Ep 34: The Secret to Financial Advisors & CPA Collaboration Featuring Paul Saganey

Episode 34 of Rethink Financial Advice, co-hosted by Derek Notman, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Couplr AI) and H. Adam Holt, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Asset-Map). (34:56)

Episode 34 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

Paul Saganey joins Adam Holt and Derek Notman to explain a partnership advisors have chased for decades with little success: getting accountants to introduce their clients. Saganey built a firm around that model before it was common, and his account of why it usually fails is about confidence rather than technique. His argument is that the most under-planned group in the country is high-net-worth families and business owners with genuinely complex situations, that many advisors do not feel equipped to serve them, and that an accountant will not introduce their best client to someone who seems uncertain. The fix is giving the advisor a team and a model before the introduction, so the accountant is risking nothing. Saganey also makes a pointed case against complacency, noting that a client’s life continues long after an advisor’s own exit timeline.

What this episode covers

• Why most advisor and accountant partnerships fail, and the ingredient usually missing
• The case that complex high-net-worth households are the least well planned
• Starting with five to ten clients rather than attempting the model at scale
• Vision, capability, and reach as the components of durable growth
• Why an advisor’s exit timeline is the wrong frame for a client’s plan

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, what is the secret for financial advisors to collaborate with CPAs? You mean, you don’t know? Well, I, no, I don’t. I don’t know that most of us actually know. It’s something- I was on a quest. A quest? I was, I was on a quest for years to figure out.

I never did. Is this like a Dungeons and Dragons adventure or something, or like a Zelda? Is that what you’re talking about? Zelda, oh my gosh. So I did play Dungeons and D&D, right? Yeah. You know, I played that a little bit as a dorky kid, but Zelda, man, that’s my jam. Dungeons and Dragons, although not the topic of this podcast since you brought it up. It’s something even my child is playing. And I was able to unearth the books of the Dungeon Dragons guide and the Dungeon Master guide. How cool is that, huh? Very, very happy. Yeah, it’s, man, those are some really nerdy days, but that’s okay.

Boy, you know what? That could actually be an interesting segue for how a financial advisor, typically a strong relationship advisor, maybe an investment manager, maybe insurance, maybe planning, works with the Dungeon Master of the client’s adventure. For maybe financial advisors are like fighter class, and CPAs are like magic users, and they just speak different languages. But if they collaborate, they can actually build a pretty good adventure team together. Oh, they so can. Oh my gosh, this is bringing back memories. Is this possible that we just came up with this on the fly? I think we just did. That’s the beauty of these things, but it’s so true.

So anyone that’s listening, you have to stop right now, pause, go buy a Dungeon Master book and then come back and listen to the rest of this. Okay, well, that’s really important. I think that means that the lawyer on the team is gonna be either the cleric or the thief, either saves you from dying in spells or steals everything. We’ll leave it there, how about that? We’ll leave it there. I think you get the idea. So there is some secret sauce here. That’s the only secret I have. I think it’s a good one, but in all seriousness, I think, and I’d love for you to elaborate on this, I think that working with CPAs has been, I don’t know, like, well, this quest, right?

It was something that was really supposed to help us grow a business at scale with great clients and all of this stuff. I know I tried it when I was a younger advisor and failed miserably at it. So I don’t know, what do you think? Yeah, well, we did this in our practice. We did engage. We had a trusted advisor program, which has become again popular in this space. And the intent was to accept the fact that CPAs had often the most trusted relationships with clients, usually business owners, high net worth families tend to rely heavily on their tax teams because it’s the biggest cost of doing business.

And so reducing it makes all the sense in the world. And so the tax advisor typically, and or auditor or compliance, or maybe even controller or CFO, tended to have a CPA background and also tended to wield a significant amount of influence over decisions made. But the challenge we always saw is that the strongest person in the room, the CPA and relationship side was almost always relegated to the deadlines of the tax filing of when they interacted with their client. And so in the last minute, it’s a scramble to meet the filing extensions with K1s that are never on time and 1099s. And so our highest net worth clients tended to really under utilize the capacity of the tax professional because it was always this scramble for a moment.

