What are opinions on Trilogy Financial services?

Answer 1

Trilogy Financial Services Inc. has been around for 11 years and has shown steady growth even through a down economy. This is a company that values their representatives and clients and offers unbiased guidance in all areas of wealth management.

Disclosure: I'm a recent UC grad, I got to the final round of interviews and didn't get the position. There were about 20 other qualified people who didn't have as many qualms with commission-based sales as I did. All of the information below is from the manager's presentation, none of it was in paperwork.

It provides 6 weeks of training and foots the ENTIRE bill for Series 7 and Series 65 Tests, which is a good deal. They only started doing this this year, perhaps due to high turnover in the first few months of a worker's career. They pay a stipend of $700 with about 50 hours/week for the first 6 weeks. I was considering working through the training and then leaving the company.

Then you can choose either

1. a base monthly salary of 1.5k + 15% of what you bring in or

2. a straight 35% of what you bring in

So once you bring in 80k or more of business (the minimum without your boss hounding you), straight commission is more profitable. This means that, for every 80k you bring in, you get an income of 28,000 a year. So your income is almost entirely dependent on your ability to constantly generate your own clients and sell life insurance and whatnot. And if you're stellar at that, you can do well regardless of the company's support.

I would have a hard time convincing people I know and respect to give me $2,000+ to manage their money at above-market commission rates. None of the focus seems to be on how well you manage people's money, but solely on how much money you bring in. It's a bit like a pyramid scheme but if you're very outgoing you may be able to advance within a few years. Something I thought was odd was that during the 3 hour interview/presentation I saw only one employee there and maybe 2 clients come in. Highly skeptical of this business model.