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New look, a new suit. I’m kind of digging. Yeah, it is. It’s a little bit, you know, you got to get used to it. I see you on one side of the computer screen. Now I see you in person. I know, but stay on your side. there’s a line right here. side of the couch.

Well, it’s good to see you. It’s nice to be together here in sunny Orlando today. is. The weather’s finally turning a little bit warmer. Thank you, Jesus. And how exciting it’s been over the last 30 days or so. We had all of our employees down here for our kickoff meeting are all hands. What do you think? Yeah, I mean, as in typical fashion, they brought the cold weather with them, right? It’s third year in a row of it being 40 degrees when our folks are coming to defrost in the Sunshine State. But it was great, man. I mean, a lot of

Conor (02:07.787)
A lot of momentum being built around our ecosystem and the value proposition that we’re trying to bring to our advisors. And I think there’s just a lot of excitement on what’s happening in the market. We are going through a market cycle where, as kind of the tide goes out, we’re seeing a lot of opportunities for those that are actually innovating and actually caring about what that end client experience looks like, such that it allows us to come in in a different way that maybe we’ve been able to show up when.

Everybody was getting the tailwinds of a market that just naturally was going up every day. Yeah, that’s absolutely true And as you as you mentioned, there’s a lot of projects that we’re working on right now that I think what we what we know look like and feel like today may not be what we know look like and feel like Six months from now. Yeah. Yeah, I mean last year we we kicked off one of your initiatives, which actually You always get to be the guy asking questions. I’ll ask you the question. What brings you to Orlando?

Yeah, we’re very excited to have another one of our Good Life CEO summits, which is something that we do that is by invite only for select advisors that we really want to engage to help them start to think more like a better business owner. Yeah. Right? And every day they show up to their office in that financial advisor mode. How do we start to reframe their day where they’re actually in that business owner mode?

making decisions from a business owner standpoint versus just a, I’m servicing another client today. So excited to have a group of our folks with us for the next few days and we’ll have a little fun with them and hopefully we’ll all learn a little something together. Yeah, I think one of our learnings last year was just that we really tried to talk to our advisors through those three lanes, right? The advisor’s capabilities as an independent financial advisor and who he’s got lining up next to him.

the advisor’s ability to be a chief executive and cast vision and then has the right tools and people around him to execute that vision. And then the third one is if you do those first two things right, what’s that impact the shareholder value? And so one of the cool things about that CEO summit is it’s taking the advisors through a journey that’s less about the widgets and the financial planning tools and the different strategies they might be able to implement with their clients. There’s always going to be that forum for that and there’s always going to be the…

Conor (04:30.984)
that’s always gonna be changing and evolving while the advisor that is already in the independent space already has a great foundation poured for that stuff. But one of the things that we’re excited about is just helping these advisors through that CEO journey. What does it mean to cast the vision for the firm? And then a lot of guys that we’re talking to as head of business development is these guys that are inside of wirehouses and regionals and.

They’ve never even had that idea that this business is an asset that has a considerable value to it inside of their family’s financial plan. And so when you start to create the right, not just the right tools, but then communicate that tool out, those tools out to the advisors in a way that empowers them to think in those three different veins, it just opens up their mind, it opens up our…

our ability to lead and teach them differently and really starts to create that differentiated value that could let folks bring all the time. Yeah, it’s exciting few days everybody walks away feeling pretty good about what they’ve learned and maybe even create themselves a bit of a roadmap for things they want to change in their practice and then coming in behind them with some support to help implement those changes. How many people go to meetings, know, they take some notes on best practices, shove them in a drawer, never see them again.

Not what this is. So when we say it’s for a select group, it is for those advisors who are open-minded and still kind of curious about their own growth potential as a business owner. It’s pretty exciting stuff. Yeah, we know the industry is going from $35 trillion to $70 trillion over the next 10 years. And that the advisors serving those $70 trillion will be a lower headcount than the headcount that we know today. And so…

If advisors are already at capacity, how do we help them to elongate that runway so that they can bring in those clients, they can continue to use this business as a mission field to help those families grow their wealth, and then in turn, they’re not going home with a thousand things on their mind every night? I really think that our hypothesis is that us solving that, anybody solving that is going to give that firm a leg up as people start to care less and less about commoditized platforms.

Conor (06:50.084)
and more and more about creating that differentiated value that sits inside of the advisor’s office. Yeah. You know, on the way back from the last trip, the all-hands trip, one of the things that was, when you see everybody in the room at once, right, it kind of gives you a different perspective. And I think back to maybe five years ago when in the room was kind of, you you, myself, and a few others, and I looked across now 45, 46 employees. How

Great does it feel when you look across that landscape at the talent level that not only we’ve developed from within, but that we’ve been able to attract from outside. mean, there’s some high caliber talent that we’ve been able to bring in the door. Yeah, I mean, I think it’s a testament to the work that the organization’s done to try and just make sure that the culture was in the right place. One of the cool things that we get to do every day is set that culture in.

