Gaining The Skills, Experience, And Team Needed To Serve UHNW Clients Effectively with Blair duQuesnay

Welcome to the Financial Advisor Success Podcast, where you go behind the scenes with financial planner, speaker, and consultant Michael Kitzis to hear stories of how leading financial advisors navigated the inevitable challenges that arise on the path to success and get insight from leading industry consultants about how to break through to the next level in your advisory business. And now here's your host, Michael Kitzis. Welcome everyone. Welcome to the 474th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast. My guest on today's podcast is Blair Ducane. Blair is a lead advisor at RIT Holtz Wealth Management, an RIA based in New York, New York that oversees approximately $6.5 billion in assets under management for 3,900 client households. What's unique about Blair though is how her career has evolved from serving traditional Wealth Management clients to working with ultra high net worth clients, giving her first hand experience and understanding the skills, experience, and team needed to make this transition effectively. In this episode, we talked in depth about how Blair learned that while she already had much of the book knowledge needed to serve the wealthiest clients, in part by earning the CFP and CFA certifications, putting this knowledge into practice is a particularly time-consuming and high stakes endeavor, how Blair finds that in attention to detail, particularly when it comes to advanced tax and state planning opportunities, is a key part of being successful serving this client type, and how Blair has a much more frequent meeting cadence with these clients given the many moving parts in their investment portfolio and cash flow. We also talk about how Blair and RIT Holtz structure their teams to serve ultra high net worth clients, with a lead advisor supported by a co-pilot and client service associate and backed by centralized service support, how Blair finds that while in assets under management based fee makes sense for most financial planning clients, it's often more appropriate for both her firm and the client, for ultra high net worth individuals to pay a flat fee that accurately reflects the time and staff needed to meet the client's planning needs and why Blair is confident she can demonstrate her value proposition for ultra high net worth clients given the broad range of high value planning recommendations that could be worth millions of dollars for these clients, more than outweigh the fees they pay. And be certain to listen to the end, where Blair shares how she finds that a key differentiator working with ultra high net worth clients is that they are very concerned about avoiding major financial mistakes as opposed to other clients who might be worried about whether they will be able to support their lifestyle throughout retirement, how Blair finds that the backing of a strong team has helped her overcome the imposter syndrome that can arise when working with ultra high net worth clients, and why Blair thinks advisors can find success working with clients up and down the wealth spectrum, with the key being able to identify the types of clients and issues the advisor enjoys working with most and then leaning into that market segment. And so with that introduction, I hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast with Blair Ducane. Welcome Blair Ducane to the Financial Advisor Success Podcast. Thank you so much for having me, Michael, I am honored to be back. I'm really excited to have you back on the podcast again. One of a few guests that we've been having lately rejoin us because it's been five plus years since the last time you joined us, and stuff has changed. Stuff has changed. When you came to us, many years ago back four, I had to look up, it was episode 204. So for anyone who wants to go back and listen, kitts.com/204, and you can listen to Blair's original episode. At the time, that was all the stuff that was going on when you had made the decision, I'm going to tuck my existing advisory firm into this much larger firm. Not because I'm selling and getting my exit or doing a PE roll up thing because they seem like cool people and I share their vision and they just already have some stuff figured out that I don't feel like dealing with and we can grow better together than apart. That's right, yeah, I jumped on a rocket ship. I was looking it up that the firm that you joined Rithole 12 was a little over a billion dollars back in late 2020 when we had that conversation and is dare I ask, now what's the asset base today? Six and a half billion on our last eight ADV. So roughly quadrupled in four or five years, just like a little bit of growth. I know part of that for you as Rithole has grown, as many firms grow, often the larger the firm, we've seen this in our research Jennifer a long time, the larger the firm, the more it tends to attract high dollar clients. It's not exclusively so some of us can run very small solo boutiques and get some very, very large clients, but there definitely is a trend that larger clients seem to skewed towards larger firms for whatever the reasons brand perceived stability. It seems like a lot of people it's got staying power and when firms get bigger and start moving quote unquote up market as that happens, they often then start rolling out higher tiers of services. I mean, most of us start with like the massive fluent a couple hundred thousand dollars up to a million or two, then maybe we move to the higher net worth clients, the like million errors in multi million errors and then some firms that get bigger and bigger, you start moving into what the industry really calls ultra high net worth, which gets different folks draw that line and different lines, but you're talking usually about ten million plus or tens of millions plus and going up there from there, sometimes you get your hundred million errors in your billionaires and the interesting thing to me about firms when they start moving up, I guess like for us as advisors, when we start moving that far up market is serving really high dollar clients, like deck of millionaires and multi deck of millionaires. They're different. Like they're really actually quite different in the depth of expertise. You need to serve them like the true complexity of their situations when you start getting to multiple businesses and private investments and lots of entity layers of various types and everyone does it on their own truly unique journey. So very not conducive to like having a repeatable same or financial planning process for them, which means when every client's unique, often it's really hard to learn how to serve them well and kind of get in the proverbial reps, the repetitions with them, until you do it. Like there are some programs like CPWA out there that help from the designation end but serving ultra high net worth from basically everyone know that I live that space well, it's incredibly experiential. You learn it by doing it, which is then really hard because you can't get really good at ultra high net worth clients until you serve a bunch of them and you can't serve them until you're already good at them and then you get stuck in the chicken and egg thing. And so I know you have lived this path now over the past five years of the journey. So I'm really excited to talk about how you have actually made this migration up market to learn and do what it takes to serve very high net worth clients. Absolutely. And that has been my journey through all of those levels of wealth working with clients and still working with clients at all ends of the spectrum. It has been a journey and I think it's going to be different for every firm. So our story may not be the story of all of your listeners. But I think there will be some threads and some corollaries that will ring true to a lot of people and maybe some things to think about for those who are aspiring to work with ultra high net worth clients because I tell advisors all the time, you may not actually enjoy this work the way that you do, you know, your clients who only have a few million dollars. It's a very different way of working with clients. It is I find sort of fascinating for the spectrum of wealth and service in our industry. I mean, most of us discover pretty early on in our career or just, you know, you get a client that's much bigger than your average client and you discover, wow, twice the assets, twice the fee or almost twice the fee depending on your break points. And it definitely doesn't take twice as much time. This feels a lot more productive, right, so you you you're you're you're serving 250,000 dollar clients and get your first half million dollar client. This feels better. You're serving half million dollar clients. You get your million dollar client. It feels better. You you've got a million dollar client. You get like a three million dollar client and go, wow, this is amazing. And I find a lot of advisors just that's like a fun productivity game to play and our research data really vets out like you really do get material lifts and productivity as you move through that spectrum because you're you really are working with clients who are willing to pay more for your time and expertise. But there is some ceiling level where they're not paying you, you know, they're not paying you more for your expertise. They're just paying you more because they expect you to do more. And you're you're getting paid well for that work. But the workload goes up a lot at a certain point. It doesn't one thing that never occurred to me until I was physically doing the work is a lot of times you get paid more because your work is so much more valuable. The tax planning advice that you give is worth so much to them. So much more to them because there's another comma there. There's more dollars to deal with. The estate planning work is so valuable to your clients now. Your work is worth more simply because your client has more money for you to provide value. And that's the truth. On the other end of the spectrum, there is a point at which assets under management as a fee no longer really makes sense. It gets to a point where, you know, how many hundreds of thousands of dollars