Why Organic Growth Is So Hard for Financial Advisors w/ Daniel Gourvitch of Mercer Advisors Pt 2.

[MUSIC] What's up, Model F A's, David the Sell here, CEO of Model F A and your host of the Model F A podcast. And as promised, both Daniel and I followed through and we are back here for part two of what was in the first episode. I think a wonderful chat and very impressed with what Daniel's doing over there. So Daniel Gourwitch, welcome back so quickly. >> Thank you, thank you David and it's an authentic part too, because I think I don't think I had a jacket last time, but the same plan is behind me so. >> I love that. >> Nice to continue our conversation. >> Yeah, let's rock and roll. So that first episode, you shared a good story about the company and what you're all building. You also shared what's stuck with me and I even chatted with one of my partners afterwards. And this is what people need to do when I asked you about the size of the company. And you say, well, we've been fortunate enough to be able to help or serve whatever word you used. Ex-A-Mona families who have entrusted us with Ex-A-Mona their dollars. And it just really resonated with me because a lot of folks talk about growth. And it's about AUM growth. It's about, it's inward focus. It's selfish and I don't mean that harshly that word. But we need to remember that you do not have an opportunity to grow or hit your goals until you're actually helpful to someone else. That really, really stuck with me. And I think the entire sort of vibe for lack of a way to put it that you put out there last time. Was much needed for folks to hear, to know exactly what it takes mindset wise to be able to grow organically. And I think Mercer is a great reflection of that from what you were able to share last time. So in today's episode, Daniel, I want to know from the organic growth standpoint, I want to get down to brass tax and chat through different strategies, different tactics, and things that folks can leave this episode and actually go start to implement. So I'm going to ask you a general question, see where you take it. Whether some of the different puzzle pieces in the organic growth puzzle that everyone's been talking about. Yeah, David, thanks and for the kind words. And last time we talked about the why of growth and we talked about the operating model and how we set up the firm. But ultimately, this is about anything else. It's about execution, right? And we talked about this idea of the growth as an outcome. And the thing that's hard about it is that it's an outcome that is comprised of a lot of different things that you've got to get right in order. And I think you would share some of what you have in the book about sort of how you kind of sequence those things. I'll start with this idea that there's actually many paths, right? There's actually many paths to successful growth. And in our firm, one of the things that we've been very excited to do is actually support lots of different paths to growth. Recognizing that different markets are different, different teams are different, different clients are going to find their best, most trusted home advisory home in different ways, right? And that's all because humans are different, right? So that's that's the that's both why this is exciting and it's hard, right? So I'll talk about a few things maybe from an execution perspective, I think, cut across all of those. And then we can have dive into any of the kind of particular strategies or tactics. I like that. Yeah, I do think that there's foundational elements, sort of non-negotiable elements of organic growth. But I'd also be curious if you're able to share top of mind later on in the episode, like unique, different cool ways that people have been able to attract the folks that they serve best. Yeah, yeah, so I think that the most, actually the most important thing that you just actually just said at the very end of what you, is rather the folks that they serve best, right? It actually execution and of growth kind of for me, starched like known who you serve best, right? And in, you know, for us as a firm, those are families that are looking really for a family office, solution, meaning an integrated team that is going to work together to serve them, right? That's different than clients who are looking for an advisor who's going to help them manage their equity portfolio, right? So understanding who you serve best as a firm, and then from that who you serve best as an individual or as a team, that's working together, right? And sometimes, you know, that's geographic, right? We are really focusing on bring, you know, we have teams who will say, you know, what we're really focused on is bringing the foremost for you, sharing family office to life in our community, right? And, and that's why we built our team, that's why we built our firm, that's why we joined Mercer, and we, we really want to deliver a world class family office experience in our community and whatever market that they're living in, right? There are others who will say and increasingly will say, you know, our focus is on unlocking the power of family office for creative professionals as an example, right? We had an amazing team that joined us from a firm that was called Singer Burke that had built just an incredible set of services, operating models to serve creative professionals, right? My wife happens to be an author in a TV show host, so sort of I know, you know, the needs well in this space, and they are very different, right? You know, when you have creative professionals who have your contracts with large studios, right? The TV show and, you know, your book is option or whatnot. Those contracts have like dozens and dozens of dozens of different ways to get paid, and if then statements, and you're in the creative industry, which is by definition, both volatile at an industry level, but also for individual creative professionals. My wife will say that every book that she's published will be her last book, because no