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Welcome to RIA Collective.
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My name's Charlie Van Dervin and if you listen to our podcast in past months, you'll see that we haven't posted an episode in a long time.
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My company, social Advisors went through a little restructuring, and frankly, the podcast got set aside for about a year and a half.
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But it's something I love doing and so we're dusting it off and bringing it back.
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And, the purpose for the podcast is to we're talking to owners of RIA.
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I've worked in financial services for almost 30 years.
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My guest has too, so we'll we'll introduce him in a second here.
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And one of the things that has come up time and again, is a lack of trust in the industry.
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Advisors selling proprietary products and having to hit quotas and, maybe serving themselves and then the company before they serve a client.
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And I truly believe in having worked in many facets of the industry that the RIA or the independent channel creates the purest client advisor relationship.
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Of course, being a fee only advisor takes a lot of the bias outta recommendations and things like that.
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In my little world, I like to interview owners of RIAs to get to learn about their experience, whether they made a transition out of a wirehouse.
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Large large insurance house.
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Like our guest today he had some background in product sales at, on the insurance level, but he didn't really make that breakaway.
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However, he's got some great lessons to teach for for some maybe young advisors that find themselves in a big bank that maybe that's not the right place for him anymore.
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Without further ado, let me introduce Greg Curry, my guest for the day.
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Greg is, greg's firm is called Pillar Financially.
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He's based outta Louisville, Kentucky, and Greg's been at this 28 years, so he's got a lot of wisdom to drop.
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Greg, welcome man.
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Thank you for being my guest on RA Collective.
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Thanks for having me.
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I'm excited to share whatever I can.
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Like I mentioned before, it's been a long time, so memory might be a little sketchy, a little selective, but.
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It's still there.
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Haven't lost it
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yet.
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Listen around.
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We, we bonded over things other than the industry.
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We both love punk rock.
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You got a couple years on me, Greg just a couple.
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Just a couple.
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Not too many guitar in the background there.
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I've got one on the wall though.
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Your mind has more dust on it than years does, it looks like.
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And he didn't shame me too bad for actually liking the Grateful Dead too, right?
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Yeah.
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Like I said, every we all have our flaws.
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I'm sure I've got my own.
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Yeah.
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We don't want to bring that up.
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Not no.
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So good.
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Greg, we often interview people who come out that big bank environment or come out of a big insurance house who, pushing prop proprietary products.
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And some people have, legal issues.
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They had to deal with your situation's a little bit different.
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But, the conversation we're getting to know each other really was.
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Based around operations.
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So I think you bring a lot of value to our conversation today.
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Why don't you give us a little background.
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How'd how'd you end up starting your own RIA?
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Yeah, so my background is I started as a CPA, worked in a large Coopers and library, and that'll, that name will date me when it was still the Big eight.
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And worked there for three years.
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Loved the experience used the experience being a CPA.
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Back then today, it has really carried through my entire career.
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But after about three years, moved to a large Louisville insurance company where I spent a little time in internal audit and then moved over to, a product, but it wasn't you say product sales.
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It wasn't a retail product, it was an institutional product.
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Okay.
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So our customers were large 401k plans in the stable value space.
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Any, anybody who has had a 401k plan probably had a stable value fund.
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That was our our niche.
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And we, we worked with large investment.
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Advisors because we provided guarantees.
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But I'm getting ahead of myself.
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But going through that process, I started on the operation side.
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So when I moved over to that product side of the business, I started in operations doing the administration for these stable value contracts until I actually moved into product management and more, I wouldn't call it sales as much as sales support.
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Okay,
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so I was the expert,
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right?
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Yeah.
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I had more experience than anybody.
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It was a brand new product when I started.
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Very cool.
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Great experience.
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Got to work with some of the biggest fixed income managers in the world.
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Saw how they worked.
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A lot of that actually helped define our investment philosophy, which is very passive.
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In nature, because I heard a lot of stories about how great these investment managers were, and then at the end of the day, it didn't come.
