Charlie Spiring to be entrepreneur again

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/01/2017 (3421 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

ABOUT five years after selling his former firm Wellington West Capital to National Bank Financial for $333 million, Winnipeg investment entrepreneur Charlie Spiring is once again striking out on his own.

Spiring and his National Bank colleague — former Wellington West national sales manager Todd Degelman — are forming a national retail wealth-management firm.

“I’ve has a great experience with the bank, and since I joined five years ago my personal book of business has doubled,” said Spiring who currently has the title of senior vice-president and senior investment adviser at National Bank Financial Wealth Management.

“I’ve got nothing but good things to say about my time with National Bank, but deep down, I am an entrepreneur. I love being my own boss,” he said.

The move is being done with the blessing of National Bank Financial. The new firm — which has yet to be named and is not expected to launch for a few weeks — will operate on National Bank’s brokerage architecture, National Bank Correspondent Network (NBCN), the same platform on which the original Wellington West operated.

Martin Lavigne, president of National Bank Financial’s wealth-management operations, said, “We like to think differently at National Bank. We know that Charlie has entrepreneurial skills, and when he said he would like to do it again we sat down to figure out how can we build something that would be a win-win for everybody.”

There are number of regulatory and licensing matters to complete before the firm will launch, but Spiring said the idea is to build a national retail wealth-management firm that will take a holistic wealth-management approach focused entirely on the retail sector.

“In our previous firm — call it Wellington West-One — we built a full-service retail/institutional asset management firm,” Spiring said. “This time I will not be knocking on Great-West Life’s doors for orders. I will be knocking on the doors of rich Winnipeggers and Canadians out there looking for advice and the whole complete, wrapped-up holistic advice.”

Spiring and Degelman’s current book of business is about $1 billion — which Spiring said is in the top one per cent in the industry — but he said the plan is to do acquisitions and grow the business to more than two offices. Degelman currently operates out of Saskatoon.

“We’ll be starting with two locations, but I have a line of site on at least three of four more in the first couple of quarters,” Spiring said, “The last time, we grew by acquisition. I would be shocked if we were not successful going ahead (with that same strategy).”

In 1993, when Spiring left Midland Walwyn to form Wellington West, he had less than $200 million of assets under management. During the next 20 years he built that business to about 50 locations with about 125 employees managing about $10 billion of assets.

Lately, the banks have dominated the wealth-management business, and the market has not been kind to independent operators, especially those in the institutional market.

“The headwinds are a little bit against independents and have been for the last four or five years, but we see that lightening a little bit,” he said. “We have built a business model that will do well in these tough times, and if the winds change in our direction we will thrive. That is my bet.”

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca