Latest / Only Fee-Only / #75- Peter Lazaroff's Journey and Blueprint for Success

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#75- Peter Lazaroff's Journey and Blueprint for Success · Only Fee-Only

• 0:05
  Speaker 1: How's it going everyone?
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: Welcome back to the only feel only podcast.
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: We have a treat for you today, as we got the chance to talk to Peter Lazaroff, and it was a fantastic conversation.
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: For those of you that don't know Peter, he is an award-winning advisor and chief investment officer at plan corp.
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: He has a book called making money simple, a podcast called the long-term investor with over a hundred thousand downloads, and he has also been a contributor to multiple publications, including the wall street journal and Forbes.
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: So there's a lot of great things there and we had a really great conversation with him.
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: One thing that stood out was just his vulnerability, honesty and willingness to talk about whatever, so this was a really great episode.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: Enjoy this episode with Peter Lazaroff on the only feel only podcast.
• 0:56
  Speaker 2: What's up everyone, welcome to another episode of the only fee only podcast.
• 1:00
  Speaker 2: I'm Peter Travelo.
• 1:02
  Speaker 2: I'm here with my co-host, brock.
• 1:03
  Speaker 2: How's it going today, brock?
• 1:04
  Speaker 2: Going well, man, I'm pumped for this one.
• 1:06
  Speaker 2: How are you?
• 1:07
  Speaker 2: Likewise, man, I'm stoked.
• 1:09
  Speaker 2: And today we have Peter Lazaroff joining us.
• 1:12
  Speaker 2: He is not only a speaker, author, top 10 financial advisor, chief investment officer and a podcaster, but we also went to the same college, so really looking forward to hearing his story and seeing how he's grown into the industry leader that he is today.
• 1:31
  Speaker 2: So, peter, without further ado, welcome to the show man.
• 1:33
  Speaker 2: Yeah, peter.
• 1:35
  Speaker 3: Brock, thanks for having me, guys.
• 1:36
  Speaker 2: Yeah, man, you bet you bet.
• 1:38
  Speaker 2: Thanks so much for jumping on.
• 1:40
  Speaker 2: I know you're a connection of Josh Passlers as well.
• 1:43
  Speaker 2: I know Josh isn't able to make it today, unfortunately, but really looking forward to having you on.
• 1:49
  Speaker 2: But for those who don't know who you are, you want to give a quick 30, 60 second overview of who you are.
• 1:55
  Speaker 3: Sure, well, as you mentioned, you gave a lot of the things I do day to day, but I'm the chief investment officer at Plain Corp, which is a national, fee only wealth management firm.
• 2:06
  Speaker 3: I do a lot of rate writing.
• 2:09
  Speaker 3: I have a book called Making Money Simple, contribute to the Wall Street Journal Forbes.
• 2:14
  Speaker 3: I have a podcast called the longterm investor, so if you want to check that out, just go to thelongterminvestorcom.
• 2:20
  Speaker 3: And I do a lot of industry stuff, a lot of financial wellness speaking events and really I just feel like all of the core different things that I do comes down to just trying to help people make good decisions with their money at the end of the day and avoid all those mistakes that sort of derail us on our progress to whatever it is we're looking to achieve.
• 2:40
  Speaker 2: So let's talk about the first time that you've ever had, like a experience or relationship with money.
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: Like, could you break it down?
• 2:46
  Speaker 2: Like, was there a time as a kid, was there a lemonade, stand Lazaroff lemonade or anything like that?
• 2:52
  Speaker 2: Like when was your first time and really experiencing?
• 2:54
  Speaker 2: Hey, you know what this personal finance stuff, this investing stuff, it's interesting.
• 2:59
  Speaker 3: Well, I would say two things.
• 3:01
  Speaker 3: So I don't know that personal finance jumped to mind, but my very first distinct memory of money was at this local pizza shop that we used to go to all the time, called Cafe Manhattan, and we had this game where, when we'd be waiting for the pizza which did seem to take forever and maybe that's because I was a kid or maybe it did take forever but you'd drop like three coins on the table and create a goalpost with your fingers and flick the coins through them and try to score.
• 3:27
  Speaker 3: We called it hockey and there's a jukebox there.
• 3:29
  Speaker 3: And I remember asking my dad hey, can I have a quarter to go pick out a song?
• 3:32
  Speaker 3: And you know, when we have coins on the table, I'm thinking this isn't a big deal.
• 3:36
  Speaker 3: And he looks at me, he goes well, is it worth your money?
• 3:39
  Speaker 3: And I say no, and he goes well, then it's not worth mine.
• 3:42
  Speaker 3: I'm thinking we'll shoot and we go to this place a lot.
