Advisor Resources

Betterment for Advisors Case Study Q&A: How Truepoint lowered the cost of serving more clients

Betterment for Advisors Case Study Q&A: How Truepoint lowered the cost of serving more clients Founded in 1990, Truepoint Wealth Counsel is an independent and nationally-recognized RIA based in Cincinnati, managing over $4BN in AUM and voted among the 2020 Top Workplaces by the Cincinnati Enquirer. Non-paid client of Betterment. Views may not be representative, see more reviews at the App Store and Google Play Store. Betterment’s Alex Choi recently sat down with Brad Felix, portfolio manager at Commas (formerly RhineVest), a subsidiary of Truepoint Wealth Counsel, to hear about how the firm has successfully leveraged the Betterment platform to grow the practice. Alex: Tell us a little bit about your practice and the factors that have contributed to your success. Brad: When Commas started in 2015, I realized how technology was changing the wealth management industry. Betterment was one of the disruptors driving that change, and we saw how the Betterment for Advisors (B4A) platform could lower an advisor’s operating costs. We wanted to leverage those cost savings to serve those who don’t necessarily have a million dollars (and that’s a lot of people). We've grown from 0 to 338 households since 2015. Growth was supercharged when Truepoint Wealth Counsel acquired our firm in 2016 and there’s been no looking back. Alex: How does Truepoint think about segmentation and where does Commas fit in? Brad: Today, Truepoint’s True Wealth service offering represents our firm’s bread and butter where we provide tax and estate services. But we still want to serve other clients well and do right by them. So segmentation just makes sense, and the Commas/B4A combination offers a great solution. B4A and Commas started by serving clients with less than $1 million but are now starting to serve clients in the $1 to $3 million tier as well. Alex: What were some of the biggest hurdles you encountered while you were initially growing your business and how did you navigate those? Brad: I think the hardest thing for every new firm is distribution; and with the less than $1 million client segment, it can be a challenge to convince people that they need a financial planner. A lot of people feel like they don't qualify. So the first marketing push was letting people know that they had options beyond an insurance company or a bank, and that fee-only fiduciary advice was available regardless of how much money you have in your investment accounts. We tried to do that in a number of ways: a kind of radical, very transparent website that clearly showed pricing and the fact that we had no minimums. We created an edgy brand to show that we don't take ourselves too seriously and that everyone needs and deserves access to financial advice. We've also done some work around search engine optimization (SEO), focusing on keywords like “financial planner” and local searches in our Cincinnati geographic area. We like to rank well in those local searches and believe that our memorable brand and website helps us attract new clients. I think there's an advantage to being different when compared to lots of financial planners that kind of look the same. I would encourage others to define a unique message and lead with that because it does help you stand out. Although things were slow at first, at some point it just clicked. Delivering on your promises and serving clients well will get that flywheel going where they're telling their friends about the good experience they've had at your firm. Alex: I have always been a big fan of your firm’s website. Can you talk a little more about your process for building that out and why you chose to include what you did? I think a lot of our clients aspire to build similar type sites and would appreciate how you went about it. Brad: I appreciate that. We worked with a really good local designer who pushed us to come up with a very simple message about why we were unique, why we were different. Our biggest goal for building out our site was transparency. We know that consumers are tired of landing on websites and still not being able to understand how much they would pay for something. We’re very clear, very upfront because in our minds this is the first stage of trust. We want people to talk to us, so our “let's talk''' button is all over our website. If the website conveys enough trust to get them to have a conversation, then we can be successful in moving them to the next stage to be a client. We felt that Betterment had an attractive product so any chance we had to note our decision to utilize Betterment’s B4A offering and also to highlight how we're providing value to the client seemed to resonate with people. Alex: So how does Commas position Betterment for Advisors to its clients? Brad: We describe Betterment as our technology partner. Given Betterment’s increasing brand awareness, we talk about Betterment alongside Fidelity and Schwab, and people are comfortable. It’s part of our tech stack just like anything else. In addition, we're in the business of financial planning. It's what we do. In that vein, we've always viewed Betterment as a complementary partner, not a competitor. Alex: How do you price your offering, and how do you communicate your firm's pricing to clients? Brad: Our financial planning fee is $65 a month, but we also believe investment management is an essential part of the whole package. Our investment management fee is 80 basis points, which includes the Betterment fee. Alex: Does Commas leverage some of the client behavior functionality like goals-based planning modules and behavioral guardrails? Brad: Well, to be honest, the advantage of partnering with Betterment is that it also has a retail product and you put in the research to know what's a good feature, what's a good design choice, how do you get a better outcome, better behavior, etc. We honestly try not to interfere with the work you all do there and really just let the platform guide our clients and focus them on what we do best. We really spend most of our time on financial planning and just working through all the goals a client has set up in the Betterment system. Alex: Can you tell me some ways your practice has become more efficient? Brad: Very simply, the Betterment platform significantly lowers our cost of doing business. So account sign up, trading, cash management, those are all ways that we're not spending