Between Now and Success: Recent Episodes

Steve Sanduski

Host Steve Sanduski, CFP® is the founder of two financial services companies, a New York Times bestselling author, podcast host, executive coach, and speaker. Through interviews with top achievers and visionary voices, Between Now and Success brings you the strategies, tips, and tools you need to succeed at the intersection of business and life. In each episode, Steve's guests open up and share their journey and the lessons they learned on their road to the summit. So rope up and get "On Belay" as we climb the summit to success together.

Sometimes you have to write the book you want to read.

As the 2008 financial crisis was beginning to drag millions of homeowners underwater, Joseph Moore took a personal finance class at his church. He realized that conventional wisdom about renting versus owning had put his family in a dangerous spot.

"We sold our house on a Saturday," Joseph remembers. "Our neighbor put her house on the market the next Saturday. It never sold. We were the last two people off the Financial Titanic in 2008."

Then a light went on in Joseph's historian brain. He wasn't the only person who followed advice like "renting is throwing away money" to poor financial decisions. But while there are countless biographies about the Rockefellers of the world, no one writes books about the folks on Main Street and the strategies that have -- and haven't -- helped them build wealth throughout history.

Joseph spent the next ten years writing that book, the national bestseller How to Get Rich in American History: 300 Years of Financial Advice That Worked and Didn't.

On today's show, Joseph and I unpack three centuries of economic booms, busts, and shifting paradigms that have defined how Americans think about growing their money.

Financial advisors are standing at the intersection of several historic, tectonic shifts. Over the next decade, we are poised to witness a staggering $124 trillion transfer of wealth. Simultaneously, the industry could be facing an unprecedented talent shortage, due in large part to aging boomers stepping away from their companies. And then there's the rise of AI, whose rapid advances are rocking the markets and advisors' value.

Many folks I talk to believe this convergence of variables has put the whole industry on shaky ground. But today's guest shares my view that while this might be a bad time to be a good advisor, it's a great time to be a great advisor, especially if you're willing to reposition your value prop from money management to high-EQ, high-end financial coaching.

My guest today is John Bowen, the Founder and CEO of CEG Worldwide. John and I discuss how advisors can capitalize on the industry's massive demographic and technological shifts. We also talk about John's new book with Dan Sullivan, The Greater Game, which explores why a small fraction of entrepreneurs achieve exponential success and the vast majority get stuck on plateaus.

To borrow a phrase from recent podcast guest Alan Smith, financial advisors are facing "a Spotify moment."

Just as streaming upended the traditional music business of selling records and put a premium on the live concert experience, AI is commoditizing traditional money management and raising the value of ...

Well, what exactly?

What is the financial advisor's equivalent of a live concert? What is that high-end experience that your prospects and clients will want to keep paying for? And how can you reframe your business around that experience so that it's replicable and scalable?

On today's show, I'm joined by Duncan MacPherson, the CEO of Pareto Systems. We discuss why Duncan firmly believes that the next five to ten years will be the absolute best time in history to be a financial advisor -- as long as you're willing to adapt and evolve.

In the early 1980s, Al Ries and Jack Trout published the seminal marketing book Positioning: The Battle For Your Mind. They argued that marketing wasn't simply about products or services; it was about capturing a specific space in the consumer's mind. Think of Volvo and you immediately think of "safety." Think of Walmart and you think, "Low prices." If you want "fast food" you'll probably start looking for the nearest McDonald's.

These principles of brand positioning still endure. For most people, Google is "search," Amazon is "shopping," and Apple is "cool tech." And these "spaces" can be powerful enough to cut across fragmented marketing channels.

So, "what" are you as a financial advisor?

What "space" does your firm occupy in your ideal client's mind?

And how can you differentiate that space and highlight your unique value proposition?

On today's show, I discuss the latest marketing trends with John Scianna, the Founder of Objective Brand. Whether you are a solo advisor struggling to stand out in a crowded marketplace or a billion-dollar firm trying to unify your corporate messaging, this conversation is a masterclass in building a modern brand.

Are you sure?

And, perhaps more importantly, are your clients?

In an increasingly polarized world, folks are becoming more and more dug-in about what they believe to be true. But an "either/or" mentality can lock out important data when we're weighing complex, real-life challenges. And when we value being "right" above all else, we may fail to recognize that not every challenge is a problem we can solve.

Often, what we're really confronting are polarities: a pair of opposing, interdependent values, wants, or priorities that are in a constant tug-of-war for our attention and resources.

On today's show, I talk to Kelly Lewis, the Founder of the Lewis Leadership Group and the co-author of Navigating Polarities: Using Both/And Thinking to Lead Transformation. Kelly explains why recognizing the difference between a problem to be solved and a polarity to be navigated is key to expanding a leader's capacity for complexity. We unpack the mechanics of "both/and" thinking and explore how understanding these dynamics can help leaders avoid the whiplash of pendulum swings and leverage the upside of opposing forces.

Organic growth has been stalling for years. AI is compressing basic money management into a commodity. And in this uncertain economic environment, where even the reliability of the 60/40 portfolio is in flux, advisors can't just count on long bull runs to keep their bottom lines up and their clients happy.

To blast off this plateau, advisors must fundamentally rethink how they train their teams, whom they target as clients, and how they actually deliver advice.

On today's show, I talk to Jamie Hopkins, CEO of Bryn Mawr Trust Advisors LLC and Chief Wealth Officer of Bryn Mawr Trust, about how advisors should be adjusting to the realities of this new era. We discus why the "apprenticeship" model of training young advisors is driving away top talent, why business exit planning will be the single greatest organic growth engine over the next 15 years, and why the ultimate metric of a successful financial plan is the client's happiness.

We also discuss Jamie's new book, Your Retirement Sketchbook, and how visual planning tools can help you clarify your process and your value to clients.

The launch of advanced AI models capable of writing code and executing complex tasks has coincided with a sharp drop in the share prices of some large financial service companies. The market is reflecting the reality that the traditional, technical, number-crunching value proposition of a financial advisor is rapidly being commoditized.

But what does this mean for the individual human advisor and the RIA CEO?

On today's show, I discuss the future of financial advisory with Dan Haylett, Marketing Director & Financial Planner at TFP Financial Planning, and Alan Smith, Founder and CEO of Capital Partners. Will AI cause short-term disruptions that ultimately expand the market, lower costs, and elevate the premium on human wisdom and relationship-building? Or are AI optimists suffering from an "empathy delusion" in our belief that AI can enhance -- but never replace -- the human-to-human connection that's always been an essential part of our value proposition?

According to a recent study from Schwab Advisor Services, 63% of advisors are now using AI in some capacity. However, the RIA AI landscape remains highly experimental: only about 10% of firms report having fully integrated AI into their core strategy, while 30% say they are still just experimenting.

So, if 2025 was the year of the AI notetakers, how can firms take the next step and truly harness this massive technological shift through the rest of 2026?

On today's show, I welcome back Lisa Salvi, Managing Director of Business Consulting and Education at Schwab Advisor Services. We discuss the current pace of AI innovation and why AI is forcing advisors to redefine their core value proposition and how they communicate it to the marketplace.

In 1984, Andy Schwartz and his twin brother Scott joined a startup Northwestern Mutual district agency in New Jersey. Four decades later, their firm, OnePoint BFG Wealth Partners, manages approximately $15 billion in assets.

Andy, now CEO and Managing Partner, describes their early days as operating like a "band of pirates" sharing resources and reinvesting heavily in building capacity. His firm's trajectory accelerated significantly when they left Northwestern Mutual in 2015 to become independent, and in 2024, Andy and Scott took an investment from Joe Duran's Rise Growth Partners to fuel their next stage of expansion.

What makes Andy's story compelling isn't just the size of the firm he built, but his intense focus on the fundamentals: outworking the competition, relentlessly reinvesting in the business, and creating a culture where everyone -- from the newest advisor to the receptionist of 30 years -- shares in the firm's success.

On today's show, Andy Schwartz and I discuss the pivotal moments in his extraordinary career, his philosophy on giving equity to team members, and how he plans to scale a $15 billion firm even as the bottom might be "falling out" for financial services.

I recently had the pleasure of joining Dave Zoller on his YouTube channel, Streamline My Practice, to discuss something I've been thinking deeply about lately: the difference between owning a business and being owned by your business. If you're a financial advisor wondering whether you've built a thriving enterprise or just created a demanding job for yourself, this conversation is for you.

Dave and I discuss:

The Four Levels of Advisory Business Evolution
The Identity Shift That Changes Everything
The Power of a Compelling Three-to-Five-Year Vision
Two Real-World Examples of Extreme Freedom
The Get-Keep Framework
Technology, AI, and Practical Action Steps for Advisors

Most people spend their lives trying to eliminate tension: Work or rest. Control or flow. Clarity or creativity. But a well-lived life isn't free of tension—it's guided by how we hold it. In this podcast, I walk through the three polarities I'm using to guide my life and work in 2026, and reflect on how last year's polarities shaped some of my most meaningful experiences—from sailing and writing to health, family, and business. Rather than problems to solve, these are tensions to navigate—and learning to hold both sides has quietly changed how I make decisions, set direction, and define success. My three 3 Polarities for 2026 are: Mythos – Method Living a meaningful story and building the discipline to bring it to life. Compass – Wind Setting a clear direction while adapting to changing conditions. Precision – Poetry Writing and thinking with clarity without losing what moves people. Along the way, I also reflect on: * Why "balance" often leads to frustration * How experience earns you the right to loosen your grip * What sailing teaches us about leadership and decision-making * Why rest isn't laziness—and control isn't always wisdom

This conversation is for leaders, advisors, creators, and anyone who senses that life is asking for integration, not optimization.

If you've ever felt pulled between two good things—and wondered why choosing one never feels right—this podcast is for you.

Guest: Nikki Henderson, a world-class professional sailor. In 2018, Nikki became the youngest skipper to lead a team in the Clipper Round the World Yacht Race. At the age of 25, over the course of more than 40,000 miles of ocean racing, Nikki led a diverse team of mostly amateur sailors from 16 countries to an extraordinary second place finish. She's also skippered numerous transatlantic races and won the Race to Alaska.

In a Nutshell: How do you define your job as a leader?

Nikki Henderson says that what she does as a skipper is pull together disparate individuals, build them into high-performing amateur teams, and then compete in the most extreme sailing races in the world.

I experienced Nikki's leadership first hand a few weeks ago when I sailed with her in the Caribbean 600 as part of her amateur crew. This was a grueling 600-mile race around 11 Caribbean islands. Despite long odds, we ended up finishing third and celebrated on stage with our prize: a big bottle of rum.

On today's show, Nikki Henderson and I discuss making life transitions, paradoxes and polarities in leadership, and decision-making under pressure and uncertainty.

I discuss how well I executed on my 3 words from 2024 and then reveal why and how I’m changing the exercise for 2025.

For 2025, I'm going to explore polarities—pairs of words that represent the tension and harmony between opposing yet complementary concepts.

This shift feels like a natural evolution.

Just as life is a balance of contrasts—action and rest, growth and reflection, giving and receiving—polarities allow for a more nuanced exploration of the rhythms that shape us.

It’s not about choosing one over the other, but about navigating the balance between the two, finding wisdom in their interplay, and allowing them to guide me in a more holistic way. This approach reflects where I am now—a stage of growth that seeks to integrate opposites and embrace the richness of life’s cycles.

My 3 Polarities for 2025

Horizon – Hearth: Pursuing dreams while not losing sight of what’s amazing in my current day-to-day life.
Slack – Flood: Adjusting my pace to optimize my energy.
Control – Flow: Blending detailed planning with tapping into the universe’s current.

There’s an old quote from Richard Branson that has stuck with me for many years. He said, “I don’t think of work as work and play as play, it’s all living.”

Similarly, in recent years, My 3 Words, and now My 3 Polarities, make little distinction between the personal and professional. I view them as a guide for living. That way, I don’t have to ask myself, “Does this apply to work or to my personal life?’ And if I do, the answer is, “Yes.”

Here are some practical tips for creating a “My 3 Polarities” exercise:

Identify Key Tensions: Reflect on areas of your life where you feel pulled between two opposing but complementary forces (e.g., fear vs. courage, ambition vs. contentment, chart vs. explore, journey vs. destination, reinvention vs. continuity).
Choose Meaningful Pairs: Select three polarities that resonate deeply with your values and current life stage. Ensure each pair addresses a distinct aspect of your life, such as goals, energy, or mindset.
Define Each Side: Clearly articulate what each side of the polarity represents for you, including the values and behaviors they inspire.
Create Guiding Questions: Develop a key question for each polarity to guide your decisions and self-reflection (e.g., “If I wasn’t fearful, what decision would I make?”).
Track Progress: Use a journal or weekly reflection to assess how well you’re honoring both sides of each polarity.
Integrate Into Daily Life: Regularly remind yourself of the polarities and apply them to real-life choices, whether at work, home, or in personal growth. Print them or have them on your computer screen and see them daily.

Now it’s your turn. Take a first pass at your My 3 Polarities exercise for 2025 and then set it aside. Revisit what you wrote the next day and see if they still feel good.

Guest: Dr. Preston Cherry, AFC®, CFT-I™, CFP®, Ph.D., an entrepreneur, coach and speaker. Dr. Cherry is the creator of the Life Money Balance™ approach and founder of Concurrent Financial Planning. His new book is Wealth in the Key of Life: Finding Your Financial Harmony.

In a Nutshell: "Songs in the Key of Life" is one of Stevie Wonder's most famous albums. In a similar vein, Dr. Preston Cherry wants people to find that kind of harmony between their money, their values, and their lives. And advisors who can help folks create a financial life that really sings are going to connect more deeply with clients and empower them to live -- and plan -- with more intention.

On today's show, Dr. Preston Cherry and I discuss his new book and his unique perspective on how to bring purpose, balance, a "permission to prosper" and a little bit of rhythm to your financial planning process.

Guest: Kendra Wright, owner of Rebel Media Agency, a marketing company specializing in financial professionals. In her prior life, Kendra worked in rock ‘n roll marketing for some of the biggest names in music (Willie Nelson, Motley Crue, Matchbox Twenty, and more).

In a Nutshell: Great copy means you'll never experience a failure to communicate. Great copy is simple. Great copy is found and it comes from the mouths of your clients and prospects. Your job is to transfer what you find to your website and client communication.

As important as social media, podcasting, YouTube, and email have become, your marketing plan is incomplete if you don't have a professional homepage that tells prospects who you are, who you serve, and what outcomes people can achieve by working with you.

And let's not forget, people come to you because they have a problem, a question, and they want help. How clearly does your website show that you know their questions, you know their pain, and you know how to solve their problems?

On today's show, Kendra Wright and I do a deep dive on finding and communicating great copy and we put several financial advisor websites under the microscope and discuss what they did well and where they could improve.

This one is best watched on the YouTube video.

After I left Peak Advisor Alliance (now Carson Coaching), I settled on the idea of starting my Between Now and Success podcast as part of my next chapter. I figured podcasting would be a great way to stay in touch with people in our industry, keep networking, and learn from the best of the best.

Now, 10 years later, across five separate podcasts, I've recorded more than 850 episodes, the vast majority of which are interview shows. Thanks to podcasting, I went from having a handful of trusted mentors to learning from hundreds of world-class teachers.

While I could easily list dozens of unique and actionable ideas I've learned from a decade of podcasting, these 10 insights stand out.

Guest: Mindy Diamond, the founder and CEO of Diamond Consultants and the author of a fantastic new book called Should I Stay or Should I Go?

In a Nutshell: Between the competition for top talent at large firms and the proliferation of smaller lifestyle RIAs, many advisors feel like they need to be constantly evaluating their career options. But the grass is not always greener, and FOMO should never be the lead driver of a major career decision. Instead, advisors should follow their internal compass towards opportunities that will help them accomplish what matters the most to them in their lives and work.

On today's show, Mindy Diamond shares the process she uses to help advisors clarify their goals and make the right decision for their careers. We also explore the concept of living your best business life and how aligning your personal values with your professional environment is a key to long-term success. Mindy offers practical advice for advisors at any stage of their careers on assessing your options, asking the right questions, and understanding when it's time to stay put or make a move.

Guest: Eric Brotman, CFP®, AEP®, CPWA®, is a Principal and the Chief Executive Officer of BFG Financial Advisors. Eric began his financial planning practice in Baltimore in 1994, and founded Brotman Financial Group in 2003, which later became BFG Financial Advisors. He and his team focus on supporting families and individuals by providing comprehensive financial planning and wealth management services.

Eric is also the author of Don't Retire... Graduate!: Building a Path to Financial Freedom and Retirement at Any Age.

In a Nutshell: As a founder/advisor, how does your role evolve over time?

I frequently have these conversations with my coaching clients where we discuss what does the advisor want their role to be.

In the early stages of your career, you have to do everything, but as the business grows, you have to decide what you're going to double down on and what you're going to let go of. There's no one answer that fits every advisor. Some advisors naturally and easily segue into a leadership role and give up most, if not all of their lead advisor client relationships. Other advisors do not enjoy the management role of running the business, managing people, and they prefer the relationship side of the business and business development.

Regardless of which route you want to go, you have to figure out how to build the team and the infrastructure around you so that every function within the organization is getting taken care of at a high level such that you can focus on what you do best, what you enjoy the most, and that moves the needle for the company.

On today's show, Eric Brotman and I have a wide-ranging conversation that touches on evolving your role over time, succession planning, transitioning clients, teamwork, scalable processes, and how to accelerate organic growth without losing a human touch.

Guest: Dave Zoller, CFP®, owner of Streamline Financial Services in Warrenville, IL. Streamline currently manages over $450 million in assets for 250 client households.

In a Nutshell: Digital marketing isn't about trying to strike lighting and "go viral," although that certainly helps! The advisors I've talked to who have mastered YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook. email, and other channels turn clicks into clients through consistency, rigorous analytics, a personal touch that connects them to their audience, and yes, some luck of being in the right place at the right time.

On today's show, Dave Zoller and I discuss how advisors can get started with YouTube marketing or optimize their existing channels. We cover everything from ideation and workflow to Dave's meticulous process for steering ideal clients towards that first phone call.

Interestingly, Dave's biggest problem is his lack of advisor capacity to serve all the qualified leads that reach out to his firm. If the prospective clients don't have $1.5 million or more to invest, they don't get on an advisor's calendar. So, if you are looking for a sweet advisor role, reach out to Dave--he's hiring!

Guest: Josh Self, CLU, ChFC, CFP®, Managing Partner of Ridgeline Wealth Advisors in Raleigh, NC.

In a Nutshell: Do you serve your business or does it serve you? Josh Self decided to do a complete rebrand and design his business around his personal passion of being an everyday explorer. He wanted to attract other like-minded outdoor enthusiasts so his website and podcast are 100% geared toward that specific demographic. If you share your passions with your audience and tie them into a holistic approach to Life-Centered Planning, you're going to grow something more valuable and durable than a client base. You're going to create a real community around your practice.

On today's show, Josh Self explains how "Financial life planning for the explorer living out their bucket list" became the organizing principle of his firm, especially on the branding and marketing side of the business.

In a Nutshell: Steve and Amy Koenig, a financial advisor coach, are back for a deep dive on an issue every advisor will face at some point which is, how do you transition existing clients to another advisor and do it so the clients stay and there's no drop in service.

Sometimes there's a personality mismatch. Sometimes goals aren't aligned. Sometimes advisors need new challenges.

Or, as was the case for Heritage's Erin Scannell, sometimes an advisor has to clear the deck so that he can step into a leadership role and drive the vision for the company's growth.

Whatever the reason, there will be times when your firm needs to move clients from one advisor to another. And, on today's show, Steve and Amy detail the system they use to ensure a smooth transition and optimal results.

Guest: Lisa Salvi, Managing Director, Advisor Services at Charles Schwab.

In a Nutshell: If you could start from scratch and sketch out what the ideal advisory practice looks like, what would you come up with?

Lisa Salvi and her team have developed just such a blueprint for what the most successful firms at Charles Schwab are doing to manage and grow their businesses.

On today's show, Lisa and I dig into the details of Schwab's 2024 Benchmarking Study, paying particular attention to the five Guiding Principles for Advisory Firm Success that Lisa says separate good firms from the best of the best.

Guest: Erin Scannell, Chief Executive Officer of Heritage Wealth Advisors.

In a Nutshell: When I talked to Erin Scannell in 2020, he was directing 50 team members, 18 advisors, and about $2 billion in AUM. Four years later, Heritage has doubled to $4 billion in AUM, and Erin is in charge of over 80 team members, including 20 advisors and a robust support team.

On today's show, Erin shares the secrets behind his firm's explosive growth, including their innovative approach to organic marketing, the power of virtual events, and the strategic acquisition that brought them into the high-net-worth space. We also discuss how Erin's role has evolved from lead advisor to CEO, as well as leveraging tech to help advisors move up the value stack and address client's higher-level advice and life needs.

Guest: Dr. Shaywanna Harris-Pierre, a licensed professional counselor and financial therapist with a rich background in marriage and family therapy. Dr. Shay is also the owner of Shades of You Counseling and Consulting.

In a Nutshell: Every family is unique, and no family is perfect. The dynamics, positive and negative, that exist between loved ones create ideas and emotions around money that influence your clients' attitudes about financial planning. Advisors who are willing to engage on this more personal level have an opportunity to transform their relationships with their clients and the quality of service that they deliver.

On today's show, Dr. Shay shares her journey into financial therapy and how to open dialogues that will help you and your clients understand the emotional side of money better.

Guest: Amy Koenig, a financial advisor coach and the Chief of Operations at ROL Advisor.

In a Nutshell: Amy Koenig was the first coach I hired back in 2004 when I was running Peak Advisor Alliance-now Carson Coaching. She coached advisors, operations leaders, and she developed the entire systems manual that was a key part of our coaching offering back in the Peak days.

Now, Amy coaches with me and heads up operations for my other company, ROL Advisor. Nobody knows systems like Amy.

On today's show, Amy and I discuss how financial advisors can integrate systems into their practices, from identifying a strategy to some practical nuts-and-bolts checklists and tech solutions that will put that strategy into action.

Guest: Shannon Warwick, Certified Personal Trainer, Yoga Teacher, & Sports Nutritionist.

In a Nutshell: There's a profound connection between our physical health and the stress that we carry around with us every day.

Today's show is a bit different from my usual focus on financial advisor practice management. Shannon and I dive deep into the topic of reducing stress in our lives - something that I believe is crucial for everyone, regardless of their profession or background. We discuss the profound connection between our physical health and the stress we carry, and how practices like yoga and sound baths can help us release tension and find balance.

Shannon shares her personal journey of overcoming health challenges and discovering the transformative power of slowing down and tuning into our bodies. We explore the concept of anchors, such as breath and sound, that can help us stay present and grounded in the midst of life's chaos.

Throughout our conversation, Shannon offers practical tools and exercises that anyone can incorporate into their daily life to cultivate a sense of calm and self-compassion. From the five Tibetan rites to the importance of learning our love languages, Shannon's insights are both accessible and deeply meaningful.

What can Elton John, Van Halen, and Taylor Swift teach financial advisors about running a successful firm?

On today's show, Matt Ackermann and Andree Mohr discuss their unique spin on writing about practice management, which examines stories about how famous musicians hone their craft and applies those lessons to what we do as advisors.

Guest: Tom Rieman, the Founding Partner and CEO of Practice Intel, a company dedicated to empowering advisors to deliver truly impactful advice. Tom has held leadership roles at J. D. Power and Associates, Brinker Capital, and J. P. Morgan Asset Management.

In a Nutshell: Tom and I explore three themes that are crucial to all advisors' success: organic growth; bridging the advice-experience gap between what your clients want and what you're delivering; and what an ideal advice experience looks like from the client's perspective. Our conversation is filled with actionable insights that challenge conventional wisdom about client satisfaction and business growth. And Tom's perspective and experience offer a powerful roadmap for you to make a real difference in your clients' lives.

Guest: Devin Martin, a transformation coach who specializes in helping individuals navigate major life and career transitions.

In a Nutshell: Devin discusses his transformative journey from corporate success to a year of solitude on a mountain, his insights into personal growth, and his approach to transformational coaching. The episode explores themes of crisis management, the importance of mindfulness, and the transformative power of self-discovery.

Guest: Bill Cates, a Hall of Fame speaker, author, and referral coach. Bill's latest book is The Language of Referrals: The Words & Scripts Financial Professionals Use to Gain More Ideal Clients.

In a Nutshell: When it comes to creating and sustaining organic growth, clicks and "likes" are important. But turning your existing clients into superfans who generate a steady stream of referrals creates strong, person-to-person connections that digital marketing never will.

On today's show, "The Original Referral Coach" Bill Cates offers actionable specifics on how to set the stage for referrals, how to ask and position for referrals, how to follow up on referrals, and more importantly, how to create the mindset that attracts referrals on a consistent basis. If you're serious about growing your client base, grab a pen and paper and block off an hour or two -- you're going to want to listen to this episode more than once.

Guest: Alex Miele, CFP®, a Managing Director and Partner with Hierax Wealth Partners. Alex’s fifteen years of service in the wealth management industry has focused on advocating for her clients throughout every permutation of their financial lives. Alex prides herself in finding solutions for her clients’ seemingly unsolvable problems, while providing a patient presence throughout each client’s unique journey.

In a Nutshell: Mitch Anthony and I started ROL Advisor because we believe the future of our industry lies in not only improving clients' return on investment, but also in improving their Return on Life. To help folks get more from their money than just more money, advisors need to expand their ideas about what kinds of services we can offer and improve the "soft skills" that can form generational relationships.

On today's show, I'm sharing a conversation about providing world-class, human-to-human service that I had with top advisor Alex Miele during an ROL Advisor Learning Hour session. Alex breaks down what "concierge" service is, how she charges for it, and how her team delivers value that too many advisors don't.

Guest: Mario Nardone, CFA, Founding Partner of East Bay Investment Solutions, which offers outsourced chief investment officer (OCIO) solutions for planning and relationship-focused financial advisors.

In a Nutshell: The human side of financial planning is, increasingly, where financial planners are delivering the most value to clients. Building those relationships and helping people achieve their life goals can also be incredibly rewarding. But even an expert "people person" still has to deliver on the numbers side as well. Outsourcing your investment management can be one way for advisors to spend more of their time doing what they do best while also ensuring optimal outcomes for clients.

On today's show, Mario Nardone explains what an OCIO is and how they work with advisory firms to enhance their investment offering while freeing up the advisors time for other high-value pursuits.

Guest: Benjamin Brandt, a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ and Founder/President of Capital City Wealth Management, a Bismarck, ND fee-only financial planning company. Benjamin is also the host of the Retirement Starts Today Radio podcast and co-host of The Least Boring Tax Podcast.

In a Nutshell: Many advisors think about tech and marketing in terms of "more": more reach, more productivity, more clients, more AUM. But lately I've been asking myself and my coaching clients: Isn't part of the promise of our all-digital, AI-driven future supposed to be "less" time grinding away at the office and "more" time living your life?

That depends on what kind of service you want to deliver, what size firm you want, and how you want to spend your time. Some RIA CEOs are going to pump productivity gains right back into the business and keep trying to "add a zero." Others, like my guest today, are going to be very intentional about maintaining both high-touch service for a specific niche of clients and healthy work-life balance for themselves and their team members.

On today's show, Benjamin Brandt and I discuss his podcast marketing funnel, his unique approach to accepting and onboarding new clients, and how he's leveraging technology to optimize the efficiency of his firm.

Guest: Matt Reiner, a CFA® Charterholder, CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ , and partner at Capital Investment Advisors, a $4.3B RIA in Atlanta, Georgia. Additionally, Matt is the managing partner of Wela Strategies, an RIA that deals with the investment needs of the mass affluent.

In a Nutshell: Nobody likes to fail, nobody likes to admit they failed, and nobody likes to publicly discuss their failure.

That’s why I have huge respect for Matt Reiner.

In early 2020, Matt made his first appearance on Between Now and Success to talk about Benjamin, his AI startup. Benjamin supplemented a traditional tech stack with workflow automation that took care of menial tasks so that advisors and support staff would have more time to work directly with clients.

Today, that company is dead. And, on today's show, Matt is back to talk about what happened.

