Building a Collaborative Culture, Targeting Business Development Channels, Sustaining Scale, and Learning to Grow by Letting Go

Steve Sandusky [00:00:08]:
Welcome back to another episode of between now and success. I’m your host, Steve Sandusky. My guest today is Eric Brautman. Eric is the founder and CEO of b f g Financial Advisors. In today’s conversation, Eric and I have a wide ranging discussion where we talk about how he’s planning for his own succession, How to transition client relationships from one advisor to another. The critical role of teamwork, culture, and scalable processes in a modern advisory firm. We also talk about how to accelerate organic growth without losing the human touch, and how to structure compensation models particularly with advisors that support firm growth. With that, please enjoy my conversation with Eric Brautman.

Steve Sandusky [00:00:54]:
Eric, you have written a book. It’s called Don’t Retire Graduate. Building a Path to Financial Freedom at Any Age. So you know how books are structured. So I’d love for you to describe your path, your journey through the financial industry as if it were a book. And if so, what would be the title of the book, and what would be some of the main chapters? And ideally, is there a plot twist in there?

Eric Brotman [00:01:24]:
It’s funny because the title is already taken. It would be Forrest Gump. And the reason for that is that so much of my life has been a fortuitous accident, including getting into this business. I, like most great financial advisers, I was an English major. That’s a natural transition into finance. Studied English, was planning on law school, took a job at a brokerage firm and in the legal department and was on my way and fell in love with the financial business. And that was now 32 years ago. And I wound up going through some of the iterations early in the career.

Eric Brotman [00:01:56]:
I spent some time at a life insurance company. I started building a practice and getting all the alphabet soup after my name because I had no background in finance or accounting or any of those disciplines. And once I earned the CFP in 1998, I wanted to do financial planning. You cannot do that. You certainly couldn’t then at an insurance company. It’s still not easy, but it was impossible then. And so I found a more senior CFP who was looking to start a firm and needed some sweat equity. And I got a chance to be part of a start up in the late nineties, pretty well just in time for the tech bubble to burst.

Eric Brotman [00:02:29]:
We spent 4 years together. I learned an enormous amount from him. He was a wonderful mentor. And in 2003, I launched what is now BFG Financial Advisors with 1 full time and one part time person. And so now we’re 10 CFPs, 22 employees, clients in 37 states. And I’ve been at this now for 30 plus years. And I think if there’s a plot twist, it’s that all the things that I was super excited to do are now the things that other people in the firm are really excited to do. And so I’m beginning my succession plan now and transitioning into a role that probably I was born to play, which is a growth officer and spending time growing the organization instead of doing direct client advising because we have a huge team of people who do an incredible job with that.

Steve Sandusky [00:03:19]:
And was there a pivotal moment there, let’s say, from 2003 when you started BFG Advisors? What was or was there a big turning point that sort of changed the trajectory of the firm?

Eric Brotman [00:03:32]:
I think the turning point was taking on and selling some equity in my late thirties to then a junior partner and realizing that I did not wanna do this alone despite being the entrepreneur and the face of the firm. I really wanted to build a team. And so the combination of having started selling shares at a very young age and people thought I was nuts and then growing a team both organically and inorganically. So we’ve grown our organic client development has been strong over the years, but we’ve also added 2 other m and a activities to our growth. 1 being bringing somebody on who was 5 years from retirement, who was able to come and transition her clientele to us, and then we bought her out, and one who came in and has a long runway ahead with the company and is my successor. I think the if there was a big moment, it was when I realized I didn’t wanna do this by myself.

Steve Sandusky [00:04:25]:
And you mentioned that you’re already looking at your succession plan there. You did an m and a deal, and that person is

Eric Brotman [00:04:33]:
gonna be this successor. Mhmm. And are you still

Unnamed Announcer [00:04:34]:
managing clients today, or have you

Steve Sandusky [00:04:35]:
completely exited out of being a lead adviser? Very few. And I’m on

Eric Brotman [00:04:40]:
my way to exiting entirely over the next 36 months or so. It’s gonna be a a gradual transition because some of these people I’ve worked with for their entire adult lives and certainly mine, and it it is a challenging thing. Even though we have wonderful people, the relationships are challenging to sever. And so what I wanna do is I wanna make sure that, number 1, they’re in good shape, and number 2, that every one of the clients we represent knows that I’m still here for big life changing events, for philanthropy, for estate planning, if there’s a loss of a loved one, some of the big things that really are still I’m passionate about. I wanna be more of a utility infielder, a pinch hitter, Steve. I wanna be the one who gets brought in to assist when there are moments of either opportunity or tragedy as opposed to doing sort of the routine physical exams financially. And that way I can stay very much involved as an adviser, but not be on that treadmill that 30 years in any industry can create.

Steve Sandusky [00:05:37]:
I spent a lot of time over the years working with advisers on that very topic of how do you transition clients and relationships that you’ve had for 20, 30 years over to another advisor at the firm. So I’d love to hear a little bit more about that in terms of the actual conversation that you have with the client. How do you communicate that? How far in advance do you prepare for that transition? How do you decide which of the advisors in your firm might be the most appropriate advisor to work with this client? I’d love to hear any details that you can share there.

Eric Brotman [00:06:10]:
I can share that. That’s about a a 7 part question. So I’m gonna approach that in various chunks. First, in a perfect world, a transition of a client relationship is a 2 year process. And the reason that I consider it a 2 year process is it’s important for the incoming adviser or advisers to be in meetings with these clients along the way. It can’t be total strangers when they finally sit down together. And so for year 1 of that transition, there would be we do an annual strategy meeting, and we do an annual tactical meeting with clients every year. So there would be 2 sessions that I would lead, and they would be in the room and participating and getting to know and starting to build a relationship.

Eric Brotman [00:06:50]:
In year 2, we would both be in the room, but they’d be running the meeting, and I would be the so called arm candy and just there to to help take notes and and assist and and maybe provide perspective. And in a perfect world, come year 3, I don’t need to be in the room anymore. And we’ve had a fair degree of success with this over the last couple of years. I would say early in my career, when there were opportunities to transition clients to younger advisers, I would say we made almost every mistake you can make. This was not perfect, and it does come down to communication. It comes down to expectations. I think it’s really important. Clients generally want advisers younger than them.

Eric Brotman [00:07:28]:
They really do in the same way that I I wouldn’t want my father’s doctor. I wouldn’t want my father’s my father’s accountant, any of those folks, because I want them to be available when I need them the most. And so to have an adviser who is experienced, capable, competent, diligent, and ethical, but also 10 or 20 plus years younger means that when it’s your moment to retire or when there’s a health issue or when there’s some kind of major event in your life, there is someone who hasn’t retired, who is still very much there with boots on the ground. And I think that’s part of the messaging is to make sure that we’re here. The other part of the messaging, Steve, is that we are a true ensemble. None of us manage our own clients. All of us are salary based. So every client is a client of the firms anyway.

Eric Brotman [00:08:12]:
So we have about 700 families, most of which are multigenerational. And all of our advisors plug and play. So if there’s a situation where we have educational diversity, there’s a situation where we have somebody who’s a business owner is going to go through a transaction. We have one of our principals who does a great job with that specific issue. If there’s something around education planning or there’s something around a tax matter or there’s something around a divorce, we have people who have really built some niches within the market, and we can pull them in and say, here’s somebody who really knows how to value that closely held business, or here’s somebody who really understands what happens when a a household splits. Or I’m the person that gets called generally when a client or one of their loved ones dies. Not because that’s a fun thing to talk about, but because that’s my background with the life insurance and the estate planning and the legal side. I go to estate planning conferences.

