AXA Advisors Reviews

Former Employee – worked at AXA Advisors part-time for less than a year

Pros – -Entreprunial
-Earning potential
-Flexible
-Good money if you can sell, but they want you to sell to friends and family. Once you run out of them, alot of people can fail

Cons – -Start up cost
-Turn over rate
-Chop Shop
-Hard work

Current Employee – been working at AXA Advisors full-time for more than a year

Pros – There is unlimited earning potential, you are in complete control of your own schedule, own your own book of business, and are able to provide valuable financial services and tools to those who need it. The employee benefits are pretty good including a generous stock option plan, a nice bonus structure, and residual pay.

 It is a postion where if you can make it through the daily grind for 10+ years you will be very happy with the money made and is without a doubt a job you should only consider if you are truly looking for a long term position with a company. Don't work here if you only want to get 1-2 years of experience and move on, it's not worth it and there are better places to do that, but if you go in with a long term perspective it can be a good opportunity for those that are driven, competitive, and good in a sales/numbers environment.

Cons – It is one of the hardest jobs I've encountered and the numbers back it up as there is a little less than a 15% retention rate of employees after 4 years. A big part of this is there are a lot of costs associated with the job, for example: you rent your office space from the company and have to pay for it, the same with the mandatory company computer, as well as your licenses, the majority of the planning and organizational software necessary to do the job, and professional liability insurance among other expenses. It's not uncommon for my first salary paycheck ever month to go entirely to these costs.

You spend about the first 3 months of work without any form of salary so in additional to trying to learn about all the products and services, you are required to try to sell these products in order to make money, even though you do not know enough to adequately sell them. Additionally in the short term the pay isn't competitive with other companies in the industry, it gets better after about 5 years and catches up, but that is due to the compounded residual pay in addition to the bonus structure.

There is a terrible work/life balance as I typically find myself leaving home by 5:30am and getting back home after 10pm. This is mainly because the job is at it's core a sales job, which would be fine, but in addition to going through the typically sales process (prospecting, making calls, preparing for appointments, running appointments, closing the sale) you don't have an assistant of any type so you are also responsible for the administrative half of the sale (filling out paperwork, processing paperwork from start to finish, following up with and correcting any errors made by yourself, the client, or the home office-who unfortunately are very understaffed and as a result make an immense amount of mistakes). This gets better after time when you can afford to hire an assistant to handle the follow up and paperwork, but again that is an entirely out of pocket expense with no company support.

There isn't a very clear channel of communications at any level of the company. When paperwork needs to be followed up on you can easily wait on hold for 30+ minutes just to talk to 4 different people about the same problem before ever getting to someone who can solve it. There needs to be a restructuring and a serious reevaluation of how best to provide insurance.

Advice to Senior Management – Do more to develop and support new employees. There is no reason to be charging the employees to use office space just to increase the bottom line. It shouldn't be an acceptable practice or considered normal in the company to hire 20 people and after 10 have quit, lose another 5 on top of that just because even though they are good at the job, they simply can't afford to continue to work at the company. Something seriously needs to be done about that. Additionally, there needs to be some encouragement and support for a life outside of work. Your sales staff shouldn't be spending an extra 30 hours/ week doing activities that don't bring in money for themselves or the company. An easy fix would to be to provide a few administrative assistants that handle the follow up of paper work and take some of that responsibility from the financial professionals, so instead of paperwork the FP's can do what they are supposed to be doing, which is make sales and bring in money.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at AXA Advisors full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – They hire virtually anybody out of college as there is virtually no overhead per employee.

Cons – It is near impossible to do what is right for the client and still earn a decent living in the first 5 years. Annuity products are pushed hard from the top down.

Advice to Senior Management – Align incentives with doing what's best for the clients, do a better job of selecting and supporting new advisors.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at AXA Advisors as an intern for less than a year

Pros – Great management, Tons of training and opportunities given to you. Many different pay/stock options

Cons – Finding clients, starting salary is low, no set hours how hard you work= how big your pay check is

Advice to Senior Management – none

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at AXA Advisors full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – Open architecture, great colleagues, emphasis on teamwork, solid products

Cons – Not for unambitious or unmotivated people, must be a self starter

Advice to Senior Management – Better coffee

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at AXA Advisors

Pros – Get to know people in insurance industry

Cons – Too much work for intern

Former Employee – worked at AXA Advisors as an intern for less than a year

Pros – Generally friendly people. There is no office politics because everyone is on their own. Like all insurance business the reward is substantial if you do it well, and you don't really need to come to office

Cons – Office has poor ventilation. Low starting wage. If you don't fill targets you're in deep trouble.

Advice to Senior Management – Renovate the office. It's not 1980s

Current Employee – been working at AXA Advisors

Pros – Everyone is great to get along with and knows how to help.

Cons – Can't seem to find any cons.

Former Employee – worked at AXA Advisors full-time for less than a year

Pros – Sponsorship for Series exams, entrepreneurship, time management.

Cons – Pressure to solicit family and friends, poor guidance, salaried for only the first month then 100% commissions.
It's a tough business and extremely difficult to begin with any company in this industry.

Advice to Senior Management – Focus on providing more guidance for your employees to help get the ball rolling. Stop pressuring new hires to ask all their family and friends for business and instead help them develop a book of clients. Also provide longer financial support for your new hires rather than the one month make it or break it.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at AXA Advisors full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – Lots of resources, strong insurance brands, LPL Financial Brokerage Platform

Cons – Commission Only, Extremely high cost to operate your practice (at least 20-30k per year), Nickel and dimed for supbar technology and marketing material. No formal training program with a focus on small account production. Compensation & Benefits are too tied to your insurance production. They claim independent open-architecture but the only products they really want you to sell is AXA Equitable Life Insurance and Annuities.

Advice to Senior Management – It's not AXA Equitable, it's AXA Advisors. Insurance is not the end all be all for financial planning. Invest in your producers with a base salary and stop charging them for everything. Also, train your producers to build a pipeline of prospects with minimum asset levels. They spend far too much time servicing non profitable clients with under 100k in assets and don't have the platform to support HNW clients. They can't live and die by VUL and VA's because post financial crisis clients expect a lot of liquidity and are very fee conscious.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company