money on labor. We’re maybe unique among the firms that are using your platform in that we never intended to use Betterment as a solution only for children of our clients, but we now find that we can serve as many people as possible. Automation and efficiency are key to our profitability, because we provide great service at a higher client to advisor ratio vs. the industry. Alex: Could you just kind of take us through what the experience would be for a new client from when they hit your website to you guys actually opening and transferring their assets and where Betterment may fit into an onboarding workflow? Brad: The Betterment technology helps us to compress our onboarding cycle considerably, sometimes to as little as a day. At the end of an introductory client meeting, we send a welcome email that has a link to the questionnaire that helps us learn more about them, a link to open a Betterment account, and a link for our financial planning fee. The client signs our agreement as part of the automated Betterment signup process. Depending on what they fill out in the questionnaire, there may be additional automated follow-up. For instance, if they have certain held away assets, another email asks for more information. Once all the information is received, the advisor can then get a good look at their entire financial picture so that at the first financial planning meeting the conversation can focus on what's important to the client, rather than all the administrative details. Alex: What additional tools and automation do you employ along with Betterment? Brad: We subscribe to the “low code” or “no code” technology trend. The whole idea is that you don't have to be a developer to create automation between different systems. And that's really the whole premise of what we started experimenting with three or four years ago. We started using Zapier to tie together different pieces of our software. We use Typeform for our initial client questionnaire that we send out and that questionnaire is delivered by Mailchimp, which is a common email service. We also had a CRM at the time, so linking all those together. The basic discovery workflow started when a client booked a meeting through Calendly and then received the questionnaire. Ultimately that information would flow back into our CRM without our advisors doing anything. We were focused on determining how we can spend more time talking with clients and thinking critically while automating everything where human interaction doesn't add value. Alex: So it sounds like you’ve compiled a pretty big tech stack. Do you still find from a unit economics perspective that all those monthly subscriptions are saving you money? Brad: Yes. Our tech stack is not your typical financial industry tech stack. We're bucking the trend on what people say we should use and looking at other industries to find different, innovative tools. We’ve found that pricing for these non-industry tools is dramatically lower. We got rid of our CRM and now use Airtable, which I think everyone should check out. We use a client-to-advisor ratio to help us guide profitability. In a standard firm, this ratio is roughly 100 to 1. Even at 200 to 1, we would have profitable outcomes, but at 300 to 1, we’d feel really confident that creating business in this segment can deliver industry-like margins. It's just a different type of model. It's higher volume, perhaps less complexity, but requires a lot of efficiency to get there. The other metric of course is average account size, but the more efficiency you can create, the lower your average accounts can be. In full transparency, our first business plan assumed an average client balance of $100K. Over time we have far surpassed that. And I think it's only going up from here as we've realized this platform can be used to serve not only clients below a million, but in the $1 to $3 million range. Our average balance is only going up and we're only getting more efficient. Alex: What recommendations do you have for others thinking about how to build out their tech stack? Any resources you’d recommend? Brad: I typically recommend that before people look at available technology solutions, that they start with a whiteboard and draw what they need the technology to do. Then find the tools that fill that need. As far as resources, I’ve scooped up tons of information from #fintwit on Twitter. I think in this new economy that you don’t have to be a developer. For instance, you can build a website yourself much more cheaply than you could 10 years ago. And with subscription-based tech, you can find solutions that allow you to connect everything together yourself. The reality is the operating cost of running a business like ours over the last decade has declined substantially. But not everyone knows or realizes that yet. Alex: What would you tell advisors who might be skeptical of using a platform like a Betterment or someone else's? I think there's always skepticism around whether an algorithm can perform certain activities such as trading, rebalancing, and asset location. However, the contributions of an automated platform with impressive technology and execution can really shine during a situation like COVID, which came upon us so fast, but was met with industry high records of near-daily rebalancing of client accounts on certain high volatility days. Most human trading teams probably couldn't keep up with that pace. The other concern that advisors may have would be working with a lesser-known custodian. In my mind, custodians are more of a commodity at this point. It becomes a non-issue for most people once you educate them on what a custodian does, what they don't do, and what it really means to be somewhere else, while also articulating the advantages that they can give you. Finally, the Betterment UX provides people a clear, visual representation of their whole financial picture in a way that I don't think anyone's ever gotten with other online platforms or traditional custodians. Alex: Any parting comments? Brad: The one message I would like to tell everyone is don't just think about Betterment as a way to serve one segment of your existing high net worth business. Go out and build a business to serve the broader population because the market opportunity there is huge, there's no competition, and millions of people need financial advice. We hope that other advisors can learn from our experience in their consideration to utilize automated platforms and other tools.

