Why Organic Growth Is So Hard for Financial Advisors w/ Daniel Gourvitch of Mercer Advisors Pt 1.

Welcome Model Fays, David DeSalle here, CEO of Model Fays and your host of the Model Fays podcast. And I am joined today by Daniel Gorbache, who is the president over at Mercer Advisors. And before I officially welcome him to the show, just a quick thank you to our friends over at StreetCred for bringing us together. If it wasn't for you guys over there, this podcast would not be happening. And this podcast is also extremely timely because there's been the buzzword of organic growth being tossed around all across the industry, all across LinkedIn. It's a problem that I continuously try to solve. And frankly, that's what we are going to be nerding out on and talking about today. But with that said, Daniel, I appreciate your time and I welcome you to the show. David, thanks and thanks for having me. It's really fun. And again, also thank you to StreetCred for making the introduction. It's always fun to meet great people and have gotten a chance to listen to the podcast in the past. And it's great to join you here. Let's rock. So I'll be bold in guessing that you did not graduate college and become the president of Mercer. There are probably some steps in between. So walk us through your journey to this point and then give us a snapshot of where Mercer's at today in terms of size and scope just to help set the stage and sprinkle in some credibility before we dive into organic growth. Yeah. David, thanks for that. Yes, I did not graduate Georgetown University straight into Mercer advisors. But I did grow up around the wealth management industry. My dad was in technology actually and worked for a while for a firm called Painweber, which many of the listeners may remember and was now part of UBS. And I remember as a kid, he'd come home late from work because they were bringing together two broker dealers. And the systems weren't speaking to each other. So some of what happens in our industry is very full circle in my family. But it's relevant because when I did graduate college, I went to a consultant firm called McKinsey and Company. Right. And they said of all the things that you know nothing about as a 22 year old. Is there any industry that you know anything about? I've done a few internships in wealth management. I used to, you know, my dad's introductions in college. And I said, well, I know a little bit about this. I can spell some of the words. So they put me on a wealth management project. And you know, very quickly, I actually became really interested in sort of, to some degree like obsessed with the work that the clients who I was serving. You know, you remember when you're like an analyst or an associate at one of these consulting firms, you're not speaking to the CEO, right? You're talking, they send you out into the field and you get to meet advisors and spend time with advisors. And I found that I was just really inspired by the work that they were doing with families, right, and who they were and how they were composing themselves. And ended up spending kind of a decade at McKinsey working on and in the wealth management practice. I ended up leading the wealth management practice across the Americas to serve everyone from the largest ultra high network private banks to independent broker dealers, the wire houses, putting some of the current wire houses together and some of the big integrations that occurred. And you know, as I progressively sort of became more senior, if you will, in that and started spending more time with management teams, I actually became less inspired about what was happening. And the more, you know, the higher up, quote unquote, that you kind of start to spend in some of those organizations where I was finding, it actually became a lot less about the client, right? And it became much more about how do we operate the business to lift out one team from another firm? How do we adjust comp plans? And those are all very important, but the word client was totally missing from the conversation, right? And the thing that I started to do, just I got, you know, the really kind of interest in like, well, what do clients actually want? What delivers value? What are they asking for? What are they paying for? Right? And start actually asking clients a lot of these questions, you know, a lot of the consumer research that McKinsey and other firms now publish those things that we started at the time, right? And wasn't getting very far in convincing any of my clients to operate differently. So you know, from that, you know, just formed a perspective that there was an opportunity and that there is an opportunity to have a firm that is operating, you know, with the benefits of partnership and scale, right? But also has sort of kept clients very much at the center of who it is and what it does, right? And I sort of went on a bit of a journey to try to build that and find that. I went to Goldman Sachs for a few years and then to BlackRock where I actually kind of took a bit of a detour when the Aladdin business there. And you know, through that journey, you know, into the industry, wasn't really able to sort of find the right, the right large firm, if you will, that I thought was going to follow that recipe. And but three and a half, four years ago now in that Dave Welling, we were CEO and now my business partner. And I went home to Ali, who is my wife and is an amazing author and host a TV show about cooking. She's kind of looking in your space, in the media space as well. And I went home after that meeting with Dave and I said, I don't know whether the job will work out. Right? Mercer was $30 billion. At the time, I was at BlackRock, you know, $10 trillion. Much larger firm. We live in New York. We have three kids. They're in a great public school here. We're