Ep 9: 9. Rethink: Advisor, Adviser or Advicer – featuring Michael Kitces

Episode 9 of Rethink Financial Advice, co-hosted by Derek Notman, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Couplr AI) and H. Adam Holt, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Asset-Map). (31:59)

Episode 9 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

Michael Kitces joins Adam Holt and Derek Notman to work through what the word advisor actually denotes, and whether the distinction between advisor, adviser, and advicer carries real meaning. Kitces, founder of Nerd’s Eye View and still a practicing advisor, frames the question economically rather than semantically. His argument is that advisors historically occupied a regulator-sanctioned gatekeeper position, because financial products could only be reached through a licensed person, and that position no longer exists now that the same products are purchasable directly. What remains is customized planning applied to a specific household’s circumstances. Kitces also walks through fee compression, sketching a future in which an asset management fee sits closer to 50 basis points than 100, with the difference recovered by charging directly for advice on a recurring basis. The hosts close by arguing that the label only matters if you commit to it.

What this episode covers

• Why the gatekeeper position advisors once held has disappeared, and what has to replace it
• Kitces on fee compression, and shifting revenue from asset management toward advice itself
• The observation that advisor licensing is, at root, sales licensing
• Whether the advisor, adviser, advicer distinction is worth adopting, and what owning one requires

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. Derek, what does it mean to be a financial advisor today? Hey, Adam. Yeah, that’s a really interesting question because the term financial advisor, I think if you ask a hundred financial advisors what it means, it’s going to have a hundred different answers or definitions.

I would say in general, very general terms, it’s somebody that helps somebody else with their money. But I think that we really well, we’ve got a special guest today and we’re going to get into this, but we’ve got someone that can give us, I think, some really expert advice and insight on what this term is and how to think about it. Yeah, I’m excited about this because this, this rethink the financial advisor is part of our podcast. We’re getting so much inbound interest and say, well, what’s a financial advisor? Am I an advisor? So tell us about Michael Kitsis, for those of you that don’t know.

I sure hope that everyone does, but if you don’t, Michael has, he is best well known, if not the most well-known thought leader in the financial wealth space when he’s, you know, supporting other financial advisors. He’s been around a long time. I’m not dating you, Michael. I know you’re still a young guy, but yeah, he’s the founder of Nerds Eye View. He is extremely successful podcast, your blogger. He speaks at industry conferences all over the place. He’s still an active advisor, which is awesome, right? I mean, that’s part of how we love it. That resonates with us, Adam, right? Of course. That’s true. That’s true.

And just, just super highly regarded, but also I have found him to be very, um, he’s a good person. He wants to help other advisors and he’s very approachable. I’m not saying everyone should go send him an email right now, but he has a blog for that. Right. Um, but anyways, I think we’re going to get a ton of value and insight from what he has to say. We had a really fun chat with him. It’s true. We invited Michael to be part of our rethink tank. Uh, as you probably know, we were actually interviewing individuals in special areas. We want to get their perspective on what’s happening.

So this is exciting. So we’re going to share part of our interview and then we’re going to debate it. So there’s actually three sections here. So stay tuned to the entire program. I think you’ll get a lot out of this and then we’ll close with our to-dos and takeaways and awesome. So let’s jump right into it. Thank you, Michael, for being here. It’s really excited to spend some time with you. So Michael, one of the things that Derek and I’ve been really interested in is really understanding what’s your perspective on how the financial advisor community is changing. What do we need to know? So to me, the biggest shift that’s underway is that I don’t think the whole industry collectively appreciates is how much we really are in this transition from our roots of selling products and gathering assets into like actually getting paid for the advice, like getting paid for advice for the, for the sake of the advice itself, whether that’s robo advisors to me, just more generally, like tech making it easier and easier for consumers to get whatever product they need by just buying it online.

