Latest / Only Fee-Only / #92 - From Corporate to Independent: Brent Gargano’s Entrepreneurial Leap

Transcript

#92 - From Corporate to Independent: Brent Gargano’s Entrepreneurial Leap · Only Fee-Only

• 0:05
  Speaker 1: What's up everybody.
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: Welcome back to the only feeling podcast.
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: Happy to be here still doing it and approaching 100 episodes, which is crazy.
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: I was recently talking to somebody actually earlier this morning and they said to me I really liked the podcast.
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: I listened to most all of them over the course of the last couple of years and that feels awesome, so I'm glad you guys get something from this.
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: We learn a ton and absolutely love working with the advisors that we get to work with.
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: In this episode we talked to Brent Gargano, who is based out of Cincinnati, ohio.
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: He is the founder of Infinite Wealth Planning, but before that he was at Fidelity for about six and a half years and that was one of my favorite parts of this conversation, where he talks about those tens of thousands of calls that really impacted the way that he looked at the industry and how he's able to help people and really just put him through all these different situations and helped him grow as a planner and has brought him to where he is today.
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: He is also an adjunct professor of finance at the University of Cincinnati, so I am going to let Peter take it over from here.
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: This is Brent Gargano on the Only Fee Only podcast.
• 1:38
  Speaker 2: What's up everyone?
• 1:39
  Speaker 2: Welcome to another episode of the Only Fee Only podcast.
• 1:42
  Speaker 2: I'm Peter Travalo.
• 1:44
  Speaker 2: I'm here with my co-host, brock Buckles.
• 1:46
  Speaker 2: How's it going today, brock?
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: It's great to be here with you this morning, Peter.
• 1:50
  Speaker 2: Love it, man, love it.
• 1:51
  Speaker 2: I know you're calling in from new territory.
• 1:54
  Speaker 2: Ann Arbor Up in Michigan, yep, and I am down here in Florida today, but we're very excited to have Brent Gargano on from Cincinnati, ohio.
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: Brent, welcome to the show.
• 2:04
  Speaker 2: Thanks for having me Excited to be here, you bet, man.
• 2:08
  Speaker 2: So for those who don't know who you are, you want to give a little background of who Brent is and what you're doing over at Infinite Wealth Planning Sure.
• 2:16
  Speaker 3: Yeah, so I'm the founder of Infinite Wealth Planning.
• 2:19
  Speaker 3: The business we're structured as an independent advisor, we are fee only and I, I work with uh, you know families across the United States, helping them not only make decisions but, you know, build a better relationship with the way that they handle their money and, and you know, more or less learn to be wealthy.
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that's awesome man.
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: So how did you I mean, walk it, take us back to you know the early interest, or like how you got interested in potentially even doing financial planning?
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: I know that when I got into the industry it was kind of an accident that started as an internship, but what was that like for you?
• 2:57
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 2:58
  Speaker 3: So I kind of what I tell people a lot of times is that I think I've always been kind of a financial planner.
• 3:06
  Speaker 3: It just took me a while to figure that out.
• 3:09
  Speaker 3: So if I take you kind of all the way back to my origins, when I was a kid, I grew up in Charlotte, north Carolina.
• 3:15
  Speaker 3: My dad was a banker.
• 3:16
  Speaker 3: Charlotte's a big banking town, so we grew up in a golf course neighborhood in Charlotte and my mom stayed home and all this stuff golf course neighborhood in Charlotte and you know, my mom stayed home and all this stuff.
• 3:28
  Speaker 3: Well, when 2004 came along, my dad got your bank got restructured and so my dad moved us all up to Cincinnati and we we were here for a year or two and then my parents split up.
• 3:38
  Speaker 3: So I went from, you know, living down in Charlotte, parents together.
• 3:42
  Speaker 3: My dad was a banking exec, my dad moved to Atlanta and my mom was now a single mom and if you follow the timeline, pretty soon after was 2008.
• 3:54
  Speaker 3: So what happened was I watched my mom and I was the oldest child go through a divorce child, you know, go through a divorce, lose a lot of the things that represented her, you know meaning in life and then had the market go down 60% and that that cut her wealth in half again.
• 4:14
  Speaker 3: And I remember going through that and so, and at the time she hired an investment advisor and said, you know, it's important.
• 4:19
  Speaker 3: She even told me you know it's important to stay invested.
• 4:21
  Speaker 3: My first lesson on tax loss harvesting was 2008, 2009, when all that was going on.
