Following the Client's Lead with John Gehri

00:00
Charlie Van Derven
John Gehri is an investment advisor representative with Harvest Financial in Westchester, Ohio. Harvest Financial is a federally covered investment adviser registered with the SEC. John Gehri is neither a tax attorney nor a CPA. This is for informational purposes only, taken from the best sources available, but it's not guaranteed and should not be relied upon for the purposes of filing a tax return. 

Please forgive the abrupt start to this interview. John and I were having such a great conversation before I hit record that I thought we should get that on the podcast as well. So we jump in mid-sentence. But it's great content. Listen up. 

00:42
John Gehri
And all that time with, I'm recording. 

00:45
Charlie Van Derven
John, I figured that's a great conversation. I'm like, Why am I not recording this conversation? 

00:54
John Gehri
It was a Tuesday when Fidelity announced that as of Friday, everybody was going to be 100% work from home. Just thinking back on, I think the logistical challenge is to turn a 40,000-person workforce into 100% remote and turn it around in 72 hours. I can't imagine the heavy lift that was to make that happen. A lot of the groups were already working a couple of days a week from home, so it really wasn't a drastic shift for us. It was definitely a different experience to be there five days a week and you log out and your commute is over. 

01:39
Charlie Van Derven
Yeah. 

01:40
John Gehri
That is new. 

01:41
Charlie Van Derven
Yeah. Why don't you bear with me for 1 second here? All right. Bear with me for 1 second. Ok, I hit record because we're having such a good conversation that I didn't want to miss that because I think this is fun stuff for the recording as well. Now, of course, I'm fumbling through technology and stuff, but what I want to do is make an introduction. I probably just leave that front end in there for the 30 seconds or so. I want to introduce you to our listeners before we go any further so they know who the heck they’re talking to, right? Without further ado, John, you're an interesting guy and, today, my guest on RIA Collective. This is Charlie Van Derven, your host today. My guest on RIA Collective is John Gehri. John's interesting. He's different than the others that we typically interview. We got our friend Cory Kupfer on a couple of episodes ago, Breakaway Attorney. 

02:39
Charlie Van Derven
He got a lot of great insight, RIA leadership. John has followed different path in the industry, and he's got a really narrow focus. We're going to talk about all that, but John Gehri, welcome. Thank you for being here. John is an advisor with Harvest Advisors, Harvest Financial Advisers. Pardon me, John. Thanks for joining me today, because you've got some really interesting perspective I'm excited to bring to our listeners. 

03:06
John Gehri
Glad to be here. 

03:07
Charlie Van Derven
Awesome, man. We were just chatting about the challenges. John was analyst at Fidelity, and were just chatting about the challenges of a firm like Fidelity. 400 employees all going remote at the exact same time. What was that like, man? What was that like on the back end of that? John, with the logistics of reporting and everything else? Tell us about that experience. 

03:31
John Gehri
It was very much a build parachute on the way down type exercise. The group that I was working in, operations, we already had laptops, were already working from home two days a week. For us it was just really switching where we did the other three days. We already had dedicated spaces, we already had our processes mapped out, other groups, this was an entirely new experience for them. Just getting that many laptops, I have no concept of how anyone could do that in 72 hours. They only made the announcement on Tuesday and by Friday that was it. There were still some people had to go into the office, the mail processing and such, but the vast majority of us were working from home for I think it was about 18 months. I ended up leaving Fidelity in June of 2021 and everyone still worked from home and came here to harvest at that point. 

04:29
John Gehri
I know most of them are back in the office now, but it's mostly a hybrid schedule, so they're going back to what I used to turn my home. 

04:37
Charlie Van Derven
Yeah, very cool. We had an office downtown Daytona Beach, and we had eleven of us, maybe I don't know how many were coming to the office. And yeah, it was abrupt like that. Right. We were in like the epicenter early on, if you remember, was New Orleans. Well, the week prior to kind of everything shutting down was my kids spring break. They never ended up going, well, they're back in school now, but they never end up going back to school after spring break. We had pre planned a trip to New Orleans, not a tough little trip from where we live in Florida. So we ended up going. Everybody I think, was kind of still wondering how severe this was going to get. While were in New Orleans, like the epicenter we like to say were in New Orleans licking handrails, just picking up COVID wherever went. 

