Today we’d like to introduce you to Lee Calfo.
Hi Lee, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
After growing up in a good public school in Central Pennsylvania, where they mainly taught math and science, I was first exposed to investing when I inherited a small amount of money from my great-grandmother that was held at Vanguard. I learned to follow stocks and bonds in the financial markets when I went to college. I originally went for a math and science degree, but I enjoyed my finance electives in economics and ended up graduating with a Bachelor of Science in finance. I was fortunate to have a good internship my senior year with a money management company that hired me out of school to work directly in the field. Since then, I’ve been passionate about finding ways to properly capitalize businesses to grow individuals’ investments to meet their financial and retirement needs, and about economics and the economy in general. So, I’ve worked for other companies for the first third of my career and for companies I founded and led for the last two-thirds, and I want to continue working in this industry throughout my career.
The headquarters of all the financial services entities I’ve started as an entrepreneur since 2011 has been in Wayne, Pennsylvania. When my wife and I graduated from college and moved to the Philadelphia area, we ultimately decided to live in the Wayne area after a few years there. There are many financial services and healthcare companies headquartered in the western Philadelphia suburbs. Wayne, in particular, has a nice downtown, an easy-to-get-to train station to Philadelphia, and is conveniently located near many major roads to the airport. Beyond that, the community here is very entrepreneurial. There are people who have many small businesses that are also successful and who work for larger corporations in the area. So Wayne was a place we always wanted to have an office in, and we have enjoyed living here since 2005. Similarly, Doylestown, even more so than Wayne, has many small businesses and is a cultural, more quirky residential enclave that also happens to be the county seat of Bucks County. Both Doylestown and Wayne are fun places to have an office for our employees, generally conveniently located for our clients, and the downtown areas, which both of our offices are in, are places that are attractive to the type of people that we want to be having in our offices doing business at our firms.
One of the biggest reasons I wanted to start my own companies was that I saw people paying too much in fees for very plain-vanilla, mediocre investment products. Thankfully, technology and market competition have generally lowered the cost of financial services for the end client. However, there are still pockets of high fees, and the industry hides them in various ways. At Alden, we try to be very transparent, and at times we’ve been less profitable on individual client basis, and we attempt to make up for that by having a superior cost to value ratio and attracting more clients, because financial services and investing should be something that everyone has access to, and there’s no reason for someone to pay much more money for an investment strategy just because they don’t have as many dollars to invest in it as a wealthier investor. I call this the democratization of finance, and it’s something we’re passionate about at Alden: being transparent about fees and offering the best value in service across different investment options for clients.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
In financial markets and in life in general, there are certainly struggles along the way. The two types that stand out to me are things within your control and things that are not. So, for things that are not in your control, you have the economic cycles, you have bull markets and bear markets, you have expansionary phases and recessions, and early on in my career, we had the internet bubble burst, and then I was in finance through the great recession from 2005 to 2010, and then the recovery from that, and the COVID crisis. So, I feel like I’ve been employed in the industry through several bull and bear markets and three financial crises, each with different characteristics. The other challenges in the business are growing and managing a business that either makes money in different cycles or needs money when you’re expanding. It’s a real challenge to navigate economic and market cycles, as well as the business’s natural needs and growth.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
Alden Investment Group, the most recent version of what I’ve been doing for the last seven years, is known as an independent financial services platform that is a good home for independent wealth and financial advisors looking to serve their clients in the best manner possible, as well as institutional clients mainly banks and other credit unions and financial companies that seek good investment advice and professionals that can help them manage their business and grow. I’m most interested in creating financial platforms and businesses and attracting people with good clients to work through Alden’s entities to do interesting, valuable, and profitable things for their clients.
Alden is a rapidly growing company embracing new technology. Technology was evolving very quickly, even before COVID, with the tools that were available from mass market technology companies like Google, Microsoft, and Apple, but since AI has come to the forefront, the level of evolution has increased by many times the ability to utilize technology to protect client assets and also be more productive is going to be a main differentiator in traditional finance businesses and ones that are geared toward modern clients and modern economy, I think that Alden, as well, is known for our prowess in technology, marketing, and compliance, which are core areas of the firm that we’ve invested heavily, and I believe do a better job than similar size peers.
I get good feedback about the people that work here on our executive and core team, and I think that despite all the technological advancements and everything else, your health and your money is still something where people want to have trust in the people that they work with, and they want to have a relationship, and most of the most successful people at Alden have curated trust in relationships with their clients over many years, where they’ve demonstrated how they add value, and I don’t think that ever goes away. The challenge will be how to transition that into a client base in an economy that’s increasingly isolated by technology.
The most interesting thing for me is the variety of people that we meet, and how we try to help them with the right products, services, and technology they need to serve their clients. There’s something interesting to do every day for many people in the industry. It’s a lifestyle business where once they get to a certain point, they don’t care about growing or innovating, and I would say at Alden, the professionals that work here are always trying to innovate, grow, and be better at what we do each day, because we find the work so interesting and the personal relationships that we build so meaningful.
We’d love to hear about how you think about risk taking?
The types of risks that you take when you start a business, and you’re responsible for an ever larger group of employees and payroll, are something that many entrepreneurs can relate to. Risks and finance businesses like Alden include regulatory risk, the risk of financial market disruptions, as well as managing a business that is based on cash flow and investment. Many companies grow very slowly because they’re very risk-averse, get a little too complacent, and then lose some of the momentum they built. The balancing act is to innovate and remain open to growth as much as possible, while ensuring the core business is well-funded and able to withstand disruptions beyond your control.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://aldeninvestmentgroup.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aldeninvestmentgroup
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/alden-investment-group
