Podcasts about Ria

Frank LaRosa has been in this business for thirty-two years and he says he has never seen deals like this. Frank opens by explaining why he cannot see how financial advisor transition deals get any more lucrative than they are right now. Stacey backs that up with the numbers, pointing out that deals sitting at 100 percent of trailing twelve or 100 basis points today were only 40 or 50 just four or five years ago. That is not an opinion, it is math. From there, the conversation turns personal. Frank talks candidly about being in his mid-fifties and watching people his age face serious health scares or pass away without warning. That perspective drives his argument for why advisors with real practices should think seriously about taking chips off the table now, without selling their business, especially since transitions have become dramatically faster than they used to be. Frank also raises a fear a lot of advisors quietly carry, the worry that a new firm could eventually get acquired by the same company they left. Stacey breaks down why advisors still come out ahead in that scenario, since negotiating a move almost always comes with a lower cost of affiliation and a higher payout, meaning the money is already in the bank regardless of what happens years down the road. The episode wraps with a challenge Stacey poses directly, does your family or your spouse actually know about the decision you are making to stay put. Frank follows it up with a story from his branch manager days about closing deals over dinner with a recruit's spouse and why staying exactly where you are is still a decision that deserves a real conversation at home, not silence.   Questions answered in this episode include: Why are financial advisor transition deals at an all-time high right now? What does it mean to take chips off the table without selling your practice? Why is choosing to stay at your current firm still considered a decision? Should advisors worry about their new firm getting acquired down the road? How fast can financial advisors realistically transition their book of business? Why do family conversations matter when deciding whether to move firms? Is complacency costing financial advisors real money right now?   Chapters: 00:52 Introduction: This Market Won't Last Forever 02:54 Why Advisor Deals Are at an All-Time High 04:27 Mortality, Chips Off the Table and Taking Action Now 07:52 Choosing to Stay Is Still a Decision 10:58 The Risk-Reward Gap Advisors Are Ignoring 14:06 Your Head Is in the Sand 18:13 The Family Conversation Every Advisor Needs to Have 23:23 How to Reach Frank and Stacey   Learn more about Elite and our resources: - Elite Consulting Partners: https://eliteconsultingpartners.com - Elite Marketing Concepts: https://elitemarketingconcepts.com - Elite Advisor Successions: https://eliteadvisorsuccessions.com - JEDI Database Solutions: https://jedidatabasesolutions.com - Elite Wealth Management Insights Report: https://eliteconsultingpartne

Scaling a financial advisory practice often forces a choice between capping growth or building a large, people-heavy infrastructure. Today's guest challenges that conventional wisdom, pulling back the curtain on how he scaled his firm to nearly $2 million in revenue with only one recent full-time hire. Ryan Townsley is the owner of Town Capital, an RIA based in Bel Air, Maryland, that oversees approximately $200 million in assets under management across 155 client households. In this episode, Ryan shares how he shattered traditional solo advisor capacity limits by aggressively outsourcing non-client-facing operations like IT, compliance, and trading management. He breaks down the precise mechanics of his "time segmentation" retirement income portfolios, why he implements a mandatory client "slush fund," and how he utilizes a deeply integrated AI tech stack to automate meeting prep, draft workflows, and systematically build standard operating procedures out of his everyday client interactions. For show notes and more visit: https://www.kitces.com/499     

A client once told Stacey Frank he was losing $20,000 a day by doing nothing. That number changed the whole conversation. Frank and Stacey open by unpacking a real story from one of Stacey's clients, a junior partner at an independent firm stuck with outdated technology, a flat payout and a senior partner unwilling to change. When Stacey ran the math with him, the true cost of staying became impossible to ignore and complacency became the real competitor in the room. From there, the conversation shifts into something more personal. Frank references a recent story about an advisor in his fifties, a founder of a respected RIA, who passed away suddenly. That story becomes the jumping-off point for a bigger conversation about financial advisor transitions, why payouts and transition deals are at an all-time high right now and why waiting to explore your options carries real risk. Frank also breaks down dual monetization, a concept he has trademarked, where advisors sell their practice to a W2 firm, keep running the business, grow it further and then sell it again years later. He walks through real-world numbers, including a three-million-dollar producer who turned a transition deal into twelve million dollars upfront while still earning over a million dollars a year running the business. The episode wraps with a challenge every advisor needs to hear. Staying exactly where you are is still a decision and it is one that deserves the same scrutiny advisors give their own clients every single year.   Questions answered in this episode include: What is complacency actually costing financial advisors every day? Why are transition deals and payouts at an all-time high right now? What is dual monetization and how does it work? Should advisors consider moving from a 1099 practice to a W2 firm? How do advisors calculate the true cost of staying at their current firm? What happens to a financial advisor's practice valuation if something happens to them unexpectedly? Why is making no decision still considered a decision?   Chapters: 01:04 Introduction: Complacency Is Costing You More Than You Realize 02:11 The $20,000-a-Day Wake-Up Call 05:27 When an Advisor's Death Changes the Conversation 08:19 Why Transition Deals and Payouts Are at an All-Time High 09:57 The W2 Acquisition Trend Advisors Aren't Talking About 14:39 Introducing Dual Monetization 17:06 Why Staying Put Is Still a Decision 18:16 How to Reach Frank and Stacey   Learn more about Elite and our resources: - Elite Consulting Partners: https://eliteconsultingpartners.com - Elite Marketing Concepts: https://elitemarketingconcepts.com - Elite Advisor Successions: https://eliteadvisorsuccessions.com - JEDI Database Solutions: https://jedidatabasesolutions.com - Elite Wealth Management Insights Report: https://eliteconsultingpartners.com/insight-report - Listen to more: https://eliteconsultingpartners.com/podcasts/ - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/elite-consulting-partners/

With Constantine Hatzivassiliou—Partner, Certuity Golf taught Constantine Hatzivassiliou how to perform under pressure. Building a nearly $5B multi-family office taught him that the best advisors become the first call when life, not just the markets, gets complicated. In Summary Many advisors spend years mastering investments, but for affluent families, portfolio management is often just the starting point. Jason Diamond welcomes Constantine Hatzivassiliou, Partner at Certuity, to discuss how his journey from aspiring professional golfer to leader of a nearly $5B multi-family office shaped his approach to client service. Their conversation explores why trust is earned long before a crisis, how family office services evolve naturally from client needs, and why the advisor's role increasingly resembles that of a quarterback coordinating every aspect of a family's financial life. The discussion also examines organic growth, referrals, fiduciary advice, private equity's impact on the RIA landscape, and the qualities that allow advisors to become indispensable over decades—not just market cycles. The Storyline Many advisors spend years perfecting investment management. But as clients become more successful, the job changes. The questions become bigger than portfolio construction. A business is being sold. A family dynamic shifts. A tax issue emerges. An estate plan needs updating. Suddenly, the advisor isn't simply managing assets—they're coordinating decisions, relationships, and emotions. For Constantine, that broader role was shaped long before he entered wealth management. As an aspiring professional golfer, he learned lessons about discipline, preparation, and performing under pressure that continue to influence how he serves clients today. Jason and Constantine explore how Certuity grew from approximately $210 million in assets to nearly $5B, not through acquisitions but through referrals and a service model built on becoming indispensable to the families they advise. Constantine explains why he believes the best advisors function more like quarterbacks than portfolio managers, orchestrating the many moving pieces that come with significant wealth. The conversation also examines the evolution of the multi-family office model, the role of fiduciary advice, the impact of private equity on the advisory landscape, and why experience, judgment, and trust remain the qualities clients value most. Ultimately, this episode is about what it takes to become the first call when life – not just the markets – becomes complicated. Topics Covered Lessons from professional golf that translate to wealth management Building Certuity from $210mm to nearly $5B in assets What distinguishes a multi-family office from a traditional RIA Why referrals fuel long-term organic growth Becoming the “first call” for affluent families Fiduciary advice and the evolution of the advisory profession Family office services beyond investment management Private equity and M&A in the RIA space Developing the next generation of advisors Trust, relationships, and lifetime client service > Download a transcript of this episode… Listen and Learn Highlights for Advisors How did professional golf prepare Constantine for advising wealthy families? (3:45) Constantine explains why competing under pressure taught him discipline, emotional control, and process—qualities that now guide every client relationship. How did Certuity grow from $210 million to nearly $5 billion? (8:00) He shares why nearly all of the firm's growth has come organically through client referrals rather than acquisitions or aggressive recruiting. What separates a multi-family office from a traditional advisory firm? (11:45) The conversation explores how expanding into trust, estate, tax, and family office services became a response to client needs—not a business strategy. Why should advisors think of themselves as quarterbacks? (20:00) Constantine recounts a client business sale that fell apart at the closing table and explains why advisors often become the person holding everything together. How does Certuity view private equity and acquisitions? (36:20) Jason and Constantine discuss when outside capital can make sense—and why Certuity has chosen a different path centered on client alignment. Why do wisdom and experience still matter in an AI-driven world? (29:30) Despite advances in technology, Constantine argues that judgment, trust, and perspective remain the qualities affluent families value most. Key Takeaways High-net-worth clients increasingly value coordination, judgment, and perspective over investment selection alone. Family office services often evolve naturally as advisors respond to increasingly complex client needs. Sustainable organic growth is rooted in trust, which explains why referrals account for the overwhelming majority of Certuity's new business. Golf and wealth management share the same disciplines: preparation, emotional control, patience, and executing under pressure. The most valuable advisors become trusted partners during life's defining moments—not simply portfolio managers. Technology continues to reshape wealth management, but experience and wisdom remain difficult to replicate. Building a lasting advisory business requires investing in culture, succession, and the next generation of talent. https://youtu.be/m72Hq6bMTo4 Quotable Moments “The best advisors aren't simply managing portfolios. They're the first person clients call when life gets complicated.” “A bad shot in golf is the equivalent of a bad day in the market. You can't let one dictate everything that comes next.” “More often than not, we're not just financial advisors—we're financial therapists.” “Growth gets the headlines. Trust is what makes it possible.” FAQs What is a multi-family office? A multi-family office delivers integrated services beyond investment management, often coordinating tax, estate planning, philanthropy, business planning, and other complex financial matters for affluent families. Why has Certuity grown primarily through referrals? Constantine attributes the firm's growth to deep client relationships, a collaborative service model, and becoming the trusted advisor clients recommend to others. How does golf relate to wealth management? Golf reinforces discipline, emotional control, preparation, and performing under pressure—all qualities Constantine believes are essential for effective advisors. What is Constantine's perspective on private equity in wealth management? While he understands why many firms pursue private equity, he believes every strategic decision should ultimately be measured against what best serves clients. What qualities distinguish exceptional advisors today? According to Constantine, exceptional advisors become trusted coordinators of a client's financial life—bringing together specialists, solving problems, and providing perspective during life's most important moments. A multi-family office delivers integrated services beyond investment management, often coordinating tax, estate planning, philanthropy, business planning, and other complex financial matters for affluent families. Constantine attributes the firm's growth to deep client relationships, a collaborative service model, and becoming the trusted advisor clients recommend to others. Golf reinforces discipline, emotional control, preparation, and performing under pressure—all qualities Constantine believes are essential for effective advisors. While he understands why many firms pursue private equity, he believes every strategic decision should ultimately be measured against what best serves clients. According to Constantine, exceptional advisors become trusted coordinators of a client's financial life—bringing together specialists, solving problems, and providing perspective during life's most important moments. Related Resources Emotional Intelligence: The “Untouchable” Differentiator in an AI World Intentional Growth: How Top Advisors Build Businesses That Last The 10 Characteristics of the Most Successful Teams Constantine HatzivassiliouPartner  Constantine Hatzivassiliou is a Partner at Certuity, a nationally recognized multi-family office serving affluent families, entrepreneurs, executives, foundations, and endowments. He advises clients on the complex financial, tax, estate, and business planning decisions that accompany significant wealth, helping families coordinate all aspects of their financial lives through a comprehensive family office approach. Drawing on more than two decades of experience, Constantine works closely with successful business owners, corporate executives, and multi-generational families to simplify financial complexity and align investment management, tax planning, estate planning, philanthropy, and family governance strategies. As a Certified Exit Planning Advisor (CEPA®), he frequently assists entrepreneurs in preparing for liquidity events, business transitions, and the long-term stewardship of family wealth. His clients often view him as a trusted advisor and strategic sounding board, helping them navigate important financial decisions with the perspective of both a family office professional and a coach. Prior to joining Certuity, Constantine held advisory and banking positions with The Bank of New York Mellon, Bernstein Global Wealth Management, and Pacific Mercantile Bank. Before entering the financial services industry, he was a Golf Professional and member of the PGA of America, experiences that continue to shape his disciplined, competitive, and relationship-focused approach to advising clients. Outside of his professional responsibilities, Constantine is passionate about mentoring young athletes and strengthening the communities in which he lives and works. He serves as a Board Member of Coerfontaine Football Club (CFC), a premier youth soccer organization focused on developing young athletes and helping them pursue collegiate and professional opportunities while fostering leadership, discipline, and character. He also serves as Chair of the Safety and Security Committee for Parkland, where he works alongside community leadership to enhance resident safety, security, and quality of life. In addition, Constantine is a Founding Board Member of The Boardroom, a private membership organization focused on fostering meaningful relationships among business leaders, entrepreneurs, and professionals through networking, education, and philanthropy. Born in Greece, Constantine spent his childhood in Montreal before relocating to South Florida. He attended the University of Florida before earning a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Florida Atlantic University, where he graduated with honors. He holds the Certified Exit Planning Advisor (CEPA®) designation. A lifelong student of the game, Constantine remains active in golf and is a member of Muirfield Village Golf Club, founded by his longtime  hero and mentor, Jack Nicklaus, as well as Parkland Golf & Country Club. Constantine resides in Parkland, Florida, with his wife, Stephanie, and their two children, Nicholas and Olivia. NOTE: The views and opinions expressed by the guests on this podcast are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Diamond Consultants. Neither Diamond Consultants nor the guests on this podcast are compensated in any way for their participation. Episode Transcript Lessons from the Links: From Golf Pro to $5B Family Office Partner A conversation with Jason Diamond and Constantine Hatzivassiliou, Partner at Certuity. Jason Diamond: Welcome to the latest episode of our podcast series for financial advisors. Today’s episode is Lessons from the Links: From Golf Pro to $5B Family Office Partner. It’s a conversation with Constantine Hatzivassiliou, partner at Certuity. I’m Jason Diamond and this is the Diamond Podcast for Financial Advisors. Mindy Diamond: At Diamond Consultants, we help elite advisors identify the right environment for their businesses to thrive whether that’s at a wirehouse, boutique or independent firm. With nearly three decades of experience, we’ve guided thousands of advisors and represented more than a quarter of a trillion dollars in assets transitioned and, each year, one in four advisors managing $1 billion or more who change firms are our clients. Our process is education-driven and based on building relationships starting as your strategic partner well before you’re even thinking of a move. To schedule a confidential conversation, call us at (908) 879-1002. Wondering why advisors change firms and where they’re headed? Are transition deals going up or down? Those very questions and more inspired us to create our annual advisor transition report, it’s the award-winning data-driven resource designed for advisors that connects the dots between the motivations around movement and the firm’s appetite for top talent. Arm yourself with the knowledge you need to make smart decisions, download your copy at diamond-consultants.com/transitionreport. Jason Diamond: Golf is a way of exposing who you really are, there are no teammates to blame, no clock to run out and no hiding from a bad decision. Every shot demands discipline, patience and the ability to stay focused when the pressure is highest, my guest today knows that firsthand. Before becoming a partner at Certuity, a multifamily office approaching five billion in assets, Constantine Hatzivassiliou was pursuing a career as a professional golfer. An injury ultimately redirected his path towards wealth management but many of the lessons he learned on the course still shaped the way he serves clients today. Certuity has grown from roughly 210 million in assets to nearly five billion, that’s impressive on its own but the more interesting story is how they’ve done it. The firm has grown largely through referrals built around a multifamily office model and focused on becoming far more than an investment advisor to the families it serves. In Constantine’s view, the best advisors aren’t simply managing portfolios, they’re the first person clients call when a business is being sold, a family issue becomes complicated or a major decision carries consequences well beyond the balance sheet. Constantine and I discuss the lessons golf teaches about handling pressure then we dive into the evolution from the traditional wealth management world to the multifamily office model, why referrals drive nearly all of Certuity’s growth, how he thinks about private equity’s influence on the advisory business and what it takes to become the first call for the wealthy families they serve and perhaps, most importantly, why the same qualities that help someone succeed on a golf course may be surprisingly relevant to building trust over a lifetime. It’s a great conversation so let’s dive in. Constantine, thank you so much for joining, thrilled to have you here. Constantine Hatzivassiliou: Thank you for having me, excited to be here. Jason Diamond: Yeah, absolutely. So, you had an unconventional path to wealth management, you started as a professional golfer, I think that’s a first for us on this show, before ultimately transitioning into this world. Can you tell us a little bit about the journey and what brought you here? Constantine Hatzivassiliou: Yeah, I never thought I’d be here, my parents were certainly shocked that I got here path wise. Growing up, immigrants from Greece, you settle into Florida the traditional way where you either go down the diner route or the gas station route in mechanics which my father was the latter and school and education was never priority, it was always about supporting the family needs. So, next thing you know, sports are a critical part of any good household, that’s how I was raised and I played everything but golf. I grew up on a golf course because my parents believed that a location of a property was critical to long-term financial success. We lived on a golf course, it was in our backyard, we’d stare at it and we’d use it to play football or baseball or anything but actual golf. And my freshman year at the University of Florida, I started dating a girl on the golf team and she got me hooked to the point where, after four years of hitting balls with the women’s and men’s golf team at the University of Florida for six hours a day, we finished school and realized I’m actually pretty good at the game and, while I have a finance and economics background and degree, let’s try and pursue this for a living and I was blessed. I had a sponsor who helped me succeed at golf on a small scale, it was a humbling experience to say the least. I was competing and playing with Sean O’Hair, Ken Duke, guys who made it out on tour for a very long time, we had the same sponsor so we functioned as a team, it was a collegiate team effectively trying to make it out on tour. And, unfortunately, my second year of competing, I blew out my back doing heavy deadlifts which set me aside for 18 months. While I was recovering, my primary sponsor was in financial services and says, “Hey, you have a background in this, it’s killing you not being able to be on the golf course, why don’t you come work for me while you’re rehabbing so that, when you get back to playing golf, it’s easier for you to talk about our business as a sponsor to try and develop business to throw it to the financial services side?” And Jason, the reality is, after 18 months working there, I fell in love with it. I made way more money working in that environment than I ever would’ve made playing golf because, again, I came to the game late. I was decent but I was nowhere near the caliber of players that are succeeding now out on tour. So, I pivoted after having met my wife and decided to settle down into the wealth management space and, what is it now, 26 years later, going strong. So, it’s been a fun transition from golf into wealth management to say the least. Jason Diamond: Probably my favorite background … I watch a lot of golf, I should caveat that, probably my favorite origin story we’ve had, I’ll give you the Wanamaker trophy or whatever you get, first place. Let’s talk about the business now, so Certuity. For our audience who may not be familiar, tell us a little bit about the firm, what types of clients do you serve and any context you can provide on size as well. We’ll talk about how your firm got there but just give us where we are today to start with. Constantine Hatzivassiliou: So, goal by the end of the year is to have $5 billion in AUM, we’re just shy of that now. We currently service 428 families across the country. So, we’re boutiquey and nimble, we’re based in South Florida, we have offices in New York, San Fran and LA. I’m fortunate to be one of four partners at the firm supporting the growth and the direction of the company and it’s a fun endeavor in the sense that, when we first started, I was employee number four 16 years ago and, with 210 million in AUM at the time to grow it to where we are today, to learn all the things that we have over the years, the curve balls that were thrown at us because all of us came from massive institutional wealth management firms. So, we transitioned from the Bernsteins of the world, the BNY Mellons of the world into an RIA in the South Florida market, there was absolutely an entrepreneurial learning curve involved. Jason Diamond: I bet. And on follow-up question, 16 years ago, did you have a book of business, client business and do you still maintain a book of business today? Constantine Hatzivassiliou: I do. The four of us at the firm share in all of the clients, we work together. Being in the Southeast, I’m responsible for, let’s call it, the Southeast demographics of the US which is a large portion of Certuity’s book. I have a partner in Tennessee, I have a partner in LA and San Francisco and we divide and conquer across the country. But, yes, we came over with a small book, we’ve all grown it organically since then. So, we’ve been very effective in how we’ve grown. Jason Diamond: Just from adding new client money? Constantine Hatzivassiliou: Strictly through new clients referred to us by existing clients. Jason Diamond: Wow. I want to talk more about the growth because that’s remarkable. But before I do, can we double click on the service model? So, I would say the most typical we hear, I think more of our guests typically come from the wirehouse world where it’s I have my book, you have your book. What does your service model look like? So, is it truly, if it’s working well from the end client perspective, you should be interchangeable with your partners and it’s a true team approach? Constantine Hatzivassiliou: How we engage our clients, the theory should be I can get hit by a bus tomorrow and outside of the client not being able to speak to me directly, they will not have a hiccup in any way, shape or form. And when we’re dealing with families across multiple generations, the way we’ve built our platform, that continuity is critical in the engagement process for the clients hiring us to help them through all of the challenges that they face. Jason Diamond: What’s your sweet spot in terms of client size? Constantine Hatzivassiliou: Our average client size today has just shy of eight million AUM with us. We have some clients who have $1 million certainly but they’re strategic in that their friends, their family, they could be centers of influence who help send business our way because they value what it is that we do and there’s a strategic partnership because we might need them for their trust and estate services or their accounting work and they have clients who have a need and we’re on the short list of people they refer to. Jason Diamond: That they trust. Yeah, makes sense. So, I’ve seen this in the news and also even on your own internal materials, I’ve seen you described as both a modern multifamily office, you’ll also obviously hear the term RIA as well. Does that distinction matter at all? And maybe my second part of that question would be what is the distinction between that space, whatever you call it, and the more traditional firm world from a client service perspective? You mentioned that all of your partners from that world. Constantine Hatzivassiliou: I started in this industry truly at an institutional level at Bernstein in New York and, for anyone who knows Bernstein, they really do brainwash you on the fiduciary model and the values affiliated with that philosophy has translated through my career at BNY Mellon which has a very similar feel as Bernstein. And then, when we came here, we instilled that same core value principle of fiduciary responsibility for our clients so we are very different than a traditional wirehouse or brokerage house, it is why we’ve grown so successfully. I would never, one, work for an institution that did bide by those standards and, secondarily, I wished Congress and Senate would turn around and actually implement a mandatory fiduciary liability for all financial advisors because, far too often, we see prospective clients or families get taken advantage of because the individual sitting across from them giving them financial advice is not necessarily aligned with their goals and objectives. Jason Diamond: So, I take it you are fee only. Constantine Hatzivassiliou: We are fee only. Jason Diamond: Yeah. I don’t want to lose the thread on the first part of my question. Do you think there is a distinction between a multifamily office and an RIA? I don’t want to lead you here but to me it implies a different level or different caliber of service model that probably includes more of the ancillary trust and estate and CPA type stuff that higher network clients need but curious what your thoughts are. Constantine Hatzivassiliou: Our first seven years at the firm, we were strictly an RIA, we functioned as an advisory service provider to our clients. What attracted me and my partners to Certuity was the nimbleness of the firm. So, for instance, at BNY Mellon, we often deemed a change necessary as moving an aircraft carrier across the world but it was an impossible task to accomplish. But when you’re small and nimble and clients come to you with a need and you’re in the service, ultimately, first and foremost, it made sense for us to start building out family office services for our clients because they had a need and we found it as a way to centralize everything because, far too often, when the communication standards break down between all the individual parts, one, it’s more expensive for the clients and, two, the process isn’t efficient, things get missed. So, we tried, largely due to our growth, to bring everything in house and our clients appreciate that for it. Jason Diamond: So, this is not a chicken and egg situation, this is very much we had large clients, we were attracting large clients and, in order to service them optimally, here’s what we felt we needed to build. Is that fair? Constantine Hatzivassiliou: 100%. Jason Diamond: Let’s shift gears, I need to go deeper on the professional golf thread a little bit. I promise I won’t make the whole interview about your golf background. I’m curious if you feel like that experience or that, I don’t know, upbringing or, I guess, background laid any foundation for the way you engage with clients today or the way you operate as a business leader today. Constantine Hatzivassiliou: So, there’s a couple parts to that. The golf side, certainly, just from an engaging client perspective, 90% of our clients are golfers. Jason Diamond: It’s very true. Constantine Hatzivassiliou: Right. It just helps because of our background and certainly with some of the clients and partners that we have at the firm, golf is a critical thread in what we do. However, when it comes to golf, what I learned playing golf at a high level directly translates to how we manage money for clients and I’ll express it this way. There’s generally two types of golfers, there’s the artist, the Sergios of the world who don’t fundamentally function off of specific points in their swing or a very structured platform, they see something, their mind becomes creative and they execute on it. I was never that way, I am a numbers person, I think everything analytically, I break everything down to the minute, everything is strategized and organized, I was taught to practice that way by Coach Alexander at the University of Florida and that foundational element seemed easy, it worked. If you practice properly, you’ve succeeded. Under pressure, all those hours and hours of repetition translated to success more often than not. In our industry, it’s process-driven, it has to be unemotional. A bad shot in golf is the equivalent of a bad day in the market, you can’t let one bad day in the market influence everything you do for the next year. Same way on the golf course playing in a tournament, you can’t allow one golf shot to affect the rest of the round. We kid with our clients oftentimes that, while we are fundamentally their financial advisor, more often than not, we’re their financial therapist. We have to control their emotions and make sure they’re not making an irrational decision. For instance, a couple days ago we were out with a client the day that Iran shot down one of the US military helicopters and we’re sitting down at lunch and, all of a sudden, his phone starts blowing up because he’s getting all these Google alerts to the market heading in the wrong direction and he had to go do a life insurance test later on that afternoon. So, all week, he had prepped and he was calm and he was relaxed, he was really excited, he’s, “My wife is setting me up with a new insurance policy and I know it’s for her benefit but all my numbers look good, I’m going to ace this and my premiums will be really low because of it,” it was a $25 million policy. And as he’s looking at his phone and he sees the market collapsing in his mind, his blood pressure rose to no end, you could see that his anxiety level went through the roof and, had I not been there with him at the time to hold his hand through that process, his afternoon would’ve been shot. I would’ve got a phone call saying, “What are we doing to prevent 2% loss in my portfolio,” because that’s how he thinks and, in that moment, I was the therapist to talk him off a ledge. It’s so hard for individuals to manage the stress of the markets, that golfer mentality of, okay, just breathe, relax, let’s see what’s going on, let’s make an educated, confirmed decision, let’s circle back with our caddy if we’re on tour and competing and make a unified decision for the long-term success of the goal that we’re trying to achieve. And what we do every day is the same thing with our clients. Jason Diamond: It’s an incredibly thoughtful answer, I expected a version of the latter part of your answer. I appreciate that you added the part about just most clients like golf, enjoy talking about golf, enjoy playing golf and it’s an effective business development tool, there’s no question. Constantine Hatzivassiliou: So, I have two kids, a 12-year-old and an eight-year-old, my son who’s 12 who’s an exceptional soccer player and wants to, aspires to play professionally one day has now fallen in love with golf which I’m ecstatic about. I think golf and tennis, from a business development perspective- Jason Diamond: Yeah, lifelong sports. Constantine Hatzivassiliou: And I look at it now and my mentor when I started in the business was absolutely right. The fact that I could get a CEO of a Fortune 100 company to want to actively spend four hours with me where we could dive into the weeds about their personal life, their financial situation, their business, you could never get that time otherwise. I urge everyone who’s coming out of college or is going into college who wants to aspire to be in any type of sales related role, golf is a great venue to make long-term relationships. Jason Diamond: And importantly, tennis is not as good on the knees long-term or the back long-term. So, you stick to golf, you get a little more longevity out of it. Constantine Hatzivassiliou: It does help, yes. You’re right. Jason Diamond: My thought always goes to people call it the 15th club in golf, just this mental element of the game and to me it’s the clear moment in golf that always comes to mind for me is the 72nd hole. I don’t know if you just watched the US Women’s Open but Nelly Korda standing over a two-foot putt that I really thought she missed, is there an equivalent of that moment? Are you ever able to recreate that pressure in your current role or is that something that you miss? Constantine Hatzivassiliou: Jason, we have those moments weekly, countless stories. Here’s where I love my job. I’ve transitioned from being the guy behind the screen who is just trading accounts, that’s where we all start and you have to have that foundational perspective of what’s involved in trading an account on a daily basis. Not that we ever picked stocks to an extensive level, we were generally managing ETFs, mutual funds and strategies but I’ll give you an example. So, just last week, we had a family and this is where the family office side comes in more so than the financial advisory services come in. We had spent four months in helping a family sell their business, it was a life altering moment, the dad started the business, the dad had been independently successful, net worth of well into eight figures, was happy and content, brought his son into the business, son was brilliant, saw an opportunity within the business and grew the business by 4,000%. Jason Diamond: Literally? Constantine Hatzivassiliou: Yup. All because of this, the son saw a different direction and pivoted the business and grew it out and here he is, getting ready to have their first child and he gets approached by a firm to acquire his business. They’re ecstatic, the number was perfect, I thought it was overvalued, I was telling them that there’s no way they could turn it down because the number was too significant. Had they gone to the market, they would probably never achieve that level of return. And literally, the day of closing, as we’re expecting the wire to come through, the deal gets pulled. So, here you have the father who’s crushed because he was trying to provide something for his son, the son who’s just devastated because he now was preparing for the second stage of his life and you go through at that stage the classic stages of grief, it’s the cycle that goes through it. I was holding their hand through the three-month process up to there, every day, hourly calls, strategizing, building everything out, organizing the accounting team, organizing the attorneys, getting it all to work out. And here I am, father and son, unbelievably stressed, you have the wives in the background who can’t quite comprehend what’s going on, you have employees beneath them who are now confused as to there was a transition getting ready to take place and the only person who can step in under that critical moment to bring everybody back together was me. So, here I am thinking, 20 years ago, I’ll just pick stocks and bonds for individuals but now I’m in the middle of deal flow trying to help a family solve the issues that arise. So, those are hugely critical- Jason Diamond: Yeah, that’s right. Constantine Hatzivassiliou: …moments where, because our clients are our friends and family, we care for them like they’re our own, you become emotionally attached. And the same pressure that I felt when I won my first mini tour event after college, when I had to get up and down from the impossible bunker shot and I hit it to six feet and I made the crucial put to win my first $23,000 check which I thought was unbelievable, they gave you those big old-fashioned- Jason Diamond: The Happy Gilmore checks. Constantine Hatzivassiliou: Exactly, right? It was the greatest day at that time. The stress of being in that bunker trying to hit that shot is the same stress I felt having two phones ringing, one the father, one the son where we have to keep that situation separate. So, you’re diving into unbelievably stressful situations and the best part is, when we get it all solved and literally yesterday we solved the entire dynamic of the business, I get a text from the son saying that this was the most incredible rollercoaster experience he’s ever experienced, that he’s incredibly grateful for all that I did and our team did for him and that, for the rest of his life, we will always be the first person he calls to solve any of his problems. So, for us, that’s the recreation of that stressful moment and then the victory on the back end. Twenty-five years ago, I got the big Happy Gilmore check. Yesterday, I got that text which I’ve printed out and framed and have it in my office as a constant memory of why it is we do what we do. Jason Diamond: And I would bet that’s more impactful than the $23,000. It’s an incredible story and I’ll tell you why, you said it but it’s as far away from stocks and bonds as you could possibly get. But I think, most advisors, a story like that resonates much more. It leads into my next question. You intentionally choose to service a high net worth segment of the market and I would assume that number’s probably creeping up, not down over time in terms of who you service. My thought is that’s a very competitive segment of the market as well. Is this how you differentiate is just you make it about those types of human examples or is there more to it? Constantine Hatzivassiliou: I’m envious of the advisor who could walk into a room of 200 people and they become the central focal point of the room where they can walk up to every single person and fearlessly ask them incredibly personal information, I’m not wired that way. For me, I’m very much the individual that I will find the one person that I have common ground with, I will deepen that relationship and I will add value and, because of the value that I create, I become a critical component of that individual’s success. And that’s how we’ve grown our business holistically at the firm largely buy that extra layer of service. We’re a commodity business. Being in South Florida, the clubs that I belong to, 10 to 15% of the members feel like they’re financial advisors. You could throw a rock anywhere and find a financial advisor so how do I differentiate myself? The only way I can truly differentiate myself and my firm is the level of service we provide, to go that extra step. To where, when we’re calling a client, they know I’m calling them to support their needs not because I’m seeking something for any ulterior motive. Jason Diamond: But you don’t mention financial planning or investment management or asset custody. Is that because I assume just that’s table stakes? Of course we do that but … Okay, yeah. Makes sense. Constantine Hatzivassiliou: That’s the easy part, right? That’s foundationally … And to your earlier point, you were asking the RIA model. One of the biggest challenges that we had down here in South Florida was the RIA model is new. If you were in the northeast, RIAs are very common, out west, incredibly common. Down here in South Florida, I just finished dealing with Bernie Madoff. Jason Diamond: You were fighting the good education fight a little bit. Constantine Hatzivassiliou: At Bernstein, 108 of our clients had assets with Bernie Madoff. Jason Diamond: Yeah. Constantine Hatzivassiliou: So, when you leave, one of our biggest growing curves as an RIA in South Florida was, when you leave the power of BNY Mellon or Bernstein and you’re some random little shop called Certuity, no one knows who you are. So, there was a big part of our education in the business was learning how to educate clients and prospective clients on the value of the RIA model and the fiduciary model in particular. Jason Diamond: Could you give me the 30-second answer to that if somebody says who are you, your prospect? I’ll tell you why I ask. Forget just Bernstein’s and BNYs of the world, a Morgan Stanley advisor or Merrill advisor has the exact same fear. I’m leaving Merrill to go launch Jason Diamond Wealth Management, my client’s going to say, “Well, who is that?” So, give me the quick pitch. Constantine Hatzivassiliou: Your typical broker, let’s say, you’re not really hiring JP Morgan, you’re not really hiring Wells Fargo, you’re not hiring Goldman Sachs, you’re hiring the advisor who works for that institution. Now, yes, that advisor has the Rolodex of data and information available at the firm level but, ultimately, you’re entrusting that individual to make your decisions for you. The broker who leaves the brokerage model to open up their own brick and mortar operation has to then decide are they continuing down the wirehouse brokerage model where they’re transactional in nature, the economics behind that, far more profitable. The revenue streams affiliated with a brokerage house drastically blows us out of the water. But then you have to also look at yourself in the mirror so how are you running your book of business, how are you running your practice. So, to answer your 30-second question, the RIA model, in my opinion, is truly the only way any family of wealth should proceed with an advisory firm because you want an individual who is aligned in your goals and objectives. Our clients know that I’m their chief financial officer, I work for them. They task us with building out a financial strategy that is customized to their individual needs and they never have to worry do I have an ulterior motive as to why I’m presenting an option in that strategy. And, because of that, the fiduciary model, I think, is critical for our success as a firm and, again, as I mentioned earlier, I wish it’s something that was industry well and not the vast minority. Jason Diamond: Yeah. No, that’s a great answer. So, do you think then that, as time has gone on, this has gotten easier? I assume the answer is yes either because more clients are aware of your brand and/or more aware of the space as a whole. Constantine Hatzivassiliou: The first thing that helped the most was some gray hair. When I started at Bernstein, I attempted to solicit new clients very much the same way I do today. But when I was 26 years old and I’m sitting in front of a family worth and the dad was in the 70s and he lived his life and I’m younger than his kids, he would look at me and say, “What do you really know? What experience do you have?” So, doing this now for as long as I have, the number one thing that has helped me the most in growth is just wisdom and time. Without that, yes, you can be a rockstar stock picker. We have so many kids coming out of college today with the advent of AI and technology that have algorithms that could run unbelievable portfolios and there is a segment of the market who wants to hire and engage those individuals but, generally speaking, the families that we service, that is 10th or 12th on the list of importance. Jason Diamond: No, I think that’s spot on. I think most high net worth clients counterintuitively agree with that, that alpha, for lack of a better term, is really not the name of the game or not in the top five reasons why you would engage with a financial advisor. Constantine Hatzivassiliou: Agreed. The biggest thing that we’ve been doing to educate clients especially in today’s environment, I had a call yesterday with an individual, a client who lives in New Jersey who works out of New York for a hedge fund, he knows our space incredibly well. He’s one of those kids, 28 years old, brilliant, as smart as you’ll ever be but his tax bracket is atrocious. He is paying so much of his W-2 income in taxes and building out a strategy that can reduce his tax liability by several hundred thousand dollars a year far exceeds any alpha I can generate by picking a top decile performer. Jason Diamond: What was the strategy? Move to Florida? I’m just kidding. Don’t answer that. Constantine Hatzivassiliou: We offered that but, unfortunately, he has to be physically in the office in New York City but yes. Jason Diamond: I think that will resonate, by the way, your gray hair comment. I appreciate the humility and the modesty in that because, the reality is, one of the questions I was going to ask you about was next-gen talent cultivation. In my opinion, this is a hard game for younger folks for that reason. People sit across from other people with a lot of money and they say, “Why am I going to entrust you with my life’s work when you just don’t have that degree of experience?” I was asking more even about your firm success and your firm story, have you felt like that’s caught on more? Do you have more brand awareness, if you will, now when you go to a prospect meeting or do you think you’re still constantly fighting that education fight? Constantine Hatzivassiliou: So, first part, brands, it’s improved in our immediate network. In our little bubble of the world, yes, it’s known. Let’s call it, in South Florida the influential attorneys, the accountants, the divorce attorneys know who we are because, having been down here long enough, we’ve had opportunities to work together. Our network of friends, certainly, the word spreads. But in the grand scheme of things, we are so small in the South Florida landscape or the LA landscape or the New York landscape so any incremental gain that we pick up is meaningful. And then, as it relates to young talent, our success is completely, long-term, derived by the young talent that we bring in to nurture them to help them grow. I look at our success, two of our critical mentors and board members of our firm are in their 80s, their children and grandchildren, nepotism aside, whether it was interning while in college or coming to work for us after school, they’re our best employees. And our goal as a firm, just like how I was offered the opportunity to become a partner and own a piece of the business, our goal long term will be to transition the business to this younger generation that we’re developing. I look at, again, those two board members who are in their 80s, the advice they’ve given me is don’t ever stop working, you have to be doing something. And I turn to them and say, “I don’t work every day.” I put in 20 hour days, well, not quite 20, 18 hour days but it’s never work because, what I do every day, I don’t deem it work, I love what I do, I don’t ever see myself stopping. Because they’ll tell me all of their friends that have stopped working or sold their business, invariably, the men die within six months because boredom and we always joke around that you’ll continue to work forever. So, I would hope that one day I transition into that advisory board member role where I step aside day-to-day activity where I’m now a mentor to our younger generation that we’re promoting into partners because we’ve made promises to our clients that we will forever be their family office. So, we have to, as part of our growth model, have those transitions in place because we’re servicing many families that have 85-year-old clients and two-year-old clients and we’re tasked with the two-year-olds as well as the 85-year-old. Jason Diamond: I also feel like there’s a little bit of younger generations I think have been reluctant to some degree to get it, you can disagree with this, to get into this space because there’s a more appeal to things like investment banking and sales and trading to some degree. The other problem obviously you alluded to is asset gathering. Your model speaks so clearly to success because you don’t say I own the client, that’s my relationship. To me, you plant the seeds of being able to handle succession much better than somebody who does the mine is mine and yours is yours approach. Is that fair? Constantine Hatzivassiliou: That’s completely accurate. And I think there’s two types of people that serve in the financial advisory space. You have the individual who is analytics driven, who likes being behind the bank of monitors trading account and there’s a critical part of our firm and our success is driven by the team in the office that aren’t necessarily client facing that do all the heavy lifting every day because they’re really doing the heavy work. Myself, my partners, the select few, while talented and able to do that, realize the value that we present is quarterbacking the relationship and helping understand all the components. We kid around that we’ve all stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night, we’ve become experts in tax, we’ve become experts at trust and estate planning, we’ve become experts at divorce, we’ve become experts at the medical field. It’s shocking how it’s 2:00 in the morning and you get a phone call, panic attack by a client saying they need a doctor for X, Y and Z, can you connect me. So, the younger generation, yes, the sexy space is investment banking and that is really hard work. I could not do what my friends at Goldman do who are at these private mid-market funds, that’s just not me. I’ve been fortunate that I stumbled into an avenue in financial services that I think perfectly fits my personality and my want and desire to help others because that’s what we’re driven by and we try and hire people with that same mindset. The hardest thing as an RIA especially in South Florida is finding and retaining talent that is like-minded and that could function well within our family. Jason Diamond: If you build a firm predicated on culture and client service, I understand, certainly, the importance of that. I want to shift gears, I don’t want to lose this thought. You mentioned organic growth, it’s incredible. You have not mentioned inorganic growth at all and maybe because you haven’t had to but give me your thoughts on M&A, private equity in this space, do you have plans to sell the business, take on a capital partner, buy other RIAs? Constantine Hatzivassiliou: Yeah. So, I understand why private equity in the last 10 years has come into the market. For years, they bought up insurance practices, that recurring revenue, sticky assets, it makes sense. Personally, I’m not a fan of them being in our markets, I think they’re motivated at the end of the day by AUM growth, revenue growth and the second transaction which, for most of our clients, would not make sense because, again, that then questions why it is that we’re motivated to do something. Am I taking extra risk in the portfolio because I want to grow the AUM because I’m looking to sell in a year? Am I bringing in a strategy that has a higher fee? For us, it doesn’t work. In the brokerage model, it makes perfect sense. Now, there are some RIAs who leave the wirehouses, open up an RIA shop, do really well for their clients but don’t have the long-term aspirations of making the institution a legacy to where they’re passing it off. I hope my kids one day want to come work for dad and follow in his steps, that’d be amazing. Just like our younger generation working at the firm, our goal is we’ve already targeted the three or four guys that will be partner one day and we’ll transition the business over to them. But it’s okay if there’s an RIA out there who doesn’t have that transition product or isn’t motivated by that and is looking at it as a vehicle that I’ve built a really good successful book of business and I want to now retire and spend time with my family and kids and travel, et cetera, and that’s where PE steps in and offers an attractive number and the person makes their move. So, I can’t fault the individual for wanting that and I’m not saying that they’re not doing well by their clients, it’s just, for us, I’m not a fan of it because, again, I’m first critically and always focused on what’s best for the client. Jason Diamond: Fair. And I largely agree with some of what you said around private equity in this space but private equity enables … Obviously, it’s capital so which enables acquisitions which is why a lot of firms take on private equity. So, what about the idea of potentially buying businesses to start up inorganic growth? Constantine Hatzivassiliou: We have gone down the road of acquiring other institutions potentially. The challenge is, because we manage money so uniquely and our approach is so different, I’m not going to bring on an institution or bring in a new partner to the firm or a new book of business that we’ve acquired if the methodology and the life of that book doesn’t mirror ours. So, yes, there is opportunities to grow through acquisition, it’s not something that we are leaning on heavily. However, for the right institution that’s available that is aligned with our thinking, whose clients would value and appreciate how we do things or, if that institution is doing something truly unique that we would want to bolt onto our platform, all day long because, again, for the benefit of the client, it makes sense. So, yes, there are opportunities for that. Too often we find that, when a book is available for acquisition, the highest bidder tends to win out and we don’t have the deep enough pockets to write a multiple that we don’t deem to be, let’s call it, market neutral. Jason Diamond: Yeah, market prudent. I understand the premise and I think that’s fair. I also think you have the luxury, because of your organic growth, you can be super, super picky about inorganic and I love how you bring it all back to the lens of the client. Can this improve the client experience in some way? And, if so, yes, we’ll take a look. I got time for one more question, I can’t believe time has flown. You’ve had a remarkable journey, professional golf now partner at a $4 billion plus on the way to $5 billion RIA multifamily office. What are you most proud of when you reflect on your career journey? Constantine Hatzivassiliou: What am I most proud of? To see what Rich, myself and Mark and Jayson built over these years from where we were sitting in a small conference room, struggling to figure out how do we find a way to hire a trust and estate attorney to help with that component, which CPAs do we bring on board in-house because clients have a need. So, the entrepreneurial spirit involved in growing the business, the late nights, the struggles, the banter back and forth, to put so much blood, sweat and tears into this and now to look at all that we’ve accomplished, being in four separate states with offices, having so many wonderful employees that have come to us from all over the world, Germany, from China, from Tokyo, bringing people in to the US and building out something that, when we leave at the end of the day, are incredibly proud of. My father’s no longer with us, for 50 years, I always strived to make him proud because he never told me that he was proud of me, he was the classic Greek old-fashioned dad. I think he looks down on his now for everything that we’ve built and would say that he’s proud of us so, for me, that’s the best. Jason Diamond: Yeah. That’s an incredible place to end. Thank you for sharing that, it’s a touching place to end and I appreciate you being open. Thank you. This has been one of my favorite episodes, your journey, your humility, your honesty, your transparency, it’s no wonder you’ve built a business you’ve built. So, thanks for joining us, Constantine. I look forward to having you back on to talk about the next chapter. Constantine Hatzivassiliou: Thank you. Next time we’ll do it from the golf course. Jason Diamond: Oh, absolutely. Mindy Diamond: As a financial advisor, you hold yourself to the highest standards of integrity, honesty and credibility. You are successful because you take your professional responsibility seriously and are dedicated to your clients. But are you living your best business life? Are your goals aligned with your firms or could a better option exist? Should I Stay or Should I Go? Is a book written with you in mind? It’s a self-guided journey that walks you through the key steps that we take with our advisor clients. This strategic thought process and roadmap to professional self-discovery is designed to help you ask the right questions and think critically and objectively whether you’re considering change or not. Learn how to get your copy at diamond-consultants.com/thebook.   Lessons from the Links: From Golf Pro to $5B Family Office Partner A conversation with Jason Diamond and Constantine Hatzivassiliou, Partner at Certuity. Jason Diamond: Welcome to the latest episode of our podcast series for financial advisors. Today’s episode is Lessons from the Links: From Golf Pro to $5B Family Office Partner. It’s a conversation with Constantine Hatzivassiliou, partner at Certuity. I’m Jason Diamond and this is the Diamond Podcast for Financial Advisors. Mindy Diamond: At Diamond Consultants, we help elite advisors identify the right environment for their businesses to thrive whether that’s at a wirehouse, boutique or independent firm. With nearly three decades of experience, we’ve guided thousands of advisors and represented more than a quarter of a trillion dollars in assets transitioned and, each year, one in four advisors managing $1 billion or more who change firms are our clients. Our process is education-driven and based on building relationships starting as your strategic partner well before you’re even thinking of a move. To schedule a confidential conversation, call us at (908) 879-1002. Wondering why advisors change firms and where they’re headed? Are transition deals going up or down? Those very questions and more inspired us to create our annual advisor transition report, it’s the award-winning data-driven resource designed for advisors that connects the dots between the motivations around movement and the firm’s appetite for top talent. Arm yourself with the knowledge you need to make smart decisions, download your copy at diamond-consultants.com/transitionreport. Jason Diamond: Golf is a way of exposing who you really are, there are no teammates to blame, no clock to run out and no hiding from a bad decision. Every shot demands discipline, patience and the ability to stay focused when the pressure is highest, my guest today knows that firsthand. Before becoming a partner at Certuity, a multifamily office approaching five billion in assets, Constantine Hatzivassiliou was pursuing a career as a professional golfer. An injury ultimately redirected his path towards wealth management but many of the lessons he learned on the course still shaped the way he serves clients today. Certuity has grown from roughly 210 million in assets to nearly five billion, that’s impressive on its own but the more interesting story is how they’ve done it. The firm has grown largely through referrals built around a multifamily office model and focused on becoming far more than an investment advisor to the families it serves. In Constantine’s view, the best advisors aren’t simply managing portfolios, they’re the first person clients call when a business is being sold, a family issue becomes complicated or a major decision carries consequences well beyond the balance sheet. Constantine and I discuss the lessons golf teaches about handling pressure then we dive into the evolution from the traditional wealth management world to the multifamily office model, why referrals drive nearly all of Certuity’s growth, how he thinks about private equity’s influence on the advisory business and what it takes to become the first call for the wealthy families they serve and perhaps, most importantly, why the same qualities that help someone succeed on a golf course may be surprisingly relevant to building trust over a lifetime. It’s a great conversation so let’s dive in. Constantine, thank you so much for joining, thrilled to have you here. Constantine Hatzivassiliou: Thank you for having me, excited to be here. Jason Diamond: Yeah, absolutely. So, you had an unconventional path to wealth management, you started as a professional golfer, I think that’s a first for us on this show, before ultimately transitioning into this world. Can you tell us a little bit about the journey and what brought you here? Constantine Hatzivassiliou: Yeah, I never thought I’d be here, my parents were certainly shocked that I got here path wise. Growing up, immigrants from Greece, you settle into Florida the traditional way where you either go down the diner route or the gas station route in mechanics which my father was the latter and school and education was never priority, it was always about supporting the family needs. So, next thing you know, sports are a critical part of any good household, that’s how I was raised and I played everything but golf. I grew up on a golf course because my parents believed that a location of a property was critical to long-term financial success. We lived on a golf course, it was in our backyard, we’d stare at it and we’d use it to play football or baseball or anything but actual golf. And my freshman year at the University of Florida, I started dating a girl on the golf team and she got me hooked to the point where, after four years of hitting balls with the women’s and men’s golf team at the University of Florida for six hours a day, we finished school and realized I’m actually pretty good at the game and, while I have a finance and economics background and degree, let’s try and pursue this for a living and I was blessed. I had a sponsor who helped me succeed at golf on a small scale, it was a humbling experience to say the least. I was competing and playing with Sean O’Hair, Ken Duke, guys who made it out on tour for a very long time, we had the same sponsor so we functioned as a team, it was a collegiate team effectively trying to make it out on tour. And, unfortunately, my second year of competing, I blew out my back doing heavy deadlifts which set me aside for 18 months. While I was recovering, my primary sponsor was in financial services and says, “Hey, you have a background in this, it’s killing you not being able to be on the golf course, why don’t you come work for me while you’re rehabbing so that, when you get back to playing golf, it’s easier for you to talk about our business as a sponsor to try and develop business to throw it to the financial services side?” And Jason, the reality is, after 18 months working there, I fell in love with it. I made way more money working in that environment than I ever would’ve made playing golf because, again, I came to the game late. I was decent but I was nowhere near the caliber of players that are succeeding now out on tour. So, I pivoted after having met my wife and decided to settle down into the wealth management space and, what is it now, 26 years later, going strong. So, it’s been a fun transition from golf into wealth management to say the least. Jason Diamond: Probably my favorite background … I watch a lot of golf, I should caveat that, probably my favorite origin story we’ve had, I’ll give you the Wanamaker trophy or whatever you get, first place. Let’s talk about the business now, so Certuity. For our audience who may not be familiar, tell us a little bit about the firm, what types of clients do you serve and any context you can provide on size as well. We’ll talk about how your firm got there but just give us where we are today to start with. Constantine Hatzivassiliou: So, goal by the end of the year is to have $5 billion in AUM, we’re just shy of that now. We currently service 428 families across the country. So, we’re boutiquey and nimble, we’re based in South Florida, we have offices in New York, San Fran and LA. I’m fortunate to be one of four partners at the firm supporting the growth and the direction of the company and it’s a fun endeavor in the sense that, when we first started, I was employee number four 16 years ago and, with 210 million in AUM at the time to grow it to where we are today, to learn all the things that we have over the years, the curve balls that were thrown at us because all of us came from massive institutional wealth management firms. So, we transitioned from the Bernsteins of the world, the BNY Mellons of the world into an RIA in the South Florida market, there was absolutely an entrepreneurial learning curve involved. Jason Diamond: I bet. And on follow-up question, 16 years ago, did you have a book of business, client business and do you still maintain a book of business today? Constantine Hatzivassiliou: I do. The four of us at the firm share in all of the clients, we work together. Being in the Southeast, I’m responsible for, let’s call it, the Southeast demographics of the US which is a large portion of Certuity’s book. I have a partner in Tennessee, I have a partner in LA and San Francisco and we divide and conquer across the country. But, yes, we came over with a small book, we’ve all grown it organically since then. So, we’ve been very effective in how we’ve grown. Jason Diamond: Just from adding new client money? Constantine Hatzivassiliou: Strictly through new clients referred to us by existing clients. Jason Diamond: Wow. I

