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The Tax Problem Retirees Can't Name with Michael Mezheritskiy | Financial Planner Search · Financial Planner Search

• Gregory Wilnau: Michael, how are you doing today, sir? Michael: I am good, sir. Long time no talk. It's good to see you. Gregory Wilnau: Yeah, it's great to see you too. Really excited to reconnect and and chat with you today. to get Michael: It's Gregory Wilnau: started, why don't you just take a moment and tell us a little bit about your practice and what you specialize in. Michael: So we run a fee-only registered investment advisory firm, which I think a lot of other firms do as well, but we have a very unique speci specializing tax planning, a complex tax planning. And I think a lot of other firms would say, Well, we specialize in tax planning as well. I have an accountant and stuff. We file tax returns for clients. So when I tell you we get into tax planning, projections, estimated tax payments, Roth conversion strategies, Medicare URM management. That's what I do five five days a week and sometimes three to four times a day. Gregory Wilnau: So you are neck deep in in tax planning, yeah. Michael: That's our unique value proposition, you know. We we work with people who are either retired or very close to retirement and you know, the our ideal client doesn't have an income problem. They have enough assets that yeah, I guess they all worried about income in retirement and making sure they have enough, but their biggest problem is taxation, you know, and then passing the money on to the kids properly. So that's the ideal client for us and that is what we are solving for. Gregory Wilnau: So I wanna get a little bit more into that. but first maybe you could take a moment and share with us a little bit about your story and kinda ca kinda how you got here. What inspired you to do this? Help us understand like maybe how you got started. Michael: Yeah, well I got started completely by accident. I went to school at Suffolk University, which is a school downtown Boston, which was kinda great. I got to go to a lot of Celtics games, it's right next to it, and a lot of Bruins games. And we had a job fair and I was a junior at a time and I paid security guy twenty bucks to let me in and I I had like yeah, a hundred and twenty copies that I made at Kinkos, if anybody still remembers what it is. Gregory Wilnau: Yeah. Michael: And I was just literally passing out my resume because I wasn't supposed to be there and that's how I landed my first job at Fidelity and I worked at Fidelity for about thirteen years, bounced around, did a lot of cold calling, a lot of sales, you know, just kinda learning the industry and then I ended up in the in the West Hartford Center. I'm in Connecticut, so I ended up in Bottomero Branches and Gregory Wilnau: Mm-hmm. Michael: Kind of learned the ropes a little bit about high net worth planning, you know, portfolio management, that type of stuff. And then in eventually I was just sitting there saying, gee, you know what? There there's gotta be more to it than just, you know, products pushing and selling things and so on. Which I was pretty decent at, but Gregory Wilnau: Mm-hmm. Michael: I didn't feel like I was doing real planning and At one point I just decided that you know what, I either gonna sink or I'm gonna swim. And I just decided to leave Fidelity and I didn't tell my wife when I resigned. Yeah, I I on top of all of that, Gregory Wilnau: no. That's a little that Michael: she was pregnant when that happened. And my wife is Gregory Wilnau: wow. Yeah, you like living on the edge, don't ya? Michael: she's an opposite of me. She's like married by nine to five, buried by the book, doesn't like to rock the boat. So needless to say it it it was a little bit of a challenging time frame, but I I thought I made the right decision. I wanted to do better planning. I wanted to help people in a much better capacity than I was able to do. I think Fidelity is a great firm, but I wanted to go deeper and here I am. Gregory Wilnau: that love that you took the risk, love that you took took the leap. And I love that you were brave enough to not tell your wife. So maybe you just waited until you started to get a little bit of traction with the business before you told her hope hopefully maybe you had some strategy there. Michael: That would have been the right thing to do, Greg. You know, that that would have been the right approach. And I would not recommend people doing this. but you can't fix what I you know, you can't fix stupid, as my wife would say. So here I am. Gregory Wilnau: Yeah, yeah. So my wife's a lot like yours. She is very she's very consistent, very kind of by the book, but more she's not she's very risk averse. I'm Michael: Yes. Gregory Wilnau: the I'm more like you. I'm I'm the opposite. So it we make a good team. Michael: So you get it. Gregory Wilnau: Yeah, I get it. We make a good