C (3:36)

Thank you so much Michael for having me here. Was just talking to my wife even a couple minutes ago and she goes to me, she's like, even she's honored for me being on the show. So really happy honored to be here with you.

B (3:46)

Well, I'm really excited to have you on and I get to talk about something today that I, I don't think we talk about enough in our, in our planning world. You know, I find, I mean we do market research on this from the, from the Kids platform. Like most advisory firms grow mostly by referrals and most advisory firms don't particularly proactively ask for the referrals because they don't, they don't feel comfortable doing it. Which means basically most firms try to grow by just being so awesome for clients that they will voluntarily refer us and say that was amazing. You've got to talk to my friend, brother, business partner, whatever it is. But, but in practice, some firms get a lot more referrals than others, which to me kind of implies that we're all trying hard for our clients, but some of us are somehow delivering a service that is at least incrementally better than others that it really does trigger more of that referral flow. It's either because they just intuited better what clients, what their clients really want and how to execute it, or, or maybe they're one of the few firms that like regularly surveys clients for feedback and makes makes ongoing improvements to try to make themselves more referable in the first place. And I know this is an area you've spent a lot of time in your firm trying to figure out. How do you get feedback, input from clients to make sure you're really delivering a planning experience at a level that drives referrals. So, so today I just, I'm excited to talk about how you, how you actually go about getting feedback from clients to make sure you're really delivering at, at a level that gets them talking about you.

C (5:14)

Yeah. So, you know, just a little bit of a, of a backstory. So this actually all started a few years ago. You know, this, you know, our firm's been in business for about 40 years. My, my father started the company back in the 1980s, you know, came to the US as an immigrant from, from South America and was literally going door knocking here in South Florida and you know, just started selling Medicare supplement policies. Eventually led to life insurance, eventually led to, you know, annuities, mutual funds, and you know, now we're a full service wealth management firm. But, but it kind of, it all, it all started where, you know, we started meeting with, with specific clients and as the firm started getting bigger and bigger and our, you know, our name started going out there more. There was a lot of, you know, a lot of clients prospects that were coming in and meeting with us and they were, you know, they already had another advisor and they had, they were working with another advisory firm and this other advisory firm. You know, eventually, you know, after a few meetings they, you know, they started losing their business from where they were at and the clients started working with us. And we quickly found out that within just a couple days after that, one advisor ended up losing two clients because they were both friends. The advisor went into, you know, on Google and started pretty much talking crap about our firm and they started, you know, saying some things about us like if, like if they were a client and we didn't even know who these people were and we're like, so we started talking to the client and we're like, hey, do you think this could be that person? And they're like, for sure, for sure. That's definitely, you know, my old advisor.

B (6:41)

So, so this is like going and leaving like fake negative reviews on, on Google, that kind of thing.

C (6:47)

Yeah, yeah. So, so, you know, we didn't even know who these people were that were writing these, these Google reviews. And there was about two of them within like a, a two day period or a three day period. And so, you know, we didn't like that. And obviously we know how powerful, you know, reviews are. Yeah, people will go and you know, look online and they're like, all right, like, what do we know about this? And we had already, you know, about 10 or 15 reviews at the time. And, you know, we had these two bad reviews and we're like, all right, this is, this is not a good sign. And you know, how the algorithm works. Like if you have, you know, they average out the average stars and you know, you have 10, you know, five stars and then you have the two bad stars that all of a sudden now you're a four star firm, right? And so it's, it was something that we just didn't like. And we're like, all right, how do we fix this? And so we started thinking, okay, well, why don't we just ask our clients to start leaving Google reviews? And, and, and we, we really didn't know about, you know, exactly the process on how to do it. And so, you know, we started having, you know, a few, few of our team members start calling people and asking them, hey, are you happy with our service? And all these things. But then eventually we were like, you know what, we're, we're going to hire a person in our firm with a couple, you know, a couple roles that they're responsible for. And we call them a quality control specialist. And so this was probably, I mean, we do a lot of marketing at our firm, but this probably is our, probably our best return on investment out of all of our marketing funnels. And what we did is we created a position from scratch where this person would be responsible after every meeting that any of our advisors have in the firm, she would have to reach out to the client either the same day or during the client meeting. Because we do a lot of zoom meetings as well. So if the client had a zoom meeting with us, then the next day or the same afternoon, the client would be getting a call from this quality control specialist. And what this person was doing is they were asking a bunch of questions about how their experience has been with the firm. Everything from their experience when they walk in through the door by our front desk person, to the experience on how we answer the phones, to the experience on how we service them and how we get back to them. Do we call them on time? And then we even had a set of questions or we have a set of questions where we also asked them how their experience has been, working with their advisor and everything from communication to their knowledge to their skill set to their personality. You know, we ask all these different questions and we go through the entire firm as far as all the departments and we're trying to figure out what are the areas that we need some improvement in. But what we notice is that is as we go through this process, you know, a lot of these clients are very honest about it. They start telling us, well, I wish you could do this. I, you know, wish you would do that better. But we started noticing our, you know, our clients were very happy with our process and obviously like no firm is perfect. But we said, okay, like this is the perfect opportunity to take advantage of asking our clients for referrals. And our firm is the type of firm where our advisors are so heavy in the meeting mentally, they're not thinking about how to generate more business or how to generate referrals. That's not where their mind's at. Their mind's at like, you know, serving the client, serving the customer and just making sure that we, we service them the way they expect to be serviced. And so our advisors pretty weren't, they're not even paying attention to generating more referrals. So this is why we created this entire role. And so at the end of the interview, now this quality control specialist, one of her responsibilities is to ask our clients to obviously leave us Google reviews. And this is how right now I think we're at over 600 and something Google reviews that we got over the last one to two years just using this exact same process. So after that, now the next step is this person's also going to now ask them for referrals in the process. And so if I'm not mistaken, I think we are generating somewhere around 4, 400 and something referrals on a yearly basis just with one quality control specialist. And so we just recently added a second because we noticed how powerful it is. And then all these leads, all these prospects that are generated from this process get handed off to our appointment setters. And then their job is to go and reach out to them, qualify them and get them to come in.

B (10:35)

So I'm fascinated by this. I have so many questions. First, I guess this anchoring a little. You said you've driven 400 referrals a year from this. How many, how many clients are there in the firm in total?

C (10:48)

2700 individuals. 1750 are the amount of households.

B (10:52)

Okay, okay. So. So it is like fair for me to think of these in a rough ratio, like 400 referrals out of 1750 households. Like about was it a little under 25% of clients end out with referral.

C (11:09)

What I would, I would, I think it's a little bit higher and the only reason I would say it's a little bit higher is, you know, because the firm's been around for, for such a long time. We have a lot of clients that we, that don't really meet with us on a yearly basis.

B (11:20)

Oh, sure.

C (11:21)

Fortunately. Right. So, you know, we still reach out to them. They're just, you know, legacy clients. We normally don't like to let them go or fire them. I think it's a, it also can tarnish our reputation. We, we also, you know, played with that idea of potentially letting some of our clients know or letting them graduate how I've heard, you know, some firms call it, and just let them go. And it's just something that we just didn't want to do. And so even though we do have probably about 25% of our clients that are not profitable, let's just call it, it is a decision that we made not so much from a financial standpoint, but more from a moral standpoint. And so with that said, you know, we don't necessarily meet with every client every year.

B (11:55)

Right, right.

C (11:55)

We do meet with somewhere around 70% of our clients on a yearly basis. And so the other 30%, they might meet with us probably once every two years.

B (12:02)

Okay, sure. We've all got legacy clients. I know particularly when you come up in a, in insurance annuity channels early on, you just, we, we end up with a huge long tail legacy of folks we implemented something with five, 10, 15 years ago. And we can check in periodically and they call us if there's a service need, but they, they're just not, they're not engaged for ongoing planning. That wasn't how they came to us, 2012, whatever it is.

C (12:26)

Yeah.

B (12:27)

So, so if, if you can. I'm just wondering how this referral conversation goes. I mean, is there, is there a scripted question? How do you ask, you know, how does, how does a person in the firm who's not the advisor ask the client for a referral when this is probably the first time they've ever met and talked?

C (12:50)

Yeah, so we, we came up with a very, I think a pretty unique way of, of asking. I've heard so many different ways of asking for referrals over the years. And you know, I mean, again, it's, we can keep changing this up, you know, as time goes on, but this has probably been the one that's worked for us the best. And it's, it's a conversation with the client of asking them, hey, you know, are you, you know, are you, you're obviously they're happy with the firm. They already gave us all their, you know, their feedback on how we can get better. And then usually what this person will do is like, hey, you know, before, before I let you go, do you mind if I just ask you one question? And normally the client will say, yeah, absolutely. And so what they'll, what they'll follow up is they'll say, so if you, right now, for whatever reason, you decided to start a wealth management firm, you know, like ours, you know, somebody that, you know, you're starting a wealth management firm where you're going to help them with their tax planning and their investment management and helping them grow their wealth and helping them retire within the next couple of years. If you were to start, if you were to create a firm like this, who would be, who would be the first person that you would call as a potential client of your firm? I know you're not going to start a firm right now, but if you were to start a firm, who would be the first person that you would reach out to? And so normally the client, the prospect, I mean, the client in this scenario will start thinking of exactly the type of prospect that they would first call. And that's worked amazing because you're kind of putting them into a mental challenge of, hey, like I'm about to start a wealth management firm. Like, who do I, who's the first person? And their brain normally goes to, well, who do I know that has money? And so that's been probably the best way that I've seen ask. And then after that, once they give you the first name and they're like, okay, so after you would call that person, who would be the next person that you would call?