They don’t necessarily need us to get the thing. They need us to give the advice beyond the thing. So we’re moving more into comprehensive planning. CFP marks are on the rise, like almost every financial planning software companies that bought in the past five years, like planning and advice is in full growth mode. But to me, there, there’s still a catch up for the rest of the ecosystem that still like judges advisory firms by AUM, judges by GDC and production. And even just like the nature of how we spend on technology. If I look at an established advisory firm running some of the popular portfolio management performance reporting tools today, where you’re paying like $35 to $45 an account.

If I take an advisor with a hundred clients that’s got two or three accounts per client, so I’m at something like 250 accounts at $40 an account, it’s not uncommon to see on a P&L like $10,000 per advisor for that portfolio management performance reporting software. Then I look over at the planning software side and I’ll see 1000, 2000, maybe $3,000 a year. And so just that dynamic, like I understand why we spend 10 grand on portfolio management tools and two grand on planning software because of a lot of our models at the end of the day are fairly attached to the asset management side. So you naturally reinvest where your revenue is.

But if you were envisioning a future where we actually really get paid more for advice fees and really say like that the center of our businesses are focused around advice and maybe we help implement products and portfolios because clients have money it needs to land somewhere, but it’s not the center of the value proposition. You say, what does it look like in a future where we only pay two grand for portfolio management software, but we’ll pay 10 grand for planning software because that’s what’s driving hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue for us. The whole ecosystem we currently use today is going to go a little upside down in a world where we’re paying $10,000 for planning software that probably doesn’t even exist yet at that level.

And we’re paying $2,000 for portfolio management tools, which would really rock a lot of today’s tools and platforms. So that’s really interesting that he brought that up, right? I mean, there’s a couple of things that I heard there, Derek, right? Obviously, you know, the disconnect between all of us saying that we lead with advice and yet all of our, all of our spend goes into executing. And I think that there’s a great quote that’s out there that says, don’t, don’t tell me what you care about. Show me your budget and I’ll tell you what you care about. The same thing holds true with our practices, right?

We have, we have individuals that are investing in their practice in tools or they’re allowing their broker dealer or their outfit around them to supply them with the tools. They’re spending a significant amount of money on the execution of the money management or the insurance placement, right? We don’t always see that transparently, but that’s because that’s the revenue generation machine. He’s validating the fact that advice is such a small portion of what customers are paying for it. Therefore it doesn’t validate paying a significant amount on the investment side. I thought that was really interesting. It’s really interesting, but he also points out that there’s this shift happening where we are.

And I guess part of this is like, do you actually envision a future where advice is what was actually more profitable at a business owner level, you know, advisor level, but also that’s what consumers want. I do envision that future. I think that’s where we are headed. And I think there will be this kind of flip-flopping of where this revenue is generated. And even talking to younger advisors today, more and more of them are building, even on the independent side, they’re building these subscription-based models for planning. And then like, Hey, we’ll just do the advice or the investments or insurance as, you know, as a kind of, you want fries with that almost type of thing.

And we talked about this before, about how there almost might be this marketplace where we just go buy the product, as Michael said, like the money’s got to land somewhere, but what we’re really paying for is advice. Yeah, that’s really interesting. It’s right. It’s almost like you’ve got these accessories. Okay. So maybe I’ll help you get the annuity and the insurance and the mutual fund and the TAMP and all these different managers. Those are the accessories, but the advice is really the whole, the whole outfit, the clothing or, or I I’m not exactly sure I’m making this up as I go along, but, but I think that’s really interesting to think that, that it is, there are a lot of people that have talked about whether advice really can be a professional service.

Like, uh, like let’s say the legal profession, where somebody’s going to still earn the kind of compensation that financial advisors have been used to making, right? Cause the real, I think the question I think we need to address does the business have as much, we’ll call it margin capacity as it has had for years, because it was difficult to get stuff. You had to go through an advisor to get it. So we had the ability to create, we’ll call it from the business end, a significant amount of inefficiency. Therefore, you know, you control the money. You’re going to control the compensation as well. As that becomes more transparent, this crunch is going to affect advisors at their real wallet.

