Ep 60: Do you have partners or vendors? Featuring Brad Johnson

Episode 60 of Rethink Financial Advice, co-hosted by Derek Notman, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Couplr AI) and H. Adam Holt, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Asset-Map). (43:57)

Episode 60 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

Brad Johnson joins Adam Holt and Derek Notman to turn the empathy conversation around. If advisors are expected to understand their clients deeply, what should they expect from the vendors supplying their own practices? Johnson’s argument is that vendor products have become commoditized in the same way advisory services have, which pushes the differentiator onto the relationship in both directions. He traces three eras of advisor support, ending with what he calls the industrialized model, where a firm built one marketing package and mass-distributed it so every advisor received an identical version with the logo swapped out. The uncomfortable thread underneath concerns monetization. The business has always been funded by money in motion, which is why the top advisor in most organizations is still identified by revenue generated rather than by advice given.

What this episode covers

• Applying the same empathy standard to vendors that advisors apply to clients
• How vendor products became commoditized alongside advisory services
• The industrialized marketing model, and why every version looked identical
• Why the business has always been funded by money in motion
• The tension between calling advice a profession and ranking advisors by revenue

Full Transcript

Machine-generated transcript of this episode.

Welcome to Rethink, the financial advisor podcast. My name is Adam Holtz. 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, should advisors expect more from the vendors they partner with? Well, that’s a new one. Yeah. We haven’t talked a lot about the infrastructure of an advice practice. We’ve always been talking about the front end marketing perception, decisions, tech that the client sees, not so much about the vendors that support our practices.

What are you thinking there? What prompts this one? 0 and the changing expectations of the consumer. Is there something similar going on with advisors and the vendors that they work with as far as what kind of support they’re looking for guidance? You know, like I’m an advisor and I provide my client with X products and I use this tech. What else am I doing? What’s the deeper engagement? 0 experience like? I’m an advisor. I buy tech X, Y, Z to do things in my practice. That’s great. 0 or whatever you want to call it. 0 look like? 0 leads with this concept of empathy of the customer, right?

Are you delivering what the customer really wants? All your products and services are ancillary. They’re just what you need to do to provide the commodity that is, let’s say product placement, execution, money management, all these things. They’re becoming institutionally commoditized. And the only thing that really matters is the differentiation, the relationship. Did you solve my core needs emotionally, financially? And that’s what advice is really thinking. I think it’s interesting because we’re starting to see vendors that support advisors actually recognize that their own products are being commoditized there. Yes. And they need to be empathetic to us, the advisor, their customer, as to what really pains us and how they can support us so that they can earn the loyalty so that when it comes time to placing business, we place it with them.

And I think that is an interesting shift. We’re starting to see trickle down through the entire value chain of the system. You know, I’m just having a thought. You’ve seen how the kit says tech map has grown so much, right? And we’ve seen how many financial services firms are out there that an advisor can choose to use. So as you said, we have a lot bigger menu of choices now as an advisor. So what else are you giving me? 0 and experience you’re giving me? How are you empathizing with me past your basic service offering? Yeah. And I don’t like it, dude, an asset map, you guys do that.

You got your bootcamp, you got advice tech live, you got all this stuff you guys do that goes way beyond just the product that you have. Well, we do one on one coaching on case design because we know what the real problem is, but that’s, that’s an interesting aspect. Most companies today, especially in the tech, they can’t even do this. And if your customer number 4,623, you know, you’re going to, you can get some automated help in a support line and go find the answer to yourself by chatting into AI, but, but that doesn’t mean you’re getting bespoke guidance when you really need it. Like if you can show somebody who really solved their problem, I have enormous loyalty to an insurance company.

I’ve had them my whole life. It’s actually, I’ll say it. It’s USA because dad was in military. They’re not the cheapest, but I’d tell you what, every problem I’ve ever had, they handled it just gloriously without a lot of pain and suffering and I just don’t be on the product. They go way beyond the product. The products, what insurance? Blah. Yeah. It’s boring. Right. It’s, it’s a necessity commodity, but they are, I mean, that’s, that’s a really interesting idea. Well, let’s talk about our guests because our guest, Brad Johnson comes from the business just like us. You know, he started in insurance on the annuity side, started in FMOs and the kind of typical space where they were helping advisors understand the products.