Your clients may have millions in company stock and still struggle with the decisions that matter most: exercise now or later, hold or sell, diversify or stay concentrated. In this episode, we sit down with Marcel Miu, founder of Simplify Wealth Planning in Austin, Texas, to discuss how advisors can help clients navigate equity compensation while building a successful advisory firm.Marcel shares his journey from JP Morgan and Cohen & Steers to launching his own fee-only RIA, and why technical expertise alone isn't enough to grow a business. We discuss the realities of client acquisition, how marketing has evolved, why LinkedIn isn't the opportunity it once was, and why advisors need multiple marketing channels instead of relying on a single strategy.We also explore flat-fee financial planning versus AUM, particularly for tech professionals whose investment portfolios may be simple but whose planning needs are anything but. Marcel explains why a flat-fee model often creates better alignment, how to set clear expectations, and how to determine whether a client is the right fit.Marcel's Social:https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcel-miu/Music in this episode was obtained from Bensound.

After more than 400 episodes across eight years, Corey Kupfer launches a new quarterly roundtable with his law firm partners Brian Meegan and Sara Mostafa (together representing roughly 90 years of combined deal experience) to unpack why the projected 2026 M&A boom has not fully arrived, revisit the negotiation tactics behind the 1951 Korean War armistice, and share parting wisdom for business owners in a slower market. In this episode of the DealQuest Podcast, host Corey Kupfer launches a new quarterly roundtable format with his law firm partners, Brian Meegan and Sara Mostafa. Brian has been a partner for several years. Sara joined this year as the newest partner. Together the three represent about 90 years of combined deal experience across M&A, capital raises, cross-border transactions, and wealth management. WHAT YOU'LL LEARN You'll discover why the pent-up M&A demand projected for 2026 has not materialized as expected, how a Virginia-focused fund is challenging the assumption that acquisitions drain leadership talent out of state, and why wealth management continues to run counter to the broader slowdown. Brian and Sara explain what a $60 billion all-stock transaction involving AnySphere signals about AI M&A, what the 1951 Korean War armistice negotiations still teach modern dealmakers, and how a post-Soviet Russian deal turned on cultural understanding rather than a legal provision. THE FIRM'S JOURNEY TO A QUARTERLY ROUNDTABLE The DealQuest Podcast has run for eight years and passed 400 episodes with a rhythm of three guest interviews followed by a solocast. Brian Meegan joined the firm a few years ago as a partner and has appeared on the show as a guest a couple of times. Sara Mostafa joined this year as the newest partner and has also appeared as a guest since coming on board. With three partners now representing roughly 90 years of combined deal experience, Corey launched this quarterly roundtable to talk deals openly, share what each partner is seeing across their practice areas, and introduce a new Deals in History segment. DEALS IN HISTORY Brian opened the first installment of Deals in History with the 1951 Korean War armistice negotiations, which contained nearly every classic tactic anyone has ever written about. The North Koreans picked up the UN delegation in cars carrying white flags, used higher chairs to gain physical advantage, and pushed multi-meeting standoffs over table shape and flag size. At one point both sides sat in complete silence for over two hours, refusing to move on a single boundary point. The full negotiation spanned roughly 160 meetings across two and a half years, and the document that resulted is not a peace treaty. It is a ceasefire that has held since the end of the war. KEY INSIGHTS The pent-up 2026 M&A demand has not arrived. Energy price disruption, interest rate uncertainty, and other macro conditions have kept the big bump from showing up. Deal flow remains active, but both Brian and Sara noted a less frenetic pace toward closing. Wealth management remains a meaningful exception, with private equity capital and succession pressure keeping RIA deal flow robust. Outside wealth management, Sara is seeing active smaller and mid-market activity, especially for targets that have successfully integrated AI into operations. Andrew Dunlap's Virginia-focused fund is a useful counterweight to the standard acquisition narrative. He shared with Corey that 82 percent of Virginia acquisition buyers were from out of state, and top leadership talent tends to relocate with the new HQ. His commitment is to keep businesses local, in a mini Berkshire Hathaway style approach. Cultural understanding often matters more than a specific legal provision. Corey shared a story from the early 1990s, just after the Soviet Union fell, when a Russian counterparty refused to sign a standard non-circumvention agreement as a matter of deeply held belief. Corey structured around it by locking up non-circumvention agreements with the US suppliers directly, and closed the deal. There is a deal for almost any business frustration, challenge, or opportunity. Corey's parting wisdom points to acquihires, joint ventures, strategic alliances, and white labeling as underused options. Brian added Jim Collins' 2009 line to never waste a good recession. Sara closed with practical guidance for women-owned and minority-owned business owners to seek community and specialized funds beyond the SBA. Perfect for entrepreneurs weighing M&A moves right now, wealth management and RIA professionals tracking deal flow, and anyone interested in how experienced deal lawyers read the market quarter to quarter. FOR MORE ON THIS EPISODE https://www.coreykupfer.com/blog/quarterly-roundtable-brian-meegan-sara-mostafa FOR MORE ON KUPFER.https://www.kupferlaw.com FOR MORE ON COREY KUPFERhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/coreykupfer/ https://www.coreykupfer.com/ Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator, and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author, and professional speaker. He is deeply passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast. Get deal-ready with the DealQuest Podcast with Corey Kupfer, where like-minded entrepreneurs and business leaders converge, share insights and challenges, and success stories. Equip yourself with the tools, resources, and support necessary to navigate the complex yet rewarding world of dealmaking. Dive into the world of deal-driven growth today! Episode Highlights with Timestamps [00:00:00] - Launching the new quarterly roundtable format with Brian Meegan and Sara Mostafa[00:05:13] - Sara on smaller and mid-market deal activity, especially where AI is integrated[00:09:18] - Andrew Dunlap's Virginia fund and the 82 percent out-of-state buyer statistic[00:11:24] - Space industry multiples running hot alongside AI [00:14:09] - The $60 billion all-stock transaction involving AnySphere and Cursor[00:15:04] - Deals in History debut, the 1951 Korean War armistice negotiations[00:20:26] - Walking the Abraham Path with William Ury in 2017 [00:23:32] - Corey's post-Soviet Russian deal and the non-circumvention agreement story [00:28:17] - Cross-border capital flow from the Middle East, India, and China [00:36:22] - Parting Shots from Sara, Brian, and Corey Guest Bios: Brian Meegan has represented US and multinational clients on corporate matters for more than 25 years, primarily on M&A, business formation, contract negotiation, and real estate. Before joining Kupfer, he founded Evergent Law, listed in Best Law Firms in America (Colorado) for Corporate Law and the exclusive Colorado M&A firm in the IR Global network, and he separately founded Watson Ltd., a back-office support company serving law firms nationwide. Brian earned his B.S. and J.D. from the University of Colorado, is listed in Best Lawyers in America (Colorado), and is a self-described history nerd who powers the new Deals in History segment on the show. Sara Mostafa is a corporate attorney with nearly two decades of experience representing private companies and individuals across M&A, private equity, financing, corporate governance, employment, real estate, and outside general counsel work, with clients spanning technology, wealth management, retail, entertainment, construction, restaurants, medical practices, and fitness and nutrition. She began her practice at Cooley LLP in San Diego and later served as a Partner at Lobb & Plewe LLP before joining Kupfer. Sara earned her J.D. from UCLA School of Law and her B.A. magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania, completed Harvard Law School's Executive Education program in M&A in 2023, and is licensed in California and Hawaii. She speaks English, Spanish, Arabic, and French Host Bio: Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator, and dealmaker with more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author, and professional speaker deeply passionate about deal-driven growth. He is the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast. Show Description: Do you want your business to grow faster? The DealQuest Podcast with Corey Kupfer reveals how successful entrepreneurs and business leaders use strategic deals to accelerate growth. From large mergers and acquisitions to capital raising, joint ventures, strategic alliances, real estate deals, and more, this show discusses the full spectrum of deal-driven growth strategies. Get the confidence to pursue deals that will help your company scale faster. Related Episodes: Episode 351 - There's a Deal for That Episode 331 - M&A Market Outlook and Deal Predictions Episode 293 - Sunny Vanderbeck, Selling Without Selling Out Keywords/Tags: DealQuest quarterly roundtable, Brian Meegan, Sara Mostafa, Corey Kupfer, 2026 M&A market, wealth management M&A, RIA deal flow, AI acquisitions, AnySphere Cursor, mid-market deals, cross-border transactions, Korean War armistice negotiation, William Ury, post-Soviet dealmaking, Andrew Dunlap Virginia fund, mini Berkshire Hathaway, non-circumvention agreement, deal-driven growth, Kupfer Associates, private equity M&A

Episode 509 takes us to the heart of Latvia to meet Dace and Māris Plūme, the husband-and-wife team behind Mr. Plūme, an award-winning orchard cidery known for both still and naturally sparkling ciders. Their journey began with a chance taste of homemade cider that inspired Māris to train in Normandy and Austria before returning home to help shape Latvia's growing fine cider movement. Along the way, they explain why still cider deserves a place alongside sparkling cider, how heirloom apples define their work, the role of wild fermentation, and why patience is one of a cider maker's greatest tools. Ria also shares the latest News from Out and About Ciderville, including updates on CiderCon 2027, eCiderNews, GLINTCAP, orchards around the world, and this fall's French Cider Tour. Ciders tasted: • Semi-Sweet Still Cider • Pearadise Pet-Nat Timestamps Timestamps - 00:00 – Still Cider Origins - 00:23 – Welcome to Cider Chat - 02:31 – Ciderville News Update - 05:42 – Orchards Around the World - 08:48 – Fires and Normandy - 10:54 – Meet Mr. Plūme - 11:55 – Latvia and Location - 13:17 – Māris' Cider Journey - 15:34 – Latvian Traditions - 17:24 – Heirloom Apple Abundance - 19:29 – Orchard and Grafting - 22:20 – Learning the Craft - 25:52 – Life as a Married Cidermaking Team - 28:01 – A Microcidery Philosophy - 29:35 – Tours and Education - 30:59 – Bottle Sizes and Sales - 31:52 – Small Bottles and Hops - 32:44 – Wild Fermentation - 33:27 – The Story Behind Their Still Cider - 34:44 – Reading Latvian Labels - 35:35 – A Latvian Toast - 35:52 – Tasting the Still Cider - 36:58 – Why Still Cider Matters - 39:33 – Awards and Philosophy - 41:44 – Yeast and Apple Blends - 43:20 – The Baltic Cider Scene - 47:35 – Stopping Fermentation Naturally - 48:56 – Aging and Storage Challenges - 52:23 – Pouring Pearadise Pet-Nat - 54:40 – Flavor Notes and No Sulfites - 59:11 – Where to Find Mr. Plūme - 1:00:40 – Thanks and Sign Off - 1:02:42 – Closing Outro: We Like Cider Round

Passing the torch to next-gen leaders requires more than paperwork; it demands deep cultural investment, transparent career pathing, and a training ground for collective decision-making. Today's guest highlights the profound personal and corporate transformations that happen when a firm commits to cultivating sustainable human capital. Christine DeMao is the COO of Gibson Capital, a $3B national RIA serving ultra-high-net-worth families. In this episode, she shares her 18-year journey from entry-level portfolio administrator to "boomerang" equity partner. In this episode, Christine explains how her firm uses a transparent "Path to Partnership" framework to map out character, cultural leadership, and business prerequisites early in a hire's tenure. She also opens up about her survival of a severe burnout health crisis, revealing how it fundamentally changed how she leads, leverages peer networks, and models work-life balance to protect her team. For show notes and more visit: https://www.kitces.com/498 

This week, Jack Sharry talks with Jack Hannah, President & Chief Operating Officer at GeoWealth. Jack oversees the firm's operations, service, and both digital and investment product divisions. He is also fully dedicated to GeoWealth's strategic business initiatives, ensuring that the platform's capabilities evolve in line with their clients' unique needs.  Jack talks about what enables firms to grow and what holds them back. He discusses how operational efficiency can boost RIA growth without breaking their back office and how modern platforms are reshaping investment management. Jack also shares the importance of partnerships and how GeoWealth is pushing the boundaries of what a single client account can deliver. In this episode: (00:00) - Intro (01:09) - Jack's early career in RIA operations  (04:30) - Jack's transition from an RIA environment to GeoWealth  (05:35) - How GeoWealth helps advisors (07:02) - GeoWealth's value proposition and modern TAMP model  (08:44) - GeoWealth's platform capabilities and integrations  (10:42) - Why investors choose GeoWealth  (12:24) - What partnerships look like at GeoWealth  (15:51) - How GeoWealth expands its investment capabilities (19:11) - Jack's interests outside of work Quotes "We want to provide scale to an advisor's practice, no matter what shape or size they might be." ~ Jack Hannah "We want to meet these advisors or these firms right where they are. I know that's overused, but we really mean that." — Jack Hannah  "The investment management world is rapidly changing. We are on the cutting edge of what a UMA is and how it should actually work in a client account." ~ Jack Hannah Links  Jack Hannah on LinkedIn GeoWealth Connect with our hosts LifeYield Jack Sharry on LinkedIn Jack Sharry on Twitter Subscribe and stay in touch Apple Podcasts Spotify LinkedIn Twitter Facebook

In this episode of the RIA Edge Podcast, host David Armstrong speaks with Jason Ozur, co-CEO of Lido Advisors, about the firm’s growth from a six-person team managing roughly $400 million to one of the largest RIAs in the country with nearly $50 billion in assets under management. Jason discusses how a strong focus on organic growth, standardized investment processes and client service helped lay the foundation for expansion before the firm accelerated its growth through acquisitions and strategic capital partnerships. He also shares how employee ownership, cultural integration, technology investments and artificial intelligence initiatives are shaping Lido’s future as it continues to expand its capabilities and geographic reach. Jason shares: Growing Lido from a small advisory firm into a national RIA through organic growth and acquisitions How the firm has built wide-spread employee ownership—including million-dollar-plus equity stakes for over 70 Lido partners.  The importance of investment management, including alternatives, and how unique diversification strategies can enhance a firm's value to clients.  How Lido's executives think about handling data to remain as flexible as possible for future tech enhancements.  How he has organized the executive leadership team's roles and responsibilities—including a second chief executive officer in Ken Stern. Resources: Listen to the RIA Edge Podcast on Wealth Management Listen and Subscribe to the RIA Edge Podcast on Apple Podcasts Listen and Subscribe to the RIA Edge Podcast on Spotify Connect With David Armstrong: Wealth Management LinkedIn: Wealth Management LinkedIn: David Armstrong Twitter: David Armstrong LinkedIn: Informa Connect With Jason Ozur: LinkedIn: Jason Ozur LinkedIn: Lido Advisors Website: Lido Advisors About Our Guest: Jason Ozur is Co-Chair of Lido's investment committee. He is responsible for the management of Lido's alternative investments and is an integral part of the firm's due diligence on real estate-oriented strategies.  Education: B.S., California State University at Northridge Previous Work Highlights: Jason started his career as a CPA performing audits, preparing tax returns, and providing back-office services for numerous hedge funds. In 1999, he joined a large family investment office, where he was on the investment team that managed the family's substantial investments and served as CFO of its worldwide water conservation company that did business in over 22 countries. He also provided financial oversight as controller of a multi-billion-dollar Los Angeles-based hedge fund. Personal Facts: Jason takes on a mentorship role to help facilitate a company culture of progression, excellence, and integrity.

This week, Bea has one final sting operation - best friend Honey will be with her come hell or high water. As her obsession finally catches up with her, how will Billy and Honey recover in the aftermath? Meanwhile, Priya bares all to Max but is left stunned when Ravi returns, with a vendetta. Are we pretty much there will all the mysteries for New Years Day? Elsewhere, Eve struggles to bond with Ria, Gray continues to turn the screws and a date is set for a wedding...

What does it take to move to a new country, earn an MBA, become a CFP®, and launch a wealth management firm—all in under four years? In this conversation, Imade Iyamu shares how she built Arusha Wealth after immigrating to the United States, and why her mission is focused on helping immigrants and cross-border clients navigate some of the most complex financial systems in the world. We explore the real challenges behind building financial stability in a new country, from credit systems and taxes to visas, estates, and retirement planning across borders. Imade also breaks down how she went from law to finance, earned her CFP®, and launched an RIA while designing a business model rooted in education, community, and long-term trust. This episode offers practical insight into niche firm-building and what it really means to start a business while still learning the system yourself. You can find show notes and more information by clicking here: https://tinyurl.com/3tjr2xvu