And then it’s like, don’t bother me for months. And I think what happened is the accountants really kind of that I knew didn’t get an opportunity to come back and engage the clients. So the financial advisor was running almost a different theme, investment advice, insurance, financial planning, where the accountant was initially brought into the picture. And so I think we all saw an opportunity, a synergy to merge those two roles or bring them together to the table, but it didn’t materialize really well. Why do you think it didn’t materialize? You know, I think we can speculate a lot on this. I think their CPAs are very protective of their clients.

Rightfully so, just as we are, but I think maybe even more so than advisors are. And if they’re gonna refer out, they are, it’s almost like a lack of trust. Like what advisor can I actually trust to refer this amazing client of mine to that’s going to be an extension of me and my value add instead of compete with me or mess things up where I have to go fix things now, all that kind of stuff. And I think CPAs really do value the work we do, but they don’t know how to make that jump to bring the advisor in or the advisor doesn’t know how to help them make that jump.

Maybe that’s it. Yeah, that’s a great point. But I’m speculating a little bit here. I think that we need to, well, tell us about who we’re talking with today because I think that’s what’s really gonna help. Well, Derek, we had the opportunity, as you recall, several months ago to interview Paul Sagany from Integrated Partners. He’s the president and founder. And in addition to being a CFP, he’s been in practice like us for 25 some years. And what’s really unique about what he’s doing and what the team at Integrated is doing is that they work with over 160 advisors who deem themselves entrepreneurs and work with CPA firms nationally.

So they’ve built a process for this for things that for many of us in the field have dabbled in, right? We’ve tried to work with CPAs. Well, they built an entire CPA Alliance program and it’s really becomes quite a thing. In fact, they’ve gotten a significant number of awards recently. I don’t know if you saw, but recently they won some awards as one of the fastest growing organic RIAs. And so it was a great opportunity to talk to Paul and pick his brain about what’s working and how we as advisors can learn from their successes and so forth. And for those that noticed, we’re gonna mention this, he is a big Cleveland’s Browns fan because he’s got family that works there, although he’s in Boston.

So he’s got this dichotomy. So we asked him, what is the secret for financial advisors to collaborate? So let’s see what he said, Derrick. You know, it’s like for 25 years, we’ve seen entire companies come and go from the CPA marketplace and certainly individual advisors, but there’s a process to it. And if you follow the process, and fortunately for us, we made all of our mistakes early on as you’ve got to get to those clients that are 10, 20, 50, a hundred times wealthier than your average client because you know, most, let’s say an average advisor works with say one to $5 million of assets.

Most advisors I meet, they don’t have problems meeting other people like that. Like they can meet clients that are kind of fall inside of that net worth or liquid net worth perimeters, but getting to that much higher type of network client and doing it on a favorable basis. For me, Derrick, I had the great fortune to work with a company through the early 90s called Cigna Financial Advisors. And our business model was to go in and do a state planning and business owner planning for the FAs at places like Morgan Stanley, Smith Barney, Dean Weber. And so early on, I just recognized that if I was introduced to a client like that from a very good source, then boy, I was already halfway down the field in terms of, you know, making an impact in their lives.

And so, for me, what we did for so long, which was do the estate planning, which involves some kind of a life insurance implementation, charge of fee for planning services. Now remember, this is the early 90s, late 80s when the idea of doing fee-based planning was in its infant stages. That’s what we were doing. And we were charging very large fees. Now we could take that exact same model that works so well in the warehouse community, plug it into an accounting firm, but now we were managing the wealth. So we could manage the wealth, do the fee-based planning, do all the estate planning and business owner consulting work and keep all the revenue internally.

What’s the missing opportunity that advisors are just not addressing or perhaps they’re not seeing coming? I always talk to advisors who wanna join us. I’ll ask the question, what’s your plans for the future? Give me the vision you’re building for your practice. And many times they wanna buy another advisor’s practice or they wanna just kinda keep growing what they have. But I’ll try to tap into that. And what I’ll simply say is, do you really wanna buy another two, three, 400 clients to double the size of your current practice? Because as we all know, that takes a very different business model. It can take attention away from your current practice.

