72. Joe Duran on Why Great Financial Advice Starts with Understanding People

Money is not an intellectual category. It might be a fear in institution. It might be a fear of private equity in Vesta, but it's not if you're a human being. If you're a human being, money is tied into the way you live your life. And it is just fuel. And we act like that fuel is all that matters, but it's in fact what you do with a fuel that matters. I can't wait to introduce you to knowing me, knowing you. The Nomi podcast where the future of financial advice starts with discovery. We're bringing you candid conversations with top industry leaders, innovators, and behavioral finance experts, exploring how wealth managers can deepen client relationships, personalize advice at scale, and drive real business growth. Because clients don't just want financial plans, they want to feel understood. They want to be known. Stay tuned, subscribe, and get ready to transform the way you connect with clients. Nomi, transforming discovery into growth. Hi, and today we're joined by someone who has left an unmistakable mark on the wealth management industry. Jo Jo Ran has spent more than three decades challenging conventional thinking about financial advice. After immigrating to the United States from Zimbabwe, he built and sold his first advisory business before founding United Capital in 2005 with a radically different vision of what an advisory firm could become. At a time when most competed on investment performance, Jo argued that advisors should instead help clients build better lives. That philosophy became life management, an approach that blended behavioral finance, financial planning, and technology years before those concepts became buzzwords. Under his leadership, United Capital grew into one of the largest independent RIAs in America, before being acquired by Goldman Sachs in a landmark $750 million deal in 2019. He became a Goldman Sachs partner and led personal financial management before launching his newest venture, Rise Growth Partners. Today, Rise is helping build the next generation of billion dollar RIAs not by buying them outright, but by investing alongside entrepreneurs and helping them become national firms. Jo has authored bestselling books, advised thousands of financial advisors pioneered behavioral planning tools that changed advisor client conversations, and influenced how an entire generation thinks about wealth management. Love him or disagree with him. Few people have challenged more assumptions or had a bigger impact on how this industry has evolved. Jo, welcome to the Knowing Me Knowing You podcast. Thank you. I'm so thrilled to be here, Mala. And, yeah, you know, 30 years, it doesn't go, it goes, it goes quicker than you think, but I've had, I guess, this is my fourth iteration of a voyage, and it's all been very, very different. Each one has fed into what, where I am today. So it's, I'm very grateful for the good fortune of picking the right industry in the best country in the world. Fantastic. I love that. 30 years does fly. I had my 30 year high school reunion this year, and it does, it does go by. We always start with the same question, which is, what excites you about the moment we're in right now about the future of wealth management? You know, I'm always very excitable and always very excited about the moment I'm in, but I don't think I've seen a time where the world is going to abruptly change as much as as possible right now. Most especially for the firms that are big enough to take advantage of it, but not so big that they're going to be slow reactors. So I, I believe very much at that firm that is, I'll call it a middle market, a three billion to ten billion dollar firm. They are uniquely positioned to take advantage of what I think to be one of the most seismic shifts in the industry on two fronts. Number one, what's happening with technology and how that's going to evolve the way we interact with clients and advisors interact with clients and number two, how the industries evolved so that all of these large mega firms look like big wirehouses and a lot of them have very limited souls. They are big BMX with lots of private equity money and there is a massive competitive advantage of being a firm with a soldier can grow really quickly and so I just, as you know, I, this is my fourth venture, as you've mentioned, I like to go where things are going and I very much believe that in the next five to ten years that the kinds of firms that we're partnering with are really the future of the industry, the most exciting part. Really the mega firms are going nowhere but that their rate of innovation is much slower but they're more concerned with growing to get to the next recap, to fund the next private equity deal to do the next capital raise than they are about building a really delightful client experience because most of the founding groups that started these firms are no longer there, the people who had divisions in the creation have been replaced by conventional CEOs that don't look any different than the CEOs of the big mega-fans. Along with that answer, I think this is one of the most interesting pivotal moments in the industry and you're either going to be in it for the money or for the impact you can make on the industry and they won't always be aligned. I, there was so much in that and I think you're really pointing a pointer at who is facing this opportunity. There is a certain size of firm, there's a certain mindset of that firm, it's those that want to grow, those that want to stay nimble, those that want to and can harness the innovations. So in your history, you didn't just build a successful RIA, you helped define what a modern national RIA could become and when you founded United Capital, what was it that everyone else believed about wealth management that you saw was fundamentally wrong? I think everything I've ever done has been challenging the norms. So my first which is now called asset mark was one of the camps in the country and I didn't believe that the people who were selling commissional business were actually monitoring the portfolios after they sold temple to development markets or American funds, got their commission. I knew that the advisors were not looking at those portfolios after they got their commission and I said it's just the wrong way to do things and the advisors when again recurring fees, the clients want to know they managed, one year's