With James Woodfall, Communication and Behavior Specialist, Raise Your EI As AI makes expertise more accessible, what becomes an advisor's true advantage? EI expert James Woodfall explains why authentic human connection may be the one thing technology can't replicate. In Summary As artificial intelligence reshapes how information is delivered, financial advisors are being challenged to rethink what truly differentiates their value. Mindy Diamond sits down with James Woodfall, a former wealth management business owner turned emotional intelligence expert and founder of Raise Your EI, to explore why emotional intelligence may become one of the profession's greatest competitive advantages. Together, they discuss how rapport, curiosity, and authentic human connection influence trust, referrals, leadership, and client loyalty and why those skills can be developed just like technical expertise. The conversation also examines the difference between AI's “synthetic empathy” and the authentic relationships clients continue to value—and why that distinction matters to financial advisors now more than ever.   The Storyline For decades, advisors have built successful businesses by combining technical expertise with thoughtful financial guidance. But as AI makes information more accessible and planning tools more sophisticated, expertise alone is becoming less of a differentiator. James Woodfall believes the future belongs to advisors who master something technology cannot authentically replicate: human connection. Drawing on his experience as both a former wealth management firm owner and a specialist in communication and behavioral science, James explains why emotional intelligence isn't simply a “soft skill.” It's a business skill that affects nearly every aspect of an advisory practice—from building trust and earning referrals to leading teams and helping clients make difficult decisions. Mindy and James explore why asking better questions matters more than having better answers, how curiosity creates stronger relationships than scripts ever can, and why advisors who create memorable client experiences may find themselves even more valuable in an increasingly automated world. The conversation ultimately reframes AI not as a replacement for advisors, but as a catalyst forcing the profession to rediscover the uniquely human qualities clients have valued all along.   Topics Covered Emotional intelligence as a business skill Building trust through rapport and curiosity Authentic empathy vs. synthetic AI empathy The psychology behind client decision-making Why referrals are rooted in emotional outcomes Coaching advisors to improve communication Leadership and emotional intelligence AI's impact on advisor differentiation Creating premium client experiences Future-proofing advisory businesses > Download a transcript of this episode… Listen and Learn Highlights for Advisors Why do better questions lead to better financial advice? (6:10) James explains why financial planning is only as good as the conversations that precede it—and why understanding a client's fears and aspirations leads to better outcomes than simply gathering financial facts. How does emotional intelligence translate into business growth? (15:30) Rapport isn't simply about making clients feel comfortable. James discusses why advisors who build trust quickly tend to earn more referrals and become significantly more referable. Can emotional intelligence actually be learned? (37:05) Contrary to popular belief, emotional intelligence isn't an innate personality trait. James explains why it is a trainable skill and how advisors can intentionally improve it throughout their careers. What makes authentic empathy different from AI? (39:10) One of the episode's most compelling discussions explores the difference between AI's ability to simulate empathy and the authentic emotional connection that develops between two people. Why should advisors think more about experience than efficiency? (45:10) Clients don't always pay more for information. Often, they pay more for confidence, judgment, reassurance, and the experience of working with someone they trust. Will AI replace advisors or elevate the best ones? (46:55) James shares why he believes AI is more likely to automate routine work while making relationship-centered advisors even more valuable. Key Takeaways Emotional intelligence is a measurable business capability—not simply a personality trait. Stronger client relationships begin with curiosity rather than advice. Advisors who solve emotional concerns make it easier for clients to recommend than advisors who simply deliver technical expertise. AI may replicate information, but authentic trust remains distinctly human. Premium advisory relationships will increasingly be defined by the experience clients receive—not just the answers they're given. Emotional intelligence improves leadership, client retention, referrals, and advisor well-being. The firms that embrace both technology and human connection will likely be best positioned for the future. https://youtu.be/xlQMQm6mqtc Quotable Moments “Rapport building is one of the foundational things for trust building.” “It's not real empathy. It's synthetic empathy.” “If all of our decisions were made on price, Ferrari wouldn't have a business.” “The advisors who create authentic human connection may be the ones who remain untouchable.” FAQs What is emotional intelligence, and why does it matter for financial advisors? James defines emotional intelligence as the ability to recognize, understand, and influence emotions in ourselves and others. For advisors, those skills strengthen communication, trust, leadership, and client relationships. Can emotional intelligence actually be developed? Yes. Unlike IQ, emotional intelligence can be improved through intentional practice, feedback, coaching, and greater self-awareness. Why do referrals have so much to do with emotional intelligence? Clients often remember and recommend how an advisor made them feel more than the technical work performed. Solving emotional concerns creates stories clients naturally share with others. What does James mean by “synthetic empathy”? AI can recognize language patterns and respond empathetically, but it doesn't genuinely experience human emotion. James argues that authentic empathy remains one of an advisor's greatest competitive advantages. How should advisors think about AI? Rather than viewing AI solely as a competitor, advisors should use it to improve efficiency while investing more time in conversations, judgment, and relationships that technology cannot fully replace. What is the biggest mindset shift advisors should make? Stop viewing emotional intelligence as a soft skill. Treat it as a business skill that directly influences growth, leadership, client loyalty, and long-term differentiation. James defines emotional intelligence as the ability to recognize, understand, and influence emotions in ourselves and others. For advisors, those skills strengthen communication, trust, leadership, and client relationships. Yes. Unlike IQ, emotional intelligence can be improved through intentional practice, feedback, coaching, and greater self-awareness. Clients often remember and recommend how an advisor made them feel more than the technical work performed. Solving emotional concerns creates stories clients naturally share with others. AI can recognize language patterns and respond empathetically, but it doesn't genuinely experience human emotion. James argues that authentic empathy remains one of an advisor's greatest competitive advantages. Rather than viewing AI solely as a competitor, advisors should use it to improve efficiency while investing more time in conversations, judgment, and relationships that technology cannot fully replace. Stop viewing emotional intelligence as a soft skill. Treat it as a business skill that directly influences growth, leadership, client loyalty, and long-term differentiation. Related Resources Why AI Matters Now: Filling the Estate Planning Gap with Wealth.com The Paradox of Choice Traps Successful Advisors Freedom vs. Familiarity: Is It Worth Disrupting Comfort for Something That Might Be Better? Guest Bio James Woodfall, founder of Raise Your EI, is a former financial planner who now advises financial services and firms on how they can leverage emotional intelligence (EI) to improve individual and organizational performance. He is the co-author, with Cliff Lansley, of “The Heart of Finance,” which teaches finance professionals to develop the emotional intelligence needed to build effective and profitable client relationships. NOTE: The views and opinions expressed by the guests on this podcast are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Diamond Consultants. Neither Diamond Consultants nor the guests on this podcast are compensated in any way for their participation. View the transcript of this episode… Emotional Intelligence: The “Untouchable” Differentiator in an AI World A conversation with Mindy Diamond and James Woodfall, Communication and Behavior Specialist at Raise Your EI.      Mindy Diamond: Welcome to the latest episode of our podcast series for financial advisors. Today’s episode is Emotional Intelligence: The “Untouchable” Differentiator in an AI World. It’s a conversation with James Woodfall, Communication and Behavior Specialist from Raise Your EI. I’m Mindy Diamond, and this is the Diamond Podcast for Financial Advisors. At Diamond Consultants, we help elite advisors identify the right environment for their businesses to thrive, whether that’s at a wirehouse, boutique, or independent firm. With nearly three decades of experience, we’ve guided thousands of advisors and represented more than a quarter of a trillion dollars in assets transitioned. And each year, one in four advisors managing a billion dollars or more who change firms are our clients. Our process is education driven and based on building relationships, starting as your strategic partner well before you’re even thinking of a move. To schedule a confidential conversation, call us at (908) 879-1002. Wondering why advisors change firms and where they’re headed? Are transition deals going up or down? Those very questions and more inspired us to create our Annual Advisor Transition Report. It’s the award-winning, data-driven resource designed for advisors that connects the dots between the motivations around movement and the firm’s appetite for top talent. Arm yourself with the knowledge you need to make smart decisions. Download your copy at diamond-consultants.com/transitionreport. For years, advisors have competed on expertise, the ability to solve problems, deliver answers, and provide guidance clients couldn’t easily find on their own. But today, those answers are becoming easier to access via artificial intelligence and tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. AI can generate planning ideas, summarize complex topics, and answer questions in seconds. As the technology continues to improve, it raises an important question. If information becomes increasingly commoditized, what will clients continue to value most? My guest today, James Woodfall, is the Founder of the training firm, Raise Your EI, and a former wealth management business owner. James now helps advisors, leaders, and organizations strengthen the communication and behavioral skills that drive trust, influence, and performance. Skills rooted in emotional intelligence or EI, something that AI cannot authentically replicate. What’s interesting about James’s perspective is that he doesn’t view emotional intelligence as a soft skill. He views it as a business skill, one that impacts how advisors build rapport, earn referrals, lead teams, deepen client relationships, and ultimately differentiate themselves in an increasingly competitive marketplace that includes human and machine-driven advice. Our conversation explores why rapport is the foundation of trust, how emotional intelligence can be developed like any other professional skill, and why advisors who learn to create authentic human connection may be best positioned to thrive alongside AI, not compete against it. Or as James puts it, remain untouchable in the face of a changing world. Because while technology may continue to reshape how advice is delivered, the experience of being understood, trusted, and guided by another human being remains remarkably difficult to replicate. So, let’s get to it. James, thank you for joining me today, especially coming all the way from the UK. I’m grateful. James Woodfall: Thanks for having me on. Mindy Diamond: So, let’s start at the beginning. You’re a different kind of guest for us, and a topic that is near and dear to my heart because I’m always all about emotional intelligence and EQ, but it’s a topic that sometimes can feel a little squishy to some folks. So, tell us a little bit about your background and really how you got into the world of wealth management. James Woodfall: I got into wealth management probably was by accident while I was, I think about 19 years old. I got a job at a bank because I was living with different jobs and it was the first company that would take me. So I ended up working in a bank as a cashier in a branch. And then after a series of different career moves, I ended up running my own wealth management firm for about nine years, which I sold about three and a half years ago. Around the time that I was selling it, I did my first master’s degree in communication and behavior analysis, and that’s when I started taking a bit of a deep dive into understanding emotional intelligence and behavior and communication. But really, I started that journey before I sold my wealth management company, and really the goal was, how can I become a better financial advisor to my clients by having a better understanding of their psychology behavior around money so that I could communicate with them more effectively, help them build their plans? So I had a bit of a… like a lot of people I speak to in wealth management, they fell into it. Mindy Diamond: So, a lot to unpack there and I’m fascinated by your story. Tell us a little bit about how you began to use or leverage emotional intelligence. You say you got into it or were fascinated by it because it was a way of helping your clients. So, talk to us a little bit about that. How did you begin to see the impact long before you started this business? James Woodfall: So going back a couple of steps to that. When I started the business, it was very transactional. You’d sit down with the client, you find out about what sort of assets they have, what type of plans they have already, and you look for gaps where you can optimize things, or there was a product which they need which you didn’t have. But I moved away from that type of service to a financial planning led service. So, where actually before we get talking about, well, how do we structure your world? We spend a lot of time building a plan in cashflow modeling software. So the one that I used was over at a company called Voyant, and effectively I build a cashflow plan for the clients, which would map out based on assumptions of what age they would reach financial independence. And then that then would then move on to, how to we optimize your holdings? Now what occurred to me pretty quickly in offering that service is that the outputs from that type of exercise are only as good as the inputs. So you’re really relying on the client to be able to come up with the answers to the questions that you ask them to make the financial plan work. And in my experience, quite a lot of the time you sit down with these people and you ask them, “Imagine you’re retired, what does an ideal week look like for you?” So, what I realized is actually I was asking clients a lot of questions which no one had ever asked them before, such as, “If you go retire, imagine you’re retired tomorrow, what does your idea week look like?” Very rarely do we get asked that day-to-day, especially not from friends, family members, certainly. So I went off and actually did a diploma in coaching because I thought initially I want to become better at actually getting people to think about the future and think about plans. And in doing that, I ended up wanting to take a bit of a deeper dive into understanding behavior at a higher level. So that led me on to getting my masters. Impacts on clients though is that I became, and me as well, is that I became a far better listener first. So I listened first, I stopped making so many assumptions as I found I had about people. And really, I think that changed the dynamic in terms of me constant, I suppose, dictating to people about what they should be doing. So of course that’s what a good advisor does, isn’t it, is advice. You switch around into actually making sure you’ve got a deep understanding of people’s hopes, fears, goals, dreams, and then ultimately, you can help them better in terms of optimizing their financial plans and wealth. Mindy Diamond: Yeah. 100% of what you just said speaks to me in a big way, because that is 100% our philosophy. Most recruiters, I don’t mean it disparagingly, but most recruiters in general are pretty transactional. They see a hammer, they see a nail. So, a recruiter sees a financial advisor and he’s a means to an end to making a deal to a transaction. And our whole approach from day one was never about seeing you, financial advisor, as a transaction, but rather first and foremost, wanting to understand what’s important to you. And we get told all the time that we were asking questions that nobody ever asked them before. And I want to unpack it more, because I love what you’re saying. The goal as far as I see it is not just to ask a bunch of questions nobody asked before, but it’s to ask questions as a means to an end, to start out by asking questions that make somebody comfortable that tell them that you care about them. Then it’s about asking questions that they’ve never been asked before because the answers to a question like, “How do you see yourself behaving in retirement,” has everything to do with how much money they’ll need to retire. So, one informs the other. In our world asking somebody, “What are the things that spark you and what are the things that really don’t? And what will you do with this information?” And all those sorts of questions are questions many people had never been asked before, especially if somebody was looking at them as a transaction. And yet, it’s what deepens relationships, it’s what creates trust, and it’s what allows you to identify me as a recruiter, identify the best solution or the best opportunity for someone. So, do you agree with that? Is there anything that I’m off about? James Woodfall: No, that’s exactly the point. I think I’m asking better questions as a wealth manager talking to your client. Because ultimately this is, I suppose, one of the things which comes from understanding emotional intelligence, is that for most of us, we make decisions in motion first and then we justify with logic and reasoning, which is basically back to from. If I was to start with logical reasoning and then expect people to make a buying decision. And so a lot of the time, especially with things like retirement savings, for example, because it’s in the future, it’s over there, especially if it’s 10, 20 years away, people think, “Well, why will I give up so much money a month now for something which is so far in the future that I can’t comprehend it yet?” But if you start reigning the questions in a way which gets to kind of the… Really what you want to uncover is, if you wake up at 3:00 in the morning and you can’t get back to sleep, what’s on your mind? Because if you can uncover that emotion that fits all that kind of pain or problem, then you deal with emotion first and logic second. Mindy Diamond: And it tells you what you need to solve for, right? James Woodfall: Exactly, yeah. Mindy Diamond: If what keeps me up is I’m worried I’m going to outlive my money, and you know that’s your true north in terms of how you begin to tackle that they’re thinking about the future, they want you to focus on the long term. Right? Is that what you get from that? What’s the typical answer you get to that question, that one in particular? James Woodfall: For retirement planning, it’s usually clusters around. “Well, I’m not sure I’m making the right decision. There’s lots of options that are complicated. But really, actually, am I going to have enough money? Am I going to run out?” Because it’s the big question, isn’t it? How long are you going to live and how much are you going to need? Mindy Diamond: Right. As I was preparing for this interview, I think I know the answer because I’m a person that lives in this world that believes fully in, I don’t have a degree in behavioral finance but I’m big on emotional intelligence, connecting, developing trust, and that I don’t have any right to sell anybody anything or suggest anything unless I’ve connected on an interpersonal level. But I don’t know that everybody believes that. So help us, our listeners to understand, why does this matter to financial advisors? So, I’m going to give you two examples. I’m a younger advisor that has, say, five to 10 years in the business, say $100 million or 100 million pounds under management and is looking to really build a business. How and why does the concept of emotional intelligence, of EI, matter to me? And then I’m going to ask you the same question again with respect to someone who manages a billion dollars or a billion pounds. How and why does it matter? James Woodfall: Yeah. I think probably a starting point is, let’s just clear up I suppose in definitions so that we understand what we’re talking about when we say emotional intelligence, it’s an EQ. Because I suppose let’s think about, let’s call EQ the measurement, and emotional intelligence is the concept. So the definition of emotional intelligence is it’s an ability, and it’s this ability to understand and influence emotions in ourselves and others. So within ourselves, can we perceive and understand our own emotions? What turns them on? What triggers them? Can we do something about that? Can we recognize it, manage it in the right context, or either initiate our emotions in the right context? And can we do that when we’re talking to other people? So, are we good at perceiving people’s emotions within different contexts, and are we good at influencing and utilizing that information to help us communicate more effectively? So, these are skills which requires regard within those two roles to make you effective. And so, one of the things that we’ve learned from probably 30 years of people studying emotion intelligence is that if emotion is involved within the job role, emotional intelligence correlates with job performance and has a meaningful impact on the difference between an average and a big performer. So regardless of whether it’s one of the two scenarios that you’ve said, performance improvements are always on the table. But one of the things which tends to happen as you move from, say, up in terms of the money that you’re managing is the stakes get higher. So quite often, you actually need a much far higher degree of self-management, a higher degree of self-awareness, a higher degree of ability to perceive emotions in others, and to be able to communicate with influence. Because quite often as you are dealing with clients who are more affluent, there’s a correlation between actually the skills that your clients have and the skills that they expect you to have as an advisor. So the higher you go up that sort of ladder in terms of value, the more effective you need to be. So that’s where that EQ measurement. If you had to sit down and do an EQ assessment, for example, you need to be scoring way above average the higher up you go. Mindy Diamond: How will somebody begin to notice that developing the emotional intelligence muscle, developing the quantity of EQ, how will that begin to show up and impact their business? James Woodfall: There’s a couple of ways, and I think it really does show up in self-awareness and self-management and awareness and understanding of others. So one of the things which will show up in terms of that awareness and understanding of others is, can you build trusted relationships quickly? So like those skills that we were talking about before about asking better questions and listening, especially the first time you meet a new prospective client, if you can really turn your ears on and get very, very curious about the person that you’re talking to, rapport building is one of the foundational things for trust building. And really, if you get rapport building right, one of the goals should be to find common ground early, because the minute that you can build a connection with people and you start uncovering things that you’ve got in common, it starts signaling to people that actually you’re someone who is like them, on their side, and that they’re someone that you can trust. Now people who get this right, they tend to close more clients and they tend to gain more referrals or recommendations to other clients. And when I used to run my business, referrals was the largest source of new clients. Every single year, all the other different marketing streams, they didn’t produce anything near referrals. And I think back to that, if you look back to the kind of retirement example, if you can really get an answer to that question of, you wake up at 3:00 AM, what’s on your mind, what’s up when you’re getting back to sleep? If you can uncover that and solve that, for a client, it’s far easier to articulate that to a friend than it is for them to explain the technicalities of what you did with their retirement savings. But it’s easier to articulate, “You should absolutely go and see James. We were worried about whether we’re saving enough, he solved that, it’s brilliant, you need to go and see him.” That’s what I mean, is that they’re able to articulate the emotional outcome. Mindy Diamond: Even though what we’re talking about here is someone making the case that strengthening one’s emotional intelligence will make you a better advisor, easier to say that, sounds logical. But you’re connecting it to, you’re saying that someone who actually gets this right, gets it better, is going to create more of an instant rapport rooted in trust, and likely grow their business because it makes them more referable. And those are things that certainly every young advisor wants, but every advisor wants. So, let me switch the tables a second. I get why a young advisor with 100 million wants to get to a billion, why this is really important. They want to do everything they can to really make themselves the most referable. But let’s take the advisor that’s on the back nine that has been doing this 30 years, manages a billion and a half of pounds, dollars in assets under management, is growing by referrals and it’s an organic referral stream. It’s a business that feeds itself. So, while everybody always needs to be in business development mode, they feel like they’ve cracked the code, they’ve got it covered. How and why does this concept impact a senior advisor, someone with a much bigger, more robust book of business? James Woodfall: Yeah, it’s interesting. So if we take a bit of a step back and look at a bit about what some of the research says about the impacts of emotional intelligence, there have been some studies done within financial services about the impact of your training on business outcomes. So there was a study done probably around about between 2000 and 2004 with Ameriprise, and they brought their agents through a year-long emotional intelligence development program. And it was interesting, they measured at the beginning of the program EQ, what someone’s EQ score was, but they measured things like health, anger, trade anger. So, how often were people experiencing anger, stress, and burnout. So they’re measuring all sorts of things other than EQ just to see what the impact of EQ training was. Now EQ scores went up, sales went up, I think on average of about 24% across four cohorts. But things like stress, burnout, health outcomes, perceived health outcomes, people are asked to rate, how would you rate your health, that went up. Experience of anger went down because people become better at managing it. So as you look at the kind of example that you described, I would say that as someone who’s in that stage of the career where they may not have the capacity to take on more clients. So just think, well, actually, I don’t want an uplift of 20%, 24% in sales because I might not process that. But one of the things which I suppose the EI research shows actually is that it impacts your quality of life. And there is finding which is quite common in research, is that actually EI scores correlate with age. So as we go through life and we have sort of ups, downs, highs, lows, and we learn from those. We learn from our emotional experience, and that’s hypothesis, is it feeds into our EQ score. So you’ve probably got people at that later stage of their career who actually probably have had experience which has developed their emotional intelligence. They’ve got mature standing, which means that they might not necessarily need to go out and find new clients. They’ve got experience, which has helped them develop client relationships, but they might want to take a step back at quality of life. If they’re experiencing stress, burnout, pressure, EQ can help absolutely with all of those. The other thing which is quite common as well is that if they’re playing any sort of leadership part within that business now, let’s say if they’re a business owner, EQ absolutely is key for leadership performance. So making sure that you’re building a team of people around you, you can help you develop the business. And actually, EI and leadership’s one of the biggest areas where research has been focused. But I think one of the other things I’ve got to say is that we’ve all got blind spots. It doesn’t matter where we are in life, we’ve all got things that I suppose that we could be better at. And actually shining a lens on those and improving our self-awareness is something that you can develop at all stages. Mindy Diamond: A lot of people in our industry, whether it be a recruiter or an advisor themselves, believe that efficiency or being most effective and efficient is the true north. And that to ask what may fee like unnecessary or ancillary questions that don’t directly get to help me to figure out what your asset allocation is so that I can grow your portfolio, may feel ancillary. And so, is that one of the most common objections you get when somebody, say, comes to you and they’re thinking about retaining you and they’re wondering what the benefit is? James Woodfall: Well, I think the people in firms I tend to talk to, there’s a couple of common things that are coming to mind now. One is pressure around fees. So, how can I make sure I’m articulating my value in a time where clients are more informed, they can go on AI and they come to meetings prepared with answers, and they’re challenging back around the value that advisors can provide. So getting back, I suppose, and the answer is funnily enough, is actually if you’ve designed your service around a proposition which makes yourself easy to replace by someone else who can do it for the same or cheaper price with a promise of better performance, or even in the years coming, a robo-advisor, it’s going to be challenging to retain and grow clients. But I’m not particularly worried about AI. The other types of firms that come to me is to say, “Look, we’ve identified actually that we need to think differently about our business model, what we do and who we serve, because it’s going to be easier than it’s ever been for clients to come up to do some of these things themselves.” But absolutely what is untouchable, I think, is this ability to create a human connection, to sit down and discuss a range of different options. “Do I do X, do I do Y? What are the trade-offs if I choose that over that?” And to uncover those things which, as I said, really keep people up at night and solve for them. I think it’s going to be quite hard to replicate that digitally. Mindy Diamond: So I want to get to a end that you hit the nail on the head, and I want to delve deeper into it. Whatever the advisor is looking for, they may not worry about pressure around fees, they may not be kept up at night. They have a practice or a business that’s worked well all these years and is growing organically and it’s more than good enough. But anybody who isn’t concerned about the potential impact of AI on their business and whether they’re a financial advisor or recruiter or anybody else, is living under a rock. So, the goal for everyone should be to make yourself untouchable. And you hit it on the head, it’s the ability to create human connection. So, I want to ask you something. It occurs to me, you talk a lot about learning to ask the right questions. In some cases, the questions that a client never been asked before makes sense to me. But I think the real skill, I mean, I imagine anybody can teach you a list of questions to ask. The real skill comes in is knowing what to do with that information. So, let’s assume that someone says an advisor says you ask that smart question, “What keeps you up at night? What do you think about at 3:00 AM?” Pressure around fees. I find people, clients asking me, prospects asking me all the time what sort of value I can add, whether it be in the land of AI or competitively, whatever it is, pressure around fees. What do you do? So you’ve asked the smart question, but what do you teach? What do you do with that information? James Woodfall: It’s a mindset, I think, because having just say a list of questions I don’t think is really helpful to any advisor when you’re training them. And yet I find I do get people who, okay, say, “Well, look, what questions should we ask? Have you got a list of questions that you would ask?” I hold back giving those out because I think that, well, that’s what I would say. It’s not necessarily going to land the same way if you say it. The mindset I’m trying to teach advisor is to adopt a curious mindset. So not asking questions for question’s sake, but if I’m talking to someone, what I want to do is I want to understand, how are you thinking? How do you see the problem? What assumptions are you making? What things do you believe which maybe don’t line up with how things are in reality, or goals, objectives, or whatever it is. So I’m trying to understand how you think, and that requires not asking questions off a list of great questions to ask, comes off of understanding the format for that, is utilizing the open questions to gather information, to check assumptions that might sit behind them, because actually understanding those assumptions is really, really useful. And to then summarize and play back to someone that you’re talking to so that you can demonstrate that you’re listening and you deeply understand them, and being able to summarize and be able to succinctly put their words into a, “Well, what do we do next about this?” Mindy Diamond: Yeah, and, why does it matter? I love that because what I always say is it’s art, not science. AI could give you a list of, if I put in the topic of emotional intelligence and give me a list of 10 smart questions to ask relative to X. One of the questions I would ask someone from an emotional perspective that demonstrates I have strong emotional perspective relative to pressure around fees, AI could spit out the questions. But I think you’re 100% right. The real key is being a good listener and meeting someone where they are. And it’s not about a prescribed or canned list of questions that demonstrate you have strong emotional intelligence. It’s much more about asking the right next question, saying the right thing, the validating statement afterwards. And not as a means to an end, not as a means to a transaction, not as just a way of checking the box, I have emotional intelligence, but really because demonstrating that you deeply care. And I like what you said, the notion of a changed mindset. Do people get that right away? I guess what I’m asking is, financial advisors, while smart ones who are looking to make themselves untouchable by AI will get that concept. They’re looking to differentiate themselves and they’re looking to hone the skills that AI can’t bring to the table. But at the same time, financial advisors are number oriented and goal oriented. And so, how long does it typically take to begin to see, or how do you paint the picture about getting from here to there, connecting the dots between strengthening changing your mindset, strengthening your emotional intelligence, and seeing more results? James Woodfall: Well, look, it’s about behavior change, isn’t it? Like any kind of behavior change, there has to be a few things at play. One is that you have to have a good understanding of where you are right now, what things that you are good at, but what things you need to work on. And then effectively the things you need to work on, you need a plan of how you’re going to work on them. So I think commonly how you develop these kind of relational skills is that you need to be able to get close to, what does the goal look like? Where am I headed? If I get this right, what’s it going to look like? And then you need to have a plan to get from A to B. And actually part of that plan has to be built around good feedback. And I was quite lucky where during my career, I worked for two large banks before I started my firm. And I had really, really good training from managers that I worked with, almost on a monthly basis would come and sit in my client meetings and then feedback to me about what I could have done better. And so actually, if you’re going to really commit to developing, I suppose relational skills and becoming more emotionally intelligent, you need help from someone within your firm or externally to come in and actually observe you by trying out new things and giving you feedback. Now of course, you could do some of that yourself if you’re doing a virtual meeting, you could hit record, play it back, be your own analyst. But quite often we can’t see that ourselves, but if you’ve got say a third party, they can watch you in action. Quite quickly they can hone in and say, “Well, actually, you could have asked a different question here, or actually if you’d phrased that like this, you might’ve got a bit more information, or the client closed down when you ask that question.” So actually then, you start to create that behavior change. So feedback I think is one thing, but actually aligning it with really, values, I think. So, one of the things that I suppose is quite important for behavior change is that we are motivated to do things where we strongly believe it’s the right thing to do. So, I think which is why it can be quite difficult for a firm to bring in with a team of advisors and say, “Well, we’re going to roll out emotional intelligence training,” because you’ll get some of us go, “This is brilliant.” Mindy Diamond: Eye roll. I would imagine eye roll is the… It can be a lot of the response, right? James Woodfall: You get a lot of resistance, because some people see it as a criticism of just saying, “Well, actually I’m good at that. I don’t need training in that, thank you very much.” Mindy Diamond: And because if efficiency in getting to a goal is the true north, I mean, I think the mindset shift you’re talking about is going from believing that getting to the goal by just asking the right numbers and dealing in data, changing that from it’s about building a relationship, which ultimately will impact the amount you manage and how you grow and how you connect and all of that stuff. But for people that are goal-oriented, linear in their thinking, I imagine this can be not just felt as a criticism but hard to embrace. James Woodfall: Oh, yeah, no. I think we view the brain as kind of a black box. I do get people I speak to, they go, “Mental health isn’t real. And all of this is psychobabble,” but from the people that I’ve had feedback from, and this is even for people I haven’t trained. I wrote a book about 18 months ago about the topic which talks about emotion intelligence within the 5X context. I’ve had people contact me on LinkedIn and say, “Look, I read your book. I’ve been following your content for a while. I’ve put some of the ideas to work, and I’m now getting my manager and their manager contact me and saying, ‘What are you doing differently?’” Because all of a sudden they’re opening up conversations with clients that they couldn’t before, doing business with clients where they couldn’t before. And all it is that this kind of focus on the client, the relationship, building that connection, and all of a sudden you start seeing that convert into more sales opportunities. Mindy Diamond: Yes and more yes, because that’s always been our philosophy, my philosophy from starting the business and our philosophy, and I couldn’t agree with you more. You articulated it probably as did, I got to it instinctively. You have research behind it, etc. By the way, for our listeners, we will link your book in the notes for this episode if anybody’s interested in buying it. But you hit the nail on the head, so, or you took the words out of my mouth in terms of next question. Who are your clients? Are they individual advisors? Are they independent RIAs? Are they Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch? And what kind of work do you do for them? James Woodfall: So, I do, there’s probably two parts to my business. One is the consulting training part, which is going into firms, typically firms that were the owner managed typically, where the owner either is still advising or has a big impact on other behaviors of the advice team that’s underneath them. And really, I work on a consultancy basis. So rather than going and just provide EI training, what I do is effectively start with understanding the business. So exactly as I’ve been talking to you about, the process I used to follow as an advisor, it’s the same process I follow when I’m working with practices, is I want to find out what’s going well in the business. Where are the blockers, what’s not going so well? And I’m a social science researcher. So I’d want to spend some time in the business actually doing a bit of a deep dive and maybe speaking to the team while the owner’s not in the room and finding out a bit about how they’re seeing things. Because ultimately, what that will do is it allows me to look at thematically extracting what types of training interventions might move the needle within the business. And then I put that onto a report for businesses and say, “Look, this is what I think we should be doing.” Some of that might be me working one-to-one, doing that coaching, observing, training with particular people in the business who have been highlighted as requiring development, or it might be group training, might be taking the whole teams through a training program. And then following up, helping build those development plans, and then being there supporting with the one-to-ones as they bed in that behavior change. So, that’s one part of the business. The other part of the business is working for the larger firms. I’ve done a bit of work for Fidelity this year and last year, and they’re looking to hire me as an authority expert on the topic to put together training programs that go out to the advisors that they work with. So, there’s the two aspects, like an external speaker trainer that’s brought in by some of the larger companies. And then the other one is a bit more hands-on, applying not only the science but my experience of having been there and run a business. Mindy Diamond: Right. So are the big firms like… So you mentioned Fidelity, are the wirehouses, Merrill, Morgan, UBS, Wells Fargo, are they embracing this? Are the big banks embracing it, or is this largely in the RIA space right now? James Woodfall: In the UK, there’s been a huge kind of interest in emotional intelligence, behavioral finance, relational skills. And actually, a lot of the kind of people who require influential in the UK are actually based in the US. And so, I think there’s a good bit of crossover. We’ve got good people who are specialists in looking at the retirement piece from a retirement transition about, how do you support people through what is a profound psychological transition? So, I think the RIAs are really interested in it as a topic. Then we’ve got the larger institutions are interested in it either as the RIAs are clients of theirs and they want to be seen to providing thought leadership to the RIAs and helping them develop these skills. But also, we’ve got some quite large companies in the UK now here, like the banks, for example, the banks or the whole exited the advice market in around about 2012, 2013, and then this year they’re starting to come back. So they’ve had 15 years nearly out of the market and they’re coming back because they’re just wanting an opportunity for face-to-face advice. So, I think actually it’s a hot topic now and I think all segments of the market are looking at, how do they develop non-technical skills to help them succeed in the future? Mindy Diamond: Can someone who was not born with strong EQ, can they learn this? James Woodfall: Absolutely. One of the interesting things about EQ is it’s not like IQ, for example. IQ is our a sort of cognitive ability. There was some good research that was done probably about, I think 2016, which looked at, do you remember all this sort of brain training apps like, if you do Sudoku, do you get smarter? You get better at Sudoku, but it doesn’t translate into performance on another. You don’t get better at crosswords from doing Sudoku, for example. So, IQs are pretty much fixed and there’s not a lot we can do about that. But EQ has been shown to be a trainable ability. So regardless of where you are now, if you understand your strengths and weaknesses and put a plan together for improvement, everyone has the ability to improve their EQ. And it’s not like personality, for example, where it’s quite hard to shift the dial. Let’s say if you’re quite strongly introverted and you find social situations difficult, if you just took that approach and said, “Well, look, can we make you extremely extroverted?” The answer would be, well, probably not. But EQ absolutely helps that person because noticing that you feel uncomfortable in, say, a networking situation if you have to do that professionally, having the tools in the bag to manage that feeling and throw yourself into the experience, that’s EQ in action. So, it doesn’t matter your baseline of where you are, EQ can have a big impact on your ability to perform across a range of different contexts, home, work, with friends. Mindy Diamond: Yeah. Let’s talk about your comment that EQ or strong emotional intelligence is what can make an advisor untouchable by AI. And I assume the premise being that, I can’t replace a human relationship. It may be able to come up with the questions, but at least for today it lacks the ability to know what to do with that information and to create the human connection. Talk to me more about that. How and why is that? I mean, is that part of why people are coming to you, because they’re worried about AI encroaching on their business? James Woodfall: Where we are at the moment is actually AI… Let’s look at healthcare for a second. Chatbots in healthcare have actually been outperforming humans in some respects. So there’s a type of therapy called cognitive behavior therapy, that’s been run with AI agents and patients. And as researchers to show that actually, disclosure has increased when patients are speaking to a chatbot because cognitive behavior therapy is like it’s guided, is a method, it’s a methodology to it. But disclosure increases and this theory behind that is is that people open up more when they don’t feel like they’re being judged by another person. So that’s interesting, because that saying to us, “Well, actually, people are trusting AI agents with very, very personal information, and people are already getting that feeling of empathy with AI agents.” Because if you tell an AI agent something deeply personal and it says, “That must have been really difficult for you,” for example. Mindy Diamond: Yeah, it does that well. Wonderful feedback about how great you are or what a smart question you just asked. James Woodfall: Yeah, but it’s synthetic, it’s not real empathy, it’s synthetic empathy. Whilst we might feel actually we get that feeling that we’re being understood, it’s not real. And I think the advisor’s edge is, look, I think where we might end up with this is that if you take a step back and you do this kind of exercise of what’s my ideal client, the ideal client is, I think, now is someone who is still time poor. So yes, an AI agent might be able to interview you, build a financial plan, but do you really want to spend the time doing that or do you have any inclination to do that? No. Well, that’s a perfect client who would hire an advisor. They value human relationships. Obviously when we do get AI entering the advisor market, it’s going to be at a lower price point. So actually, we’re now talking about a difference between experience. So the experience of being with an advisor comes at a premium. So that experience is going to be what people are going to pay additional value for. So, it’s the experience of dealing with a human. It’s the experience of dealing with a human who can talk them through complex information and options, help them understand their thinking and apply judgment, connect with those emotional things. But there’s a whole range of information that we get when we’re talking face-to-face, which AI doesn’t have access to. So back to that retirement example, if we say, “Well, man, I’ve modeled your plan. If we do X, Y, and Z, you’re not going to run out of money when you retire. You’re going to be okay.” And then the person, usually what they do is they sigh with relief, which is actually the emotion of joy, relief is actually happiness. So that sigh of relief and the softening of muscle tension in the body that you see when you’re face-to-face with another person, AI can’t, doesn’t get that data. Mindy Diamond: And how powerful is that? So, why does that matter? If I say, “I have X, I need Y. I have X number of years until I retire. Will I have enough money to retire the way I want to?” AI can spit that answer out faster than any financial advisor and come back hopefully saying, “Yes,” they’ll know that I will experience relief and joy because I’ll write back saying, “Great news.” It’ll say, “Yes, that is fabulous news.” It’ll tell me why I’m relieved and all that sort of stuff. So, why does that matter? James Woodfall: I think fundamentally, it comes back to trust. For those people who can get that quick answer, they’ll go, “Yeah, that’s great.” But there’ll be some people who go, “Yeah, fine. I’ll take that answer at face value.” There’ll be other people who go, “Well, what if you made a mistake?” Quite interesting that actually, people will get the same answer from a human advisor and they’ll trust it more. And I think one of those things is because we’re wired for connection, so when empathy develops, it’s quite interesting. Something which you see in young children, for example, is when we develop at the very early stage, probably about three or four years old, before children have learned to self-regulate their emotions, you see emotional contagion in groups of children happen quite rapidly. You get one child who say gets a toy taken away from them and starts crying, and then all the other children at the same age in the nursery start crying. Now, none of those other ones are crying because they’re sad. They’re crying because we have these things called mirror neurons, which means we pick up and mirror the emotional state of people around us. So, you actually get an experience of shared feeling and especially if you’ve got strong rapport, strong relationship, you actually share emotions of the people around you. Now, of course, as we grow out of that developmental stage, we learn this ability to understand that actually what we’re feeling isn’t happening to us, it’s happening to someone else. But have you ever been around… My favorite example for this is, if my wife has had a bad day at work because she comes home and starts slamming the door and banging cupboards, why I start to feel anger, because it’s rubbing off, it’s in the room. So, it’s this shared understanding that I think is where the value is. And so absolutely the answer might be faster and quicker, but for some clients they value that experience of having that answer delivered by someone who understands them. Mindy Diamond: And I think, so the point is that there will be clients or prospects that will value the efficiency of AI, that don’t necessarily need the face-to-face, that don’t necessarily… They just want the answer. They want the answers to the test, they don’t care how you got there. But what you’re talking about is finding the clients that really value the human connection. And if that’s what in fact is going to make advisors untouchable, then they need to make sure that they really strengthen this skill. James Woodfall: It’s not just the answer, but it’s the whole experience that’s wrapped around that. So actually last year, and my wife took me to a restaurant and we had a lovely, lovely meal. And on the menu there was this cup of coffee and the beans were like one of the rarest beans in the world. They’re the ones that get eaten by this little animal with the jungle in it, poops them out, and then the beans get roasted. But it was about 40 pounds for this cup of coffee and I thought, well, I’m going to have that. But that’s the experience, isn’t it? I could get a cup of coffee at McDonald’s, but actually the experience of this, something which is rare, exclusive, delivered in an amazing environment, that’s what you’re paying for. So, you’ve got to remember that actually if experience dictates a lot of what we value as well. So because if all of our decisions were made on price, Ferrari wouldn’t have a business because everyone would just be buying the cheapest car that does the job. You’re going to think advisors that are going to operating in this space, well, they need to think about the whole package, as in the experience that the plan that’s delivered, and the advice. Mindy Diamond: But it speaks to the notion of any advisor that isn’t thinking about AI’s impact on his business and how to reshape or rewire the business, even just rewiring the value proposition, retooling their value proposition, how they explain their value and what they do needs to change because they’re competing not only with the advisor that sits next to them or down the hall, but they’re competing with AI. How about as AI, as you see AI develop? So fast-forward five years, you and I are talking about where AI is today, but AI is, God knows where it’ll be five years from now. So, how do you foresee, do you still foresee the advisor being untouchable if they get this right, five or 10 years from now? James Woodfall: I don’t think it’s financial advice that’s unique with this, because I think it’s any profession where at the moment human judgment and understanding are valued. Healthcare, for example, same thing, doctors follow consultancy process. You’ve got this like tax, legal, a whole range of professions which are all grappling on the same problem. So I think in five years time, I think the answer is, is that we just don’t know what AI will look like. But certainly in the moment, if you track what Claude are doing with code work, and what Perplexity is doing with its skills and add-ons, a lot of it is actually at the moment geared up to freeing up the advisor’s time so that they can spend more time with clients. So, I think at the moment this sort of trend is looking like AI companies want to support advisors to be way more efficient so that they can deal with more clients. But in five years time, who knows? I think probably one of the biggest leaps that will happen is when AI is no longer working from, say, just a transcript. If it gets out to that kind of chat where you can actually interact with an AI agent like you and I are talking, I think that’s going to provide a different experience, because then you’re moving it from, as I said, that kind of structure where somebody is stuck there tapping away at keyboard, having a conversation with a chatbot, effectively, to actually having a conversation with an embodied agent with a face, gestures, a voice. That I think will start to change things a little bit. Mindy Diamond: Yeah. Well, it will be an interesting future, for sure. This has been a fascinating conversation. I really enjoyed it, and thank you so much for sharing so graciously. Is there anything to wrap up that I didn’t ask you, that you would want an advisor to know about this concept or anything you’re thinking about? James Woodfall: I think we’ve taken a broad sweep and then a deep dive into certain areas. I think really probably have to get started. I think probably one of the… I mean, you mentioned obviously I’ve got a book that you share the links to, which is fantastic. Audiobook is available to that as well on Spotify or wherever audiobooks are listed. I think there’s a lot of good advice in that about how to get started. So, I think for people who are looking at covering that next step of, what do we do, it’d be, yeah, pick up a book and have a bit of a deep dive. If you want to skip the book and come straight to having a conversation with me, then I write a weekly email, which goes out once a week, which is just one topic. So very much like we’ve been talking today, I share ideas on that once a week, or on LinkedIn, I’m around on LinkedIn as well. Mindy Diamond: Good. Well, we will link all of it so everyone knows how to find you. Thank you again for being so gracious. Love the topic, love the work that you’re doing, love that there’s a need for it, and can’t wait to see where you go from here. James Woodfall: Brilliant. No, I enjoyed it. Thank you. Mindy Diamond: Thank you. As a financial advisor, you hold yourself to the highest standards of integrity, honesty, and credibility. You are successful because you take your professional responsibility seriously, and are dedicated to your clients. But are you living your best business life? Are your goals aligned with your firms or could a better option exist? Should I Stay or Should I Go? Is a book written with you in mind? It’s a self-guided journey that walks you through the key steps that we take with our advisor clients. This strategic thought process and roadmap to professional self-discovery is designed to help you ask the right questions and think critically and objectively, whether you’re considering change or not. Learn how to get your copy at diamond-consultants.com/thebook. Emotional Intelligence: The “Untouchable” Differentiator in an AI World A conversation with Mindy Diamond and James Woodfall, Communication and Behavior Specialist at Raise Your EI.      Mindy Diamond: Welcome to the latest episode of our podcast series for financial advisors. Today’s episode is Emotional Intelligence: The “Untouchable” Differentiator in an AI World. It’s a conversation with James Woodfall, Communication and Behavior Specialist from Raise Your EI. I’m Mindy Diamond, and this is the Diamond Podcast for Financial Advisors. At Diamond Consultants, we help elite advisors identify the right environment for their businesses to thrive, whether that’s at a wirehouse, boutique, or independent firm. With nearly three decades of experience, we’ve guided thousands of advisors and represented more than a quarter of a trillion dollars in assets transitioned. And each year, one in four advisors managing a billion dollars or more who change firms are our clients. Our process is education driven and based on building relationships, starting as your strategic partner well before you’re even thinking of a move. To schedule a confidential conversation, call us at (908) 879-1002. Wondering why advisors change firms and where they’re headed? Are transition deals going up or down? Those very questions and more inspired us to create our Annual Advisor Transition Report. It’s the award-winning, data-driven resource designed for advisors that connects the dots between the motivations around movement and the firm’s appetite for top talent. Arm yourself with the knowledge you need to make smart decisions. Download your copy at diamond-consultants.com/transitionreport. For years, advisors have competed on expertise, the ability to solve problems, deliver answers, and provide guidance clients couldn’t easily find on their own. But today, those answers are becoming easier to access via artificial intelligence and tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. AI can generate planning ideas, summarize complex topics, and answer questions in seconds. As the technology continues to improve, it raises an important question. If information becomes increasingly commoditized, what will clients continue to value most? My guest today, James Woodfall, is the Founder of the training firm, Raise Your EI, and a former wealth management business owner. James now helps advisors, leaders, and organizations strengthen the communication and behavioral skills that drive trust, influence, and performance. Skills rooted in emotional intelligence or EI, something that AI cannot authentically replicate. What’s interesting about James’s perspective is that he doesn’t view emotional intelligence as a soft skill. He views it as a business skill, one that impacts how advisors build rapport, earn referrals, lead teams, deepen client relationships, and ultimately differentiate themselves in an increasingly competitive marketplace that includes human and machine-driven advice. Our conversation explores why rapport is the foundation of trust, how emotional intelligence can be developed like any other professional skill, and why advis

Every couple of years, a buzzword seems to rise up to become the industry's token topic.There was an era when "TAMP" was the sexy talk of the day.About 10 years ago, "hybrid" was all the rage.While these terms are still used today, past hype has sometimes caused confusion about when and how to use them.Case in point, should you join a "hybrid" RIA?But what does "hybrid" really even mean? After all, it's often used to describe several different logistical scenarios.In this episode (#152) of the Transition To RIA question & answer series I clarify what a "hybrid" RIA is, and when it might be a fit for our practice.Come take a listen!P.S. Prefer video? You can find this entire series in video format on Youtube. Search for the TRANSITION TO RIA channel.Show notes: https://TransitionToRIA.com/should-i-join-a-hybrid-ria/About Host: Brad Wales is the founder of Transition To RIA, where he helps financial advisors between $50M and $1B understand everything there is to know about WHY and HOW to transition their practice to the Registered Investment Advisor (RIA) model. Brad has 20+ years of industry experience, including direct RIA related roles in Compliance, Finance and Business Development. He has an MBA and has held the 4, 7, 24, 63 & 65 licenses. The Transition To RIA website (TransitionToRIA.com) has a large catalog of free videos, articles, whitepapers, as well as other resources to help advisors understand the RIA model and how it would apply to their unique circumstances.

In this episode of The Decamillionaire Decoded Podcast, host Justin Goodbread sits down with Kyle Kuyat and Jacob Gardner to discuss breaking through the "advisory doldrums" where 80% of financial advisors stall. After executing a hard reset of their independent RIA, Kyle and Jake scaled their business from just $2,400 in initial monthly revenue to an estimated $2 million top-line run rate, driven by over $1 million in pure planning revenue. DecaMillionaire Decoded Links: • DefiningWealth.com • LinkedIn: Kyle Kuyat • LinkedIn: Jacob Gardner • Relentless Value Coaching Workshops • DecaMillionaire Decoded on YouTube

Ria loves Drake's album (00:00-15:15). The Jonas Brothers announce two Burning Up Tour MSG shows (16:31-32:28). Alix Earle & Nina Dobrev rumored beef (32:29-39:24). Love Island USA recap (39:25-45:29). Prince William on New Heights + Prince Harry loses Buckingham Palace invite (46:14-1:04:55). PopCorner voicemails: What is Anne Hathaway's secret? (1:06:25-1:14:09). Pedro Pascal hot take (1:14:10-1:17:27). Off Campus on DWTS? (1:18:51-1:24:21). CITO LINKS > barstool.link/chicks-in-the-office.You can find every episode of this show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube. Prime Members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. For more, visit barstool.link/chicks-in-the-office

Release Yourself Radio Show #1290Roger Sanchez Live In The Mix from Ria, Skopje, MacedoniaTracklist currently unavailable*Please note this show may contain curse words and offensive language* Release Yourself with world renowned DJ, Producer, Radio and Podcast host Roger Sanchez. More Roger Sanchez on http://rogersanchez.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Michael Zeuner, Managing Partner at WE Family Offices, joins Michelle Yu to discuss the firm's growth and rising demand for independent, fiduciary advisory services among ultra-high-net-worth families. He also explores how AI is helping families discover family office solutions, improve advisor efficiency, and shape the future of client service.

Two years ago, Ria was burnt out from her tech career in Silicon Valley, coming out of a difficult relationship, and struggling with mental health issues. Running became her way out. Within a year, she went from struggling to finish a half marathon to setting ultramarathon records on world-renowned routes. The Via Francigena: 1,014 km in 21 days The Camino de Santiago: 780 km in 12 days And now she has just started her journey to become the first human to run across Eurasia on the silk road, or what she calls: the 20000km Experiment. In this episode, Ria shares how running helped her rebuild her life, the mindset shifts that enabled her to go from beginner to record-breaking ultrarunner, and the enormous logistical challenge of planning a 20,000km expedition through 17 countries. Listen to this episode to learn about resilience, finding purpose after burnout, taking bold leaps into the unknown, and why sometimes the most "delusional" dreams are the ones worth pursuing. ***  New episodes of the Tough Girl Podcast drop every Tuesday at 7 AM (UK time)! Make sure to subscribe so you never miss the inspiring journeys and incredible stories of tough women pushing boundaries.  Do you want to support the Tough Girl Mission to increase the amount of female role models in the media in the world of adventure and physical challenges? Support via Patreon! Join me in making a difference by signing up here: www.patreon.com/toughgirlpodcast.  Your support makes a difference.  Thank you x   *** Show notes Who is Ria? Trying to run across the Asia and Europe on the Silk Road  Currently being in her support vehicle in the northeast of China, approx. 17 days into her journey  Calling in from the road after running 50km Growing up in China as a child figure skater Trying to make the Olympics Living on the edge of Beijing  Moving to the USA at 14 for school  Suffering from some knee injuries and not being into running  Her final year of high school and trying out running in nature  Going through a significant breakup  Starting to run everyday for 30 days Struggling with depression and reaching the point where nothing made sense  Having no control over the situation of her life Not knowing what to do with herself  Being in Chamonix and being inspired by the humans running the UTMB Going to Egypt to become a free diving instructor  The Sinai Trail in Egypt  Going from a half marathon to running 539km  Deciding to run across the length of the silk road Continuing to challenge herself in daily distances  Running the Sinai Trail and what the experience was like  The logistics and planning behind the trail  Running in Egypt The logistics of the Silk Road Journey and pulling it all together Planning for over a year and a half Visa's and being able to run through 17 countries Being supported by her crew and how it works day to day Paying for the running, the crew and the gear Being supported by internet strangers and creating a GoFundMe  "It's only delusional until it's not." The Planetary Run Club  Running day after day  The power of sleep and feeling more refreshed mentally  Finding motivation in many different ways Rest days Dealing with a car accident and food poisoning  Connecting with Ria Daily updates…. Planned!  Planning on starting a Patreon, YouTube channel and podcast! Words of advice for women    Social Media Website: 20000km.com  Instagram: @whereisriax  Youtube: @whereisriax  GoFundMe: gofund.me/8d624216f

CEO Raj Bhattacharyya discusses how Robertson Stephens is building its next phase of growth through strategic expansion, culture-first recruiting, and technology investment, while maintaining a personalized fiduciary approach as it scales its national RIA platform.

