Wealthy Santos, the previous writer for WealthManagement.com and its predecessor model Registered Rep. and Trusts & Estates, alongside many different business-to-business media properties, died late final month at age 76.
Santos served as writer via a number of iterations, beginning with The Registered Consultant journal in 1997. He stayed in that position till 2015. He oversaw the successive rebrands to Registered Rep., REP. and, later, the launch of this web site.
“We frequently say we are going to by no means see a writer like Wealthy once more,” stated David Armstrong, government director, content material and person engagement at WealthManagement.com. “He was the final of a kind—had the group’s again, it doesn’t matter what. He was the writer that each editor desires of getting. I’m very blissful I obtained an opportunity to work for him.”
“Wealthy was one in every of a form,” added Warren Bimblick, former group senior vice chairman. “He had aptitude and knowledge. He was enjoyable and fearless. And he was an important ‘pardner.’”
With out Santos, there could be no WealthManagement.com in any respect. About 20 years in the past, a couple of rounds deep into martinis, Santos and Bimblick remarked on how companies have been more and more bandying in regards to the time period “wealth administration” because the trade moved away from transactional brokerage companies to extra holistic and fee-based wealth planning.
“We Googled ‘wealthmanagement.com’ to find that nobody had registered it,” Bimblick stated. “The following morning, we purchased and registered the URL for $12. The remainder is historical past. Miss you, Wealthy.”
Santos made an impression on anybody who met him, labored with him or handled him as a consumer or vendor. His distinctive booming voice, impeccably tailor-made top-tier wardrobe, penchant for vodka martinis (stirred, not shaken) and tales of his former exploits as an newbie polo participant made him a focus in any setting.
The tales of his acumen as a salesman are legion.
In a single episode recalled by Matt Butcher, a former gross sales supervisor at WealthManagement.com, a member of his gross sales group was having bother sustaining contact with a giant consumer. Santos’ resolution: He instructed the journal’s manufacturing division to publish the consumer’s advert the other way up.
The consumer, in fact, known as Santos to complain. He apologized profusely for the “mistake” and provided a “make good” that went above and past. That led to an even bigger dialogue in regards to the consumer’s objectives and, earlier than lengthy, an elevated advert spend with the model. “That was Wealthy,” Butcher stated. “An out-of-the-box thinker. A danger taker. A intelligent and inventive man. A frontrunner.”
Throughout his tenure—a pivotal period in enterprise journalism as the sector developed from the reign of print magazines to at this time’s world of multi-platform digital publishing—Santos guided the model to report circulation and promoting progress in its print days after which helped usher the profitable transition to digital publishing. Alongside the best way, via its iterations, the model garnered quite a few awards. Santos mentored dozens of gross sales reps and different workers and supported the numerous journalists who labored with him.
Santos impacted numerous people throughout the monetary companies and enterprise info industries in methods each giant and small.
When he retired as day-to-day writer in 2015, Santos wrote that the one fixed in his profession had been “change,” however added, “What hasn’t modified is the retail investing public’s want to your funding and wealth administration planning and recommendation. I’ve loved interacting with a lot of you in all three channels of the enterprise. That’s what I’ll miss essentially the most.”
After retiring because the writer of WealthManagement.com, Santos was primarily based in Chicago and served as managing director at Ten Purpose LLC.
Santos graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Enterprise, Administration, Advertising and Associated Assist Providers from Murray State College.
At his household’s request, donations can made to the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society in his honor.