Matt is candid and real in this conversation, and his perspective on his entrepreneurial journey is something that I think you’ll relate to. We also discuss the broader implications of technology and AI in financial advising and a question I've been asking for a couple years now: Is technology actually increasing advisor productivity by a significant amount?

Guest: Mark Hurley, founder of Fiduciary Network and now CEO of Digital Privacy & Protection LLC, a cybersecurity company.

In a Nutshell: Back in 1999, Mark Hurley dropped a bombshell white paper that predicted the wealth management industry would be consolidated into less than 100 firms, there would be a huge amount of M&A, and the small RIAs would fall by the wayside. The first part of Mark's prediction definitely came true. And as we exit the era of cheap money and roaring markets, the fate of smaller RIAs that aren't growing organically is certainly up in the air. With tailwinds turning into headwinds, the financial services industry is about to get a lot more competitive and, for some smaller firms, potentially less profitable. But there's also a lot of opportunity for growth-minded RIAs to differentiate themselves with a higher quality of service and a more human touch.

On today's show, Mark Hurley discusses his latest whitepaper, Welcome to the Jungle: The Next Phase of the Evolution of the Wealth Management Industry.

For the ninth time, I begin the New year with 3 carefully chosen words meant to remind, motivate, and guide me on my road to making the New Year my best year yet. It’s the My 3 Words exercise.

My 3 words are printed at the top of my Daily Outcomes sheet (my prioritized to-do list) so I see them multiple times a day.

By being thoughtful when I identify my 3 words and reviewing them daily, I have an inescapable reminder of my key focus points for the year. These words help me stay on track, on plan, and on point.

In today’s post, I discuss how well I executed on my 3 words from 2023 and then reveal my 3 words for 2024.

Guest: Connor Sung, CFP®, Director, Financial Planning at eMoney Advisor.

In a Nutshell: It's been about seven months since I asked ChatGPT if I could retire without running out of money. Since then, the intersection of financial psychology and technology continues to advance rapidly -- not just in how advisors use AI, but in how they're improving their people skills and learning to meet clients and prospects where they are to deliver the advice that they need. These advancements on both the tech and human sides of financial advice are improving the client experience and coaching folks towards better financial outcomes.

On today's show, Connor Sung discusses how platforms like eMoney are evolving to support more nuanced and individualized planning conversations and redefining what "success" means for clients.

Guest: James Conole, CFP®, Founder of Root Financial Partners and star of a very successful YouTube channel with over 61,000 subscribers.

In a Nutshell: When prospects watch your YouTube videos, read your newsletters, listen to your podcasts, and click on your website, within seconds they should think, "These guys are reading my mind!" Understanding the information your audience wants is key to making content that appeals to both your ideal client and the complex algorithms that determine who gets shown your content.

On today's show, James Conole explains how he coordinated his YouTube channel, podcast, and website to create a lead-generating machine that in 12 months has attracted nearly 700 prospects with at least $500,000 of investable assets and generated $120 million in new AUM.

Guest: John Wernz, one of the top marketers on the planet. John was the Chief Marketing Officer of Wealth Enhancement Group (WEG) (listen to my podcast with WEG CEO Jeff Dekko) as that company grew rapidly through some sophisticated organic marketing programs. He’s currently Executive-in-Residence at Great Hill Partners, Executive Director and Board Member at Datalign Advisory, and Board Advisor at Testimonial IQ.

In a Nutshell: Before recording this episode, I prompted ChatGPT-4 to “Play the role of a financial advisor marketing expert. Lay out a detailed marketing strategy for a $5 million annual revenue RIA firm that wants to grow 20% per year.”

The results were … pretty good!

But effective marketing requires more than blindly following a GPT-generated plan — you have to target, personalize, and differentiate your message to reach your intended audience and turn clicks into clients through both marketing AND sales.

On today’s show, John Wernz and I use the GPT-4 marketing plan as a springboard to discuss all aspects of the marketing process and identify actionable ways for you to improve every step of your marketing program.

Guest: Jon Dauphiné, Esq. is the CEO of the Foundation for Financial Planning, the U.S.'s leading 501(c)(3) charity devoted to expanding access to pro bono financial planning for people in need. Dave Mantell, CFP®, CFA is a Managing Partner and wealth advisor at Stabler Wealth Management in Bellevue, WA.

In a Nutshell: In fields like medicine, law, and education, pro bono work is an established part of the professional culture. My guests today are at the forefront of a movement to build an infrastructure for pro bono financial planning so that folks who can't afford to work with an advisor can gain access to the essential services we provide.

On today's show, Jon Dauphiné and Dave Mantell explain how the Foundation for Financial Planning connects advisors to the resources they need to make a huge impact on people's lives and their communities. We also discuss how more advisors and -- hopefully -- conference organizers can get involved in building out this important network.

Guest: Dr. Preston Cherry, AFC®, CFT-I™, CFP®, Ph.D., the Founder and President of Concurrent Financial Planning, a comprehensive financial planning firm serving households and business owners across generations. Dr. Cherry is also Head of the Financial Planning Program and Director of the Charles Schwab Center for Personal Financial Planning at the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay. On top of that, he's a co-founder and Chief Evangelist at Practice Intel.

In a Nutshell: There's a significant disconnect in our industry between what folks say they want from an advisor and what advisors are actually delivering. To close that gap, advisors may need to start quantifying their relationships to clients so that they can track, measure, and manage more than just return on investment.

On today's show, Dr. Preston Cherry returns to discuss Practice Intel's "Relationship Quality Index" and how he's helping the next generation of advisors prepare to deliver comprehensive planning.

Guest: Manisha Thakor, MBA, CFA, CFP®, a national thought leader and personal finance expert with more than 25 years of experience working in the worlds of personal finance and investing. She's also the author of a great new book, MoneyZen: The Secret to Finding Your "Enough."

In a Nutshell: Society trains us to believe that the answer to all of our problems is More: more stuff, more clicks, more Likes, and, of course, more money. But financial advisors know that the connection between true happiness and money is a lot more complicated than that. Shifting your focus from improving clients' return on investment to improving their Return on Life can help folks find that healthy balance between what they have, what they want, and what's really important.

On today's show, Manisha Thakor and I have a wide-ranging conversation about the meaning of money in our life and how it can evolve over time, Manisha's personal journey to "enough," and how to find joy in living simply.

Guest: Louis Barajas, an author, speaker, CFP®, an the CEO and founder of International Private Wealth Advisors, where he serves as a wealth manager for influential Latin celebrities, athletes, executives, and other high-net-worth individuals in the entertainment and sports industries. Louis also serves as the founder and CEO of Business Management Lab, where he provides comprehensive business management services for iconic Latin artists.

In a Nutshell: As a financial advisor, you've probably learned that it's very difficult to help someone who isn't ready to accept your help. But advisors also need to work on the skills that will help them meet clients and prospects where they are in life. That emotional intelligence becomes even more important as our industry continues to improve its diversity and broaden the impact that we can have on a wider variety of people.

On today's show, Louis Barajas discusses how the desire to make a difference in his own community transformed how he felt about financial services. He also shares experiences that taught him more effective ways to reach people and improve their lives.

Guest: John Furey, Founder and Managing Partner of Advisor Growth Strategies. John also created the Alliance for Registered Investment Advisors, a think tank including seven of the most successful firms that are dedicated to improving the RIA industry through a culture of continuous learning and sharing.

In a Nutshell: The large RIA firms and the private equity investors that fund them are creating a new financial advisory landscape: a handful of really big firms and thousands of really small firms. Some of these firms are growing organically, many more are only growing at the rate of market returns. Carving out a place for your firm is going to require a new level of clarity around both strategic planning and how you communicate what makes you unique to your team, clients, and prospects.

On today's show, John Furey and I discuss how large firms are impacting the evolution of financial advisory and how individual advisors and RIA CEOs should prepare themselves for the future.

Story is software for the heart.

A great story well told is your greatest tool for influencing behavior. Your listeners can “call up” that story in the future and apply new input specific to the current situation. The story “programs” your listeners to take action based on the emotions the story generates. And this is how a story can continue to influence long after you've told your story.

Becoming a masterful storyteller and story receiver will enrich your life, reignite your relationships, and grow your business.

In this podcast, Mitch Anthony and I discuss:

The power of masterful storytelling.
How to craft your own stories to deepen your client connection.
How to elicit stories from your clients.
The critical role emotion and empathy play in storytelling.
Why putting your client’s LIFE at the center of the planning conversation is critical.

This podcast is a rebroadcast of the live July 19 webinar Mitch and I did that more than 1,300 people registered for.

We are following up on this highly successful webinar with 4 hours of storytelling training on September 14. You can learn more about this virtual event and register by visiting roladvisor.com/stories. See you there!

Guest: Tim Gerend, Executive Vice President and Chief Distribution Officer for Northwestern Mutual.

In a Nutshell: You can't turn a tanker around in the Panama Canal. Instead, insurance giant Northwestern Mutual is carving a new lane for itself by adding wealth management to the services its 20,000 advisors, leaders, and team members offer nationwide. With this unique combination of advice, products, services, and technology, Northwestern believes it can compete on client experience while also attracting the next generation of independent advisors into the fold.

On today's show, Tim Gerend and I discuss the five components of Northwestern Mutual's client experience, how the firm recruits and train advisors to hit the ground running, the importance of diversity, and how Tim thinks the financial advisor profession will evolve over the coming years.

Guest: Cheryl Strauss Einhorn. Cheryl is the creator of The AREA Method, an evidence-based decision making system that uniquely controls for and counters cognitive bias to expand knowledge while improving judgment. She developed AREA during her two decades as an award-winning investigative journalist, writing for publications including The New York Times, Foreign Policy Magazine, Barron's, and Harvard Business Review. She's also the author of three books, including Problem Solver: Maximizing Your Strengths to Make Better Decisions.

In a Nutshell: Rather than making decisions by gut feel or pure instinct, Cheryl presents a well-researched framework that helps you make better decisions when the stakes are high.

On today's show, Cheryl Strauss Einhorn explains the AREA Method and the five "problem solver profiles" that will help you determine your most effective course of action when making big decisions.

Guest: Mark McGrath, CFP®, an advisor with Sweeney Bride Strategic Wealth Advisory in Squamish, British Columbia.

In a Nutshell: Back in March, I saw a tweet from Mark that had gone viral. In it, he shared a very personal story about the hidden challenges of retirement that really struck a chord. As I write this, Mark's tweet has racked up 3,034 retweets, 900 quotes, 17.6K likes, 5,401 bookmarks, and an incredible 5.2 million views. We talk about that powerful story and how Mark uses social media to connect to his community and turn clicks into new clients.

Guest: Jason Pereira, Partner & Senior Financial Consultant at Woodgate Financial Inc. in Toronto. Jason is a financial planner, writer, speaker, teacher, and podcast host with 20 years of experience in finance, practice management, and fintech.

In a Nutshell: The rise of generative AI like ChatGPT, Bard, Midjourney, and Dall-E is creating a new series of challenges and opportunities for advisors. First-mover advisors, like Jason, are integrating this fast-moving technology into their practices so they can grow more profitably and free up more time for human-to-human interaction that no technology can ever replicate. Listen in as Jason and I discuss how you can take advantage of AI instead of being taken advantage of by AI.

Guest: Danielle Howard, a Certified Financial Planner and the Founder of Wealth By Design, a boutique wealth services firm that works with individuals and families that value a holistic financial approach to the fall season of life. Danielle is also the author of Your Financial Revolution: Time To Recognize, Revitalize & Release Your Financial Power.

In a Nutshell: Living a rich, full life goes well beyond how much money someone has. On this episode, Danielle Howard and I discuss how advisors who put their clients' lives ahead of their money can help them break free of the limiting beliefs, delusions, and scripts around money that can prevent them from enjoying the journey, especially in retirement.

Guest: ChatGPT, a natural language processing tool driven by AI technology that allows you to have human-like conversations and complete a variety of other mind-blowing things. This artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot developed by OpenAI was released in November 2022 and has been upgraded since then.

In a Nutshell: With all the excitement and interest around artificial intelligence, particularly ChatGPT, I thought it was time I did an episode on AI. And as I looked around for potential guests, I thought, why not go directly to the source and interview ChatGPT. So I connected ChatGPT to a text-to-speech AI from ElevenLabs named Rachel. She was gracious enough to answer my questions and give me a snippet of what AI is capable of.

Guest: Dan Haylett, Director, Head of Growth & Financial Planner at TFP Financial Planning in Essex, England.

In a Nutshell: My business partner, Mitch Anthony, calls it "Life-Centered Financial Planning." Dan Haylett's firm uses the term "human-focused financial planning." However you describe the process, the fundamentals are the same: a growing movement of financial advisors putting people first and prioritizing the relationships they build with their clients over time. On today's show, Dan and I discuss what that level of personalized service looks like, how it's priced, and how he's built a team to support every client on their journey to retirement.

Guest: Amit Dogra, President and COO of tru Independence. tru offers an open architecture platform that provides a full suite of services that advisors need to manage and grow their business effectively.

In a Nutshell: In 2022, I crunched the numbers from Charles Schwab’s 2022 RIA Benchmarking Study and spotted an alarming trend: net organic revenue growth is almost non-existent in our industry. Solving that problem isn’t just a matter of running a better marketing campaign or asking clients for more referrals. It requires an understanding that every facet of your organization is interconnected and must be thoughtfully designed to support and reinforce your ultimate aim.

Amit Dogra and I discuss: * Six specific areas that leaders need to focus on to build a highly functional, growth-minded firm. * The relationship between total client experience and organic growth. * Using your Why Story to enhance your culture and deepen your connection to employees and clients. * The question tru Independence is asking itself as it redefines its purpose. * How leaders and entrepreneurs should think about their responsibilities when it comes to driving growth. * Why it’s worth investing in relationships even if there isn’t a direct “dollars and cents” ROI. * Why Amit believes advisor technology is heading toward what he calls “experience as a service” that’s part of a “single source code” instead of best of breed or integrated but separate applications. * Building excellent service around your team’s unique skillsets. * How Amit fosters a curious spirit that helps him see the big picture and connect some surprising dots.

Resources Related to This Episode * Elliot Weissbluth on building $30 billion RIA HighTower Amit chuckled when I mentioned Elliot’s habit of “firing” himself at the end of every year — turns out he encouraged people who worked for him to do the same! * Elliot Weissbluth on management: Fire yourself every year I dug into Elliot’s methods and philosophy a little deeper in this article I wrote for InvestmentNews. * Deconstructing Amazon’s Massive Growth by Working Backwards with Bill Carr Amit is an admirer of Amazon’s leadership principles, and I talked to one of the company’s key executives about the insights, stories, and secrets that propelled Amazon to the top. * Building an Interconnected Technology Future Ainslie Simmonds, President of Pershing X, talked to me about how an interconnected suite of financial applications could help advisors spend more time doing what they do best: delivering human-to-human interactions. * The Digital Money Advisor Podcast Amit says you don’t have to believe in Bitcoin. But you do have to have an informed opinion when your clients come to you with questions. In this year-long podcast series, I talked to leading thinkers in the crypto space.

Guest: Leslie Y. Tabor, Director of Business Consulting and Education at Charles Schwab Advisor Services.

In a Nutshell: Most successful RIA leaders have been very intentional about hiring top talent in this competitive jobs market. But the best of the best are now being just as intentional about diversifying their talent to create a more dynamic culture capable of delivering more value to clients.

Leslie Tabor explains how Charles Schwab is helping RIAs build diverse cultures based on four pillars:

Cultivating an inclusive workplace culture.
Attracting, developing. and retaining a diverse workforce.
Serving the needs of a diverse marketplace.
Supporting diverse communities.

Guest: Gayle Colman, Certified Financial Planner®, Master Integral Coach®, and author of the new book The Body of Money.

In a Nutshell: Financial decisions are often framed as a tug of war between the head and the heart. But by paying attention to how the whole body expresses feelings around money, advisors can guide clients past their fears and towards a fulfilling sense of sufficiency and inner knowing.

Guest: Terry Foxworth CFP®, CLU, and his daughter, Morgan. Terry is the Managing Partner at Foxworth Advisors in Asheville, NC. Morgan is a student-athlete at Oregon State University where she is a member of the women's rowing team.

In a Nutshell: To quote Terry's firm, "Life's an adventure. Plan for it." The TransAmerica biking adventure that Terry and Morgan planned (more or less) for Morgan's last summer before college brought them closer together and taught them just how much they're capable of achieving.

Guest: Scott Holsopple, the Chief Growth Officer at Hightower, one of the top RIA firms in the country with well over $100 billion in assets under management.

In a Nutshell: How do you think about your personal and professional growth?

Guest: Ainslie Simmonds, President of Pershing X.

In a Nutshell: For decades, technology has promised productivity boosts that would shorten work weeks and increase leisure time. But despite all the computing power at the heart of a modern financial services tech stack, I don't think the typical advisor is working any less than he or she was 10 years ago. Perhaps more importantly, I don't think tech has freed the typical advisor to focus more of their time on building client relationships and delivering human advice. Instead, what tech has done is enabled financial advisors to do more analysis and deliver more data and "what ifs" to clients while also facilitating the increase in communication. The fact remains that no technology enables two humans to increase the speed at which they’re having an in-depth conversation. And ultimately, it's the human to human conversation that generates the true value in a financial advisor-client relationship.

Technology is a means to an end and Ainslie Simmonds and her team are hard at work building an interconnected suite of financial applications that will respond to your most challenging needs, so that you can spend more time focusing on helping your clients thrive and running your business your way.

Like Miracle Mile Advisors, the path from where your firm is today to where you want it to be tomorrow is not a straight line up and to the right.

You'll face fork-in-the-road moments that will define you and your firm. Antonia Burchman shares how Miracle Mile Advisors responded to their pivot points and paints a path forward for advisory firm leaders who want to grow and deliver a great client experience.

Guest: Antonia Burchman, Senior Director of Corporate Development for Miracle Mile Advisors. Antonia was one of Miracle Mile's first team members and has been with the firm as it has grown from less than $100 million in AUM to approximately $4.5 billion.

Pam Perskie is the Founder and CEO of Seven Mile Advisory, a multi-family office that works with clients who have significant financial complexity, including business owners, private equity professionals, real estate investors and operators, professional athletes, and entertainers.

Pam and I discussed how a successful multi-family office operates, the profile of clients, how her firm charges for its services, the mindset advisors need to work with wealthy (and oftentimes famous) individuals, where alternatives fit in her clients’ portfolios, and the role that technology plays in delivering exceptional service.

Andrew Kaye-Skinner is a Senior Product Trainer for Advisor Group, which is one of the country's largest independent broker dealers.

Andrew and I discussed how he taps into his theater and linguistics background to deliver effective training to financial advisors. We also touch on some adult learning theory topics that will help you get your message across whether you're training your team of advisors or preparing to speak at an event.

Michael Fosnaugh is a Chicago-based Senior Managing Director and Co-Head of the Flagship Fund at Vista Equity Partners (Vista). Vista has over $95 billion AUM and over 20 years of experience investing exclusively in enterprise software.

I talked to Michael about the opportunity in private equity and how he and his team analyze and invest in the B2B software market.

Miguel Sosa is a research and product strategist at Bluerock Capital Markets, which has $15 billion in AUM.

At the 2022 CAIS Alternative Investment Summit in Beverly Hills, Miguel and I discussed a paper he wrote on Advanced Diversification, where he used modern portfolio theory to deconstruct the three elements of diversification to quantify the benefits of each of those elements. We then discussed how to apply those three elements to build a more efficient portfolio. We get a little technical in this one but I think you’ll really appreciate how this type of knowledge can help you build higher performing risk-adjusted portfolios.

John Christmas is Co-Head of Business Development and Investor Relations at HPS Investment Partners, a global investment firm with approximately $92 billion in AUM as of September 2022.

John and I talked about how even as interest rates rise, private credit could provide a reasonable ROI with moderate volatility for clients looking beyond the traditional components of the 40 in the 60/40 portfolio.

Since 2014, I’ve published 678 podcasts and the vast majority were interview shows. In 2022, I published 45 shows. Here are 10 ideas from my top podcasts of 2022 that particularly resonated with me and my audience (in chronological order). You'll hear ideas from:

Lisa Salivi
Denise Shull
Scott Keller and Vik Malhotra
Scott Hanson
Julia Boorstin
Carrie Melissa Jones
Lynne Twist
Jess Bost
Dr. Preston Cherry
Rachel Robasciotti

Full show notes: https://stevesanduski.com/top-podcasts-of-2022/

For the eighth time, I begin the New Year with 3 carefully chosen words meant to remind, motivate, and guide me on my road to making the New Year my best year yet. It’s called the My 3 Words exercise.

My 3 words are printed at the top of my Daily Outcomes sheet (my prioritized to-do list) so I see them multiple times a day.

By being thoughtful when I identify my 3 words and then reviewing them on a daily basis, I have a daily reminder of my key focus for the year. These words help me stay on track and on plan.

Last year, I decided to mix it up and instead of doing the My 3 Words exercise, I did a “filters” exercise—more on that in a moment.

For 2023, I’m keeping the same filters from 2022 and bringing back the My 3 Words exercise.

In today’s podcast, I reveal my 3 words for 2023 and discuss how well I executed on the filters exercise from 2022.

Michael Bradley founded Bradley Wealth in 2002. Today the firm offers high-touch financial planning and alternative investments to high-net-worth clientele.

Michael and I have known each other since my days at Peak Advisor Alliance, and I was excited to catch up with him at the 2022 CAIS Alternative Investment Summit in Beverly Hills. We talked about his evolution from being a corporate executive for 15 years to starting his planning firm from scratch at the bottom of the Dotcom bubble. We also discussed why and how Michael made alternative investments a core part of his investment strategy.

There's no one predefined path that will lead us through the challenges and heartbreaks that we all face in life. Often times the best that we can do is learn to accept and explore our emotions while remaining open to the opportunities in front of us. That willingness to explore and grow can help us heal, and help us redefine who we are going forward.

In today's adventure episode, I talk to Jess Bost, VP – Brand Partnerships at Alpha Architect, a research-intensive asset management firm. Jess is also the host of The Breakthrough Factor podcast, a CrossFit coach, and an Olympic weightlifter.

Jess was in a "dark night of the soul" place due to personal trauma and she shares with me, in raw, real terms, her journey of personal and professional self-discovery that brought her to a place of strength where she now coaches others who want to make major life changes and plan for a successful future.

As I said to her during the show, what she shares is "a gift" to those who listen. Don't miss it.

Shannon Larson is the Senior Vice President, Platform Management and Product Development at Advisor Group, the nation's largest network of independent financial advisors.

I spoke with Shannon at the 2022 CAIS Alternative Investment Summit in Beverly Hills about how she and her team manage a shared service model, as well as how alternative investment products are helping their advisors offer more value to a wider variety of clients.

David Copeland is a principal and co-founder of Strategic Wealth Partners, an RIA firm with approximately $3.7 billion in assets under advisement as of December 31, 2021.

He founded Strategic Wealth Partners in 2008 after serving as Senior Managing Director with Mesirow Financial for 21 years. He has also held investment positions with Merrill Lynch and commercial banking positions with Harris Bank.

I sat down with David at the 2022 CAIS Alternative Investment Summit in Beverly Hills, CA and we discussed his approach to investing and how alternatives play an important role in his clients’ portfolios.

You don’t reach the summit of 14,000 foot mountains more than 150 times without learning a few things along the way about life, health, and adventure.

In today’s adventure episode, I talk to financial pros Skip Schweiss and Scott MacKillop. Between them, they’ve climbed mountains all over the world and lived a life of adventure while building thriving careers as executives in financial services.

I’ve had the pleasure of joining them on several trips and can attest to their skill and wisdom, but more importantly, to their sense of team and community. They’ll be the first people on the mountain to help someone in distress and they pack “extras” just in case someone besides themselves needs help (and I know because I was on the receiving end of their help!).

Ben Harrison is the Co-Head, Wealth Solutions at BNY Mellon | Pershing, one of the industry’s largest custodians.

I sat down with Ben at the CAIS Alternative Investment Summit in Beverly Hills, CA and we discussed the biggest challenges and opportunities facing financial advisors as well as his thoughts on what’s happening in the alternative investment space.

In this series of podcasts, I'm going to talk to financial professionals about their lives outside of the office: the passions, hobbies, experiences, challenges, and accomplishments that have influenced who they are and how they think about success and fulfillment.

The first episode with Ben Jones explores his trip down The Great Divide Mountain Bike Route, a 2,808 mile adventure from Banff in Alberta, Canada all the way to Antelope Wells, NM at the Mexican border. It's a grueling trip that required thorough planning, perseverance, and a belief that dreams are worth pursuing.

Should you allocate to alternative investments?

For decades, advisors to the wealthiest strata of investors offered offered access to investments beyond the traditional stocks, bonds, and real estate. And for decades, there were significant barriers to entry in the alternative space that made it difficult for independent advisors to access the best money managers in the alt space. That’s now changed.

Firms like CAIS have democratized access to some of the best money managers available and streamlined what has historically been a time-consuming process to “complete the paperwork” when using alternative managers.

In today’s episode, we explore the alt space and how independent financial advisors can access an asset class that was previously reserved for the big banks and wirehouses and their well-heeled clients.

Guest: Matt Brown, Founder of CAIS, the leading alternative investment platform for financial advisors who seek improved access to and education about alternative investment funds and products.

Matt and I discuss:

Why should advisors consider adding alternative investments to their allocations.
The biggest reasons why advisors have been reluctant to allocate to alternatives.
What are the most popular alternative investment asset classes.
What’s the profile of a typical client who is going to be receptive to an allocation to alternative investments.
Whether advisors use a buy and hold strategy with their alternative assets or do they actively switch managers over time.
What role CAIS plays in facilitating advisors making an allocation to alternative investments.
What role education plays in expanding access to alternative investments.
The best investment Matt ever made.

Resources:

Attend the CAIS Alternative Investment Summit on Oct 17 – 19, 2022 in Beverly Hills, CA. Learn more here.

Matt Brown on LinkedIn

Podcasting is a wonderful way to showcase the talents, insights, and creativity of the amazing people that populate our world. In that spirit, I'm thrilled to announce two special series of episodes that I'm launching this fall.

The first series of episodes is in partnership with CAIS, the leading alternative investment platform for financial advisors. To explain what we're doing, I asked industry star and CAIS CMO Abby Salameh to join me today to discuss this special series of 10 podcast episodes and how they can help you enhance the investment side of your practice. (Teaser: you can register for the Summit Abby mentions by clicking here: https://caismarketing.com/summit2022)

The second series is something that I don't think has ever been done before in the financial advisory profession. So please listen to today's episode as I explain what these "adventurous" shows are about and how you might be able to be a guest on one of them.

I hope you enjoy these upcoming shows as much as I love doing them. Please spread the word about the podcast and rate it and write a review on your favorite social platform. Thank you!

Podcasting is a wonderful way to showcase the talents, insights, and creativity of the amazing people that populate our world. In that spirit, I'm thrilled to announce two special series of episodes that I'm launching this fall.

The first series of episodes is in partnership with CAIS, the leading alternative investment platform for financial advisors. To explain what we're doing, I asked industry star and CAIS CMO Abby Salameh to join me today to discuss this special series of 10 podcast episodes and how they can help you enhance the investment side of your practice. (Teaser: you can register for the Summit Abby mentions by clicking here: https://caismarketing.com/summit2022)

The second series is something that I don't think has ever been done before in the financial advisory profession. So please listen to today's episode as I explain what these "adventurous" shows are about and how you might be able to be a guest on one of them.

I hope you enjoy these upcoming shows as much as I love doing them. Please spread the word about the podcast and rate it and write a review on your favorite social platform. Thank you!

Today's guest is Brent Kessel. Brent is co-founder of Abacus Wealth Partners, which has more than 50 employees and more than $2 billion in assets under management. (Editor's note: as of the date of this repost, September 2022, Abacus has about $3.5 billion in assets under management.)

About ten years ago I was reading a Buddhist magazine and did a double-take when I saw an ad for a financial advisory firm on its back cover. Abacus Wealth has been on my radar ever since.

