Suyoung Cha flunked out of the University of Minnesota at 19 after passing the brutal actuary exams. The aftermath strained his relationship with his parents for years. What came next was a job as a Wells Fargo teller, seven years climbing a corporate ladder, a move to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and a brand new financial advisor business that made almost no money for a year. Suyoung calls that stretch his crucible. This episode is the story of what the heat burned off.
What You'll Hear
- Why Suyoung starts every client conversation with the dream, not the dollars
- The two careers an immigrant Korean family will approve, and the third if you're very lucky
- How a prestigious Catholic high school collided with a traditional Korean home
- What Wells Fargo's internal advisor academy promises and why Suyoung never got in
- The Hattiesburg, Mississippi church service that ended with people running laps around the altar
- Why nobody in Mississippi would hire a young Korean advisor no matter how good the numbers were
- The top five questions Suyoung's clients actually ask, and why none of them are about returns
- Dr. Rivard's advice that Suyoung wanted to smack him for, and later realized was right
Life first, money second
Suyoung Cha runs the Kansas City office of BSG Advisors, where he offers what he calls comprehensive holistic financial planning. His first principle is simple and he repeats it more than once in the conversation. Start with the life you want. Then make the money fit.
He contrasts that with what he sees most people do. Look at the paycheck, look at the 401k, look at what the market might return, and quietly settle for a smaller dream. The cookie-cutter path, as he describes it, is a corporate job until 65, money funneled into the S and P 500, and then retirement. His question is, retirement into what. A lot of his clients, he says, get hit with a now what feeling the day the paycheck stops.
His job, as he sees it, is to answer a different question first. What does the good life look like for you. Then he reverse-engineers the numbers and the timeline. He notes that the dream itself is not even the important part. The pursuit of it is. Purpose is what keeps people out of the now what void.
He also draws a sharp line between his old life at a corporate broker and his practice today. At the broker, he was trained to keep clients partially in the dark so they would stay dependent on him. Now he lays out every finding, every answer, up front. If a client wants to execute it themselves, they can. If they want to hire him to help, they can. The relationship is based on want, he says, not need.
A Korean household inside a prestigious Catholic high school
Suyoung's family immigrated from Korea to Minnesota when he was seven. He grew up in what he describes as a not-yet-diverse Minnesota, and attended a high school of about a thousand kids where he, his younger brother, and one other student were the only non-white students in the building. The school cost about 15,000 dollars a year, so his parents were paying roughly 30,000 a year to put the two boys through it.
The result was a tornado. At school he was surrounded by wealthy families where the expected path was starting your own business or running one. At home he was inside a traditional Korean house where professions came in a short list. Doctor. Lawyer. Engineer if you got lucky. His father was an engineer. Business ownership, with its lack of guarantees, was not on the table.
Sam asks where Korean business owners come from, given the cultural pressure. Suyoung's answer is that the largest Korean companies are family-run dynasties. Samsung, he notes, started as a farming company that sold bags of rice, and has been led by the founder's descendants ever since. Business, in that worldview, belongs to a kind of ruling class. For everyone else, the message is grind, grind, grind.
Suyoung did try to obey. He was strong at math, so his parents blessed a career as an actuary. Prestigious, highly paid, heavy on schooling. He passed the grueling actuary exams. Then he enrolled at the University of Minnesota, majored in mathematics and statistics, and flunked out his first year. The intelligence was there. The dream was not his. He describes it as the first real burnout of his life.
Wells Fargo, the carrot, and an aspiring advisor's resume
After college, his relationship with his parents became strained around his career choices, and the break took years to process. He had to get a job, and the job he got was teller at a Wells Fargo branch in a busy part of Minneapolis, near the breweries and the bars. He loved it immediately.
That branch had a financial advisor on site, and Suyoung watched him closely. Nice cars. Nice suits. Showing up two or three days a week. Suyoung decided that was the life he wanted. He notes in hindsight that those advisors had ground hard for years to get to that point, and that some of the ones who appeared to work two days a week were actually out doing luncheons and golf outings the rest of the week. Either way, the dream was set.
