What Running a Business Teaches You About Choosing a Financial Advisor: A Conversation with Tyler Lang

You already make the calls that keep your business compliant, from filing W-2s and 1099s to deciding what to handle in-house versus hand off. We asked Tyler Lang, CFA, CMT, founder and CEO of Journey Advisory Group, recognized with 5 stars on Newsweek's list of America’s Top Financial Advisory Firms, how those same instincts should shape the way you choose someone to manage your money.

Q1: What should a business owner actually look for when choosing a fiduciary financial advisor, and why does that distinction matter more once your finances get as complicated as your business?

Tyler: Most people assume every advisor is held to the same standard. They're not. A fiduciary is legally required to act in your best interest. Others are only held to a suitability standard, meaning their recommendations just have to be appropriate, not necessarily the best option available to you. You already know this gap from hiring vendors: there's a difference between someone allowed to sell you something and someone obligated to tell you if it isn't the right fit.

Journey Advisory Group is an independent, fiduciary Investment Adviser registered with the SEC. Independence matters too. We're not owned by a bank or insurer with products to move, so a recommendation isn't benefiting a parent company. FINRA's BrokerCheck and a firm's Form ADV let you verify this the same way you'd check a vendor's credentials before signing a contract.

Q2: You already know how ownership structure shapes the way a company operates. Why does that same logic apply to choosing who manages your money, and what changes when an advisory firm is family- and employee-owned instead of backed by private equity?

Tyler: You've likely seen this after a vendor got acquired: pricing shifts, familiar contacts leave, decisions start getting made elsewhere. The same happens in financial advice. Private equity ownership often brings pressure to grow assets quickly and prepare for an exit, which tends to increase advisor turnover and standardize service.

We built Journey Advisory Group to avoid that. We're family- and employee-owned, meaning the people managing your money have a long-term stake in getting it right, with no outside owner pushing quarterly growth targets. That structure has let us grow to more than $1.8 billion in assets under management and over 900 client households since founding in 2013, without losing the independence that built it. Ask any firm you're considering who owns it and what that means for continuity.

Q3: Business owners are used to deciding what to keep in-house and what to outsource. Why does that same decision matter for investment management, and how is an in-house investment team different from an advisor who hands your portfolio off to a third-party model?

Tyler: You make this call constantly with payroll, bookkeeping, and filing. Many advisory firms don't actually manage money themselves. They gather your information, then hand it off to a third-party model that builds a generic portfolio from a risk score, outsourcing the part of the job that should stay closest to your plan.
We manage investment strategies in-house through a dedicated team led by our Chief Investment Officer. Our process runs in four stages: understand the full picture (goals, income needs, tax exposure, risk comfort), design a strategy where each holding has a role, implement with attention to account type and tax impact, then refine as markets and your life change. A generic model doesn't know you just had a strong year or are two years from selling the business. Our team does, because the people managing the investments are connected to the plan.

Q4: Many business owners manage retirement accounts, tax planning, and estate documents separately from their business's compliance obligations. What's the risk of that approach, and how does comprehensive financial planning solve it?

Tyler: This is a familiar risk: decisions made in one area without visibility into how they affect another. A Roth conversion your CPA suggests can raise your taxable income, which can ripple into other tax decisions and your estate plan. If your CPA, attorney, and advisor aren't talking, nobody sees the full chain of consequences.
Comprehensive financial planning coordinates retirement income, investment strategy, tax-aware planning, and estate considerations through one relationship instead of leaving you to connect the dots. For business owners, that coordination also depends on clean, accurate year-end filings, since compliance data feeds directly into tax and retirement decisions. We don't prepare tax returns, draft estate documents, or handle W-2 and 1099 filing ourselves; those belong to your CPA, attorney, and filing service. What we do is make sure your financial decisions account for how they'll affect that broader picture, and we coordinate directly with those professionals when it helps.

Q5: You've likely handled your own business compliance, filing your own W-2s and 1099s along the way. At what point does managing the bigger financial picture start to outpace your bandwidth, and what does working with a firm like Journey Advisory Group actually look like once you get there?

Tyler: This is a common starting point for our business-owner clients. They haven't lost control, they've simply reached a point where retirement timing, a possible business transition, and family wealth decisions have grown past what one person can manage well alongside actually running the business.
Handling your own filings for years doesn't mean you should build a retirement income strategy from scratch. It means you take ownership of the details, which makes you a good fit for a real advisory relationship rather than a product pitch. It starts with a conversation, not a sales pitch, and we intentionally keep our client-to-advisor ratio low so advice stays proactive. I started Journey Advisory Group in 2013 to build a firm where that relationship was the point, not an afterthought. If the bigger financial picture is starting to outpace your bandwidth, that's usually the sign it's worth a conversation.

Disclosure: Newsweek's America's Top Financial Advisory Firms 2026, published in partnership with Plant-A Insights Group, evaluated over 16,000 SEC-registered financial advisory firms. Eligible firms had more than $20 million in assets under management, at least three wealth advisers, five individual clients, two years of SEC registration, clean disciplinary records, and portfolio management services available to individual investors. Firms were scored on asset and client growth, adviser expertise, client-to-adviser ratios, and breadth of services, with the top 1,000 firms assigned star ratings. Journey Advisory Group received a 5-star rating for 2026. Firms do not pay to be evaluated or included in the ranking, but the firm paid a fee for permission to use the logo when marketing the award. Full methodology at rankings.newsweek.com.