Ep 20: The Risk of Advisor Complacency Featuring Aaron Klein (Ep. 20)

Episode 20 of Rethink Financial Advice, co-hosted by Derek Notman, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Couplr AI) and H. Adam Holt, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Asset-Map). (33:15)

Episode 20 of Rethink Financial Advice, co-hosted by Derek Notman, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Couplr AI) and H. Adam Holt, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Asset-Map). Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or Acast.

Episode Summary

Aaron Klein joins Adam Holt and Derek Notman to name a risk that appears on no risk questionnaire: the advisor’s own complacency. The hosts observe that advisors asking whether to retool, replatform, or restructure are by definition not the problem, while a large share of the market has been carried by market growth into assuming nothing needs to change. Klein’s contribution concerns risk conversations with clients. His argument is that clients experience risk emotionally and in the short term, which is exactly when good portfolios and good plans get abandoned, and that an advisor’s job is to give them a framework before that moment rather than after it. He also makes a case for addressing risk in the first meeting as a conversion advantage. The episode closes on simplicity as the mark of technology worth buying.

What this episode covers

• Complacency treated as a business risk, and why market growth conceals it
• Why clients experience risk emotionally and over short horizons
• Addressing risk in the first meeting as a conversion advantage rather than a compliance step
• Reducing complexity and the cost of being wrong as the core advisor role
• Why good technology produces a simple output, and what happens when a stack does not integrate

Full Transcript

Machine-generated transcript of this episode.

Welcome to Rethink, the financial advisor podcast. My name is Adam Holt. And this is Derek Notman. We are your hosts, both veteran advisors and FinTech CEOs who challenge the status quo, question everything, and have fun doing it. Hear honest commentary on the challenges facing advisors today, and be part of a community where we can all rethink the profession. Now on to our episode. Adam, are you managing your complacency risk my complacency risk? Yeah, I don’t know. I’m too, are you too complacent and lofty to answer that question. Too much brain power. I think I’m gonna go play golf. You should probably take that tub of ice cream off your desk then.

Oh, gosh. Well, it was this or do some like financial planning for somebody or make some prospecting calls. I don’t know. Or go play golf. We can just go play golf or surf or surf. Yeah, get some surf and turf. Hey, let’s do that. Let’s have my ADD come in here. I think this is a big bigger risk than a lot of advisors realize. You explained it to me in a really interesting way previous sound like for listeners, just give us like the two minute like what is complacency risk. Alright, so this is an interesting idea that came up with. And one of the it comes out of a lot of things, Derek, that we’ve seen, which is we talked to a lot of advisors.

They’re all asking us about whether they should retool, whether they should replatform, maybe they should change up structure completely. Should they add people? Should they not? And these are all good business development questions. And we’re glad you should be asking these questions, because it shows that you’re not complacent. You’re challenging yourself by saying I know I need to grow because if you’re not growing, you’re doing what? You’re dying, worse. But we have seen because we don’t get to talk to everybody, probably 80 90% of the market of financial professionals, just sitting around fat and happy, and they’re not changing anything. They’re not asking questions. They’re not wondering about what’s coming.

We talked about a tsunami coming in the last episode with Jason Wang, check that one out. We talked about digital revolution. We talked about expectations are changing drastically. I think a lot of financial professionals, Derek, have gotten complacent because between the market growth and their established way of doing business, it ain’t broke. Don’t fix it. Okay. And so they’re setting themselves up, in our opinion, with this complacency risk that they’re going to get a mad, rude awakening. And it’s going to come in the form of either disruption to their business practice or disruption to their margins. And I really am trying to impress upon everybody the importance of being intentional and mindful about how do I keep growing and avoid complacency risk.

That nails it. I think that’s spot on. It is a risk we all face, whether we like it or not. And we’re not saying like facing that risk means you have to work 100 hours a week. That’s not what we’re saying. You can be managing that risk at 10 hours a week, if that’s all you want to do and play golf the other four days. But it’s something that has to be addressed. It will be cool. And this is a nice lead into who we’re talking to today is could we get a complacency risk score? Whoa. How will that be? I don’t know. I don’t know that that’s above my pay grade, man.