should this client actually be paying? And so the other thing that advisors should think about in working with large clients is, you know, don't think of the same profit margin that you do for a one or a five million dollar client. You're probably at some point going to say, all right, here is the fee we think is appropriate for the annual amount of hours we're going to spend on this relationship and we'll review it every two years and make sure it still makes sense. So can you share a little bit of, I guess we're wearing your experience, those thresholds are like, when does it stop being an AUM conversation and start just being a flat fee conversation? I wouldn't say there is a specific dollar amount because every ultra high net worth individual has a different makeup of their wealth. So you know, we may have a client who, you know, we're managing 15 million in assets, but everything else is locked up in a company that was founded and so the hours of work is tremendous. And so the AUM fee doesn't make sense because it's too low, right? Okay. And then on the other end of the spectrum, there's a couple of more commas there and our AUM fee ends at 35 basis points and it would just never make sense for someone to pay a 35 basis points. That's too high. And there's no magic solution that I personally have found. Each of these fees is truly individualized and sometimes the fee that starts the engagement is not enough. And that's a very interesting ask, but hopefully the value that your team is providing becomes so obvious to the client that raising the annual fee by a couple hundred thousand dollars, which is a very scary thing to ask can make sense. So there's no magical number. If you have a hundred million dollars or 50 million dollars, this is when the retainer fee makes sense. It really comes down to man hours required to do the work and so far we have decided we're not going to become lawyers tracking, you know, every six minutes of our time. So we just have to estimate it. And that's one of the benefits of being an employee only earned firm. We have no outside investors looking to squeeze all the juice possible. We can decide for ourselves what feels profitable in each client relationship. So I'm struck by your point that I feel like for a lot of us when we're starting to talk to higher dollar clients, the flat fee conversation usually kicks in in really the version you said second, like I'm, you know, I've got some break points in my schedule. The basis points number gets pretty low. But there's some point at some number of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars where any basis point number is not even hundreds of thousands of dollars of fees. It can literally be millions and the math just doesn't make sense. And we have to flat fee it and figure out an appropriate number. And I'm struck by your highlights that you can't just look at it on a UN basis though because the irony is sometimes the problem is not you apply the fee schedule to their assets and the fee just seems too high and you have to flat fee it because sometimes it's too low because there's a lot of planning work to do. And their liquid assets are too small a percentage of their total net worth for you to feasibly apply this as an AUM fee. And usually that's a very rare find, but one of the things that I'm feeling in my little subset of, you know, client base that I have access to is there are a lot of Americans right now who all of a sudden in the last five, ten years have multiple tens of millions of dollars and or, you know, multiples of that because of the growth that's going on in various parts of our economy. And not only, you know, people who may have worked for tech startups or own them or publicly traded companies, but simply just regular folks who the grandparents owned a bunch of real estate out in California and now it's worth a whole month bunch. So I was, I was talking to a friend about this the other day. There's unexpectedly a whole lot of people with taxable estates and now that's, you know, $15 million in January for a single person and 30 million for a couple, there's a whole lot of those people that have just recently inked those dollars and it's a really interesting time and it's a testament to the US economy. We have been growing and creating a lot of wealth in very recent years. So can you help us understand what kind of fees we're talking about, I mean at the end of the day, are these $50,000 fee clients or these $100,000 fee clients or these several $100,000 fee clients? Like again, I think when most of us are used to, you know, I charge 1.1% on the first 500,000 and then it's 1% and then it's 0.9 and my average client is $1 or $2 million. That's an amazing business to have an average revenue per client north of $10,000. But those numbers, I suspect, are much smaller than the scope of what you're talking about as a typical client fee. In what we call our multifamily office, yes, right? So keep in mind, I have not necessarily left behind my 1, 2, 3, $5 million clients who are paying those types of AUM fees. Okay. And it's a handful of newer clients, a handful that I work with, a handful that several other of my colleagues work with that make up our multifamily office, which is where we say there's a tax, there's an estate tax issue, right? We've got multi-generational wealth, we have a state tax planning situation here and that's where the multifamily office team comes in. And multifamily office clients are still paying 35 basis points on, you know, $30, $40 million. It still makes sense. But we do have clients who pay retainer fees in the multiple hundreds of thousand dollars a year. I don't think we have anybody that's paying us more than a million. But if they were at say one of the trust companies or one of the large brokerage firms handling the same relationship through not so explicit fees, they'd probably be paying millions of dollars in fees a year and not necessarily knowing that. And how many hours of work is it for a client at this, at this level to do what it takes to earn a multi-hundred thousand dollar fees? So the important thing to know is it is not just me or the lead advisor, right? Okay. The advisor in this situation is orchestrating a team of people who are doing work from the client. Okay. So there's always a lead and that's think of that as the quarterback, the person who literally knows every single thing that's going on with that client relationship. But each multifamily office client also has a market strategist assigned. So you know, the Ben Carlson's or Cali Cox, our chief market strategist will be involved providing market updates at periodic calls. There will be an actual portfolio manager assigned. So this is not just a trader, but somebody who is, you know, very well versed in portfolio management, you know, tax situations knows how to properly allocate, you know, all of the cash that's coming in that we're waiting to reinvest, you know, so that portfolio manager is managing like the day-to-day cash flows of the investments. There's always an associate advisor, we call those co-pilots here, right? So the sort of, I hate the word junior, but the advisor who's assisting the lead advisor, who also pretty much knows everything and does a lot of the work that is not done by other members of the team. There's usually a tax person, so we do taxes in-house, we don't do taxes for all of our multifamily office clients, but we are consulting and working with their tax provider. So there's usually a tax member of the team. There will be a CSA, who is a senior CSA, who is really well versed in complicated account opening and transfers, and then there will be somebody who feels that role of sort of a state planning specialist, right, the person who can work with the attorney to make sure that we're executing, you know, say, there's a grant program, making sure that all of that is being handled properly. So that's a lot of people for one client. And so I actually don't want to try to calculate how many hours we're all collectively spending because we'll probably realize that we're undercharging and we know that, but one of the great things about what I love about our multifamily office is that we're able so far to do that, you know, with the number of employees, we're at 80 employees at the firm to provide incredible amount of value at much lower of a cost than you would get at a very large institution, which is pretty much who we're competing with at this point and at this level of client. So how do you get to some number for any particular new client who's coming in in this model? So you really have to give it your best estimate. The other thing that we have done is unlike a lot of larger family office type firms, trust companies and so on. We have allowed our services to be selected all a cart. So not every client needs help with their charitable giving. They may even have their own foundation with staff there. Not every client needs help or wants our help in every single area, right? So we don't have to charge on everything. They could say, "I want you to come in and provide an investment policy statement for me and help me work with other money managers that are already in place and reinvest cash flows and do some tax consulting." And so we have to take the estimate of how many hours we believe that is going to take. Sometimes we will also just sort of do a double check. How does that equate to a basis point fee, just to make sure we're not totally off, of course? And then after you've been working with that client for a year or two, it can become a parent whether you have over or undercharged. The other thing that's great is that sometimes there is a lot of work early in a relationship with the client and then things may actually normalize. So the upfront fee could actually be lowered hypothetically if the work required is not as much after we've done some sort of initial complicated planning and gotten everything sort of set on, "I don't want to say autopilot." There is no autopilot at this level of wealth, but the processes are in place, everything's running smoothly. It's not taking as much of our time as we expected. And then on the flip side, of course, realizing that, "Okay, this is way more work than we initially, you, the