B (14:31)

We're not done yet.

C (14:32)

After you, after you call that person, who would be the next person that you would call? And so you keep like just putting, putting them into this mindset of they are creating their own wealth management firm and now they're going to start thinking in a more productive manner.

B (14:48)

I, I love the framing, right, because we all, I think, go through varying levels of struggles and trying to articulate who the ideal client is that the, that the, that the current client is supposed to refer to put them in the right mindset about what a qualified client looks like. So I like how you set this up because you're putting them in the context of basically who needs wealth management services. That would be the easiest fit, right? You, the first person you call is whoever's gonna be the, the best fit in the client's mind. You don't start with the hard ones, you start with the easy ones. So they're, I just, I like the framing. They're, they're thinking it's a way to get them to say who do you know who would need wealth management services that would most readily engage? So, so as you ask this, do you, I mean, do you then say like, oh, and, oh, and can I have their contact information? Oh, and would you provide an introduction to them? Like, what's the. I'm assuming there's some next step beyond just literally they're like, oh, my neighbor Bob, like more than this.

C (15:50)

Well, well, yeah. So, so what we, what we've trained our, our quality control specialists to do is that they, as soon as they say Bob's name, they're writing Bob's name down. You know, they're just saying, Bob. Oh, they're. And then they're going to say, oh, Bob. What's his, what's his last name? You know, Bob Jones. Okay. And, and what's his phone number? You know, we're not, we're not going to ask kd, are you okay with us, you know, reaching out to them? We'll ask that after we ask already for their contact info. So we will. It's a normal conversation. Right. Because they're already kind of in this process of actually being asked for the referral. So. Hey, Bob. Okay, awesome. And what's Bob's last name? Okay, Jones. And what's his phone number? You know, we're not gonna reach out to him or anything like that before you speak to Bob, but, you know, what's his phone number? We'll actually send him an invite to probably one of our events over the next couple weeks. Or we'll also send him to one of our webinars. I mean, we have so many marketing strategies that we use to engage people. So usually what they'll do is they'll either invite them to one of our webinars or invite them to one of our, one of our, you know, educational events, dinner seminars.

B (16:49)

So I get it. Now it gets relatively low, low stakes, right? Like we're, we're not going to call them. And for like, you know, for, for a hard press sale, like we're going to, we might, we might reach out to him to invite them to one of our educational events. You probably found us through one of our educational events. Like, we're going to invite him to one of the things that you came to. You can, you can come with them if you want to.

C (17:08)

Yeah. And then usually what happens is once These, you know, five names and numbers are provided to our appointment setters. The appointment setters first have to call the existing client to make sure that the spoke to the person because we don't want them, you know, doing a cold call to this prospect. And the prospects like, you know, who are the world are you guys, you know, I don't know who you guys are. So we always want to make sure that the client has spoken to the prospect prior to us calling in.

B (17:31)

Oh, interesting. So you will, so you will do an outbound to the prospect, but you ask the client, hey, will you reach out first and just let them know that we may be in touch?

C (17:40)

Yeah. So our appointment setters will first call the client and say, hey, remember the five names and numbers you gave us three days ago. We're going to go ahead and call these five people this afternoon. Can you please let them know that we'll be calling them this afternoon?

B (17:55)

Oh, interesting. So you, you just, to me there's interesting nuances to that. So you're, you're not just leaving it open, you're kind of setting a timeline for them. Like, no, hey, like we're planning to call them this afternoon. Can you, can you please just take a moment and let them know that we're going to be, we're going to be reaching out. It's not just, hey, let them know some time. And then whenever you get to it on whatever one week, three week, ten week schedule, you get around to like seeing them somewhere and then letting them know like you, you kind of, you take control of the timeline a little bit. A little bit more.

C (18:26)

Yeah.

B (18:26)

By saying like, hey, we were going to call them this afternoon. Have you touched base with them? You need, could you do that really quick?

C (18:31)

For sure. So you need to definitely tell them. I mean in our case we noticed that we just have to tell them up front. We're going to call them this afternoon after 4:00'.

B (18:38)

Clock.

C (18:39)

So please make sure that you speak to those five people before 4:00pm and.

B (18:43)

And I'm, I'm assuming, you know, they have to give some level of, of, of satisfaction feedback in the initial quality control call before you, before you ask for, for referrals. I mean, hopefully doesn't come up often, but I'm, I'm presuming every now and then a client is a little grumpier about some experience that they had and it's not the best time to ask them for a referral.

C (19:06)

Absolutely. And that's, and that's our opportunity to get better. Right. So you Know, we, you know, our company runs at a million miles an hour. You know, sometimes things small, you know, fall through the cracks. And we need to hear these things because sometimes some clients are, you know, going to just not say anything. And this is our opportunity for us to hear their feedback and, and, and try to make things better. And so sometimes we'll. We'll see that a client might be on the cusp of probably leaving us for whatever the reason is. It's good that we know these things before it happens. And so every time these meetings, you know, occur, these, you know, our yearly financial reviews or quarterly financial reviews, you know, whenever these meetings happen, we want to know, like, hey, how was the, you know, how was the experience? How's been the experience with us so far? And we also want to know, you know, details about the advisor. We want to make sure that the advisor is giving all the answers to the client as well, that they're looking to hear, that they're more confident about their financial future after every one of their sessions. So, you know, we do have a set of. Of about, I think anywhere between 5 to 10 questions per department because we do want to make sure that all this feedback is being given to the department leaders so that they can communicate it over to their team.

B (20:05)

So help me understand how long this, I guess, like, questionnaire process is. I mean, five, five to ten questions per department. How. How many. How many departments? I mean, how many departments are there? How. How much do you get into here?

C (20:20)

Yeah, so it's mainly. It's four. I mean, there's. There's a lot more departments than just four, but they're the four that we, that we look at as, as kind of the areas that we need feedback from a client. The first is their client experience. And that means primarily as, like, you know, walking into the office, how you're greeted. So that's the main. That's the first area. The second is advisors. Right. So we want to know how was their experience with their advisor recently? You know, any feedback on how the advisor can get better. And there's also a rating scale on the advisor as well. And there's also. The advisors are also. They also get bonuses at the end of the quarter based on that as well. So there's also some questions that are tied to that. And then there's a. There's a point system that is attached to their bonus. So there's the advisors, the advisor questions, then there's the new business questions, which is probably, you know, is primarily making sure that any client that is, in the process of transferring assets, we want to make sure that the new business team is executing the transfers, you know, the right way as far as like not being any hiccups. So we always ask the questions like, hey, how was your transfer process? Right. How was your process in the transfers of your accounts from, you know, from these institutions over to us? How was that process? And we have a set of a few questions. Mainly it has to do with callbacks, you know, the, the turnaround time of the transfers. And so we're just trying to get feedback. And obviously some of the things they don't really know because we can't control certain things. But then there's a lot of things that if we see repetitive things about a certain team member that, you know, they're probably not calling, you know, they're not giving the client a weekly update of their transfer status, then, then now we know, okay, this, this one team member probably needs a little bit, little bit, needs a little bit more training in that area. That's the third. And then the fourth area is service, right? So we have a whole service team where we have about six or seven people on that team. And their job is to pretty much just process all service requests coming in in all, all categories, whether it's transfers or not transfers, but withdrawals, you know, positions that need to be sold, any sort of questions, you know, beneficiary changes, addresses, things like that. So as those things happen, there's also a set of questions for the service team. Just making sure that we're also have a, we have a proper turnaround time for the questions that clients are asking us and we want to make sure that they're reaching out, back out, back out to the client as soon as possible.

B (22:28)

So how long does it take for this conversation? It just feels like a number of questions per department across client experience and advisors in new business and service. And then the Google review and referrals conversation.

C (22:45)

And Michael, it's even more than that.

B (22:47)

What else is in there?

C (22:48)

We even ask for the client to follow us on social media as well, because we do post out a lot of content on social media. So we want to make sure that they're constantly seeing our content. Uh, you know, just telling the client to follow us is not enough. So we actually have our quality control specialist. They actually ask the client, hey, so you know, do you use Facebook? Do you use YouTube? Do you use, you know, are you subscribed to any of these platforms? And so we'll help them subscribe, you know, some of Our clients are a little bit older and so she'll grab the client's phone and actually walk them through the subscription process for any of our platforms that we put content on. So this could be anywhere between a 15 to 30 minute conversation and what we've done is over time we've removed certain things in the process. So, you know, we had about a good year where we 100% focused on reviews and that was our primary driver in the process. And we, I think we, you know, we removed the foot off the gas about, probably about six months ago. We are still getting, you know, Google reviews, but it's not a, it's not something that we're doing in every one of these quality control meetings. So there is about a good five or six different areas, but we rotate those topics depending on the necessity that the company has in that moment.

B (23:55)

So you said you may even like pull out the client's phone with them to try to sort out, you know, here's how to actually follow our, our channel on YouTube. So does that mean sometimes these, this process is happening in like, in person, in the office? Because I presume this is follow up phone call, but not necessarily.