I don’t know. But I know what it is. Okay. So if you haven’t added a new piece of technology in the last two years, if you have an integrated existing infrastructure, if you haven’t figured out a way to scale advice, if you haven’t figured out a way to make it easier to do business with you, you’ve got a high complacency risk score. I love it. We should create a tool like that for advisors to test themselves. I’m a little too busy. Listen, maybe eventually I’ll get around to that. You’re just too complacent. Hold on. I’m still got to finish this ice cream. I think it’s a great topic and it’s going to tie into the value of human advice and just risk in general and all that.

And we’ve got a pretty cool dude we’re going to talk to today. Are there any other things you want to add here that people should be thinking about as we go? Well, I knew it’s really interesting because as Derek is leading in, we actually asked our good friend, someone who’s become a good friend because he’s such an advocate for the advisor and he’s so open and willing. And I think he’s done a great job. Aaron Klein, the CEO and co-founder of Riskalyze. And if you don’t know Riskalyze, Riskalyze is right now the leading platform in the States, at least, one of the fastest growing because they figured out how to solve a problem that wasn’t broken.

I mean, I think so many of us were used to the typical, if it’s in risk analyzer, what are you, a moderate plus conservative, think it was like a political spectrum, right? Nobody ever knew where they sat on this range. I don’t know that kind of coming into 2015-16 that I thought risk was broken. We just accepted it. We were complacent. It was just the way you always had to do it. It was a regulatory compliance component of your process. And the interesting thing about it, as he kind of touches on, I don’t want to give away his thunder here, is I realized after listening to this, how much this actually applied to me and my own biases.

So I hope that when you listen to this, listen for this for yourself, because Aaron always does a great job of really framing a perspective, but listen to this because there is complacency, bias, fears, and something that we all have. And I think what Riskalyze did is they proved that it was broken and they proved that actually after they fixed it. So I think that’s really an important aspect of this. Derek, you ready to hear from Aaron? Yeah, I always love chatting with him. So let’s get it up and running. All right, let’s hear Aaron. So Aaron, what is your perspective of the financial advice market today?

It’s so incredible how our market is changing, but still the same all at the same time. And what I find really interesting is that financial advisors often have a really hard time appreciating just how much value they bring to the table for their clients. We’re only like seven years out from that moment when Wealthfront announced that they were going to completely obsolete financial advisors, just send them the way of the dodo bird. And I remember when that was said, I happened to be walking into a financial advisor conference and somebody stuck a camera in my face and put a microphone up to me. And they were like, what do you think about these comments from Wealthfront?

And I was just like, Wealthfront is E-Trade with a shiny coat of paint. And it was, I think later that day, their then CEO, Adam Nash, blocked me on Twitter. But nonetheless, I remember a couple of weeks after that, speaking at a conference of financial advisors and just saying, look, you can’t, people, advisors were asking me all the time, I’m trying to figure out how I’m going to compete with 25 basis points. And I’m like, in the race to out-robo the robos, you will lose. In the race to depersonalize your services and go to the lowest common denominator, the venture capital money is going to win.

Go the other way and let’s be confident in the value that we deliver to our clients. And I look at what just happened with Wealthfront being sold as basically a lead generation engine to one of the world’s largest and most successful banks that is powered by thousands of human financial advisors. 6 billion vote of confidence in the human financial advisor. We won. That’s a great perspective. Like drop right there, right? I mean, seriously, we won. We did win. I love it. Yeah. Oh man. I wonder if you’re going to get blocked by anybody else on Twitter. No, that’s great. All right. So along that theme, we’re not out-roboing the robo, right?