client, and us thought we were going to be doing for you." And so we're going to change the fee because it just makes sense too. And then on the other side of that, now I talked to you five years ago, I wasn't working with any multi-family office client, so this is a very new service model, is that there will be probably just every so often sort of in a cost of living adjustment and inflation type adjustment to the fee. Okay. But not, it sounds like not every year and automatically that say periodically revisit and just have the conversation, "Hey, it's been a few years cost to go up. Your fee was $150,000, we need to move it to $165,000 to keep pace with inflation over the past few years." Sure. And we just don't want to be doing that conversation every single year. It feels too intrusive. So every time we sign a new engagement, we say this is the price for the next two years. Okay. So it's steady to your cycles for you because that's just the time window of the engagement scopes in the first place. Yeah, think about it. Rather than saying some esoteric, it's a 50 basis point fee and maybe some clients calculate that in their mind, but a lot of clients actually don't. You're actually bringing a number, a round number to the table. And that's just not a conversation that's fun to have every single year with a client. It's more, it's more comfortable to say, "Here's everything that we've accomplished over a multi-year period and here's the new people who are now on the team that we've had to hire and we want to make sure that we can keep up with the service level." And so here's the new fee. And so how do you explain, I was going to say justify that, it feels more negative than I mean it to be, but how do you explain and justify six figure fees when you just start quoting? It's $150,000. It's $220,000. It's $305,000. I mean I'm assuming to say, at some point people are going to say something, ask something about it, "Blare, I'm sure you're wonderful, but where did that number come from?" And I don't know that that's a reasonable price. It's until you have worked with and met people at this level of wealth, I call them extra comma or two club, you don't realize how much just their life in general costs. And that $250,000 or whatever it is seems like a deal. Not to mention the fact that if our grant program rolls three or four million dollars out of their estate tax-free, we've already earned multiples of our fee. So again it comes down to the advice that you're giving is actually worth. Much more than you're charging and they understand that because they're seeing it and living it every day. And oh by the way, they understand that larger firms with higher fee structures are going to cost them much, much more. I guess it's a good reminder that so much of cost of expenses of what's a quote unquote reasonable spend is just so relative to your wealth and income in the first place. I mean, it reminds me of a piece of Nick Majouli's book, I forget what he called the rule. If there's an expenditure that's less than 0.01% of your net worth, just do it, stop stressing, just do it. It doesn't matter. Granted, a few hundred thousand dollars might be more than 0.01% of their net worth, but if IP 0.03, 0.05, like you're actually not far off from that number. If that makes their life a little bit easier, like cool problem solved, that's in the two small to matter expenditure range. And that's the other, that's the flip side is you have to make sure that also that you're charging in enough that it seems like legitimate, right? There could be a level of wealth where a hundred thousand dollars, they don't even, it's questionable because it's too low. How could it possibly be? How could I actually get access to this seven, eight professionals who are some of the most talented people in the business to work just on my wealth? And it would only be that something's wrong here. So very interesting mental framework that requires a shift in yourself personally when you start working with clients at the size. I mean, different scale, but it reminds me I had an advisor friend years ago who was rolling out like a subscription model and was really kind of anxious about the price. It was going to be four hundred dollars a month, it just seems like that's going to be a lot of money to a lot of people, like that's almost five grand a year and they were doing subscription because working with a lot of clients that don't know if they have liquid assets. So they're going to pay it from cash flow and it's just a little anxious if people were going to think it's too expensive or just right and was trying to figure out how to get in front of people who make enough money that it would be okay to them and ended up getting this this meeting with someone who was making like one or two million dollars a year from their business, which probably means their enterprise value would have been $10, $20 million more depending on whatever their evidence multiple was on their on their business and he got blown up in the other direction, which was he was so nervous to say this four hundred dollar a month fee and the client was like, you're four hundred dollars a month, my lawyer is seven hundred dollars an hour. You can't be a credible professional at four hundred dollars a month, like if your monthly fee is less than my lawyer per hour, you must suck, like you can't be a credible professional in my eyes and I mean it was a wonderful advisor, a great great value for his clients but was was so unprepared for how the lens of what is a reasonable price changes as he went from, you know, working with doctors that made three hundred thousand dollars a year to working with a business owner with a twenty million dollars a month worth. Right. Yeah, that is so perfectly encapsulating the the shift in framework that you have to go through as an advisor to go up the scale to these astronomical levels of wealth. Yeah, I couldn't you couldn't have put it anymore perfectly with that example. So when you're structuring these fees, is it sounds like this is kind of scoped to the amount of stuff you've got to do, is there a state plus stuff because you're doing rolling grats, are you doing their tax return in house or not and how messy is it. How does the portfolio part fit back in like our is is is the flat fee also covering all of the investment management stuff or is there a like no, no, this is for the advanced financial planning things. We also have an AUM fee for the pure portfolio side like how does the portfolio part mix in? Right. So every client in the multi-family office has a custom written multi-page term paper, IPS. So think about, you know, doing the the CFA level three exam and you had to write in an IPS or or what you learned about on the CFP, we're actually writing those for each client custom. And it's more because if somebody is coming in from the outside and needs to learn the relationship, they could just pick it up and run. You know, if for whatever reason are all of us were gone tomorrow, somebody else would have all that information. So who are the people involved? So someone else on the team internally, this is like a internal redundancy crossover thing. Right. But there's there are other in in high ultra high net worth clients. There are other professionals involved. There may be other asset managers involved relationships that aren't going to be severed. There are private investments that have already been made that, you know, we didn't recommend them, but now we're servicing them. So who are all the money managers that are involved? Who are all the people involved? Some of these clients have their own staff that we are also coordinating with. They're part of our team, right, but they're on staff with the client who is if we're not doing the tax return, who is the tax return, who is the provider, who is the estate planning attorney, and then how should the portfolio be allocated? And does that differ based on ownership structure? So most ultra high net worth clients don't just have money in their revocable trust, right, in their IRA. In fact, they have very little IRA money most of the time. They have potentially assets in a in a DAF or a private foundation or a grant for their children or grandchildren, each of those structures might need a different target asset allocation. They may have different liquidity concerns. There's different tax concerns for each entity. So each entity has to be described what was this set up for, what is it? What was the purpose of this trust or that trust or this entity? So all of that has to be written in the investment policy statement. And from that drives the investment recommendations that we make. So we're not charging an additional fee on those investment recommendations. Because they are AUM to us, meaning we're driving the train. Sometimes they are AUA. Maybe there's a private equity portfolio that was already invested before the client came to us, but we are reviewing all of those managers, updates, servicing the capital calls and the distributions, reinvesting the distributions. Believe it or not, private equity is not always a one and done. So there might be LP agreements that we have to review until the client hears why we agree on why you should sign this update or this extension on the fund. So that's where the asset management comes in. But as far as our investment philosophy and the products and tools and investments that we recommend, it still comes down to what should there overall mix of stockspons. In this case, cash and private equity always play a role instead of just stockspons and cash or just illiquid investments, I would say it's not all private equity. Which of that overall allocation be? How are we going to implement that? Is the US stock going to be in a direct index platform? Is there an active manager that they're still going to work with? Do we have tax loss, wash sale concerns? So coordinating all the pieces, that's why each multifamily office client has to have its own dedicated portfolio manager, not just a trader. And so there are costs associated with those investment vehicles, right? So if we're using a direct index provider, they may charge 10 basis points management fee. But that's not obviously our fee, that's