C (24:14)

So it happens in both ways. So we have the person's calling them and if that's the case, then what we'll do is we'll send them a link by text of our YouTube channel in that case. And we want to make sure that, hey, like, do you know, to make sure that they subscribe? But you know, some people don't have a YouTube account, right. That they actually subscribe to anything like that. So, so, you know, we have to ask them, hey, do you, are you subscribed to YouTube? Do you have a YouTube account where you have subscriptions on it? If the answer is no, then we're going to bypass that, right? We're going to ask them, hey, do you use Facebook? Okay, yes, I use Facebook. Okay, I'm going to send you a link right now so you can go ahead and follow us on Facebook. Right. So we're asking them the different platforms that they're using. And that's one of the other reasons why, you know, some of these platforms that we're on have grown obviously a lot. And we want to make sure that our clients are staying in touch with us. It's not just the yearly call or the quarterly call is, you know, if we're posting out content on a weekly basis, you know, we want to make sure that the client is seeing this stuff.

B (25:02)

So I'm just trying to Visualize how this works when it's in office. Like the client was in for a meeting and then the advisor leaves and the quality control person just kind of walks right in. You like do a handoff in the room.

C (25:16)

Y. Yeah. So what will happen is in the middle of the meeting, the quality control specialist will knock on the door and they'll pass them a little paper. And the little paper just says qct. It's just a form of a reminder, just letting them know, hey, after your meeting, please make sure that you don't let the client leave because I'm going to come right in.

B (25:33)

And so you've got meetings planned and staggered, so one or more quality control team people can just literally be there ready to rotate into the room.

C (25:42)

Yeah. And we don't get to all the clients. That's. That's another challenge. Right. That's the reason why we hired a second person. You know, sometimes in, in an office, I mean, in our office, eight to nine meetings happening at the same time. You know, some of them are new prospects, some of them are existing clients. And so we don't get to every, every client meeting. So we're just, they're just trying to see which ones are the meetings that we probably need to get the most feedback from or clients that probably haven't given us referrals recently because they want to make sure that they're going into those meetings to ask that prospect, receiving that client for those referrals.

B (26:12)

Interesting. So I was going to ask as well, just clients. So client. Well, I guess two follow ups. That. How much, how often is this an in person. Hey, before you leave, can our team ask you a couple of questions versus doing it as a, as a follow up phone call.

C (26:31)

So, you know, we don't ask the client, you know, is it okay if our team asks you a couple questions? We just let the client know, hey, you know, just.

B (26:38)

We will be asking you some questions.

C (26:40)

Yeah, yeah. So we always assume. So we, you know, just give me a couple minutes. You know, our quality control specialist, Nancy, she'll be coming in right now in about two minutes. She just has to ask you a couple questions about how your experience has been with the firm. We just want to make sure that we're doing the right thing by you. And so the client never has a problem with that. I mean, ever, because it's, it's their, you know, you're letting the client know that they're going to be asked some questions on how we could get better. And, and I think that, and it's a very honest conversation. Right. The client really is really honest in the process because it's not in front of the advisor. It's a private conversation that's being had. And this person, I will say this is probably one of the reasons why this worked so well is this person that first started as our first quality control specialist. Her name is Nancy. She actually was a client first. She retired from a law firm that she was at for, I don't even know, 20, 30 years. And so she was a client first. And she's like, man, I love what you guys do. I love everything that you guys represent here. I would love to somehow work with you guys. And her personality just fits, you know, fits the part so well. And so, you know, she's, she's, she's just great at that.

B (27:40)

Very cool. And, and so is this. I mean, you said you can't quite get to every client because there just can be too many client meetings in a day for the QCT person to get them or, you know, two of them overlap and finish at the same time. And you can't get both. But nominally is the goal to do this continuous, ongoing. So I guess I'm just trying to visualize, is this mostly a new client process or even if an existing client. I've been working with you for years. Like I come in for my annual review and I know at the end of the annual review you're going to ask me the set of questions again about feedback.

C (28:15)

Yeah. At least every six months. Right. So after the client's been with us at least six months is when that person is involved in that.

B (28:21)

Okay, so you will wait. So it's not like immediately a new client onboarding process, you have to wait until they get to the six months start before you begin.

C (28:29)

Primarily that has to do with the service questions. So anything that has to do with service, we want to make sure that the client has gone through with us at least six months to make sure that they can give us real feedback of how our service has been over the last six months.

B (28:40)

Okay.

C (28:40)

Yeah. And what they're doing is they don't go in and they don't do another quality control interview unless the person has done it at least six months. So there must be a six month period between every single one of those interviews. Cause we do meet with some of our clients every quarter, so we're not gonna do that every single quarter. So before they go in, every single day, that quality control specialist, they look at all of the clients that are coming in that day and what they're looking at is, okay, what clients are coming in that day that have not done a quality control interview over the last six months. And what they're gonna do is they're gonna go into those meetings and go through their process.

B (29:12)

Okay. And so I guess as a client, like I, I'm gonna assume most clients are in once or twice a year. So as a client who's in once or twice a year, I just learn and get the gist pretty quickly that once or twice a year I'm going to have my QCT questions coming in at the end of my meeting with my advisor there.

C (29:31)

Yeah, yeah. And again, right now, because of the amount of clients we have versus the amount of quality control specialists that we have, it's not happening as often as we want. That's the reason why we just recently, over the last 30 days, we just hired a second person. So if, you know, if it gets a little bit too much for a client, obviously we're going to want to scale back. But we don't have that problem right now. We have the problem that we have too many clients and we don't have enough quality control specialists. And we've noticed that out of all of our marketing funnels, this is by far the most profitable one. I mean, you pay someone, you know, 50, 60, 70, $80,000 to do this role. And there's also performance, there's also performance based. Right. So there, the compensation is also tied to this is we want to make sure that there's a, there's bonuses based on whether it's reviews that are being generated or there are, there's also bonuses tied to the amount of referrals generated, whether they become clients or not. That doesn't really matter. But there's also bonuses and compensation structures tied to this. And so, you know, we're not just telling the person, hey, you know, these are the goals. Here's the salary. It is what it is. We want to make sure that they're, that they're following the process and they're, you know, they're generating the most amount of referrals as possible.

B (30:30)

So beyond referrals themselves, I mean, have you had a. Process improvements? It's like things you found in client experience, service, new business that, that changed as a result of going through this.

C (30:44)

Oh, absolutely. I would say that the most powerful thing has just been feedback for the advisors. You know, the advisors are kind of, you know, the clients sometimes come in and they're like, yeah, you know, I feel like the advisor kind of skipped over A few of my questions or, you know, I feel like the advisor probably, you know, probably spent a little bit more time talking about my outside assets and probably didn't talk about my assets with you guys. And so that's where, you know, we have to have those conversations with the advisor of letting them know, hey, look, you know, you want to make sure you're servicing the client on the front end before you start talking about, you know, outside assets that they still haven't brought in. And.

B (31:19)

Who, who delivers that conversation to the advisor?

C (31:22)

Yeah, right now it's the director of advisors, which is me right now.

B (31:25)

Okay. Okay. So the, the, the QCT person doesn't necessarily have to come back to the advisor and say, oh, and here's what your client said about you. Like it essentially it goes to leadership and then it comes down to the advisors.

C (31:37)

Yeah, correct. And, and all that's documented. So as the client's giving all this feedback to the quality control specialists, all being typed out and this is being sent over to each department leader just letting them know what the challenges that they got from the, from the client.

B (31:53)

And, and I presume then most of what the QCT person does, like the quality control team person does, is very square scripted.

C (32:02)

Yep.

B (32:03)

I mean, I'm sure you practice it enough that it sounds natural, but like there's a, there's a flow, there's a sequence, there's a way that the questions are supposed to be asked that you.

C (32:10)

Correct. Yeah.

B (32:11)

You built, you built or you just iterated over time?

C (32:13)

Correct. Yeah.

B (32:15)

So how. I, I just, I've got to ask this overall and just in a world where I feel like most businesses feedback is, you know, an email survey you get after the meeting. Please tell us what you thought of the experience that you had. You can largely automate it with technology. It's a fairly nominal cost to get some feedback going. I'm just curious, like, how did you get to. Oh yeah, there's like survey software that we could buy for one or two thousand dollars a year, but let's hire a full time employee to do this. Like, how did that jump happen?

C (32:49)

So we didn't look at it that way. We looked at it as this is our person that's going to generate hundreds of referrals every single year and you're not going to be able to do that with software. Like that's a conversation. And so the way we justified it is this person's going to go through the process of asking the client for, you know, for feedback on how we can get Better. But in doing so, we're also going to insert the process of asking for referrals. And so the way we justify it is, you know, if you're paying somebody, call it $70,000 a year, and they're helping us generate 400 new leads, 400 new referrals on a yearly basis, which normally out of that, I think if I'm not mistaken, there's somewhere around 150 to 200 of them are turning into appointments. I mean, it's, it's, it definitely makes financial sense. Right. I mean, if you look at it from a marketing standpoint, would you spend $70,000 on generating 200, you know, additional qualified appointments?

B (33:39)

Yeah, that's a good, that's a good marketing ROI just in and of itself.

C (33:43)

Well, it's our best marketing ROI across the board from all of our channels. And, and it's crazy because it's, it's like the least traditional one that we all hear about. You know, we all hear about radio, TVs, seminars, all these things. But, and on top of that, the closing ratio of these prospects are way higher than any of the other categories. Because of referrals?

B (34:01)

Because of the referrals. So you still get your traditional like 50% plus close rates kind of scenarios.

C (34:06)

Yeah, I think it's closer to 70 for referrals.

B (34:10)

So, so help us now understand the advisory firm overall, what our biggest priority is.

