← Top Advisor Podcast
Top Advisor Podcast
#81 Generational Wealth Transfer: The 100 Year Family Strategy with Josh Kanter, JD
00:36:27
In today’s episode, we dive deep into the world of multigenerational wealth management and generational wealth transfer with esteemed guest Josh Kanter, JD, a family office executive, advisor, and founder of leafplanner.
Loading summary
Transcript53 lines
- [00:04]
A
Welcome to the Top Advisor podcast, brought to you by Proudmouth's Pod Rocket Academy. I'm your host, Bill Cates, creator of the Cates Academy for Relationship Marketing. In each episode, I interview one of our industry's top performers, getting them to pass on their secrets to success to you so that you can impact more lives and generate more income. Now onto the show. Welcome. Welcome. Today is going to add some new concepts and phrases to your vocabulary and how you view your financial advisory practice. Today we're going to talk about the 100 year family, the family Owner's manual, family meetings, and something called Leaf Planner. In addition, we're even going to touch on the United States Supreme Court. But first, before we dive into all this with our featured guests, I want to let you know about some of our free resources I invite you to retrieve. After you've listened to today's interview, you find checklists, guides, videos, other tools. Simply go to referralcoach.com forward/resources and write this down. Unless you're driving referralcoach.com forward slash resources. It's also in the show notes. And while you're there, make sure you sign up for our weekly tips. We're always sharing best practices. We'll notify you of our newest podcast interviews as they go live, and while these are free to you, I think you'll find them quite valuable. And now on with today's show. Today's featured guest is Josh Kanter. Josh is an attorney, the principal at Josh Kanter Wealth Advisory Services, and the founder of a process he calls Leaf Planner, which brings the deliberateness of a family office to a client's family organization, education, communication and decision making. Josh knows firsthand the challenges families face when it comes to managing multigenerational wealth. After the passing of his father, Josh took on the task of resolving his family's three decade long estate and income tax controversies, taking them all the way to the United States Supreme Court before reaching a successful adjudication. He also reorganizes family's business, tax and estate structures, laying the necessary groundwork to function as a single family office while also keeping 15 family members from multiple generations communicating harmoniously. And that was probably the hardest challenge of them all. Josh Cantor, zooming in from Salt Lake City, Utah. Welcome to Top Advisor Podcast.
- [02:38]
B
Thanks Bill. I'm so happy to be here and really excited about this conversation.
- [02:42]
A
Likewise, I am really into this multi generation how the advisor brings more value to the family, to the individuals, to his or her practice. It just there's a lot of wins Involved in this. I don't always ask my guests about their path into this business, but in your case, I'm going to make an exception. Your path is not only interesting, but I think it'll prove highly informative for the rest of this interview. So I have a compound question for you. First, tell us about your family story a little bit and how it, how that got you into this industry. And second, how this led to the development of your practice as an advisor to families and family offices. And if you forget the second part of the question, we'll go back to it. So, compound question. Have at it.
- [03:31]
B
Perfect. Well, thanks. I do love, as you know, sharing my story and our family story. And it's really been a journey. You know, it's one of these situations where I didn't set out to get to this particular place in my life at 62 years old. And it's all come from that path. So the quickest version of that, if you want me to dive in any more detail, I'm happy to do it. I was a lawyer, as you mentioned, in Chicago. I was a corporate and securities lawyer. My family at the time had been involved in the venture capital business. So as you can imagine, I had a close relationship with my family and, and ended up being the lawyer for our venture funds, our portfolio companies, representing our family, et cetera. My dad, who's really at the heart of the tax litigation and tax controversy that you mentioned, was a world renowned tax lawyer in the 60s, 70s into the 1980s. And so when he, he ended up getting sick in 2000 and we found out he had cancer, he was 70 years old, so still very young, globetrotting deal junkie. And we found out that he had cancer and was going to, you know, leave frankly, 30 years earlier than we thought he would be. The guy at, you know, his desk having a heart attack at 100. And so I left my practice to come help my family figure out how do we navigate through what was a wildly complicated enterprise structure. We were filing 750 tax returns a year. We had a wildly complicated balance sheet and we were 22 years into what you mentioned as a three decade long, ultimately was a 33 year fight with the Internal Revenue Service that went up to the US Supreme Court as you mentioned. So my hands were a little full and trying to figure out how do we, and you also mentioned, of course, how do you keep family harmony and get multiple generations to be educated and understand all the different things that are going on. So I jumped into this family office world that led Me ultimately to a partial career of helping other families think about these issues about multi generational wealth and legacy and philosophy and um, really anything down, all the way down to facilitating family meetings for families and, and found that those were the things that I really loved. I actually one, I'm probably not qualified to manage anybody's money and I certainly am not interested in managing anybody's money. So what really interests me is those family dynamics and, and those kinds of things. And ultimately that'll lead to leaf planner as well. So it's all been one really interesting path to, to get to this point.