It doesn’t make it a bad thing if somebody’s culture is that they create this weekly or monthly or quarterly happy hour for employees and advisors or that they do a semi-annual regional meeting or whatever the case is. They get to dig, or that the car that everybody drives to work at a BMW, something defines a culture. And I think one of the things that we’ve been intentional about is creating and fostering this sub-community.

that is entrepreneurial in its nature. And then again, having the right people support those entrepreneurs that are also thinking like entrepreneurs themselves. Naturally, you’re gonna attract a different type of person because what we know about those athletes, those entrepreneurs that are showing up every day is that to be successful in that lane as an advisor or as somebody supporting a segment of the business that thinks that way, the tendencies that are so consistent, it’s the guy that’s the first one in the locker room and the last one to leave.

I think, I mean, it’s not just the volume of folks and it’s not just the paper resume that a lot of these folks that are coming into our organization bring with them. But it’s the things that we don’t see that don’t show up on paper. It’s that hard-nosed work ethic that really has been a part of the good life pedigree from day one, that blue collar work ethic to a white collar job. Now, you take that and you support that with a place that’s attracting those nine and 10 employees, you know, on a scale of one to 10, those nines and the tens.

Conor (09:14.081)
and the nines and the tens advisors who are then gonna go out and develop those sevens and eights into the next round of nines and tens. I think historically, you kind of look back at a lot of startup companies and for us that startup was back in 2012 and you really start to say like, hey, back then I might have a few nines and tens but I also have lot of three, fours and fives. I am hiring people with a pulse that can help me execute that initial version of what this thing was.

the evolution of where we’ve come to under the leadership of some of the folks that we brought in the last couple years is now at a point where those Folks that are been with the organization from the beginning have elevated themselves to the nines and the tens and they’re going and finding other nines and tens to come along for the ride It’s really exciting. Yeah, it’s super exciting and that was just one of those reflections I had Going home after that trip. So Pretty cool. I think you start to see the evidence of it all too

Because think about what we got recently from our broker dealer and how we sort of squared up against our peer group in that system. I mean, from a net new asset perspective, what our group did compared to everybody else from a recruiting, bringing in new advisors. I mean, I don’t know about you, but number one feels pretty good.

Yeah, mean, when you talk about net new assets, that’s one of those key first things that you look at in terms of health of an organization and priorities of the organization. And for us to see a lot of our peers that were in the past in that high single digit, low double digit range. Now that the water gets a little bit choppy, that kind of reversal back to that two and three percent. And then you look at what we’ve been able to do, obviously,

Because we’re smaller and more nimble and more agile Being able to come in and and get consistent in that double-digit area It’s showing one thing that when we say we care about the advisors that we serve we’re not just saying that we’re demonstrating that every day by landing inside of their business and Helping them with the things around the horn that that otherwise would be hard for them to get to yeah one of the cool learnings that we had Recently was just this idea that like you had these big companies that

Conor (11:37.288)
know, mutual fund companies and product oriented companies at kind of a 50,000 foot level. And then you get down to the 40,000 to 30,000 foot level and you get down to those platform providers and the IBDs that start to know the advisor getting closer to the advisor, but they’re still so massive that despite the desire of leadership, they can’t get low enough in the ecosystem to make that meaningful difference for the individual advisor practice. On the flip side of that, you have that individual advisor.

that’s saying, hey, you know, I’m doing six, seven, $800,000 in production, but they look at what the business needs and they look at, especially now with the rising cost of wages over the last couple of years, what infrastructure it would take for them to invest into. I was saying to somebody today, you know, have, you put three or four key pieces around the business and the advisor knows better than anybody else what that business needs. And you start to chip away at,

the gross value of what the advisor’s bringing in in terms of revenue, all of a sudden he’s looking at it and saying, man, that 30 % payout at Merrill Lynch doesn’t sound too bad anymore. So you have the big companies wanting to get low in the ecosystem, and you have the individual producers that want to get the resources that they need but don’t have the money to get there, and this guy can’t reach down low enough, and this guy can’t reach high enough. And so in that middle,

is where we’re starting to play and we’re starting to play that meaningfully where we can make those investments as that company that has the balance sheet to be able to do it. But still, we’re not so big with the ability to write a blank check, but we’re nimble and agile enough to actually make that meaningful difference because we’re sitting at the altitude inside the advisors practice to make that difference every day. Yeah, amazing. You know, we had a chance to address all of our advisors a few weeks ago in a sort of state of good life address.