Eric Brotman [00:09:05]:
I’m one of the only financial advisers there. That’s really that wealth transfer and wealth preservation and philanthropy, that’s really where I can provide the most value. And I can do that with any client if I’m not still on that treadmill. We wanna be agnostic. If a prospective client contacts the office, I want adviser a to take the call, have a conversation, say, you know what? You really need to meet advisor b so that there’s no me, my there’s no sort of desire to out produce somebody. There’s no compensation based on how much you’re selling to some none of that exists here. What’s good for the firm matters, and our younger advisers have paths to equity. So we have 7 different equity owners.

Eric Brotman [00:09:48]:
And as a result of that, as we grow and as we take folks on that bus, they benefit from the success of the firm, not from the success of their clients or their practice.

Steve Sandusky [00:09:59]:
Yeah. Getting back to the the client transition for just a second here.

Unnamed Announcer [00:10:03]:
Yeah.

Steve Sandusky [00:10:04]:
Over the course of those 2 years, is there a specific point in there typically where you clearly say to the client, I, Eric, am gonna be stepping into a different role here, and Mary is gonna be your quote lead adviser going forward. Is there a point when you have that type of conversation? I want you to be aware that rather than sharing all of my insights on a publicly available blog or podcast, I’m reserving some of my most provocative and insightful comments for my email letter called g t k, and that stands for good to know, and it comes out every couple weeks or so. Each letter covers a topic that I think is important and timely. And I also share a rotating cast of content that can include a few links to my favorite reads, my favorite podcast episodes, and some tidbits from insider conversations that I’m having. And I share all of this for free. To get access to the letter, just go to stevesandusky.com/letter.

Unnamed Announcer [00:11:03]:
That’s stevesandusky.comforward/letter

Steve Sandusky [00:11:11]:
and pop your email address in there and then confirm it with the email that you’re gonna get right after that and you’re all set. Again, go to stevesandusky.com/letter to get access to g t k. And by the way, you can always reply to each email with questions or comments. They come to me, and I respond. Alright. Back to the show.

Eric Brotman [00:11:33]:
Yeah. It happens early in that process saying that the reason that that Mary in your example is here is because I I wanna make sure that you all know each other because, ultimately, this is a role that she’s transitioning into, and my role within the firm is changing. And there can be trepidation around that, and every now and again, we get some pushback. But generally speaking, I think people understand this is a a natural progression in a firm of our size and with our depth. And I believe very strongly in communicating that, but we don’t always know way in advance. I don’t know exactly today what’s gonna happen a year or 2 from now. I know what I think is coming, but I I like to reserve the right to be wrong because I I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen. I I know what we’re trying to accomplish, but we may wind up, for example, a year from now, we might may wind up onboarding another adviser who’s got a a $100,000,000 book of business, and we have to suddenly all take on some new roles.

Eric Brotman [00:12:26]:
And I might get involved in a different way because of that transition. So I don’t know what’s going to happen. I know that we’re trying to be flexible. We’re trying to communicate. And our clients, there’s an enormous amount of depth. So I typically don’t answer my own emails. I have a I have a my right hand who goes through the emails, forwards them to the appropriate people, and every one of the clients who I work with has someone listed in our CRM as future lead adviser. They’re the ones answering the emails, returning the phone calls, and so forth for the routine stuff.

Eric Brotman [00:12:57]:
So by the time clients meet them and have sat with them, they’ve had communication with them before. They’re not a stranger. They understand that there’s diligence that they’re gonna get back to them. And quite frankly, as much as I travel, I’m hard to get. Like, I’m not that easy to book with right now. And a client who has a question who needs it answered is much more likely to get it answered the same day by someone other than me than if I had to wait until I got to that queue. It’s just not it’s almost impossible.

Steve Sandusky [00:13:21]:
For those of you listening that might be in this process or you’re gonna be entering this process at some point of trying to transition your clients over to another adviser at the firm, I actually did, a podcast on that with my coaching colleague, Amy Koenig, and we went into great detail on the specific steps that I recommend and the way that I that that I work with my adviser clients on that. And I’ve got it all written out too. So it’s something that you can download for free. So feel free to go to stevesandusky.com and look up the episode with myself and Amy on transitioning clients, and you can, download sort of the step by step process that that I recommend. So, Eric, I appreciate you sharing some of your thoughts there.

Eric Brotman [00:14:02]:
Yeah. I wish I had known there was a process on paper. You could have saved me a lot of time.

Steve Sandusky [00:14:06]:
That’s right. Good stuff. Thank you. So you started talking about how your advisers are structured, how they’re compensated. You mentioned that they’re on salary. I’d love to go a little deeper with that in terms of maybe how you think about career paths as well. And is it just salary, or is there a salary plus bonus? How do you think about advisor capacity? You mentioned you function as an ensemble, so I’d love to hear how you think about that. So I know I keep throwing a bunch of different questions at you.

Steve Sandusky [00:14:36]:
So I’m giving you some hooks here, and you can pick which ones you wanna go after.

Eric Brotman [00:14:40]:
Wanna get to all of them, but I I’ve gotta I gotta remember one at a time. You asked about you asked about advisor capacity. So let’s start with that. We for our advisors, every one of our advisors, every one of our clients, I should say, has at least 2 advisors within the firm, usually someone more senior and someone more junior because of travel and because of the complexity of relationships and because of the availability to get somebody. Now we have something, you know, availability to get somebody. Now we have something internally. We have 2 different kinds of clients. We have private wealth clients who we meet with twice a year, and we have financial planning clients who we meet with one time a year.

Eric Brotman [00:15:14]:
So naturally, we can’t use capacity as just a household count because there’s twice as many routine meetings for some clients as there are for others. So we use something that we refer to as the private wealth equivalent, which is really the 2 to 1 ratio so that we’re trying to determine how many strategy meetings or tactical meetings should be held, should be on each adviser’s calendar for client retention and for client service and when they need an associate assigned to them. So for us, the number is 75. At 75 households, you either have 75 for 2 a year or 150 for 1 a year or some combination. That’s when you get a 2nd share associate assigned to you who’s going to start answering some of your emails and being in the meetings and handling some of the phone calls and doing a lot of the wrap up for meetings. And then when you get to a point that’s twice, that’s when you fit your capacity. So our capacity is 150 relationships basically that are twice a year. At that moment, you can’t take on new clients.

Eric Brotman [00:16:14]:
And we actually don’t want people to get to that capacity. That’s the moment where the associate, before they get there, the associate has to start receiving some of those opportunities to be what we refer to as a hybrid. We have some people who are associate advisors who are second chair for meetings, doing the prep, doing the wrap up. They’re in the meetings. They’re answering emails and calls, but they’re not rendering the advice directly. And then we have the lead advisors who, of course, are responsible for not just the relationship management, but for the advice. Once you’ve gotten to a point where you’re prepared to start being first chair, it doesn’t happen overnight. You don’t go from 0 to a 100 households overnight.

Eric Brotman [00:16:50]:
That’s not reality. So we actually have a position that we refer to as a hybrid adviser who has some client relationships where they’re still 2nd chair, some client relationships where they’re 1st chair. And the idea is that all those 2nd chair relationships should transition over a 2 year period or so to be 1st chair so that no one ever caps out their capacity because that’s not a that’s not a good sign. If you hit capacity for your senior most people, it means they don’t have time for business development. They can’t do as great a job as they want to, and they’re going to be stressed. And so we try to make sure that at 75, you have some help. And well before you get to 150, you’re doing some transitioning yourself. So that’s fantastic.

Steve Sandusky [00:17:30]:
Yeah. And then in terms of the career path, it sounds like there’s a pretty clear path there for folks from 2nd chair to 1st chair to getting support and that sort of thing. So any additional detail on that?