Betterment for Advisors Case Study Q&A: How Ritholtz reaches a new client segment

Betterment for Advisors Case Study Q&A: How Ritholtz reaches a new client segment Matt Lohrius oversees the Liftoff platform at Ritholtz Wealth Management, which began leveraging Betterment’s platform more recently. Ritholtz is located in New York City and manages more than $2.7 billion in assets. Non-paid client of Betterment. Views may not be representative, see more reviews at the App Store and Google Play Store. Dan: Tell us about how the sort of robo-advisor aspect of things works within Ritholtz Liftoff. How do you guys organize it and think about it? Matt: As you probably know, our core business was focused on high net worth households, people that were staring down retirement or leading up to it. And we put out a lot of content—whether it's blogs or The Compound (our YouTube channel)—so a lot of people are following us and telling us they’d like to become clients. But many of them didn’t fit our traditional high net worth, pre-retirement customer profile. But clearly there was a demand, and we wanted to help these people. So that's why we created Liftoff, which we’ve continued to improve over the years. But it really blossomed once we started working with automated platforms like Betterment. There’s no minimum, so it’s great for people in their twenties or thirties who are maybe just starting to invest. Dan: Tell us a little bit more about Liftoff’s ideal client profile. Matt: There are a couple of different types. One would be someone who's on the younger side and who is in the accumulation stage base. They may not yet be married or have a family, but they’re starting to make money and they want to save in a smart way. This type of investor also wants access to an advisor for questions that do arise: around what they should be doing differently when they do get married or start having kids. I also love talking to people who have just graduated college, because they’re such enthusiastic followers of ours. We’re happy to accommodate them. Dan: This is obviously a big potential for growth. How do you think about growing Liftoff? Matt: I think we want to grow it as big as we possibly can and take it as far as we can. And that's kind of my mindset: I get on the phone with everyone who wants to chat. Hopefully we do get to the point where we need to bring more of me to oversee twice or three times as many Liftoff clients as we have right now. Dan: What have been the biggest hurdles to growth so far? Matt: One hurdle is that there's always going to be people out there that would rather just do it themselves and that's fine. We totally understand that. But there are still plenty of other people out there who don't even know where to start. And so we're looking to reach that group of people. Dan: Do you find that there is a catalyst that brings the self-directed types to you? Matt: Yeah, it could be a year like this one that we're in right now where people who have been investing on their own for a while reach out because of all the uncertainty. They are looking to get a little more advice. Dan: Talk a bit about the culture within Ritholtz to new technologies. Matt: We're all about it. Outside of the Liftoff channel, Ritholtz is looking at technology to onboard clients more quickly and smoothly. We know it’s possible—with Betterment and Liftoff, you can open an account like that. So we want to be able to expand that kind of capability throughout our entire firm. And that really just involves us looking at all the technology we currently have to streamline the client experience. Dan: Can you talk a little bit about the difference that an automated platform like Betterment makes in your day? Matt: For Liftoff, it’s just huge from a technology standpoint: opening accounts, transferring money from other custodians, depositing money, linking a bank account. Everything is so easy and intuitive for the client. And that saves us a lot of time: we’re not having to help a client with the logistics of opening an account and can spend our time with them focusing on advice. That's where platforms like Betterment really excel, with the operational efficiencies. I think a lot of advisors hear “robo-advisor” and sometimes get a little turned off, but who doesn't want operational efficiency? And that’s on both sides of the equation to clients and advisors. Dan: What if you go back, what initially sparked the interest in convincing you to start using a robo-advisor as a partner? Matt: It’s kind of just set it and forget it. It's easy. You have a durable, long-term portfolio. You're going to invest in it just to keep saving. That's the work that you need to do, is constantly save. And outside of that, you don't need to do a whole lot. It's helpful for a lot of people. And when we do have a client ask “Can I do my own thing?"