team. all right, so I appreciate you s you you you telling your your story. How did you end up settling into tax planning specifically? This probably wasn't something that you 'cause this is a very narrow focus, which is obviously very strategic. How did you settle in into this? Michael: You know, it's a good question. Wha when I s just started, you know, it was just basically like any other firm. We wanted to go out, do some retirement planning, you know, use a Monte Carlo simulation and then just manage money. That's really was the objective. And and and as we continue to go through it, one of the things that I really wanted to and and then we we were very generic, right? If you there was no minimums, if you're willing to work with us, with me at the time. you are a good client. And we were just trying to build back up to produce some income because as you know, we were getting, you know, into red and into red and you keep spending a savings because this is not an easy business to be in. so once I got some traction in it, one of the things that I learned is that is it's like how do you stand out? How do you do better work? You know, I always felt that retirement planning, which is really what we specialize in Not very few firms actually do tax advice at the level that it should be done at, right? Very few firms ask you for your tax returns. Very few firms understand and guide you on what qualified versus non-qualified dividend is. How do you avoid capital gain payout by mutual funds? How do you asset locate positions, right? So I always felt that there was a lot more to retirement planning and to the complexity. But I really didn't know much about okay, how do I get there? So I, you know, started to take classes. I discovered Halista Plant. I went through lots of training with Holista Plant and some of the other systems that we're using. And took a lot of work, a l a lot of studying. You know, you know what the interesting thing is, we had a c a client that reached a prospect that reached out to us about two weeks Gregory Wilnau: Mm-hmm. Michael: ago, who I spoke with in 2017, which is a year into me starting this journey. Gregory Wilnau: wow. Yeah. Michael: And I pulled up the old emails and sort of the conversations that we had back in the day. And I would not hire myself back then. Knowing what I know now, it was it's just it was just kind of such a a surreal moment for me to go back and say, gee, it's been almost 10 years and see how much of Gregory Wilnau: See how far you've come. Yeah. Michael: an evolution took place from where I was to where I am. They are they they're coming on board now as as a client, but purely because of that extra alpha that we grew around tax planning. So it was just kind of interesting aha moment for me. Gregory Wilnau: Yeah, I love that. It's part of your story, part of your journey, man. It's funny. I can imagine the realization where you read your own email from nine years ago and you're like, Ooh, this is rough. I w Yeah. Michael: I was cringing. I literally pulled this up in our team meeting. we have a team meeting every Monday morning from you know 9 a.m. We have a team meeting and I pulled it up and I said, listen, here's the presentation that I put together for these people. Here's the email, zero tax planning, everything is centered around portfolio management, very basic Monte Carlo view. It was so, as the teenagers in today's day say cringe, that I was like, Gregory Wilnau: Great. Yeah. Michael: my goodness, this is just. Gregory Wilnau: Yeah. Well Michael: We got a good chuckle out of it. Gregory Wilnau: it's good too. I with my team, you you know, a little self deprecation is always good if you you know can make fun of yourself and also point to the fact that your team is much better than you were for sure, probably, and let them know, you know, they do how you guys have evolved. All right, I wanna I thank you for sharing your story and and what Michael: Yeah. Gregory Wilnau: more about what you do. I wanna talk a little bit more about your clients and the people who you work well with. Michael: Sure. Gregory Wilnau: so you do tax planning, but maybe you could d take a moment to kind of dis to describe the Typical person who comes to you. Michael: Yeah. So our typical ideal client is an individual who are either retired or five years from retirement or so. And we have a million dollar minimum at this point in time. We're probably gonna push this higher, but the typical client that we see is between two and ten million. That's usually what we sort of come across as far as asset level is concerned. Gregory Wilnau: Mm-hmm. Michael: And they they they really don't have I mean they all wanna know whether they have enough. To spend in retirement. Many of them, you know, I think that retirement consists of three stages, right? I you know I always say that go-go years, slow go, and no-go. And many of our clients want to front load their