A Katrina Survivor Rebuilds His Business From Scratch

By Zack Anchors
Trae Wieniewitz founded Baton Rouge, Louis.-based Wieniewitz Financial in 2001. Today, Wieniewitz Financial is a $15 million firm specializing in financial planning services for individuals age 50 and over.

The problem
By the fall of 2005, 28-year-old Trae Wieniewitz had built a firm that provided financial services for about 100 clients, generating annual sales of roughly $2 million. Then on September 29 Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast, and everything changed.

Wieniewitz's property held up well during the storm, but many of his clients returned to find their homes destroyed, their family members missing, and their livelihoods in question. "The demand for financial planning nearly vanished overnight," he says. "One day we had a great business that was profitable and expanding, and the next day there was no need for our services. The last thing people were thinking about was where to put their retirement money."

Wieniewitz realized that if he wanted his business to survive, he would need to scrap everything he had built and and start over in a community where he had no clients and no reputation as a financial planner. "When the scale of the devastation became clear, my wife and I decided we needed to act quickly," Weiniewitz says. "Within a week we had begun planning to leave all our friends, family, and clients behind and rebuild the business somewhere else."

The Solution
With the decision to relocate settled, Wieniewitz faced an equally difficult decision: where to go. "We looked at the demographics of different areas, focusing specifically on our target population, which includes people age 50 and over," he says. "We looked at how many people were moving to locations to retire, and Knoxville was one of the major destinations."

Wieniewitz knew little about Knoxville, Tenn., and knew no one there, but just six weeks after Katrina he relaunched his business in the city. "A lot happened in that six weeks," he says. "We had to find a home, an office space, a place to live for our only employee, who was moving with us -- and within a few months of moving here, my wife was pregnant with our first child."

The Aftermath
There were high financial stakes to the move. "To make it through the first 24 to 36 months we went through all of our savings, the profits from the houses we sold in Louisiana, and we borrowed some money," he says.

He immediately began a marketing campaign in Knoxville to alert the community of his firm's new presence in the community. "Having people trust us is essential," he says. "At first, people didn't want to take financial advice from a 28-year-old who had just moved here a few months earlier, and who they thought might move again in a few months."

Wieniewitz demonstrated his experience and his commitment to the community by contributing articles on financial planning to local newspapers and through advertisements in local media. He also offered public seminars on financial planning targeting his primary demographic of age 50 and over. "The seminars provide a way for people to see me and my logo and basically become familiar with who we are and what we do," he says.

Wieniewitz also found that his story of relocating became one of the most powerful tools for reaching out to prospective clients. "Now I almost always share the story of what brought us here," he says. "Being able to show the challenges we've overcome makes people more likely to trust us." Today Wieniewitz Financial has five employees, more than 500 clients, and annual sales of about $17 million.