being managed so we built one of the first camps in the country to allow that to happen. It's obviously gone on to go public and it's been a very successful enterprise. I saw that to GE when I was 34 and at that time I had a two-on-on-compete. I really didn't like working in general electric nothing against them but it wasn't for me and when I left I interviewed a hundred entrepreneurs built in sole companies. I was going to grad school at the time was working on my second book and they all said the same thing which was there was the American dream they were you know it was amazing success and I said I don't feel that way I feel lost and all of them every single one male female all people said you know what it was awful it was the death in the family it was a loss of identity all these regrets and I thought boy isn't it interesting that they got to this magic number and they don't feel what they thought they'd feel and I'm the same way you know I came here with nothing I left with $200 which sold the business for a hundred and some million obviously I've partners and all the rest but I done as well as I imagined a 34 and I felt lost and the big question was if it's not about the money what's it really about and I as I was a grad school came up with the idea for United Capital and it was to really bring emotions into money because I thought money is not an intellectual category it might be if you're an institution it might be if you're private equity investor but it's not if you're a human being if you're a human being money is tied into the way you live your life and it is just fuel and we act like that fuel is all that matters but it's in fact what you do with the fuel that matters and so I thought I have to change the dialogue because what I want to do is not talking about portfolio performance and tabs and and what we were doing I'm like people made bad choices even when I tell them don't sell I need to help them make good life choices because that's what ruins every financial plan it is not whether you're outperform or underperform the market by 1% it's whether you retire too early it's whether you start a business and fails it's whether you got divorced and didn't plan for it or somebody gets cancer or any of the myriad of things that can go on in life that is what ruins a financial and I thought I want to solve for that and in order to do that we have to give tools, evil tools that help us to identify why people make the choices they do you need two categories number one what do you prioritize it's really four things every human being wants they want to be protected from bad outcomes they want to enjoy life and maximize it have fun number three is they want to take care of their commitments to their family their friend to society and lastly they want freedom it's what we did is we built a way of thinking we all prioritize certain things I'm driven by fear and insecurity because I grew up with nothing in a war-torn country and so I owe the index to protection but I need all four my wife on the other hand grew up in West LA and is the happiest person in the world and enjoys everything and wants to take care of everyone around. And so we wired. differently. Our values, even though the same dollar is worth the same in a financial sense, it's not the same for hers for me. For me, an extra dollar protects you more. For her, an extra dollar means hosting another party. And I just couldn't believe that no one in the industry was talking about that. And even today, Marla, this is the shocking thing. Even though we show the path, and almost every commercial talks about this the same way, they are no actual tools that people are using on a day-to-day basis to talk about that. And the second big identity issue is, how do you actually make choices? Because at the end of the day, every single client will only listen to you if they feel understood. And that means that some people are deliberate, slow, decision-makers. Some people are quick conscious makers. Some go by instinct or not. So the two things that we thought about a lot, and I still think about, number one, what do you want this money to really provide for you? And make sure that you don't go with your natural bias always. So if you're somebody who needs protection, as a good advisor, I would advise Joe to run, ensure your money, take vacations, take time with your family, take time to give to charity, do the things that fill all four buckets because you've got to fill them all before you die. And then here's your decision-making Joe. You're an impulsive quick decision maker. Slow down. Make sure you understand all the pros and cons. Don't over index to bad outcomes, which is your natural bias. And the personal coaching, I've received my whole career as a CEO, as a leader, has also helped inform the kind of advice I believe advisors should be giving their clients. Because if you don't know those two things, your financial plan is worthless. You know the plan the day it's written is wrong. You know the amount of money you're telling your clients they need might be too much or too little, but you know that's not accurate the way you portray it. We have false precision down the street. And your biggest value is helping people make the right choices at any given moment with the limited information we have. And if you don't know what they care about and what they're sacrificing, and also how they choice making gets in the way of their making optimal decisions, how in the world can you do your job well? So we're using AI to actually embed that in a way that's totally personal to each of the firms we partner with. Because I'm just a true believer that emotions and understanding how you make choices is the single biggest element to being a great advisor. If you want to be, if you want to give advice, you have to understand. And so I just think for me that was where United Capital was that it's core. It was built around helping people improve their lives. And you do that by helping them make better choices. In order to do that, you have to give them tools they don't currently have. Because tone to that, they're all willing to sacrifice more than they should. Many successful people will over index and then leave their money. The kids will gladly spend all the money. Because they don't have to do all this sacrifice to make it. So there's we're in the business of trade-offs always, even with the wealthiest people in the world. It's a set