Promise High - Deliver Low
Pros
Zacks provided "warm leads" to RVP's in their assigned geography. Other RVP's were generally sharp professionals who were competant. You were able to build up a sizeable stream of recurring revenue if you stayed at Zacks. Most RVP's who have stayed are doing quite well...
Cons
Bad management and very poor communication between RVP's in their home geographies and the team back in Chicago. We were charging clients almost 2% for management - however, that could not buy the response of Ben Zacks responding to legitimate questions as to why we were violating our stated investment discipline. "Wealth Management" consisted of an Investor Profile Questionaire - which one of the portfolio managers reviewed before making an allocation of a mixture of Zacks strategies. No estate planning, no tax planning, no insurance recommendations. The strategies had extremly high turnover which meant very complex taxes for clients and almost all short term capital gain treament for taxes. They also retroactively changed these allocations (against their "philosophy") in the midst of 2008 problems to be more conservative - which of course KILLED returns for clients when markets recovered in 2009.