C (34:18)

We want advisors to only be in meetings. That's our number one priority. We want advisors that have that work 40 hours a week. We want them to spend 38 hours in client meetings. That's our mission. Right. That's our goal. And obviously I'm exaggerating it, but ideally it would be all 40 hours. So what we've done is we've built teams around advisors to do as much as they possibly can so that the advisors are only in client meetings because that is, that's really where revenue is generated. Right. It's by meeting with existing clients, meeting with new prospects and bringing in new assets and generating new business. Right. So what we've done is we have a marketing team which is right now, if I'm not mistaken, somewhere around like 12 or 13 people. Their job entirely is to do a bunch of client events. We do about 100 dinner seminars throughout the year. They run our YouTube channel, they run our social media. So we have a whole digital team as well. We also have a pay per click division which also generates leads through digital as well. Well, so we spent some ad money there to help generate leads as well, we have a, we also have a traditional marketing side which makes sure that, you know, we get onto different, you know, TV shows, radio shows, things like that. We also have that same person's also in charge of, of optimizing our website, you know, for, for SEO purposes. So we have a digital, a marketing team which is somewhere around 12, 13 people. Then we have an appointment setting team. Their job is to pretty much reach out to every prospect, every lead that is generated from the marketing team. And so if I'm not mistaken, I think it's somewhere around 400 leads a week. Three or 400 leads a week. Somewhere around that, that our marketing team is generating.

B (35:57)

Wow.

C (35:57)

And that's, that's across the board in all of the, you know, all the different departments we have, sorry, all the different marketing channels. So it's about three or 400, if I'm not mistaken, somewhere around that. And then their job is that goes to the appointment setting team. But remember these, you know, as you know, not all 400 of these people, they qualify to meet with you or meet with the firm. So there's usually out of these 400, close to about 40 to 50% of them don't even end up qualifying. So that brings us down to about 200, you know, to 200 potentially qualified leads. And then the job of that team is to generate. Right now, if I'm not mistaken, I think our Target is about 33 new appointments every single week of held appointments they're booking. If I'm not mistaken, I think it's about 42, 43 appointments on a weekly basis of brand new prospects. And out of these two, 43, about 33 of them are supposed to show up. So we expect about a 75% show ratio for every appointment that is scheduled on the calendar. So that's the appointment setting team.

B (36:54)

Interesting. And how many people is the appointment setting team to manage to this?

C (36:59)

So that's something that we've tested over time. You know, we realized that this position is a position that can easily be burned out just because of the amount of calls that are made. And it's a very unique type of individual that probably is going to do very well there. So right now we have six people. That is something that we are scaling back because what we noticed is that we have a lot of leads that are generated obviously on a weekly basis. But the mistake that we were doing is that we were splitting all of the leads evenly between all of the appointment setters. And the problem with that is that there are some appointment setters that are much better than others. And so what we decided is we, this is something that we just recently did is we now have. So I don't have the data for this yet, but what we did is we kind of broke up the appointment setters into three different tiers. So you have appointment centers that only talk to prospects that have been generated over the last seven days. Then you have appointment centers that are only talking to prospects that have been generated from day seven back all the way up to day 30. So that's about, you know, about those three, that three week period. And then you have a third tier of appointment centers. They're in charge of reaching out to prospects or leads that have been generated more than 30 days ago. And so what we, the reason we did that is because we didn't, you know, all these leads that are being generated on a weekly basis, we just didn't want to split them evenly with maybe an appointment center that's not that good at the conversation of turning a person that's potentially interested into an actual appointment. So that was one of the reasons why we kind of broke up the, the, the appointment setting team into those three departments.

B (38:28)

So the, so the idea is, look at the end of the day when you've got an active marketing system, leads that didn't turn into an appointment over the first seven days or the first 30 days are already probably like a wee bit cold. So let's let our least experienced appointment setters work in that space because anything they generate is good, but you know, it's also kind of a good, safe learning ground. Whereas our strongest prospects are the ones that literally just reached out for the first time in the past seven days and they're interested in our services. So our best, most experienced employment centers go there because that's our highest quality leads where we want to put our highest converting activity.

C (39:08)

Right.

B (39:08)

And I think that's framing that well.

C (39:10)

Yeah, that's accurate. So I think one of the things that we've done probably really well is we always want to put people in where they're, where their strengths are. And that's across the board. That's just a company philosophy is we want to make sure that we are optimizing every decision that we're making. And so, you know, I've seen a lot of people that they say, oh no, we want to treat everybody equally. And it's like, no, we have to make sure that we are earning our way to, to be able to, to probably meet with those hot prospects that were just generated last night or you know, at a, you know, at a dinner seminar, you know, we had a dinner seminar two days ago. We had 31 appointments that were booked there. Those 31 people. I don't want those 31 people to go and, you know, be given immediately to a, to an appointment center that probably just started with us, you know, a month ago. That, that's not really converting at the level of other appointment centers. So we give the hot leads to the, the top two appointment centers.

B (39:56)

So, so what does this typically boil down to in actual new client flow? Like, I'm just trying to think through the funnel. 400 leads a week, 200 are qualified. 40. 40 something of them set an appointment. 30 something of those show for the appointment. What do you typically find is like conversion once you get down to initial, initial prospect meetings that are held.

C (40:22)

Yeah, yeah. So our closing ratio right now is about 33%, I believe. Last year, 20, 24, we onboarded about 480 new households.

B (40:30)

Okay, okay. So. So now keep taking us. So you talked about appointment setting, team, and a bit of how you're. You're restructuring it to align. So then what are, what are the other. What's, what's the rest of the organization like structure that you're walking us through here? So this is really helpful.

C (40:48)

Yeah. So we have, right now we have a total of 10 advisors, but that's not something that we started off with last year. So 12 months ago from today, we, I believe we were at only five or six advisors, I think, one year ago. So we've added about four new advisors this year. And it really has to do with the amount of lead flow. That's probably one of our biggest challenges.

B (41:08)

Is we don't have almost 500 clients. At 500 clients, you're going to need a lot of new advisors. Yep, yep.

C (41:15)

Yeah. So I think that's one of our biggest challenges. It's not so much like the lead flow. I mean, it's. Which. It's kind of funny because that's kind of the biggest challenge, I think, that most people have in the industry. They don't have enough people to talk to. We kind of see that we don't really have that challenge. We have the challenge of we don't have enough advisors at the firm to make sure that they're, you know, that they're, that they can service all these leads. And so we do have that challenge where we have. We sometimes have clients that need to wait three weeks to meet with us. And that's not a healthy thing. Right. It's it's not clients, but prospects. They have, they have to wait three weeks to meet with us. And that's not a healthy thing. Right. Because you have a bigger drop off of a prospect when you have a prospect have to wait three weeks. So what our mission is, is how do we get a prospect to turn into an appointment within 48 to 72 hours? Because we know that the show ratio of this prospect drastically goes up and actually it starts going down by about 5% for every day that you wait to book that appointment. So if I book an appointment for 24 hours out, there's close to about like a 90, 95% show ratio. And every day that you wait, it drops by about 5%. So the mission is, how do we get a prospect to turn into an appointment as fast as possible and meet with an advisor as fast as possible? Because the longer you wait, the, the higher likelihood that that prospect might not show up.

B (42:28)

Or so you can, you can drop your show ratio by half if you have to push these meetings out two to three weeks?

C (42:34)

Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, our show ratio has gone down to like 40% if the client has to wait more than two weeks.

B (42:41)

Okay, right.

C (42:42)

And I think, and I think that that's one of the things that a lot of advisors also talk about is they're always, you know, they're saying things like, oh, you want to be exclusive, you know, make the client wait two weeks or three weeks. And it's like, I think that's, that, that hurt. That does more harm than good. That could work with some people, but a lot of people are going to get cold. And so if you just generated a lead last night from an event or if you just, you know, had a white paper that was downloaded and, you know, an appointment center reached out, turned it into an appointment, you want to make sure that that lead is being turned into a client or to an appointment as quickly as possible because they're the hottest that they're going to be versus letting them cool down two weeks after meet with you, they're never going.

B (43:16)

To have more energy, enthusiasm than right there. Right, right in that moment.

C (43:21)

And I don't know if it's a, I don't know if it's a Miami thing. I mean, we're in South Florida, so Miami is a very hard charging type of environment where, you know, people don't like to wait for things, they want things now. And so, you know, having that whole thing of, oh, you know, you have to wait three weeks to meet with this advisor, you know, in Miami. That kind of doesn't, that doesn't go well.

B (43:39)

So, so then keep taking us through the organization. So what are, what are the other kind of departments in headcount?

C (43:46)

So we have, so there's, there's the. Right now we have about those 10 advisors. Yeah, so as I mentioned, you know, we were about five or six about one year ago. So definitely there's a, there's a really, really robust process on how to onboard an advisor. That's probably a separate conversation. But then we have the, the new business team. So the new business kind of broken up into different subdivisions within. We have the AUM side, we have the insurance side. We also have the estate planning side as well. And so we also have a life insurance division as well. So we have the new business team which, their job is to process all of the planning and all of the types of accounts that need to be set up. And so the estate planning division, what we've done, which actually has been a huge lead generator for us. So we market a lot of estate planning, not as attorneys obviously, but we market the subject matter a lot. It brings in a lot of people that are interested in setting up, you know, legal documents, wills, trust, powers of attorneys, things like that. And so what we did is we have a, we have our estate planning team and their responsibility is to process all of the estate plans that are, call it offered to clients. So we have an external law firm that does all of the, that does all the legal document preparation. And so what this estate planning team is responsible for is they kind of operate as a paralegal for the client and the client actually buys the estate plan through our, pretty much through the attorneys that we obviously partnered up with. And their job is to do all the legal drafting. Our job is to do all the facilitation as far as gathering the information. So we are not in any way operating obviously as attorneys in the process, but we are operating as the paralegals, the people pretty much gathering the financial information, the details that the client wants so that we can go in and shift that over to the attorneys to draft up the legal, legal documents.