And to try to absorb an opportunity like that is really a lot of work and takes a long time. Where we come in the door and we’re more like, hey, why don’t we get another 100 to $200 million of assets, but do it with maybe five or 10 clients. And you can find those five or 10 clients once again by partnering with other advice givers such as accounting firms. And so that’s really in terms of missing opportunity. When I meet with advisors, I’m always about sharing with them that I personally feel because I work in that marketplace that the most underplanned force segment of the population is actually the highest net worth families and business owners with really complex financial needs and complex situations inside their family lives.

And so a lot of advisors don’t have the confidence to jump into that space. And so therefore, if we can provide that confidence by giving them the team and the backup support, provide the model to get in front of accountants on a favorable basis and give that accountant the confidence to get us in front of their wealthiest clients. I think that is a significant opportunity that a lot of advisors are missing today where there is the need for advice. They’re willing to pay for that advice and they will remain loyal forever if you are the one that becomes the central hub and the central person they go to as they kind of get through their own financial concern.

As an advisor listening to that, it’s a really interesting growth model because a lot of us have been told, hey, it’s a race to 500 clients, right? If you wanna double that or grow, then you have to bring on a ton more advisors or go buy practices. And there’s so many headaches that come with it. And I think the missing opportunity that you just mentioned is huge. Here is an alternate growth path, if you will. So along that vein then, Paul, what would you say are some action steps for advisors listening, whether it’s maybe they’ve been in 20 years and they’re looking to grow and they’re like, well, how the heck do I break into this CPA marketplace?

And build that way, or I’m six months in and I don’t wanna race to 500. And how do I build my confidence faster and sooner so I can do this? Well, it always comes down to what I call your V, your C and your R. And what that stands to is your vision, your capabilities, and then your reach. And so every single time, because I obviously work with a lot of advisors and a lot of accounting firms because that’s also an industry that’s going through significant change. And so I know with the prior question, when you look at the industry and where things are going, boy, the next 10 years for both the financial services industry and the accounting community will be hyper changed based on the last say 20, 30 years.

But I think it’s important that you as an advisor and as we do is get your vision really solid, know what you want to do in one, three, five, 10. I have a 25 year plan. So I know I’ve been doing this since many of you were born, but you should know sitting here in front of you and talking to you, I still have a 25 year plan that I operate off of. And it’s very clear in the vision that we have for where we want to take our organization and where I want to take my personal practice. And so what I always say to advisors, make sure you know what your vision is.

Maybe it is by a bunch of those three, four, 500 client practices. Although I think that when presented with alternatives to grow in a different way, as I talk to advisors and they say, how do you want to double your practice? And not a one has ever said, I want to double the number of clients to get to that number. It’s always how do they do it more efficiently? So to your point, the vision that we are here to share with people, the vision we help advisors really fulfill in our business model is to work with wealthier clients and then providing the proper capabilities, both internally and externally.

We have got talent all around the country to make sure once again, when you get in front of those clients and keep in mind, getting in front of those clients, sometimes the most difficult person to win over is the CPA because he or she is sitting there watching what you’re doing and they know a lot about our industry and they certainly will have feelings either way. So make sure you build that proper capabilities team with internal and external talent that is truly bringing the highest value in terms of financial advice to that client. And then we talk about reach. Who are you going to talk to?

So you can get that wonderful capabilities team, have a perfect vision where you want to go. You might like this. In one of my entrepreneurial study groups, we studied the Kardashian family. We studied Mr. Beast, Little Nas X. I mean, think about me out there looking at what these people are doing. But when you think about what they did, each of them had an amazing vision. They had the capabilities team around them but what they had is the reach. They had social media. They had ways of getting their story out to many hundreds of thousands if not millions of people. So in our organization, working with over 160 accounting firms, sitting here in front of you today, we have access to over 150,000 clients.

That’s our reach. And if you want to kind of take the 80, 20, we’ve got 30 or 1000 clients that meet that mark of being high net worth, business owners, people that are truly 20, 30, 50 times larger than a typical advisor’s client. And so I think to answer your question there and to be really clear, I think it’s really knowing what your vision is, building your capabilities around that, having the proper reach and then build that under a 25-year plan. And to share one last thing with you, the reason why I love a 25-year plan is because a 25-year plan is built up of 190 day quarters.