05:27
Charlie Van Derven
Right. That was when everything shut down. We did the same thing and it was probably Saturday of that week and were like, no need to go back to the office now. We were eleven. There was no problem. Everybody was working on laptops anyway, right. It was really easy for us to do. I agree with you 40,000 and the other firms that some of the firms we work with 15,000 advisors and things like that, well, of course they all got their own offices, but anyway, just a crazy time. 

06:00
John Gehri
Yeah, it was definitely an experience and I'm glad we're through it. I'm glad that things are somewhat back to normal. I just hope that we as a collective species can learn some lessons from this move forward. 

06:17
Charlie Van Derven
I don't know if we are. I don't know if we're learning any lessons. 

06:22
John Gehri
I'll default to the positive. 

06:25
Charlie Van Derven
Listen, I like that. John, I'm curious, right? One of the unique perspectives you have is you're analyst at Fidelity, choosing wealth management for the next stage of your career. What leads to that? What did you see in that piece anyway? What leads to that? Why did you choose wealth management after so many years of Fidelity? 

06:49
John Gehri
I spent 17 and a half years of Fidelity, and I got to do a lot of different things trading leadership, trade correction, and then ultimately, the analyst role got to do a lot of different things in terms of correcting work, correcting mistakes, making decisions about how we're going to implement things. What led me here was one of the people that I really considered being one of my best friends, monica Dwyer, who works here at Harvest and has for about the last four years. This is our third job together, so we've been together about 2021 years now. We started in customer service at City Bank together in Northern Kentucky. 

07:35
Charlie Van Derven
Cool. 

07:35
John Gehri
Went to Fidelity together, and she came here about four years ago, and she kept talking to the owner about, you really got to meet John. You really got to meet John. At the time, they just didn't really have any physical space. Harvest built this new building that we're in and got to meet the owner, Mark, and we hit it off, and one thing led to another. Here I am. 

07:57
Charlie Van Derven
That's awesome, man. That is so cool. I think you certainly get to impact people's lives on both sides, right? You've got direct impact on people's lives now. I think part of the reason that we do what we do with social advisors is part of the reason forRIA Collective. Right. I really do feel like and this is maybe p****** people off, and I guess that's okay. I really do feel like when we get in the big brand bank wirehouse type roles, it's really difficult for an adviser to be a fiduciary. Right. They're acting too often on behalf of that brand, pushing quotas, need more lending if they got a bank side, things along those lines, right. Products that are being sold. So we push really hard. I feel like supporting that RIA independent space helps have this unbiased, this fiduciary impact on a lot of households, on a lot of people, right? 

08:57
Charlie Van Derven
So, anyway, that's part of the well, not part of the premise ofRIA Collective is to help educate those people that are in one of those big brands that are thinking, gosh, I got to be independent. What I just heard you say is that it really is a relationship that brings you to the wealth management side, right? 

09:17
John Gehri
Yeah. Being here allows me to do a lot of the things that I truly have a passion for. I really, as nerdy as this is going to sound, I really enjoy digging in someone's tax situation. When I took the tax class as part of the CFP, it really just ignited something inside of me, and more so than the other class, I took the insurance class and the process class and all that, but when I took the tax class, it really just kind of made me sit back and think, this is something that touches everybody's lives. 

09:53
Charlie Van Derven
Yes. 

09:54
John Gehri
Rich, poor, young, old, name any race, name any gender. Everybody has to deal with taxes. You've got federal, you got state, you got local, you got sales, you got estate taxes, gift taxes. The world of tax is much bigger than just federal income tax, and there's so much that it touches. A good portion of what we do in helping clients decide what type of account do you want? Is really a tax question. Do you want a Roth IRA? Do you want a traditional IRA? Well, how do you want to be taxed? Do you want a trust account? Do you want annuity? All of these come down to taxes. My growth fund and somebody else's growth fund and my value fund and somebody else's value fund are going to look very similar and probably perform just about the same. You can tweak around the edges and you can use individual stocks, you can use ETFs. 

