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A company is just a series of decisions that are made. And so the faster you can make higher quality decisions at a fast pace, the better you're going to be.
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Welcome back to another episode of Builders. As always, this show is brought to you by Frontlines IO, Silicon Valley's leading B2B podcast production studio. If you're bringing technology to market and want to learn from your peers, we have a library of more than 1200 interviews with Venture backed founders and marketers. Where they talk, all things go to market. Of course, if you want to launch your own podcast, we offer podcasts as a service to more than 80 tech startups. The idea there is very simple. You show up and host and we do everything else. Now, with all that said, let's jump into today's episode. Our guest today is Ridic, founder and CEO of Savvy Health. Rick, welcome to the show.
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Thank you. Excited to be here.
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B
Yeah. Looking forward to this. So look through your background and a lot of interesting stuff you've been part of. But I saw that you were at Brex. What was that like? Just because it's a relevant conversation right now. They just got acquired by Capital One. What was Brex like?
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It was an insane company in the best way possible. So it was there near the beginning of 2019, all the way to about the middle of 2021. And it was a moment of tremendous growth. I think the, you know, Brex started close to 5 to 10 million in revenue at the beginning of 2019 and just, you know, we scaled that year to 100 million. Well, that was, you know, just absolute craziness in terms of building new things, getting the go to market. Right. But there was this rock. Let's focus on just, you know, the next, how do we keep the growth going? I think the experience itself was very emblematic of what it actually takes for a high growth company to succeed. Because the amount of chaos, the amount of things that you had to get right, do all these things in parallel, felt like we were all over the place in the moment. But then they all kind of sum together and that's kind of what was necessary to keep that crazy, crazy momentum high.
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Were there any big lessons that you walked away with to say, okay, when I go out and build Savvy, I'm going to do this, or maybe opposite of that, of things that you were not going to do?
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A ton. I think that the first few that come to mind are, number one, just the sheer importance of hiring the best people. I mean, Brex was excellent at finding really, really Top talent. One of the quotes that one of the founders told me was, you get no extra points for doing things yourself, so you might as well get all the help you can. And it's obvious, right, good people are necessary to build iconic companies. But I think just living and seeing that was really important. That's number one. Number two was the lesson maybe on the other end of what not to do. I actually think that in many cases we at Brex, we were getting down into the bare metal from the beginning and what that meant was that we were going to rebuild the financial infrastructure, that the card processing was done or the bank processing. We built a banking core from scratch. And I think in those cases it made sense for Brex to do it. In some cases maybe we would revisit that decision today. But when we started sapping, I actually thought, you know, it doesn't always make sense in principle from a business strategy perspective to go and just rebuild those things. And so we took the opposite approach. We actually partnered a ton in the beginning and said, look, we can figure out all the limitations as we go on and over time build incrementally to get better financial infrastructure. And so that was the, you know, the opposite way that we went versus the Brex philosophy. And I think beyond that, you know, there's the a few things that we take in terms of the culture. So we have a pretty strong written culture here at Savvy. And that was simply just, you know, writing equals thinking is the philosophy. And at Brexit was very emblematic of that. If you write, you can think and you can present and get alignment and decision making done really fast. And ultimately, if you really think about it, a company is just a series of decisions that are made. And so the faster you can make higher quality decisions at a fast pace, the better you're going to be in terms of getting things out and just getting output.
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Let's talk about Savvy for a second, maybe just to give some context there. So at a high level, what does the company do?
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So Savvy, we are an AI enabled platform for independent financial advisors. What that means is that we help independent advisors, both solo operators and small teams, manage and run their business. This involves a lot of software services, including autonomous AI agents that effectively help them from everything from their CRM to billing to operations to compliance, admin, business development, investment management, financial planning and so on and so forth. So it's a one stop shop to help these individuals build and grow their business.
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B
What would you say is the sentiment around AI right now with this ICP and maybe tell us, you don't have to name who it is, but like talk us through a recent conversation that you had with a financial advisor talking about AI specifically.