And so advisors who tend to try something new can get frustrated very quickly. The way I try to help them avoid that is, by the way, maybe you don’t have a 25-year plan personally to stay in your practice, but your business model in your practice and your clients, think about it for a moment, you need to have a 25-year plan for them that either includes you or not. And so therefore, when I coach advisors and I look at their 25-year plans for the business once again, it’s 190 day quarters. Let’s look for gradual growth, gradual improvement. And while before you know it, you can build a really amazing practice out there.

That’s fun. Gosh, that was really, that’s great. It’s a great takeaway for myself. I know that the 100 quarters has some synergy with something Derek and I talked about in our most recent podcast, which was what’s your 100-year legacy as a client, but also thinking as a financial advisor, so much of what we do to help consult with people is also can we actually take some of this advice for ourselves? 100 quarters is reasonable enough. Most of us will have some fingers in the business as well as potentially our own legacy. That’s a great comment. I hope people heard that. We’re curious. We always like to, on the rethink tank, bring in some controversy if we’re allowed to.

And if there’s things that are on top of mind that you think that the industry in general needs to be thinking about or hearing about or something that just most of us are oblivious to, is there something that you’d love to share? Ooh, keep it controversial here. Sports or okay? You could do go sports if you want. Yeah, you could go Browns versus Patriots if you want. We all love the Cleveland Browns. You get to approve for the Browns. But I think, I don’t know if I’m in the right position to bring up anything controversial here, but look, I’m a financial advisor. I work with some amazing other financial advisors and work with some amazing accountants and law firms.

One thing that comes to mind is I always tell advisors, don’t get complacent. That $50 million RIA that’s now 100 plus, because the markets went up in the last 10, 15 years and they added some clients. I had a wonderful lunch about a month or two ago with about a $400 million advisory practice. And they were just kind of resting on their laurels and they were looking more about golfing and really not looking to, I hate to say it, they were kind of bored with the practice. And so we had a wonderful talk for a couple hours about how do you get excited again? How do you think like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk?

I mean, these guys are worth billions yet they’re still in the game every single day trying to impact the people around the world that they want to impact. And so, yeah, I don’t think it’s controversial, but I think in terms of where the industry needs to address itself is I think the current compensation model of getting some percentage of someone’s assets as the way we get paid kind of lends itself a little bit to being complacent. And so maybe a little bit of controversy here, but I think in the next 25 years and my 25 year plan, I do envision and can imagine the way we get paid as advisors will change over time.

And so therefore, instead of being complacent, look out there at the tremendous opportunities and think like these other people that are out there trying to change the world because our businesses, once again, are in a unique position to change people’s lives and change their world. And so even if you’ve got five years to go and you want to sell your practice, please remember your client’s lives continue on until the day they pass on. So therefore you need to be the steward for their wealth, for their financial plans. And so I always tell advisors, stop thinking about your timeframe and when you’re getting out, your clients have to continue on forever.

And so therefore, that complacency part kind of drives me crazy because we’re being gifted with this amazing opportunity to change people’s lives. People are screaming for help. Let me ask you both, have you ever sat down with a client in a first meeting and walked away and said, there’s nothing I can do for you? As I give talks to industry and advisors, that’s the one common thread that we should all allow us to sleep at night is that none of us have ever walked away from a first meeting with a potential client. And so there’s absolutely nothing I can do for you. And if you take that up into the business owner marketplace, the high net worth marketplace where their lives and their wealth is much more complex, there’s a million different things you can do to help them out.

And so for me, not controversial, but I think just don’t get complacent, recognize what you have in front of you, embrace it, and then really look to build that 25 year plan for your business and your clients’ lives. And I think in doing that, you can really not only have a lot of fun, but really make a difference. I think that’s what we’re all here to do. It’s a powerful statement about stop thinking about your own timeline and start thinking about your clients’ timelines. And I think that complacency bit, Adam and I have touched on this a little bit in the past in other episodes, but I think it also goes to succession planning.

