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Many young financial advisers will spend a decade or more working for a large brokerage firm before even thinking about striking out on their own.

That wasn’t the path for Jason Wiltse and Matt Onstot, who started their own firm, Navigator Financial Partners, after just three years in the industry.

“I think we both felt that we wanted to build our business from the ground up, the way we wanted to do it, not with the restraints of a big company,” Onstot said. The two were each only 25 years old when they launched the firm.

Since then, Navigator (www.yournavigators.com) has built up a following of clients and an investment portfolio of about $20 million, and is winning additional clients by conducting educational seminars focusing on alternative investments suitable for high-net-worth investors. And it has reached profitability, to boot, say the partners.

The two University of Iowa graduates worked for Waddell & Reed Inc. for about three years before they decided to strike out on their own three years ago.

“A lot of times at the big firms, you’re told what you should invest your clients’ money in and how you should go about doing things, whether it’s right or wrong,” Onstot said. We want to be able to give our clients the products and services they need.”

“Through this downturn,” Wiltse added, “you’re seeing a lot of advisers now starting to do that same thing, leaving the ‘wire house’ (large brokerage firms) in search of an independent broker-dealer.”

Wiltse, who grew up in Storm Lake, met Onstot, who is from Lake View, while they were students at Iowa. The two found they worked well together after they both joined Waddell & Reed.

After deciding to go independent, they interviewed about 15 independent broker-dealers. They chose Berthel Fisher & Company Financial Services Inc., a Cedar Rapids-based firm that currently works with about 350 independent investment advisers in 41 states.

The partners also chose a different route than many investment advisers by investing in their own office space. They recently purchased a 3,400-square-foot office space at 2400 86th St., Suite 32, in Urbandale. “We are currently looking to lease out space to other professionals that are complementary to our business,” Wiltse said.

On a day-to-day basis, Wiltse focuses on client acquisition, while Onstot handles most of the portfolio management duties of the firm. “That’s one of the main reasons we partnered to begin with,” Onstot said. “You have to be out acquiring clients, but also building and managing the portfolio.”

Rick Murphy, executive vice president of Berthel Fisher, said his firm has definitely seen an increase over the past year in independent advisers who are seeking to make a move, though it’s still rare to see advisers in their mid-20s start their own firms.

“Those guys are relatively young to take that on,” he said, referring to Onstot and Wiltse, “but they’ve got an entrepreneurial spirit, and I think they’ve got a good chance of making it.”

Stepping away from a larger firm to go independent can take “a lot of chutzpah,” Murphy said, because advisers often give up most or all of their existing clients to do that.

Over the past several years, the broker-dealer has seen its average production per representative it works with increase, he said. “We’re tending to get reps that are more independent-minded.”

Onstot and Wiltse say providing educational seminars has been a key element for their firm’s growth, along with referrals from existing clients.

“We have a huge focus on education, and a large part of that is on the nonprofit side,” Wiltse said. “We tend to get out in the community and educate a lot of people that way. From our experience growing up in school, you are never really taught the tools to be successful financially.”

Many of the investment options they cover in seminars are known as “non-correlated assets,” which don’t necessarily decline in value with the stock market, such as specialized real estate ownership opportunities and equipment leases.

“When we searched for a broker-dealer, this was one of the No. 1 reasons we picked Berthel Fisher, because they have a strong background in alternative investments, and we knew it was something we wanted to provide our clients,” Onstot said.

“Rather than buying shares of Exxon, we’d rather have our clients own the oil wells that produce the oil,” Wiltse said, as one example.

Among Iowans, there are also significant opportunities for older residents who own farmland to use tools such as a Delaware Statutory Trust to facilitate the exchange of land for other types of income-producing properties, he said.

“The tradeoff you have in non-correlated assets is that you give up some liquidity,” he said. “So we have to be confident that the investment sponsors are capable of doing what they say they can do. Berthel Fisher has a huge funnel of different investment opportunities and a due-diligence process they go through. And then we do our own due diligence.”

Their youth can work to their advantage, the partners believe, because it provides them with decades of potential continuity with their clients.

“If you can imagine being in your late 60s or early 70s and having your adviser retire before you hit retirement, that can be quite a shock,” Onstot said. “Whereas we’ll be there to guide them all the way through.”