Offering individualized advice in a 401(k) plan—one tough nut to crack. While the asset size of plan in total makes it attractive to manage, each individual plan participant rarely has the asset level necessary to make it worth an advisor's time.
Mike Scarborough has the solution.
"Our service will step in and act as a third-party asset manager within the plan; we're not taking the money out of the plan," Scarborough, president of the appropriately named Scarborough Capital Management, says. "The advisors, registered reps and RIAs work with the client and is the main point of contact, but we manage the trading, billing, reallocating, rebalancing and anything else the employee needs with regards to the portfolio."
So how does he do it? With a heavy emphasis on technology and scale of course, but also by "making a lot of money, spending a lot of money and spending the last 24 years making a lot of mistakes."
Yet four years ago, he felt confident enough to take the "Intel Chip" out of Scarborough Capital Management and market it to other advisors and plan sponsors.