of trade-offs that we have to navigate people through. So that was really the thing that is true today, that is, was true back then. And it's still true today. It's still remarkably shocking how little innovation is happening. And most firms think about, well now I got to add tax prep. Now I got to add a state plan. A state planning. Yes. I don't want the core thing that the client really needs is, how do I make better choices? How do I see that? I'm knowing that I'm doing the things that matter to me in the short life I have on the South. Yes, meeting note takers. So you said so much in there. And I feel like, I hooked into a couple of things that are so aligned with topics that come up again and again on this podcast and so aligned also to the ethos behind Nomi and this podcast in general. So it's the limited information. And you mentioned in the very beginning, you said, everyone's got the commercials up. They're saying the right things. They're not doing the right things. And I want to go back to that for a moment. Why do you think that the industry is so slow to embrace this? There's research, there's science, there's proof points that it works. What is holding them back? Because they don't need to. The reality is the average advisor, if the markets continue doing what they're doing, it's a 10% organic growth without doing a thing. So as long as they clients aren't pulling all their money out, they're doing fine. And they're living a very nice life. They don't need to add more clients. And they've got a great corner office firm. As you get bigger and retaining is harder and growing is harder because the law of big numbers get in the way, it starts to become more complicated for sure. And that's when you have to think about what are we going to do to differentiate. And I wrote about this earlier. I think we've passed the golden age of financial planning. Those the golden age for me was really from the early 2000s till about 2020, 2015. Because in that period, the big Y houses were not doing financial planning. If you're an independent advisor, you could do things that the big banks couldn't. They weren't any large national firms at that time. And you could be very differentiated by offering planning for a fee and answer questions other people couldn't. That's not true today. Today, anyone can go in and put in financial planning near me. And there will be a mountain of choices all doing the same thing. Money, guide or finance, wear or write, one of the financial planning tools and an index portfolio that's typically allocated, maybe is with an individualized indexing versus ETS, but it's kind of the same thing. And so what is going to make you better? And the only differentiator today is brand. But if your brand is just a name with nothing that it does that's different, it's going to be really hard. The only way you're going to grow is by outspending your colleagues or having a niche that no one else can compete with. And so other things of first things we do and we partner with a firm in that $5,6 billion level is say, what's the promise you're making to the marketplace? And why is it unique? What is the problem you're solving? Other people are not solving? And how are you living up to that promise? And how is it different than the person right next to you who's doing the same thing? And I think that's the challenge that phones are creative planning and fisher investments have solved. They are doing things. Now you might not agree with their approach, but they have solved it. Fisher by spending a fortune on advertising and building as brand and having an incredible distribution platform with really good salespeople that know how to close business, whether you like how he does it or not. A firm like creative planning by having a lot of systems and tools that are scalable in all the custodial programs and a way to grow. And a lot of the other firms, the big mega firms, spending a fortune, maybe not building their brands as wisely as I would say. But there's so little differentiation between the person with with $5 billion in assets and the firm with $500 billion except the firm with $500 billion can spend a fortune over what you can spend. And so it's not a big lift to do things in a different way. And I'll give you a good example of that. If you just go to our website at Rice Growth, our language is totally different. Most equity investors, private equity investors talk about rate of return and history and heritage. And I approach Rice the same way I've approached everything I do. Does that excite me? And the idea with what I saw is I'm like, I would not want any of these people's money. And I have full private equity partners all of whom I loved and all of them good very well. And I'm like, I want to talk in a different way. And I talk about joy. And I talk about friendship. And enjoyment and fun because the reality is like short. Language, talking in plain English, talking about things people care about. Talking as one human to another, you know, I'll give you another good example, Marla. I'll ask people what they start for what their values are. And they'll give me this long elevator speech that they don't even remember. They have to pull up their window. We are this, we are that, we are that. They're like, what's yours, Shaw? Mine's really easy. Number one, we're good people. That means we do what we say we're going to do. And we're authentic to the core and care about doing the right thing. Number two, what we do matters. We only partner with exponential thinkers. We want to change the world. And number three, we love what we do. So we only work with great people and have fun doing it. That's really easy to remember. That's plain English. And our industry, because we come from a financial background and think we have to be academic and prove our worth, we talk in languages that is totally uninspiring. We can choose that are completely unfathomable to our clients. Every survey we've ever done for clients and ask them what they know about their financial plan. 99% of them don't have a clue what they're looking at. They just know their advice is very confident tells them they're in good shape. How about you actually gave them something that made them feel good, that they could actually comprehend. And you spoke instead of beta and alpha and probability of success. Just told them here's where I think you're paying the price. Here's where I think you could be happier. Here