A Special Industry Update, With Jason Diamond and Mindy Diamond Jason and Mindy Diamond revisit how advisor due diligence is evolving—from AI and enterprise value to firm stability, ownership, and optionality—and why those questions matter more than ever. In Summary Due diligence has always been about finding the right fit. But what advisors are evaluating has expanded considerably. In this replay of an Industry Update, Jason Diamond and Mindy Diamond revisit The Advisor Transition Playbook to explore how advisor priorities continue to evolve. Beyond the traditional reasons advisors consider change, they discuss newer factors shaping decisions today—from artificial intelligence and enterprise value to ownership structure, firm stability, and long-term optionality. The conversation reinforces that while every advisor's motivations are personal, the evaluation process has become far more strategic. Today's advisors aren't simply comparing recruiting deals or platforms. They're considering how today's decisions may influence the value, flexibility, and future of the businesses they're building. The Storyline For years, advisor movement was largely driven by familiar themes: bureaucracy, management changes, technology frustrations, and the desire for greater independence. Those factors remain important. But the conversations Diamond Consultants has with advisors today increasingly include questions that rarely surfaced just a few years ago. How should AI factor into firm selection? What is the long-term value of building enterprise value instead of simply maximizing a recruiting package? How important is a firm's ownership structure? And how should advisors think about stability in a marketplace where acquisitions, recapitalizations, and private equity investment have become commonplace? Jason and Mindy revisit the transition framework introduced in Part 1, focusing less on the mechanics of making a move and more on the evolving criteria advisors are using to evaluate their options. The result is a broader discussion about due diligence—not simply as a transition exercise, but as an ongoing strategic process for advisors seeking to build their best business life. Topics Covered Advisor due diligence Traditional vs. emerging drivers of advisor movement Artificial intelligence in wealth management Enterprise value and advisor ownership Recruiting deals versus long-term economics Reverse due diligence Firm ownership and stability Private equity in wealth management Advisor optionality Building a long-term advisory business Blubrry Player > Download a transcript of this episode… Listen and Learn Highlights for Advisors Why are the traditional drivers of advisor movement still relevant? (4:00) Jason and Mindy revisit the longstanding push-and-pull factors that continue to influence advisor decisions, from bureaucracy and management frustrations to the desire for greater ownership and control. How has AI become part of the due diligence process? (13:50) The discussion explores why advisors increasingly expect firms to demonstrate a clear AI strategy—and why investment, integration, and vision may become meaningful competitive advantages. Why should advisors care about enterprise value, even if they don't technically own their business? (24:30) Jason and Mindy explain why more advisors are evaluating decisions through the lens of long-term business value rather than solely short-term economics. What does reverse due diligence really involve? (37:15) The conversation highlights why advisors should evaluate prospective firms with the same rigor firms use when evaluating advisors. How does firm ownership affect advisor optionality? (38:00) Private equity, acquisitions, and changing ownership structures have made it increasingly important to understand what happens if a firm's strategy changes after an advisor joins. Why has due diligence become more strategic than ever? (45:30) The episode concludes with a broader discussion about defining one's “best business life” and making decisions that align with long-term goals rather than reacting to short-term frustrations. Key Takeaways The reasons advisors evaluate change have expanded well beyond traditional frustrations such as bureaucracy and compensation. AI has become an increasingly important component of firm evaluation, not because it replaces advisors, but because it can enhance productivity and client service. Enterprise value is becoming a consideration even for advisors who currently work within employee models. Reverse due diligence is just as important as a firm's evaluation of an advisor, particularly when assessing ownership structure, capitalization, and long-term stability. The most effective transition decisions balance immediate economics with long-term flexibility, ownership, and optionality. Every advisor's definition of success is different, making clarity around personal goals the foundation of any due diligence process. https://youtu.be/WZbUZJZK1yc Quotable Moments “Every advisor deserves to live their best business life.” “Just because you're frustrated doesn't mean you should move. You need something worth moving toward.” “The question isn't simply what you're paid today. It's what you're building over time.” “Knowledge is power. Understanding what your business is worth should be part of every advisor's decision-making process.” FAQs Why are more advisors expanding their due diligence beyond compensation? While transition economics remain important, advisors are increasingly evaluating technology, AI capabilities, enterprise value, ownership opportunities, and long-term flexibility as part of the decision-making process. How should advisors evaluate a firm's AI strategy? Rather than looking for finished products, advisors should assess whether a firm has a clear vision, meaningful investment, and an integrated approach to using AI to improve advisor productivity and client experience. What is reverse due diligence? Reverse due diligence is the process of evaluating a prospective firm as thoroughly as the firm evaluates the advisor. It includes understanding ownership structure, financial stability, culture, technology, leadership, and long-term strategy. Why does enterprise value matter for employee advisors? Even advisors who do not currently own their businesses may benefit from understanding how different business models create opportunities for ownership, long-term value creation, and future monetization. How has private equity changed advisor due diligence? Private equity has introduced new opportunities for growth and capital, but it has also made it more important for advisors to understand ownership structures, investment horizons, and what future transactions could mean for their business. What does Diamond Consultants mean by an advisor's “best business life”? It refers to aligning an advisor's business model, goals, client experience, compensation, flexibility, and long-term vision in a way that best supports both the advisor and the clients they serve. While transition economics remain important, advisors are increasingly evaluating technology, AI capabilities, enterprise value, ownership opportunities, and long-term flexibility as part of the decision-making process. Rather than looking for finished products, advisors should assess whether a firm has a clear vision, meaningful investment, and an integrated approach to using AI to improve advisor productivity and client experience. Reverse due diligence is the process of evaluating a prospective firm as thoroughly as the firm evaluates the advisor. It includes understanding ownership structure, financial stability, culture, technology, leadership, and long-term strategy. Even advisors who do not currently own their businesses may benefit from understanding how different business models create opportunities for ownership, long-term value creation, and future monetization. Private equity has introduced new opportunities for growth and capital, but it has also made it more important for advisors to understand ownership structures, investment horizons, and what future transactions could mean for their business. It refers to aligning an advisor's business model, goals, client experience, compensation, flexibility, and long-term vision in a way that best supports both the advisor and the clients they serve. NOTE: The views and opinions expressed by the guests on this podcast are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Diamond Consultants. Neither Diamond Consultants nor the guests on this podcast are compensated in any way for their participation. Related Resources The Advisor Transition Playbook: The Latest on Due Diligence, the Move, and Everything In Between – Part 1 Annual Advisor Transition Report Top 10 Tips for a Strategic Due Diligence Process Should I Stay or Should I Go? View the transcript of this episode… The Advisor Transition Playbook: The Latest on Due Diligence, the Move, and Everything In Between – Part 2 A Special Industry Update with Jason Diamond and Mindy Diamond. Jason Diamond: Welcome to a replay of one of the most popular episodes from our podcast series for financial advisors, The Advisor Transition Playbook: The Latest on Due Diligence, the Move, and Everything In Between. It's Part 2 of a 2-Part Industry Update with Mindy Diamond. I’m Jason Diamond and this is the Diamond Podcast for Financial Advisors. Mindy Diamond: At Diamond Consultants, we help elite advisors identify the right environment for their businesses to thrive, whether that’s at a wirehouse, boutique, or independent firm. With nearly three decades of experience, we’ve guided thousands of advisors and represented more than a quarter of a trillion dollars in assets transitioned. And each year, one in four advisors managing a billion dollars or more who change firms are our clients. Our process is education driven and based on building relationships, starting as your strategic partner, well before you’re even thinking of a move. To schedule a confidential conversation, call us at 908-879-1002. Wondering why advisors change firms and where they’re headed? Are transition deals going up or down? Those very questions and more inspired us to create our Annual Advisor Transition Report. It’s the award-winning data-driven resource designed for advisors that connects the dots between the motivations around movement and the firm’s appetite for top talent. Arm yourself with the knowledge you need to make smart decisions. Download your copy at diamond-consultants.com/transitionreport. Jason Diamond: There’s been a noticeable shift in how advisors are approaching decisions about their business, not necessarily in whether they’re exploring change, but in what they’re focused on when they do. Mindy is back with me for a continuation of our earlier conversation on the Advisor Transition Playbook. Last time, we spent time on the mechanics, how due diligence works, what a move actually entails, and how to think through the process. What’s become more apparent since then is that the inputs into that process are evolving. The traditional drivers are still there, but layered on top are a set of considerations that didn’t carry the same weight before. AI is one of them, and not just as a tool, but as a differentiator that advisors are starting to diligence more seriously. Enterprise value is another. Showing up in conversations, even for advisors who don’t technically own their business, but are thinking more critically about what they’re building over time. And then there are questions around stability, ownership, and flexibility. What happens to the firm itself and whether advisors retain the ability to adapt again if circumstances change. None of this is theoretical. It’s showing up in real time conversations. What we want to do here is unpack those new triggers of advisor movement and what they suggest about how decisions are being made today. So let’s get to it. Mindy, the legend, thank you for joining me. So glad to have you on. Mindy Diamond: Thank you. I’m so happy to be here. Jason Diamond: Great. Let’s dive right in. I’ll set the stage really quickly one more time. When we spoke about this topic last, we talked about the drivers of movement, what we’ll call in this conversation as the old or the legacy drivers of movement, and we spoke about the mechanics of the move. Before we get into the new drivers of movement, which I want to be the meat of the conversation, remind us, when we talk about the legacy drivers of movement …. And by the way, by saying legacy, I by no means want to suggest that they’re not valid today, because they’re equally valid, if not more so today than they were then. But when you think of the classic drivers of movement in our industry, what are they? Mindy Diamond: Yeah. So I would say, first of all, let’s start by saying that for every advisor, they’ve got a unique set of needs. So the first thing to say is that while you and I can talk about the categories of frustrations or things that might bother an advisor, they show up differently in each advisor’s life. So it’s important to note that everyone is unique. But generally speaking, if I had to package them, I’d say it’s number one that shows up most of the time is too much bureaucracy. A feeling that a firm or a model is just too hypervigilant in terms of compliance and it’s too bureaucratic and too hard to get things done. Number two would be some sort of change in or frustration with management. Something is going on that the person or persons that are responsible for managing the business are just not … They’re not the wind at their back. They’re obstreperous. They’re causing difficulty and frustration. And probably the third one would be less about a pain point and more about the desire to be something that they couldn’t where they were. The notion that they want to be more independent, they want to be a business owner and they just can’t do that. That doesn’t exist within the model where they work. Those probably have been the three ones top of mind, but I bet you’ll have some … You’ll add to that. Jason Diamond: I’ll add a couple. But before I do, I’ve heard you talk about this topic, maybe said another way as pushes and pulls. Can you explain what you mean by that? Mindy Diamond: Yeah. So I think that we think about the pushes, the frustrations, the things pushing somebody out the door, the factors that make it less easy or less fluid to do business. And there’s almost always pushes that exist when somebody comes to us, where they’re frustrated to some degree or another about certain things. But we tell people all the time that just to be frustrated should never be enough, because if all you’re doing is running from one set of problems, you’re very likely to run into maybe a different set, but still problems elsewhere. So a move needs to be driven in equal part, if not more, by pulls. Being pulled toward an opportunity that can be needle moving enough or better enough than where you are now. Pushes and pull. Jason Diamond: I love it. So let me ask you a little bit of a pointed question. Is a recruiting deal a valid pull factor? Mindy Diamond: So look, it’s different for every person. We’ve had advisors come and say, “I just went through a divorce and the most important thing to me is to recapitalize. And so a recruiting deal is really important.” And while I would never be one to say that’s not valid, it can be … And by the way, any advisor should want to and expect to better their financial situation. There should be economic gain. But it shouldn’t be the only or the primary reason for the move. So you want to monetize. The notion of wanting to monetize in the short term should be a factor in what model you pick, but it shouldn’t be the primary driver for a move. Jason Diamond: I agree with that wholeheartedly. I was going to say something I think maybe would’ve surprised you a little, which is like, yeah, I think recruiting deal is a very valid pull factor because what we’re saying is, it shouldn’t be the only pull factor. And sometimes it is and it makes us a little bit sad, I think, when that’s the case. But all of these factors you mentioned, and the ones I would add, I think that maybe technology would be another kind of factor that drives movement, all of these factors are not one specific reason. If you did the exit interview, either actually conducted the exit interview with advisors or thought exercise exit interview, I think they would point to a confluence of all of these factors. Compliance was a headache. I wanted to launch a podcast. I wanted to be able to send a timely communication to my clients. We used to hear that one during COVID a lot, right? By the time compliance approved something to send to clients, it was already stale. So do you agree with that, that it’s generally a confluence or a combination of these? Or in your experience, is it advisors are like, “No, compliance or the tech is so bad, I’m out”? Mindy Diamond: Yeah. So most often there’s a straw that breaks the camel’s back incident or thing where they’re willing to put up with a series of minor paper cuts, if you will. And then almost always there’s something that happens. You and I got a call the other day from a team that said that they had split from their partner and the management of the firm was favoring the ex-partner, making it harder for them to stay or making it less fun or feel good for them to stay. So while they gave me a laundry list of things that were imperfect, I don’t know that any one of the things that were imperfect up until then would’ve been enough to drive them out. But when that one thing, that feeling that they were a second class citizen came up, that was the straw that breaks the camel’s back and went from a minorly frustrated to, “I’m out of here.” Jason Diamond: Yeah. And there’s probably a hundred examples you could walk us through. And I wanted to just highlight too, this concept is not limited to the wirehouse or employee or captive firm world, this is equally relevant for independent advisors. Granted, some of the pushes and pull factors, some of the triggers are not necessarily the same, but the idea that advisors outgrow a broker dealer or an RIA or either need or want or desire in some way, shape or form, greater autonomy, flexibility, freedom, control is certainly not limited to the employee space. I just wanted to make that point. Mindy Diamond: And I think that’s absolutely right. I think the notion of that frustrations or limitations or bureaucracy only existed if you were a W2 employee at a bulge bracket firm. That went out the window. As the industry landscape has expanded and there’s more and more valid ways to be a financial advisor, there’s more and more ways for a firm or a model or an infrastructure to frustrate an advisor. And that’s not being overly negative. It’s just to say there is no perfection anywhere. Jason Diamond: Yeah, 100%. And by the way, to play a little bit of devil’s advocate on that, and then we’ll move on, I would just say there are pain points that might come from a firm being small and subscale as well. My firm doesn’t have efficient technology. They don’t invest enough in the business. They don’t provide a lead mechanism. They don’t have a robust banking and lending or investment solutions platform. So this stuff cuts both ways. An advisor can be frustrated or limited and an advisor can be excited. Pushes and pulls I think touch on, we’ve heard from advisors in every single pocket of the market, this is a relevant concept. Mindy Diamond: The theme of this is that every advisor deserves to live their best business life. That’s what people are in search of when they reach out to us or when they engage with us. What they’re looking for more than anything, and this is irrespective of where they work or how long they’ve worked or how much they manage, every advisor is in search of their best business life. And what defines their best business life is having the best quality of work life, but also the best ability to do what they want to do with their business, to serve their clients without limitations, to grow the way they want, to be paid a fair wage, and ultimately set up to maximize the value of the business they’ve built. Those are the definitions of one’s best business life. Jason Diamond: I used an even simpler definition of best business life and I stole it from you, which is the true north concept, which is if your true north is maximizing enterprise value and chasing the dollar and trying to build something that’s scalable and saleable, then great. If your true north is to build a lifestyle practice, there’s plenty of advisors who are successful and happy and content in that regard as well. And I think that’s what we’re talking about, is finding your true north and then it’s possible. I mean, that’s the beauty of the landscape. We’re talking about this, a lot of this is pain points or things that advisors experience. The exciting part of this is there’s never been a better time to be an advisor because of the breadth of choice they have and the ecosystem that’s been born to support advisors, to your point, across the spectrum. Mindy Diamond: Yeah. And it’s also, I think, worth saying that it starts with really good crystal clear clarity around not only what’s frustrating you, but what you want ideal to look like. Because I can’t tell you, or I can tell you because … I can’t tell our listeners, I can’t stress enough how often we get calls from advisors that tell us where they think they want to be or tell us they want to move. They have clarity about what’s frustrating them or what they want to change, but they don’t really have clarity about what they want it to look like. And the less clarity you have, the less likely you are to be successful in finding the exact right solution. So our work, the thing we probably do best is really work with advisors to help them. It doesn’t take long. In an hour conversation, we can help them to really get crystal clear on what they’re looking to solve for. Jason Diamond: Absolutely. All right. Great appetizer. We set the table. Let’s dive into the main course now. I want to talk now about what I’m calling the 2.0 triggers or the new triggers of movement. And to be clear, it’s not that these are more important or better or more significant drivers of movement. In fact, you could argue they’re probably at present less significant than the ones we just listed. But I think what we’re saying is these are triggers that are starting to come up more and more in conversations and we expect them to only proliferate further. And in that regard, they’re noteworthy and important for advisors because advisors should be reconciling not just what are the things I need to be worrying about today, but also what are the things I need to be potentially worrying about five years from now. So with that in mind, let’s dive in. I think the first one we have to start with is AI. And I always chuckle a tiny bit when we mention AI, we used to have to specify what are we talking about. Are we talking about artificial intelligence or alternative investments? And now it’s very clear. Everybody knows we’re talking about artificial intelligence. So the direction of the industry, no over-dramatization to say is at stake here. It’s that important of a topic. Let me ask you just very simply first, is this coming up in conversations with advisors? Mindy Diamond: Oh, all the time, but it’s almost table stakes. So I think the way it comes up is that people assume, advisors assume, and by the way, have the right to assume that AI is part of the tech stack. The notion that if I’m evaluating a firm and part of what frustrates me or part of what’s really important to me is cutting edge, really robust technology, part of what I am expecting is that a new firm is going to have really robust technology. And part of that is really robust access to AI. And has honed the AI in a way that’s user-friendly, that really answers or delivers on making me a better … Not replacing me as an advisor, but making me a better, more efficient advisor. Jason Diamond: 100%. And I would also add, so as I think about this AI topic, I don’t want this to become a conversation around, is AI going to replace advisors, because I think we both agree that’s not going to be the case. Especially at the top end of the market for quality advisors, I think they’re not going anywhere. But in my view, when we think about the trigger of movement, AI has the potential to be transformative because a couple kind of use cases or trigger cases come to mind, and I’d love to hear your thoughts. One is, do you think advisors will potentially consider a move because they’re worried about this? So in other words, play this logic out with me. I’m 55 years old and I’m like, “Oh man, AI might be coming from my job.” And there’s firms offering 400% of revenue to move my book. Maybe I should take that check and kind of de-risk and monetize while I can. What are your thoughts on that? Mindy Diamond: I absolutely think we’re already working with that fall into that category, but to say that is the only reason for the move would be wrong. I’m grateful that people trust us enough to be transparent with us. So they let us know that underneath the notion that they want to better serve clients, they ultimately want better access to A, B, and C, they want to be able to do D, E and F with less restriction, is really the main reason for the move. But underneath it, the notion that my book, I want to protect myself. My book may well be the biggest it’s ever going to be. It is going to be worth more today than it could be in the future if things don’t go my way. And if I know I’m going to move and one of my goals is to monetize, I might want to do that now. Jason Diamond: I agree. And that’s where the top deal story comes in also. Firms paying a top deal is a part of that story. It’s what you just said, plus advisors know firms are willing to pay incredible multiples. I mean, as we speak, UBS is in market with one of the largest deals in history. So those two narratives side by side, I agree. I think this becomes more of a kind of catalyst or driver movement. It’s come up in my conversations on both sides of the spectrum. It’s the tech savvy, AI savvy advisors who are excited about this, who are like, “I want to be the most AI enabled version of myself I can be. It’s going to make me a rockstar and it’s going to widen the gap with my peers,” but it’s also come up with the people who are, I think, rightly scared and fearful about what this might mean for their job. Mindy Diamond: Let me ask you, what are examples of the way you’ve seen some of the best firms who have embraced AI? What is their narrative? What is it that they’re saying to advisors that if you come here from a tech or AI perspective, you’ll be better because we’re able to do … Fill in the blank. Jason Diamond: Yeah. So a couple that come up. First of all, I want to make the important point. Advisors do not expect that firms, either their current firm or firms that they are diligencing prospectively, have this figured out or solved. Everybody understands this is a fairly new area that firms are still very much kind of developing their strategies in. What advisors want to see is a few things. They want to see though leadership, they want to see investment, and they want to see a strategy, right? Effectively, they want to see a step in the right direction, really. So I’ll give you a couple examples. There are a number of tech savvy RIAs, very tech-enabled, AI-focused RIAs, because I think this is easier to be nimble. I think where you’ll see this quicker probably is in the independent space. That what they’re doing is things like this. An advisor logs on to their workstation in the morning and their system queues them proactively, Mr. and Mrs. Smith may be good candidates for a Roth IRA conversion. And then if the advisor decides to contact the client in some way about it, the system will of course help them draft the communication, but then it’ll take it a step further and actually help them to process and transact that conversion. So soup to nuts, ultimately driving efficiency. That’s the name of the game. That’s why firms, I think, are excited about AI, at least the good firms. Because what I think they realize it will do is, the stuff that’s a waste of time that could be automated that advisors, and probably even more so their associates, client associates are spending time on, that should be a massive time saver for advisors. And I think if you play that story out, what does that mean? It should mean bigger books of business and therefore more productive advisors because they have more time to prospect and focus on their clients. Thoughts? Mindy Diamond: Yeah. So I think you said it perfectly, but it raises the question then. You say that the RIAs can be more nimble. You’re right. I mean, the big story around the biggest firms was like moving a battleship, it takes a long time to turn it. It’s not as nimble. So what and how are the bigger firms competing against the RIAs with respect to AI? And second question, we still always get questions, and rightly so, about Morgan Stanley has more money to invest… Jason Diamond: That was going to be part of my answer. Mindy Diamond: … than fill in the blank RIA. So how does that all work? Jason Diamond: That is absolutely going to be part of my answer, is that I have heard this question posed almost presumptively both ways. “Oh, it’s got to be that the RIAs are going to be the clear winners in this.” And I’ve also heard, “Oh, it’s got to be that the wirehouses are going to be the clear winners in this.” I don’t think it’s going to be channel specific like that. I think it is going to be firm specific. I think there’s going to be firms that are going to do this well and firms that are going to not do this well. But there’s going to be winners in the wirehouse space. There’s going to be winners in the regional firm space, with firms like Raymond James who are clearly trying to be on the cutting edge of this. There’s certainly going to be winners in the broker-dealer space. LPL is investing heavily in this, as are many of their broker-dealer competitors. And then of course the RIA space, where sometimes they may not have the budgets, but they have a couple things. They have private equity backing, sometimes. They have the custodians that they’re built on, right, or the tech vendors that they’re built on. So Schwab and Fidelity or Orion and Addepar. They have other ways to access these innovations. One of the things that comes up with this that your question I think gets at is, a similar question that was raised around technology stacks, which is strength of offering versus integration. And that’s where I think a firm like Morgan Stanley really will shine, is they should … Because they don’t put anything out that’s not well integrated. The big firms have generally done a pretty good job of that. Versus the RIAs. Sometimes we’ve heard feedback where, yes, you have access to you name it, right? You dream it up, you can go and buy it. But the left hand may not speak to the right hand quite as well. Mindy Diamond: Yeah, that’s actually a really good point. And integration is probably one of the biggest … If you ask an advisor when they talk about technology as either being one of their pushes or pulls, probably what they’re referring to more than anything is not only having the capability, but having the integrated capability. So that’s a great point. And I think your point is right, that the final chapter on this has not been written. Nobody thinks that it has. And so whatever answers you and I can talk about today about who’s winning this race, or this tech race or this AI race, will be totally different tomorrow. We all know that. But I think for purposes of this conversation, to say that an advisor having an expectation that their technology be outstanding and that AI be on the table, that a firm is embracing it and heading in the right direction, if you will, has the right thought leadership and the right willingness to invest in it is what advisors are really looking for right now. Jason Diamond: Absolutely. And this is a question too from the firm’s perspective, if you are a firm of any size, you must be able to answer that. This has become question 1A. And again, I don’t mean to suggest that I think AI is the number one most important factor driving advisor movement today. It very well might be at some point down the road. I don’t think we’re there yet. But I do think it’s the topic du jour or the hot topic, where every advisor is asking about this. So that means if you’re a firm, you need to be prepared to tell the story or at least have the vision. And I think what we’re hearing from both advisors and from firms is this, AI is going to … What is right now a gap between the good and the bad, the quality and the non, is going to become an absolute chasm, right? An absolutely mountainous gap between the best firms and the firms who are able to adapt this technology or this AI. And the same thing at the advisor level, between the AI-enabled superpowered advisor versus those who are in the dinosaur ages, for lack of a better term. Mindy Diamond: Yeah. And we’ll move on, but it is worth saying that the day of the standalone independent, the one man or one woman band who hangs out a shingle, and to use your term, running a lifestyle practice, nothing wrong with that, but it would be near impossible to imagine a world where a standalone independent can compete with a private-equity-backed RIA or an RIA that has a big pool of capital behind them or to compete with the major firms. And our point is the ability to compete is probably more important with respect to this topic than just about any other. Jason Diamond: Totally agree. Thank you for tying a bow on that because I think that’s a good place to leave the AI topic, at least for now. I’m certain we’ll have more to say on this one. By the time we release this episode, we’ll probably have more to say on it. So we’ll have to do a follow-up again. But I want to talk now about enterprise value. And this is one where if you’re an RIA or if you’re an advisor at an independent firm, this might sound like a duh, but hear me out on this one. The idea is as follows, if I’m a wirehouse advisor or any sort of captive advisor, I don’t technically own anything. Agree? Mindy Diamond: Agreed. Jason Diamond: Okay. So if that’s true, that I don’t technically own anything, I technically don’t have any sort of enterprise value or ability to monetize. But my premise here and why I would argue that enterprise value has become a driver of movement is even wirehouse advisors know … They see teams like OpenArc, a massive RIA that launched last year. They see their corner office peers breaking away, starting independent firms. They see them selling to asset managers, private-equity-backed RIAs, private equity firms in their own right for these massive multiples. And what I guess I’m getting at, and I’m curious if you agree is, if a wirehouse advisor, let’s say, sees their colleagues sell to a private equity firm for 20X, doesn’t that have to become a little bit of a catalyst for movement in its own right? Mindy Diamond: Without a doubt. Historically … Actually, let me date myself. When I started this business now 32 years ago, there was zero way for an advisor who was a captive employee of a firm, of any firm, to monetize their business. It’s why there was so much movement, because the only way they could monetize was to get paid a big fat transition deal to move from one firm to the other. Jason Diamond: Yep. Mindy Diamond: Obviously, we all know that first it started with the big firms, and then just about every brokerage firm on the street began to offer a retire-in-place program. And that is the big firms or a traditional brokerage firm’s way of allowing advisor to monetize in place from their perspective to stave off attrition. And for an advisor that believes that the status quo serves them well, that finishing their career, that leaving their legacy, that leaving their team at their firm is the best thing to do, then those retire-in-place programs, like Merrill’s CTP or Morgan’s FAP or UBS’s Alpha or a name at every firm has them, is the best gift to advisors there is. But the problem is that the next generation at those firms are buying an asset they don’t own. And so when we talk about enterprise value or the desire to build enterprise value as a real driver of movement, what we’re talking about is not only that advisors want ownership of an asset, because ownership translates into more control and autonomy and agency over building it the way you want to, but it also translates into maximizing the value of the business that you’ve built. So that’s a long-winded way of saying that the OpenArc deal you are referencing, for anybody not familiar, is a Merrill Lynch team, a legacy Merrill Lynch team in Atlanta that was managing more than 120 billion in assets, part retail, ultra high net worth client assets, and part institutional consulting assets. And believe me, I don’t want to make it sound like it was a snap that one day they’re happy and the next day they’re going independent. Over a 10-year period became more and more aware, driven by the pushes and more aware of the pulse. But ultimately, while there was a long list of things they wanted to be able to do that they couldn’t to best serve clients and grow the business, the real driver at the end of the day, or I shouldn’t say the real driver, but a major driver was the notion of building and owning enterprise value. Yes, they could have all gotten very attractive deals and retired with your Merrill CTP, but they wanted to own the business, they wanted cap gains treatment. And so they went through the sweat equity big time of building what they’re calling OpenArc for the ability for probably five, 10, 20 years, because there’s partners with all different ages, so at all different times, to be able to really maximize the value of the business they’ve built. Jason Diamond: Can I push back on that for … It’s a super helpful example, but my one thought is, okay, yeah, of course, 130 billion in assets, they should be concerned with enterprise value at that size. And the delta between caring about enterprise value and not is too great because those guys have, by all accounts, a phenomenal business that is rivaled by very few in the industry. Most of our audience does not fit into that stratosphere. So what about advisors in, let’s call it the million to $10 million space? Should they still care about this concept? Mindy Diamond: Again, it’s an inside job. It’s a personal thing. Some don’t. But the answer is yes. And if I were them, I would. Why? Because whether I am generating a million a year in revenue or $10 million a year in revenue, at the end of the day, I’ve got an asset. I’ve built a valuable asset. And I have the choice at the end of the day or the middle of the day to decide a million things about that asset. How do I want to live my business life? How do I want to serve my clients? Where do I want to work? But one of the biggest factors to determining where and how they want to work is, ultimately, do I want to be able to maximize the value of the business that I’ve built? And while there are few things that are really definitive in this industry, the one thing that is absolutely indisputably definitive is that if you build an independent practice like the ex-Merrill Lynch churned RIA OpenArc team did, you will ultimately build enterprise value exponential multiples greater than any way you could monetize the business as a traditional employee. Jason Diamond: And that math absolutely still holds up even at numbers smaller than we’ve mentioned. I totally agree with that. I’ll give you one other reason why I think you should care. And I’d love your thoughts on this one. I’ll ask it two ways maybe. I’ll tell you my take and then I’ll ask you yours. Morgan Stanley, let’s use as an example. Who are Morgan Stanley’s competitors? In my opinion, the legacy answer to that is, well, of course the wirehouses are Morgan Stanley’s competitors. Merrill, UBS, Wells Fargo, what maybe used to be a longer list, but today those four. I don’t think that’s the answer anymore. I think those are the direct competitors. But because of this enterprise value conversation, I think Morgan Stanley’s competitors are anyone and everyone who recruits financial advisors with books of business. Because if you think about it, an advisor who has a $3 million business at a wirehouse, even if they’re not actually going to do this, they don’t have any entrepreneurial spirit, no desire to go independent, they still know that they could. This is an option and a viable option. And firms are even figuring out ways to cut out the middle step, right? Because this was historically a two-step process. You’re a wirehouse advisor or a W2 advisor. You break away, launch an independent business to establish your enterprise value, begin building it, and then you monetize it. If you could cut out the middle step, or even if you couldn’t, I still think it’s pretty clear that if you’re an advisor, this is important because the firms know … Like when Morgan Stanley’s writing a recruiting deal, they’re kept honest by RIAs and acquirers just the same as their direct peer set. Do you agree with that or do you think I’m reading too far into this? Mindy Diamond: Oh no, I agree a thousand percent. I think that it is naive for anyone recruiting for or on behalf of a traditional firm to think that the only competition is another traditional firm. The days of pomposity for a senior leader at a traditional firm to say, “We’ve got the best technology, the best everything fill in the blank. We have no competitors.” That’s just naive. Because even if it’s true, you’ve got the best platform infrastructure fill in the blank, there is a multitude of advisors that value things different than what you can provide. Beauty is in the eye of beholder is probably a good way to say that. But at the end of the day, what we’re really talking about is when I started the business, because there was no way, no really good way for an advisor to really monetize their life’s work, the only thing they could or were focused on from a personal financial gain perspective was the short-term deal. What are they paying? What’s the transition deal? Now, of course they’re concerned about that. But almost to a person, they’re equally concerned about what I can build and what will this allow me to build in terms of the value of the business I’m building in the long term. So let me ask you, if we’re talking about an advisor that has the ability to monetize in the short term for what could be 4X and in some cases more than that these days, and we’re talking about the ability to maximize enterprise value, and we talk about the concept of moving once and monetizing twice, what kind of numbers are we talking about? Fill in the blanks there. Jason Diamond: It’s such a hard question to answer because I do genuinely believe recruiting deals, when you talk about 300 to 400% revenue deals in the recruiting space, they vary a little bit, but I feel pretty comfortable quoting those types of numbers that most firms are somewhere in the 300 to 400% of T12 realm. There are some outliers, we mentioned UBS. But the multiple or EBITDA based or enterprise value M&A market where we’re doing these legitimate buyout transactions, the valuations do vary quite a bit. But here’s how I think about it. First of all, most firms are not purchased or sold at top line revenue. Most are sold at some sort of adjusted EBITDA number, which factors in local expenses, platform expenses, but also advisor compensation. And then that adjusted number is typically multipled. The multiples are anywhere from 8X for small kind of, let’s say, million dollar revenue businesses up to, we’ve seen deals struck at north of 20X for some of these mega cap RIAs. Typically, just back of the envelope, if I had to quote, I typically estimate around 5X top line at capital gains is a good kind of ballpark valuation. But there is quite a bit of nuance to it, more so than the traditional recruiting space. And I do think, shameless plug, part of the value in working with somebody who’s an expert on the entirety of the industry landscape is just that. It’s the idea that you need to run the horse race across multiple verticals. The good advisors who work with us typically are looking at a wire like a Morgan Stanley or a Merrill. They’re looking at a boutique firm like a Rockefeller, or they’re looking at a regional like an RBC or a Ray J. They’re looking at an independent firm like an LPL or a Sanctuary. They’re looking all across the spectrum. Mindy Diamond: I think that’s exactly right. But the topic of enterprise value, you can see how powerful it is and how wise it is. For an advisor today, when considering their personal economics to consider not just the short term, but to weigh in or add in or factor in, what could I be building and what ultimately will that business be worth at the end of the day? Jason Diamond: Yeah, 100%. Short of going out and selling your business, what can advisors do then? So I’m an advisor, okay, I’m curious about this. Or is it just as simple as, “Yeah, you should know what your business is worth if you’re an advisor”? Mindy Diamond: Definitively yes, because I mean, we always believe that knowledge is power. And just like it’s important for you to understand what your options are within your own firm, how can I ultimately retire out and monetize my business where I am, I think it’s really hard to make a decision in a vacuum without having other perspective. And getting other perspective doesn’t have to be that you have to go out and take 20 meetings. It’s not that hard for you to figure out what your business is worth to make it a data point for whether or not you’re ultimately best to retire in place or go elsewhere. Jason Diamond: Yeah, that I think is the main takeaway. And the education point is so important. I think because these are relatively new concepts for a lot of advisors that haven’t formally shopped a business before, there’s a lot of resources available. And we’ll certainly link some as well on the page for the episode. Let’s shift gears now, our kind of final trigger 2.0, which is stability and ownership structure of the firm. And this has been a little bit of a hot topic. It’s honestly been a hot topic every year because it seems like things pop up every year. And a lot of times advisors don’t reconcile the question of who owns the firm or how stable is the firm until something happens. The firm gets bought, the firm goes bankrupt, like the First Republic scenario. What should a good advisor do proactively about the idea that if you’re a W2 employee or even an employee who’s affiliated with a broker dealer, you saw this with Commonwealth, you just don’t really have control over what the firm decides to do. Give me your thoughts on this. I know it’s a big topic. Mindy Diamond: Yeah. First of all, using Commonwealth an example, it’s a good one. Because for those unfamiliar, Commonwealth is a boutique broker dealer that was privately owned and whose tagline was, “We love our privately owned status and we are never going to sell,” until one day they did. And not only did they sell, but they sold to the biggest independent broker dealer in the country, ala LPL. That’s not good nor bad, it’s just a fact. So if Commonwealth, who had definitively said we’re never up for sale, suddenly sells, any time you’re an employee of a firm, you never know what tomorrow brings in. You’re not in control over whether it’s sold. So that’s one example. But as you’re talking about this, I’m thinking about, I’m probably going back 20 years, so I’m 10 years into my career and I talked to someone who had been a very successful Merrill advisor. So I’m going to say he was probably generating around $5 million in revenue at the time. Going back 20 years, that’s a pretty significant book of business. He was courted for years by what he thought was a top RIA. And in those days, remember 20 years ago, the RIA space wasn’t nearly as mainstream as it is now. But the story the RIA told him was that ultimately, one, he was going to be a partner in the firm, that was very appealing to him. So he was going to have equity in the firm and much more freedom and control. And locally, by the way, the RIA was a really high quality brand. He worked on a lot of the economics, the short term and the long term with them. They did a ton of due diligence on his book of business. But he failed to ask … And I didn’t represent him. I just know this story. He failed to ask or do enough due diligence about the stability of the firm. What we think is really important, we talk about this expanded landscape. If you’re looking at Morgan Stanley, I don’t think you necessarily need to see Morgan Stanley’s balance sheet. If you are talking to a firm that is anything but a bulge bracket or anything but a large firm, it’s really important to do what we call reverse due diligence and to really understand if a firm expects you to open your kimono and show everything about your business to prove your worth, it is equally important that you do the same for them. In this new world order where private equity has come in and there are so many different ways for a firm to be owned and to be capitalized, it’s very important that an advisor understand what’s going on behind the scenes. And one of the questions around stability, if a firm is private equity backed, is it permanent capital? Is it patient capital? Is the private equity firm going to look to sell and monetize in five years? And then who would the likely buyer be and what does that mean for you? So the question is a big question and it’s really important. Jason Diamond: I love everything you just said, except I do think even the wirehouses, wirehouse advisors, honestly, as much as anybody should be asking these questions. And I’ll give you an example right now, UBS. And UBS, it’s not a story of balance sheet stability. I don’t think anybody has concerns that UBS is going to fail. But UBS management has been very publicly, “Oh, we’re cutting costs.” There’s been some rumors, I think for years, probably dating back 30 years to when you started the business about UBS’s commitment to the US wealth management business. I think those questions about stability and ownership structure are still valid. And to me, the implication of it is twofold. One, what you said, reverse due diligence, ask the questions, plan B. But also the concept of the exits or the off-ramps or how many bites of the apple do you get. So if you’re an advisor and you sell your business to somebody and you sign garden leave and non-competes and non-solicits, the question of ownership structure of that firm becomes less relevant because you have no off-ramps and no ability to exit that business anyway. A lot of times that’s how advisors get comfortable with this concept. And that’s what firms will tell them too, frankly, and we’re living through the middle of this, by the way, with Commonwealth and LPL, is vote with your feet, right? To the extent advisors can, the offer … And this is like, you used the example of private-equity-backed firms. This is how Rockefeller addresses the question of their private equity ownership. If we sell to UBS, all of our advisors will leave. They have that built-in put option. So knowing where the off-ramps are or how many bites of the apple an advisor gets, I think is a big concept that ties into that. But we’re absolutely seeing this pop up, probably largely because of those two examples, Commonwealth and UBS this year, more so Commonwealth, to your point. Janney’s another example last year or two years ago now where KKR comes in and buys Janney. So when these examples happen, it seems like it triggers advisors to say, “Is this something that could happen to me and should I be thinking about this?” Mindy Diamond: Yeah. So let me ask you a question. You’re talking, you’ve mentioned UBS offering this outsized deal. So how does the notion of stability and ownership factor in? If an advisor is considering an unprecedented deal from UBS, what are the caveats or concerns with respect to stability and ownership? Jason Diamond: It’s the same list of considerations you should and would ask of any other firm you’re diligencing, except I think amplified even more in the case … If I was counseling an advisor who was looking at UBS, that would be what I would say, is exactly that. You’re seeing all of these departures and defections, and I would want to have conversations with those advisors and understand exactly why and have guarantees or assurances that I’m not going to suffer from those same pain points that force them to leave. Or, and I say this a little bit flippantly, but it’s a little bit true, I understand the devil that I’m getting into bed with, but for 550%, or whatever the deal might be, I can suck it up. And that’s something that some advisors might well say as well. Mindy Diamond: Yeah. Jason Diamond: I don’t want to end on the negative note of overly large transition, not there’s anything wrong with large transition deals, but as you look out, is there anything that’s coming up in your conversation with advisors that you view as the next wave of this? I’ll give you one that maybe you could touch on, and if you have another one, feel free to offer it in conclusion, but do you think age or advisors starting to succeed out of the business will become more of a driver of movement, even though to your point, advisors can access sunset deals? Mindy Diamond: I do actually, because I think the more the average advisor age increases, the more likely that those advisors are going to want to move on to do something else to monetize the business. And so much of the wave of movement we see is driven not so much by the senior advisor, because many seed advisors are happy enough with the ability to monetize their business in place. Even though it may not maximize the value of the business, it’s a close enough approximation and it means I don’t have to disrupt the apple cart. So we support that 100%. But where we get the calls is from the next generation that says, “Yeah, but hold on a minute. It’s a good way for me to take on a book of assets that I not otherwise have access to. And it’s great for my senior partner, my father, my mother, my whatever to monetize the business. But I’m buying an asset again that I don’t own and I ultimately don’t have control over all these things we’re talking about, the AI investment, the ability to create enterprise value, the stability, the cost cutting, all of it.” So I think it’s all of the above. You say, “What else is there?” I think that’s it. It’s all of the above. It’s anything and everything that drives movement. One, it’s personal, it’s highly unique, it’s different for every advisor. There are certainly themes, and we’re talking about them, but there’s a million different things. It’s personal. And while there are an awful lot of pushes, things that can frustrate an advisor, it is the most exciting time in our view to be an advisor, particularly a high quality one, because the options abound, the ecosystem is big, because the ability to monetize both in the short term and the long term is big, mammoth, exponentially bigger than it ever was before. And the true ability to really build an enterprise has never been greater. And I think all of those things, the desire for an advisor to be the best that they can be and live their best business life is probably the biggest driver of all. Jason Diamond: It’s really true these days, if you can dream it, you can probably build it. And we’ve said in the past, if you build it, they will buy it. It’s a great place to end. This was a really fun topic. I think that’s a spot on kind of fourth trigger, by the way, too. This sort of next gen is almost like the force multiplier or the amplifier of like they see all this other stuff and they’re asking these questions even more so. Because if I’m 60 years old, none of this matters all that much. It matters, but I’m out of the business in five to 10 years. Versus the next gen advisors are the ones who often bear the brunt of this. So I think a lot of really smart stuff. Thank you for sharing your wisdom and expertise. In the episode page, we’ll be sure we have our Industry Transition Report. And we’ve also created a tool, the top 10 tips for a strategic due diligence process, which is a great kind of practical hand-in-hand companion for this topic for advisors looking for more pointed tips on the due diligence process. So Mindy, thank you again. This has been a blast. Mindy Diamond: My pleasure. Thank you. Jason Diamond: Thank you for joining us. We'll be back with a new episode next week, so be sure to listen in. Mindy Diamond: As a financial advisor, you hold yourself to the highest standards of integrity, honesty, and credibility. You are successful because you take your professional responsibility seriously and are dedicated to your clients. But are you living your best business life? Are your goals aligned with your firms or could a better option exist? Should I Stay or Should I Go? is a book written with you in mind. It’s a self-guided journey that walks you through the key steps that we take with our advisor clients. This strategic thought process and roadmap to professional self-discovery is designed to help you ask the right questions and think critically and objectively, whether you’re considering change or not. Learn how to get your copy at diamond-consultants.com/thebook. The Advisor Transition Playbook: The Latest on Due Diligence, the Move, and Everything In Between – Part 2 A Special Industry Update with Jason Diamond and Mindy Diamond. Jason Diamond: Welcome to a replay of one of the most popular episodes from our podcast series for financial advisors, The Advisor Transition Playbook: The Latest on Due Diligence, the Move, and Everything In Between. It's Part 2 of a 2-Part Industry Update with Mindy Diamond. I’m Jason Diamond and this is the Diamond Podcast for Financial Advisors. Mindy Diamond: At Diamond Consultants, we help elite advisors identify the right environment for their businesses to thrive, whether that’s at a wirehouse, boutique, or independent firm. With nearly three decades of experience, we’ve guided thousands of advisors and represented more than a quarter of a trillion dollars in assets transitioned. And each year, one in four advisors managing a billion dollars or more who change firms are our clients. Our process is education driven and based on building relationships, starting as your strategic partner, well before you’re even thinking of a move. To schedule a confidential conversation, call us at 908-879-1002. Wondering why advisors change firms and where they’re headed? Are transition deals going up or down? Those very questions and more inspired us to create our Annual Advisor Transition Report. It’s the award-winning data-driven resource designed for advisors that connects the dots between the motivations around movement and the firm’s appetite for top talent. Arm yourself with the knowledge you need to make smart decisions. Download your copy at diamond-consultants.com/transitionreport. Jason Diamond: There’s been a noticeable shift in how advisors are approaching decisions about their business, not necessarily in whether they’re exploring change, but in what they’re focused on when they do. Mindy is back with me for a continuation of our earlier conversation on the Advisor Transition Playbook. Last time, we spent time on the mechanics, how due diligence works, what a move actually entails, and how to think through the process. What’s become more apparent since then is that the inputs into that process are evolving. The traditional drivers are still there, but layered on top are a set of considerations that didn’t carry the same weight before. AI is one of them, and not just as a tool, but as a differentiator that advisors are starting to diligence more seriously. Enterprise value is another. Showing up in conversations, even for advisors who don’t technically own their business, but are thinking more critically about what they’re building over time. And then there are questions around stability, ownership, and flexibility. What happens to the firm itself and whether advisors retain the ability to adapt again if circumstances change. None of this is theoretical. It’s showing up in real time conversations. What we want to do here is unpack those new triggers of advisor movement and what they suggest about how decisions are being made today. So let’s get to it. Mindy, the legend, thank you for joining me. So glad to have you on. Mindy Diamond: Thank you. I’m so happy to be here. Jason Diamond: Great. Let’s dive right in. I’ll set the stage really quickly one more time. When we spoke about this topic last, we talked about the drivers of movement, what we’ll call in this conversation as the old or the legacy drivers of movement, and we spoke about the mechanics of the move. Before we get into the new drivers of movement, which I want to be the meat of the conversation, remind us, when we talk about the legacy drivers of movement …. And by the way, by saying legacy, I by no means want to suggest that they’re not valid today, because they’re equally valid, if not more so today than they were then. But when you think of the classic drivers of movement in our industry, what are they? Mindy Diamond: Yeah. So I would say, first of all, let’s start by saying that for every advisor, they’ve got a unique set of needs. So the first thing to say is that while you and I can talk about the categories of frustrations or things that might bother an advisor, they show up differently in each advisor’s life. So it’s important to note that everyone is unique. But generally speaking, if I had to package them, I’d say it’s number one that shows up most of the time is too much bureaucracy. A feeling that a firm or a model is just too hypervigilant in terms of compliance and it’s too bureaucratic and too hard to get things done.

Welcome back to the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast.Today's episode dives deep into the world of wealth management with someone whose career is emblematic of the intersection of private markets and private wealth.We sat down with Larry Restieri, the CEO of Hightower.Larry is the CEO and a member of the Board of Directors at Hightower, a national wealth management firm that empowers financial advisors to deliver sophisticated investment and financial services to clients.Larry joined the firm in June 2025 from Goldman Sachs, where he was a Partner. Larry served as the CEO of Goldman's AYCO business, which specializes in workplace financial planning and private wealth advisory services.He held a variety of leadership roles at Goldman across its wealth and asset management divisions, including heading up the Alternative Capital Markets business.Larry and I had a fascinating conversation about the continuing convergence of private markets and private wealth from someone who was at the forefront of this industry transformation. We covered:The evolution of private markets within the wealth channel.Lessons learned from Larry's time building Goldman's Alternative Capital Markets business and the AYCO business.The path to building Hightower into a $1T RIA. The build-out of Hightower's Signature Wealth brand.What does the continued buildout of private equity-backed platforms mean for the evolution of wealth management?What drives financial advisors?The benefits of the independent RIA model.How and why wealth clients should be thinking about private markets.Thanks, Larry, for sharing your wisdom, expertise, and passion at the intersection of private markets and private wealth.Show Notes00:15 Meet Larry Restieri01:22 Sponsor Message from Ultimus Fund Solutions05:37 Larry Career Journey11:21 Why Hightower12:02 Next Wealth Evolution14:37 Democratizing Alternatives17:08 Education And Expectations18:14 GPs And Distribution19:49 Big Versus Niche Managers22:09 Platform Due Diligence23:20 NEPC And Hightower One26:18 Trillion Dollar RIAs27:42 What Advisors Want28:57 Building Hightower One29:27 Signature Wealth Brand30:41 Acquiring The Bahnsen Group31:57 Why Brand Matters32:22 The Volkswagen Brand Analogy34:15 Culture and Community36:34 Hightower 3.0 Strategy37:59 Open Architecture Explained41:04 Private Equity Exits43:06 Multiples and Deal Discipline44:49 Markets and Cash Flow46:20 Private Markets Adoption49:10 GPs Serving RIAs52:33 Closing ReflectionsA Word from Our Sponsor, UltimusThis episode of Alt Goes Mainstream is brought to you by Ultimus, the full-service fund administrator and transfer agent powering asset managers in private and public markets. As alts go mainstream, you need real expertise to handle complex fund structures, connect with key distribution partners, and handle sophisticated compliance, reporting, and transparency demands.That's Ultimus: high-tech, high-touch solutions for over 450 clients and 2,500 funds with $775B in assets under administration. Backed by an expert team of over 1,200 employees, they place client service at the core of their business, helping you navigate complexity during your fund structuring or launch and then supporting you through every stage of growth. Whether you're already in the market or thinking about entering private wealth, you can trust their team's deep expertise in retail alternatives to help you reach your goals.Learn more at ultimusfundsolutions.com or email info@ultimusfundsolutions.com.We thank Ultimus for their support of alts going mainstream.Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant.