What is then the missing opportunity or challenge or both for advisors that you see that are not being addressed currently? Yeah. One of the things that I think is so interesting is the way that advisors do engagement, both with new clients coming to board and with existing clients, frankly, for many advisors, they haven’t changed it for decades. Or frankly, even if they’re a newer advisor, they’re using a process that hasn’t changed for decades that they learned from somebody else. And the truth is, is that there are new and better ways and we’ve seen them. We can see them happening in the real world. And I’m talking a little bit close to home for me, but when you choose to flip on the lens of risk for how you engage with both new clients and existing clients, it does some powerful things.

By the way, when we first started Riskalyze, people were like, are you crazy? You put risk in the name. There’s two things advisors are never supposed to talk about with their clients. It’s not religion and politics. It’s risk and the short term. And my response to that was like, well, the problem is that all of your clients react to risk in the short term. So they’re getting emotional when markets start going against them and they’re blowing up perfectly good investment portfolios and perfectly good financial plans because there are psychology works against us with investing and we’ve got to figure out how to build clients a framework to understand and react to risk appropriately because that’s what transforms a fearful investor who makes bad decisions into that fearless investor who makes really great decisions.

And ultimately what every financial advisor needs are clients that are willing to make great decisions. That’s what a financial advisor can turn into an amazing financial outcome. And I look at that and I just go, the missing opportunity that so many advisors have is to have dramatically higher conversion rates for bringing new clients aboard because they are addressing the question of risk upfront. If you ask clients a question in that first engagement of what is your risk number, let’s just see. It’s a question that allows you to build trust. And we’re starting to do some partnership with some of these, lead generation services. I don’t know if you heard there’s one called coupler.

There’s one that’s kind of interesting up and coming, right? Like imagine if these lead generation services might be like driving some of this, what is your risk number question at the very beginning of the process of bringing leads into your firm so that you can then answer the question. Well, based on the fact that you want to be a risk 42, how does that match with the risk in your portfolio? Boom, we can see the misalignment and that’s a major ACAT forum moment. And the flip side of that is with existing clients. When we are continually demonstrating what is normal for our portfolio, we don’t have the issue of the client calling up and being upset because, hey, we’re down 4%.

It’s like we’ve already established that it would be normal behavior for this portfolio to be down 8% all the way to up 12%. That’s normal. So we have good expectations and we’re going to have dramatically higher retention of clients. And we’ve seen it. We’ve seen advisors tell us their conversion rates have gone up from 40% to 80%. And we’ve seen them talk about retention rates for their clients go up from like 83% to 97%. That’s pretty impressive. I was thinking about what would happen if you actually could match up yourself with an advisor who has a similar risk preference as you. What do you think would happen if I said, I’m a 25 by just, and I know that, show me the other advisors who are also 25s because we’re going to relate on a whole different level.

I think that’s a really interesting point. And I do think that there’s something to that, but I would tell you that one of the interesting things that we discovered when we got Riskalyze started is that frankly, it’s almost like that was how the advice industry worked. Advisors were like, well, I’m a 60. That’s the kind of advisor. They didn’t use that language, but that’s the kind of advisor I am. And those are the clients that gravitate towards me. We had one financial advisor who was one of the first to use Riskalyze and he called me and he goes, okay, this is crazy. He goes, I went in and I plugged in all of my client portfolios.

And first of all, by the way, I did my own risk number and I did my own portfolio. And I’m like, I got it going on. I know what I’m doing here. My own risk questionnaire came out at a 52 and my portfolio was at 55. It was crazy. He goes, then I went, I got all my client portfolios. I plugged them all into Riskalyze and they ranged from the forties to like the sixties. Okay. And then I went and I actually did the assessment with all of my clients and the clients ranged from the twenties to the eighties. He said, and it didn’t take me long to figure out the pattern.

I was really good at figuring out which of my clients were conservative than me and which of my clients were more aggressive than me. But see, I was anchoring their portfolios to me. I was actually like anchored. I was making this client’s portfolio a little bit more conservative or a little bit more aggressive than me, but I had them anchored to me. And so now I understand why my conservative clients still felt nervous and my aggressive clients still felt frustrated. And now I’m anchoring their portfolios to them. Now I’m actually aligning their portfolio to their risk number, not to my risk number of being a little bit more conservative, more aggressive than me.

