Ep 25: Are the Right People Building Fintech? (Ep 25)

Episode 25 of Rethink Financial Advice, co-hosted by Derek Notman, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Couplr AI) and H. Adam Holt, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Asset-Map). (37:31)

Episode 25 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

Adam Holt and Derek Notman ask whether the people designing financial technology have ever done the job it is meant to serve. Both argue the historical answer is no, and both trace their own companies back to problems they had personally as practicing advisors. Holt describes Asset-Map originating from his attempt to make sense of a client’s full financial picture in a single view, and Notman describes an ebook he published in mid-2019 predicting an industry-disrupting shock that arrived roughly six months later. The most useful section for buyers rather than builders is on configurability. Advisors run their practices differently and will abandon a tool that forces one workflow. The hosts also explain why broker-dealers resist open tool choice, citing information security, update management, terms of use, and oversight burden, which pushes them toward the largest and most familiar vendors.

What this episode covers

• Why building for a job you have done produces different software than building for one you have not
• How Asset-Map and Notman’s earlier venture each began from a personal operating problem
• Configurability as an adoption requirement, and what happens when a tool forces one workflow
• Why broker-dealers default to large familiar vendors, and the oversight burden behind it
• What the hosts advise an advisor with a product idea to do before building anything

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, did you think the wrong people are designing the future of FinTech? I like that question. Historically, yes. I think the wrong people have been designing what we’re currently using. And that’s, thankfully, I’m hopeful that the future is being designed by people who have actually had the problem.

People like you, people like me. And like a lot of our friends out there that are starting to create the next generation of tech, but it’s not common. What do you think? It’s not common. I would agree with you. Not that we want to throw anybody under the bus here, but yeah, beep, beep, beep. We’re gonna do it. Do it again. You should do it. That was the bus. That was my radio voice bus driving over people. That was amazing. You should really just go mainstream. I was asking you, what do you think that the future of FinTech is being designed by the right people?

I don’t. And I think when you look, I’m putting my entrepreneur business owner hat on for a moment. One of our jobs is to know your customer as the best that you possibly can. Because at the end of the day, if you want to build a really successful business, that will be a by-product of solving a problem for your customer. So what’s the best way to know your customer? To be your customer. What do you think? That’s true. I didn’t think about it that way. Probably a lot of the social media tech that’s taken over our life was designed by somebody who said, I have this problem and I’m so passionate about it.

I’m gonna fix it. And I know all my friends have this problem because we complain about it. And now investors believe it because they’re willing to put money behind it. And guess what? Everybody saw themselves using the solution and said, this solves my personal problem and they’ve taken over. And you can imagine why there’s hundreds of millions of people using social media today as an example. Or even the newest cool tech that I keep buying a new app every week, it seems, that does something cool or solves a problem. I don’t even know I can solve. But I think with respect to financial services, there has been a real gap in solutions that most financial professionals use having been created by people like them.

The problems it seems that most of the solutions we are seeing today are designed by engineers. And I’m saying this lovingly because we employ a bunch and people who have the money to pay for a project, like a large enterprise who says, we need a CRM. Let’s fund and spend tens of millions of dollars on a CRM. Let’s bring in a bunch of engineers and consultants and let’s build a CRM and we’ll roll it out to all the advisors. And then the advisors get it. And what happens there? They don’t use it. Crickets. Crickets. And then they’re like, why aren’t they using it? Because the people who are funding the project are solving their problem.

They’re not solving the advisor’s problem. Advisors didn’t ask for another CRM with workflow and data oversight and management to see, oh, what are our people doing? They said, I want to take notes on my clients and revert back to them when I see them again and maybe automate an email to them once in a while and send a reminder for RMDs. And that’s good enough for me. Rolodex has worked just fine, by the way. I don’t know if you remember Rolodex. Yeah, I had, do you remember the old Tickler card system? Oh yeah. I had that one. One card system. Yeah, yeah. Did that work?

