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Meet TJ Tillman of Empire Wealth Management in Gilbert

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Today we’d like to introduce you to TJ Tillman.

TJ, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
I started my career in finance in 2005. At the time, everyone was flying high on soaring real estate prices, easy access to money, and a surging stock market. It seemed like because everything kept going up and up, that it was destined to keep going that way indefinitely.

I worked for one of the biggest banks in the country and saw, first-hand, the shadiness that permeated the entire industry. People were being encouraged to take out home equity to invest in the market, leveraging their futures and their family’s home on the word of an advisor they’d entrusted their entire financial well-being too.

And two short years later…it all came crashing down. Every third house in any neighborhood was vacant. Foreclosure notices adorned the windows and doors of the houses of families whose lives had just been crushed. Jobs were scarce and, with the stock market taking a meteoric nosedive, people’s retirement plans vanished. The experiences I had during that time in my life changed me. I saw how quickly people I loved and cared about could be taken advantage of by people who would sacrifice these people’s well being and financial security, solely to make a commission for themselves.

At that point, I resolved to make it my mission to do everything in my power to educate people and lead them away from all the scams, hidden fees and shady sales-tactics that ruled the financial industry. That was the genesis of my firm, Empire Wealth Management.

Has it been a smooth road?
Well…no. If I had to distill the entire experience of building this business into a single word, “smooth” wouldn’t even come to mind. In order to do what I felt was best for the people I was going to work with, I couldn’t operate the old-school way by making a living on commissions. In my eyes, that’s what caused so many of the problems I was trying to get rid of in the first place.

So, I established my firm as a fee-only, fiduciary planning firm. Unlike the majority of the advisors out there, my belief is that good financial planning should revolve around a process, not a product. So, irrespective of what types of investments my clients have, I don’t make any more or less money. That allowed me the freedom to eliminate a huge conflict of interest and affords my clients the peace of mind to know that anything I’m recommending for them is 100% what I feel is in their best interest because I make the same amount either way.

The issue with that was, when you’re starting a financial planning firm from the ground up, in the midst of the biggest financial crisis the world has seen in 80 years, and all the other guys are making 5-10% commissions on anything they sell while you’re hovering around a 1% annual fee, you’re not making much money in the beginning.

And, when you’re a 26-year-old guy with a no-name local firm, you have to build a serious amount of trust with people before they’ll decide to work with you.

So, as you know, we’re impressed with Empire Wealth Management – tell our readers more, for example, what you’re most proud of as a company and what sets you apart from others.
There’s kind of a baseline in financial planning that every decent firm should hit. For starters, they help people assess where they’re at, where they’re going and what they need to do to get there. In that regard, all firms are pretty much the same. The only difference is how they get paid. Commission, fees, or both.

At Empire, we do all that just like any other financial firm but we set ourselves apart in a few different ways beyond that as well. Everything I do here I do because I wanted to be different, to be better…and to DO better than what most advisors do.

For starters, as I alluded to earlier, we work on a fee-only, fiduciary basis. I think that’s one of the absolute most important aspects to working with an advisor and I’m astonished at how few people understand the difference and how little the industry, as a whole has, adopted that compensation model to this point. It’s just so much better for the client.

We take a much deeper dive into our investment recommendations. If a typical review of your retirement accounts is a check-up, we’re more of an x-ray, MRI and CT Scan. The reason we do it this way is that almost every time I sit down with someone new and analyze their current accounts, I find thousands of dollars of internal fees they’re not even aware of that don’t need to be there. If you’re just doing a brief once-over, you’re missing all that.

Another huge differentiator is our process-driven mentality. More often than not, when you’re working with an advisor, at some point, you’re going to get lost in the shuffle of, your life, your advisor’s life and their time spent with other clients and marketing their practice. Over the ten years, we’ve been in business, we’ve continually refined our process in order to eliminate redundancies and make our time together as efficient as possible so we continually gather all the information we need to stay on top of your situation and continue to deliver great ongoing advice.

Let’s touch on your thoughts about our city – what do you like the most and least?
I love Gilbert. My family and I have lived here for 12 years now and, there’s nowhere we’d rather be. I love the feeling of community here, the business-friendly atmosphere, the way the town is developing and the excitement that surrounds it.

I lived in the same city from the time I was six until I graduated and moved to New York for a couple years but I’ve never felt more home than I do right here. For me, my wife, our kids, and our businesses…we’re all in on Gilbert.

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Getting in touch: VoyagePhoenix is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.

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