ETF Central: Melanin Money and Capitalwize Founder George Acheampong

Bilal Little (0:13)

Welcome to another edition of ETF Central, I'm your host Bilal Little. This episode is important to me because I have my good friend George Acheampong, who is actually a financial advisor, and he's also doing something that's completely revolutionary when it comes to distribution. We're going to unpack all of that and more. And with that, George, welcome to the show.

George Acheampong (0:31)

Thank you for having me. It's always an honor to be in your presence, man, and get to rap.

Bilal Little (0:35)

When was the last time you were at the Exchange?

George Acheampong (0:37)

Last time I was at the Exchange? I think it was in June.

Bilal Little (0:39)

Okay.

George Acheampong (0:40)

Yeah, I think it was in June.

Bilal Little (0:41)

So you're one of the few people that get to come on a more regular basis.

George Acheampong (0:44)

Yeah, I know a guy.

I know a guy who helped facilitate that opportunity and that guy is Bilal. So yeah, since February of 2025, I've been able to come pretty much whatever I want, but I want to average every other month. We come up, record some segments of the podcast and just have a great time.

Bilal Little (1:02)

Yeah. The media team, the leadership here, they're extremely open and welcome to partnership. That's what I love about the Exchange. Capital markets are like that.

I want to make sure we have a jam-packed conversation about some things, literally about you and the business that you're managing. I want to really unpack a lot of different things, but I want to start and level set with what your story is, how you became the advisor you are today and how you're managing the business of Capitalwize.

George Acheampong (1:29)

Yeah. I remember taking it back, you're going to age me a little bit. But taking it back, I actually started out on the risk management and insurance side of the business, working with MassMutual, and got all my licenses there. I was still full-fledged brokerage, and I was able to get all my licenses, but I started out on the insurance side.

We had to do this exercise called Project 200 I'm sure we've heard of some variation of it. Write down 200 names of your friends and family members and people who you want to make clients. I'm a 24-year-old kid, no one's going to trust me with anything financially related. So I was like, all right, cool, I'll write it down. But there was certain criteria in terms of their net worth, or just at least estimations that you can make. As I started writing down the names, I was like, I'm not going to make it to 200 I don't know if I'll make it to 20, right? In terms of people that I think would be a good fit for this firm's model. That was the first barrier. The second barrier was, as I mentioned, I'm a 23 year old kid who just graduated not too long ago. I graduated for Context in 2009, right? So we know what the financial world was like around that time. And so in my mind, I can't take a lot of credit for it, but logically it seemed like it made sense to kind of flip it on its head. So I'm making a list of 200 names of people I want to make clients. I made a list of potential centers of influence, let them know the backing and support that I had in this industry, and ask them if they knew anybody in their industry that would benefit from the services that the firm offered. So it's like, I will go to one of the top surgeons or top attorneys and say, hey, I know you're all taking care of, I know you probably already have an advisor, but this is what I'm doing now. Don't know if people in your industry would find value in this, but I know you would know. Inherently what happened is because I was coming to them from that angle, their guard was down. And so they're like, actually, I do need that. But had I came to them and said, hey, I want to be your advisor, their guard would have been up and they never would have been open. And so that became, I would say for the first probably five years of my career, I was able to really steamroll that into a lot of momentum to be able to build my clientele through those centers of influence. Fast forward, I'm building my practice, but I'm realizing there's a disconnect with underrepresented communities. I was like, OK, cool.

Just because they may not have a certain net worth or certain amount of investable assets doesn't mean that they don't deserve to be served in some capacity. So those are ideas I was throwing around with myself. And so from there, I tried to figure out what could that look like. So I started a blog, I think, back in 2014