Between Now and Success

The growth of United Capital is a fascinating case study in how being early on a trend, M&A, technology, financial life planning, and a charismatic leader all came together to create one of the industry's biggest and most innovative RIA firms. Today, we'll take a deep dive on this story through one of firm's longest tenured employees, Matt Brinker. Starting at $0 in 2005, Joe Duran founded United Capital, and one of his early hires was Matt Brinker. Matt joined the firm when it had about $300 million in AUM and rode it all the way to $24 billion in AUM. He left after 13 years when the company was sold to Goldman Sachs in mid-2019. Most recently, Matt was the chief business development officer and head of acquisitions for the firm.

If you're not learning faster than the world is changing, then you are going to fall behind very quickly. And businesses that fall too far behind usually don't get a second chance to catch up. A big challenge for financial advisors is, how do you stay on top of everything that's required to run a successful advisory business? As Josh Brown put it at the recent Wealth/Stack Conference, "A good advisor is both coach and quarterback, on-demand psychologist and personal friend, historian and futurist." That's an awful lot of ground for us to cover in our personal and professional learning. Plus, we have to track technological advances that are impacting our industry, while also adapting to best practices that help our businesses stay ahead of the competition. If you haven't made a commitment to learning one of your top responsibilities as a CEO advisor, today's episode will help you get with the program. My guest today is financial planner, author, podcast host, and speaker Taylor Schulte. Taylor is the founder of Define Financial, a financial planning firm headquartered in San Diego, CA. He's also the co-founder of Advisor Growth Community, a place for financial advisors to connect with and learn from each other, and the host of two excellent podcasts, Stay Wealthy and Experiments in Advisor Marketing. Taylor and I talked about why all financial advisors need to be lifelong learners, our sources for learning, and we share a few marketing ideas too.

When was the last time you talked to a Netflix employee about your account? How about an Amazon employee? I'm guessing for most of you the answer is: never. Netflix automatically charges my credit card every month and uses its algorithms to push content it thinks I'll enjoy to my home screen. A shipping problem or return request with Amazon is usually resolved with a couple swipes or clicks. It's efficient customer service, but it's all faceless, online, impersonal. Now, when was the last time you stayed at a Ritz-Carlton or Four Season? How did that experience make you feel? Pretty darn good I bet! The key to your success as an advisor is to marry the tech efficiency of an Amazon with the deluxe service of a Ritz-Carlton and underpin it with high technical competence. It's really a three-legged stool—tech efficiency + deluxe service + technical competence. I sometimes worry that our industry has become so obsessed with the tech efficiency leg of the stool that we are losing sight of what clients are really paying us for—helping them make better financial decisions so they can live their best life possible. I couldn't attend this year Wealth/Stack Conference, so I invited two of my favorite past guests who did attend to recap some of the key themes that emerged from the conference. My guests today are Dennis Morton and Matt Wilson. Dennis is the co-founder of Morton Brown Family Wealth along with his partner, Kathryn Brown. Matt is the Chief Investment Officer and Managing Director of Keen Wealth Advisors along with his partner, Bill Keen. Here are four major themes from the conference and our thoughts about each.

Email Marketing is one of the most effective, least expensive, and underutilized marketing strategies available to you right now. I'm on the record as saying a person's inbox in the most valuable piece of marketing real estate you can own. When a person gives you permission to show up in their inbox on a regular basis, you can develop a personalized relationship that leads to new business and long-term loyalty. Now, you might be thinking, "Steve, have you lost your rocker here? Email is so 1990s. Why are you talking about email marketing? Email is dead. We've got Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, LinkedIn, texting, Instagram, webinars and much more, so why are you talking about a dinosaur like email?" Because it works! Just like I was early to the podcasting space five years ago when I started Between Now and Success, the next big marketing and education platform is a resurrection of an old one—email. I started using "electronic mail" back in the 1980s when I worked for corporate giants Caterpillar and Hewlett-Packard. In those pre-commercial internet days, it was a closed loop and I could send mail only to other employees. I thought it was really cool back then and today, it's even cooler now that your "email" is as unique and ubiquitous as your thumbprint. To explore email marketing, I invited one of the country's leading authorities on email marketing, Dan Oshinsky, to my podcast. Dan is the founder of Inbox Collective, an email consultancy that helps brands grow audiences, build relationships, and get results via email. Previously, Dan was the Director of Newsletters at The New Yorker, where he helped launch new newsletters, optimize their suite of products, and drive paid subscriber growth through email. Dan was also the Director of Newsletters at BuzzFeed, where he built a team that grew newsletters into one of the biggest referrers of traffic to the site and drove 250 million clicks to BuzzFeed. Dan also wrote more than 200 posts for BuzzFeed, including one that hit 1 million views.