- [06:02]
A
Curiosity question, did you, were you part of the argument in front of the Supreme Court as an attorney? That would be pretty cool thing to do, I suppose. Or did you have someone who's more of an expert in that area?
- [06:13]
B
Yeah, it's interesting. So I'll, I'll take some credit in the sense that what I think was interesting and, and I think it goes to this, this notion of holistic advising which, which obviously most of the people probably listening to this are in the advisor's chair and are thinking about, what does it mean to be a holistic advisor. And in my case, so I'm not, I was not a litigator. I was certainly not a Supreme Court litigator. And what I quickly learned by the way, through this tax case we ended up with, there were two CO plaintiffs along with my father. So we had three different litigation counselors. We then had 5th, 7th and 11th Circuit appellate counsel. We then had innocent spouse counsel from my mother. We had collection counsel because initially the IRS won part of this. We then then learned that you actually had to have Supreme Court counsel because there's like a handful of people in the country who are known for Supreme Court arguments. Right. And so I never knew there were so many specialties in the tax arena. So no, I did not go argue it. But what was fascinating to me was like this notion of holistic advice is if I had followed the advice of the estate tax lawyers, we would have lost the income tax case. And if I followed the advice of the, of the income tax lawyers, we would have lost the estate tax case. And so the place I will take credit is essentially being the quarterback, or whatever you want to call it, the coordinator of all the different strategies and all the different perspectives that ultimately did lead us to a 7 to 2 winning opinion in the Supreme Court and ultimately a very favorable adjudication, as you alluded to, of the entire case. But I will also say do not go to the supreme like hopefully the last time anybody went to the Supreme Court was with their eighth grade, you know, civics teacher. Because you don't want to pay to go there.
- [08:09]
A
I, yeah, I can only imagine that. I look at the team that you assembled and, and it does, you're right. It makes the, for when you bring various experts together, even if it's at a lower level situation with the accountant, the estate planning attorney, you know, maybe an insurance specialist, whatever, you get these minds, they all kind of know what they know and think they know more than they know and all have their opinion. But you have to distill what's really going to be the best course. Right. For the client. So, and that's what you were able to do. So that's, that's, that's fascinating. Moving forward a little bit, when we were preparing for this interview, you mentioned the concept and I mentioned it earlier already called the 100 Year Family. Intriguing. What is it? How did you come of it? How do you apply it? Tell us about that.
- [08:58]
B
Yeah, so it's not my phrase. I'm trying to think of who coined it and I'm not sure that. So I can't give credit to whoever coined it. But it's the idea of the 100 year family. You know, when you think about multi generational wealth, right, you're thinking about how do you not necessarily only preserve the wealth but how do you preserve the family and how do you support a family over multiple generations? And so the idea of the Hundred Year family is really just that it's, it's how do you think about things? Again, sort of through that holistic lens, through the different advisors that a family might have, through the estate planning structures, through the, the wealth planning structures, whatever, whatever these things are to think about, how does this last for generations to come and that again, that doesn't have to be necessarily, you know, families have to decide, is that about per capita income, per capita wealth, is that about philosophy and legacy and values, whatever it's about. But thinking about that as you know, what is this going to mean to future generations? And if you think about that through this lens of saying I'm, I'm looking for the 100 year family, then you have that long term perspective. You'll see this obviously in business all the time. Right. I'm sure a lot of your listeners know Simon Sinek's work and the Infinite Game is one of his books and, and he talks about, and I actually read that thinking through my family office lens. And when you read his book, for example, you'll see lines that talk about it's, it's the player's time who's run out, it's the players time that runs out, the game continues. Right. And things like that. And that's really to me again at the heart of this idea of the 100 year family. My generation, my dad's generation's gone. My generation will hopefully not too soon will be gone. And, and this is about how do you perpetuate whatever it is you're trying to perpetuate into those future generations?