"I have been a student of different kinds of Eastern traditions, mostly yoga and mindfulness meditation, for over 25 years," Brent says. "As your listeners probably know, the abacus is a Chinese mathematical computational instrument. What I liked about that name is that it felt like it brought in Eastern tradition and history along with computational dexterity, just the ability to really think, figure things out precisely."

Brent's unique path through life and personal passions have had a big influence on how he runs his firm. We discussed how that confluence has helped to make Abacus stand out from the crowd while also offering its clients a mind-opening perspective on what the wealth they're building is really for.

For a detailed write up of his episode, visit: https://stevesanduski.com/brent-kessel/

Today's guest is Brent Kessel. Brent is co-founder of Abacus Wealth Partners, which has more than 50 employees and more than $2 billion in assets under management. (Editor's note: as of the date of this repost, September 2022, Abacus has about $3.5 billion in assets under management.)

About ten years ago I was reading a Buddhist magazine and did a double-take when I saw an ad for a financial advisory firm on its back cover. Abacus Wealth has been on my radar ever since.

"I have been a student of different kinds of Eastern traditions, mostly yoga and mindfulness meditation, for over 25 years," Brent says. "As your listeners probably know, the abacus is a Chinese mathematical computational instrument. What I liked about that name is that it felt like it brought in Eastern tradition and history along with computational dexterity, just the ability to really think, figure things out precisely."

Brent's unique path through life and personal passions have had a big influence on how he runs his firm. We discussed how that confluence has helped to make Abacus stand out from the crowd while also offering its clients a mind-opening perspective on what the wealth they're building is really for.

For a detailed write up of his episode, visit: https://stevesanduski.com/brent-kessel/

My guest today, Dr. Eliott Berkman, is a tenured Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Oregon, where he directs the Social and Effective Neuroscience Laboratory and conducts field-leading, federally-funded research on goals, motivation, and behavior change. He's also the Associate Director of the Center for Translational Neuroscience, and an author who writes about psychology and neuroscience for lay audiences, including in Psychology Today. We talk about the concept of the will and the way of goal pursuing, where the way is the set of cognitive skills, capacities, and ability that we collectively call the executive function, and the will is the motivational factors that propel the behavior. We also talk about how to increase our motivation and influence other people's behavior, the idea of flow states, and how that applies to achieving goals.

What is the cornerstone of your financial planning process?

Solid money management is table stakes, not a differentiator. What really stands out is when you help clients be thoughtful about "what's the money for" and then align their money to support the life they want to live and be in harmony with their values. Advisors who learn how to help clients make those connections will be providing a valuable service that creates clients for life.

Note: This episode is an excerpt from one of the monthly members-only Learning Hours at ROL Advisor. If you'd like to learn more about the Return on Life philosophy and explore becoming a Life-Centered Financial Planner, go to https://www.roladvisor.com.

Guest: Natalie Taylor, a Certified Financial Planner™ and Behavioral Financial Advisor™.

Your business may not be for sale, but it should always be salable.

According to a 2019 study by J.D. Power, the average age of a financial advisor is 55; approximately one-fifth of advisors are 65 and older. If you're within 5 - 7 years of exiting the business, succession planning should be one of your key strategic initiatives. Paul Blease advises that preparing to sell your practice is a process of analysis and optimization that requires a multi-year runway. Without proper planning, you risk undervaluing your life's work and damaging the key client relationships you'll need to sustain the business when the time comes to retire.

Guest: Paul Blease, Strategic Consultant, Invesco Global Consulting at Invesco Global Consulting.

In a Nutshell: Paul Blease's 40 years of experience in financial services covers everything from the big wirehouses to the largest independent RIAs. In the first of two conversations, Paul and I focus on the synergistic team model, which he believes is the best way for advisor CEOs to attract, retain, and maximize top talent, while also providing "white glove" service to all clients.

Guest: Paul Blease, Co-Head of Invesco Global Consulting at Invesco U.S.

Rapid advances in technology, generational change, Covid, financial upheaval, and distrust in institutions are upending the course of life…and financial planning. In light of all that is changing, how do you future proof your business?

In this special live webinar recorded on February 1, 2022, Ric Edelman, the #1 financial advisor of the past 30 years, joins me to discuss the impact of five critical areas on personal finance and how that affects your client work as a financial advisor.

Exponential technologies
Bitcoin, blockchain, and digital assets
Longevity
Retirement security
Health and wellness

Ric Edelman and I discuss:

The wide variety of exponential technologies and how they will impact the nature of advice you give.
Why Bitcoin, blockchain, and other digital assets are here to stay and why it's incumbent upon financial advisors to learn about them even if you don't recommend them.
The impact of lengthening lifespans, what that means for a move toward a multi-stage life, and how to plan for someone who may live to 1oo or longer.
The fresh approach for personal financial planning and investment management that's needed as people live many decades in retirement, including:
- Generating lifetime income you can’t outlive.
- Tax and estate planning strategies to protect yourself and heirs.
- Managing your home: where to live, buying second homes, downsizing.
How living to 100+ offers your clients the opportunity to enjoy peace and contentment, happiness and joy, and a rich and fulfilling life and how your planning advice needs to adjust to include aspects of self-care such as:
- Nutrition
- Sleep
- Exercise
- Breathing

See the full notes at: https://stevesanduski.com/future-proof-your-advisory-practice-with-ric-edelman

In a Nutshell: Webinar marketing and digital communication is here to stay. In today's show, I talk to Eight Digit Media founder Chris Ross and we discuss a detailed, step-by-step strategy for generating tens of millions of new AUM each year from webinar marketing. And I'm not talking marketing fluff here. I have coaching clients who work with Chris and I've seen firsthand the results his team helps my clients deliver.

Let's be honest, most advisors are not natural marketers. We'd rather spend our time helping people navigate life transitions than battling with Wordpress plugins and managing Facebook ads. That's where firms like Chris Ross' "done for you" Eight Digit Media come in. Chris and I went down the rabbit hole of webinar marketing and you'll learn the details of how to benefit from this powerful marketing strategy.

Guest: Chris Ross, CEO of Eight Digit Media.

For seven years, I’ve started each year with 3 words that I’ve carefully chosen to motivate me, remind me, and guide me on my road to making the New Year my best year ever.

My 3 words are printed at the top of my Daily Outcomes sheet (my prioritized to-do list) so I see them multiple times a day.

By being thoughtful when I identify my 3 words and then reviewing them on a daily basis, I have a daily reminder of my key focus for the year and this will (ideally) help me stay on track and on plan.

In today’s show, I review my 3 words for 2021 and discuss how well I executed on them.

I’ll also share why I am NOT doing this exercise in 2022 and what I’m doing in its place.

What is the “real value” that financial advisors deliver and that clients are willing to pay for?

The value delivered by financial advisors has morphed over time. Decades ago, it was picking stocks and facilitating transactions. Then asset allocation and money management came into vogue. In the past 15 years, financial planning has become popular in parallel with the rise of financial planning software such as MoneyGuidePro, eMoney, and NaviPlan.

Underlying this has been the accelerating pace of technology change as smartphones make the non-behavioral aspects of saving and managing money as simple as a few screen taps. Today, average financial advisors who remain wedded to the way they’ve been doing business will soon find themselves perfectly suited for a world that no longer exists. They’ll be chased out of business by prospects who never became clients, by clients who left to work with advisors better-suited to their evolving needs. Just like smartphones replaced laptops, and laptops replaced desktops, the value delivered by financial advisors is shifting from being “all about the money” to a focus on helping clients align their money behavior with their life satisfaction.

In this world, money is simply a tool. And the advisor’s role is to smartly manage the money and collaboratively guide the client’s behavior so they can live their best life possible with the money they have. In this world, advisors who remain focused on the “mechanics” of money will be replaced by advisors who focus on the “alignment” of money.

Guest: Ashley S. Murphy, CFP® AIF® CEPA™, Founder and Executive Director at Global Financial Planning Institute and Founder and Principle at Arete Wealth Strategists.

Insight: Where do you want to be at the end of next year? Most of us can see the top-line goals we want to achieve. What's harder is identifying the smaller steps you have to take every day to get to that destination. And what's harder still is having the discipline to keep taking those steps, even on the days when you're just not feeling it. One common characteristic of the highest achievers I've talked to on my podcasts is that they've all settled into a daily routine that puts them in the right physical, mental, and emotional space to complete those select, specific tasks. If your approach to goal-setting needs a shake-up, start experimenting with your routine now. When the calendar flips to the New Year, you'll be ready to hit the ground running.

Guest: Janine Wertheim, who recently retired from Securities America after spending 37 years with the company. Janine started shortly after the company was founded and served in a variety of leadership roles. Most recently, Janine was President of Securities America Advisors, which is the $75 billion RIA firm she and a small team founded back in 1994.

Insight: I started my financial services career working for Janine back in 1993. Under her leadership, we built Securities America Advisors, the corporate RIA, from $0 to nearly $2 billion in AUM by the time I left in 1999. Today, the RIA has $75 billion in AUM and Janine has served as its long-time president. It was a real treat for me to interview Janine as she reflected on nearly four decades of leadership. The industry has changed over the last four decades, but a constant has been her thoughtful, innovative leadership.

9 months of job interviews. 27 “No’s” from top advisory firms. 33,000 cold calls.

That’s all it took for Erin Scannell to open up his independent office and land his first client back in 1999.

Few people would have powered through that long, but as Erin Scannell explains on today’s podcast, he learned some hard lessons in perseverance and resilience growing up that continue to motivate him to this day.

Erin is the founder and CEO of Heritage Wealth Advisors in the Seattle area, where he directs 50 team members, 18 advisors, and about $2 billion in assets under management. Erin is also a regular on Barron’s list of the top advisors and an inspiration to anyone who thinks the next hurdle in your business’ growth is insurmountable – even if that hurdle is a global pandemic. (June 2020)

Guests: Patrick Brewer, CFA, CPA is the President & CMO at WealthSource, a full service national independent registered investment advisory firm. Prior to that, he was the founder and CEO of SurePath Wealth Management, a financial advisor practice with seven offices across the country. SurePath was acquired by WealthSource Partners in early 2021. He’s also the founder of Model FA, which supports financial advisors as they grow sustainable businesses, increase their visibility, and change their clients’ lives.

Stephanie Bogan has had a long career in financial consulting, including founding her own consulting firm at the age of 24 and selling it 12 years later in a seven-figure deal to a Fortune 200 company, and a stint at United Capital as SVP of Training and Client Experience. Today she runs Limitless Advisor, which is a program for advisors and founders to create bigger, better futures.

Insight: Financial advisors have never had more marketing tools at their disposal, more options for how their businesses can operate, or more access to prospects who value real human-to-human guidance. Your use of these mechanisms has to be connected to a clear, overriding strategy that will break down trust barriers between you and your niche, demonstrate your value proposition, and help your business grow.

Jim Crider, CFP® and CEO of Intentional Living FP discusses how his desire to guide people through the personal stress that money can create led him to a career in financial services and, ultimately, founding his own firm.

In a Nutshell: Technology is going to absorb most of the technical aspects of our work, so we have to become experts at what it means to be human. And advisors who embrace and further develop their "human" side of advising will thrive no matter how technology evolves.

Guest: Clare Ciervo, CFP®, Advisor & Financial Planner at Balanced Rock Investment Advisors.

Most advisors effectively handle the money question. Few are adept at handling the emotion question.

In this discussion, retirement expert Mitch Anthony and Steve Sanduski, CFP® show how you can become your client’s retirement coach and help them navigate this tricky transition to retirement.

For the full presentation, please register for our free webinar on June 29 at 2:00 ET.

To register, visit: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_bkodSXOASbyT0eTyIBH4wg

This program has been accepted for one hour of CE credit from the CFP Board and for one CE hour toward the CIMA/CIMC/CPWA designations.

What do you need to be a successful financial advisor?

An Ivy League degree in finance? A family practice that you can inherit? A group of wealthy connections that you can network? An "in" at one of the major firms?

Well, Rebecca Rothstein doesn't check off any of those boxes, and she's currently managing over $4.5 billion in AUM.

Without even a high school degree, Rebecca left home at age 17. She bounced through a series of odd jobs -- including walking racehorses after they'd finished running -- and by the late 1980s she was slogging through an unfulfilling sales position. She jumped to finance and earned her Series 7 just weeks before Black Monday. Anxious investors looking to take their portfolios in a new direction responded to Rebecca's curiosity and tenacity, two traits that she credits with helping her build her business brick by brick, one phone call at a time.

Today, from her office in Beverly Hills, California, Rebecca's client list includes celebrities, athletes, musicians, and top CEOs and entrepreneurs. Rebecca has appeared numerous times on Barron's List of the top financial advisors, and according to Forbes, is currently the #1 woman advisor in the United States.

In our conversation, Rebecca Rothstein and I discussed how drive and perseverance helped her to overcome the obstacles she faced early in her life and build a multi-billion-dollar AUM business.

(Notes: This is a rebroadcast from October 2018.)

Episode: Joining me for this panel discussion on Bitcoin are:

Meg Bartelt, CFP®, MSFP of Flow Financial Planning
Ronnie Colvin, CFP®, of ColeFP Wealth Management
Adam Blumberg, CFP® of Interaxis Academy

Insight: Bitcoin can lead you down some very twisty rabbit holes. But as an advisor, learning the basics will allow you to answer the most common questions you’re going to get from clients: What is this? Should I invest in it?

In a Nutshell: Top-performing financial advisory firms create an employee value proposition that goes well beyond what you pay them. The firms that are attracting and retaining top talent have developed multi-faceted strategies that address team members' financial desires as well as their innate desire to connect with something bigger that inspires them to do their best work.

Guest: Anand Sekhar, Vice President, Practice Management & Consulting at Fidelity Investments.

Ready to take your marketing up a notch? Working with a PR firm can really accelerate both your media presence and your potential for growth. But PR isn't something an advisor can just outsource and forget about; you have to be prepared to invest both your time and your money to get the most out of this relationship.

Guest: Jason Lahita and Jimmy Moock of StreetCred Communications, a public relations company specializing in the financial services sector.

Episode: Recently I was a guest on the Wicked Pissah Podcast, where I talked to hosts Chris Boyd, CFP® and Jeff Tomaneng, CFP® about how my lifelong interest in finance and tech led me to investigate bitcoin's potential as digital money and a store of value. Today's episode is a rebroadcast of that show.

Insight: I believe that our global financial systems are at an inflection point. You don't have to agree with me about the role that Bitcoin might play in this transition. But you do need to have an informed opinion so that you can answer your clients' questions and help them make the best decisions for their future.

In a Nutshell: If you want to grow your business, you need to build out a systematic, repeatable action plan that will reach your ideal prospects and motivate them to make some positive changes in their lives — including working with you.

Guest: Jeremy Keil is a CFP, CFA, CIMA, and founder of Keil Financial Partners in New Berlin, WI.

My Key Takeaways:

Be specific. Jeremy’s firm is laser-focused on helping folks 55 and older transition into retirement. All their branding and messaging revolves around positioning the firm as an expert consultant for soon-to-be retirees.
Take advantage of opportunities. When the pandemic hit, Jeremy doubled his marketing budget, which helped him reach more folks facing early retirement and other COVID-19 financial challenges.
You can’t make other people change their behavior. But if you improve your interviewing skills and learn how to ask better questions, you can lead folks to realizations that can inspire change.

Also Learn:

How Jeremy rebranded his business around his target niche and name recognition.
How Jeremy created a repeatable marketing system that adds value before a prospect even picks up the phone and generates quality leads.
How Jeremy uses motivational interviewing rather than slick sales techniques to turn prospects into clients.

Listen to this episode to learn about the change I'm making to Between Now and Success.

The second announcement is the launch of my new podcast. You can subscribe to it here:

https://stevesanduski.com/dma/

In a Nutshell: The next wave of fintech and wealthtech will offer dramatic efficiency upgrades for advisors. Prepare your team to spend less time shuffling papers and more time having meaningful conversations with clients that will create real value.

Guest: Marty Bicknell, Founder and CEO of the $35 billion AUM behemoth Mariner Wealth Advisors.

My Key Takeaways:

We need a true advisor desktop platform. Marty believes the independent space still lacks a unified advisor desktop platform and that miss hurts our productivity. But he says it's coming.
Embrace change. Before the pandemic, about 25% of Marty's team was using the company's internal technology platform. During the pandemic, usage jumped to almost 100%. Now 85% of Marty's employees believe their productivity is up too. Those kinds of workflow and efficiency upgrades can be permanent if you build buy-in with your own team.
Explore your options. From upgrading your existing systems to affiliating yourself with a larger firm like Mariner, advisors need to evaluate the new pathways to growth that are opening in front of them.

Also Learn:

What Marty says is the number one problem in finance that tech can help advisor address.
Why Marty believes that the consolidation trend in our industry "isn't going anywhere, it's just getting started."
What changes Marty's team made because of the pandemic that will continue to be part of their business post-pandemic.
How Marty is leveraging the advantages of WFH while also helping his team work through the downsides, such as feelings of isolation.

Words have power, especially when you pick three of them at the beginning of the year and use them as a guide for the next 12 months.

Life is filled with distractions and it’s so easy to let the “stuff” of life knock us off the path we planned to follow at the beginning of the year. But an exercise I picked up from Chris Brogan called My 3 Words helps me stay on that path regardless of what life throws at me.

The idea is simple. Pick 3 words that motivate you, remind you, and guide you on your road to making 2021 your best year ever. Then write them down in a place where you’ll see them every day.

My 3 words are printed at the top of my Daily Outcomes sheet (my prioritized to-do list) so I see them multiple times a day.

By being thoughtful when you identify your 3 words and then reviewing them on a daily basis, you’ll have a daily reminder of your key focus for the year and this will help you stay on track and on plan.

Barron’s Advisor is the gold standard when it comes to advisor conferences, rankings, education, and practice management. I’ve had a longstanding relationship with them and am thrilled to announce our new collaboration.

Learn all the details in today’s short episode. And be sure to visit: https://stevesanduski.com/barronspodcast/

In a Nutshell: Learn the basics and dispel the myths around Bitcoin so that you can provide advice that's in your clients' best interests.

Guest: Adam Blumberg, CFP, co-founder of Interaxis, a company that provides research and education to advisors and companies in the cryptocurrency, digital assets, blockchain, and DeFi space.

My Key Takeaways:

Money is complicated. Money's been called many things and we discuss some of its key properties and why Bitcoin may just be the ultimate manifestation of "money."
Bitcoin is not going away. It's survived several boom and bust periods and is now hovering near all-time highs. Big players like Fidelity, MassMutual, Paul Tudor Jones, Bill Miller, Stanley Druckenmiller, and many others own and advocate for it.
Bitcoin is not for everyone. Not yet, anyway. But as interest rates stay low, federal deficits rise, and ideas like Modern Monetary Theory gain popularity, there's a subset of your client base that will be looking for alternative investments. Do you want those clients buying volatile crypto on their own or working with you to diversify a reasonable percentage of their portfolio?

Also Learn:

What the difference is between "bitcoin" and "Bitcoin."
Why many bitcoin proponents call it "digital gold."
Why some of the mystery that turns people off Bitcoin -- such as who created it -- is actually a strength that has helped it gain widespread adoption and acceptance as a store of value.
Where advisors are turning to learn more about Bitcoin, even if they ultimately decide to guide their clients elsewhere.

Paul Tudor Jones did it for hedge fund managers. Michael Saylor and Jack Dorsey did it for publicly traded companies.

Now, Marty Bicknell is doing it for RIAs and he discusses it with me on my new podcast.

Once called “rat poison squared” by Warren Buffett, bitcoin is now going mainstream. After a tumultuous 12-year existence punctuated by head-spinning bull markets, devasting declines, exchange hacks, and its use in criminal activities, bitcoin has grown into adulthood.

Bicknell recently announced that his firm, the $35 billion AUM behemoth Mariner Wealth Advisors, will offer bitcoin to its clients through a separately managed account run by Eaglebrook Advisors.

To date, only a small number of intrepid advisors including Morgen Rochard, Jackson Wood, Adam Pokornicky, Tyrone Ross, Adam Blumberg, and Isaiah Douglas have done the pioneering work of understanding bitcoin, figuring out the compliance and operational details of offering it, and presenting it to their clients as part of a thoughtful asset allocation.

In a Nutshell: As our industry evolves beyond money management, engaging with clients on their money-life issues and formative experiences surrounding money will be one of your most valuable services.

Guest: Dr. Preston Cherry, the Founder and President of Concurrent Financial Planning, a comprehensive financial planning firm serving households and business owners across generations. Dr. Cherry is also an Assistant Professor of Finance & Personal Financial Planning at the University of Wisconsin - Green Bay's Austin E. Cofrin School of Business, where he is in the process of building a new personal financial planning program.

My Key Takeaways:

Experience matters. Your clients are bringing a lifetime of positive and negative money experiences into this working relationship. You need to understand where they're coming from to help them get where they want to go.
Bridge generations. Older clients might still be "stuffing money under the mattress." Millennials are curious about the latest bitcoin surge. How are you serving your current client base while broadening your horizons for the next generation?
Share your stories. Opening up about the experiences that shaped your own life and career creates real connections. Those connections can create clients for life.

Also Learn:

Why one of Preston's favorite discovery questions is, "Tell me about a money situation that you've had the last six months."
How a combination of open dialogue and measurable assessments can keep clients actively engaged with your planning process.
How to use connection, communication, and convincing to "nudge" your clients towards better financial decisions.
What Preston saved in an envelope to remind him of an important disconnect between his emotions and his money that he was able to overcome.

Mindy Diamond is the President and CEO of Diamond Consultants in Morristown, NJ. Recently, Mindy invited me to be a guest on her podcast, Mindy Diamond on Independence, and I appreciate her allowing me to share our conversation with you here.

Some of the topics Mindy and I discussed include:

Why discipline and focus are two essential traits of a financial advisor, especially an RIA CEO who wants to grow a lasting business.
Some of the most common problem areas that the advisors I coach are working through right now.
How the best advisors crash through perceived barriers by adjusting their mindsets and matching their dream to their desire.
The 5 key areas I believe advisors need to focus on to accelerate their growth.
Wisdom from top advisors like Ric Edelman, Joe Duran, Jon Jones, Elliot Weissbluth, and Peter Mallouk that you can adapt to your own business.
The ways that the pandemic will continue to affect marketing and messaging as we head into 2021.

Thanks again to Mindy for having me on and for letting me republish this episode.

In a Nutshell: In this era of "fake news" and deep divisions between people, understanding the context behind dominant narratives can help build bridges, stimulate new ideas, and push us all forward.

Guests: Nathaniel Whittemore, a strategy and communications consultant for leading crypto companies as well as the host of The Breakdown, which is my favorite podcast in the crypto world. Nathaniel was also a principle at the venture capital firm Learn Capital and he was on the founding team of Change.org.

My Key Takeaway: As you try to anticipate some of the narratives that could shape your story in 2021:

Think macro. Big ideas like Bitcoin and MMT could have more of an impact on global economics than they do on how we buy and sell things day to day.
Explore in good faith. There are thoughtful folks on both sides of every issue who are worth listening to and learning from.
Share your diagnoses. When we talk about problems we agree on, we're more likely to arrive at meaningful and inclusive solutions.

Also Learn:

Why, as a financial tool, Bitcoin might not be an "either or" but more of an "and."
What the broader applications for crypto could mean for developing countries and creative companies.
How narratives can create self-fulfilling prophesies that alter our beliefs.
Which narratives Nathaniel Whittemore is trying to break right now to expand the range of political and economic possibilities he shares with his audience.

In a Nutshell: The top 20% of RIAs aren't just the biggest. They're the firms whose best practices lead to sustained growth, high valuation, and an enduring business.

Guests: Lisa Salvi, Vice President, Advisor Services, Charles Schwab and Catharine Aguilar, Chief Marketing Officer, CornerCap Wealth Advisors.

My Key Takeaway: To prepare your firm to make a big leap in 2021:

Standardize your workflow, write out your plans, and strengthen your value proposition by creating a clear, definitive ideal client profile/persona. These are actionable activities that can lead to growth and low attrition.
Build metrics that allow you to track and manage your progress on top-line growth, customer service, and profitability--and hold your team accountable for meeting them.
Always be recruiting. Billion-dollar firms are always hiring the best people, even if that means poaching from another advisory firm.

Also Learn:

Why Lisa, Catharine, and I are such big believers in the annual planning process.
How hiring a diverse group of top performers from inside and outside of finance can lead to stronger culture and greater innovation.
What kinds of motivation and incentives the next generation of your firm's leadership will respond to.
How embracing authenticity can lead you to more effective social media strategies.

In a Nutshell: Computers are for number crunching. When it comes to managing people, leaders have to nurture the qualitative if they want to drive quantitative results.

Guest: Walter Booker, the Chief Operating Officer of MarketCounsel, the premier business and regulatory consulting firm focused exclusively on the RIA sector, along with its affiliate, The Hamburger Law Firm.

My Key Takeaway: To take a holistic approach to managing your team:

Focus on the "soft stuff." Teaching your people how to manage portfolios is easy. Helping them grow as people so that they can be more effective advisors is how you create real value for your firm.
Let your people be who they are. Covid-19 and WFH are changing the boundaries between our professional and personal selves. Make sure your employees know you embrace both.
Treat your team the same way you treat your clients. Caring that goes beyond the numbers will trickle down through the rest of your organization and across your whole client base.

Also Learn:

Why "who" your team members are matters more than "what" they are.
How to apply the same process of discovery and values-matching to potential hires that you use with potential clients.
How improving your cultural fluency and embracing diversity can lead you to a talent goldmine.
What Walter Booker learned about teamwork and diversity from working on his own "Island of Misfit Toys."

Dennis Morton, Jr. CFP,® CHFC® is a Founder and Principal at Morton Brown Family Wealth in Allentown, PA. I've known Dennis for several years and he and his co-founder and business partner, Kathryn Brown, have built a really outstanding firm.

He also hosts one of my favorite podcasts, "Leading with Purpose." Dennis was kind enough to let me share this outstanding episode on developing versatile leadership. Joining Dennis for this conversation about leadership, blind spots, and adaptability are Craig Reynolds, former CEO of Cigars International and current Senior Advisor to Scandinavian Tobacco Group, and his Executive Coach, Eleanor Lawrence of Human Dynamics, LLC and the Center for Creative Leadership.

Imagine you’ve just given a fantastic presentation to a roomful of executives. You’re pumped because you know all your preparation and rehearsal paid off. And you can tell from the energy in the room that your audience was knocked out too.

Then, as you’re shaking hands, one of the execs “compliments” you by saying they were amazed by your intelligence because given your ethnicity, it had predestined you to a life of mediocrity. That’s exactly what happened to today’s podcast guest, Cecile Munoz!

I was stunned when she shared that story with me. But, in a certain sense, I wasn’t. Anyone who’s been in financial services a couple decades is far too familiar with incidents like that. Too many pockets of our industry were boys’ clubs, and usually, the higher up the ladder you got, the whiter and more male the organization looked.

Thanks to executives like Cecile, that’s finally changing in a meaningful way. On today’s episode, Cecile talks about how her experiences as a Hispanic woman inspired her to create an executive search company that’s helping advisory firms redefine what leadership looks like, especially post-pandemic.

Is the key to growing your business narrowing your niche?

I know that sounds contradictory. And I know many advisors worry about the “Million-Dollar Prospect” who swipes past your firm because she's a pediatrician and you specialize in orthodontists.

But if you're one of 10 advisors in town that offer the same services, you have a 10% chance of winning a prospect. If your specialization, your marketing, and your values set you apart, then prospects who are drawn to your firm have a binary choice: you versus everyone else. Your 10% chance just skyrocketed to 50%!

My guest today, Samuel Deane, started with a pretty narrow niche: comprehensive planning for millennials working in tech. Then, Samuel zeroed in on a niche within his niche where Deane Financial Partners could establish a real competitive advantage and make a positive impact on communities across the country.

Due to advances in technology and the rise of centralized systems that limit privacy, the very nature of how we think about money and the government’s role in it is evolving.

The clearest manifestation of this is the rise of cryptocurrencies, of which bitcoin is the most prominent.

In today's conversation, we go back 5,000 years to explore the beginning of money and then trace how the way we think about money and how we distribute money has evolved over time. Along the way, we touch on gold, central banking, Modern Monetary Theory and yes, bitcoin. It’s a wild ride!