the kinds of things that you might want to improve or even ask the question. How you're feeling about your life right now? What one thing could you do over the next six months to improve it? And we used to score along their priorities every maybe six months on a scale of one to 10, how you're doing on spending time with people you care about, which was the number one value that people had. And if it was an eight or less, would say, okay, what can you do in the next six months to improve it? And let's put it in your plan. And that might be got to dinner with my wife more often. Or it might be got to take a private date with one of my daughters. It could be any one of them, got vacation with my friends, could be any one of a million things. It's more valuable than how you're performing relative to the S&P. That's a long rumble, but. Yeah. Or either those are the things that really matter in the people really remember. What if financial planning wasn't just about numbers, but about you, your values, your goals, your vision for the future? Nomi is transforming client discovery for wealth managers, going beyond assets and risk scores, to uncover what truly matters with behavioral insights and real-time data. Nomi helps advisors personalize advice, build deeper connections, and grow their businesses. Because the best financial decisions start with knowing you, discover the future of client engagement at nomi.com. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And I think right now we're also facing such a risk where that aura of authority and information and knowledge and the ability to talk about alpha and use fancy language is dead. The era of that being a differentiator and meaningful and something that a customer cares about is over in this era of information abundance. Somebody can go to AI and get all the questions answered that they ever wanted answered around. I swear, by the way, in a much longer span of the world. Yes, help me understand these things in a language I can understand. That is not any longer going to be the value of an advisor. An advisor has to change. So I want to come back again to United Capital. And I am so in alignment with everything you said. And I also believe in United Capital influence the direction of the industry in that era of call it the financial planning heyday, as you said, kind of the golden era of financial planning. What if you were going to give advice to RIAs who are listening now and they're in that sweet spot, let's say they're growing rapidly, they're hitting a billion, two billion, and you look at that single biggest innovation that you introduced at United Capital that was a change in the way the industry approached their clients. You talked a lot about how RIAs today have to hone in on their niche, how they help people live better lives. How do you relate that to kind of that big innovation that you unlocked, you introduced to the industry back when you were building United Capital? And is there some repeatable lesson, some learning that if you just do this thing, and maybe it's stay true to the client, be authentic in who you're actually serving when you show up every morning and you show up to the office. But what would you think that one innovation is? When it was very easy, the first touch point should be different than every other touch point they have from anyone else. That's all. Just make sure I had on my board the head of creative, the CCO, and former president of Starbucks, Arthur Rubenfeld, a brilliant man, still a friend of mine for a decade. And he said to me, "Joy at Starbucks, 100% of our profits are not in the coffee but everything that wraps the coffee." It's what it looks like when the minute you think about us, to the minute you walk into the minute you get your cup, what it looks like, what it feels like, the way the labels are. The same is true for our industry. What about their interaction with you at each touch point, but most especially the first touch point would tell them that you're different than anyone else. And that might be as simple as a, come on in, we want you to do this very simple intake form. It's going to be 15 questions that help us understand what really matters to you and how you make choices, which is something we're doing today. That is alone something no one else is doing. So just ask if we are going to truly delight, and this is the thing, our industry is just about getting to good enough. They never ask the question, what would delight me as a consumer? What would delight me is something that's different than everyone else, even if it alienates certain people. So if you're going to win, you have to tell a story that's different than everyone else and have the courage of investing money up front to make that first experience different than anyone else's. And I can tell you, when we would do acquisitions, what was different about United Capitalism and acquire than everyone else is when I would get on a phone, I would say, "Tommy, why you do what you do?" And the advice that would go, "Excuse me?" I'm like, "Look, you got money, you want to make money?" I get all of that, but why do you do what you do? And we would talk about it, and my second question was, what is it that your clients want from you that no one else can give them? It was a, they would be shocked that a, instead of talking about the math, or instead of talking about acquisitions, I would talk about that. And when I'd made with clients at Goldman that were large clients, it was the same thing. I would know that my first interaction with them was gonna be about two humans getting together and say, how can I give you what you need and what do you need? What are you currently unhappy with that isn't working for you? Asking, and again, I'm a huge believer in gamification. So if you can create an upfront experience that allows for you to collect information and insight that is interactive, that is different, that makes you know things, and next time know things about themselves that they might not know, that is going to change the whole nature of how they perceive you. But unfortunately, most people say, well, they come in, I bring in my yellow pad and I tell them how great we are and I tell them how great they are. And it is the same thing, I think about this, like going to dental practice and like, it's always awful. They always have old magazines. They always make you wait. They always have the same forms and I'm like, wow, it's