- [10:49]
A
Interesting. So over the years I've coached and interviewed many successful advisors. I'd say with a handful of exceptions, most advisors shy away from facilitating family meetings. And in fact I think there's some that wouldn't touch a family meeting with a 20 foot bowl. On the other hand, you have made family meetings an important part of how you serve your clients. In fact, I remember and this is what kind of got my interest, you told me that you love family meetings because I don't hear that very often. So tell us more about the why and how of this. You already come of mentioned that you enjoyed it. But let's dig into the family meeting thing and, and why do you think advisors resist? And why shouldn't they resist? And do families resist and give us a little meat on that bone, if you don't mind.
- [11:39]
B
Sure. You, you. There was another series of compound questions kind of in the multiple.
- [11:45]
A
Yes, there were. I. It's my nature. I'm sorry.
- [11:47]
B
No, no, no, I'll. Good. Feel free to, feel free to tell me what I'm missing. I think you know, for me one. Yes. I just love it. Um, it's, I jokingly say to a lot of the families I work with, it, it lets me be a little bit like a therapist except I get to have an opinion. Um, and so you know, there's a little bit of my corporate law background. Right. And being a general advisor to families, I think I'm a good listener. I think I make sure everybody in the room gets heard, things like that. I think when you talk about advisors who don't want to do this and, and by the way, I would not recommend that you know, an advisor who's, who's a really talented wealth advisor all of a sudden pick up and say I'm going to start running family meetings. I mean it's, it's in and of itself, it's a specialty. There's a, a cadre of us who do this around the country and, and you should rely on experts who really do understand how to do this because there are, you know, therapeutic elements and their family relationship elements. I say, for example, I'm not a parenting expert. I've got two kids, I've got two data points on parenting. If somebody asks me a parenting question, I got lucky. I love my kids, they're awesome kids. But I've got two data points. I'm an expert at families and that's different. And so, so for me, I think first of all it's really at the heart of again, go back to the hundred year family and the success of families. How do you keep families together? Well, it's about relationships, it's about communication, it's about education. It's not necessarily about is the balance sheet growing. I mean that's, that's obviously an important piece to many of your listeners, but it's, it's also about how is this all being perpetuated over generations and, and to multiple generations. So I understand why people want to avoid it. And by the way, most advisors are not getting paid for it. So we have to focus on that as well. Right. It's very time consuming, it's very expensive to provide, but it's hugely valuable. And if you think about that also in the advisory context of this, whatever the number is, 84 trillion dollar wealth transfer that, that we're in the midst of. Right. Coming from our generation to the next generation. And think about what does it take when you're talking about client retention from an advisor perspective. You know, the vast majority of kids do not keep their parents, advisors. I think there's all kinds of data out there about that. Right. So the family meeting from the advisor standpoint, I would, I would ask people to think about embracing it. Not necessarily to run it, but embrace it as a concept. Because if you really want to build a relationship with that next generation, what better way is there to do it than to think about having that deep relationship that will sustain? And I've got to assume I'm not in that side of the business, but I got to assume the cost of acquisition is a lot higher than the cost of retention.
- [14:28]
A
Oh yeah.
- [14:29]
B
If you could, if you could be on that side of the equation.
- [14:31]
A
So, so tell me, tell me, you said that can be costly. What, what's, where's the cost come in for hosting? Is it hiring someone to facilitate or is it more that.
- [14:41]
B
Yeah, it's really, it's really the facilitation question. I mean when I typically, if I go into, let's say even a, a nuclear family of four Let alone a multigenerational complex family enterprise. I'm going to probably do a two hour individual interview with each member of the family. I'm going to prepare for that family meeting. I'm going to then travel somewhere most likely to that family meeting and facilitate that family meeting over, say, a day or two. There's going to be all kinds of follow up that comes from that. So if you just start to think of the sheer number of hours involved, if you're going to do it in, in what I'll say that thorough level, there's other ways of accomplishing this. It's, it's just, it's time consuming and costly.