It worked for 800 years, right? Passed down from generation to generation. Yeah. And then they tried to put that into a CRM without actually asking the advisor and it didn’t work so well anymore. There’s exceptions to that. When I think about the most popular CRMs in terms of who’s using what today, between Redtail and Wealthbox, they really just dominate because I think they were really designed in mindfulness of the advisor journey. And that is interesting because we started racking our heads before coming to this podcast and saying, who else in our space is really doing this, right? There’s a lot of new tech that’s come out, Derek.

Not only us, this is probably a good example. So tell us how you, as a financial advisor, came up with your most recent technology company. Well, how did that happen? Give us the short version. There’s two different companies I’m building. Well, I’ve already built one. Which one do you want me to talk about? Well, how about the one, how did you first start? Because I know why you did the second one. Tell us the first one, Connector. So Connector. So I was like most advisors, including yourself, I was taught to cold call, door knock, drive, work nights and weekends, have a brick and mortar office, all of that stuff.

So I did, and I bought it hook, line and sinker. Made some okay money, did art, but I had no time. I was missing time with my family. I became a dad. I’m like, wait a minute here. My priorities are shifting drastically now. And my business is not growing. It’s not as scalable as I’d like it to be. I don’t want to have to keep hiring more and more staff. I bought a 10,000 square foot office building. I don’t want to have to buy more. So long story short, I was like, I’m tired of this. I’m tired of doing what’s always been done. I’m tired of spending a lot.

My margins are getting squeezed. I was just, the whole thing was getting really tiresome. So I was like, all right, this gotta be a better way. And that’s when I went down this whole like remote digital path, if you will. And I’ll tell you, most advisors are like, Derek, you have to wear a suit and tie to be successful in this business. You have to drive two hours one way to meet with someone at their home if that’s what they want. You have to have an expensive office. You have to have a conference table and a boardroom and blah, blah, nice artwork and the really fancy copy maker.

No, I don’t want that stuff. So all those advisors are like, is that being told I can’t do something? So I was like, all right, this gotta be a better way. And I rethought, rethinking, right? The entire advisor model, and it took a while because there wasn’t a blueprint on how to do it. So long story short, I built a practice that was very successful remotely. I’ve been remote since 2013. Make more, spend less, work from wherever the hell I wanna work. And what happened is a lot of the same advisors that said, Derek, it can never be done, saw the success I was having and that I was doing it from Japan or Ireland or South Africa or the beach, wherever the hell I wanted to be.

And they’re like, so how are you doing that? How do you run a blog? How do you run a virtual meeting? All of these little things. How do you do financial planning online? All of this stuff. And I was like, boom, that’s the problem I’ve just solved for myself. It took years to figure out. When I’ve lived it, I’ve been through the pain. Now I’m gonna go solve it for the people that are asking about it. And that’s how I’ve created Connector. Connector was inspired by other advisors asking for help. Did you ever expect that Connector was going to be a big thing or was it just a side way to monetize your unique expertise?

At the time, it was a passion project. My advisory business was doing really well and I had extra time. And I had the entrepreneur hand on like, I want to go build this thing and see what happens. And then it really actually took off. And it was funny. I announced it like massively on Michael Kitsis’ podcast, December of 2019. Oh my. Right? Yeah, the beginning. Talk about timing. So COVID wasn’t on the radar yet, but that’s when it all went live. And it’s just been growing ever since, which is, it’s just pretty cool. And some really awesome stuff has happened because of it. And even some things recently.

So that’s interesting. I wonder, it’s funny because it sounds to me, just to recap from at least what I heard in your voice, you had a problem. You solved the problem for yourself. You optimize it over a while, probably before 19 hit. Oh yeah. And then you had inbound demand when other people said, Hey, I want to do what you’re doing. So you started creating a bit of a role model and realized that people were probably willing to pay you for that. Yeah. And they probably should pay you for that because you’re giving away your special sauce. I’m giving away sauce in a blueprint that took years to figure out.

So it took me five plus years to iron out. Yeah. They can do it in three months now. I’m guessing that time is worth something, right? I think to your point earlier, I think a lot of the newer tech coming out today, just like Connector and AssetMap has done the same thing. And while we’re on the vein, let’s slip it back. Tell me, what problem were you solving with AssetMap? Similar to you, although the irony behind this is I also went remote for most of my meetings back in the same period of time that you did, mostly because I needed my time back to run AssetMap and my clients actually preferred it.