And then of course, participating on the backend when that business got placed, but he just saw the business being broken. And one of the things that’s been interesting about Brad and why we chose him to be on the podcast is because he took actually a hiatus. He took a sabbatical to spend a year or so finding himself, reevaluating his life, his spending time with his kids and saying, what, what was the practice I really want to build? Where can I really add value and make a difference? And he came up with this really unique model for what we would have typically called a vendor, a field marketing organization where he’s supporting at a whole nother level beyond marketing, but actually going down to vision mission and aligning values with the practice and then supporting that on the backend.

So I think everybody, you’re going to find some really interesting insights here. He drops a bunch of mics on this one and very worthy of rethinking. Well, let’s, let’s hear what he had to say, man. It’s going to be a great conversation. Brad, given your history in the business, what’s your unique perspective of the advice market today? My short answer to that, Adam, is I think still today, although there’s softwares like asset map and things that help here, I think our industry is still very much in, it would be like a hamburger stand selling their ingredients versus their actual product. Um, and so I think a huge opportunity in the space of advice right now is to simplify the complex, to productize the value proposition that great financial advisors, great holistic planners do and deliver.

And actually package it, communicate it, message it better instead of like most financial services firms that I still see today, even incredibly successful ones north of 500, a billion dollars under management, where you go to a services tab on their website, you click it and it says income planning, risk and fee analysis, healthcare, life insurance. And it would be like a hamburger stand that says we have sesame seed buns, we have lettuce, we have ketchup, tomato, pickles, like no hamburger stand that doesn’t want to be a commodity would ever market themselves that way. Unfortunately, still some of the most successful firms in the country, they’re selling ingredients versus packaging what they actually do.

So drilling down on this, this opportunity or missing opportunity that you’re seeing, you know, even with really successful firms, what are action steps? What are the things that these firms can do? You know, I know you’re doing some stuff at Triad, like what’s like a top three, like, Hey, you guys got to do this. What can our listeners walk away with that might be, they might be able to nudge the needle the right way a little bit. So many different ways you can go with this one, Derek. Uh, but I’ll, I’ll try to summarize what’s a longer conversation. So I think the first thing is really figure out who you want to be and who you want to serve.

Uh, most firms, even the most successful ones have no vision, uh, no clarity. If you ask the founder or you ask the team, where are you guys going three years from now? No clue, blank slate, um, or just random all over the place answers. And so in order to figure out where you want to go, you have to actually figure out where that is and communicate it across the team. A lot of founders, it’s up here. Actually a lot of founders have it up here. They just haven’t gotten it down on a piece of paper. Uh, and it would be like a football team going into a game with no game plan.

So of course they’re just running plays all over the place. It’s a mess, right? So I think that’s where it starts. A subset of vision is how do you deliver value, not only to your clients, but to the right clients? Because if you’re going to build a product, I think most people build a product and then they hope people buy it versus first figuring out who is our ideal customer that we want to serve at the highest level. Now, what product would serve them at the highest level? And so I think there’s a few steps before you get to what I call productizing your services, which is naming, trademarking, figuring out what are the ingredients in the recipe and how do you package it, everything that goes into that, then it’s how do you communicate it, uh, in a clear, compelling way, not a acronym, jargon-filled messaging, like many financial advisors, it’s the curse of knowledge.

And so I’ll stop there because there’s a lot of different places we could go, but that’s where my head starts to go as we drill down into how to get there. There really is a lot there. I’m sorry, Adam. No, that’s fine. I, you know, one of the things that’s become obvious about following you in this space is that you have focused a lot on coaching. And I’m curious because you seem to be part of a new wave of financial services advocates beyond a vendor to financial services professionals that is trying to wake them up, help them and support them in a whole new level.

And I think it’s actually endemic of what you’re talking about at the financial services level, we need to find ways as professionals to deliver more than the commodity, more than what was previously expected. And I think you’re doing this actually at a vendor level. I’m curious what inspired you to do that? Or is that just an ethos of, of how you approach things? I love that you brought up the word vendor, Adam. Um, we say that a lot around here and it’s not a good word. We have a list of trying bad words. Vendor is not a good word. Um, I don’t think people get too excited about vendors, you know, at the end of the day.

And I think vendors don’t get too excited about being called a vendor either. So, um, if I had a whiteboard, I would draw this out, but for those listening in, think of like a pyramid with three levels, the base level. It’s actually part of my learning here, Adam is this is the industry I grew up in. If you look at insurance distribution, the company I grew up in was called a field marketing organization, a lot of financial advisors. I mean, I think it’s better known today, but back in 2007, where I got in this space, if I talked to somebody with a series 65, they had no clue what that even was.

