Former Merrill Lynch Manager David Mullen Turns Author and Teacher

David Mullen was a Managing Director at Merrill Lynch for 27 years from 1980 before retiring in 2007. He personally hired and trained over 500 advisors, and his methods have been adopted by many managers and advisors firm-wide. Since retiring from that company, Mullen has written two books,

and

. Mullen spoke to Benzinga to fill us in on the details.

I started with Merrill Lynch in 1980 and spent my first six years as a financial advisor, building a successful practice. Then I was tapped to go into management with Merrill Lynch. I went to the Merrill Lynch management assessment center in 1986 and I was a managing director of five different assignments for the next 21 years. Newport Beach, California, responsible for Merrill Lynch's offices there. Minneapolis. I was a national sales manager, eastern division, in New York City. I managed one of Merrill Lynch's, as the time, largest offices in Atlanta. I ended my Merrill Lynch career as the managing director of the Colorado complex. I retired from Merrill Lynch in 2007 after 27 years with the firm. I always enjoyed the training as I was a manager and worked with the advisors through those years. I thought there was a real need for the kind of training insights that I had developed and accumulated over the years, and I felt that there was a great second career for me in the training business. I retired in '07, and thought that the best way for me to get started would be to frame my thoughts and organize my different experiences that I had in the training part of the business, and write a book about how to become a successful advisor. I always felt that the million dollar level was the gold standard that people work towards, and I thought that if I put a book together about providing the blueprint on how to reach a million dollar profit, then that would be a popular book. That's what led to the publication of

in 2007.

Yes. The first book did very well, so Amacom [publishing house] came to me and said, 'we'd like you to consider writing a second book', and did I have any ideas. I told them that I felt that there wasn't a great flow of communication between financial advisors that aspired to be at the highest levels and those that were at the highest levels. The most successful advisors I worked with were pretty focused on their business and didn't spend a lot of time sharing how they became successful with people that were really interested in that. I thought that I would pull back the curtains on the most successful practices and I interviewed the most successful advisors that I had worked with during that period of time, as a manager. I basically came up with a pretty big body of research, plus my own observations. Through that process I identified 13 success principles that the most successful advisors I had worked with all had in common. I wrote a book about identifying those 13 principles, and sharing with my readers how they could aspire to be proficient in those principles. That was the basis of my second book.

Well, the books are aimed at financial advisors at all levels, with all levels of experience in the financial services business.

They were the best advisors that I had worked with in my 27 years at Merrill Lynch. I was pleasantly surprised - not only were they happy to be involved but they answered every single question. I was surprised at that because I asked some pretty personal questions about how much money they had put in the practice, what they felt like their failures were as well as their successes, and they were extremely open with me.

Since you ask, I'm in the process, almost complete, of the second edition of my first book. It's going to come out, I believe, the end of this year. So I'm right in the middle of taking all those things I wish I'd added and putting them into the first book. I'm doing that right now, and specifically there are two things that I'm spending a lot of time on with the second edition. One is a whole chapter on social media, and how financial advisors can use social media to market themselves. The other is, I'm fleshing out the wealth management process in a lot more detail than I did in the first book. I think that our industry has really evolved from when I started in 1980, being primarily a sales, product oriented business to one of advice, council and guidance. I think that's all very good. I'm spending a fair amount of time talking about that evolution and what I think is the gold standard in terms of the wealth management process. I treated that pretty superficially the first go around, and I'm really fleshing that out a lot. I'm also updating all of my chapters with things that I've learned over the last five years that weren't in the first or second book.

When I first started in the industry in the '80s, I won't say it was all about product but there was a heavy product focus, and that is new issue stocks that were coming out. It was a transactional business. You bought and sold things. The best advisors always acted in their client's best interests but there was definitely some conflict going on between the need to sell product and to generate transactions in the best interests of the client. I think that our industry has evolved in such a good way. We're now primarily fee-based. People pay for advice and guidance. I think that the professionalism of the advisor today is so much higher. I think that advisors have elevated themselves to being more like a physician kind of relation with their client vs. kind of a sales relationship. I think all that's been really good.

Well, I feel like I'm still in it. I ended up doing 83 group training days last year, when I was in front of financial advisors, training them. I currently have 15 coaching clients that I actively work with. I feel fully immersed. My role is different - I'm more of a teacher than a manager or an advisor, but I'm still in it pretty deeply.

That's a little bit like asking a woman who has just had a baby when she's going to have another baby. I can't tell you how hard it is. There are some people who are natural writers, it just flows in their brain and they can sit down and crank it out. For me to write a new chapter in a book, it takes hours and hours. It's tedious and it's hard. I think the hardest mental exercise that there is, in my experience, is writing. It isn't just your thoughts and your research - you have to out it down in an organized, coherent way. It's difficult. I'm right in the middle of a second edition, and the thought of writing another book right now, I can't even imagine.