• 3:46
  Speaker 3: So the next time we're there, kind of the same scenarios playing out we're playing coin hockey and I asked my dad, can I have a quarter for the jukebox?
• 3:54
  Speaker 3: And he says is it worth your own money?
• 3:56
  Speaker 3: And this time, thinking I've sort of learned the lesson.
• 3:58
  Speaker 3: I say, yes, it is, and he goes great, go spend your own.
• 4:03
  Speaker 3: That to me is the most distinct early age money memory.
• 4:08
  Speaker 3: I don't know how it influenced my life.
• 4:11
  Speaker 3: I feel like my grandmother gave me a share of Nike stock on my 12th birthday.
• 4:16
  Speaker 3: She gave me a different share of a different company on every birthday after that and I know that that share of Nike stock now.
• 4:22
  Speaker 3: That really piqued my interest in investing in personal finance.
• 4:27
  Speaker 3: I wasn't very much of a reader as a kid but at that point in time Nike had split a couple of times so that one share was very quickly two shares, then four shares, then eight shares.
• 4:37
  Speaker 3: And I'm getting these paper checks in the mail for doing absolutely nothing at all and I'm thinking this is the answer, this is it, and I started reading everything I could on investing on personal finance, and so those are kind of the two younger age things that set me on a trajectory that I feel really fortunate to have been aligned with what I ended up doing throughout the rest of my career.
• 4:59
  Speaker 3: I mean, how many of us think there's something we want to do when we're a little kid or even in college, and then you get there and it turns out not to be the thing you dreamt it to be.
• 5:07
  Speaker 3: I just feel so fortunate that so much of it has fallen in place for me.
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it's fascinating to hear that, and it's funny when you can go back to kind of those memories of being a kid and be like huh, that's funny Because your brain at the time it laughs us on and it holds on to those memories and those are lessons that you can kind of take through life and be like I mean that's a pertinent lesson to anybody that's listening right, as you kind of went on, went to the Paw, graduated, how did you kind of get on the track?
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: Obviously, you know we started the episode contributing to all of these different huge publications for Wall Street.
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: You know, doesn't start that way though, right?
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: So what was it kind of like originally?
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: Getting into the space and kind of feeling it out.
• 5:49
  Speaker 3: Well, I feel like that was all pretty random and good fortune as well that I landed at a fee-only firm and I didn't even really know what a fee-only firm was and that there were differences, so that alone felt unbelievably lucky.
• 6:04
  Speaker 3: I think when I got out of school and I started to earn a little bit of money, that's when probably the interest transitioned from being solely about investing and more about personal finance, because I suddenly had money that I had to do something with.
• 6:18
  Speaker 3: Now I graduated in 2007, and so I graduated right into the financial crisis.
• 6:23
  Speaker 3: So it was a great time to learn.
• 6:25
  Speaker 3: But also a lot of people were out there writing about things like budgeting, about cash flow optimization, about taxes, and what became really fascinating to me was it seemed like this puzzle or this game that you could win.
• 6:39
  Speaker 3: There were a right series of moves that were mathematically optimal.
• 6:44
  Speaker 3: Now, where I've grown over time is I realize well, there's some differences between needs and wants, and what's mathematically optimal it's not always what's optimal for the person who actually has to do these things.
• 6:54
  Speaker 3: But all that said, I was reading a lot and I couldn't ever really remember things unless I wrote it down.
• 7:01
  Speaker 3: So I took very, very detailed notes and at some point in time at my prior firm, I had sent out the notes, I think, to our company president, who was like wow, why'd you do this?
• 7:13
  Speaker 3: And I said, well, I do it every day.
• 7:14
  Speaker 3: I started forwarding.
• 7:16
  Speaker 3: He asked if I'd forwarded them via email every day and then it came out in a portfolio manager meeting that I was doing it, and so I started forwarding it to more people and this was, honestly, these were just bullet points, they were just thoughts, but over time bullet points turned into sentences, sentences turned into paragraphs, then paragraphs turned into blog articles and I think the very first time I published anywhere outside of the company blog was maybe for the CFA Institute, and it was me just begging.
• 7:44
  Speaker 3: I was begging them to do something and over time I kept publishing here or there.
• 7:49
  Speaker 3: I think I published for like etfcom.
• 7:51
  Speaker 3: I was at a conference once and somebody introduced me to the managing editor at Forbes, and so that became ultimately, three weeks later I was writing for them and then something sort of fell into my lap Wall Street Journal but at that point the writing like the publication was super cool.
• 8:10
  Speaker 3: Don't get me wrong.
• 8:11
  Speaker 3: I don't do it as much anymore because the novelty is worn off for me, but I still do it.