clearly not a competitive industry because my goodness, it would not be hard to make this a delightful experience. We, many of us operate like that, like law firms, but it's a highly competitive industry. And so I think asking yourself, how delighted would you be and what would make you feel special if you just visited your own website and came to your own first meeting? And you'd say, well, if it all relies on the quality of the person asking the questions, you don't have a very institutionalized business. So you need to create something that is in the fabric of the DNA so that no matter who the advisor is, the client's going to be delighted. - I love that. And very great alignment to what Nomi is, what we're building, that whole idea of gamification and interactive, insight driving, giving value to the client, the individual to get to know themselves. I want to ask you a slightly, a question going in a slightly different direction. So the RIA industry is consolidating rapidly. We've had the two biggest years on record for private equity investing. For, with your current hat at Rise Growth Partners, what would you say to the industry as a beware? This is what you run the risk of with private equity coming in and eating up so much of our industry. And what would you say on the other hand of that coin? There's an opportunity here. This is how you harness it. And you've already spoken a bit to that. But just when you think about outside capital coming in and eating up a lot of wealth management firms, what are some of the things we should keep in mind? - Look, I think I'm a huge believer in motivations. And what is the incentive? With private equity, they offer do shareers to deliver the highest rate of return to their investors. That's it. They're not here to make people happy. They're not here to be good guys or gals. They're here to deliver the highest rate of return they can to their investors. And they will do that under all conditions. They are commercial creatures through and through. And no matter what their words are, they will do whatever it takes to get that extra 25 cents of return. They are not in the business of building your culture, of ensuring that you feel good, that your staff is well taken care of. And everything you ask for that takes away from that rate of return is gonna be a debate. And if you've given up control, your voice is very small. It makes it much more difficult when we were building both firms we never gave up control. We have minority investors. We have several of them, rather than one large one. That's not the case for the vast majority of large firms in the industry today. They'll run bright private equity. Typically one cornerstone and then perhaps a minority investor that it's part of the big pie. That means that a lot of these firms do not have the soul, the thing that makes them magic, that made them magic, the thing that made them different than everyone else. And that is hard to recapture. Once the bureaucracy and the, okay, now we get leverage and we do a big dividend distribution. Now we do these acquisitions. It creates a massive opportunity with the firms that are not, that want to do it the right way, that want to be built around the clients while being, that are willing to give up some of the upside in equity returns to do it in a certain way. And that's why again, we do what we do, 'cause I'm like, there are no firms, investing firms run by people like us, me, Terry, Tony, who've sat in the seat and know what it means to have the responsibility, because unlike the private equity firms, are for do share responsibilities to our clients. We also CEOs might have a responsibility to shareholders, but our first responsibility is to our clients. And just like legal firms do not do well being taken over by private equity or accounting firms, of your industry the same way, you have to be very judicious, that you do things in a way that doesn't misalign your interests, the interests of your teams, 'cause while it wasn't true in the early '90s when I started the industry, our industry today has got really good people who are here to serve their clients overwhelmingly. There are some bad eggs, we're overwhelmingly good people, and we're prone to be taken advantage of by private equity investors who know that we don't know, and we believe in people. And at the worst possible time, you'll be out of control and unable to do the things that matter most that you really wanna do for your teams, for your clients, and that's a concern for me. Where does this all end up? Because we're getting now multi-billion dollar transactions from one private equity firm to another, and every time that happens, all you have to know is that firm now has to triple in size, because they have to do their next recap, because none of these things are going public at a premium relative to sponsor-disponsor deals. For most PE firms, they come in. At a month of leverage, they dividend out to themselves, their original investment. They had more leverage, and then they do a bunch of acquisitions, and then when it's grown from 200 million EBITDA, or 500 million, but are they doing a recap at $5 billion, and they get their original investment back. They're happy, the new investors now do the same, shall game again. They put in a different CEO, "Hey, here's what you got to do." And for G2, it's not a winner, because the folks who don't have equity don't even participate in the ride, and it becomes somewhere in there that clients get lost. The innovation and investment that needs to happen, and creating delightful experiences gets lost. Clients aren't harmed, but they feel like they might as well be at one of the big wirehouses, getting a very impersonal experience. And people will say to me, "How could you stay at Goldman for four years, and why isn't that selling your solar?" I'll hear that sometimes. I'm like, I've never met an institution that can't more about its clients. Like I can say that honestly, like the care and rigor with which they take care, now their clients are very large clients, and not our traditional clients, but the people who are at Goldman, certainly within ACO, are getting white glove service. Like I know the kind of experience that we delivered to these CEOs and executives, and they continue to deliver to my wife and I. The reality is that the firms like Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, they have good advisors, they're all doing