• 4:27
  Speaker 3: So to the next step.
• 4:31
  Speaker 3: In high school I ended up with a class where I was supposed to do a science project and, lo and behold, my science project won the University of Cincinnati Science Fair.
• 4:38
  Speaker 3: And so 17, 18-year-old Brent was thinking gosh, I want a science fair, like I should probably do science, you know, it seems like a fit.
• 4:47
  Speaker 3: So I went to UC and I signed up as a biology major.
• 4:52
  Speaker 3: Within the first couple of years I was actually valeting.
• 4:58
  Speaker 3: I parked cars at the local mall, so I was valeting for work and I had some side money that I made through the tips that I was making local mall.
• 5:04
  Speaker 3: So I was valeting for work and I had some side money that I made through the tips that I was making.
• 5:07
  Speaker 3: And I opened a TD Ameritrade brokerage account and I started buying a couple of individual stocks.
• 5:11
  Speaker 3: And I remember sitting in my inorganic chemistry class looking down at my CNBC app, thinking like what am I doing in class?
• 5:18
  Speaker 3: I'm so much more interested in this other stuff.
• 5:21
  Speaker 3: This is where I spent my free time, basically when I was in college.
• 5:24
  Speaker 3: So I went to my advisor and looked at the math on, you know finance, or you know or biology, chemistry, whatever and it was to be a finance major.
• 5:35
  Speaker 3: It was like an extra two years of school.
• 5:36
  Speaker 3: You know a bunch of money that you have to spend, plus you're not making money working.
• 5:40
  Speaker 3: So I just decided that was an expensive proposition.
• 5:44
  Speaker 3: So I signed up for a chemistry degree and graduated with a chemistry degree.
• 5:48
  Speaker 3: So after I graduated I kind of knew I wanted to get into financial planning.
• 5:53
  Speaker 3: Right, like that was okay.
• 5:55
  Speaker 3: I like investing how do I take a chemistry degree?
• 5:58
  Speaker 3: And like translate that to finance?
• 6:01
  Speaker 3: And Cincinnati, where I live, we've got a Fidelity call center here, right.
• 6:06
  Speaker 3: And so I actually ended up with a job at Fidelity.
• 6:11
  Speaker 3: Just basically resetting passwords was how it started.
• 6:13
  Speaker 3: It was like they start everybody at the lowest rung of the ladder and then they kind of bucket you from there.
• 6:19
  Speaker 3: And so I started there.
• 6:23
  Speaker 3: But pretty quickly met a good friend of mine.
• 6:26
  Speaker 3: His name is Andrew Lippert.
• 6:27
  Speaker 3: We lived together for a couple of years.
• 6:29
  Speaker 3: He's a couple of years older, he already had his CFP, he was already a certified financial situations and together we got involved in the Financial Planning Association.
• 6:38
  Speaker 3: We ended up getting involved in their young person, their next-gen group.
• 6:52
  Speaker 3: He brought me into kind of the Michael Kitsis ecosystem, which was great and really helped me learn a lot, anyway.
• 7:04
  Speaker 3: So that's the longer story, but that's basically that evolved from Fidelity, then to UBS and then from UBS to launching my own practice a couple of years ago.
• 7:14
  Speaker 2: So yeah, yeah, that's a great kind of background.
• 7:17
  Speaker 2: I mean I feel like most people who get in this industry right, either you can go like insurance broker dealer sales route right, eat what you kill, and then people finally they'll open up and listen to Kitsis, right.
• 7:32
  Speaker 2: Or there's the other side where you start kind of on the admin side right and work your way up.
• 7:37
  Speaker 2: I mean we've seen very successful advisors come from you know Fidelity just like you, even Fisher Investments or Charles Schwab.
• 7:45
  Speaker 2: But like, looking back, like I mean, what were some of those main like skills that you learned at the call center?
• 7:51
  Speaker 2: Right, because it's pretty redundant, people like they might look at the job is like, oh well, it's service.
• 7:56
  Speaker 2: But like what are some of the main like foundational skills that you learned there that, like you can still like attribute to your success today?
• 8:08
  Speaker 3: Well, I'll say that for me, specifically at Fidelity, like I mentioned, they bucket you fairly quickly.
• 8:11
  Speaker 3: So as soon as I got in there I still remember our new hire, first training they gave us a piece of paper that had a bunch of company names on it and they were blanks next to it and they said write the symbols to all the stock symbols, to all the company names.