If you become complacent and you don’t upscale your tech or whatever it is that you’re doing, are you gonna be as attractive when you wanna sell your business? Probably not. I’m sure you can say a ton more about that. We don’t need to go down that rabbit hole today, but I can see that being as part of the complacency problem. Yeah, one of our divisions is we call it integrated succession solutions. And it’s truly about making sure that our advisors have a succession plan. It’s well-funded with insurance, by the way. There are contracts put in place. But you know what’s most important with that comment is the fact that then we work with the families of our advisors to make sure that their spouse, that their children, think about it now, is we’re all, the average financial advisor is 60.

Therefore, their kids are in their 30s and 40s. So therefore, it’s making sure that their children are ready and equipped to handle the wealth about to come their way. And so we’re trying to really change that paradigm around succession planning and not just worry how much can I get for this whole thing, but how will it impact your family? How does it impact your clients? What steps to your point can you do to maybe make that number of multiple higher? These have been talked about a lot in our industry and certainly advisors should be reaching out for help as far as that goes. So I have a question here.

There’s a controversy that I think you might be able to touch on briefly. Paul, you made comments about compensation changing drastically. And one of the things that Derek and I have talked about is this move towards professional advice where we have a typically, many of us came from the commission world or the asset-based compensation field and we’ve been moving more towards paying for value, human value in the form of advice, relationship, empathy and all these other fun words we’ve been talking about lately. How do you see in this 25 year vision the financial advisor migrating to a fee for service or true professional mindset? Well, I think under the umbrella of being a fiduciary, I think we do operate under a fee for service model, but I always, when I give talks to groups of people, I’ll say, everybody put a pen in your hand and on the napkin in front of you, write down what is 1% of $437,212.

The only challenge there is the average person can’t even tell you what 1% of that number is. And so therefore I think when we court our fees in terms of percentages versus what the actual fee is, boy, that gets a little gray, doesn’t it? Versus, I mean, being preferably black and white. So certainly we saw in the last, when Obama’s regime was in place, they were trying to address that with some of the fiduciary standards and having the actual number on the documents that people were signing. I think that will happen at some point. I don’t think we’re doing anything wrong. I think we’re bringing tremendous advice to the table.

I just think that there could be more disclosure as to what is the actual dollars you are paying me to be advisor and what is the impact of those dollars over a long period of time. And I think when you talk about percentages, maybe that leaves room for ambiguity and some level of uncertainty. And therefore I think clearing that up. And so for me, I’m very clear. It’s a fee to be your financial planner. It’s a fee to manage your wealth. And so I break that up and I urge that to all advisors because when you see a down market and they’re like, well, wait a minute, my statements are going down, but you’re like, yeah, but remember I did your estate plan and we did this for the kids and blah, blah, blah.

The consumer can’t remember that, especially during a somewhat emotional time when they see their statements are going down, they put it all together. So therefore when I teach fee-based planning and talk about this, it’s all about, this is the fee to provide advice, counsel and service for you. And I’ll quantify that by the way. I will show you what you’re saving in taxes or what I’m doing for your family and how that impacts them in some way. And then on the other side of the ledger, this is what we’re doing to manage your wealth. And so I think just doing it with a high level of disclosure, I think that’s gonna be the way of the future, in my opinion.

Adam, what did you think about what Paul had to say there? I think he had some really interesting perspectives given his unique situation, what he’s created with integrated partners, especially around the CPA model. But what are some of the main takeaways or things that really struck you? You know, this is interesting. I found myself actually getting sucked into his coaching because I think one of the great things that you know that we do here when having people on the Rethink Podcast is to get the mentorship. And I was really actually happy that he took the time to start actually giving us some knowledge on things that we can all benefit from that had actually nothing to do specifically with the CPA stuff.

So thanks Paul for that. And we all should know that he just published a book actually this week, Optimizing the Financial Lives of Clients. So check that out. It’s about harnessing the power of accounting firms for elite wealth management practices. And you can get that pretty much everywhere. You get books these days. And it’s interesting because I remembered what he had shared with us about his history working with large wire houses and how they had done fee-based financial planning. Boy, way before it was popular. Way before. 10, 20, 30, $50,000 fees for high net worth clients who want to know are they making good financial decisions.