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I think the sentiment right now is it's very focused on AI, especially just in the last six weeks where there was a massive shift just in the kind of public markets where we saw a lot of action in a number of different industries. But wealth management was one where you saw a massive drop in public stock market prices for these more legacy wealth management institutions as these private startups were starting to announce a lot more AI functionality related to enabling these wealth advisors and getting outcomes. So it's very top of mind purely from that perspective. Now beyond that, the smartest advisors, those that are at savvy, are experimenting constantly with what they can use AI to do to speed up their internal processes. And what that means is effectively that things that they might have taken a few hours to do research, for example, preparing for a client meeting and digging deeper into their portfolio and getting some investment research done in certain areas, they're looking and trying to figure out how to do that in a matter of minutes by leveraging a number of AI tools. So the conversation then shifts over from well, how can software just help build and run my workflows in a faster way to how can software, in this case AI actually output answers that I just need to review. So easier to be an editor than it is to be a writer. Taking that the second part of your question of just, you know, an active conversation we've had, let's see, I think two weeks ago, speaking with one of our, the teams of advisors. So it's about a seven or eight people in that team. They are at the bleeding edge of trying to figure out how to leverage AI. And the thing that they keep running into is that ultimately there's two elements. The first is privacy and security is paramount, especially when you're dealing with client data. So they're looking at and trying to figure out which AI models are going to work and, you know, what is the savvy integrated way to do it. And the second is actually that they're thinking about how do we get very, very vertical, specific AI advice. So if we think of ChatGPT as a very generic wraparound, you can ask anything, it gives you an answer. They think of AI as effectively going to a specific need. So instead of calling up an outside investment analyst firm, they want to have an investment analyst AI that effectively can go and give them that same level of advice. In a much faster manner. So that mode of working is actually the design pattern is very much tuned to what are the specific jobs to be done that are in specific categories and how specific can you get, and then develop agents that are finely tuned to that specific fate. So that's something that we've been thinking about, which is very different than a blank, empty chat box that can do anything for you.
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This show is brought to you by Frontlines Media, a podcast production Studio that helps B2B founders launch, launch, manage and grow their own podcast. Now, if you're a founder, you may be thinking, I don't have time to host a podcast. I've got a company to build. Well, that's exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit Frontlines I.O. podcast. Now back to today's episode. What's the general Persona of the advisors that you see that are really getting it? Is this kind of the next generation that's coming up, that's technology native, or is it the older generation who say, hey, we need to evolve and adapt?
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What does that look like? So it's all of the above, because I think at this point we're past the point that AI is now in the zeitgeist, so everyone is aware of it. I would say that spectrum is actually based on how leading edge or cutting edge is the individual's usage. So you're right in thinking that the younger financial advisors, they're a little bit more adept at figuring out which ones, which tools to leverage, where AI can help them. But across the spectrum, we're seeing that every advisor is interested in curious to either learn if they themselves are maybe not as attuned so far because they've believe and have heard of others also are getting benefit all the way to people coming to us and saying, hey, I made this thing. You know, the other day someone said, I have this thing that's running in notebook LM and doing X, Y and Z. So they're really kind of testing and pushing the state of the art to figure out what they can do.
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Talk to us about the Go to market motion. What does that look like?
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So for us, the go to market is somewhat unique. What we do is we're not selling just another software solution where someone signs up and clicks a button. Ultimately, it's a full, vertically integrated platform. And what that means is that when an advisor is leveraging the savvy platform, they are moving their business over they're the 1099 contractors on our registered investment advisor because that's the value prop for them. They don't want to think about having to set up a business and deal with compliance and licenses and so on and so forth. So we have taken care of that. But at the same time, that means that they are going to be moving their business over and running it through the Savvy infrastructure, which is a big ask, right? This is not something that you just rip and replace every other day. So the amount of diligence and care required is actually quite high. So what does that mean from a Go to Market perspective? In some senses you can think of it as a typical B2B motion where you have a team which is effectively a hybrid recruiting plus sales team. And it's like kind of as imagine a recruiting or typical sales team, the SDR or sourcers, and then there's the account executives or you know, the managers that are actually running the individual through the process. So if you think about it from that perspective, the go to market is focused on how do we isolate and find the advisors that can best benefit from the platform. Huge data science effort, a lot of different signals that help us answer that question. Then that the sales and recruiting team can actually go and have those initial conversations to assess whether or not this move would make sense. And then the actual process itself is highly educative in the sense that we're effectively treating it like a business consultant where they analyze all parts of their business, where they're having pain points, where they have gaps and try to retrofit and see if Savvy's platform can actually go and fill and help those gaps. Right? So you're almost doing the level of consulting to say, hey, here's where Savvy can help and plug in to, you know, help you achieve your goals. And ultimately, if the advisor believes that and they get to see it in our demo, they get to, you know, go and talk to all the people they want across the team to really get understanding of what is possible and capable. Also some references from other advisors. That's when we make a move and that process is effectively getting signatures on the contract and whatnot, but also importantly, moving their business over all the repapering all the contracts, et cetera, of their constituent business as part of that sale process.
