Shownotes
- Representation Matters in Finance: Manny highlights the visible lack of diversity in financial planning, and how seeing few role models in the industry can limit a young person’s belief in the possibilities for their own career.
- The Power of Exposure and Mentorship: Manny’s journey was shaped by mentors and chance encounters—emphasizing that if you don’t know a career exists, you can’t prepare or aspire to it. Intentional outreach and speaking at schools can create these vital opportunities.
- Apprenticeship Over “Sink or Swim”: Rather than the traditional approach of pushing new advisors to sell right out of the gate, BFG’s apprenticeship model focuses on gradual learning, client exposure, and holistic development—leading to better advisors and better client outcomes.
- Excellence Over Perfection: Manny distinguishes himself by expecting perfect effort, not perfect performance, from himself and those around him. He believes in holding high standards while understanding that learning and growth are ongoing processes.
- Paying It Forward: Manny is committed to giving back—returning to his alma mater, educating others about financial literacy, and striving to be a first-call advocate and steward for his clients and community. He believes true luck and success come at the intersection of preparation and opportunity.
Transcripts
This is Eric Brotman, the host of Don't Retire Graduate, the podcast that asks you what you want to be when you grow up so you can graduate into retirement with purpose and with passion. Welcome to our Diary of a Financial Advisor segment where we interview financial advisors about their professional journeys and their passion for helping others succeed. Today, I'm pleased to be joined by Manny essien. Manny joined BFG Financial Advisors in June of 2020 as a client service associate. After spending his final college semester as an intern in that client service department, he transitioned to an associate within our advisory team in 2022 and became a financial advisor in 2025. Manny pursued a career in finance and hopes to use his position to help the firm in its efforts to spread financial literacy to the masses. And this is a great way to do that. Manny, welcome to Don't Retire Graduate.
Manny Essien [:Thank you very much. I know it's been a long time coming. I've been excited to get this podcast going.
Eric Brotman [:Yeah. I would love to say that. That you were first on the list to be on the show, and you were, but you're just too busy. The man is busy.
Manny Essien [:Every time I wanted to do it, you had somebody else lined up. But, you know, it finally works out, and I'm ready to. To get this going.
Eric Brotman [:All right. Always the bridesmaid, never the bride. Over here, actually. So Manny started. He was a. A student at. At Stevenson when I met him, and. And I think it's such an impactful story.
Eric Brotman [:Would you share the story of sort of how this came to be? Because it's been. It trans hope for you, but definitely for me and for the firm.
Manny Essien [:Yeah, absolutely. Well, it starts in the 1990s, when I was born. Just kidding. Eric and I met at Stevenson in 2019. So my senior year there. At that point in time, I was playing football. I was pretty involved with the finance community there, and I was receiving some scholarships. So, long story short, I was the student speaker at a scholarship luncheon that Eric was the MC at.
Manny Essien [:And when I got up on stage to talk about my journey thus far and where I kind of saw myself going in my life or, you know, where I hoped to go, a lot of the passions that I had and a lot of the things that I wanted to achieve were in line with BFG Financial Advisors and Eric's vision. And, of course, this was unbeknownst to me, but the people that were there at the luncheon, you know, knew Eric and had heard from me and told us that we just needed to talk to each other. So after the football season, Eric invited me into the office to come and meet the team. You know, see. See the space and, you know, one thing led to another, and here we are.
Eric Brotman [:So, you know, we are. I often refer to this place, this magnificent place, as a teaching hospital for financial advisors. In most financial advisory spaces, as soon as someone joins the firm, they're asked to call 100 or 200 of their friends and sell them something. And we just simply don't do that. So we look at getting young people ready for this career as an apprenticeship. And since you started with a dig about when you were born, what I can say is that your generation tends to like immediate gratification. And it's hard to find people who are willing to be patient to allow careers to develop the right way, in my opinion. And you've done that.
Eric Brotman [:I mean, you really have done that. But. But beyond that, you once told me an incredible story about why so few of your teammates specifically even attended various functions when financial advisors or other finance firms came to speak, to recruit, to talk about careers. That sort of knocked me sideways. I was not expecting to hear that. Would you share that with us?