Eric Brotman [00:17:41]:
Yeah. We have 2 defined career paths here at the firm. One of which is designed to be moving someone toward the advisory role and one which is not, which is more of an operations or behind the scenes role because they’re both important, and we want them to both be treated with not only respect and reverence, but with the opportunity to grow their careers. So almost everyone who’s hired, if they’re hired and they’re green, they don’t already have clients, they’re hired as CSAs, their client service associates. They’re assisting behind the scenes. They’re spending their 1st year or 2 getting licensed and learning the business and handling some of the investment operations, the insurance operations, some of the planning and prep. And then after that happens, they can choose whether they want to move toward being more of a senior CSA or someone who eventually is going to be involved in some of our committee work, investment committee, marketing committee, finance committee, different groups of people who have other roles beyond just the CSA piece or if they wanna then move to being an associate. And, really, it comes down to the career path is written out, but it comes down to need.

Eric Brotman [00:18:44]:
At what moment is there a need? Do we need that next associate to step into that role, or do we need the next senior CSA to be doing much more high end high end meeting planning, meeting prep? Somebody who’s who doesn’t wanna be a client facing financial adviser can still be a CFP if they choose. They can still do a lot of the behind the scenes, the plans, the the power planning type work, the investment recommendations. The only thing they’re not doing is sitting down with the client and managing the 1 on 1 relationship. There are 2 defined career paths for people based on what they want to do, and one is not more important than the other.

Steve Sandusky [00:19:19]:
And in terms of the comp structure again, you mentioned that a base salary, but is there also a bonus in there? And if so, what’s that based on?

Eric Brotman [00:19:27]:
The base salary is based entirely on the investment news compensation study that comes out every year. We use that compensation study and we make sure that everybody’s at top quartile. That way we know we’re not losing anybody over money. That means compensation is fair, and it means it’s at the higher end of the spectrum without being and it’s very objective In terms of the bonus structure here, we have a few different ones that are available. 1 is a marketing activity bonus for folks who essentially do business development and land new clients that there’s always incentive around that because that helps grow the firm. There’s also a team wide profit sharing bonus. If we are more profitable than 25% come the end of the year, we share the excess profits with our non shareholders because the shareholders are already getting a bite of that apple in terms of dividends. And then periodically, we will throw in other incentives for things like recruiting an employee or other types of things like that.

Eric Brotman [00:20:19]:
But we have not done incentives around personal production per se because no one has their own book. I need employee or adviser a to be perfectly comfortable saying this person’s getting married, and I think they ought to work with you now for whatever reason.

Steve Sandusky [00:20:34]:
And you mentioned that you’re sort of evolving into a growth officer role.

Eric Brotman [00:20:39]:
Yes.

Steve Sandusky [00:20:40]:
Yes. Some firms expect that every adviser does both in terms of they do business development, and then they also are the adviser. Other firms really split those roles where they’re large enough where they can have a full time dedicated business development team, and then they have full time advisers who do nothing but just serve clients. So

Eric Brotman [00:21:03]:
Mhmm.

Steve Sandusky [00:21:04]:
Where do you guys fall on that spectrum?

Eric Brotman [00:21:06]:
I think we’re somewhere in between. Right now, I would say that the vast majority of the new business development still begins somehow with me, and that’s not something we wanna perpetuate. So our theme for the year is organic growth, and my desire is to spend some time with the 3 or 4 advisors within our team who really have a desire and aptitude and an an ability, in our opinion and their opinion, to learn how to do business development. So I’m gonna be teaching people how to fish instead of catching fish for them. But not everyone is really made for that. Some people are incredible technicians, but they’re not necessarily gonna go work a Chamber of Commerce event. Other people have that gift. And if we can have people play to their strengths without overburdening the folks who really would hate that, I don’t wanna lose great advisers because their compensation requires them to do a certain amount of business development.

Eric Brotman [00:21:59]:
If you’re handling client relationships and you’re doing a great job, you’re going to get referrals anyway. So even our people who aren’t active regular business developers, who aren’t wild extroverts are doing some biz dev just by virtue of getting to their clients, to their kids or family members or neighbors or coworkers or any of those other things. And so I think everyone’s playing a role, but for some, it’s going to be a bigger piece of their job. I can’t be the only one because I first of all, I could kiss the bus tomorrow. 2nd of all, I wanna do this for a long time, but not forever. We need to make sure there’s other people here who know how to do it.

Steve Sandusky [00:22:35]:
And for those handful of advisers that you’re gonna work with to help them become effective in business development, Do you envision some type of bonus program for them for bringing the business in, or how how how might you envision their structure changing?

Eric Brotman [00:22:49]:
That already exists. That’s the marketing activity bonus. So there there’s already an incentive to land new clients and to bring them into the fold. So I suspect they’ll be doing more of it than if they weren’t focusing on that. So I think it’ll work out financially for them too. But I don’t want to put people in a position where they’re miserable doing what they do because that’s so uncomfortable for them. And some people just aren’t comfortable doing that.

Steve Sandusky [00:23:11]:
So walk me through some of the the marketing that you’re doing today. So I know you’re pretty active on the media side. So Yeah. Tell me the story about how that developed and where you’re at today with that.

Eric Brotman [00:23:22]:
So I I have written 3 books and a workbook. So there’s material out there. We also do a lot of white papers or ebooks that we put out as as opportunities to not only grow our influence and grow our list, if you will, but also to do some education for folks. So that’s part of the the mass media type piece. And, of course, we have social media and and some other things, though we’re not advertising per se on that, but we do have a presence. I think the things that we’re doing that are a little different, I am focused really on 4 aspects of business development, which I don’t wanna confuse with marketing, but it is certainly part of that. One of them is working with centers of influence. And we went through our CRM, and we found that there were 600 centers of influence in our system.

Eric Brotman [00:24:09]:
There’s no way under the sky we have relationships with 600 centers, but it is impossible. So we’ve been going through Amanda and I have been going through this list and cultivating it and basically figuring out, first of all, where is there stuff in there that doesn’t belong? And then I’m reaching out to the attorneys and accountants and other advisors who work with mutual clients to introduce myself in my current role and spending some time with people. And we’re trying to figure out who are those active relationships likely to be because at the end of the day, I’d like to have between 2550, not 600. So that centers of influence. And I’m also using that as a way to help our young people fish. Because if I know there’s a senior partner at a estate planning firm who does great work but is my age or older, they probably have a young associate who also needs to learn how to do this for their firm. And I can sit down and be a kind of a matchmaker and say, I can bring one of the folks from our office to meet him or her. And next thing, they’re starting to build a relationship that from there, I don’t even have to be involved.

Eric Brotman [00:25:09]:
They can get together for coffee once or twice a year and and talk about business or join networking groups or or find other ways to work together. So that’s the center of influence piece. 2nd piece is we have a lot of strategic alliances with other financial advisers, and that sounds strange to a lot of people. A lot of people do a double take, but you can’t be good at everything. And so for us, we’ve got a a relationship with a firm in Pittsburgh that we really love working with, and they have a minimum asset requirement, and we don’t. We’re happy to work with folks with no assets or with assets that are not under our management for a monthly subscription, essentially. And so they will refer opportunities to us. We take great care of them and everybody wins, and there’s a revenue share.

Eric Brotman [00:25:52]:
Same thing. We have a firm in Manhattan where they do a great job with asset management, but they do no insurance work. And we have an insurance department. So rather than have them worry that either it’s not getting done or it’s being done by someone who’s going to try and poach their relationship, we work together. We share compensation. We do the meetings together. They’re on the same side of the table as their client when they’re having that discussion as the advocate, and we can help solve some problems for that client without stepping on their toes. We’re building relationship right now with a major 401 k producer.