Um, and of course we’re going to have to figure out a way to monetize if you want to keep, keep, you know, pace with your prior growth, unless you just can scale. That’s, I think this is a big challenge and opportunity in the same, in the same work. A huge opportunity. I think, I think that most clients will still want an advisor to implement the investments in insurance, but they’re going to expect you do it at a much lower price point. So maybe your max, uh, AUM management fee is 50 basis points instead of a hundred. Right? So you’ve just lost a whole bunch of revenue there, but you’re making up for it now by charging for awesome advice, even on a recurring revenue.

So, so maybe like, maybe like we net out at the same type of revenue and growth, but it’s coming from different places. And that’s what Michael was telling us here. And this is actually a great lead into the next section that Michael talked about. We, we fast forwarded a bit. Um, he had, he brought up this, this conversation, which we’re going to share with you about what role you’re playing, right? And the product placement, where’s your compensation? So let’s, let’s listen back to Michael again. Wow. That’s interesting. I mean, we, Derek and I have talked about this several times about this kind of commoditization of the investment management and the move towards, uh, advisors.

Now you have an interesting term that you’ve used in the past. When you explain that to us, right? I think that’s starting to catch hold. You might’ve actually come on with a, a great, uh, tag, a new hashtag. Yeah. Yeah. I w we’ve used this label financial advisors for what? 20 or 30 years since we all took stockbroker and insurance agent off our business card. I started my career 21 years ago. Now it said financial advisor on my business card. I was assurance agents. Like, no, if Sandra bots, I was, I was an insurance agent, but like, that’s not what it said. We called ourselves advisors, even though we were real really so primarily in kind of either product distribution or asset gathering businesses.

Like, again, that’s fine. Consumers need this, need the stuff. Money’s got to land somewhere. Like I’m not trying to be negative about those, but when we shift in the actual business of advice, it’s a different value proposition. It’s a different path to success. It’s different growth. You differentiate differently. You scale it differently. There’s a lot of stuff that’s really different. And so I’ve started calling this group of advisors, advisors, like people who are literally in the advice business, advisors. And I just trying to recognize there is a distinction between this broad group today that we call advisors and the way advisors people actually in the advice business behave, right?

Everything from how much they want to spend on planning software, how much they’re not going to spend on portfolio management software, as well as a lot else about what they need to build their businesses, scale their businesses, differentiate, grow. Just the whole thing looks different when your value proposition is not, you know, your company’s investment team or your company’s slate of products. It’s like literally the knowledge between your two ears that you’re like laying on someone to try to demonstrate expertise and get paid for that. So I’m using the label advisors now to make the distinction of just the people who are really in the advice business and trying to build a business around advice.

So here we go again. This is kind of, this is interesting, right, Derek? I mean, you have this idea that maybe even identity, how you explain yourself to a customer, which we’ve talked about many times on this podcast is really critical. You know, I think we need to break it down, but I’d be curious, what were your initial gut reactions to hearing that? Well, I love how he has defined it. He’s, he’s coined a new term. It’s pretty interesting. I don’t know if I would ever go to a client and say, hi, I’m a financial advisor. That might sound a little weird, but what the, the thought behind it makes sense.

What’s interesting though, is that in all three of these terms, advisor with an O, advisor with an E and then advisor, they’re still sales driven, right? Like it’s compensation driven. Now advisor means you’re getting comp for giving advice for expertise, not products. Maybe, or maybe a blended too. I don’t know. Um, but it is, it’s an identity thing for sure. I, and I suspect that it’s going to be shifting more and more to the advisor side of things, just because that’s what the consumer’s asking us for. There’s a, there’s an interesting concept around identity and it really goes to, I heard this once. They said, uh, they said, Adam, are you an American Jew or are you a Jewish American?

