Connect with Shawn Glogowski
Before you watch, listen, or read the show article below, connect with Shawn Glogowski, principal and co-founder of Note Advisors.
You can learn more about Shawn and the Note Advisors team here: https://www.noteadvisor.com/team/shawn-glogowski-bio/
Shawn represents a new, and in many ways older, version of wealth advice: fiduciary, human, local in values but national in reach, deeply technical but emotionally intelligent, and built around the idea that the future of financial planning will not be won by the advisor with the flashiest portfolio model.
It will be won by the advisor who can help another human being act on the advice that actually matters.
TL;DR Key Takeaways
Shawn Glogowski did not enter college on a clear financial services path. He grew up in Buffalo, New York, went to school there, and says he “fell into” the financial services profession in 2005 through a family friend.
He began inside a bank-owned broker-dealer environment with proprietary products, sales pressure, high turnover, and the old-school “smile and dial” culture of call nights, desk phones, and learning how to survive by making human connections.
Instead of becoming disillusioned, Shawn found something he loved: being in service to other human beings. That became the thread that carried him through nearly two decades in the profession.
Early in his career, he gravitated toward holistic financial planning rather than product sales. He loved understanding the ripple effects of decisions across investments, insurance, taxes, retirement, estate planning, cash flow, and family life.
A pivotal moment came during his CFP coursework, when another young advisor named Sean introduced him to the idea of a fee-only RIA. Shawn had never heard of that model before, but the conversation stayed with him.
He met his future partner, Tom, in the broker-dealer world. Tom was older and beginning to think about succession, while Shawn was younger and thinking about the kind of firm he wanted to build for the next 30 years.
In 2014, Shawn and Tom broke away, dropped securities licenses, eventually moved away from insurance licensing, and built what became Note Advisors as an independent, fee-only, SEC-registered investment advisory firm.
The move was not only about compensation. It was about escaping the “cage” of broker-dealer compliance and product constraints so they could serve clients the way they believed clients actually needed to be served.
Note Advisors is built around a team model rather than a lone-advisor model. The firm focuses on holistic wealth management, planning, client experience, and the ability to serve clients across multiple dimensions of life.
A major differentiator is the firm’s use of a wealth coach, Christina, who helps bridge the gap between technical financial advice and the client’s relationship with money.
Shawn believes the future of advice is not fee compression as much as value expansion. Advisors who only charge to manage a portfolio may be vulnerable. Advisors who help clients navigate the human, emotional, behavioral, and multigenerational side of wealth may become more valuable.
The firm organizes planning around six pillars: cash flow, insurance, taxes and tax planning, investments, retirement planning, and estate planning, wrapped inside the client’s relationship with money.
AI is not something Shawn fears. He sees it as a productivity tool that can make technical people more efficient and give front-facing advisors more time to be proactive, human, and present with clients.
Shawn believes the future belongs to advisors and firms that use technology as table stakes while differentiating through human connection, empathy, clarity, proactive communication, and trust.
The deeper message: wealth advice is not just about getting the numbers right. It is about helping people actually live the life the numbers say they can afford.
Why You Should Listen
This ATOMIQ LEVEL conversation with Shawn Glogowski is not just an advisor interview. It is a story about a Buffalo-based fiduciary who came up through the old broker-dealer world, survived the smile-and-dial era, discovered the deeper calling of holistic planning, broke out of the product cage, and built Note Advisors around the belief that the future of wealth advice is profoundly human.
It is about a young advisor who entered the business in 2005 without a grand plan, learned to make calls on Monday nights, chased appointments from phone books and referral lists, and slowly realized that what he loved was not selling financial products.
He loved helping people.
It is about why technical advice is only the beginning. A spreadsheet may say a client can retire at 62, but if that client gets to 62 and cannot emotionally imagine who they are without work, the plan is not complete. The math was right, but the human system was unfinished.
It is about why AI may make the best advisors better and expose the ones who were only hiding behind investment management, generic portfolios, and old distribution advantages.