And I had a big infrastructure and I actually think that the whole remote movement was happening well before COVID. The problem is that a lot of firms hadn’t bought into it yet or hadn’t even had the capability. What I also sense in your story is that you were right place, right time. You had a solution to a problem that wasn’t perceived to be widespread yet. And then all of a sudden it was, and there was no other players. And in a sense, because you had the forethought and took the five years to hone the skill that nobody valued until everybody valued it. And now you were actually in a blue ocean situation.

And so where do you go to train for moving your firm remote when you have no choice? You go to Connector, right? Now you have thousands of advisors you’ve touched up. So in a sense that you hit the Tesla bubble, which is we all knew it was gonna be a big thing, but it took a moment of critical mass to take off. Well, you and I were talking earlier about my ebook that Connector has just to give people context. I wrote that ebook initially, I believe it was like June, July of 2019 when I first published it. And I talked about the 100 year storm that was coming that was gonna disrupt our industry.

It happened six months later. I didn’t know it was gonna be COVID, but that’s what happened, right? So it is forethought. I think just knowing that and seeing that problem and then being able to apply that problem, be like, wow, as an advisor, if I have this problem, other advisors probably have it. And I’m guessing you saw the same thing with AssetMap. So you did ask that, I didn’t answer the question. AssetMap started because I was trying to understand these clients, right? So client comes in, as you guys all know, if you’re an advisor or you’ve worked with an advisor, that there’s a lot of complexity.

All consultants go to the most core basic questions. For an advisor, it’s tell me who’s in your family, what’s going on? What are the things that you’ve done? What’s your income sources? What kind of assets you already have? You have investments, you have insurance. You don’t have this data. What kind of debt you got? You got a house or you own your house. What kind of budget you got? So these are the questions that we have to ask, right? Some of us did it on a yellow pad. Some of us did it in a fillable PDF. Some of us have a fact finder or something like that.

So we all have to collect this data to try to get to understand the client before we can give them some recommendation. You’ve heard that phrase all the time. Prescription without diagnosis is malpractice. And that means we have to understand what’s going on in these first. So I was a visual person. I would draw these maps out that helped me understand what the heck was going on in these families who was involved. There were trusts, there’s businesses, real estate, split interests. Oh, I got this deal with my brother that I’m doing. Oh my gosh. So how do you do this tabular? You can’t even write a big huge note and nobody can read it anywhere at the end.

So I used to draw these things. And eventually because I was ADD prone and also artistic prone, I didn’t like it to be messy. So I would design these maps. And I went to a meeting once. I remember, cause you said this, I drove two hours down to Washington DC to this client’s house. I was in my early years, so maybe fourth or fifth year in the business. I brought my huge Morningstar analysis and my e-money analysis at the time because we were real early adopters. And I went there and I had my map on the side and he saw, I started going through all the big paperwork, all the presentation.

And he saw this drawing on the side and I was scribbling on it. He literally just took it from me. He said, what is this? And I told him, I said, this is a map of all the stuff that I’ve written down that’s going on in your life on one page. So I can just reference it and I know what’s going on. You know that big pile of stuff you brought, take that home with you. I don’t want you ever bringing that again. I want you to make this from me and my spouse and I’m gonna show it to her when she gets home. I’m gonna explain what the heck we talked about.

I know this box needs to move over here. We gotta get rid of these things. We gotta add this box and we gotta push this over here to trust. And now I know what we’re doing. Don’t you ever bring that big packet here again. Okay? It’s like consulting to me. And I was like, wow, he has the same problem I do, which is he doesn’t know what’s going on in his life either. Okay? So for me, it started out that way and where it got scaled, like your story, is by the time I got to 2008, our business was exploding because every client we were doing this map for and we were uncovering enormous amount of cross-selling business.