And so field marketing organization was a term invented by Allianz who at the time was the largest distributor of fixed and indexed annuities in the United States of America. And what they did is they said, we’re the insurance company creating the product. Here’s the field distributing the product. Let’s create a middleman distribution platform in the field that markets to the field, right? And so that was a very much a vendor based, uh, the index annuity was invented in 1995. And so it was to educate and distribute to the field, to marketing, very vendor based. Hey, here’s this new product. Here’s the caps. Here’s the rates.

Here’s how it works. Go sell it. We’ll license you. We’ll help you sell. It was very product vendor based, very commoditized. Then a few years later, there was a firm called asset marketing way back in the day. Uh, a guy named Rick Medcap. To me, he created a second tier and this was, wait, we’re not just going to help you understand the product, we’re going to help you build a marketing funnel to get prospects in the door. And what they did was they created probably not the first, but they’re the first very successful dinner seminar. Here’s the slide deck. Here’s what you say. Here’s the mailer.

You said you can fill a room, convert half the room to appointments. Now, hopefully you convert them to clients and there you go. Now you’ve got a way to market and grow your revenue as a firm. So I label that the industrialized model because they created a shiny marketing object. They mass distributed it where every single person that went through that firm got the same thing. And this was probably 25 years ago now. And then what our industry did was replicated that because now the competition was getting eaten alive because everybody was flooding to this new organization that figured something different out. And then the shiny objects just became more advanced.

It went to radio shows. It went to TV shows, by the way, this still exists today, except it was industrialized like put it on this assembly line and swap out a logo, swap out the name of the company, same script on the radio shows, same script on the TV show. And now let’s mass distribute marketing. What we believe Triad or what we’re trying to create in our space is a third level, which is a true partnership and how we got there. We listened. Sean and I, my business partner, we get asked this a lot is how did you come up with this master plan of Triad?

We’re like, we didn’t. We just kept hearing over and over and over that industrial model is beautiful model until you reach a certain level and you’re like, wait, I’ve actually started to create a brand. I maybe don’t want the same radio show that the guy, you know, halfway across town has because it’s not true to me, it’s not unique. It’s not distinct. It’s not preeminent. So a true partnership. The reason partnerships, you can’t scale them to the masses is you have to go deep. It has to be very unique one of one, and you have to actually understand your client and what are they, why are they different?

Back to work. We’re coming full circle here. What product makes them unique and distinct? Think McDonald’s, Burger King versus the hamburger stand on every street corner in America, they might not have that good of burgers, but they are distinct, they have created something unique in the marketplace, which has allowed them to franchise and spread out through the world. So, sorry, that’s a long soundbite, but I wanted to explain the thinking behind it. I think that’s great. I would listen to that whole thing. Bill, but that, that was really cool. 0 that we’ve been talking about and how there’s these things are going deeper and there’s it’s more empathetic.

Like you’re saying, like Brad, you want to understand who you’re serving on a much deeper level and then go serve them that way. And we keep hearing that across a lot of different areas now. Well, it just makes so much business sense, right? I mean, that’s the, this whole context of, of empathy, understanding your partner, not maybe your customer or your vendor, but your partner in this endeavor certainly breeds loyalty and that breeds obviously expansion of your business and long-term retention. And so all the good things on the business side that, that are supported by this, I’m highly aligned with what I think the market needs to move.

Well, I don’t think it’s that different guys. The, the upper echelon of what I’ve seen to be independent financial advisors that build true holistic plan. They don’t have a one-size-fits-all cookie cutter. It’s not here’s your fact finder, plug it in, in a online portal and then print and then here’s your financial plan that they all look the same. That would be the industrialized model, right? That the, the firms I’ve seen that truly scale and deliver on holistic planning. It’s a very one-to-one approach. Yes, there are some common rules depending on the problem you’re trying to fix and solve, but it’s very unique. It’s a, it’s like building a custom home versus these boxes that all look the same.

And for us, the reason that we are truly limited on who we can bring on and serve, which is why we built the model we did, you know, we, we took the minimum way up because the math still needed to work economically as a company. Um, we solve for growth mindedness. That’s kind of non-negotiable number two for us. So 10 million plus of distribution annual growth minded. And then, you know, I mean, you guys know this do business, do life. We want to work with people we enjoy doing life with. And, um, our onboarding process is seven to eight hours of interviews. Because it’s like that scene out of Jurassic park.