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Going back to the first part of that you mentioned signals there. What are the top signals that you're looking at that may surprise the audience or may not be common signals to
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monitor and look at? I don't think that it's anything surprising because ultimately, well, maybe the nuance here is that these signals are not describable in the sense of beyond just the high level. So as an example, one of the signals is, you know, likelihood to move. Now, likelihood to move from their current platform or their current company to Savvy. Well, that's obvious, right? You know, you want to find the ones that are highest likelihood to move. So what built into that signal? Well, there's a number of factors, but that's where effectively we have this somewhat black box model that's effectively just running a number of permutations across a number of variables. Now, the thing with a black box model is that you can only estimate what those signals are, what the variables are, and what the weights on each of those are. So that's effectively the challenge of how do you describe what are the elements that you can get that determine the likelihood to poof. Now, data that goes into this black box model is, you know, everything we can find, which is information on LinkedIn they're passing through because from a compliance perspective, their licenses are made public on the SEC website and you can see kind of their activity and where they've been, which firms have they been at, and kind of this, this model is able to draw all these strong correlations and then kind of ladder up into this ultimately probability to move context.
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What would you say is really moving the needle in terms of growth right now and acquiring customers?
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I think for us it is a combination of two things. One is the size and scale, and the brand that Savvy has is now at a point that people have started to see it and believe that there is something here that maybe sounds obvious that, you know, over time the brand improves and you get more traction. But in this industry, of course, being, you know, figuring out whether the platform is real, when, you know, taking a bet is a big deal, you're moving your CL over, you really have to trust whether or not this thing works. The second is actually that word of mouth. So this comes from both our existing advisors, who are a big source of referrals, who are telling their friends or they're getting calls or they're speaking about their experience about savvy. And then of course, partners in the industry. So we're finding that there's a number of partners in the wealth management industry, whether it's, you know, they just talk to advisors as well. And so having the brand is the precursor and then the experience from the existing advisors to basically give every partner in the industry Trust that this is a platform that they can match for. So nothing novel, right? At the end of the day, most B2B motions will have some sort of partner ecosystem that they're able to leverage and they'll have some sort of word of mouth and referrals. But ultimately those are the things that matter a lot more for us. Given that it is such a trust based industry, much more than, you know, a better AI based email outbound workflow, it's not really going to move the needle.
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Is there anything that you spent a bunch of money on that you thought was gonna work that didn't work? This could be sales, marketing, just anything related to growth that you now look back on, you're like, huh, maybe that that was dope.
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A ton. And I think I say that proudly in the sense that you were always looking to allocate part of the budget that is dedicated to experimentation. And so, you know, that could be as low as 10% in a given quarter all the way. I mean we've had a quarter where we had 50% in the marketing budget specifically related to marketing, deep advisors outside dedicated to experimentation. So we'll modulate that up and down. So yes, tons of failed experiments. But ultimately the thing that we realize we're doing is you're really what I call spear phishing here where you really need to figure out how to get early signals on a wide diversity of experiments. And as soon as you find the one, then you basically just a hundred x your spend on that one strategy. And effectively, if you build the best repeatable laboratory of just being able to do this over and over again, that is how you design the best go to market motion. So that's kind of the general philosophy of how we operate it.
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Can you give us an example of one of those experiments that you tried that didn't work, Especially one that you. I don't know if you have these, but like I have some experiments I run where I'm like this is going to work so well, it's almost dumb to even test it because it's going to work so well and then it doesn't work at all. Do you have any like that that you were like very convinced they were going to just perform?