So we would not just do the investments. We would get all the investments. Oh yeah, and we’d get all the insurance. And if there were annuities, we would get in there and fix them. And then we’d get the business because we had everything in front of us. So you can imagine if you’ve ever seen this before, when you have permission to talk about everything all the time in every meeting, you don’t leave stones unturned. And we had great sales success, which got recognized. And when I shared this in 2012 with other top producers at my broker do at the time, 20 guys said, hey, can we use this process?

We’ll pay you a thousand bucks ahead. Can we use it? We’re using yellow pads and whiteboards and we’re trying to do this on Excel, but it’s insane. It takes three hours to do it. So that’s what happened. And you need to look now at the thousands of advisors and multiple currencies and currencies using this thing. It shows a prolific problem, which is we all had, which is we need to communicate better, more with clarity and simplicity. And that was the problem we solved. I don’t know that I ever really believed that I would be a tech CEO. I love my business. I didn’t set out that way either.

I want my LinkedIn profile to say that. Yeah, but it has taken us both away from our practices in some measure. It’s been distracting our hobby, our best practice that became a hobby, that became a business that actually has now grown more than my financial services practice. It’s taken over my life, my second job, which I love by the way. I do love it. For those of you that are wondering out there, is it worth it to take your process and turn it into a tech company? We got some takeaways on that one. There were some, what do we call them? Learning moments. Oh yeah, for sure.

It’s not for everybody. It’s not. So I mean, it’s interesting. Okay, we have a common theme. Advisor had a problem, fixed it. Others wanted it, created a company to do it. It seems like all the really cool tech coming out now for the most part is either completely advisor created and led, or at least has some very strategic advisor input happening. Yeah. So when we say the wrong people are designing fintech, I would say that, like, how do we further define that? Is it basically like you didn’t ask? Did you ask the end user, the advisor in the first place? Not for us at MAP.

Just like you, we field tested it for 10 years and just kept honing it and honing and cutting and cutting, say less is more, less is more. And that’s not easy by the way, for those of you that have actually ever made a presentation, it’s not easy to go to one page, especially for something that we’re expecting technical expertise to be put into it. So it doesn’t look like a Fisher Price Crayola drawing. I mean, then all of a sudden it looks like this is simplistic and that doesn’t sound credible. It’s not easy. And I know the same thing is true with you because Connector, in a sense, one might argue go remote, it’s pretty obvious.

You run the Zoom meeting, right? You send a meeting invite, but there are so many nuances having done it for years, little best practices that are just worth so much extra time wasted. I’ll make you look so much better if you actually know what you’re doing when you present. And so I think that people tend to poo poo it, but it’s really powerful when you start using this stuff, but you have to field test it for years to hone it to something that can really compete. You do, you really do. And you gotta, again, I think the unique thing that you and I and a lot of other offerings out there have is that we have that insight from being an advisor.

And that’s what’s really important. When a necessity driven problem is clear, we fixed it. And it’s still a risk. That doesn’t mean that just because you fixed a problem that everyone wants to fix that problem, right? But that’s what happened. You know what I think of when I think of what’s being built today? So we’ve seen a lot of all in one platforms that are trying to get built out there. Not only you’re seeing the M&A, the merchant acquisition around buying a lot of tech that seems like it could be essential tech, package it all together, maybe sell it to an advisor, a broker dealer, RAA as a big package, try to get economies of scale.

Maybe it all talks to each other. Maybe it does, it integrates. Maybe. But I’m not so sure, and I really want your feedback on this because I’m not so sure that the all in ones are what the advisor community really is number one looking for. Because even though they all say they want everything integrated in one dashboard and one single pane of glass, to give me like one spot and I can go get all my tech, every time they get this, it’s either way over designed or it doesn’t contemplate five new problems. And so then you got to go buy the like individual tech anyway, and that doesn’t integrate.

And there’s a detriment to doing it because now the all in ones, they create walls around themselves so that you don’t buy tech from outside. So I don’t know that it’s serving, but what do you think? So I have two hats I can wear on this one. So I was a broker dealer advisor for a long time and I was limited to, hey, here’s your tech menu, take it or leave it. That’s it. So I took it and half of the stuff I didn’t use, I just didn’t like it. I didn’t like what it did or didn’t do. But now I also, as someone who’s fully independent with my own RIA, it’s actually really fun because I got to build my tech stack from the ground up.