Eric Brotman [00:26:24]:
We don’t do 401 k’s. We do we work with families and employees, and a lot of 401 ks producers try to do family work. They try to work with the participants and some of them do and they do a great job. Most of them don’t. Most of them do a great job with the plan, but don’t have the infrastructure or the manpower to also then work with the employees. So we can come in and we can work there where we’re not looking to poach their plan. And so these are just some examples, but I have a list of strategic alliances. I am active with with those kinds of things, and I’m looking for other financial advisers we can partner with and work with because there’s so much abundance, there’s so much opportunity.

Eric Brotman [00:27:02]:
And working together, it is so much better to see each other as collaborators rather than competitors that I just think there’s a huge opportunity for the right folks. So we mentioned I mentioned the centers of influence and strategic alliances. The next is the traditional media. And it’s not just the books and the publishing, it’s also the podcast. And I did 5 years of the Don’t Retire, Graduate podcast, and we took some time off for the book. And now the show is coming back January 1st 25, so we’re very excited. We’re scheduling interviews again. And every Thursday, there’ll be a new episode, and that has been great for business development and for brand awareness.

Eric Brotman [00:27:38]:
And it’s also a ton of fun. I mean, you know, you do it. It’s this is a ton of fun to meet new people and have and and get a chance to podcast. So that’s the 3rd. And then 4th is financial wellness, which so many firms say they do, particularly big firms. But what they’re really doing is they’re really saying, hey, we have an app for that. We actually put boots on the ground. We do education for employees.

Eric Brotman [00:28:02]:
Employers will hire us to not only do employee education, but then to do 1 on 1 consults with their employees on the employer time and employer nickel. And we have the opportunity to help them not only navigate their own financial journey, but also make sure they’re using their benefits properly because people just don’t understand them. So we do webinars, we do seminars, we do a full day education events, whatever employers want. And if we do a 1 hour webinar, it’s simple and inexpensive. We spend half an hour on the 10 steps to wealth building. It’s very straightforward, very basic. And then we spend a half an hour on a deeper dive on their benefit plan. And then when we meet with people, Steve, we find half of them don’t have beneficiaries on their 4 zero one k where they didn’t elect disability insurance because they didn’t know what to do, where they’re they’re not using their HSA properly, and the list goes on and on.

Eric Brotman [00:28:51]:
Simple stuff. And we’re not a threat to their benefit people, their HR department, their 401 k provider, or anybody else because we’re not poaching that. We’re working with these people. And what I what I tell folks is that money’s a little bit like oxygen. When you have enough, you don’t think about it. And when you don’t have enough, it’s hard to think about anything else. And if that’s true, then your employees, while they’re at work, if they’re worried about making the next tuition payment or mortgage payment or car payment or how they’re going to handle mom and dad, they’re not thinking about work. So if we can provide an outlet for them to get some advice they might never have paid for and to do it as an added employee benefit, that becomes a home run.

Steve Sandusky [00:29:29]:
I appreciate the great detail there. Very helpful. As you look at the amount of new business that comes in from those 4 channels, Can you give me a rough sense for, like, how many leads do these generate or how many new clients in 2024, for example

Eric Brotman [00:29:46]:
Sure.

Steve Sandusky [00:29:47]:
That are gonna come in through these 4 channels?

Eric Brotman [00:29:49]:
We will add this year about a 100 families as clients to the firm. The vast majority will come from one of those 4 channels. The only 5th channel being client referrals, which, of course, we’re always happy to have, and that they make a huge difference. We I’m involved in other things to generate to generate opportunities. We have a client advisory board that’s incredibly helpful. We do we work with study groups with other advisers. That’s incredibly helpful. We go to the industry conferences, which is helpful, but, we’ll have about a 100 households a year.

Eric Brotman [00:30:20]:
K.

Steve Sandusky [00:30:21]:
I’m I can be very numerical.

Eric Brotman [00:30:23]:
Mhmm.

Steve Sandusky [00:30:23]:
So I’m gonna ask you to take these 4 channels, let’s call it. And can you rank those from 1 to 4 in terms of how they have been most effective in bringing in new business?

Eric Brotman [00:30:35]:
Absolutely. Number 1 is financial wellness because you’re meeting with so many people that it creates this opportunity right off the bat. Because if you can get an employer to say yes and they have 400 employees, a 100 of them are gonna meet with you. 12 of them are going to say I have to work with you beyond this engagement, and then we’ll discount our normal onboarding and financial planning fee for them as an added employee benefit, and they’re delighted. So that’s clear. That’s absolutely number 1 in terms of headcount. In terms of sort of what second, I would say the second one would be strategic alliances. And again, it’s because it’s one to many working with a 401 k producer or working with a firm that that is also generating opportunities that they can’t handle or don’t want means that we’re getting an avalanche from those folks.

Eric Brotman [00:31:18]:
It’s not a one off like a referral might be. I would say centers of influence is probably 3rd, but I would also with the caveat that most of the new business that comes from centers of influence is the highest end client. So when you look at the revenue per client, the the depth of the revenue in that relationship, if it’s coming from an estate attorney, is generally going to be better than if it’s coming from an entry level employee in a financial wellness program. That’s the caveat. And I would say that the media piece is 4th and it’s a distant 4th. The writing books does not make you money. It becomes an interesting calling card. It gets you speaking opportunities.

Eric Brotman [00:31:54]:
It’s created consulting business for me, but it it hasn’t created a huge number of households joining the firm. I don’t think it hurts, but no one should write a book for the money. It does not make you money ever.

Steve Sandusky [00:32:06]:
Yeah. I’ve written a couple, so I know what you’re talking about.

Eric Brotman [00:32:09]:
Yeah. No. It it is a money loser. It’s fun. I love doing it, but you don’t make money on it. You can do I do a lot of public speaking, and I love to do that. And but normally, the books are sent to an attorney after a 1 on 1 COI meeting or they’re sent to to the employer to say, hey. If you’d like workbooks for your employees, we can do a bulk order for those, and the the workbooks are great.

Eric Brotman [00:32:30]:
People love being able to go through and build their own financial plan. The book is fun, but it’s not but it’s not John Grisham.

Steve Sandusky [00:32:36]:
But I think your point is well taken there in that. You may not be selling a 1000000 copies of it, but it is a great tool as part of the overall marketing mix, the marketing strategy you just mentioned there. You send a copy to a center of influence. You put a personal note in there. Correct. You say, hey, on page 82, we talk about such and such. I think this might be something that you and some of your clients might be interested in. If you have any questions about this, let’s set up a a call and we can talk about it.

Steve Sandusky [00:33:06]:
So Correct. Little things like that can go a long way toward deepening a relationship and really highlighting your level of expertise.

Eric Brotman [00:33:14]:
I would totally agree with that. And and I would also say that the short ebooks are much better for business development than a full published book. And the reason for that is that you can give them their own URL. You give them their own landing page and people will remember it. If I rattle off our website address right now and someone’s driving in the car, they will not remember it as they listen to the show. They’re not writing it down. But if I said go to low tax book dot com and learn some strategies for paying less taxes, people will go to low tax book dot com. They’ll look it up, and they’ll download some free information, learn how 5 20 nines and HSAs and life insurance and Roth IRAs work and all that kind of stuff, and they’ll remember it.

Eric Brotman [00:33:54]:
And then they’ll be on our on our communication list. They’ll start getting a newsletter or something, and then that creates opportunity. But the book itself, it that’s really tough. And I did the audio book, Steve. That is really tough. Sitting and reading a book is not the easiest thing in the world on camera.

Steve Sandusky [00:34:11]:
It’s funny you should say that about the URL because I still have ringing in my head a some ads that I kept hearing constantly some time ago. I think it was from Grant Cardone. Maybe it was him, maybe it was someone else. But it was tired of missing sales dot com. And he must have said it a dozen times in each ad, tired of missing sales dot com.

