COLE HEIDEMAN, CIM, Investment Advisor, RBC Dominion Securities, Orangeville, ON
Updated: Sep 2
COLE HEIDEMAN
"You don't want to be retiring on the same day your Advisor does.”
When a prospective client sat down across from Cole Heideman recently, they shared that they had already outlasted three Advisors because they'd retired. Each handoff meant a new style to learn and a new rapport to build from scratch. In addition to sound wealth planning and disciplined investing, Cole provides his clients with a dedicated, high-touch relationship based on a time horizon that spans generations, not years.
At 31, Cole is an Investment Advisor with RBC Dominion Securities, and is an outlier in a profession where, by his estimate, the average age of an Advisor dances closer to retirement age than not. "It’s an advantage,” he says. “I'm going to be in this seat for the next 35 years, long enough to carry a client through their entire retirement, then be there for their children, and, if I’m lucky, their grandchildren.”
Cole didn't choose his career by way of a childhood spent reading stock tables. But at the forefront, there was a model of self-made work. “My father built an insurance agency, home, life, and auto, from nothing, door-knocking his way through pairs of shoes in record time. He was a man who worked hard to support his family and did a great job at it."
Like his father, Cole has always been driven. From age six to sixteen, he ski-raced, finishing his racing career on the international FIS circuit. Summers meant chasing winter into the Southern Hemisphere, with three-week training blocks in Chile, high above the tree line, bunking with the same teammates who were also his competition.
“It was an interesting dynamic to absorb so young: you train together, share coaches, become close friends, but their success is at your detriment because you're all competing at the same time and for the same goal," says Cole.
The lessons he learned weren't only discipline and time management, though those came, too. The hardest one was emotional—how to want to win without becoming the person nobody could stand. “Come race day, you’d have to flip a switch, showing up, being your best self,” he says, “and still carry a friend's jacket down at the finish, win or lose.”
After Queen's University, where he studied at what was then the Queen's School of Business (now the Smith School of Business), he found his passion. A 2014 internship led to a decade in investment sales. The pivotal move came in 2018 when he joined a small, fast-growing Toronto investment manager as its twelfth employee. Hired to sell into the Financial Advisor channel, he ended up doing it all: sales, marketing, research, client service, and getting milk for the coffee station. "Every single thing that I did in that job, I was contributing to the growth of a business, and that feeling started to become very powerful for me."
For years, though, Cole's job was to bring portfolios to the people managing money for the business owners, the affluent families, covering territory from Colorado to California and across Canada. He saw hundreds of practices, good and bad, and quietly assembled a picture of what the best ones shared: Advisors who knew their clients' families intimately, who understood where people had been and where they wanted to go. Against that, his own role began to feel a step removed. The word he kept returning to was fulfillment. "I kept asking myself, ‘what is going to make me feel the most productive, that I've done something good over the next 35 years?’" The answer was to move into the driver's seat.
Cole is unusually candid about the part of the job many Advisors would probably rather not talk about. He started with no clients, but found success by truly getting to know people and their needs and building them a deliberate, disciplined roadmap to their goals.
First comes financial planning, which he distills to the two questions almost everyone is really asking: Am I going to have enough? And will the people I love be okay if I'm no longer here? The second step is wealth planning: estate, philanthropy, tax efficiency, and, for the business owners who make up much of his market, succession and transition: whether a company passes to the next generation or sells, and how to structure things to maximize the proceeds, and minimize the tax liability. Only then, third and last, comes investment management.
"The portfolio is an outcome of the process," he says. “If you were to lead with investing, you’ll go in blindly, aiming to beat an arbitrary index without really understanding the why." Anchor the portfolio to a plan, and clients tend to hold steadier when markets wobble, he says. “If they already have enough to check every box, there's no need to reach for more return than the plan requires, or more risk than it can afford.”
His shorthand for all of this is "structured wealth," and the operative word is intention. Too often, he says, he opens a new client's statements and finds savings scattered across account types with no logic linking them: some in an RRSP, some in an RESP, a non-registered account, cash piling up untouched in a corporate account. “Every account should have a job. A child's education savings, needed in a couple of years, shouldn't be invested like a retirement account with a fifteen-year runway, yet frequently it is.”
The same discipline applies at the other end; for retirees, the order in which you draw down different accounts can meaningfully change both after-tax income and the size of the estate—sometimes counterintuitively. "There's no morally right or wrong answer," Cole says. "My job is to educate, let them know the impact, and put the plan together. The goal is that clients leave a meeting knowing exactly what they have and why they have it."
After years of living downtown Toronto, Cole and his wife, Montana—a physician at the local hospital—settled in Orangeville. From his office window, he says, you can see his house through the trees in winter. Their son is now just a year old, and a Hungarian Vizsla named Rigby rounds out the household. Cole sits on committees of the Dufferin Community Foundation and the Headwaters Health Care Foundation. “In the city, you could go about your entire day and no one would notice a thing about you. Here, the work visibly moves the needle in what is a real familial community.”
When he isn't working, the athlete in him still surfaces. Skiing, golf and tennis—alongside a lifelong love of photography that began with his mother's decades-old film camera on a ski trip to Colorado—keep him busy.
For all the time Cole spent studying other Advisors' practices, the clearest lesson was the one he carries into every client meeting: a relationship worth having is one built to last. That's his promise to clients—a plan anchored in intention, a portfolio that follows from it, and an Advisor who plans to be in the seat for the next thirty-five years. For clients who've already outlasted three Advisors, that may be the most valuable number of all.
Cole Heideman, CIM
Investment Advisor
RBC Dominion Securities | RBC Wealth Management
Carmen Morgan is a skilled business writer and storyteller, collaborating with business owners and executives to tell their stories and share perspectives on growth and success, as well as perseverance and adversity. Over two decades she has refined her interview, writing and editing skills to capture the nuggets and captivating details that engage readers and make a story memorable.