And we always tell, like you hear so much about this integration. It is important, but it’s not like the end all be all. And I was able to create this tech stack that worked really well for me. So what the point is for advisors listening is, I think if I speak for most advisors and saying that we like customizing, we like to be able to choose because even how you and I run our practices, they are different Adam. Like we have a lot of similarities, but we also had to do things a certain way. So if you’re forcing an advisor to do things a certain way, they’re just not gonna use most of your tools.

Let them pick. Let them build it the way they wanna build it. And yeah, it can actually work pretty darn well. But why the broker dealers don’t wanna do that though? It’s incredibly difficult to manage. The InfoSec alone, the updates, the terms of use, the oversight that it requires to protect oneself from the inevitable failure of either data breach or someone misused a tool or legal attacks is unfortunately so large that they’re tending to trust the bigger names in the space, right? The names that we all know that it’s easier to hire a consultant from a top four firm and them say, oh, go buy X.

And you know what I’m saying? It’s a CYA moment. So in a sense, you have this kind of pain avoidance by basically going with the big firms that have done it forever and it’s slow and expensive, but you don’t get fired over it. But then the field advisors are like, why did you buy that? You didn’t ask my opinion or I really, I wouldn’t have put that there or can’t you just give me what I want? Right there, my man. That’s it. So the big ones are still gonna do this. And we understand it’s a CYA as you said, but bring some advisors into the fold.

Get some feedback, especially if you’re gonna buy an off the shelf solution and then customize it for your environment. And Ben, please don’t just bring in your top 20 producers. The top 20, yeah, always. That’s what it is. It’s always the top 20. I always got in those committees. Yeah, cause you’re so amazing. Maybe not. Well, there were only 21 people in your firm, so top 20. That’s right. No, there were only 18. Only 18. Yeah. But I think get different more advisors put out, like you can do a lot of this data gathering pretty quickly with demos and digital surveys or get more feedback.

And are you actually gonna use this? Yeah, you know what I just thought? You know what would be better? A lot of thinking about like both you we had our ups and downs with our BDS that either adopted or didn’t adopt or fought it or made it difficult. I’ve been saying for years that some of the larger companies would do a lot of benefit for themselves if they just let their own advisors create best practice tools and then support that innovation so they can scale it. Think about how much innovation gets stifled because some advisor in Iowa comes up with this fantastic Excel process. He winds up crushing it.

Crushing their numbers. And they’re like, what is he doing? Oh, he’s doing some Excel. Don’t let him do that. Okay, kill that innovation. And you know what happens that advisors are like, wait, I’m like running this killer practice. I’m gonna leave. I’m gonna find a place that’s gonna let me do it. And then I’m gonna scale it out and all that value is lost. And I was really lucky. My broker dealers saw the vision of what we were doing at Asimap. And they did. They made me work for it, but they scaled it out. And it’s one of the most impactful tools in their entire company.

They won, but they had the vision, which a lot don’t. And I’ve seen plenty of situations from big companies that stifle this innovation. They don’t create an outlet for it. Even like a competition or an innovation outlet. And I think that’s one of the reasons why you’re seeing such a massive growth in RAs because frustrated advisors saying, I’ve had enough of you telling me how to run the practice and the clients are going with me. So you’re stuck. So I think it’s a wake-up call for to get the right people designing the future of fintech. I think you hit it on the head right there.

I mean, we’re not gonna go down into the weeds about why I left the place I was at, but I went independent for a couple big reasons. And I think you’ve just touched upon them. We wanted to, I appreciate that. So in addition to ourselves, we’re putting ourselves in this category of advisors who were dumb enough to create their own tech that actually had some kind of scale. And we came up with a whole bunch of names. Now I know we’re gonna miss some people here. And by the way, friends, we apologize. Yeah, right, we don’t have it. We’re gonna make it a 50 minute podcast.