It is about why the next generation of advisory firms may need more than quants, model portfolios, and financial planning software. They may need wealth coaches. They may need emotional intelligence. They may need multigenerational teams. They may need the courage to talk about money, identity, fear, marriage, children, work, legacy, and what happens after the client achieves the number they thought would make them free.
Most of all, this is a conversation about the difference between delivering advice and helping someone act on it.
That difference is everything.
Press play on this conversation with Shawn Glogowski of Note Advisors if you want to understand where fiduciary advice is heading, why the human advisor is not going away, and why the future of wealth management may depend less on managing money and more on understanding what money means inside a human life.
Because the next era of wealth advice will not be won by the advisor who simply has the best answer.
It will be won by the advisor who can help the client become ready to live it.
The Advisor Who Escaped the Cage
Before Shawn Glogowski became principal and co-founder of Note Advisors, before he helped build an SEC-registered independent advisory firm, before he was speaking fluently about wealth coaching, relationship with money, value expansion, succession, AI, client experience, and the emotional architecture of financial planning, he was a young man in Buffalo who had stumbled into financial services almost by accident.
That is how he tells it.
He grew up in Western New York. Born and raised in the Buffalo area. Went to school there. Went to college there. He was not on some perfectly charted finance track. There was no cinematic moment where a young Shawn looked at a stock quote and decided, with total clarity, that he would one day become a fiduciary wealth advisor.
The profession found him sideways.
Through a family friend, he ended up inside a bank-owned broker-dealer environment in 2005. Proprietary products. Securities licenses. Insurance products. The old financial services machine. He was in his early twenties, and like so many people who entered that world, he was thrown into a culture where the attrition rate was brutal.
Most people did not survive it. Shawn did.
Not because he loved the product machine. Not because he wanted to become a financial salesperson in the old sense. Something else happened. Beneath the call nights, the proprietary products, the pressure, and the grind, he found the part of the business that lit him up.
He loved being in service to other human beings.
That sentence sounds simple. In his case, it became the foundation for everything that followed.
The Old World of Smile and Dial
The financial services world Shawn entered in 2005 still carried the echoes of an earlier Wall Street sales culture. The desk phone mattered. The call list mattered. The Monday night call session mattered. How many dials? How many touches? How many nos? How many appointments?
This was not the world of polished LinkedIn content, AI-generated newsletters, automated lead funnels, podcast appearances, content engines, and digital credibility. This was still a world where a young advisor learned how to survive by picking up the phone and asking for time.
Shawn remembers those nights. The lists. The teacher’s directory from his wife’s school. The names from his father’s manufacturing company. The feeling that if he could just get one or two people to say yes to a meeting, he might have enough oxygen to keep going.
There was something hard about that world. There was also something useful in it.
It taught rejection. It taught persistence. It taught that financial advice, before it is anything else, is a human contact sport. You had to reach another person. You had to earn a conversation. You had to sit in front of them and explain why they should trust you.
You had to learn how to connect.
That kind of training is unfashionable now, but not irrelevant. In fact, as Shawn and Chris explore in the conversation, one of the dangers of the modern advisory profession is that many young advisors now enter with far better technical training, but far less experience in the human grit of building relationships from scratch.
They may know more planning software. They may know more tax strategies. They may even be better prepared to sit for the CFP. But they may not yet know what it feels like to need one more human being to say yes.
That matters because wealth advice is still built on trust. And trust is not downloaded.
It is earned.
The Planner Inside the Product World
Although Shawn started in the broker-dealer world, he did not fall in love with the product side of the business. He became drawn to planning.
The planning was what made sense to him. Not just selling an investment. Not just recommending insurance. Not just pushing whatever the proprietary product shelf offered. He wanted to understand the whole person and the ripple effects of their decisions.
What happens if this client retires early?
What does that do to cash flow?
What does it do to taxes?
What does it mean for insurance?