Wow. I don’t even know what they’ll say, but that’s, I mean, talk about insight, right? Cool stuff. Oh, that happens all the time. That’s amazing. But that’s when we’ve talked about advisor bias, you know, on previous episodes, right? Talk about an example of advisor bias and having to remove that, right? And it’s unconscious bias, right? Because he wasn’t trying to do anything inappropriate. He was actually trying to listen and hear what his clients were saying. And it turns out he was doing a decent job with the tools that he had at the time, trying to match what his clients wanted, what he was doing in their portfolios.

He was just able to take that to a whole new level by actually quantifying it with real math. That’s really cool. Well, let me ask you this, is what action steps would you recommend advisors taking us now? What should they be rethinking about? You know, the biggest thing advisors need to rethink is their tech stack and how to really get it into action and make it an asset for their practice. And the number one thing that they need to do in that case is to get it really well integrated. Some of the integrations that are out there are really tough, like just being honest. And I think we in the fintech industry owe it to the universe of financial advisors to get this right and to go deeper.

But if you look at integrations and they’re just some single sign on and maybe just a little bit of data sharing, like not cool. We need to think about this in terms of workflows, but there are a lot of integrations out there that are really deep and really great and can really drive incredible productivity gains for advisors. I think about, again, to bring this close to home, the risk lies in the asset map integration and just how seamless that is in terms of workflow for advisors. You can do the engagement work with your client and bring their portfolio in to risk lies and you have their risk number and you’ve got stuff there.

You jump right into asset map and pull up the same client and bam, you’ve got their assets mapped out visually to start having that conversation and filling in details about their insurance and filling in details about the rest of their financial lives. It’s incredibly easy. And I set this up myself. I have an asset map account and I have a risk lies account, obviously. And if Aaron Klein can go in and make this integration work really easily, I’m pretty sure any financial advisor can because I’m not an advisor and I was able to figure it out. It is so easy and it works so well.

So that’s the number one thing advisors have got to rethink. Get that tech stack integrated, leverage the support that you have with these different companies. We are willing to jump on and help any advisor get their integrations working with our integration partners. I know asset map is the same. I know very much is going to be the same as it has integrations too. These companies will invest in you as a financial advisor to make your tech stack work more effectively when they’re a part of it. You’ve got to leverage that as a financial advisor. So I thought that was interesting. There was a couple of things I picked up.

How about you? Yeah, I always love chatting with Aaron, smart guy, and he almost makes fun of himself because he’s never been an advisor, but he’s pretty darn good at this space. Pretends well. I’m sure he has a financial advisor and his co-founder Mike was a financial advisor, but I keep going back to the same idea that a lot of people say don’t try to solve a problem that’s not broken. I mean, here he just saw this and they came up with this solution. It’s just so effective at communicating something and by just communicating more effectively, he’s helping advisors really reimagine what’s possible and make it more accessible and reduce complexity and then drop the cost of being wrong.

It’s the quintessential role that a financial professional has to play. Reduce complexity so I can make a decision and reduce the cost of being wrong because I’m making it intelligently. Oh, and do it with a number. It just is so awesome that it’s kind of funny. I don’t know. Obviously, I like it. I think it’s a great, I laugh just like I laugh at that QR code, flip it across the screen. I’m like, it’s just so smart and it doesn’t need to be explained. It just, you see it. You’re like, I get it. I get it. You know what? They’ll look at all the best solutions out there in FinTech or not.

They’re simple. That’s right. They take the complex and boil it down to a very simple output that people just love. And sometimes as advisors, man, oh, I got to buy this tech. I got to buy that tech and I need all this stuff. And then one, it doesn’t integrate two. I don’t know how to use it. And now I’ve just got this mess of a machine. I don’t even know how to use. Well, you know what? Maybe you just hit on why the complacency happens. The intimidation factor of adding new technology when it ain’t broke is, and margins are still strong and the markets are going up and the clients aren’t complaining and they’re generating, they’re defining more assets.