You remember where they pulled the DNA out of the mosquito and the amber. Like we have to extract it and we found most founders. It’s not that they don’t want to, but if we ask them to go, you know, journal in the woods and, you know, while they’re looking out in the wilderness, one out of maybe 50 will and 49 will be like, yeah, I meant to do that. And I haven’t had time. So we just ride beside them, interview them, pull this out and package it in a way that they can then deliver it to their team. We call that our launch plan. So it, we had to actually create Kristen Shea.

She’s our chief product officer. And this was a very, very painful process. Um, and it was hard to build because it had never been done before. And we’re like, but wait, this is what they need. How do we facilitate the extraction process so that we can then deliver, uh, what they need to actually become a one-of-one brand in their marketplace and message it differently from everybody else. You guys are going so deep and listening so much and helping. I would argue most advisors truly want to do what you’re helping them do, but they haven’t really had, I mean, let’s face it, even probably in the way that you grew up in the business.

Initially, Brad, here’s our product list, learn it, go cold call. And we’ll hopefully see you in three or five years. And then we’ll talk about being a business owner and help you with all this other stuff. Consumers don’t want transactional advice anymore. I don’t think advisors want transactional business building. Yeah, a hundred percent. I found that to be very true. So I’m curious here. Is there anything else that you think that the industry really needs to rethink or debate? And controversy is welcome. We love it. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think the definition of success and finance is broken. And I’ll speak specifically to the financial advisor space, because that’s the world I’ve grown up in.

I can’t speak to kind of the more the retail or the institutional side that’s, you know, building products or things like that, but I I’ve grown up side by side in the trenches next day, independent financial advisors, primarily starting in the insurance world. And today, you know, most, I think 98, 99% of our distribution are, we call them triad members. We don’t like the word advisor agent because we, we curate a community. Um, 99% of them are securities licensed. And I think the thing that I look at either of those two worlds, both insurance asset management, it’s, it’s really a red line behavior environment. And what I mean by success is broken or the definition of it is success for many, many advisors that I’ve talked to over the years is they grind.

This is definitely a survival of the fittest industry where most people get thrown into the deep end. They’re lucky if they met, they’re like, they come in in this class and they’re like the lone survivor at the end of the day, you know, a year or two later when they look up, because they grind it, they doorknock, they cold cold, they figured it out the hard way. And so it’s like almost driven into you from your first round until you hit this glass ceiling. Typically you become a victim of your own success and you’ve been running on the hamster wheel. You’re exhausted. You’re you go from 20, 30, 40 hours a week when you have no clients and you’re prospecting to all of a sudden you still have to prospect and drive new revenue, but now you have to serve clients.

And now this trade off of all the time in the world and no revenue becomes more revenue, but oh wait. No time. I actually don’t have time anymore. So most people go from 40, 50, 60, 70. I saw one guy that was doing a hundred plus hours a week. But here’s the problem. It’s celebrated. This is the same advisor that walks across the stage. He’s the top five in his firm or her firm and pat it on the back. Good job. You’re a top performer because she drove max revenue in the firm or annual premium or whatever that metric is. And this is the same guy I talked to his health is failing.

He’s on his second marriage. He hasn’t seen a kid’s ball game for the last five years, all in the pursuit of, but I’m doing it for my family. It’s the entrepreneurial lie. It’s a myth of I’ll just grind and make this living for my family. Where what I see is all your family wants is your time. That’s it. So it’s absolutely backwards in my opinion. It’s one of the things, uh, do business to do life for us. That’s our mission at Triad because we’re trying to correct that. And what we found is it’s been, we call it dog whistle languaging. It’s like the people that want to hear that.

They’re like, that’s what I want. I don’t want to sacrifice my family, my hell, my marriage, simply for sheer production or success or to be paraded across an industry stage for five seconds and then hate like the rest of the year. So I think that’s very broken. We’re working to fix it, but yeah, that’s a big topic too. Well, that resonates more than you know, Brad. That’s his mic drop by the way. Well, I think that’s why you formed the business you did, Derek. If I, I mean, I know you went a very different direction compared to a lot of advisors out there. Oh, for sure.

I was doing what you were talking about and yeah, you do your award ceremony once a year and you’re like, yeah, I’m awesome. And then you go back to just hating life. Yeah. And it got real free when I became a dad, right? That’s when I was like, Oh shit. Like I’m watching my kid grow up on this thing while I’m traveling around and about and like this, this is not okay. Great conversation with, with Brad, huh? Absolutely. Boy, that really just hit home in so many ways, you know, thinking about that, just smiling at some of the stuff that he just dropped. Some really great, great reminders and phrases.