My objective in this episode is to give you some historical context that has led to the development of bitcoin and how it is being used today so you can speak more confidently to your clients when they ask about it.

My guest to discuss all this is Michael Casey. Michael is a true pathfinder. He spent over three decades in journalism including 18 years with Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal. He's been in business and academia, and he has a real grasp on the big technological, geopolitical, economic, and social trends that impact businesses, communities and individuals.

Currently, he’s the chief content officer at CoinDesk.

In addition, he's the author of five highly acclaimed books including:

"The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything"
"The Social Organism: A Radical Understanding of Social Media to Transform Your Business and Life"
"The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and the Blockchain Are Challenging the Global Economic Order"

In a Nutshell: To stand out from all the fake news and clickbait cluttering your audience's inboxes, you have to produce content that's authentic, entertaining, interesting, and above all, human.

Guest: Brooke Southall, the founder of RIABiz. Back in 2009, Brooke built his online-only news publication on traditional journalistic values like using multiple sources and editorial analysis. Brooke and his team captured the rise of new models for providing client-first financial advice against the backdrop of Wall Street's decline during the Great Recession. Today, RIABiz is one of the go-to sources for deep, sophisticated analysis of the most important issues affecting the RIA business.

My Key Takeaways: To create engaging, authentic content:

Don't be boring. Before you even start writing, ask yourself, "Is this an article I would click on or swipe past?"
Slow down. Brooke believes that the race to be first has really hurt online journalism. Working important news into your regular communication rhythm will result in better content than a rushed newsletter.
Keep your eyes open. Brooke says the key to writing good articles isn't great writing ability, it's curiosity about the world and other people.

Also Learn:

Why hiking with his dogs is an integral part of Brooke's writing process.
How to use other people's stories as a jumping-off point for your next blog or newsletter.
What separates a compelling headline from pure clickbait.
Why Brooke believes showing weakness is more important to good writing than demonstrating success.

Building one advisory firm with billions in AUM is hard enough. Joe Duran has done it twice, most recently selling United Capital to Goldman Sachs and becoming Head of Goldman Sachs Personal Financial Management.

We had an insightful conversation about how he did it and what he sees for the future of financial advisors and for the advice they deliver.

In March 2020, Covid-19 lockdowns were starting, businesses were scrambling, and the markets were in a state of shock.

Despite all that, Creative Planning, Inc. had one of its best months ever.

According to President and CEO Peter Mallouk, his firm brought in $500 million in net new assets. Instead of panicking and trying to get their money out of the markets, Peter says many of his clients were giving him more money to manage – and sending more referrals as well.

The seeds that Peter’s firm planted many years ago led to his clients turning to the firm during a moment of unprecedented uncertainty. While great marketing will get you noticed, it’s the total client experience package that will get and keep clients as Peter’s firm has amply demonstrated.

Some advisors lament the chaos caused by Covid-19, but others realize there’s a tremendous opportunity to go on offense and see this as a time to reach out to people who need you now more than ever.

Covid-19 is teaching investors that there’s a big difference between auto depositing into a robo account and working with a professional who is sensitive to your unique life needs.

And, increasingly, people are willing to pay for that difference, if you can deliver it.

On a recent virtual event, Peter and I talked about how advisors at any level can develop the kind of five-star experience that underscores your value to existing clients, drives referrals, and protects your business from fee compression.

9 months of job interviews. 27 “No’s” from top advisory firms. 33,000 cold calls.

That’s all it took for Erin Scannell to open up his independent office and land his first client back in 1999.

Few people would have powered through that long, but as Erin Scannell explains on today’s podcast, he learned some hard lessons in perseverance and resilience growing up that continue to motivate him to this day.

Erin is the founder and CEO of Heritage Wealth Advisors in the Seattle area, where he directs 50 team members, 18 advisors, and about $2 billion in assets under management. Erin is also a regular on Barron’s list of the top advisors and an inspiration to anyone who thinks the next hurdle in your business’ growth is insurmountable – even if that hurdle is a global pandemic.

The Covid-19 pandemic has forced financial advisors to shift the way you market your services. In person marketing and networking is severely restricted for the near future and if you want to succeed in this new world, you have to adapt to the new virtual reality.

Even before the pandemic, our industry was already making a shift towards digital marketing combined with digital events. Things like pay-per-click advertising, newsletters, podcasts, video, and virtual events like webinars, panels, and summits have been gaining steam for years. But now, the pandemic has accelerated that trend to light speed.

The most successful firms have jumped all over the virtual marketing trend and are crushing those firms who haven’t.

To help you succeed in virtual marketing, I hosted a virtual panel with two experts. Bill Keen is the founder and CEO of Keen Wealth Advisors, which is an RIA in the greater Kansas City area with half a billion dollars in assets under management. Lisa Salvi is Vice President, Business Consulting and Field Experience at Charles Schwab, where she oversees the advisor consulting group and produces the industry’s gold standard annual benchmarking report.

In a Nutshell: There's no "silver bullet" marketing strategy that's going to turn your blogs and tweets into clients. But if you identify a niche and develop a consistent media presence that's appealing and engaging, you can reach your ideal clients where they're more likely to see and hear you.

Guest: Wes Moss, the chief investment strategist of Capital Investment Advisors, which is a multibillion-dollar RIA in Atlanta. Wes has been ranked as a top 100 independent advisor by Barron's. He's also the host of Money Matters, which is Atlanta's longest running live call-in radio show on investment and personal finance, a regular contributor to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and the author of three books.

My Key Takeaway: To build your media presence:

Get writing. Wes and I both believe that writing is the key to finding your voice and starting to create stellar content.
Re-purpose. Break down a good newsletter into a week's worth of social media posts. Turn audio from your webinar into a podcast. Use the intro from your last blog as a script for a 2-3 minute YouTube video.
Automate and delegate. If you can use AI or a team of assistants to handle basic communication tasks you'll have more time to write, record, and get personal with clients.

Also Learn:

Why the ability to self-publish media gives independent advisors an advantage over larger firms when trying to reach people.
What advisors should know about trying to break into radio versus trying to start a podcast.
How Wes answers the question, "I'm your client. What is the value that you provide to me?"
What Wes' experience as a contestant on "The Apprentice" (back when President Trump was the host) taught him about succeeding in marketing and media.

In a Nutshell: It's human nature to want to be part of a community. Hosting and participating in live events is essential to maintaining a connection with your client and prospect base and to furthering your own personal development -- even during quarantine.

Guest: Alison Rooney, Global Managing Director, Wealth Management, Barron's Group. Alison's team oversees the underwriting, membership, and content development for all of Barron's live events, including over 20 conferences geared towards elite practitioners.

My Key Takeaway: To create memorable events that will benefit and grow your community:

Delegate responsibility. A Barron's-sized event requires a team of pros focused on specific details, but even your next webinar will have many moving parts to coordinate.
Diversify your content. The broader your range of perspectives, topics, and speakers, the more likely you are to surprise, engage, and delight your audience.
Never run out of coffee. Your attendees are going to remember whom they saw and what they learned, but it's the little hospitality touches that will determine how they feel about your event. For virtual events, "coffee" might be a friendly thank you email or an exclusive offer.

Also Learn:

How Alison moves from "ideas by committee" to one lone decision maker when designing consistent and cohesive conferences.
What the big three reasons are that attendees go to conferences and how to appeal to each.
How the content that's most interesting to advisors, clients, and prospects has evolved in recent years.
Why Alison always zeroes in on three or four people she wants to meet ahead of any conference she's attending.

In a Nutshell: Growing your business -- especially during a crisis -- depends less on your ability to manage money that it does on your ability to become an important part of your client's story.

Guests: Arthur Ambarik CFP® is the CEO of Perigon Wealth Management, which currently has $1.8 billion in AUM. Rachel Elson has recently transitioned from a career as a personal finance journalist to working as a Financial Planning Associate at Perigon.

My Key Takeaway: In order to make you and your services major players in your client's financial narrative:

Do what other advisors don't. Find those pain points like helping family members or advising on a potential career change that fall through the cracks of old-fashioned advisory.
Be your client's friend. And remember: friends do things for each other because they genuinely want to help, not because they expect something in return.
Look outside the box when you're searching for talent. Money managers are a dime a dozen. Caring, curious, motivated people who are excited to learn the ropes are gold.

Also Learn:

Why Arthur and Rachel replaced traditional discovery summary letters with personalized financial narratives.
How your quality of service trumps your asset management when it comes to getting referrals and winning new business.
What Arthur has learned about balancing CEO-level responsibilities with client service responsibilities.

Recently I was a guest on the Better Conversations, Better Outcomes podcast presented by BMO Global Asset Management. Host Ben Jones and I discussed my 5-point framework for effective communication with clients during a crisis. I developed this framework based on the mistakes I saw some advisors make back in the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). These advisors got hit with a double whammy of market declines and lost clients as they failed to effectively communicate with their clients as the GFC unfolded.

In a Nutshell: Silicon Valley unicorns make the billion-dollar headlines, but the true measure of an entrepreneur's success is how you align your business with your goals, your lifestyle, your values, and the impact you make in people's lives.

Guest: Author, journalist, and speaker David Sax. His new book, The Soul of an Entrepreneur: Work and Life Beyond the Startup Myth, approaches entrepreneurship from a broader, more personal, and more realistic perspective.

My Key Takeaway: To define success for yourself as an entrepreneur:

Accept that your business isn't Amazon or Facebook. You don't have to become a billionaire to be successful.
Be yourself. The misfit eccentric who dropped out of high school and skateboards to the boardroom in a hoodie is the exception. Successful bakeries, salons, restaurants, and, yes, financial advisory firms are run by hardworking people like you who have a dream and put a plan in place to achieve it.
Set purposeful but personal business targets. Don't try to grow like everyone else is. Build the business that you want to run.

Also Learn:

How to "get over the hump" of not seeing yourself as a real entrepreneur.
Why taking on loans or third-party investments to accelerate your growth might hurt your business more than it helps.
What seeing Heidi Klum on the cover of Maxim taught David about the unrealistic expectations our country sets for entrepreneurs.
The process David uses to write his books.

Seth Streeter is the CEO and founder of Mission Wealth, a leading wealth management company with more than $2.5 billion in assets under management. Seth was an early proponent of our industry's shift into Life-Centered Planning, and I could listen to him talk all day about how advisors can help folks redefine what wealth and happiness really mean.

Recently I heard an episode of the Wellness Revolutionaries podcast in which Mindbody co-founder Blake Beltram talked with Seth about this concept of redefining wealth. Their discussion was so insightful that I reached out to Blake, and he's been kind enough to let me share this episode here.

Some of the topics Blake and Seth cover include:

Why Seth believes money counts for only 10% of a person's wealth.
Seth's 10 Dimensions of Wealth and 7 Dimensions of Wellness.
How the values of a new generation of workers are reshaping the classic American Dream.
How to help retirees develop a "Life 3.0 Vision" based around the freedom to pursue passions, strengthen relationships, and build their legacies.
Preparing your business for the paradigm shift Seth sees in how our culture views money and defines wealth.

Thank you Blake and Seth for letting me post this episode.

In a Nutshell: Hard work, a deep love for his clients, and a niche working with retirees of a particular company led this advisor to the pinnacle of the profession.

Guest: Barron’s Hall of Famer Scott Tiras, President of Tiras Wealth Management, which is a private wealth advisory practice of Ameriprise Financial Services. Scott has more than 30 years of experience as an advisor. Currently he manages around 700 family relationships and more than $1.5 billion in assets.

My Key Takeaway: To create an experience that makes clients feel like they’re your only client:

Identify your “bread and butter client,” meaning the people to whom you can bring the most value over time.
Focus your pitch and your value proposition on what Scott calls “the soft side of retirement” — the things clients and prospects will be retiring to, not just their raw numbers.
Challenge yourself and your team to excel. Scott channels his competitive energy into running a world-class business. You need to find a similar motivation and drive to deliver “hall of fame” service and keep growing.

Also Learn:

How Scott targets a local company niche with on-site workshops that demonstrate his expertise and lay the foundations for strong relationships.
How Scott leverages his team of 16 to support him and personalize the relationship building touches that keep his clients connected to the business.
What Scott does to build his brand and play an active role in his community so that he has a noticeable, positive presence.

In a Nutshell: A "wow" customer service experience meets clients needs, engages customers on terms that gel with their lifestyle, and creates genuine human connection. Hitting those check marks is what separates Ritz-Carlton, Starbucks, Zappos, and the best financial advisory firms from the rest of the pack.

Guest: Joseph Michelli, a bestselling author, an international speaker, an organizational consultant, and one of the world's leading authorities on how to develop joyful and productive workplaces with a focus on the customer experience.

My Key Takeaway: To give your clients a "Ritz-Carlton" advisory experience they'll be sure to tell their friends about:

Don't strive for excellent customer service. Seek perfection. The companies that try to deliver better service tomorrow than they did today are the ones that build the priceless brand loyalty that sets them apart from their competition.
Focus your client experience around addressing "peaks and pains." Find small ways to celebrate big wins with clients that your planning helped them achieve. Use your financial expertise and your human empathy to mitigate painful moments -- like, say, a sudden market downturn after a global virus outbreak.
Make the most out of every face-to-face interaction you have with a client. Your most effective marketing doesn't happen in Facebook ads or on a billboard. It happens when a client is in your office getting five-star treatment from the moment they walk in the door. You won't have to ask your clients for referrals -- you'll be earning them.

Also Learn:

Why you wouldn't take a first date to McDonald's and what that says about good service vs. great hospitality.
How to integrate your tech stack with your advisory team to create elevated customer experiences on a consistent basis.
What Joseph Michelli learned about world-class customer service and team leadership from Howard Schultz, Airbnb, and Mercedes-Benz.

On this special bonus podcast episode, I'm doing something I've never done before: republishing someone else's podcast. I think you're really going to enjoy this episode of the Top Advisor Marketing Podcast, hosted by Matt Halloran and featuring guest Mitch Anthony.

This was a really fun listen for me because I go back a long way with both of these guys. Matt was one of the best coaches we had when I was running Peak Advisor Alliance. And Mitch is my business partner in ROL Advisor, our online platform that's helping advisors refocus the planning conversation on people's lives, not just their money. And that idea is at the heart of Mitch's conversation with Matt. They do a real deep dive into how advisors can use the discovery process to reveal the client's story and understand how significant life experiences have shaped the client's relationship to money.

In addition to discussing how ROL Advisor builds out that initial storytelling into an engaging client experience, Mitch and Matt also talk about:

How to guide clients towards an empowering decision-making mindset that makes them feel more in control of their planning.
What kinds of questions you can ask to help clients connect their means to a sense of meaning.
Why dialogue is more powerful than monologue.
What the true purpose of money is.
How to get more comfortable and more adept at helping clients manage the emotional side of financial life transitions.
How to pull all of the above together to create a value proposition that's truly valuable to clients and prospects.

A big thanks to Matt Halloran and the team at Top Advisor Marketing for letting me share this insightful conversation.

Where does the drive come from for top achievers who keep knocking it out of the park long past the point that many of us would have kicked up our feet and called it a career?

That question has fascinated me for decades and today's podcast guest, Laila Pence, CFP®, shared with me one of the most compelling stories I've ever heard about overcoming early life challenges to become one of the country's most successful and respected financial advisors.

As we talked at the Barron’s Teams Summit in Las Vegas, Laila also explained how her approach to overcoming some incredible personal hardships informed how she built her billion-dollar advisory firm with an intense focus on creating true, lasting relationships with her clients.

Laila Pence is the President of Pence Wealth Management, one of the nation’s leading private wealth management firms with over $1.0 billion in AUM. She’s currently ranked in the top 1% of female financial advisors nationwide and, in 2019, she was named among the top 6 female financial advisors in the country by Forbes, and the #38 top independent financial advisor nationally by Barron’s Magazine. Forbes also ranked Laila #1 on their Best-in-State Wealth Advisors List for Southern California in 2019.

In a Nutshell: All financial advisors deliver services and advice. The ones who are growing their businesses find creative ways to stand out in an increasingly crowded marketplace and attract a niche of clients they can offer the most value to.

Guest: Steve Wershing. Steve is the President of The Client Driven Practice and the author of Stop Asking for Referrals. He's also the cohost of a great podcast called Becoming Referable.

My Key Takeaway: To differentiate both your firm and your prospective client base:

Discover, design, develop, and declare your niche.
Craft a unique client experience that will cater to your ideal client.
Remember: a niche is a need that sets your clients apart, and a need that you are able to service in a unique way.

Also Learn:

Why separating "target" from "niche" is essential to transforming your business.
How simple tweaks to things like your meeting calendar can have a big impact on your niche client experience and drive up your value to clients.
What kinds of dialogues you can have with clients that will lead to referrals ... without you having to ask for them.

In a Nutshell: Delivering great service is table stakes. Drive toward extraordinary by creating a unique, emotionally engaging experience for each individual client.

Guest: Julie Littlechild. Julie is a leading expert on the drivers of client engagement. She's also the cohost of the Becoming Referable podcast and the author of the book The Pursuit of Absolute Engagement.

My Key Takeaway: To create an engaging client experience that becomes a magnet for new ideal clients:

Be intentional about designing a discovery and planning process that engages your clients emotions and makes them feel more connected to you.
Focus less on a prospect's assets and more on how they view themselves, then deliver an experience that is tailor made for who they are.
Draw a distinction between service and hospitality ... and excel at both.

Also Learn:

Why creating a client journey map should be an essential early step in thinking about your systems and services.
How to put your firm and its ideal clients to an "Authenticity Test" that will make you think about what you're really trying to accomplish as an advisor and as a business owner.
What it means for advisors and their clients to "co-create" a financial planning experience together.

In a Nutshell: In 2020, the most successful advisors have moved past worrying about "competing" with technology. Instead, they're finding ways to automate the 30 - 40% of the mundane tasks that are necessary for relationships but don't enhance them, so that they can focus on the human conversations that create real lasting value -- and more business.

Guest: Matt Reiner, CFP® CFA®, the cofounder and CEO of Benjamin, "the world’s first A.I. assistant created for advisors by advisors."

My Key Takeaway: Used properly, AI can do things human advisors don't need to be doing so that we can focus on things AI can't do, like:

Build better relationships with our clients.
Coach our clients on financial matters so that they make better decisions and feel more in control of their futures.
Help clients clarify what their money is for and live their best life possible today, not just in retirement.

Also Learn:

Why you need to start thinking about technology -- and AI in particular -- as your partner, not your enemy.
How an AI platform can help keep your margins and expenses under control during a burst of high growth.
What nuts and bolts integration and training looks like when you decide to add an AI component to your tech stack.

A single word or a short phrase could permanently change your life.

When you were young, a teacher may have said something to you that forever altered how you viewed yourself—good or bad. Maybe a parent said something that still sticks with you today. Or perhaps a former boss made a comment that drives you nuts to this day—I’m in that boat!

In a similar way, this “My 3 Words” exercise I learned from Chris Brogan is designed to empower you with 3 words that drive your actions and keep you on track to make this your best year ever.

This is the sixth year now where I’ve begun the year by identifying 3 words that will set the course, give me direction, and totally excite me as I move through the year. I write these words at the top of my Daily Outcomes sheet and look at them daily throughout the year.

The premise is simple. Pick 3 words that motivate you, remind you, and guide you on your road to making 2020 your best year ever.

I encourage all my clients to do this and I encourage you to do this same exercise as it will help you stay focused on the most important outcomes for the year.

In a Nutshell: The largest financial advisory firms have developed consistent marketing programs that deliver a predictable stream of ideal clients...and there's just a handful of different ways to do it.

Guest: Brad Johnson. Brad is the Vice President of Advisor Development for Advisors Excel. He's also the host of a great podcast for financial advisors called The Elite Advisor Blueprint.

My Key Takeaway: To get your marketing machine humming:

Understand that marketing is NOT optional. Referral marketing is not enough. Choose from a list of five broad marketing buckets (with an infinite number of tactical ways to execute), and implement aggressively and consistently.
Marketing is math. Don't let your emotions distract you from the key numbers that will determine how and when a particular marketing initiative will pay off.
Make practicing a practice. Once you identify the most effective marketing strategy for your ideal client pool, practice and pursue mastery of it.

Also Learn:

Why strong marketing that keeps your business growing double digits each year is one of the most effective ways of retaining top talent.
How one well-produced piece of content (like a book) can be repurposed, sliced and diced, and become an evergreen source of more content (like blog posts, short videos, and social media posts).
What sets apart a valuable proprietary process from a generic commodity that prospects can get from any advisor.

In a Nutshell: Shifting from being a financial advisor to being a financial coach could be the next evolution of how financial guidance is delivered and enable independent human advisors to remain profitable and relevant.

Guest: Todd Tresidder. Todd is a former hedge fund manager who transitioned into a successful financial coaching career. Recently, he has adapted his coaching into a series of premium online courses on wealth building at Financial Mentor.

My Key Takeaway: In order to keep adding to your value proposition:

- Spend more time empowering clients and less on enabling them.

Help your clients find the path to the next step, help them always be taking that next step, and help them avoid the missteps that are in their path.
Consider getting formal training in how to coach people, from organizations like Coaches Training Institute.

Also Learn:

How the act of gaining financial freedom doubles as a path to personal growth.
How a financial coach's services differ from a traditional financial advisor's.
What separates most people from setting their wealth goals and actually achieving them.

In a Nutshell: Clear career paths and offering a path to partnership and equity ownership are key ways to attract and retain next generation advisors and advisory firm leaders.

Guests: Lisa Salvi is Vice President of Advisor Services at Charles Schwab, where she oversees business consulting and education offerings, including their one-on-one consulting engagements, the annual RIA Benchmarking Study, and other programs that support the development of advisor talent.

Yonhee Gordon is a principal and Chief Operating Officer of JMG Financial Group just outside of Chicago, which has more than $3.0 billion in assets under management.

In a Nutshell: Whether you're writing website copy, sending email newsletters, social media posts, physical mailers, or a combination, you have to master the psychology of engagement to turn your prospects into clients and keep your business growing.

Guest: Adam Bensman. Adam is one of the top direct response copywriters and consultants in the country, and he has a particular expertise in helping financial advisors improve their marketing.

My Key Takeaway: If you want win more business from your copywriting, you need to craft a compelling offer that:

Differentiates your firm.
Reaches your ideal client right where they are.
Addresses the questions that are going in their mind.
Provides a high level of perceived value.

Also Learn

Why you should delete your glossy headshot from the top of your emails, open with an ellipsis (...), and always end with a PS.
How to address your prospect's pain by appealing to the "search trigger" that brought them to you in the first place.
What 4 quadrants Adam says your marketing needs to hit in order to set yourself apart and demonstrate your value to your audience.

The growth of United Capital is a fascinating case study in how being early on a trend, M&A, technology, financial life planning, and a charismatic leader all came together to create one of the industry’s biggest and most innovative RIA firms. Today, we’ll take a deep dive on this story through one of firm’s longest tenured employees, Matt Brinker.

Starting at $0 in 2005, Joe Duran founded United Capital, and one of his early hires was Matt Brinker. Matt joined the firm when it had about $300 million in AUM and rode it all the way to $24 billion in AUM. He left after 13 years when the company was sold to Goldman Sachs in mid-2019.

Most recently, Matt was the chief business development officer and head of acquisitions for the firm.

If you’re not learning faster than the world is changing, then you are going to fall behind very quickly. And businesses that fall too far behind usually don’t get a second chance to catch up.

A big challenge for financial advisors is, how do you stay on top of everything that’s required to run a successful advisory business?

As Josh Brown put it at the recent Wealth/Stack Conference, “A good advisor is both coach and quarterback, on-demand psychologist and personal friend, historian and futurist.” That’s an awful lot of ground for us to cover in our personal and professional learning. Plus, we have to track technological advances that are impacting our industry, while also adapting to best practices that help our businesses stay ahead of the competition.

If you haven’t made a commitment to learning one of your top responsibilities as a CEO advisor, today’s episode will help you get with the program.

My guest today is financial planner, author, podcast host, and speaker Taylor Schulte. Taylor is the founder of Define Financial, a financial planning firm headquartered in San Diego, CA. He’s also the co-founder of Advisor Growth Community, a place for financial advisors to connect with and learn from each other, and the host of two excellent podcasts, Stay Wealthy and Experiments in Advisor Marketing.

Taylor and I talked about why all financial advisors need to be lifelong learners, our sources for learning, and we share a few marketing ideas too.

When was the last time you talked to a Netflix employee about your account?

How about an Amazon employee?

I’m guessing for most of you the answer is: never. Netflix automatically charges my credit card every month and uses its algorithms to push content it thinks I’ll enjoy to my home screen.

A shipping problem or return request with Amazon is usually resolved with a couple swipes or clicks. It’s efficient customer service, but it’s all faceless, online, impersonal.

Now, when was the last time you stayed at a Ritz-Carlton or Four Season? How did that experience make you feel? Pretty darn good I bet!

The key to your success as an advisor is to marry the tech efficiency of an Amazon with the deluxe service of a Ritz-Carlton and underpin it with high technical competence. It’s really a three-legged stool—tech efficiency + deluxe service + technical competence.

I sometimes worry that our industry has become so obsessed with the tech efficiency leg of the stool that we are losing sight of what clients are really paying us for—helping them make better financial decisions so they can live their best life possible.

I couldn’t attend this year Wealth/Stack Conference, so I invited two of my favorite past guests who did attend to recap some of the key themes that emerged from the conference.

My guests today are Dennis Morton and Matt Wilson. Dennis is the co-founder of Morton Brown Family Wealth along with his partner, Kathryn Brown. Matt is the Chief Investment Officer and Managing Director of Keen Wealth Advisors along with his partner, Bill Keen.

Here are four major themes from the conference and our thoughts about each.

Email Marketing is one of the most effective, least expensive, and underutilized marketing strategies available to you right now.

I’m on the record as saying a person’s inbox in the most valuable piece of marketing real estate you can own. When a person gives you permission to show up in their inbox on a regular basis, you can develop a personalized relationship that leads to new business and long-term loyalty.

Now, you might be thinking, "Steve, have you lost your rocker here? Email is so 1990s. Why are you talking about email marketing? Email is dead. We've got Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, LinkedIn, texting, Instagram, webinars and much more, so why are you talking about a dinosaur like email?"

Because it works!

Just like I was early to the podcasting space five years ago when I started Between Now and Success, the next big marketing and education platform is a resurrection of an old one—email.

I started using “electronic mail” back in the 1980s when I worked for corporate giants Caterpillar and Hewlett-Packard. In those pre-commercial internet days, it was a closed loop and I could send mail only to other employees. I thought it was really cool back then and today, it’s even cooler now that your “email” is as unique and ubiquitous as your thumbprint.

To explore email marketing, I invited one of the country’s leading authorities on email marketing, Dan Oshinsky, to my podcast. Dan is the founder of Inbox Collective, an email consultancy that helps brands grow audiences, build relationships, and get results via email.

Previously, Dan was the Director of Newsletters at The New Yorker, where he helped launch new newsletters, optimize their suite of products, and drive paid subscriber growth through email. Dan was also the Director of Newsletters at BuzzFeed, where he built a team that grew newsletters into one of the biggest referrers of traffic to the site and drove 250 million clicks to BuzzFeed. Dan also wrote more than 200 posts for BuzzFeed, including one that hit 1 million views.

A top-notch tech stack is table stakes. And you won’t “out tech the tech titans” so you can’t win on technology.

So what can a financial advisor do to remain relevant and thrive in the years ahead?

You can double-down on your ability to humanize the advisor-client relationship, to understand and deliver on exactly what your clients really need, and you should do it in a technologically-enhanced way.

“You're not competing on your toolkit or the software that you deploy in your office,” says podcast guest Lex Sokolin. “You're competing on the core need, which is that most people don't have enough money. They don't know how to retire. They're super anxious. I think the smart financial advisor will shade the constructs of how they work and move towards what the human need is in this evolving world.”

Lex Sokolin is the Global Fintech Co-Head at ConsenSys, a blockchain technology company building the infrastructure, applications, and practices that enable a decentralized world. Lex is also a futurist and entrepreneur whose newsletter, Future of Finance, should be on your must-read list every week if you want to stay ahead of the curve (I read it each week).

