The WealthStack Podcast
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.
00:31:05 · Shannon Rosic, Brad Johnson
[00:31:05] S0: do agree there. [00:31:07] S1: Okay, now, how do I adjust my sales process? I've been running the same way for twenty years if I've got this new tool. Now, if I've got a fact finder, I can speak the fact finder into existence through my words which are captured, and now that flows. This is one of the things in Triad AI, it's flowing into the CRM. Now we can start the build, but here's what's really cool, we can start to benchmark. Because now, firm a, firm b, following similar process, next gen advisor over here in firm a, 10% close rate. Next gen advisor in firm b, 40% close rate. What's the difference? Oh, interesting. In his first visit, he's missing bullet two and bullet three and he's talking 98% of the time. Coaching opportunity. Over here, and you can very quickly start to use that data to improve your process, better serve your clients, and now at Triad, we can coach better because we're coaching on real math, not imaginary math. And so it's just really cool how all of that stuff can start to work together. So long answer, but I would say the biggest disconnect I see, most advisors don't know to... How to transfer twenty, thirty years of knowledge, learn through the school of hard knocks into a repeatable, duplicatable sales process so they can add advisers to the firm and scale.
00:32:29 · Shannon Rosic, Brad Johnson
[00:32:29] S0: It certainly seems like we're on a massive learning curve in our industry right now, but it's also very exciting because it will continue to challenge folks to just reconsider their skill sets like you said. So I'm excited to see where it goes. And also to your point around the transcription and note takers, it's allowing folks to be a lot more proactive around their advice. So my hope is that when you have access to these types of tools, you're able to go deeper on those relationships because it's naturally catching things that you aren't able just to listen and write down and be able to retain all of it. So my hope is that the industry just gets much more proactive around around servicing their clients. So I appreciate your insights there, and I'm... Now I'm hungry, and I'm gonna have to DoorDash some chicken nuggets from Chick Oh, yeah. How did [00:33:15] S1: this episode? You deserve it. You've had a good week. [00:33:17] S0: Thank you. I agree. But it is time now, Brad, for segment two of this episode called ask us anything where I have gone out to the social universe and asked folks to submit their questions and... That they want answered by you. And we had a few folks slide into the DMs this week. If you're prepared to be put in the hot seat, I'm gonna throw a few questions. The hot seat. [00:33:36] S1: Let's go. [00:33:38] S0: Alright. First question we got, what's in your stack right now? What technology solutions are providing the greatest value for your business? What... What's working?
00:33:50 · Brad Johnson
[00:33:50] S1: I'll go with something that's unique to Triad because I think AI transcription, there's kind of the usual suspects out there that's not gonna be new news to anybody. I I think the biggest thing is what is the engine that drives everything, and we've invested a lot into Triad AI. And if I describe what that is, it's... I don't think saying it's a CRM does it justice, although it does that. It's really... If I look at most of our community, coming from the insurance space, one of the things that's unique is they're very good at direct response marketing. They've done dinner seminars. They've done educational events. They've done radio, TV, YouTube. Go down the proactive direct response marketing. The problem is if you look at those different slot machines. So you walk into the casino, put a dollar in this one, it pays out three. Put a dollar in this one, it pays out 5. Put a dollar in this one, it pays out 7. You would obviously put every amount of money into the $7 machine unless you could only pull that handle once every quarter because maybe that's a referral event and you can't you can't bleed that one dry. It's not as frequent. So the problem is most advisors when they show up to us, they don't know their spend, they don't know their ROI, they haven't tracked it, and they sure don't know what happens when it goes to different advisors, what's the closing rate. So what we wanna do is we wanna coach on math, not emotions. And so if we've got those feeding in an APIs so that they actually flow... The leads flow into the system where they're tracked, we know where they came from, we know how much they cost to get on the calendar, We now know they went to this advisor. This is the CRM part. And we're like, okay. They're following a process they've been coached on that is consistent, that's duplicatable. Okay. Now, what are the results? This one does twice as well as that one. There's obviously a reason for that. So now we can either level them up and get them to where they need to be benchmarking, or unfortunately, sometimes you have to coach them out because they're just not a fit for that role. So the the problem with all of that, it's so data intensive. Oh, yeah. I had this person. They were supposed to fill out a spreadsheet, but then they forgot to for a month. They got too busy. Now you're missing a month of data.