not moving. And Mercer appeared to be headquartered in Colorado. So I wasn't sure about whether the job worked out, but I went home to Ali and I said, you know, regardless, I would like us to be clients. And that's really cool. And the reason is, you know, first, you know, Mercer is solving the problem that our family has. Right? It is really, you know, for us as, you know, two working professionals, you know, time is scarce, right? You know, I had the classic, you know, cobbler's children's use problem, right? And this is a firm that is solving the problem we have, which is connecting all of the dots across tax, the state, investing, obviously financial planning at the center and doing it kind of with one team. So that was the problem, you know, that that that that we were trying to solve. And Dave was the first person who I'd heard similarly articulate. And this is, I think, is the main point. The idea that what we owe our clients when we operate a subscription business and wealth management is very much a subscription business in the sense that you pay as a client every year for the same service. And, you know, when you're a client of subscription business, if you're a client of Netflix, you expect them to invest in new movies every single year, right? Mm-hmm. Like, new shows every single year. When that stops, you're going to cancer subscription at some point, right? And Dave was the first person who I heard articulate that the benefits of, you know, what clients are paying us, the benefits of scale have to be repaid back to the clients in the form of making the capability better each year, right? And that idea that ethos of, you know, like I was like, I can understand why it's good for us now. And I can understand why it's going to be better for us or why the firm will be better than it is today in three or six or ten years in a structural way. And there's lots of things which we can come to in Mercer about like how the firm's engineered to do that. But just those kind of two ideas, you know, really, really hung with me or our consistent with my kind of way of thinking. And obviously turned into more than just being a client to turn into an opportunity and have end up here and have just had a wonderful time joining this partnership and getting the party with Dave and so many others in helping to serve families and create the context for financial advisors to do the best work of their careers. Well, I wasn't expecting to hear a new organic growth strategy, but what I heard is Mercer should continue to interview a bunch of people and whether they work there or not, they make them clients anyways. Yeah. That's really cool. I mean, that's really cool. And the fact that throughout that process and being able to, you know, take a peak under the hood, that was your initial thought was regardless of how this shakes out. We're going to be clients of this firm like that's a, that's a good testament to the process they brought you through and the vision they were able to cast, especially someone with your background of McKinsey, Goldman, you know, Black Rock, I'm sure you have had no shortage of all the big dogs in the in the finance space called Colliniant. your desk and trying to set appointments and things like that. So that's really, really cool to hear. So Mercer, it's also a testament to the wisdom of my wife who said, if that's your instinct, you should really think about that job. So that's really what it is. It's a testament to her wisdom. And she's definitely my better half in that regard. So I love it. So you had alluded to that three and a half, four years ago, when you first came across Mercer, they were $30 billion. Give me a snapshot quickly of today, ballpark, comedy advisors, assets and their management, what does Mercer look like today? Yeah, we take care of roughly 40,000 families, finances and financial lives. Our team is roughly 1,500 colleagues now, who do that, right? We have 400 lead advisors, but really one of the things that is most important to Mercer is to really unify the in-house team. So the ratio of expert colleagues who serve advisors, so think CPAs, the state attorneys, and professional investors, it's actually greater than one to one. So when we talk about kind of our client serving team, it's not just advisors, right? It's kind of that broader ecosystem of interdisciplinary experts who are serving you. And we've, from 30, we're going to sort of hit about $100 billion in assets our clients have been trusted with us probably this month or we may have just headed depending on where the market is. So that's sort of the journey. It's really cool how you answered my question for what it's worth. I asked AUM and I asked how many advisors and you started off with we help 40,000 people and when you talked about assets, you say clients have entrusted us with about 100 billion. And earlier you mentioned that it's part of Mercer's ethos to have that mindset and that leaves me into our organic growth conversation. So let me give me a moment to try to tee this up and then I'll let you rip and comment on it. So it's interesting. I think like one of the things I want to chat through today is like why firms are struggling with organic growth and just to help set the stage. You know, when you strip out Schwab, fidelity referrals, when you strip out market growth, when you strip out M&A organic growth in this industry is abysmal. It's like two to three percent at best when you strip it out. You guys are roughly five X that in 2025, you grew 11% organically, which is amazing. And so that's sort of the problem at hand to go a little bit deeper into, as you use the word ethos, like the ethos surrounding the problem is, when firms, a lot of firms that come across that want to grow organically, they talk about organic growth, they talk about growing their