—because there’s often that temptation—we tell them “No, you can't.” That's the whole purpose and benefit of this. You can go somewhere else and do that. But if you want a concrete long-term plan, this is where you're going to get it, and it's very likely to work. Dan: What would you tell advisors who are skeptical about using a robo-advisor? How would you help them to understand how well it's worked for you and your clients? Matt: People who are skeptical need to realize that this is a hybrid platform. Yes, the portfolios and operations are automated, but you have access to an entire firm. Because if you have access to me, you have access to all the resources that I have access to. And that can be powerful. Dan: Last question. Does using an automated platform like Betterment mean that you, as a CFP®, as an advisor, get to spend more time on bigger issue questions like planning? Matt: Yes, one hundred percent. That is the whole reason Liftoff switched to Betterment. With the custodians we had been using previously, there were a lot more operational emergencies that needed our time and attention. But with a platform like Betterment, all of that is taken care of so that we at Liftoff can focus solely on providing quality advice. That's all we want to do here. Automation (through Betterment’s platform) is allowing us to do that now, which is why I'm confident that Liftoff will continue to grow. Ritholtz Wealth Management is a Registered Investment Adviser. Advisory services are only offered to clients or prospective clients where Ritholtz Wealth Management and its representatives are properly licensed or exempt from licensure. This website is solely for informational purposes. Past performance is no guarantee of future returns. Investing involves risk and possible loss of principal capital. No advice may be rendered by Ritholtz Wealth Management unless a client service agreement is in place.

Q&A with Paul Sydlansky of Lake Road Advisors

Q&A with Paul Sydlansky of Lake Road Advisors A conversation about going independent and scaling your business using the Betterment for Advisors platform. Paul Sydlansky is the founder of Lake Road Advisors, an independent, fee-only financial planning firm. He has worked in the financial services industry for over 20 years. Prior to founding his firm, Paul worked as a relationship manager for another RIA. He also spent 13 years at Morgan Stanley in New York where he was a senior level manager in the institutional equities department. Paul is a Certified Financial PlannerTM, a member of NAPFA and a member of the XY Planning Network. Non-paid client of Betterment. Views may not be representative, see more reviews at the App Store and Google Play Store. Q: Tell us a little bit about your practice and the factors that you think have contributed to your success in growing your RIA. Lake Road Advisors is an independent, fee-only financial planning firm. We specialize in working with mid-career professionals who have young families and that's been developing over time as our niche. Right now we have about 100 client relationships and manage roughly $60 million in assets. We have offices in upstate New York and in Long Island. We launched the firm in 2016. Before that, I was at a RIA where my views, goals, and values were not in line with the firm owners. For me, launching the firm was about sticking to my views – simplifying things for people, making things easy, and really focusing on what adds value to my clients. And for the niche that I work with, it's having somebody who is an accountability partner – somebody to bounce ideas off of, who can worry about all these things that generally folks don't have time to do, but they realize are super important. Focusing on those clients’ needs and making their lives easier has really led to our growth. Q: What were the biggest hurdles that you encountered when you were initially growing your practice, and how did you navigate those? Starting from scratch. I had a non-compete at the firm I left in 2016 so I had to start with nothing. Planning out my runway was difficult. I think for anybody who's thinking about starting their own firm, it's always going to be longer than you assume – if you're budgeting, I recommend you assume the worst and then add two or three times that in terms of how much you need. That was very difficult for me, starting from a position where really all you had to focus on for the first year or two was growth and making sure that I was developing enough of a client base to make the business viable. I was lucky that we had some good growth to start with and now my challenges are all different. But that was the biggest one – making sure that financially I had enough runway, I could still live the life I wanted and support my family while I was doing it, and making sure I was doing things the right way. Q: What role has Betterment for Advisors played in your growth over the last few years? When I was at Morgan Stanley, I was in private wealth management for a couple of years, but I spent the majority of my time in prime brokerage working with hedge funds. So I came into the financial planning business with a kind of skewed view of investments. I'll be honest, I believe in hedge funds and alpha creation and the ability to outperform. And as I've evolved as an advisor, I've really done a 180 and realized that for the majority of people, trying to chase alpha is not really going to change their life. What's going to change their life is focusing on blocking and tackling their cash flow, their spending habits, their balance sheet, not making silly decisions, creating good habits. Of course, we'd all like extra return. But I think the pursuit of that is going to be fruitless for most, and for the majority of people, having a simple, low cost, diversified portfolio just makes sense. So the firm I was at was an active manager and I saw firsthand what a disaster that was, to try to manage 800 individual portfolios and do things like tax-loss harvesting or rebalancing. It was just a nightmare and they spent a ton of time doing it. And in my opinion, it didn't really add much value to the end user because the manager was actually underperforming a lot. So for me, Betterment was number one given that the platform is easy to explain to my clients. Most of my clients obviously understand investing, but they don't want to spend too much time on it. Betterment allows me to do that. It's straightforward. They have one page in the app