The WealthStack Podcast
00:05:58 · Shannon Rosic
[00:05:58] S0: That's certainly a refreshing perspective, but you've actually had a front row seat to how advisory firms operate at different stages of growth. Right? So what's one thing you've noticed that separates firms that successfully scale from those that seem to maybe hit a ceiling regardless of how much tech or talent they add?
00:06:19 · Brad Johnson
[00:06:19] S1: Just because you're a great financial adviser, those rules, those behaviors don't make you a great business owner. Two very different skill sets. And one of the things I see with a great individual adviser that oftentimes is a founder, oftentimes an entrepreneur in our business if they're on the independent side, which is who we typically work with. When you go from playing a solo game to a multiplayer game, it's like, well, that was... It's like a video game. That get... That level was really easy, or at least you'd figured it out. And then when you go to a multi adviser team, it gets complicated again, and it gets frustrating at times. And you have to let go. It's not... If you want something done, do it yourself. If you want something done right, do it yourself. No. That doesn't work when you build a business in a multi adviser team. So you've got to start to delegate, empower, bring great talent onto the team, systems, processes, repeatable, duplicatable, trainable, someday sellable. So there's just a bunch of different behaviors that need to be formed, and that's where a lot of advisors get stuck, which is why that's what we coach on extensively here because it is a blueprint that is achievable, attainable, but it's very different from how most advisors grew up in this space. They went through the school of hard knocks. How they learned to sell or to bring on new clients took them fifteen to twenty years of figuring it out the hard way, And then it gets really frustrating when you have that next gen adviser that's 25, and they don't just instantly get it and start closing deals. But, yeah, you've gotta train them. You gotta have a process. So that's one of the things we help a lot with.
00:08:01 · Shannon Rosic
[00:08:01] S0: Great. I appreciate the background and the context, but I wanna jump into our first segment that I call stats all folks. And there was one number in particular that caught my attention, and that was 2,000,000,000 because Triad Wealth Partners surpassed 2,000,000,000 in AUM in less than three years, which is a very impressive growth by any measure. But what interests me isn't necessarily the number. It's what has to happen behind the scenes to support that kind of growth because adding advisers, clients, and assets also means adding complexity. So I'm sure that's more workflows, it's more data, more service demands, and really just more opportunity for things to fall through the cracks. So, Brad, when you look at the infrastructure required to support that kind of growth, where do you think most advisory firms are getting it wrong?
00:08:50 · Brad Johnson
[00:08:50] S1: I'll try to... There's a lot of directions you could go here, Shannon. So I'll just... The first one that comes to mind is regardless of where you grew up in finance, I feel like there's these... It's almost like religions. Where... What religion did you grow up in? I grew up in the Ed Jones religion, the Ameriprise religion, the insurance sales religion. So I think at the end of the day, all of that with AI, with technology, it's all converging. It's the general client out there in the market space right now that's a pre retiree retiree, which is what most of our members work in that space primarily. They don't wanna be sold anything. It's... That's like the nineteen eighties Wall Street movie, Stockbroker. Like, that's that... In my opinion, that era is over and technology is ending it very quickly. And so what they actually want is goal based planning that meets them where they're at. Here's where I am. I have uncertainty. I have anxiety because I don't have a plan. Here's where I wanna be. And so, if you can go into a conversation, you're curious, you start to understand, and then put the best options in front of them that get them most efficiently from where they are to where they wanna go, We've seen that work over and over. So one of the biggest things that we added that was not part of the original build, we call it operating by member obsession here, borrowed a bit from Amazon, they call it customer obsession. So why is it... Why does everybody buy stuff from Amazon? It's so easy. Click, it's there. No credit card, no address reentry, boom. It's there probably the same day. If you operate at Triad that way, it is what are the themes that we keep hearing from our member firms that's getting them stuck, that's overly complicated, that's a ton of data entry, that all of the stuff that bogs firms down and gets in the way of them serving clients, how do we fix that for them? And one of the big one of the big gaps was our distribution believes that both insurance and wealth management is the best way to accomplish retiree goals. Right? So it's put more tools in the toolbox, and then as a fiduciary, reach in, select best tool to solve problem most efficiently.
00:11:08 · Brad Johnson
The problem is when it comes to technology and distribution for advisors like insurance and wealth management, the tech doesn't work together, the data doesn't flow, there's a lot of disconnect there. And so we actually started by breaking down this kind of siloed build where it's insurance brokerage, wealth management, annuities, life, and we basically built a hub and spoke model that starts in the middle with advanced planning. So when I'm an adviser, I have a client with a million, 2,000,000, 5,000,000, we've served clients north of 50,000,000 on the platform. I can make one phone call to a team led by a c f... CFA, multiple CFPs on the team. I can start to have client focused conversations. Here's the goals. Here's the lack of planning in place to get them there. It starts there, and then we pull in the proper tools to solve the need where most of the industry sells the product, and there's... They truly don't actually deliver on the plan. So we start with the plan, and then pull the product into the plan and we've seen that create massive breakthroughs. Firms that weren't working with clients that had more than $1,000,000 of investable assets are now routinely working with $10.15, $20,000,000 investable asset clients because they've got the firepower and bench behind them to actually build the plans they deserve. So that's been one of the biggest breakthroughs.
00:12:35 · Shannon Rosic, Brad Johnson
[00:12:35] S0: Much sense. Honestly, that approaching it from that way, saying almost the tech comes second. Define your business model and who you wanna be and then build in from there because I wanna pull on that tech thread just for a minute here because you alluded to it that there's been this long standing belief in our industry. It feels like that the more sophisticated your tech stack, the more efficient your firm becomes. But I think we've all seen at this point that even firms with an impressive technology collection can still be incredibly inefficient, and maybe we're still even overestimating what technology can actually solve. And I know that Triad has made some significant investments in your own tech infrastructure. You brought in a CTO to help build those more connected systems and AI driven platform. So when you're evaluating technology for advisers in your ecosystem, what problems are you prioritizing? How do you distinguish between tech that genuinely creates capacity and tech that just introduces another layer of complexity for the sake of having it? [00:13:36] S1: Yeah. So recovering nerd alert. I'll admit it. I think he might be with me in that club. I'm not sure. [00:13:45] S0: But Are you too?