Eric Brotman [00:34:31]:
And you remembered it. And I remember it.

Steve Sandusky [00:34:33]:
And you

Eric Brotman [00:34:34]:
would never have gone to his site otherwise. No one’s coming to our website. A Google search is great. SEO is fine. It’s not where to spend money, though. It’s really not. You spend money on things like this, like being able to give out in a conversation, give out some free information. If you’re doing a talk, give out free information on the consulting side or on the financial planning side.

Eric Brotman [00:34:54]:
And if you’ve given something to people that they really want, that’s free. They will not forget that you’ve given that to them. And it’s not quid pro quo. Most people will look at it and maybe do nothing with it, and that’s fine. But for the ones where it really resonates, you have an opportunity to meet somebody you would never otherwise meet.

Steve Sandusky [00:35:12]:
I heard you say a little bit ago that you have no minimum at the firm, and I think you also said you have about 700 households.

Eric Brotman [00:35:21]:
So Yes.

Steve Sandusky [00:35:23]:
What’s like the AUM or the average household size? And then I wanna talk a little bit more about this no minimum idea.

Eric Brotman [00:35:29]:
Sure. Right now, we’re at about 750,000,000 under management. So the average household for us is about 1,100,000, but that’s misleading. That’s the mean. The median is much lower than that because we have 200 private wealth clients and 500 financial planning clients. And so there’s a delineation there. The reason that we don’t use a minimum asset base is that we were turning away folks that really, A, needed the advice and couldn’t find it anywhere, and B, who are going to have events down the road where their relationship with us will change. There’s going to be an inheritance or a business sale or a real estate sale or a change of job or something is going to come down the pike.

Eric Brotman [00:36:10]:
Who do you think they’re going to work with? They’re going to work with the folks that already know them and have already done some work with them. And so we don’t have a minimum on our financial planning for anybody under $300,000 with us. We charge them 2.50 a month to be a member of the firm, to have ongoing advice, to be able to email us or ping us with various things. For private wealth, it’s 500 a month. And that’s it. And for people with assets, obviously, if they get over various levels, we don’t charge the monthly. We don’t have to. The assets are paying the freight.

Eric Brotman [00:36:40]:
And for larger clients, we are absolutely offering added value type services. We have segmentation plans just like most firms either do or certainly should. You’re much more high touch with the families that are at the higher end because they require that type of handholding. They want it. They expect it, and they’re paying for it. So it’s a reasonable thing.

Steve Sandusky [00:37:01]:
You mentioned your degree is in, English. Mine’s in finance. So I often talk about the numbers. So Uh-huh.

Unnamed Announcer [00:37:08]:
When you look at the profitability of

Steve Sandusky [00:37:11]:
your private wealth clients versus your financial planning clients, I guess, a, do do you look at the profitability in some level of detail?

Unnamed Announcer [00:37:19]:
Yes.

Steve Sandusky [00:37:19]:
And if so, as you look at the financial planning clients where I think you said you’re charging $250 a month, they may have less than 300,000 in assets. And I’ve done this analysis with a lot of advisors over the years where they are losing money on a significant percentage of their clients. And, obviously, it’s being made up on the larger clients. And so there’s always this question of, okay Yeah. Is it fair to the large clients that they’re subsidizing the losses on the small clients? And is it fair to the small clients where they’re basically even though, quote, they’re paying a service, they’re paying a lot less? So how do you think about but on the other hand, I wanna serve everybody. I wanna help people.

Eric Brotman [00:38:04]:
Your point’s well taken. And I was in your camp until one of our partners, Johnny Niebuhr, spent some time and did a pro form a just based on the financial planning, this concept of financial planning for all and what it could become. And so many firms were parting ways with clients below a certain minimum or simply not taking them on. And I was in that camp. I was thinking that’s exactly what we need to do. That’s what the that’s the direction that the stream is going. And so we have become salmon swimming in a different direction upstream. The short answer is our financial planning for all is profitable.

Eric Brotman [00:38:37]:
It’s not nearly as profitable, but it is profitable partly because it is one meeting a year and they’re all remote and partly because they’re working with advisers at a much lower salary level than the salary level that the private wealth clients are working with. So when it comes to figuring out what it costs to service that book of business, it’s actually very modest. No, it’s not fair for larger clients to subsidize smaller ones. That is something that would make anybody unhappy. And I can say that’s not happening here. I would say that the financial planning clients are by and large creating enough profitability that it’s worth doing. And then the private wealth is what is that is what’s giving shareholders ROI. So if the combination of the 2, if all we had was the financial planning for all division, we’d be profitable, but not enough that someone would say, I’ve got to buy that stock.

Eric Brotman [00:39:29]:
The combination, though, is really good. And we’ve had a lot of cases where financial planning clients suddenly move over and become private wealth clients because an ESOP comes due or a 401 ks rollover happens or a or a mom passes away and suddenly it’s $4,000,000 And because that’s happened enough times, we don’t even consider that in the profitability because they’ve already jumped ship. If we were to add that back into the folks that we onboarded as financial planning clients who are now 7 figure clients, the ROI would be a whole lot better.

Steve Sandusky [00:40:03]:
Yeah. And your points are well taken. And along those lines, what I say to advisers is I’m not making any judgments here. My role is not to judge whether you should work with no minimum or not. Mhmm. What I wanna do is just a, deal in reality and make sure that we understand what the situation is. And then you can make a decision on where do you wanna position yourself in the marketplace. Meaning and I have advisers come to the conclusion that we’re here to serve people.

Steve Sandusky [00:40:33]:
And if it means that 10% of our clients we’re losing money on, we’re okay with that. And we’re gonna consider that sort of our pro bono type giving back to the community thing. And I’m like, that’s terrific. And I just wanna make sure that you understand what that is so that you can make a conscious decision to do that as opposed to just thinking things are okay, but they may not necessarily be. And the other thing that you said that I think is so key is that you’ve structured your level of service to be somewhat commensurate with what their needs are and what they’re paying, so you may be minimizing what you may be losing. Although, I think in your case, you said they aren’t actually are profitable. So I think that’s also important is that the service level is commensurate with as close as you can to what they’re paying. And as long as you can do that, then as as you’ve built there, it makes a lot more sense to be able to work with those folks.

Steve Sandusky [00:41:30]:
And to your point, some of them are gonna turn into private wealth clients over time.

Eric Brotman [00:41:34]:
They are. And, frankly, to have no minimum but not charge some kind of ongoing fee is a recipe for losing money. Yeah. That and and that is it’s unfortunate, but it’s true. And those folks need to find something online where they’re paying almost nothing because there’s not a whole lot to do. But we’re talking about people who actually do want a financial plan, are willing to pay for 1, are willing to pay for it to be renewed, and then we’re automating as many of the steps in that process as we’re able without dehumanizing it and without making it feel institutional because nobody wants that. And and so there’s still a relationship 1 on 1. There’s still a CFP working with you.

Eric Brotman [00:42:13]:
You’re not it’s not a this is not the b team per se, but it is the younger advisers because they’re gonna grow with these clients. A lot of the financial planning clients are young families. They’re gonna grow together. They’re gonna work together for the next 40 years. They don’t want me. I’m not gonna be here in 40 years. Bottom line is where

Steve Sandusky [00:42:32]:
Yeah. And charging that subscription fee, I think, is so key because, obviously, if someone has a $100,000 and you’re charging 1%, it’s hard to make a profit on that, but if you are charging the subscription fee. And I think the other thing that that I also counsel advisors on is Mhmm. I say, look. I’m never gonna suggest that you just cut clients because they no longer meet your minimum. They were there when you needed them, and it’s just it’s not appropriate for you just to cut them because you’re not making any money on them anymore. What you can do though is you can honestly go to them and say, we do need to charge a minimum fee to provide the support and just talk about all the things that you’ve done over time. Mhmm.