In this powerful episode of SEE Change, we welcomed back the Founder and CEO of Technovation, Tara Chklovski, for a conversation about the staggering reality facing today's youth with the rapid acceleration of AI and how our education system is not structured in a way to keep up with the rate of change. AI is fundamentally rewriting the future of work and Tara and the team at Technovation are on a mission to fill the gap by preparing the next generation to lead, innovate, and solve real-world community issues through technology. For over 10 years, Technovation has been in the technology and AI space, long before it came into the mainstream. In their model, learners use AI and technology to create solutions to real world problems they care about, guided by lessons that teach them resilience, problem-solving, and adaptability, as well as coding, AI, and entrepreneurship skills. Under her leadership, Technovation has grown into a global movement, empowering over 450,000 total participants across 120+ countries!  Tune in to hear about their incredible work and the future that they are building!This is one episode that you do not want to miss!!!About Tara Chklovski: Tara Chklovski is the visionary founder and CEO of Technovation  which is now the world's largest AI & tech-accelerator for girls, and also the world's largest women-in-tech community (300,000+). A former aerospace engineer, she transitioned from her PhD studies to dedicate her career to bridging the gender gap in STEM fields.About R. Seelaus & Co., Inc.R. Seelaus & Co., Inc. was founded in 1984 by Richard Seelaus, originally as a municipal bond broker-dealer. The firm has since become a certified women's business enterprise ("WBE") and has grown into a full-service financial firm that is mission driven in its commitment to creating more opportunities for women in the financial services. R. Seelaus & Co., Inc. and its subsidiaries offer investment advisory, asset management, capital markets, brokerage, fixed income and equity trading, institutional sales, leveraged finance and insurance services. The R. Seelaus & Co., LLC subsidiary is a broker dealer registered with the SEC and member of FINRA, and the subsidiary Seelaus Asset Management, LLC, is an SEC Registered Investment Advisor ("RIA"). With various fixed income trading desks and more than seventy professionals, both entities serve individuals, families, public and private companies, non-profit organizations, and institutional investors. The firm has offices in NJ, CT, New Jersey, Connecticut, Illinois, South Carolina, and Massachusetts.For more information about R. Seelaus & Co., and its subsidiaries visit www.rseelaus.com

Today, Steven Jarvis, CPA, is joined by Darren Whissen from Invito to explore what it actually looks like for RIAs to implement alternative investments in practice. Darren shares his background running an RIA where nearly half of the client assets were allocated to illiquid alternative investments. Darren also walks through the compliance infrastructure required to support an alternatives program, including WSP updates, due diligence processes, and supervision requirements. The discussion highlights common pitfalls advisors should avoid, including poor manager selection, overly optimistic projections, and overconcentration in client portfolios. https://zurl.co/MZkQl

Molly’s sick of being called Pooper Scooper, Puppy Dog Pie, and a host of other silly nicknames by her mum. She loves her real name, so she’s come to Judge Bex to ask for her identity back. Will Judge Bex rule in favour of Molly and which nickname will be officially banned from the house? Meanwhile, siblings Niamh and Ria are at odds over who gets to play their Nintendo Switch. Was it a solo gift or meant to be shared? The twist: Santa’s written instructions and some sneaky switch sessions. Judge Bex has the final word!Got a case you need Judge Bex's help with? Get to funkidslive.com/judgebex right now and let her know!Support the show: https://funkidslive.com/plusSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode, the hosts discuss the challenges faced by financial advisors in navigating IPO restrictions and compliance issues. They explore insights from the Carson Group regarding M&A trends, the importance of partnerships, and common missteps in valuation and deal structuring. The conversation highlights the significance of accurate financial representation, the impact of market conditions on business valuation, and the risks associated with middle market aggregators. The hosts emphasize the need for advisors to be prepared for potential sales and the evolution of Carson Group's business model in the advisory space. The Power of Partnership in Financial Advisory With Michael Belluomini and Liam Heffernan  Resources in today's episode: - Matt Jarvis: Website | LinkedIn- Liam Heffernan: Website | LinkedIn- Michael Belluomini: Website | LinkedIn- Download the evaluation framework Carson uses to assess RIA growth!- Learn More about our Coaching Programs  

Jason Fertitta – CEO & Partner, Americana Partners Jason Fertitta shares how Americana Partners grew from a $2.6B breakaway team to a $13B+ enterprise by focusing on ownership, enterprise value, strategic acquisitions, and long-term growth. In Summary Many advisors view independence as the ultimate objective: a chance to gain control, improve economics, and build a business on their own terms. For Jason Fertitta, independence was only the beginning. Louis Diamond speaks with the CEO and Founding Partner of Americana Partners about the firm's evolution from a $2.6 billion breakaway team in 2019 to a national enterprise managing more than $13 billion today. The conversation explores the decisions that fueled that growth, the mindset required to build long-term enterprise value, and why Jason believes advisors should evaluate success through the lens of net worth rather than annual income. Along the way, they discuss recruiting, acquisitions, private equity, professional management, and the tradeoffs that come with building something intended to outlast its founders. The Storyline The independent channel has matured. A decade ago, many advisors pursued independence primarily for greater autonomy, higher payouts, and control over the client experience. Today, a growing number are approaching the decision differently—viewing independence as a platform for building enterprise value, attracting capital, completing acquisitions, and creating businesses that can scale beyond the founders themselves. Jason Fertitta's journey reflects that evolution. When he and his partners left Morgan Stanley in 2019, Americana launched with approximately $2.6B in client assets and a vision to build a nationally recognized wealth management firm. Seven years later, the firm oversees more than $13B, employs roughly 100 people, operates across multiple markets, has completed several acquisitions, and brought on Lovell Minnick Partners as its first institutional investor. Throughout the conversation, Jason offers a transparent look at the realities of enterprise building. That includes reinvesting profits rather than maximizing income, hiring professional management long before it feels necessary, embracing acquisitions as a growth strategy, and making decisions based on long-term value creation rather than short-term economics. For advisors considering what comes after independence, the episode provides a practical framework for thinking about ownership, scale, capital, and the future value of their business. About the Build, Grow & Transact Series for Advisors Build, Grow & Transact explores what happens after independence. The series features advisors and firm leaders who viewed independence not as a destination, but as the foundation for building something larger. Some launched firms from scratch. Others scaled through recruiting, acquisitions, or strategic partnerships. Many eventually faced decisions around capital, ownership, succession, or liquidity. While every story is different, they share a common thread: a willingness to think beyond the transition itself and focus on creating long-term enterprise value. Through candid conversations with founders, builders, and industry leaders, the series examines the decisions, tradeoffs, and lessons that come with growing an advisory business into an enduring enterprise. For advisors contemplating independence, actively building a firm, or considering what comes next, Build, Grow & Transact offers a look at the paths others have taken—and what they've learned along the way. > Download a transcript of this episode… Listen and Learn Highlights for Advisors Why did Americana grow from $2.6 billion to more than $13 billion? (06:16)Jason explains how a combination of organic growth, advisor recruiting, acquisitions, and long-term strategic planning helped accelerate the firm's expansion. Why do clients often do more business with independent advisors? (12:17)Jason shares his perspective on why clients frequently deepen relationships after an advisor leaves a wirehouse environment. What role have alternatives played in Americana's growth strategy? (14:40)The discussion explores how differentiated investment access can help advisors stand apart in an increasingly commoditized marketplace. When is it time to build a professional management team? (18:36)Jason explains why Americana invested heavily in leadership, operations, and infrastructure from the very beginning. Why did Americana bring in private equity capital? (25:16)A candid discussion about growth capital, M&A opportunities, and the decision to partner with Lovell Minnick Partners. How do you evaluate enterprise value versus annual income? (20:16)Jason offers one of the episode's most important lessons: building wealth through ownership can look very different than maximizing current compensation. What makes a successful acquisition target? (39:51)Jason outlines how Americana evaluates M&A opportunities and how acquisitions fit into the broader client experience. Is it better to build your own firm or join an existing platform? (45:40)The conversation closes with Jason's perspective on the trade-offs between launching independently and joining a scaled independent enterprise. Topics Covered Enterprise value creation Independence and ownership Organic growth strategies Advisor recruiting RIA acquisitions Private equity partnerships Professional management teams Alternative investments Family office services Building a national wealth management firm Key Takeaways Independence can be a starting point for building an enterprise rather than the final objective. Long-term wealth creation often stems from ownership and equity appreciation, not from maximizing annual income. Reinvesting profits into leadership, infrastructure, and talent can accelerate enterprise value. Organic growth and acquisitions can complement one another when supported by a clear strategy. Outside capital can be a growth catalyst when aligned with management's long-term vision. The most scalable firms are often built around client needs rather than predefined acquisition targets. Advisors have more options than ever before, ranging from building independently to joining established platforms. https://youtu.be/_12jZJFsi4U Quotable Moments “Even to this day, I don't make anywhere near the amount of income that I made when I was on Wall Street. But my net worth is up tenfold.” “If you want to create value for yourself and your partners and grow your balance sheet, you can do it in a much more tax-efficient way in the independent world.” “I've never thought about how much of the company I own. I've thought about what my slice is worth.” “We want to build something our children would be proud to say we helped create.” FAQs Why are more advisors viewing independence as a business-building opportunity? The independent channel increasingly offers opportunities to create enterprise value, pursue acquisitions, attract capital, and build scalable businesses beyond a traditional advisory practice. How can advisors increase the enterprise value of their firms? Enterprise value is often driven by factors such as growth, profitability, leadership depth, recurring revenue, client demographics, infrastructure, and scalability. What role does private equity play in wealth management firms? Private equity can provide capital, strategic guidance, operational expertise, and acquisition support while helping firms accelerate growth initiatives. How do RIAs use acquisitions to grow? Many firms use acquisitions to expand geographically, add specialized capabilities, deepen client services, and accelerate asset growth. Why are professional management teams becoming more common among RIAs? As firms scale, dedicated leadership across operations, finance, compliance, and business management enables advisors to focus more effectively on clients and growth. Is launching an independent firm always the best path? Not necessarily. Some advisors prefer to build their own enterprise, while others may achieve their goals more effectively by joining an established independent platform that already provides scale and infrastructure. The independent channel increasingly offers opportunities to create enterprise value, pursue acquisitions, attract capital, and build scalable businesses beyond a traditional advisory practice. Enterprise value is often driven by factors such as growth, profitability, leadership depth, recurring revenue, client demographics, infrastructure, and scalability. Private equity can provide capital, strategic guidance, operational expertise, and acquisition support while helping firms accelerate growth initiatives. Many firms use acquisitions to expand geographically, add specialized capabilities, deepen client services, and accelerate asset growth. As firms scale, dedicated leadership across operations, finance, compliance, and business management enables advisors to focus more effectively on clients and growth. Not necessarily. Some advisors prefer to build their own enterprise, while others may achieve their goals more effectively by joining an established independent platform that already provides scale and infrastructure. Related Resources From Ex-Morgan Stanley Advisor to One of the Biggest Breakaway Stories of 2019 with Jason Fertitta (Podcast Episode) Intentional Growth: How Top Advisors Build Businesses That Last (Article) M&A Readiness Assessment (Tool) Guest Bio Jason Fertitta Jason is currently Chief Executive Officer / Founding Partner of Americana Partners. Jason was a Managing Director in Morgan Stanley's Private Wealth Division for eleven years. He joined Morgan Stanley in 2008 after six years with Lehman Brothers High Net Worth Division. Prior to joining Lehman Brothers, Jason worked six years for Texas Direct. Jason serves on the Board of The Good Samaritan Foundation and Endowment and the Houston Museum of Natural Science. Jason attended St. Edwards University in Austin. NOTE: The views and opinions expressed by the guests on this podcast are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Diamond Consultants. Neither Diamond Consultants nor the guests on this podcast are compensated in any way for their participation. View the transcript of this episode… Build, Grow & Transact: Americana's $12B Path from Breakaway to Enterprise A conversation with Louis Diamond and Jason Fertitta, CEO & Partner at Americana Partners.      Louis Diamond: Welcome to the latest episode of our podcast series for financial advisors. Today’s episode is Build, Grow & Transact: Americana's $12B Path from Breakaway to Enterprise. It's a conversation with Jason Fertitta, CEO and partner of Americana Partners. I’m Louis Diamond, and this is the Diamond Podcast for financial advisors. Mindy Diamond: At Diamond Consultants, we help elite advisors identify the right environment for their businesses to thrive, whether that’s at a wirehouse, boutique, or independent firm. With nearly three decades of experience, we’ve guided thousands of advisors, and represented more than a quarter of a trillion dollars in assets transitioned. And each year, one in four advisors managing a billion dollars or more who change firms are our clients. Our process is education driven, and based on building relationships, starting as your strategic partner well before you’re even thinking of a move. To schedule a confidential conversation, call us at 908-879-1002. Wondering why advisors change firms and where they’re headed? Are transition deals going up or down? Those very questions and more inspired us to create our annual advisor transition report. It’s the award-winning data-driven resource designed for advisors that connects the dots between the motivations around movement, and the firm’s appetite for top talent. Arm yourself with the knowledge you need to make smart decisions. Download your copy at diamond-consultants.com/transitionreport. Louis Diamond: Independence is often viewed as the finish line. Break away, gain control, own the business, and enjoy the economics that come with it. But, for some advisors, going independent is just the beginning. That’s the idea behind this new series called Build, Grow, and Transact, featuring advisors who saw independence not as a destination, but as the first chapter of a business building story. And there will be some familiar names along the way, including our first guest who was on our show back in 2020, talking about what was at the time, one of the industry’s breakaway moves. That’s Jason Fertitta, CEO and founding partner of Americana Partners. When Jason and his partners left Morgan Stanley in 2019, they started Americana with approximately 2.6 billion in client assets, and a vision that extended well beyond becoming a successful independent firm. Today, Americana oversees more than 12 billion, has expanded nationally, completed multiple acquisitions, built out a professional management team, and brought on institutional capital to support its next phase of growth. What makes Jason’s perspective valuable that he’s now experienced independence through several different lenses as a breakaway advisor, as a founder, as a builder of enterprise value, and now as the leader of a firm, actively pursuing acquisitions and recruiting talent from across the industry. We talk about the decisions that fueled Americana’s growth, why Jason has always viewed the business through a long-term lens, what changed when private equity entered the picture, and why maximizing enterprise value often requires a very different mindset than maximizing current income. For advisors who think independence is a destination, Jason’s story offers a look at what can happen when it’s treated as a starting point instead, so let’s get to it. Jason, thanks for coming back on our show today. Jason Fertitta: Pleasure to be here. Thanks for inviting me. Louis Diamond: You got it. Yeah, you’re our first guest in our new subseries, so you should feel honored. And I’m honored too, because the last time we had you on the show, Americana was about a year old, you’re navigating COVID, and all those challenges. But, for listeners who may not remember the episode, can you give us a quick version of the origin story of Americana, and what the firm looked like when you first launched it? Jason Fertitta: Yeah, I believe if I’m remembering correctly, I was in Colorado talking to you guys, and it was right after we launched, so that was a fun but stressful time. I think at the time that we launched, it was certainly the road less traveled. Most teams go from one wirehouse to another. We had an entrepreneurial itch. There was 11 of us that started the firm. We actually launched the firm from this exact building that we’re in here, but all of this was under construction. We were in temporary space one floor below on card tables, and pizza boxes, and all the things that you can envision when you think of a startup. But, yeah, we weighed all of our options in terms of going from one firm to another, staying where we were, and had a lot of talks with ourselves, and our spouses, and they were all very supportive. When you do something like this, you’re certainly scratching the entrepreneurial itch that I think is required for somebody that wants to try and build their own company. And I think we’re all satisfying that itch in different ways. We all had a lot of other outside business interests. I’m passionate about the restaurant industry, because it’s what I grew up in as a kid. And so, had opened some restaurants with some chefs that I really admire, and were doing things like that to scratch the itch, but there’s no other way to do it than doing that in your profession. And so, we decided to launch the firm. We also just felt like Texas being such a wealthy state, there really wasn’t a regionally dominant RIA from here. There’s a lot of big RIAs in the Northeast, and the Northwest, and the West Coast. And we just felt like Texas was ready to hopefully be able to support the concept of launching it from the state, and then expanding it out regionally and nationally from here. Those are all thoughts in our heads and dreams and we’ve worked really hard to get to where we are, but I think we’re in a great spot right now for another leg of growth. Louis Diamond: Amazing. I would say that plan has certainly worked out. When you were on our show last in 2019, the firm was at about 2.6 billion at time of launch. And now, I saw in news articles and your ADV, it’s north of 12 billion, but I’m sure it’s even larger now. Can you walk through just what’s the makeup of the firm today? How many partners and advisors? What’s the profile of the end client? What markets are you in, in and around Texas or around the country? Jason Fertitta: Yeah, so today we’re roughly a hundred employees, right at 13 billion in AUM. I would say we have six offices, Houston, Austin, Dallas, Midland, Beverly Hills, and Nashville. We have about 30 advisors, 30 financial advisors, and our average account size I would say is right around $20 million. That’s not a rule, it’s just the way it is. We have some wonderful accounts that are two or three million, and we have some great accounts that are well over a billion. And in terms of the makeup of the firm, since the time we’ve spoken, and we’ll get into this later, but we have run in private equity, we have about nine families that are owners of the firm with us. It’s really families, private equity, and employees. That’s the cap table currently. Louis Diamond: Very cool. As far as building the firm geographically, for the offices of Texas, that makes sense to your earlier comment about wanting to build a Texas dominant or a regionally dominant firm. But, how’d you land in Beverly Hills and Nashville? That’s a little bit different. Jason Fertitta: Yeah, it is. I think so much of where we’re going is secondary to who we’re partnering with. I think we would go anywhere in the country if we had the right partner in that city. We’re not necessarily saying we have to be in Atlanta. Let’s find the right partners in Atlanta. It’s more about, we found the right partners in Atlanta, so we’re going to Atlanta. And you meet these people everywhere. Everyone has their own Rolodex inside of our firm. Sometimes it’s an employee here that has a relationship with someone that wants to break away and be part of an independent firm. Sometimes it’s me. There’s a lot of golf DNA in our firm, so we’ve met a ton of people through the incredible game of golf. In fact, last weekend we just hosted our first Americana Cub Golf Tournament where we took over an entire club, and invited 40 strategic invitations to people that could be helpful to our firm. I would say it’s really just networking, trying to find like-minded advisors that were very big at putting the client at the center of every decision you make. A lot of times you’ll come across of an advisor that financially looks really good on paper, but they’re maybe not always doing what’s right by the client. We run from those situations. We’d rather have a financial advisor that perhaps statistically is inferior to that other one on paper from a P&L perspective, but we feel like it’s doing what’s right by the client in the decisions. And that’s usually the main factor for us in seeking out the right partners. Louis Diamond: I love that. And one of the premises of this new subseries of ours is about growing, and then, of course, recognizing that value through some sort of monetization. To me, the star of your show is your insanely impressive growth, which I would assume comes from both organic means, and also from inorganic, whether through M&A, or recruiting teams from your predecessor firms, or from other wirehouses. Can you talk a little bit about the breakdown of the two growth channels, and how you pursue both, organic and then inorganic growth? Jason Fertitta: Yeah. Well, I think organic growth, the preference for anyone that’s in our sea, because you don’t have to pay for organic growth. It’s just you have to expose your platform to potential clients, and it has to be differentiated enough for them to move assets from another firm to yours. And I would tell you, I think we do a really good job at that. We’ve built an incredible platform that has, and enables a financial advisor to have all the same arrows in the quiver that a big firm has. We’ve got an incredible alts department. We’ve got an incredible CIO that produces great research. We got incredible in-house portfolio managers, both in the core equity space, but then also the municipal bond space. We have an incredible external manager platform that has everything from cash management on steroids, to venture capital investing, to co-investing, to direct investments into companies. We have this really great platform. We also recognize that we want to grow through M&A as well, because there’s only so much time in the day you’re not willing to add more employees and more like-minded advisors to grow. We do both, to your point, we absolutely do both, and they’re both equally as important. On the M&A side, I would say it’s been responsible for half of our AUM growth over the last seven years, and the other half has been organic. And I think as we get bigger and bigger, that number’s going to not stay consistent. I would say that if we could grow our AUM organically by 10% per year, and then do five to seven acquisitions a year, combination of RIAs and Wall Street lift outs, I think those are good goals for us, and we’re off to a good start in trying to achieve those goals. Louis Diamond: I think if you pull off even half of that, I think your private equity sponsors, and investors, and employees would be very happy. Can we double click into the organic growth side? How do you view whether your growth rate changing organically since leaving Morgan to start the RIA? And if it has changed, what do you think are the things that are responsible for the faster growth, or slower growth if it’s slower than when you’re at Morgan? Jason Fertitta: One of the interesting secrets about being independent versus inside of a big bank is I think your clients will actually do more business with you if you’re independent. I didn’t realize that until we went independent. I had heard that before, but I was like, that may or may not be true. But, when we went independent, and every time we recruit a team from a big bank, the same thing happens. It’s like the clients are like, “What took you so long?” They’ve very much, for the most part … Now, that’s not every client, but most clients, I think prefer to be serviced by an advisor that’s conflict bringing the independent channel. There are other clients that might have a big investment banking relationship with a big bank, or something like that, like a business reason for not leaving. But, in terms of just being able to service the client from an independent channel where you’re a legal fiduciary, I think all the interest is aligned from client to service provider, and I just think it’s easier to raise money in this channel than it is at a bank. Louis Diamond: And you really think the types of clients you work with or just clients in general, the difference maker is really the conflict-free advice. Obviously, it sounds good, but I would argue that when you were at Morgan Stanley, your team was one of the top teams in the country, you had an amazing reputation, you’re probably giving similar quality advice then than you were today. How has that really manifested itself? Jason Fertitta: I always say I think you can have a great experience at a firm that is perhaps not the most prestigious, great firm in the country if you’re with the right team. And I think you can also have a horrible experience at a firm with a great reputation if you’re with the wrong team. It is my belief the most important thing from the customer’s perspective is who you’re working with. I appreciate your comments about our team, and we work very hard to deserve the reputation that you’re talking about. But, I also think that when you’re in the independent world, some of the things the banks do very well is they have great investment platforms, and a lot of due diligence in their products. I think when you’re an independent firm, you’re obviously, you don’t immediately have all of those same intangibles that a big bank has. I think it was very important for us to invest heavily into those departments inside of our firm to where we could be on some equal footing with Wall Street firms, and we have been. We have raised a lot of money for alternative managers. I think alternatives are a huge secret sauce that an independent advisor needs to have access to, because in a world where the public markets are getting more efficient and more commoditized, it’s very challenging to grow organically the way that we have without some secret sauce. And I think the secret sauce lies within the alternatives, because it’s very hard to differentiate yourself if you’re just trying to optimize someone’s public equity portfolio, and improve where they sit on the efficient frontier. I think that’s just a tough challenge. But, if you can mix in some truly differentiated alternatives where access is a big component of the value proposition, then all of a sudden, you’re bringing your clients something special, and something that’s unique. Louis Diamond: I really like that perspective. I think you’re completely right. I’ve always heard people say investments are commoditized, and it’s all about advice and planning, but I think the way you framed it about the ALFA essentially being worked out of it, so it’s the access, and it’s what you’re doing different on the investment side outside of the more basic or commoditized stuff that’s a difference maker. When you launched the firm, and I believe still today, Americana hired Dynasty Financial Partners as your infrastructure partner. Now that you’re significantly larger, you’re seven years into your independent journey, how does the relationship with Dynasty change, if at all? What do they do for you that you benefit from differently today than when you first launched? Jason Fertitta: Yeah, it would’ve been impossible for us to do what we did without Dynasty’s help. Dynasty has delivered for us in a meaningful way and they continue to. They’re a great partner. We definitely are developing our own sea legs as well, just because you have to just by virtue of the size that you get to. But, Dynasty, I think, has been incredibly innovative in terms of launching an investment bank and bringing … Dynasty’s brought us deals, which is incredible. Just in addition to being an infrastructure partner, they’ve actually provided us deal flow. They’re also, because they’re working with so many firms, you get in all sorts of situations as an independent firm, and to have someone to pick up the phone and say, “Here’s what we’re dealing with.” And they’ll say, “Oh, here are the three things you need to do. You either need to do it like this or this.” Just a lot of experience within Dynasty. I don’t know if we’re Dynasty’s biggest client or not, but I would say we’re certainly in their top three. We are looking to continue that relationship, and always having a relationship with Dynasty, but I would describe it as evolving, because our revenue is up 6X in the last six years. Louis Diamond: Amazing. That makes complete sense. The needs of the business when you are leaving a big firm is got to get the clients over, got to build the plane before it can fly, and understand how to do X, Y, and Z, to now, it’s enterprise building, and optimizing, and growing inorganically, so that makes complete sense, and very cool to hear that Dynasty has evolved or morphed the relationship to meet you where you are now. And to me, I think a big part of that is hiring professional management. That’s always a question we get. When am I big enough? When’s the right time to hire professional management, whether it’s a full-time CEO, a CFO, a COO, et cetera. I know in your case, fairly early on you hired Ron Thacker who was a regional manager from Morgan Stanley. I saw recently you hired a CFO, so you’re really professionalizing the leadership ranks. When did you know it was the right time to build a professional management team, and how did you think about that evolution? Jason Fertitta: We knew from day one that’s what we wanted to do. I think when you go independent, there’s a couple of different schools of thought. One school of thought is I can go independent. I’m not going to really have a boss. I’ll be my own boss. I may or may not grow the business. I’m going to run it in a way that’s lean. I might be able to have a little bit more of a take home because there’s not a third hand in the cookie jar in terms of the bank, and it’s a great lifestyle. I think that’s one school of thought and I think that’s great. That was not our school of thought. Our school of thought is we had a belief that in this country, there’s going to emerge five to 10 regionally dominant RIAs, and these regionally dominant RIAs were going to enjoy economies of scale, and they were going to compete with Wall Street. And in order to do that, we had to reinvest a lot of our profit into our business through building this management team that you’re referencing. Even to this day, I don’t make anywhere near the amount of income that I made when I was on Wall Street, but I’m not, and it’s because we’re building equity value, and we’re building something that will last, and we reinvest a lot of our cash flow into professionalizing the management team, and then being able to deliver on that promise to the financial advisors that are here that you’re going to have a platform, that when you walk in the room, you’re going to be able to compete with Wall Street. And so, that’s always been our goal, which is not necessarily everybody’s goal when they go independent, because it’s a lifestyle decision really. I work way harder today than I worked when I was at a Wall Street firm. Louis Diamond: It’s so interesting. Two threads I want to tug on from what you said. The first one is I think just the comment you made that you’re making less today when the business is significantly larger than it was when you’re at Morgan Stanley, you’re working harder. I think even that dynamic is going to feel like a shock to a lot of people, right? If you’re working harder, the business is doing six times more revenue than it was at Morgan Stanley, that doesn’t seem like a fair trade. How do you think about that relative to the equity value that you’re amassing? Was that always the plan, or is that just something you’ve leaned into as the firm has grown and scaled? Jason Fertitta: Well, the third component you left out is my net worth is up 10X- Louis Diamond: There you go. Jason Fertitta: … whereas if I would’ve stayed at a Wall Street firm, and so are all the employees here. If it’s about that, I can tell you that we checked that box. Americana is very valuable, and we’re happy about that. It’s really just about how you want to create that, right? If you want to create it through income, and pay a lot of taxes along the way, stay at the Wall Street firm. But, if you want to create value for yourself and your partners, and grow your balance sheet, you can do it in a much more tax efficient way in the independent world. And I’m light years ahead of where I would’ve been if I would’ve stayed at a Wall Street firm. Louis Diamond: I think that’s the coolest realization I think someone can have, right? We always say it’s like, what do you value more? Is it the short-term liquidity, or certainty of getting a big upfront recruiting deal at ordinary income, or staying where you are and keep making your 50% payout, take advantage of your firm’s retire in place program? And for many people, that’s what they value. But, for you, I think you very clearly and transparently articulated that, yeah, I might make less, but what really matters is my net worth. It’s how much I’m actually netting for my family in the long run. For people who want to play the long game, really buy into that concept, it sounds like following your path would be ideal, but it may not be for everyone. Jason Fertitta: It’s a much better path, and I’m living proof of it, and not only am I living proof of it, all of my partners are here, and everybody that owns equity in Americana is living proof of it. Louis Diamond: Amazing. You said you’re working more now than when you’re at Morgan. How has your day-to-day, or day in the life changed? What types of activities are you doing more or less of, and how do you balance everything? Jason Fertitta: Yeah, it’s hard to balance everything, it is. But, I would say that one of the unique things about Americana is the founders are all financial advisors. We aren’t consultants that came out of the consulting world, we’re financial advisors. I’m still a financial advisor. I still cover clients. I would say a third of my time is actually covering the house accounts here with some of my original partners. A third of my time is firm related stuff, and then, a third of my time is M&A, and that’s not only M&A, but helping the advisors that are here grow their business also. And so, I come across a lot of leads and opportunities. I’m not really taking them for the house account book or myself. I’m finding the right advisors that I feel I could service the clients the best, and then I’m flipping them to them and sitting second chair and I’ve seen some amazing growth to their businesses by just being able to send them leads. Louis Diamond: Yeah. I think that’s always like the tug of war for … I think most founders of RIAs in this industry, they were advisors themselves. They were the rainmakers, or they still are, but there’s definitely some folks who, whether because of lack of time, or lose the spark or passion for working with clients, that they pivot to being full-time CEO, or we’ve even seen people go the other way where they say, “I was the CEO. I really just want to be an advisor, or just do M&A, and I’m going to hire a CEO.” It’s really cool to hear how you split up your time, and you’re able to do it all. And I’m sure it’s not perfect. I’m sure your family wishes they saw you more, and et cetera, but it sounds like you’re able to really pursue your different passions. Jason Fertitta: All those three activities are very fun, and they keep everyday interesting, and you don’t necessarily know at what points in the day you’re going to be working on which bucket, and there’s a lot of blend and overlap, but we spend a lot of time here working on behalf of our clients, and the firm, and every day is an adventure, but it's fun. It’s a blast. Louis Diamond: Absolutely. Well, let’s spend some time talking about your fairly recent capital raise. In October of 2024, Americana announced that PE firm Lovell Minnick Partners, the firm’s first outside institutional investor was coming in to take a majority stake in the firm. Can you take us back to that decision? I’m sure it’s still clearly vivid. Maybe talk through it, and when did you first start to think seriously about bringing in capital? Jason Fertitta: Yeah, so probably at the end of ’23, we looked down, and there was $100 million worth of potential M&A that was fairly actionable that we could do. And the other M&A events we did were small deals, 10, $20 million sometimes, but firms with three, 400 in AUM to 600 million in AUM. We were doing deals that size, and we’re just passing the hat, and saying, okay, to the families that were in our cap table and to ourselves, who wants to write a check? The cap table was changing all the time based on people’s buy-in and M&A transaction. But then, when you sit down, and you look at potentially $100 million of M&A, if every deal came through that you’re in conversations around, and we owned at the time 75% of the firm, the families owned 25. If all of that M&A were to have happened, we didn’t have $75 million as employees. We were facing dilution. And then, we went to the families and said, “Hey, we don’t mind being diluted, but we got to know that if all of these came through, you guys want to invest another 100 million into this business.” And that’s when they said, “Well, we can. All the deals that you’ve done so far have been accretive and great. But, our value add to you is not M&A. It’s not underwriting. It’s not how to take this firm from four billion to 12 billion or customers. Why don’t you contemplate bringing in an institutional partner to help you round first base and go to second and third?” And so, I called a good friend, a gentleman by the name of Jimmy Dunne, who’s legendary in the world of golf and business. He’s a vice chair at Piper Sandler. I explained the situation, and he said, “Well, this is going to sound self-serving, but I think you should hire me and my firm to run a process to find your partner.” Louis Diamond: Classic investment banker. Jason Fertitta: And we did, and he worked on a very small retainer, and a contingency fee, and they helped us get ready to show the firm to the institutional world, and that took nine to 12 months of hard work to get ready. They ran the process. I think we had 30 firms sign the NDA in the October of ’24 month that you mentioned. I think we had 20 offers. And during that year, we were getting to know a lot of the people that were going to be bidding on us, and we frankly were incredibly impressed by Lovell Minnick and their success that they have had in investing in the wealth space. We were always pulling for Lovell Minnick to compete and compete well, got to run an honest process and Lovell Minnick was not the high bid, but they were a very good and well-thought-out bid that was easy for us to understand on why they were where they were. And for us, it was about how can we create value from this point forward with the right partner to really grow the firm and scale it to where we wanted it to be? And so, that was the more important driving factor in our decision to sell to Lovell Minnick. Now, of course, we wanted to sell a minority piece, but the reality is, given the activity that we had in our M&A pipeline at the time, they were going to eventually get to majority anyway. And so, I may be skipping ahead a little bit in the podcast, but I know what some of the questions are going to contemplate, and our thought was, you’re in a better position to negotiate minority rights before the transaction than later. And so, we got all of that out on the table in our negotiations with our private equity partner, and then just got married immediately instead of had this weird period of where they ultimately were going to get to majority control through M&A, and then, you have this awkward moment where that shift happens after you’re already partners. Louis Diamond: Very interesting. Was it a hard decision to give up majority control over your baby? Jason Fertitta: Definitely a lot of self-reflecting on behalf of our team and everything, but I think where we came out with it, and I’m a big believer in this, is the people that really control the business are the people that control the relationships with the clients. Lovell Minnick knows that, and we’ve never had a decision in a year and a half that we don’t all arrive at the same place. We negotiate, we study, but they know that it’s not in their best interest to try and force the management team to do something that the management team is not in agreement on, because at the end of the day, we’re servicing all of these accounts. Look, we don’t see eye to eye exactly on everything, no partners do. But, we’re generally in the same zip code on everything, and we talk things through until we all arrive at the same place that this is in the best interest of the company. And I think a big part of why that works so well for us in Lovell Minnick, and I think this is very unique in the industry, it all goes back to we all own the same share class. We’re all in the foxhole together. We all sink or swim together. There’s no way one group can win and another group can lose. We all own the exact same security. Not only do we all own the exact same security, but our employees own it. The families that are in our cap table own it. And so, every decision comes from the standpoint of how do we make decisions to benefit that security? Louis Diamond: Makes sense. It’s still a tough decision, but you lay it out, make it seem like an easy decision with the conviction you have, I think the very pure motivation to make that leap. Aside from capital to fuel M&A, what are the other things that Lovell Minnick is doing for your business to help it? Jason Fertitta: Well, Lovell Minnick, and this is another thing that was impressive to us, they’re always the first institutional capital until what’s otherwise an entrepreneurial family-owned business. They’re not afraid of building the things that you have to build to get ready to scale. They’ve seen it in every investment they’ve made. And so, that was very refreshing to us, because frankly, we wanted the help. We wanted the expertise. We’re financial advisors at heart. Like a lot of private equity firms, LMP has this third party advisory relationships with industry people, and they’ve brought those people into our firm, several sit on the board of the firm today, and they’ve just been fantastic to work with. Some have more experience with FinTech, some have more experience with HR, some have more experience with actual investment platforms and product. Some have more experience in how to help clients optimize from a tax perspective. Some have family office experience. And so, we’ve really benefited from this group of people. And I would tell you that, since they came into our world, which is about 18 months ago, we have been building a lot of things that are about to be unveiled to not only our financial advisors, but our clients. And I think that the experience is just going to continue to get better for both of those segments. Louis Diamond: Very cool. Yeah, it seems like a great fit. And I meant to ask you before, because it’s such a cool, and I think still a fairly novel concept, but what was the thinking behind having nine families, their customers or clients come in, and buy some equity in the firm? Why’d you do that? And then what’s been the outcome of that? Jason Fertitta: It was more their idea than us after we launched the firm. And this goes back to my original comments about the clients want to do more business with you when you’re independent than when you’re inside the bank. And we have a lot of clients that are entrepreneurial. And so, I think when we explained to them the reasons why we were doing this, and the reasons why we’re so excited about it, they got excited about it too, some clients, most clients. And so, what they said was, “Yeah, we’re going to move our money to it, we’re excited about it, but if there’s an opportunity, we’d also like to own a piece of the firm.” And originally, when they said that, I didn’t know if they meant that they wanted us to give them, but they wrote a check. They all wrote checks. We set an arbitrary value of the firm in the first year after we launched it. And that wasn’t a whole lot of science behind the value. It’s basically what we would’ve been paid by walking across the street, and that was the original value. And they bought into the firm, and then, Lovell Minnick really thought it was a nice novel concept that they hadn’t seen before, and they’ve embraced it. When they invested, we brought another round of clients into the firm at that valuation. I think it’s really powerful, because what’s important for us in these families is that they’re all pillars of their respective communities and they’re spread across all over the country and Mexico. We have some incredibly good reputation, great business people in Mexico City, and Monterrey, and Los Angeles, and Midland, and Dallas, and Austin, and Houston. And we’re open to the concept of when we come into new markets, finding that pillar of the community, finding that family who people ask, “Well, what do you do with your money?” We want them to say, “Well, we own our own wealth management firm. He wants to have them call you and they’ll show you what we do with our money.” And that’s a powerful part of the organic growth and the flywheel. Louis Diamond: I absolutely love that. I oftentimes have clients, especially breakaway clients talk about how cool it would be to have a client or set of clients invest in their business. But, the reasons why, I love that as part of a very consistent, repeatable strategy of identifying key influencers essentially in different markets, and then having them come into the cap table. I would assume too, the dynamic of, “Oh, you should call Jason, he’s my financial advisor, he’s great,” to, “Hey, you should come in and meet my firm.” And I feel like clients are probably much more incentivized naturally to refer friends, family, et cetera. And just the power and dynamic of that referral is probably that much better than a referral from another happy customer who’s not an investor. Jason Fertitta: Exactly. When we’re looking at coming into a new city with a new partner, to the extent they have those clients in that community, and when they join us, we have a private equity partner that embraces that strategy and concept. When we’re talking to that Wall Street advisor, and they’re interested in our business model and our plan, I think that particular part of our business model is very differentiated and intriguing to them. Louis Diamond: Amazing. You mentioned in your last answer that you have, it sounds like you have some investors in Mexico, and that you’re serving families in Mexico and Latin America as well. Can you talk about adding that capability or the openness to go international? That’s clearly a big decision. It’s a different risk profile, different client needs. What was the thought process behind taking Americana, I guess, still in the Americas, but outside of America? Jason Fertitta: Yeah. Well, I think a lot of it is growing up in Texas, there’s a lot of wonderful families from Mexico whose kids and grandkids have moved here, and our children are going to school with their children, and they’re part of our community, and I think they’re a great part of our community. And so, I just started to notice how Wall Street treated this community as just one, right? And what we were able to do is cherry-pick a few families that we knew very well that are incredibly good reputations in the cities that they’re from, and their origins are from. And there’s a high desire on behalf of not only those families, but their friends to invest into the United States into our economy. And given that a lot of their children and grandchildren live in the US, these are families that have citizens and their family inside of the US and back home in Mexico. Most of these families, they’ve been going to our colleges. A lot of these families sit on the boards of Fortune 500 companies inside of the United States. These are families that are very easy to do due diligence on, and frankly, we have learned a lot from them. They’re very sophisticated families, and so, they’ve been amazing partners, and we use Bank of New York Pershing to custody a lot of these assets, and I think they’re increasingly becoming more interested in alternatives as part of their portfolios, because I think going back 15, 20 years ago, these families were mostly stocks, bonds, and cash. But, as they continue to build out their own family offices, they’re becoming more sophisticated and interested in alternatives, so it’s really been an exciting part of our firm. Louis Diamond: Did this expansion, does it scratch the itch to go into different Latin American countries in Europe and Asia, or is that not really part of the roadmap? Jason Fertitta: Well, it’s open to the concept. Like I said, the genesis of this for us was the fact that our children go to school with their children, and we got to know several families just through our social circles here in Texas. But, I don’t think that same phenomenon would exist in Europe, other Latin American countries per se, but we’re certainly open to it, and there’s a lot going on in Latin America. There’s a lot going on and a lot of potential, so we’re open to anything that increases the footprint in the right way for Americana. Louis Diamond: Great answer. Let’s go back a little bit to talk a little bit more about your M&A strategy. You merged with or acquired Boulevard Family Wealth, which was Matt Celenza’s firm. I think Matt was the first breakaway guest on our show, and an amazing advisor. You bought Goodpasture Gray in Nashville, and more recently you bought NRT Consulting. I think from my read, three different types of firms, different geographies. How do you think about the M&A strategy? Jason Fertitta: I feel like we’re building out a firm and departments in the firm, and each of those acquisitions goes into a different department of our firm. I think Matt Celenza and Boulevard are fantastic, and they’re really good at tax optimization strategies for families, and they’re really innovative there. That is a very hot topic with all of our clients. More and more families are getting smart about the fact that not only does it matter what your returns look like. What really matters is how much of those returns you get to keep. And so, Matt and his team are incredibly sophisticated and cutting edge on tax optimization, and that's proliferating throughout our firm right now, which is I think making us even better at what we can advise and provide to our clients. I would say that’s more in the family office service and tax planning part of our firm. Goodpasture Gray’s fantastic. WL who runs that firm, or did prior to the merger, I’ve known him for 30 years. He’s a longtime family friend. His clients are in Nashville, Santa Fe, and Texas. He and my father actually used to office together. And then, ironically, he hired Dynasty to represent him to find the right partner. That’s an example where full circle Dynasty brought him back and I hadn’t talked to him for decades, but we shared a bunch of fun stories about how I used to go up in college, and hang out with he and my dad in their office. That was a great full circle experience, but WL’s just a fantastic financial advisor that does what we’ve always done. He’s just a natural fit inside of our firm. And then NRT, Chris Ginsbach and his team, they’re unbelievable. They do bookkeeping services for families. They’re not signing tax returns, but the more sophisticated these families get, some of these families have 35, to 45, to 55 different LLCs that require bookkeeping services. He’s an accountant by training, so is everyone that works there. And I think that there’s a lot of cross-pollinating with our client base that wants bookkeeping services for their needs. With all of these different M&A events, it’s trying to meet or have the ability to meet your client at wherever their pain points are. And some of your client’s pain points are in bookkeeping and accounting. Some are in tax optimization, and some are just good old-fashioned financial advice and access. And all three of those acquisitions that you described are meeting that client in a different pain point, but they’re all pain points, and they’re all important. Louis Diamond: When you’re thinking about M&A, is it like you have, these are the three areas that we want to add to the firm? Next one, making it up, we want to add tax preparation. Are you then going out to find a firm that fits the bill, or is it more so just you’re selective with who you take on, and you look for a new capability, or just like an extreme alignment with how you’re already serving clients, and then, that’s what makes a compelling deal for you? Jason Fertitta: Yeah. Most of the time, we’re getting feedback from our clients on where they need help, and that is usually the spark that starts the fire on, okay, what if we added this? It’s really I would say more based on client feedback. We don’t have estate planning attorneys inside of Americana per se. We don’t have accountants that are signing people’s tax returns inside of Americana. We get a lot of interesting opportunities from accounting firms and estate planning firms. And so, I like how we have this great referral network in place with those industries. And so, I think we’d have to think long and hard about getting into those businesses per se. Louis Diamond: Makes sense. I feel like there’s probably a version of this story, your story, where you break away, you plot along, you’re happy to not have a boss anymore, clients are happy, maybe you get to like four or five billion in assets, and you call it a win, and just throw in coast mode, but clearly you didn’t do that. You went the opposite direction. What do you think drove the ambition to keep building towards something larger? What’s really sparking you and motivating you today maybe differently, or in a more defined way than it was when you first broke? Jason Fertitta: Yeah, I would say it’s not just me, it’s all the founders, and I think all the employees. I share this and not to sound corny about it. I think everyone here wants to try and build something that his or her children would say, “My parent was one of the founders and employees of Americana Partners.” It’s like, I think when you work at a bank, you definitely care about your brand that you’re building, but this is a whole next level of care about your brand. We really care about this brand, and we want it to outlast all of us. Louis Diamond: Love that. For a successful wirehouse advisor or team that’s sitting on a really nice practice maybe similar in size or in the same realm that you had back where you were in that world, and they’re thinking about maximizing their value, what advice would you offer? Do you think your story is an outlier, or do you think it’s doable by others if they follow certain advice or principles? Jason Fertitta: I would have a two-word answer. Call us. I’m kidding. I have a much longer answer. One of the things I really respected about a certain advisor, and if he’s listening to this, he’ll know exactly who he is, but I feel awkward saying his name. When I was contemplating going independent, I talked to an entrepreneur I really admire, and I called him, and I said, “Hey, we’re thinking about doing this.” And he said, “Look, I’m going to try and convince you to join our firm, and if you don’t end up doing that, it’s fine. There’ll be no hard feelings, because we ended up launching our own firm and I would never fault you for the decision if you wanted to do that with your team.” And we thought long and hard, we almost joined his firm. It was in a very different geography so we ended up launching our own firm. I would say that if you want to do it yourself, we would respond the same way. We would give you a high five, and wish you well, and say you’ve made a great decision, and we’d be pulling for you. If you want to spend more time with your clients, and less time in building the firm, we have the firm built, and it’s fantastic, and it wasn’t without blood, sweat and tears for seven years, and we can create a transaction that is economically the same or better as launching your own firm, and you have a voice, and you have a seat at the table, because we’re still small enough to where you can help shape the direction of this firm, and we want your input. The difference is that instead of spending a third of your time interacting with financial advisors the way I do, you could spend 90% of your time interacting with your clients, instead of a third, and be part of a firm that I think has great national prospects. But, I would never fault someone for doing it themselves, because that’s what we did, and that would be hypocritical. But, I really do think that this is a better path, even if you did it yourself, or if you did it with someone like us. I think you’re choosing two better options than what you currently have. Louis Diamond: I think it’s a great perspective, and I think it’s balanced and fair too. There’s plenty of people that I speak to where their passion is building. They want to be the next Americana, right? That’s what’s going to spark them and get them out of bed. They want to do M&A, they want to be the CEO, they want to really make their mark on the industry, and that’s fine. But, I do think there’s probably more advisors out there that would love to be part of something, and they’d love equity, and they’re passionate about different things than you were passionate about when you launched the firm. And the theory of a rising tide lifts all boats, it’s like, you can do this yourself or let’s just build something bigger and better together. And just getting comfortable with the theory of you’ll own a smaller piece of the pie, but the pie is much more valuable than owning 100% or 80% of something that’s less valuable, and is going to take you in a different direction personally. I always say we’re not in the business of making judgments for people. It’s up to them to define their goals, and then, we’ll help them execute on it. But, I really like that perspective. I agree, it’s not for everyone. What you did is extremely hard, it’s a risk, it’s a big swing. But, if you have the stomach for it, and you want to take the swing, to me there’s no better time to pursue that path than today. Jason Fertitta: I agree. And I could totally see a world over the next five years where some of these advisors that join us are bigger shareholders in this firm than me, and that would be great. Louis Diamond: Interesting. Jason Fertitta: I’m with you, not only do I agree with what you’re saying, to me, I’ve never thought about how much of this company do I own? I’ve thought about what is the percentage of the company that I own, and what is it worth? I could care less if it was 25%, 12.5%, 5%. What I care is, what is that slice worth? Louis Diamond: That’s a fun way to look at it. Jason, this has been really fun. This new series Build, Grow, and Transact, this is proof of concept, but we’re going to have to do a ton of these, because the richness of detail, and whenever we have breakaway guests, we’re talking to them in the beginning when they’re still finding their feet, everything’s new and fresh. They haven’t thought about or executed on M&A and taking on capital partners. But, I feel like this is the missing ingredient where it’s a playbook for how others can be better themselves, something to shoot towards. And I really appreciate your candor and transparency, and I’m very serious, we’ll have to do this again when you’re at 25 billion, and you have even more lessons, and I’m sure battle scars to share. Jason Fertitta: No doubt. I’m for sure open to doing that. And maybe in the meantime, I see the pictures behind your head there. I’d love to come visit you in Park City and hang out and ski, or play golf, or- Louis Diamond: You got it. Jason Fertitta: All right. Thanks for your time and thank you for having me. Louis Diamond: Thanks, Jason. Mindy Diamond: As a financial advisor, you hold yourself to the highest standards of integrity, honesty, and credibility. You are successful, because you take your professional responsibility seriously, and are dedicated to your clients, but are you living your best business life? Are your goals aligned with your firms, or could a better option exist? Should I Stay Or Should I Go is a book written with you in mind. It’s a self-guided journey that walks you through the key steps that we take with our advisor clients. This strategic thought process and roadmap to professional self-discovery is designed to help you ask the right questions, and think critically and objectively, whether you’re considering change or not. Learn how to get your copy at diamond-consultants.com/thebook. Build, Grow & Transact: Americana's $12B Path from Breakaway to Enterprise A conversation with Louis Diamond and Jason Fertitta, CEO & Partner at Americana Partners.      Louis Diamond: Welcome to the latest episode of our podcast series for financial advisors. Today’s episode is Build, Grow & Transact: Americana's $12B Path from Breakaway to Enterprise. It's a conversation with Jason Fertitta, CEO and partner of Americana Partners. I’m Louis Diamond, and this is the Diamond Podcast for financial advisors. Mindy Diamond: At Diamond Consultants, we help elite advisors identify the right environment for their businesses to thrive, whether that’s at a wirehouse, boutique, or independent firm. With nearly three decades of experience, we’ve guided thousands of advisors, and represented more than a quarter of a trillion dollars in assets transitioned. And each year, one in four advisors managing a billion dollars or more who change firms are our clients. Our process is education driven, and based on building relationships, starting as your strategic partner well before you’re even thinking of a move. To schedule a confidential conversation, call us at 908-879-1002. Wondering why advisors change firms and where they’re headed? Are transition deals going up or down? Those very questions and more inspired us to create our annual advisor transition report. It’s the award-winning data-driven resource designed for advisors that connects the dots between the motivations around movement, and the firm’s appetite for top talent. Arm yourself with the knowledge you need to make smart decisions. Download your copy at diamond-consultants.com/transitionreport. Louis Diamond: Independence is often viewed as the finish line. Break away, gain control, own the business, and enjoy the economics that come with it. But, for some advisors, going independent is just the beginning. That’s the idea behind this new series called Build, Grow, and Transact, featuring advisors who saw independence not as a destination, but as the first chapter of a business building story. And there will be some familiar names along the way, including our first guest who was on our show back in 2020, talking about what was at the time, one of the industry’s breakaway moves. That’s Jason Fertitta, CEO and foun

In most scenarios, passing the Series 65 exam is the prerequisite to become licensed as an Investment Advisor Representative.However, there are scenarios where the 66, a CFP, or maybe even a 7 are still applicable.It's important to understand how your practice profile, both today and going forward, impacts the licenses you may need in the RIA model.In this episode (#151) of the Transition To RIA question & answer series, I break down the licensing scenarios to be aware of.Come take a listen!P.S. Prefer video? You can find this entire series in video format on Youtube. Search for the TRANSITION TO RIA channel.Show notes: https://TransitionToRIA.com/what-licenses-do-i-need-for-the-ria-model/About Host: Brad Wales is the founder of Transition To RIA, where he helps financial advisors between $50M and $1B understand everything there is to know about WHY and HOW to transition their practice to the Registered Investment Advisor (RIA) model. Brad has 20+ years of industry experience, including direct RIA related roles in Compliance, Finance and Business Development. He has an MBA and has held the 4, 7, 24, 63 & 65 licenses. The Transition To RIA website (TransitionToRIA.com) has a large catalog of free videos, articles, whitepapers, as well as other resources to help advisors understand the RIA model and how it would apply to their unique circumstances.