• 8:25
  Speaker 3: And you know it was supposed to be a fun activity, but I think they're also trying to gauge like who uh knows what.
• 8:32
  Speaker 3: And so I remember, um, like going through those answers and and and getting a lot of them.
• 8:39
  Speaker 3: So they basically, within the first three months of being at Fidelity I was taking my Series 7.
• 8:45
  Speaker 3: I actually signed up for my CFP and I was starting to kind of graduate into like planning roles.
• 8:53
  Speaker 3: So you know, service was the first couple of months, then transition to planning.
• 8:58
  Speaker 3: What I tell people about Fidelity was the best part about Fidelity is like you don't you know, in some places where you start in this industry, the advice you might get might sound something like, hey, if you don't have appointments, you can't close business.
• 9:12
  Speaker 3: So what you know is great, but like you need to get appointments set.
• 9:17
  Speaker 3: At Fidelity you have as many inbound phone calls as you can possibly handle coming your way, and so to me that was that like really led to maybe a different way of thinking, which was how can I get the person on the other end of the phone thinking a little bit more deeply about something that they hadn't thought about in a certain way before, or maybe say something they weren't really like, kind of threw them off and then open that conversation and so over the course of the I mean, if you do the math, in the seven years roughly I was at Fidelity I think I talked to something like 30 to 35,000 people, right.
• 9:54
  Speaker 3: So you have, I mean, think about, there are advisors that go their entire career that don't talk to 35,000 people, right, right.
• 10:03
  Speaker 3: So when you have the chance to see 35,000 individual situations and practice kind of getting through those and then get to ask questions and go back and research through, like I said, kitsis or other advisors and things and try to solve problems, there's a level of expertise that you develop that you kind of look back at the end and you go, holy crap, how did I learn all of this?
• 10:24
  Speaker 3: And so today I actually teach at the University of Cincinnati.
• 10:29
  Speaker 3: I teach one of their and you know so.
• 10:29
  Speaker 3: So today I actually teach at the university of Cincinnati.
• 10:29
  Speaker 3: I teach one of their their finance capstone classes, and it is funny because you know a lot of these students.
• 10:35
  Speaker 3: They almost know like when I came out of college I didn't know much of anything, um, about finding I mean, I bought stocks and stuff, but really I didn't understand the financial planning landscape these students are graduating with like a financial planning focus.
• 10:49
  Speaker 3: They all want to go to like RIAs and all these.
• 10:51
  Speaker 3: You know what sounds like really great places to start.
• 10:55
  Speaker 3: But you know there is something to being able to kind of take yourself down at the beginning and get that ground level job where you kind of grind it out.
• 11:04
  Speaker 3: There's so much good experience that you take away from that, be that conversational skills, situations that you see.
• 11:12
  Speaker 3: So, to answer your question, peter, I really think fidelity or a job like that for me was really key to my success early on, because I found success through the learning that I did over that time.
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: Well, the sample size, too, is one of my favorite things.
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: Like that you get to talk to, right.
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: You kind of went to hard knocks university.
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: I mean, when you're talking to 30, 35,000 people, you learn a lot, right.
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: My favorite thing is that you filled out the stock sheet.
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: You're like I know all of these are like all right, put Brent in the up and coming bucket.
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: This guy is going to go somewhere.
• 11:49
  Speaker 3: That's like the only thing that I could have done.
• 11:51
  Speaker 3: All I knew was the different stocks that I traded, and I watched my stock on the app all day, so it's just the best place to start.
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: All the CNBC during chemistry class really came into play when you were filling that thing out.
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: That's cool, man.
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: No-transcript, you know, going to UBS but then starting your own business, so that's huge.
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: So a lot of advisors that listen to the podcast are kind of coming from places like that and or are just getting ready to start.
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: So, going from those prior experiences to what you're doing now, what do you feel like are some of the things that you've learned just right off the bat about being a business owner?
• 12:58
  Speaker 3: When I started the business, you're taking this big leap and they say that the hardest moment is like right before you jump right.
• 13:05
  Speaker 3: So you're getting anxious about it.
• 13:07
  Speaker 3: And to give you a little bit more insight on my situation, so my wife and I we have two children.
• 13:13
  Speaker 3: They're two and four now.
• 13:15
  Speaker 3: At the time, you know, they were like less than a year old and two and my wife was a teacher.
• 13:22
  Speaker 3: We're paying for daycare and all of this.
• 13:24
  Speaker 3: The economics didn't make a ton of sense.