• 8:18
  Speaker 3: The thing that I am always doing and what I was doing then was that writing is such a great process to learn.
• 8:24
  Speaker 3: My dad, he's a pediatrician and he used to like leave the house at five in the morning and go do rounds to see newborn babies at the hospital.
• 8:30
  Speaker 3: But he also did some teaching for the medical school, even though he had his own practice, and he once told me about the process of learning is in medical schools, that you see one, you do one and then you teach one.
• 8:42
  Speaker 3: And for me, the writing I'm ultimately writing stuff for me to help myself learn better, but it becomes this process of teaching others through that writing and now through the podcast and through videos, all sorts of different forms of mediums where that is that last little bit of true understanding, when you're able to teach somebody else that and so yes, kind of going way back to your question, none of this started where it's like, yeah, I'm going to go publish for the Wall Street Journal and get a book deal.
• 9:10
  Speaker 3: It was just me taking notes, trying to learn and remember things and then just help other people arrive at making some of those good decisions with their money.
• 9:20
  Speaker 2: So you started off client facing, you said correct.
• 9:24
  Speaker 3: To an extent I actually started as an analyst, but then, yes, I transitioned to client facing work and even when I went to PlanCorp I was a lead advisor.
• 9:32
  Speaker 3: But I came in as our director of research at PlanCorp with sort of you know, no promises but an idea of what my career path at PlanCorp might be, but a lot of times spent with clients in my prior roles and then even today, you know, I'm still in client meetings every week coaching people through certain circumstances.
• 9:54
  Speaker 2: So how did you find PlanCorp, or how did PlanCorp find you?
• 10:32
  Speaker 3: Well, so I work in.
• 10:33
  Speaker 3: I live and work in St Louis, which has the second most financial professionals to New York City, so there is a lot of financial services companies here.
• 10:43
  Speaker 3: I had a pretty healthy size book of business at the time when I transitioned and it was complicated.
• 10:52
  Speaker 3: I wanted to be an owner of my firm.
• 10:54
  Speaker 3: I am not just an owner in the economic sense but an owner in the actual like has a seat at the table and, you know, is actually helping manage the company and its future growth.
• 11:08
  Speaker 3: So I reached a point in my career where I wanted to find a firm where that could be true, and I also wanted to find a firm who would let me launch a personal website, because back then blogging was still kind of new and it is difficult to have a single person create a little bit of brand equity, especially if that brand equity seemingly grows larger than the actual firm's brand equity.
• 11:33
  Speaker 3: And so I think I ended up at Plaincorp, largely because our CEO, chris Kirkhoff, really saw the vision of what I was trying to do and was very trusting and excited about it.
• 11:45
  Speaker 3: I think what also helps is that there was such a close philosophical alignment with the investments, because here I have all these clients that I'm going to take to another firm.
• 11:54
  Speaker 3: I really want to make sure that they're well taken care of.
• 11:58
  Speaker 3: And it was very difficult.
• 11:59
  Speaker 3: I feel like the process took eight to 12 months for me to choose where my next home would be, so to speak.
• 12:05
  Speaker 3: And the thing that really stood out to me about PlanCorp and still does, is I had a number of different firms, both locally and nationally, run sample financial plans on my parents, on one of my mentors and on myself, and PlanCorp's financial planning was just.
• 12:22
  Speaker 3: You know, I had said that I was doing financial planning for so long I was a CFP.
• 12:27
  Speaker 3: As a CFA, I really felt like what I was doing was financial planning, but then, when I saw what they were doing, I said, oh my goodness, and that's a lot of what led me there.
• 12:35
  Speaker 3: And you know, even though I'd been looking around for so long, once I really started that planning process with PlanCorp, I think I was working there within two weeks of seeing those results.
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: That they were that impressive, huh.
• 12:50
  Speaker 3: It was just it's sometimes hard.
• 12:52
  Speaker 3: You know it's really crazy as we try to market how our planning is different, because so many times people today say they do comprehensive financial planning.
• 13:00
  Speaker 3: Our firm was started in 1983 as a fee only financial planning, only firm.
• 13:06
  Speaker 3: Before that was even like a thing.
• 13:08
  Speaker 3: So we weren't even investing assets for the first 10 years because the founder, jeff Buckner, felt like well, at that point in time the only way to invest assets was to have products that were kicking you back revenue and he just didn't want to be a part of that.
• 13:21
  Speaker 3: So it's really in the company's core culture.
• 13:25
  Speaker 3: And you know it does make marketing difficult when everybody says they do it and it's hard to describe what the difference is until you see it.