10:50
John Gehri
A lot of the decisions we're trying to make for clients and with clients are tax related. Most tax legislation is written in pencil. It gets rewritten and rewritten. We're not only looking at what are the rules today, what do we think the rules are going to be? 30, 50, 70 years from now? We may be looking at the amount you're saving. You're going to have several million dollars leftover. We need to start doing some state planning. How do you want your heirs to receive this? Am I going to optimize this so that you and your spouse can get the most out of this? Am I going to optimize this so the second spouse can get the most out of it? Are we optimizing this for the kids? What are the trade offs? What are the choices that you can make? One of the roles I had at Fidelity, working with retirement participants, they kept hearing over and over again people that were in their 70s, in their age when retired, they saved all this money in these pre tax buckets. 

11:57
John Gehri
They felt like they were stuck because they'd saved everything pretax. Now their tax picture was they were going to get these 1099 Rs for these RMDs or for their annuity payouts or whatever, and they have zero control over their taxes, whatever their marginal rate was. That the year that's what they were going to pay and just kind of reinforced the thought for me that I want to have more of a conversation about taxes and about how that can impact you and how that can make you more or less successful. 

12:35
Charlie Van Derven
Again, we're getting to know each other. I was sitting in the parking lot at Lambeau Field in my little rig here, right. Again, a couple of things that struck me, and I was like, I got to get this guy on the show. Right? John, first off, your background as analyst going wealth manager unique to me. Right. The second thing was, I don't think I've ever heard of anybody else getting their master's degree in taxation. Like, you don't just talk to talk, man. You walk the walk. Right? Like, this is such a deep education and taxes. You're right. It touches us all in so many ways. As you're talking, I'm thinking about the structure of our corporation. Right. All of that is a tax discussion. If you're not working with the right tax professional, who doesn't have the deep knowledge that a guy like John has right. 

13:28
Charlie Van Derven
Working on your master's degree, are you getting the right guidance? That was unique also, John, in that obviously you offer outside of that tax conversation, obviously that's part of the service that you bring to your clients, but you're really narrow on I don't want to call it messaging, because it's more than that, right. You're really narrow on what sets your clients up for the best success, and that is tax planning. 

14:03
John Gehri
I've found that there are generally two things in life that people are willing to value. One is anything medical. My wife is a nurse. That's how we met. I was her patient. I wrote a thank you note, and here we are 20 some odd years later. 

14:20
Charlie Van Derven
That's amazing. 

14:21
John Gehri
The other thing is, get the Irspacelocal tax bill down or I've got a problem with one of these and I need you to fix it. I'm three and zero in audits with the IRS. Two of them were for me, and one of them was for my 15 year old son. 

14:43
Charlie Van Derven
Wow. 

14:44
John Gehri
March of this year, he gets a letter from the IRS. I walk upstairs and I tell him, well, congratulations, you're growing up. You just got your first IRS notice. You've got two choices how you can handle this. You can either call or you can sign this power of attorney, and dad will take care of it for you. What do you want to do? Where do I son. 

15:08
Charlie Van Derven
John, I know who I'm calling. We have nine years in this business and several more than that filing taxes. I haven't had to deal with that yet. I am knocking on wood as I say that. It's nice to know I got a resource in my corner. If I do come across that. 

15:28
John Gehri
The things that they wanted were pretty simple. For Ryan. 

15:31
Charlie Van Derven
It was. 

15:32
John Gehri
They had misapplied a payment. Okay, we filed a tax return. Tax is due. They didn't have $115, and they didn't fix it. 

15:41
Charlie Van Derven
Got you. 

15:42
John Gehri
So they got a screen print confirmation. They got a letter from the bank saying the payment had been withdrawn. They got a copy of the Power of Attorney and a letter from me indicating, please contact me with any further questions. I was really, honestly, pleasantly surprised how quickly that got resolved. We got that notice on March 7, and I replied the next day, and I want to say it was May 25 or May 26. I got a letter back that said, hey, you're all good. You're taken care of. 

16:11
Charlie Van Derven
Wow. All right. 

16:13
John Gehri
I was really surprised, and that was for the 2021 filing, so I was really surprised they were able to turn it around at the speed that they did. 