What does it mean for estate planning?
What does it mean for the spouse who sees money differently?
What does it mean for the children who may inherit not only wealth, but habits, silence, fear, confusion, or opportunity?
That holistic instinct became a quiet rebellion inside a product-driven environment. Shawn was not alone. He met his partner, Tom, in that broker-dealer world. Tom came from an older generation and had deeper roots in insurance. Shawn was younger and finishing his CFP. Tom was already thinking about succession. Shawn was thinking about the next thirty years of his career.
Together, they began to see the same problem from different sides.
They were trying to operate like fiduciaries inside a structure that was not built to make that easy.
The Conversation That Changed the Map
One of the pivotal moments in Shawn’s story came during his CFP coursework. He met another young advisor, also named Sean, who worked at a fee-only RIA.
Shawn had never heard of that before.
That detail is easy to miss, but it says everything about the era. Today, the language of fiduciary, RIA, fee-only, planning-first advice is far more mainstream. Back then, for someone inside the broker-dealer world, it could feel almost like discovering a hidden door in the same building.
Wait.
You can do this without selling products?
You can be paid for advice?
You can build a firm that is not tethered to a broker-dealer?
You can serve the client without the same product machinery sitting between the advisor and the recommendation?
The conversation stayed with him. It did not immediately create a grand plan, but it planted a seed. Over time, that seed grew into conviction. Shawn wanted to build in that direction. He wanted independence. He wanted to serve clients without being trapped inside a compliance and product cage that increasingly felt misaligned with the work he believed mattered.
There are moments in a career that look small when they happen and enormous in hindsight. That conversation was one of them.
The Cage
Shawn does not describe the broker-dealer transition as a simple moral binary. He is careful about that. He still has friends in the broker-dealer world. There are good people there. The point is not that every person in that model is bad or every independent firm is automatically good.
The point is fit. For Shawn and Tom, the cage became too small.
They were already doing fee-based planning and investment work. They were already trying to operate in a client-centered way. But the more they tried to deliver advice the way they believed clients needed it, the more they ran into walls.
A word in a marketing video could trigger a compliance rejection. A planning tool could not be used the same way another RIA could use it. A communication that might help a client understand a concept could be blocked because of firm liability concerns. The structure existed to protect the institution, but sometimes it prevented the advisor from serving the human being in front of them.
That is when Shawn began to understand the difference between compliance that protects the client and compliance that protects the machine.
He kept hitting his head against the top of the cage. Eventually, he told Tom they had to leave it together, or he was out.
The Breakaway
In 2014, they broke away. They dropped securities licenses and went independent and fee-only. Over time, they moved away from insurance licensing as well. The firm eventually became Note Advisors in its current form: an SEC-registered investment advisory firm built around holistic wealth management and consulting.
It was not easy.
Independence creates freedom, but it also creates responsibility. The broker-dealer cage may restrict you, but it also holds up parts of the roof. Once you leave, you own more of everything: compliance, HR, benefits, technology, client communications, operations, liability, cybersecurity, business development, succession, training, culture, and the emotional weight of building something that has to work.
Shawn would not trade it.
He says if he could do it differently, he would have started the transition earlier.
That is an important line. It is easy for advisors to romanticize independence from the outside. It is also easy to fear it from the inside. Shawn’s answer lives in the middle. Yes, independence is harder. Yes, it creates more complexity. Yes, it demands an entrepreneurial mindset. But for the kind of advisor who wants to build around the client experience and make long-term decisions without institutional drag, it can also become the only honest path.
Note Advisors was built on that bet.
From Lone Advisor to Building a Team
One of the most important shifts Shawn describes is cultural. In the broker-dealer world, advisors may technically share a brand or office, but they often operate as individual competitors. Same business card. Same parent company. Different books. Different incentives. Quiet competition.
Note Advisors is different by design.