What resonated for you? I mean, of all the things, what, what did you really think about? I think he’s spot on in everything he’s saying. I like the goal and the direction that he and his team at Triad are taking. But what hits closest to home for me was his whole definition of success for financial advisors. And even like my early days in the industry, it was like once a week, once a month quarterly, nearly it’s here’s how much so-and-so sold. Here’s how much they made. Here’s how many policies they sold. And you kind of get drawn into it. Like, man, that’s a lot of money.

Boy, I bet they’ve got a great life and they got the flashy suit and the big house and 14 cars or whatever. But, but Brad is right. Is that most of them are pretty actually unhappy and unhealthy. And I fell into that, man. I said, boy, does that resonate? How about you? You know, I’m thinking about it myself, you know, cause most of us started out in either a wire house or an insurance agency or something like this where what was monetized was the placement or acquisition of new assets, either premium or AUM, whatever it might be. So in a sense, the entire business has basically been funded by money in motion and the acquirer of that, whether it was the FMO that helped you acquire the money, the advisor, everybody was getting a piece of that action to fund the business.

So it’s no question that this was, this has been a sales and a distribution business and still is today. I mean, even the robo advisors, guess how they’re making their money? Premium placement, assets, I mean, so that’s where the monetization is. We charge a fee, we charge a commission, whatever it might be. The thing that really just hits home is this constant statement that the number one advisor in your org is really tied to their amount of revenue they generate, amount of sales commission. We’re still treating it like an AUM game. And we’re trying to argue that this is advice is so much more than just asset collection.

So I think it’s an interesting perspective because I know it to be true. I just don’t think it’s going to change. It probably will, but you know, it would be cool is to add one or two metrics to be like, okay, top advisor did this in production. Awesome. Okay. They’re doing something right. If you’re right in that kind of business, but Mr. Mrs. Advisor, how many hours a week do you work? Oh, it worked the least hours. You know, like the source, they add that to the equation and be like, well, so-and-so made a million this year, but they work a hundred hours a week, you know, and then this other person made 600, but they work 10 hours a week.

Oh, right. So it’s something along those lines would be cool to add where we’re not taking away the production aspect, but we’re adding a quality of life aspect, maybe throw that in there. Somehow it’s really interesting. It’s so, it’s so qualitative. It’s not quantitative. It’s easy to calculate revenue generated, right? It’s not easy to calculate impact. One of the coolest awards I know that they had in my original firm was this honor agent, which actually contributed to society. And actually people came out from community and talked about what kind of impact they made in their lives. I think we’re seeing more of a, I think a desire for people to find meaning, I think a lot of us find meaning in our, in our home lives, you know, God willing, if we’ve set them up that way.

And that’s why I think we’re seeing much more intentionality around behavioral coaching and even financial advisors becoming more coaches to help people live the life they want, not just collect the dollar amount that they think they need to fund what they really want. And I think there’s some, there’s definitely some great trends that have been, that seeds have been planted over the last 10 years. You and I have been touching on trying to move towards trying to drag other people towards. And, and I think we’re starting to see it though. There’s just general awareness that the life balance, the work balance, especially given the COVID kind of forced remote work has really woken up a lot of people, you know, I couldn’t help, but think also about the project that we’re working on with Rebel dads.

How did that, how did that bring that up for you? Yeah, that whole Rebel dads thing started for me. Well, it’s been in the works for many, many years. I just didn’t really put it together as an idea until about a year and a half ago, but it’s tough being a successful entrepreneur advisor, whatever you want to call it. But while also being a great parent and our kids grow up so darn quickly, you know, my, my kid, my, my wife said that my son last night was looking in the mirror, trying to see if he had armpit here. I’m like, what the hell? You know, this kid growing up too quick.

And so I wanted to figure it out. Like, man, there’s gotta be a better way where I can be present with my kid, but also still run a great business. Cause I get fulfillment out of that as well. And well, we’ll talk about that a little bit later in this episode, but I, I, yeah, we’re going to figure it. We’re trying to figure out how to crack that code. Oh yeah. All of us. And by the way, isn’t it’s a process, a continuous process. It’s not perfect. We can’t get this down to a conveyor belt. And I thought that was really interesting. His story about how FMOs and partnerships and, or event that kind of came out of vendors really moved to this industrialized distribution, I didn’t think about it like that it’s once you figure out how to make the hamburger, you want to scale it, right?