one will ever, you know, you know, and that's not unique to her, right? But we have a team of professionals who've devoted their careers, right? To figuring out how do we create economic freedom, so creative professionals can focus on being incredible creatives and not have to worry about money, right? And increasingly, you know, those people are not just in LA, right? For obvious reasons that firm, you know, took root in LA, but those people are all over the country, right? So number one is like knowing who is that right client for you, you know, David is sort of you kind of we're getting out. That's sort of, to me, like the foundational, non-negotiable piece of it, because ultimately when we talk about organic growth, we're very focused on like what happens after you get that right lead into that right conversation. What are you telling them that is both authentically true and differentiated enough in such a way that they would say, I want this team, this advisor, this firm to take care of my livelihood, all the money that I've earned, maybe all the money that I will earn, and you know, be my steward, be my partner in this journey, right? So I think that that to me, sort of the first foundational element is really being sharp about who are those clients and what are you going to deliver to them? I do, so I agree with that completely. I do think there's a step before that that is commonly overlooked and we talk about it in the book. Yeah, I want to spend a ton of time on this, but I'm curious to get your thoughts on it. A lot of advisors that we come across, they don't even know who they are yet and where they derive their end. No, that's self. No, that's self, right? No, that's self. You know, sort of secure your mask before helping others, like figure out like who you are and where you should be spending time and what makes you light up inside. And if we go down the path of talking about like a niche is kind of what we've been saying. I always tell people there's two boxes that you need to check and one box that is helpful to check. One is you need to be incredibly passionate about helping those people. Number two, it needs to be profitable, right? You could be very passionate about helping elementary school teachers. You're just going to need to work with a ton of them to stay in business. And then the third is having some sort of natural affiliation with that group of people already because your natural market is all in this industry. Or you already have a pocket of clients that are in this space or in this situation. So I think it's going and trying to figure out who you are first where you derive energy and then making sure you're checking those two, if not all three of those boxes to then bleed into everything you just said. So I think there's that like preface. That's right. I think that's it. - Totally, I totally agree. I think one of the things that we've been excited about in our firm is a lot of, we have a ton of homegrown advisory talent in Mercer. Right? You know, if you look at the folks who are divisional leaders, I'm meaning kind of our East Division, our West Division, our Central Division, they support advisory teams geographically. We're very creative with the names. (laughs) And, you know, the folks who are in those seats today, or folks who've spent 10, 15, 20, 30 years at Mercer, have started as a relationship manager, as a client service specialist, in many cases, you know, got their CFP moved through, but through that journey, we're able to find that thing that let them up, right? And, you know, that we found is a really kind of exciting part of what we are thinking about in our firms. How do we build fiduciary talent, not just from a technical skills perspective, right? But finding, you know, those journeys internally for folks, and unlocking them so that they can produce through them. That's something we all learn over time, and sometimes it changes over the course of our lives. And so, you've that, and then I think in addition that you mentioned that third box, which is interesting. I think if you have your own firm, and you're operating in an independent, or you're operating in an independent capacity within a larger firm, where you're responsible for sourcing your own clients, and you don't have sort of this operating model dynamic that we described at Mercer in the last episode, where we've split, you know, client development, and client service. That third box is really important. One of the things we found, which is really interesting for us, is we've got advisors say, you know, come from a military family, are extremely passionate about serving military families, the ability to find military families, and match them is something we can do as a firm, right? And that sort of accelerates people, then leaning into their passion, because you can have people who can get there without having that natural affinity, or that starting group of clients, 'cause that could sometimes be the hardest place, is like where to start. So this idea of a jump starting people's journey, both by giving them this ability to navigate across our firm, but also, you know, how helping them get started with the right group of clients, is something that I think we're, as a group, really excited about here. - So let's say, so staying on the path of foundational elements, know thyself as you put it, know who you want to serve, what's another foundational element that comes to mind. - I think the second piece of this is process. - Okay. - Right. The folks who, at least I found, right? And I think we've found in our firm, I'd be interested in others view in your view day because you've interviewed so many firm here on this. I found that because organic growth requires this kind of consistency of putting these pieces together, it's really hard to do in like a start stop manner, because if you're stopping the funnel, if you will, stopping the opportunity funnel, it's hard to get back on, right? And it's hard if you're not kind of connecting all of the