AftermathAftermath

HALAH TOURYALAI

On Sunday evening, Aug. 28, 2005, the night before Hurricane Katrina was to hit Gulfport, Miss., financial advisor Bob Sawyer reckoned it might be a good idea to make one more visit to his Stifel Nicolaus office to board up some of its windows. Before leaving, Sawyer went into his desk and pocketed his Social Security card. After looking around the office for a few moments, something told him that he probably should grab his computer hard-drive tower, which held all 1,200 of his clients' data for the past 15 years. That last-minute decision is probably what saved his practice from collapsing in the aftermath of the hurricane.

Then the storm came, and it was unlike any he had experienced before. Sawyer, 51, awoke at five in the morning to fierce winds and hammering rain. “The wind was so powerful I couldn't open up the front door,” he recalls. “It was sucking up trees from the ground — an 80-foot oak landed right in my front yard.” Katrina, of course, would go on to take the lives of nearly 2,000 people and cause billions of dollars in damage — making it one of the deadliest and most costly storms in United States history.

Aftermath

Katrina was so overwhelming and costly that regional broker/dealer Stifel Nicolaus didn't have plans to reopen Sawyer's downtown offices, and instead offered to relocate him to Sarasota, Fla. The move wouldn't be too onerous, at least theoretically. After all, Sawyer and his wife Suzie, who is also a partner at his firm, helped launch the Sarasota Stifel Nicolaus branch.

But, after spending two months working from the Florida office to “regroup and get our thoughts in order,” Sawyer did something most reps spend years pondering: He went independent. Sawyer and wife decided they could not abandon their clients in Mississippi.

“So many of them had lost their homes and businesses, and it was a time when they needed their financial advisors the most,” he says. In January they decided to open temporary offices in Gulfport while the city was in the middle of a major clean up. In the meantime, they could renovate the old offices, the lease of which he would take over from Stifel. Fortunately for the Sawyers, Stifel Financial, the parent company of Stifel Nicolaus, owns a separate independent b/d subsidiary — Century Securities — which they joined. The senior management at Stifel Nicolaus, including Jim Zemlyak, chief financial officer and chairman of the board, was in constant communication with the Sawyers throughout the process. “When my wife and I were working from above the garage at one point, using a candle for light, I got a phone call from Zemlyak asking us how he could help out,” he says.

Sawyer says the details of the transition hardly fazed him. “After going through one of the biggest natural disasters this country has ever seen, you're still very much in a daze for a long time after. Mentally and physically, you're not there,” he says. Over half of his clients lost their homes or businesses, or both, to the storm. Remarkably, Sawyer says he didn't lose much of the roughly $90 million in client assets he managed.

The Importance of Home

In March 2006, Sawyer and his wife set up shop in a 70-foot, three-bedroom trailer home to begin their independent operation as Trinity Investments. The trailer was about two blocks from their ruined downtown office and was complete with phone system, Internet access and fax machines. The setup cost the Sawyers about $100,000.

They worked from the trailer for a year while the offices were being renovated downtown. Just this past month, the Sawyers and their three assistants were able to move back into their offices. Says Sawyer, “It was important to us that we keep the same location for our clients.”

The Independents

There are literally thousands of independent broker/dealers.Here's a list of some of the largest by rep count.