where they can click to see their performance and really quickly understand. It keeps things super simple. I don't spend any time on things like rebalancing, I don't spend any time on things like tax loss harvesting. It's all automated. And I know that frees me up to do things that actually will add value to clients. Q: Is all of your AUM at Betterment or do you use other custodians as well? Yes, so the majority is – I have a portion of it that is with Vestwell on their 401(k) platform. I have no other partners – it's all Betterment for my individual clients and then for my five clients who are on the 401(k) platform as well, that's the other system I'm using. Q: How does Lake Road position Betterment for Advisors to its clients? I've obviously had this conversation tons with different advisors. Everybody seems to be hesitant to partner with Betterment, saying – well, aren't they your competitor? Absolutely not. Because the way I view it is Betterment is a partner and a technology platform. So that's how I position it. First and foremost I say I'm a registered investment advisor. I am not a bank, I am not a broker-dealer. I've partnered with another firm who can allow me to leverage a system that really buys in perfectly to how I believe investing should be done for almost everybody. So for me, I position Betterment as a partner, as a technology solution, and I don't see it as competition. Q: How do you price your offering and how do you communicate your firm's pricing to your clients? Great question. What I do is tell the client one all-in price because as everybody knows, pricing can be confusing, and I try to just be as straightforward as possible. For anybody under a million in AUM, it's 1.25%. And again, usually it's a half a million minimum of assets. And the way I tell that to clients is that ultimately, I have a set amount that I'm trying to make for the firm, and a percentage does go to me, and a percentage goes to Betterment. My fee is for the planning work and obviously helping with the investments. And then part of that fee goes to Betterment for the technology and for all the tools that they're providing us to use. But I like to present it as an all in fee. And in addition, I have breakpoints. So if a client hits a million, that all-in fee drops to 1.1%, and then so on. I also have another offering where I have clients who have no investment management. It's just straight planning. And for those clients, it's a flat $5,000 a year. They are not on the Betterment platform, but it's another way for me to work with young families or folks who have assets tied up in their business and don't have the assets to manage right now at this point in their life. I'm up front with clients and say, “I only have so many seats on my bus.” I have one other gentleman who started working with me late last year. And so now that we have 75 relationships, ultimately I'm looking to try to make $5,000 minimum on each one of those seats because I know the amount of planning work we do. I know how many touch points we have, how many meetings, how many calls, how many zooms, how many visits. And so for me, that's kind of the minimum where I want to be with the amount of service that we're going to provide, the relationships that we're looking for to grow the business. Q: Are you typically using Betterment’s investment portfolio? Are you using different portfolio strategies for clients? Right now I'm using Betterment strategies for the majority of clients. I thought about creating my own portfolios but for the amount of time it would take me to research and keep on top of it, it just didn't seem like I was adding any value there. In addition to the Betterment portfolios, I've used the BlackRock portfolio, one of the income generating portfolios for a client where it was appropriate. Q: Aside from Betterment for Advisors, what else is in your tech stack? I use MoneyGuidePro on the planning side and my CRM is Wealthbox. I've been using Riskalyze and I've been really happy with them in terms of storing and having an IPS, and it's a great conversation starter and just a way to explain risk a little bit better to clients. I use Calendly. I think most people probably use something, but Calendly has been a huge time saver for me, for my business. Q: What are your client acquisition strategies? I've been pretty lucky in that when I look at the tracking of where my clients have come from, they've been pretty evenly split from a lot of different sources. The first has been friends and family. Another one is current client referrals. And a third one has been networks or traditional centers of influence like lawyers and accountants. In terms of marketing, I write a blog. I have over 100 blog posts now and while it was tough to do, it's a really good marketing tool. I answer questions on it that I hear all the time from clients and prospects. So if a client or a prospect reaches out I can tell them I just wrote a blog post about that. I also started to do some videos. Creating awareness and really connecting to your niche or your target market is huge. I went through the exercise of figuring out exactly who I want to work with and with everything I do from a marketing perspective, I try to speak to that person. That’s really been a driver of growth. Q: What would you tell advisors who might be skeptical of using a platform like Betterment or something similar? You need to think about your practice and where you add value to your clients. I do believe that there are folks out there for whom active management can make sense in some instances. But I think you really need to figure out how you're positioning your firm for the future – is it the planning you're going to focus on or is it the investment management? Where are you going to add value? What's going to differentiate you from other advisors? If you think that you're going to be focusing on planning and the relationship and accountability and all that type of stuff, choose something that automates other work for you. Because you going in and clicking a button to rebalance does not add any value and it just takes away from other things you could be doing. Q: How do you answer questions from clients that want to have positions that aren't part of the Betterment models, such as single stocks? What do you tend to say to them? Yeah, that's a great question. So I think that goes to fit upfront. I have a conversation upfront about my investment philosophy and how I don't really believe in holding individual positions. Ultimately, we do work with some executives and they have restricted stock and individual positions and options and you can't get around that. So what I tell people is if you're going to have individual stocks, by all means have a Fidelity account. Have a Charles Schwab account. Have a Vanguard account where you can do that as long as you want to trade it on your own and you're doing it outside of what you’re doing with me. Q: As an advisor who's also a business owner, how do you keep up with compliance as you grow your business? When I launched my firm, I launched with XY Planning. They helped me get up and running, but I outgrew it and needed a little bit more help. Since I'm in New York, I had to be SEC registered. I work with an individual who basically opened up a compliance firm that helps folks like us – the smaller size advisor. So I have an individual lawyer who helps me with the compliance. Because I'm still on the XYPN platform, I also use something called Smart RIA that's like a CRM for all of your tasks and all the things you have to do for compliance. And the other thing is, my business is super simple because of the nature of the investing. For anybody who's done the ADV, a lot of the questions are around investing and advice and things like that. My investments are so simple and so vanilla that I think because of the reduced complexity, it makes compliance a little bit easier. Q: Do you have any advice on how to coordinate your IPS with the Betterment portfolios? As part of my onboarding process, I make people go through the risk process. I use Riskalyze which connects with Wealthbox. So I check a box, and once a risk score is in Riskalyze it flows to Wealthbox, and it populates a field for me so I can see the score when I pull up the client. And then on top of that, when we start building out their plan in MoneyGuidePro, we have the ability to make sure that that score translates to Money Guide Pro. It’s not perfect right now, but it goes between those different systems. Q: The transition to remote work has been a popular topic. How have you adapted to that? Is there anything new or different that you're doing to connect with clients and prospects? No, remote work has honestly been completely seamless. From a system standpoint, I worked from a home office already. From a marketing perspective, it's really made me realize how important your online presence is. Everybody knows your website and blog and all that is important, but I started doing video too because I feel like it's a better way to connect with people. I've been using something called Loom, and I also took a class about how to do videos and best practices. Before I meet a prospect, if somebody reaches out online, I will send them a quick 20-30 second Loom video saying: Hi, I'm Paul. Thank you so much. I'm really excited to meet you, if you could just prepare this and that for our meeting, and so on. I've been told it has been really positive because people feel like they know you before they talk to you. Now I'm trying to incorporate it into my client service process too. So every once in a while if I have a follow up task, I can send someone a quick video and say, hey, it's Paul, we took care of that Roth conversion, you're all good to go, have a great day. Little things like that, I think those are going to be more important going forward. Seeing people on Zoom can be tiring, but getting a quick short video from somebody, a friend or somebody who's helping me with something, it's really nice versus an email. So I do think for me and my firm, it's going to be more focused on video, leveraging that and using that as a way to connect. Q: One last closing question: What advice would you give to new advisors who are just starting out? Aside from making sure that you have enough cash to weather the storm of the ups and downs, I think the other thing is making sure if you have a spouse or partner, whoever's going to be there with you, that they're bought in. Aside from the financial stress of starting something new, don't discount the emotional ups and downs you go through on a day to day basis. Having somebody who's supportive and who can be there in the good and the bad is very important. Your emotions go all over the place and it's still that way. As an owner, I don't know if it will ever change. I think it's leveled out a little bit but I still want to grow. If you would have told me when I started where I’m at now, I'd probably be really happy. But now I want to get to $100mm or $250mm. I'm thinking about my firm and what people I need to help me get there. So I just think having support at home from that person and making sure they're bought in is huge. Because if you don't have that, it's probably going to be difficult to do it.

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