You want to replicate it. You want to turn it into a conveyor belt and do it again and again and again, and monetize it. And it’s what, what a lot of us talk about in technology is how do you scale a process? How do you do it cheaper, faster with less overhead? But the interesting thing about this evolution of human delivered advice and the expectations that we’re all looking for more value is, are we asking the same questions of our typical vendors, are they delivering more than just the commodity at the right price anymore? Are they delivering an experience, a process, a way for me to multiply my impact, not just economically, but also in my own life?

Are you, are you finding, are you creating ways to find more relevance in the practice or maybe even make difficult decisions? Like how to, how to cut elements of our practice that don’t serve us. And I think we’re seeing a desire for many advisors out there to seek downstream value from our typical vendors to become partners and realize that we’re really in business and our success is tied to each other. I agree. There’s definitely been a shift there and even myself, like I look for more than just the basics because we need the, we need that, but here’s the sticky wicket is that it’s the partners, which tend to be product manufacturers or marketing arms.

They don’t get paid until we sell something. 0 advisors, just like the consumer are looking for a deeper, more personalized experience. Fine. I love that, but that’s a long tail for the vendors, the partners providing it because they don’t get paid on that today. No. They get paid on that three years, five years from now. And so trying to find that balance, because you got to get paid today too. So I don’t know. It’s, it’s, it’s an, it’s an interesting shift that’s occurring. And one that could probably balance doing both, which it kind of sounds like Triad’s doing it on their level. There’s going to be a lot of success there.

Well, Triad is also being intentionally selective, right? I mean, they, they mentioned that they had 49, 50 some members notice this, his change of language makes a big difference, huge numbers, not agents or advisors or reps, these are partners in their process and their firms. And they very much view it that way, not just in business, but also in life development coaching and all kinds of other and marketing, right? Beyond the typical marketing, like here’s a brochure or a webinar or seminar to send out, we’re talking deeper branding. I loved what he said, this idea of one of one brand, right? Can an advisor be a one-on-one brand?

I would say though, in general, the only way that they’re able to do that and go super deep is if they have super, we’ll call it scale on the advisor productivity, right? It begs the question again, do you have to be rich to get the best service? And so I think one of the bigger challenges for all of us is how do you deliver this level of intimacy to hundreds of clients or how does a vendor deliver it to hundreds of professionals, you know, it begs the question how we’re going to scale some of these practices so we can make it more universal. I don’t think we’re going to solve it today, man.

That’s a big question. No, we’re not. Big is a question whether we want to in the sense, right? Yeah. Not everybody really wants it at that level. You look at the wirehouses, the insurance companies, I mean, they are hiring thousands of people a year and you can argue some of them probably shouldn’t have been hired in the first place. Quota. But it’s a quota thing, right? So like, well, if I hire enough, I know I’ll get some great ones out of it and I’m willing to take the great ones because I missed the other ones. I don’t know. I guess it’s kind of like picking 10 different stocks and hoping I get a couple of winners or venture capital firms investing in 10 companies, knowing most of them will fail.

I don’t know. It’s interesting. Maybe the model can’t be fixed. Maybe it is what it is, at least at that level. I don’t know. It’s a decision. It’s a commitment. So what did you take away? What are the, what are the actionable aspects that an advisor can put into motion now or start rethinking? Well, I like this and I’ve been a big proponent of this for a long time. Is figure out who you are and want to be, which will then help you decide on who you want to serve. Brad was talking about defining your vision and getting super clear on that and using that then to build your practice and really figuring out who’s your customer first and then coming back and saying, okay, how are we going to build a practice around that customer?

We’ve even talked about this before in other episodes. And instead of saying, here’s my ingredient list, here’s my product list, now I build around that. Let’s turn it the other way around. Like, all right, who do I serve? Oh, they need these things. I’m going to focus around that instead. So I really liked that about just flipping that around. 0 type of thing when you’re looking for your vendors. Those are the big ones for me. How about you? Yeah, I kept thinking to myself. We are telling our financial advisors, friends, we’re telling you, the listener, to be very intentional about your process, about the brand you create, the preeminence that you promote, about the technology that you use, about the front office experience, your staff, your full client experience.