B (45:33)

Do you do the, the, like the post implementation work as, as well? The. Yes, you know, funding, funding assets into revocable living trusts and the like.

C (45:45)

Yep, yep, we do, we do all of that for the client, which you know, we kind of tell the client how expensive all that process is because you know, some, some clients don't really understand how a real full, detailed estate plan could cost them, especially in South Florida. I mean that could be, you know, anywhere between 6 to $12,000 in South Florida to do a full, you know, a full estate plan with all that execution afterwards. So, you know, we let them know that, you know, even doing it through us, it's. It's much less expensive, and we're just pretty much charging the client for the facilitation of it. And then obviously, the. The attorney is the one that does all the legal drafting.

B (46:17)

And is this a service you charge separately for? Yeah.

C (46:21)

Yes. The fee could range depending on what type of legal documents are needed. I would say that the average is somewhere around $3,000 for that, which is much less expensive. What they would spend with, obviously, any other, you know, any other law firm. And then all of the documents and.

B (46:35)

With 3,000 for documents and the support you do, or that's just your layer.

C (46:39)

No, that's. That's the documents and the support we do.

B (46:42)

Okay.

C (46:43)

Yeah, yeah. So it's everything. It's about $3,000. Some clients end up spending a little bit more if they need a few additional documents that need to be drafted up. But our average would say. I would say it's somewhere around 3,000.

B (46:54)

So do you. So I'm presuming then you've set a relationship with a law firm that you send the business to that's giving you some kind of favorable rate because you're going to send them a lot of flow of estate documents. You effectively negotiate this on behalf of.

C (47:12)

That's exactly what we did. So we have a. I believe we have a requirement to set up about 200 estate plans a year. I think we're blowing that out of the water. I think we're at like. I don't even know, like, almost like 400 or something like that just last year. And we just started that division mid last year. So obviously it's going to die down because a lot of our clients didn't have their estate planning. And in the past, what we would do is we would just refer it out to other attorneys. And that was something that we just didn't like. We didn't like that we were referring it out to other attorneys. And then if something went bad in the service process or the attorney didn't call them back, or the attorney just charged too much money or whatever it is, then it was a bad reflection on us. And we got. We did this for years and years and years, Michael, and we were just done with it. And we're like, man, we're not going to do this anymore. We need to figure out a way on how we can bring this in house and control it. And so our attorneys right now, they just do legal drafting. They have in our contract, they have to have a turnaround time of I believe, three weeks from the moment we provide the questionnaire to the law firm. And so we were, you know, we took the full control of the, of the gathering of the information, of the delivering of the estate plan, of making sure that it's notarized and have the witnesses in the room. And we took control over that process. We just needed the attorney to do the legal drafting. And so we, we pay them very, very little, you know, in comparison to what we charge for the service. But the reality is there, you know, I mean, you know how these, the majority of these attorneys, they operate, right. They off of, they operate off of a, a standard template and they just add the additional pieces that the client is filling out from their questionnaire. So, so because of the amount of business that we send them. Yeah, they give us a very favorable rate. And in doing so, we also help the client out because the client doesn't have to go spend six, seven or eight thousand dollars to, to get what we're doing for, you know, for almost 3.

B (48:49)

Out of curiosity, how, how many estate plans, like how many state drafting documents are you queuing up in a. I know, in a year? I mean, just even like you doing a dozen of these, are you doing like 100 of these?

C (49:02)

Yeah. So we did, I believe last year and I think we just, I think we launched it back in May of last year of 2024, and I believe we did almost about 400 estate plans last year. It's going to start dying down. Yeah.

B (49:13)

So when you start, you work through the backlog of all the clients that just never had. Exactly.

C (49:18)

Exactly. Right, so. So it's going to die down. I would say this year it's still going to probably be the same amount, but I would say on a yearly basis it'll probably be somewhere around 3 to 400 throughout the year once we go through all of our clients and finish off all of the estate planning for every client.

B (49:33)

And, and did you look. So is this a like a local in person firm? Did you look at there. You know, there's lots of digital services out there now that are, are doing versions of this as well for advisors. Well, wealth.com and trust and will and Encore Estate and such. So I'm just, I'm curious, like, did you look at those services versus local? How did you choose who you, who you selected?

C (49:56)

Yeah, yeah, the Main reason was we were just looking for a firm that can help us out with this. And we were trying to negotiate the pricing and we obviously saw all those models and we saw what they were doing. And, and we just. This, this firm is actually in California. So what we did is we, we were just talking to a lot of people and we kind of told them what we were looking for. And it was just something that we negotiated, we agreed on, and they decided to move forward with us. And, and we've been super happy with the process. I mean, we have no either.

B (50:22)

And I guess just you found one that could handle the volume. I mean, for a lot, A lot of law firms are. Couldn't, couldn't do three, three to 400 new documents in the span of, of seven or eight months. They don't have the volume. You got to have a pretty sizable firm just just to be able to handle the activity level.

C (50:39)

Right? Well, I think, I think the challenge is the majority of law firms and the majority of attorneys and paralegals, they spend the majority of their time speaking to prospects and clients, gathering their information, and that's where the real time is spent. So if we take that time away from them, they can pump out a lot more legal documents and they do what their job is. The attorney's job is to draft up the legal documents. You know, and so that's kind of where, that's kind of where they step in.

B (51:03)

So do the attorneys still have any client facing time or do you, do you just interface all of that?

C (51:09)

Zero. Yeah. The client never meets with the attorney.

B (51:12)

Interesting.

C (51:12)

So we tell the client there for the, from the very beginning, you know, this is a, the reason this is a less expensive process is because of this. If you want to have that interface with the client, with the, with the attorney, I mean, just get ready. It's not going to be 3,000. I mean, you're going to start spending five, six, seven thousand dollars for that because now you're spending, you know, four or five hundred dollars an hour for the attorney time.

B (51:31)

So how many people are in this new business team? Investments, Insurance, Estate? Yeah, yeah.

C (51:38)

The entire new business team, I believe right now is about 14, 15 people. And that includes also the estate planning team, the paralegals.

B (51:45)

Okay, so then what else departmentally, then.

C (51:50)

You have the service team. And their job is there's kind of, there's two divisions there. There is what we call wealth management associates, and then we have what's called wealth management processors. And so that team right now, I believe it's about Seven or eight people. And their responsibility is to the Wealth Benefit processors. Their job is to process service requests. So what they're primarily doing is any type of. Any sort of client service request. Their job is just to do the processing of the service request. Then you have the wealth management associate. This is kind of what we call like our internal service sales team. And so even though they're part of the service team, they're also their. Their job is to do activity that generates additional revenue, finds additional business. And so what their job is, is to reach out to our existing clients that have outside assets. Because, I mean, you know, a firm like ours, you know, we, we sometimes end up meeting with clients and we don't get all the assets up front. And so what the service team is supposed to do is to reach out to the clients that have outside assets that have not transferred over. And we have that all documented as well. Of like, you know, we have, we have kind of clients categorized into, you know, maybe let's call it, you know, a silver platinum client. And what that means is they might be a silver with the firm. That means they're. They have a certain amount of assets with the firm, but if they're platinum, that means that they might have. They have more assets outside of the firm. So we kind of categorize clients like that. And so what they do is they, on a daily basis, they pull up a report of all of the clients that don't that have outside assets, and then they're reaching out to those people, servicing them better, asking them how we can do better as well, and getting those assets transferred over. And so these are also people that are licensed as well. They're getting assets transferred over to their, you know, to the clients, whether, you know, retirement accounts, brokerage accounts, whatever, whatever it may be, they're getting those assets transferred over and then they're also getting paid for doing those transfers. They're not giving any financial advice to the client. All they're doing is just processing transfers of external assets.

B (53:45)

So help me understand how that, how that outreach or ask works. You know, I visualize existing client, that we're, we're working with some other assets and not all their assets, asking for more business from the client. I guess that's traditionally I think of as something that happens by the advisor in a client review meeting. Hey, we've been servicing you really well over the past several years. Like, you know, would love to know what it takes to win all of your business or however it is that you want to, you want to queue up that conversation. So how does it work when a wealth management associate who isn't the lead advisor and isn't necessarily giving advice is supposed to like open the, open the door for clients to move more in assets?

C (54:30)

Yeah. So this wealth management associate is the go to person that the client calls every time a service request is needed. So there is that relationship. Think of it as like the right hand person to the advisor and the advice. And the client knows of this person as well and they speak to this person very often. But when a client says I need, you know, I need $10,000 out of an account or I need to change a beneficiary, they're not the ones processing it, but they're the ones receiving the request. So it all seems like this person is the one that is also processing it, when in reality they're not processing it, they're just the relationship person with the client. And in doing so they're also asking, you know, they're reminding the client of the service that we've done, of the work that we've done, and just asking for that business. And so this is also a position in training for an advisor. So we, that's a whole other conversation of how we train advisors. But this is one of those roles that when a person really shines, here is where we know that person is almost ready to start meeting with new prospects and existing clients to be their advisors.