retirement. They want to spend more money up front because they understand when they're older. No problem. It's Gregory Wilnau: What were those three stages again, Michael? I'm sorry. You broke up for me. Michael: go-go years, slow go, and no-go. That that that's essentially how I describe it, right? So when you're younger, you have more Gregory Wilnau: Interesting. Yeah. Michael: energy, you want to do more things, but as you progressively get older, you just become less energetic, you know, most of the time. so the ideal client for us is somebody who comes in and says, gee, I want to be able to support this lifestyle. I want to give to charities, right? I'm passionate about charitable giving. I have kids, I want to be able to help them now rather than wait till I pass away and not really see them enjoy the money, right? That that's also a really big one for us. But the biggest issue for them is I have an enormous tax problem. And what's interesting is many times they understand that there's a tax problem. But they can't verbalize what it is. They get it, they Gregory Wilnau: Interesting. Michael: read enough about it, they understand what a required minimum distribution is, they understand what an Irma bracket is, but they they know there's a problem, but they cannot verbalize it and put it on paper. But they need somebody to help them understand it. So for us, that's the ideal client. It's looking to solve that problem as a primary issue. yeah, it's been Gregory Wilnau: Okay. Michael: really good for us so far. Gregory Wilnau: Alright, I love that. I love the no the go go slogo and no go. I love that. Yeah. It's not Michael: Feel free to use it, it's not trademarked. Gregory Wilnau: I wanna understand a little bit more about your clients. So they they realize this have they have this situation. They can't necessarily articulate it, as you you explain, but Michael: Yeah. Gregory Wilnau: they probably attempt to articulate it to you when they meet with you the first time with with the questions that they ask. So what are some of the questions that your clients typically ask you when they meet with you for the first time? They're not necessarily clients yet, and maybe they're just trying to get to know you. Maybe it's the first meeting. what are some of those what are some of the things that they that they ask you? Michael: It it always starts off with, okay, well, they don't even necessarily know what to ask, right? So the usually it starts off, well, gee, do I have enough assets to retire? Do I have enough money? Where do I spend the the money from? I have three different accounts, right? I have an an IRA, a Roth, a brokerage account. Where do I pull my money from? Yeah, what about Social Security? When do I kick this off? If I married, do we change that a little bit? And then usually we're pretty good in identifying sort of an ideal client for us. We've done this for a little while. So I kind of stirred the conversation up to an area said, Okay, well, do you know what required distribution is? And they usually go, Yeah, yeah, I know what that is and well do you know how that's going to potentially impact your situation down the road? And They understand that it's taxable, but they don't understand the weight that they are going to have to lift because they've done, you know, such good job saving in their four or one K accounts and the assets are growing tax deferred. They don't understand what the what tsunami is coming down when they turn 73 or 75. So I I I almost proactively kicked this conversation off because Gregory Wilnau: Mm. Michael: I know that it's there, it's just they're not proactively asking about it. So Many times I just have to kind of pry them a little bit, but as soon as I do, it really opens things up because now it's a conversation that nobody has really had. Gregory Wilnau: yeah, I love that. I'm sure having that conversation with him for the first time leads to a lot of positive in a in a lot of positive directions. let's let's talk about so you know, as you've done this, you've been doing this a while. oftentimes when I interview people, they share certain like situations that their ideal clients are t typically in and oftentimes these fall into into buckets. we don't have time to go into all of those today. but maybe pick one. What's a typical situation that they're in that they need you to lead them through? A situation that causes them to initially reach out. does that make sense? Michael: Yeah yeah yeah it does so I'm gonna answer this question by saying something else. So most of our clients come to us from our seminar marketing. So we run classes every month like a clockwork, sometimes twice a month. And the classes are based around taxations, specifically concentrating around on Roth conversions. So most of the time when somebody is sitting in front of us, they are coming from our class engagement. So they have already heard me speak, you know, for