• 13:33
  Speaker 3: And so usually we're just so thrilled when people give us the opportunity to do kind of like a first draft or a skeleton of a financial plan to give them a little sense of what it is we're doing.
• 13:45
  Speaker 3: People say, well, gosh, that's a lot of resources.
• 13:47
  Speaker 3: But honestly, once people kind of see that in a prospective client meeting they're usually on board.
• 13:53
  Speaker 3: I mean, it's really it is a differentiating thing.
• 13:57
  Speaker 3: I think over time the whole industry is going to go that direction.
• 14:01
  Speaker 3: It already is.
• 14:03
  Speaker 3: I feel like if you're not doing financial planning and you're just charging for investments, that's you know you better not be charging very much.
• 14:10
  Speaker 3: I mean, it's just the value proposition of the modern day advisor has evolved so much over the past five years, 10 years, 20 years.
• 14:18
  Speaker 3: Michael Kitzes does a great job of outlining that and I think he was on my show sometime in this year, you know, just talking about how AI drives that next evolution, and I kind of agree with a little bit of the view that he sort of implicitly implies that you know, it's not just going to be financial plan, it's going to be life coaching.
• 14:40
  Speaker 3: That we really get into over time, and so we've made some investments there with the training, with the type of people we hire.
• 14:47
  Speaker 3: You know, the ideal advisor used to be a number cruncher, whereas now the ideal advisor is more of a therapist like listening like a therapist to their clients totally different skill set.
• 14:57
  Speaker 3: And so we have some wildly talented people who've been at the firm their whole careers 20 plus years.
• 15:03
  Speaker 3: That are kudos to them, adapting to the new value proposition that we feel like has to be brought forward to clients, where it's not just asset allocation, it's not just retirement plan Monte Carlo analysis, it's not just tax projections, it's really doing some very deep life work with the clients.
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: I liked that you said that I'm going to.
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: There was a comment on one of my posts recently.
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: In the post that I made, or the tweet that I made, was something to the effect of the most crucial skill that you can have as a professional or as a financial planner or anybody, is being personable, being able to listen, practicing empathy and all of that.
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: And somebody commented right and they were like yeah, that's great.
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: I mean, if you put the same situation into a doctor, though, you wanted to be personable, but would you really care if your specialist surgeon is personable?
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: So what would you say to that comment?
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: Because now that you said that, I'm just curious, I'm going back to that comment and I'm curious to hear your take.
• 16:03
  Speaker 3: That's so interesting because, so I mentioned, my dad's a pediatrician and I feel like he had to be a therapist sometimes.
• 16:08
  Speaker 3: But you're right, your surgeon.
• 16:10
  Speaker 3: You know I'm mostly concerned if my surgeon's gonna do a good job with the procedure.
• 16:14
  Speaker 3: I don't like them to have good bedside manner and empathy.
• 16:18
  Speaker 3: But if I could see a success rate on paper that one surgeon was better than the other, it's very transactional.
• 16:25
  Speaker 3: So yes, I would agree with that.
• 16:26
  Speaker 3: An advisor isn't quite as transactional.
• 16:29
  Speaker 3: I mean, if your surgeon is something more than transactional, your body is falling apart.
• 16:33
  Speaker 3: Right, right, the other, yeah.
• 16:37
  Speaker 3: So, I think the other thing that I think of with our model.
• 16:40
  Speaker 3: So you guys have had so many different advisors on the podcast and there's no right one way to build a practice.
• 16:46
  Speaker 3: What I will say about PlainCorp you know, especially as we've grown, we have the scale to have a model where the lead advisor is sort of like your primary care physician and they have excellent bedside manner.
• 16:59
  Speaker 3: There's a lot of interactions with them and they're well versed in diagnosing and assessing issues and sometimes they can even treat and prescribe.
• 17:07
  Speaker 3: But sometimes they do need a specialist.
• 17:10
  Speaker 3: The primary way that I engage with our clients is as an investment specialist.
• 17:14
  Speaker 3: We have accountants who rotate around and just go in when there are very complex issues, even though our wealth managers can use the same accounting software that the big four accounting firms use and go through ridiculously detailed tax projections.
• 17:28
  Speaker 3: But still sometimes you want the specialist or someone who specializes in estate planning or you know healthcare plans when you are self-employed or unemployed or retire early.
• 17:39
  Speaker 3: All these specialists sort of serve that role, which then gets you back to that lead advisor, sort of kind of practicing that empathy, that listening, that personable, that relatable set of skills, whereas I can go ahead and just be the robot and help them.
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: You're the investment surgeon, for lack of a better way to say it.
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: Peter, I'm sorry, what did you say?