B (55:31)

Okay, and so is it still mostly inbound for the wealth management associates or are they going out like outbound? I mean, outbound to existing clients, but.

C (55:40)

Outbound, they spend the majority of their time outbound. And so what their role is is to reach out to the existing clients that have outside assets and get those assets transferred. And then the second responsibility is to book meetings for the advisors. So they know that because their entire team's compensation structure is also tied to making sure that there's a certain amount of appointments that are held on advisor calendars. And so what they're doing is they're just reaching out to all of the existing clients, not only asking them to transfer additional assets, but they're also asking them, they're also booking their financial reviews either quarterly or semiannual or yearly. So the wealth management associate is in charge of their primary two goals is transfer assets, external assets, and book appointments on advisor calendars.

B (56:24)

Okay, so, so, okay, so what other departments as we go through the organization have we covered everything?

C (56:35)

Yeah, so that would be service and yeah, I mean you have operations, you have, you know, you have hr. That's Actually, another area that I think has been a big reason why we've, why we've grown, I think over the last couple of years is a lot of, I've seen usually at all these conferences and all these events that, that we all attend. You know, you tend to hear that people say things like, oh, you can't find good people, you know, you can't find good hires and it's hard to find good people. And, and I look at it the same way, like a client, right? Like what's the effort that we are putting in, in generating a brand new client? And obviously, you know, a lot of firms out there that are putting a significant amount of effort in, you know, doing a lot of marketing and generating new business and generating leads. You know, what type of effort are we putting in generating potential candidates to work for your company? So about two years ago we decided to create a full time role in the company. And instead of having, you know, headhunters or anything like that, we had an in house recruiter. And so this person's responsibility is to, their entire job is to find new talent, either to improve our talent or to also add new pieces to the team. And so every quarter, my brother, which he's the one that mainly leads this side, his responsibility is to provide on a quarterly basis either people that need to be positions that might need to be replaced or positions that might need to be added to the company. So every quarter it's anywhere between four to six people that need to either be replaced or added to the company. It could be, you know, three replaced, you know, three new, something along those lines. And every single quarter we're adding, that person's responsible for adding those six new people. And then we have another person that also works on that team that's in charge of onboarding. And so there's a, there's a 90 day onboarding process for every position in the company. You know, some positions take a little bit longer to train, but this, this is probably one of the biggest reasons why over the last two years our team has grown. I think two years ago I believe we were at like, you know, somewhere around like 30, 35 employees. And now we're at about 60. And I think the is because of this division and instead of just having departments and if you're a firm that's looking to grow, I think that you need to have a recruiting strategy in place to make sure that you're bringing out new talent.

B (58:47)

So we're like 55 to 60 team members. I think you'd said earlier, about 1750 client households. So what is that in terms of other assets? Revenue? I don't know how you measure overall for the firm.

C (59:00)

Yeah, so you're talking about primarily assets as far as the average assets per client. Is that kind of where you're getting.

B (59:05)

At or just total assets for the firm or total revenue for the firm? Like what does this all add up to from a business perspective?

C (59:12)

Yeah, so I believe last year we were right under 15 million. I believe we were like 14.8 in, in total revenue for the firm. This is all of the, all of the channels as well. So this includes the estate planning side. This also includes any insurance revenue as well. And then also any aum.

B (59:29)

Okay, okay.

C (59:31)

And then we also did the, and then we also did that big, that big event, the Miami Retirement Summit, which we also charged for attendance there as well.

B (59:41)

So what was the, what was the Miami Retirement Summit?

C (59:44)

So we, so this was an idea in the making. For about the last like three years, we were kind of talking about how we wanted to do a very big, big event, you know, with a few hundred people there. And, and what we kind of decided is we're like, man, we want to do like an event with probably 4, 5, 600 people where we can have everyone from the community there and, and pretty much turn this into a big giant seminar. That's, that's kind of what our goal was. We had no idea how we were going to do it. We had no idea how we were going to get so many people to attend. We had no idea how many, you know, how many leads we're going to attend. We had no idea how many clients were going to be potentially interested in working with us. Like, we just, we didn't know. But you know, we wanted to give it a shot and see if this was something that made sense to do every single year. So we, we decided last year was the first year we were going to do it and we had, we decided, we're like, okay, we're going to try to. Our target is to hit about 500 people. We hit, I believe, a total of like about 510 people that attended the event. And our entire mission was to do a big all day event. We did it at the Trump Hotel in Miami, in Doral. And we had about a little bit over 500 people. And it was all. The entire title was called the Miami Retirement Summit. We noticed that we needed to have. One of the things that we learned just in marketing is, you know, we needed to have a person that can draw people in so we're like, okay, who do we know that or not? Who do we know? But who's someone that is really famous, that is known for the subject of retirement and that we could bring in? And so we decided we're gonna bring in pretty much Miami's biggest star in the 1980s and 90s, Dan Marino. So we had Dan Marino at the event, and he was kind of our draw. And he's the person that, you know, pretty much. We, you know, we hired him, we interviewed him on stage. He was the last person, obviously, to speak on that day. And we just asked him the questions of, what does it mean to be, you know, what does it mean retirement to you? And we asked him those questions. And, you know, my brother interviewed him for about, like an hour, hour and a half. And. And we had a bunch of speakers there, right? We had, like, Ed Slott. We had a Social Security spokesperson as well. We have a few of our advisors. We had an attorney. Our attorney fly out and speak as well at the event. So we did have, you know, we did have a good. Probably eight people, eight or nine speakers throughout the day. We had breakout sessions, kind of like a regular conference. And. And it was mainly for the community. And we did charge, I believe it was like, 69 or $79 to attend. It wasn't so much. We just wanted to make sure that we had a. We had as many people to actually attend. We also gave everyone lunch, and then we also had VIP packages that people could purchase and they could get a photo with Dan Marino as well. So we kind of try to make it a fun event. And we had about 500. Yeah, about 500. A little bit. About 500 attendees at the event.

B (62:26)

And so was the goal of this simply, like, teaching giving back to the community at its core? Or ultimately, is this still trying to drill down to, can we drive leads? Can we drive new clients, like, as. Call it traditional seminar marketing?

C (62:44)

Yeah. So we. Our mission definitely was, yes, to community, you know, to educate the community. But it's. It's still a. You know, it's still a business. And, you know, we spent a significant amount of money on putting together this whole event. I mean, just in speaker fees, I think we spent, like $75,000 just, you know, paying speakers to come out and talk to the audience. So, you know, we still needed to generate some sort of revenue from this. So we. I believe there was about 500. 500 people there. A little bit above 500. Out of those 500, obviously, there's. Some of them are Households, Right. They're coming in with their spouses. So we don't really look at them as, you know, 500 households. It was probably somewhere around like 350 households. And out of those 350, there were some clients in the audience as well. But you know, when it was all said and done, there was about 115 appointments that were scheduled for people that were not clients from the event. So yeah, so we had to clear out all of our schedules. In other words, all of the advisors had to be 100% dedicated for like the next two to three weeks. Nobody could take vacation. Like, we just needed to be all hands on deck as far as the team because we knew that the influx was going to be, you know, an enormous amount. We also stopped all of our marketing for all of our other marketing sources for like two weeks prior because we knew that that was going to obviously, you know, fill us up too much. So we stopped all of our marketing two weeks prior to the event. And then, and then we, we ended up booking about 115 appointments out of that. 115, excuse me, 115 held appointments. So I believe we booked like 160 appointments from it. But 115 of them were actually held.

B (64:10)

And I'm presuming similar kinds of conversion rates that, you know, ultimately a third became clients, give or take a little.

C (64:17)

So I believe the conversion rate was a little bit higher for a few reasons. Number one, the people were there for the right reasons. You know, sometimes when you do these dinner seminars, as we all know, you know, some people are there for the wrong reasons. The other is we generated a much bigger average asset size. I believe the average asset was about 50% higher than the normal type of lead that we were generating through all of our marketing sources. And you know, a person that's willing to spend eight, you know, six, seven, eight hours at a conference, the likelihood of this person converting is much higher because they spend a lot more time with you versus, you know, a person that just saw a 45 minute dinner presentation.

B (64:53)

Right. And what, what was, I guess in that context, what was typical asset size here and what's normal for your marketing?

C (65:00)

Yeah, so our normal from a marketing standpoint is about 650,000. And from this event was about almost about 1.1 million average spendable assets, or what we call liquid assets.

B (65:11)

Wow. So I guess in this vein, as advisors are fielding all these inquiries and you'd said earlier, your goal is to really leverage up your advisors to be prospect and client facing. So are There goals that you said of how many, how many hours client facing per week or like how many meetings per week that advisors are expected to have.

C (65:34)

Yeah, yeah. So what we, what we do is that every advisor has a, our appointment setters have these goals of trying to make sure that every advisor has a certain amount of appointments on their schedule on a weekly basis. And so our average advisor is having right now somewhere around five appointments per week. Five brand new appointments of brand new prospects. Everything else. The other, you know, 25, 30 appointments that come out, you know, throughout the week is everything else. Right. That's existing clients, that's, that's, you know, second appointments, third appointments, investment strategy meetings, estate planning meetings. So that's everything else but our appointment setting team and what our expectation is out of our marketing and our appointment setting team is that we deliver five new potential households on a weekly basis to every advisor that are held. Not that are scheduled, but that are actually held. And the advisor doesn't have to confirm the appointment. The advisor just has to show up, walk into the room and do their thing.