just the cost of the underlying investments. So is part of the fee scoping, whether or how much you're actually managing versus monitoring? It's not. And that's one of the strengths of the way we work with these clients is we're agnostic. So if we recommend maybe you shouldn't work with this manager anymore, hopefully the clients understand it's not because we're trying to get more assets to manage and more fees. We're doing it because we truly believe maybe this isn't working in your asset allocation anymore, or maybe it's too large and you need to take some money out. So no, it's literally the fee is based on the work we believe we're going to have to do throughout the year. And sort of a best case scenario of what we should charge for that work. But it so ironically is probably from that vein, it's actually more work when you don't manage the money and have to monitor everybody else's stuff and whatever strange things they're doing all over the place. It reminds me of like the, is it the meme, you know, we can, we can do it for you at a low cost or we can do it with you, but we'll have to charge you twice as much. It is. And again, it goes back to the client is not the only client. So sometimes the client is also the client staff. Sometimes the client is also the client's, like with investment managers. Sometimes the client is also other money managers where there's a relationship there that's not going to be severed and we have to work collaboratively. So then how often do you end up meeting with clients in this segment? So the service model is also customized. Most clients, it's at least a quarterly meeting, but some it's a monthly meeting. Now when it's a monthly meeting, sometimes it's 10 meetings a year because not everybody is going to be able to meet, you know, during the summer, every single month during the summer and every single month during the holidays, right? So let's say it's 10 meetings a year and there's the preparation for that meeting. And in one case, there's a call before the call with the client staff to set the agenda. And so the service model is customized to each client, but most of these clients have at least a monthly meeting with us because there's an update because again, there's so many, there's just so much money happening from dividends being paid to bonds maturing, to distributions from private investments. There's just always tweaks that need to be made. We need to talk about how we're going to reinvest this money that came in. We need to talk about how we're going to raise money for your estimated taxes. So there's always something that needs to be discussed at least on a quarterly basis and sometimes monthly. The other thing about our service model is we can customize how often they want to receive certain communications for us. So if you think about we're looking at everything managing some but not all, we are doing performance reporting on the whole portfolio, right? So some clients receive a monthly customized performance report from us. In the case where they're bringing legacy illiquid investments and we're reading those manager reviews, we might send a monthly update. Here's all of the updates that we got from your money managers this month. There might be a monthly cash flow report. Here's how many capital calls went out and how many distributions came in. But that is very client dependent, right? So in the case of a client who has a few tens of millions of dollars liquid but everything else is in the company that they founded, maybe there's not so much of that. And so really, this comes down to every client is unique. And that's one of the things that I always stress to advisors who are dreaming of doing this work is it doesn't scale in the same way that traditional wealth management does. As you get more clients, your revenue will grow but then you're just going to have to hire more people to service that revenue. It's not the same beauty of the scale that you get in a lot of different types of wealth management. Yeah. I mean, ultimately almost all of the wealth management advice business is a human delivering services business and you can measure off things like revenue per employee, right? Just how many people do you need to do the things for the revenue and revenue per employee is remarkably stable across all advisory firms. It gets slightly better as you get larger, they're just a little bit of efficiencies as you build systems and roles, role specialized but like it's incredible how similar revenue per employee is for a billion dollar firm, a five billion dollar firm, a ten million dollar firm and a hundred billion dollar firm, like a hundred billion dollar firm on average has almost exactly a hundred x the employees of a one billion dollar firm, a hundred x the asset, a hundred x the revenue, a hundred x the head count. That's fascinating. Yeah. The like super efficient ones are well, then their head counts only 95 x instead of a hundred x. Congratulations, you're saving 5% of margins by saving 5% of your head count but you still have to 95 x your staff to a hundred x your business and somebody's working too many hours a week, probably, usually yeah at that point. So so in that spirit around workload, I guess taking one step back to the earlier conversation. So clearly these ultra high net worth clients are super complex are say kind of jokingly like our our mere millionaire clients are not that complex, I mean we need expertise, there's real value provided, but like I don't have to check in on how the seventh rolling grant is doing while also clearing up the distribution from their PE fund and the capital call from the other one. Like just the complexity is a bit is a bit simpler, which is why the hours don't spike as much. So I guess I'm wondering from your perspective, like you know you go from a half million dollar client to a million dollar client and the workload doesn't go up that much. You go from a million dollar client to a two million dollar client service expectations are often a little bit higher but like it's not a it's not a radical shift in service model and you know monthly meetings with the call with their staff before the call with the client kind of thing. Where is the shift, where's the crossover, like is there is is there some, I guess assets or net worth or just fee level where we're no longer in the they're just paying us more for our expertise and the fact that they have more money at stake and we're into the this is just more work. Good fee for more work, but like this is clearly more work. Yeah, well I would also say that because we try to touch anything where money is involved with our clients, you know some of our wealth management clients who aren't as complicated we're doing a lot for them. So, you know, I had a bunch of clients turning 65 in the last couple of years. We found a Medicare enrollment consultant and I'm setting up those calls and getting them to fill out forms of you know what prescriptions do you take and what's the right, you know, Medigap policy for you to choose. We work with outside providers to review homeowners and umbrella policies, you know, give me all of your coverages there and let's have somebody review it and see if they can do a better job. Obviously we're doing taxes for a lot of our million dollar clients and so there's the complexity of okay, we've done the financial plan review, but hey, now, you know, somebody on the tax team is wanting us to remind you that your estimated payment is due, you know, we have life insurance in house and not to sell a bunch of life insurance, but because we didn't want to refer it out and so when a life insurance need arises, you know, there's somebody on our team that's sending them that crazy questionnaire about their medical history, right? So we're doing a lot at all levels and so is that revenue for you? You've got some one percent of your revenue is insurance implementation commissions because you brought it in house and stuff sending it out at the firm level. So what we don't do is incentivize individual advisors or even the advisors who write the insurance policies and our license on individual revenue because they're because the advisors are salaried and the revenue is such a small percentage of the firm overall as it's not a growth lever to incentivize. Right. And we don't want that incentive, right? We want that to be, you know, go it into the pot for bonuses or, you know, some other type of compensation, not not in a direct correlation to the life insurance policy that was needed for the client because you just happen to get the client who needed the buy sell agreement and so your client has a need for an expensive insurance policy. Whereas everybody else's clients just needs cheap term coverage. So I've got to ask just because it's so much in the industry debate right now, like does that give you concerns or challenges around being able to market as fee only versus not when you bring, bring insurance in house? We don't market as fee only. You can't at that point, but I mean, where you in the past, is that something that went away, is that something that comes up with ultra high net worth or other clients? It honestly doesn't come up. And I actually was kicked out of NAPA before I joined the firm because my prior firm had insurance license, but we had never written any policies. But in NAPA's definition, that made me, that disqualified me. So they very nicely informed me that I could not be in their group anymore. Okay. Because if you could write a policy, they don't want to find out after the fact that you did it and you were violating so you had to not have an insurance license to be under the umbrella. And I think that's something that overall the fee only crowd gets wrong because at the end of the day, we can't change or hopefully one day we could change the way insurance is sold, but that requires all 50 states to amend their insurance laws. But so in a perfect world, we wouldn't have insurance commissions. It's not the reason we do it. But referring out to the insurance agent, no matter how great that relationship is, who is incentivized to use the hammer that they've been given, it's just not, it just doesn't work. And so we wanted to wrap our hands around that. And so I can't