dots from this initial outreach, building awareness to the first conversation, to the second conversation, and so on and so forth, right? So for us, what we found is that the advisors, the teams, the markets and our firm that are growing most consistently, and, you know, we, you know, three quarters of the markets in our firm for you kind of north of eight or nine percent last year, right? And when you look at those, but you look at the teams underneath them, the ones that are doing that most consistently year in year out, have real dedication to process. The process can be different, actually, right? The process can be different about based on how your practice is structured. It can be different based on who are the clients, who you're trying to onboard. Obviously the process needs to be very different if you're working with business owners who are selling their business, right? Because then the process needs to be really linked to that transaction, right? Versus if there's a different specialty or a different group of folks who you're working with more directly. But this dedication to process I found is something that is really common and so common that I would call it foundational. Because if you don't, if you stop, then all of a sudden you wake up and you haven't filled the top of the pipeline with new opportunities, because you stopped in a process oriented way, putting your name out there, creating new opportunities and you were focusing on something else for a period of time, and then you feel like you've got to restart the whole thing. So that's another thing for me that this process dedication feels really important and foundational. I don't know if you've seen the same thing with others. - I have and it's a whole idea of to build a castle your job is to lay one brick at the time. - So to speak, it's being energized and obsessed with the mundane knowing that, that the momentum, you know, it's, if you go back down to zero, it's a lot harder to move that train than if it slows down during certain periods, but you still have a minimum level baseline of things that you do to keep things going. And I'll just share just like one quick example. So I guess it's a three part example, but I'll be quick with it. So I know you guys have worked with one of my good friends, Dan Allison, and he's done research alongside DFA for 13, 14 years and time and time again, when they send out their surveys to their advisors clients, 98% of clients say that they're willing to refer. 51% of those people say that they have referred. But even someone like you guys who serve 40,000 plus families and are doing great from an organic growth perspective, I bet a lot of money you did not receive 20,000 referrals last year. - That is correct. - So there's even the firms like you that are doing great, they're still like a disconnect of people who are trying to get their friends and family help, but they're not actually making it to the advisor. So there's three quick things that an advisor can do, specifically going back to your point of process, which is when you meet with someone that was referred to you at the end of the call, its statement, question, statement, it's positive reinforcement language. So was this help I'm summarizing? Was this helpful? Yes, it was, hey, can you please go let Dan know that we had a chance to connect and that was helpful. He took a risk in introducing us and I'm sure that he'd like to hear that that risk was worth taking, would you be open to going to do that, right? That ended up itself, that positive reinforcement, when that client hears, hey, thank you so, 'cause they often exaggerate because they don't want Daniel in this case to feel like it was a risk, it's like no, it was awesome meeting with them, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's way more likely for that client to then refer again. Then when they become a new client, hey, we have three objections, we want the experience to be great, we want you to, we want you to be educated on the services that we provide so that as your needs evolve, you know what we can help you with and number three, want your experience to be so good to where you wouldn't hesitate introducing us to someone that needs help, awareness, right? Positive reinforcement, awareness. And then finally, his interactive client survey model, the conversations he has, it's getting feedback that deepens the relationship, cross educating them so they know what the firm provides. And then just simply not asking for referrals, but simply letting them know, hey, just so you're aware, we have capacity to help in other, you know, six to seven families over the next quarter. If there's anyone that you care about, just know that we have the capacity to help them, period. No question. And if you just did that in all of those different interactions when you got referred, when you onboarded someone and in every 12 to 18 months with a client, folks with that more business than they know what to do with because you're not trying to get referrals, you're trying to facilitate what's already happening. They're just not making it to you. So I don't mean to. - David, I think that that's great. And I'll sort of add three to your three. - That's good. - Or did her to dance, three. - Which is the first thing that I found, which kind of gets ahead of this process, but it's about having the right mindset about asking for referrals. And what I found is that many of our advisors, even most of our advisors, they're uncomfortable with this referral asking motion for very particular reason, which is there's a perception that it breaks the social contract, which is the social contract is, I am here to serve you and I'm being paid to do that. So anything that steps outside of that alignment that we've had that forms the basis of our relationship starts to feel selfish, right? It's about me, it's, and all of our advisors, And in particular, kind of fiduciary advisors, I've seen more broadly start with a really, really deep level of