New Brunswick advisors explain how teamwork pushed them towards Wellington-Altus
The Josselyn Flemming Wealth Management Group always had a bit of a unique value proposition. Founded in Saint John, N.B. by Senior Investment Advisor & Senior Portfolio Manager Glenn Josselyn and Senior Investment Advisor Peter Flemming, the services they offered to clients was wider than most advisors, given Josselyn’s status as a CPA and Flemming’s training as a lawyer.
From 2008 to 2026, their practice grew within the umbrella of RBC Dominion Securities. In 2015, Glenn’s son Peter Josselyn joined the practice, in 2021 Peter Flemming’s son James Flemming joined as well. Gradually, the second generation of the practice came to take on more leadership responsibilities, with Peter Josselyn becoming Senior Investment Advisor & Portfolio Manager and James Flemming taking on the role of Investment Advisor & Portfolio Manager.
As this multi-generational, multi-advisor practice grew, their business model became more focused on teamwork, with multiple advisors sharing and servicing the same clients to achieve better outcomes. Seeking a dealer that could better support a team-based approach, the team recently made the decision to go independent, joining Wellington-Altus Private Wealth.
Peter Josselyn and James Flemming explained how their team made that decision and how teamwork fit into their business model. They highlighted some of the unique opportunities and challenges in New Brunswick while explaining how national issues around team-based service and holistic wealth planning motivated their decision.
“We’ve always had a unique service offering based on some of our unique, relevant experience. We can draw on each other to provide value to our clients,” says Flemming. “At the core of what we’ve always done is investment management service, but when you can give advice to clients, or just point them in the right direction on all those other things, it can go a long way and strengthen those relationships.”
“A lot of other places have one person, but we operate as a team, and the rationale behind our move was that we wanted to lean in more to operating as a team and bringing all of our experience to the clients regardless of who the main relationship manager might be,” adds Josselyn.
How client needs are changing, in Canada and in New Brunswick
Josselyn and Flemming explain that their practice has been built with a diversified client base of business owners, charitable organizations, families, and clients ranging in total investable assets all the way up to the ultra-high net worth. In the years since the practice was founded and since the second generation joined it, client needs have evolved. Both Josselyn and Flemming say that now investment management and financial planning have become table stakes. For example, they’ll get calls from clients about whether to sell an investment property and what the tax implications of such a sale could be.
As much as that shift towards more holistic advice has been mirrored nationwide, Josselyn and Flemming say there are some aspects of New Brunswick that make it unique. Real estate in the province is quite affordable and as a result people, especially high earners, tend to have more liquid investable assets. They contrast that with other major Canadian centres where high earners may end up ‘house poor.’ Josselyn adds, as well, that relationships tend to be quite sticky there. Clients are often not willing to change advisors and the opportunity to connect with a new client will typically only arise when their former advisor decides to retire.
Unlike nearby Nova Scotia, which is centred on Halifax, New Brunswick has three centres of roughly equivalent size: Moncton, Frederickton, and Saint John, each with their own degrees of economic specialization. It’s a province that exports a great deal of lumber-derived products and energy, and the recent trade war with the United States has been a source of some worry for Josselyn Flemming’s clients. Through this period, Josselyn and Flemming remind their clients that the tariff headlines change day to day, and that panic now will do more long-term harm than any decision made in Washington.
Why teamwork will shape the practice’s future
Josselyn and Flemming note that the decision to switch firms was not a sudden shift made as they took more leadership of the practice from their fathers. Their roles in the practice have grown over the years and the whole team gradually came to the consensus that the arrangement for teamwork and client sharing available to them at RBC Dominion Securities was insufficient for what they wanted to do. That model was built, they say, around individual advisors serving individual clients with shared administrative support. They wanted deeper teamwork. They wanted more collaboration between advisors and they wanted a means of expanding their practice through client sharing.
The decision, then, was to go independent, but finding the right firm took time. They did their due diligence on other independent firms but found that Wellington-Altus offered them a true sense of collaboration. They say that during a day spent in a Wellington-Altus office in Toronto, they felt a sense of positive collaboration that they didn’t feel elsewhere. While they are still new to the firm, they say their experience has been similarly positive. Other advisors in the firm don’t treat them as a threat. In fact, with one of their associates out on medical leave, an associate from another practice in Montreal was seconded to support them, something they say would not have happened in the bank-owned ecosystem.
Now, as they set themselves up with a new dealer, Josselyn and Flemming say they want to grow, adapt, and take advantage of the new flexibility their firm affords them.
“We want to really hit the ground running with some marketing. Of course, we've got a lot of work to do over the next couple months, and it may not happen immediately, but we're thinking about, finding ways to get the word out, working on our brand, maybe even a name change,” Flemming says. “Now that we have the flexibility to run our business how we see fit and do all these things that we may or may not have been allowed to do before, we want to take advantage of those.”