think of a time that I talked to a prospect or a lead who reached out to me who that was the defining issue. What they want to know is, are we fiduciaries? And I think that's more important than how you're compensated. So, I'm sorry, I pulled you off kind of the thread of, where does the workload really start to pick up? Right. Yeah, so I don't know that I can say it's a certain dollar amount. But if you go back to how we define multi-family office as a taxable estate, it's when the conversation begins on, what are we going to do to work around your estate tax bill? That's where the complication begins. And that's where multiple, it's more than just the lead advisor, the co-pilot and the CSA, which is who works with the majority of wealth management clients. It's when you need to pull in a specialist. When you need to go, you're going into multiple entities for one client relationship. You're working and spending, you're in the meeting with the estate planning attorney. You're coordinating with their office. That's the level where the workload really does go up as for the team as a whole. As an advisor, as the lead advisor who's sort of orchestrating all this, it just depends on which multi-family office type client you have. Do you have the one that has staff? And you're coordinating not only with your team, but with their team. And there's a lot of people to conduct there. Or are you working with a $100 million client and you're talking to them directly and they don't have a need for complicated estate plan yet at this point. So there's no magical dollar amount, but I would say that threshold of the taxable federal estate really is sort of the line where the work starts to go up. So then how do you think about and manage capacity? How many clients like this can you handle? How do you deal with having these clients and some of the ones that you had historically. So you just got clients with wildly different service needs under one umbrella. Where's capacity? How do you manage the load across these clients? So this is at a firm level, something that we have been really focused on in recent years. In the beginning, every advisor who joined Riddle's wealth was a senior advisor. Their clients were coming with them and they were going to talk to new people who were reaching out to us and bring on new clients to the firm. And those advisors, those senior advisors, were supported by a CSA and a trading team and you could bring in, you know, Barry or Josh or Michael or Ben as needed to certain conversations. But then there was a group of us who kind of got to this level where we were tapped out. We didn't physically have time to schedule all the calls with the clients, prepare for the calls, give the calls, do the follow-up after the calls, put everything into the CRM so that the traders could execute. And so that's where we started bringing on co-pilots who are advisors who assist a lead advisor. They're CFPs for the most part, they're fully functional, it's not someone you're having to train to do financial planning and they can come in and share the load while also talking to new people and starting the process over again themselves so that maybe one day they can have a co-pilot working with them. And that capacity level before we started having, you know, $100 million clients reaching out was for a lot of us, it was around 200 million in AUM was where we were finding that threshold. Okay. Which is, I guess probably one and a half million of revenue, give or take a little because it's not not everybody's at one percent on everything. Depends on, yeah, the average household size and the fee, yep. And that's where it was when it was you and the CSA or that's where you got to when it was you and the CSA and you added the associate advisor, co-pilot. That was when we needed co-pilot, those of us who were at that level, we realized we're tapped out. Now, you know, some of us tapped out at a different number of households again because 200 million might be, you know, a whole 100 households or it might be 65. And clients with 30 million plus that you have to do continuous meetings with. Right. Exactly. So where is capacity moved for you with the co-pilot's onboard? So I think about two and a half years into having a co-pilot, I might have to get back to you on what that means, but I would assume that we can be at least more than double. I think the two advisors together is more than two single advisors alone without a doubt. And I'm sure that, you know, J. Tinney, our president has looked at this data more closely than I am. One of the things I love about this firm is I just get to be an advisor. I don't have to worry about the business side of things, but I could say that I do believe that the two advisor model is more than the sum of its parts. What I'm interested to see is when our co-pilots need their co-pilots and how we handle that. Let's say there are plans for it, do they break off and form their own new team or do they start sub-teaming under you with tears? I think it could differ based on the co-pilot. So Alan Brockhouse is my co-pilot and we sit in the same office in New Orleans together. So we would love to like make a mega team. There might be another situation where a co-pilot is like not working as closely with that advisor and would rather just go on to be a senior advisor themselves. So I don't think that we're, the one thing that's great about Reddell's wealth, it's a rocket ship and everybody can go on their own path. There's plenty of growth for everybody and that's obviously a really privileged place to be. But that's what helps us attract that younger talent is that, you know, we had recently a CSA who said, I think I want to be an advisor several years ago and she has now moved fully into the paraplanar and co-pilot role and made that transition. So those things are possible at our firm, there's no ceiling for anybody. But sounds like the baseline team then is a like a three person dedicated team senior advisor associate co-pilot and CSA and then lots of, lots of centralized service support from centralized investment team trading operations, all the things that you've got from an investment support perspective. Right. It's sort of build your own team from that central team of advisor co-pilot CSA, then you based on the clients needs build your own team around that. So if they become a tax client, they're going to be assigned a tax advisor. And we have, you know, multiple tax advisors now. So I work with with my clients for different tax advisors, depending on the timing of when that tax relationship came on. And it's the same, you know, several people working if it's life insurance. So it is sort of a pick and build the team based on the clients needs. So now, take us back to where we started this whole thread. How do you, like how does Blair who had wonderful massive fluent and millionaire clients learn to do the things that it takes to effectively service this ultra high net worth clientele? What's your learning growth, training, upskilling journey? Yeah, so it's funny because when we, when the firm was founded with less than a hundred million in assets, two of our founders, Chris van and Michael Batnik used to laugh and say, we'll never have anybody that has more than seven million as a client. Like that's where we top out. Like that'll be our biggest client. And then so a few, a few years back, we were having a lot of seven million dollar plus clients. And so that's when we created this idea of the service model, the preserve where the conversation changes. And hey, am I saving enough in my own track to retire? Do I have enough? It's, okay, I know I'm never going to run, I know I have enough, right? I don't need to see your Monte Carlo, am I going to run out of money? It's how do I not make a mistake? And if you've taken the CFP, you already have the book knowledge, but now all of those letters and numbers and things that you've studied and memorized and may have forgotten, now you're going to actually implement those things for a client, your grads and your cupboards and all the things that you probably already know, you might have to study up on them. And then you know, never, you've got to realize when you have the expertise or when you need to go hire it or outsource it, right? So we have made incredible relationships with some of the top, in my opinion, state planning attorneys in the country. And so we work with them and they are leading the expertise on the legal side. And then we have, you know, people who have joined us. So Taylor Hollis is a hire that we made several years ago just in time for the multifamily office to kick off. And she leads the multifamily office, well, her career prior to joining our firm was inside of a Tennessee trust company that worked with ultra high net worth clients. So we hired that. So in working together as a team and having taken the CFP, you've learned all of these things. It's just now you actually have to go out and do them. And so having those people on your team or working with the right outside providers is really the only way to go. So the advice that I would give to anybody is know what you don't know and know when you need to either hire somebody with an expertise or find it outside of your firm. So how do you start getting in the reps? How do you solve the chicken egg problem? I don't know. I really don't know if the chicken or the egg came first to be honest for us. It was, you know, we grew to one billion and then two billion and then three billion and no longer was it seven million is the largest client we're going to have. All of a sudden it was 20 and 30 and 40 and 50 and 100 and higher than that. And they just came. They came to us because of course we have an incredible marketing machine that is very unique, very public facing and their friends heard about us or their staff member heard about us and told us, told them to talk to us and and so the clients really came to us. But you know, it wouldn't have worked if we hadn't had that preparation and had that talent or been willing to go out and hire that talent to service it. And the CSA role is very important here. It's one thing to be a CSA that can open your typical rev trust and IRAs and Roth IRAs and UTMAs. It's another