In today’s conversation, we discuss the sweeping changes in the fintech landscape and what new skills advisors will need to thrive in an industry that’s getting more digital and more automated every day.

“You’re either growing or dying.” How many times have you heard that chestnut? Too many!

But what if you decided you didn’t want to grow? What if you decided you’d be happy at the current size of your business and just add new clients when an existing client leaves or passes away?

Does the thought of that idea make you vomit or is it liberating?

If you decide it’s all about growth, what are you willing to sacrifice to scale?

My guest today, Carolyn McClanahan recently decided her practice was “big enough” with 100 families and she has now closed her firm to new clients.

Carolyn is the Director of Financial Planning at Life Planning Partners in Jacksonville, FL and she has a fascinating background. She's actually a M.D. who decided to become a CFP® after she and her husband couldn't find a financial planner who provided the kind of life-planning advice that they really wanted. After she opened her own firm in 2004, Carolyn split her time between advising some of her doctor buddies and treating patients as an emergency room doctor.

In our conversation, we discuss how Carolyn replaced the old “big book” financial plans we all remember with a more personal, goals-based narrative approach. She also talks about her unique fee structure of pricing based on complexity, and we discuss how she concluded that 100 families was the optimal size for her practice.

The classic educational seminar still works if you spend the time, and yes, the money to do it right.

My podcast guest today, Matt Gulbransen, has mastered the science—and art—of delivering seminars that convert.

Matt is the President of Pine Grove Financial Group, which is an RIA operating in the St. Paul, Minnesota area. In our conversation, Matt discusses what attracted him to seminars, what works for him, a few things that don't, the kinds of events he hosts, the formula he uses to calculate his ROI, and, maybe most importantly, the emphasis that he and his team place on rehearsing your presentations until not even a power outage is going to throw you off your game.

Today I’m going to share 3 maxims used by Navy SEALs that drive their elite performance.

These maxims have been used by SEALs for decades and have proven their worth in thousands of Special Operations missions in every corner of the world.

The good news is, they’ll work for you too. Apply them to your business and to your personal performance and watch your results soar.

My guest today is Commander David Sears of the United States Navy. David retired after serving for 20 years in the Navy SEALs. He's a decorated veteran who planned, led, and executed hundreds of Special Operations missions in more than 40 countries on five continents.

In our conversation we talk in-depth about three maxims that guide how Navy SEALs operate. Each maxim is so nuanced that once you dig into the surface-level truth, you’ll find deeper levels of insight that can apply to any kind of business – including, of course, financial advisory.

I really love making these kinds of connections. I firmly believe that to be successful in any business, you need to diversify your inputs and learn as much as you can from whomever you can. You might not think that advisors and Navy SEALs have a whole lot in common. But more often than not, I’ve found that strategies that the absolute best of the best use to excel in one field have lessons for folks in other businesses as well.

Imagine for a moment if you could build a highly profitable practice that served a total of just 10 families and individuals. And through your personalized, indispensable service you could create clients for life, and perhaps even for a generation or two.

That’s exactly what David Dunn is doing at Kingsbridge Wealth Management. David describes Kingsbridge as a family office featuring a “full stack financial infrastructure” that provides high-net-worth families and individuals with everything they need to manage their wealth. That means a thorough understanding of how each client thinks about their money, offering specialized services, and incorporating some outside-the-box thinking on asset allocation (hint: it’s definitely NOT modern portfolio theory).

Even if your typical client’s net worth is in the 7-figures, as opposed to 8, 9 or 10 that David works with, you’ll gain a great appreciation of the psychological and service needs of all investors and how to apply that understanding to better meeting your client’s needs.

You’re not going to reach the top of this profession without having a competitive streak in you. And when you channel that competitiveness into “winning” for your clients and “winning” in the growth of your business, that’s a dynamite combo.

Today’s guest, Michael Bapis, is a competitor who played golf for the University of Utah, then collegiate-level basketball while studying abroad in Greece for two years. After finishing school, he moved to Phoenix and ran Jim Flick's Golf School at Desert Mountain. Once he decided to follow his father into finance, Michael kept learning and achieving at a very high level, first at Morgan Stanley, then at HighTower. In 2018, he opened Vios Advisors under the umbrella of Rockefeller Capital Management, working with high-net worth individuals, pro athletes, and entertainers.

We connected in person at the 2019 SALT Conference and discussed a wide range of topics including two key lessons he learned from his early mentor Jim Flick. These lessons became foundational cornerstones for how he built his advisory firm to more than $1 billion in AUM.

I'm convinced that one of the keys to success is to have extreme clarity. But clarity can be difficult to define, and even harder to achieve. In our business, many advisors don’t do a thorough enough job defining themselves to an ever-more-crowded marketplace. “We help you achieve your financial goals” might fit well on your website’s masthead. But does a phrase like that really say anything meaningful about who you are as an advisor, what kind of value you bring to the planning process, and who your ideal clients are?

To help us all achieve some … well, clarity on these important issues, I sat down with the “King of Clarity.” My guest today is Steve Woodruff, who is in the business of helping people discover their fit and then craft the words that become their verbal business card. He's also the author of a great book called “Clarity Wins: Get Heard, Get Referred.” In our conversation, Steve discusses the five questions he believes all business owners need to ask themselves about their branding and messaging, especially when it comes to your website.

And make sure you listen to the whole episode, because at the end we hold some advisor websites up to the King’s clarity standards. Steve’s feedback on the good, the bad, and the ugly of clarity will make you look at your own marketing in a whole new way.

(Don’t worry. Names have been disguised to protect the innocent. And the guilty.)

If I only knew then what I know now …

As advisors and business owners, we all think about this from time to time. But how often do you actually put what you’ve learned into action?

Right now, you’re probably sitting on a lesson or idea you could use to transform your business. In fact, you might have enough “A-ha!” moments stored up to do something really exciting, like starting your dream RIA from scratch.

My guests today did just that. Dennis Morton and Katie Brown are the co-founders of Morton Brown Family Wealth in Allentown, PA. They used lessons learned during their previous 10-year working relationship at another firm to grow Morton Brown from $0 to over $100 million in AUM in just 12 months.

In today's show, we discuss the specific ways they designed their firm from Day 1 to be an enduring business with no regrets and no more “if onlys.”

A master class from Sterling Shea on how to revamp your business and thrive as a world-class financial advisor, taught by someone who literally writes the book on where our industry is going and how the best of the best stay at the top.

How can financial advisors build an enduring business with sustainable value?

Contrary to what we often hear and read, it's not all about tech. It's about being indispensable in your clients' lives.

Today's guest, Brie Williams, says there are four areas we should focus on to create sustainable value.

Be authentic to what you represent.
Set, manage, and deliver on client expectations.
Remember that perception is reality.
Optimize to realize your long-term vision.

These four areas can form the core of your client-centric approach to business.

Brie is Vice President of State Street Global Advisors and Head of Practice Management for the Global SPDR Business. Before she entered financial services, Brie had a great career in advertising and research where she managed big brands like Frito-Lay, McDonald's, and Target.

In our conversation, we explored some of the key drivers you need to put in place to build a sustainable business in our fast-paced world. In particular, Brie talked about the lessons she learned on Madison Ave. that have translated into helping advisors build better practices, and how you can use technology combined with human empathy and curiosity to help clients understand how to engage with you and your team when their money needs and life needs intersect.

Capitalism is taking a beating right now. Rising wealth inequality and low social mobility have been festering for decades. The median income of Americans hasn’t budged in 30 years. The overall share of GDP accruing to capital has risen significantly relative to labor. And I could go on.

So is capitalism the problem? No. We don’t need to ditch capitalism, we just need to evolve it so more people can benefit from it.

But how do we do that?

For some answers, I reached out to Anthony “the Mooch” Scaramucci. You may know him as the short-lived communications director in the White House. But he’s also the founder of a multi-billion dollar alternative fund, organizer of the SALT Forum (BTW, I'll be podcasting from the SALT Forum so register to attend and I'll see you there), and a fun guy to talk to.

In today’s show, we talk about capitalism. We discuss what works, what’s not working, and what would it take for our country to evolve capitalism so it helps all Americans live the American dream.I hope you enjoy today’s show.

Seminars work. I’ve had multiple advisors on my podcast in recent months who are all killing it with seminars. In fact, today's podcast guest, Bill Keen, raised $90 million in AUM last year from seminars.

Sure, it seems old school in the age of Facebook, YouTube, and Zoom, but people still value human to human live contact. You can only Google, click, and swipe so much before you just want to hear an actual person give you some good, solid information about how to live the best life possible with your money.

If you’re behind the curve on seminars and you aren’t sure how to start, my guest today, Bill Keen, is going to help you catch up. Bill’s firm, Keen Wealth, has almost half a billion dollars in AUM, and seminars have been pivotal to Bill’s success.

On this episode, Bill details the 5-step process he used to perfect his seminar process and it could help you get on track to raise tens of millions in new AUM. Yes, there’s more to it than just slapping together a good PowerPoint. But if you commit to Bill’s process and throw in some personal touches, you’ll be on your way to grabbing an audience and growing your client base.

A growing financial advisory firm needs lots of top talent. What are you doing to deepen your roster of advisors? Do your brightest employees see a path for themselves from, say, a business or marketing degree to CFP® certification? And if so, what can both the employee and the employer expect during that process?

Well, confession time: it's been a couple years (actually decades) since I got my CFP®, so I don't think I'm the best person to answer those questions. I decided to go to a better-qualified source.

Andrew Jones is a representative in the high-net-worth area at one of the country's leading investment management firms. Andrew recently completed the CFP® program and will soon meet the work requirements to become, officially, a CFP®.

Andrew told me that one of the reasons he decided to pursue his CFP® rather than an MBA is that he saw himself as more of a people person. Your firm needs to attract and cultivate millennials like Andrew who recognize that there's more to advisory than just managing money. Advisors who are skilled communicators and who are empathetic with an ability to connect with your clients as people are vital to the future of your business.

On today's show, Andrew shares his best advice for studying and passing the CFP® exam. He also talks about the resources his company made available to him and how studying with other aspiring CFP®s created a sense of camaraderie and accountability that was critical to his success. We also hear from a special guest who was particularly instrumental in helping Andrew earn his CFP®.

As you're listening to Andrew discuss this process, ask yourself what your firm could be doing to encourage young employees to pursue CFP® certification and how you could foster a workplace culture that would improve their chances of success.

David Bach is one of the most well-known names in personal finance and the RIA space. In 2018, AE Wealth Management ranked as the second-fastest-growing RIA in America according to Investment News and Financial Advisor Magazine.

David is also an 11-time best-selling author, including 9 New York Times best-selling books that have sold over 7 million copies and been translated into 19 languages. His latest, “The Latte Factor,” is also a huge hit.

And on top of all that, David’s massively popular “Smart Women, Smart Retirement” seminars are currently being taught coast to coast by his licensed advisors.

On today's show, we do a deep dive on marketing, with a focus on seminars and the kind of storytelling David uses to connect with prospects and grow great businesses.

Rohit Bhargava is the founder and chief trend curator of the Non-Obvious Company, which helps companies and leaders win by learning to see what others miss. He’s also the founder of three successful companies, and advisor to multiple startups, and a bestselling author of five books on a wide variety of topics, including the future of business, how to build a brand with personality, and why leaders always eat left-handed.

We talked about some key trends from the 2019 edition of “Non-Obvious” that financial advisors are going to want to pay special attention to. The rapid advances in technology, media, and marketing have put our business in an “accelerating present” for more than a decade now. Rohit’s observations will help you stay ahead of the curve.

As technology automates much of the “mechanics” of money, advisors need to evolve to the more emotional aspects of money. After all, simply helping rich people get richer isn’t usually a driving motivator for advisors—or clients.

In my conversation with Doug Lennick, the co-founder of Think2Perform, an author, and former EVP of Advice and Retail Distribution for American Express Financial Advisors (now Ameriprise Financial), he shared four words that he believes underlie the real value financial advisors deliver.

Today's guest is Brent Kessel. Brent is founder of Abacus Wealth Partners, which has more than 50 employees and more than $2 billion in assets under management.

About ten years ago I was reading a Buddhist magazine and did a double-take when I saw an ad for a financial advisory firm on its back cover. Abacus Wealth has been on my radar ever since.

"I have been a student of different kinds of Eastern traditions, mostly yoga and mindfulness meditation, for over 25 years," Brent says. "As your listeners probably know, the abacus is a Chinese mathematical computational instrument. What I liked about that name is that it felt like it brought in Eastern tradition and history along with computational dexterity, just the ability to really think, figure things out precisely."

Brent's unique path through life and personal passions have had a big influence on how he runs his firm. We discussed how that confluence has helped to make Abacus stand out from the crowd while also offering its clients a mind-opening perspective on what the wealth they're building is really for.

Today's guest is Dan Moisand. Dan is a Principal and Financial Advisor at Moisand Fitzgerald Tamayo. He’s also a past national president of the Financial Planning Association and has been featured as one of America's top financial planners by at least 10 financial planning publications. Dan’s perspective on how the industry has changed during his long career led our conversation to some strong insights on steps advisors can take to improve their value in 2019 and beyond.

“I've done a little bit of just about everything that you can imagine,” Dan Moisand told me as he reflected on his 30 years as a financial services industry leader. "I don't know if the next 30 will be more dramatic, but I sure as hell wouldn't bet on it being less. The pace of change generally does seem to be quicker. So, I think that the financial planning profession will continue to evolve." And we discuss how your role as a financial advisor needs to evolve right along with it.

If you could come up with 3 words for this year, 3 words that would drive your actions and keep you on track to make this your best year ever, what would those 3 words be?

This is the fifth year now where I’ve begun the year by identifying 3 words that will set the course, give me direction, and totally excite me as I move through the year. I write these words at the top of my Daily Focus sheet and look at them daily throughout the year.

Prior Years 3 Words 2018: Spark, Community, Savor
2017: Discipline, Deliver, Score
2016: Launch, Leverage, Connect
2015: Implement, Energy, Relationships

The premise is simple. Pick 3 words that motivate you, remind you, and guide you on your road to making 2019 your best year ever.

I encourage all my clients to do this and I encourage you to do this same exercise as it will help you stay focused on the most important outcomes for the year.

In today’s podcast, I discuss my 3 words for 2019 as well as review my 3 words for 2018 and discuss how well I executed on them.

Life-centered planning, improving client behavior, the client experience, positive psychology, marketing, and technology are some of the hot topics I got to discuss with finance industry leaders and thinkers on my Between Now and Success podcast during 2018.

I think some of these topics, like a renewed emphasis on your human touch as an advisor, will continue to have a huge influence on where advisory goes in 2019.

And others, like, say, cryptocurrency ... Hmm ... Maybe not quite so much.

Let's take a look back at some key learnings from my 10 most popular podcasts of 2018.

What are the top firms doing to outperform the rest?

How are they growing?

What’s the silver bullet that’s going to help my firm hit that 16% five-year growth CAGR I’m seeing from the best of the best?

These were hot topics at last month’s Charles Schwab IMPACT Conference in Washington, D.C. And of course, the very reason that so many of our industry’s best and brightest were gathered there to speak, learn, and network is that there isn’t one “silver bullet” that’s going to transform your practice in 2019.

But some guiding principles for advisors looking to grow did emerge at the conference, which I discussed with Lisa Salvi, Vice President of Business Consulting and Field Experience at Charles Schwab. Lisa and I were joined by Mitch Reiner, Chief Operating Officer, Managing Partner, and Senior Investment Advisor of Capital Investment Advisors, who is a graduate of Schwab’s Executive Leadership Program.

For advisors who want to grow their audience – and hopefully, their client base – content and distribution is King, Queen, and Jack. But how do you build your audience? What is going to set you apart from the crowd and make your blog post or newsletter a must-read, your video channel a must-watch, your next podcast a must-listen?

Caleb Silver, the editor-in-chief of Investopedia, discussed these hot topics at the recent FPA Annual Conference in Chicago. After his presentation, “Building an Audience: Top Strategies for Exponential Audience Growth,” Caleb sat down with me to discuss the 10 ways he believes advisors can improve their online presence and create content followers won’t swipe past.

What do you need to be a successful financial advisor?

An Ivy League degree in finance? A family practice that you can inherit? A group of wealthy connections that you can network? An "in" at one of the major firms?

Well, Rebecca Rothstein doesn't check off any of those boxes, and she's currently managing over $4.5 billion in AUM.

Without even a high school degree, Rebecca left home at age 17. She bounced through a series of odd jobs -- including walking racehorses after they'd finished running -- and by the late 1980s she was slogging through an unfulfilling sales position. She jumped to finance and earned her Series 7 just weeks before Black Monday. Anxious investors looking to take their portfolios in a new direction responded to Rebecca's curiosity and tenacity, two traits that she credits with helping her build her business brick by brick, one phone call at a time.

Today, from her office in Beverly Hills, California, Rebecca's client list includes celebrities, athletes, musicians, and top CEOs and entrepreneurs. Rebecca has appeared numerous times on Barron's List of the top financial advisors, and according to Forbes, is currently the #1 woman advisor in the United States.

In our conversation, Rebecca Rothstein and I discussed how drive and perseverance helped her to overcome the obstacles she faced early in her life and build a multi-billion-dollar AUM business.

If you want to be a better financial advisor, learn how to land a jet plane on an aircraft carrier in the middle of the ocean in the middle of the night.

Ok, maybe I’m exaggerating just a bit …

But I really do believe that the top advisors of the future will be those who are open to a wide variety of insights that come from a wide variety of experiences you and I might never have. Talking to and learning from people outside of our field can really get our gears turning. Suddenly you’re approaching challenges and opportunities from different angles and finding creative ways to deal with the stresses of running a business. You’re also equipping yourself with new ways of thinking that will help you make long-lasting, indispensable relationships with clients.

That’s why I was excited to talk to Lieutenant James Licata on a recent podcast. James is a Naval test pilot who’s often in high-pressure, high-stakes, life-or-death situations. I wanted to discuss how he handles those environments, and how those of us with two feet firmly on the ground can adapt similar strategies to perform under the pressures we face running our businesses.

Building a top-notch intern program doesn't simply mean hiring a few planning interns. Top financial advisor David Armstrong took it much further and hires creative interns too. These are students who major in the creative fields and can build a portfolio of work at David's firm while David gets to stay on the leading edge of marketing and social media.

No two paths to financial services are the same, but David Armstrong's was particularly unique. As he served overseas in the Marine Corps, David couldn't spend any of his money. But he could invest it. So he taught himself the ins and outs of managing money, and by the time he left the service, his ROI was, “along with a few bucks in cash as a bouncer, good enough to pay for an MBA, a new car, and two years of living expenses.”

David also credits an internship with providing crucial real-world experience that eased his transition into our industry. So it's no surprise that his own company has a robust internship program that attracts students who, like David, might be approaching financial advisory from unconventional angles.

David Armstrong is the President and Co-Founder of Monument Wealth Management. In this conversation, David and I are joined by some of his team members and a current intern to discuss Monument's unique approach to its internship program, succession planning, and lessons from the Marine Corps that David has used to build a successful independent RIA.

How does jumping out of airplanes apply to managing clients' money? Listen to find out!

The AUM pricing model is prevalent in our industry but in many cases, the pricing is significantly disconnected from the real value being delivered.

Depending on your expertise and your client base, you might add value through tax management or estate planning advice. You might add value by fostering a positive attitude in your clients about investing, talking clients down from the ledge and helping them avoid a bad decision when volatility shakes the market. If you're working in the life-centered planning space, you might create value by forging life-long relationships that make you indispensable to your clients.

And that's the rub for our industry: we're pricing based on investing, and less so on the real value we're adding. Clients and prospects think they're paying for portfolio performance, so it's almost like we're giving away the planning and advice piece of the pie for free!

So how do we change this backwards structure? How do we price our value?

Matthew Jackson is a director in the financial services division of the pricing consultancy firm Simon Kucher & Partners. He specializes in the area of the psychology of value communication and digital presentment. He also has a Master of Arts degree in classics from Oxford University and holds the Chartered Financial Analyst designation.

In this conversation, Matthew Jackson and I discuss eight different pricing models and how to determine which one is right for you and your clients.

What separates the merely good from the absolute best of the best? Is mastery an end that we can achieve, or is it a lifelong process of continual evaluation and improvement?

I've been fascinated by these questions for a long time, particularly as they relate to what drives peak athletic performance and how those concepts might be applicable in other disciplines as well.

Like, say, going from being a competitive long distance runner as a kid to running a successful life-centered planning practice! After all, you and I won't ever stand on an Olympic podium. But we do have to excel in the high-stakes sport that is business so that we can deliver the best results for our clients.

So I googled "top sports psychologists in the US," and it turns out that one of the best in the country was right down the road from me.

Dr. Barbara Meyer is a professor and director of the Laboratory for Sports Psychology and Performance Excellence at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee. Dr. Meyer is not only an academic, she's also a sports psychology coach who works with professional and Olympic athletes on the mental side of the game. In fact, Dr. Meyer has trained athletes at every Winter Olympics since the 2002 Salt Lake City games, where her client won a gold medal.

In this conversation, Dr. Meyer and I discuss how to prepare mentally for a peak performance in any profession, striking a balance between sticking to the process of mastery while still achieving your desired outcomes, and how the concepts of self-regulation and visualization can help you monitor your behavior and alter it based on the demands of the situation you're facing.

If you're serious about personal improvement and growth you're going to love this episode.

If you don’t “know thyself,” you’ll have difficulty succeeding in a world where technology is making average human advisors obsolete.

Self-aware advisors understand that they have blind spots and they seek to shine a light on them, make changes, and turn them into strengths.

Joe Deitch, the founder of Commonwealth Financial Network, joins my podcast today and shares wisdom from his four decades of running a top broker dealer and drops some amazing insights from his new book, "Elevate: An Essential Guide to Life."

In this conversation, we discuss overcoming blind spots, closing the knowing-doing gap, leveraging the multiplier effect, deep listening, meeting people where they are, and much more. By the end of this episode, you’ll have a good understanding of the key skills you’ll need as an advisor to thrive in the years ahead.

For additional notes and quotes, visit https://www.belayadvisor.com/134

What's working right now in financial advisor marketing? Based on my conversation with marketing pro Abby Salameh, you'll be very surprised.

While attending the 2018 In|Vest Conference in New York, I had a chance to sit down with Abby Salameh for an in-depth conversation about the state of advisor marketing. We talked about which marketing strategies are working the best, branding, the client experience, referrals, making a good first impression with prospects, the proper role of technology in marketing, and much more.

Abby Salameh is the Chief Marketing Officer at Private Advisor Group, a RIA with 620 advisors overseeing $27 billion in AUM (See my earlier podcast with John Hyland, the co-founder of Private Advisor Group). Her sterling career as a RIA marketing expert has included stops at Sanford Bernstein, TD Waterhouse, and the Fusion Advisor Network. She was also a founding member of the team that launched Investment News.

One consistent thread among the most successful advisory firms is they know how to market. And they know how to strike the right balance between using technology to scale their marketing efforts and using the human touch to engage potential new clients. So if you're looking to improve your marketing efforts, generate more qualified leads, and position your firm for accelerated growth, you'll want to listen to today's conversation with Abby Salameh.

In this excerpt from a Master Class I presented for First Assent Asset Management, I discuss 5 strategies to close the 70 basis point gap in your value. This gap comes about from the fact that advisors charge an average of 100 bps for their services, yet robo-advisor type services (and Vanguard and Schwab) are closer to 30 bps for investment management. Advisors have to make up this 70 bps gap by adding non-investment related services that clients value.

In this excerpt, I share 5 of the 9 I discussed in the Master Class. Make sure you listen all the way to the end – the 5th point might sound like a bit of a head-scratcher, but I think it’s extremely important to improving your practice and your relationship with your clients.

There are few things more detrimental to our wealth than the negative money stories we pickup in our youth that haunt us as adults. And there are few things more impactful you can do as an advisor than to understand your client’s money stories and work with them as you engage in your planning relationship.

Let’s face it, we all grow up with hang-ups around money. In those formative years of our upbringing, we start to absorb the financial habits and attitudes that we hear and see modeled in our family and other social relationships. Positive habits, like an emphasis on saving and investing, can set us up well for long-term financial planning. But some negative attitudes, like a fear of market volatility, can cause us to make poor emotional decisions about our money. Over the course of a lifetime, those can be seven-figure mistakes.

Dr. Brad Klontz, CFP told me that he believes the very best advisors learn what their client's hang-ups are and use that knowledge to work more effectively with their clients. And Dr. Klontz is tackling those hang-ups from two sides: first, as the managing principal of his own RIA, Your Mental Wealth Advisors; second, as the founder of the Financial Psychology Institute and as an associate professor of practice in financial psychology at Creighton University's Heider College of Business.

Dr. Klontz keeps these businesses and clients separate to avoid any unethical conflicts of interest. But through his unique experience as both a researcher and a client-facing advisor, Dr. Klontz identified four broad Money Scripts that show how our experiences shape our attitudes about money.

Are your multi-millionaire clients any happier than your merely millionaire clients? As your clients' net worth increases, have you seen a direct rise in their level of happiness? Have you ever felt frustrated that all your hard work on the financial side of your client relationships didn’t move the needle in their sense of well-being?

Helping clients save, grow, and protect their money is a service that clients value and appreciate. But there is so much more you can do to help them beyond just the numbers.

On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being maximum life satisfaction and well-being, what if you could help your clients move from a 6 to a 9? Or even to a 10? Think about how that would add meaning to your work and satisfaction to your client’s life.

My recent podcast guest, Dr. Martin Seay of Kansas State University, researches how we can apply the concepts of positive psychology to the financial planning process. And advisors who incorporate Dr. Seay’s work won’t be drifting off course into “touchy-feely” territory. They’ll be putting sound scientific data into action and future-proofing their businesses.

Have you ever seen an advisor on TV or read a quote from an advisor and thought, “They should be talking to me; I’m just as smart as that advisor.”

The fact is, that advisor may not be any smarter than you from a technical standpoint, but they may be more media savvy than you are.

Now more than ever, money is news, twenty-four-seven. Baby boomers are retiring. Millennials have major money issues. Health care costs, Social Security, and Medicare are a constant source of political debate. The pros and cons of the new tax laws are still contentious. Cryptocurrencies could be bigger than the internet…or simply the next pets.com.

And one group of pros uniquely qualified to weigh in on all these hot button issues is…You—a financial advisor.

Recently I visited CNBC Studios in New Jersey and talked with Jim Pavia, award-winning journalist and Money Editor at CNBC Digital, about how advisors can get themselves ready for prime time.

Michael Chasnoffdiscusses how he grew Truepoint Wealth Counsel, his fee-only wealth management firm, to $3 billion in AUM and 750 households without any mergers or acquisitions.

Barron’s recently wrapped up the 2018 edition of the Barron's Top Independent Advisors Summit in Orlando. Whether you were in attendance or are looking to catch up on what you missed, today’s episode will give you an insightful snapshot of one of the most valuable get-togethers in our industry.

My guests today are Bill Keen and Matt Wilson of Keen Wealth Advisors, a fast-growing RIA with more than $400 million in AUM. Bill also has his own excellent podcast, Keen on Retirement.

Bill and Matt have attended the Barron’s Top Independent Advisors Summit and the wirehouse version for many years, so they have the perspective to connect the dots between the lessons from past conferences and where the 2018 summit is pointing. We talk about some of the key takeaways from this year’s event, the ongoing trend towards Life-Centered Planning, and how advisors can put these insights into action right now to grow their businesses.

John Hyland was unhappy.

Fresh out of college, the big firm lifestyle of late nights and steak dinners had taken a physical toll. John felt unhealthy and out of shape.

At a tailgate party he heard some friends talking about Ironman races, how impossible they seemed, how no average person could complete one.

“I just had this a-ha moment in my mind,” John told me on a recent podcast. “I just had this moment of clarity and said to myself, "I need to do this."

John finished the first of eleven Ironman Triathlons in 2000. The lessons from that transformative experience didn’t just improve his health, it gave him a new perspective on how to transform businesses that continues to guide his company, Private Advisor Group.