And that means even the referral partners that you send business to, whether that be legal or tax or maybe insurance or maybe investment or financial planning or all the different services that we tend to promote for our clients that are maybe a degree separation. Maybe we don’t manage that personally. We have dedicated people we trust. We will refer that business to, but I don’t know that we always hold our vendors in the back office to the same standard. And I think what Brad is starting to really say is why aren’t we looking inward? The way we’ve always done business does not have to be the way we always will do business.

And the question is whether your current infrastructure supports who you want to be and who you can be to create a brand that needs to stand out from all the other commodities out there, because we certainly are moving towards a more commoditized environment. I don’t think you saw that say, but Bitcoin ETF is basically coming out. Clients can self-service. They can buy all this stuff. Uh, more accessibility is there. Technology is making everything available. Why does the human advisor exist? And I think we’re going to need to be even a bigger, deeper package of value, and that includes not only who we refer to, but who we’re actually relying upon in our practices day to day, and are they delivering more value than just a commodity?

You know, as a new advisor, you’re drinking from a fire hose. There’s so much to learn and do. So how do I wrap my mind around what we’re talking about today? If I’m listening to this, I don’t know, man. I think that that’s tough. It’s almost like, maybe the vision is like, listen, all right, three years from now, I want to have what they’re talking about on this episode right now, but today it’s just not feasible because of time budget, I got to eat today, right? I still got to sell something and eat today too. But maybe even just knowing that like, here’s the path I want to be on.

When I started, I was like, I know I want to be a CFP. It’s going to take me years to get there, but I know I want that. So what do I have to do? And then just chunk that up in stages. And maybe you can do that when you’re picking your vendors and the type of client you want to work with and the support you’re getting. We do have a choice in that. Just maybe being a little bit more mindful of that. You know, so if you are listening and you’re in that stage, just maybe take a step back and just take a look at what’s around there.

Cause you may be getting some appealing offers like, Hey, join our firm and we’ll give you X bucks. But what kind of handcuffs does that come with? You know? You know what the irony behind all that is, Derek, you and I would not be able to have this conversation unless we had an experience, a set of experiences that we just said that we loved and we hated the irony behind maturity and perspective is that you have to go through the fire to be able to look back and say, I don’t want to keep doing that or is that I want to do something different. So the irony is that when you start out in the business, you have to learn the basics anyway, being a good entrepreneur and being a successful practitioner means you have to learn how to be a business person.

You have to learn how to manage expenses, how to do things you don’t want to do, how to actually generate revenue when it’s tough. And that’s how you determine whether you’ll be successful 20, 30 years. Cause you know how to do the things that most people are not willing to do. And so that’s really the irony behind it is that you must go through the fire in order to come up with this vision of contrast to say, I’m not going to do it that way anymore. I really want it now. And now that I understand the machine, this is how I’m going to use it.

So we all have to go through it. Unfortunately, it’s a, it’s, these are, these are what we would call the earn your stripes, right? You have to go through it. To your point, we can maybe give the advisors going through the fire. Yes, they all have to go through the fire a hundred percent, but maybe by giving them our insights, they’ve got a fireproof suit on, or it’s a smaller fire, or they can go through the fire faster. There’s value in that. And you still learn, you’re still going to get burned, but maybe it’s not going to hurt as much. I don’t know. As a father, I keep telling my kid, if you do this, this is going to happen.

You know what she does? She does what she wants to do. And then she get burned and she learns anyway, but all of us have learned this way, right? I mean, what do you know, dad? Yeah, right. You think a podcast is going to help somebody not make the mistakes we’ve made, no, they’re going to make the mistakes and then they’re going to say, yes, yeah, I should have listened to Derek and Adam, but that’s, but that’s okay because it’s, it’s the number of times that hopefully you make better decisions when the moment happens and I think that’s for all of this, I think, I think the rethink conclusion for me in this program with Brad is, is really just to challenge the status quo again and decide whether yes, I’m going to continue to keep up with the status quo because it serves me in some form or it doesn’t.

And then that recognition will promote a change, right? A change or not a change. And that’s really it. So I think that’s the key. Ask, ask whether you’re getting as much value as you can and whether you care and be intentional about what you’re creating or don’t and get the default outcome, who knows, but that’s the choice. We’re all making every day. Well said. And I really appreciate Brad coming on and helping spur this conversation. They’re doing some great work. And as I said before, it’s kind of one of those, duh, we should be doing this. There’s other things than production that matter. And they’re definitely focused on that.