their own thing, and something similar is happening now in the big mega firms, which is, in my biggest concern for the industry, honestly, is I don't want us to become like the big wirehouses. I think what makes us special is the fact that we can have a one-on-one interaction that is really life-changing for our clients without being forced into package products, without being forced into a standardized financial plan. But if you don't do something different, you're really doing nothing that different because these big firms are doing really good work when it comes to the routine financial planning and investment management solutions. - That might be a very nice-- - It should happen at the same rate for you to be able to realize that it's happened at the big firms. - Yeah, it may be a very nice transition. I'm sure some of our listeners are listening to you and saying, "We agree with everything you're saying, Joe, we want to retain the soul of our company. We want to actually maintain our diligence and our persistence, our commitment to our clients under all costs." They may be asking, "So Joe, why did you launch a private equity firm instead of launch a new United Capital, where you could actually rebuild to that type of a relationship and that type of soul?" - I know what I want my life to be like. - The hey. - What I preach. I'm 58 now, it's 56 when we launched our rise. And I thought, I have done it. I have climbed the mountain twice. I've done, I've been a part of Golden, which was an eye-opening and awesome experience. I'm never going back to being that guy again. And after every major transition, I do a lot of self-reflection. I have personal cultures. And I joined a group called the Stagen Academy where I did a lot of deep work to say, what do I want this next chapter to look like? And when I learned with three things, I didn't want to have anymore. I didn't want to be the man in the arena. And I am a man, I'm not using it as sexist way as a dad to three daughters, but I'm like, I don't want to be that guy. Number two, I don't want to do nothing. I've done that, it doesn't work for me. I'm not a guy on the beach-candid person. I like to paddle to the island. I like to sit there having my ties. So I've got to build something. And number three, I exist to make the biggest possible dent in the universe I can. It is why I'm on this planet. So knowing what I know, knowing that I don't want to be the man in the arena, and knowing that I want to make the biggest possible dent, what does that look like? And this was the logical offshoot of that. I want to help the next generation of great firms to be different and awesome and exciting, and get the refracted payoff of knowing that I've continued to make hundreds of new millionaires. Like, it's really exciting to me to know that there are hundreds of people who are millionaires because I woke up one day. They probably would have gotten there without me, but I like to think that some part in making that a reality. And it's really exciting. We have four amazing partners that have all grown like weeds since we partnered. And I should say like flowers because they grow beautifully. But they're amazing. And it's exciting. I speak with them every week. And they call me on the weekends and I, "Yo, how do I deal with this?" And it's nice not to have to be the one who has to deal with it, but they just advise. But actually, when they do well, I'm also economically aligned because I'm an economic creature. So I tell them all the same thing. We have been there. There's almost nothing that we and our team haven't experienced. But we're aligned in the benefit we're all going to get as the growth of your equity. And we'll never ask you to do anything that's bad for your clients or your advisors or your culture, because that is the thing. And it's been an amazing voyage, but it is a very different thing than anything I've ever done. I think perhaps in the beginning, I was more heavy-handed than I should have been. I think they would tell you, well, just always growing and learning. And so I think I'm better now as a coach than I was. I'm certainly in the first few ones. I'm like, this is what you should do. And now I'm like, OK, here's what I would suggest. And it's been amazing. And I think if you go to my partners, our partners, it's the same thing that I'm never short for ideas. Some of them are good. We have a great time. Well, kudos to you. As I will say, the thing I'm proud and stuff is I've managed to attract the most brilliant, lovely people in the world to work with me. And there's not better marker of who I am as a person than who I'm surrounded by. And I just wanted to add, as a validation to everything you're saying, Joe, so we did recently have on this podcast a new employee at 1.bfg, Molly McClure. And she referenced that they're a portfolio company of yours. And she spoke the world of how you actually even helped her make the decision to join the company because it was so client-centric. It was so focused on helping people live better lives that it actually helped motivate her to actually take the role in the marketing share. It's the-- Andy is truly a servant leader. So I can't take any credit for the fact that he is an exceptional-- by the way, we partnered not even two years ago. They were at 8 billion in assets. They're over 17 billion now. Yeah, it's incredible. 20 months. I mean, it's been amazing. New Brebrand, incredibly exciting place. Molly's at it a ton, obviously. But they just need a little bit of helping guidance. They're a very magic team. Incredible. Great answer to why private equity. And thank you for going there with us. So it would not be a good podcast about the future of wealth, if we didn't at least touch on AI before we close. So AI is transforming every profession, but wealth management, in particular, as they did with RoboAdvisors, they're feeling threatened. They're feeling like, oh no. What do we do in this era? And how can we actually harness this tool to elevate the experience we're delivering to become more client-centric, to get to know them more deeply, to understand their needs and help them make better decisions, maybe even beyond the portfolio. and into other areas of their lives. How do you say AI? - We have a dedicated AI team here at Rice. It is from day one of primary focus for me. I thought there was an analogy there. I wish I could remember her name, but she ran knowledge for Google, a