The path forward at Wells Fargo was the bank's internal financial advisor academy. To get in, you had to prove your sales ability. Suyoung did. He calls the academy a giant carrot that the bank holds in front of you while you, the donkey, chase it. The fine print, he learned the hard way, is that there is a huge backlog and plenty of internal politics. After almost seven years and every promotion they could give him short of the academy, he stopped seeing it coming.
The door that actually opened was outside the bank. His wife got into medical school in Mississippi, which meant a move to Hattiesburg. Suyoung started applying for jobs with a resume that led with the line aspiring financial advisor. New York Life offered him the shot Wells Fargo never had. They put him in their academy right away and paid for his FINRA and life insurance licenses. At 26 and a half, he moved South and went to sell.
The crucible in Mississippi
Hattiesburg was a culture shock on every axis. Suyoung had gone from a Yankee suburban city to a small Southern college town. His first attempt to find a church ended with a Pentecostal service where people ran laps around the altar, hollered in tongues, and then got a fire-and-brimstone sermon that left him stressed out in the pew. He never went back. The humidity he describes as overwhelming in a way Minnesota summers never prepared him for.
The business side was harder. The demographic that hired financial advisors in that market, in his description, expected a white man over 55 who went to the right fraternity. The good old boy network was the gatekeeper. Suyoung, young and Korean and from the North, could not get through the doors no matter how strong his technical case was. He made almost no money his first year. He and his wife lived off savings he had stockpiled, credit cards, and additional student loans just to cover bills.
He also learned, slowly, that his whole sales approach was wrong. He was leading with numbers. Returns. Tax benefits. Projected balances. Nothing landed. People, he discovered, do not hire a financial advisor because they love finance. They hire one because they are scared. The top five questions his clients ask him today are versions of the same question. Am I going to run out of money. If my wife gets sick, can I take care of her. If my husband dies first, will I be okay. The overarching ask, he says, is simply Suyoung, tell me I am going to be okay.
He was not okay yet. He wanted to quit every day. His wife, his peers, and a small group of believers kept him from doing it. Eventually one of those people told him New York Life was the wrong home for him and introduced him to BSG Advisors. He bought into the firm. That is the practice he still runs. He named the season his time in the crucible, the place where a blade gets melted down, poured into a mold, and hammered into shape.
The giant who carried him, and the mantras he earned
When Sam asks who has been a giant in his life, Suyoung names his first spiritual mentor, Dr. Rivard, at a small Mississippi church called New Life. Dr. Rivard had been a psychologist for decades. He taught Suyoung to treat faith and neuroscience as two halves of the same gear, both needing to turn in the same direction. The line that landed hardest, and that Suyoung admits he wanted to smack him for at the time, was this. If you want a positive life, think positive thoughts. Your thoughts have to lead. Right now your feelings are leading. The other line Suyoung still quotes is, don't go around it, go through it. Going through is the shortest path.
Suyoung finishes with two mantras of his own. The first is that you only fail when you quit. Business, he argues, is less a game of succeeding than a game of surviving. Last long enough and a lot of things resolve themselves. He is about to celebrate his fourth year as an independent advisor, and says this is the first of those years where he can see success ahead instead of just more survival.
The second mantra he heard recently. Everybody is jealous of what you got. Nobody is jealous of how you got it. He credits his wife as ninety-nine percent of the reason he is still in business. The things he had to walk through to stay married and stay in business are things he would not wish on anyone and would not trade for anything. What he has on the other side, he says, is holy buckets worth it.
At the end, he tells listeners they can find him by searching his name or BSG Advisors, or by Googling financial advisor in Overland Park and clicking one of the top results. Ninety percent of his marketing effort, he admits, has gone into earning that placement.
About Suyoung Cha
Suyoung Cha is a financial advisor with BSG Advisors, where he opened and runs the Kansas City office out of Overland Park. He offers comprehensive holistic financial planning, teaching clients their full financial picture up front so they can choose whether to execute it themselves or hire him to help. Before BSG, he spent almost seven years in sales roles at Wells Fargo in Minneapolis and began his advising career with New York Life in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.