I know, I know so many financial professionals that had their record years in 2021. They brought on more assets than they could have working from home with lower overhead. And they didn’t drop their fees per se. And boy, things are good, right? Again, easy to get comfortable. Yeah, it’s easy to get complacent. It’s easy. And look, it’s worked. Someone said to me recently, they said, change doesn’t happen until something changes. So the question is the change going to happen from within, or is it going to happen from externally? And then you’ve got to react. I thought the comment on integrations and the single sign-on we’ve seen there, there’s been a lot of, we’ll call it fluff in the air of all these tools that integrate.

So people or advisors will buy them. They don’t really integrate or do anything with strong utility. So it doesn’t change anything. You’re just using two processes and okay, I can jump into one of them easier, but it doesn’t really add real utility to the practice. So I don’t know that that gets us out of being complacent, right? Because it’s easy. We got to actually do some major changes and think about what our customers want. It takes work and thought. And I have to put all that mental energy in instead of playing nine holes, right? Like that stuff. It’s easy to be complacent, but then eventually you’re not going to be playing nine holes.

You’re going to be the caddy because you’re out of business because you got to complacent. Well, that is, I guess, unless you banked some of that, I guess you had a good advisor yourself and an investment. I know it’s true. We talk about this a lot. We major disintermediation event in our space and we just don’t know what it’s going to be. Is it going to be the Amazon like distribution model or is it going to be the financial advisor sitting in India replacing you? 0? What do you think about the whole wealth front comments? I like it. I’m right there with them. I hope I don’t get blocked now on LinkedIn or Twitter from the powers that be, but I think it’s a great boat of confidence on the human advisor.

And I know like we’re talking some crystal ball stuff. Like we don’t know what the disruption quite is going to be yet, but I think two themes that have come through with a lot of the people we’ve spoken with, human and digital. They’re going to be part of the disruption. How? I’m not quite sure yet, but they’re going to, they’re going to be there. So which means we need to focus on being better human advisors and we need to embrace digital tech. The rest of it. I don’t know. My crystal ball never gets it right. I thought the wealth front comment was interesting. The billion dollar sum vote by UBS that they basically just created a lead generation tool.

I think it actually goes further than that. And I know we didn’t get a chance to talk about it. I think what UBS just bought is a whole new platform without having to rebuild it. They’ve already bought a platform that was embedded by the DIYer. Arguably the highest standard of user experience are the tools that are used and successfully used by the do-it-yourselfers because there’s no one to point the finger at. It’s got to be effective so that someone can do it themselves. And basically UBS with an extraordinary distribution model and a lot of capital and management basically just reinvented their entire platform. If they distributed that to their human advisors, they have done exactly that.

They have basically elevated their human advisors by giving them a kick-ass platform that they can now go sell to their high net worth. Pretty awesome, right? I think it’s a validation that we should be absorbing the robo advice into the human delivered concept. And I think that’s a validation for it. So I think that’s really what he’s referring to. But you’re right. If we have to find ways to, of course, avoid getting comfortable, recognize that we need to probably make some changes for the trends that are happening and coming, we need to get unintimidated by that process. And we have to decide that it’s valuable to invest in our own practices now as opposed to just kind of sit back and say, hey, it’s not broken.

Let’s not fix it. So I think RISC-Li is a great example of how you create not only a consumer experience that creates a fantastic response, lets people know that you’re really paying attention to their needs to understand and remove complexity, but also shows that you’re innovating. And it’s a step away from, I think, the typical complacency that we tend to have in our space. One way I would say is easier to overcome the complacency because it can be a bit of a nudge, right? Craig Iskowitz moderated a panel for Advice Tech Live, I think it was last year, the one he did last fall, Adam, and I was on the panel of a couple other people.