to be able to open a joint tenants and common owned by two separate trusts where they're, you got a, you know, who are the actual end beneficiaries and get all that paperwork right at a Charles Schwab or a fidelity. That takes a really high caliber CSA. So that's a very critical role in all of this as well. And is that one you also hired, I guess as opposed to training developing internally? So we are so blessed, the very first CSA. She was the fifth or sixth employee ever at Redhold's Wealth, Erica Morrow. She's just a veteran and knows everything you could possibly ever know. She's probably the top CSA that exists. She has all along the way been involved in the growth of our firm and came on as the first multifamily office dedicated CSA. And then since then, we've been able to make other key hires who've already been working in the space at other firms. So, so what are the, I guess, what are all the higher, the key hires for working into this, this segment? I'm searing just, it's a different level of of CSA support because of the complexity and the entities and the specialized investments. It's, so what, what else, what else have you are, did you actually have to hire and bring on board to the firm? It's, it's incredible how we already had some of these key pieces in place, like with the CSA. So Bill Sweet, our CFO, the first advisor doing tax consulting at the firm has been instrumental in some of these large relationships where maybe we're not doing the tax return, but there's tax consulting going on, there's projections, how much income do we think the clients going to have this year? Therefore, how much incredible donations can they make and both appreciated stock and cash, you know, modeling that out over a multi-year period. So, so Bill Sweet, having him in house, having a Ben Carlson to give these clients a customized market update every month, an email that goes out, here's what we're seeing in the markets, can you imagine? Literally, Ben Carlson is, is writing that for you every month. So, we're lucky in that Taylor Hollis, who I mentioned, who runs our multi-family office coming and saying, "Hey guys, you guys know about markets and wealth management and maybe a little tax, but have you ever done a, you know, Roth conversion of the whole IRA and married it with a huge DAF contribution to mitigate some of the tax, because you have a taxable estate and you're trying to reduce it." So, she came to us with some of those estate planning tactics that we again knew on paper, but hadn't actually been executing yet. So, I'm trying to think, you know, Patrick Haley, employee number five or six right there with Eric Amaro, who was originally a client-facing advisor and then let, was our sole trader and let our trading team has grown into the port, one of the portfolio managers for our multi-family office clients. And so, you know, literally a naval aviation navigator, who else could you want driving the ship, you know? Yeah. So, a lot of it was the pieces were already in place and then a few key hires have really helped us build out that service model. And I guess from your end, part of the chicken egg solve was the firm has such a strong marketing process that you were able to get some of the initial at-bats to serve, serve these high-dollar clients when you didn't have as much experience with them yet. The firm's marketing helped make them appear the depth of the team and you didn't have to figure this out alone and then you get your reps in and it gets better. Right, and a lot of serendipity there, right? I had known Taylor Hollis for several years before we hired her and I was trying to encourage her as a hire and low and behold, like right when she came on board, we had our first $100 plus million relationship come on board. So some of it was serendipity. I wouldn't, you know, it's where every successful person will tell you that there's luck involved. There's definitely some luck involved here, but we were, we had been putting in, you know, the work of that incredible marketing machine of Josh three times a week on CNBC, Barry literally writing since the late 90s a blog with a huge readership and then Michael and Ben becoming these podcast stars and the YouTube channel coming over 100,000 subscribers, right? All of that happening and the convergence of our AUM growing and the talent that was coming here and then, you know, eventually you're going to get a larger prospect reach out to you and we were ready and we were just able to build that plane while we were flying it. So did you go the formal training route of the degrees designations programs like that or have you stayed focused in the, I mean, in like learn it by living it because every client so unique. So when you say formal training, do you mean master's degrees or advanced designations or all the different stuff our industry likes to, to cook up to, to offer to advisor to help do these things? So I actually did a master's in financial planning purely because I thought maybe one day I'd like to teach a, you know, in a university setting and the CFA and the CFP don't count to academia as a mass and you have to have a minimum master's degree to be an adjunct professor. That was just a bunch of writing papers about what I already knew about financial planning the course load is the CFB, CFP course load. So no, we don't have any of the additional, I can't say any because we have a lot of advisors in house and some of them have, you know, additional letters behind our name. The majority of us who are advisors are CFPs. Okay. A few of us are CFAs particularly on the investment committee and we encourage our younger advisors of course to, to go the CFP route as well and one of the things that I loved when I first joined this firm is because we're not a two, three advisor practice, we are a multiple, you know, 30 plus advisor practice at this point and we're doing a high volume of plans. We come across these esoteric financial planning situations collectively and then we share that with each other. So a lot of times if you find something that you've never seen before, one of your colleagues has already done it and you can reach out to them and say, hey, I just came across this. I've never seen it. I've read it in a book. Can you tell me what this is like in real life and so that sharing of knowledge in a larger group in a high volume planning practice is incredibly valuable. So did you struggle with any fears, nervousness, imposter syndrome of trying to engage with more ultra high net worth clients? I certainly have imposter syndrome at all times. You know, I spent so many, you know, the first decade and a half of my career just trying to be considered old enough or were experienced enough to work with a million dollar client, right? And then overnight it seemed, right, I went from one million to five million to 10 million to 40 million, you know, it just, it just really went fast. And so no matter what their net worth is, the fact that people trust me to help them with these most important decisions in their life is just mind blowing. And so it's something you have to live up to every single day as an advisor. And it's part of the reason that this is, it seems so easy, right? You just go into the office and you don't have to work long hours and you talk to people about their money all day, but it is a mental load that you're bearing at all times, a very emotional job as well, when you're talking to people who just had a baby or somebody just died or they got divorced or married, like these are the biggest decisions that they will make in their lives and they're trusting you with some, with some part of that where money touches those decisions. It's pretty incredible actually if you think about it. Where was the experience threshold when suddenly the number started moving up quickly? I mean, was there a like turning point of career or I got to year 12 and suddenly everything just started changing? Really, it's just I moved over to Redhold's Wealth and had the benefit of talking to people who had reached out to the firm because they had red berries, Washington Post column or heard him on Bloomberg Radio or seeing Josh on CBC and they knew what we provided, they knew it was financial planning and I'm a good relationship manager. I can't find those people on my own, but once they were provided, I was able to say, okay, here's, give me all the pieces of your puzzle. Let's put together your financial plan, we can do this. And I think when I talked to you in 2020, I was at almost to 100 million and that growth that you said, the quadrupling of the firm since then, I've lived that as well. I think I always joke, a lot of us still have PTSD from 2021, that was the busiest we've ever been and we were understaffed and a lot of us experienced tremendous growth in the number of clients we were servicing and the assets that came with that. And what made the year of craziness happen come trigger? You know, that was a craze, you know, normally we see an uptick in people reaching out because the market is crashing, but 2021 was the meme stock craze and I just think that something happened with COVID, everybody's life was changed by COVID and maybe it was just the combination of a bunch of different things at one time, but we've always worked remotely with our clients, our clients have always lived all over the country even though we don't have people in all of those cities and people were making changes fast and furious that year and we just, we had more people reaching out to us than we could physically handle. I don't know how many accounts Eric Amaro personally opened that year, but it's an astronomical number of accounts and it just, it never has really let up from there. So, so then help us understand the advisory firm as it exists today of my size and assets and revenue and team and clients just like help us wrap our head around the firm overall. Yeah. So I mentioned the last ADV that we filed six and a half billion. We have a lot of households because we have no minimum, we have different service tiers. We have a robo advisory service called liftoff. If you've been listening to animal spirits and you want to invest your first $10,000, you can go on there, it's backed by betterment and we set the