- [15:27]
A
Other than yourself, how would, how would folks listening go about finding someone who facilitates these meetings?
- [15:36]
B
That is an excellent question and I wish I had a really snappy answer off the top of my head. And I don't. You can always call me and I'll help you find people because I know almost everybody in the industry. But there's not a great, you know, some firms, obviously some of the larger firms have built these practices into their firms. Then there's a whole host of people who do this independently like I do, and those are kind of hard to find. It's, it's a little bit word of mouth, but again, and I'm happy to help any advisor find those people. Not to pitch my, myself, but I know a good number of those people around the country and, and they're people who have very different backgrounds. So it's really important. For example, you know, again, I'm a lawyer, so I'm not a therapist. I have zero therapeutic training.
- [16:19]
A
But you play one on podcasts.
- [16:21]
B
I play one on podcast. If somebody comes to me and says there's significant conflict in our family and I mean real conflict, like people aren't talking or whatever. I'm like, you don't want me. You want somebody who's got a therapeutic background who knows how to dig this out. And so it's really important to find the right match to each family situation when you're looking for that family meeting facilitator.
- [16:44]
A
So Josh's email is in the show notes. It's Joshoshkanter J-O-S-H-K-A-N-T-E-R.com and it's very generous of you, Josh. Thank you. All right, let's shift a little. But we're in the same neck of the woods here. You've created a process you call Leaf Planner. L E A F P L A N N E R. You use it as all one word. What is it and how does it help advisors help their client families?
- [17:19]
B
So I need to go a little bit back, if you don't mind, to our family story, because this really comes from again, our family story. But what one of the interesting things to me that happened in the wake of my father's death. Long before we went to the supreme court, I spent 18 months with my dad. I literally left my job the second we found out he was sick because I understood the level of complexity that we were dealing with. I'm a trained lawyer. I happen to have taken my father's estate planning class in law school. I spent 18 months with him. And as soon as the lawyers and accountants and family members started asking me questions, I realized how ill prepared I was. And yet, on the face of it, I would say I was about as prepared as somebody could get and as educated as perfectly as somebody could get to step into this role. So recognizing that I was in trouble, my immediately, real immediate realization, as you can imagine, was if I'm in trouble, my mom's in really big trouble, my sister's in really big trouble, my brother, my wife, I didn't have kids yet, but my kids, everybody is in more trouble than I am because I'm again as well prepared for this as possible. So we started building this thing for our family 22 years ago that I kept referring to as a family owner's manual. And the idea of it was to really say, how do you go exponentially past what I'm sure everybody on the listening to this is familiar with the old in case of emergency file. How do you go exponentially past that? How do you describe what do we do, how do we do it, why do we do it, who do we do it with? All these things, you may remember the old, I don't really, I guess it's not a joke, but the little cliche of you get an owner's manual with a toaster but not with a kid. Well, you don't get one with a family of wealth either. And so the idea was, how do you create an owner's manual for a family of wealth? And that's what we did. And 20 something years later, that became leaf planner of a very structured process to help families with that. And I think for the advisor, it's a process to really give them. Again, some of it is about stickiness, right? The same kind of issues we were talking about before family meetings. How do I, you know, my, I have one of my kids turned 18 last year, I didn't hear from. I got. I got an email. I'm not sure I'm allowed to say this. I got an email from Lifelock, which I'm a subscriber of, Right. That said, you gotta. You gotta upgrade your junior plan to an adult plan. My insurance agent did not call me, my estate lawyer did not call me. My wealth advisors. Nobody called me. So Leaf Planner and the process of the owner's manual is there for an advisor to say, hey, family, do you know you have a kid who turned 18 who needs to get a HIPAA release, who needs to do this, that, or the other? So building those deep client relationships, seeing the holistic picture of what the family is about, and really being a valued advisor or a holistic advisor or an integrated advisor, whatever words you want to put around it is where this really fits in that advisory relationship.
