Meet The North Dakota Farm Boy Turned $4 Billion Wealth Manager

Name: Joel Bird

Firm: Ameriprise Financial AMP Services

Location: Bismarck, ND

Team Assets (Custodied): $3.9 billion

Forbes Rankings: America’s Top Wealth Advisors, Best-in-State Wealth Advisors, Best-in-State Wealth Management Teams

Background: Joel Bird grew up on a farm in a small town in North Dakota, near the Canadian border. He graduated with an accounting degree from the University of North Dakota in 1999 and spent a bit of time doing tax work before joining Ameriprise as an advisor in 2000. Working out of the Bismarck office for over a decade, he eventually decided to expand and in 2013 founded Legacy Financial Partners. The idea was to share resources and team up with several other advisors in the same office, but growth took off as he continued to add more people from around the state. In just over a decade, the team has grown to 112 employees across 29 locations in six states. What’s more, with over 15,000 clients, the team leverages its scale through different systems such as having its own client service call center or its own internal investment committees and marketing teams.

Building Relationships: “We help people achieve their goals and for most of our clients, that’s retirement,” he says. With North Dakota being a rural state, Bird doesn’t have any minimums for new clients and often ends up taking referrals from existing clients. “The biggest challenge is making sure that client service remains very important, so we stay in touch and do a lot of marketing events because we want to know people on a different level,” says Bird. “I always tell my advisors, underpromise and overdeliver—we have to make sure we’re still providing a high level of service and continuing to add staff as we need them so we don’t have any coverage gaps.” One way that he stays in touch with clients and families is through having each advisor or office at Legacy Financial Partners host local events, ranging from renting out the local zoo and beer or wine tastings to picnics and river cruises.

Competitive Edge: Bird recalls his days bartending throughout college and how it taught him how to deal with different types of people. “I like to hire from the service industry,” he says. “People with that background not only know how to think on their feet but also how to deal with clients who are in various stages of emotion.” When markets do strange things and clients react differently, his employees subsequently have a good background to deal with those situations, he adds.

Investment Philosophy/Strategy: Bird takes a comprehensive planning approach, understanding both a client’s risk tolerance and timeframe. He uses a bucketing strategy to earmark client assets into short, medium and long term segments. For short-term assets—typically one to three years, positioning is more conservative to ensure spending money for the near future, while clients can typically be a bit more aggressive with long term assets. Bird also employs alternatives, pointing to the state’s abundance of natural resources—from coal and gas to crops and cattle. For some clients that’s an attractive way to diversify, but for most, it’s typically a mix of stocks and bonds, he adds. “We’re positive on the market—stocks go up 75% of the time—and those are good odds,” says Bird. “If you can get through rough patches you will be rewarded, but most people don’t like to see assets go down.”

Investment/2024 Outlook: “There are always clients who are nervous about something, whether it’s inflation or the Federal Reserve or an election year,” says Bird. He nonetheless remains optimistic about a soft landing: “We’re thinking later this year before the Fed starts cutting rates.”