Entrepreneurial Vision Brings Out the Best for Clients

Joseph Janiczek, Janiczek Wealth Management

By Kevin Adler

Many NAPFA members have become Fee-Only financial advisors after having successful careers in other fields, but Joseph Janiczek, MSFS, ChFC, is probably the only one who has high-performance, high-endurance motor oil in his background.

“I have an absolute passion for business and for developing products and services to help people,” he says. “That’s been my modus operandi for as long as I could remember.”

Janiczek says being resourceful, doing the best with what you have, and building strength and endurance have been staples of his approach across industries, starting with the motor oil business he launched in Chicago. In selling that business, he spent time with wealth managers and decided that wealth management would be his next career move.

He founded Janiczek Wealth Management LLC in 1990, and the Denver-based firm has grown to more than $1 billion in AUM. Along the way, he’s patented several wealth management and personal growth methods, written three books (Absolute Financial Freedom, Investing from a Position of Strength, and Family Wealth), and developed software and apps related to optimizing wealth and personal growth.

Evolution

Janiczek’s first wealth management software was a simple spreadsheet that enabled him to analyze clients’ balance sheets and cash flows and to project their resources into the future. “I’m not saying it was a big, sophisticated software package, but it allowed me to represent a client’s best interests much better than the crude industry software available at the time,” he says.

Back in the ’90s, before the terms “Fee-Only” and “fiduciary” were widely used, Janiczek was showing clients how he worked in an unbiased way for their interests. “This approach immediately resonated with people,” he says.

He still operates that way, as his team serves high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth clients in more than 35 states with his patented Strength Based Wealth Management^® system. “Our aim is to help people flourish financially and otherwise in a fraction of the time and effort it otherwise takes,” he says.

A typical client is a high-net-worth couple with a portfolio of $2 million to $20 million or an ultra-high-net-worth client with a $20 million-plus investment portfolio who may have recently experienced a life-changing liquidity event such as selling a business, exercising stock options, or receiving an inheritance. Clients look for investment management, financial planning, tax planning, and estate planning and typically need introductions to upgraded support in augmenting professions such as tax compliance and various legal services.

“I borrowed an engineering term called elastic limit (defined as the amount of stress something can withstand before being irreparably damaged) and applied it to personal finances to create the phrase ‘elastic limit wealth threshold,’” Janiczek says.

The idea is to help clients increase the elastic limit of their wealth, which enables them to maintain their desired standard of living. This, in turn, is defined through the 35 Essential Strengths identified on the Wealth Optimization Dashboard. For each strength measurement, a client can immediately see if their position is strong (green), an issue of concern (yellow), or a vulnerability (red). “They see where they can be confident and where they need to act,” he says. “This is the essence of effective financial planning. It need not be complex, just effective in giving the client the precise direction and motivation to act to make improvements.”

To manage clients’ investments, the firm has adopted evidence-based investing (EBI), a whole-market, long-term strategy. “EBI, among other things, helps clients follow a disciplined process with passive indexing, direct factor indexing, and, of course, no-load, low-cost vehicles,” he says.

With the advent of low-cost and high-speed trading, the firm can readily employ numerous tax strategies, including direct indexing combined with a tax alpha strategy (in many cases), because most of Janiczek’s clients are in the higher tax brackets. Portfolios include individual securities, select ETF or mutual fund equity and fixed-income investments, and, for many clients, equity and fixed-income alternatives too.

“The aim is to make the client’s balance sheet, cash flow, and portfolio their friend, not their foe,” he explains. “Typically, this means a portfolio that might weather downside events better, knowing gaining alpha here is a wonderful advantage and often preferred to a portfolio with potential alpha in raging bull markets but potentially more damage in bear markets.”

Financial Freedom and Beyond

When it comes to investing and planning, Janiczek seems to have a knack for catchy names for the services he provides and the benefits they can bring to people. He developed a Stages of Financial Freedom^® model in the 1990s, which shows people how they move through five stages financially: the foundation, early growth, peak growth, transition, and security. Depending on how people use their money and where they are in their lives, the use of that money can be described as in the stages of maintenance, growth, exponential growth, controlled depletion, or uncontrolled depletion. (He wrote a book about it: Absolute Financial Freedom.)