about an hour, an hour and fifteen around. Taxes and what required distributions can do to you? How is it gonna, you know, change your Medicare Irma bracket, that the armor Irma brackets, that the Medicare Irma is based off of Maggie versus it's not from Aggie. And you know, all this terminology, right? That they've never heard of, it kinda picks their interest, then they come in. So if I had to pick one bucket, that bucket is okay, Mike, my required distributions are gonna be X, we can help him figure out what that is. How do we minimize that? How do we get myself? To a 10, 12% marginal tax bracket. How do we utilize Roth conversions potentially as a unit or as a way to pay the taxes now? Because you're gonna pay taxes one. There's no way to avoid paying taxes. It's illegal. I tell them all the time. but how do I minimize it? Because today is the the least amount of money I'm gonna have for the rest of my life. Is there a benefit for me to doing that? Is there a Is there a breakeven? When is it? How does it help my family? They don't, you know, they have a ten year rule. The kids are gonna have to take the money out. What happens when one of the people passes, you know, spouses passes away? Now you have a widow's penalty Gregory Wilnau: Mm-hmm. Michael: where the other spouse becomes a single file. How is that gonna impact her if I don't do any tax planning? So Gregory Wilnau: Mm-hmm. Michael: if I had to put one bucket in, which is hard to do, I would probably say the Roth conversion and the tax planning around it is probably the number one thing that we try to tackle with them. Gregory Wilnau: I love that. sometimes I'll ask this question and it's hard for some people to to delineate and specifically describe this in a way that's easier to understand. And I think one of the reasons you're able to do this is because you've been doing this a while and you've settled in into this and you have a good mental model around how to think about your ideal clients and the solutions that you pri provide them. So I love that. I want to talk more I I want us to get more into how you work with your clients in a little bit, but I'd like to take a step back for a second and learn more about kind of your vision and where you're wanting to take your practice over the next couple of years. so when it comes to your practice, where do you see in the next two to three years? What's your vision? Are there any goals you're working on? Michael: You know, it's funny. When I just got into this, all I wanted to do is get to fifty million under management, have an admin, and be done with it. Meaning that just have a like a really nice lifestyle practice and you know, just just do everything that I wanted to do, but just not my personality, you know. We just started to grow and started to grow. Next thing you know, I have three offices, I have eight people under me, and then we have about almost four hundred million under management and we just keep going. So about two years ago, we had a conversation with my team and they said, Well, what what where do you guys see us going? Because I have my thoughts, but and it was universally we want to go to a billion. So that that that came from Gregory Wilnau: Wow, th they totally won up to you, huh? Michael: It it was completely on there. We're not have Tchachkas in the office, road to a billion is is a really big thing for us. And that's the goal, you know, we grow at about thirty percent year over year. We probably add about a hundred million dollars of new assets on annual basis. So we'll probably next year or so we'll hit half a billion and then we're just gonna continue to roll. So seventy-eight years, a billion dollars under management. I'm gonna create a separate tax planning practice and we bring a couple of more accountants on on staff, but and I think what's it was driving that, Greg, is not the monetary compensation part of it, is that the fact that we do such good work and it's so meaningful to us and it's really meaningful to our clients where we feel like more advisors should do what we do. And there are quite a few of them that do, but majority don't necessarily go as deep as we do. And I feel it's a detriment for the clients. So And I'm only forty eight, so we're gonna keep rolling. Gregory Wilnau: Yeah, you're a young buck still in your prime. So it's kinda like Michael: You'll do that. Gregory Wilnau: It's become more than what you even envisioned when you first started. And it's Michael: by a mile. Gregory Wilnau: it sounds like you've created a culture where you have a team who knows that you do such great work and the impact and knows that the impact you have over your clients. And it sounds like this has turned into a conviction to grow so that you can serve and help more people. Michael: That's that's exactly what it is. And you know what I love about it? It's not me telling them to do it. It's the whole team is behind it. And you know, we