brilliant woman, and she gave a great analogy that I think is very useful. I'm writing an article on this particular subject. And she said, you have to think about AI, like a genie in a lamp. And the genie in the lamp has three components to the story. Number one is the genie. And in this case, the genie keeps getting stronger and better every single day. But you have to have it in a lamp so that you can constrain it. The single biggest thing you need to know is if you don't have the right controls on it, the genie could be out of control. And then the third, she said, is the single most important of everything, which is, what are you asking and who's doing the asking? I thought it was a very useful analogy for where we are right now with AI. We have this amazing genie that will keep getting stronger. And we don't even know yet what we're capable of asking to maximize what it does today, but by tomorrow it will be even stronger. And we go to AI and say, what can AI do for me? And the question we're asking is the wrong question. What we should be doing is saying, what in our way of working needs to be improved? And then say, what is this genie able to do right now to improve that? It's a few different questions because what we typically do is we go and say, hey, let's use AI for so and so. And let's do AI with this. Instead of looking at our own business and saying, okay, I think our branding work was really bad or our onboarding looks really bad. Or the way we ask clients questions is not particularly good. What do we do to improve that experience? And how would AI help that? It's a very different thing because you're then having the business direct technology just like we did with the internet. And we seem to all be so fascinated by the fact that it can do anything that we actually ask too much of it or not targeted enough of it and not actually fundamentally improving the core business processes. Now there's nothing we do at Rise, that doesn't involve AI, like literally nothing. And that is everything from database research to writing articles to any aspect of what we do and everything we embed in all of our firms. So the magic is unquestionable. But if you don't have a dedicated time as a leader on AI, you're going to be behind. You don't embed it so that everyone in your team is native in AI. And that does mean going to ChatGPT and asking some questions. Take a business process that can be improved today and ask every one of your senior managers right now what one thing needs to be improved on what you're doing and how are you gonna use AI to solve that? And by the way, you don't need to have, you don't need to think about it. You can literally go to AI and say, "Here's the problem I got. Can you solve it?" And don't go to ChatGPT because it'll hide you and say, "Yes." So make sure that you have. And by the way, I don't want you to say, "Yes, there's something you cannot do." So asking those questions, if you don't have a team that is not embedded natively in AI, you're really in trouble. And you will win a lot because the big firms are gonna take forever. They have legacy systems will take forever. The small firms want to have it embedded enough. So the right size firms right now can do magic right now. They're magic, but you have to have your team native and comfortable in it. And it needs to be a non-negotiation. Like you cannot have ahead of marketing, ahead of client service, ahead of sales, even an advisor that is not native on AI. Like that's the standard. If I were the leader and CEO of Affirmine to say, "Well, in the next 12 months, every single employee here will live and breathe understanding what AI is capable of." Now if you do, you will be way ahead of everyone else because what's gonna happen, my life for sure. Everyone's kinda good. They're not gonna do much. They'll play with it. Yeah, yeah, we kinda look to it. We'll get around to it. And the firms that actually do something will have a quantum leap advantage over everyone else. It requires energy and you don't need to do it. So I suspect just like the every economics, just like many things, they will be very slow adopters. And the ones who actually are quick adopters will win a lot and the ones that are slow will win a lot less. - I would wanna add something to this and I'm curious for your thoughts on it. So having also worked in asset and wealth management my whole career, I wonder, is AI also an opportunity to look at what Welltech has generated over the last many decades? And most of Welltech does is help advisors sell products. We're at a unique position where we can ask is it helping me deliver value to my clients? Is the client getting something out of it? Is it being built for the client to feel like they are more connected, more aligned? Am I empowered to continue to touch on all of those things you raised earlier in the podcast, to differentiate, to know my niche, to deliver ongoing, increasing financial decision making tools to my client base as opposed to, am I capturing the meeting notes effectively? Look, to me, even more explicit, here's a very simple starter point. Take your meeting notes from your last meeting, upload them to a chat GPT or cloud or whenever you put complexity and say, tell me, how do we think this client reacted to this meeting? And describe the client beforehand, give a client profile and say, do we think I handled this the way this person probably wanted to be handled? You'll be shocked to what you see. Us AI, right now, tell me about this firm, your own firm. What do you know about it? And tell me about their approach, tell me about their advice, tell me about their clients and have a look and is it right? It is remarkable, the most basic things that take literally three minutes to do being done. Is he thrilled that it can find a new restaurant or a new recipe, which is all great, but I would say with most advisory firms using 2% of AI's capacity and there are so many ways in which it's going to deepen relationships with clients. Help us to onboard much more smoothly, talk about what really matters. And most importantly, pre-identify what the clients are probably thinking about before they come and how you should approach them and create a checklist for the meeting that reminds you what you need to address. And by the way, you have an agentic AI agent listening and saying, don't forget to speak about this and stop talking, the client needs to talk. You know, like there