“I think it's just a great example of having a belief, having a goal and committing to it,” John says. Just like business, Ironman is not a short event. It doesn't happen in a day. It happens over years of training to get the results that you're looking for. But I think it's just that perfect example of setting a goal, breaking it down to what do you need to do every week, what do you need to do every day, monitor your success, alter things when needed and just continue to focus.”

Today, John Hyland is the co-founder of Private Advisor Group, an RIA with approximately $15 billion in AUM and more than 600 affiliated advisors.

Historically, the financial advisory business has been about a story of numbers. Today, it’s about a number of stories, say Mitch Anthony.

Of course, good advisors always knew that viewing our industry as a matter of number-crunching was just a fairy tale. And today, revolutions in technology and an aggressive marketplace have made that fairy tale ancient history.

Instead, pioneers in life-centered financial planning, like noted author and speaker Mitch Anthony, want to refocus our industry on a different story: the client’s.

How? By having better conversations that take place where money and life intersect.

If you are in the “inform” business, and not the “transform” business, you won’t be long for this business.

Technology services are quickly chipping away at the value-stack financial advisors offer to clients. There may come a time when, “I turn on my phone and I say, ‘Hi, Alexa. Tell me what my bank account is today. Transfer $10,000 from Bank A to Bank B. Open a 529 plan for my kid. Then, rebalance my brokerage account.’ And tell me how I'm doing against my goal of buying this house,” said Lex Sokolin, Global Director of Fintech Strategy and Partner at Autonomous.

In this near future world, you won’t need MoneyGuidePro, e-Money, or Advicent. Instead, “You have a more modern architecture, so you don't have a UI. You might have APIs that allow machines to talk to each other. Then, you can plug that into all sorts of chatbots for conversational interfaces,” said Lex.

Lex isn’t describing some crazy sci-fi dystopia. Rapid advancements in AI, algorithms, chatbots and a host of other technologies is bringing planning services to your favorite digital friend faster than you may think. And if Amazon, Google or some other behemoth decides to get into our business in a big way, well, you can forget about competing by using technology as a differentiator.

There is only one ultimate differentiator; it is your ability to help transform people’s lives.

I’ve long said that there are many ways to be successful as a financial advisor. My guest today, Steve Cassaday, founder and CEO of Cassaday and Company, Inc., is a perfect example. His main marketing plan is a throwback to the 1990s. He spends hundreds of thousands of dollars per year doing high-end dinner seminars for a carefully selected group of people. And when they become a client, he creates a comprehensive financial plan for them but he does NOT use financial planning software to do it.

Steve Cassaday and I talked about how he’s grown from $44 million in AUM to the #12 ranked advisor in Barron’s list of the Top 100 Independent Financial Advisors and $2.7 billion in AUM. We also discussed the principles that guide his business, how he explains the firm's value proposition, the service differentiators that his firm delivers that are above and beyond what most firms do, and the marketing strategy that has added about one billion in new assets and is still working today.

My guest today, Dr. Eliott Berkman, is a tenured Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Oregon, where he directs the Social and Effective Neuroscience Laboratory and conducts field-leading, federally-funded research on goals, motivation, and behavior change. He's also the Associate Director of the Center for Translational Neuroscience, and an author who writes about psychology and neuroscience for lay audiences, including in Psychology Today. We talk about the concept of the will and the way of goal pursuing, where the way is the set of cognitive skills, capacities, and ability that we collectively call the executive function, and the will is the motivational factors that propel the behavior. We also talk about how to increase our motivation and influence other people's behavior, the idea of flow states, and how that applies to achieving goals.

With the accelerating pace of technological change, how can you be sure you are making the right technology choices? What should your tech stack look like?

One of the biggest changes in the financial advisory business over the past 10 years or so has been the rise of technology. Now, of course, technology has always been a part of the business -- as anyone who, like me, struggled with Advent Access performance reports in the 1990s can attest. But the accelerated rate of technology change in the last 10 years has been amazing. Unfortunately, for many financial advisors, the rate of change, and the number of choices available, has also been overwhelming.

My guest today, Matt Sonnen, is the founder and CEO of PFI Advisors. Matt's firm works with billion-dollar breakaway advisors who are looking to set up their own firms. In our conversation, Matt and I sorted through the tech stack that advisors need to run a top-notch firm and compete in today's marketplace. We "name names" to help you figure out which companies and products will offer the best solutions for your practice.

How long could your business survive without you?

For financial advisors, I think that’s really two questions in one. Part one is a question of scale. Part two is a question of how you want to connect with your clients, build a sense of community, and run a modern advisory practice.

Brighton Jones is one of the top fee-only wealth management companies in the country, and one of Washington’s 100 Best Companies to Work For seven years in a row. Brighton Jones also placed on Barron’s List of the Top 100 Independent Financial Advisors, and Forbes’ List of the Top 50 Wealth Advisors.

And they racked up these accolades, in part, while the CEO was on a year-long jaunt with his family that covered 35 countries.

My guest today, Jon Jones, is the CEO of Brighton Jones. We talked about how he prepared his company to run without him for a year, why financial advisors should put more focus on revenue and less on AUM, and how his firm divides up responsibilities between business development and advising clients to achieve scale without sacrificing the Life-Centered Planning experience.

If you could come up with 3 words for this year, that would drive your actions and keep you on track to make this your best year ever, what would those 3 words be?

For several years now, I’ve begun the year by identifying 3 words that will set the course, give me direction, and totally excite me as I move through the year. I write these words at the top of my Daily Focus sheet and look at them daily throughout the year.

The premise is simple. Pick 3 words that motivate you, remind you, and guide you on your road to making 2018 your best year ever.

I encourage all of my clients and I encourage all of you to do this same exercise as it will help you stay focused on the most important outcomes for the year.

In today’s post and podcast, I discuss my 3 words for 2018 as well as review my 3 words for 2017 and discuss how well I executed on them.

People often times know what they need to do to reach their goal, or know what the “right decision" is, but they still don’t do it. It’s that old knowing-doing gap idea. And much of the popular literature about how to create better habits and change your behavior, are, unfortunately, based on weak science.

The good news is, there is solid scientific research on how to change behavior and stick with this new behavior...and we're going to discuss it in today's podcast.

My guest, Sean Young, is on the leading edge of this research. Sean is Associate Professor at the School of Medicine at UCLA, a Wall Street Journal best-selling author, and Executive Director of the University of California Institute for Prediction Technology and the UCLA Center for Digital Behavior. Sean's new book, "Stick With It," details a "scientifically proven method for changing your life -- for good."

Can I interest you in my new cryptocurrency, BelayCoin?

You can use BelayCoin to pay for the services of my company, and every transaction is verified and recorded in the Ethereum blockchain. And over time, the value of BelayCoin may rise to reflect how in-demand my services are.

Now, don’t go running for your credit cards – I’m just kidding. I haven’t actually set up a system like this. But if I did, would I be crazy, or ahead of the curve?

On today's show, I sit down with Jim Dowd to find out.

Jim is the founder and managing director of North Capital, the leading provider of prime brokerage and technology application services to power financial marketplaces. North Capital also has a Reg D offering called Proof Ethereum, and they intend to invest most of its assets into Ether, which is the value token – the cryptocurrency – that is used on the Ethereum blockchain.

In the last 35 year, we’ve seen the following happen in the financial markets.

The beginning of the great bull market in August 1982.
The stock market crash on October 19, 1987.
The technology bubble of 1995 – 2000.
The bear market of 2000 – 2002.
The real estate bubble of 2002 – 2007.
The Great Recession of 2007 – 2009.
The amazing, low-volatility bull market of 2009 – today.

Two leading financial advisors have been through it all and on today’s podcast, we come to you live from Schwab Impact 2017. We discuss what they’ve learned, share their insights on how to be successful going forward, and get the perspective from a Schwab executive on supporting and building excellent RIA firms.

For 30 years, Charles Schwab has been providing services to independent RIAs and I was pleased to host a panel discussion at Schwab Impact 2017 in Chicago.

Imagine you’re sitting down with a potential new client for the initial discovery meeting. What do you see sitting across from you?

Unfortunately, many advisors see a “prospect,” “dollar signs,” or perhaps “a million-dollar account.” The philosopher Martin Buber called this an “I-It Relationship,” in which one person objectifies the other.

On today's show, Ross Levin explains the importance of "I-You" relationships, how to master the "slow things," and the story behind building one of the industry's most iconic firms.

Ross Levin is the CEO and Founder of Accredited Investors Wealth Management, which is an RIA based in Minnesota, with approximately $2 billion in assets under management. Ross was the first recipient of the Financial Planning Association's Heart of Financial Planning Award, and the inaugural recipient of Financial Planning Magazine's Lifetime Achievement Award. He is truly an icon in our industry.

Financial advisors have a unique opportunity to make a real, immediate impact on people's lives -- if they're willing to break away from the old model that's only interested in improving return on investments.

On today's show, RIA leader Seth Streeter explains how his firm not only delivers a first-class planning experience, but also helps their top clients "redefine wealth" and develop their "inspired life purpose."

Seth Streeter is the CEO and founder of Mission Wealth, a leading wealth management company with about $1.6 billion in assets under management. Seth's team specializes in comprehensive financial planning and investment advisory services for high net worth clients around the country. Seth also helps people reframe their perspectives of wealth beyond just the financial so that they can enjoy a more balanced, impactful, and fulfilled life. And in 2016, Seth was asked to speak on the TEDx stage to share "an introspective approach to help you assess and transform your true wealth."

Mark Casady had a front row seat on the massive changes hitting our industry over the past 15 years of his tenure at LPL. Now that he's "retired," we discuss his career and the lessons he learned.

During his 30-plus years in financial services, Mark likes to think his job was to be a classic "change agent." As chairman of the board and CEO for LPL Financial, Mark led the company through its IPO and grew it into the fifth largest brokerage firm in the United States. Today, you might say Mark is "retired," but he prefers to think he's in the middle of "Life 2.0," which includes working as General Partner and Advisory Board Chairman for Vestigo Ventures, a fintech-focused venture capital firm.

"Compassionate" isn't necessarily the first word that springs to mind when you think about the traditional financial planning model. But that's just another way that the old model is outdated.

The shift in our industry from Return on Investment to Return on Life requires a new conversation between advisors and clients. Understanding your clients as people -- their goals, their fears, their perspectives, where they come from, where they want to go -- is the new step one in the discovery process.

My guest today, Kurt Rossi, another "40 under 40" honoree by Investment News, has already transformed his practice by adopting this new model. Kurt is a CFP and the founder of Independent Wealth Management out of Wahl, New Jersey. He's also an award-winning financial columnist for the Times of Trenton and nj.com. His column, Financial Focus, can be read every other Sunday in the business section. Kurt also blogs at his website, bringyourfinancestolife.com, where he uses this compassionate approach to financial writing and planning to empower his readers.

You can get the mechanics of a financial plan right, but if you miss the "life" part, you're shortchanging your clients.

A financial plan is a tool to help your clients live a happier, more fulfilling life. Consumers can easily get their money managed through the big national brands like Vanguard, Schwab, TD Ameritrade, Fidelity, and the Robo Advisors, without your help. A key value an advisor adds is in helping clients create a thoughtful financial plan, and understanding how they can use their money to live their best life possible. But you have to know the kind of life your clients want! That comes from engaging your clients in a robust discovery process like the kind offered by ROL Advisor.

We don't want our clients to feel like they're just winning at investing -- we want them to feel like their investments are helping them win at life.

My guest today, Lauryn Williams, is a four-time Olympic athlete, three-time Olympic medalist, and the first American woman to win medals in both the Winter and Summer Olympic games. After retiring from her track and field and bobsledding career, Lauryn founded her own advisory firm, Worth Winning, to help other athletes use Life-Centered Planning to transition to happy and fulfilling lives after sports.

Curiosity. The best advisors have it. Hannah Moore's curiosity has led her down many roads and in today's podcast, she shares what she's learned about structuring the client meeting process, creating client personas, blogging to "just one person," using three words to define your business, succession planning, and much more.

My guest today, Investment News "40 under 40" honoree Hannah Moore, is an expert on charting a course from young advisor to successful RIA. Hannah is a CFP® and owner of Guiding Wealth Management. She also hosts the podcast, "You're a Financial Planner, Now What?" where she tries to help young advisors with guidance on career paths, tips on research and client service, and explorations of the history of financial planning.

How do you go from a struggling, cash-strapped RIA to running a fast-growing, profitable top firm? Adopt Sten Morgan's 7 Mindsets and you'll be on your way.

As the founder of Legacy Investment Planning, Sten Morgan has lived that dream, and overcome the obstacles that go with it. Sten was recently named one of the “40 Under 40” by Investment News, and his new book, “7 Mindsets of Success,” challenges entrepreneurs to change their mindsets, and see their businesses, and the world, differently.

On today’s show, Sten explains how the mindsets that he had been developing from a young age allowed him to go from making nothing, to running a successful RIA firm in three short years.

By rethinking every aspect of how to price and deliver wealth management, AdvicePeriod has gone from a startup just a few years ago, to more than $6 billion in assets under advisement. We go under the hood to learn exactly how they did it.

They're not shy about stating their take on the financial advisory business. "We're reinventing wealth management. The old model is totally outdated," says the bold headline at the top of their website.

My guest today, Larry Miles, is a Principal and shareholder at AdvicePeriod, and as the company's proclamation about reinventing wealth management suggests, he isn't one to set the bar low. Larry's primary focus at AdvicePeriod is to provide strategic leadership for growth and profitability while maintaining a high standard of excellence, something all financial advisors should be thinking about as our industry evolves into Life-Centered PlanningTM.

The latest RIA Benchmarking Study from Charles Schwab contains surprising insights and contradicts some common industry beliefs.

I always look forward to Schwab's annual Benchmarking Study because it's full of data that I enjoy digging into to uncover the health of our industry. This year's report is no exception as it contains some nuggets that may surprise you.

On today's show, Jon Betty, Charles Schwab's Senior Vice President of Advisory Services, joins me to sort through the results of the latest Benchmarking Study. Jon brings 18 years of experience working with fee-based advisors to this discussion on "what success looks like across firm size as well as different life stages of an advisory firm."

Gail Graham is one of those rare people who have worked in the top echelon of two major companies--Fidelity Investments and United Capital--and helped shaped their strategies that led to massive growth and industry accolades.

Today, Gail is the founder of Graham Strategy, and works with companies to figure out where the gaps are between their strategy and how they're running their company.

On today’s show, Gail and I discuss the evolution of advisor marketing and offer some advice on how to fill the gaps in your marketing, content, and advisory strategies to grow your business. It’s going to be more and more important that advisors build not just a practice, but a distinct brand that communicates who they are and what kind of services they offer (i.e., messaging). Gail’s tips will help you stand out in the crowd, generate more leads, and endear clients to your firm.

The science of wealth is in Sarah Fallaw’s DNA. Her father, the late Dr. Thomas Stanley, literally wrote THE book on how and why affluent people accumulate wealth, "The Millionaire Next Door" (1996). Today, Sarah is using her doctorate in applied psychology to create analytics and metrics that carry on Dr. Stanley’s study of wealth-building habits at the company she founded, DataPoints. The proprietary assessment technology Sarah has developed can analyze individual wealth behaviors and reveal the activities that are scientifically proven to impact people's ability to generate wealth over time.

On today’s show, Sarah discusses the psychology behind wealth, and how her assessment technology can help financial advisors identify and work well with prospective clients who have strong wealth-building habits.

The resurgence of analog products in our digital advisor world has profound implications for both consumers and businesses, which author David Sax details in his new book, “The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter.”

As financial advisors get caught up in trying to “digital advisor everything,” it’s important to remember that there are many times when human to human contact is the best strategy to please the client and deliver the best client experience.

On today’s podcast, David and I discuss how digital advisor and analog technologies can both complement and disrupt one another, and how striking the right balance between digital and analog experiences is key to your future success as a financial advisor.

The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter

If you're still stuffing mailers, making cold calls, and tweeting the occasional Warren Buffet interview to a handful of followers, it's time to upgrade your marketing strategy and let data driven content drive some foot traffic through your front door.

On today's show, Justin Wisz, the co-founder and CEO of Vestorly, talks about how automated content and advanced AI can provide "delightful digital experiences" that will engage your client base beyond their balance sheets and, potentially, streamline your entire practice.

What if you had more than 20 years of financial services experience, then decided to start over and build a new RIA from scratch? Do you think you could take those decades of experience and build a new RIA in tune with the times? That's exactly what Stephanie Sammons is doing with her new RIA, SammonsWealth.

Talk about a multi-hyphenate: Stephanie Sammons is the Founder and CEO of SammonsWealth, a best-selling author, a Certified Financial Planner, a speaker, a business coach ... and a singer-songwriter who just released a new EP in April! And for good measure, her 20+ years of financial advisory experience also includes successful runs at Merrill Lynch and UBS.

On today's show, Stephanie explains how she drew on her wide variety of experience to go independent, and create a new RIA with a personalized approach.

Michael Nathanson is the chairman, CEO, and president of the Colony Group, a multi-billion dollar wealth management company with offices across the United States. But Michael thinks his most important title is one that isn't listed on his business card: CIO.

"I sometimes joke that I'm CIO of this organization -- the Chief Inspiration Officer," says Michael. "I consider that to be one of my top functions. What's the key to our success? It's to attract, develop, engage and retain the best people in the business. That only comes with inspiration."

On today's show, Michael offers some tips on creating inspiration, innovation, and growth in your business, and also shares memories of a couple of his Harvard Law School classmates whose names you'll definitely recognize (hint: think President and Supreme Court Justice).

There's never been a more exciting time to be a financial advisor, or a more challenging one. The Baby Boomer generation is keeping advisors busy as they age into retirement. A new generation of internet-savvy millennials is beginning to consider their investment opportunities. Competition is everywhere. Technology is both disrupting the RIA landscape, and giving advisors new opportunities to retool and expand their businesses, while staying independent.

Dyanasty Financial Partners is one of the companies that's providing RIAs with a modern platform to differentiate and grow. On today's show, Dynasty's founder, Shirl Penney, discusses the core services that RIAs have to provide their clients to remain independent, and how a company like Dynasty can help.

As the co-founder of multi-billion dollar RIA Beacon Pointe in Newport Beach, CA, Matt Cooper has a unique, in the trenches view of trends that are sweeping the financial advisory industry, on both the client and advisor side.

In addition to his original, $7-billion-plus RIA, Matt founded a sister company, Beacon Point Wealth Advisors, which partners with smaller RIAs around the country so they can enjoy the benefits of working with a larger firm. Beacon Point Wealth Advisors includes eight other RIAs, representing more than $2 billion in assets under management.

On today's show, Matt addresses a variety of issues including technology, demographics, minimum account sizes, competitive threats, and much more. Learn from one of the best about how you can keep pace with the trends buffeting our industry.

Erin Botsford is one of the top financial advisors in the country. She is the founder and CEO of the Botsford Financial Group, which has nearly $1 billion in assets under management. She has appeared on Barron’s list of the Top 100 Women Financial Advisors and Top 100 Independent Financial Advisors multiple times. And she’s also an author who just released her second book, “Seven Figure Firm.”

But maybe more impressive than Erin’s resume is the hardship she had to overcome to get where she is today.

Erin was only 11 when her father died of a heart attack. The small life insurance policy he left behind made life very hard for Erin, her mother, and her five siblings. A car accident in her teenage years and a bad investment with a stockbroker in her early 20s put further strain on Erin’s family life and finances. These experiences taught Erin the value of comprehensive financial planning and asset protection, lessons she continues to impart to her clients.

On today’s show, Erin discusses her compelling story, the personal and financial lessons she took away from her adversities, and how she built her own seven figure firm from scratch.

Once upon a time, financial planners met with clients annually, showed them a printout of how all their investments were performing, shook hands, and moved on to the next annual appointment with the next client.

Smart advisors know those days are over. Many investors are already monitoring their portfolio online, often for free. Fees are compressing across the financial advisory industry. A younger, more connected, generation is starting to decide how much money, and how much spare time, they want to invest in planning for their futures.

On today's show, I talk with Ben Jones, Managing Director of Intermediary Distribution for BMO Global Asset Management and host of BMO's excellent Better Conversations Podcast. We discuss how financial advisors can engage in better conversations that lead to better outcomes for your clients.

Whatever you think about Donald Trump, it’s hard to deny his masterful use of persuasion and branding techniques to win over a specific segment of the electorate that propelled him to the White House. Here are six key strategies Donald Trump used in his campaign and how you can adapt them to your business.

Imagine walking into a doctor’s office with a bad cough and walking out on crutches, still coughing. That’s how Brent Brodeski saw the client experience of financial advisory in 1992 when he co-founded Savant Capital Management in Rockford, IL.

“It was kind of like going to the general practitioner, you get a checkup, and he wrote prescriptions and sent people on their way,” said Brent. “And people take that prescription and imagine the pharmacist saying, ‘No, I’m going to sell you this wonder drug instead. It’s more expensive and doesn’t really make you better.’ That was the problem, the clients had a prescription for one thing and they often were getting something else.”

On today's pod we discuss lessons Brent learned from diagnosing his clients’ problems and devising the best cures for their finances on his way to expanding Savant to nearly $5 billion in assets under management and 13 offices throughout the Midwest:

Nobody can accurately and consistently predict the future but by observing and curating ideas, you can uncover accelerating trends, see things other people miss, and position your business to profit from these upcoming opportunities.

In 1982, John Naisbitt wrote a book called Megatrends. It became a huge bestseller and he made the term "high tech high touch" a household phrase that we still use today.

Unfortunately, Naisbitt's trends were so big and unfolded over decades that they weren't immediately actionable.

In steps Rohit Bhargava. Rohit publishes a yearly book called Non-Obvious: How to Think Different, Curate Ideas and Predict the Future.

Rohit says, "A great trend is a unique curated observation about the accelerating present. Great trends are never predictions about the world 20 years from now. Those are most often guesses or wishful thinking."

Another trend forecaster, Chris Sanderson, describes trends as “profits waiting to happen.” That's clever but to turn trends into profits, you have to act on them.

In today's show, Rohit and I discuss some of the non-obvious accelerating trends he sees happening right now. We then talk about how to apply those trends to the work financial advisors do.

Non-Obvious 2017 Edition: How To Think Different, Curate Ideas & Predict The Future (Non-Obvious Trends)

Megatrends: Ten New Directions Transforming Our Lives

Could 3 words be the difference between success and failure for you over the next 12 months?

The recent presidential election proved once again that words are powerful. The words that we use, the language that we use has the ability to move people to take action.

For several years now, I’ve taken this idea of “words are powerful’ and completed an exercise that I want to share with you. The exercise is this, “Identify 3 words that would set the course, give you direction, and totally excite you as you move through the year and look at them repeatedly for the next 12 months.”

I started doing this 3 words exercise several years ago after hearing about it from Chris Brogan.

The premise is simple. Pick 3 words that motivate you, remind you, and guide you on your road to making 2017 your best year ever.

I encourage all my coaching clients to do this same exercise as it helps them stay focused on the most important outcomes for the year.

In today’s episode, I discuss my 3 words for 2017 as well as review my 3 words for 2016 and discuss how well I executed on them.

If you don’t plan your personal life with the same rigor and discipline you do your professional life, your personal life will suffer, says Ed Rapp. As a Group President and former CFO for Caterpillar, Inc. during the financial crisis, Ed was a high-level, globe-trotting senior executive who never forgot the importance of keeping family front and center.

Ed and I go back more than 30 years when we worked together at Caterpillar. I left after a few years to go to grad school while Ed quickly moved up the chain and eventually became one of the top 3 executives at Caterpillar.

In today's conversation, we discuss his keys to being a successful business executive operating at the highest level, while also being a family man.

At the pinnacle of his career, life threw Ed a curveball and I encourage you to listen to this episode to the very end to learn what happened.

There are many great lessons in today's show and I'm very grateful to Ed for taking the time to share them.

I just finished my second year of podcasting and the numbers are in. Here are my 10 most popular podcasts for 2016 based on downloads along with a key idea shared on each episode. Grab some coffee and a notepad. It'll spark some ideas.

Your business is under assault from Robo Advisors, technology disruption, Vanguard and Schwab’s low-cost call-center programs, the DOL rule, flat markets, and clients who are scrutinizing fees more closely than ever before. Ask yourself…

How will you continue to add value in an industry that faces competitive threats and shrinking margins?
How will you ensure clients don’t fire you if the financial markets experience years of flat to declining returns?

Business as usual will lead to a steady and predictable decline in the value of your business. But there is a way you can add predictable and measurable VALUE that doesn’t depend on the S&P 500 going up.

In today's show, learn how to:

Add overwhelming client value.
Protect your margins.
Get more referrals.
Never lose another client.
Close the 70bps gap in your value.

"If you want to be an entrepreneur, you have to get comfortable with the notion of failing. Once you get completely comfortable with the idea that you're going to fail, what ends up happening is you build this resistance up and you start to think more clearly," says Anthony Scaramucci.

Today's guest, Anthony Scaramucci, is the founder and managing partner of the $12.5 billion alternative investment firm SkyBridge Capital, the host of "Wall Street Week" on Fox Business, and a frequent contributor to major media. His new book, Hopping Over the Rabbit Hole: How Entrepreneurs Turn Failure Into Success, is a primer on how to thrive in an unpredictable business environment.

In our conversation, we discuss the ups and downs of entrepreneurial life, the key lessons learned on his road to success, and we even sneak in some conversation about the DOL Rule and the presidential campaign.

Hopping over the Rabbit Hole: How Entrepreneurs Turn Failure into Success

Shockingly, you might be able to generate more alpha for your clients by helping manage their career than you can from investing or financial planning.

Today's guest, Michael Haubrich, CFP®, created the concept of "career asset management" as a way to help add additional value to his clients using an asset that is typically neglected by financial advisors.

The idea is by helping clients manage their career and earning potential, you can not only help them earn more money, but you can also help them find greater career satisfaction and guide them through a more rewarding retirement.

How would you answer these three questions about exploring advice?

What is the definition of good advice?
What is the definition of a quality financial plan?
What does it mean to be a fiduciary?

Kevin Knull, the president of PIEtechSM, Inc., (parent company of MoneyGuidePro financial planning software) asked those three questions to an audience of financial and wealth management leaders and basically got blank stares in response.

Dismayed, he decided to reach out to thought leaders and experts around the country to get their answers.

He collected their thoughts and published them in a remarkable new book called, Exploring Advice: What You Need to Know About Good Financial Advice, a Quality Financial Plan and the Role of a Fiduciary.

I was one of the 36 leaders who contributed a chapter to the book.

In today's show, I'm joined by Kevin Knull and two other contributors to the book, Tricia Rothschild, Head of Global Advisor and Wealth Management Solutions for Morningstar, and Frank McAleer, Director, Retirement Solutions for Raymond James.

We discuss these three questions and point the way toward how you can add value in an increasingly commoditized industry.

Exploring Advice: What You Need to Know About Good Financial Advice, a Quality Financial Plan and the Role of a Fiduciary

Should RIAs offer an automated investing Robo-Advisor service? What are the pros and cons? How should you price the service? Will it cannibalize your existing clients?

In today's show, Tina Powell and I discuss how she launched automated investing Robo-Advisor SheCapital and why they kept it separately branded from the large RIA that she was affiliated with. We also discuss the difficulties in gaining traction with a Robo-Advisor and how that led to her shutting down SheCapital after just about one year in business.

It appears clients care much less about their advisor's digital technology than advisors do.

The financial services industry spends a lot of time talking about technology and there are thousands of companies around the world and tens of billions of dollars being invested in financial technology or FinTech companies to enhance the digital offering. Yet, when you ask clients of financial advisors how important all this technology is, you get a surprising answer.

In today's show, I discuss a number of digital technology issues including:

Recent research which suggests a financial advisor's digital capabilities rank low in terms of the value the client gets from their advisor.
The strategy behind offering, or not offering, robo advisor technology.
The surprising result of my proprietary research on how many clients one advisor can work with and the real secret behind how to increase that number.
The implications of all this emphasis on digital technology and what it means for client satisfaction and referrals.

I believe financial advisors can add the most value to their clients in the areas of financial and life planning, and not as much in the investment management area. I also understand that you can't forget about the investment side.

