How ex-Amazon employee grew his tech client base

As the saying goes, it isn’t about who you know, but what you know. And Eric Franklin is one of those advisors who left an industry and ended up finding their way back to it.

As a former employee of Amazon, Franklin co-founded Prospero Wealth with a former colleague at the retail behemoth in 2016, blending his knowledge of tech and wealth. Naturally, he eventually decided to focus on serving tech-based clients.

“This space really chose me because after you work in it for 23 years, that tends to be who your network is,” he admits. “When I got into this, I didn't have that strong of an opinion of whether that was my target demographic, as I started with friends and family. I have friends in all sorts of different industries.”

It wasn’t until he went full-time with Prospero in 2021 that he realized the last 20 years of his career had blossomed into a network of people who fit into that niche.

“I realized that was going to be a really interesting, endless niche to explore,” he said.

Franklin says serving in the tech niche, or even having a niche in general, can help an advisor’s growth model. “The growth model for our business is once you understand who that client is or that client profile you're going after, then you can get really specific about curating your services, your pricing and your offering to that niche,” Franklin says.

Franklin noted that while many senior professionals are constantly targeted by various financial advisors, the industry experience held by the lead advisors at Prospero Wealth prioritize a data-driven and iterative approach to financial planning.

“We have that shared language and approach,” he says. “We're much more iterative with our approach than a lot of financial service companies or financial planning companies. We recognize that our clients are very busy, so we try and do as much as we can proactively for them on their behalf.”

Having this approach ideally fosters a long-term relationship with the client, Franklin says, as well as an “accountability partner over a really long period of time.”

The problem with the industry, Franklin highlighted, is there’s a set of best practices where advisors end up building firms that look roughly like each who have similar offerings and similar price points. Franklin thinks there's a huge opportunity in the advisory space to “be unique and meet a niche.”

“Not just [to] go after the niche from a marketing perspective, but to build your entire service model and the entire way that you charge and interact with the products you use. Be very intentional and thoughtful for that audience,” he attests.

Additionally, from a tech investor perspective, Franklin says the extremes of DIY investing are on full display and he’s been shocked at the number of people who have aggressive stock picking accounts in technology. “Everybody who works in technology think they have insight into how technology works, and what the next big technology companies are." That results in “a lot of irrational stock picking and non asset allocation investing.”

“There's a large number of gamblers out there,” he said. “No matter how sophisticated you are in other areas of your life, there's still a lot of education that needs to happen around investments and risk and how those work together over long periods of time.”

Franklin reflects he wouldn’t have the confidence or have been able to succeed in the advisory space if he didn’t have the support from his co-founder, who was also his former advisor. That said, he encourages other advisors to “find their tribe.”

“It's really important to not do it alone, to find a community of other advisors or an advisory that can support you,” he says.

“Find somebody that makes you passionate about the clients you're serving and go learn there and go work with those people because you'll greatly accelerate and miss all of the unfortunate learning experiences you otherwise have along the way,” Franklin said.