My name is Nick Gonzales, and I am with North Star Resource Group.  I am based out of our Durham, NC office.  A little about me personally.  I am the oldest of 3 boys and a son to doctors.  My father was an anesthesiologist, and my mother was the director of NICU.  I was born in the Philippines and move to West Palm Beach, FL when I was 5 years old.  Growing up, we were a sports family with baseball mostly being the focus.  I got the opportunity to play college baseball at Greensboro College and that is what brought me to NC.  I met my wife in 1998, and we got married in March of 2003.  Our family consists also of 4 boys, Cullen is 16, Caeden is 14, Cameron is 9, and we can’t forget our 3-year-old Irish Wolf Doodle Teddy.  Our days and weekends are filled with sports activities from cross-country races, to track meets, to football games, and to baseball tournaments.  In my spare time my wife and I like to have a weekly date night where we like to try locally owned restaurants.  I also like to stay active by still racing in triathlons and marathons (but not nearly as many as when I was younger and before kids).

I started my professional career when I graduated college in 2000 as a management trainee for a textile company in Greensboro, NC.  It was not a good fit and after a short year I decided to transition careers to financial services.  In 2001, I started the licensing period to be an advisor with American Express Financial Advisors (now Ameriprise).  I spent almost 10 years with AMEX and most of it in leadership ending my career as the Field Vice President for the Greensboro office.  In 2010 amid all the changes from AMEX to Ameriprise, I found myself a little burned out with leadership, so I decided to go back into production and move my family from Greensboro, NC to Cary, NC. In 2010 I went independent clearing through Capital Analyst (now Lincoln Investment), working with family-owned businesses helping them with their retirement plans.  This is also the time in my career where I earned my Certified Business Coach and Certified Professional Coach designation from the International Leadership Institute.  Going through that program is where I found my love for leadership again.  So, in 2015, I went back into leadership with AXA Advisors (now Equitable) leading their RTP office. In 2017 I got recruited by Prudential to run the entire Triangle Region.  After my time with Prudential and with AXA, I wanted to try to move away from the insurance-based broker dealers and move away from the big corporations and get back to my roots which was the independent space and that is why I joined North Star.    

I joined North Star Resource Group in 2022 to be the Vice President of the Durham office and late last year Ed Deutschlander our CEO asked me to run recruiting nationally for the company.  So now I lead a team of 4 recruiters, and we recruit for our main growth offices (Richmond, Durham, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Austin, Scottsdale, and San Diego).  In three years, my goal is to have my current recruiting team promoted to exclusively run their regions and to have 1 – 2 recruiters under them to help keep growing their region.  Personally, my goal is to still lead the recruiting team, but at a higher strategic level.  It is also a goal over the next 3 years for me to have more impact across the different departments beyond just recruiting.  It has always been a goal of mine to create a leadership development institute at North Star to identify leadership talent early and to develop them to help grow our footprint nationally.  As far as measurable success in my current position, we have a mantra and North Star with is 90-60-30.  The recruiting team has an impact and influence on all these metrics.  The 90 represents offers accepted for the year, the 60 represents advisors that have passed the appropriate exams and enter our pre-contract phase, and the 30 represents full contract starts.  I reported to the executive leadership team that our recruiting not only has a goal of 90-60-30, but we want to build the systems and processes to make attaining those goals easier each year to the point where it is almost a given that we hit it every year.