Early Background.
Our founder, Zurich Awes, started in the financial field at the tender age of 14. Over the next twenty years, he worked his way through nearly every job in the investment services field, acting as a principal, a compliance officer and even as a president of several different types of financial companies. Eventually, had accumulated the experience, the expertise, earned his CFP®, earned his Master of Science in Financial Services, and was leading a team that offered fiduciary advice to the kind of clients he love to work with. People who saw money as a tool, a means to an end, not the end itself.
New Direction.
But nearly 20 years ago, when he was in his mid-30s, Zurich realize that he wanted to start to live a life he loved, to systematically test the limits of the successful advice he had been giving to clients for almost two decades. At first, there was a lot of pushback from colleagues and supposed thought leaders in his field. But after getting the green light from his legal counsel and compliance firms, he began to apply the scientific method to the concept of semi-retirement. He quickly realized the key was a function of happiness.
So he took a hard look at his practice, identified all the things he loved to do, the things that were profitable, and the things that weren’t litigious. Then he looked at everything else, his personal drudgery if you will. Next, he broke the drudgery up into rational groups, and hired high-quality talent at outside firms to handle his drudgery issues for him. It freed up gobs of his time. He was immediately ten times happier. But he had to figure out what it meant to have such freedom, such a quality of life, and, more importantly, how to share the fruits of this experience with others
Lessons Applied.
Since then, with Zurich at the helm, our team has shared the fruits of this experience with hundreds of clients and their families. We have been able to show our clients how to semi-retire, how to solo retire, or how to joint retire because we’ve done it ourselves. We can educate our clients about compressing work schedules, about prioritizing quality of life over quantity of work, because we have done it ourselves.
We get a weekly lesson about the value of this strategy because twenty years ago Zurich initiated a four-day work week at his firm. He did it because he thought it be better for his team, based on the research that Henry Ford had had completed nearly 100 years prior. Surprisingly, some team members resisted back then and Zurich was forced to lock them out of the building on Fridays. But his persistence paid off and it has allowed our team to embody our own Live the Life You Love® tagline in each of our personal lives.
Our Team.
Certainly our team has grown over the years. But Zurich has taken a very unique approach to team-building, resulting in large part from the new direction he took almost 20 years ago. Learn more about this approach by starting with our Outside Partners. Then move on to Zurich Awes and Andrew Trammell.