rolled out EOS internally earlier this year, which really Gregory Wilnau: So for you who don't know, EOS stands for entrepreneurial operating system. It's a framework Michael: Yes, sir. Gregory Wilnau: to keep everything kind of organized within your business, have internal go goals and execute on those goals with your team. didn't want to interrupt you. I just wanted to make sure that we explained what that was really quick s for everybody. Michael: No, no, no. I appreciate it because that's, you know, to me it's it and we haven't really fully implemented it, but we were able to write out our value prepositions, identify much clearer our individual clients, what makes us unique, our VTOs. All of that helped us really make sure that, you know, we're all on the same on the same team. And growing and hiring is so much simpler now, but Gregory Wilnau: Yeah. Yeah. Michael: The team is pushing all of this. And for me, I'm still, you know, I believe in work life balance. I encourage them to take time off. I certainly follow through with that. But when we hear, Gregory Wilnau: Mm-hmm. Michael: you know, Danielle on my team right now, she's got six or seven onboardings happening right now and she's she's busy. You know, she's busy. So Gregory Wilnau: That's exciting. That's fun. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's when you're really busy, I find that, you know, you kind of in in s in many cases, not not all, you know, you're like you're like, man, I just need a break. And then when you if you're not busy enough, you're like, man, I'm so bored. So it's Michael: Yeah. Gregory Wilnau: the combination of being busy but also believing in what you're doing is a very exciting thing. So it's cool that you have a team who's a part of that and they feel like they're almost being swept up in this. In this kind of thing. Anything standing in your way, like any particular challenges that you're that you're struggling with and and or or see yourself possibly struggling with or running into as you work on this goal? Anything stand out to you? Michael: You know, I I will tell you, my my biggest struggle, Greg, is is not is finding the people who have the right attitude because I can teach you stuff, right? We we can we can train you, right? There's many different ways you can be involved at our firm, right? From marketing, like we in the process of building out Monday dot com as as part of our unique system to use internally. So there's many ways that you can find you know, one of the things that EOS helped me is to kind of identify what somebody's really, really good at and make sure that they do only that and they're not really doing anything else. But finding the people that have the same passion as we do and do it because they are passionate about. You know, we have a prospective client the other day that called us to tell us that they want to move forward with us. It was a relatively high value client. And all of the sud I was in the meeting and all of a sudden I hear them cheering and they're all excited because, you know, we are growing, we you know and it and we can really help this person. So finding diamonds like that, that's my Gregory Wilnau: Yeah. Michael: biggest issue because if you bring somebody in who's not a good fit for the culture, that just Gregory Wilnau: Mm-hmm. Michael: it becomes a speed bump. And Gregory Wilnau: Yeah. Michael: that's my biggest obstacle, be honest with you, because everything else, we have a great marketing process, we have a phenomenal prospecting process, great onboarding. We have systems in place that we've built out the infrastructure to be successful, spotting the right people. Gregory Wilnau: Yeah. I well that's definitely a a universal problem, I think. You know, you're when you're cultivating a culture and you kinda have a miss mission, you want to make sure that you're bringing in people on your team who believe in it and are Michael: Yeah. Gregory Wilnau: great fits for that. So Michael: I will tell you how I'm solving it. Like if any other advisors who are listening to this podcast want to kind of get some ideas. I don't believe in hiding things. I mean, I don't think I don't believe in secrets. There's 360 million people in this country. You need a small sliver of them. so what I've done is I've built I've built out a robust internship program where I have you know probably like 30 or 40 resumes that I get for for the summer. And then we go through a very extensive interview process. And then the individuals that come in, you know, they around us for three months. And that allows us to, because you can say a lot of things during the interview process. You can be a good BSR, right? You can say stop. But your words speak loud, you your actions speak louder than your words. And over the three months, something is is bound to come out. And You know, like for example, I had Gabby on my team. she was an intern over the past three