• 13:25
  Speaker 3: So at the same time as I started the business, she quit her job.
• 13:27
  Speaker 3: And all of this, the economics didn't make a ton of sense.
• 13:28
  Speaker 3: So at the same time as I started the business, she quit her job.
• 13:30
  Speaker 3: And, you know, there's the obvious fear of like, what am I going to do without a paycheck?
• 13:33
  Speaker 3: And we had saved up some savings, which was good.
• 13:37
  Speaker 3: So you know, I think one of the things that young people underappreciate is the value of like, having liquidity.
• 13:43
  Speaker 3: You know, and that was really meaningful in that moment.
• 13:46
  Speaker 3: You know, having a big brokerage account, not having maxed out every 401k plan for the first seven years of my career and having access to some of that money was really meaningful.
• 13:55
  Speaker 3: But my assumption at the beginning was going to be that the hard part about the business was like actually getting the clients was kind of right at the beginning, because you need those initial clients to be able to kind of start repping you and understand what you do and how you do it and see the value you provide.
• 14:14
  Speaker 3: But I quickly learned, like, if you can see what's behind me, like I'm at my house.
• 14:19
  Speaker 3: You know my wife and my two kids are hanging out over here.
• 14:21
  Speaker 3: Most of my clients are not in Cincinnati Ohio, so they meet with me over Zoom and trying to balance, you know, family life with two little children.
• 14:33
  Speaker 3: At the same time as you're starting this business, you start to realize that the challenge of the business isn't like getting the clients, which is what your fear is when you're starting.
• 14:41
  Speaker 3: It's kind of like balancing and operating everything in a way that, like doesn't drive everybody in your life crazy and, you know, keeps everybody in a good place.
• 14:50
  Speaker 3: So as we've you know, as I've run the business and as I've become, I'll say, more profitable and had more money to reinvest, you know I've kind of some of the creature comforts of our life like that's where I found reinvestment, because I'm trying to make sure she's happy and that everything at home is, you know, well run, because you know, if I can have my head clear, the business, you know, really takes care of itself at a certain point, you know, yeah.
• 15:18
  Speaker 2: Yeah, those are great points.
• 15:20
  Speaker 2: I mean balance definitely is key and I mean I love how you're always family first, everything that you've just said.
• 15:26
  Speaker 2: You know, like, how has client acquisition been?
• 15:28
  Speaker 2: I mean you're always family first.
• 15:29
  Speaker 2: Everything that you've just said.
• 15:29
  Speaker 2: You know, like, how has client acquisition been?
• 15:30
  Speaker 2: I mean you said you know there's no income coming in, you left your job, your wife left your job, like kind of what was the initial marketing plan?
• 15:38
  Speaker 2: Did you have, you know, people lined up before you made the jump?
• 15:41
  Speaker 2: Like what was your initial strategy there?
• 15:43
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I had a handful of founding clients.
• 15:47
  Speaker 3: Like I think that's kind of one of the things that's really important when you do start a practice is kind of know where, like, your first couple of people are going to be from, because like having zero in income versus like $2,000 or $3,000 of income makes a world of difference right at the beginning.
• 16:03
  Speaker 3: So, like I said, having liquidity and then having a couple of founding clients was was meaningful.
• 16:10
  Speaker 3: I remember a very specific moment where I was working with one of my like kind of original clients and we were talking about and really I have a deep relationship with some of these people.
• 16:20
  Speaker 3: I mean, some of these people were kind of involved in the thinking of this from from early on and I, I I like to kind of pull back the curtain a little bit and get their input on some of this from early on, and I like to kind of pull back the curtain a little bit and get their input on some of this.
• 16:30
  Speaker 3: And so I asked him what do you think?
• 16:34
  Speaker 3: And I was sharing some of my ideas about how to market with him and he said look, brett, if you just take care of me and do a really good job for me, I'm going to make sure that you're in a good place.
• 16:47
  Speaker 3: And that moment really set a good tone in my head for, like, what is my mission here?
• 16:54
  Speaker 3: Is it to acquire more clients that don't know me already, or is it to really deliver better value, and more deeply, for the clients that I already have?
• 17:02
  Speaker 3: And what I found was that when I kind of turned inwards and invested in that that they you know really, then they kind of talked to people about me and all of a sudden I was getting put on an email here or you know a text there and you know, slowly but surely, kind of you know, one client leads to two clients leads to five or six clients, you know Yep.
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: Man that is like I don't know if anybody's I mean obviously taking care of clients, but I think that is such a good point, because so many people get focused on how many people can I get on the books, right?
