Modern Financial Planning: Flat Fees, Personalization, and Client Involvement

Eric Brotman [00:00:00]:
Well, 1st and foremost, our our entire firm is an ensemble. So we have 10 CFPs, but none of us have our own book of business or our own clients. All of the clients are clients of the firm, and all of our CFPs are salaried. So they’re not paid or incented to sell anything to anyone ever. And as a result, their their role for each of us, the role is to take incredibly great care of families and to deliver to them what they need, which in a lot cases we find is multigenerational planning, and that requires multigenerational advisors because most growing, you know, young adults do not wanna use their parents’ financial advisor or attorney or accountant. They wanna build their own relationships with a peer. And so half our advisors in the shop are under 30, which is extremely rare in our business.

Roger Silk [00:00:49]:
Welcome to Sterling Insights, stand out and supercharge your assets. The go to podcast for financial advisors aiming to grow their assets under management, stand out in a crowded market, and retain assets nearly forever. Are you advising high net worth clients who want appreciated capital assets? Do you want to help them sell without losing a quarter, a third, or even more of their hard earned profits to capital gains taxes? Then this podcast is tailored for you. Each episode brings you the latest strategies and expert advice from leading financial advisors, seasoned attorneys, and experienced CPAs. Learn how to maximize your client’s wealth, minimize their taxes, and supercharge your advisory practice with actionable insights. Join us on Sterling Insights, stand out and supercharge your assets where you’ll gain the knowledge and tools to set yourself apart and achieve unparalleled success in wealth management. Subscribe now and empower your practice for a brighter, more prosperous future. Welcome to Sterling Insights, stand out and supercharge your assets.

Roger Silk [00:02:07]:
I’m your host, Roger Silk, and today’s guest is Eric Brotman. Eric is a certified financial planner. He’s the CEO of BFG Financial Advisors in Maryland. He’s been in the financial planning industry since 1994. And in 2003, he launched a startup, which now has over 20 employees and $700,000,000 in assets under management. Eric is the author of 3 books, including the award winning Don’t Retire, Graduate. And as you can see by his background, he hosted podcasts, by that same name. Eric, is there anything you wanted to amend or add to that bio?

Eric Brotman [00:02:53]:
No. I I think you did a great job. Thanks, Ryan.

Roger Silk [00:02:56]:
It is my pleasure, and thank you for being with us.

Eric Brotman [00:02:59]:
Absolutely. Eric, can you share

Roger Silk [00:03:01]:
a little bit about your journey? How did you get into the financial industry, and how have you gotten to where you are?

Eric Brotman [00:03:09]:
Well, it is highly unusual. I I came into this business, with an English major and having studied English and psychology, not finance, and took a job. My first job out of school was at a brokerage firm in the legal department. My plan was to go to law school like many English majors do, and I fell in love with the financial business. And, specifically, what I fell in love with was the ability to help people on the front end because my role at the brokerage firm was to deal with people when they had lost a loved one in most cases. The legal department was dealing with the decedent. And what I found was I had to have conversations with people saying, I’m I’m sorry you lost your husband, but his ex wife is still his beneficiary on his IRA. And those were conversations that I don’t recommend any 22 year old or anyone have to have, and so I said, well, how do I get on the front end of this rather than a cleanup mode? And so I started working in the life insurance business, and I was 22 years old.

Eric Brotman [00:04:04]:
And I spent some time getting all the credentials that I could get and learning estate planning and learning risk management and insurance. And then, you know, when I earned my CFP in 1998, I said, I really wanna do financial planning and make this more holistic. And I found a mentor who was starting a practice, and I became his junior associate, and I spent 4 years with him helping grow a firm. And then in 2003, went out on my own and, you know, we called it a graduation, not a divorce. When we split, we’re still dear friends. And, you know, I started with one full time, one part time person. I borrowed from everywhere, and it was a true bootstrap. And we’ve grown sort of exponentially over the years with a model that I think is unique, and we can certainly talk about it.