But here’s some of the tech that we found really is a great example of this. Probably the one that comes most to the top of mind is clearly eMoney was created in many parts by Edmund Walters, who was an advisor himself and just was always just very vocal about how it was broken the system, didn’t do financial planning, vaulting, all that stuff. So you think that was an actual amazing feat. They was able to pull it off, get the backing. And you think about the thousands of users that eMoney can claim today, it’s really a great example. What comes top to mind for you? A newer one that I’m actually using is Altruist.

Jason Wenk was, he was actually an early adopter of being an RIA. Yeah. And he’s still an active advisor today, I believe. Again, another great tool advisor created to solve problems that he saw. And notice both of them didn’t solve originally before they allow other people to take over their company. When Edmund sold, I think that changed a bit. But they stayed true to form. They didn’t try to overbuild, okay? And that’s what we see large companies tend to do. They try to solve every single problem. And instead of solve this advisor problem so well that nobody can question it, they’re just the best in the business.

There’s a couple others that came to our mind. Roger Pine and Kevin Loeser created Hellista Plan for themselves. Hellista Plan is blowing up. And if you think about the corollary, at the same time, Andrew Outfest from Outfest RIA did FP Alpha. So similar concepts of how we help advisors add more value by solving the real problem the advisors had, which is, I don’t want to read these tax returns and I want to know what they say. So just scan them and let the system tell you what it says, right? Scan the trusts. Let the system tell you what it says. Saves us an enormous amount of time.

Why nobody solved this before blows my mind. So they’ve done awesome jobs there. What are some other ones that we like? Oh man, there’s a long list. What about Kitsis? Kitsis did a bunch. Yeah, and he’s got, obviously he’s got his really awesome personal branding and blog and podcasts and all that, but he’s got XY he was involved with. Bean counters. FP Pathfinder with Michael Kors. Right, so all cool stuff. And Kitsis even says himself, he started off selling life insurance. He was in it and he’s still a registered, you know, as an advisor today. Oh, perfect example, because he talks a lot about fee base.

So he did a advice pay with Alan Moore. Yeah. So that’s, we know that’s growing in size because I’m starting to see them everywhere. How about on the compliance side, Pulse 360 with Anand Sheth. He used to have an office that he could see on the back office side. Doesn’t he have a CFP? He might be a CFP. I can’t remember, but he’s totally in the space. I remember talking to him about how he, you know, his days as an advisor. Oh, speak about CFPs. Ross Riskin, that’s relatively known, right? Explaining problems with pictures. Well, I like that one, clearly. That’s right up your alley.

Pictures. Most of the college funding solutions and social security analyzer tools were also created by financial advisors too, because they wanted to solve that problem for themselves and nobody was solving it. There’s a couple others. Don Whalen is probably one of the original precise FP with Sebastian. Yeah, right. And those guys solved that problem way before it was cool to try to move data and do great fact-finding. Really early on, they just got picked up by DocuPace, actually. So just so many of you, and for our friends, that they’re like, hey, how come you didn’t mention us? It’s just because it’s top of mind and we’re gonna run out of time.

But the point is that- When we post it? There you go. Drop your company in the link. That’s right. In the post. We’re happy to push it out for you. There’s lots of others. And we think that the future of FinTech is really gonna be designed by people in the space. The barrier to entry to create a company, as we all know, is much different like than it was five years ago. We can all start a tech company today. There’s lots to do, lots to work in that process, but don’t shy away from it. So let’s talk about the takeaways because we wanna make sure that, for those of you that are thinking along these lines, what can I take away from today, Derek?

There’s a lot here. I know we’ve jumped around a little bit, but I think at the end of the day, this is a top of mind topic because a lot of advisors are thinking about tech and how can they be better at what they do and serve their clients. Speaking as an advisor now, I would say one of the first things you really gotta think about is vet your tech. And I don’t mean just do a demo and talk to a sales rep. Really talk to them, who built that tech? Do they understand what it means to be an advisor? If it’s a digital marketing firm, have they actually lived that life trying to do digital marketing as an advisor or do they just sell to advisors?