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: And then what they find is, oh, this worked better than I thought it was, but now two, three, four, five years down the road, the people that I was originally working with aren't necessarily the people that I should be working with now, right.
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: So having some intentionality and long standing relationships behind that, I think is huge, because I can't tell you how many times we've had conversations with advisors Like I've got probably 10 people right now that, like you know, they just need to be doing the same thing every year, and so working with clients that actually challenge you to be a better planner as well, I think is is huge, man.
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: So developing that relationship or kind of, when you got more in depth around that relationship, how long did it take to kind of I don't know if you want to call it prove yourself, or you know what was there like a turning point where he was like oh, I mean, brent, this is, this is unbelievable and you know, I think the question kind of around the question you're asking is like how do you deliver value as an advisor and what does that value actually look like?
• 19:15
  Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, I think the impression that a lot of I'll say like potential clients have is that, like an investment advisor gets measured by their like investment returns, is that like an investment advisor gets measured by their like investment returns?
• 19:31
  Speaker 3: And while I don't want to like minimize the importance of like having inline returns and managing a proper portfolio, there's so much more to what once like, when you start a relationship with somebody as a potential client, it's normally it's driven by some kind of logical issue.
• 19:45
  Speaker 3: Whether it be taxes or investments, it's some kind, some kind of logical issue that starts.
• 19:47
  Speaker 3: Whether it be taxes or investments, it's some kind of like stated logic driven need.
• 19:52
  Speaker 3: As you work with somebody like to me, a hallmark, the hallmark of me doing a good job, is I get them asking like more meaningful questions that they might not have asked otherwise otherwise.
• 20:12
  Speaker 3: So like, for example, you know you might have a young person that has a pretty good amount of income and has a pretty good amount of savings in their 30s, and sometimes there are things like, for example, building houses right Houses is a big one for young people right now.
• 20:24
  Speaker 3: Right, there's millennials are kind of in the middle of these household formation years and we're getting to higher income years and so the question of like, how much house can I afford?
• 20:32
  Speaker 3: Like, what value do you put on helping somebody confidently buy their $2 million house and not be worried about running out of money because of it right and be able to have that?
• 20:41
  Speaker 3: So I think there's not like one thing that you can totally point to that just turns the relationship.
• 20:47
  Speaker 3: But I think, over time, where you prove yourself as the advisor is like how you help that person open up their mind and develop a comfort with, like, how they're handling their money.
• 20:58
  Speaker 3: And they start asking the less logical questions, right?
• 21:02
  Speaker 3: So it's hard.
• 21:03
  Speaker 3: It's hard to like touch exactly when that moment happens and you can't control what the impetus for it is going to be.
• 21:08
  Speaker 3: I think the job of the advisor, you know, is to listen in those conversations and help ask questions so that you can and and and then use the planning to help kind of quantify, like can you, you know, why can't you?
• 21:20
  Speaker 3: Yeah, right yeah.
• 21:23
  Speaker 2: so like what are some examples that you've worked through recently with clients where you know there's definitely like on paper this is what you should do, but you know what's life, and like what are your emotions and like what do you want to do on that side?
• 21:36
  Speaker 2: Like what are some examples recently that you've gone?
• 21:38
  Speaker 3: through, particularly like the wealthy subset of clients.
• 21:46
  Speaker 3: There there's almost this like level of guilt that people house around like having the money Right and so like, for example, you know, I have a client where they wanted to buy a car.
• 22:01
  Speaker 3: They wanted a nice like electric car.
• 22:04
  Speaker 3: It was it's nice car and they called me and asked you know, can we buy it?
• 22:08
  Speaker 3: And at this point we've done enough planning to where they know they can buy it and I, kind of think, realize that they know they can buy it.
• 22:17
  Speaker 3: So the question I asked is like you know why not?
• 22:21
  Speaker 3: And it turns out that the client was like worried about the perception of like what other people would think Like hey'm, if I'm part of the business and I'm management in the business, like what are the employees gonna think when they roll up in this nice car, you know?
• 22:37
  Speaker 3: And there was this level of like guilt around that.
• 22:41
  Speaker 3: And I'll say that, uh, the client did end up buying the car and they're happy they bought it yeah.
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: Well, what was your?
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: What was your advice to them?
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: I mean, like what, like what did you?
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: Was it?
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: You know you've worked hard, cause obviously we talk about a lot Sometimes.