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: I said you're the investment surgeon, for lack of a better way to say it.
• 18:03
  Speaker 3: That's exactly right.
• 18:03
  Speaker 3: Yes, 100%.
• 18:05
  Speaker 3: You can bring up all those arguments, yep.
• 18:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but there's such a market for that too, right?
• 18:09
  Speaker 2: I mean, I feel like the term, you know, family office or whatever you know used to only be for the ultra, ultra high net worth individuals and with the fee only industry and the different fee structures and ways you can work with clients, you even see it with, like the chief, you know, financial officer, like a fractional position, right, and you see that there's a lot of these, like I mean, they're high net worth but you know they could be five, 10, 15 million.
• 18:39
  Speaker 2: They're not necessarily an old or an old school family office type of client.
• 18:45
  Speaker 2: You know they need, you know they crave these types of services and the markets.
• 18:48
  Speaker 2: Finally, you know, coming to meet kind of those needs and coming to the right fee structure, right, I feel, like you said, being able to quarterback these clients, introduce them to other professionals, things like that, Like what are some other high level bullet points that the modern advisors are doing for clients?
• 19:12
  Speaker 3: Well, I think you know to understand the modern advisor.
• 19:15
  Speaker 3: If I just take a moment to think back of how the advisor has evolved, I mean it used to just be that you would call your broker or your broker would call you and you buy individual stocks or individual bonds and that was really the only way you got market exposure and it was expensive.
• 19:31
  Speaker 3: You know, the spreads on these stocks and bonds were enormous and then eventually diversification became what brokerages were selling?
• 19:40
  Speaker 3: They were selling mutual funds.
• 19:41
  Speaker 3: So instead of you know this one stock that may or may not do well, this manager is the person who's being sold, this star manager who knows all the things they need.
• 19:51
  Speaker 3: You know they're going to know when to buy and sell at the right time.
• 19:54
  Speaker 3: They're going to know which companies to buy.
• 19:56
  Speaker 3: You know that became the thing that advisors started selling and then from there it became asset allocation.
• 20:02
  Speaker 3: So it's not just having star managers, it's having a diversified set of managers covering a diversified set of asset classes.
• 20:12
  Speaker 3: You know, by this point in time you the index fund exists, but it's not as prevalent as it was, as it really became in the 2000s and in the 2000s you just have this explosion of active versus passive conversation and overwhelming results, that traditional active management does not beat simple indexes.
• 20:34
  Speaker 3: Now what's become more nuanced over time about that is people say, well, okay, that does that mean indexing is the best option, full stop, and to which I would say it very well could be for a lot of people.
• 20:48
  Speaker 3: It doesn't have to be for everybody, and I would never talk anybody out of an index fund if that's what they want to use.
• 20:55
  Speaker 3: But you know, if you are, if you have a longer time horizon, perhaps it can be improved upon and be as successful for the same reasons, the index be active.
• 21:05
  Speaker 3: And at that point you have the robo advisors coming out and a lot of people were worried oh my gosh, are the robo advisors like a betterment or a wealth front or a personal capital or an L vest?
• 21:14
  Speaker 3: Are those going to displace advisors at all?
• 21:16
  Speaker 3: And no, they really didn't.
• 21:18
  Speaker 3: But they started serving a different marketplace where you know you have enough money that you ought to be investing, but you don't necessarily have enough money where a high quality advisor with a million dollar minimum can afford to take care of you.
• 21:32
  Speaker 3: I mean because they're in a business too and it's just not profitable to serve that person and that was such a huge, tremendous win for the retail investor having that option.
• 21:42
  Speaker 3: The next evolution, I feel like, is that the fact that people are doing financial planning and then, even from there, that you have people who will do it on an hourly or a retainer basis again a huge piece of the market that had never been addressed and was forced to choose from options that didn't necessarily fit for them.
• 22:00
  Speaker 3: So you know, there's been things that are, I feel, like investments have been commoditized quite a bit, where if you're paying somebody 1% management fee on a million dollars, maybe a quarter to 30, a quarter of a percent or 30 basis points is going to the investment management piece.
• 22:18
  Speaker 3: That's sort of the way that the market has priced it.
• 22:20
  Speaker 3: So where's all the other value coming from?
• 22:22
  Speaker 3: And that's where all the financial planning work comes.
• 22:26
  Speaker 3: And again, I think more and more advisors are doing it.
• 22:28
  Speaker 3: More are doing it well.
• 22:30
  Speaker 3: The piece that I think the modern advisor does is actually in a client meeting yesterday with a retired couple who has plenty of money and they ought to spend it Now.
• 22:44
  Speaker 3: It's easy sometimes to be like how could you not spend an extra $10,000 a month?