He realized he can do that with the CPAs. And the takeaway was of course, when we work with CPAs, you know, he’s figured out a way through credibility building and fee-based financial planning that he guess what? When he’s working with CPAs, he doesn’t have a competitor per se for the placement of solutions. So he winds up with the asset management gathering as well as the solution placement. So they tend to really monetize those relationships the way that many of us hoped to. But I thought it was really interesting what he said about, you know, not just doubling your client base or buying another book of business and actually just trying to figure out how can we add five, 10, 15 mega clients to our book by using a trusted resource.

What did you take away? What were the kind of salient points for you? Well, definitely to piggyback on that one, I really liked that. Let’s not add on another 500 clients. Let’s add on five or 10 to double. I think that’s a brilliant way to think about it. I liked his statement on stop thinking about your own timeline for your business and think about your client’s timeline. That was good. Yeah, that really resonated with me. I really liked his VCR analogy. I grew up with VCRs, man, the DHS tapes. Rewind them before you brought them back to Blockbuster or Mr. Movies or whatever you had.

But vision capabilities and reach and he’s talking about how they do that in an integrated fashion to grow the businesses. And it’s so true if you don’t have vision and you don’t have capabilities and you don’t have reach, how are you gonna grow? So I really liked that. And I don’t know if I’d actually use a real VCR to do that anymore. Well, I still have VHS tapes. I thought that was interesting. And then also just don’t get complacent. You know, that goes back to that timeline thing a little bit, but there’s a much better approach we can use to growing, but also to succession planning and making sure that we have equity in our businesses.

Bring your families in. And I think Paul’s got a very attractive model at his firm. I mean, what you said, like they’re one of the top organic growth RAs in the country. Something’s working right over there. That’s for darn sure. That’s true. Well, I think if you can finally tap the CPA network where you make them feel comfortable and get over their biggest fear. Cause I mean, you think about it, most of the reasons why the CPAs for years are accounting firms practices, that was their single source of revenue. If you mess up the relationship because your product didn’t perform or the product gets unsold or doesn’t perform as expected if it’s insurance, you know, it puts a huge reputation risk on the CPA as typically not willing to take a risk with their most valuable asset, which is the relationship with the client.

It almost didn’t make sense, but if they can move to a model where they can feel comfortable recommending that their clients pursue financial planning, either by building this, let’s say in-house CPA practice, build a financial planning unit, or by outsourcing this to trusted partners that have a very clear process that is inspectable and definable. And then of course it keeps their reputation. I think that that makes all the sense in the world. And you can see why integrated partners, advisors are bringing in significant revenue to scale over other partners. You know, I thought that the, how he said the 190 day quarters was really interesting because most of us that have come from the entrepreneurial side, we tend to think in short-term metrics.

How can I just move the ball slightly every day? How can I chunk this down into smaller actions, right? You don’t lose 20 pounds overnight, you lose a couple of grams a day and it’s by taking consistent action. And I think that’s the same attitude here that we should start thinking this way or push ourselves to contemplate a 25-year plan. And I think the steward, you’re right, of your client’s financial plan and having to think beyond your own timeline is really important. I know that succession has been a big conversation of late, but I think as we heard from the podcast number 33 with Amit, he talked about how in many cases that’s just people trying to exit the business.

They’re not thinking about the clients that got to still do full distribution planning well beyond that succession plan. So that’s an important aspect. com and we’re actually about to announce some really interesting synergies there. 0. What that means is client advisory services where accountants want to expand the repertoire of services that they’re providing to their clients, not just audit, not tax, not just let’s say financial reporting, but they want to get into financial planning and they’re looking for these outlets. So I think the opportunity for financial advisors is to find a way to collaborate. One of the things that we focus on obviously heavily at AssetMap is how do you collaborate amongst professionals?