B (66:26)

But that means in total like 25 to 30 meetings a week is normal for your advisors. Like that's typical flow, very normal.

C (66:34)

I would even say probably closer to 35 appointments sometimes.

B (66:37)

Are these hour long, are these half hour? I mean just at some point there's only so many hours in the day to get them in.

C (66:44)

Yeah. So we have different appointments that have different lengths to it. There's some appointments that are one hour, there's some appointments that are an hour and a half and there's some that are 30 minutes. So you know, every category of type of appointment we have like our firm has I think about like nine different appointment categories or something like that. And every appointment category has a different amount of time. So it usually is anywhere between 30 to 35 appointments.

B (67:05)

How do you prep for 35 meetings? So I'm just envisioning like prep and follow up is a lot for 35 meetings.

C (67:15)

And this is why our support staff is probably so large is pretty much we have about three to four support staff for every advisor. And so number one, all of the prep is done by someone else prior to the meeting. And it's all updated in our financial planning software. So prior to the meeting, all of the assets are inputted. We also call the client, we also update all of the assets that the client has. So that way the advisors walking into a meeting with all of the assets usually updated, the advisor is still going through a full review of all of the assets. Just making sure that everything's correct. And then what also happens is right before the meeting, right before they walk in, literally like two feet away from the door, the wealth management associate is letting the advisor know of anything that's important for that client that needs to be discussed. Because that wealth management associate that's booking the appointment is always asking the client what's important for you to discuss during the meeting. Even though we do have specific subjects that we like to cover in every single meeting. But there are specific topics that a client might want to discuss in their financial review. And so all of that is put in the notes of the activity in our CRM. And the advisor, pretty much every advisor has their CRM right on their phone, which is Salesforce. And then they can just go into the activity that they're about to walk into, the appointment that they're about to walk into, look into the notes and just see exactly what type of meeting they're about to walk into and what are the biggest concerns that the client has.

B (68:38)

Interesting. I'm almost envisioning this like the doctor's. Yeah, like the doctor's office with a lot of nurses where like the doctor has their notes that they review before they come in. But the main focus of the doctor is just literally like be present with me as the patient to answer whatever questions I have and go through whatever I'm working on or dealing with. And then the nurses keep them really well prepped for the next meeting.

C (68:59)

You got it. And then what happens is right after the. But the advisor actually goes into all these meetings by themselves. They don't go in with the nurse, let's call it. Or with a wealth management associate, they go into the meetings by themselves. But right after the meeting is over, the advisor dictates all of their notes into our, pretty much our communication system. This communication system is now the audio, because it's an audio dictation. Then it goes. Then we have a person that grabs that audio, they upload it into an AI transcription service, which then summarizes the entire process. I've seen all these other AI programs that exist, and I haven't really found one that that really works at the level that we want. So we're still enjoying the advisor having to do their actual dictation after the meeting. Then we have a person that will grab the audio, upload it into a transcription system, which then that will live in our CRM for all of the notes, for any compliance reasons or just documentation purposes.

B (69:54)

So you don't put the AI recorder in the Meeting you have the advisor audio dictate and the AI transcript describes and summarizes their post meeting summary dictation.

C (70:04)

Yes. And then because in every meeting there could be different tasks for different departments, the advisor needs to tag the team member in the note of the. Of who is relevant. Right. Because you might have like every advisor has their own call it advisor chat pod where they're, where they're sending in their notes. But you know, there might be an estate plan that was sold during the meeting or there might be a transfer that needs to take place. And so the advisor needs to tag the relevant team members that need to be involved in that process. That way the advisor just completely releases the process and each team member, whether it's every team member on the new business side or the service side, just has to process the request that was dictated.

B (70:45)

So how does the Advisor tag the department or people?

C (70:48)

So we use a system called WebEx, which is pretty common. A lot of people probably know about it. And so everyone in our system, if I'm tagging John, I just put on and it automatically just pops up there. And then John gets a notification that that's an audio that John needs to listen to.

B (71:06)

So where does this. I guess I'm trying to visualize where this happens. This is in, in the meeting after the meeting via the CRM. Like just where does tagging. Oh, on your, on your. Because WebEx is what you use for the audio you like, correct? Create, create a WebEx meeting for yourself. But it's literally just you and then you at the people who are supposed to be tied to the meeting that they're not in. But the meeting isn't actually a meeting at this point. It's the audio dictation of the meeting.

C (71:35)

Exactly right. So we have at the end of every single meeting, the advisor grabs their phone and this is a system that the advisor has no control over. We actually can remove an advisor immediately or remove any team member immediately. And any history that's in that chat is gone. Like I remember, you know, I remember back in the day, you know, we would, we would even use WhatsApp as a form of communication, which was horrible internally. But now we can do is, you know, we with the system is, you know, if a team member is not with the firm anymore, it's very easy for us to remove the team member off the system. And then the team member doesn't have access to any previous history inside that system as well. So, so pretty much right after the meeting you finish the meeting, the advisor dictates the notes right on their phone. It's not on a computer. Whether it's, like, on their way walking to the next meeting. And then they act, the two or the three team members that need to be involved.

B (72:25)

Okay. So as you look across just this whole growth journey and evolution sounds like a particular growth ramp up in the past couple of years, what surprised you the most about building the advisory business?

C (72:40)

So I think that one of the things that my brother and I, we always talk about, my brother is also a partner in the firm. And. And, you know, we. We went through a buyout with my father a few years ago is. Is this concept of struggle. And I think that it's, you know, some. Sometimes we start thinking of, you know, what are the areas that we have struggled in. And, you know, I go back and I think of, you know, people like my dad, you know, a person that arrived to this country with, like. With no English, you know, and he arrived here trying to do the best thing for his family. And. And, you know, my dad really struggled. Right. And so, you know, when my brother and I, we. We talk about this concept of struggle, it's like, no, we really haven't struggled, you know, in comparison to what my dad went through, in comparison to what other people have gone through all around the world. And so, you know, I can't really stand here and say that, you know, we, you know, we've struggled. I mean, I can say we've had challenges in the company, you know, and I think that one of the biggest challenges that we've always had is metrics, is having metrics in every position. Because I think that one of the biggest mistakes that we did in the past is we did not track people or track responsibilities or track our goals well enough. And then what that did is it didn't allow us to make smart decisions moving forward. And so that's something that we've gotten a lot better at over the last three to four years, is just making sure that every position has their KPI and making sure that we have a clean system of getting clean data so that we can make the right decisions. I think that that's probably a very easy way to grow is having clean data, because now you can know exactly what decisions you need to make.

B (74:14)

So how did you go from a firm that didn't have great metrics to one that did? What did you do? What did you change?

C (74:21)

It's been a lot of work. I mean, one of the things that we did a couple years ago is we decided to join EOS which I know that you're a big fan of as well. And it was something that really changed in the way we do things. It just helped us get clear on what our goals are, what our vision is, what our mission is as a company, what our core values are, and just get the entire team more aligned. And then just operating off of the concept of Rocks, and, you know, it's still not perfect. We're still trying to get better at tracking data, but, you know, we operated off of Google Sheets for many, many years, and pretty much everything was living on a Google Sheet. I mean, I would say that one of the powerful things that we did is we had great team members that are very good at Excel and Google Sheets, and they know how to create formulas and pull up reports and, and things like that. And I think that was a big reason why it helped. And then eventually we're like, we can't operate a company off of Google Sheets. And so we, that's where we eventually transitioned to Salesforce. And that was the big thing that my brother and I, we spoke about a couple of years ago is, you know, where is the company going in the future? And we want to make sure that the systems that we are putting in place today are systems that are going to be, can still be used when the company's 10 times bigger than it is today. And so that's where we're like, all right, we, we, we gotta, you know, we gotta suck it up. Salesforce is a very expensive system, but it is something that when the company is 10 times bigger, it is still something that we'll be able to use. You know, Google Sheets is not gonna be something that we'll be able to use, you know, when the company's 10 times bigger than what it is today.

B (75:50)

So what was the low point on this journey for you?

C (75:54)

I think it goes back to the struggle. I, I, I can't sit here and say that, you know, we had a low point because it's been, you know, I think my brother and I have just been very focused on hiring more people. But I would say the biggest low point is hiring people that did not fit the core values of the company. You know, my brother and I, we've always been the type of people that we know who we are, and we kind of expected people to just be how we were. And so we're like, all right, like, this is, how do we, how do we put this into words? And so, you know, EOS is what really helped us, really help us clarify our core values of who we are and what we expect out of our team members. And, you know, we've had to make some very tough decisions with, you know, new hires and, you know, old hires based on the core values. And, you know, unfortunately, we've had to let people go because, you know, they don't. They don't meet our core values. And it is. It is something that is. That is really, really important. Important to us. So, yeah, the core values were kind of the biggest eye opener for us in every person that we hire. And everybody gets evaluated on a quarterly basis based on the core values. And we're constantly just reminding the team of the importance of them.

B (77:07)

So what are your core values? How did they get articulated?