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: The role of financial planner is almost like a therapist in a way too, cause people bounce off like you have to get into the feelings of it as well.
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: Right, it's not all just about the numbers.
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: So how did you, how did you walk them through that?
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: Or did just by kind of being able to bounce that off of you, they came to their own conclusion.
• 23:11
  Speaker 3: So going back to Fidelity for a second, fidelity does a really good job of training you on when you ask, helping people self-realize is really, really meaningful and the best way to get there is to ask good, open-ended questions is to ask good open-ended questions.
• 23:27
  Speaker 3: So, like when I'm teaching my class, one of the things I try to teach the students is like any yes or no question can always be asked as an open-ended question.
• 23:35
  Speaker 3: Okay, like just start with, tell me about, or you just start it some way that will finish it in a way that's not a yes or no answer.
• 23:41
  Speaker 3: And so in that client situation I can't recall it, but I think that more or less went like hey, do you think that's really like your concern or do you think that's really something they're concerned about?
• 23:53
  Speaker 3: You know, and what you know you think is really, and basically through it, the client kind of acknowledged like no, I don't think they really care you know it's really something that I'm in my head about and maybe I should just buy the car.
• 24:04
  Speaker 3: So you know and and and.
• 24:06
  Speaker 3: The car is just one example.
• 24:08
  Speaker 3: I mean I've got other examples around houses and having kids and things like that.
• 24:13
  Speaker 3: I mean these are all big life decisions.
• 24:16
  Speaker 3: But I think, like when I, when I work with, when I taught my class, one of the first financial planning case studies I gave them was like a 50 year old couple that was over saving and underspending.
• 24:27
  Speaker 3: I gave them was like a 50 year old couple that was over saving and underspending and I asked them how do you think you might get this client to start spending their money?
• 24:37
  Speaker 3: And when we ran their financial plan, I think the client died with like $140 million I think there's something great about just asking, like, how do you feel about dying with that much money?
• 24:44
  Speaker 3: And when you get the inevitable answer, like I don't really want to die with that, you know okay, how do we solve for not dying with that much money.
• 24:50
  Speaker 3: Now, it's not my job to tell you what you should do to solve for that.
• 24:55
  Speaker 3: Like I don't care.
• 24:56
  Speaker 3: It's your job to tell me what levers are most valuable to you.
• 24:59
  Speaker 3: But, like you know, if you're on track to have that much money and you don't want to have that much money, maybe we should do something about it.
• 25:08
  Speaker 2: Yeah, Right, right, exactly.
• 25:09
  Speaker 3: What do?
• 25:09
  Speaker 2: you think, like brings up that misalignment, sometimes Cause clients.
• 25:13
  Speaker 2: You know they might say one thing, but their actions are another.
• 25:16
  Speaker 2: Right, like, is it like a childhood memory?
• 25:19
  Speaker 2: Or like growing up, like being poor, and they're like scared to spend?
• 25:22
  Speaker 2: Right, it's a scarcity thing, like you know.
• 25:25
  Speaker 2: Like what do you think it is?
• 25:27
  Speaker 3: With the case study that I brought up.
• 25:29
  Speaker 3: I will tell you because it was it's all fictional scenario.
• 25:31
  Speaker 3: But in the case study the father, this couple, it was the husband that was like kind of the saver and didn't like the spending and all of that.
• 25:43
  Speaker 3: His dad in the case study had like basically gambled away the family money and and left his mom, you know, without anything at the end of her life, and so I think you know that's just one example, but I think a lot of times when people over save it's, it's rooted in fear, right, and I think part of the advisor's job is to acknowledge that it's okay that people are.
• 26:10
  Speaker 3: You don't want to make somebody feel bad for being nervous about running out of money.
• 26:17
  Speaker 3: It's a logical fear.
• 26:19
  Speaker 3: But you also want to introduce some real logic to assess is this fear really based in reality or is this just you in your head?
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah, no, that's a good point, man.
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: So let's get back to your business.
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: Obviously, this is one of my favorite questions to ask, because everybody has a different answer.
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: We obviously have some times where there are certain answers that come up more than others.
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: But Michael Kitsis does a talk where he talks about I think we were actually in the audience one of the times they did the talk about there's different kind of ways and directions that you can go with your planning or with your business.
• 26:54
  Speaker 1: First one is stay solopreneur.
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: Maybe you hire a VA or an assistant at some point, but he says to maximize money, keep most of your time.
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: That's kind of the route that you want to go.
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: Second one is boutique.
