Cruising along the highway can be fun: the wind in your hair; the thrill of the acceleration; the sense of freedom...Maybe Steve Cornelius can relate to that feeling in his newest strategy.

Appointed three-months ago to be the head of distribution for RevenueShares [profile], Cornelius has been revving up the ETF shop's sales operations, hiring folk, building up infrastructure and crafting sales strategies.

"I like to look upon us as a startup, but with a head start. The startup part is on the distribution side of things," he recently told MFWire.

Cornelius, who previously worked for 14-years with Hartford Funds [profile] (with eight of those as divisional vice president), has quickly grown the company's sales team from two externals (hired earlier in the year before his arrival) to seven externals and three internals. By early 2014, he plans to hire an additional three to six externals depending on the need, as well as grow the internal desk proportionally.

For now, he is focusing this sales team on a select number of regions, primarily along the I-95 highway on the East Coast. For example, two sales people are covering the Philadelphia/Southern New Jersey region and one is covering Northern New Jersey. One is covering Manhattan while another covers Long Island. The sixth is covering the Washington, D.C./Baltimore market.

The seventh is covering Chicago.

"Instead of trying to blanket the country, we want to be focused in our strategy," Cornelius says. "Our plans are to cover those important markets, accelerate the growth in our business and then continue to look to expand."

His firm has witnessed growing demand from RIAs for ETFs in the portfolios they develop for their clients.

Cornelius also believes that the firm is experiencing a sweet spot given current trends within the markets as well as the economy with company's posting better fundamentals than in the past. He says his firm's ETF managers are able to tap into this trend by weighting company holdings by revenue, thereby getting better exposure to companies that are strong in growing their businesses.

"RIAs will be a big and very important market for us," he says. 

Stay ahead of the news ... Sign up for our email alerts now
CLICK HERE