firm, they talk about making more money when they talk about, when they grow the courage to ask a client for a referral, they say, hey, we're growing, you know, and it's all centered around that. But what's missed that you've done a great job articulating, which for what it's worth, my questions were kind of a test to you. To see how you answer it and you have very much passed. But what's interesting is that organic growth cannot happen at all until you're first helpful to another human being, period. And if we can get firms to adopt that, so rather than adopting AUM numbers, but we want to help 100 new families this year. We want to help 1000 new families. Whatever that number is, if that can be the ethos, and if that can be the mindset from leadership down, certainly there's tips and tricks and tactics and systems that need to be deployed, but that alone picks up a few percent on the organic growth metrics just by having that mindset. So with all that context in mind, I'm curious to know like what your thoughts are on why firms struggle with organic growth and why they've become reliant on M&A exclusively, Schwab referrals, fidelity referrals, market growth only to where it all results in two to three percent growth when you strip all that away. Like why do you think firms are struggling with it? Let's talk about how to solve that. - Yeah, so maybe I'll sort of, and I love David the comment about the why. I was actually gonna go there as well. So when I think about organic growth, I think about it in sort of three layers, if you will, and it starts with the why. Meaning understanding why you are doing anything is pretty important to doing it sustainably. The thing that's interesting about organic growth, organic growth is not an activity, it's an outcome, right? And part of the reason why it's hard is because it is organic growth is the sort of successful execution and the consistent execution of 8, 10, 12, 15 things that have to happen in a row and consistently. And if any one of those things drop, the outcome doesn't happen. You can do 13 to the 14 things well. And the seventh one didn't happen, right? And when you talk about those three more things, it's, are you actually solving a client need that exists? Are you able to find those people? Are you able to talk to them about their need in a way that is compelling, right? Are you able to actually find the people in the organization who are able to do the work of helping them make a hugely consequential decision, which is who am I going to entrust my livelihood? Maybe all the money that I've ever made and all the money that I will ever make, right? Are you going to be able to then service them successfully and scale the capability to do that, to keep those promises, right? And so on and so forth, right? And each of those things is hard individually and getting them all right in a consistent way is sort of this thing that when we talk about organic growth, because it's interesting because you talk about the two or three percent. And if you look underneath that, right, and you kind of de-avarge that, what you actually see is you see firms that have a bunch of like zero and negative two and negative three years. And then like one, seven or eight percent or 10 percent or 15 percent growth year. And then they go back, right? And that's kind of a hard thing to do, right? Allie will tell you like Daniel going to the gym once, like three years ago was not Daniel going to the gym every day. (laughing) You know, it takes some consistency to see actual improvement. So the idea here of like why do people struggle 'cause like actually growth is hard, right? So when we say about what's needed, I kind of separate into three things, this idea of the understanding why and I'll kind of come back to that. The second is like being structurally set up for growth as a firm. And I mean that in terms of operating model, which I think is a piece that we often skip over and we're gonna come back to that. I think actually some of the main innovations at Mercer and they predate me and actually predate Dave have to do with having 40 years of history of folks who are willing to kind of structure the firm in the right way and not cut corners. To create a foundation that structurally allows for continued and sustained growth. And the third is having all of the tactics, right? And the tactics change because how you reach people changes in the social media environment changes and the internet changes and all those things that are different ways that you communicate. But I think it starts with a Y, right? And for us, for us that starts with what Rick Mercer founded the firm to do, right? Rick founded the firm in 1985. He was a tax and estate attorney. And his observation was, and remember this is sort of, you were talking about Stratton, Nockmont, Wolfel Ball Street in the mid-Age, right? That's the ecosystem, right? And different people were reacting to that in different ways, right? Chuck Schwab, you know, in around that time said, okay, I'm gonna give consumers direct access to the markets through discount brokerage and through kind of the ability to trade directly. You first over the phone and then on the internet. Now we see the firm that Schwab has become, you know, over so many decades, right? And Bogal said, you know, we're actually not gonna do this trading thing. We're gonna, you know, create an indexing solution to this, right? And create a Vanguard, right? Rick was an incredible visionary. He was not as good of a business person. His partner at the time, would tell you that. But he was an incredible visionary. And he had a third approach. He said, listen, The thing that's interesting is that I think this is an advisory profession, right? I actually think it's an advisory profession. But in other advisory professions, right, the legal