In today's conversation, we discuss how to improve your investment performance by overcoming some of the behavioral investing mistakes that are so easy for all of us to make.

My guest is Daniel Crosby, Ph.D. Daniel is a psychologist, a behavioral investing expert, a bestselling author, and president of Nocturne Capital.

Checkout Daniel's new book, The Laws of Wealth: Psychology and the secret to investing success.

The Laws of Wealth: Psychology and the secret to investing success

The second of two special episodes.

What does the future of FinTech look like? It was on display recently in Park City, UT at the 3rd Annual Fuse Event sponsored by Orion Advisor.

Fuse is a three-day coding event that brings together dozens of programmers from FinTech companies around the world who band as a community and solve advisor problems. It’s part hackathon, part relationship-building all wrapped up in a spirit of making the industry better.

Eric Clarke, the founder of Orion Advisor, (see my podcast convo with him) is the mastermind behind the event along with his crack team of technologists including Brad Burgess and Joe Leyboldt. Leading advisors and technologists including Joel Bruckenstein, Michael Kitces, J.D. Bruce, Bill Winterberg, Tina Powell, Billy Oliverio, Ryan Beach, and yours truly were also on hand to lend a hand.

I spent three days hanging with the cool people and created two podcasts to chronicle the event.

This is the first of two episodes.

What does the future of FinTech look like? It was on display recently in Park City, UT at the 3rd Annual Fuse Event sponsored by Orion Advisor.

Fuse is a three-day coding event that brings together dozens of programmers from FinTech companies around the world who band as a community and solve advisor problems. It’s part hackathon, part relationship-building all wrapped up in a spirit of making the industry better.

Eric Clarke, the founder of Orion Advisor, (see my podcast convo with him) is the mastermind behind the event along with his crack team of technologists including Brad Burgess and Joe Leyboldt. Leading advisors and technologists including Joel Bruckenstein, Michael Kitces, J.D. Bruce, Bill Winterberg, Tina Powell, Billy Oliverio, Ryan Beach, and yours truly were also on hand to lend a hand.

I spent three days hanging with the cool people and created two podcasts to chronicle the event.

The nature of financial planning advice will change dramatically as it becomes common for people to live to 100.

The idea of a three-stage life where we go to school for 20 years, work for 40, then retire for 20 and die will go away. It will be replaced by a non-linear, multi-stage life where people will cycle in and out of education, work, leisure, re-creation, sabbatical, gig economy, and encore careers.

How we define what an "asset" is will change and the ability to enhance your "intangible" assets will become critical to a happy life.

The advice we give on saving for retirement and working in retirement will change as we need to make our money last as we live to 100 or beyond.

Life planning will emerge as the dominant construct for financial advisors as our life pattern becomes more complicated and investment management becomes more automated.

In today’s show, my guest is Professor Andrew Scott of London Business School. Professor Scott is the co-author of an important new book titled, The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity.

The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity

What if you cut your AUM advisor fee in half and made up the difference by charging a retainer fee? That's what multi-billion dollar RIA firm Abacus Wealth Partners is experimenting with.

With the DOL rule and increasing pressure on firms to be more transparent with their pricing, we're starting to see firms experiment with their advisor fee.

In an earlier episode, I talked to Scott MacKillop who founded third-party investment firm First Ascent Asset Management. His firm capped its advisor fee at $1,500 for accounts larger than $300,000.

In today’s show, I talk to J.D. Bruce, president of Abacus Wealth Partners and Billy Oliverio, vice president of United Planners.We had a lively conversation about alternative pricing strategies from the RIA and broker/dealer perspective.

It doesn’t cost twice as much to manage a $1 million portfolio as it does a $500,000 portfolio so why do clients have to pay twice as much? That question is getting asked more frequently and we are starting to see advisors and money managers move to a flat-fee pricing model in response.

Long-time industry veteran Scott MacKillop is today’s podcast guest and he recently launched a new third-party money management firm called First Ascent Asset Management that charges a maximum fee of $1,500 to manage a client’s account.

In today’s show, we explore the industry standard AUM pricing model and discuss if it still makes sense in a world where technology and competitive pressures are forcing advisors to re-think how they do business.

For many years, I've started each business day by writing down my prioritized list of actions. I then spend a couple minutes searching for a quote that speaks to me that day and I write that quote on the top of my list. When that's done, I print the list and keep it on the top of my desk so it's front and center during the day.

For today's show, I’m going to share with you 10 quotes that made my list recently and describe why they spoke to me and why you may be able to benefit from them, too.

Today’s podcast guest, Alex Tapscott, is the co-author of an important new book called, Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin is Changing Money, Business, and the World.

Alex describes blockchain as a vast, global distributed ledger where digital assets can be moved, stored, and managed securely and privately and where trust doesn’t need to be established by a third-party or an intermediary, but rather can be established in collaboration, cryptography and clever code.

Bitcoin, which we’ve all heard about, is the largest and most used blockchain in the world.

Now, why am I talking about blockchain and why should you care as a financial advisor?

One simple reason…blockchain could fundamentally alter the way financial advisors interact with and connect to consumers. And it could cut billions of dollars out of the intermediary cost structure of the financial services industry.

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World

How do you build and manage a fast-growing billion-dollar RIA? What is the role of the CEO in this type of company?

As the financial advice industry continues to evolve at a rapidly increasing pace, the role of the CEO becomes even more critical. Yet, as a business coach, I often see advisory firms struggle with making the shift from being an advisor-led firm to one run by professional management.

Over the past few years, I’ve worked with and had dozens of conversations with leading advisors and CEOs of some of the industry’s fastest-growing and best run companies. While the group is diverse, I discovered seven common threads in terms of how they built and run their businesses.

As an advisor, if you ever hope to make the jump from several hundred million in AUM to a billion or more, either you or a hired CEO have to step in and become—in title and in practice—the CEO.

If it’s you as the advisor, then you’re no longer an advisor. You need to become a professional manager.

Listen to the show to learn the 7 characteristics shared by leading CEOs of RIA firms.

Financial education is hot and it’s a great way to build your business. Investopedia generates more than 20 million monthly unique visitors to its website by offering the public (and financial advisors) educational articles, Q&As, and videos. Ric Edelman built a $16 billion RIA by educating the public through books, seminars, radio and TV shows, podcasts, and newsletters. And I’m using the same concept to build Belay Advisor by educating financial advisors through my podcast, blog, webinars, and speaking.

What are the strategies and tactics behind using financial education as a way to grow your business? How can you piggyback on Investopedia’s trailblazing digital marketing success to build your business?

Today’s guest is Investopedia CEO David Siegel. David is one of the country’s leading digital media executives and has spent 18 years leading organizations through innovative product development, rapid revenue growth and traffic acceleration.

What's it like to climb Mt. Shasta with a hard-charging group of financial industry executives? What goes on behind the scenes to prepare for the climb and who made it to the top? And how do you deal with a major accident before the climb even starts?

In today’s episode, I take you behind the scenes in the Skip and Chip Excellent Adventure 5.0. Skip Schweiss of TD Ameritrade and Chip Roame of Tiburon Strategic Advisors organize an adventure trip each year and this year's destination was Mt. Shasta in northern California.

I participated last year and completed the 27-mile, 15-hour hike through four 12,500-foot high passes in the Rocky Mountains near Aspen, Colorado. This year, well, you'll have to listen to the story...

If you want to succeed in digital marketing, you can’t use yesterday’s strategies. Today’s most successful digital marketers take full advantage of the major digital networks and are creating content that is relevant, engaging, and share worthy.

In today’s episode, I chat with Mitch Joel. Mitch is President of Mirum - a global digital marketing agency with over 2000 employees. Marketing Magazine dubbed him the "Rock Star of Digital Marketing" and called him, "one of North America's leading digital visionaries." He is also an author, blogger, podcaster, and passionate speaker who shares his innovation insights on digital marketing and business transformation to audiences around the world.

Mitch and I discuss the strategies used by the country's most successful digital marketers.

Note: This episode originally ran on July 18, 2016

Eli Broad is the billionaire founder of two Fortune 500 companies—Kaufman & Broad (now KB Home) and SunAmerica. You don’t reach that level of success by doing things just like everybody else does. Broad said ‘being unreasonable” led him to generate massive results.

Listen to the podcast to learn 7 key business insights from his autobiography, The Art of Being Unreasonable, that illustrate how you can apply “being unreasonable” to jumpstart your success. Here's the first one.

In order to innovate, be unreasonable enough to ask fundamental questions about unexamined assumptions.
Start by looking at the most fundamental operating principles of your business., what most people would call the basics. They represent the strongest, stickiest, and most unexamined kind of conventional wisdom. Broad said this conventional wisdom has often gone so long without scrutiny that they’re accepted as gospel. That's what makes these core assumptions the best place to look for opportunities to innovate.

Charging a fee for assets under management certainly qualifies as conventional wisdom and we are starting to see advisors innovate in this area. Podcast guest James Osborne now charges a flat annual fee of $4,500 for money management and planning services regardless of account size. Brittney Castro charges a planning fee and a monthly subscription fee. And Scott MacKillop, founder of TAMP First Ascent, is capping his asset management fee at $1,500 regardless of asset size.

If you want to quickly gain visibility and new business, find a piece of conventional wisdom and be unreasonable enough to shake it up and find a new angle that appeals to a certain segment of your target audience.

Eli Broad is the billionaire founder of two Fortune 500 companies—Kaufman & Broad (now KB Home) and SunAmerica. You don’t reach that level of success by doing things just like everybody else does. Broad said ‘being unreasonable” led him to generate massive results.

Listen to the podcast to learn 7 key business insights from his autobiography, The Art of Being Unreasonable, that illustrate how you can apply “being unreasonable” to jumpstart your success. Here's the first one.

1. In order to innovate, be unreasonable enough to ask fundamental questions about unexamined assumptions. Start by looking at the most fundamental operating principles of your business., what most people would call the basics. They represent the strongest, stickiest, and most unexamined kind of conventional wisdom. Broad said this conventional wisdom has often gone so long without scrutiny that they’re accepted as gospel. That's what makes these core assumptions the best place to look for opportunities to innovate.

Charging a fee for assets under management certainly qualifies as conventional wisdom and we are starting to see advisors innovate in this area. Podcast guest James Osborne now charges a flat annual fee of $4,500 for money management and planning services regardless of account size. Brittney Castro charges a planning fee and a monthly subscription fee. And Scott MacKillop, founder of TAMP First Ascent, is capping his asset management fee at $1,500 regardless of asset size.

If you want to quickly gain visibility and new business, find a piece of conventional wisdom and be unreasonable enough to shake it up and find a new angle that appeals to a certain segment of your target audience.

When your clients sell their business, are you frustrated that you don't always add the resulting windfall to your AUM? There's a simple way to insert yourself in the sales process, add more value to your clients, and ensure you get your fair share of the proceeds to manage.

One of the objectives of my podcast is to help advisors figure out ways to add more value to their client relationships that goes beyond money management.

Today, we'll discuss how you can add tremendous value to your clients by helping them get top dollar for their company by selling to strategic investors.

My guest is Rob Follows, Founding Chairman and CEO of STS Capital Partners.

Rob is one of the world's leading mergers and acquisitions experts and his firm specializes in helping mid-market private businesses get maximum value for their companies by selling their business to a strategic--as opposed to financial--investor.

If you have clients who own a successful private business, you'll want to listen to this podcast and read the show notes.

You could be the smartest, most technically competent financial advisor in the country but without solid leadership and a marketing plan, you’ll be like the lonely Maytag repairman.

Few RIAs have been as successful at building their business through good old fashioned business leadership and sophisticated marketing than Wealth Enhancement Group (WEG). This multi-billion dollar RIA has an impressive management philosophy and marketing machine that is firing on all cylinders.

CEO Jeff Dekko’s early career was spent working for consumer packaged goods companies such as General Mills. In 2003, he joined WEG and has guided the company through tremendous growth.

He’s rather unusual because he did not “grow up” in the financial industry and instead, brought a sophisticated outsider's perspective to building and managing an RIA.

Listen to Wealth Enhancement Group CEO Jeff Dekko as we discuss leadership, marketing, and the future of the RIA business.

Providing great customer service is no longer good enough. Today’s consumers are grading you on the “client experience” you deliver and how your client experience makes them feel.

Customer service is just one aspect of the client experience and if you do not intentionally create a client experience that “wows” your clients, your business will quickly fall behind the national RIAs who are leading the way in creating national brands with consistent experiences.

I recently moderated a panel at the FPA of Massachusetts annual conference and while the topic was ostensibly about Robo Advisors, it was actually about how to use Silicon Valley thinking to deliver an extraordinary client experience.

This podcast is a recording of the session with Eric Roberge, Alex Benke, and Lex Sokolin that was moderated by me. By listening to this podcast, you’ll gain a deep understanding of Robo Advisors, the different ways to use them, and how advisors are using technology to enhance the client experience.

The Envestnet Advisor Summit was packed with an agenda of top speakers and a multitude of sessions to choose from. And they capped it off with a closing keynote from Ohio State football coach Urban Meyer. Meyer’s talk was so good and insightful that I’m now a Buckeye fan—except when they play Wisconsin and Nebraska!

Here are six of my takeaways from the event plus a bonus interview with Vestorly co-founder Justing Wisz. Make sure you listen all the way to the end as I ask Justin what was the most important thing he learned when he worked for mega-RIA Ken Fisher. His answer may surprise you.

If a prospect asked you, "Why should I choose you?," could you answer it in seven words or less? In this world of short attention spans, you better be able to.

The rap on financial advisors is they all sound the same. In the past, you could get away with that because there was so much business to go around and consumers were less discerning. Today, it's a much more competitive world and this means you must find a way to become "uniquely remarkable" or else resign yourself to commodity level income.

Ian Chamandy is the co-author of the incredible book, Why Should I Choose You? He joins the podcast today for a fascinating look at how to answer the "why should I choose you" question in, get this, seven words or less.

In fact, Ian says this is the most important question in business because answering it will shape every area of your business, not just sales and marketing.

I run into advisors all the time who struggle with trying to articulate what makes them different and how to answer the why should I choose you question. Fortunately, Chamandy and co-author Ken Aber have created a roadmap to help you figure it out.

I strongly encourage you to order the book and learn more about Chamandy and Aber's process by visiting their website.

And click here to learn more about how financial advisor coaching through Belay Advisor can help you become “uniquely remarkable” and attract ideal clients.

Why Should I Choose You (in Seven Words Or Less)?

The top marketing people realize that when it comes to marketing the services of a financial advisor, you'll have better results if you purposely repel a significant segment of the population.

Most of us want to be liked by as many people as possible so the thought of gearing our marketing to repel potential clients seems ridiculous. But one very successful advisor at the Barron's Top Independent Advisor Summit has built a top business by becoming the recognized expert for a select type of clientele.

That's just one of the many takeaways from part II of our roundtable discussion with attendees from Barron's Top Independent Advisors Summit. Our goal was to pull out the key takeaways from America's top advisors and deliver Actionable Intelligence to you.

See here for part I of the conversation and the detailed blog post I wrote covering six key takeaways from the first day of the conference.

The roundtable participants were Jack Davis of Navigation Retirement Group, and Bill Keen and Matt Wilson of Keen Wealth Advisors.

America's top advisors gathered in Scottsdale, AZ on March 21 - 23 for the annual Barron’s Top Independent Advisors Summit. I held a roundtable discussion with three top advisors who attended the event and our goal was to pull out the key takeaways from America's top advisors and deliver Actionable Intelligence to you.

The roundtable participants were Jack Davis of Navigation Retirement Group, and Bill Keen and Matt Wilson of Keen Wealth Advisors.

This is part I of a two-part podcast. Make sure you visit www.belayadvisor.com to read the article that goes along with this episode.

Financial advisors used to get paid for managing money to help clients safely reach their retirement goal. Going forward, financial advisors will get paid for creating a client experience that shepherds their clients through a lifetime of experiences and transitions that taken together, add up to a life well lived.

In today's podcast, I touch on a major shift I see happening in the industry. The shift is from the destination (retirement) to the client experience (here and now).

Three forces are coming together to give rise to this shift from the destination to the client experience.

First, as the millennial generation becomes more pervasive in society, this idea of retirement gets obliterated. Most millennials will never stop working. Instead, they'll seamlessly blend their work and life to create a way to make money and have fun at the same time.

Second, events such as The Color Run, Tough Mudder, Comic-Con (and the hundreds of other "Cons") are stoking our interest in a live client experience that allows us to "do" something as opposed to passively consume something. Research clearly shows that humans value experiences more than things. Experiences bring us more happiness than do possessions. So, become an experience maker!

Third, big brands are moving away from interruptive advertising and creating an immersive client experience where the product is part of the production. If you watched the finale of American Idol, you couldn't tell where the commercial for Ford ended and the Idol show began--it was all integrated into one seamless production.

These forces make it imperative that you reimagine your client experience and make it one our clients want to remember and experience over and over again.

I’ve always taken the attitude that you’re never too smart to learn or too good to improve. So even though I get paid handsomely as a professional speaker, there’s always room to become better. And at a recent Master Class with top professional speaker Michael Port, I picked up three excellent speaking tips when he critiqued my performance.

Michael was a guest on my podcast (Read the show notes/listen to it here) and I was looking forward to meeting him in person at the Social Media Marketing World Conference where he was a featured speaker. We met and I got to practice my speech at during his workshop and here are three key tips he shared with me. These are speaking tips that can help you too.

Ric Edelman is one of those rare people who can make bold, provocative statements AND have the experience and track record to prove that he’s not just blowing smoke.

If you ask industry people who has been the most successful financial advisor over the past 30 years, Ric Edelman would likely top the list. Starting from scratch in the 1980’s, Ric built a juggernaut with 30,000 clients, 125 financial advisors, 500 employees in 42 offices, and $15 billion in AUM.

When I asked Ric what the next 10 years looks like, he said, “10X. Add a zero to everything.”

What’s even more impressive than the raw numbers Ric has generated to date is how he did it--through organic growth.

Ric leveraged his journalism background and became a massive media star spanning multiple bestselling books, a nationally syndicated radio show, and a popular television show. Through educating the public, Ric Edelman gained trust and the clients followed by the thousands.

Be sure to visit BelayAdvisor.com and read the special article I wrote to accompany this episode. I cover some of the highlights from this episode along with my color commentary.

Knowing what you know now, what would you do over if you could restart your business today?

I posed this question to 6 successful advisors and their answers were insightful. And here's the funny thing, you can implement these ideas now and benefit from their hard-fought mistakes. You'll also hear my color commentary on each of their do overs.

How well are you using advisor technology to automate your business, augment your work as an advisor, and segment and personalize the value you deliver to your clients? Have you thought strategically about your business model and how you use technology to support it in a profitable way?

In today's show, I chat with Michael Schrage, who is one of the world's most provocative thought leaders on innovation. He's also a research fellow at the MIT Sloan School’s Center for Digital Business, a columnist for Harvard Business Review, Fortune, CIO Magazine and MIT’sTechnology Review, and the author of multiple books. Perhaps no one knows more about how to maximize return on investment from innovation processes than Michael.

I first became aware of Michael nearly 20 years ago when I read his article, The Relationship Revolution. In the article he said we should think about technology as a way to enhance relationships, and not just a way to add value to information. It stuck with me.

Our conversation covers several topics including:

How to align using advisor technology to automate, augment, and segment and personalize the work you do.
The importance of figuring out your business model (e.g., a highly automated mass market model like Betterment, a high-end, hands-on boutique like AdvicePeriod) and how you use advisor technology to support it.
How you can use advisor technology to gather information that leads to insight that allows you to deliver greater value with greater confidence to your selected clients.
How advisor technology can deepen your client relationships instead of just "scaling" them.
How to use data to optimize what's in the best interests of your clients.
Why robo-advisors are not commoditizing investment management--despite what many people believe.

Financial planning as practiced today is going away and will be replaced by an entirely new way of interacting with and delivering value and connection to clients. The days of offering a free financial plan in order to snag AUM are done.

In today's show, I chat with Phil Cunningham, CEO of Advicent, the global provider of SaaS technology solutions for the financial services industry. You may know them better through their products including NaviPlan®, Profiles™ and Figlo™ financial planning tools, the Advisor Briefcase® marketing tool and the Narrator™ application builder. Advicent has about 100,000 advisor clients across North America so Phil has a bird's-eye view of what's happening in the fintech space.

Our conversation covers the spectrum including:

The changing role of the financial advisor (See: Going beyond money management to make a deeper client connection).
How advisors can stay relevant and add value.
The impact of technology on the client experience, managing your business, marketing it, and advising clients.
What "big data" means for advisors and how you'll benefit from it (See: Jud Bergman discussing big data).
Where financial planning fits into the equation and how the definition of financial planning is changing radically.
What you should do with Robo-technology to benefit from it instead of being threatened by it.
How to compete against a big brand like Vanguard.

Tony Robbins, a peak performance strategist, entrepreneur and bestselling author and Peter Mallouk, the #1 independent financial advisor in the country have joined forces to offer comprehensive planning services to clients with a minimum of $50,000. In today's podcast they explain how they came together and what they hope to accomplish.

We also talk politics, the fiduciary standard, why advisors need to be a practical psychologist, the disastrous 401(k) industry, how Mallouk grew his firm from about $50 million in AUM to roughly $18 billion today, and we even mention the Showtime series Billions. It's a packed episode you won't want to miss.

Your business success boils down to three things: 1) the right people, 2) building, selling and servicing the right product, 3) at the right price and cost structure to generate acceptable profits. In other words, it's about people, product, and profits.

The great auto executive and commercial pitchman Lee Iacocca got it right when he said:

In the end, all business operations can be reduced to three words: people, product and profits. Unless you’ve got a good team, you can’t do much with the other two.

In today's show, I go through each of these areas and discuss specific things you can do to excel. Make sure you visit the website to read the full article and see a video of one of Iacocca's classic commercials.

After reading about a new digital platform for financial advisors that builds traffic on the other company's website I thought, 'This is not a good way for advisors to build their digital presence.' So, in today's podcast, I'm going to walk you through a three-step digital marketing strategy for building a digital presence that drives traffic to YOUR website, that builds YOUR leads pipeline, and that builds YOUR brand, not somebody else's(See my podcast: How to Build a Brand That Connects With Your Clients and Prospects).

There are so many platforms out there that rely on you to create content for them--for free--in order to build THEIR business. I'm thinking of Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, Medium, Advisor Insights from Investopedia, and many others. The trick is you have to be very careful with these other sites to make sure that you get a positive ROI on the time and intellectual capital you spend populating these other sites.

I'm not kidding when I say if you pay scant attention to your digital marketing and digital presence strategy, you're going to be history before you know it. All these platforms that have popped up in recent years are trying to grow by getting free content from you and then selling advertising to the platform user base. It's a great business because their cost of goods is like--zero. These platforms know the value of attracting lots of people to their system. You need to do the same.

Now, there is a time and a place for you to use these third-party platforms to grow your business. But, you have to be smart about how you do it. You have to carefully choose the third-party places where you post your intellectual capital and devote your time. And the ultimate goal of doing this is simple--you want to drive traffic back to your website, capture the leads, and start nurturing them to become clients.

Today, I discuss how to create a digital strategy that drives traffic to your website and builds your brand, not somebody else's.

Why are only 23% of CFPs women? Why are even fewer women in leadership roles? Why aren't more women entering the business? What can existing firms and leaders do to encourage more women to become financial advisors and help them through the tough early years? Those are just a few of the questions Eleanor and I discussed on today's show about how to hire and train women financial advisors.

All firm leaders and industry leaders reading this post and listening to this podcast have a role to play in encouraging more women to enter the business and helping ensure they succeed. Frankly, it's a great business for women. They possess certain interpersonal skills that make them ideally suited for the human-to-human nature of this work.

Unfortunately, there's a stereotype among many women that this business is all about sales and numbers. Sure, that's part of it, but ultimately it's much more than that.

When it comes to training women financial advisors, Eleanor said, "I think a training program has to make sure that she understands the timeline for advancement, the expectations for the role, the responsibilities, where she is going to be in the firm if she meets expectations in the next year, 2 years and beyond."

Hiring women makes good business sense. "Firms need to realize that having more women in a firm does very positive things to the workplace environment, to the culture, even the bottom line. Large companies who have put more women in leadership positions, management positions, really do have higher return numbers measured in a number of ways. It's just good business," said Eleanor.

Oh, and let's not forget, women may be slightly better investors than men, according to various studies.

Technology is changing at head-spinning speed and it's easy to get confused about which technology to implement and how to go about being profitably innovative. Betting the farm on a certain technology direction is usually not the best idea. But what can you do instead?

In today's show, I have a conversation with Lex Sokolin, co-founder of an early Robo Advisor called NestEgg, and now a partner and chief operating officer of Vanare. Lex gave an excellent talk at the T3 Technology Conference in February and we got together to chat about being innovative. (Also, checkout this profile of Lex at Wealthmanagement.com.)

We talk about the process of being innovative and how financial advisors can make good technology decisions without betting the farm. We also discussed James Altucher's process for coming up with ideas, lean startup methodology, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. It's a value-packed 25 minutes!

How do you influence people to take action? How do you get people to follow you, rally behind you, and take your advice?

Robert Cialdini wrote the seminal book on influence and I encourage you to read it (or checkout the highlights here). But in today's show, I want to share a few more tips that come from an article written by United Capital founder Joe Duran (see my earlier interview with him here), a conversation I had with one of my coaching clients, a podcast I did with professional speaker Michael Port, and from a book by Robert McKee called, "Story."

We all want to be more influential so we can help people take positive action to improve their situation. The good news is there are specific ways to do that and I share them with you in today's show.

If you have any questions or comments, please email me. I'd love to hear what you like and what you'd like to see improved about the podcast. Thanks!

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Revised Edition

It was a great week for podcast recording. I recorded several episodes with people from as far away as Sydney, Australia and as close as 30 minutes from my house. And each of them generated numerous insights and on today's show, I'm going to share 3 of them.

I close the show with a quote from Buckminster Fuller on how to make change. This quote is particularly relevant to the financial industry right now.

If you have any questions or comments, please email me. I'd love to hear what you like and what you'd like to see improved about the podcast. Thanks!

Can you get a true understanding of a client's risk tolerance and place them in a portfolio with the appropriate portfolio risk by asking a few simple subjective questions? Robo Advisors Betterment (see my interview with Betterment founder Jon Stein) and Wealthfront believe they can but today's guest, Aaron Klein, co-founder of Riskalyze, believes those firms have it all wrong.

Aaron's firm tackles the risk tolerance and portfolio risk challenge from a different angle by utilizing concepts borrowed from Prospect Theory. Prospect Theory was developed by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky and essentially says, "People value gains and losses differently and, as such, will base decisions on perceived gains rather than perceived losses. Thus, if a person were given two equal choices, one expressed in terms of possible gains and the other in possible losses, people would choose the former." Source.

We had a fascinating discussion about how investors deal with risk and we capped it off with some thoughts about the future of the financial advice business. Aaron has strong opinions and he has the smarts to back them up. Don't miss this episode with Aaron Klein of Riskalyze.

We all love great stories and in today's podcast I share some insights on why stories are better than facts when it comes to influence. You'll also hear my conversation with academy-award winning producer Ed Saxon, as we discuss the power of story.

But wait, there's more! At the T3 Technology Conference I also talked to Jay Jay French, a founding member of the popular band Twisted Sister. And you'll hear our conversation on this podcast as we discuss four ways to deal with setbacks. He also shares a story about Keith Richards that you won't want to miss. Fun stuff!

Jay Jay is a columnist for Inc. Magazine so he knows more than just how to get a crowd rocking.

This is a jam-packed episode filled with my takeaways from the T3 Technology Conference as well as interview clips from six industry leaders. I cover four themes that emerged from the conference including: enhancing the client experience, offering a client portal, delivering a quality financial planning offering, and using big data to make better business decisions and personalize the client experience.

In today's show, you'll hear from:

Phil Cunningham, CEO of Advicent
Kevin Knull, – President of PIETech Inc., the creators of MoneyGuidePro
Drew DiMarino, Head of Sales for eMoney
Greg Friedman, CEO of Junxure, CEO of a top RIA called Private Ocean, and author of Advisory Leadership:
Kevin Cimring, CEO of Invesco Jemstep, and Josh Self, Envision Wealth Planning
Greg Sauer, – Business Development at Oranj

I just got back from the TD Ameritrade National Conference and in today's show, I'll share a few quick comments from the event.