months. I just hired her because she's a phenomenal fit, you know, and Gregory Wilnau: Yeah. Michael: because I can train him. I'd much rather you have spent my time and resources training you, getting you the CFP, sending you to the conferences, right? Doing all that stuff because you can learn these things. If I can learn it, anybody can learn it. Gregory Wilnau: Yeah. Michael: But it's your attitude that that I can't it's unfixable. You are who you are, you know, the people don't change that allows us to really clearly see how somebody would react in certain situations and how they interact with the team and so on. Gregory Wilnau: Yeah, I like that. So you give them a a a framework to follow, right? Like the the the internship process, and you see you get in real time, you get to see how their what what their attitude is like, the the work that they produce and how hungry they are to learn and to grow and how open minded they are. I love that. I love that. That's what you're looking for, the people who who want to be trained and are excited about what Doing. All right. So what I want to do now before we end in the next couple of minutes is I really want to understand what it looks like to work with you. So maybe you could take a moment to walk us through your actual process. So if someone were to become a client today, what does onboarding look like? This is something that I know that you said that you were you proud of. You have a good onboarding process. So maybe you could talk about what happens during onboarding. What happens the first couple of weeks? And then maybe go into what does it look like after onboarding? What does it look like to work with you over the course of a calendar year? Could you d dive Michael: Yeah. Gregory Wilnau: into that for us? Michael: Sure. So Our prospecting process, I guess, and I hate that word, but that's basically what it is. You know, we usually have two meetings with a potential client. We have a discovery meeting, and if it makes sense, then we have an assessment meeting. In the assessment meeting, we provide them with what I call the retirement planning light. We want them, we understand that it takes it's a really big decision for them to get someone, hire somebody who will be responsible for their financial future. So We want to make sure that they understand what we're gonna do, how we're gonna do it, what the fee is gonna look like. So by the time and then during the assessment meeting, we tell them, go home, think about it. You know, we we don't need quick hits. We're looking for long-term relationships, right? So after the assessment meeting, when they go away, we followed up with them a few times and we let it go. If they decide to become a client, we schedule At least one onboarding meeting. Sometimes the complexity is so long we need to have multiple onboarding meetings with them. But usually one onboarding meeting works. When they come in, so when they schedule the meeting, they get an email from us. With our ADVs attached, telling them everything that they need to bring with them. You know, beneficiaries, Gregory Wilnau: Mm. Michael: voidy check, you know, so there's like a lot of stuff that they need to have with them when they come in. When they come in for the assessment meeting, we spend about 10 minutes letting them know what the paperwork process is gonna look like. We custody through Fidelity, we tell them that we're gonna open up a bunch of docusigns, we're gonna send them some stuff, they're gonna sign some stuff, we're gonna send them our contract, they're gonna have to sign that as well. That's the administrative part of the equation. That's right. That's what it is. Now, yeah. Gregory Wilnau: Yeah. Gotta do it, right? It's boring, but you gotta do it. Yeah. Also want a quick quick quick note before you continue. I'd like that you're working with Fidelity and you came from Fidelity. I think that says a lot. Anyway, go ahead. Michael: It's yeah, it's it's it it is interesting. It you know, it it's it's good to be on their platform because I understand it really, really well, but it is kind of like a full circle for me, you're right. Gregory Wilnau: Right. Yeah. Michael: but w so when they come in, we spend a little bit of time on the administrative part of the equation. And then we usually jump right in into planning. I wanna dial in their retirement plan, I wanna dial in their Roth conversions, I wanna see what their projected incomes are actually for the year. We ask him to bring their pay stubs if they're still working. We use a system called HolistaPlan. If you are not using HolistaPlan, you are missing out. I can I can take a pay stub, scan it in, and it projects out. All their income for the year, but it also projects out the federal income tax, state income tax that they're gonna pay. So if Gregory Wilnau: Mm-hmm. Michael: we're gonna do a conversion in 2026, for example, I want to know whether they're gonna