And I’m like, well, I don’t know. What’s the difference? What does that mean? And it turns out if you break apart the English components of it, it’s, it’s, what is the, the, the description of myself, of who I am is I’m an American. What kind of American are you? I’m a Jewish American. And I think the same thing is when you think about financial advisor, it really makes a big difference where your true identity lies, where you align. Now what Derek said is really interesting because financial advisor with an O is what we typically term term the professional use of I’m a financial advisor. In fact, many of the firms that had reps, insurance agents, um, financial advisors in a bank, they just adopted this term financial advisor has no legal connotation, uh, associated with the regulatory yet advisor with an ER does in fact, the registered investment advisor, uh, does con connotate this idea that you’re providing investment advice.

So the RAA or the IAR designations, if you read into this, um, advisor, we’re tending to send see actually regulatory awareness around this term of advisor with an ER, but the advisor C E R, um, really kind of begs the question, could you use this in a way to talk to your clients about how you do get compensated? I get compensated by advice and maybe the products are ancillary or there’s other, some other form of let’s say, renumeration as a result of, if I get paid by the product placement, I’ll reduce the feed. Can you have that? Can we finally able to do this? That just makes sense.

Um, and I think that’s important for every one of us to just decide, you know, kind of where we stand on this one. I think so it’s going to be a bit of a shift here, but I think it needs what I like is that it’s forcing some clarity around it because in all the other industries out there, financial or not the title of what you do is very specific, right? It’s it, and it means something where advisors is just kind of this generalized term, which I think causes a lot of confusion. Very true. Anyways. Well, that’s true. And we asked Michael, we said, well, what is this?

What does this have in terms of the aspect of regulation? Because this is a, this is an important aspect for us to understand. There’s a couple of things that just jumped out to me. And, and I guess the question I’d have for you, if in fact, your prior comment on we are leading towards a world of advice, Derek and I talked about this, we call this disease or advisors that sell or salespeople that advise some, something how this kind of combination of what came first, the chicken or the egg. And it’s, it’s really unclear today. A lot of individuals, like you said, both of us actually started in the sales side and moved towards advice.

I mean, really curious. What do you think is going to happen to the marketplace of advisors and advisors? Are we seeing, you expect a consolidation or a marginalization of the advisor in general and they have to increase their skills? I do think there is a, a, a slow and steady marginalization of the, advisor in that realm. Just, just recognizing like, look, if you go back 25 or 30 years, you literally couldn’t get a mutual fund if you didn’t go through an advisor, there was almost no direct to consumer business. Like T Rowe price had this little edge thing. Vanguard was minuscule then, uh, there were no online, uh, brokerage platforms where you could buy a mutual fund in a, in a, in an online account.

Like you had to go to an advisor to get a mutual fund. If you go 20 years before that, you had to go to a broker to get a stock. Like you literally couldn’t buy a stock if you didn’t go through a broker and have them sell it to you. So we, we really were like literally legally mechanistically in the regulatory environment, intermediaries and gatekeepers for products, you had to go through us and, and that’s just not true anymore, right? Well, you can get the stuff yourself now still many reasons why advisors recommend products, help clients, implement products. Not everybody does it themselves. Again, I’m not negative on what we do to help clients implement, but we kind of had this regulatory sanctioned gatekeeper effect that forced everyone to go through us.

And that’s not true anymore. And I think that’s much of what drives this phenomenon that yeah, you can get the product through me, but you can also get the products online, which is why I give you customized, individualized personal planning and applying advice based on your needs and circumstances and our years of experience, right? We’ve, we’ve amped up that value proposition because I think we’re all inherently recognizing. Oh, I guess I probably got to bring something to the table beyond just literally the product you can probably buy through some kind of website. And, and so the pressure is on. Absolutely. I think for that, that lifting of the value proposition, you just, when you look at it at most basic level, uh, you know, the licenses we need to be advisors, advisors, uh, like their sales licenses, I mean, it’s literally with that, like their sales licenses, here’s the rules that will apply to you.