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It didn't come to fruition.
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So
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yeah, your experience was a little different.
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Yeah, it was okay.
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They weren't bad.
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It was just nobody was really adding the value that they, thought they would regardless.
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Having that operations background having that real, key to being able to serve our clients was being able to have good systems behind us.
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When I did start the the RIA, when I started Pillar Financial I was coming from a different world.
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I was coming from the institutional world, not the retail world.
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Yeah.
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So for me, starting a an RIA a fee only practice.
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Only seemed natural because that's what I was used to.
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Yeah.
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There's not an institutional play, big institutional player out there that's gonna pay commissions or pay to play type things or anything like that on any ongoing basis.
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So to me it was just natural.
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Cool.
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So what what led to the career change?
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What was the mindset change that led to making this leap?
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So I worked for a company.
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It was originally Capital Holding, and then it was called Pian.
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And we were on the block.
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We knew it, someone was gonna buy us, they were selling the company.
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Gotcha.
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There were two suitors.
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One was Agon.
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One was, I believe, Conseco.
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If Conseco had bought us, our business would've dried up because their credit ratings weren't.
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Good enough.
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Yeah.
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So my business partner and I decided, hey, if this happens, we'll take our nice fat severance and we'll do something on our own.
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And I would love to be able to tell you that on day one I was like, I'm gonna be an financial advisor.
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I'm gonna work on taxes.
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I'm gonna do, that wasn't the case.
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We were gonna be a boutiquey investment management shop.
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Okay.
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But it didn't take me long to figure out that the value is much more on the planning side and working with people and digging into their finances and being able to guide them through anything that comes along than we're gonna invest.
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We invest their we do manage the investments.
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I think we do a fantastic job doing that.
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But the value comes on the planning side, and I've learned that over and over.
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And I will fight you to the grave on that one.
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I complete, I completely agree with you, right?
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If you're investment management only, right?
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You're really subject to outside forces that you have little control over.
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Where if it's planning based, regardless of what's happening with the outside forces, it just you tweak the plan to stay on path, right?
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Yeah.
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And I agree, and I think as the industry goes, I think the greatest thing you have is that planning relationship.
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Stress on the relationship.
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There's so many fintechs out there that allow you as a, allow you access to research and, it's the relationship of the advisor that really sticks.
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Agreed.
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Definitely
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let, so let's go back to early years.
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And we've both been, we've been in this industry about the same amount of time, and I know my memory's foggy from 27, 28 years ago too.
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As you look back on the early days what were some of the things that you did really well that, maybe were a catalyst to where you find yourself today?
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Was there anything in particular that you did that you were like, Ooh, we could have done that differently, that we can help maybe our listeners avoid?
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The same type of mode, same type of, I won't call it a mistake 'cause everything's a learning experience, but,
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yeah.
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I'll focus on a couple of things.
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One, going back to operations having good support, even when it was just myself being able to, build.
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If nothing more than a checklist or something like that to make for sure that when I was delivering what we were delivering to our clients, that we could be consistent from client to client and make for sure that we weren't winging it.
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That we were actually, that.
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I say we, but at that point it was me that I was wearing all the hats.
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I was a client service professional.
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I was an investment management professional.
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I was an operations professional.
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And building those those processes over time, it again, would love to go back and go, wow.
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We had processes down pat on day one, not the case.
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Obviously, there were times where we had to, I had to wing it.
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Yeah.
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And sometimes that got.
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That got me in trouble.
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Not major trouble, not massive, errors or anything, but, things that would happen.
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And my philosophy's always been if there's an issue, one, identify what it is and what caused it.
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Fix it.
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If it if it made a client if it costs a client, you make 'em whole.
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There's, and there's no compromising that.
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There's no hiding it, there's no, oh, it was their fault.
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It was this fault.
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Own it.
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Stand up.
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And every time I've done that, it has done nothing but solidify the relationship with the client and then create a controller process to make sure that doesn't happen again.