There is a huge difference. And what I have found, and I think there’s a lot of providers out there, you would agree on them is that the tech that tends to be built by advisors tends to run a little bit better for advisors. And just because we know it, it’s just the space. Not that other tech is bad, but I think personally, I have a choice and I look at the founder page on the website and I say, oh, wow, there’s some advisors here that are involved with this company. That makes me feel really good because I know that they get me as somebody that might be using their tool.

I think if you’re gonna put on your FinTech CEO hat, Adam and I didn’t put that on first, right? This was something that happened. We ended up putting the hat on as we went on. But if you have an idea, if you were solving a problem as an advisor right now and you think it’s scalable, don’t just think it, find out. As Adam and I both said, we tested it. We put it out in the market. We got client feedback. We got advisor feedback. So you may have an amazing idea, but going from idea to execution and having a scalable FinTech company is a long bumpy road.

So just be careful there. But at the same time, I really encourage those that have ideas to take a hard look at it because you guys are the future of our industry. I think the best tech for our industry is gonna be created by other advisors like you. And also it’s okay to just be an advisor. I think Adam and I had this like little itch where we had to go and we’re gonna do this. The next thing we knew, we woke up and we had another company. An expensive hobby. That’s right. Deductible hobby. A deductible hobby. So it’s okay to be just an awesome advisor and get your business to a point where you don’t have to work full time.

That’s so awesome if you wanna do that. And if you have an idea, maybe share it with someone else who’s willing to build it. That’s it. So that would be my take it was. Very cool. It’s funny, I thought the same thing. I wrote down that to look at the founders and see if they solve the pain point that you actually have right now. And many of these advisors like I know we were and still are today accessible. So talk to us about the problems that we’re trying to solve. What are the visions? And we’re also thinking about what’s the problems five years from now by the way.

We’re still thinking about what problems are we gonna have? Put our advisor hat on, go talk to our team. What’s the real problems? Cause we’re not stopping with what the problem was a year ago. We’re starting, we’re doing that stuff. If you’re doing, if you’re really thinking about doing a technology platform, make sure you have a very clear vision and the people that it’s gonna take to execute it. Cause you’re likely not the skilled person for all of it. You may not have tech skill or operation skill or marketing. Think about funding and backing. And of course that you have the support of your family because you’re talking about making a major change to your life as we had to.

I probably had a 50% reduction in income just because I wasn’t focusing on acquisition and retention business. So I was okay with that cause it was passion project for me. And I saw a long-term vision there but make sure you’re really thinking it out. Not just, oh, I got a cool idea and you’re always worried you’re gonna see it on the shelf for the next day. And so you just, you rush into it and you don’t really think it through. We’ve seen a lot of those ideas fail. And around that, I’ve seen a lot of advisors come to me and say, Adam, I have this idea.

I want to run with it. I’m like, okay, what’s the idea? They’re like, no, I don’t wanna tell you cause you might steal my idea. I’m like, well, I’m not gonna give you any advice either. It’s like your client saying, I’m not gonna tell you anything. Should I invest in Apple or Tesla? I’m not gonna tell you anything. Hey doctor, guess what’s wrong with me and give me a prescription, right? I’m not gonna tell you what’s wrong. My toe hurts. Do you have any oxy? No, okay. So that’s the idea. What do you see? I’m joking, of course. I don’t see doctors, but don’t hoard your ideas.

I know everybody’s worried that someone’s gonna steal their idea. Don’t worry. Everybody who’s busy is too busy to worry about stealing your idea, okay? They got a roadmap for six months, a year in advance. They’re too busy to try to knock off your idea. And by the way, if it’s that good and they love it, maybe you should just license it to them. If they have the infrastructure to execute something, don’t get hung up. Building something from scratch to actual fruition ain’t no easy, okay? Oh my gosh. And it takes an enormous amount of time, capital, and energy, and likely still is not gonna work out.