profession, the medical profession, you know, it's rooted in the code of ethics, right? You know, the legal profession is rooted in a deep code of ethics. It's actually why we get so offended when lawyers are unethical. It's because we expect them to be operating an ethical, with an ethical standard, right? Doctors, right, the hypocritic of. So Rick's perspective is, first of all, I want to build a firm that is rooted in deep code of ethics. And second of all, I want to build a firm that is solving the entire problem, right? The way that the Rockefellers did by hiring all of these experts and acts in the state and investing in one place, because I think this problem is all connected. It's associated with your money. And just like we go to a hospital, right, to solve the problem with our bodies, we need a place that has the radiologists and the surgeons and the doctors all on the same team wearing the same jersey. You know, to be able to go and do that, right? So when we talk about why we grow, we grow because we believe this idea of delivering fiduciary advice, right? Rick found the fiduciary registration, the RIA registration, as a way of finding an ethical way to do what he wanted to do, right? He didn't say I want to go found an RIA. He said, I actually want to provide, you know, advice in the best interest of clients with an ethical standard. And I want to find a registration that will allow me to do that, right? And he said, I want to go and do this in an integrated way, because I believe this money thing is all connected, right? And I think that many, many families should have what he called economic freedom, which is this idea that we don't have to worry about money, right? And that's what's empowering the firm since that time, right? Is how do we reach families and help them achieve economic freedom, right? And at some level, everyone who is at Mercer, we don't want to do that. And when we say we want to grow, we want to grow to do that. And what we found is that growth is the only way to create professional opportunities to grow people and to create careers for people, right? If you're in an advisory firm that's not growing, it's very hard to create new opportunities for colleagues. One of the things that's most exciting about Mercer, I came from the outside, but our leadership team, we have three executive managing directors who lead geographic divisions in our country, all of them grew up at Mercer, right? Started as client service specialists, right? Started as client development folks, right? 20 years ago, because of the growth, they've been able to grow their careers, right? This is not true, just at that level, it's true kind of at every level across the firm. I think we promoted 350 people last year internally, right? And so growth creates professional opportunities, right? So if we're trying to create the context for people to find economic freedom and we're trying to get the context for the best fiduciary professionals to grow their careers, you sort of have to grow to have that kind of impact, right? So that's for us, that's kind of the why, right? It's rooted in our clients, first and foremost, and very connected that is creating the professional opportunities for our people in different, for them to have different rationales, not the only valid one, right? But I think if you're not deeply rooted in that it's hard to find the energy to go to the gym every day, right? It's hard to find the energy to do the thing that's hard consistently and to solve it as it breaks and re-solve it as it breaks and to do that year and in year out. And I think it's being part of a firm, being part of culture is really rooted in the way that for us has been the thing that's powered organic growth for such a long period of time. And it's interesting because you read about Mercer and you see all the press releases, right? That we do and we welcome new partners into the firm and it's incredibly important part of our culture to be able to create a home for firms to join, right? When they want to be part of a team and we can talk about that in another podcast, I think that's not the topic here. But we actually added more assets through new clients joining than all the M&A we did let this here in last year, right? So that's like not a stat that people often think about as it relates to Mercer because you kind of just read the press releases and you kind of see that in the headline that sticks in your brain. But I think that that's, but it's really rooted in this very deeply held view of the impact we're trying to have and the way to achieve that is through growing impact. So it's interesting Dan Allison, who you know, he's worked with a dimensional fund advisor as DFA for a number of years and every year they put out this massive survey across hundreds of thousands of clients. And it's not, it's not a quick kind of three question survey. It is very, very detailed and it's anonymous. So they have no reason to lie and if they do go through the survey, like they spend a good amount of time on it and time and time again, what the survey results share. I feel like I was just on Jerry Springer for a moment, but the survey results, sorry, I digress. But what the results state is that 98% of clients have such a positive experience, even with firms who aren't focused on providing a great experience. The bar is incredibly low, but 98% of clients say that they've had a good enough experience to where they would refer someone that they care about. And 51% of those think that they have referred someone and I could keep going through the stats of like a smaller percentage thinks they've referred to three, so on and so forth. So based on that, if you have a thousand clients, let's say there's 500 referrals out there. And if I go to any firm that has a thousand clients and I ask how many referrals, I