The importance of advisor rankings for Barron’s

Steve Garmhausen of Barron’s interviewed colleague Matt Barthel, who oversee’s the newspaper’s advisor rankings.

Here is an excerpt:

Q: What are your job responsibilities?

A: First and foremost I am the face of the rankings, so if advisors have any questions about where they rank or why, I’m the first stop for them. The rankings are aimed at celebrating the best advisors in the industry, with the hope that by holding them up, others will aspire to [their example], thereby raising standards in the industry.

Whether or not an advisor makes one of our rankings, if they go through the trouble of submitting the 102 pieces of data that we require to be ranked, I’ll have a conversation with them. We’ll talk about where they fell in the rankings process and why—with the whole process serving as a benchmarking exercise, helping them get better.

Q: Do you like your work?

A: It’s a great job. Almost all [the advisors I work with] are self-made and entrepreneurial; almost all of them are interested in self-examination and self-growth. It’s endlessly interesting to hear the different ways they approach assembling a practice and the different ways they approach investing.

It’s not an overstatement to say that the best in this business are sort of like the best in the medical profession, in that they’re trying to make peoples’ lives better. That’s not true of every advisor in the world, any more than it is true of every doctor—but to be able to play a role in helping encourage that makes this a really good job.

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