A few years later, he patented Systems and Methods for Optimizing Wealth (USPTO) and the proprietary Wealth Optimization Plan^®, Strength Based Wealth Management^® discipline, and Wealth Optimization Dashboard^™. “This is highly desired by our clients because it takes the complexity of finances and makes sense of it in a way that helps them feel more in control, on top of, and confident that they are doing their best with what they have,” he says.

Now, his creative mind is onto something else: life and goal optimization. In 2024, he will roll out Flourish 360^®, a multipatented artificial intelligence mobile app he created (see text box below).

Great People Create Great Opportunities

Whether it’s building an oil company or a financial planning firm, Janiczek knows that he didn’t do it alone. He credits his wife, Mary, for sustaining the family in the founding years of Janiczek Wealth Management. This enabled him to continually put the profits back into improving the firm and building its team and systems.

Today, he says the excellence of his staff members is behind the high-quality client service that clients expect. Their work keeps the firm an annual fixture on “top” and “best of” lists from Forbes, Barron’s, AdvisoryHQ, and other sources, which in turn helps attract new clients and fund more and more innovation and efficiencies. In all, he and the firm have been named to 36 “best of” lists over 22 years.

Janiczek says that attracting new talent to serve those clients is a challenge in a tight job market, and he says the company’s last four hires have been “grand slams.” These hires include a summer intern to whom the firm offered a remote part-time position while she finished school and a full-time position that started a few weeks after graduation.

Still, he says, the firm has more staffing needs, particularly for early- to mid-level wealth strategists and investment strategists. Those hires will support one-year and three-year growth plans, as well as a 10-year vision that he calls “a healthy stretch, yet something that helps us continually flourish and grow.”

The 10-year vision is to be the desired destination for high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth clients with $5 million to $50 million-plus in assets, able to offer boutique, high-end personal service. The idea is to be more client-centric than larger competitors who have become too bureaucratic and impersonal but also to provide more comprehensive service than smaller players lacking sufficient scale, systems, and expertise. “Our business needs genuine heart, creativity, relationship, and soul on one end and true expertise, service, technology, and value-add on the other,” he says.

“I believe strongly we can transform the lives of many clients and colleagues. This is what makes me more and more ambitious as we grow and see such results,” Janiczek says.

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Money and Life “Money is not an end; it’s a means to an end. Helping clients flourish with wealth and beyond wealth is one way I seek to contribute to others in a meaningful way,” says Joseph Janiczek, founder and CEO of Janiczek Wealth Management in Denver. This is a sentiment that many financial advisors try to convey to their clients. For Janiczek, the Flourish 360® app is the answer. To be released in 2024, the app is built on what he calls the “Science of Goal Achievement.” “The intent is to help adults 18 to 80 figure out what they really want in life and, using the science and art of goal achievement, one by one learn how to flourish across as many life domains and interests as desired in a practical cadence: financial, work, leisure, health, relationships, hobbies, travel, spiritual, etc.,” Janiczek says. An online video course, “Unlock the Science of Goal Achievement,” will teach people how to use the Flourish 360® app. It brings full circle the knowledge Janiczek has gained through three decades of wealth management aimed at achieving a client’s life goals and ambitions. To learn more, go to flourish360.com.

 

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Janiczek Wealth Management

Location: Denver, CO

Website: Janiczek.com

Year founded: 1990

Number of staff: 10

Number of clients: 170

Total assets under management: $1 billion 

Typical clients and their needs: High-net-worth couple with a portfolio of $2 million to $20 million or an ultra-high-net-worth family with $20 million to $200 million net worth. They want their wealth managed prudently with professional, Fee-Only, fiduciary advisors who have the empathy (table-side manner), expertise, systems, team, tools, and experience needed to serve them.

Investment strategy and methods: Evidence-based investing, favoring lean investment vehicles and selecting firms with factors such as strong profitability and balance sheets that research supports as solid long-term strategies aligned with clients’ goals. Tax-smart investing is a key as well, through the use of direct indexing with tax-oriented strategies built in along with satellite investments in select ETFs.

Favorite financial planning websites or apps: Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, Morningstar

Favorite nonfinancial planning websites: Spotify, WHOOP, Zoom, Google, Salesforce, The Strategic Coach, and Entrepreneurial Operating System

Advice to other advisors: “Work hard to gain genuine clarity about your personal strengths, advantages, and weaknesses in serving clients to master money with integrity. Then team up with other talent that complements yours, so, as a team, you genuinely provide value and deserve great success as a firm.”