Like, I mean, if you just think about that, there’s, there’s no actual test for whether you understand anything about finances or advice in the licenses to be a, to be a financial advisor. It’s like, do you understand how FINRA works and how the SEC works and the, and the laws that will apply to you. Cause that’s what you do in a, in a sales environment. And so I think even the regulation is probably a little behind on that will come up over time, but when you look at the fact that the number of CFP certificates is more than doubled over the past 20 years, to me, you can see collectively, like the regulators may not be lifting the bar on what it takes to be an advisor, but the total head count of advisors is declining, has been for 20 years, the total number of CFP certificates is more than doubled.

The percentage of advisors who are CFP certificates is skyrocketing from less than 10% to more than a third, almost a third. Uh, and so that that shift is already on, we’re starting by getting there voluntarily. Cause it’s just how we differentiate from all the other advisors who don’t have as much expertise in education yet. And are, are still in that reinvestment process, but the game is already on. I mean, it’s, it’s happening live in real time, uh, as we all try to figure out, how do we differentiate in a world where like, oh, yeah, I guess you really could get that product from anyone with that.

You couldn’t 20 or 30 years ago, but now you, you really pretty much can cause almost everyone’s got some fairly open architecture system where I can get you pretty much anything that you could probably also just get off the internet. If you really were just trying to buy that. Now we talked about that several times, Derek. I mean, the fact that the marketplace will ultimately answer the question of, can I get the products I need when I want them at the price I want them competitively and so forth without a human, we’ll call it facilitator AKA financial advisor, right? What do you think? Yeah, I love this.

And he sums it up. Well, I, I, I’ve got an actually interesting example. This just happened yesterday. Um, for the advisors I serve, uh, through connector, you know, I have access to different tech that I get to preview and sometimes I even recommend it to these advisors and a tech company contacted me saying, Hey, we’ve got this thing now where advisors clients can buy life insurance fully underwritten in five minutes. That’s the marketplace, right? So why isn’t it? So if I’m not getting comp to sell that life insurance policy anymore, why I still, you know, the client may say, okay, I’m going to go get there there and buy it, but what type of insurance should I buy?

You know, how does it fit into everything? How much blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that’s where the advice comes into play. And it’s clear he said, like see a piece of more than doubled other types of advisors are declining drastically, right? So the writings on the wall and it’s kind of interesting how the boots on the ground is driving the change and the regulatory body saying, Hey, yeah, you know what? These guys are onto something. We’re going to start backing it up with actual regulation now. You know, it’s funny to me because, you know, we tend to stay in our lane so much, right?

When you, when you’re delivering financial advice, you’re talking to people who want advice, which tend to have, you know, there’s some complexity there. There’s some assets. There’s some needs for insurances, right? So there’s a role for us as self-selecting into talking to an advisor, but there’s an extraordinary number of people out there that are not even banked, right? That don’t, that don’t have, or are starting to, starting to create something and they don’t even know where to go. And they’re just under the radar for most advisors. And I think that marketplace, of course, is going to inherit the next generation’s money. And it’s important for us, I believe, to position to sometimes we need to just help people buy, right?

Because they just don’t even have any education around this. And it kind of leads me into another conversation that came up on another panel we were on recently. There are a number of financial advisors, CFP certificates that don’t know how to actually help somebody learn about budgeting is, is amazing. And it promotes the fact that I think most of the CFPs out there, sometimes myself included, are so used to dealing with the high end problems. We don’t know how to deal with the basic ones as well. Like we’ve forgotten the pushups. And I still think that there’s going to be a need for speed planning and, you know, quick engagement triage, you know, aspirin, if you will, on the planning side.

But it’s going to be people are going to come to us because we can help them solve their problems, right? Yeah, first of all, you almost call it, what’s it called? Like planning light, right? There’s going to be a huge need for that and software that can actually help facilitate it, of course. What do you think about the regulation, though? Do you think that the do you think that the CFP could become a regulatory more than it already is, because it does have an ethics board and has components there. Do you think that that could create an advice standard? I think it could. I think if the if the SEC or any federal body is looking for guidance or a model that they could base regulation off of, I think the CFP is a pretty darn good one.

