How To Scale Up a Financial Services Firm With Jim Dunlop Managing Partner at Advent Partners

Jim Dunlop is the Founder and Managing Partner at Advent Partners, a Gettysburg, Pennsylvania-based wealth management and financial planning firm. A Certified Financial Partner with over two decades in the financial services industry, Jim has developed a niche focus on helping faith-based clients align their wealth with their values. He is also the host of the podcast You Can’t Take It With You, which explores generosity, legacy planning, and impactful giving. Through Advent Partners, Jim supports clients in making meaningful decisions about their financial futures while planning with purpose.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: 

• [1:42] The summer camp job that shaped Jim Dunlop’s work ethic and community values
• [4:25] How faith and church involvement influenced Jim’s early leadership
• [9:32] Why Jim initially rejected — and later embraced — a career in financial services
• [15:20] What “You Can’t Take It With You” means in client conversations
• [16:22] Jim discusses launching Advent Partners during the pandemic
• [20:01] How Jim’s firm transitioned clients remotely during the shutdown
• [22:44] What’s behind the decision to stay faith-based in an independent financial practice?

In this episode…

Faith-based financial planning can offer a meaningful framework for managing wealth with purpose. As more people accumulate resources, many are asking deeper questions about legacy, generosity, and what happens to their money when they’re gone. How can financial advisors guide clients toward intentional giving and legacy planning?

According to Jim Dunlop, a seasoned wealth advisor, legacy planning starts with aligning finances to core values. After years of helping clients navigate wealth decisions, Jim emphasizes the power of generosity — whether it’s supporting family, donating to community causes, or creating lasting impact through charitable giving. Through his firm and podcast, he encourages clients to plan wisely and give meaningfully, even before the end of life.

On this episode of The Top Business Leaders Show, John Corcoran welcomes Jim Dunlop, Founder and Managing Partner at Advent Partners, for a conversation about scaling a financial practice during a crisis, building a faith-aligned client base, and why generous clients often experience the most joy. Jim also shares insights on merging firms, planning with purpose, and the story behind his podcast, You Can’t Take It With You.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Chad Franzen on LinkedIn
• Rise25
• Email the team at Rise25: support@rise25.com
• Jim Dunlop on LinkedIn
• Advent Partners
• You Can’t Take It With You podcast

Quotable Moments:

• “You can’t take it with you. So let’s figure out what meaningful impact you want to leave behind.”
• “Our best clients are people who view their finances through the lens of their faith.”
• “The clients who give the most are often the ones who experience the most joy in doing so.”
• “We had to adapt overnight during COVID — literally mailing hundreds of account transfers.”
• “Being a business owner was never the plan, but it turned out to be the perfect fit for me.”

Action Steps:

1. Align wealth with your values: Reflect on how your faith or core beliefs shape financial decisions.
2. Start giving now, not later: Explore opportunities to make charitable contributions while alive to see the impact.
3. Adapt business operations to remote success: Leverage tools like Zoom and digital forms for seamless transitions.
4. Build a niche client base: Define and serve a specific community whose values match your mission.
5. Plan for succession through partnerships: Consider firm acquisitions to expand services and secure long-term continuity.

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Episode Transcript

John Corcoran: 00:00

All right. Today we’re talking about how to scale up a financial services firm. My guest today is Jim Dunlop. He’s got lots of experience in that area. I’ll tell you more about him in a second.

So stay tuned.

Intro: 00:14

Welcome to the Top Business Leaders Show powered by Rise25 media. We feature top founders, executives and business leaders from all over the world.

John Corcoran: 00:30

All right. Welcome, everyone. John Corcoran here. I’m the host of this show. And you know, every week we have smart CEOs and founders and entrepreneurs from all kinds of companies.

And if you check out the archives, we’ve got Netflix and GruRhub and Gusto, Kinko’s, Activision Blizzard, LendingTree, lots of great episodes for you to check out. So go check that out. And of course, this episode brought to you by rise, where we help businesses to give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. How do we do that? We do that by helping you to run your podcast.

We are the easy button for any company to launch and run a podcast. If you want to learn about how we can do that or how we can help you with that, you can go to our website, which has been recently refreshed with lots of great resources on there, rise25.com, and or you can email our team at support@rise25.com. All right I’m excited to have our guest here today.

His name is Jim Dunlop. He is a certified financial planner and managing partner with Advent Partners, which is a wealth management and financial planning firm based out of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. And he’s got over 20 years of experience in the financial services industry. And what’s really interesting is, you know, he’s the host of the podcast You Can’t Take It With You, which we have been fortunate to work with him on. And so a big part of his why is helping people who have been fortunate enough to accumulate a bit of wealth to figure out what they’re going to do with it.

And so I think that’s a really interesting approach, the way that he does the work that he does. And we’re going to talk about that focus and of course talk also about scaling up his wealth management practice over the last 20 years, even doing acquisitions and how that has gone. So, Jim, excited to have you here today. As always. I love to start to get to know people a little bit more and what their background was like.