So if you’ve got a great idea and you’ve got a good partner you trust, maybe it’s better to just take a piece of it and say, hey, let me champion this and be your advisor. So I think there’s great ways to create innovation that we really could look at. But don’t be afraid of it because the next generation will be created by you in the field to solve the problems that are human, not just tech driven. I think that’s gonna be really important. Great advice. I hope that resonates with everybody. And hit us up. Adam and I like to help out and give back, drop a comment, send us an email, whatever.

Let’s wrap this up with a question that came in. Adam, something that might be top of mind for advisors and just see where this goes. There’s this talk about back in the old days was where you’re brick and mortar office, buying nice artwork, nice tables, plush carpet, swag, all of that stuff. Should advisors be doing that? Because arguably clients didn’t really care about most of that. They cared more about specifically thoughtful things that were being done for them by you. So should, in this digital world we live in, should advisors be spending a ton of money on like the 20 grand on a website or whatever else type of swag that they can do and these digital pamphlets and all that, should they be spending a ton of money on that or should they be more thoughtful about where they’re spending their money?

Any business, right? We should always be thoughtful about where our money’s going. There’s that great phrase that says, don’t tell me what you care about, show me your budget, I’ll tell you what you care about. And I think if we’re putting our money into a website or spending 20,000 on a website, it better be pretty awesome and we better drive everybody to that website and we better, we should use it. If you have a Ferrari, it should be your daily driver. The problem is advisors just don’t know what these things should cost and what they should spend money on. Unfortunately, like any uninformed consumer, they basically get pitched, oh, you need to spend 25 grand on your website and that’s true, you can.

I’ve done that before, by the way. I’ve done it three or four times because I just, I thought, I kept thinking to myself, it’s gonna be that much better. It’s gonna drive traffic. It’s gonna, no, no, it was just pretty. And it was like the artwork in the conference room, nobody saw it because we do virtual meetings. So nice artwork, okay. That’s what I think. I think we’re just spending money on the wrong things. And what would happen if we spent that same X number of dollars on giving customers the real thoughtfulness of what would help them achieve their goals? Like maybe what they really need is to be organized.

So what I did is I spent five person hours and I had somebody organize your entire whatever. Here, that seems to me really thoughtful. And I think we’re getting to the place where everyone’s talking about mass personalization. The personalization is the real key, okay. Everyone’s just trying to scale it and make it easy. It is, I just didn’t think of you, but it looks like I did. So maybe we should spend our money on really being thoughtful in ways a client can never leave us because we’re just so on top of their needs. My guess is that clients didn’t leave or not leave your firm, Adam, because of the nice artwork.

They didn’t leave because of the thoughtfulness of the stuff that you did. The relevance of it, the personalization of it. I think that’s, unless your artwork was of like your client. You don’t think it was the pens? We had those awesome pens, logos. Or the fridge magnets. Oh, the magnets, that’s true. The squishy balls with your logo on it. Oh my gosh. The dog eats it apart. Somehow the dog never sent referrals based upon that squishy. Yeah, never. I never got a referral from the dog. So don’t make the same mistakes that you did as a brick and mortar advisor virtually. Or digitally. I think we’re staying here.

Be thoughtful, be smart. And by the way, you mentioned most fighters don’t know what it costs. I actually break that down in connector. Here’s exactly what it costs to build my practice. It’s good stuff. We gotta wrap out. This is awesome. We gotta wrap it up. Okay, first of all, hopefully you’ve taken something from this presentation. You’re thinking, yeah, I was thinking about starting a tech or I know somebody else who was. Forward this podcast to them and have them listen to it. Help force them to ask some of the good questions, the hard questions. And of course, subscribe to this podcast. Tell your friends.

Listen to it a second time. Take something from it. Of course, contribute back to us by posting on Rethink on our LinkedIn page. Leave us a review. We’ve got some pretty awesome reviews from folks. Leave us a review if you don’t mind. We’d really appreciate it. We really appreciate you guys spending a little bit of time with us and hopefully having a few laughs, whether it’s with us or at us. I don’t care. Whatever, I’ll take it. It’s all fun. But yeah, we really appreciate it folks. Thanks again. And we’ll be circling back with all of you soon here. Thank you, Derek, as always. Good to see you, my man.

And until the next time. Until the next time. 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.