allocations and you can become a client of the firm with literally no minimum. We have a level for the massive fluent called good advice because they don't need just a website and a massive allocation. They actually need to talk to a CFP advisor. They have, these are young families who need advice about how and where to save into their 401k. They do Roth or regular. Do they need life insurance? They just had a baby. So it's financial planning, but not full service. So a little bit lower fee, a little bit lower assets somewhere. What is a little bit lower fee meat in your world? So good advice is 75 basis points between 250 and a million dollars and you can stay on good advice. There's no reason you have to move up just because you cross that million dollar threshold. So our flagship wealth management, which is really where we began, most of the clients of the firm is between one and seven million and that's where you start with the sliding scale. It's 1% up to the first three million and then there's break points after that is where you get a dedicated advisor. So a good advice you might talk to two or three different CFPs. You'll probably know their names, but you're not having a dedicated advisor. That flagship model is the 1 to 7 million. Everybody has a financial plan. They have a dedicated advisor. They may have some direct indexing instead of ETF models. We can incorporate existing appreciated stock into their portfolio. There's more customization. Some of the good advice clients are tax clients, but wealth management is really where we start to talk to people about, hey, do you like your CPA? Are you happy with them? Do you want us to also do your taxes? The preserve is where the conversation change, not the service model or the fee structure, but 7 to 25 million is where it's not about the Monte Carlo. It's more about how do I not make a mistake with this money that I've amassed? And then the multifamily office is really at that level of the taxable estate. So 6.5 billion spread across almost 4,000 households, but again, keep in mind that we have a lot of households below a million in those service tiers. Some of them that may just call in once a year in the lift off service. And we are over 80 employees. What's unique about us that if you did like a benchmarking study, you wouldn't see is that we have media people, we have content show producers, videographers, video editors, and the likes. So we have a whole staff. So when you see our YouTube videos, that's professionally done. So that's a little different than us. We have our founders. And that's professionally done in-house, like you're not hiring a bunch of agencies. You hire the people since you do so much of it. I'm going out and imagine that that costs amortize as well for you, given the sheer amount of content. Yes. And it sort of is a self perpetuating business unto itself, because if you listen to our YouTube videos or podcasts, they are sponsored. So that's interesting. And then of course, we have the advisors, the CFPs, the people who are doing financial plans for clients from good advice all the way to multifamily office. A handful of those are working with co-pilots now. Of course, there's the CSAs. Our trading team is three people strong, and then we have a research team. So Cali Cox joined us as our chief market strategist. She works with Sean Russo, who is our first hire as a research analyst. He supports the investment committee. He also supports some of the information that we need on our media. So he has a very interesting role at the firm, and there will probably be another person. Future people in that role as well, because there's a lot of research that comes into onboarding new clients. Here's what we're inheriting. Do we have any information about this or that investment that they're bringing to us as they onboard? We have some senior management, so we made a big hire and bringing in Jay Tenney to be our president, because at a certain point the four founders needed a professional manager. I think that's pretty common amongst larger firms. That's been a key hire. Our vice president Anna Chacon came to us as a CSA, it's one of my favorite stories in the firm. So she's very involved in looking at the metrics of the firm and how we're growing and what technology we're using and what are our internal processes. We have a COO in Nick Majuli. He's basically a data scientist. There's nobody that you would rather give a complicated data project to. We have the tax team, right? So the tax business is its own LLC entity and they're four tax preparers and they're backed up by at least one service person. Do clients pay separately if you do their returns or is that rolled into the aggregate fee offering at certain tiers? It is a separate fee because we don't want clients who aren't doing their taxes to subsidize that. And so the way that the tax preparation fee works is it's a flat annual fee based on the complexity of the return. So it's not just give us all your paperwork in February and we'll spit out a return. It's at the end of the year, hey, how much income has come in this year? Any changes from last year? Is there anything we need to do to finish out the year? Which is why I'm, I've been knee deep in, you know, Daff contributions, Roth conversions, QCDs from RMDs, opening steps as the last minute or solo forum case. So all of that work comes from the tax preparation. Yeah, it's a flat annual fee for tax prep based on complexity. We're not the low cost provider, but we're also not the most expensive. So sometimes clients who live in high cost of living areas like San Francisco or New York may be paying a little bit more than we're charging and then in other areas, you know, we're more expensive to do their taxes. So I and then I pause you as you're going through the list, water, are there other functional apartment areas? Yeah. Of course, compliance, the most important, absolutely. You're very important, absolutely. We have, you know, our, our CCO and she's backed up by one employee so far in that department, she's incredible, our CCO, Patricia is, came out of Fenra, just nobody, nobody knows it better. In fact, I was speaking to, okay. We were working with several different providers to do portfolio loans back when interest rates were zero, right? And we were speaking of Goldman Sachs because they actually had a great service offering in that, in that capacity, really easy to open it up. And they said, we need to have a call with your compliance team first to make sure that you're prepared for this. And the comment we got back was like, wow, we've never met a CCO at an RA that's anything like her. So that's, you know, that's the, the glue that makes sure that we're going to continue into the future is compliance. And I'm sure I've missed a few things, but there's a lot of us and there's a lot of extremely talented people here, especially the young people. I am, we opened a second headquarters in Chicago. I think that was, yeah, earlier this year, actually, wow, time is such an interesting. It's hard to remember what, you know, when people came on board. But that second headquarters and we already had, you know, several staff there has allowed us to concentrate some of our young CSA hires to be physically in Chicago. And they're just some of the most incredible young people that I've seen. I'm fascinated that just the, I guess the scalability of the tech now that six and a half billion runs on three traders. I know. I am impressed. And the youngest one, we, is a recent hire, just passed a CFA level two. We had two traders until recently. Yeah. I remember being at a 200 million R.I.A. in 2002 and we had three traders for 200 million and so many spreadsheets, like just to handle this year number of clients. Like it was, there was no rebalancing software yet. I rebound and launched until 2004. It was all manual with spreadsheets and it was, it was three traders for 200 million and now you just added the third trader over six billion. So I used to do that as well. There was a master spreadsheet, each client account had its own tab and you would download all the data from the custodian in the morning and it would populate into that spreadsheet and then you would go in and manually adjust each spreadsheet to like if you need to invest cash or raise cash and want to have in front of you and try to do the whole firm rebalance. I mean, that would take weeks. Well, I'd say like doing the whole firm rebalance and just like trying to block trade it and then allocate it, like setting up the file to allocate the block trade properly and by the time you do that, the prices moved and the share count is different and you need to recalculate the block trade. Oh, in 2010, it was very volatile. We would have to sell on one day and buy the next day. We couldn't even do it on the same day because you couldn't allocate the trade. Right. Yeah. And I guess across the different tiers, like how many, I don't know if you know how many clients is it in each tier and or total, I'd be fascinated if you know by tier. So are at the filing of our ADV in June, we had 3,900 households. Now, what would be more interesting is if I had the breakdown as to how many in each tier because obviously there's a lot more households in the robo and good advice in the multi-family office. Yeah, the distribution of wealth is a pyramid with a larger base and a smaller peak. So is it pretty much every advisory firm as it moves up? Exactly. But I guess functionally by the tiers, so robo is pure investment back by betterment. I guess like you have CSAs because someone's got to answer the phone, but it's not a planning offering. Planning is good advice. Starts at 75 bips and 250,000 of assets, but it's like a centralized planning team support. You don't get a dedicated person and also a great training of a ground for young advisors. Sure, they spent a few years there before they moved to the wealth management division, which is now dedicated advisor. Every client gets a plan, some more investment customization starts to kick in and your fee actually moves up a little from 75 bips to 1%. And then you go to the preserve. Is the service model or pricing different at the preserve? Or is it just a function of, we need more