integrity around their relationship with their clients, which is why the service, the experience, and the outcomes are so outstanding. But that same thing then gets in the way potentially. And what we found is what I found is that the key mindset unlock is once you recognize that the limiting factor in this country, in the world, in your market, to great fiduciary advice is the availability and the time of great fiduciary advisors. That's the limiting factor. Nothing else, right? And we read about this in every type of, you know, survey about advisors retiring and advisor capacity and the need for advice growing. But once you recognize as an advisor that the precious element here is your time, actually this conversation that you're having about extending the opportunity to work with your clients' community is paying them a tremendous compliment. You're paying your client a tremendous compliment to say, "I so appreciate our relationship that I'd love to work with more people like you," right? And I think that sort of mindset shift of like the scarce resource here is our time, my time as the advisor, I think is actually a really important one. I think the second thing is this, I love the sort of the interactive client survey kind of example. And we've used you before and for those of you who are listening and it's basically this idea of having an agenda item on the client meeting agenda, right? At least that's the way we've interpreted dance frames advice. It's actually to have a formal opportunity to actually receive feedback, right? And do that in a genuinely genuine authentic manner and that can lead to referrals and whatnot. For me, the second one is actually upstream of that, which is treat your client like your business partner. And what I mean by that is we are, you know, clients are so vulnerable with us as advisors and advisory team that talk about the most sensitive topics, the things at the heart of their concerns, their hopes, their dreams, their family dynamics. And then they ask advisors, how are you doing? How's it going? And Dave, what do you, what would you guess the number one answer is? Like, busy, fine things. Yeah, busy and fine. It's great. But it's like one or two words, right? And what you're doing in that moment is that person is reaching out for a reciprocal relationship with you, right? And you as the advisor is you're shutting them down. When you say it's fine, I'm doing great. You're being extremely polite and you're shutting down their sort of outreach, they're big to have a reciprocal relationship with you, right? So I've actually, you know, when we talk to our teams, this opportunity to actually have like a genuine two-sided relationship that your client is, some clients won't ask, right? And you can put those inside. But most of, you know, our advisor and most of their relationships are seeing this and we found that if you actually just take up clients on their offer to genuine answer, how am I doing? Right? Actually, it's going great. But what I'm trying to do is add 10 more clients this year, what, like, just tell them the truth. It's fun. I'm smiling as you're talking because, um, so my baby just turned at the time of this recording six months old a few days ago and my wife did this super sweet little like photo shoot. She like said it all a lot, but the backdrop has balloons and all that type of stuff. And so every single call I've had since that day when someone says, how are you doing? I share my screen and show some of the pictures and like I'm doing great, the baby just turns six months old, check it out. And now they're, because one of the, and Dan says this a lot, one of the most powerful things you can instill in a client relationship. And when you first hear it, it sounds a little messed up, but it, but it, it's, it's true. It's guilt. They would feel guilty ever going to anyone else because you have such a good, open, vulnerable relationship with each other, not just them to you. And when you let them into your personal life, they would feel guilty leaving, which means we're all humans. You're going to make some mistake at some point in that relationship. They are way more forgiving, assuming that you fix it, right? But that little taste of your life and stills that again, it sounds messed up, but it's powerful. That little layer of guilt to where they couldn't even imagine leaving because they feel too bad because they know you and your family is very powerful. Yeah. And, and, and for us, there may be 20% of clients who actually don't want to have a reciprocal relationship. Totally. They view it. And, and, and, and we're not suggesting to our colleagues like force that on them in order to create guilt or whatnot. That's not at all what we're suggesting. It's, it's actually for the 80% who are trying to build a reciprocal relationship with pick up on those cues and to be vulnerable because they're, they're actually here. So that was number two. And then, and then number three for us is make it easy to make a referral when they want to. I've, the number of times when people say, I've a referral for you, but then they make it, you know, it's, they don't find the words to describe your firm, what you do, what not. So just when people say, you know, hey, I've got someone I want to introduce you to just like anything else, just say, hey, what would be, you know, would be helpful if I wrote a little email for you, would be helpful if, you know, what, what do you need to make that happen? That little last step we found is really important as well. Hey, it's, it comes off and it is intentionally, like an act of service, hey, you, you're doing me this favor, this kindness, you know, and, and I want to make it easy for you to do that, right? But also it just, it increases follow through dramatically. And you have control over how they tee you up. I just did this recently, and got introduced to the CEO of dynasty and my client literally copy and pasted the email that I sent over there. It was easy for him. He