The Open Door: How Andrew Szugyi Built the Investment Platform Behind Victory Financial

In 2023, Andrew Szugyi was doing more than most people could manage at once.

He was the portfolio manager for a group of advisors at an insurance-affiliated broker-dealer, running investment strategy for their books while serving his own clients. Outside of work, he was growing a family and helping lead his local church. He was good at all of it, but he felt his real talent, investment management, deserved more than the slice of his attention he could give it.

Then a call came from Victory Financial, connected through Andy Nichols, one of the firm's founding partners. It reached Andrew at a decision point he had been circling for months. "I was doing a lot of things well," Andrew said. "But if I really wanted to do something great, I had to go all in on investment management. Victory Financial was the open door."

Three years later, Andrew is the Director of Investments at Victory Financial and has built much of the investment platform its advisors and clients rely on every day.

Where Andrew Started

Andrew entered the industry in 2016 as a trader at a national brokerage firm before moving to Texas to build his book as an advisor the hard way. He built one client at a time, from the ground up, and developed a sharp instinct for portfolio management.

The instinct outgrew the environment. Trades were placed one at a time, entered by hand from a spreadsheet. The product menu was narrow, and any new ideas were usually met with ‘no’. "My entrepreneurial spirit was buried," Andrew said. "I wanted to do so many things, and I was told no a million times."

He is candid that the constraints wore on him, and that his part-time work outside the industry was partly a response to how often he ran into a wall. The talent was there, but there was no room to use it.

A Different Kind of Kitchen

To describe the change he found at Victory Financial, Andrew turns to something familiar: the kitchen.

"At my old firm, I was cooking with whatever happened to be in the cabinets," he said. "Now I'm in an industrial-grade kitchen, standing next to Gordon Ramsay, with a grocery store right next door."

The difference showed up immediately in how he worked. One of the first things that struck him was a single button in Schwab that could sell every position in a client account at once, a task that used to eat up an afternoon of manual work. It was a small thing, and it hinted at how much more was possible.

"From there, the scope kept opening. Today Andrew supports a dramatically larger AUM base across thousands of client accounts, and he does it in less time than he once spent managing a small fraction of that size. He had the same drive all along. He just finally had the room to use it."

"Now it's simple," he said. "If you can dream it, build it. Go figure it out."

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Building a Family Office Platform

What Andrew has built at Victory Financial over three years reaches far beyond model portfolios. The platform now includes custom direct indexing with tax-loss harvesting, options overlays for tailoring portfolios, access to private equity and private credit, private placements, and lending solutions, all available to Victory Financial advisors and the clients they serve.

The purpose of it all is access. Clients who once had a narrow menu of options can now reach strategies that used to be reserved for the wealthiest households. Andrew can sit down with an advisor who just opened an office in Dallas and map out exactly how to compete with an established family office across town.

"I can help an advisor transform their book so their clients feel like a JP Morgan private client," he said, "whether they're worth a hundred million or a couple hundred thousand."

That range is the point. The same infrastructure that supports a high-net-worth household with concentrated stock, estate needs, and private investments also supports the family just beginning to build. Both get an advisor backed by a real investment platform, rather than a short list of proprietary products.

An Innovator, Not an Order Taker

Kyle Wardlaw, President of Victory Financial, sees Andrew's drive as one of the firm's most valuable assets.

"There are people who take orders, and there are people who push things forward," Kyle said. "Andrew is an innovator. He wants to be the tip of the spear and bring all of that to our advisors."

That instinct to keep building is also what keeps Andrew close to the advisors he serves. He spends much of his time working directly alongside them, which has given him a clear read on what experienced advisors face once they step into a more independent role.

The Real Challenge Advisors Face

The challenge Andrew returns to most is focus. New software, tools, and technology arrive constantly, and the pressure to chase it all pulls advisors away from the work they already do well.

"The advisors I see winning aren't chasing every shiny new thing," he said. "They stay focused and build systems that delight their clients."

For advisors still inside captive or restrictive structures, the problem runs deeper than distraction. Andrew has watched capable planners realize, mid-conversation at a conference, that their platform allows only one strategy, and nothing more. He remembers the feeling well, because he lived it.

"When all you can offer a client is one option, and they have to go somewhere else for anything beyond it, it makes you feel insignificant as a planner," he said. "That's why independence matters so much."

In his view, independence removes that ceiling. It changes what an advisor can offer clients and the kind of professional an advisor can become.

What Comes Next

Andrew talks about the work now like someone who can finally see the whole board. He is sharpening the firm's investment offering into a higher-conviction set of services, so that an advisor walking into a meeting has a clear, deep set of tools rather than an overwhelming one.

The scope of what became possible still surprises him. When he started, he pictured managing a handful of ETF and mutual fund models well. Instead, he found a platform that could compete, account for account, with the industry's largest firms.

He still describes the work the way he did on day one, as a kid in a candy store, but now with a much clearer sense of what he wants to build next. After three years, the door that opened in 2023 has led him somewhere he didn't know existed, and he is nowhere near finished.

At Victory Financial, we're proud to support advisors who are building practices with intention, ownership, and a real commitment to the clients they serve. If you're considering what independence could look like for your practice, book a discovery call with our team.