16:23
Charlie Van Derven
Yeah. And I'll tell you what. I've gotten that letter before where, hey, you underpaid by $175 or whatever. I don't remember what the amount was. Now, ours did not happen as quickly as yours because I just wrote the check and said, Here you go. It was a small enough amount that it really wasn't worth a lot of time digging deep, and I got the letter a month later. Now, I had already submitted the check 28 or 29 days prior to getting the second letter, but by the time I called and followed up on it, that was all good, too. Actually, it was an easy thing to deal with, but it took us several weeks to make it happen under the same circumstances. I'll do the same thing, John, but if it's a bigger deal, man, you're getting my phone call. 

17:09
John Gehri
Hopefully we don't have to talk about that. 

17:11
Charlie Van Derven
Yeah, exactly. Again, knock on wood. Right. I want to talk about kind of mission with your role at Harvest Financial Advisors. I know taxes touch everybody, but is there anybody in particular that you like serving? Is there a personal reason behind that? Tell me about kind of mission and values around your practice. 

17:37
John Gehri
The type of client that I really connect with is an engineer, logical, detail oriented, task focused. Those are the type of clients that I really enjoy sitting down with because I know that I can really add a lot of value to what they're already doing. 

17:56
Charlie Van Derven
Wonderful. 

17:58
John Gehri
I can't think of a client that I haven't been able to help in some way, and maybe they didn't like the message that I had to deliver, but I can still consider it to be a help to them because I told them the truth. 

18:15
Charlie Van Derven
Yeah, for sure. 

18:19
John Gehri
Not my role or I think any advisers role to tell a client what to do. I'm going to give you options, and I'm going to tell you, here are the choices. Here are the consequences of each. You're the captain of the ship. You get to decide how to move forward. We'll have some clients that will say, here's the position I want to take on this tax issue. Here's a couple of cases, here's a couple of precedents. It's your choice how you want to move forward. I'm not the person that's going to be signing the tax return, and we don't prep tax returns, and I never want to put myself in the position of signing a tax return. I'm much more interested in the tax planning, not the tax reporting. 

19:04
Charlie Van Derven
Yeah. 

19:06
John Gehri
They have to be comfortable with what they're going to be signing on at the term because it's their signature. 

19:12
Charlie Van Derven
You don't only create a great resource to me and guys like me, john, you are a great resource to other advisers. Right. You've got a narrow knowledge where not only does that serve your clients, but potentially serves the clients of others. For those people listening, are you open to being a resource? Are you open to helping out where help is needed? We all get compensated for the work that we do. For our listeners who have questions about taxes, things along those lines, can they reach out to you? 

19:46
John Gehri
Absolutely, yeah. Best way to get a hold of me, the email would be, John@harvestadvisors.com, I write a monthly article for the website Rethinking 65. 

19:58
Charlie Van Derven
Yeah, thanks for bringing that up, by the way. 

20:01
John Gehri
I didn't anticipate when I started doing that how many people I would have reached out to me. That's been really satisfying to see how many people will send questions about the articles I write or they'll say, hey, I read your article and I really appreciate it. Help me with X, Y, and Z. 

20:21
Charlie Van Derven
So cool. 

20:22
John Gehri
It tells me that people are reading it. 

20:24
Charlie Van Derven
Yeah, you got a lot of great content there. I took a look at it this morning. You got a lot of great content there. 

20:33
John Gehri
I got a news to them through Monica, and she writes for them as well, occasionally, but I've just kind of kept it up saying this as a marketing piece. I'll write an article a month for them on various topics, and most of them have some connection to taxes. Every once more. There's one in there that's not like, did one on cyber security. My wife got her Amazon account hacked back in February, and that had payment accounts attached to it, had emails attached to it. That really made us sit down and really say, okay, where are we vulnerable? How can we close some of these vulnerabilities? What can we do to make it hard for the bad guys to get in, but also not make it so difficult on us that it's really hard to get things done? We started looking at things like, okay, let's block the ability to port our cell phone numbers, because if somebody puts your cellphone number. 

21:34
John Gehri
Now they've got the key to the kingdom for a password reset or using password managers. I don't have to remember a ton of passwords because by default, what ends up happening is it all becomes the same password. 

