In this Q&A, Nate Oltmans, Partner and Director of Advisors at Cornerstone Wealth Management, shares insights he’s learned about purpose and intentionality.
What do you mean by purpose and intentionality and how does it relate to your work?
My job satisfaction went through the roof when I felt like I was operating in alignment with my purpose. I think I was created to help improve other people’s quality of life. When I connected the dots that I wasn’t saving the world one financial plan at a time, but helping other people overcome worry, fear, and dissatisfaction with their money, I enjoyed every client interaction more.
How has that realization impacted your team?
Fortunately, my partners all have the same drive to improve our clients’ quality of life. So, as we identified our corporate core values, that value came forward. And as we got more clarity on our core values, our culture became more compelling to those who shared those values. It even helped some clients find their unique purpose.
Have you applied a systematic approach to purpose and intentionality?
The intentionality that we brought to finding our purpose, we implemented across our systems. That has made it easier to help our clients identify what’s important to them, and for us to craft tailored plans and investment solutions.
How do alternative investments fit in?
As we brought intentionality to the forefront, we realized we’d been doing some things less mindfully such as allocating to alts at roughly 20% when appropriate — simply because that’s what we’ve always done. We were able to deconstruct that and differentiate the use of alts from basic diversification to help our clients achieve specific goals. That’s one of the reasons I’m excited about some of the newer alts solutions in the space — we can get really specific at targeting clients’ wants and needs with some of the things we’re finding (like structured notes).
What can Alts Summit attendees expect at the Wednesday morning prayer breakfast?
We’re hoping to bring some foundational discussion around purpose to the prayer breakfast. Why are we here? What’s the point of it all? Those are the first purpose questions to wrestle with, in my opinion. We’ll talk a little about that and plan to spend some time praying about the answers and implications of those answers as we carry on our individual purposes post-conference.
Learn more about Nate Oltmans and Cornerstone Wealth Management.