was, we have a great relationship. He was happy to do it. And now they're on the calendar, you know, so it's, and I was able to control the narrative in what that intro email looked like. Yeah, it's, it's, it's powerful. So, did you go through three to lose track or is there one more? No, no, the, the four, yeah, no, those were three. So it was the line set thing. It was the reciprocal relationship, right? And it was, and it's, make it easy, make it easy. Those were, those were my three, but cool. What about from, I'll be general with these phrases and see where you take it, but from a, a marketing, branding, relevance sort of standpoint, like that side of the organic growth equation beyond your existing client, client relationship, serving the people that they care about, understanding who you want to work with, understanding who you are, the other side of organic growth, marketing, branding, etc. Whether some of your thoughts on that. Yeah, so I, um, I think this goes actually right back to the earlier conversation about know thyself and know who you're trying to serve. Yeah, how you tell your own, like if you kind of just think about marketing very simply as helping others understand the opportunity as it relates to, you know, working together, right? Building awareness around that. How you build that awareness, what you're talking about where you'd actually go and do the marketing, what channels you use, how you show up is all extraordinarily dependent on who are you trying to speak to and what are you trying to say to them, right? So where, where we've seen sort of the biggest successes and also the biggest failures, right? And we've had our share is when there is a mismatch between the core message, the audience that you're trying to reach and the channel in which you're trying to reach them and how you're trying to communicate in that channel, right? So the sort of most basic example, right, has to do with if you're trying to reach, if you're trying to reach executives, right, of companies who have recently been promoted, right? There's a very obvious channel for that's called LinkedIn. Right? Why? Because people who work in companies tend to be on LinkedIn. But if you were trying to do, you know, reach out to dentists or doctors who own their own practice and you tried to do LinkedIn marketing, you wouldn't get very far because most dentists and doctors aren't on the good work. They are, it's because someone signed them up once, but they're not living there, right? And then sort of understanding how are we talking authentically in that channel, based on what works in that channel. Every channel, as you know, has different tactics that work and doesn't, depending on the nature. And I picked a digital channel, but the same could be true for dinner seminars or for, you know, events, you know, that are more intimate, right? But understanding sort of this match between who are we trying to reach? Where are they naturally? How do we reach them? And how do we optimize these in that channel? So, actually, if you know who you are and you know what you're trying to say and who you're trying to work with to our earlier conversation, then maybe you don't need to get great at every channel, right? You just need to get great at the one or two where that conversation is most relevant, right? So I think that's where we see a lot of very obvious opportunities. And, and where we see the biggest successes when that all kind of lights up, you're saying the right thing, you're finding the right person, you're doing in the place where they're paying attention, you can see a lot of flow through there. There's a, uh, Rennie Mayneth, a client that I have in London who specializes in working with attorneys in London that work for large US-based law firms. So, niche down. And he crushes it on LinkedIn. Like he, he has organic posts that get 40, 50, 60,000 views. And he gets a lot of traction with partners of law firms reaching out because with he, it's, it's masterful what he does. But essentially through a short, very, very short story, I'm talking three, four hundred words or less, will walk through a client scenario of what they helped with and anonymized, of course. And when a partner of a law firm reads that, they get pulled, they're like, that's, that's what I'm struggling with. And this person seems like they can help. So try and get your, your messaging structured in such a way to where you're getting into their psyche and you're, you're able to attract them to you because they can see I'm where that person was and I want to be where they are now. And this person was the conduit. Let me, let me actually get on their calendar. So like speaking to the marketplace in, in that way I think is helpful. And then going back to the, you know, how are you doing? The, you know, question when clients ask you that. Also not being afraid to show yourself online. It doesn't all need to be business. But allow them to, you know, get a good understanding of who you are as a human in what's important to you. And David, the thing that I think is also the other place I was going to go with this, like once you've gotten this alignment between who you are and who the target client is and where they are, right, which channel. The other thing that's actually really, that is really resonant in that story and we found to be true is we start almost everything that we're doing in marketing from a place of education. First of all, it's authentic to us. At our firm, you know, our advisors, our colleagues in another life would be educators, right? You know, they're, they're really committed to delivering value through education. And if you interact with, with our teams in an in person setting, in a seminar, in a lunch, in a dinner, success for that is did folks walk away with value, right? From that interactive, not about whether or not, because you believe if you put a lot of education, a lot of value into the world, value will come back, right? And so this concept of, you know, what your