A former Stanford receiver chooses NIL freshmen over NFL millions

Osiris St. Brown began his advisory career at RBC Wealth Management with the two referrals most sports-focused advisors would sell a roster spot for—his brothers, Amon-Ra and Equanimeous, both NFL wide receivers. Amon-Ra signed a four-year, $120 million contract with the Detroit Lions after three seasons that included two Pro Bowl selections, and Equanimeous has spent time on four NFL teams. St. Brown, himself a former Stanford receiver whose playing career ended with injuries, made the two of them his first clients and then aimed his practice somewhere smaller and younger.

The niche Financial Planning profiles this week in its Know Your Niche series is not the NFL but college athletes who have just started receiving money from name, image and likeness deals—freshmen earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, handed a check before they have ever filed a tax return or met a financial advisor.

St. Brown's route to this market runs through the stories he grew up with—a bodybuilder father, a sports family that produced professional football brothers, and the cautionary tales of athletes who squandered millions, entrusted money to thieves, or relied on well-meaning friends and relatives whose financial illiteracy turned into investment losses. Those stories shaped his decision to get licensed and go to work as an advisor, a career he proposed to Amon-Ra when the $120 million deal landed; his brothers were enthusiastic clients, but they were a starting point, not the destination.

St. Brown has declined to mine the obvious vein—wirehouse advisor with a Pro Bowl brother, he has a referral engine built in: teammates, agents, trainers, the whole ecosystem of the league. He has not shut the door on professional athletes, telling Financial Planning he has not shied away from other professionals, but his stated energy goes to a market with smaller checks and a much longer runway.

The market St. Brown is chasing is a bet on the shape of a career, not the size of an account: a college freshman with a six-figure NIL deal is not a profitable client in year one, needing budgeting help, tax education, and someone to tell him which of the many people offering to invest his money are worth speaking to. St. Brown, who says he would have made the same bad decisions at that age, is positioning himself as the person who shows up before the mistakes get made. The payoff comes later, when that client signs a pro contract or starts a business and already has an advisor he trusts.

College rules have only recently changed to allow athletes to be paid, which means no long-established list of advisors owns this niche. St. Brown is entering a greenfield with no rivals holding a decade of campus relationships and no entrenched referral networks controlled by the sports establishment. The profile's suggestion is that he is counting on being the early mover, much as an advisor who specialized in tech equity grants before the dot-com boom was able to write his own ticket.

The broader lesson for practice growth is to find the moment when money first arrives and make yourself useful before the client knows what they need. For NIL athletes, that moment is the first sponsorship deposit; for other niches it might be an inheritance, a stock grant, or the first year of a medical practice. Advisors who dominate those markets will not be the ones who wait until the client has a portfolio and a problem; they will be the ones who treat the pre-wealth client as an investment in a future relationship.

What St. Brown is building is not yet a proven revenue model. The profile does not say how many NIL athletes he advises or what he charges them, and a freshman earning $100,000 a year may not support the fee structure a veteran earning $10 million can. That is the risk of any early-stage niche: the client is not valuable today, only tomorrow. The measure to watch is whether these athletes stay with him after they leave campus. If they do, St. Brown will have pulled off something rarer than signing a Pro Bowl receiver—a client base that started with him, not with his brother's contract.