Jon Powell

Jon Powell, CFP® serves as a financial planner and portfolio manager for Ferguson-Johnson Wealth Management, an independent, fee-only fiduciary firm that has been helping clients plan for and enjoy retirement for more than 40 years. With more than 10 years of experience, Jon is passionate about providing unbiased advice that puts his clients first. He considers it a privilege to carry some of the financial burden for his clients and educate them so they can make empowered decisions for their futures. He organizes, develops, and delivers financial plans to our clients as well as overseeing client portfolios.

Jon is also the primary author and curator of the content featured on our website’s blog. He has been with the firm since 2013. Prior to his time at Ferguson-Johnson Wealth Management, he gained experience in investments, risk management, and financial planning from working with other local wealth management firms. He has a fierce commitment to the fiduciary standard and always exercises this care with our clients. Jon maintains professional memberships with the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors (NAPFA) and the Financial Planning Association (FPA).

Jon graduated from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University with a bachelor’s degree in financial planning and holds the CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ certification. He is a constant learner, always seeking out the most effective ways to deliver solutions to our clients. His commentary and opinion on personal finance have been featured in publications such as Bloomberg and Reuters. Outside the office, Jon enjoys playing tennis and golf and loves to sit down to a good board game. He is a diehard fan of the local D.C. area sports teams. It’s not unusual to catch him at a Washington Nationals game in the warmer months. He and his wife, Erica, live in Virginia with their black lab, Nugget, and an orange tabby cat, named Kiwi. Jon is a diehard fan of D.C.-area sports teams; you might see him at a Washington Nationals game.

What is your typical day, and how do you make it productive?

My day is quite flexible due to the nature of my profession, which is one of the things I find fulfilling in this line of work. I don’t have a regular day-to-day routine; it’s always dictated by the needs and requests of my clients and other ongoing tasks. I find myself pulled in various directions throughout the day.

Coming to work every day, there’s an element of unpredictability that I embrace. My day might involve client meetings, engaging in discussions with them, or devising tailored solutions and strategies to address their needs. Alternatively, it could revolve around investment analysis or trading activities. I enjoy the freedom to adapt and prioritize tasks based on the demands of the day.

How do you bring ideas to life?

I am a big proponent of iterations. Going back to customization, we don’t do the same thing twice for clients and that’s partially driven by my desire to constantly improve things. It is also partially driven by the fact that no two clients are the same and no two clients have the same understanding. I could have a client who is a doctor and although they are intelligent they may not be a numbers person. So, the way I need to communicate with them needs to be more visual or more emotional in a lot of ways. If I have an engineering client, however, it is the opposite. They want to see hard numbers, they want to see charts and figures, and when I talk about the more qualitative aspects of their situation I lose them a little bit. Coming up with ideas entails just sitting down with whatever models I have in my various software, figuring out what is going to resonate with a particular person, and crafting an experience that can deliver on that.

What’s one trend that excites you?

Over the last 20 years, we have seen a shift from what used to be called active management of investments. You would go to somebody and they would take stocks for you or get in or out of the market based on current events or their predictions.

There is ample academic evidence that suggests that active management tends to do poorly in financial markets. During this period, products have been invented and there has been a mass adoption of more passive or index style products. They have come into the fold and we have just gotten to a point where passive investing has overtaken active investing. In the long term that is going to be a good thing for most investors as they are going to pay less in fees for the services they need. Additionally, they are going to get better and increasingly consistent returns from their investment.

It’s a win for everyone and we have been using this type of investing strategy for over 40 years and it has worked very well for our clients. Overall, I think it’s going to help a lot of people achieve their financial goals.

What is one habit that helps you be productive?

Setting deadlines for myself even when there’s no actual deadline. I have the autonomy to do various tasks on a day-to-day basis and that leads me to prioritize the tasks that are naturally more fun or engage me more over the tasks that engage me less. So, setting deadlines for all my tasks, even when I don’t have a hard cut-off date, motivates me to make sure that everything gets done.

