From mailroom to CEO AS SEEN IN THE
Transcription
From mailroom to CEO AS SEEN IN THE
AS SEEN IN THE GREENVILLEJOURNAL Greenville, S.C. • Friday, August 31, 2012 • Vol.14, No.35 From mailroom to CEO Trevor Gordon makes a home at the helm of the Sandlapper financial companies By DICK HUGHES | contributor Sandlapper Securities CEO Trevor Gordon’s office is decorated with memorabilia of various musicians from Frank Sinatra to Elvis Presley. While Gordon is a music lover, he said his interest in the performers is also rooted in their abilities as entrepreneurs. GREG BECKNER / STAFF Still, keeping Sandlapper small and independent is important to differentiate the services from large national broker-dealers, he said. “Big firms don’t do a lot of products I am able to promote. A firm that has 12,000 to 15,000 registered representatives doesn’t have the time to do the due diligence I am able to do on an underwriting of a $20-million offering.” Gordon has run the company since its inception without debt. “If I went out and borrowed a bunch of money, I probably could grow exponentially faster, but I have been able to manage the growth,” he said. Gordon decided to stay in Greenville after flirting briefly with moving the business to Florida, where he got his start. There’s a large market there for financial services, he said, but also a lot of competition. “It was a very short-lived process in thinking of taking it to Florida. I created a home here. South Carolina has been very pro-business, and I haven’t had any impediments from the state, GREG BECKNER / STAFF Fresh out of the Army and a couple of years beyond high school at age 20, Trevor Gordon got his start in the securities business pushing a mail cart at Raymond James in St. Petersburg, Fla., and later moved up to a “dictation-taking, go-get-my-lunch secretary.” It was “a great opportunity to see all the intricacies of the trading floor, the fixed-income department, syndication, watching money move, watching securities move,” he told the Journal last week. “I joke that if it paid better I’d still be doing it today.” Well, he’s not. Today – 21 years later – Gordon is founder and CEO of four Greenvillebased financial companies that meld a complementary spectrum of investment products from the simple to the complex. The four entities are branded as Sandlapper Capital Investments, Sandlapper Securities, Sandlapper Insurance Services and, the newest and soon most publicly visible, Sandlapper Wealth Management – an addition Gordon considers a natural progression. “It is a natural fit for us to move more toward the planning and advisory side of the business,” he said. With the wealth management company, which the Securities and Exchange Commission approved to operate as a national financial advisory firm, Sandlapper now has what may be the only full-service broker-dealer agency in the state. “I couldn’t bet the farm on it, but I haven’t seen any others,” Gordon said in an interview in offices in the Bank of America building in downtown Greenville. The Bank of America address is temporary. Gordon and his partners are in the process of acquiring property that they can redevelop as a place of their own with high public visibility. In the three years Sandlapper has been in business as an independent firm, revenue grew from $1 million to $5 million. The company has 30 to 35 independent agents representing Sandlapper across the country, a number that could grow with the financial advisory business just underway. “I feel like I could manage 100 relationships and really know and understand the people. That would be a nice sweet spot for us,” Gordon said. However, if opportunities come along “to buy broker-dealers,” Sandlapper could handle 500 to 1,000, he added. Sandlapper Securities executives (from left) Jack Bixler, principal and national sales manager; Trevor Gordon, CEO; and Karl Leonard, president and financial professional, meet in Bixler’s office. the city or the county in getting the business started.” Gordon came to Greenville after stops in New York, Texas and Southern California, gaining experience in a wide diversity of investment products and honing his financial research and marketing skills. In that span between St. Petersburg and South Carolina, he also earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in business administration from Kentucky Western University. While working for a firm in Orange County, Calif., that packaged syndicated real estate under an IRS 1030 Exchange, Gordon got to know and joined John Boyd of TIC Properties in Greenville, which was doing similar work. The 1030 allows investors to defer capital gains if they use proceeds from sold properties to buy “replacement” property within a short period of time. Gordon became a partner in TIC and affiliated companies, but when the bottom fell out of the real estate market in 2008, he found himself “staring at this massive portfolio of real estate and thinking to myself, ‘I am not even qualified to be a receptionist there. Here I am a principal in this company, and there really isn’t a job for me.’” He saw Sandlapper Securities, which had been created by TIC in 2005 but largely used to simply market its own syndication, as an opportunity to use his strengths in securities. TIC was the majority owner; Gordon “owned a little bit by myself.” “I wanted to build a better mousetrap,” he said. “I saw a lot of brokerdealers, especially in the independent channel, go belly-up the last few years,” particularly in the area of private placement of investments. Gordon figured his experience in private placement syndication, combined with his broker-dealer experience, gave him skills in careful risk management to identify red flags early and avoid pitfalls that brought down so many broker-dealers. He went to his partners at TIC with his plan. “I said, ‘Guys, I want to build a full-service independent broker-dealer.’ They said, ‘Great, best of luck to you. We’re real estate guys.’” Gordon set out on his own with Sandlapper, recruiting Jack Bixler, an old friend and colleague, as a partner and Karl Leonard, a colleague from Raymond James, as president of the wealth management company. When Gordon talks about the core values he infuses in Sandlapper, he harks back to what he learned from the mentor whose mail he delivered and later opened as her secretary in that first job in St. Petersburg. “The job evolved into a marketing position; and in order to understand and market the research we were doing, I ostensibly became an analyst to place in perspective quantitative data with qualitative understanding.” Contact Dick Hughes at [email protected].