One of the things that came up was getting the right tech, the right tech stack. You don’t need a whole bunch of tech. You just need the right tech for your firm. You don’t need 15 vendors, right? You can do it with a lot less and get the tech that’s right for you and for your clients where you’re comfortable. And I think if you do that, the learning curve is shorter, you’re happier, better experience for your clients. You’re more inclined to get over the complacency hump, if you will. Yeah, that’s true. Just start. You got to start. Let’s start somewhere, right? Yeah. Agreed. Agreed. Nothing changes until something changes.

Yeah. What can advisors take away, Derek? Double down on being human. That’s where it’s at, man. You just said it. Enhance your experience with the Robo stuff. Embed it into what you’re doing. Bring the tech in. Make the best peanut butter and jelly sandwich you’ve ever had by marrying all this stuff together and serve that up to your clients. I think that’s what it is. They want that human advice. The delivery of it, as we’ve talked about, has changed. So I think that definitely take away there. And a nice way to get over this complacency risk or issue or to bring that risk profile down for you, go try an integration of some tech, like Riskalize and AssetMap.

Just go get it. Try it. Ask for a week of free tech where you just go demo it. I’m not so sorry, Riskalize and Adam, if I’m giving away a week of free tech there. Another one. Who needs right tech? I just want free tech. Free tech has no, right. There’s no risk in free tech, is there? None. None. There’s also no real payoff, actually. There’s no value. You got to pay to get the right stuff, 100%. My point, though, is go get this stuff. You don’t need to bring 100 clients on in week one. Use it on yourself and maybe like your mom or something and just see how it feels and works and be like, wow, this thing’s really awesome.

Oh, that’s the best test, by the way. Put it in front of your spouse or your partner or your mom. 100%. Right. Or they’re like, what? What are you doing? What? If they don’t get it, then don’t do it. OK, because remember, they’re going to be the most hopefully the most honest with you. Oh, yeah, totally. Yeah. What? What? What? What’s real? OK, that’s a great idea. The mom spouse test. Totally right. You know, have them. They’re going to beat you up, man. Let’s say, dude, like this sucks or wow, this is awesome. Why aren’t you doing this for all your clients? Why are you giving this to me now after all these years, right?

Right. That’s right. So we’re going to come up with a little thing on that. The mom test, the mom test and the complacency risk scoring. OK, so I wrote a couple of things here to Derek. I said nothing changes until something changes. I mentioned it several times on this podcast because it’s my coach says that to me all the time. I don’t want to make change change something. And I think the real call to action is for each of us just to change something that you’ve always done, not just because change for change of state. Look at what you can do. We created actually a survey.

We did a checklist. We just threw it up on the website. It’s on asset map dot com slash journey. You can see it was a huge survey we did of hundreds of advisors and we asked them what were the kind of critical pain points in the entire advice journey. Go check that out. There’s an assessment there. You can just download it and give yourself a score, right? We don’t care what whatever doesn’t matter. We don’t see that. Give yourself a score and be honest with yourself. And whatever you come up low in a score, just focus on that, right? Whether it’s calendar scheduling or your review process or how you do data gathering, whatever it might be, there’s probably something that needs to be addressed, right?

Maybe there’s a better solution. And I think the second thing is remember to set expectations early and give people a plan and expectations when there are going to be changes in your process. Tell clients what you’re doing, how you’re investing in them so that you are not complacent, so that you’re telling them I’m investing in your experience two, three, four years from now and walk them through the vision of what that journey is going to be like together. Because remember it’s a long-term relationship if you want it to be. And you have to tell people where you’re going. Otherwise, they assume there’s no vision. It’s just going to be the same as it was last year and the year before and the year before.

And the next new shiny advice experience that comes along, they’re going to be like, yeah, I’ve gotten the same thing every single year from these guys. Let’s try this new thing, right? And the next thing you know, go buy a relationship. You don’t really have a relationship because you’ve been delivering the same nonsense. It’s good enough, right? Paid our fees. I’m telling you, expectations are going to go up to the roof. So we have to do a better job as professionals of telling people what change is coming, how we’re going to be there and what we’re doing for them. What’s in it for you. You’ve got to remember to do that and constantly point it out to people.