The firm is built around a team. One advisor may be the lead relationship, but the client is backed by a broader group. That matters because complex wealth cannot be served well by one heroic generalist forever. Clients have different needs. Families have different dynamics. Younger generations communicate differently. Business owners need different guidance than retirees. Technical planning requires different skills than emotional coaching.
The future firm cannot be only a book of business.
It has to be an organism.
That is one of Shawn’s quiet insights. The firm is not only serving clients today. It is also being built for the next generation of advisors. Shawn has lived through a succession process with Tom. Now, in his early forties, he is already thinking about how to create the path for the next generation inside Note.
That long-term orientation is not accidental. It is one of the privileges of independence. A privately owned firm can make decisions for the next five, ten, or fifteen years, not just the next production cycle.
That kind of patience is becoming rare. And valuable.
Fee Compression Was the Wrong Fear
For years, the advisory industry talked about fee compression. Robo-advisors were coming. Passive investing was expanding. Technology would commoditize portfolio management. The fear was that advisors would not be able to charge what they once charged.
Shawn sees the issue differently. The real question is not only fee compression. It is value expansion.
What else does the advisor do for the client beyond delivering market exposure?
That question is the future of the business.
If an advisor is charging a fee only to build an asset-allocated portfolio, the pressure is real. Technology can already do much of that cheaper, faster, and often well enough. AI will accelerate that pressure. Clients will become more informed. Younger heirs will ask sharper questions. Public tools will make previously elite information available to almost anyone willing to ask the right prompt.
But if the advisor is helping a client navigate cash flow, taxes, insurance, estate planning, retirement transitions, business sales, family conversations, emotional decision-making, and relationship with money, the value proposition changes.
The advisor is no longer just managing money. The advisor is helping organize a life. That is harder to commoditize.
The Six Pillars and the Circle Around Them
Note Advisors organizes its planning work around six core pillars: cash flow, insurance, taxes and tax planning, investments, retirement planning, and estate planning. Those pillars are technical. They matter. They are the table stakes of serious financial planning.
But Shawn adds something else around them.
A circle.
That circle is the client’s relationship with money.
That is where the conversation becomes especially important. Technical advice can be correct and still fail. A plan can be mathematically sound and emotionally unusable. Two spouses can receive the exact same recommendation and hear two completely different things. One may feel relief. The other may feel fear. One may see opportunity. The other may see loss of control. One may be ready to retire. The other may quietly wonder what retirement will do to their identity.
This is where most financial plans break down. Not in the software.
In the human.
Shawn tells a familiar story. A client comes in at 60 and says they want to retire at 65. The advisor does the work, runs the numbers, and discovers the client can retire at 62. The client stays on track, reaches 62, and the advisor says, “You can retire.”
Then the client pauses and says, “Yes, but what would I do?”
The math was right. The plan was incomplete. That moment is the difference between financial planning and life planning.
The Wealth Coach
To solve for that gap, Note Advisors brought a wealth coach, Christina, onto the team. Shawn acknowledges that he does not know how many firms have done something similar, but the logic is clear. Christina helps bridge the technical and emotional sides of money.
She is not there because the firm lacks technical skill. Shawn is clear about that. Note Advisors still must be excellent at the core advisory work. The investment advice has to be sound and is table stakes. The planning has to be right. The tax thinking has to be thoughtful. The estate conversations have to be integrated. The bed still has to be comfortable. The lights still have to turn on.
But wealth coaching adds another dimension.
It helps the team understand why a client may not act on good advice. It helps translate between the numbers and the meaning a person makes from those numbers. It helps advisors become better communicators. It helps couples, families, and individuals see their relationship with money more clearly.
That is not soft. That is strategic. Because advice that is not acted upon is not fully delivered.
The Client Who Just Wants to Play with Her Grandkids
One of the most powerful examples Shawn shares is about a successful executive who had managed her own finances for years. She met with him, went away, and then years later called back.
She was ready.