What advice would you give your younger self?

I struggled with confidence early in my career. I was working with people that had a million or more dollars. As someone fresh out of college, I didn’t want to rock the boat. I didn’t want to say the wrong thing, and I didn’t want to make these people feel like they couldn’t trust me. That led me to not engage or not be as proactive as I should have been a lot of the time with clients. Clients come to us for a service and we expect to deliver that service.

In that regard, I would tell myself to be proactive, reach out to clients, and annoy them if you need to in order to get the things they hired you to do, to be done.

When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused, what do you do?

I break things up into smaller tasks. I identify something that I can get done and I get it done. I then identify the next thing that needs to be done and I get that done. More often than not, that enables me to accomplish more and more. Identifying those little wins in the moment gets me started.

What is one strategy that has helped you grow your business or advance in your career?

From an internal perspective with my company and an external perspective working with clients, it has been my ecosystem to figure things out. If there is something that we don’t know how to do, I assert myself and figure out how to do that thing.

That could be from an internal standpoint of how we do something for a client or an external standpoint if the client has an issue. It’s not necessarily what we do but we are going to help them figure out how to do it or at least let them know who can do it for them and guide them in the right direction.

What is one failure in your career, how did you overcome it, and what lessons did you take away from it?

Early in my career, I had a client that was hard to reach. We struggled to get them to engage with us when we needed things from them to help deliver the value we promised them. They weren’t always forthcoming with the information we needed to execute our job. Eventually, they no longer wanted to work with us. What I took away from that was we lost that client because I was not pushing them. I was not being proactive enough in reaching out to help them get the things they needed. I would just ask and I expected them to provide what we were looking for. The situation illustrated that in a lot of cases, you need to be proactive and even annoy clients to give you the things you need from them to deliver the value that they are banking for. Moving forward, that’s been very effective for us. We had that one setback earlier on but I learned from that.

What is one business idea you’re willing to give away to our readers?

I preach about my industry. I vouch for the fee-only fiduciary advisory industry. It is an honest way of doing business and rendering advice to people who need financial help. There aren’t many of us overall so, I think it is a fertile space to start a business if you’re interested in helping people and engaging on a deeper level because money is a taboo in our world. It is sometimes very hard to talk about. The people who engage with the fee-only fiduciary financial advisors really build a strong bond of trust with them and having those relationships is very fulfilling.

What is one piece of software that helps you be productive? How do you use it?

Microsoft Excel. This might sound like a cop-out but it is my catch-all for everything. It is a calculator, my note-jotting tool, and my space for visually organizing various models in various situations for individuals. It can do everything effectively if you’re willing to learn it. It is completely invaluable to me.

What is the best $100 you recently spent?

I bought a mechanical keyboard for my computer. It’s great because it works and feels very nice. That probably doesn’t sound like much but just the tactility of typing is quite satisfying and it enhances everything I do.

Do you have a favorite book or podcast from which you’ve received much value?

My favorite and honestly most valuable podcast is Plain English by Derek Thompson. It touches on largely current events related to medical advancements, technology, economics, and sometimes politics. I have found it very hard to get good honest information from traditional news sources. There’s usually a gender bias that comes with a lot of them and Derek typically has academic guests on his podcast. They explain relatively complex situations and the implications of those situations for someone who is not necessarily as well vast in those realms. I take that information and understanding and use it to communicate with clients about the complex topics they ask me about that I don’t quite have a good answer for. Having the context I learn from the podcast is very helpful for communicating ideas and bringing awareness of these ideas to clients.

What’s a movie or series you recently enjoyed and why?

One show that my wife and I have been enjoying is “Succession” on HBO. Everything about that show is excellent. To be clear, I don’t think these characters are in any way aspirational. They are, by all accounts, all horrible people but the actors and actresses that portrayed these characters have developed such a good rapport with each other.

It’s a show about a family, more or less, that is extremely believable. These are brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, and fathers that feel very real and it’s just mesmerizing to watch.