Yes, the conference covered the usual slew of technology sessions dedicated to robo advisors and scaling your business. But what I found most interesting was the theme of putting the "human" into finance.

TD Ameritrade clearly understands the importance of the "human" in the financial planning process and the importance of using story to connect with others.

I start the podcast by discussing an important insight from keynote speaker Sally Hogshead and then wrap up with on-site conversations I had with Matt Brinker of United Capital, Spencer Segal of ActifFi, and Matt Ackermann of Investment News.

Podcasting is a great way for financial advisors to differentiate themselves in a crowded marketplace.

My good friend, Bill Keen of Keen Wealth Advisors, joins me in the studio for today's podcast and we discuss how he got into podcasting and how it's working for him. Bill is one of a small number of financial advisors who are pioneering the use of podcasting as a way to educate investors and expand the reach of their business.

If you are interested in learning more about podcasting and whether it might make sense for you to start your own podcast, then I suggest you do two things.

Listen to today's show.
Complete the podcast interest survey.

As you can tell, I love podcasting and think it's a great way to get your message out and complement your other marketing/outreach activities.

“All the world’s a stage” said William Shakespeare. Turns out we’re all actors playing multiple roles in our business and the better job we do “acting” in each of these roles, the more deeply we’ll connect with other people, says Steal the Show author Michael Port.

On the surface, thinking of yourself as an actor playing a role sounds like I’m asking you to fake it, to be someone you’re not. Actually, it’s just the opposite.

Today's guest, Michael Port, is a New York Times best-selling author, professional speaker, and former TV and movie actor. Michael wrote a book titled, Steal the Show, where he talks about how to apply the methods of top actors to, “connect with, inspire, and persuade any audience.”

In today's show, you'll learn how to use actors' tools such as honesty, rehearsal, blocking, and silence to own the stage and deeply connect with your audience.

Steal the Show: From Speeches to Job Interviews to Deal-Closing Pitches, How to Guarantee a Standing Ovation for All the Performances in Your Life

Optimism is only half of the equation to overcoming a tough situation.

Regarding the current volatile financial markets, I hear many advisors talking right now about staying the course, we're in it for the long-term, "this too shall pass," and other similar comments. Intellectually, that makes sense as over the long-term, the odds are high we'll hit new all-time highs in the market again. But if this optimism prevents you from taking action because it will all work out in the end anyway, well, I think that's a mistake.

"Action" does not mean you start timing the market and make bold portfolio moves. Rather, I'm talking about proactive client communication and other things you can do to deepen your client relationships and show your value in times like this. I'm talking about having a contingency plan in place that you can spring into action on short notice should this current turbulence turn into a major tailspin.

In today's show, I discuss the "Stockdale Paradox" from Jim Collins and how it is timely and relevant for what advisors are facing right now. When you couple it with last week's Friday Podcast on confidence, you have two excellent tools to make sure your mindset is in "great shape" to not only weather this storm but come out stronger from it.

I also share about a dozen comments from other financial advisors who explain what they are doing right now to deal with the market turbulence. I end the show with a quote from Maria Robinson about the power of making a new decision today.

With the turbulence in the financial markets and client accounts running near the flatline over the past couple years, it’s easy to get discouraged. Yet now more than ever it’s critical that you maintain one key characteristic.

The importance of this characteristic was driven home to me during an interview I did last week with Sheldon Wolitski. Sheldon is a hugely successful entrepreneur (Inc. 500/5000 winner for 9 consecutive years) who learned a business-saving lesson during the depths of the tech recession in 2001.

In today’s show, I tell Sheldon’s story and the lesson he learned that is directly applicable to each of you. If you maintain this “one key characteristic” that Sheldon discovered, you’re not only going to survive these rough times, you’re going to absolutely crush it and come out much stronger.

I also share many of the “My 3 Words” that listeners posted on my blog, on Linkedin and emailed to me. I also reference a panel I was on last week at Mariner Wealth Advisors National Advisor Meeting and end with a stirring quote from Nelson Mandela.

Can you organically grow a multi-billion dollar RIA?

Many of the large RIAs you read about got there because they acquired firms or they were part of a banking, accounting, or law firm that fed them a large number of clients.

Today's guest, Scott Hanson of Hanson McClain, built the firm with his partner Pat McClain the old-fashioned way--one client at a time.

Using gorilla-marketing tactics, a radio show, and smart marketing, these guys built a $2 billion RIA with about 4,000 clients and an average account size of $500,000. Similar to Edelman Financial Services, Scott and Pat built a hugely successful RIA with relatively modest size clients.

I've known Scott for more than 20 years and in today's show, we take a chronological look at what he systematically did to build a top RIA from scratch and the strategies he's now using to keep the machine humming.

Well, it's been an ugly start to the New Year in the stock market. And in today's episode, I share three things financial advisors can do right now to prepare for the next bear market. Whether what's happening now is the start of one, nobody knows, but the top advisors are doing a "bear market drill."

I also share an idea on how to move beyond the "overwhelming tasks" that probably are lining your "to do" list this time of year. You'll also learn what golfers Phil Mickelson and Roger Sloan can teach us about the big difference small incremental improvements can make in your business.

I end the show with a quote from Ralph Waldon Emerson.

Welcome to 2016! This is the perfect time to look back on the past year and forward to the New Year.

In today’s show, I cover three topics related to looking back and forward.

Three key questions to ask yourself as you reflect on 2015. Yes, it’s important to look back so you can use the year’s experience to propel you in the New Year.
Use the year ahead to “risk walking new ground.”
Three important steps to take that will make 2016 your best year yet.

I end the show with a quote from a daily email I receive called “Our Daily Bread.”

How will you succeed in the years ahead?

Multiple trends are shaping the industry and how advisors respond to those changes today will determine whether they thrive or just barely survive over the next few years.

Will Robos drive down pricing and push mainstream advisors out of business? Will Vanguard, Schwab, Fidelity, and TD Ameritrade grab the lion’s share of the mass affluent market with their hybrid robo offerings? Can lifestyle practices survive?

Those are just a few of the questions I discuss with today’s guest, Chip Roame. Chip is the Managing Partner of Tiburon Strategic Advisors and a leading strategic consultant to CEOs, other senior executives, & boards of directors in the banking, insurance brokerage, & investments markets.

While it’s easy to dismiss “the future” as something you don’t have to worry about today, the reality is, change is happening faster and with more ferocity than most people think. Listen to today’s show to catch up on some of the big trends and learn how to make your business “built to last.”

What is the most important part of a happy retirement? Here's a hint--it's not financial security.

A recent study from Age Wave said 81% of retirees felt health is the most important part of a happy retirement. That was followed by financial security at 58%, family and friends at 36%, and having a purpose in life at 20%.

In today's show, I discuss the idea of helping your clients take more control over their health situation--not from a diet and exercise standpoint--but by helping them become better consumers of healthcare services. See below for a link to a resource that will help you do that. Given how important health is to a happy retirement, you may want to add this as an agenda item to your next review meeting.

In addition, I talk about making a shift from focusing on the "destination" in what you do to focusing on the experience for your clients. I also make an offer to review the completed business plan of three advisors who completed the business plan template I discussed last week.

I end the show with a story about a monk meditating by a lake and how that applies to the "basics" of building a business.

Are you feeling too busy? Not enough hours in the day? The problem may not be your level of productivity. The problem may be you’re doing way too many activities that bear little fruit.

Instead, in today’s show I share one question you can ask yourself that will force you to zero in on the leading activities you need to do to get the results you want.

In addition, I discuss a simple three-step framework you can use to bring about behavior change in you–and in your clients–and I share a key insight from an earlier podcast with Hollie Fagan of Blackrock.

I end the show with a quote from Aristotle and challenge you to put your “real” self out there even if some people disagree with you.

The unstoppable pace of technology innovation and market competition could put you out of business unless you take steps today to add value far above and beyond traditional investment management.
Robo advisors, Vanguard’s Personal Advisor Services, and Schwab Intelligent Portfolios are just a few of the firms who are transforming the delivery of financial advice. And these firms have bigger brands, huge resources, and offer their services at a fraction of the cost when compared to traditional financial advisors.
So here’s the deal–financial advisors who want to remain relevant for years to come, who want to maintain their profit margins, and who want to offer services that clients are willing to pay dearly for, will need to completely rethink the services and type of advice they offer.
Today’s show with guests Alan Spector and Keith Lawrence discusses retirement coaching as one possible advice area where advisors can add value to fend off competitive attacks.

Is it a good idea to set stretch goals? Yes. Stretch goals, set and managed properly, could catapult your business 10X.

Stretch goals make you realize you have to change your level of thinking. With stretch goal thinking, you have to ask yourself, “What new strategy or business model could enable me to grow 10 times bigger than I am today?”

Clearly, the answer involves leverage—not financial leverage—but people and technology leverage. This is how the largest RIAs grew to billions in assets under management.

In this episode, I discuss three things: 1) how to set stretch goals, 2) the need to make the shift from just managing money to managing lives, and 3) I share insights from two of my 10 most popular podcasts in 2015.

I end the show with a tribute to adventurist, entrepreneur and deep ecologist Doug Tompkins who passed away this week.

Here’s a short but very powerful exercise. What three words could you come up with that would set the course, give you direction, and totally excite you as you move through 2016? In my financial advisor coaching, we dig deep to get focused on the key things that will make the desired outcomes happen. This three-word exercise is one simple way to help the focusing process.

In this episode, I discuss how to come up with your own three words for 2016 as well as review my three words for 2015 and my assessment of how well (or not so well) I executed on them. Plus, I share one other idea on a one-sentence strategic plan and leave you with a meaningful insight from Roy Disney.

Do you know where your new revenue will come from in 2016? When I coach financial advisors, I often find they have a goal to generate a certain amount of new assets under management. What's frequently missing, though, is a detailed breakdown of where those new assets will come from and a specific plan on how they will be generated.

In this episode, I discuss how to specifically identify where your new revenue will come from and how to ensure you achieve your new AUM goal. Plus, I share two other ideas and leave you with a key insight from Jim Rohn.

In addition to volatility in the financial markets, financial advisors have to worry about other threats to their business including regulations coming out of Washington and cyber attacks. Today’s guest, Skip Schweiss, keeps a close eye on all these non-market related issues and we go through the list and discuss simple steps you can take to mitigate the risks.

Skip is responsible for TD Ameritrade Institutional’s Retirement Plan Services platform. He is also the Managing Director of Advisor Advocacy & Industry Affairs.

And as I’ve witnessed firsthand (more in the podcast), Skip is a skilled and avid outdoorsman. In his spare time, he climbed all 54 of Colorado’s 14,000-foot mountains.

Four tips today about a bucket list, not settling for average, starting anew, and thinking much bigger about the impact you can make. I close with an inspirational quote that has been very meaningful to me.

Hey, welcome to my first Friday Podcast. Today, I share five ideas and tools that will help you plan better, market better, and get more profitable results from your seminars and events.

For free access to the tools and links I mention in today's show, visit www.belayadvisor.com/fridaypodcast

Have you planned as effectively for the transfer of your business as you have for the financial lives of your clients? In part II in our series on succession planning, (see part I here with Tim Kochis), my guest Jay Hummel continues the conversation and we discuss the operational and financial details of making a smooth transition.

Jay, along with Tim Kochis and Eric Hehman, is the co-author of a new book on succession planning titled, Success and Succession: Unlocking Value, Power, and Potential in the Professional Services and Advisory Space.

As a senior VP in the corporate strategy group at Envestnet, (see podcast with Envestnet founder Jud Bergman), Jay works closely with the firms largest RIA's. Prior to Envestnet, he was president of a large RIA.

Success and Succession: Unlocking Value, Power, and Potential in the Professional Services and Advisory Space

Succession planning is a critical yet woefully neglected business necessity that could cost advisors millions of dollars if not properly handled. Today’s guest, Tim Kochis, is the co-author of a new book on succession planning titled, Success and Succession, and we dive into the details of how to effectively do it.

Tim is a legendary wealth advisor who co-founded Kochis Fitz, a multi-billion dollar RIA firm, and guided it through a merger to create Aspiriant, one of the country’s leading wealth managers. Along the way, he held numerous leadership positions within the industry and has been recognized with several prestigious awards including the inaugural Schwab Impact Award and FPA’s P. Kemp Fain Award.

Success and Succession: Unlocking Value, Power, and Potential in the Professional Services and Advisory Space

Jud Bergman, the founder of Envestnet, has been at the nexus of every major trend happening in the financial services industry for the past 15 years. As a serial acquirer, Jud and his team have built an industry behemoth.

With recent acquisitions including Yodlee for big data and analytics (pending), FinanceLogix for financial planning, and Upside for robo advisor–coupled with its many existing businesses–Envestnet has a window into almost every corner of what’s happening in the advisor space. And in today’s show, Jud and I talk about all of it and what the future holds for financial advisors.

Seven Things You’ll Discover in This Episode 1. How the value proposition of financial advisors is changing and what the successful advisor of the future looks like. 2. The main way the advisor of the future can improve their productivity and grow their fee-based practice at 2.2 times the rate of the average advisor. 3. The three things we can thank robo advisors for. One is they’ve set a market rate for commoditized investment advice. The second is they’ve demonstrated the value of aggregated data as a backbone to a financial plan. And the third is they’ve proved the value some investors place on 24/7 access to their account data. 4. Specific ways the promise of “big data” and account aggregation will help advisors and clients make more money and reach better outcomes. 5. What the implications for advisors are when Jud says, “We’re seeing lots of evolution, lots of transformation, lots of evolving towards different pricing arrangements for the advisor.” 6. How to conquer the digital divide that separates advisors stuck in an old business model from advisors who are well-equipped to work with the digitally savvy clients of the present and future. 7. Why having an offering for millennials that may not fit your normal account minimum is an essential ingredient for the successful advisor of the future.

In this fourth and final episode in the millennial advisor series, we discuss an area that was not addressed with our previous guests.

The other guests were all running their own independent RIAs and generally targeting other young professionals with non-traditional business and pricing models.

But what about millennial advisors who are pursuing a traditional career within a well-established RIA? What’s their story? How are the established RIAs finding, managing, and retaining talented young advisors in their business?

To find out, I dialed up my friends at United Capital, one of the country’s largest RIAs, and had a great conversation with Jarrod Upton and Brandon Moss. Jarrod and Brandon are two of the firm’s leaders and they work with their young, up and coming advisors.

Today’s guest, millennial Alan Moore, started out working for a traditional RIA firm, then started his own “location independent” RIA while concurrently developing other entrepreneurial sources of income. Alan and I discuss how millennial advisors think, act and make money differently than traditional financial advisors and what that means for the future of the financial advisory profession. Traditional RIAs can benefit from hiring a millennial advisor and injecting some “millennial thinking” in their business.

MILLENNIAL FINANCIAL ADVISOR JAMES OSBORNE STARTED OUT ON A TRADITIONAL FINANCIAL ADVISOR TRACK then he became disillusioned.

He noticed there wasn't much difference in the services he provided to a client with a 3 or 4 million dollar portfolio versus a client with a half million dollar portfolio. As he told me, "It started to feel that the fee structure was not based on what we did for people or the value proposition, but was really based on ability to pay."

So what did he do?

He left the traditional RIA, started his own firm, and began charging a flat fee of $4,500 per year, which includes financial planning and investment management services.

Today, after just three years, James has about $100 million in AUM, roughly 50 clients, and is earning a nice living running a lifestyle practice in the foothills of the Colorado Rockies.

If you do the math, you'll notice his fee comes out to about 25 basis points on $100 million in assets. That's equal to what the average robo advisor charges but in James' case--it also includes personal financial planning directly with him.

He's beating the robo advisors at their own game!

His pricing structure is just one of the many ways he's reimagining the financial services industry. We discuss them all in the podcast.

This is the second in my series on how millennial financial advisors are shaking up the industry. Be sure to checkout the first one with Brittney Castro--including her finance rap video.

MILLENNIALS GET A LOT OF PRESS AND THERE'S GOOD REASON FOR THAT. They’re over 80 million strong, they’re digitally savvy, and they tend to think and act much differently than earlier generations.

In this new series of podcasts, I interview several leading millennial advisors and explore their business models, their thinking, and how their cohort may reshape the financial industry over the next 15 years.

Although there’s no definitive start and end date for this generation, it’s fair to say they range in age from about 35 to as young as 15. You may think they’re too young and too few in the business to have an impact on our industry. In the short-term, that’s true. But long-term, they’ll cause a titanic shift in how financial advice is conducted.

As I spoke to these millennials, it’s clear—they’re smart, articulate, and definitely not your “traditional” RIA.

They have different business models. They price their services differently. They market differently. And they’re not afraid to call out what they see as “problems” with the way financial services is structured today.

I thoroughly enjoyed talking to these advisors and I know you’ll enjoy listening to their stories. Keep an open mind because they are the future of our business.

First up is Brittney Castro, a talented and innovative RIA from Los Angeles.

Brittney is a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™, entrepreneur, personal finance expert for women and Founder & CEO of Financially Wise Women. She specializes in working with busy, established professional and entrepreneurial women who are passionate about life and want to finally understand money—how to manage it, save it, invest it, and protect it—in a fun and simple way.

A relatively small number of RIA firms have grown faster and more profitably than their peers in recent years, according to research from InvestmentNews and BlackRock.

Dubbed "Elite RIAs," these firms have cracked the code and implemented strategies, tactics, and "ways of doing business" that propelled them to the top.

On average, these Elite RIAs have > $500 million in AUM, $5.8 million in revenue, 13 full-time employees, 365 active households, and revenue per client of $14,327.

In today’s episode, Hollie Fagan, head of BlackRock's RIA business, and I discuss the specifics of what these leading RIAs are doing to scoop up the lion's share of industry assets.

You could be a highly competent financial advisor but if few people know about you, you’ll starve for new business.

There are two main ways to become known to your ideal audience.

Develop the audience yourself through marketing.
Show up in the middle of somebody else’s audience and display your value.

I can assure you, the second option is by far the most effective both in terms of time and money if done correctly.

In today’s episode, we discuss the mechanics of how to show up in the middle of a media outlet’s audience and share your voice, your opinion, and your insights to a large group of ideal prospects who are hungry for your wisdom.

My special guests are Jim Pavia, senior editor-at-large at CNBC Digital and Fred Gabriel, editor at InvestmentNews.

Jim and Fred are two of the financial industry’s top journalists and they share an incredible number of tips and insights on how to work with the media to get your message out.

Visit www.belayadvisor.com/media-marketing to read 9 tips from today's episode.

Today’s podcast with Steve Sanduski is all about understanding the concept of exponential technology and how you can incorporate it in your business to accelerate your growth, your profitability, and keep you relevant for years to come.

In this episode, you’ll discover:

Why your mindset is a more important asset than time.
How a deep understanding of the "6 D’s of Exponentials" will prepare you for explosive business success.
Why the marginal cost of sales and marketing is heading toward zero and what that means to you.
How a simple exercise called “Add a Zero” can completely change your thinking.
Why you can’t just redesign your process, you have to reimagine the entire client experience.
Why radical pricing transparency is critical to your future success.

Get ready for a wild ride as Steve takes you on a tour of the future of financial planning. It's very bright for those who are ready to embrace exponential technology and Steve lays out a roadmap on how to do it.

Consumers are getting spoiled with services like Uber, Airbnb, Netflix, and the iPhone and they expect the same level of ease and access when working with an advisor. If you don’t deliver it, you’ll lose clients to advisors who will.

In today’s podcast, I discuss the conversations I had in New York last week with Betterment founder and CEO Jon Stein, Personal Capital co-founder and CEO Bill Harris, and the on-stage duo of Ric Edelman, chairman and CEO of Edelman Financial Services and Bill Bachrach, founder and CEO of Bachrach & Associates.

You’ll learn…

How Betterment’s RetireGuide is the latest example of a Robo firm quickly moving up the complexity scale and digitizing what used to be solely done by financial advisors.
The one thing both Jon Stein of Betterment and Bill Harris of Personal Capital told me financial advisors should be scared of.
What Jon Stein thinks of the traditional 1% AUM fee and his take on Vanguard’s new hybrid advice offering.
The metrics behind Personal Capital’s conversion of clients from account aggregation to directly managed assets.
Why Ric Edelman firmly believes half of all financial advisors will be gone within the next 10 years and what you can do to NOT be one of them.
What Ric Edelman believes the advisor/client relationship will look and feel like in the future.

My main reason for visiting New York last week was to attend Singularity University’s Exponential Finance Conference. Today’s podcast is the first of two podcasts that will address some of the things I heard at this event.

While some of the things discussed at the event were “way out there,” my role is to connect the dots and translate what I’m hearing and seeing into practical ways for you to grow your business and make it more profitable.

If you want to accelerate your growth rate and create a consistent stream of new clients, you have to move beyond referral marketing and become a marketing machine. David Canter, EVP, Practice Management and Consulting at Fidelity leads an ace team that has been consulting with RIAs and researching how they can elevate their performance for years.

In today's podcast, David and I discuss what the RIA Marketing Leaders are doing to grow their business 40% faster than non-marketing leaders. You'll learn...

The percentage of revenue the Marketing Leaders invest in marketing and business development.
The 6 key disciplines Marketing Leaders devote the most resources to.
How to leverage the "Rule of 15" to double your business.
Why your "About Us" page should be more like an "About You" page.
How to generate more referrals by being a "giver," not just a "taker."
The importance of using events to get your message out.

Elliot Weissbluth started $30 Billion RIA firm HighTower by asking, "If we had a blank piece of paper and a blank slate and I started with my mom as the client, what would she expect from a thoughtful financial advisor?" Working backward from that premise, he built the firm into a powerhouse. In this episode, we discuss: How he raised $65 million in institutional money before even having his first client. Why he fires himself each year. The one metric all RIAs should track. The two things their advisor do (and don't do) to grow organically at double the industry rate. The three keys to building a thriving RIA in the years ahead. Who will be disrupted by robo technology. As a founder and excellent business leader, Elliot is well worth listening to.

Faced with the task of upgrading the portfolio accounting system at CLS Investment, his family's growing investment advisory firm, Eric Clarke couldn't find a suitable off-the-shelf product. So, like every great entrepreneur, he decided to build it himself. That was 1999. Today, Orion Advisor Services is a fast-growing $25 million technology company that serves as the operational hub for many of the country's leading Registered Investment Advisory firms. Eric shares how he built the firm, how they keep innovating, and the big mistake he made that kept the company mired in slow growth for its first 5 years.

Carl Richards is best known as the Behavior Gap guy and for his weekly Sketch Guy column in the New York Times. He’s now out with a new book, The One-Page Financial Plan. We had a lively conversation about the book, his writing process, financial planning conversations, and how financial advisors can use books in general to build their business.

After interviewing more than 50 of the world’s greatest investment managers, Nobel Prize winners, self-made billionaires, and leading academics for his book, Money: Master the Game, Tony Robbins came to some startling conclusions.

In this episode, he reveals a treasure trove of actionable insights and behind the scenes stories that will benefit you for years to come.

Near the end of the conversation, Tony tells a touching story that occurred in his early twenties and changed the course of his life forever. He said it, “may be the most important lesson a person can have in finance.” You’ll have to listen to him tell the story because written words can’t do it justice.

MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom

WOULD YOU LIKE TO WAKE UP ONE MORNING, TURN ON YOUR COMPUTER, AND DISCOVER that you have two new clients with a million in assets waiting to do business with you? It’s happening now with Robo Advisor technology and Simon Roy of Jemstep shares how. Having great technology is one thing, but leveraging it can be a whole different ballgame. Simon and I discuss how to build a business, leverage it with technology, wrap it in a human relationship, and deliver great results for clients. As a successful entrepreneur and business executive based in the heart of Silicon Valley, Simon is someone well-worth listening to.

Marty Bicknell left a great job as a senior vice president at A.G. Edwards & Sons in 2006 and started over. Today, he presides over an empire of 32 companies managing more than $30 billion in AUM. He accomplished this feat through a combination of acquisitions, organic growth, and good timing. In this episode, Marty adds texture to one of the most exciting growth stories in the financial services industry.

Despite a dreadful childhood growing up in the Republic of Rhodesia, super entrepreneur Joe Duran has built not just one but two multi-billion dollar investment advisory firms. And along the way he had time to write three books including one that became a New York Times bestseller. Here’s an example of the type of advice you’ll hear from Joe, “The more important you are to the business, the less valuable the business is.” In this insightful conversation, Joe shares the principles he used to build his businesses, how he spots trends that he rides to millions in riches, and the story behind the Albert Einstein quote that has driven everything he has done in his life.

The concept of retirement has changed dramatically over the past couple decades. Has your retirement planning changed with the times? Effective planning starts with understanding a client’s story and what their money is for. Are you asking the right questions? Are you helping your clients find “meaning” and not just “money?” Are you aware of the 67 life transitions that your clients might go through? Do you have planning solutions for each of those 67? Are you familiar with the four deadly fears and how they relate to living a fulfilling life? Mitch Anthony and I discuss these ideas and a few more in this episode of Between Now and Success.

If you ever wanted to know what it takes to get on Barron’s list of Top Advisors, here it is. Sterling Shea opens the kimono and takes us behind the scenes as he shares the criteria Barron's uses to rank its top advisors. From his perch as the Managing Director and Head of Advisor Programs at Barron's, Sterling is a leading authority on financial advisor practice management and one of the most plugged-in experts on the best practices of the country's top advisors.

DAVID BACH IS A BESTSELLING PERSONAL FINANCE AUTHOR, an expert on women investors, and Vice Chairman of Edelman Financial Services. Our wide-ranging discussion covers how he wrote 9 consecutive New York Times Bestsellers, how to raise billion of dollars in new assets, and why women make great clients. The podcast was recorded in San Diego and we have some interesting sound effects for your listening pleasure.

MARK MOSES COACHES 30 OF THE WORLD’S TOP ENTREPRENEURS AND CEOs and kicks their butt to increase profitability and accelerate growth. As a successful entrepreneur himself, Mark discusses the 5 things every entrepreneur and CEO should focus on and delves into the world of singularity and exponential organizations.

As the #1 Independent Financial Advisor in the U.S. in 2011 and a serial entrepreneur, Steve has some great lessons to share. I call him the "Uncola" of the financial industry because he is truly a maverick. We delve into how he built his businesses, how he serves clients, and what he does differently from everybody else that helped him reach the top. He even shares how he recently brought on two new clients with $100 million in assets without ever having met them in person! All done on the phone and online. A great lesson for how business is being conducted these days.

JON STEIN, CO-FOUNDER AND CEO OF BETTERMENT, TELLS HOW HE co-founded the company and built it into one of the fastest growing and most innovative investment firms in the country. It’s a great story about how a smart guy with a timely idea can marshall the resources and build a company that is reshaping how business is done in the investment world.

JOHN MICHEL, CEO OF CIRCLEBLACK, SHARES HIS BEST STRATEGIES, TIPS, AND TOOLS on how to think about and incorporate innovation into your business. The world is moving rapidly and those who understand how to harness technology and use it to improve their operations and their client experience will reap tremendous rewards.

STEVE MOELLER SHARES HIS BEST STRATEGIES, TIPS, AND TOOLS on how to incorporate his concept of Endorphinomics into your life so you can maximize your emotional, physical, and financial well-being. As a long time consultant and coach, Steve details how you can use these principles to build your business and help you and your clients live their best possible life.

Paul Santello shares his best strategies, tips, and tools on how to build a brand that connects with your clients and prospects. Plus, we discuss how you can use "VIPER" as a strategic framework to build your compelling brand.

DEBORAH FOX SHARES HER BEST STRATEGIES, TIPS AND TOOLS on how to ensure your business grows in the years ahead. Plus, she goes into detail on how to build a Robo-Shield for your firm.

JASON LAHITA SHARES HIS BEST STRATEGIES, TIPS AND TOOLS on how to use public relations to enhance credibility and grow your business. Plus, he adds some bonus thoughts on how to use PR to leverage your referral marketing and social media activities.