- [20:15]
A
Wow, I really like that. A family manual. So the. The website is leaf planner.com L E A F P L A n n e r.com and in about 90 seconds, I'm going to ask Josh to go a little deeper into Leaf Planner. And I also want to talk to Josh a little bit about how he finds his clients. Where they find him is, you know, I'm, I'm. My mojo comes from client acquisition. So I always want to talk about that. But first, let's take a brief pause to listen to a word from our sponsor, Pod Rocket Influence Academy, brought to you by Proudmouth. First, they make this podcast possible, and their core business is helping financial advisors like you accelerate their influence through marketing activities like podcasting.
- [21:06]
B
This podcast is sponsored by Proudmouth, the Influence Accelerators. Tired of chasing potential clients, we help you spend less time selling and more time advising by amplifying your influence over a growing audience of magnetically attracted fans who will chase you down. Instead. Visit proudmouth.com to learn more. Be your own loud foreign.
- [21:41]
A
I'd be remiss if I didn't at least mention the three main ways I work with financial advisors. First, I have my Kate's Academy for Relationship Marketing. Some advisors go through the academy all on their own. Some add a bit of coaching with me to make sure they maximize their results. To learn more, go to the katesacademy.com the katesacademy.Com Second. Yes, I have several coaching programs designed to help you acquire more right fit clients through more relevant messaging and more compelling messaging. Attracting ideal clients through building a reputation in a target market and multiplying your best clients referrals. Personal introductions to learn more go to coachcates.com that's coach kates.com and third, I love my sharing, my proven strategies and methods and live forms such as speaking conferences, virtual presentations. If you're part of an organization that brings in experts such as myself, I'd love to hear from you. Just shoot an email over to me. Bill catesferralcoach.com Not Bill Gates. We kind of wish. But you know, what's a few billion among friends? Bill katesferralcoach.com now back to my conversation with my featured guest, Josh Kanter, Family Office executive advisor to Families of Wealth and founder of Leaf Planner. Josh, as promised, I want to go a little deeper with this tool you call Leaf Planner. And I also want to learn more about how you attract your clients. Let's start with Leaf Planner. Tell me more about what it does. What, what are some of the elements of it, I guess, and I'm guessing that it's the kind of tool that not just brings a more holistic approach, but maybe even advisors can use to differentiate themselves from other advisors. Talk about that, if you don't mind.
- [23:24]
B
Absolutely. Yeah. It so ultimately, you mentioned this at the outset. Leaf Planner is designed to essentially provide a single family office view or lens into any client family. And what I mean by that, if, if I look at what I really believe the single family office does, well, it is that deep knowledge, that holistic knowledge of everything about the family, family enterprise, the family business, whatever components a family may have. So much of this is really about taming complexity, right? And the inner and the integrated parts. And so in the Leaf Planner context, it's asking, I don't know if it's literally thousands of questions, but thousands of questions of how do you think about all this different information from different perspectives and then how do you put it all together and map it? For those of your listeners who are familiar with mind mapping, I really think of it as almost a mind map of everything there is to know. So for example, you could look and say, okay, Josh is part of this family ecosystem because he's the suddenly you're going to see he's the trustee of 12 different trusts and he's the tax matters partner to three partnerships that go back to the 1970s and he's this, that, and the other. Then zoom in on any one of those different things. So say it's a particular trust and you'll suddenly see everything there is to know about that trust. Is it a grantor trust? Is it GST exempt? How often should we review it does it have crummy letters or islet funding or grant payments associated with it? All the things that the estate lawyers are really good about giving us that estate administrative memo, but everybody's really bad about actually doing. How do we, how do we turn that into workflows? How do I look at that trust and say, hey, that trust owns my house and by the way, my house has utility accounts and has a housekeeper and has this, that and the other. And my dog lives in my house and my dog goes to that vet and has a chewy account and, and whatever. Right. So it's on and on and on. If you think about an ever expanding map.
- [25:24]
A
Wow.
- [25:24]
B
About everything you could imagine if you have a private, if you own a business and many of your client, many of the listeners. Clients certainly are business owners, right?
- [25:32]
A
Yeah.
- [25:33]
B
It's who do you trust? Do you trust your partners? Do you have partners? Do you trust your partners? Do you have buy sell agreements? How do they work? Are they funded by life insurance? Not just the documents, but the explanations, the context that so many of our spouses, our partners, our kids, our advisors, our trustees, our executors would be digging through mountains of paper to try to figure out if they could even figure it out. Because this is trying to get into your head as well. And so it's really. How do you build all of that into a map that anyone can access?