Eric Brotman [00:04:47]:
But our our planning strategies and our staffing model and our career trajectory are very different than most of our industry.

Roger Silk [00:04:55]:
Well, I’m certainly gonna follow that up with I wanna hear both about the approach to financial planning that you do and how it’s different for your employees at your shop then at most places. So if you wanna start with the how do you approach the client differently?

Eric Brotman [00:05:13]:
Well, 1st and foremost, our entire firm is an ensemble. So we have 10 CFPs, but none of us have our own book of business or our own clients. All of the clients are clients of the firm, and all of our CFPs are salaried. So they’re not paid or incented to sell anything to anyone ever. As a result, the role is to take incredibly great care of families and to deliver to them what they need, which in a lot of cases we find is multigenerational planning, and that requires multi generational advisors. Because most growing, you know, young adults do not wanna use their parents’ financial advisor or attorney or accountant. They wanna build their own relationships with a peer. And so half our advisers in the shop are under 30, which is extremely rare in our business, in a business where recruiting is very tough.

Eric Brotman [00:06:02]:
We have diversity here that most don’t. I mean, we go to conferences, Roger, and everybody looks like you and me. They’re all 50 plus year old white guys, and, you know, the industry is has not changed in the ways that the world has arguably, and and our firm really has done a nice job with that. We have a a terrific team and a diverse team that reaches the population in a different way. In terms of our planning, the thing that makes us different is everything we deliver to clients is uniquely ours. We’re not using a software that, frankly, somebody could buy for $59 out of a box. We’re not competing with the apps and the robo advisors and just spitting stuff out. Everything we do is high touch.

Eric Brotman [00:06:39]:
There is some manual entry to it. We go through every nook and cranny of somebody’s financial life. It it is a unique process and a unique deliverable that people really like, and so they tell their friends about it.

Roger Silk [00:06:50]:
What’s the demographic? I mean, you probably have a range. What’s the sweet spot of your client base?

Eric Brotman [00:06:56]:
Most folks show up on our door, and I’d call them the sandwich generation. They’re 45 to 60, maybe 65. They they have parents getting older they’re worried about. They’ve got kids to educate. They’re busy, successful professionals in their own right working 50 and 60 hours a week. They wanna retire or at least reach financial independence before they die, and they’ve got, you know, things pulling on them at both ends of the family a lot of the times. We find that while there’s a great deal of diversity, we have clients in their twenties and clients in their eighties, there’s really 2 types of families we serve, one which is a a higher net worth family that has, legacy issues and sophisticated planning issues, And then the other is more of a a Henry type of group, which are the high earners who aren’t rich yet, and those are folks who we can really make a big difference for and help grow into that wealthy category. So we don’t have an asset minimum.

Eric Brotman [00:07:46]:
Most firms say if you don’t have x $1,000,000, we won’t even talk to you, and those firms are actually sending folks to us. So it’s it’s been a remarkable experience. We’re we do business with other financial advisors. We don’t see anybody as competition.

Roger Silk [00:07:59]:
If you don’t have a minimum, how do you guys charge?

Eric Brotman [00:08:04]:
We charge a flat fee for engagement, and that fee is either for a private wealth engagement or a financial planning engagement. So the fee varies based on the complexity of the planning and and how much hand holding people want. You know, if if someone wants to be told, here are the steps you need to take, here are the recommendations, and they wanna implement on their own, it’s one price point. If they want us to shepherd them through that entire process and speak with their attorney and their accountant and look at their good faith estimates and talk to their bankers, then it’s a a totally different type of relationship. So we charge a flat fee to engage. We are then paid based on assets under management. But for clients who are below various thresholds, we just charge an annual retainer. And that way, it becomes more of a subscription model and folks can work with us.

Eric Brotman [00:08:45]:
So we do have a minimum fee. We don’t have a minimum asset level, and that allows a lot of flexibility. It means someone doesn’t necessarily have to move all of their assets with us to have our advice, and that’s a a breath of fresh air to some people. We meet with people all the time who say we’ve talked to 3 other firms, and all they wanna do is transfer the assets right away. That’s the first thing they talk about. And quite frankly, it’s one of the last things we talk about, not because it’s not important, but because until you’ve built the foundation, why are we decorating the great room?