• 22:49
  Speaker 3: And look, if you gave me $10,000 a month to spend.
• 22:52
  Speaker 3: I'm pretty sure I could find a way to spend it for a while, but at a certain point be like this is all stuff I don't really need, and you get ingrained in that and so it becomes more digging into those deep values.
• 23:01
  Speaker 3: What are your core values?
• 23:04
  Speaker 3: What makes you happy?
• 23:07
  Speaker 3: When I use the word therapist very intentionally, I mean I think sometimes people think of therapist as purely like mental health, but it's also developing a sense of identity and a sense of wellness beyond money.
• 23:21
  Speaker 3: Because money you need money for everything, but money isn't everything and it's sort of like trying to align your money with the different types of wellness.
• 23:31
  Speaker 3: There is holistic wellness that comes from being part of spiritual groups, from where you work, from your friendships, from the clubs you belong to, from your hobbies, from your family I probably should have started with that one from your health.
• 23:47
  Speaker 3: There are all these areas in which you can touch on and I think it just takes some intentionality.
• 23:53
  Speaker 3: Most advisors are pretty sharp people.
• 23:56
  Speaker 3: They all got into it for different reasons.
• 23:58
  Speaker 3: It's just one more place where, because you are the person touching everything with a dollar sign and that you've designed a plan that's based on goals and desires, that you have this window and this trust built to go that layer deeper and focus on more than just financial wellness, but more of this holistic wellness.
• 24:18
  Speaker 3: It's what a lot of behavioral economists call behavioral finance 3.0.
• 24:22
  Speaker 3: Behavioral finance 1.0 is people are flawed in silly.
• 24:28
  Speaker 3: Behavioral finance 2.0 is okay.
• 24:31
  Speaker 3: It's okay to be human.
• 24:33
  Speaker 3: We are silly humans, but let's recognize that that's normal.
• 24:36
  Speaker 3: Behavioral finance 3.0, I think, is really taking to this holistic view, beyond the cognitive and emotional biases that I personally think are very fun to talk about and see and even help people with, but really aligning your wealth with your values in a totally different way.
• 24:56
  Speaker 2: Are you familiar with the Kinder Institute?
• 24:59
  Speaker 3: Yes, yes, yeah, of course.
• 25:00
  Speaker 3: They were early adopters of a view like this?
• 25:03
  Speaker 2: Yes, Very much so.
• 25:04
  Speaker 2: Well, we had Scott Francon recently and I know he teaches it quite a bit.
• 25:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I know, scott, he's great, yeah, yeah, but a phenomenal listener, and you can definitely hear it in the more experienced advisors.
• 25:16
  Speaker 2: You know, like when you're just getting started, there's always like this feeling to like memorize everything and then be able to like resuscitate it back to your client and like prove to them that you know what you're doing.
• 25:28
  Speaker 2: And there's like this like misalignment of like what the client really wants and what the client or what the advisor thinks the client wants.
• 25:37
  Speaker 2: And that's where you know the Kinder Institute and the life planning is so cool and just being able to mesh it all together.
• 25:44
  Speaker 2: So you know like what's your day to day look like in your role as CIO.
• 25:49
  Speaker 2: I mean you mentioned a little bit of client facing work.
• 25:51
  Speaker 2: I mean I'm sure you're doing some analysis.
• 25:53
  Speaker 2: Are you still doing your bullet point newsletters?
• 25:57
  Speaker 3: I don't do the bullet point newsletters.
• 25:59
  Speaker 3: Fortunately I have some help to do some of that work, but when I'm reading I still take notes.
• 26:05
  Speaker 3: I find that the podcast and my blog are the primary ways that I am taking ideas or answering people's questions or my own questions and clarifying my thought.
• 26:17
  Speaker 3: The clarity of thought is so important to getting something that's actually understandable and writing.
• 26:24
  Speaker 3: When I do a first draft of anything, it's a complete mess and I sort of knew that.
• 26:28
  Speaker 3: I remember showing our CEO a draft of something because I wanted his input on it.
• 26:33
  Speaker 3: It was something that sort of was representing Plaincorp in a way that was a little more so than just the investments, and he saw it and he was like, oh boy.
• 26:42
  Speaker 3: And I'm like, oh no, no, I'm not going to publish this.
• 26:44
  Speaker 3: So my drafts are just a total mess.
• 26:46
  Speaker 3: I basically just type everything that is in my head and then go back and clean it up and cut it and delete it, and what that leads to is really clear thoughts.
• 26:55
  Speaker 3: When someone asks me a question that I've written about or spoken about, the answer is clear, it's concise and it can be calibrated in level of complexity based on the audience.