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: Maybe you want to have six to 15 employees at some point, serve a decent amount of households, but you're not trying to go crazy.
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: And then the third one is the enterprise level.
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: So Carson, wealth, root Planning, james Caddell, these people that are literally going to be the massive RIAs of the world, and everybody has a different answer for a different reason.
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: But what would yours be?
• 27:34
  Speaker 3: When I first started in this profession, when I was at Fidelity, the picture I had in my head of what I was doing when I was a 50-year-old is being able to wake up in the morning, check out what's going on in the world.
• 27:47
  Speaker 3: Kind of get it.
• 27:48
  Speaker 3: Get it up.
• 27:49
  Speaker 3: They talk to people that I really care about right Clients that I enjoy working with, that I like to talk, to get on the phone and talk with them, help them make strategic decisions in their life, be a thought partner with them and have what we call in the industry a lifestyle practice.
• 28:03
  Speaker 3: So when I launched my business, that was totally the direction that I was like going in and that I was trying to go in, and it's still.
• 28:11
  Speaker 3: I'll say that where I'm at today, I'm, I'm.
• 28:14
  Speaker 3: I still really like the idea of being there.
• 28:17
  Speaker 3: What's hard is that kind of, as I mentioned at the beginning, when you start the business you think the hardest things would be getting new clients, and as you operate the business, you realize that, like, finding new clients is kind of incidental to what you're doing, and so the hard part is like how do you?
• 28:33
  Speaker 3: You know you only have so much time and energy.
• 28:36
  Speaker 3: So if you want to run a solopreneur lifestyle practice, at a certain point you have to manage capacity.
• 28:42
  Speaker 3: And how do you do that?
• 28:44
  Speaker 3: And you know, especially when you you start to amplify your voice through things like podcasts.
• 28:48
  Speaker 3: And you know, especially when you you start to amplify your voice through things like podcasts and you know, all of a sudden it's maybe a little bigger than you kind of anticipated and you've got to start thinking about, okay, how do I solve for this?
• 29:00
  Speaker 3: Right?
• 29:01
  Speaker 3: And you know those will be questions.
• 29:05
  Speaker 3: I think Michael Kitsis and his thing like the, the advisor ensemble, right, you have the elite advisor, a paraplanner and then and then a service person I think can service something like 120 to 150 clients is kind of his rough, rough math and I've got a little while till I get there.
• 29:21
  Speaker 3: But I'm in my young thirties, you know early thirties, I mean, you know you could be talking about 40 years and I could probably add you know a client every six months and get to that number Right, right, yeah, so to answer your question, I think that's something that over the next three to five years, like I've got to kind of look within and figure out like, how do you map that out and what does that really look like?
• 29:45
  Speaker 3: I do want to preserve, at the end of the day, you know, that lifestyle practice element, like I talked about at the beginning.
• 29:54
  Speaker 3: But get into these podcasts and whatnot it is, you know you do realize that you can make a larger impact by getting these things out to more than, let's say, 50 or a hundred people that are your client base and talk to you know, maybe, maybe thousands, you know, yeah so professionally.
• 30:13
  Speaker 2: Um I know you mentioned early on you were involved in fpa.
• 30:17
  Speaker 2: Um you're an adjunct professor at university of cincinnati.
• 30:21
  Speaker 2: Um you're a member of xypn right I, I am not xypn, although I.
• 30:28
  Speaker 3: I looked at x, N and kind of I mean I can talk about how the business got set up if that would be helpful, but I, as opposed to so with X, Y, P, N.
• 30:39
  Speaker 3: You know, one of the good things or bad things is kind of depends on how you look at it.
• 30:44
  Speaker 3: When I set up my business I wanted autonomy.
• 30:48
  Speaker 3: I didn't want somebody else to tell me how to run it and what have you?
• 30:50
  Speaker 3: The most obvious answer to that seemed like write your own ADV, do your own registration.
• 30:57
  Speaker 3: Through the process, as I was networking with people, I found basically an RIA that their business model was to kind of bring you onto their ADV but let you run your own branding and run your own practice.
• 31:14
  Speaker 3: So the benefit of that as opposed to like like, the downside of that as opposed to XY, is like.
• 31:20
  Speaker 3: Their compliance manual applies to me right, you know, the good side is they have a lot of assets under management.
• 31:29
  Speaker 3: They, like I, get preferential treatment at Schwab.
• 31:33
  Speaker 3: My my trade connections are easier to do because I have enough money with Schwab for them to allow me certain things.