Roger Silk [00:09:16]:
Right. So would you say your engagement is you do a lot of work upfront from what I just heard? Yes. How is that similar to or how is it different from an adviser who says, well, I’m gonna do a financial plan for you?

Eric Brotman [00:09:34]:
Well, it’s different in a lot of ways. Most advisers who say they do financial plans are really handing a pile of documents to a 24 year old person who’s gonna put them into a computer program and spit out a a 100 pages, stick it in a binder, and charge $5 for it. And there’s so many problems with those written plans. 1st and foremost, they are impossible for most clients to read, to digest, to understand. They’re also stale. They’re obsolete in 3 weeks because something changed in their lives, because their emergency fund got tapped because they needed a car or whatever it is, silly thing, little things, big things. So what happens is that becomes a document that sits on a shelf and collects dust and becomes less and less valuable daily as opposed to a model that every time we talk, we’re able to update that in real time either in front of somebody while they’re here physically or on a Zoom with a shared screen. We can adjust various variables.

Eric Brotman [00:10:30]:
We can adjust various progressions and do the hypotheticals and say, you know, are you on track for financial independence? And if not, how do we get you there? Or how are we developing retirement income for you? And and then making sure we talk about it from a tax perspective and from a a legacy perspective and from, you know, a a philanthropic perspective. So I think it’s different. It’s just it’s not a a binder with a bunch of graphs and stock language in it that no one’s gonna

Roger Silk [00:10:55]:
read. Mhmm. So you’ve got entry level clients and what I might call, if they’re under 30, sort of entry level planners. Just because just the way the world works, there’s only so much experience you can get even if you work 247.

Eric Brotman [00:11:16]:
Correct.

Roger Silk [00:11:17]:
Everybody takes care of everybody, but I assume that that’s really driven by client needs. So you probably got a a relatively small number of pretty high net worth people, and your more senior people. Am I right that your more senior people would be getting involved more with them than with, say, the younger people? Is that am I getting that right?

Eric Brotman [00:11:42]:
Well, I think it’s probably overgeneralized a little bit, but the the theory is right. We have about 200 private wealth clients and about 500 financial planning clients. So from a a ratio standpoint, that’s the that’s the math. 2 out of 7 are higher net worth families, multimillion dollar families. In terms of who does the work, we really try and make it relational. And so it’s not necessarily the age of the adviser. It might be a number of factors. It might be geography.

Eric Brotman [00:12:08]:
We have one adviser who handles all of our clients in Ohio, for example, or in Florida or in Texas. We have other folks who prefer to work with a woman who’s an adviser or somebody who went to the same alma mater and just connects with somebody because they have something in common. Sometimes it’s about the professional acumen. Sometimes it’s about the personalities and who people are comfortable with. But what’s interesting is on our private wealth side, all ten CFPs look at at every plan before it goes out the door and reviews it before every time that they come in for a strategy meeting. So we actually spend time on Monday mornings looking at, as a group, looking at all of the various deliverables, looking at all of the various strategies, and, frankly, talking about, hey. Did you consider this strategy, or did you consider this regarding long term care or this regarding capital gain harvesting or this regarding whatever it is? And so all of our clients are benefiting from an enormous collective of experience regardless of who’s delivering the actual advice.

Roger Silk [00:13:06]:
No, Eric. What you the last part of what you said is I wanna want our listeners to actually give us a chance to because what you said is I’ve never heard that before. I have never heard anybody who does that. So I just wanna see if I got that right. You have 200 private wealth clients, which is high net worth and what’s sort of the cutoff for that?

Eric Brotman [00:13:28]:
You know, most are 2 to 20,000,000. That’s so it’s a large range, but they’re multimillionaire.

Roger Silk [00:13:34]:
Uh-huh. So you’ve got 200 of those, and you look at each one you didn’t say, but quarterly, you look at each one?