A top-notch tech stack is table stakes. And you won't "out tech the tech titans" so you can't win on technology. So what can a financial advisor do to remain relevant and thrive in the years ahead? You can double-down on your ability to humanize the advisor-client relationship, to understand and deliver on exactly what your clients really need, and you should do it in a technologically-enhanced way. "You're not competing on your toolkit or the software that you deploy in your office," says podcast guest Lex Sokolin. "You're competing on the core need, which is that most people don't have enough money. They don't know how to retire. They're super anxious. I think the smart financial advisor will shade the constructs of how they work and move towards what the human need is in this evolving world." Lex Sokolin is the Global Fintech Co-Head at ConsenSys, a blockchain technology company building the infrastructure, applications, and practices that enable a decentralized world. Lex is also a futurist and entrepreneur whose newsletter, Future of Finance, should be on your must-read list every week if you want to stay ahead of the curve (I read it each week). In today's conversation, we discuss the sweeping changes in the fintech landscape and what new skills advisors will need to thrive in an industry that's getting more digital and more automated every day.

"You're either growing or dying." How many times have you heard that chestnut? Too many! But what if you decided you didn't want to grow? What if you decided you'd be happy at the current size of your business and just add new clients when an existing client leaves or passes away? Does the thought of that idea make you vomit or is it liberating? If you decide it's all about growth, what are you willing to sacrifice to scale? My guest today, Carolyn McClanahan recently decided her practice was "big enough" with 100 families and she has now closed her firm to new clients. Carolyn is the Director of Financial Planning at Life Planning Partners in Jacksonville, FL and she has a fascinating background. She's actually a M.D. who decided to become a CFP® after she and her husband couldn't find a financial planner who provided the kind of life-planning advice that they really wanted. After she opened her own firm in 2004, Carolyn split her time between advising some of her doctor buddies and treating patients as an emergency room doctor. In our conversation, we discuss how Carolyn replaced the old "big book" financial plans we all remember with a more personal, goals-based narrative approach. She also talks about her unique fee structure of pricing based on complexity, and we discuss how she concluded that 100 families was the optimal size for her practice.

The classic educational seminar still works if you spend the time, and yes, the money to do it right. My podcast guest today, Matt Gulbransen, has mastered the science—and art—of delivering seminars that convert. Matt is the President of Pine Grove Financial Group, which is an RIA operating in the St. Paul, Minnesota area. In our conversation, Matt discusses what attracted him to seminars, what works for him, a few things that don't, the kinds of events he hosts, the formula he uses to calculate his ROI, and, maybe most importantly, the emphasis that he and his team place on rehearsing your presentations until not even a power outage is going to throw you off your game.

Today I'm going to share 3 maxims used by Navy SEALs that drive their elite performance. These maxims have been used by SEALs for decades and have proven their worth in thousands of Special Operations missions in every corner of the world. The good news is, they'll work for you too. Apply them to your business and to your personal performance and watch your results soar. My guest today is Commander David Sears of the United States Navy. David retired after serving for 20 years in the Navy SEALs. He's a decorated veteran who planned, led, and executed hundreds of Special Operations missions in more than 40 countries on five continents. In our conversation we talk in-depth about three maxims that guide how Navy SEALs operate. Each maxim is so nuanced that once you dig into the surface-level truth, you'll find deeper levels of insight that can apply to any kind of business – including, of course, financial advisory. I really love making these kinds of connections. I firmly believe that to be successful in any business, you need to diversify your inputs and learn as much as you can from whomever you can. You might not think that advisors and Navy SEALs have a whole lot in common. But more often than not, I've found that strategies that the absolute best of the best use to excel in one field have lessons for folks in other businesses as well.

Imagine for a moment if you could build a highly profitable practice that served a total of just 10 families and individuals. And through your personalized, indispensable service you could create clients for life, and perhaps even for a generation or two. That's exactly what David Dunn is doing at Kingsbridge Wealth Management. David describes Kingsbridge as a family office featuring a "full stack financial infrastructure" that provides high-net-worth families and individuals with everything they need to manage their wealth. That means a thorough understanding of how each client thinks about their money, offering specialized services, and incorporating some outside-the-box thinking on asset allocation (hint: it's definitely NOT modern portfolio theory). Even if your typical client's net worth is in the 7-figures, as opposed to 8, 9 or 10 that David works with, you'll gain a great appreciation of the psychological and service needs of all investors and how to apply that understanding to better meeting your client's needs.

You're not going to reach the top of this profession without having a competitive streak in you. And when you channel that competitiveness into "winning" for your clients and "winning" in the growth of your business, that's a dynamite combo. Today's guest, Michael Bapis, is a competitor who played golf for the University of Utah, then collegiate-level basketball while studying abroad in Greece for two years. After finishing school, he moved to Phoenix and ran Jim Flick's Golf School at Desert Mountain. Once he decided to follow his father into finance, Michael kept learning and achieving at a very high level, first at Morgan Stanley, then at HighTower. In 2018, he opened Vios Advisors under the umbrella of Rockefeller Capital Management, working with high-net worth individuals, pro athletes, and entertainers. We connected in person at the 2019 SALT Conference and discussed a wide range of topics including two key lessons he learned from his early mentor Jim Flick. These lessons became foundational cornerstones for how he built his advisory firm to more than $1 billion in AUM.