And there were some interesting points that were made during that. A lot of advisors had great success in growing their practice last year as a result of market returns and some tailwinds that we were experiencing. But then we had another group of our advisors, our prime partner advisors. So if you’re a prime partner advisor and listening to this, shout out to you. That grew at a clip that was twice

Conor (14:01.786)
what the average advisor grew last year. We’re talking about 31 % growth for that group. And a lot of that had to do with their ability to successfully deploy capital into their business, which is something that a lot of advisors don’t think about. How do you position that when you’re talking to advisors who might be considering taking a capital injection into the business? I got a lot of thoughts there. I think the first one is,

It’s not just that they were able to successfully deploy capital back in their business, is that we helped them to create the roadmap to do that. So it’s not like all the advisors are saying, hey, as soon as that check comes in, which was a check that we wrote to give us the right to participate with them on the journey, well, we’re going to take this and we immediately know we’re going to put it into these four different investments. That wasn’t the case. You know, this is a journey that we ran alongside those advisors and individually prescripted.

what was necessary to help them grow their business. So if you are willing to reinvest back in your business, here’s the way that we would activate those different lanes for you. And so that growth is result of that. It’s also the sustainable growth because the investments that we’ve made are investments that are gonna stick the course of time. One of the things that we’ve been talking about a lot lately internally here is to set, when you position yourself as a private equity company, name any of the players that we all know.

The journey for them and the advisor ends on that little minority liquidity event. That check comes across the table. Everybody’s happy. The advisor gets to go out and do whatever he wants. Some 5 % of them left unguided without any help are going to make the great decisions on exactly knowing where it needs to go in the business. Probably the majority of them are going to look at that as a small liquidity event that they’ve earned, which they have, but they haven’t really said, I’m going to take this money and grow my business.

My business is fine the way it is. But what we’ve been able to do is to say, hey, let’s use that as the jumping off point, not as a point where the relationship ends, but where the relationship begins. Where this check, while it’s meaningful to you and it’s meaningful for us, make no mistake, to come out of our bank account to go to yours, that is literally our right to, we’re doing this to earn the right to run alongside you.

Conor (16:24.759)
And what does that look like? Well, that’s being able to look behind the curtain now and see what good life has done to create this curated environment where you don’t need to go spend the $700,000 a year on the six staff members to support the growth apparatus that we want to build in your business. We’ve already made that spend. Now we just need to get that implemented into your business. So you have the growth chassis and the service and support chassis alongside the team of activation.

that we’ve built to help those advisors actually put the right tools into their day-to-day operations with the capital injection that they’re getting, and they’re off to the races. They’ve replaced that income that they’ve sold, and their enterprise value has gone up, because again, we’re leaning on those three different veins, advisor, CEO, and shareholder. Makes a lot of sense. Well, I think that it’s exciting, and I want people to ask themselves this question, because we…

pose this in our CEO summits, if I put, pick your number, $250,000 on the table today for your practice, do you know what you’d do with it? Or what would you do with it? And if it’s sort of a blank stare, like I don’t really know, there’s the opportunity to engage, dive in, and start to really think about how you get the maximum ROI as a business owner on that. That’s Yeah, mean, and it requires discipline. Again, the easiest thing to do is to take it and buy a book.

or to take it and put a renovation on the house or whatever the case might be. But when you see that look in a certain entrepreneur’s eye, that they want to unlock the capacity that their business has to go and grow, man, it’s a cool thing to see. And I think that that’s one of the elements of a property diligence is like seeing what the heart is of that advisor and are they actually willing to make that investment back into their business.

You know, we look at advisors in really three different segments. Are you a goer, a grower, or a stayer? And we know that much of the industry is going, that there’s probably going to be a turnover of 60 to 70 % of the industry over the course of the next 10 years. So that’s one key. What’s their issue? They don’t know who they’re going to sell it to because they built something that is so large in its value that they need to find the person that can afford the business, that is licensed, that can

Conor (18:40.156)
And it gets so narrow that it winds up always being this perennial buyer’s market. So you have your goers and their issues. You have your growers. Who are the guys that want to go from 70 million in assets to 150 or from 250 to three quarters of a billion? And what are their needs? They need to inject the capital back into their business, right?