promise you it's nowhere close to 500. So my question is, if we know that, why do you think firms are not investing dollars in organic growth solutions, programs, an ecosystem, whatever you want to call it, why do you think they aren't investing in it? Yeah. So I think the answer to this really depends on the firm, right? I mean, the first question around the business rationale, if you will, because you're using sort of investment sort of in that context. The first thing that I think I've observed is that it is very easy in our profession to fool yourself or to fool oneself about whether or not you're a grown. And you know, you had said earlier, even when you defined growth, you sort of explained, you know, to the listeners, right? And to me, that when you're defining growth, you're stripping out, you know, market and you're stripping out other things. You know, and the reason is because you could just look at, you know, AUM metric, right? And look at it from, you know, one period to the next period. And if you looked it in 2025, said, I grew, right? And you'd be quite proud of yourself, right? That's clients money, right? And I think that the first reason, probably the most important reason is, I don't know that in the whole firms and teams are always super honest with themselves about whether or not they're grown. Right? That's like a hard, maybe a little bit of a provocative thing to say. But I think one of the things that we care a lot about is just like being really honest with ourselves, you know, as a team, about where are we? Right? Where are we with this client? Where are we in our client service? Where are we with our firm? Where are we with growth? Right? So when we define growth, we define growth in a very particular way, right? We kind of strip out all of the things that we talked about. But I think it starts with, you know, to go back to the gym analogy that I was using earlier, you're like having a scale that works in its functioning, right? So for us, right? We don't use AUM to measure growth. We use revenue to measure growth, right? Why do we use revenue to measure growth? Because AUM is clients money, right? Like AUM is not our business, right? AUM is what we're taking care of, right? And AUM can grow for lots of reasons, right? And we actually think that it is a better way to measure growth to understand. Because revenue is what people are paying us for the value that we're creating for them, right? That's what that is. And if we want to understand our weak creating value, we're having more impact, you know, the best way in a capitalist society to understand that is what are people paying you for it, right? You know, if we have to boil down, recognizing lots of different things that go into that, right? So, but that's kind of, we think it's a much better way of thinking about it than AUM, right? Now, so it starts with like actually having a scale that works, right? And I actually would bet that if you asked 70% of firms who in your category would be not growing, they might tell you that they're grown. 100% and then- So, so why are people not growing because they don't realize they're not growing? It's the birth cancer. Yeah, it's the, it's almost like likes and impressions on social media, like that doesn't actually- matter. And I would also say, especially firms focused on M&A, I would guess the very small percentage would be able to state what you stated either because they don't know the answer or because it doesn't shake out the way that you stated it, which is we helped more clients organically than we did through the clients we acquired through M&A. Like, that seems like for you guys, that's a very important metric to track as a alongside revenue growth. It's very, if our aspiration is to deliver the highest standard of financial care, and to continue to invest and make it better every year, and take the benefits of scale, because there are real benefits of scale. But it only matters if you make the client experience better. And I can rattle off kind of all the things we've done over the last three or four years in terms of making that real for clients, in terms of adding services or adding capabilities or including things in the fee that you know, used to cost extra, all of those things that in terms of the ability to add more and more value day in and day out, probably most importantly, just continue to hire the best experts in local markets, right? Not in some central location investing in local boutique teams in markets around the country, you know, where we operate. When we think about this idea, for us, it's all about, are we able to look ourselves in the mirror and say, you know, when a client had a choice, the client was making a choice had a choice, you know, they evaluated and they decided that, you know, we were better than all their other choices, right? Because if you didn't, and if you're not doing that over and over again, it's actually pretty hard to look yourself in the mirror and say like, we're actually building a better mouth strap and we're doing better for our existing clients as well. Because if you're not at the edge, if you're not, you know, at the, you know, what we call kind of pioneers in our industry, it's kind of one of our important values. It's actually pretty, it's pretty likely that your existing clients are also being left behind, right? So we actually think of it not only as an evidence of growth and health. Right? We think of it evidence of like the actual capability we have is standing the real test of, you know, a family that is making a choice is choosing us, right? So that's helpful, but that's sort of how we kind of connected back to, to, to that idea. As we think about kind of growth, like you, you had talked about growth tactics earlier. So I'm also, I think there was some desire to get into