Blue Ocean Global Technology Interviews Jon Powell | Portfolio Manager at Ferguson-Johnson Wealth Management

Jon Powell, CFP® serves as a financial planner and portfolio manager for Ferguson-Johnson Wealth Management, an independent, fee-only fiduciary firm that has been helping clients plan for and enjoy retirement for more than 40 years. With more than 10 years of experience, Jon is passionate about providing unbiased advice that puts his clients first. He considers it a privilege to carry some of the financial burden for his clients and educate them so they can make empowered decisions for their futures. He organizes, develops, and delivers financial plans to our clients as well as overseeing client portfolios.
Jon is also the primary author and curator of the content featured on our website’s blog. He has been with the firm since 2013. Prior to his time at Ferguson-Johnson Wealth Management, he gained experience in investments, risk management, and financial planning from working with other local wealth management firms. He has a fierce commitment to the fiduciary standard and always exercises this care with our clients. Jon maintains professional memberships with the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors (NAPFA) and the Financial Planning Association (FPA).
Jon graduated from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University with a bachelor’s degree in financial planning and holds the CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ certification. He is a constant learner, always seeking out the most effective ways to deliver solutions to our clients. His commentary and opinion on personal finance have been featured in publications such as Bloomberg and Reuters. Outside the office, Jon enjoys playing tennis and golf and loves to sit down to a good board game. He is a diehard fan of the local D.C. area sports teams. It’s not unusual to catch him at a Washington Nationals game in the warmer months. He and his wife, Erica, live in Virginia with their black lab, Nugget, and an orange tabby cat, named Kiwi. Jon is a diehard fan of D.C.-area sports teams; you might see him at a Washington Nationals game.

Blue Ocean: Why did you choose to work in the wealth management industry?

Jon Powell: My interest in this field started when I was a child. There was a lot of strife in my family over money. A lot of it stemmed from a misunderstanding of what money is and what role it serves in running a family, making sure food is on the table, and ensuring school fees and all our needs are covered. This led me to take classes on wealth management when I entered university.

I did not want to relive the strife I went through as a child when I had a family down the road. Exploring these classes and learning from my professors piqued my interest and the profession felt like a calling. I knew I wanted to do this and help other people manage their wealth. 

Blue Ocean: What does your typical day look like?

Jon Powell: My day is quite flexible due to the nature of my profession, which is one of the things I find fulfilling in this line of work. I don’t have a regular day-to-day routine; it’s always dictated by the needs and requests of my clients and other ongoing tasks. I find myself pulled in various directions throughout the day.

Coming to work every day, there’s an element of unpredictability that I embrace. My day might involve client meetings, engaging in discussions with them, or devising tailored solutions and strategies to address their needs. Alternatively, it could revolve around investment analysis or trading activities. I enjoy the freedom to adapt and prioritize tasks based on the demands of the day.

Blue Ocean: What is one trend in your industry that excites you?

Jon Powell: Over the last 20 years, we have seen a shift from what used to be called active management of investments. You would go to somebody, and they would take stocks for you or get in or out of the market based on current events or their predictions.

There is ample academic evidence that suggests that active management tends to do poorly in financial markets. During this period, products have been invented and there has been a mass adoption of more passive or index style products. They have come into the fold and we have just gotten to a point where passive investing has overtaken active investing. In the long term that is going to be a good thing for most investors as they are going to pay less in fees for the services they need. Additionally, they are going to get better and increasingly consistent returns from their investment.

It’s a win for everyone and we have been using this type of investing strategy for over 40 years and it has worked very well for our clients. Overall, I think it’s going to help a lot of people achieve their financial goals.

Blue Ocean: How have you differentiated yourself, and what underpins your success?

Jon Powell: We operate as fee-only fiduciary advisors. That is a contrast to most of the investment advice industry. This means that we are only compensated directly by our clients. There are no other sources that are paying us. The advantage of that is we usually run into less conflicts of interest than advisors that sell products or receive commissions for the things they recommend. There is no other third party that is in the relationship with us and our clients that is paying us for recommending a certain product or service. 

Most of the financial investment industry either sells insurance and annuities or gets kickbacks for various products and services they recommend. That leads to a situation where things being recommended to a client are potentially not the best thing for those clients. But they are recommended because advisors are getting paid for those things. 

We don’t do that, and we find it to be a cleaner way of rendering advice so that the conflicts of interest that would arise from being paid from other sources is eliminated.

Blue Ocean: What is something unique that you offer to your clients?

Jon Powell: We offer extremely customized solutions. The majority of wealth advisors plug numbers into software and give you outputs. That works fine enough but the reality is each individual is different. Each situation is different and each relationship with money is different because of all the nuances and particularities of individuals. Things don’t always fit cleanly into software solutions. So we get in there and tailor our advice. We build out customized models and tools that are particular to individual clients. and give them the results and information they need to be able to make smart financial decisions. That level of customization enhances what we do compared to what most of the rest of the industry does. 

Blue Ocean: What advice would you give to your younger self?

Jon Powell: I struggled with confidence early in my career. I was working with people that had a million or more dollars. As someone fresh out of college, I didn’t want to rock the boat. I didn’t want to say the wrong thing, and I didn’t want to make these people feel like they couldn’t trust me. That led me to not engage or not be as proactive as I should have been a lot of the time with clients. Clients come to us for a service, and we expect to deliver that service.

In that regard, I would tell myself to be proactive, reach out to clients, and annoy them if you need to, in order to get the things, they hired you to do, to be done.

Blue Ocean: What is something you are grateful for?

Jon Powell: My family and friends. They are what keeps me going and who I do it for.

Blue Ocean: What are your sources of happiness and inspiration?

Jon Powell: I have an optimistic mindset, which is important, especially in my industry where clients call with worries about what is going on with their money and what is happening in the news. How that’s going to affect things 5 and 10 years from now.

There are a lot of things I don’t have answers to. I can’t solve the socio-political and geopolitical crises that are going on in the world and I don’t know how that’s going to affect things in the future. However, I am optimistic, and human ingenuity has shown that over time we’re going to figure things out that may not be a straight line all the time. If we look at a long enough window, which is often the duration that we are working with clients, things generally seem to trend in a positive direction.

So, maintaining optimism has helped me sleep at night and keeps my mood up. It also translates to being able to communicate with clients that there are hopefully brighter days ahead.

Blue Ocean: Outside of work, what passions and interests do you pursue?

Jon Powell: I consider myself to be a fitness nomad of sorts. I am not a cyclist, weightlifter, or runner but I like to do all of those things. I like to dabble with various fitness-related activities that keep me feeling good. 

Blue Ocean: What is your favorite quote?

Jon Powell: A quote by Neils Bohr, “Prediction is difficult, especially if it’s about the future.” It is kind of humorous, it echoes my attitude about investment, in that predicting is inherently impossible. You can watch the news on any given day and there will be someone on a panel that is predicting something, and they are usually going to be wrong. Why we listen to them, I don’t know. If we had a crystal ball and knew what was going to happen, things would be a lot different around the world.

So, I think that quote perfectly encapsulates the unknown and known, really about everything we deal with.