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Yeah.
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Fool me once.
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Shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.
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That's how, and that comes from my CPA background and, being so controlled.
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Building those processes over time making sure that you come outta the box.
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And again, when I started, I had nothing.
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There was, there were no books.
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There were no, NAPFA was there, but they didn't have their new, new advisor, new company type thing.
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There just was nothing, so I was in a lot of cases, ma not making it up, but creating it as I went.
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Yeah.
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So our process now.
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Derived from that and has grown since then.
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But you'll see if we get into it, what I use as planning software.
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The tools that we use might look a little different from, someone who's just going out and buying money Guide Pro or ride capital or one of those, one of those things.
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I, I have nothing against those plan those programs, but I like digging in.
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I like getting my hands dirty with numbers, and I find that difficult to do with, black box type software and it's, I know it's not black box, I know that there's things behind it, but we use Excel quite a bit.
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We use tools to supplement that.
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Okay.
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Having all of that, pulling it together as important.
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So
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the second thing I wanted to mention was the thing that the thing that I've learned almost throughout my entire career is the simpler we get, the better.
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I would love to show you my very first plan.
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It is while it certainly served the purpose, it is abysmal.
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It was a book and it had graphs and it had tables and my poor aunt and uncle who were my first client.
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They're like, why are you showing us this?
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We're gonna hire you donor.
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Yeah.
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But every step of the way, as I've simplified what we del what we actually deliver to our clients the document, the, whatever it is, the simpler we get, the more the clients buy into it.
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Now we can always dig deep, we can always, some I'm worth an engineer and they wanna see this and that.
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No problem whatsoever.
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But yeah.
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That simplification.
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Every time we got rid of a report, every time we made it more conversational.
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It just got more powerful.
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The clients bought in.
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We knew what our marching orders are, were when the crap hits, the fan markets are down 40%.
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We always get call.
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I'll get one person say, man, you must be on the phone all day.
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I'm.
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No, we've already doing a
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good job.
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We talked about
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this when we met.
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Yeah.
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The first time that when this happens.
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Yeah.
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We got a plan.
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Yeah.
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There's the simple way we do it.
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It's not an if, it's a win.
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And always building a plan and anticipation of that win is a big part of it.
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I want to key on a couple of things because you and I have had some similar experiences.
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Small business, right?
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Our businesses are different, but certainly it was me, myself and I, when, I moved the bed outta the master bedroom the first day we went to business and built a website, moved a table in, built a website, set up some email addresses, and away we were going right?
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I don't know what that looked like.
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That's 12 years ago.
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So that's evolved a lot.
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The simplification, I think is a lesson I've learned over the years too as a young professional, whether that's age or, amount of time in the profession.
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We wanna wow with our, our credibility is how smart we are and let us display the intelligence and, frankly, we get hired because people trust us.
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At the end of the day, they like us and they trust us.
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And I have learned that my clients don't want all that detail.
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Charlie, we trust you to do this.
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If the outcome's good, then good.
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If the outcome's not good, then we dive deep and find out why not.
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Yeah, no, definitely.
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So now it sounds like Greg, a lot of the, a lot of the processes and operations you put in place sounds like are not out of the box, right?
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They're not the black box software that you talked about.
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It's things that you guys, whether yourself or an internal team have modified existing technologies to fit your needs.
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Let's talk about that a little bit.
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What does that look like?
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And then do you have any recommendations that you can make for advisors who are looking at this path?
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Tools that they might be able to use?
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Yeah, it's our focus tends to start with cash flow, the client's cash flow.
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Okay.
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So over the years we've just developed a methodology for creating a high level, pretty accurate cash flow statement for right now.
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Cool.
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So a client can really see.
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Here's how much we've got coming in, here's where it's going.
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Taxes, debt, living expenses, savings, and investments.
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I don't really feel the need to go any deeper than that.
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I don't need to know how much you're spending on groceries or anything like that.
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No budgeting.