Eric Brotman [00:13:42]:
No. What we do, we do an annual strategy meeting with clients, and we do an annual tactical meeting with clients. So the first half of the year is strategy. That’s the full physical exam. And so that’s when we’ll go through and update the full model and review the tax returns and review the estate documents and review the beneficiaries and review all the various things that are happening. The second half of the year is really about did the action items happen, did all the homework that we assigned get done, did the things we said we would do get done, Are there deadlines we need to meet? Are there capital gains or losses to harvest? Are there things that have to get done by December 31?

Roger Silk [00:14:15]:
So it’s

Eric Brotman [00:14:15]:
twice a year.

Roger Silk [00:14:17]:
Okay. And so you have your entire team of planners Mhmm. 10 people looking at. So we’ve got the Smith case, and you’re gonna have and today, we’re looking at that. And so all 10 people are sitting down in a room looking at Smith and making sure that we’ve got all of our i’s dotted and our t’s crossed.

Eric Brotman [00:14:38]:
Correct. And the person who’s delivering the meeting, the relationship manager for that client is the one who is introducing the case and saying, I’m meeting with Joe and Mary Smith on Wednesday or or it’s usually 2 or 3 weeks in advance to give time to adjust.

Roger Silk [00:14:50]:
But Uh-huh.

Eric Brotman [00:14:51]:
I’m meeting with the Smiths, and this is what’s going on in their world. And, you know, mister Smith is planning to retire, and missus Smith has specific health concerns or whatever it is, and we go through the full array. Now that doesn’t mean we get into the tactics of how we’re gonna adjust the portfolio. We have an investment committee.

Roger Silk [00:15:07]:
Right. Right. Right.

Eric Brotman [00:15:08]:
But in terms of the actual planning, the strategy is something we talk about together. Hey. You know, we might wanna consider looking at their P and C again and having some additional liability coverage, or, you know, this person’s gonna be turning 59a half. Let’s make sure we do x, y, and z or some of the various things that are milestones. You know? They’re gonna be empty nested next year. That may change their world. Are they planning to age in place or to downsize? All the stuff. And it it creates not only some extra eyeballs on the case, but it also stress tests it for the person who’s the relationship manager to make sure they’re not missing anything and that they’ve really thought about this.

Eric Brotman [00:15:44]:
It’s not that we don’t trust our folks. It’s just

Roger Silk [00:15:46]:
the opposite. No. I I totally get that. I totally

Eric Brotman [00:15:48]:
get that. Everyone is learning from each other, and we each have you know, we practice something called educational diversity. And the idea here is that you can’t be an expert at everything. We’re all primary care physicians. We’re all generalists in terms of the financial planning, but we each also have certain areas where we excel. So mine is in estate planning and philanthropy. You know, when a client dies, no matter who the relationship manager is, I’m going to get involved personally because it’s something that I have a great interest in and a lot of experience doing. We have another planner here who’s phenomenal with exit planning and with stock options and RSUs and and NUA planning and a corporate plan and all that stuff.

Eric Brotman [00:16:30]:
And so when we run into it, we will pull that person in and say, hey. Would you meet with the Smiths with us for an hour, and can we can we do this together because you’re the resident expert? And clients get the benefit of people who really know that specific area. You know, we have people here who are really insurance experts. We have people who you know, we have an investment committee of 6 folks, and so if somebody is really you know, some clients wanna know how the watch works, Roger, and some just wanna know what time it is. Yeah. And for the ones who wanna know how the watch works, we’ll bring the investment committee chair in to talk about this is what we did this quarter, and this is why we’re why we’re making these adjustments to this model, and we’ll get into the weeds. Other clients are like, I don’t care. Am I okay? So so knowing what that is allows you to figure out which hands need to be on deck.

Roger Silk [00:17:13]:
So I’m just curious from a resource allocation point of view. You’ve got 200 of these. There’s about 1 a day throughout the year, a little bit less. How much time do you guys allocate for, like, just to review? Okay. I’m meeting with the Smiths next week. How much time will this 10 person meeting cover?