And you started at 13 or 14 years old, washing dishes at a summer camp. I worked at some day camps. Not overnight camp; was a day camp. I think back in, like, seriously, like probably the most fun, like one of the most fun jobs out there. And you actually ended up becoming a counselor all the way through high school and college and everything.

So you stayed with this summer camp for quite a while. But take me back to young 13, 14 year old Jim washing dishes. Not the most glamorous role on a summer camp, but. But what did you like about being there?

Jim Dunlop: 02:45

Well, you know, first of all, thanks for having me. And what was exciting for me personally was that this was a camp that I had gone to as a kid from the time I was very young and I just loved it there, and I always admired the staff that worked there. I thought as soon as I was old enough to do that, I would. And so the first job you can get when you’re a kid in high school is support staff, and that’s doing the stuff that nobody else wants to do, like washing dishes and taking the garbage out and those kinds of things. So I got a job washing dishes the first summer there, found a job in the office the next summer and spent a lot of my time at an overnight camp.

So it was pretty cool. I was gone six days a week. I get one day off on the weekend to go home and see my family over the summer, but I spent my summers there all through high school and a good chunk of college. Not all of college. I did some other stuff there, and I actually met my wife there.

John Corcoran: 03:45

And cool.

Jim Dunlop: 03:47

And interestingly enough, my daughter, who’s now a college age student, has been a counselor there. She was a counselor there this year, and she had been the camp lifeguard this summer before. So it’s something that even my kids love. And I won’t be surprised if my son ends up there someday.

John Corcoran: 04:04

It’s such a great experience. You know, I was just thinking about it, as you were saying, that, you know, I just went to see a friend who’s been a friend of mine since we were 14 years old, and we worked at a summer camp together. It was the same summer camp that I also went to as a kid. And now my kids, we I don’t live close to where I, you know, grew up, but my kids have gone to the same summer camp every summer. And now my oldest, last summer, was a counselor at that camp.

So, you know, it repeats itself, you know, and that’s such a great experience. You were also involved in your church, got involved in babysitting through your church. Yeah. Talk a little bit about that community.

Jim Dunlop: 04:42

So I think it’s worth mentioning that the camp is a camp just outside of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, but Kahnawake was affiliated with the denomination of the church that I grew up in, and the churches that my wife and I go to now. So which is Lutheran. And so it was very active in my church and still still to this day, a different church. But that connection, because I was there in that community throughout middle school and high school, I got asked to be a baby to babysit kids part because I worked at the camp and part because I was. People knew who I was and knew who my family was.

And so that, you know, when it wasn’t summertime, I made extra money doing that as well.

John Corcoran: 05:34

Yeah. And this all circles back to kind of your focus with the wealth management practice, but you ended up getting into doing year round fundraising for the summer camp. What was that like? Because that, that I mean, from dishwashing to year round fundraising. very different, even if you’re doing it for the same camp.

Jim Dunlop: 05:55

Yeah. I think that I loved the camp. And I think, you know, getting out of college that they were looking for somebody to do that kind of work year round. And it sounded very interesting to a 22 year old. And I took that job and did that for just under two years.

And it was a great job. But at some point, I hate to say this, you have to grow up, and I don’t think it was a grown up job, at least not in my mind. And so I had an internship one summer in financial services, and the internship didn’t go very well, actually.

John Corcoran: 06:35

And which is funny because you end up having, to this day, a relationship with that financial service. So the internship didn’t go well. Yeah. And from that experience, you’re like, I don’t think this industry isn’t for me. And 20 years later, you still have a relationship too.

Jim Dunlop: 06:51

What I didn’t understand at the time. And what I understand now is, you know, companies hire interns because they want to see if they’d be good employees for them when they graduate college. And that that company was much more interested in me than I was interested in them. And they kind of pursued me for two years. And I finally got to the point where, like, you know what?

It’s probably maybe this is the grown up job I’m looking for. I don’t know, but I’ll try it. My wife and I were married, but we didn’t have any kids, and she was working. She still is. But, you know, so I was like, yeah, I could take a risk here.

If this doesn’t go well, I could. I’ll come up with something else after a while before we grow up and have kids and, and, you know, I started in 2003 and now, 23 years later, I’m still there doing something work.

John Corcoran: 07:38

Something switched, though, from the internship. And so what was I mean, you know, maybe the answer is that just interns don’t get the sexiest job responsibilities. They’re like, go file this stuff, right? You know, I was an intern, you know? Yeah.

Right. So it’s it’s it’s looking back on it now, I realize that, you know, it’s any internship, you’re not going to really get a true picture of what, you know, being in the paid roles are going to be. Would you agree with that?