have to pay estimated taxes or we're gonna have to withhold from the conversions. Most will pay estimated taxes. Well, that conversion becomes part of the income for the year. If they're working and they're paying federal and state income tax, we got to back that out so that they don't over don't overpay on their estimated payments. So it helps us tremendously. So we spent quite a bit of time. Time in that first onboarding meeting figuring out what is their plan going to look like, what is their asset allocation going to look like, and roughly what the plan would be once the assets are starting to come in, because we use asset location, meaning that if they have a bunch of different accounts, we don't go 60-40, 60-40, 60-40. We go in and we say, gee, we have a Roth account, we're gonna load that up to be 100% equity. And then we're gonna be a little more conservative on the other side. So we put tax alpha even in our trading platform, if you will, we use black diamond. So we spend some time there, we get their buy-in, we understand what the what the process looks like, and then we schedule a 30-day follow-up. In 30 days, they come back in, the objective there is to say, hey, do you have access to Black Diamond? Were you able to get into Fidelity? Did you have any issues seeing ev everybody's accounts, right? will you it here's what we've done so far with your assets. Everything came in, everything is on board. Now we started to make some adjustments. Here's some of the things that we've done for you so far. And then we put him in a regular cadence. Like regular cadence for us is quarterly meetings. So we proactively send them Gregory Wilnau: Nice, nice, nice. Michael: out an invites. We let them know that if we don't see them on the schedule, Tina on my team will start harassing you till you either get on the phone, I mean Zoom, or come in. Because we do want to see you. We can't do our job if we don't stay on top of your stuff. Extremely proactive. Gregory Wilnau: Yeah. So you're very proactive. I like that. And you wanna make sure that you educate and the client understands kind of what things look like, what their accounts look like. They can wrap their head around it. Michael: We want them to be comfortable with it. And then listen, sometimes there they have complexity to their situation where we also don't want to sit there for three hours and onboarding meetings either. So we would set up a follow up for them to come back in to continue the onboarding discussions if necessary. Usually one meeting is adequate for us because we are prepared. I'll say ninety percent of the time, ten percent of the time we might have to have another meeting for them and so on. But we're always available. If stuff comes up, if there's a NIGO on TOA or there, you know, something is happening, we'll just get them on the phone. If we need to do 401k rollovers, we schedule a time for them right there and then to do a conference call. So we just kinda organize it and then we use our workflows to track it all. Gregory Wilnau: you do a quarterly meeting. I know some of my visors will say we do a a minimum of one meeting per year and that's required. But I like the quarterly man. I think a lot can change in three months. And if anything it's a good just idea to just check in and get on the same page align, see what you're working on and see if anything's changed. So I really like how you structured everything, how you educate the client, make sure they're comfortable they understand what's going on. So all right, let's land this plane, Michael. thank you for coming on. Thank you for sharing us with telling us your story, how you serve your clients, a little bit about your vision, how you work with your clients. so for somebody who listening who wants to get in touch with you, what should they do next? If a client's interested, a potential client's interested in learning more about you and possibly having a conversation, where should they go? What should they do next? Michael: The best thing to know is is two things. Number one is we're not salespeople. We are phenomenal planners. So just by reaching out to us, it doesn't mean that we're gonna try to sell you anything. You know, you either are fit or you're not. And if you're not, we'll be the first one to tell you that. So the the best the best thing to do is to go to our website, milestoneamg.com. There is a free assessment button right in front of you. Click it and schedule an introductory 30-minute Zoom call with me. And then from there we'll figure out what we do. You don't want to go see a food doctor for a heart problem. We want to make sure it fits. And if it does, then we'll explain to you what the next steps look like and so on. But our website is the best place to go to. Gregory Wilnau: Awesome. Well thank you so much for coming on, Michael. I appreciate ya. Michael: Any time, Greg, it was good to see you, my friend. Gregory Wilnau: You too.