And we do have actually advisory firms, Derek, now that are working with CPA firms and they can collaborate on shared clients using AssetMap and they can do planning together for their respective strengths. And that’s really important to provide that continuity for the client because it’s ultimately all about their experience. I think just hearing you say that, it’s just a no-brainer to be able to do that and have that collaboration back to the dungeon master thing, like we’re all on the same board, right? We’re throwing the dice down in the same place here, right? 0 maybe? I don’t know. Maybe it is, I don’t know. It’s the game board, right?

It’s the, it’s trying to get us all on the same page so we’re all playing the same game and ultimately we’re providing the most advice and value to our clients. That’s what we all really wanna do, bring a dream team together for our clients and I think this is a great way to do it. Certainly check out what Paul’s doing and I think it’s an interesting opportunity for most of us to rethink the typical advisor CPA relationship. And of course, if you don’t do it, it’s gonna happen all around you and you’ll miss the boat. So find ways to collaborate and to continue the conversation of bringing the right players to the team in your meetings with clients.

Let’s jump to our community question. What did you hear out there? And I know you just ran this massive poll. Yeah, it was really fun. It’s just, it’s something that I actually, I don’t know how much public data exists on it, but I suspect this is true. So I did a poll just about a week ago asking why did nine out of 10 financial advisors fail within about three years of entering the business? And it got quite a bit of traction, a lot of interest, a heck of a conversation going on in there. And between lack of lead gen and lack of systems and processes, it was 81%.

Those were the two main reasons with lack of lead gen being 52% of why they fail. Wow. Which is really fascinating. And there’s actually a question that came in because of that poll and there’s gonna be more to come on that by the way. I’m actually gonna be doing some cool collaboration. We’re gonna dig in on this because that’s terrible. Nine out of 10 shouldn’t fail. And it’s really bugged me for a long time and we’re trying to fix it. But one of the questions I got was what are my thoughts on lead generation and the best avenues for generating more leads? And this comes from John, an advisor out in Orange County, California.

Thank you, John. Appreciate it. I think lead generation is broken, honestly. And we just had a conversation with another guest, Libby, who you’ll have to check out our podcast when it goes live or episode. But she’s basically saying referrals the way we know what are dead. Megan Carpenter said referrals as we know what are dead. And there’s all these other lead gen solutions quote unquote out there, but I think they’re all broken. So it’s a much bigger conversation, John. I’m very passionate about this and I’m actually trying to solve this problem. I think we’ve got a really great way of doing it, but we probably should do another episode to dive in a little bit more of this because this is really top of mind for advisors more than almost any other topic out there from what I keep hearing.

That’s true. How do you differentiate, how to bring people in? We’ve been so mindful of process. I think there has been a shift, Derek, too, though. When we moved from salespeople to advisors, the focus went from acquisition of clients to retention of clients. And as those of us who have been focusing so much on the retention, because our compensation model changed to recurring revenue, we didn’t need to make those sales. We stopped learning how to market. And I think there’s an interesting challenge now that when you lose the face-to-face and you go virtually or digital, now all of a sudden you’re relying a lot on thought leadership and attracting people.

And it’s a different model. A lot of advisors have not been trained on it professionally or where they started in the business. I think there’s real opportunity there for what I know you’re working on. With that, we’ve got to end our podcast and thank Paul Sagany. You did a fantastic job. Thanks for your mentorship, for participating. Derek, what does everybody need to do from here? They need to go get their Dungeon Master book. No, they’re gonna buy Paul’s book. They’re gonna go buy Paul’s book, check out Integrated Partners. They actually have a really cool model there. But please follow us, if you don’t already, subscribe to our podcast.

Follow us on LinkedIn, share us with another advisor. We’ve been getting so many notes from advisors saying that they’re binging on our episodes, which is really awesome, man. And we’ve got some great stuff coming up for folks, but we’d still wanna hear your questions. So apply to be on the podcast, but please listen. We’d love that when you listen, we get feedback from you. So there you go. Is there anything else you wanna add before we sign off here? No, that’s it. It’s great seeing you, buddy. And we look forward to the next podcast. Cheers, bud. All the best. Thank you for listening to Rethink, the financial advisor podcast with Holt and Notman.

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