client is doing in LinkedIn is actually, they're actually delivering education through a story, through a storytelling mechanism, right? Like, this is the thing that happened. This is how we dealt with it. Like, someone's learning something. It's actually the reason that it's taking 300 words and not the form of like a 10 word ad, right? Is because they're actually investing in telling a story in a way that's delivering education. And I think that's the other kind of really important foundational principle for us is, you know, does the, does the actual kind of, once you've gotten the person's attention, what you're really engaging with them, right? Does that engagement, right? And I'm not talking about the Google paid search words or what, now those are just kind of, that's your two seconds of attention that buys you, you know, the two minutes where you're going to communicate, are you really delivering value, you know, in that, in that, you know, two minutes that you've gotten the privilege to kind of have someone's attention. And are you educating to me also feels like something that we've seen time and again is a really important thing? You know, it's interesting. So I've come across folks, I've worked with folks that, you know, pick a, pick a channel, LinkedIn, you know, YouTube, video, short form videos. And they enter into that initiative for the purposes of trying to get more clients. And then there's other people who do that for the purposes of helping people at scale and be the educator, like you referenced, you know, people at Mercer would be educators in another life. And what's, what's interesting to me is the college, god, college, the universe with everyone to call it, the people who have the intention to do stuff for purposes of getting clients, struggle getting clients from that channel, the people who have the intention to help people and educate people end up getting way more clients. Like I met with someone, his name's Kevin, he had $80 million in assets and management last year or at the end of 2023. He started a YouTube channel because he was passionate about educating people. He brought on $200 million in the last 12 months directly from YouTube. He had 75 intro calls in the last 30 days alone. Like that, your intentions are felt by who's ever on the receiving end of the things that you're putting out there. It's so interesting to me that it's so subtle, but people feel it on the receiving end. I'll tell you a story from from this week in between episode one and episode two. I didn't a terrific conversation with, I won't name him for obvious reasons, gentlemen, who's the CEO of an RIA that takes care of, you know, three or four thousand clients and isn't trustworthy about $10 billion of their assets. And you know, I had reached out and you know, share that he might be interested in joining our farming and building together. And I'd ask him sort of what, what drew you and you know, there were a few things, but he said something which really stuck with me is like, you guys have incredible marketing, right? And I said, well, what, what, what specifically stood out to you is like, well, you guys did this video when the LA fires were happening for folks in LA, right? And I was reflecting on it because the way that that had happened was we worked together as a firm, our leadership team and all of our advisors, all of our client development team members, you know, every year, five or six hundred of us get together in person, right? To really connect and talk about how do we continue to advance our profession. And a couple of years ago, that was happening in Anaheim just as, kind of the second days, when the fire has really broke out just north of us. And the team was together and we're like, we feel like we have clients, you know, we're being impacted in real time and we want to do something to help. And we said, you know, how do we, can we actually on a pro bono basis make, you know, a bunch of our financial planners available to help clients or families who are clients navigate the impact of the fires, right? And just for us, who leads our teams on the West Coast, kind of did a quick video to help get the word out there that we were available to help. And that stuck in his mind from two years later as like great marketing. But like there was no marketing intent, there was no commercial intent. In fact, it was just it literally had come from this deep desire that the team had to help in the moment when a lot of families needed help, right? And, but it's sort of the most extreme example of this. But it was interesting that it kind of stuck in this person's mind as marketing because it left an impression that who our firm was, which was genuinely authentic from that interaction from that conversation, right? Well, and there may be some people that hear that I'm not one of them that hear that and say, well, it's a marketing ploy. It's like, no, no, you wanted to help people pro bono and the way that you can help them is the way in which your team is uniquely gifted to help people. And therefore, we're giving our time. And then you fast forward two years later. And in a roundabout way, you are in a roundabout way, you are compensated for those genuine efforts two years later with whatever financial impact a $10 billion firm is going to have on on Mercer, if that deal goes, you know? Yeah, and that's and that's sort of where, you know, I'm I'm and the point was more that like, that was the farthest thing that we've ever done for marketing. Right? We actually, we're not going to charge clients. Most of the families that were impacted are not clients who naturally are well. So it's actually in that situation, but the point more was that how people remember you is how you genuinely show up. And this point that you had made earlier, which is just about authentically delivering value to others in our communities, is sort of at the heart of it. I love it. What in the last few minutes that we have, whether we not yet touched on categorically