And then you get your sayers and your sayers are probably just looking for that little bit of a check, get some liquidity and risk off the table. But I’m cool riding even keel and I’ll take the market tailwinds when I can get them. Our process is to take the advisor through a journey that really helps us to identify not what they’re thinking at the service level, but if we can go deeper and actually connect with them and see what is their desire to add capacity, what is their desire to grow the business, at least we’ll know where we’re starting from. But what you won’t see from us is us saying like, hey,

Here’s a check and we want to get preferred coupons and market insulated risk off the table for ourselves. No, we are an equal participant on the other side of the table that when they hurt, we hurt. And if we can share in that journey together and they’re willing to put in a little bit of the work that they know we’re willing to put in, the outcome’s usually pretty good for the advisor. Yeah, absolutely. Again, we mentioned at the top here that we’ve got a lot of projects that we’re working on.

What’s something that over the next, let’s say, 60 days you’re really excited about? I think the continued exploration to create that additional time and space. When we ask our advisors, what is the number one thing that is concerning to them that they have to deal with every day? The feedback we got back wasn’t the risk of making a bad recommendation or that they needed to implement a different tool, tech tool or something like that.

The answer they set back was service. That they are finding themselves bogged down with 60 to 70 % of their time being just getting clubbed with service requests. And as you grow your business, the service requests are inevitably gonna happen. So as we look at what happens this year, where we can make a meaningful impact this year, we have two key initiatives that we’re working on right now to really make that process dynamic and unique for our advisors. One coming in the next probably 30 days and the other one’s probably coming six months after that.

Conor (20:57.316)
But if at the end of the day, we’re anchored in this particular scenario, we’re anchored in two things. Getting our advisors the runway spaces they need, one, and two, honoring the client through that journey. Because the worst thing you could do is tell your client, like, hey, this has been fun and real, but here’s your orphan 800 number. Or like, hey, I have to charge you 10 times as much because right now your account isn’t worth it enough for me to pay any attention to it. There’s something in between there that we think that we can have a cool opportunity to explore.

to align better with our advisors and we’re getting there in the next 30 days. But then on the service side, think, you know, since the great resignation of the COVID era, all the large companies are struggling to provide ample, consistent, reliable, predictable service for their advisors. It doesn’t matter what custodian you go to, what broker dealer you go to, they’re all saying the same things. So our question is, how do we not sit on the same side of the advisors and complain about it?

But how do we actually create something that lives as an intermediary between service and the advisor’s needs? And I think that we’ll solve that. Our goal is to get that plan in place that just gives the advisors a different leverage point and allows them to be successful. And again, if service is 65 % of their tasks, but we can create an extra X amount of hours per week back in their schedule by getting them the right answer the first time without sitting on hold to get there. The first time. That’s the key. And that’s where we’re really hoping to…

to deliver on behalf of enhancing our client experience this year. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So, you I came in today and I’m an observant guy and I’ve got some concerns if I could bring those to you. man, let’s hear them. So I noticed that there was a pink bicycle with a basket in the closet next to us. that?

Yep, that’s mine. It is yours. No, no, no. is my daughter’s. Oh, it is? Yeah. That’s the story we’re sticking with? Yep. Yep. Yep. Okay. I mean, mine’s not pink, but it is missing at the moment. Long story. Okay, very good. And then, you know, I’m looking at the executive snack box over there. Yeah. I have concerns. Oh, do you? We’re going have to talk about them offline. I think for sure. Is there one over there that’s your favorite? Probably the pistachios. Just an easy quick grab, throw them back.

Conor (23:13.326)
Okay, it’s good to know what chief executives snack on the most. So, Pistachio’s free. I mean, at the end of the day, we don’t have a lot of time. So, I’m not, you know, making a hamburger in the middle of the day. There’s two seconds to pop a bag of chips. I could put a George Foreman in here real quick. That’s not a bad What, George Foreman? I don’t know if that would set off one of these alarms.

I see little George’s sizzle sizzle sizzle over here on the desk. mean, at the end of the day, man, we’ve talked about this at length, but your body is a temple. What you have to do to it to keep it operating at the right pace and the right level for you every day, it requires discipline. so whether that’s the workout that you got to get in, even though you don’t feel like it like mine was yesterday, or it’s getting the right nutrition so that your blood is circulating in a way that allows you to out think and out perform, you and I both know this. We’re not going to be the smartest guys in the room.

But we are going to do our best to work hard and be the ones that are bringing that discipline every day and lead our people that way. Yeah, that’s the key to the electrolyte coffee. Yes. Which we’ll talk about offline as well. We’ve got good stuff coming on the electrolyte coffee. Nice. Well, thanks everybody for tuning in to myself and Connor. Again, Nick Lopresti, Chief of Staff here Good Life, along with Connor Delaney, our CEO. We hope you enjoyed today’s episode and we look forward to catching up with you real soon.