that. I'm happy to get into the growth programs as well, but I know that, that was something you wanted to kind of spend a little bit time on. Well, I do want to go back. My thoughts just quickly as to why folks aren't investing in organic growth programs. One, you hit on which I agree with is they think they're growing. When they look at their, when they look at their AUM growth, they look at the revenue growth, it's really market growth in the markets have been crushing, right? But I also think it's paralysis by analysis. There's, there's so many different companies out there that provide a piece of the puzzle and it's difficult, really difficult to put that, that puzzle together. So like one of the things that we're working on solving is, is just that is, hey, you don't have to go to all these different providers to collect these puzzle pieces and try and put them together. We're developing every single puzzle piece and we're helping you put it together. Like that's the problem we're looking to solve. I think that there's, there's a sense of paralysis by analysis of like, I don't even know where to start. And then there's a stat. I think it was in a broadridge study, where it was something to the effect of with marketing dollars spent that after 12 months, you get a 1.2x return on your marketing spend on average. So you're basically breaking even and usually that's the point where someone tries something different. And then they reset that 12 month clock over and over and over again. Whereas the study also stated that if you stick with the thing that you evaluated that you know works over time, right? You can't, you can't stick with something that's just clearly not working. But over a five year period, the ROI is 6x on that spend. So I think that it's a, it's a combination of people not knowing where to start and people not seeing things through long enough to truly experience the benefits of whatever strategy you decided to deploy. So I just wanted to hit on that as we kind of bleed into it. I could, I could not agree with you more. I could not agree with you more. And I think that the, this goes back to the point of like, what is growth, growth is an outcome, right? And to get that outcome to work, you've got a string together, you know, again, 10, 12, 14, 14, that's why I'm sorry. And like getting like, you can be working at it to your point for a year and you got the first eight. And you've actually made a lot of progress, but you're not seeing it come out of the back of the funnel because you're only eight out of the 14 through, right? And it's, it's kind of putting these Lego blocks together because it's not linear, right? It's not like you get, if you put the ninth block in, you unlock, you know, one 14th of it, you actually have to get all of the blocks strung together and get the motion working and then test and learn and repeat and do that over and over and over again, which is why you're seeing, I think the broad rich outcomes you're describing. But I think this idea of like patients and putting your head down and doing it, I think it's spot on actually. Well, and that's what it, it, it, and I'll try not to get too frustrated, but that's what's frustrating is I see on LinkedIn so much that people are talking about organic growth, but all they're talking about is an outcome, like you've put it. No one's talking about here's what it takes. And I apologize, I can't help myself. As you know, it just arrived today, but that's why that's why we wrote this book, organic growth revolution is to say, here's the eight to 14 steps, like you just, you know, you've been alluding to here's all the things that it takes. Here's the system that is required to get the outcome that everyone's talking about because my partner and I were just sick of the buzz of people saying words, but not providing solutions. So let's actually get into. Can I ask you a question? So one of the things that we found, you know, then this was like 20 years ago, I'm sure, right? 20 years ago, I'm sure, you know, we were on this journey and the firm at the time was sort of in several billion dollars in size, just to kind of give people a sense of scope and size. And the team said, a group of people who were here at the time said, growth is a full time job. We don't believe that we can do an incredible job for existed clients and do growth at the same time. Not we as a firm, but we as individuals. So what we should do is everybody should choose, right? Everybody should choose what they love the most. And we bifurcated the model. We said we're going to have advisors, the people who want to spend all day spent serving clients, advising clients, bring together the family office. That's going to be their primary role. That's going to be their major. And then the people who love finding new families, matching them to the right advisor, handing that family off, right? Doing that like really high quality matching function. That's going to be their role, right? And it's hard because right, like a lot of people said, well, I'm in the middle and all that, but they sort of had the conviction that that was going to be a better way to serve clients and a better way to grow. And what happened was, you know, we now have sort of record and that promoter scores, you know, very long client, very high client retention, because we have groups, people who spend all day serving clients who don't have a sales goal of any sort, right? And then we have a separate group of people whose full time job is figuring out this really hard challenge, right? And by the way, what happens when you do that we found is that you also get to match families better to the best advisor, right? Because the advisor you first meet doesn't have to be the advisor you work with. That advisor can actually assess who you are and match it like that. So