for the market’s ups and downs. It paid off during the 2008 financial crisis when he instructed them to talk to clients about not panicking.
“If you don’t communicate during those times, people make poor decisions. They do sell, and they absorb losses.”
Backdoor Connections
Nowadays, Motske is well-known in investment circles. His firm agreed in October to affiliate itself with LPL Financial LLC, an independent broker-dealer with $509 billion in advisory and brokerage assets.
He’s involved in Pacifica Christian High School in Newport Beach, where he’s the Booster Club president and works with school founder David Bahnsen, owner of Newport Beach-based Bahnsen Group, which has $1.1 billion in assets under management.
A former college baseball teammate, Randy Conner, is president of Churchill Management Group, a Los Angeles-based wealth manager with $4.7 billion assets under management.
Motske, chairman of the Vanguard University Foundation, recently led an effort to raise $850,000 to build a new baseball stadium named after one of his teammates, Dean Harvey, who died in 2011.
The father of two teenagers, Motske is an avid bridge player and keeps active on the Trilogy Orioles softball team with his 74-year-old father, Steve, and his son. He lives in Fountain Valley.
Like many other financial advisers, he’s restricted in what he can advertise about performance and methods to get out his message. Thus he landed on the idea of a radio show, saying AM’s average listener is 60 and quite concerned about retirement.
“The No. 1 fear of retirees is running out of money. The No. 2 fear is being a burden on relatives. If you run out of money, you may become a burden.”
Serious Listeners
Motske estimated that building the radio studio cost $45,000 and said he spends about $14,000 monthly to get it on stations and platforms like iHeartRadio and Salem Media Group’s KFAX 1100 in San Francisco.
He also makes podcasts of the show that he said probably reach thousands more in the younger demographics.
Motske said he spends most of his advertising on Facebook; he can’t use Snapchat because the images disappear, which is against compliance regulations that financial advisers must save their advertising.
The show has the added bonus of promoting the expertise of employees or associates who make guest appearances, such as financial adviser David Willett and colleagues like estate planner Mark Lewis, both of whom gave advice during a recent appearance, as did sidekick Kimber Holdaway.
Even with the relatively small audience, Motske said that by the time listeners have heard a radio show or podcast and studied the company website, they’re often prepared to do business when they call the company.
“These people are serious. They don’t listen for just five minutes. I look at this radio show as another calling to being a good adviser and educating America.”