When Julia answers an ad offering cash to spend the night in one of England's most haunted hotels, she expects cheap scares and staged ghost stories. Instead, she finds herself trapped inside a place where reflections linger too long and corridors shift in impossible ways.A gothic supernatural horror story filled with mirrors, whispers, and creeping dread.Originally from the UK and living in the USA for nearly 20 years, Ria is an author and artist with a background in journalism and communication. Blending creativity with storytelling, Ria published their debut book, Elara's Tea Leaves, a whimsical journey through magic and meaning. Their next book, a richly illustrated tale about gnomes, is set for release in 2026. With a love for folklore, nature, and visual storytelling, Ria combines words and art to craft immersive experiences. Their work reflects a lifelong passion for narrative in all forms, shaped by both European roots and American life.The Kaidankai Podcast features original short fiction exploring horror, fantasy, science fiction, and the strange.New episodes every Wednesday.Subscribe on Spreaker, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.Read the stories at kaidankaistories.comFollow the show:InstagramFacebookBlueskyHave a story you'd like us to read? Send submissions to kaidankai100ghoststories@gmail.com.

What does it take to build a successful advisory firm using a flat-fee model instead of charging based on assets under management? And how can advisors scale effectively while still delivering highly personalized retirement income planning and maintaining strong client relationships?  Bradley Clark is the founder of Clark Asset Management, a remote RIA overseeing $1.6 billion in assets under management for 340 client households. In this episode, Bradley shares how he has grown his firm by focusing on flat fees for clients nearing and in retirement, and why he believes achieving "minimum efficient scale" is especially important for firms using this model. Listen in to hear how Bradley tracks operational metrics to measure growth and efficiency, how he has thoughtfully increased fees over time while maintaining strong client retention, and how lessons from his earlier career experiences helped shape the way he runs and grows his advisory business today.  For show notes and more visit: https://www.kitces.com/495    

Carolyn Armitage spent decades building a career in wealth management while privately carrying the emotional effects of childhood trauma. For years, she compartmentalized those experiences, believing she could simply push through them while focusing on work, achievement and daily life. After an emotional breaking point following her mother's funeral, Carolyn began exploring deeper forms of healing, including somatic therapy and psilocybin, a natural psychedelic compound found in over 200 species of mushrooms. That process helped her better understand how unresolved trauma had shaped her nervous system, relationships and sense of self over the course of her life. In this episode of The Healthy Advisor, host Diana Britton speaks with Carolyn Armitage, founder and CEO of Wealth Management Consulting and RIA Circle, about her experience with trauma recovery, emotional healing, and psychedelic-assisted therapy. Her experience led her to produce a recent documentary, “Journeys,” a two-hour film addressing the ethics behind the use of psilocybin to navigate trauma. She discusses: How childhood trauma shaped Carolyn’s nervous system, relationships and emotional responses for years Why somatic therapy helped her understand the physical effects of unresolved childhood trauma What she experienced during her guided psilocybin journey and emotional healing process How forgiveness, emotional safety and self-worth became possible after years of internal struggle The creation of the documentary “Journeys” and her mission to increase awareness around psychedelic-assisted healing Resources: Listen to The Healthy Advisor on Wealth Management Subscribe and listen to The Healthy Advisor on Apple Podcasts Subscribe and listen to The Healthy Advisor on Spotify Website: Journeys' Film  Connect With Carolyn Armitage: LinkedIn: Carolyn Armitage LinkedIn: Wealth Management Consulting LinkedIn: RIA Circle Website: Wealth Management Consulting Website: RIA Circle Email: carolyn@wealthmanagementconsulting.com  Connect with Wealth Management: Wealth Management LinkedIn: Diana Britton diana.britton@informa.com LinkedIn: Informa LinkedIn: Wealth Management About Our Guest: Carolyn Armitage is a longtime leader in the wealth management industry with experience spanning advisory work, executive leadership, consulting, and investment banking. Having built and led multiple wealth management firms throughout her career, she brings a broad perspective shaped by her work as an advisor, operator, and consultant. Her background includes building high-performing teams, guiding firm growth, and helping organizations create long-term value through strategic leadership and integration. After beginning her career as a financial advisor, Carolyn developed a strong understanding of the challenges advisors face firsthand. Over the years, she expanded her expertise through leadership roles across both large and boutique firms, helping organizations improve operational structure, advisor engagement, and enterprise value. Her experience has made her a trusted consultant to RIA leaders and wealth management executives navigating growth, succession, compensation design, and strategic planning decisions. Carolyn has held leadership positions with several major firms and organizations, including HD Vest, now Avantax, ING Advisors Network, now part of Voya and Cetera Group, and Thrivent Advisor Network. She also led the Large Enterprise Business Management Consulting Team at LPL Financial. Prior to leading Thrivent's independent RIA platform, TAN, Carolyn worked with ECHELON Partners, where she provided investment banking and consulting services to some of the industry's largest and most established firms. Her experience across advisory services, consulting, investment banking, and firm leadership gives her a deep understanding of the wealth management value chain and the complex business, family, and legacy decisions firm leaders often face.

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They specialize in helping adults 50 and older build portfolios designed to generate income that can keep pace with inflation over time." } } ] } ] } The Nike Cautionary Tale: What Happens When Leadership Loses Touch With Its Customers The Tom Dupree Show | Dupree Financial Group | dupreefinancial.com | 859-233-0400 Nike spent decades building one of the most recognized brands on the planet — the Swoosh, the Air Jordan, high-heat basketball shoes that consumers lined up for, and a presence in every major sporting goods retailer in the world. Then, in 2020, the company handed its future to a CEO who believed physical retail was a dying model, and what followed became a business school study in how quickly a great company can lose its way. In this episode of The Tom Dupree Show, host Tom Dupree and analyst Michael Dawahare walk through the full arc of Nike’s rise and decline — from its origins in a track coach’s garage to a stock that traded at $180 and has since fallen to around $44. They examine the strategic decisions that caused the damage, the board failures that let it compound, and the hard-won lesson that consumer loyalty, once transferred to a competitor, is almost impossible to reclaim. And for anyone managing retirement assets, the parallels are direct: proven strategies should not be abandoned for untested ones, fundamentals matter more than narratives, and the cost of a foundational error can take years to undo. You cannot put your own lenses on the lenses of your customer — you have to ask how they see the world, not how you see it. — Tom Dupree How Nike Built the Brand — and What It Was Actually Built On Nike was founded on performance athletics. Phil Knight, a runner at the University of Oregon, partnered with legendary track coach Bill Bowerman — who famously experimented with a waffle iron to create better running soles — and built a company that stood for technical innovation and athletic credibility. The brand’s cultural ascent accelerated in 1984 with the signing of Michael Jordan, and from there, Nike became what everyone knows: the dominant force in athletic footwear and apparel, consistently ranked among the world’s most recognized brands. At its peak, Nike operated across multiple business lines — high-heat basketball, lifestyle and streetwear, performance running, and endorsement deals with some of the most iconic athletes in the world. Its Jordan Brand alone eventually grew to represent 25–30% of total business. But that success carried a hidden fragility: the Jordan Brand was built on a generational talent, and there was no clear plan for what would carry that brand forward once Jordan’s cultural relevance inevitably faded with younger consumers. The 2020 CEO Transition and the Fatal Pivot When Nike’s board appointed John Donahoe as CEO in 2020, it elevated someone who had served on the board since 2014 and who had an exceptional track record — at eBay and ServiceNow. But his entire professional background was in direct-to-consumer digital commerce, and he arrived at Nike with a conviction that physical retail distribution was a slowly melting ice cube. His plan: reduce Nike’s dependence on wholesale partners — Foot Locker, Dick’s Sporting Goods, specialty running retailers — and shift the business toward a pure direct-to-consumer model. Margins would improve by eliminating the distribution layer. And the consumer, Donahoe believed, would simply find Nike on their phone rather than in a store. The pandemic made it look like a genius. Physical retail was disrupted, Nike’s direct channels surged, the stock reached all-time highs around $180, and the board was enthusiastic. Beneath the surface, the strategy was already creating irreversible damage. The Shelf Space Problem — and the Competitors Who Said Thank You When Nike told its wholesale partners they would be receiving significantly less product going forward, those partners did not fight back. They simply filled the space with someone else. HOKA — already a credible running brand — accelerated its growth dramatically. On Cloud, a Swiss performance running brand, began one of the most remarkable growth runs in the industry, expanding into running, tennis, golf, and multiple other categories simultaneously. New Balance, ASICS, and Brooks also claimed their share of the newly available retail real estate. The consumer who walked into a Foot Locker or Dick’s and encountered a wall of Nike was now encountering a much more competitive set of choices. They tried the alternatives. Many of them preferred what they found. And once a runner builds loyalty to a particular shoe platform — especially in a category where consumers replace their shoes every 90 days — that loyalty is remarkably durable. Nike also lost something less tangible but equally important: the feedback loop. Specialty running retailers were the ground-level intelligence network that told Nike week by week what runners wanted, what was working, and where the product needed to improve. When Nike walked away from that channel, it walked away from its early warning system. The Board Failure — and the Groupthink That Let It Happen One of the most striking aspects of the Nike story is not that one CEO had a flawed conviction — that happens — but that an entire board of accomplished executives approved and sustained a strategy that was, in hindsight, obviously misaligned with how Nike’s business actually worked. By some accounts, Tim Cook of Apple was on that board during part of this period. It is difficult to imagine Cook making an analogous argument that Apple did not need its retail stores. The dynamic Tom and Michael describe is familiar to anyone who studies large organizations: board members are generally reluctant to challenge a CEO too forcefully, because the social and professional cost of being the dissenter is real. The result is groupthink — a board that validates a strategy long past the point where the data should have prompted hard questions. By late 2022 and into 2023, the numbers made it undeniable. Nike attempted to reverse course, reaching back out to wholesale partners and offering them premium product. The response was polite — and firm. Retailers were glad to take the high-demand items that consumers queued for. The rest of Nike’s moderate catalog? They had already replaced it, and they were satisfied with what they had. Where Nike Stands Today The board replaced Donahoe with Elliott Hill in September 2024. Hill’s story is genuinely different from his predecessor’s: he started in a Nike stockroom and built his entire career inside the company, earning credibility at every level. He speaks clearly and credibly about what went wrong and what needs to happen. And nearly two years into his tenure, Nike’s stock remains near $44 — roughly 75% below its peak —, and the company has not yet found its footing. In running — the category that gave Nike its identity — the brand no longer consistently appears in the top 10 for preferred shoes among dedicated runners. In China, sales are down 20–30% in recent quarters. On Cloud continues to grow at roughly 50% per quarter. The chart, as Tom notes throughout this episode, always tells the story: if a real recovery is underway, you will see it in the price action. The current chart does not yet show that. What This Means for Your Retirement Portfolio Tom closes this episode with a point that connects the Nike story directly to retirement investing: when someone tells you that a proven model is outdated — that index funds are so last century, or that some new product captures market upside without any downside — the right questions are always the same. What is the process? Has it been tested across different market conditions? And who benefits when you believe in it? The investor who abandons a sound income strategy during a period of volatility, convinced by a compelling narrative, is making the same error Donahoe made. The fundamentals that built something durable do not become wrong because someone new arrived with a different set of lenses. Key Takeaways Know what your business — or portfolio — is actually built on. The moment Nike shifted focus from technical performance products, competitors filled the gap. Investors face the same risk when strategies drift from the principles that made them work. Never surrender your shelf space. Giving up distribution is almost impossible to reverse. The same principle applies when investors abandon a proven income strategy during volatility — re-entry is rarely seamless. Leadership bias is one of the most expensive mistakes in business. Donahoe was an outstanding digital executive who ran a physical consumer company through a digital lens. Bias in a CEO or a portfolio manager costs real money. Boards exist to prevent catastrophic decisions. Most don’t. Nike’s board approved a strategy that effectively fired its wholesale customer base. Institutional oversight is only as good as the willingness to ask uncomfortable questions. Consumer loyalty, once transferred, is remarkably sticky. Runners who found HOKA or On Cloud did not come back. When you give a customer a reason to try something else, and they love it, you may have lost them permanently. Recovery from a foundational strategic error takes far longer than the error itself. The damage from a few years of bad decisions can take a decade to undo — in business and in retirement portfolios. Proven strategies deserve skepticism about replacement, not abandonment. When a new model sounds compelling, the questions are always: what’s the process, has it been tested, and who benefits from your belief in it? Frequently Asked Questions What caused Nike’s stock to fall from $180 to around $44? Nike’s decline was driven primarily by a strategic pivot under CEO John Donahoe, who took over in 2020 and aggressively reduced the company’s reliance on wholesale partners in favor of a direct-to-consumer digital model. This freed up shelf space for competitors like HOKA and On Cloud, whose products consumers tried, preferred, and stayed with. Nike also lost focus on technical product innovation — the foundation of the brand — and the combination proved very difficult to reverse. What leadership lessons can retirement investors take from Nike’s decline? The Nike story illustrates several principles that apply directly to managing retirement assets: proven strategies should not be abandoned in favor of untested new models; losing touch with core fundamentals creates compounding damage; and when someone tells you the old approach is outdated, the right question is always whether the new approach has been tested and who benefits from your belief in it. Why did Nike’s wholesale withdrawal strategy fail? Nike believed consumers would migrate online and that eliminating wholesale intermediaries would improve margins. What actually happened was that vacated shelf space went to competitors — HOKA, On Cloud, New Balance, ASICS, and Brooks — who earned consumer loyalty through it. Once runners found a shoe they preferred, they did not switch back. Nike also lost the critical feedback loop that specialty running retailers provided. Who is Elliott Hill and can he turn Nike around? Elliott Hill replaced John Donahoe as Nike CEO in September 2024. Unlike his predecessor, Hill spent his entire career at Nike, starting at the lowest rungs and earning his way up. He is widely regarded as credible and clear-eyed about the challenges. However, nearly two years into his tenure, Nike has not yet regained meaningful traction — illustrating how much harder recovery is than the original damage. What is Dupree Financial Group’s investment approach for retirement income? Dupree Financial Group is a fee-only, fiduciary SEC-registered RIA based in Lexington, Kentucky. The firm builds retirement income strategies around dividend-paying, income-generating separately managed accounts — with no products sold, no commissions, and no conflicts of interest. They specialize in helping adults 50 and older build portfolios designed to generate income that can keep pace with inflation over time. Schedule a Complimentary Portfolio Review If you’re not sure whether your portfolio is built on the same principles Nike abandoned — proven strategy, staying close to what works, and never losing sight of the fundamentals — we’ll take a look. No charge. No pressure. Just an honest conversation about what you own and whether it’s working for you. Call: 859-233-0400  |  Visit: dupreefinancial.com Dupree Financial Group is a Registered Investment Adviser (RIA) registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Registration does not imply a certain level of skill or training. The information presented on this podcast is for educational purposes only and should not be construed as personalized investment advice. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Investing involves risk, including the potential loss of principal. Please consult a qualified financial professional before making investment decisions. The post Nike’s Fall: Leadership Lessons for Retirement Investors appeared first on Dupree Financial.

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Michael Smith—Managing Partner and Founder, Emerald Advisors Michael Smith shares how a client-first philosophy, niche specialization, and independence helped Emerald Advisors grow from $385mm to more than $1B in assets. In Summary What happens when an advisor builds a business around client service rather than operational efficiency? Jason Diamond speaks with Michael Smith, Founder and Managing Partner of Emerald Advisors, about the path from a successful Merrill practice to an independent RIA that has grown from approximately $385mm to more than $1B in assets. Along the way, Michael shares the story of being told he was “overservicing” clients, why that moment became a catalyst for independence, and how a highly specialized service model fueled the firm's growth. Drawing on lessons from a 24-year Navy career, Michael offers a perspective on leadership, specialization, client care, and what it takes to build a durable business in today's wealth management landscape. The Storyline Growth is often viewed as the result of marketing, referrals, acquisitions, or scale. Michael Smith sees it differently. After building a successful practice at Merrill, Michael found himself at odds with the constraints of the traditional wirehouse model. What ultimately stood out wasn't compensation, technology, or platform capabilities. It was a philosophical difference around client service. When he was told he was spending too much time helping clients navigate tax planning, equity compensation, and other financial decisions outside the traditional scope of investment management, he began to question whether the model aligned with the way he wanted to serve families. That realization eventually led him to launch Emerald Advisors in late 2019. The firm started with roughly 85 clients and approximately $385mm in assets. Today, Emerald serves more than 225 families and oversees more than $1B in assets. Throughout the conversation, Michael reflects on the lessons learned from building an independent firm, developing a niche around concentrated stock positions and executive compensation, navigating custodial and technology decisions, and creating a culture rooted in accountability and service. Underlying it all is a simple belief: when firms become highly intentional about who they serve and how they serve them, growth often becomes the outcome rather than the objective. Topics Covered Merrill breakaways and independence Client service as a growth driver Building an RIA RIA growth and scalability Organic growth strategies Concentrated stock positions and equity compensation planning Ideal client personas and niche specialization Schwab and Fidelity custody relationships Advisor succession and enterprise value Navy leadership principles in wealth management The rise of mega RIAs Advisor technology and infrastructure > Download a transcript of this episode… Listen and Learn Highlights for Advisors Why did being accused of “overservicing” clients become a turning point? (08:15)Michael explains how a conversation with management revealed a deeper misalignment between his client-service philosophy and the wirehouse model. What does client service look like beyond portfolio management? (11:30)The discussion explores how tax planning, equity compensation guidance, and proactive coordination can deepen client relationships. Why can specialization accelerate growth? (15:45)Michael shares why serving a defined niche often creates stronger referrals, greater expertise, and clearer positioning. How has the RIA landscape evolved since 2019? (20:30)Michael reflects on the rise of mega RIAs, changing technology capabilities, and why he believes independent firms still have significant advantages. What role do custodians really play in an independent business? (23:15)Michael discusses his experience working with Schwab and Fidelity and why he views custodians as strategic partners rather than competitors. Is the wirehouse model still the right fit for some advisors? (26:45)The conversation challenges the assumption that independence is the best path for everyone and explores the realities of running a business. Does reaching $1 billion in assets actually change anything? (32:45)Michael offers a practical perspective on growth, success, and why asset milestones can be misleading. What can advisors learn from the “steamboat” philosophy? (37:15)Drawing on his Navy experience, Michael shares a leadership framework that continues to shape how he approaches business building and decision-making. Key Takeaways Exceptional client service can become a meaningful competitive advantage when it extends beyond investment management. Independence gave Michael the flexibility to build a service model that aligned with his philosophy rather than adapting his philosophy to fit the platform. Developing a niche around executive compensation and concentrated stock positions helped accelerate Emerald's growth. The ability to make technology, custodial, and operational decisions quickly remains a significant advantage for independent firms. Not every advisor should be independent. Running a business requires a different set of skills and responsibilities than serving clients alone. Growth milestones are useful, but they do not define success. Michael believes success existed long before Emerald reached $1 billion in assets. High-performing teams with a clear client focus often find that growth becomes a natural byproduct of execution. https://youtu.be/RjzsMcC2DnY Quotable Moments “I literally had to go back and Google the word overservicing.” “Servicing the client is the most important thing that we can do today.” “If you serve a niche and you're very good at that niche, that word gets around.” “Growth becomes the outcome.” FAQs Can an advisor really “over-service” clients? The discussion explores the tension between efficiency and depth of service. While some business models prioritize scale and consistency, others are built around solving a broader range of client problems. The right answer often depends on the advisor's philosophy and business model. Does specialization still matter in a relationship business? Michael argues that developing expertise in a specific area can accelerate growth by making referrals easier and helping advisors become known for solving a particular set of problems. What actually changes when an advisor becomes independent? Beyond economics, independence often creates more flexibility around client service, technology, processes, and business decisions. At the same time, advisors assume responsibility for running the business itself. Is full independence the right path for every advisor? No. Michael acknowledges that many advisors benefit from the structure, support, and resources available within traditional firms. Independence offers flexibility, but it also introduces complexity and responsibility. How should advisors think about the $1 billion milestone? Michael views asset milestones as useful benchmarks but not measures of success. In his view, business quality, client outcomes, and sustainability matter more than any specific asset number. What role does an ideal client persona play in growth? Rather than trying to serve everyone, Emerald built its business around a clearly defined client profile. Michael believes that focus improves service, creates operational consistency, and supports organic growth. How can advisors balance growth with client service? One of the central themes of the episode is that growth and service are not necessarily competing objectives. In some cases, a differentiated service model becomes the reason a business grows. The discussion explores the tension between efficiency and depth of service. While some business models prioritize scale and consistency, others are built around solving a broader range of client problems. The right answer often depends on the advisor's philosophy and business model. Michael argues that developing expertise in a specific area can accelerate growth by making referrals easier and helping advisors become known for solving a particular set of problems. Beyond economics, independence often creates more flexibility around client service, technology, processes, and business decisions. At the same time, advisors assume responsibility for running the business itself. No. Michael acknowledges that many advisors benefit from the structure, support, and resources available within traditional firms. Independence offers flexibility, but it also introduces complexity and responsibility. Michael views asset milestones as useful benchmarks but not measures of success. In his view, business quality, client outcomes, and sustainability matter more than any specific asset number. Rather than trying to serve everyone, Emerald built its business around a clearly defined client profile. Michael believes that focus improves service, creates operational consistency, and supports organic growth. One of the central themes of the episode is that growth and service are not necessarily competing objectives. In some cases, a differentiated service model becomes the reason a business grows. Related Resources The Transitioning Advisor's Lament: Things I Wish I Knew Before Freedom vs. Familiarity: Is it Worth Disrupting Comfort for Something That Might Be Better? IBD vs. RIA Revisited: Two Independent Pathways for Advisors to Consider Advisor Transition Report 2026 Guest Bio Michael Smith, CPWA® is the Founder and Managing Partner of Emerald Advisors, an independent wealth management firm overseeing more than $1 billion in assets for affluent families, executives, and business owners with complex planning needs. Mike entered the wealth management industry in 2005 after a distinguished 24-year career in the United States Navy, where he served both as an enlisted sailor in the Submarine Force and later as a Limited Duty Officer aboard USS Abraham Lincoln and on major staffs around the world. He earned a Bachelor of Science in Management and an MBA with dual emphases in Finance & Accounting and International Business. Throughout his career, Mike has been known for his commitment to comprehensive planning, helping clients navigate complex issues involving concentrated stock positions, executive compensation, tax strategy, estate planning, philanthropy, and multi-generational wealth transfer. His client-first approach and passion for education have helped Emerald Advisors grow from a startup firm in 2019 to a nationally recognized RIA serving more than 225 families. Outside of the office, Mike is an avid ultrarunner, golfer, lifelong learner, and dedicated advocate for children’s health initiatives. He is a current member of the Legacy Council at Seattle Children’s Hospital and has served in leadership and board roles supporting the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, the Barbara Davis Center for Diabetes, the ALS Association, and the Alyssa Burnett Adult Life Center. He is also the proud father of Kat Smith. NOTE: The views and opinions expressed by the guests on this podcast are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Diamond Consultants. Neither Diamond Consultants nor the guests on this podcast are compensated in any way for their participation. View the transcript of this episode… From “Overservicing” Clients to Building a $1B RIA: A Merrill Breakaway Story A conversation with Jason Diamond and Michael Smith, Managing Partner and Founder of Emerald Advisors.      Jason Diamond: Welcome to the latest episode of our podcast series for financial advisors. Today’s episode is From “Overservicing” Clients to Building a $1B RIA: A Merrill Breakaway Story. It’s a conversation with Michael Smith, managing partner and founder of Emerald Advisors. I’m Jason Diamond and this is the Diamond Podcast for financial advisors. Mindy Diamond: At Diamond Consultants, we help elite advisors identify the right environment for their businesses to thrive whether that’s at a wirehouse, boutique or independent firm. With nearly three decades of experience, we’ve guided thousands of advisors and represented more than a quarter of a trillion dollars in assets transitioned and, each year, one in four advisors managing a billion dollars or more who change firms are our clients. Our process is education driven and based on building relationships starting as your strategic partner well before you’re even thinking of a move. To schedule a confidential conversation, call us at (908) 879-1002. Wondering why advisors change firms and where they’re headed? Are transition deals going up or down? Those very questions and more inspired us to create our annual advisor transition report. It’s the award-winning, data-driven resource designed for advisors that connects the dots between the motivations around movement and the firm’s appetite for top talent. Arm yourself with the knowledge you need to make smart decisions. Download your copy at diamond-consultants.com/transitionreport. Jason Diamond: Growth is often viewed as the result of better marketing, stronger referrals, a larger team and even acquisition and that’s all true yet growth can be the byproduct of something else entirely. For example, Michael Smith built a successful practice at Merrill then, one day, he was told he was spending too much time with his clients, or his management put it over-servicing clients. For Michael, that wasn’t a warning sign about his approach, it was a signal that he might have outgrown the firm and the model. Today, Michael is the founder and managing partner of Emerald Advisors, the independent RIA he launched in late 2019 with roughly 385 million in assets and 85 client relationships. Less than seven years later, the firm has grown to more than a billion in assets while remaining deeply focused on a highly-specialized client base and an unusually hands-on service model. What makes this story particularly interesting isn’t just the growth, it’s the thinking behind it. Michael’s perspective was shaped long before he entered wealth management. After serving more than two decades in the Navy, he brought a leadership philosophy centered on accountability, discipline and what he calls steamboat people, those who keep moving forward regardless of conditions, that mindset continues to influence how he builds his team, serves clients and evaluates opportunities. In this episode, we discuss the decision to leave Merrill, the realities of launching a fully independent RIA, why specialization can accelerate growth, the evolving role of custodians and technology and why he believes exceptional client service remains one of the industry’s most durable competitive advantages. Because Michael’s experience suggests that growth isn’t always the result of finding more opportunities, sometimes it’s the result of creating the freedom to execute the vision you already had so let’s jump in. Michael, thank you so much for joining us today. For starters, can you walk us through your background and what brought you to the world of wealth management? Michael Smith: Jason, thank you so much for the opportunity to be here today, I do listen to the podcast a lot especially before I left Mother Merrill. But my background and how I got into financial services is really distinct because I was on the board of JDRF back in the day and the national sponsor for JDRF was UBS PaineWebber and they’re like, “Mike, why don’t you be a financial advisor?” And my master’s degree was actually a finance and accounting in portfolio management because I’ve managed my own portfolio for years and years and so, when I couldn’t get a job, I just fell into it because I couldn’t get a job and I needed a job. That was 21 years ago, Memorial Day so that’s how I got into this industry. Jason Diamond: It’s a unique background, it’s super interesting and I want to talk more about it. You mentioned Mother Merrill, we’ll certainly get there. Before we do, give us a little bit of context on the current business you operate, Emerald Advisors, any context you can share on size, number of staff, types of clients you serve would be great. Michael Smith: Sure. So, we launched Emerald in 2019, November 2019 with about 85 clients and you always talk about this on the podcast how scared it is to launch and go independent. And I would say we took over about 95% of our clients that we wanted to bring over and today we’re at about 230 clients, I think we have some onboarding right now, we have just over a billion of assets. So, we launched with the 85 clients and around 350, 385 million, now we’re over a billion. Jason Diamond: Good for you. Michael Smith: Thank you. And I launched with four employees and we’re now at 11. And I would give a shout-out to one of my key employees because, when I launched, I actually hired somebody that had no experience with us and that was really a good thing because that allowed that person to really focus on operations and back office stuff while my business partner Emily and I were able to focus on bringing on the clients and alleviating any issues that they may have or thought. Jason Diamond: So, meaning you hired somebody basically immediately upon launch to help you with the transition and with this next chapter? Michael Smith: Correct. I hired them before but they started the day we launched. Jason Diamond: Brilliant, I love it. Oh, let’s definitely talk more about that because I think that’s a great strategy for … You’re right, you said it in a joking manner now because you’re seven years past but it’s a very real fear that advisors have and I think it’s worth talking more about. I want to mention too you have, obviously, built this business and grown this business dramatically. I don’t want to make this episode about the pandemic but you moved the business at a, certainly, a unique time. Did it impact your growth at all? Did you feel like you hit a brick wall? Just curious about your thoughts. Michael Smith: No, Jason, that’s a great observation. I would venture to say that the pandemic was actually a good thing for us. Jason Diamond: Interesting. Michael Smith: And I say that because, all of a sudden, you could hit pause because everyone was relearning how to do business, how do we do client reviews, how do we communicate with clients in a environment. So, I think the pandemic allowed us to just really reset our expectations visiting with clients because I used to fly a lot because I have clients in 38 different states so this has actually been, not just good for me, but good for the industry because I think it’s reset our expectations that we don’t have to be every day with a client facing. Jason Diamond: I agree with that largely and it’s true of our business too, by the way, it’s certainly reshaped the way people expect to be communicated with. I think Zoom has become much more mainstream, phone calls and we’ve heard from many other advisors who say something similar. I was just curious because you moved so close to or if there was an impact but I get, honestly, I think you’re right, it allowed you to have this nice natural inflection point and almost like flipping a switch of a clean slate. Michael Smith: It allowed us to learn the processes too. So, we launched in November 1st, by March we were in lockdown and so it gave us the opportunity to take several months of just learning the processes of how to be an RIA, it was pretty good. Jason Diamond: Absolutely. So, one of the things you mentioned in that was the way in which you serve clients and I’d read something funny and I think it was around the time of your move. You were talking about that, Merrill, you had a manager who spoke about that you would overserve your clients, you serve clients too much, tell me about that. Michael Smith: That was such an interesting topic because I got called down to the ops officer’s office and they’re like, “Ugh, Mike.” And it brought my admin down with me and they’re like, “Mike, these reports that you’re taking care of your clients too much,” and I’m like, “What do you mean?” “Well, you’re overservicing them.” Jason, I literally had to go back and Google the word overservicing because I was like, “How do you overservice the client? I’m not making their bed.” It was just so funny to me that I got counsel for overservicing clients when we’re in a client-facing job and I think that was part of the catalyst. Jason Diamond: Tell me more about what they meant, you think. Michael Smith: Hindsight, I think they … I like to take care of people which means I’m very intuitive towards taxes, I understand how the tax code works, I understand how everything impacts their bottom line. So, when we’re doing deferred comp enrollments or 401(k) enrollments or I’m a big believer in Roth 401(k)s and backdoor Roths and I’ve been doing them for years, I think what Mother Merrill wanted at that time was us not to do that. And, again, nothing against Merrill, I get it but this is how they wanted us to act and I wasn’t in that mold, I was taking care of clients to a much deeper depth is how I would say it. Jason Diamond: And I think that speaks to you outgrew the model not necessarily the firm. I think Merrill does a lot of things really well, you would agree with that, I think given that you built 85 clients and 350 million in assets is nothing to sneeze at. But the model that it seems like you value client service and an integrated client service experience of that and the wirehouse model oftentimes doesn’t put a premium on that. Tell me about your ethos or your thoughts around client service today and what being independent enables you to do. Michael Smith: So, that’s an interesting observation because one of my clients actually just mentioned to me that the reason we’re growing so much is because of our service model and the fact that we deliver a tremendous amount of value over just portfolio management. I said my managers is in portfolio management, I don’t do that any longer, I have a staff that handles that for me but it’s really the servicing of the clients because they don’t know what we know and I think servicing the client is the most important thing that we can do today. Jason Diamond: Give me some examples of what you mean by servicing the client in a more holistic way. I agree with you, by the way, portfolio management, table stakes, financial planning, table stakes, tell me more about what you mean. Michael Smith: By that I mean we do a quarterly review on tax. So, a lot of people don’t understand how taxes work and how estimated taxes work. So, estimated taxes are January 1st to March 31st, January 1st to May 31st, January 1st to August 31st, that’s how you do your estimated tax payments, you figure out what that is. And for compensated employees where they have RSUs that come in at different times of the year or different grants or exercise their options at a different time, that can affect their estimated tax liability and I’m not big on giving Uncle Sam any more money than they have to have until they need it. And then everyone doesn’t understand how the penalties and interest works on the IRS. And I’m big on the tax payments because that’s where we can add a lot of value for not a lot of time and we integrate it with our portfolio so we know what we’re doing with our gains. And I happen to reside in Washington State which has a long-term capital gains tax rate once you surpass about 270,000 of long-term capital gains. So, it’s super important for us to be aware of this and that’s how we service them. We also help them with their rebalancing of their 401(k)s, things that wirehouses cannot supposed to do, we are not supposed to be helping them with some of their aspects of life. Jason Diamond: Yup. That’s what I was alluding to earlier, it’s limitations on the model, not because they’re bad models, it’s just a different way, a different ethos around client service. You mentioned RSUs and corporate employees, I know that’s a niche you have is around concentrated stock positions and equity comp plans. I guess let me ask you two different questions around this. First of all, why that niche? Interested. And then, second of all, do you think a team needs to have a specialization to be competitive these days or do you think it’s okay just to be like, “My job is to be the best advisor and I want to service assets wherever those assets may come from?” Michael Smith: Another great observation. I’m going to address the niche first and foremost. I think, and I talked to R.J. Shook’s staff just recently, and having a niche gives you a specialization and it also accelerates your growth factor. If you serve a niche and you’re very good at that niche, then that word gets around. If you’re a jack of all trades, you can do lots of things but I don’t think you’re focused and you’re not hitting the right numbers that I like to see. And I think that would be my theme is the niche allows you to focus on a very specific type of ideal client, that’s a Schwab thing where you have an ideal client persona and our firm has an ideal client persona. As far as having the equity comp, I absolutely was one of the teams at Merrill Lynch that was equity compensation designated, I managed a couple of plans. My exposure to that, Jason, I haven’t thought about this in a very long time, came from UBS where I had team members that were colleagues that were associated with the Nextel Sprint plan. And I always thought that you’re taking care of the top executives but, really, my background being in the military was how do we take care of the troops, the troops, I call them sailors, and how do we educate those sailors. And one of the things I’ve always said in my entire career in the military and I still say to this day is 50% of every bonus or a promotion or something like that should go to long-term savings. So, I use that same mentality with RSUs, with stock options, with bonuses. Set that aside, let that grow because you’re not used to spending it and you will learn to spend what you make. Jason Diamond: I think that’s a great reason, it’s super smart and I love your explanation, it was a very simplistic way. Honestly, even I hadn’t thought about that around your niche, I think, becomes almost like a force multiplier for your own growth because it’s much easier to become the guy in X, Y, Z vertical than to be the guy in every financial advisor of America, across America. Let me ask you a follow-up question, you mentioned the ideal client persona. I spend a lot of time at our firm thinking about this as well, what does your ideal client persona look like. How do you think about an opportunity though that differs from that persona? So, it’s great. Obviously, everybody, it’s easy, you get somebody who’s your perfect prospect, they walk in the front door, sign me up. But when you get something that’s not down the fairway for you, is it just I evaluate it on a one-off basis or are you super disciplined to that approach because it’s who your firm is? Michael Smith: I truly haven’t given that a whole lot of thought but I will tell you how I would handle that because I am handling it with some one-offs. I like the opportunity because you’re stretching your brain in that you’re thinking about how somebody else is reacting so you’d never know. So, I like it from a learning perspective but I also know it comes with a lot of other baggage, I’ll call it baggage, because, all of a sudden, they want to short the market, they want to go long-short strategies. So, all of a sudden, they’re not in our niche and, all of a sudden, they’re taking a lot of time, they’re draining our time so I think you got to be very careful about what you wish for. And there’s a lot of great advisors out there that will walk circles around these topics that I’m like, “Okay, I would rather refer somebody so they get the right experience than give them the wrong experience.” Jason Diamond: I absolutely love that answer. The bow you just put on it, I think, is the appropriate way in my mind to put a bow. At the end of the day, wouldn’t you rather service somebody more optimally even if you don’t believe it’s yourself, I agree with that. I want to ask you one more point on the client service piece. I was playing around on your website and, on your service model, you have health as a component of the client experience of your diagram. Why do you think health matters in a financial context? Michael Smith: I always believed in a healthy mind and a healthy body will bring so much joy to you and I think health is just part of your persona. If you don’t take care of yourself and your body and your mind, then it doesn’t matter what I do, I think you got to start with health. So, I’m very big on the executive physicals, I routinely require all of our staff to have an annual physical. And, again, they’re young people but you got to have these annual … I live and breathe going to see a doctor every year to do my annual physical, not because I think I’m pretty good health, I still run, I do a lot of things but I think your life starts with being healthy. Jason Diamond: Yeah, it’s refreshing to hear that, no doubt. It’s funny to think about but 2019 is a long time ago now and, in RIA world, I almost think of it like dog years. You’ve been around the block now for a little while so I’m curious how have you seen this space change since you launched in 2019? Michael Smith: In 2019, I didn’t know what I was doing, I could barely get out a wet paper bag but I do think it’s changed dramatically. I would say the biggest thing I’ve seen in just the six and a half, almost seven years is the rise of the mega RIAs and how they’re going to shape the industry. Everyone talked about fee compression at Merrill Lynch. When I was at Merrill, we talked about fee compression, then they talked about robo-advisors and now they’re talking about artificial intelligence replacing advisors, I don’t believe that and I don’t think that’s going to happen in the RIA space. What I see the RIA space maturing is into these very big mega firms as well as these independent RIAs like myself that serve a very niche market where we can walk in our lane. The ability to transact today is so much easier as an RIA than it was at a wirehouse as well because we have instant access to technology. My military background, my Navy background says make a decision right, wrong or different, if you don’t like it afterwards or you get new data, course change. So, in our industry, we can change on a notice. I hired a tech firm last year, I didn’t like the experience nine months into it, guess what, they’re not coming back. So, I can do that but you can’t do that at the bigger firms and even the bigger mega firms would have a hard time navigating a change just like that on a dime. Jason Diamond: You bring up an interesting point. To the extent you face competition, do you find yourself competing more against traditional wirehouse type firms or RIAs like yourself, mega caps RIAs? Are your clients attuned to any of this? Michael Smith: That’s an observation I haven’t thought of either there, Jason. I would say I don’t feel that I have a … I know there’s competition out there but we have a growth issue more than we have anything else so I don’t … I can’t take on the clients that want to become my clients so I’m not competing with people too much. Jason Diamond: A capacity issue, you mean? Michael Smith: Yeah, I have a capacity issue. Jason Diamond: I think you’re not alone in that. How can I even think about competition and the like when … A lot of advisors would probably say that. I want to talk more about the capacity situation but, before I do, let’s talk a little more about the RIA setup. Who do you custody with, remind us, and why or how did you arrive at that decision? Michael Smith: Yeah. So, when I launched, I went with Schwab, Schwab is a phenomenal partner, they helped me get a lot of stuff done, I couldn’t have done it without Schwab. During the pandemic, I realized that I should probably … So, remember, during the pandemic, we had a lot of issues with the banking industry, it was almost like a financial crisis but in a very compressed time. So, during the COVID, I decided to add Fidelity as another custodian so now I have two custodians and I opened accounts on both sides of the house but I like the custodians that are there to help you, they’re very good at what they do. I don’t even consider them a competitor and they aren’t competitors, they have their own branch so I don’t consider them competitors, I think they’re my partners and both Charles Schwab and Fidelity are good partners. Jason Diamond: Yeah, I think that’s the healthy way to look at the custody relationship. That’s a very common approach, I think, is launching with one custodian and then adding a secondary custodian or a tertiary custodian down the line for one reason or another so I appreciate you sharing that because we get those types of nuts and bolts questions a lot so I figured I’d ask you. One last question on the setup and then we’ll shift gears. Has anything been a negative? So, you talked about leaving Mother Merrill behind and, Mother Merrill, we use it facetiously but obviously it implies a degree of comfort and the homeland so I’m curious if you miss anything. Michael Smith: I miss the camaraderie of being with a bunch of other folks. I mentioned this when I first launched, I mentioned it year over year with my team, the one thing that we miss as an RIA and, again, Dynasty has their benefits as well and the mega RIAs have their benefits but, if you’re a true independent like myself, we get to go to conferences that we want to and that’s a timing issue, really, a time constraint. But one thing Merrill and Morgan, JPMorgan, and the other big wirehouses have as well as the megas, they have the ability to put conferences together for their advisors or their administrators and have this education. That’s the one thing that, I think, would evolve in the RIA industry in the future as well. They’re not my competitors, they’re my business colleagues. And if we think of them as competitors, and a lot of people do because I don’t want to share my client information or what I do with my competitor because they may steal them, if you’re that insecure, then you’re probably not the right advisor in the first place. Jason Diamond: I don’t disagree with that. It’s interesting too, I hear two common answers to that question, not about Merrill but just about somebody who’s broken away, what do you miss about the captive firm world. Either on this podcast or just in conversations with advisors, brand comes up a lot and then the point you just raised. I’ll even hear like, “Hey, forget the conferences and the trainings, just being able to have an office where I’ve got eight other advisors on a row for me, it’s a little bit of a different setup than in the independent space,” and I think that’s just a reality of you take the good with the bad. And for other advisors, by the way, one of the things I want to ask you about to this point is do you believe that there are advisors that are just better served in the W2 traditional firm world or do you think that every advisor should be looking at the RIA space? Michael Smith: I think that wirehouse serves a great purpose and- Jason Diamond: Okay, me too. Michael Smith: … there’s a lot of great people that are great advisors in that wirehouse, they need the structure. What I hadn’t alluded to is, and I mentioned this to a former manager from Merrill Lynch of mine just recently, actually, I was like, “I don’t think advisors realize what it takes to run a business.” I’m not trying to sugarcoat it, running an RIA is hard work, it takes a lot of your time day in and day out to run a business as well as taking care of and servicing your clients so I do think the wirehouse venue is the right way to go. And, Jason, I want to go back to one other thing about your identity. I launched as the Smith Group because that’s what I was known at Merrill Lynch. Within three or four months, I changed that name to a firm because I did not want to be associated with it. So, when you’re at one of the wirehouses, you’re known as your team name or something of that sort, I didn’t want to be known as that, I wanted to be known as Emerald Advisors not the Smith Group because, all of a sudden, you have a single point of failure. So, brand identity, it’s not so unique inside the wirehouse because it’s a team name versus Merrill or Morgan Stanley or something like that. Jason Diamond: It’s a good segue because I’ll tell you where my mind goes when you bring that up. My mind goes is you’re smart in a way that you might not even realize or maybe you do realize which is that, if and when it ever comes time to sell this business, it is probably more valuable without your name attached to it or maybe not. But in some way, shape or form, as an RIA, you have an obligation to be thinking about that or it’s probably on your radar, maybe not an obligation. Have you given an ounce of thought to M&A either acquiring businesses, growing in that way or, ultimately, when you succeed out of this business and what the RIA space enables you to do? Michael Smith: To answer that question, yes. Everyone’s thinking about merger and acquisition, I think about succession planning from day one. I actually thought about I’m a big team person, I come from the submarine force where everyone is a key player on a submarine, every single person has a job and responsibility on a nuclear submarine. So, inside the financial services industry, I know Merrill Lynch was very big on teaming, I understand Morgan Stanley is as well because teaming gives them a breadth of responsibility where the responsibilities are shared. So, mergers and acquisitions or selling my business, I think, if you’re not thinking about that … And I’m not thinking about selling my business because that’s a distraction to me. If I needed the money, then I would’ve went to a wirehouse and that’s okay, you monetize your life’s work. Today, I’m all about what’s right for the client, what’s right for my team and what’s right for where I want to be in the next 10 to 20 years. So, I am growing, I do want to grow, I’m looking at opening offices in probably three locations in the next 24 months or so. Jason Diamond: Well, that’s what I was going to say, plenty of advisors I think would say the same, I have a lot of runway. But what about the other side of this equation which is you’ve had tremendous organic growth, you’ve tripled your client base, you’ve more than tripled the asset base, have you thought about acquisition as a mean to jet fuel the inorganic growth side of things? Michael Smith: I have but not in the typical sense that you’re looking at as buying a book of business. I want to partner with like-minded advisors that share that common thread of taking care of clients where you can serve as their trusted counsel and sit in the meetings with their attorneys and sit in the meetings with the accountants and give them sage counsel that you can only do because you’ve been with the family for 20 years. You know this family and that, not always, but I think that’s missed a lot in other firms. Jason Diamond: Yeah, I think that’s fair. I just thought of something else that you brought up. You brought Dynasty so I’m going to ask … I’m going to pull on this thread. That implies to me that you’re at least loosely aware of the supportive independence models that are out there yet you chose a very independent, autonomous path, why? Michael Smith: Because I didn’t know what I was doing. Jason Diamond: Fair. Michael Smith: Let’s be honest, I like Dynasty, I talked with Dynasty when I left. I talked to them all, I talked to Rockefeller, I talked to Morgan, I talked to Dynasty and then, when push came to shove, I wanted to be Mike Smith and launch my own firm and learn. And I will tell you, you learn drinking through a fire hose and we did that, we learned, I know the mistakes. What I didn’t want to do is just go to someplace where this is the stuff you’re going to have to use. So, I think Dynasty is a great launching platform, I think there’s other ones out there that are similar to Dynasty or the Rockefellers or the Morgans, it’s truly what you’re trying to achieve in life. What do you want for you and your clients and I always put my clients before me because I’ve always had this lifelong thing of, you do the right thing, you’re going to get taken care of. Jason Diamond: Yeah. And that’s a very common analysis, by the way, and it’s very common too for big advisors like yourself to say I did my homework across all of those different categories. I looked at the traditional wirehouses and regional firms and boutique firms, I looked at the independent broker dealers, I looked at the support platforms and the aggregators and the roll-ups and here’s ultimately what I landed on and why. Did you always know that though or was that something that it took you a diligence process to figure out? There was plenty of advisors, by the way, who come to us and they’re like, “I knew for the last five years that I was sitting there I was launching an RIA someday.” Michael Smith: Yeah. I did not know that and, to be honest with you, hindsight, I think one of those partners probably could have made me a little bit better at first because then I could have focused on clients versus focusing on, hey, how to open a business, who’s your technology … We talked about custodians and some other things but we didn’t talk about technology, how do you go find that technology. Where’s your email address come from? Who’s your chief compliance officer? When it resides on you, you got to look in the mirror. So, I think those parties out there that provide that for brand-new advisors launching could be very beneficial. I had in my mind what I needed to do and I knew I’m very frugal so mine boiled down to how much money I wanted to spend, to be honest with you. Jason Diamond: I think it is a cost benefit analysis, it is. It’s absolutely … Because if you list the functions of a support platform on paper and you showed it to somebody who didn’t know the industry, they would say, “Why on earth wouldn’t you do this? They’re taking off your plate compliance and tech and custody and the like,” and the answer is because there’s a cost associated with it and plenty of advisors decide what you decide, I wanted … Or I just wanted a greater degree of autonomy and freedom, to your point, the name on the door piece, I wanted this to be mine. Michael Smith: And, Jason, I think it also goes to the uncertainty. I had never done anything since Navy, financial advising and then launching. So, for me, I was launching with four employees I had to take care of and here I was going to hire a third party that I was going to have to spend X amount on and I didn’t even know what my income was going to be. That’s different if you’re a multi-billion dollar FA coming out of a wirehouse, the monetary dynamics are different. Jason Diamond: Agreed. Okay, here’s a good one for you. We get this concept from advisors, from firms, from private equity that a billion dollars in assets is like this magic number in our industry. Do you feel like anything’s changed now that you’re at a billion and what’s the next chapter for Emerald Advisors? Is it just continuing on this steady trajectory and serving clients and trust that everything else comes with that? Michael Smith: I go back and forth on a billion, everyone thinks that’s the right number, the biggest number that you need but I think it’s just an arbitrary numbers because it didn’t define who I was. And a lot of people define success at a billion, they define success that you’re a successful firm at a billion. I think I was a successful firm at 300 million, I was a successful financial advisor with 20 clients in 2005. I would say a billion is a multiplier, what I would tell new advisors out there today is gather assets. The more assets you have, the more revenue you generate. The more revenue you generate, the more money you can put in your pocket which means the longer you can stay in the industry. The problem with the industry is an attrition problem, not anything else. So, assets just give us the ability to have revenue which gives us the ability to grow. Jason Diamond: And is that the plan? Keep adding assets, keep growing one client at a time with the focus though, obviously, on what makes you which is a very client-centric service model. Michael Smith: Correct. There’s a lot of things I want to do in the next couple of years and expanding our footprint is our biggest one with the right partners and then just keep adding. I have a business development officer that I’m probably offer a job to here pretty soon and things are going well. Jason Diamond: Yeah, that’s great. You mentioned the tech stack and the other components of the business and I hear you on the frugal cost-benefit analysis. But who did you turn to for some of those early decisions, was it Schwab primarily who helped hold your hand through that? Michael Smith: Schwab was very good at helping me identify the tech stack at first and the tech stack is actually the one consistent, there’s a lot of things I’ve been consistent on but tech is one that I’ve stayed with them. I launched with RightSize, now they’re Advisory, they’re very good, they do the right job for us and I’m big on cybersecurity. So, tech was helpful from Schwab, Schwab helped us with that. Jason Diamond: So, we spoke a little bit about your naval experience but, I’m curious, can you tell us how has your naval experience shaped your perception or your experience in wealth management? Michael Smith: My Navy path was a lot different than many officers. I served 12 years as an enlisted person before I got my direct commission as a Mustang officer, typically called limited duty officers or loud, dumb and obnoxious as I like to say. But that experience gave me a unique perspective because I was able to be the enlisted side and officer which are the workers and then the management side so I had both experiences which was unique. When I was commissioned, Admiral Jerry Ellis, a submarine admiral that commissioned me, heard this lesson to the podium, he was just talking about me in this point but he said, “There are three kinds of people in every organization. You have rowboat people who need to be pushed, you have sailboat people who move whenever the conditions are favorable and then there’s steamboat people, they move continuously through calm or storm.” And he said, “This is Ensign Michael Smith,” he said, “Make your course.” And that’s always stood with me because you do have those three types of people in life. You got people that are just … They’re robo people, they go until they get tired. You got sailboat people that go wherever the wind blows them and then you got steamboat people that chart their own course. I would say for advisors out there make your course or just be happy with what you’re doing. But for some of us hard chargers, I think that analogy has stayed with me my entire career. Jason Diamond: It’s fantastic. I love the analogy, great naval tie in also. Thanks for sharing that. We got time for one more question. You have a fascinating background, a fascinating path to the industry, obviously, an incredibly disciplined approach around client service, any parting thoughts, words of wisdom especially as it relates to growth? That’s what strikes me most about your story is the growth that your move unlocked and that’s what every advisor who listens to our show is looking for. Michael Smith: I’m going to give another plug to Schwab on this. We actually were fortunate and I got their consulting group to come in right afterwards and I’m a big believer in having offsite. So, I’ve had an offsite, two offsites a year for my team and it’s the entire team unlike the wirehouses where you don’t take your admins and stuff like that. I take my entire team to an offsite and we group up on what we’re trying to achieve and have goals and objectives for the year. Schwab allowed us to use their consultants and we came up with our ideal client persona. Teams or firms that have this model become high performing. When you become high performing, growth becomes the outcome. I couldn’t do anything but grow. Jason, I couldn’t not grow because I had this ideal client persona, I knew how I was going to do it, it was measurable. So, growth becomes the outcome and, if you hold people responsible, then we’re all going to grow together and it’s a fun outcome. Jason Diamond: Fantastic, it’s a great place to end. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise with us, I can’t wait to see what the next chapter holds for Emerald, this has been a lot of fun. Michael Smith: Jason, thank you so much. I appreciate everything you do for the industry as well. Mindy Diamond: As a financial advisor, you hold yourself to the highest standards of integrity, honesty and credibility. You are successful because you take your professional responsibility seriously and are dedicated to your clients. But are you living your best business life? Are your goals aligned with your firms or could a better option exist? Should I Stay or Should I Go? Is a book written with you in mind? It’s a self-guided journey that walks you through the key steps that we take with our advisor clients. This strategic thought process and roadmap to professional self-discovery is designed to help you ask the right questions and think critically and objectively whether you’re considering change or not. Learn how to get your copy at diamond-consultants.com/thebook. From “Overservicing” Clients to Building a $1B RIA: A Merrill Breakaway Story A conversation with Jason Diamond and Michael Smith, Managing Partner and Founder of Emerald Advisors.      Jason Diamond: Welcome to the latest episode of our podcast series for financial advisors. Today’s episode is From “Overservicing” Clients to Building a $1B RIA: A Merrill Breakaway Story. It’s a conversation with Michael Smith, managing partner and founder of Emerald Advisors. I’m Jason Diamond and this is the Diamond Podcast for financial advisors. Mindy Diamond: At Diamond Consultants, we help elite advisors identify the right environment for their businesses to thrive whether that’s at a wirehouse, boutique or independent firm. With nearly three decades of experience, we’ve guided thousands of advisors and represented more than a quarter of a trillion dollars in assets transitioned and, each year, one in four advisors managing a billion dollars or more who change firms are our clients. Our process is education driven and based on building relationships starting as your strategic partner well before you’re even thinking of a move. To schedule a confidential conversation, call us at (908) 879-1002. Wondering why advisors change firms and where they’re headed? Are transition deals going up or down? Those very questions and more inspired us to create our annual advisor transition report. It’s the award-winning, data-driven resource designed for advisors that connects the dots between the motivations around movement and the firm’s appetite for top talent. Arm yourself with the knowledge you need to make smart decisions. Download your copy at diamond-consultants.com/transitionreport. Jason Diamond: Growth is often viewed as the result of better marketing, stronger referrals, a larger team and even acquisition and that’s all true yet growth can be the byproduct of something else entirely. For example, Michael Smith built a successful practice at Merrill then, one day, he was told he was spending too much time with his clients, or his management put it over-servicing clients. For Michael, that wasn’t a warning sign about his approach, it was a signal that he might have outgrown the firm and the model. Today, Michael is the founder and managing partner of Emerald Advisors, the independent RIA he launched in late 2019 with roughly 385 million in assets and 85 client relationships. Less than seven years later, the firm has grown to more than a billion in assets while remaining deeply focused on a highly-specialized client base and an unusually hands-on service model. What makes this story particularly interesting isn’t just the growth, it’s the thinking behind it. Michael’s perspective was shaped long before he entered wealth management. After serving more than two decades in the Navy, he brought a leadership philosophy centered on accountability, discipline and what he calls steamboat people, those who keep moving forward regardless of conditions, that mindset continues to influence how he builds his team, serves clients and evaluates opportunities. In this episode, we discuss the decision to leave Merrill, the realities of launching a fully independent RIA, why specialization can accelerate growth, the evolving role of custodians and technology and why he believes exceptional client service remains one of the industry’s most durable competitive advantages. Because Michael’s experience suggests that growth isn’t always the result of finding more opportunities, sometimes it’s the result of creating the freedom to execute the vision you already had so let’s jump in. Michael, thank you so much for joining us today. For starters, can you walk us through your background and what brought you to the world of wealth management? Michael Smith: Jason, thank you so much for the opportunity to be here today, I do listen to the podcast a lot especially before I left Mother Merrill. But my background and how I got into financial services is really distinct because I was on the board of JDRF back in the day and the national sponsor for JDRF was UBS PaineWebber and they’re like, “Mike, why don’t you be a financial advisor?” And my master’s degree was actually a finance and accounting in portfolio management because I’ve managed my own portfolio for years and years and so, when I couldn’t get a job, I just fell into it because I couldn’t get a job and I needed a job. That was 21 years ago, Memorial Day so that’s how I got into this industry. Jason Diamond: It’s a unique background, it’s super interesting and I want to talk more about it. You mentioned Mother Merrill, we’ll certainly get there. Before we do, give us a little bit of context on the current business you operate, Emerald Advisors, any context you can share on size, number of staff, types of clients you serve would be great. Michael Smith: Sure. So, we launched Emerald in 2019, November 2019 with about 85 clients and you always talk about this on the podcast how scared it is to launch and go independent. And I would say we took over about 95% of our clients that we wanted to bring over and today we’re at about 230 clients, I think we have some onboarding right now, we have just over a billion of assets. So, we launched with the 85 clients and around 350, 385 million, now we’re over a billion. Jason Diamond: Good for you. Michael Smith: Thank you. And I launched with four employees and we’re now at 11. And I would give a shout-out to one of my key employees because, when I launched, I actually hired somebody that had no experience with us and that was really a good thing because that allowed that person to really focus on operations and back office stuff while my business partner Emily and I were able to focus on bringing on the clients and alleviating any issues that they may have or thought. Jason Diamond: So, meaning you hired somebody basically immediately upon launch to help you with the transition and with this next chapter? Michael Smith: Correct. I hired them before but they started the day we launched. Jason Diamond: Brilliant, I love it. Oh, let’s definitely talk more about that because I think that’s a great strategy for … You’re right, you said it in a joking manner now because you’re seven years past but it’s a very real fear that advisors have and I think it’s worth talking more about. I want to mention too you have, obviously, built this business and grown this business dramatically. I don’t want to make this episode about the pandemic but you moved the business at a, certainly, a unique time. Did it impact your growth at all? Did you feel like you hit a brick wall? Just curious about your thoughts. Michael Smith: No, Jason, that’s a great observation. I would venture to say that the pandemic was actually a good thing for us. Jason Diamond: Interesting. Michael Smith: And I say that because, all of a sudden, you could hit pause because everyone was relearning how to do business, how do we do client reviews, how do we communicate with clients in a environment. So, I think the pandemic allowed us to just really reset our expectations visiting with clients because I used to fly a lot because I have clients in 38 different states so this has actually been, not just good for me, but good for the industry because I think it’s reset our expectations that we don’t have to be every day with a client facing. Jason Diamond: I agree with that largely and it’s true of our business too, by the way, it’s certainly reshaped the way people expect to be communicated with. I think Zoom has become much more mainstream, phone calls and we’ve heard from many other advisors who say something similar. I was just curious because you moved so close to or if there was an impact but I get, honestly, I think you’re right, it allowed you to have this nice natural inflection point and almost like flipping a switch of a clean slate. Michael Smith: It allowed us to learn the processes too. So, we launched in November 1st, by March we were in lockdown and so it gave us the opportunity to take several months of just learning the processes of how to be an RIA, it was pretty good. Jason Diamond: Absolutely. So, one of the things you mentioned in that was the way in which you serve clients and I’d read something funny and I think it was around the time of your move. You were talking about that, Merrill, you had a manager who spoke about that you would overserve your clients, you serve clients too much, tell me about that. Michael Smith: That was such an interesting topic because I got called down to the ops officer’s office and they’re like, “Ugh, Mike.” And it brought my admin down with me and they’re like, “Mike, these reports that you’re taking care of your clients too much,” and I’m like, “What do you mean?” “Well, you’re overservicing them.” Jason, I literally had to go back and Google the word overservicing because I was like, “How do you overservice the client? I’m not making their bed.” It was just so funny to me that I got counsel for overservicing clients when we’re in a client-facing job and I think that was part of the catalyst. Jason Diamond: Tell me more about what they meant, you think. Michael Smith: Hindsight, I think they … I like to take care of people which means I’m very intuitive towards taxes, I understand how the tax code works, I understand how everything impacts their bottom line. So, when we’re doing deferred comp enrollments or 401(k) enrollments or I’m a big believer in Roth 401(k)s and backdoor Roths and I’ve been doing them for years, I think what Mother Merrill wanted at that time was us not to do that. And, again, nothing against Merrill, I get it but this is how they wanted us to act and I wasn’t in that mold, I was taking care of clients to a much deeper depth is how I would say it. Jason Diamond: And I think that speaks to you outgrew the model not necessarily the firm. I think Merrill does a lot of things really well, you would agree with that, I think given that you built 85 clients and 350 million in assets is nothing to sneeze at. But the model that it seems like you value client service and an integrated client service experience of that and the wirehouse model oftentimes doesn’t put a premium on that. Tell me about your ethos or your thoughts around client service today and what being independent enables you to do. Michael Smith: So, that’s an interesting observation because one of my clients actually just mentioned to me that the reason we’re growing so much is because of our service model and the fact that we deliver a tremendous amount of value over just portfolio management. I said my managers is in portfolio management, I don’t do that any longer, I have a staff that handles that for me but it’s really the servicing of the clients because they don’t know what we know and I think servicing the client is the most important thing that we can do today. Jason Diamond: Give me some examples of what you mean by servicing the client in a more holistic way. I agree with you, by the way, portfolio management, table stakes, financial planning, table stakes, tell me more about what you mean. Michael Smith: By that I mean we do a quarterly review on tax. So, a lot of people don’t understand how taxes work and how estimated taxes work. So, estimated taxes are January 1st to March 31st, January 1st to May 31st, January 1st to August 31st, that’s how you do your estimated tax payments, you figure out what that is. And for compensated employees where they have RSUs that come in at different times of the year or different grants or exercise their options at a different time, that can affect their estimated tax liability and I’m not big on giving Uncle Sam any more money than they have to have until they need it. And then everyone doesn’t understand how the penalties and interest works on the IRS. And I’m big on the tax payments because that’s where we can add a lot of value for not a lot of time and we integrate it with our portfolio so we know what we’re doing with our gains. And I happen to reside in Washington State which has a long-term capital gains tax rate once you surpass about 270,000 of long-term capital gains. So, it’s super important for us to be aware of this and that’s how we service them. We also help them with their rebalancing of their 401(k)s, things that wirehouses cannot supposed to do, we are not supposed to be helping them with some of their aspects of life. Jason Diamond: Yup. That’s what I was alluding to earlier, it’s limitations on the model, not because they’re bad models, it’s just a different way, a different ethos around client service. You mentioned RSUs and corporate employees, I know that’s a niche you have is around concentrated stock positions and equity comp plans. I guess let me ask you two different questions around this. First of all, why that niche? Interested. And then, second of all, do you think