• 27:06
  Speaker 3: So am I doing that work.
• 27:09
  Speaker 3: Yeah, that's constant.
• 27:10
  Speaker 3: You have to always be reading, always be writing to keep up some of the stuff that I'm doing.
• 27:15
  Speaker 3: But day to day I try not to have meetings in the morning so I can get some of that deep focus worked knocked out in the morning.
• 27:22
  Speaker 3: I do a lot of management stuff within the firm.
• 27:25
  Speaker 3: I act as the specialist in client meetings, the due diligence of funds and companies, asset managers.
• 27:33
  Speaker 3: I try to batch that as much as possible and right now we're recording this at the beginning of December.
• 27:40
  Speaker 3: I have all of our due diligence mapped out for all of 2024, like down to the week.
• 27:47
  Speaker 3: So it is very regimented to make sure that both we hit everything.
• 27:51
  Speaker 3: And then I don't have to think about it, because I think the more habit you build into your day, the more your brain is freed up to do some of the creative work, like the podcasting, like the writing, like the video and speaking, and so week to week it's a mix of those different things.
• 28:07
  Speaker 3: I think one of the things that I have enjoyed more over time as I've gotten older.
• 28:11
  Speaker 3: So I turned 39 next week and now for so long in my first firm I was the youngest person there for seven years, which is crazy and then I got to Planned Corp and I was still pretty young relatively speaking.
• 28:25
  Speaker 3: But now we're hiring people out of college all the time.
• 28:28
  Speaker 3: There's all sorts of people in their 20s and I find it very rewarding to mentor and work with people throughout the firm on what ever it is they're trying to achieve.
• 28:38
  Speaker 3: Because I've touched so many parts of the firm over time and because I was a lead advisor for so long, those are pretty rewarding parts of the day when those can get scheduled in as well.
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure.
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: I know that you said before we got on here, being a lead advisor wasn't like the perfect role for you.
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: They're not one that you enjoy as much as you do your current role, but you've had.
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: Obviously you have a lot of followers.
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: You have a lot of meetings that you've been in with advisors at the firm.
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: Now, for those that are listening, that are aspiring to get better and do better in their professional career as financial planners, what are some of the characteristic traits and things that you see advisors do that make them successful on a daily basis?
• 29:18
  Speaker 3: That's a really good question and I am going to note in case clients are listening.
• 29:22
  Speaker 3: I actually love client meetings.
• 29:24
  Speaker 3: I have kids and my parents talk about how much more joyful it is to be a grandparent than a parent, because you get to play with them for a little bit and then you're like done, you don't have to change diapers, you don't have to discipline them.
• 29:36
  Speaker 3: That's the way I feel about client meetings.
• 29:38
  Speaker 3: I get to go in for an hour.
• 29:40
  Speaker 3: The clients are excited on there, I get to help solve problems and then I walk away.
• 29:45
  Speaker 3: I'm not going to be answering emails or taking care of the blocking and tackling that needs to happen.
• 29:50
  Speaker 3: So I still love the client meetings.
• 29:53
  Speaker 3: But when I look at the advisors who are most successful, not just at our firm but everywhere the thing that really sticks out to me is that they are continual learners and that learning.
• 30:08
  Speaker 3: It can be narrow and very deep.
• 30:10
  Speaker 3: I think as much as you can be a generalist before you go deep.
• 30:15
  Speaker 3: That is helpful.
• 30:15
  Speaker 3: But also, continual learning typically correlates to somebody's attention to their own self-improvement, so the continual learners are doing it in different manners.
• 30:29
  Speaker 3: Podcasts are so helpful today.
• 30:32
  Speaker 3: So many people hated to read that.
• 30:34
  Speaker 3: Now just listen and honestly, I don't know about you guys.
• 30:37
  Speaker 3: I started the podcast because I realized nobody's really reading anymore.
• 30:40
  Speaker 3: They would rather just listen to us talk.
• 30:42
  Speaker 3: That's easier for people to digest.
• 30:44
  Speaker 3: There's still some people who learned through reading, but now you also have YouTube, so people who need the visual are stimulated.
• 30:52
  Speaker 3: But those continual learners are doing those things.
• 30:54
  Speaker 3: They are networking and getting mentors both inside the firm and outside the firm.
• 31:00
  Speaker 3: I can't tell you how important it was to my career and just to my overall development as a human being that I had three mentors that did not work at my firm for the first, say, 10 years of my career.
• 31:13
  Speaker 3: Those people were immensely helpful in different situations.
