The WealthStack Podcast
00:22:47 · Brad Johnson
[00:22:47] S1: So my my take on that, Shannon, is at this stage, we're recording this towards the end of twenty twenty six. So a year or two from now, it could all change. Who knows where it goes? But at this stage, AI is a great complement to a great human. Yeah. There are some things that it could replace, but I'm not confident, especially in our industry right now because as as we sit here today, 10/23/2026, read an article this morning, all of a sudden banks are cutting back that AI agents are basically logging into bank accounts, making transactions that aren't approved. Okay. So imagine if that was your client's bank account. Imagine if it was your client's PII sitting in your inbox because you've enabled like an AI EA. Right? That's not a good look. In fact, you might not be in business if that happens. So I'm not putting a business and finance at risk by adopting too early and then things go haywire that I can't control, and now I'm out of business. So an EA specific to that role, I believe it's the number one missing role in finance. If you look at every Fortune 500 CEO, they have an EA, maybe multiple EAs. In finance, you look at some of the largest producers, largest firms in the country, almost EA's a nonexistent role. So why is it here and not here? I believe it's because most financial advisers weren't ever coached on why they need one. So inbox management, scheduling, bookkeeping, like all the things that bog you down, I wouldn't even wanna do this job without an EA. I look right now, like over to my right, my wife has substate volleyball today. Actually, tomorrow. High school football tonight, substate volleyball tomorrow. She's a high school coach. I would have always had the intention to go get some balloons, a card, good luck, and then life would have happened, and I would have woke up Saturday morning and said, oh, shoot, I forgot to do that because I was slammed all all week with work. Now, the intention is matched by the action, and that's a great EA, proactive, get ahead of it, make you sure up... Show up on the business side how you want to, make sure you show up on the life side how you want to. And so, obviously, to our approach here, but huge proponent of EAs in this business.
00:25:12 · Shannon Rosic
[00:25:12] S0: Love that. One thing I find interesting is that, to your point, we spend so much time talking about the ROI of technology, but far less time talking about the ROI of an adviser's time. So if I'm spending hours on tasks that could be automated or delegated, there's an opportunity cost that doesn't necessarily show up on a traditional p and l. So how should firm leaders be thinking about the economics of their own time, and what are maybe some of the biggest mistakes advisers making when deciding what they should personally own versus hand off?
00:25:47 · Brad Johnson
[00:25:47] S1: So I used to do this coaching exercise, and it was the... It was like the number one thing when I would coach somebody on this, their jaw would drop and they'd be like, I never thought about it that way. But here, I'll give you the simple version of how to do it. Take your total revenue as a firm last year, and then top line, and divide it by 2,000. And if you do that, basically, that gives you a very rough estimate of your hourly wage as a founder. Right? Now, granted that you're not taking into account payroll and all of that, But a very simple way, and two... Why two thousand hours? That's if you worked forty hours a week and took two weeks of vacation. As we know, many advisers take much more vacation than that throughout the year. So that means the number's less, which means the number's even higher than the number you just calculated. So let's just say that number is 500 an hour. And then look at your calendar. And I will pretty much guarantee you there is a lot of stuff on there that if you hired somebody for $500 an hour, you'd be like, that was the worst hire of all time. Why am I paying them that much? The truth is you are paying them that much because it's you doing it. And so when you start to look through a different filter and say, wow, checking emails for two hours every day, focusing on somebody else's to do list because that's what email is getting in the way of me actually doing my to do list, which is worth exponentially more than that because if you're actually sitting with clients, your time is much more valuable than $500 an hour. And so once people start to understand that, it cracks open the idea of maybe I should write a check and never do that again the rest of my life. And those are the the fastest highest growth firms in the space. They do not spend time on activities or tasks that are below their hourly wage. And a lot of advisors still do, and that's what's getting in the way for their growth.
00:27:50 · Shannon Rosic
[00:27:50] S0: I can imagine that's a massive light bulb moment then for folks trying that exercise. So if you take away anything from this conversation, I think that was a a great point. But say I'm an RIA owner listening to this conversation and realizing my firm has become just far too dependent on me. Where do I start? Because before I buy another piece of technology or hire another person, what are maybe the first two or three things I should evaluate about how my business actually operates?
00:28:22 · Brad Johnson
[00:28:22] S1: The first one that comes to mind, most founder led firms, and that's not everybody. Some some firms have outgrown that. But what we see is we see some very high growth firms that come to us and we're like, how many advisers drive the revenue for your firm? It's all... Almost always 80% or more of the revenue is driven by the original founder. And so if you think about that, the old hit by bus test, if anything happens to that founder, the business is essentially done. It's over. It doesn't exist after them. And so if you want a sellable business someday, and that doesn't mean you want to sell today, but guess what's really cool? To have the option to sell if you decide to, but you're not required to. So the number one thing, which is one of the first things we typically coach on, which is also why we run a boot camp monthly in our office, we call it Sales Lab. But that probably doesn't do it justice because really, it's like going to Chick fil A and learning how to run a franchise. There's a reason they have a mock restaurant at Chick fil A headquarters in Atlanta. It's really cool. Go check it out if you haven't. It was a very eye opening tour we did a few years back. But if you think about a Chick fil A, imagine how much gross revenue they could do if they had one cash register. It would be a fraction of what a one one of those franchises does in reality because you walk in, there's always a line out the door, there's three or four cash registers open. Then you go through the drive through, and it's not just the drive through, it's the other person with the iPad. And so if you think about that in adviser world, most firms, when we meet them the first time, they have one cash register. It's the founder. And that cash register is doing a bunch of free refills. That would be review appointments. So every other person in line is asking for a refill. They're already a paying customer, so you're sitting there, not that you don't have to take care of clients continuously, but the highest growth firms, these salespeople make sales, these service advisors do service, and those are two separate lines. So the free refills go to the service advisor, the new paying customers go to the sales advisor. So we have a model we coach on called the Triad advisor model, sales service planning. What is the coordination of that?
00:30:41 · Brad Johnson, Shannon Rosic
So now founder led firms can truly scale next gen advisors with a dialed in systematized sales process that's repeatable and duplicatable and super coachable. So if somebody's not following it, we can see where it's broken. Last point, tie it back to AI. The best most widely used AI tool in finance right now is AI transcription. Is that fair, Shannon? I feel like just about every advisor's using some I [00:31:05] S0: do agree there.