The reason was not that she suddenly became less capable. It was not that she did not understand money. It was not that she could not manage a portfolio. It was that she had retired and found herself on the floor playing with her grandkids while thinking about the stock market, distributions, Medicare premiums, and whether she was taking too much money.
She did not want her mind split between the life she had earned and the portfolio she was still managing. She wanted to play with her grandkids. That is why people hire advisors.
Not always because they cannot do the work. Sometimes because they no longer want the work taking up the most sacred parts of their attention.
For Shawn, those are the right clients. Intelligent, capable people who understand there is value in delegating to a professional so they can spend their time on something more important.
That is a profound reframe. The advisor is not only managing assets. The advisor is returning attention.
AI, Table Stakes, and the Return of Humanity
The conversation eventually moves into AI, because every serious conversation about financial advice now has to. Shawn is not dismissive of it. He uses it. His team uses it. He believes AI can make people on the technical side more productive and give front-facing advisors more time with clients.
But he does not think AI replaces the core human work of advice.
In fact, he believes the opposite may happen. As AI commoditizes the technical layers, the human layers become more valuable. The advisor who only manages a portfolio may be exposed. The advisor who uses AI to increase proactive service, deepen conversations, improve responsiveness, and solve more integrated wealth problems may become more valuable.
Chris frames it through a hotel metaphor. Every hotel room needs a bed, lights, a shower, and basic functionality. Those are table stakes. In financial advice, portfolios, tax awareness, planning tools, and investment access are becoming table stakes too. In the near future, saying “we use AI” may be like saying “we have electricity.” It will not be a differentiator. It will be expected.
So what will clients pay for?
The experience.
The trust.
The humanity.
The relationship.
The feeling that when they walk into the advisory equivalent of the Ritz, someone sees them, understands them, hands them the room key with care, and knows why they are there.
Technology should not turn advice into a phone tree. It should free advisors to be more human. That may be the central thesis of the episode.
The Empowered Client
One of the most important disruptions AI will bring is not simply advisor productivity. It will empower clients.
Clients will walk into meetings with AI-generated questions. They will run tax strategies through ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or whatever tool they prefer. They will ask about estate structures, asset protection, deductions, Roth conversions, insurance strategies, concentrated stock, business succession, and investment ideas with more context than prior generations ever had access to.
That does not mean they will always be right. In fact, that is why advisors still matter.
A client may ask AI whether they can do something and get a technically plausible answer, but miss the follow-up question that changes everything. Yes, you might be able to do that. No, you may not get the deduction you think you are getting. Yes, that strategy works in one context. No, it does not fit your entity structure, family dynamics, risk tolerance, or tax profile.
The client will be more informed, but not necessarily wiser. The advisor’s job will shift from gatekeeper of information to interpreter of context. That is a better job.
And a harder one.
The Great Wealth Transfer Is Also a Great Trust Transfer
Shawn sees another major shift underway. The older generation, especially those in their mid-70s and beyond, often held money close to the vest. They did not talk openly about wealth. Children would find out when the parents died.
But Shawn sees many baby boomer clients behaving differently. They are more willing to talk with their children about money. They are asking Note Advisors to help the next generation. They want their children, often in their late twenties and thirties, to start earlier than they did. They understand that if they had begun with better planning when they were newly married, buying their first home, having children, and building careers, the compounding effect could have been enormous.
That creates a major opportunity and responsibility. The great wealth transfer is not just about assets moving from one generation to another. It is about trust moving, or failing to move, from one advisory relationship to another.
Most inherited assets do not automatically stay with the parents’ advisor. The next generation will decide whether the advisor understands them, communicates with them, respects their preferences, uses technology well, and can help them navigate a different world than the one their parents lived in.
This is why multigenerational teams matter. This is why emotional intelligence matters. This is why the firm cannot be built only around one founder’s relationships.
If the advisory firm does not evolve, the assets may move. Not because the old advisor was bad. Because the new client was never truly served.