21:48
Charlie Van Derven
Exactly. 

21:50
John Gehri
Looking at things like that and saying, okay, how can we make this work? That was just something were going through at the time, and I probably spent 2020 5 hours on that. My mother recently got taken advantage of. She got her Discover card hacked, and we spent probably six or 7 hours calling people and telling her, hey, you need to cancel this order. This is invalid. She's going to lose any money out of it. I can see cyber being certainly as important of an issue as tax, and I would think any adviser would do well to have a momentary understanding of how to protect their clients. 

22:34
Charlie Van Derven
Yeah, that's great. And we've been listening. My family has been victim of it too. My parents have been victim of it, too. I think it probably touches all of us, or the huge majority of us eventually. When I tell you the other thing, we sell services, so we've got credit card numbers that we keep on file and certainly the security on top of that, the number of people that we've got to get in touch with every month who has had fraud on their cards or their card never changed. So I see it every single month. We've got to update cards in the system because it's touching every one of our touching some of our clients every month. So it's crazy how often it happens. It really is. Go ahead. 

23:21
John Gehri
Alice and I have a checking account that I got a notice that it had been linked to a PayPal account a couple of months ago. 

23:29
Charlie Van Derven
Wow. 

23:30
John Gehri
I asked her, did you do this? She said, no, I don't have a PayPal account. It turns out I had a PayPal account back in 2009 that I completely forgotten about that someone had broken into and they were attempting to remove money from our checking account via the PayPal account. I had to go back to the drawing board on the cyber. So it's one thing and it's another. You just react as best you can. 

23:58
Charlie Van Derven
The scammers are smart. 

23:59
John Gehri
Yeah. I would just love to see some of them just use their talents for good. I can't imagine how much better the world would be. 

24:08
Charlie Van Derven
I know, right? Exactly right. If we could get a sizeable percentage. You're exactly right. John's also on LinkedIn. And his last name is spelled G-E-H-R-I. There's not a lot of John Gehri's out there, right? 

24:25
John Gehri
Not too many, no. 

24:26
Charlie Van Derven
That's a pretty rare last name. 

24:30
John Gehri
A couple of people when I was at Fidelity would say, oh, are you related to the Watchmaker? 

24:37
Charlie Van Derven
Okay. Yeah, that's not a brand I know. 

24:41
John Gehri
Are you related to the architect. There are at least two other people with the same name. 

24:47
Charlie Van Derven
All right. 

24:48
John Gehri
But, no, I'm not related to either one. 

24:50
Charlie Van Derven
I don't know if I'm fortunate or unfortunate, but there is only one Charlie vendor. I don't know, maybe in the Netherlands somewhere there's another John. You have such a unique path in this industry. I love it. I love your focus on the technical aspects of the cybersecurity, the taxes. Right. Those are things that, unless you're getting your master's degree in taxation, I mean, there's things you're not going to know. I'm impressed by that level of knowledge. There's a lot of wealth advisors maybe listening to the show, they're like, he's working with engineers, so I don't have to not every financial adviser wants to work with an engineer because there's such a data driven mind there. Right. Such analytical counterpart sometimes that's not right for every personality. It's cool that you focus on serving those folks as well. Look up John on LinkedIn. John and I are going to stay on here after recording because I'm going to help him put his articles that are on Rethinking 65. 

25:54
Charlie Van Derven
Com. Is it rethink or rethinking? John? 

25:58
John Gehri
I ng? Rethinking. 

25:59
Charlie Van Derven
Okay, so Rethinking 65 dot.com is where you'll find John's articles. I'm going to help show him how to get that in front of a larger, much larger audience on LinkedIn. I want to say thank you so much. If you enjoyed our show, make sure you subscribe. Give us a, like, all those good social media things. Also, we're also looking for interesting we're always looking for interesting people to interview onRIA Collective. If somebody absolutely needs to be interviewed, it's got a unique story on their path to independence. We'd love to talk to them. Riacollective.com, to find out more information about the podcast and the book interviews, thank you so much for joining me and my new friend, John Gehri, who is the smartest tax guy I know. John, thanks for being here, man, and signing off from an A Collective. 

26:46
John Gehri
Glad to be here.