So hopefully this is opening the door and get shedding some light on this for others. I agree. Very cool. All right. Talk to us about our community question. Who, who wrote in this week? So this is Jeff up in Duluth, Minnesota, which is where I used to live, man. Up in Duluth. I’m a UMD bulldog, man. That’s where I went to school. I didn’t know. So there’s like one neighbor. That’s pretty cool. Ex neighbor, right? My ex neighbor. He actually writes in a question via LinkedIn that this one’s close to heart. He says here, Hey, Derek and Adam, it’s tough being a dad and a financial advisor slash entrepreneur.

How do you balance being great at both? Well, you get, you do a lot of production and you, that’s how you determine that you’re great as a financial advisor and get, get all the awards and then bring the awards home and put them on your kids, like the shelf next to the show or something. To show them what they should be aspiring to. And then kiss them on the forehead and say, you’ll see him in a week. That’s right. Right. There you go. Right. I’ll text you. Yeah, that’s a good question. I mean, look, there’s, I don’t know that, that we have it down. I’ll speak for myself.

You know, I, I have really been focusing a lot on presence in one of the goals I had when I was, when I first got into the business at 25 was, was my goal was to get to a place by the time I was 35, cause I had seen my mentors. Cause we, we sold a lot of insurance. We sold investment management. We knew how to do it. The formula is very clear. Was to get to 20 to the age of 35, be able to spend 20 hours a week working and 20 hours a week, intentionally at home, being really present and making a quarter million dollars a year.

That was my goal by the time I was 35. And I achieved that. And of course I had so much extra time and I didn’t have a kid yet. So I decided to build, build some other businesses. But even to this day, Jeff, I am committed to being present and the way that I have defined that is at, I am at home at five 30 every single day. I make dinner every single night. I, I’m present all the way through till sleepy time. And then when sleepy have time to happens, then it’s back to my time. And I usually use that time to work or work on my hobbies.

I take my kid to school every single day for her entire life at 12 years old. Then also I never work on the weekends. So the key is I’ve just defined it through calendar management. Cause that’s the only way I was able to execute it. And it’s basically saying, pardon. No. So I, I, for me, my love language was being present. And it, and so I just basically said, then that’s what I have to do to express my love, uh, is basically say, don’t, you know, don’t tell me what you value. Show me your calendar and your budget. I’ll tell you what you value. And, and that was just the way I rationalized it for myself.

I love that. And as a dad, I mean, I’m sure you’ve experienced this. I experienced it about every single day. I can tell my son something 10 times, 20 times, he’ll say he understands it, but he doesn’t. How could I show him something that resonates? So when you show your daughter, you’re driving her to school, you’re making dinner, you’re there. She gets that no matter what you say, she understands that dad’s home and present. So I think that’s a really great example is just showing your kid like, Hey, you are a priority in my life. And you know what? Communicate that with your clients. Like, Hey, I only work these hours.

I have a kid, my kid comes first and almost opening up a little bit with your clients. Like, Hey, I’m coaching my kids football now, or I’m doing this, or I’m doing that and show that there’s, there’s like a human being behind the business, I guess. Um, but, but it is challenging and Jeff brings up an interesting point. And also, I don’t think you can ever actually achieve the balance that people claim is maybe out there, just like you can never achieve perfection, but you can, you can strive for it. You can get better. And that’s one of the things you and I do in our next episode is going to be a very special one because you, myself, and a group of other really cool dads are getting together on Necker Island to talk about just this type of stuff.

How do we be the best dad, but also entrepreneur possible? Um, so that’s going to be a really fun experience, man. It’s going to be some really great relationship building insights from some very successful people. And can’t wait to record that episode with you. Absolutely. No, that’s really great. Just remember Jeff, that the balance is never perfect. The best way I describe this is go stand on the top of a medicine or a yoga ball. At what moment are you balanced? One moment in, you know, 1% of the time, 1% of the time, the rest time roll over to place, if not falling off. And so it’s not a, it’s not a perfect sport, right?

It’s a, an ethos. It’s a, it’s an attempt, uh, to be mindful of making decisions and when you’re pushing it, right? When to, when to compensate and when not, and I think that’s really the key for balance. It’s never perfect with that. Let’s thank Brad, everyone who attended today. Thanks for listening. Thanks for being part of this and we appreciate your time. We look forward to the next time, Derek. Yeah, definitely. Great conversation, great insights, good things to think about. Please follow us on social and give us a great review and send us a note. You want us to talk about something that’s important? Let us know.

We’re here. Awesome. Until the next time, my friend. See you brother. 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 asset map or connector. The content has been made available for informational and educational purposes only.