C (77:12)

Yeah, so the first is always be learning. We expect that of our team to just constantly be learning as much as possible. You know, it's something that we've noticed that all of our people in our firm that have grown the fastest, that have grown the most, they put a lot of dedication to the learning part. The other is your words matter. We're a strong believer in the power of words. And you can use it to lift people up. You can also use it to tear people down. And that's something that I think across the board is very, very difficult for most people. But it's something that I believe that as a firm, we're all more conscious of and we're always calling each other out about. You know, it's not about, like, what you said, but how you said it. And so that's our second core value. Our third is all for one and one for all. We want to make sure that we're always here for each other and we have this sense of support on a regular basis. Pretty much every person in our company was trained by somebody else. And so one beautiful thing that I think our company has is that every team member that has that, every new team member that's been brought on board, all of our existing team members were previously trained by somebody else, and none of them expect to be paid for training other people. Even those that are operating off of performance based, right. Like all of our advisors, they have all helped each other out, just get better and better, even though they don't get paid to train other advisors. And I think that's something that's been really beautiful about our company, is that we've. All of the advisors, they're just, you know, they see an advisor struggling with something. All of our meetings are normally responsible, recorded on Zoom, and so we also have, like, weekly training on it and. And all of our advisors get. Get these videos that we can now all go back and watch as well. And. And then we all give each other feedback on how we can get better. And so I think that's also a very. A very powerful thing. The fourth is taking ownership. So is. Is. Is. We want to make sure that when a person's being critiqued or being, you know, given feedback, that they're actually taking ownership of it, that they're not, like, you know, pushing back on the. On the feedback that's being given. And it's mainly. It's just acknowledging and accepting your actions and your results. And then the fifth is just doing the right thing. And for us, doing the right thing. It's a combination of mainly three things. It's doing the right thing for the team, it's doing the right thing for the company, and then it's also doing the right thing for the clients. And I think that's one of the big struggles that I think a lot of advisors and firms have is how do you balance all three of these? How do you make sure that you're doing the right thing for the client, doing the right thing for the company, and doing the right thing for the team? And so, you know, there's certain moments that it's like, okay, we gotta do something that's better for the company. There's something. There's some moments that we, you know, we do what's right for the team. And then there's other. Obviously, most of the moments, it's where, you know, we're doing the right thing for the client. You know, something that we just recently did is, you know, our firm hit our target in 2024 about our goals. And, you know, one of the things that my brother and I made it a mission is we wanted to take our entire staff, our entire team out on a trip. And. And so we decided to do is right now, in about two months, the entire company, we're all getting on a cruise ship, and we're gonna go to the. We're gonna go to the Caribbean, and we're taking all 50, 60 team members with their spouses and all their children. And, you know, we're. We're inviting everyone out. And. And the reason we do that is because, you know, they. They were a big reason. They're the main reason why the company has gone to where it's at. And so we're just a strong believer in just making sure that we take care of our team. And we got bigger goals this year, and we're just Trying to push forward. And I think putting these big goals, these big dreams that we have is part of the reason why companies can grow a lot.

B (80:52)

So what do you know? Now you wish you could go back and tell yourself 10 years ago, as you were starting this growth ramp up?

C (81:02)

I think definitely getting clear about the type of people that you want to hire, I think that was. Which goes back to the core values. I think knowing that, I wish 10 years ago, 15 years ago, we were more focused on that. And I would say that the biggest reason, which is kind of what I mentioned earlier, is having a individual earlier on that focuses on recruiting. I think that if 10 years ago, we would have had, you know, a recruiter in house, that their entire job was to find new talent for the firm. I believe that today the firm could probably be four times bigger than what it is today, because this is just something that we did over the last two years. And over the last two years, we've added, you know, over 25 people to the team. And it's mainly been because of the recruiting division and the HR division. If it wasn't for that, there's no way that we can, we can have the focus of the amount of talent that we're onboarding.

B (81:54)

So can you help us understand further what. What changed in hiring? I guess as. As you set core values as you brought in a recruiter, can you. Can you help us understand more like, what. What was different? What really changed? Because, I mean, you. I'm sorry, you already felt these values. You were already hiring people. But. But something's different now. So what?

C (82:14)

Well, the thing is that, the thing is that when you're, I think when you're an owner of a company or you're an advisor of a company, you're wearing so many hats and you, you put on all these goals, it's like, okay, I want to hire more people. I want to do more business. I want to, you know, I want to train the staff. I want to. I want to do all these goals, but it's not until you literally give the task to a person to have that responsibility is not until it actually happens. And so I think hiring a recruiter and giving them very, very clear metrics on these are the amount of interviews you need to do every single week. These are the amount of shadow days that need to take place on a monthly basis. These are the five hires that we need to do for this quarter is a very clear way of getting them very focused on exactly what the goal that they're. That they need to accomplish. And so, you know, when you go and put this hat on, for example, myself or you put this hat on my brother, you know, on top of that he's running, you know, a bunch of other department, you know, leaders as well. And on top of that he now needs to go and focus on hiring these five new people. And going through this process is, in reality, it doesn't become a priority because he's got, he's wearing six other hats. And so when you give this one hat to this one person, I think that there's no excuse on the goal not being accomplished. And so that's, I think one of the big reasons why we just said, hey, you know what, we just need a full time recruiter. And yes, it's not a revenue producing activity, but it is the position that's needed to find the talent that's going to help us get to, you know, a thousand employees over the next 10 years.

B (83:38)

So what advice would you give younger, like newer advisors looking to come into the, into the profession today?

C (83:45)

So I would say that, you know, one of the things that I did is I remember even when I was just 17 years old, you know, going to school, going to high school, I was, I was listening to a lot of audio tracks on, on financial planning, which is pretty weird for a 17 year old. I think that's probably why I didn't get too many dates at 17 years old. But, but I think that one of the, one of the reasons is, is I was very obsessed with the subject matter. I truly don't look at my job as, as a job or something that I don't enjoy. I truly love the subject of financial planning and I just love learning new ideas, new concepts about money that, that I just didn't know. So I think number one is being obsessed. And then I would say number two is finding a organization or an individual that you can go and learn a lot from. And I, you know, obviously you're, you're a big mentor for I think, the entire financial planning community. But I would even go deeper than just listening to someone's podcast. You know, if I was 22 years old, 23 years old, and I wanted to get into the industry and I wanted to be, you know, the best possible advisor, I would literally go and find the top three advisors in your city, in your town, and just say, what do I need to do to work for you? I think that doing that for your first three to five years is extremely powerful. And our top advisor right now at our firm, that's exactly what he did, you know, we gave him an opportunity. And you know, when he technically probably, you know, looking back at it today, we probably wouldn't have let him come into the company, but you know, back in the day we would have to hire people that just, we need to fulfill a role. But, you know, this, you know, this guy, you know, Jimmy, he came into the company and one of the first things that he did is he's like, I'm going to sit next to you and I'm going to learn everything I possibly can from you. And you know, and he, this year, I mean, just this year by himself, he'll probably move probably about 50 to 60 million dollars on his own. And it's all because he was obsessed with just being the best version that he can and not necessarily just saying it, but actually going and finding, you know, the top advisory firms, the top advisors to go in and learn from. And so I think doing that at a very early age in your, in your career is probably a very easy, easy way to get 20 years of experience in two or three years.

B (86:06)

So as we come to the end, this is a podcast about success. And just one of the themes that comes up is literally like the word success means very different things to different people. And so you and your brother have built this incredible business, like when anyone would objectively call a very successful business, as you, as you crest 15 million of revenue. So the, so the business is in a wonderful place. How do you define success for yourself at this point?

C (86:31)

So that's the question I've been asking myself over the last pretty much the last 30 days. I've been, you know, I've always been a very hard charging individual. I've always been a person that has like this mission, this goal. And I've always had this mindset of, you know, I think sometimes us as advisors, we have this challenge which is we have this mindset of nothing's going to get in my way until I accomplish my goal. And I would say that, you know, for the last 15 years of my career, it was all about that until about three years ago, which is when I got married. And 365 days from the day that we got married, our daughter was born. Lena. You know, we got married on September 8, 2021. Our daughter was born on September 8, 2022. And I think that after the last two, three years of my daughter's life, I started noticing that there's this mission that you have as an organization, but you start looking at what are the other areas that you're potentially sacrificing in the process. And I've had to make some recent strong decisions. Willing to sacrifice, call it the mission and the drive of working until 10, 11 o' clock at night, starting work at 6 o' clock in the morning, and constantly just going at it to make sure that we accomplish the goal and just creating these very strong boundaries of work and personal. And I think that's just what's worked for me. I know that some people kind of blend it all in, but what's worked for me or what's working for me now is just creating very strong rules that I'm not willing to break and I'm not willing to budge in no circumstance. And so, you know, I leave now, the office at 6 o', clock, which is for me very, very, very early. And you know, I get in at, you know, at 9am, which for me is very, very, very late. But, but I think that was one of the biggest things is for me, I think success has, it really boils down to what the priorities are in your life at that given moment in your life. Success five years from, you know, five years ago looked very differently than what success looks like today for me. And I'm sure that, you know, 15 years from now, 20 years from now, you know, or 30 years from now, when I'm a grandfather, I'm sure my, my success is going to be looked at very differently. So I think success is looked at differently depending on the stage of life that you're in. And for me today, it's, it's really, it's, it's being able to understand the difference between, you know, spending quality time with your family and, and really driving the company forward. And so that's kind of my next challenge in life.

B (89:03)

I love it. I love it. Well, thank you so much, Sebastian, for joining us on the Financial Advisor Success podcast.

C (89:10)

Thank you, Michael. Thank you so much. And thank you so much for everything you do for the community.

B (89:14)

Thank you.

A (89:17)

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