• 31:16
  Speaker 3: And then I had other people where, because of networking, maybe they weren't, it wasn't as formal of a mentorship relationship, but I did at least learn things about people so that when I would approach a situation that I didn't really feel comfortable with what was the right way to approach it or how to answer something or deal with a conflict then I at least had a group of people to go to and talk to them about it and get that perspective.
• 31:41
  Speaker 3: These are all different examples of that continual learning that I think advisors who are committed to ultimately go on to just be absolutely amazing, amazing people to work with.
• 31:54
  Speaker 2: Yeah, those are all great points.
• 31:56
  Speaker 2: So where's Peter going from here?
• 31:58
  Speaker 2: I mean I know you love mentorship and, as your podcast continues to grow, I mean you're going to take on more speaking gigs, or kind of.
• 32:06
  Speaker 2: What's the future look like in the next five to 10 years for you?
• 32:11
  Speaker 3: Well, that's a great question as well.
• 32:13
  Speaker 3: So my kids are 10 and 6, so I have, let's say, 12 more years of kids in the house.
• 32:20
  Speaker 3: So I definitely want to make sure that my career at the early stages was just like work, work, work, work, work, like work as hard as you can and work harder, whereas I feel like in the last year or two, you know, I've had the opportunity and maybe it was the pandemic where we are all scrunched into our house but just taking the opportunity to be like I really want to be present with my family in the next 10 years.
• 32:44
  Speaker 3: So that is actually guiding the amount of work and the types of projects I take on.
• 32:49
  Speaker 3: But I would say that this year I started doing a lot more public speaking, something that I've always loved, but you know, those are hard things to book.
• 32:57
  Speaker 3: One of the great things about a podcast if you're an advisor listening, you're always saying, like, man, I wish I could get a speaking gig.
• 33:03
  Speaker 3: Well, like, imagine that a thousand people are in your.
• 33:06
  Speaker 3: You know you're talking to a thousand people, hundreds of people, even if you only have 20 people listening to your podcast.
• 33:11
  Speaker 3: That is a weekly speaking engagement right there for you, no work required except the actual planning and speaking.
• 33:18
  Speaker 3: So I have done a lot more speaking in the past year, a lot more people inviting me to do the podcast live, which is super cool.
• 33:27
  Speaker 3: I will be launching a YouTube channel.
• 33:30
  Speaker 3: That's not true.
• 33:31
  Speaker 3: There already is a YouTube channel launched.
• 33:33
  Speaker 3: It's just Peter Lazaroff and it's all of my guest interviews from the podcast, but I have a lot of solo videos that I'm going to start releasing in late January, early February, so there'll be individual videos coming out every week.
• 33:45
  Speaker 3: That's probably the biggest new thing, and there is a second book concept in the works.
• 33:51
  Speaker 3: It's more a matter of figuring out when do I actually have time to write it, like having a child.
• 33:56
  Speaker 3: There's never like a good time, yeah right, but it's more like when is a bad time, like definitively.
• 34:03
  Speaker 3: So trying to sort that out, I have, you know, something in line with the publisher.
• 34:07
  Speaker 3: I'm very excited about it.
• 34:08
  Speaker 3: I just need to figure out when I can dedicate a couple months to knocking it out along with doing all this other stuff.
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: I love it, man.
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: It's awesome.
• 34:16
  Speaker 1: It's very clear that you have a brilliant mind and some great thoughts and obviously have done some amazing things, so appreciate you joining us.
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: I know you mentioned the YouTube, the books coming out.
• 34:25
  Speaker 1: Where else can people follow along with what's going on with you, peter?
• 34:29
  Speaker 3: Anything that's a media platform, social media platform of any kind.
• 34:33
  Speaker 3: It's at Peter Lazaroff Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube.
• 34:37
  Speaker 3: It might be at P Lazaroff, but I think I'm the only Peter Lazaroff posting on YouTube.
• 34:42
  Speaker 3: So if you, if you search that, you're going to do well and and would love to have people join in on listening to the longterm investor, so you can go to the longterminvestorcom, you can see all the past episodes or just when you're rating this episode so well in your podcast app for our lovely hosts here, you can go ahead and then search mine as well, subscribe and you'll catch me every week.
• 35:03
  Speaker 2: Awesome, I love it.
• 35:03
  Speaker 2: Peter Lazaroff yeah, peter Lazaroff, the modern advisor himself.
• 35:09
  Speaker 2: Thank you so much for coming on, man.
• 35:11
  Speaker 2: I had a great conversation and look forward to catching you soon.
• 35:15
  Speaker 3: Brock Peter.
• 35:16
  Speaker 3: Thanks so much.
• 35:16
  Speaker 3: I appreciate your guys time.
• 35:17
  Speaker 3: Thanks, man yeah.