Succession as Stewardship
Shawn is also thinking about succession inside his own firm. He is in his early forties, but he has already seen how long succession takes when done well. He watched and lived through the process with Tom. He understands that waiting until your late fifties or sixties to start thinking about succession may be too late.
He wants to create a path for the next generation of Note Advisors.
That includes ownership. It includes infrastructure. It includes training. It includes culture. It includes giving younger advisors a firm worth inheriting and a reason to stay. He has attended succession conferences and is interested in internal succession, employee ownership, and building a legacy firm rather than simply selling into a roll-up machine.
That is a meaningful distinction. There are firms built to be sold. There are firms built to endure. Shawn sounds far more interested in the second.
He wants the next generation of advisors to have a home, but not a cage. A platform, but not a prison. Structure, but not stagnation. Compliance, technology, marketing, and operational support, but also the freedom to serve clients deeply.
That may become a major recruiting advantage. Many advisors love client relationships and business development but do not want to carry the full weight of compliance, HR, cybersecurity, operations, and tech stack management. Others want total independence. The future may require different homes for different kinds of advisors.
Knowing what you actually want becomes more important than copying someone else’s model.
Buffalo, Roots, and the Long Game
There is something fitting about this story being rooted in Buffalo. Shawn serves clients nationally, but the firm carries a Western New York sensibility: grounded, relationship-driven, practical, salt-of-the-earth, not overly impressed with financial theater.
That matters.
In an industry often seduced by scale, roll-ups, branding, and abstraction, Shawn’s worldview feels anchored. He talks about brick by brick. Day by day. Week by week. Year by year. He talks about loving the work. He talks about showing up. He talks about the marathon mindset.
That is how durable advisory firms are built. Not all at once. Not through one clever campaign. Not through one acquisition.
Through years of doing the work, serving the people in front of you, learning where the model is broken, and having the courage to rebuild before the market forces you to.
The Human Premium
The deeper message of this episode is that the future of advice will not be less human because of technology.
It will be more human because of AI technology, if advisors choose correctly.
AI can produce answers. It can summarize. It can model. It can draft. It can compare. It can automate. It can analyze. It can reveal what used to be hidden behind expensive research, proprietary software, or specialized education.
But it cannot fully know what retirement means to a person whose identity is tied to work. It cannot feel the silence between spouses when one agrees out loud but disagrees internally.
It cannot understand the fear in a client who has enough money but does not feel safe. It cannot replace the trust that comes from years of being steady when life is not.
It cannot build a legacy firm unless humans decide what kind of legacy they are building. That is where Shawn’s work lives.
In the space between the technically correct answer and the human being who has to live with it.
Closing Thought
This ATOMIQ LEVEL conversation with Shawn Glogowski is a reminder that the financial advisory profession is not dying. It is being sorted. The advisors who only sell products may struggle. The advisors who only manage portfolios may be compressed.
The advisors who hide behind institutions may find the cage safer but smaller. The advisors who ignore AI may fall behind.
But the advisors who combine fiduciary independence, technical competence, emotional intelligence, team-based service, multigenerational continuity, and a willingness to use technology to become more human may be entering the most important era of their careers.
For clients, this episode is a reminder that the right advisor should help you do more than grow a portfolio. They should help you live the life the portfolio is supposed to support.
For advisors, it is a reminder that the future belongs to those willing to expand value before the market compresses fees. For families, it is a reminder that money decisions are rarely just money decisions. And for anyone trying to understand what comes next in wealth management, Shawn’s story offers a grounded, practical, human answer.
The future advisor will not merely manage assets. The future advisor will help people make meaning, take action, build trust, transfer wisdom, and protect the one asset no market can replace.
Time.
Press play on this episode with Shawn Glogowski of Note Advisors, and you will hear why the next era of fiduciary wealth may be less about replacing humans with machines and more about using machines to give the best humans more room to serve.
Because wealth advice was never supposed to end with the answer. It was supposed to help someone become ready for the next chapter.
The real risk is doing nothing!
~Chris J Snook