Manny Essien [:Sure. And, you know, while I was in the moment, while I was in school, you know, surrounded by my. My peers, my teammates in one area, surrounded by finance majors in another area, I realized that there were two completely different sets of thought, right? So when I'm surrounded by my teammates, I'm surrounded by guys that typically come from a different kind of community, whereas finance majors come from a different kind of community. And I just found that the two did not intersect often. One thing I've learned, and I feel like this might be a universal truth, I don't want to say it is and try and know patent that, but I think you oftentimes try to emulate what you see within your community, whether that be your parents, your uncles, your aunt. You go out there and you want to do what they do, they're your hero. For me, my parents worked in the health space, in the. In the medical space, and for the longest time, that was my goal.
Manny Essien [:It was going to be that or. Or law or engineer. I also, my parents are immigrants from Nigeria. So there's a funny saying where those kids often seek out those three professions, and that's the expectation. That being said, I think that that on a broader space, kind of explained my. My football team. Okay. I think that people sought out to do what they knew, what they understood, and what they believed they could achieve at.
Manny Essien [:It's a funny thing now that I'm saying it because when you're playing football, your goal is, I want to win a championship. I want to be all American. I want to get this conference title or whatever, whatever it might be, and you've never done. But when it comes to our careers and what it is that we want to do in a professional space, sometimes it feels like we are limiting ourselves based on what we believe is possible.
Eric Brotman [:So at these recruiting events, Mandy and I had a lot of heart to heart conversations about the industry, about the business. And they were really incredibly transparent and human and honest. And over the years, it's been abundantly clear that the financial planning space, everyone in the financial planning space looks like me. Now, I'm not saying wildly handsome. I'm. I'm especially handsome in that regard. But they're older, they're Caucasian, they're male. And that means I check at least two of those boxes.
Eric Brotman [:You might think it's three, but I think it's two. At any rate, there's not a lot of diversity in the field and therefore it's, I think, a little bit. It's gotta be intimidating as hell to figure out how do I. How do I break into a field that looks like it's not even available to me?
Manny Essien [:Sure. What's that saying luck is the intersection of preparation and opportunity?
Eric Brotman [:Yep.
Manny Essien [:I. I could say that success is the intersection of preparation and opportunity. Well, what happens when you net. You don't necessarily have people preparing you for something or you don't have the opportunity available to you because of the community that you're in. Then what? That's the question I've been trying to answer myself. And I think that that's why I enjoy bfg. I enjoy our huge emphasis on financial literacy. I enjoy that it is not necessarily told to us to do, but the hope and really what has become the standard is that we are evangelizing not what BFG can do, but what having an education or a background in financial literacy can do for you.
Manny Essien [:So I go back to Stevenson as much as I can to speak to the students, because that's what was done for me. I didn't necessarily know that I wanted to work in financial planning or wealth management or however you want to call it. I knew that I had a passion for making your money make money. I knew that I understood numbers better than some people, and I knew that I liked finances. What happened for me was that I had a professor that I had developed a great relationship with. I'll say Dr. Simpkins name, because she's done a lot for BFG and really a lot for me. But she told me, manny, financial planning seems to be the space you would excel at.
Manny Essien [:You enjoy relationships, you enjoy getting to know people, and you enjoy educating. All in all, I believe that sums up to being an advocate and a steward for folks. But. But, you know, that being said, I think that once you have somebody expose you to various careers, then you have a better understanding of what you could be best at. If you've never heard of it, how would you know to go down that road? How would you know to go down that preparation road? How would you know to go to seek out that opportunity? And therefore, how do you find, quote, unquote, luck or success?
Eric Brotman [:Yeah, no, I think luck a lot of times starts with showing up.
Manny Essien [:Sure.
Eric Brotman [:Like 90% of it is showing up. And somewhat I might have been. Wayne Gretzky said you miss all the shots you don't take. Absolutely. And that's certainly one of them. So over the five year apprenticeship, which I unabashedly refer to it that way because it does require some steps. It requires learning the business, learning the industry, getting some licensing, getting some formal education. It involves serving in different capacities within the organization.