we structurally 20 years ago, we're like, it's one of the things that like got me excited about Mercer when I met the firm was like that thing. So when you've written the book, do you think it's possible to do all of these things in a context where that is like, that's something that I think about like because we have this amazing structural advantage and we have great colleagues who are in the client development team who identify and find these families and match them to advisors. And it doesn't mean that the advisor job does, they're not part growth as a team sport as you know, but their role is to generate the referrals and to figure out the through great client service and then to have folks who help them. So how have you thought about like when you did the research and wrote the book, like I recognize the work kind of relatively unique in the in that structure, at least in my travels. Hello. like is what you're describing like possible? Or like what needs to be the case for other firms? I'm curious and in, and, and, yeah. - So, first thing I'm going to state is, and I'm going to say this publicly. So you have to follow through on this. But we're going to do a second podcast as well, because this conversation is just getting started. And we're also running out of time. So, that's not very, no, no, that's good. That's good. I thought you were about to say. - No, this is, it's perfect. But truly, like we're just getting started. And this is, this is going to be a very valuable kind of two-part series here. So to answer your question, it's my belief that growing is possible when you're both trying to grow and serve across the same human, particularly because of where technology is today, but there's different degrees of growth. If there was unlimited budget and unlimited resources, your model is best. So much so that we've developed a personality assessment. And that's why I'm smiling ear to ear as you were going through it. Is we've developed a personality assessment called advisor DNA. And you go through a plethora of questions. And I don't even need to define these for you because you'll get it. But you basically come out as one of four personalities as an advisor. You are either the connector, the rainmaker, the guardian or the architect. And you take the connectors and the rain makers and you let them loose to go help as many people as they can on the front end. The guardians in the architects, you keep them put to serve the heck out of these clients and ensure that they have the best possible experience that they that they can. And you're leaning into each other's strengths because if you ask a guardian or an architect to go and prospect, their skin's going to crawl. You ask them to have a thoughtful conversation with the client, deepen the relationship and do amazing planning for them. They'll do that 15 hours a day. So so in an ideal world, your model is where it's at. However, with where technology is, they can they can do both. But it gets to a certain point to where there's an inflection of, okay, what do you want to focus on now? Yeah. And to be clear, right, we have the privilege, we've had the public partner with a hundred and ten firms. And I've seen many individuals who can do both to your point, right? Because of their capabilities, their show, even small teams, but their growth can be better or their service can be. Yeah, I'm actually more talking about like once you get to a larger team, it's like, how does that, you know, you know, I actually think that you're, you're exactly right. And we've seen it over and over again, where we partner with incredible individuals, incredible firms, incredible founders. And they've joined our partnership and they've brought this, um, this, this, this integrated skill set, right? Um, which, which it sounds like what is what you're kind of getting at and how you cut and how technology can help unlock that kind of integrated skill set, but that almost sounds like someone who is sort of sitting in like the middle of your four quadrants, um, uh, in your, in your personality assessment, but, uh, I'll have to buy the book to read because it very much resonated with me to, uh, to, to, to, to, to hear those four because I almost like start to put the people who I know into those, into those, uh, uh, personality, uh, types, I guess. Yeah. I, um, so we'll, we'll chat about this more, uh, offline, but I, uh, I would love to have you back, uh, soon, they're out in the later to keep the conversation going, um, because truly we are just getting started. But for now, we didn't even get to the tactics. I know that's why we need the part to, we just why we need the power to, uh, uh, so, and rarely do I have people on, uh, twice. So I'm, um, pumped about this. That's some much I'm enjoying the conversation. Um, but in the meantime, where can people connect with you? Where can they find you just if they want to stay tuned along the way while they're waiting for part two? Yeah. So, um, um, Mershary advisors, uh, uh, you know, uh, it's pretty easy to find us. Um, but, you know, we, we spend a lot of time sort of in, in, in the industry with colleagues. I think one of the nicest things about, um, our profession is how collaborative, uh, it is and, and in the sharing of ideas, uh, you know, for, for the benefit of clients. So definitely folks can find me kind of on our website and, and elsewhere and, and look forward to connecting David again with you and spending more time here, and as well with your listeners, uh, as well. So thank you again for having me. Of course. So for everyone tuning in, uh, hopefully we've gotten your, your gears turning, uh, you'll tune in to part two. Um, and, uh, Daniel, I appreciate your time today as well. Uh, and looking forward to chatting with you again. Thank you so much, David. All right, take care.