- [26:04]
A
This clearly isn't for every advisor and, or every client. Is there some way to measure the complexity or the. Is it? Is it? Yeah. What. What's the criteria of how someone would know if Leaf Planner applies? I guess so.
- [26:22]
B
One answer I'm going to say is is it's really we. I do think of Leaf Planner as being complexity driven, not wealth driven. And the reason I say that is my view is you could be worth $10 million and have a couple of homes and a couple of trusts and a couple insurance policies and a couple private investments and a couple of asset managers and a couple of kids. And if you start to think about the number of moving pieces, you're pretty complex. On the alternative side of that, you could I suppose theoretically these days be worth a billion dollars of bitcoin on a USB drive. And don't lose that password. And you're not that complex at all. So to me it's complexity driven.
- [26:58]
A
Makes sense.
- [26:58]
B
I wish to some extent we were having this conversation in about a month because we actually are building. That'll be a free resource on the website, which I'm happy to again share with anybody well, of course it's a free resource on the website. It's by definition share with anybody is going to be a complexity calculator. And the cool thing about that is it's going to go through questions like what generation are you? How many generations are you responsible for, how many homes do you have, how many country clubs do you have, how many trusts, insurance policies, all these different things. And it'll rate you on a complexity scale to really come up with that answer. So are we, I believe personally, every single person, as soon as you put your Quicken file together, you should next start. Like as a young professional, you should next start. I don't know if people still use Quicken. I do. You should next start on your Leaf plan. But certainly by the time you get into kind of the 10, $20 million net worth range, chances are you've got enough complexity that you really need to start thinking about this because you're talking about multi generational wealth. If you're 40 years old and you've got $10 million and you do the math every 10 years. Right, you've got multi generational wealth.
- [28:06]
A
Absolutely. And I like the idea of complexity. And by the way, this is going to air, by the time people are listening to this, this complexity calculator will probably be up and running on your website. So leafplanner.com L E A F P L-A-N-N-E-R.com anything else for them to know or look at once they get to leaffplanner.com no.
- [28:29]
B
If you go to the website, there's a place where you can find our family assessment tools and there's a couple of different tools there now, including an emotional intelligence tool and a data tool. And then that's where this complexity calcul will be housed as well. Perfect.
- [28:47]
A
Well, this is, this is great stuff, especially for, you know, I try to cater to the higher level advisors. In a sense that's why I call it Top Advisor podcast. So I hope a lot of folks are, are digging into this. How do you.
- [29:00]
B
Can I jump back in for a second?
- [29:01]
A
Yeah, of course.
- [29:02]
B
You mentioned, can advisors use this to differentiate themselves? Yes, and, and I think both from a business development and a differentiation and obviously as we talked about earlier, our client retention standpoint, I think absolutely there is nothing else that does this. So if you think about the top advisor who's looking at providing that holistic advisory experience to a client, I can only promise you, without seeing it, that something like Leaf Planner is going to differentiate you and is Going to be a really interesting business development tool. So I'll just leave it at that.
- [29:41]
A
Well, it's clearly more than just some of the tools out there that will host your essential documents and passwords and things like that. Obviously, it goes a lot deeper than that. So how do you grow your advisory business? How do you find your clients? How do they find you?
- [29:55]
B
So on the advisory side, if I think of that as the kind of the family meeting type consulting side that you and I were talking about, in fairness, I work with very few families. I work with a half a dozen families a year. I tend to get them by word of mouth or from my colleagues in the industry who say, hey, this is a situation we think you'd be really, really good at. And I have some wealth advisory firms that will refer or wealth advisors who will refer people to me again, where they think that it's the right match between me as a, as that advisor and the family at issue. You know, everybody knows that I'm not going to step on their toes. I'm not going to embarrass them. I mean, obviously one of the risks for advisors is are you going to lose a client because I come in and screw up that relationship? And so, you know, most of the people who know me know that I'm obviously not going to do that and I'm not going to try to steal their business because I'm not in their business. So there's a fair amount of just kind of word of mouth through the industry from, from that side of it.