From speaking at three major wealth management conferences in a single quarter to mapping out a pattern that's already reshaped accounting and is now creeping into law and the trades, Corey Kupfer breaks down the barbell effect and what business owners should be doing now to avoid getting caught in the middle. WHAT YOU'LL LEARN: In this episode, you'll discover what the barbell effect is and why it shows up across industries once consolidation and outside capital enter the picture, how accounting's shift from the Big Eight to the Big Four foreshadows what may be coming in wealth management, and why most deals positioned as mergers are actually acquisitions in disguise. Corey explains why firms stuck in the middle face higher overhead than small competitors and fewer resources than large ones, and how the same dynamic is showing up in the trades, from roofing to electrical. KEY INSIGHTS: The barbell effect describes what happens as an industry consolidates: large, well funded firms on one end, small boutique firms on the other, and the middle becoming the hardest place to operate, with higher overhead than small competitors and fewer resources than large ones. The accounting industry offers a preview of where wealth management may be headed. Corey points to the shift from the Big Eight to the Big Four, and to firms like Eisner and Amper merging to compete at a higher level, along with Apria's growth through acquisition. In legal, only attorneys can own law firms in most states, but Corey describes private equity entering through a managed services model similar to healthcare, where a non-legal company runs the back office while attorneys retain ownership of the practice. Corey shares a comment from his Entrepreneurs Organization lawyers group, that it is much easier to run a law firm under two million dollars or over ten million dollars in revenue than to be stuck in the middle, connecting this to the crossing the chasm dynamic of investing ahead of payoff. Drawing on NAPFA in Minneapolis, Corey notes many members are choosing not to sell to PE backed aggregators, even leaving value on the table, out of concern for fiduciary alignment, while noting he is relaying their perspective rather than judging it. He also points out most "mergers" are actually acquisitions, cites the 2026 Advisor Growth Strategies Report and DeVoe's data showing fewer buyers chasing more sellers and average seller AUM crossing a billion dollars, and closes by noting the same barbell dynamic in the trades, where consolidators and mom and pop firms both persist while the middle gets squeezed. Perfect for RIA owners weighing independence, succession, or sale, leaders of growing companies assessing their industry's consolidation cycle, and anyone navigating competition in the middle market. FOR MORE ON THIS EPISODE: https://www.coreykupfer.com/blog/barbelleffect FOR MORE ON COREY KUPFER https://www.linkedin.com/in/coreykupfer/ https://www.coreykupfer.com/ Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator, and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author, and professional speaker. He is deeply passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast. Get deal-ready with the DealQuest Podcast with Corey Kupfer, where like-minded entrepreneurs and business leaders converge, share insights and challenges, and success stories. Equip yourself with the tools, resources, and support necessary to navigate the complex yet rewarding world of dealmaking. Dive into the world of deal-driven growth today! Episode Highlights with Timestamps [00:00:04] - Introduction: the barbell effect and why Corey is talking about it now [00:04:23] - The NAPFA community conversation on succession and exit options aligned with values [00:08:37] - What the barbell effect is and why the middle becomes the hardest place to compete [00:12:21] - Why it's easier to run a law firm under two million or over ten million in revenue than to be stuck in the middle [00:16:14] - NAPFA advisors and the choice to stay independent from PE backed aggregators[00:19:55] - The barbell effect in the trades: roofing, gutters, and electrical consolidation[00:21:55] - Planning for industry evolution instead of being surprised by it Host Bio Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator, and dealmaker with more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author, and professional speaker deeply passionate about deal-driven growth. He is the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast. Show Description Do you want your business to grow faster? The DealQuest Podcast with Corey Kupfer reveals how successful entrepreneurs and business leaders use strategic deals to accelerate growth. From large mergers and acquisitions to capital raising, joint ventures, strategic alliances, real estate deals, and more, this show discusses the full spectrum of deal-driven growth strategies. Get the confidence to pursue deals that will help your company scale faster. Related Episodes Episode 350 - Tom Dillon: Building a firm positioned for acquisition and succession Episode 339 - Solocast 74: Building your G2 and creating optionality for internal successionEpisode 331 - Solocast 72: Reading macro and industry trends without letting personal views distort business decisionsEpisode 327 - Solocast 71: Using authority marketing to build relationships and deal flow Keywords/Tags barbell effect, industry consolidation, RIA independence, private equity wealth management, mergers and acquisitions, internal succession planning, mergers of equals, middle market squeeze, fiduciary advisors, NAPFA, accounting industry consolidation, legal industry private equity, managed services organization, crossing the chasm, RIA exit planning, trades industry consolidation, deal driven growth, 2026 advisor growth strategies, business positioning strategy, exit strategy planning

For advisors considering independence, this episode is full of real-world perspective.Evan J. Mayer sits down with Paul Wood of Agility Wealth Management to talk about why advisors leave wirehouses, what holds them back, and how the right independent platform can create room for growth. They also discuss recruiting, succession, private equity, RIA models, and what it takes to support advisors across multiple locations.