So have a plan, get some confidence and go with it, but communicate it. Otherwise, I don’t know that anybody is going to value it or know to look out for the investments you’re making, especially in their tech experience until they have it. So that’s my thought on it. I don’t know if you agree. I agree. Try it out. I concur. Your complacency risk just went down. Yes. Now I actually have to do something. So Derek, this question came to you actually. So I’m going to read this question to you as our community question. Remember, you can send these to us in LinkedIn or email. Hey Derek, I’m currently an advisor at an insurance broker viewer.

I’m considering leaving. Okay. Where should I go for an independent wirehouse, another BD, established RIA? I have met with so many recruiters. They all seem to be more interested in signing me to their firm than to actually figure out what’s best for me. I’m not surprised at that. I’m frustrated, nervous. I don’t know where to turn, what to do. Do you have any thoughts? Thank you and Adam for everything. Love the podcast. Jay, we sure didn’t name Jay from Wisconsin. Well, so thank you, Jay, period, dot, dot, dot. What do you think, Derek? Yeah, this one is close not only to my heart and given what I just went through, but I think for a lot of advisors, this is on the radar.

It’s tough. It’s really tough. And there’s, I think we’re going to have to do a full episode on this one to answer this question. In short, Jay, I think like you gotta go with your gut on this one. And it goes back to one of the questions that Adam and I asked earlier is where, and I think this might have been on the podcast with Jason Wenk actually was one of our questions there was, can you do what you want to do where you currently are, or do you have to go somewhere else to do that? What do you truly want to do? That’s a tough question to answer.

I think it’s also frustrating that recruiters are not aligned with advisors for the most part. A. Match and Ryan Shanks, like they’re crushing it over there, right? They’re doing their models disrupting the space. They’re part of the Jason Wenk flywheel that we talked about. I just went through this experience and I considered all the different options. I don’t know. I’m passionate about this one. It’s close to home for me and we will need to chat this one out. Yeah, it’s a controversial one. We talked about it, as you say, with Ryan Shanks and I think that’s one of our episodes. Actually, we’ll look it up.

I guess you have to look it up now with so many episodes, but he talked about this problem and how there’s obviously there’s a sales role, right? They’re trying to attract you to go to where they’re going to get comped. We get it. I understand that, but I think it’s important for you to understand where you want to be, what kind of environment you want to be in for the next 10 to 15 years. It’s not easy to move. You remember that wherever you go, you bring your problems with you, so you have to recognize that there’s no panacea here. Most of the advisors we talked to that are moving, they’re moving for flexibility in either branding, advertising, and message, and or they’re looking for tech platform or they’re looking for product distribution.

For the most part, we’ve seen a lot of firms really try to retool, but there’s no question they’re dealing with legacy tech. I think that’s going to be a big challenge for a lot of advisors in thinking about where they want to be. Thankfully, we are seeing good investments from the larger BDs. They’re either buying companies up like UPS, buying platforms. I think that’s going to continue to happen or adopting in themselves. But definitely let’s do an episode on this. I think it’s a big enough topic. Let’s have fun with it. Awesome. I love it. Yeah. So, Jay in Wisconsin, thank you. Appreciate the question.

I think putting yourself out there. I know this one’s a scary one. We’ll dive into this on one of our episodes here. Fantastic. Well, as always, be sure to follow us on LinkedIn. Send us a direct message. If you have any questions, we’ll be sure to send you some of our swag with rethink written all over it so your family can question you and say, what are you doing? What are you rethinking? That’ll be fun. Make sure to subscribe. And of course, if you have the opportunity to leave us a review, please do so. Thank you as always. Derek, my man. Adam, my man. See you, everybody.

Take care, guys. Thank you for listening to Rethink, the financial advisor podcast with Holt and Notman. Be sure to subscribe now and join the ongoing conversation. The information covered and posted represents the views and opinions of the guest and does not necessarily represent the views or opinions of AssetMap or Connector. The content has been made available for informational and educational purposes only.