I know that customers right now can submit complaints to the CFP board to against CFP certificates. I feel like they’ve been, you know, taking advantage of relative to advice. They certainly can. So I think that that could possibly happen. And I’ll tell you, if you’re an advisor who’s not considering getting a CFP, like this is on the horizon. I would pay attention to it. Yeah, it’s a lot of work, but again, you know, well, we’re going to get to my point on this here in a second, actually. So I’ll withhold comment for a little longer. No, tell us, tell us. I mean, what are the takeaways?

So what are what can advisors be doing right now to take some of the information we learned from Michael today put into their practice? Yeah, I mean, to define what type of an advisor, advisor, you know, how you spelling the word, right? How what are you? And and and own it, own it what you are, because you’re not going to change overnight. If you’re just the insurance producer who’s under the guise of financial advisor term, like, OK, own that, but be aware of where things are headed. You know, I would also like say, like, don’t feel like you have to be shamed by others that that have a different feeling about this.

And this is actually going to lead into a bigger topic later. But so is know who you are. Understand the industry is changing and it’s happening, but because of your peers first, actually, and then the I think the the regulatory bodies are catching on pretty quickly and I think it’s going to be important that whatever type of advisor you are, I think you’re going to have to consider advice as part of your practice moving forward and through a skate where the puck is headed, not to where it’s been. So think about that and how you can maybe add that to your to your you know what you’re doing to your credentials and then just align with people and companies that are empowering to do these types of things who are open to change, who are forward thinking and, you know, as always, stay away from the negativity.

There tends to be a lot of negativity in this space, which we’re going to unpack here a little bit in another episode. But that’s those are my takeaways. That’s why I think advisors could walk away from here and do pretty quickly, actually. Great. And I think the things for me is, you know, when I listen to Michael speak and I think he does a great job and I have to thank him again because he’s so approachable, so willing and thank you. And if you haven’t had a chance to check out his blog, please go check it out. Nerds Eye View. And you can that’s easy enough to Google Michael and see what he’s talking about, because always dot com.

Yeah, he’s giving more information than than he ever asked for in return. So that’s really, really great. Thanks for what you do, Michael. I think the first thing for every advisor is you got to decide if this even matters to you. Right. Like, does it matter if you’re an advisor, advisor, advisor? Maybe it doesn’t. But if it does, then decide which one, as Derek said, and own it and also maybe perpetuate, maybe tell people if you’re going to be an advisor or you’re moving towards this kind of idea, maybe it’s a market differentiation attitude. And you could say, listen, I’m an advisor here. Let me explain to you why I’m different and promote that and market it like we’ve talked about in prior episodes.

I think the other thing is here to take away everybody, every client at some level is going to expect that whatever you promote in the solution side is coming from a needs analysis. So that means that despite the fact that we want to do financial planning for everybody, maybe we believe CFP is the future or some kind of version of regulatory. Everybody needs some level advice and more importantly, then getting that advice, whether they need an aspirin triage or surgery, right? The full deep analysis or they just need you need a solution. You need to be able to back this up with evidence that you provided guidance based upon a process.

And here’s the reason why if we do move towards a regulatory environment, best interest, deal well, whatever the next one’s going to be. The historical aspect of what you’ve done for people that you’ve been collecting compensation on for years is going to be important and you need to make sure that you have a way to document your fact finding, document your your milestones that you’ve hit for them and the advice that you’ve given them. And if you need to back up your truck, you can do that as well during the podcast. Well, I thought you were pushing a button there. I thought you had one.