• 31:40
  Speaker 3: And I was able to set up the business in two days.
• 31:44
  Speaker 3: I mean, once I was ready to go, it took two days to turn on, as opposed to three to five months.
• 31:48
  Speaker 3: And you guys asked me a lot about client acquisition.
• 31:50
  Speaker 3: I think one of the one of the hardest things in your startup business is if you put you know two to four months in between, when you kind of leave one practice and set up the other, you might think that your people are really loyal to you and that those people have the relationships.
• 32:04
  Speaker 3: But you know, you call somebody and say, hey, yeah, give me three to five months and I'll be up and running.
• 32:08
  Speaker 3: It's a big risk, I think, you know, and, not to mention, you need to have the capital to fund those.
• 32:14
  Speaker 3: You know those months.
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: So yeah, that's a good answer, man.
• 32:19
  Speaker 1: One last question I have for you.
• 32:20
  Speaker 1: If you could give one piece of advice to someone who is literally right about to start their practice right so in the next coming weeks they're going to be up running and live what would that be?
• 32:33
  Speaker 3: Care about your clients you guys mentioned in the last question before I railroaded you with my answer.
• 32:39
  Speaker 3: You guys mentioned the last thing like professional development and that I'm involved in the FPA and the university and stuff like that.
• 32:47
  Speaker 3: You know, I think there's two ways to go about this industry.
• 32:52
  Speaker 3: There's kind of this blunt force like join all the chamber events, join every you know nonprofit that you can get on all these boards, meet all these people and like you know, for every hundred connections you make, you'll get a client, or something like that's the blunt force aspect.
• 33:06
  Speaker 3: The other side is like to me it goes back to doing a good job for your clients.
• 33:12
  Speaker 3: So you know, I think if you genuinely care about the people that you work with and they can feel that and you do really good, you know work for them and you spend the time and the interest in them, I think you know that is really meaningful.
• 33:28
  Speaker 3: So for me and it's not to say this is right or wrong this is just how I did it.
• 33:33
  Speaker 3: As opposed to focusing on going out and meeting more non-advisors, potential clients, I reinvest part of the FPA for a long time.
• 33:47
  Speaker 3: I go to a lot of these educational events and to me what that allows us to deliver better for the clients and then ultimately get those referrals that we talked about.
• 33:56
  Speaker 3: Because I'm being more valuable, I would say don't lose the sight of the fact that your clients are your number one advocate, you know.
• 34:08
  Speaker 3: And so if you have three to five, you know, founding clients like knock before you get on LinkedIn and spend all of your time putting LinkedIn messages together.
• 34:15
  Speaker 3: You know, knock it out of the park for those three to five.
• 34:29
  Speaker 2: Right and really show them what, and then and then, once you've got a really solid relationship with them and they really buy in, it's much easier to you know, move from there.
• 34:33
  Speaker 2: Yeah, those are all great points.
• 34:34
  Speaker 2: I mean sometimes you know you want to look on the other side of the fence, but sometimes you know good clients or good referrals are sitting right in front of you.
• 34:38
  Speaker 2: Just have to pay attention to it.
• 34:40
  Speaker 2: So well, brent, love the conversation today.
• 34:42
  Speaker 2: Man, for those who want to follow along, what's the best way for them to see how you and Infinite Wealth are growing?
• 34:50
  Speaker 3: Well, so the website, our website is wwwinfinitewealthplanningcom, so that you know we're always working on the website and updating that so that that should be up to date and any of the content that we're publishing through our newsletter, things like that is all published to the website.
• 35:05
  Speaker 3: And then, additionally, we then additionally myself and then a close colleague of mine named Ben Ben Jones we've started a podcast.
• 35:13
  Speaker 3: It's called the Money Alchemist Podcast and we kind of talk.
• 35:17
  Speaker 3: We talk about, you know, these kinds of concepts like hey, right now, housing is really expensive, right, I've got so many parents talking about what can I do to help my kids buy houses, right, can we have a conversation about that on the podcast?
• 35:32
  Speaker 3: So we really enjoy putting out that content.
• 35:34
  Speaker 3: It's really something that we do, not because we want to grow the business, but because we enjoy talking and it's fun to put it out there.
• 35:41
  Speaker 3: So we'd love for, you know, it'd be great if people would check that out.
• 35:45
  Speaker 2: Love it man.
• 35:45
  Speaker 2: Well, brent, thank you so much for your time this morning.
• 35:47
  Speaker 2: We really