- [30:55]
A
As it should be from me, the guy who talks about relationship marketing. Right. It's being referable in the eyes of other advisors. Being referable in the eyes of these centers of influence of yours.
- [31:08]
B
Yeah.
- [31:10]
A
I want to finish up with a question that you don't know is coming, but I would love to know what drives you. I mean, when you wake up in the morning and you think about going to work and, and doing the work you do is there is. Can you identify kind of a central point or theme or concept or whatever that, that drives you, that keeps you going in all this? The purpose behind what you do? I suppose.
- [31:41]
B
The answer is yes, a resounding yes. It's also a bit of, I'm going to say, not embarrassing, but it's an answer that I'll say, you have to know me to believe.
- [31:53]
A
Okay.
- [31:54]
B
But I'll give you, I'll give you a couple different versions of that. So one is I started having kids fairly late. So my kids are 22 and 19 still, I would say impressionable kids, it's important for me for them to understand the work ethic that for some, somehow my parents instilled in me and my wife's parents instilled in her. And they see the two of us working incredibly hard but passionately about what we do. It's important for me, for my kids to see that and for me to say, I hope my kids are proud of me. It's important for me. I have really come to my sort of passion around all this. Obviously, as we talk about family meetings, you can hear it, I hope, in my voice, I'm passionate about helping families. And so whether that's through my consulting practice or whether that's through Leaf Planner, the more families I can help, whether it's avoiding the outrageous circumstances that I went through, I mean, clearly nobody else should be going through a Supreme Court fight over a tax case, but whatever everybody else's complexity, if I can help with that, the more families I can help. That drives me every single day. How can I help these families not go through this? And then there's a personal checkbox on my resume that is. I was never the builder of something. I had a successful law career. I had a successful family office career. I've got a successful consulting career. But I want to build something. And when I say build something, you understand, I'm saying, like, in a business kind of sense. So Leaf Planner for me is the culmination of that. To say all these things that I've done over 35 years as a professional have led me to the ability to do this and that in my own personal, egotistical. I need my own therapy over. It will help me check that box. But those are the things that probably drive me the most.
- [33:44]
A
I would say that that when you mentioned egotistical, that qualifies as good, healthy ego. Right? I mean, yes, for anybody to be in this, the business, you're in the business. I am financial advisor. You know, we've got to have a healthy ego. We got to bring that. To bring that confidence to bear. And we need to keep it in check sometimes, too.
- [34:05]
B
Absolutely.
- [34:05]
A
And that's. That's what marriage is all about. So, just teasing, sort of. Hey, this is. This is great. And I'm glad I asked you that question, Josh, because my mission is similar in the sense that I. I believe that every person on this planet deserves to make educated financial decisions that are in their best interest. And, you know, that looks different for different people in different places, etc. But everyone deserves to do that to have the knowledge and then to be able to make those decisions. And sometimes they won't make those decisions without an outside guide. Right. Without an advisor or consultant or something to help them maybe see the way they've been moving up to this point isn't in their best interest. So yours has just taken what I have kind of on steroids to the next level. So that's great. Well, thank you. My future guest on today's show has been Joss Canner, Family Office executive advisor to Families of Wealth and founder of Leaf Planner. Josh, thank you for all the value provided to our listeners as a guest on Top Advisor Podcast.
- [35:14]
B
Thanks for having me, Bill. It's been great and I hope some of this has been valuable to your listeners.
- [35:19]
A
I'm sure it has. I've loved it to you. The listener of this podcast may ask a small favor. If you like this episode or like the podcast in general, please leave a five star review on the platform you're listening to the show. Not all platforms have a place for reviews, but if yours does, I'd be grateful. Thank you. And I invite you to come visit me. Visit with me@coach Kate's coachcates.com we have some new coaching programs we've just put out and if your organization, or if you're part of an organization that brings brings in speakers, would love to come visit with you guys and gals and see if I can bring some value in a live presentation. This is Bill Cates reminding you that ideas do not make you more successful. Only acting on those ideas will bring you the success you desire. Thanks for stopping by. Thank you for listening to the Top Advisor podcast brought to you by Proud Mouse Pot Rocket Academy. I encourage you to Visit my website referralcoach.com for links to my books, online courses and to register for the Cates Academy.