I wish I had like the mad money. I would play a Kramer all of a sudden and play the backing up of the truck. Let’s jump to our community question, Derek, because we got this. Would you mind sharing what Rebecca from New York shared? Yeah, this one is something I think there’s been a really strong undercurrent here. So I’ll jump into the question and then we can. Well, we’ll talk about what we’re going to do here. But Derek and Adam and this comes from Rebecca in New York City, by the way. Thank you, Rebecca. We appreciate it. Derek and Adam, I’m always getting different arguments about the differences between an RIA and captives and insurance broker dealers and why any one of these is better for me than another.

I hear from my newly minted friends that I have to come over from the dark side, but I’m not sure that there are any less real problems since we’re all just running businesses to serve our clients. Can you guys do an episode on this topic? Thanks and keep up the good work. Well, thank you. Yeah, thank you. I mean, what do you think, Adam? I think like I have some pretty big feelings on this. How do you feel about this? You know, we’ve talked about some some we know a lot of our peers that don’t want to touch this one. All right, because in many ways, whether we’re of the RIA movement or the IBD, the the independent broker dealer or the no broker dealer or no FINRA or I’m just insurance.

You know, this is an interesting one. And it’s a bit of a third rail. But just because we’re who we are, we’re going to do it anyway. So that’s it, man. We’re going to reserve this one for another full episode. In fact, I think we’re going to do it next. And we’ve got some interesting topics here. But I think the short answer, Rebecca, is that it is all about how you want to run your business. I think that the general answer I would give is we have seen most of the most of the friends that we know in industry who have moved, let’s say, to the RIA space, have done so out of aggravation.

What is that aggravation been? It’s almost entirely either process or compensation, right? It’s the perception that if I jump from my old house to my new house, what I’m going to give up is aggravation around I’m constrained on the tech I can use or it’s all antiquated legacy tech. And I really and they’re stopping me from using the newest tech, OK? So I need to get independence. Or number two, the compensation structure doesn’t align with where I am. OK, and I know there’s a compelling reason to go to. I will tell you at the end of the day. Wherever you go, you bring your problems with you.

So if there are internal problems on structure, process, marketing, going into going away. Yeah, you you have to actually get more diligent when you go independent, because now all of a sudden you have things that you didn’t know you were getting covered. So it’s a it’s really a matter of personal choice, Derek. Yeah, I will definitely unpack this. I don’t want to belabor, but I would say that when they used me two good points of why the main reasons people go independent. And it wasn’t about how I can like be a better person and advisor to my clients. Most advisors, advisors, whatever we’re using, right?

Whether you’re fully captive or fully independent or somewhere in between, most of us are doing what’s best for our clients. Anyways, we want to help them. We’re doing what we can. And so I would say that independence doesn’t define the advisor and the person that’s the other way around. At the end of the day, it’s the person that defines a type of advisor and how you work and everything. So we’re going to don’t worry, Rebecca. We’re going to jump in and do a big one on this. I know a lot of people don’t want to talk about it. It’s debated, but we’re going to just rethink the heck out of it.

Well, the point is that we throw out the throw out the the debates and then maybe we’ll throw in some opinions in there. But the reality is, is that the great thing about our industry is that it is changing. It’s evolving. And we are seeing a lot of the legacy companies trying to catch up and sometimes leapfrog what’s happening in the independent space. But we’ll debate that one. So thanks. Thanks very much for the question. We’ll be sure to send you a shirt, Rebecca. Thank you. Hopefully you’ll wear it proudly and say I was on this podcast. At least my question was. Thank you again to Michael Kitsis, of course, for all your business and for being willing enough to come on our podcast.

A tremendous resource and a cool dude. Yeah, very true. And I love his blue shirts, man. He’s always got the blue shirt. I don’t know how many blue shirts the guy has. I don’t know if you noticed, but he actually had an undershirt that was blue, the same color. So I he is committed to the blue shirt brand. So that is pretty awesome to see someone stick to the brand consistent. Totally something we can all learn from that. Derek, have a fantastic, fantastic day. And of course, I will look forward to talking with you at the next rethink of it. Yeah, soon, soon. Thank you, Adam.

All the best to you, my man. We’ll chat soon. All right. Thanks, everybody. 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.