Never thought my first ever review would be about a company on Glassdoor, but good luck recruiting more people to work at Lenox Advisors/Lenox Wealth Advisors. The culture in this company is extremely toxic because of the following reasons.
1. They have associates work for IB hours without the rewards of IB in terms of salary and technical experience gained from the quality and amount of work. Most of the responsibilities the associates undertake are administrative in nature that don’t require any technical or analytical skills.
2. There’s absolutely no growth opportunities on the associate level. They make them work like slaves as nothing but a mindless processor rather than positioning them in a role that’s more challenging and meaningful, brainwashing them to think that being able to process client requests will make them a rockstar in the company (but in the end they’re really just nothing but a client service administrator that process money movements and account activities for clients). The recruiters paint an ideal picture of the role during the interviews by telling the associates that they will get to participate in meaningful day-to-day responsibilities, which is the biggest lie I’ve ever heard. The associates are being referred to as the “operations team” because all they do is process requests.
3. The relationship managers are nothing but a bunch of glorified insurance agents who try to act like actual financial advisors that offer meaningful advice., but in reality they have the wealth strategists to do financial planning and the portfolio managers to analyze investments because they are so unfit to understand any of their clients’ finances. Most of them are far from being a fiduciary and DON’T EVEN PUT IN THE WORK TO KNOW THEIR OWN CLIENTS AND ARE TOO LAZY TO EVEN CARE THE SLIGHTEST ABOUT THEIR NEEDS. They rely on the people beneath them to do all the work about their clients while they sit around and get these clients to sign up for insurance. How ironic, shameless, and despicable is this kind of service model?
4. They supposedly advocate for open communication and strive to create a learning environment as a company, but that is the biggest lie they’ve ever created. The people you work with would go behind your back when they’re not satisfied with your work by directly going to your manager. The classic 5th grader syndrome of wanting to tell on their “teachers” because they’re too immature and afraid to have a direct discussion with you. There’s no open and direct communication whatsoever - only the ones you would have with your manager about something you don’t even know you did.
4. Middle Management is a joke - incompetent to get anything done or offer any type of useful advice to people who ask for performance evaluations. They ask people to abide by certain standard on their work but don’t even follow through with those standards themselves. Don’t even think about relying on management to help you with anything or act like your backbone when you make a mistake - you’re on your own.
Tl; dr: For prospective AM associates and wealth associates - if you want any type of career growth, career progression, and doing some remotely skilled work at all, DON’T WORK HERE. This place will have you question your own existence by giving you unrealistic timelines on just client requests alone, and you will spend the majority of your day processing account openings and filling out paperwork after paperwork for account applications for as long as you work here. You will spend HOURS to be placed on hold just to get connected to custodians in order to help a client process something for their accounts when they can easily go online and do it themselves. YOU WILL BE NOTHING BUT A PROCESSOR FOR ADMINISTRATIVE REQUESTS; the bottom of the food chain; an insignificant robot waiting to be manipulated by both management and the upper level people you work with.