Jim Dunlop: 08:05

I think so. And I think, too, for me, my internship, I was paired with a slightly older advisor. He wasn’t you know, he’s probably in his late 20s at the time, but he seemed to me. Yeah. And he was not having a good time.

Yeah. This type of work can be very entrepreneurial where you’re, you know, your income is dependent on the clients you bring in. And he was not having a lot of good success with that. And that had to be very frustrating for him. Because it wasn’t going well.

And he I don’t think he’s in the industry any longer. I haven’t heard from him in years, but I had a front row to that and I thought, why would I want to have a job like that? Yeah. But I do love the entrepreneurial aspect of it. I do like working for myself, and being a business owner.

And that was not something that I ever grew up thinking that I wanted or would be helpful for me. But once I got into it, it was clear to me that that was the right place for me and my personality. I’m not really, I don’t know, I’ve never really had a boss in 23 years other than myself. And so I don’t know that I could start now.

John Corcoran: 09:26

Yeah, yeah. So see you go on. You kind of go out on your own, I guess. Right. But it was, it was under the Thrivent banner.

And then you had this interesting situation where 2019, 2020, which we all know what happened right around then. Yeah. Thrivent kind of undergoes a change. And so you start adventuring around that time period. Looking back on it now, what was it like starting a new initiative, a new business, basically while the world was shutting down during Covid?

Jim Dunlop: 10:01

Yeah. Well, great. Great question. Thrivent was interested in creating an independent wealth management platform as a way to attract additional people or additional financial advisors to the organization. And so they took a group of us from across the country and launched what was called the thrive an advisor network, and we were all invited to take our clients and build our own identities and brands and our own businesses.

And they would provide that Ria back office infrastructure that that you need in this business and, and give us a great deal of autonomy to build brands and niches around what was important to us. And so that was very, very appealing to me being even in there under their banner. We were independent operators running our own businesses underneath their banner, but we were still independent practitioners. And then in the midst of that, you know, we started this transition in 2019 and we were going to have a date in in June of 2020 where we were going to take all of our clients and move them from their the old legacy systems and move them into the independent wealth management platform, which meant taking from their clients investments from the thriving side and putting it under fidelity. In this case, we used fidelity as our custodian and, and that was going to be great.

The clients were going to sign all their papers. They would flip a switch in the middle of the night, their clients would pay, their accounts would get moved from here to there. What, what? When we came up with that plan, it was, you know, late 2019, early 2020 and then the pandemic set in.

John Corcoran: 11:49

Best laid plans.

Jim Dunlop: 11:50

Right. And and and we literally had cases and cases of UPS overnight envelopes. We had to have all of our clients sign all the new account paperwork, which we had intended, just to sit down with them and go through. And instead what happened is if I was meeting with you to sign that paperwork tomorrow, we were doing it over zoom, most likely, or the telephone I was going to overnight. I dropped off piles of envelopes at UPS every day.

Clients would get that. And we did all that remotely. And it was painful. And we were successful. We got it done.

We had to adapt tremendously. And my team who was helping me in all this, of course, for a while in the state of Pennsylvania, you couldn’t come into the office if you weren’t a frontline worker?

John Corcoran: 12:39

Yeah.

Jim Dunlop: 12:40

And so we were all trying to do this remotely and I would be in the office by myself. But talking to my team on zoom and they’re saying, oh, you need this, and can you print this and mail this? And so it was, it was an interesting time to do that.

John Corcoran: 12:54

Scary at the time. But it worked out in retrospect. So that’s good. Let’s let’s talk a little bit about, you know, obviously with your roots working for the, the summer camp that had connections to your church and your involvement in the church, it makes sense that you would, you know, focus on that as a demographic that you would, you know, you know, kind of hang your shingle as a faith based wealth management professional. But talk a little bit about that decision and what that’s meant in terms of, you know, the types of conversations that you have with your clients and the types of clients that come in the door because, you know, business owners make a million different decisions about how you want to run your business.

And that’s an important one.

Jim Dunlop: 13:39

Yeah. So I grew up again, as I said, inside of thriving, and that thriving was always a faith based financial services company. It was organized as a fraternal benefit society, which meant it was not for profit. It was a kind of interesting business arrangement. It still is.

So for a long time, those were the types of people we worked with and when, when we got our independence so we could do whatever we want, we still made the conscious decision that our best clients were people whose faith was an important part of their life. For some clients, it means that all their financial decisions, they look at it through a faith lens for others, not necessarily, but their faith is still an important component of their life. And so it’s something that we think about in their finances. And then there’s some clients that just don’t look at their faith that way, and that’s fine. I don’t think it’s something that we, I think I’ve, I’ve said this to people, we, we, we want to find the right people.

We don’t want to bang the drum too loud. And in that, we don’t want to be working with people of faith just for the sake of working with people with faith. We want to make sure that all of our values are aligned with them. And but work that’s always been important to me is work around generosity and, you know, charitable.

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