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You know, I think a couple easy ones were, you know, there's certain events that had a lot of attention in the industry where they had a lot of people coming. And ultimately, you know, we tried some that we played the ground game on, others that we had a booth and did all of that and mixed results, you know, I don't think there was a strong correlation with one or the other of really going big and having a booth versus just having people on the ground and having genuine conversations. And so, you know, it depends on the industry, depends on the conference certainly. But I think for us we realized actually you got to analyze the delta. Like what is the impact of the additional dollars to do all the big flashy things? Is it actually moving the needle? Maybe not for the results we wanted, but maybe it helps the brand. So that was one, I think another, let's see, was email outbound. I mean, you know, that just, I think I mentioned it before. Pretty much every startup has to try most of those, you know, low hanging fruit type of strategies, but that's just not going to, you know, it doesn't move the needle, particularly because financial advisors are getting bombarded with all sorts of other people trying to sell them. And so standing out from the noise is actually really important. And you know, that experiment, I mean, we poured so much time and effort and energy into figuring out, you know, how do we do this outbound sequence and use AI here and improve our deliverability and creative content. And maybe there's something we haven't tried but you know, in the early signals when we did try that just ended up not working out tons more. But I think those are the two that come to mind. This show is brought to you by the global talent company, a marketing leader's best friend in these times of budget cuts and efficient growth. We help marketing leaders find, hire, vet and manage amazing marketing talent for 50 to 70% less than their US and European counterparts. To book a free consultation, visit GlobalTalent
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co. Makes me sad when I think about how much time I spent on cold email and you know, the like 50 domains I bought and like the infrastructure I built out to try to make cold email work and it just didn't work. And I think most founders I talk to, they say the exact same thing. I think there's some industries maybe where it works, but I haven't found them. I don't think I've talked to anyone so far who said cold emailing people is like the channel for us right now.
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I think that's right. I think it has to be paired with something. I mean, you definitely need some level of brand impression to really stand out in the cold email the other spends. I think, you know, there could just be a question of did you reach the high watermark required in order to stand out. Right. It's one of those things where if the cold email is at the 95th percentile you'll get no responses. But being at 97th percentile, you'll get a ton more signal out of it. So I think that it's hard question because you know, it's kind of playing into the gambler's philosophy of just, you know, let's keep going and keep investing because it must be the 97th percentile that's required. And so I think that's just a trade off. You have to make a call on do you keep going and trying to get it at 97, 98 to the hope that that is what the problem is.
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As you've approached building out this go to market team, have you been hiring people that come from this space and maybe to give some context there, like the trend that I'm seeing is I'll talk to a company that's building legal tech software and they say we're not hiring salespeople, we're hiring lawyers to come in and sell or we're hiring doctors to come in to sell. Is that something that you're experimenting with or something that you're seeing?
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Yeah, it's a good question. So the answer is that no. We actually have everyone coming not from the industry here and the sales team does have a few folks from the industry, but majority are not. So the way that we went about it was if folks have worked in capacity in a similar industry, but recruiting for whether it's not, if it's not financial advisors, whether it's insurance brokers or real estate agents and so on, that was something that was similar enough because in a similar vein you were asking those individuals to also move their business over. And then we got folks that were adept at also doing financial advisor recruiting at other institutions. Right. So they understand the best practices that do of this. And what we found is that if you blend both then you're able to get the best of everything where you can cross validate good ideas whether or not they're industry specific, so the nuance is important or other tactics that have helped move others over that have a similar profile. Right. Where their livelihood is dependent on their business. So it is a big ask to make the move. Right. You have this high sense of both IQ and EQ in the individual. And I think that was the right strategy. I think we tried a number of different things and this combination is working out. You know, we haven't gone as far as getting someone that is doing the job as a financial advisor to be doing the recruiting as well. I think particularly it hasn't Been something that needs to be an active role is what we found. Because the best advisors who know others and you know, are acting as both referral source. So you know, they're benefiting from being a referral source but also their reference checks to others. And I think ultimately that's just the nature we see of that dynamic has worked well.
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I had a founder on the other day who's running a pretty big AI CRM or AI SDR startup I would say and you know, he was telling me is their tool is about enabling SDRs and supporting SDRs. And then he had a competitor come in who had a very aggressive message of this is going to wipe everyone out, you know, fire all your SDRs and you can just have AI do it instead. And he said that's created a lot of frustration for him. And just in the market in general, that's you know, kind of opposite of his message. It sounds like you're very much taking the, it's, you know, an AI copilot. AI is there to support you and enable you and empower you. Do you have any competitors who are taking the more aggressive stance of AI is going to wipe all of you out?