experienced advisors to have different conversations because the conversation is different at that level. It's the second, right? So our break point is, you know, I'm not going to remember it exactly because when we changed it a few years ago, my brain just wouldn't adjust. But let's say you've got seven million, your fee is, I believe, 75 basis points, 10 to 10 million. Right? And so, it's still the AUM model. It's similar. Some clients wouldn't even necessarily know like a, you're a preserve client. But, you know, when, when people go out to our website and say I want to talk to an advisor, they put their, their level of assets. And, you know, there's a certain, each advisor at the firm has to go through that process of getting their confidence up with the one to threes and the three to sevens and then, you know, so, but, but everybody that wants to get the chance to grow into those and talking to those clients. Yep. So, as you reflect on this journey now, what surprised you the most about trying to build with ultra high net worth clients in particular? I think what, it's the Imposter Syndrome, right? Me? You're going to choose me. But then at other times, it's like, well, of course you would choose Ridhold's wealth management. I mean, we've got all these amazing people here. So, it was, it was just surprising to see how we were able to really intelligently shift and build those new service models and customize in that way and how all the pieces just came together. I would say that was very surprising. So, what was the low point on this journey? Actually, a low point for me, personally, is the first co-pilot that we hired to work with me ended up getting a really fast education and wealth management and decided that it wasn't for her and she left. And actually, interestingly enough, I just wrote her recommendation letter for an MBA program last night. So, we're definitely left on good terms, but having getting the co-pilot in place finally, you know, leveraging my time, not spending my time putting in the trading instructions and the CRM and all of that, and then having that person leave, and it took time to hire the next person. That was a really, that was a tough time for me because I had just started a transition away from doing all of that work. And then it all boomeranged back. Right. Exactly. So, you know, did that change anything for you? I mean, is there a lesson learned takeaway beyond turnover, is unpleasant, and we try to minimize that, anything you would have done differently in retrospect or learning since? I think we have gotten better and I can't take any credit for it in how we hire and the process for interviewing people. It doesn't mean we're going to be perfect. And in fact, I think on this person was so talented, we would hire again today. So, I don't think there really is a learning curve, except just to know that in a growing firm, you know, don't be despondent if not every hire works out, that's just not reality. So, what else do you know now you wish you could go back and tell you like five or six years ago before you started down this moving up market path? I would tell myself not to worry, like you are going to make it, like this whole two decades of striving to succeed as a financial advisor, it's actually going to work because I had such a level of anxiety for so many years. Like, you know, I've been working in this for so many years and, you know, I don't have a lot of clients and I've got all the credentials, I've got all the skill set, like why isn't it happening? And I would just tell myself to relax and enjoy the ride because it is going to work out. So any other advice you would give younger, newer advisors, like looking to come into the profession today? We get so many people reach out to us, like how do I break in and it's getting better but it's still a very murky profession to enter. And so a lot of times if you're extremely green, this is your first job, I'll say go anywhere you can get experience, go to the large firms, even if you don't want to work at them long term, go to the training programs where they have, you know, the money to spend on you to train you up, go work for an advisor, even if it's not forever, like don't be shy about realizing that sometimes your first job is just getting two years of experience so that you can get the next job. The other thing I would say is, you know, think hard about what really gives you energy and joy and spend, and how you spend your day. Do you want to just tell people who are saving and diligently investing and want to know if they can retire and win? It does that bring you joy and it's just enough of a conversation, then maybe think about targeting clients in the one to five million dollar range, right? Do you enjoy spending an hour looking through a thousand page tax return to look for a couple of numbers or reading, you know, hundreds of pages of trust documents to figure out, you know, if there's any clause in there that can help you make an amendment to do the complicated estate planning, you know, just think about that. It's one thing to say, I wish I had a client with a hundred million dollars or fifty million dollars, whatever. But think about first the actual work involved and then think about whether that's how you really want to spend your time, because I could see how people could be miserable, finally getting what they want and realizing it's not what they wanted at all. So what comes next for you on this journey? So I haven't talked, I haven't brought on a new client this year. I've been just laying low, working on sort of streamlining the way I work with my current clients. I've had a couple of new things just pop up recently, because an old lead referred somebody to me and sometimes I just come across people and I'm like, I have to help this person. This person has to become a client. I really want to do more writing and I finally think I know what I want to write a book about. And it comes from the fact that I had a client at a quite young age unexpectedly die earlier this year. And I've been helping her family with the administration of her estate. It's going to be a taxable estate. And I've learned a lot about what happens in the aftermath of a death like that. And I think that no matter what level of wealth you have today, administering in a state is an extremely complicated process and more complicated day by day. So I think it's a book that can relate to pretty much everybody about how to get your finances in order, what you should know, what you're not thinking about. Yeah, you have your wills and POAs in place, but have you thought about the fact that they might have to call all of your next and kin to get approval for your cremation? You know, it's just crazy things that I never thought I would be thinking about. But I think it's very relevant and I've never really known what I wanted to write a book about. And I think I know now. So maybe the fact that I'm saying this publicly will make me do it. You are kind of committed now. I am. And that's good. And my friend, AJ Ayers, told me you got to go out and say it publicly because then you'll never do it if you don't. So that's what I want to focus on next year in addition to just continuing to work with. I mean, that's the beauty of this business as we get to choose who we want to work with. And I have the most amazing relationships with clients. And it's such a joy to help them out. And it's a blessing. It's really a blessing to get to this point. And so I just want to continue working with them. I have no desire to scale back from that anytime in the near future. But hopefully do a little bit more writing and engaging publicly on some of these topics would be nice. So as we wrap up, this is a podcast about success. And one of the themes always comes up and it's just that word success means very different things to different people. Sometimes it changes for us as we go through the life journey and seasons of life. And so you know, you now have this wonderfully successful practice moving into ultra height at worth that of firm that's doing incredibly well. So all the all the business stuff seems to be going great. How do you define success for yourself personally at this point? So you mentioned Nick Majouli's book The Well Flatter, I just finished that and now I'm reading Morgan Housel's new book The Art of Spending, which is a total gem. And there's a lot of overlap in those two books that really help me define what I think is success. And it's really the ability to spend your time, your days, your weeks, your months going back to my friend George Kender in life planning the way you want to spend it. And of course, money's involved in that because a lot of times having control over your time means saving money and getting that independence. But success to me is being able to spend your time, your time at work. Is it fulfilling? Is it something that gives you energy and joy? Is it something you want to wake up first thing on a Monday morning and do? But also spend your time away from work, whether it's your family or the things that you love to do, your hobbies or whatnot, that to me is success, being able to maximize the minutes that you have on this earth because it's long, but it's short. And so for me, being able to have control and joy over the way I spend my time, which means I think and for a lot of us that I have to give a lot less of that time to those algorithms, those platform companies. Because I'm a much happier person when I don't. And there's nothing that success in a career can do to stop you from doom scrolling. But I think it really does come down to time. I love it. I love it. Thank you so much, Blair, for joining us on the Financial Advisor Success Podcast. Thank you so much for having me. It's been an honor. Thank you. One even more ideas, tools and resources on how to break through to the next level of success as a financial advisor? Check out the leading financial planning industry blog Nerds Eye View at www.kitsis.com where Michael covers the latest practice management trends and financial planning strategies. And by joining the members section, you can earn INCA and CFP continuing education credits along with exclusive member content, get it all now at www.kitsis.com.