Eric Brotman [:It involves sitting in on hundreds of meetings with clients who are going through sometimes financial challenges, sometimes financial opportunities are there, of course, and really getting to know the people. But what I found. And Manny, I'm going to give you a compliment on the airwaves, which I should know better because I know it'll come back and I'll hear all about it. But the compliment is that no one in this organization, no one in this organization holds other people to the standard of excellence that you do.
Manny Essien [:Thank you.
Eric Brotman [:You literally tolerate nothing less than someone's best. And I don't know if that came from your parents, I don't know if it came from athletics, I don't know if it came from education or if it just innate to you. But your, your tolerance for anything less than the best is nil. And that's not to suggest that I'm calling you a perfectionist, because I don't, I don't ever get the sense you're a perfectionist. I think you expect perfect effort, not perfect performance. And to me, that is so in line with the way I've tried to grow an organization over three decades.
Manny Essien [:Sure.
Eric Brotman [:That you are a natural fit for us. So, yes, I gave you a compliment on air. I'm sure I'll hear all about it later. Yeah, now I have to compliment everyone.
Manny Essien [:Thankfully, you've Done most of these because you were holding out on, on letting me speak to the people.
Eric Brotman [:Oh, oh, is that what it is? Okay, so, so let's talk about what's coming because we're, we're running out of time. I'm going to ask you what you want to be when you grow up, because it feels like I don't graduate tradition. But, but I also, more than that, want to know sort of what you see the next five to ten years being now that you're wearing the hat of a client facing financial advisor in a firm that's growing as rapidly as we are.
Manny Essien [:Sure. Well, to talk about what's coming, I want to just highlight some things from the past. The five year apprenticeship. I think it's a two way street. You said that a lot of people in my generation are not like me and that they're not, you know, being patient and waiting. But you know, on the other side, what was the norm or what is the norm in the industry is that, you know, you're sat down on your first day and told to call 100 folks. I think that what we experience here is that I've been insulated from some of the pressures of growing a book and therefore I've been allowed to learn, I've been allowed to experience. And Eric, you say this sometimes when we're getting to know folks.
Manny Essien [:I have never seen your pieces of the puzzle together like this, but I have seen each piece of this puzzle. I have experienced this in the past. I have seen this debt. I have seen this family dynamic, dynamic to a certain degree, but I've never seen it all together like this. I think that's a fundamental piece of learning that I've been able to get these first five years. Now, where does that take me in the future? Hopefully focusing on those things, the things that brought me here, focusing on people's individual characteristics and how that differentiates themselves from one family to the next. What do I want to be when I grow up? An advocate. I'd like to be a steward.
Manny Essien [:I'd like to be the first call. You know, that's, that's what I want to be. I want to be a helper. I guess I should have given you one word, but I really feel like that all just about encompasses what it is that I want to be when I grow up.
Eric Brotman [:Well, I, I think number one, my money's on you. I think that's exactly what has already happened to a great degree. I don't think that's purely future talk. I think you're already doing that. And. And you've brought so much to our culture, to our organization, to our team, to our. To our brand, to our model and to our standards that I just. This was a pleasure.
Eric Brotman [:I'm glad you finally got a chance. I might even have you on again.
Manny Essien [:I feel like there's so much I need to say.
Eric Brotman [:Well, I might have you on again. We'll have to talk about it, but. But thank you, Manny, for doing this. There's a. There's a lot of enormous opportunity ahead, and I'm glad you're on our bus and that we're going together.
Manny Essien [:Thank you. I'm happy to be here.
Eric Brotman [:I'd like to thank all of you for listening and watching today. If you enjoy our show, please subscribe so we can continue to be a part of your journey to financial freedom. We'll be back next week with another engaging guest and in two weeks with another entry in our diary of a financial advisor. For now, this is your host, Eric Brotman, reminding you don't retire. Graduate securities offered through Kestra Investment Services, llc. Kestra is member finra, sipc. Investment advisory Services offered through Kestra Advisory Services, llc. Kestra as an affiliate of Kestra is.
Eric Brotman [:Kestra is or Kestra as are not affiliated with Brotman Financial or any other entity discussed.