Steve Sandusky [00:43:12]:
And then clients may self select

Eric Brotman [00:43:14]:
Oh, yeah.

Steve Sandusky [00:43:14]:
In that situation. And I think that’s okay. You know? So you’re giving them an option. So I think there’s ways to do that are fair and ethical based on, you know, them being there when you actually needed them in the early days.

Eric Brotman [00:43:26]:
And the fee that we are charging monthly is not perpetual. It’s not forever. It’s not flat for the rest of time. As expenses go up, as the cost of living goes up, as the cost of managing a firm goes up, we may have to adjust that over time. I try not to do any kind of increases multiple years in a row. I think it’s really important to message at least every other year that fees aren’t changing. I think that and I actually learned that from the NFL team in town here because when the Ravens came to town, they said we’re only raising ticket prices every other year so that half the time you felt like you’d gotten slugged and half the time you felt like it was great, even if it wound up being exact same place. And I thought that was a really smart way to do it because half the time people are psyched.

Eric Brotman [00:44:10]:
So that’s why we did it that way.

Steve Sandusky [00:44:12]:
It’s perception.

Eric Brotman [00:44:14]:
It is. And it some of that’s marketing, some of it’s messaging, but it’s also nice to be able to message that.

Steve Sandusky [00:44:20]:
Let’s talk about scaling the business. And I I almost hate to use the word scale because I think it just it it sounds like negative for the client. Like, how can I make more money and do less work kind of thing? But as you continue to think about how do you grow the firm Mhmm. How do you think about technology? What role is technology playing? How can you grow a personal services business in a way that continues to provide the same or better level of service at, hopefully, increasing rates of profitability?

Eric Brotman [00:44:57]:
I think it starts with having the right tech stack. I think a lot of independent firms have tech stacks that are that their independent broker dealer somebody throws out there, and they’re not great. And so there’s a lot of manual work. We use Salesforce Financial Cloud, which is totally amazing. We use Orion, and the 2 of them integrate completely. While all of the communication with our clients is personal, all of the to dos and tasks and the notes and the things that need to happen are happening behind the scenes, and they’re happening in an automated way. So we don’t forget things. We don’t make mistakes nearly as often.

Eric Brotman [00:45:31]:
We’re not perfect, but we don’t make mistakes nearly as often that way. And I think what’s coming down the pike, AI is certainly going to change the way we handle certain operational things at some point. I’m not usually an early adopter with new technologies. I usually find that being patient and waiting a little while can protect you from being a guinea pig for something that may be not working yet, but there will be some the transcription of notes. I I know that this podcast is being transcribed right now by AI. That’s great. That doesn’t bother me as a guest and and as a host, it makes that’s awfully smart. You don’t have someone in the background scribbling notes.

Eric Brotman [00:46:07]:
You don’t have to watch it 6 times to get the the poignant notes that you want. AI can absolutely help with note taking. It can help with compliance. It can help with it can help with a variety of things without changing the 1 on 1 relationship. AI is not rendering advice. It can’t. It can try, but it can’t because it can’t know what it feels like to go through some of the things you’re going through. It can’t know what it’s like to feel like you might lose your job.

Eric Brotman [00:46:31]:
It can’t know what it’s like to have a mom with cancer. It can’t know what it’s like to have a special needs child. And if the if they ever tell you a computer can learn to feel that stuff, that’s I’m sure it will learn to do that. That’s creepy because it can’t. It’s a human experience. So I don’t think we’re taking away I don’t think we’re taking away from the 1 on 1 and the human interaction at all. I would not wanna do that because I frankly don’t like having technology replace humans. We don’t have a for example, nobody calling our office is going into a prompt system to press 1 for this or dose for Espanol.

Eric Brotman [00:47:05]:
It’s not happening. They’re getting a human to answer the phone. I think it matters. I think it is nice to know the people here. It’s nice for us to do some things that are incredibly human, whether it’s one to 1 or one to many. But technology, the having the right tech stack does make the practice more scalable because we can see we can for example, we can automate scheduling. Used to be, I had to call every client and go back and forth. Oh, let me check with my spouse and see if they can do that Wednesday or let me or you send an email.

Eric Brotman [00:47:33]:
Here’s a date. And by the time they get back to you, that date’s full and you’re back and forth and back and forth and back. And now schedule once can handle that, and people can pick the time they want, and it goes in your calendar. It runs the workflow, and we know exactly who needs to do what to be ready. So technology is already playing a huge role in efficiency, which lends itself to scale.

Steve Sandusky [00:47:52]:
You mentioned Salesforce, Orion, ScheduleOnce, financial planning. What are you doing for financial planning?

Eric Brotman [00:47:58]:
Ours is all our own. Ours is all Excel based. It’s all our own. It automates taking a model that will build out hypotheticals for accumulation, for income, for all the various types of steps where we can in real time with a client say, what if there’s this change? What if we added this amount per month instead of that month? Or what if inflation did this? Or what if we worked an extra 2 years and you can model it out instantly without having to go through a 100 page report, which is pretty cool. I’ve been told that the software we’ve created, we could probably package and sell, but I’m not sure I wanna do that. Right now, it’s our secret sauce.

Steve Sandusky [00:48:31]:
It’s interesting. I’ve talked to a handful of firms over the years that have their own internal Excel spreadsheet based financial planning software. Even multibillion dollar firms have their own in house planning Excel spreadsheet, so I find that interesting.

Eric Brotman [00:48:46]:
Yeah. It’s uniquely ours. And when attorneys or accountants or other people see the model, they know exactly where it’s come from. They know it’s ours. And so, locally, that’s created a weird advantage too. Because people are like, oh, we’ve seen this before. We know you’re in good shape. Because and because 12 other advisers aren’t spitting out the same emoney report.

Eric Brotman [00:49:04]:
We’ve tried those things. And it used to be we used emoney for a client vault, but then you had NFS had their own login for statements and Orion had it for performance. And and you have all these different logins. And if there was any complaint that we got from our advisory board, it was always, why do we have 3 different logins? So now Orion does it all. It’s our vault. It’s our performance management, and it aggregates statements and confirms and all the things people need. And it’s one login, and clients love it. So that saved us a lot of time.

Eric Brotman [00:49:34]:
Think how many times people were forgetting their password because they had 3 different logins and 3 different passwords.

Steve Sandusky [00:49:39]:
And then on the tax side, do you have any software that you use for tax planning?

Eric Brotman [00:49:43]:
We use a list of plan for the tax planning piece. And I’ve just I’m a premier member of RTS. So if Steve Jarvis and their group, there’s a lot of tax planning resources there with their team, including and up to tax preparation if we need it. We don’t do that in house. But I would say that our tax liaison and also our estate planning liaison are very good.

Steve Sandusky [00:50:06]:
Yeah. The tax prep, you said you don’t do that in house. And that’s also a conversation I have frequently with advisers about Mhmm. Should I do tax prep? Should I not do tax prep? I do tax planning. And and so how do you think about doing tax prep in house versus not doing that? And how do you connect that? Since you’re not doing it in house, how do you connect the tax planning that you do with the person’s tax preparer?

Eric Brotman [00:50:32]:
Great question. And we, like many firms, were kicking around the idea of hiring a CPA, doing some things internally. We took that to our advisory board and unanimously said they said, don’t do it. They said, one of the benefits to working with you and having our own CPA is 2 sets of eyeballs, 2 sets of 2 different perspectives, and the ability to communicate in that way rather than us checking the same box, using the same strategy. They liked the checks and balances between the financial and the tax side. Much the same. I’m not hiring a lawyer to write wills and trusts. We’re gonna handle beneficiaries and asset titling and all those kinds of things.