that you wanted to hit on that you think is cool that you guys have done. Well, maybe it's a good question. I mean, you you you guys wrote the book, right? I'm really interested in in in in the learning, David, like as you were doing the interviews and doing the research and writing the book, what is the thing that was most counterintuitive to you? You've been in the space for a long time. You've been very successful in the space for a while. Like as you were putting your thoughts together as you were kind of what was new that that felt counterintuitive or interesting or provocative, it's going to be it's tough to think about what was new and I don't want to come off any sort of way, but we every single day have multiple conversations with firms about organic growth. So we've I don't want to say we've seen it all, but we've seen a lot. What's what's most what how I'll answer that is rather what's most baffling. Okay. What's most baffling is when someone says they want to grow. But then they don't put together systems and processes like we've talked about today and stay consistent with those things and lay one brick at a time and build something of significance. What's baffling to me is that they're still okay with growing accidentally. What's baffling to me because the two to three percent organic growth the average in the industry when you strip away marker returns and all the stuff we talked about last time, even that is accidental for for most people. And what's also baffling to me is what I've referenced to you before when advisors and firms agree with us when we share the data with them about the 98% of the people willing to refer. 51% said they have and then you analyze and they you say okay you have 500 clients that means you have between 200 and 250 referrals floating out there. You already said you agreed with the data and you got 20 referrals last year. So now you have you know 180 to 130 people that went without help and it's baffling that they don't do the steps necessary to solve for that. And I think it comes down to like I had a conversation really of this week where when I walked through that capacity language that I shared earlier on like hey just so you're aware we have the capacity to help ex-monofokes over the next quarter. So if they when you care about you know please feel free to introduce them we'd love an opportunity to help. Period. And he's like I'm just I'm uncomfortable with that because I don't like asking for referrals. I'm like where's the question mark? There's no question mark in what I just said it's a it's a it's a period. You're not asking for a referral you are letting them know you are here to help in the event which may never happen bring the sales pressure down. In the event that you ever come across someone that needs help. So what what what's here here's what was an interesting finding as I was talking to Dan as we were writing the book. The industry is is sort of filled with uh uh we view it as like a barbell. You have the old guard who grew up high sales pressure bang in the phone you know didn't have an option but to to learn how to develop business right and then you have the service oriented advisor that never had to develop business because they were fed by the old guard and and whatnot and they just gave great service and now these old guards are either tired and not developing businesses as much anymore or getting out of the industry and these new folks have never had to go out of their way to help new people. They do a great job helping their current people and that's an observation as as we were discussing and sort of analyzing the firms that we work with um that simply sharing that you have the capacity and desire to help more people feels salesy because their starting point is zero from ever having to do anything sales related um so that that's probably one of the most interesting dynamics um with the the average age of the advisor being late 50s early 60s at this point leaving it's like there's a lot of people that are going to go on help to if we don't solve this problem industry. Yeah yeah yeah so uh it's uh it's uh it's it's it's it's it's an opportunity and a challenge and uh they're ungrateful for you having me on to to talk about it as well you know it's one of these things that uh like we talked about earlier it's an outcome right it's an outcome rather than activity and you know at its core it starts with what we talked about I think in the first episode which is just having a really deep seated desire and a mission to create good in the world right and if you anchor around that and create for us at least if you anchor around helping families and creating the context for great fiduciary professionals to do their best work you know it's the the way to do that is to have a healthy level of growth right both because that is what creates impact and what creates opportunities for professionals so back to the you know you've brought a full circle which is you've got to to know what growth is and want to do it for the right reasons um and then kind of you get into all of the other tactics that we talked about today. Mm hmm well um well I'll say the end it earlier you mentioned something to the effect of you know one of the most valuable things that an advisor can offer is their time and when I spoke with Will Rubin over at StreetCred he made mention that you it's tough to get your time because you have a lot of stuff going on your part of a big company and you've been very kind in spending two hours with me over the last two weeks so I know you have a lot going on I appreciate your time I'm glad that you came back for part two even though I did put you on the spot you followed through in the in the last recording but very grateful for your time Dana. Yeah same here and have have a great time of future person. We're looking to hear more about what you were in there. Yeah I'm excited and for everyone tuning in hopefully you enjoyed part two and we will catch you on the next episode. Take care.