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I think that's been the moniker for a long time. If you look at the 2010s, you had the robo advisors that came and said the same thing of how the advisor is going to be wiped out. Ultimately the data speaks for itself. You know, there's very little impact to financial advisors. And actually if you look at it really in the call it low end of the client segment, you see some in fact where they're getting the benefit from these robo advisors, but eventually they graduate out to moving to a human financial advisor. We do have a few competitors that are still claiming the same thing. Now instead of the robo technology, it's effectively using AI to replace the advisor. Our philosophy is the same where we think that it's the wrong way to think about how AI can go and disrupt an industry because that is only looking at AI in the lens of work output. So if you're analyzing it of can you create a financial plan that is going to be at some percentile level of the average advisor? Maybe the answer is yes, maybe in the future it'll be yes if it's not today. But actually the core value of the advisor is not to create just a financial plan. That's one of many different things they're doing. But there's additional latent value in an advisor that doesn't get talked about often. That an AI doesn't replace what that is, is actually just the human nature of someone dealing with their own money actually has a lot of psychological elements that need to be considered. So if you think about it, there's a number of different studies that show that as people increase in net worth, there's a lot of fear comes with making financial decisions because the brain for your own self goes and devolves down to the most dramatic downside case. So there's decision paralysis. You feel like you may not be able to make the decision the right way if something does go wrong, even though there's a probability distribution on that decision, you feel bad about making the wrong decision. And so this is where we see that many folks, especially as you get up that net worth graph, end up wanting a financial advisor from a peace of mind perspective. And to me this is, you know, this is true across age groups, this is true, you know, that just a human evolution perspective, I think that's the element that doesn't get replaced. Now if you think about that, that's why our thesis has been for so long that you get use AI to enable the advisor because then it can eliminate a lot of the time that they're spending on the middle and back office in order to maximize the time they're spending in front of the client. Because ultimately driving decisions forward is important, communicating those decisions is important. So again, let's get them to be the call it the newspaper editor rather than a writer by having a number of AI agents that are effectively producing work for them to review and aggregate together and synthesize to understand what they should show and communicate to the end client.
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Now final question for you. Since we're almost up on time, let's talk about the big picture vision. So we can go out 3 years, 5 years, 10 years, however far we want to go. What's the big picture vision for everything that you and the team are so
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hard at work building? So our ultimate goal at Zavi is to build the one stop operating system for the financial advisor. And what that means is it's fully vertically integrated, it allows the advisor to run their business. So all the practice management, that's your CRM, billing compliance, all those things in one place. Then on top of that, full integration into all the, let's call it financial services or the money related elements, right, the investment management, financial planning, taxes, estate planning, so on and so forth. And you know, we've made really strong headways across both of those areas already. And then finally vertically integrating and integrating the functionality for Brokerage, clearing and custody banking and all those elements into one place, which allows the advisor to have one place that they're able to handle anything money related for their end clients and can effectively, at a click of a button, access any of these different services. On top of it is your layer of AI agents that orchestrate all of this. So there's one version where you can have AI that is a chatbot that effectively allows the advisor to go and ask it questions. Our view is that it should be the flip if you think about the best team that an advisor would like. It is a team of proactive agents that are able to go and provide information proactively in advance of the advisor need. Again, so this is your always on team of investment analyst agents, senior financial planning agents and so on and so forth that's able to analyze who are the clients in the book of business that are coming up on a meeting or have had some significant change or just constantly passively analyzing those portfolios and financial planning goals to be able to surface those insights. The Advisor has this full operating system with all the data that allows them to just make quick decisions across the entire board. That's the ultimate vision and how we think there's 100 billion plus dollar opportunity here.
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B
Amazing. I love it. All right, where should we send people if they want to follow along with you and everything that you're doing?
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So you can go to our website, savvywealth.com and easy to sign up there if you are a financial advisor. Otherwise, follow along on LinkedIn, my personal LinkedIn. I'm always putting something out about what's happening in the industry or what I'm hearing here at Savvy. So that's just my name. Renek Malhotra is the tagline for the LinkedIn.
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B
Amazing. Thanks so much.
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A
Appreciate it. Appreciate it. Thanks, bro.
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B
Well, that's today's episode of Builders brought to you by the Frontlines. If you want more amazing content like this, visit Frontlines IO where you'll find the library of more than 1500 interviews with founders, marketers and other GTM leaders, where we unpack the tactical lessons from their journey. And of course, as always, if you do want to launch your own podcast, we'd love to have a conversation with you. Visit Frontlines IO podcast as a service. Mention that you listen, mention you love the show and we'll give you a 10% discount. Thanks for listening. We'll catch you on the next episode.