Eric Brotman [00:51:07]:
But to have that second set of eyes creates that dream team a little bit. Our clients said, please do not do tax prep. We would much rather work with folks and the Center of Influence Project by knowing all of our clients, CPAs and being proactive by saying, hey, send us these returns. We’re going to run a report. We’ll send it back to you. We’re looking at whether it’s Ross and Ross, whether it’s Roth conversions or whether it’s IRMAA planning or whether it’s Social Security timing or any of those kinds of things or capital gains or losses or how we’re handling charitable contributions, we have the ability to run it by our clients CPAs. Now I will say of the 700 or so families, 500 have CPAs and 200 don’t. The folks who are self preparing at using TurboTax or the ones who are just going to H and R Block or Jackson Hewitt or one of the tax preps, I think they’re shortchanging themselves.

Eric Brotman [00:51:56]:
I think they’re making a mistake, not because it can’t be done yourself, but because there is a benefit, I think, to objective solid tax advice throughout the year, not just somebody to fill out a form once a year.

Steve Sandusky [00:52:09]:
So two observations on what you just said there.

Eric Brotman [00:52:12]:
Mhmm.

Steve Sandusky [00:52:12]:
One is that you mentioned that it’s unanimous among your client base that they want a separation between Yes. The tax prep and the tax planning. Yes. I don’t think that’s a hard and fast rule around the country because I definitely have worked with a lot of advisers where the clients say, I really like the fact that we do all of this and everything’s coordinated. It makes it seamless. It seems much easier for them to just have to deal with one place.

Unnamed Announcer [00:52:37]:
It I think people are a

Steve Sandusky [00:52:38]:
little different. In your case, your clientele, they like the fact that it’s separate. But I think your other point is probably not highlighted enough, which I think is really important in that. If you don’t do the tax prep in house, there’s that great opportunity to develop relationships with all these others tax preparers and planners out there

Eric Brotman [00:52:58]:
Yeah.

Steve Sandusky [00:52:59]:
That are that your clients are using. So I think there’s a benefit there that may not necessarily be talked about enough. And I think that in your case, obviously, is is a key benefit and a and a source of new business for you.

Eric Brotman [00:53:10]:
It it is. And someday, we may wind up with a strategic alliance with a CPA firm locally or nationally or what have you. I I’m not ruling it out because I understand the desire to bring some of that complexity under not one roof necessarily, but onto one team. I think, though, if we were to do that, we probably have hundreds of clients who really like their CPAs and aren’t going to want to switch just because it’s here. So I don’t know that it would become a convenience for a small percentage of folks, but I don’t think it’s going to radically shift where they do their taxes. And I could be wrong. But when we went to the board and we said, this is what we’re thinking of doing, we’re thinking about bringing a CPA in house and doing this in house, they literally all said don’t. And I was surprised by it actually because I thought it would be a convenience, but it was seen as a deterrent in a very strange way.

Eric Brotman [00:53:54]:
And part of it is because we have so many relationships with CPAs, to your point, we’d be biting the hands that feed us.

Steve Sandusky [00:54:00]:
Let’s talk about the client experience.

Eric Brotman [00:54:03]:
Mhmm.

Steve Sandusky [00:54:03]:
And that’s something that we talk a lot about in the industry these days. And I’d like to start with what is your definition of the client experience?

Eric Brotman [00:54:11]:
The client experience for BFG for us has to be a completely unique set of deliverables and a relationship that goes beyond just the things that get a financial adviser paid. In other words, the client experience, they have to be able to call us and say, should I buy or lease my next car? Or I’m thinking about I’m thinking about an allowance for my kid. What do you think? Things that that might seem really innocuous. We want that dialogue to be very robust and very constant. We want our team to feel like we can be on call and that folks can reach us. We also wanna make sure that they’re getting a human to answer the phone, that they’ve got a team of people who can help them, that they’re not waiting for if it’s me, for example, they’re not waiting for 3 days for me to get back from Arizona or something. They’re getting this right away from a team of folks. So the client experience has to be very hands on, very responsive, and and we have to be prepared to say there’s something we don’t know.

Eric Brotman [00:55:06]:
There’s plenty we don’t know. I think clients expect us to have the answers for a lot of things, but no one expects us to have the answers for everything. And for us to say, you know what? That’s an excellent question. I’m not sure. Let’s check with your CPA or your attorney or let me do some research and get back to you. And then to get back to them is better than making something up or taking a guess. And so I think there’s so many different aspects of financial planning that don’t generate revenue directly, and I want our client experience to be agnostic to that. I wanna be looking at a good faith estimate on a mortgage refinance.

Eric Brotman [00:55:40]:
I wanna be looking at the drafts of legal documents or even the drafts of tax returns sometimes. We have clients who send us a draft and say, does it look like everything’s good? Is there anything missing that you can see? And while we’re not practicing law and we’re not practicing tax, we will certainly give it a second set of eyeballs. And I think that’s part of the client experience. Our client experience has changed a little bit over the years as we’ve gotten broader because we used to be a pretty local slash regional firm, and now we have clients all over the country, which means a lot of our experience has transitioned to Zoom. Some people love it. Some people don’t love it as much. And so we’re still for areas where we have a large clientele, we’re still doing roadshows. We’re still spending time in Texas and in Ohio and in other states where we can be in front of a lot of people in Florida, certainly.

Eric Brotman [00:56:27]:
I think there’s a benefit to that. We’re still running events and education and things that give clients extras, and I think that’s important. I will say that the most important piece of the client experience, I think, is always getting human assistance and always getting it quickly. It doesn’t mean that we’ll have every answer on the tip of our tongue. It means we’re gonna get it and we’re gonna get it right.

Steve Sandusky [00:56:48]:
How consistent is the delivery of the client experience throughout the firm? For example, some advisors will have a comprehensive financial planning checklist. Fifty items, a 150 items that they make sure that they go through. Now, obviously, not everything on that list is gonna be applicable to every client, but at least they’re gonna address it over some period of time. So do you follow some kind of checklist financial planning process to make sure you don’t miss anything, or how consistent is that delivery?

Eric Brotman [00:57:20]:
I think the delivery is incredibly consistent. I think the nuance is in the personality of the adviser. We all have different personalities. We’re all gonna share different anecdotes or or different experiences, which is fine. But in terms of making sure that the functional things are being done, we have a team of people who build all of the various agendas, review all the various reports, make sure that we’re ready to deliver what we need to deliver. All of our clients have the same models. All of them have the same hypotheticals. All of them have the same we eat what we our own cooking in terms of our investment management.

Eric Brotman [00:57:49]:
I own what clients do. And so we have models here that we manage in house, and our clients who are in a similar situation to me will have a portfolio that looks a whole lot like mine. Never eat in a restaurant where the chef won’t eat. And so I think the experience is pretty similar. I also think that one of the things that makes this good is that we do advanced planning meetings every Thursday. All of our CFPs sit in a room, and we go over all of the various private wealth cases that are coming up in the next 2, 3 weeks. And we talk about them together so that they’re getting lots of different perspectives of, hey. Did you think of this? Or what about this NUA planning? Or or how do how does this buy sell agreement affect their business plan or any of those various things? We’re getting lots of different input on the private wealth piece.

Eric Brotman [00:58:31]:
And on the financial planning piece, I’m sitting down with the the team who is delivering those meetings every Monday, and I’m spending time with them to talk about, hey, make sure that we explore this or did you consider that or have you met with their their daughter who’s the responsible party for them, and let let’s make sure there’s some communication. So quality control is something I take very seriously, and I I think we’re doing a pretty good job. And if we’re not, I I would always be open to somebody calling me and saying, hey. There’s been a there’s been a blip. I wanna know about it.