With the Co-Authors of The Greater Game and Dan Sullivan of Strategic Coach and John Bowen of CEG Insights Louis Diamond speaks with Dan Sullivan of Strategic Coach® and John Bowen of CEG Insights about founder dependency, enterprise value, and the architecture behind scalable businesses. In Summary Many advisory firms grow successfully while remaining highly dependent on their founders. Dan Sullivan and John Bowen argue that the difference between a successful practice and a valuable enterprise comes down to architecture. Louis sits down with the co-authors of The Greater Game to discuss founder dependency, enterprise value, intellectual property, and why some businesses scale beyond their owners while others do not. The conversation offers advisors a framework for thinking differently about growth, succession, and long-term optionality. The Storyline Many advisors spend their careers helping clients build valuable businesses. Far fewer stop to ask whether their own firms are being built the same way. That tension sits at the center of Louis Diamond's conversation with Dan Sullivan, co-founder of Strategic Coach®, and John Bowen, founder of CEG Elevate Group and CEG Insights. Their new book, The Greater Game, challenges a common assumption about growth: that bigger businesses are simply the result of working harder, adding more clients, or improving existing systems. Instead, they argue that enterprise value is created through architecture—the deliberate design of a business that can scale, transfer, and thrive without its founder at the center. The discussion introduces a framework for understanding why some entrepreneurs remain trapped in optimization while others build enterprises that compound in value over time. Along the way, Dan and John explore founder dependency, intellectual property, succession planning, strategic partnerships, and the role advisors can play in helping entrepreneurial clients navigate each stage of growth. For advisors, the framework creates an important mirror. The same forces that limit enterprise value for entrepreneurial clients often exist inside advisory firms themselves. The result is a conversation that extends well beyond business growth and into questions of optionality, transferability, and what ultimately makes a firm valuable. Topics Covered Enterprise Value Creation Founder Dependency Risk Business Architecture vs. Optimization Intellectual Property & Scalability Strategic Partnerships & Leverage Succession Planning & Optionality Legacy, Impact & the “Greater Game” Mindset > Download a transcript of this episode… Listen and Learn Highlights for Advisors What is The Greater Game—and why does it matter to advisors? (17:57) Dan and John introduce the framework behind their new book and explain why advisors should think about it both for entrepreneurial clients and for their own businesses. Why do only a small percentage of entrepreneurs create exponential enterprise value? (22:24) The discussion explores the difference between “architects” and “optimizers” and why most business owners remain focused on improving what exists rather than designing what comes next. Why is founder dependency such a significant valuation risk? (35:00) John explains how businesses that depend on a single individual often struggle to scale, transfer, or command premium valuations. How does expertise become intellectual property—and why does that matter? (35:00) The transition from expertise to transferable systems may be the most important bridge in the entire framework, creating leverage that extends beyond the founder. What prevents many advisors from fully serving entrepreneurial clients? (18:00) The conversation examines why most advisors are well-equipped for traditional planning needs but less prepared for the governance, succession, and enterprise-value challenges entrepreneurs eventually face. What does the next game look like after you've already “won”? (50:00) Dan and John discuss why many successful entrepreneurs and advisors eventually shift their focus from accumulation to significance, impact, and legacy. What's the single most important move an entrepreneur can make? (52:30) Dan shares the concept of Unique Ability® and explains why simplifying around your highest-value strengths often creates the greatest multiplier effect. Key Takeaways Enterprise value is created through architecture, not effort. Many successful businesses continue to grow while remaining highly dependent on their founders. The firms that command premium valuations are often built differently from the start. Founder dependency acts as a hidden valuation discount. The more a business depends on one person, the more difficult it becomes to scale, transfer, or sell at a premium. Intellectual property is often the bridge between a practice and an enterprise. When expertise becomes codified, transferable, and repeatable, value begins to exist independently of the founder. Advisors and entrepreneurs often face the same challenge. The same founder-dependency issues advisors help clients solve frequently exist within their own firms. Strategic partnerships create leverage that expertise alone cannot. Many of the most successful entrepreneurs grow through collaboration, ecosystems, and coordinated expertise rather than attempting to solve every challenge themselves. Most advisors are trained to solve early-stage problems. Entrepreneurial clients eventually require guidance around succession, governance, scalability, and enterprise value—areas that extend beyond traditional planning. The next stage of growth is often not about growth at all. For many successful entrepreneurs, the question eventually shifts from accumulation to significance, impact, and the legacy they want their business to create. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JY5xOB8GTQY Quotable Moments “The exit multiple is downstream of the architecture.” “The difference between a three-times and a fifteen-times multiple is often whether the business depends on the founder.” “You have to simplify in order to multiply.” “We're not talking about a 10x game anymore. We're talking about a 100x game.”     FAQs Why do some advisory firms command higher valuation multiples than others? Dan Sullivan and John Bowen argue that valuation is often determined long before a transaction occurs. Firms that reduce founder dependency, codify intellectual property, and build transferable systems typically command higher multiples than those built around a single rainmaker. What is founder dependency and how does it impact enterprise value? Founder dependency occurs when clients, revenue, and decision-making remain concentrated around one individual. While those businesses can be highly successful, advisors find they are often more difficult to scale, transfer, or sell. What is the difference between an architect and an optimizer? An optimizer focuses on improving an existing business model. An architect builds systems, intellectual property, and structures designed to create leverage, scalability, and long-term enterprise value. What does Dan Sullivan mean when he says “100x is easier than 2x”? The concept challenges entrepreneurs to stop thinking incrementally. Rather than working harder within the current model, transformational growth often comes from redesigning the model itself through better leverage, collaboration, and systems. How can advisors better serve entrepreneurial clients? Many entrepreneurial clients eventually need guidance beyond investment management, including succession planning, governance, intellectual property strategy, and enterprise value creation. Understanding where a client sits in their business journey can help advisors provide more relevant advice and coordination. What is the expertise trap and why does it matter for advisory firms? The expertise trap occurs when critical knowledge, relationships, and processes remain inside the founder's head. Until that expertise becomes transferable and repeatable, enterprise value often remains limited regardless of growth. Dan Sullivan and John Bowen argue that valuation is often determined long before a transaction occurs. Firms that reduce founder dependency, codify intellectual property, and build transferable systems typically command higher multiples than those built around a single rainmaker. Founder dependency occurs when clients, revenue, and decision-making remain concentrated around one individual. While those businesses can be highly successful, advisors find they are often more difficult to scale, transfer, or sell. An optimizer focuses on improving an existing business model. An architect builds systems, intellectual property, and structures designed to create leverage, scalability, and long-term enterprise value. The concept challenges entrepreneurs to stop thinking incrementally. Rather than working harder within the current model, transformational growth often comes from redesigning the model itself through better leverage, collaboration, and systems. Many entrepreneurial clients eventually need guidance beyond investment management, including succession planning, governance, intellectual property strategy, and enterprise value creation. Understanding where a client sits in their business journey can help advisors provide more relevant advice and coordination. The expertise trap occurs when critical knowledge, relationships, and processes remain inside the founder's head. Until that expertise becomes transferable and repeatable, enterprise value often remains limited regardless of growth. Related Resources The Greater Game by Dan Sullivan and John Bowen Strategic Coach® CEG Elevate Group The Greater Game Dashboard Diamond Consultants Advisor Transition Report Dan Sullivan The world's foremost expert on entrepreneurship in action, Dan Sullivan has spent the past five decades empowering business owners to reach their full potential in both their professional and personal lives. His strong belief in and commitment to the power of the entrepreneur is evident in all areas of his company, Strategic Coach®, and its successful membership community. Dan is married to Babs Smith, his partner in business and in life. They jointly own and operate The Strategic Coach Inc., with offices in Toronto, Chicago, and the UK Dan and Babs reside in Toronto. John Bowen John J. Bowen Jr. is the founder and CEO of CEG Elevate Group, the holding company that includes CEG Worldwide and CEG Insights. Through these companies, he helps elite financial advisors serve fewer, wealthier clients exceptionally well while building more valuable and scalable businesses. Before founding CEG, John spent 26 years as a financial advisor and built a $2 billion wealth management business. That firsthand experience grounds CEG’s work today across advisor coaching, enterprise programs, empirical research through CEG Insights, and practical frameworks for advisors who want to move beyond practice growth to enduring enterprise value. John is the author of 21 books on wealth management, entrepreneurship, and success. His newest book, The Greater Game: Your 100x Blueprint for Exponential Growth, Freedom, and Legacy, co-authored with Dan Sullivan of Strategic Coach, will be published by Hay House Business in May 2026. Today, John and the CEG team work with leading advisors and enterprise firms — including some of the largest advisor organizations in the United States — to help advisors deepen relationships with affluent clients, build scalable practices, and design lives of greater significance. NOTE: The views and opinions expressed by the guests on this podcast are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Diamond Consultants. Neither Diamond Consultants nor the guests on this podcast are compensated in any way for their participation. View the transcript of this episode… Architecting 100x Growth: A “How-To” From Legends Dan Sullivan and John Bowen A conversation with Louis Diamond and Co-Authors of The Greater Game, Dan Sullivan of Strategic Coach and John Bowen of CEG Insights.      Louis Diamond: Welcome to the latest episode of our podcast series for financial advisors. Today’s episode is Architecting 100x Growth: A “How-To” From Legends Dan Sullivan and John Bowen, a conversation with the industry’s top coaches and co-authors of The Greater Game. I’m Louis Diamond, and this is the Diamond Podcast for Financial Advisors. Mindy Diamond: At Diamond Consultants, we help elite advisors identify the right environment for their businesses to thrive, whether that’s at a wirehouse, boutique, or independent firm. With nearly three decades of experience, we’ve guided thousands of advisors and represented more than a quarter of a trillion dollars in assets transitioned. And each year, one in four advisors managing a billion dollars or more who change firms are our clients. Our process is education-driven and based on building relationships, starting as your strategic partner well before you’re even thinking of a move. To schedule a confidential conversation, call us at 908-879-1002. Wondering why advisors change firms and where they’re headed? Are transition deals going up or down? Those very questions and more inspired us to create our annual Advisor Transition Report. It’s the award-winning data-driven resource designed for advisors that connects the dots between the motivations around movement and the firm’s appetite for top talent. Arm yourself with the knowledge you need to make smart decisions. Download your copy at diamond-consultants.com/transitionreport. Louis Diamond: Most entrepreneurs and many advisors spend years optimizing for growth without realizing they’re building a business that still depends entirely on them. Revenue and complexity grow; enterprise value, transferability, and freedom often lag far behind. Dan Sullivan and John Bowen argue that the issue isn’t effort or intelligence; it’s architecture. No doubt these are familiar names in the wealth management industry, but just to set the stage, Dan is the co-founder of Strategic Coach, and John is the founder of CEG Elevate Group and CEG Insights. Together, they spent decades coaching and studying high-performing entrepreneurs and advisory firms. Their latest book, one they joined forces on, The Greater Game, lays out a very different framework for thinking about growth, one built around scalability, transferrable value, and long-term leverage rather than incremental optimization. What makes this conversation especially relevant for advisors is that the framework cuts both ways. It applies to the entrepreneurial clients that advisors serve, as well as to the advisory firms themselves. And in many cases, the same founder dependency and expertise trap that limits a client’s enterprise value is quietly limiting the advisor’s business too. We talk about the difference between operators and architects, why 100 times growth can actually be easier than two times growth, where businesses tend to stall as they scale and how advisors can start thinking differently about their own firms, particularly when it comes to enterprise value, succession, and long-term optionality. It’s rare access to a conversation with two of our industry’s legends whose advice and counsel has not only helped to transform the business lives of many of our listeners, but also my own. So let’s get to it. Dan and John, thank you both for joining us today. Dan Sullivan: Thank you, Lou. It’s a real pleasure. John Bowen: I’ve had the privilege of joining you before, but never with my co-author, Dan Sullivan, and I’m excited to share what we’re doing because I think it can make a big impact in our advisor industry. Louis Diamond: No doubt about it. Yeah, this has been an interview I’ve been very excited to host. So let’s jump right in. Dan Sullivan, I think you are a man that needs little introduction. So many advisors in the industry are fans or clients of your firm, Strategic Coach, but for those who aren’t as familiar or need a refresh, can you just give some quick context into why you started Strategic Coach and what the company does today? Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Well, it goes back to 1974. I was a copywriter at BBDO, the Canadian branch of BBDO, big global advertising agency. It still is. But I’ve been sort of a lifetime coach. I remember once when my mother finally caught up with what I was doing in life and I was describing what I was doing, she says, “Well, you were doing that when you were a child. You were talking to adults and you were asking adults about their experiences.” And I said, “Yeah, I could do this when I was eight or nine years old, but it took me a long time to get a business model wrapped around it.” But I jumped out in 1974 and started coaching anybody, but it actually turned out that entrepreneurs were the best people to coach because they would write a check on the spot and they would make a decision on the spot and I needed cashflow and I did it. So I’ve been personally, as a Strategic Coach, which was named by someone else. You’re just out there trying to get cashflow to pay for the rent. So I started in ’74, and I was lucky and it really relates to your target audience, Lou. Right off the bat, I got what are called top-of-the-table life insurance agents. And that was really, really great because life insurance agents are purely a conceptual business. So someone can get a new idea at breakfast and they can have a new business by dinnertime just because they can change their mindset. And that moved on. And I did that for 15 years, just one-on-one, 1970s, 1980s. And then, I’d had enough experience that we turned it into a workshop program in 1989. We’ve been at it ever since. So I was at a talk. Joe Polish is a great friend of ours, Joe Polish with Genius Network. And he had a speaker there, and he says, “You’re one of the original gangsters, aren’t you? You’re one of the first people.” And I said, “I don’t know if I’m the original, but I think I’m the only surviving one.” So it’s 52 years that I’ve been doing what I’m doing. And I had the good fortune to meet John in around 2009. John, was that the year? 2009? John Bowen: Yeah, in the little economic downturn that everybody knows about here. Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And John had a great coaching program and we had a great coaching program. And over the years, we’ve talked a lot about what makes a entrepreneur exponential in their thinking. And finally, about two years ago, we decided, let’s write a book about this. And that’s the new book, which is called The Greater Game. That’s where this all started. It’s just been a great pleasure because we sync very well. Louis Diamond: Amazing. And Dan, I think a lot of people likely know you either from Strategic Coach. I know I’m personally a big fan of two of your books and I know of others, The Gap and The Gain and Who Not How. We’re going to talk about your new book, but I think it’d just be helpful. Can you talk about the key premise of some of your prior books, The Gap and The Gain and Who Not How? Dan Sullivan: As a result of my membership, I’m a member in other groups. And so Joe Polish of Genius Network fame, he’s been in my program for 28 years, and I’ve been in his program for 15 years. And there was a writer who was in one of the first Genius Network workshops, and he approached me. And I created a lot of books, but I create small books and they’re self-published. I do a book a quarter. I’m 82 in about three weeks. So when I was 70, I said, “I’m going to give myself a 25-year project. I’ll write 100 books in 100 quarters.” And this is quarter number 47, and I’m writing my 47th book. But they’re little books. They’re 60, 70 pages. They’re one-idea books. And Ben Hardy, who was, at that time, the number one writer on Medium, which is a blogging type medium, he approached me, and he said, “I know you don’t write big books and you don’t have publisher books. But,” he said, “if you ever did,” he said, “I’d like to collaborate.” And that was a great good fortune on my part. So we produced three books in five years. The first book was Who Not How. Who Not How basically says when you have a goal, the biggest problem with the goal, you’re excited about the goal, but you’re not excited about doing it. So you find “Whos” who help you and you build teamwork around it. And that was a big seller. And then, we had another concept which was called The Gap and The Gain that entrepreneurs, depending on how they measure their progress, can be perpetually unhappy or they can be perpetually motivated. And it all depends on how they measure their progress, how they measure their goal setting and their goal achievement. And then the third book, which has really turned out to be the big one, up until this book, this book will be bigger. It’s called 10x Is Easier Than 2x. So hence, Coach, everybody has a 10x game plan. Whatever number they want to choose, revenues, personal net worth, whatever, you have a framework of 10x, which is sometime in the future, but you use that future framework for deciding what you’re going to do today that will end up as a 10x result. I thought that was going to be our formula for the rest of my life until I met John. And then John is a great AI practitioner. And I began to realize that that 10x is now becoming 100x for really top-notch entrepreneurs, but the 10x is easier than 2x. And we just crossed the million mark with the three books, which is really good. And it’s great for lead… we’re having people show up and they’ve really bought into what Strategic Coach is. We have a good size company. We’re not a small company. We have 120 team members. We’re in five centers: Los Angeles, Vancouver, Chicago, Toronto and London, England. But it’s been really great because we’ve really grown with technological change and it’s basically, we teach people how to think about their thinking. And Lou, you were in for three years, both in-person and virtual. So you know what the starting structure of it is, but I’m in love with entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are crucial characters on the planet, but mostly they operate alone and what we’ve done is create a community for them. Louis Diamond: Fantastic. Thank you, Dan. And John, I think perfect segue to you, because I know you’ve spent your career serving and helping entrepreneurs as well, mostly within financial services or within wealth management. And you’ve been very kind to share some of your amazing research on advisors serving entrepreneurial clients in the past. But for anyone who’s missed those episodes, similar question for you, can you share what your companies do? CEG Elevate, CEG Insights, your new research, and then we’ll dive into your exciting new book. John Bowen: Thank you, Louis. And Dan and I are very excited about just entrepreneurs in general. Dan is, because he’s working with them directly. The best clients for financial advisors are entrepreneurs, largely, if you’re going to go high net worth, ultra-high net worth. So we have a company, CEG Elevate, which is our parent company. Two of the companies that are really interesting for this podcast is CEG Insights and this is our research arm. And we’ll study about 20,000 high net worth, ultra-high net worth clients this year in depth and 6,000 up to 7,000 we’ll do just of entrepreneurs. And this is in the partnership. Lou, I invited you up to… We were skiing two years ago in Park City and you couldn’t join us. But Dan and I made a deal to do a 25-year partnership studying entrepreneurship, one for Strategic Coach and his coaching clients, but really the opportunity for financial advisors. And it’s probably just as well because I came down, and I think, Dan, you were 80 at the time and I was 69. I’m 70 now. And I was skiing with a whole bunch of 40-year-olds, and they’re all going, “You guys are way too optimistic.” And Dan and I are just getting started on this. And the other company that’s applicable is CEG Worldwide, where we have the privilege of coaching and training some of the top financial advisors, those aspiring, and also working with the enterprises to really help move up market and do this great experience. Louis Diamond: Fantastic. Dan, question for you. What was the core problem you and John were trying to solve in your new book, The Greater Game? What is it that existing frameworks weren’t touching? And then John, I’ll have a follow-up question for you after that. Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Well, by the very nature of what we do, we’re not going for wannabes. We’re not going for entrepreneurs who hope to be really successful someday. We’re engaging with and we’re registering into both of our communities, people who, they’re already great. They’re already doing so many things right, but they’re kind of doing it unconsciously. They just have a unique ability for growth. They have a unique ability for networking and expansion, but the very, very core is they’ve done it on their own. And they’ve done it out of intuition and they’ve done it out of ambition and motivation. But their biggest problem is that they’re really lonely. I’m in my sixth decade now of coaching entrepreneurs, and people say, “Well, what’s the number one problem that entrepreneurs face?” And I said, “Loneliness.” They can’t explain themselves to the family they grew up with. They can’t explain themselves with their lifetime friends. They have thoughts about how they’re operating. And they take enormous pride in their ability to transform difficulties into breakthroughs, but they don’t have anybody to talk to. So what we’ve created is a community where when you walk in the room, everybody in that room immediately understands you. Everybody immediately applauds what you’ve done. Everybody is inspired by you. So my framework is I call, “What you’ve done on your own, you’re great. You’re a winner already, but who do you talk to?” You have to hide a lot of your success because they just won’t understand what it is that actually motivates you. And the beauty of the partnership with John is the vast majority of our clients are in 70 or 80 different industries, so they’re not peculiar. We start off with financial services, especially life insurance. But what I notice is that all the difficulty they get into life is they’re trying to communicate with people who don’t understand them. And what we’re saying is, “Stage one, you did it on your own, you’re great by any standard whatsoever. You check all the boxes for being a successful person, but you don’t really have any way to actually check out how other people are doing this.” And so we’ve created a community, and John has created a community where people, immediately, there’s understanding. And not only that, but there’s opportunity because they’re unique in their own ways. Every one of our entrepreneurs has created a very, very unique pattern of success that if they were with 10 other people, they could learn from this. If they were with 30 other people, they would learn even more. So that’s what we’ve done. So stage two is now joining a community where everybody gets you. Louis Diamond: Interesting. And that’s the premise of the book. We don’t want to have people not buy it, but what is the greater game? What’s the game that folks are playing and pursuing and how do you make it greater? Dan Sullivan: I tell you, what I’ve always been lacking, I’m sort of intuitive like most entrepreneurs are. We’ve done about 300 times growth since we started the program. But it’s intuitive. I don’t have any research to back this up. I’m low on fact finder. I find, generally speaking, the best facts are just the facts that I make up, but at a certain point, you’d like to have some actual research to back me up. So I’ve gone as far as I can go with our company without real research. Then John comes into the picture, and now we got some real research. And I will say this, this is generally true. It’s not just a problem with me that I don’t have research. I find that entrepreneurism is one of the least researched subjects on the planet. And John comes along and he’s done all the backfill for how entrepreneurs actually perform and I’ve got research to prove it. Louis Diamond: Perfect. Yeah, John, question for you. So what is The Greater Game? And then, how do you think it relates to what financial advisors have been missing? John Bowen: One of the things that we as financial advisors all want to work with people who have already won. And there’s no better group than entrepreneurs, successful entrepreneurs. If we look at people with 25 million or more of investible assets across all households in the US, 90% are entrepreneurs. And at the 5 to 25 million of investible assets, it’s three out of four. So at CEG Worldwide, we’ve always wanted to really understand advisors. And we said we’ll partner with Dan and his passion with entrepreneurs, we’ll go ahead and study them so that we can bring insights on how we can better serve them. And the very first thing we want to do is understand, yeah, there’s very different stages that we see of entrepreneurs and we talk about the whole concept of The Greater Game. And the idea here is we wanted to identify… And I’ll share some PowerPoint slides. I know a lot of us are listening and I just want to walk through this, but Louis will have it in show notes, his team will. We really saw four areas. The first one was level one, stage one was foundation for freedom. They had ambition, the vision, but they really needed security. And Dan calls this, and I love this term, “cash confidence.” But it’s really using a financial advisor to have security. And one of the things, the last time I was on with you, Louis, we talked about there’s 59.2% of entrepreneurs who want to switch advisors because they don’t believe they have that security. And that’s kind of the foundation. And this is why you’re never going to read a more friendly financial advisor book for entrepreneurs than this because in our coaching program, we’re developing workshops and so on to bring this message out. And then the second level is where now we saw… and there were four levels. Dan and I identified 5.4% of these entrepreneurs that were just killing it and they were going through all four levels. The second level was energy for expansion. They were very motivated, they were excited about getting up and really the intellectual property, and Dan’s been one of the big leaders in this, is so much of what we know… And as I go through this too, I want every one of the advisors to think about it’s not only your entrepreneurial clients, this is for you too, is having this intellectual property, getting it out of your head so that your business is not founder-dependent or personality-dependent. You’ve got this enterprise. And then, the third level where it really took off was collaboration and multiplication. And Dan talked about the power of community and this is so big. And for advisors, the community is often working with other professionals, the accountants, the attorneys, the investment bankers. Matter of fact, when we survey, we found that 40% of the people with 25 million or more that they invest with an advisor came through an investment banker. So creating that community, teamwork, having the right team and then autonomy. Can you step away from your practice? The entrepreneurs step away 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, making that independence, moving from the founder-dependent to the enterprise. And the last level was exponential. And this is all along the way, the AI opportunities to accelerate this and augment this is really real, but the agency where the blue ocean, creating new markets, then getting the commitment and courage. And at each of these levels, we saw different entrepreneurs just really taking off. And one of the things that’s so important, Louis, for what we’re talking about today is advisors all are ready to treat stage one, the foundation for freedom, but they don’t really understand the other stages, and that’s really what entrepreneurs want. So if you want to work in this market, it’s very important for you to understand what you can do to help. The difference is often for an entrepreneur, a three to five multiplier versus 15, the level one or stage one to stage four. And this is where it gets really exciting. Louis Diamond: This would be a question for John. You found, and he’s mentioned it, that only 5.4% of entrepreneurs operate as architects versus optimizers. Can you explain the difference between those two personas? John Bowen: Well, I’m going to set up the research and let Dan really bring it home. But Dan and I came up with this framework, The Greater Game and the 10 Multipliers, and we’ve got that and we’re putting it in order and we wanted to really confirm. And everything we do is empirical research. So we reached out to 1,000 very successful entrepreneurs, 1,016. And it became very clear that the 5.4% of them were actually executing on all these levels and they were just distancing everyone else. And what we came up with, and Dan mentioned it earlier, that his book, 10x Is Easier Than 2x, but we said, what we’re seeing… and we’ve got a whole bunch, I think it’s 26 stories in the book of entrepreneurs, we’re seeing so many people blow this out that 100x is easier than 2x, and it forces a whole different mindset where if you’re optimizing, you’re kind of looking incrementally. But when you step back as an architect, big picture, wow, huge opportunity, both for entrepreneurs and advisors that are entrepreneurs to make a real big difference. This is something you’ve really coached to and had the privilege of working with thousands of entrepreneurs helping them on that journey. Dan Sullivan: Yeah. One of the things that was confusing for me, Lou, when I first started coaching, because everybody who came in to coach, you remember when you came into your first Chicago workshop, that everybody in the room was motivated. I’m not a motivational speaker. I don’t have to motivate the entrepreneurs who are in Coach. They’re already motivated. The problem is the focus of their ambition and focus. And what we discovered was that there were two types that showed up. I didn’t really understand it, but they’re what I call status-oriented entrepreneurs. And what they are when they were a kid, they didn’t have anything. Their family wasn’t at the top of the pole. When they were born, they grew up in a certain community, but there were certain people who lived in the right part of town and they had really big houses and everything about their lifestyle was way above everybody else in the lifestyle. And they saw the lack of what they had, because of the way they were born, that they were going to match it. But the matching was based in not only what the big home looks like. They’ve got other homes, they’ve got vacation homes. They belong to clubs. There’s clubs for the winners, and the losers aren’t part of those clubs, golf courses and boating clubs and everything else. And what I noticed was their motivation was simply to get to that point where they had the same sort of status. And they’re interesting for a while, but once they’ve gotten to that level of status, they’re not interesting anymore. They go on cruise control at that point and they just want to stay within that framework. But the really interesting entrepreneurs, and we really highlight them in the book, it’s just about growth. So when they get to one level, they say, “That’s great. Okay, now I’ve got a new baseline and now I want to grow even further.” And we have one story, very, very interesting. When he came into my Chicago workshop, I met him and he said, “I’ve got a big engineering company.” This is Paul VanDuyne. He’s out of the Quad City area of Iowa. And he says, “My ambition for your program is for three years, I’m just going to plan my retirement.” And I said, “Well, we’ve got some thoughts about that.” So I said, “Just do your first workshop and we’ll talk about it 90 days from now.” And he came back and he had an entirely different game plan, and he’s grown basically 250 times in his last 13 years. He’s completely transformed the industry that he’s in and he had this growth. So what we’re looking for in The Greater Game, we’re looking for those entrepreneurs who are already successful, but they don’t see any stopping point. They’ll grow to one level and then they say, “Okay, that’s the new baseline. Now I grow to another level.” Meanwhile, three years ago, what happened is the world got a new capability called AI. AI, you’re not talking 10x. If you use it properly… a lot of people are in the very early stages here, but we can see the ones who are applying it for growth. John has set up an entire research structure just to measure the people, and what are the people who are just motivated by growth? They don’t see any stopping point. They don’t see any retirement age. They’re just growing. They’re in better health now than they were when they started their ambition. One of the great breakthroughs we’re having now is the impact of AI on physical fitness and health right now. And so you have 70-year-olds now who are way more ambitious at 70 than they were at 50. So we think a whole new world is being created in front of us, but there isn’t the research to measure what the real winners of this new game are actually doing. And The Greater Game is a lot of Strategic Coach thinking tools, but it’s also the phenomenal research that John is doing, and we’re measuring exactly what are these people who just constantly grow, what are they actually doing? John Bowen: Louis, if I can jump in, I want to go back to Paul just for a second because he was going to do something classical, and Dan is also my coach and I was going to do something similar. Paul told Dan that he was going to retire at 65, and his wife. And he were going to open up a little mom-and-pop coffee shop. And the reason so many of the entrepreneurs are caught in the 2x optimization is they’re grinding it out. They’re working harder to be more successful and the desire to do that isn’t very high. That’s why you retire. On the other hand, what we found, the ones working on 100x are building platforms and ecosystems. They’re architected. And as we were writing the book, CEG grew by 58%. I’m going to give a lot of credit to the book, because as Dan and I were working on the processes, I wanted to walk all the talks. This is where the world is changing. I want everybody to think as a financial advisor, you’re being served twice, one with The Greater Game, they don’t care about a few basis points on returns. That’s table stakes. So much of the level one is taking care of the investment side, mitigating taxes, taking care of the areas, protecting the assets, some charitable planning, maybe shoot in some succession planning. I can tell you only 6% of the entrepreneurs actually feel they’re getting that from you, but that’s only level one. If you can help them from each of the stages, stage one through four, and help them create that vision, they’re going to love you to death. Because many of them want to continue in this path and create tremendous value, bigger impact, not creating legacies in the sense of enduring legacies, but active legacies. Last year, my wife and I set up a private foundation. I called it The Greater Game Foundation. I just love this so much, the difference that you can make, and I want to do it while I’m living, not while I’m gone type of thing. I think that’s one Dan and I very much share. Louis Diamond: Awesome. You wrote the book 10x Is Easier Than 2x, but now you’re claiming 100x is easier than 2x. How can that be the case? Dan Sullivan: The interesting thing, one of my points of proof on the original idea, the 10x Mind Expander, I use a lot of what the entrepreneurs have already done to prove the future. In other words, I said… You’ll remember the exercise, Lou. And I said, “I want you to pick your best number.” Everybody’s got a best number. It’s revenue, it’s net worth, whatever. And I said, “I just want you to multiply by 10.” And immediately there’s this reaction. He says, “You know how hard it was to get to just where I am 10 times?” And I said, “Well, you’ve already done 10 times. You’ve probably done 10 times twice. So let’s go back to the beginning. When were you 1/10 of where you are right now?” And they can nail it. They can tell you the year, they can tell you the month when they were 1/10 of where they were. And I said, “Let’s write the actual structure that got you from 1/10 to where you are right now.” And there’s five stages, and usually it’s an event, it’s a new relationship and all of a sudden they get a big check. And we measure, as entrepreneurs, size of check is a good scorecard. When you’re first starting, you got a $10,000 check, that was the biggest check. But about five years later, you get a $100,000 check, and all of a sudden it seems strange at breakfast, but by dinner you’ve normalized the idea, “Well, I know what it’s like to get a much bigger check, a 10 times check.” And so I have them create five growth stages that took them from where they were 1/10 to where they are right now, and I said, “Now let’s go back and talk about doing 10 times more.” And what they recognize, 80% who’ve got them 10 times the first time is going to be the same. It’s relationship, it’s having a great team, it’s having a simple approach that always works and it’s about the kind end customer. It’s not about them. It’s about who is it that you’re being a hero to in the marketplace. Because the truth is people don’t want to have a lot of relationships as they grow. They’d like to have one relationship to grow. They’d like to have an advisor who’s growing with them. But then John introduced me to the whole world of AI and I said, “We’re not talking 10 times anymore. We’re talking 100 times.” I said, “If you apply this new form of thinking, because it is an entirely new form of thinking, to what you’re doing right now, you can see that 10 times is going to happen just by doing three or four things where you’re eliminating waste, you’re eliminating things that just don’t work anymore, changing relationships, changing teamwork, changing collaborations in the marketplace.” But meanwhile, this new world of thinking is making you healthier. It’s making you more fit. So where before you thought you wouldn’t have the energy at 70, you now have more energy at 70 than you had at 50. So you’re the only one who says when it’s going to stop. I’m 82 in three weeks. We’re having this… I’m 82 and I’m way more ambitious at 82 than I was at 52. And the world is, because the world outside in terms of technological capability and access is way, way bigger in my 82nd year than it was in my 52nd year, and I love the growth. I have to tell you that the greatest point where AI is going to have the impact is going to be making money. The big titans, the Metas, the Googles, the Nvidias, what do they have in common? It’s about the money and where AI is being applied most is how you do new things with money. So that’s where the 100 times now comes from. I’ve normalized it. I said, “We’re not talking a 10x game anymore. We’re talking 100x game.” But the number on the scoreboard isn’t the issue. The scoreboard is, are you actually having fun? Louis Diamond: Yeah, we call it living your best business life. That’s our major barometer in charge. John, I don’t know if you could pull up your slides again, but I want to talk about the bridge between stage two in your pyramid to stage three. So that’s from expertise into scalable property. Can you explain how this relates to a financial advisor or an independent business owner and why this concept is so important for the valuation of a business? John Bowen: The book, it’s written for entrepreneurs, but I wanted to create some bridges while we’re together with Louis on really what’s going on for financial advisors and how you can help them. So if they’re at our stage one, Dan and my stage one of The Greater Game, and they want to go to two, they’re kind of dreaming oftentimes, and we want to help them begin creating the architectural structure. And as an advisor, this is really going to encourage everybody to read chapter two, The Greater Security. It talks about really the VFO, Virtual Family Office structure that they want, and you got to help them get financially solid, building personal wealth outside of the business, tax, estate, insurance, business structure. That’s what we all do today. Then though, if they want to move from level two to three, what we find over and over again, advisors are not equipped to do this, because what we’re taking is that founder where everything’s in its head, we’re now helping them move from just having that expertise to having scalable property. This is that codifying the process of building IP that’s transferable. And this is where the real valuation changes. Now, I’m not asking financial advisors to be the IP experts, but what the entrepreneurs want is they want somebody to help them curate and then coordinate between each of these levels. We go from three to four that the founder is indispensable, oftentimes at three. Now we want the team there to be invincible. And it’s not just the individual team as Dan was talking about. It’s the community. The collaboration is where this really takes off. The noise of AI is making it harder to market, but by partnering, particularly as financial advisors, we can very quickly have groups. One of the reasons why I’m collaborating with Dan, I want to help our financial advisors to work with entrepreneurs. Dan wants that research. So this is the natural collaboration. But they’re interested here in governance, self-managing teams. One of the things that Strategic Coach is brilliant at, the pre-transaction they want. And what we find so often is the indispensable discount. So many businesses sell, if they sell at all, they’re selling for three to five times multiplier, not advisory, but traditional businesses. Well, if you can make it to four, all of a sudden you’re now talking to 10 to 15 times multipliers. And think of it as if I’m a buyer and I’ve been involved in 50-some transactions, what happens is if the business is the guy, the gal, they’re the business, then you’re buying a very expensive job type thing. So let’s just keep a simple one. They’re having a couple million dollars of EBITDA. And let’s say the high range of that, five times EBITDA is $10 million. Well, the difference at 15 times two million is 30. Now, a few basis points I don’t really care about. I really care about capturing that difference. And because there’s a machine working without, I can buy that machine and generate that cash flow and it’s also taking advantage of the vision. And then when we get to level four, this is where most advisors make the biggest mistake is, “I’ve won. I’m at level four. I’ve got tremendous wealth.” Okay, but I’m now looking at significance. And I do want to go, “It’s not enduring legacy I’m looking for. I’m looking for active legacy. I’m looking for family governance.” Do I want to continue to build it like Dan and I’m doing at 70? I’m building the business so I can continue doing it as long as I want to do it. At the same time, and I love the impact we have and I know you do too, Louis, for the impact you have. Why not build the platform that’s going to allow you to do that as long as you want to do that? And if you don’t want to do it, let’s create the most value to transfer. When you start having conversations like that with families, entrepreneur families, it just changes, and very few advisors can do that. And that’s what we’re finding. We have a coaching company, training company, we train those things. They’re winning, quite honestly, almost 100% of the time because entrepreneurs didn’t know that was available to them. Louis Diamond: Interesting. It seems like the difference between stage two in your pyramid, to leap to stage three or four, that seems like a pretty massive pivot point for valuation for building a scalable business, having a self-managing company, et cetera. Do you find or have you seen that advisors or entrepreneurs that are in stage two themselves, they kind of pattern-match when they’re working with their own clients and kind of manage their own clients into stage two, or is it not really connected? John Bowen: I think that once you get the bigger picture and see the greater game, you can help your clients. That is a very small percentage. Remember, it was only 5.4 of when we surveyed successful entrepreneurs were actually playing the greater game, all four levels, the 10 greater multipliers. So I think what we tend to do is we get stuck on what we can do. And all the training is for level one for financial advisors. We don’t know how to guide them through the other levels. And really, the big difference from two to three, Dan and I’ve talked about this a lot, and I think Dan’s one of the biggest champions of this, is collaboration, putting together strategic partnerships. It could be with your competitors. This is for entrepreneurs, competitors, it could be various vendor partnerships. But the ability to open up markets that way when you have now put together in level two your IP, value creation’s huge. For advisors, it’s putting together partnerships with centers of influence. When we survey top financial advisors, 70% of their best clients came through COI, Centers of Influence with accountants, attorneys, investment bankers, and so on. Well, let’s do it on purpose, be successful on purpose. Louis Diamond: Dan, question for you. In all your experience working with successful financial advisors, insurance producers, probably any entrepreneur, what do you feel are the most common things that folks do unintentionally to really hurt their enterprise value even long before, or if ever, they decide to sell their business? Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I think the biggest thing is they stay entirely within their industry. One of the first questions that we ask our entrepreneurs when they come into the program and where you see it most is in the professions: lawyers, accountants, engineers, architects. I’ll say, “Well, what is it that you are?” And they’ll say, “Well, I’m a lawyer. I’m a tax lawyer.” And I said, “Are you a tax lawyer or are you an entrepreneur who has a specialty in tax law?” Okay. It makes a big difference, because if you see yourself as a tax lawyer, then you’re saying that you’re a better paid factory worker. You’re a manual laborer. But if you’re an entrepreneur, it’s a fairly recent idea in human history. There’s always been entrepreneurs, but it wasn’t until about the beginning of the 1800s that you start seeing this really different class of people in the marketplace, who, it didn’t matter how they were born, they were taking advantage of some new multiplier technology. Steam power being a great example. Around 1800, steam power came on. And anybody who had a bright vision for themselves and had the wherewithal to figure out what needs could be satisfied with a new technology, all of a sudden they became rich. They became rich. And it was very disruptive, because up until then it was based on aristocracy and you were born into wealth or you were born into poverty. There was no crossover. So what we’re saying is anybody who comes into Strategic Coach, I said, “I’m not going to tell you anything about your particular industry.” I said, “You know all the best practice people in your industry and they have workshops and they have conferences and you go to them, but they don’t know how to be entrepreneurs. You know how to create a really well-paying job, but you haven’t created a company.” A company is a totally different realm and I would say the vast majority of entrepreneurs, 95% of entrepreneurs haven’t really created a company. They’ve just created a really well-paying job which requires their presence and their attendance. I said, “You don’t get any payout for your company. If you’re the company, you need to have a structure.” I’ll give you an example. We started the company in 1989, and we’re about 270 times what our first year revenues were, and that was a great year. I was very happy for the first year, but we’re about 270 times. Along the way, what I did is I created other coaches so it wasn’t just Dan, the coach. So we have 16 other coaches. And I’ll give you a little example. In 1994, that year our company did 144 workshop days, 36 per quarter. One coach: me. Last year we did 600 workshop days and I did 12. 588 were done by other coaches. And our coaches are great. They’re clients who have coaching instincts and they do it. So about four years ago, I met one of our clients who’s an M&A specialist, and I laid out all the facts just in conversation, “This is our revenues. We have no debt. It’s repeatable income, around 70% is repeatable for one year.” I put the whole structure together. And I said, “So right off the top, I don’t have any relatives on staff.” The first thing they look for, “Any relatives working for you?” And he gave me a number. It was a big number. It was probably four times revenue for that year. He said, “We got a lot of structures.” Then something happened in the marketplace, and this is a great breakthrough that the US Patent Office sometime in the last 10 years recognized that up until about 10 years ago, to get a patent, you had to have a technological component for what you were doing. Sometime in the last 10 years, the patent bureaus decided that the internet is the technological component. So they’ve introduced education and entertainment as patentable processes. So in the last three years, we’ve gotten 82 patents. 82 patents. And these are our thinking tools, Lifetime Extender, Free Focus and Buffer Days. You know the routine that you learn in the first three days, and we’ve got 82 of them. We’re averaging about 25. I get a new patent about every two weeks. So I saw this M&A specialist, and I said, “This has happened in the last three years.” And he said, “Immediately it doubles the valuation of your company.” So what John’s saying here, as you go through the four stages, more and more you get paid for your creativity, retail, you get paid for your retail. But if you structure it, you record it, you package it, it is even greater than what you got paid for your creativity. Louis Diamond: Super interesting personal anecdote, and I appreciate you sharing that because that definitely did drive the point home for me. I see the applicability to probably any industry, but especially to any financial advisor. Dan Sullivan: Oh, yeah. Louis Diamond: The best RIA firms, the best advisors, they pretty much all start off with a cult of personality founder who’s the rainmaker. And then the practices that really grow and scale and are valuable are more platforms. That’s what private equity wants to invest in. And those are the firms that get the higher multiples. Dan Sullivan: Yeah. So the big thing is there’s a really, really great IP lawyer. He’s in our program and he’s made the breakthrough, and he’s the first IP lawyer that doesn’t charge by the hour. He charges by the patent. If the IP lawyer charges by the hour, it’s a very slow patent. If he charges by the patent, it’s a very fast patent. But the big thing, he showed a slide that in just big corporations, 1980, you took big corp, Fortune 500, the S&P 500, more than 80% of their valuation was tangible. It was property, it was real estate, it was fleets, it was equipment. Last year, more than 80% were intangibles. It was your ideas, intellectual. If you look at Elon Musk, it’s all intellectual capital. If you look at Meta, you look at anything, it’s intellectual. It’s not tangibles. So we’ve entered into that new world and AI has introduced us to that new world. It’s new processes, new structures, new approaches and it’s really interesting. It’s hard for entrepreneurs to get their idea that your creativity is actually property. Louis Diamond: It sounds like the ultimate challenge for anyone listening is translate your process, your ideas, the stuff that you’re doing by instinct as you both had said, and turn it into something patentable or something repeatable that another advisor, another executive, another owner can pick up and deploy and scale. John Bowen: We share the process in chapter four. It’s the fourth greater multiplier. And we actually share Caldwell, the attorney that Dan’s talking about, his story and the value creation. He’s now the major player in that space. And this is where we as advisors, we’re given a twofer, Dan and Louis, is that you can help your clients, but you can do this yourself too. You’ve been involved in a number of large transactions. The difference, I had a $2 billion advisory practice I sold in ’98, and we sold for 16 times earnings. And a big part of it, we were in that blue ocean. We had agents that we created and strategic process that would run without me, and it did type thing. And it continued to grow and went for about 10 fold what I sold for a number of years later. This is something that’s very real. Louis Diamond: Absolutely. I got two more questions for you guys because I know you’re both busy. For an advisor who feels like they’ve won the growth game, they grow 10, 15, 20% per year, they’re charged up, they’re on the Barron’s list, the Forbes list, they’re hitting their AUM milestones, they built an amazing team, they have a family member in the business. They have everything that anyone could want. What does the next game look like for them? What’s the next frontier once you’ve achieved all those things that from the outside looking in, seems like you have it all? What’s the next game to play? John Bowen: Well, we’re going to both say The Greater Game, but the- Dan Sullivan: Well, tell them about the dashboard, John, because the book is just part of the deal here. It gives you the landscape. There’s a great tool that comes with the book. So tell them about the dashboard. John Bowen: Really what we wanted to do is to create kind of a community just around the book. Dan and I and team built a dashboard. We were very creative on naming, thegreatergamedashboard.com. You can go in and we’re now studying every month over 500 successful entrepreneurs. We have that data in here. You’ll be able to see how you compare at each of these stages, the four stages, the 10 multipliers. And you’re going to get specific recommendations. This is for entrepreneurs. But again, you should do it. If you’re a financial advisor, you have an equity ownership, you should definitely be doing it as well. And one of the things that we see over and over again, and Louis, you probably see this a lot in the conversations. They have advisors who have already won. They don’t know what the next game is. And it’s easy to check out at that point. It’s easy to frustrate the next generation of leaders and so on. If you take the time to really see what the opportunities are and architect to realize that vision, you can create, whether it’s selling the practice, creating tremendous value there or designing a role for yourself, maybe it’s executive chairman type for that business that you can guide it with the vision and what you’ve brought and strategy. But bring that team up. That’s going to create so much value, so much impact and you can design it for the life that you want. And that’s where I get very excited. Louis Diamond: I can hear the passion in your voice. Dan, let’s finish with you. Given all of your experience working with entrepreneurs, advisors, business owners, et cetera, what’s the one move that you’ve seen the most successful entrepreneurs in your orbit make that’s changed the trajectory of their firms and their life more than anything else? Dan Sullivan: I’ll answer it in a little roundabout way. Periodically, I have a thinking tool. I said, “If everything was taken away from you as an entrepreneur and they moved you 1,000 miles away, what’s the one thing that you would take with you? It has to be portable. So what is the most portable thing that you have that you would start over again with the greatest value that you had created previously? What would it be? And then you would rebuild what you’ve already created, but you would do it much faster. What would be the one thing?” It’s an interesting thought. But in our concept, it’s called unique ability, that there’s something about you, as an individual, that first of all gave you enough confidence to become an entrepreneur because it’s risky. It’s a risky proposition. It’s guessing and betting and it’s risky business and it’s unique ability. So the starting point for all growth in Strategic Coach is that there’s something about you that’s absolutely unique. You don’t have any competitors on this and it has two qualities. One is that you’re so good at it, you don’t take it seriously. You’ve done this since you were a child and it just comes to you naturally and you don’t see the significance of it. When you’re in Coach, you start seeing the significance of it. And the second thing is you just absolutely love doing it. It’s what you love doing most of all. It comes to you naturally. You don’t even have to think about it. And then you begin to realize that anything else you’re doing as the founder and the owner of your company, probably somebody else can do. So you’re doing 20 things, but really you should be doing three things. The other 17 things still need to be done but not by you. And that’s the breakthrough. You have to simplify in order to multiply. Louis Diamond: I absolutely love that. I know when I was in Coach, that was my biggest takeaway or realization was figuring out what my unique ability was because I think the two components,

Money decisions are rarely just about math. The hardest part is often the human side. Rafael Melendez of NextGen Financial Planning joins us to discuss how fee-only financial planning helps younger families move from stress and uncertainty to confident, intentional decisions.We explore Rafael's path into the profession, what he learned from sales-driven environments, and how those experiences shaped his client-first approach. We also break down what “fee-only” really means and why it can be a great fit for people who need planning guidance without having millions invested.Rafael shares his journey from joining NextGen during the pandemic to becoming a partner as the firm evolved. We discuss firm ownership, balancing growth with flexibility, and his advice for aspiring RIA owners: design the life you want first, then build the business around it.We also walk through a real-world planning scenario involving a high-stress job, stock compensation, student loans, and the decision to earn less in exchange for a better quality of life.Subscribe for more conversations like this, share with a planner friend, and leave a review. What value matters most in your next financial decision?Rafael's Social and Websitehttps://www.linkedin.com/in/rafael-melendez/https://www.nextgenfinancialplanning.com/

There is no golden goose when it comes to affiliation models in the wealth management industry.Wirehouses, independent broker-dealers, RIAs all have pros and cons.Anyone who suggests otherwise is either ill-informed or being disingenuous.So when considering pathways for your advisory practice, it's important to understand how those pros and cons compare.In this episode (#150) of the Transition To RIA question & answer series, I explain the pros and cons of the RIA model.Come take a listen!P.S. Prefer video? You can find this entire series in video format on Youtube. Search for the TRANSITION TO RIA channel.Show notes: https://TransitionToRIA.com/what-are-the-pros-and-cons-of-the-ria-model/About Host: Brad Wales is the founder of Transition To RIA, where he helps financial advisors between $50M and $1B understand everything there is to know about WHY and HOW to transition their practice to the Registered Investment Advisor (RIA) model. Brad has 20+ years of industry experience, including direct RIA related roles in Compliance, Finance and Business Development. He has an MBA and has held the 4, 7, 24, 63 & 65 licenses. The Transition To RIA website (TransitionToRIA.com) has a large catalog of free videos, articles, whitepapers, as well as other resources to help advisors understand the RIA model and how it would apply to their unique circumstances.

New York Knicks update (00:00-13:42). Ria's Pop Culture Jeopardy! finale reaction (13:43-22:59). Fran had dinner with Niall Horan (23:00-32:31). Summer House reunion part three recap *Recorded before next week's episode was announced* (33:35-53:41). Ariana Grande & Ethan Slater split (53:42-57:34). PopCorner voicemails: Love Island breakfast used to mean something, Off Campus x High School Musical parallels, Madelyn Cline & Henry Henry Henry + more! (58:20-1:17:31). CITO LINKS > barstool.link/chicks-in-the-office.You can find every episode of this show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube. Prime Members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. For more, visit barstool.link/chicks-in-the-office

Budgeting – less about rigid restrictions, more about changing mindsets on using income effectively. Today's guest shares a different approach to financial planning: one that focuses less on restricting spending and more on creating intentional systems that help clients save automatically and use their income more effectively. David Mozeika is the founder of TOMORO, an RIA based in Red Bank, New Jersey, that oversees $350 million in assets under management for 600 client households. In this episode, David explains how his "income under management" philosophy helps clients treat cash flow as an asset, using a "cash flow reservoir" system to separate spending from saving and reduce unconscious spending habits. We also talk about his four-part financial positioning framework, how he approaches ongoing client meetings as a calibration process rather than a static plan review, and how leaning into his unique strengths ultimately shaped the growth of his firm.  For show notes and more visit: https://www.kitces.com/493     

In this episode, I sit down with Fran Mariano, co-host of the hit podcast, Chicks in the Office, to hear her takes on the latest pop culture moments. We dive deep into the Summer House drama, whether the new seasons of Love Island are worth the watch, a debate on Off Campus vs. Heated Rivalry, and why we're both unashamed romance readers. Fran also talks about her career journey at Barstool, building her show with co-host Ria, and why their sister-like dynamic works so well. Plus, we put Fran to the test with a celebrity guessing game of "Who The F Is That?”Key Takeaway / Points:Going from Barstool intern to co-hosting her successful show, Chicks in the OfficeWhy her co-host, Ria, is like family and being women in a male-dominated companyFran's love of pop culture and how she is a fangirl at heartA breakdown of the Summer House reunion part twoFavorite TV shows: Off Campus, Heated Rivalry, Summer I Turned PrettyWhy SMUT/romance novels are the best (and not because of the writing)Love Island USA vs. UKColoring confessionals: TV boyfriend obsessions, her Nick Jonas fangirl moment, and dream podcast guestsFollow Fran:Instagram: @francescamariano & @chicksintheofficeTikTok: @francescamariano & @chicksintheofficeYouTube: Chicks In The OfficeFollow me:Instagram: @cameronoaksrogersSubstack: Fill Your CupWebsite: cameronoaksrogers.comTikTok: @cameronoaksrogersYouTube: Cameron Rogers

Four days. Twenty-four firms. $4.5 trillion in controlled assets. Here is what Frank and Stacey took away from Elite Ignite 2026. Frank LaRosa and Stacey Frank are back in the studio for the first time in about six weeks and they are using this episode to do something they have never done quite like this before: open up the room. Elite Ignite started five years ago as an internal team meeting. It grew into a broker dealer and RIA conference unlike anything else in the industry. No deals discussed. No transition packages on the table. Just firms coming in, laying their swords down and getting to work. Frank and Stacey walk through the standout sessions and conversations from the 2026 conference held in Mount Laurel, New Jersey. They explain why working with 65 to 80 firms is not a liability but a strategic necessity, why 85% of what firms offer is essentially the same and why the remaining 15% is what Elite is built around understanding and how the conference is designed to make every advisor placement a deliberate decision rather than a convenient one. They get candid about the Good Firm Bad Firm Recruiter panel, where firm recruiters heard directly from Frank about what professional courtesy looks like when an advisor takes time away from their family to explore a transition. They also talk through the growing AI conversation among financial services firms, why the pro forma model Frank has been building for 15 years stopped every firm in the room and what it means that some firms walked out of the conference and immediately started rewriting their 2026 growth strategy. The full Elite Ignite 2026 Insight Report is available at eliteconsultingpartners.com/2026-ignite-recap   Questions answered in this episode include: What was Elite Ignite 2026 and who attended? How does Elite Consulting Partners decide which firms to work with and recommend to advisors? Why do advisors get confused when comparing offers from multiple firms, and how does Elite solve that? What did the Good Firm Bad Firm Recruiter panel reveal about how firm recruiters approach advisors? How are broker dealers and RIAs using AI to support financial advisor growth right now? Why doesn't Elite invite financial advisors to the conference, and will that change? What does it mean to make the right move instead of just the next move?   Chapters: 0:00 — What It Means to Make the Right Move, Not the Next Move 0:54 — Welcome Back: Stacey Rejoins and Elite Ignite Recap Begins 3:12 — The $4.5 Trillion Room: Firms, Collaboration, and the Iron Sharpens Iron Moment 7:15 — Why 85% Is the Same and the 15% Is Everything 10:06 — Inside the Conference: RIA Panels, M&A, and the AI Conversation 13:38 — Good Firm Bad Firm Recruiter: What Firms Need to Hear 18:11 — The Pro Forma Reveal and What the Industry Can Learn From It   Learn more about Elite and our resources: Elite Consulting Partners | Financial Advisor Transitions https://eliteconsultingpartners.com Elite Marketing Concepts | Marketing Services for Financial Advisors https://elitemarketingconcepts.com Elite Advisor Successions | Advisor Mergers and Acquisitions https://eliteadvisorsuccessions.com JEDI Database Solutions | Technology Solutions for Advisors https://jedidatabasesolutions.com Elite Wealth Management Insights Report https://eliteconsultingpartners.com/insight-report Listen to more Advisor Talk episodes https://eliteconsultingpartners.com/podcasts/

Solarstone pres. Pure Trance Radio Episode 486 01. metakomplex - Feeling [Pure Breaks] 02. Lean Robotti - Shake It [The Soundgarden] 03. Kev Wright + Jay Storic - From Beyond [Pure Progressive] 04. Shinewelt - Gute Reise [House of Horus] 05. Claudio Suara - The Peak [Joyride Music Progressive] 06. Plynn, Brian Flinn - Skytree [Light of the Moon] 07. Wow Effect - Smash Loyalty (E-Talking Remix) [BELTERS 4 U] It's Not The Kind Of Thing We Usually Play... But We Like It Anyway: 08. Emily Jeanne - Twice Not Nice (Notte Infinita Hi-Tech Roller Mix) [quỳnh] Solarstone's Big Tune: 09. Solarstone & Orkidea - Slowmotion VII [Black Hole] 10. Darren Tate - A Child Of The Times [Anjunabeats] 11. NAV (RU) - Zero [Inspired Virtu] 12. Pascal M & Scott Mac - The Remedy [ASOT] 13. John O'Callaghan - The First Sip [Subculture] 14. Re:Locate - Beyond [Pure Trance] 15. Underworld - Cowgirl (Ian Betts Rewind Mix) [White Label] 16. DJ COSMIC DREAM - Turtle Beach (Solarstone Pure Mix) [Insignia] 17. Reflekt feat Delline Bass - Need To Feel Loved (Lostly Remix) [White Label] 18. Lumine - Here For Us [Musical Freedom] 19. Johan Gielen pres. Airscape ft. Katie Sky - All Of Me For All Of You (Club Mix) [Black Hole] 20. LOSTLEGEND - Hadal [Landscapes] 21. Sequence Six - Boundless [FSOE] 22. Lange & Betsie Larkin - All Around Me (Ferry Tayle Remix) [Black Hole] One from the Archive: 23. JOC ft. Ria vs. Ferry Corsten ft. Betsie Larkin - Love I'll Follow (Solarstone Pure Mashup) [White Label] 24. SAMOH - Excluded [KNTXT] Oh Yeah: 25. Smith & Brown - Inhibition [Pure Trance NEON] Chillout Moment: 26. Boards of Canada - Blood In The Labyrinth (Inferno) [Warp]

Matthew Liebman, Founding Partner and CEO of Amplius Wealth Partners, discusses the factors behind the firm's rapid growth, what sets Amplius apart in an increasingly competitive RIA landscape, and the innovations shaping its future. He also shares how the firm is leveraging video communication to stay agile, strengthen client relationships, and deliver a more personalized wealth management experience.

Hello and welcome to Handgun Radio! I'm your host Ryan Michad and Weerd beard and this is your home for all the news, information and discussion in the handgunning world!   This week, we talk The Current State of Handgun Development Down By The River!!!   Please check out the Patriot Patch Company for their awesome patches and other high quality  items! Visit www.patriotpatch.co for more information! Cool artist “proof” rendition come along with the latest patch of the month patches!    We are proudly sponsored by VZ Grips! Please go check out all their fantastic products at their website! VZ Grips!  -KFrame Magna Grips   Thank you to all our patreons! Visit us at https://www.patreon.com/handgunradio    Week In Review:   Weerd: I'm next to him on a Bench DOWN BY THE RIVAH!!   Ryan: In NH with mr Weerd beerd!   Drink Segment: Fort Constitution Blended Whiskey that benefits some NH fund    Main Topic: The Current State of Handgun Development Down By The River! -RIA 5.0e Forgotten Weapons Video Where do you think it's going to go Metal 3D printing, suppressors etc   Wrap Up: Don't forget to shop Brownells using our affiliate link! Head to firearmsradio.net and click the affiliate link in the upper right hand corner! Be sure to go like Handgun Radio on facebook and share it with your friends! Leave us a review on iTunes! Check out VZ Grips!  Listen to all the great shows on the Firearms Radio Network! Check out the Patriot Patch Company!! www.patriotpatch.co   Weerd where can people find you? Assorted Calibers Podcast,  Weer'd World   Oddball gunscarstech.com Assorted Calibers Podcast ACP and HGR Facebook Play screechingtires.wav   David Assorted Calibers Podcast ACP and HGR Facebook Blue Collar Prepping Brena Bock Author Page David Bock Author Page Team And More Xander: Assorted Calibers Podcast Here so Ryan doesn't do a bad impression of me   Until next week, have fun & safe shooting!  

In this episode, Matthew Jarvis hosts Michael Belluomini and Liam Heffernan from the Carson Group to discuss their recent acquisitions, the intricacies of deal approvals, and the importance of cultural fit in acquisitions. They delve into the structure of acquisition payments, the significance of maintaining a full pipeline, and the financial discipline required in the M&A landscape. The conversation also covers the importance of growth metrics in valuation and the tax implications for advisors considering a partnership with larger firms. Unlocking Value Through Strategic Acquisitions With Michael Belluomini And Liam Heffernan Resources in today's episode: - Matt Jarvis: Website | LinkedIn - Liam Heffernan: Website | LinkedIn - Michael Belluomini: Website | LinkedIn - Download the evaluation framework Carson uses to assess RIA growth! - Learn More about our Coaching Programs

What would it take for a client to happily pay you $70,000+ per year… and feel like they're getting a bargain? In the case of today's guest, it's building a high-value advisory firm by helping business owners unlock significant tax savings, often in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.  Patrick Lonergan is the founder of Vital Wealth, an RIA based in Clinton, Iowa, that generates $2.5 million in annual advisory fee revenue for approximately 100 client households. In this episode, Patrick breaks down how he structures his services around a clear, tiered tax strategy approach, starting with foundational optimizations and progressing into more advanced, high-impact planning techniques. Listen in to learn how these strategies go beyond tax savings to support better cash flow, smarter reinvestment decisions, and long-term wealth building for entrepreneurs, as well as how delivering clear, tangible value has turned his clients into powerful referral engines. For show notes and more visit: https://www.kitces.com/491    

Ria's back! (00:00-14:00). Summer House Finale & In The City premiere recap (15:45-27:58). Ria's thoughts on Drake's new albums (27:59-36:59). The Jonas Brothers have entered the podcast game (38:11-46:32). Anne Hathaway is producing an Ella Enchanted TV series (46:33-53:38). Grey's Anatomy is getting a Texas spinoff (53:39-1:00:32). Ria has rewatched Off Campus three times already (1:00:33-1:06:31). PopCorner voicemails: Beyond the Villa drama, Hot take on sheer dresses + Evan Bates & Madison Chock on DWTS idea (1:07:37-1:20:05). Interview with Ashley Iaconetti - talking everything Real Housewives of Rhode Island, her and Fran's love of the Jonas Brothers + more! (1:20:53-1:57:48). CITO LINKS > barstool.link/chicks-in-the-office.You can find every episode of this show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube. Prime Members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. For more, visit barstool.link/chicks-in-the-office

Ria's celeb filled night in NYC (00:00-45:34). Ciara Miller claims West Wilson & Jennifer Fessler slept together (46:23-59:45). Ciara Miller & Tefi Pessoa join Love Island USA as Aftersun co-hosts (59:46-1:02:37). Taylor Frankie Paul calls out Mikayla Matthews (1:02:38-1:12:19). Weekly Watch Report: The Roast of Kevin Hart, The Devil Wears Prada 2. Euphoria+ more! (1:13:52-). CITO LINKS > barstool.link/chicks-in-the-office.You can find every episode of this show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube. Prime Members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. For more, visit barstool.link/chicks-in-the-office