Do your reps: advice for the 2026 Emerging Leaders

PLANADVISER's 2025 Emerging Leaders cohort has a pointed message for the incoming class: stop waiting until you feel ready and get in front of clients now. Their advice runs through direct client exposure, professional networking, humility, and continuous learning, and no one puts it more concretely than Curtis Fugate, an account executive at Newfront Retirement Services, who says a single 15-minute attempt to explain fee benchmarking to a skeptical CFO is worth more than a year spent building that exhibit in the background. "Do your reps," Fugate says, "it might be bumpy, but it also might mean that you're an adviser five years sooner."

The members come from different professional journeys, but their recommendations converge on a common theme: career development in this industry happens fastest when professionals actively engage with clients, colleagues, and mentors rather than waiting until they feel fully prepared. No amount of preparation, Fugate notes, fully replicates the experience of sitting across from a plan sponsor and explaining complex retirement plan concepts in real time, and early interactions may not go smoothly, but practical experience accelerates development more than mastering every detail first.

Gregory Fortier, a financial adviser at Mosaic Partners, points to networking within the community as one of the most valuable investments an emerging leader can make, because sharing ideas across teams, geographic regions, and client segments lets advisers learn from others' experiences and stay current on products ranging from collective investment trusts to managed accounts. Those connections compress what would otherwise take years to assemble independently.

Patrick Donnelly, investment director of defined contribution and wealth management at CBIZ Investment Advisory Services, supplies the counterweight: "I hate the phrase 'fake it until you make it,'" he says, because experienced professionals can typically recognize when someone lacks knowledge. That warning has real teeth in a field where a plan-sponsor meeting can turn on explaining fee benchmarking to a skeptical CFO or weighing the merits of one retirement product structure against another, and a confident but misinformed answer can be more damaging than a hesitant but honest one.

The cohort is describing an apprenticeship model, not a confidence game. The bumpy client meeting, the cross-firm network, and the willingness to say "I don't know yet" are the real accelerants, and firms building the next generation of retirement plan advisers should put junior people in front of plan sponsors early, measure their development in relationship reps rather than back-office exhibit work, and treat a professional network as a firm asset rather than a personal perk.