Steve Sandusky [00:58:58]:
As it relates to the nonfinancial aspect of the client experience, whether it’s client events, whether it’s Mhmm. Taking clients out for breakfast, lunch, or dinner more on the social side, do you do much of that? And if so, what does that look like?

Eric Brotman [00:59:12]:
We do some. It’s hard because we’re so geographically dispersed. We do our advisory board meetings, and we communicate that to clients. We do what we call meet and mangles, which are just happy hours. In fact, we have one tonight. And so we’ll do 4 or 5 a year in different areas where we have large client we have large client profiles. And so we’ll take our entire team to those kinds of things. When we go, for example, to see clients in Florida, I’ll take 3 or 4 people with me, and we’ll go.

Eric Brotman [00:59:38]:
In that way, they’ll get to know some of our firm because some people have never set foot in our office. So we try to make sure that there’s a lot of personalization, a lot of outreach. And every one of our clients has a client relations person who’s essentially their concierge. They have one human they can call, and 2 of them have been with us now for many years. And I would put up against anybody’s client relations team anywhere, and they are the one go to. So if you’re not sure who to call or what you need, you call this human, and they will take care of you. And having that concierge and that’s at both the financial planning and the private wealth level. If you’re not sure who to call this human, and we’ll get you what you need.

Eric Brotman [01:00:15]:
And so I I think there’s I think from an event standpoint, the meet and mingles are great. They are bring a friend kinda thing. We’ve certainly done ball games, and we used to have a suite at the Orioles games. And people used to love coming, and now they don’t, so we stopped. Sometimes things come and go a little bit.

Steve Sandusky [01:00:29]:
What’s been the hardest part building this business over the years?

Eric Brotman [01:00:33]:
It’s a great question. And the the hardest part is recognizing that I can’t do it all. And this sense that when I was a startup, I did everything, and I had to trust the experts and let people get better at things than me. That means giving up a lot of the hands on stuff that I was used to. And it’s been a it’s been a blessing, but it was challenging to trust other people to do it differently than I would do it, but just as good. I’m not trying to create an army of mini mes. I do a lot of mentoring and coaching, but our younger advisers need to they need to know what they’re doing, and they do. They’re very talented, but they also have to know how to massage certain situations or how to engage in certain conversations.

Eric Brotman [01:01:13]:
And there are things there there are days still where I say, man, if I had done this myself, it would have been x, y, and z. And then I have to slap myself and say, that’s not reality. That’s not how it works. And we have great people. We get a lot of positive feedback about our team. We hire really well. We engage our clients and our staff a lot. And mostly, the things we get complimented on the most are our people.

Eric Brotman [01:01:37]:
And so that means we’re hiring well. It means we’re training well, but it means I’m staying out of it. And for me, I’m much more external than internal these days, and the place will run without me. If I tripped and fell into traffic today, the office wouldn’t miss a beat. They’d miss my charming personality, but they would not miss a beat. They would repurpose my office immediately, of course. And at the end of the day, I think I’ve made myself irrelevant, which is incredibly important as a business owner in any industry and also really hard.

Steve Sandusky [01:02:08]:
Yeah. And I think that’s one of the signs of a great leader is if you can make yourself irrelevant over time. And I think I’ve done that a couple times in my career. And on the one hand, it can be a little scared. It’s like, oh, I guess you don’t need me anymore. You know, I put a great team in place and things are humming along. But what would you say is, like, the hardest thing for you to give up over time?

Eric Brotman [01:02:30]:
These are tough questions, Steve. You didn’t tell me if we stayed in for overtime, it was gonna get more difficult. The toughest thing for me to give up, frankly, is some of the relationships because I adore the people we’ve been working with for years, and I don’t ever want someone to feel let down because I’m not in that room. And it’s not that they’re not gonna get a great experience. It’s that it it’s it’s a little like losing a friend, and I don’t wanna feel that way, and I definitely don’t want them to feel that way. And so I think the hardest thing to do is to say, man, I I remember these folks from 1997, and that institutional memory is more than that. It’s it’s a friendship that develops over many years. And so maintaining a relationship with with folks is hard.

Eric Brotman [01:03:11]:
I’ll also say as we grow and we hire people, I can’t know them all as well as I used to. It used to be simple to have everybody to lunch or to invite everybody to my home or something. Now it’s hard to get everybody in the same room. There’s a lot of people. And they say that the sign of a big firm is you have clients you don’t know, and the sign of a really big firm is you have employees you don’t know. I don’t have employees I don’t know, but I definitely have employees I don’t know very well. And I’m not always involved in the hiring, and that is an interesting thing. I used to be involved in every nothing happened unless I was aware of it for many years, and it’s impossible.

Eric Brotman [01:03:48]:
It’s untenable, and it’s not healthy for me or for the company. But the hardest thing to give up is, I think, the personal relationships with not only some clients, but also some employees, people who you spent the people you spent Saturdays with because you couldn’t get it all done during the week and everybody came in and you sprung for pizza. That stuff sticks with you, and that doesn’t happen anymore. We have all the technology and all the people and all the systems, and it used to be us making it up as we went. And I remember the day we moved into our first office, and I borrowed money from everywhere. And I remember Lisa, who was the first person I ever hired and who is a dear friend to this day, though she doesn’t work here anymore, but she’s a dear friend. And I remember the 2 of us sitting on the floor because there was no furniture waiting for it to be delivered. And I’m thinking to myself, what have I done? And we went through this together, and it’s a bond that 20 plus years later, we still have and we still laugh about.

Eric Brotman [01:04:40]:
We still go, oh, my gosh. Like, we left another firm together. And it was our Jerry Maguire moment. It was the grab the goldfish. We’ll have dental. Right? And let’s just do this. And those memories are are priceless. And most of the people here, some of them weren’t born, but none of them were here.

Eric Brotman [01:04:56]:
And so you lose some of that some of that personal the personal memory piece.

Steve Sandusky [01:05:01]:
Yeah. At the end of the day, that all comes back to those relationships. Does. It really does. Eric, as we wrap up here, is there any final thought, comment, observation that you’d like to share that we haven’t touched on yet?

Eric Brotman [01:05:16]:
The only thing I’ll say is that that you and I have talked about a lot. We’ve covered a lot of ground today. And one thing that I know that I suspect you also know is there isn’t one way to do everything. And that for your advisers who are listening to this, there are lots of different ways to accomplish all of these various things. And it’s about finding the the resource, the system, the people, the technology, the the consultant, the the folks who really make that come to life and who speak the language that you speak. And I think there’s lots of different ways to do things really well. And as long as we’re doing them well, the only thing I would urge your listeners to do is to start looking at each other as collaborators rather than competition. I don’t know of anything that would be more impactful than if the really good financial advisers because there’s a shortage.

Eric Brotman [01:06:01]:
There’s a shortage of good financial advisers. If the really good ones work together rather than feeling like they were, you know, sharks on on chum, that would be a win. And I think we’re doing a pretty good job as

Steve Sandusky [01:06:12]:
an industry now. I really do. Excellent. Alright, Eric. If folks wanna connect with you in some way, what’s the best way for them to stay in touch with what you’re doing?

Eric Brotman [01:06:21]:
I already told you if I give you my website, no one will write down, but it’s bfgfa.com. You can also go to brotmanmedia.com. Pick up a copy of Don’t Retire, Graduate. If you loved it, put it on Amazon, tell everybody. If you didn’t love it, please don’t tell anyone. You can let me know. But I would love to stay in touch with some of the folks who are here, and there’s a whole lot of information at brotmanmedia.com. Excellent.

Steve Sandusky [01:06:44]:
Thank you, Eric.

Eric Brotman [01:06:45]:
Thank you, Steve. It’s been a pleasure.

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