is, I am vision in the next year. AI will be actually facilitating the meetings and making advises, far superior what they do. And I believe that like the whole behavioral economics that the AI will very quickly identify, this is this kind of person, this is how they need to be communicated with. And everything that you do to actually understand them better and speak in their language was create a much more personalized experience for every single client. I just again, I can't speak enough about what I think is coming down the pike. It's one of the most exciting things I could ever imagine being part of. And I thought the internet was big, and Bitcoin was big, but this is another world altogether in my mind. I mean, to me, this is like the invention of mass production when Ford started doing like, I'm like, it's going to just change everything. It's a true evolution. - Absolutely. We always end with the same question, Joe, and thank you for going a bit long with us today. What is an instance in your life or a conversation you've had that totally changed your personal relationship with money? - Well, my number one was when I was 34 that wire hit, I was gonna go have dinner at 21 club with a senior executive as a general electric. And I'm waiting, I'm waiting, I'm waiting for the money to come and I'm at the gym, waiting and waiting, and it finally hits. And I go out, I was on Fifth Avenue, I go to Tiffany, I'm like, I gotta get, I've been married for 34 years. Back then it was like 14 years, whatever it was. I gotta go buy her something. And I walk around, I'm like, she doesn't care about any of this. I don't care about any of this. She just wants to be with me and I want to be with her. And I'm like, I just want to finish dinner with these people, fly home and be with my family. And it's very interesting, when you have an ultimate goal, you never think about the price you pay to get to that goal. And whether the goal is the thing that you really care about. And it really, it was such an almost disappointing feeling to say, wow, I always say that if I can get rich by the time I'm 34, rich is relative, but to me it felt like rich. I was like, oh, this is not the thing. And my wife doesn't care about, she cares about me and I care about her. And we would have a good life. And I enjoyed the building of what was censuring capital more than I enjoyed anything else. The same, the good news is the second time you do the trip, like I did with United Capital, you know it's about the journey. And then they're not just words because you've gotten to the finish line and you realized I didn't care about the finish line. Again, that's. Everyone has different things, but that was my magic moment when I went, oh, the why matters more than anything else. And I should ask the why more often because you grow up with a view that it's this money, or this marriage, or this child, or this school, and that this is not the thing. There's something underneath that that is the thing. And for me, it was wanting to make a difference and love deeply what I do and the people I do it with. And that's been always at the core of whatever I do. I want to make it dense. I want to feel good doing it. And I never want to have the outcome drive the voyage. The outcome should be a consequence of doing things the right way. And then that's going to be, that's an all controllable thing. What is control? But it's how I wake up every day and show up. And I'll add one thing that I will share to every CEO, leader, human listening to this. Because I always say that I get off to us with the one question that's the most important question. And I always say the same thing. What if I'm wrong? That just approach everything in your life with enough humility to say, what if I'm wrong? Because it makes you more approachable. It makes you kinder. It makes you less judgmental. It makes you more open to the possibility. And most importantly, and reinforces a unique, to have a growth mindset. Because as you get older, and I've certainly seen this even in myself, that I start to believe that I'm right. And it's very useful to go, well, I've been wrong after enough every single day. And I got to remember in everything, no matter how much I believe I'm right, what if I'm wrong? That it's very hard to come on top of that. But I definitely want to thank you for joining us. And you have certainly been right multiple times in your career. Your career has been defined by challenging assumptions, pushing the industry to think differently. And reminding advisors that wealth management is about people. It's not only about the portfolios, it's about the why behind them. And so whether through United Capital, Goldman Sachs, or now Rise Growth Partners, you have consistently focused on helping advisors build stronger businesses by creating better, client relationships. Thank you so, so much for sharing your journey and your vision for what's next. If any of our listeners want to learn more about you, your books, or Rise Growth Partners. Just want to look me up. It's not hard to find. And then I'm on, it's really easy. Joe at Rise Growth. Amazing. And so again, you're welcome to go look at our website. I write for lots of magazines. So you'll see those articles. They always get posted on LinkedIn. We'll follow Rise Growth on LinkedIn as well. Oh, phenomenal. Listeners. Thank you. The great work you're doing. This was really fun. Joe, thank you very much. I would love to encourage our listeners to do exactly as you were suggested to do. If you found something meaningful in this conversation, please like it, rate it, share it. I'm sure there's people in your practice and your family that should be listening to this conversation. Make sure they do. Make sure that they get a copy of this podcast and that they can share it with others that need to hear it. Wealth has changed dramatically and Joe, you have given us a really good snapshot of where it's going. Thank you very much. Have a great day. You too. Thank you for joining us on the Knowing Me Knowing You podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, share it with someone who needs to hear it. And don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review. Your support helps us bring more transformative conversations to you. Until next time, keep discovering, keep growing, and remember, you're in control of your own financial story. 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