Eric Brotman [00:17:32]:
We allocate 3 hours every Monday for this calendar, and we would go through maybe 12 or 15 or 18 cases during that time. Some are very straightforward. Some are like, you know, I I’ve sort of got this. I have a question about 1 or 2 things. And some of them are relatively new intakes, and there’s a lot more to talk about. But it’s rare that we need the full 3 hours. Most of the time, we’ve blocked out more time than we need, and we see clients on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. So on Mondays, we’re doing the the prep and the planning, whether it’s this week or a week in advance.

Eric Brotman [00:18:02]:
Fridays, we’re doing wrap up. We’re we’re making sure that all the t’s got crossed and the i’s got dotted. And Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, typically are client days where we don’t have internal meetings. We just are focused on clients that full time.

Roger Silk [00:18:13]:
So I’m gonna guess, Eric, that your client retention rate is very close to a 100%. Correct. I’m not surprised.

Eric Brotman [00:18:23]:
We we set a target for every adviser as a relationship manager to never drop below 98, and we haven’t had a conversation about that. It just doesn’t happen. If a client leaves, and it does happen occasionally. I mean, life happens, but sometimes it’s because someone dies and for one reason or another, we we don’t work with their kids, although we’re pretty good about that. Yeah. In other cases, somebody moves to another state or out of the country, and they want somebody local to them, and that that’s okay. I mean, we’re we have clients in 37 states, but if you want somebody you can break bread with on a random Wednesday and you’re in Nevada and we’re in Maryland, it’s not happening. But it’s extremely rare, and it’s almost always a a handshake and a hug, not a you’re fired.

Roger Silk [00:19:03]:
Yeah. Uh-huh. That’s good.

Eric Brotman [00:19:05]:
Yeah. I mean, you know, I I I feel like we we I know that our team I know we’re good stewards. I know we’re doing the right thing. I know that all of the incentives are lined up so that there’s no incentive ever for any of our folks, be them younger or older, more experienced or less, to ever do anything that’s not 100% client centric. And if we do that, number 1, we’ll have good retention. Number 2, we’ll we’ll grow. I mean, this year, we added almost a 100 client families to the roster this year. I mean, that’s how quickly we’re growing, which means we’re hiring, and hiring means obviously, a significant amount of time is spent on training too.

Eric Brotman [00:19:40]:
So we are hiring operations folks. We’re hiring client service associates, client relations people. And right now, we have 20 folks plus some outsource people. I think we’re gonna double over the next 5 years.

Roger Silk [00:19:52]:
Are your clients coming mostly from referrals from existing clients or

Eric Brotman [00:19:57]:
It’s a great question. A good number come from referrals. A huge number come from corporate financial wellness programs. So we actually created a program where employers will pay us to have our advisory team either by Zoom or with boots on the ground to meet with their employees 1 on 1, and the employer pays for it. It it creates some additional dialogue for employees, and a lot of those employees then decide that they’d like to work with us after. And when they choose to do that, we offer them a discount as an added employee benefit, and that brings on an enormous number of families a year. In addition to that, we work with centers of influence. I’m an accredited estate planner and spend a lot of time with attorneys.

Eric Brotman [00:20:34]:
We actually don’t get a lot of referrals from CPAs. We get a lot more from lawyers. We I tend to talk lawyer. And then beyond that, there’s the podcast and all the media and the speaking engagements and the things that for me, my primary role is business development. My primary role is growing the company. And so I spend a lot of time doing this quite candidly.

Roger Silk [00:20:56]:
And it seems to be working.

Eric Brotman [00:20:58]:
It’s working great. I mean, the the systems we have in place now for for for business development allow us to have landing pages and white papers and calls to action, and and people are able to get onboarded in a very effective and efficient way. So we’re adding, in some cases, as many as 10 or 15 households in a given month, which is an enormous amount of time. Although as I mentioned to you, when we do the strategy meetings the first half of the year and the tactical meetings in the in the latter stages, summer is almost entirely new business development. We have lots of time because we’re not doing routine strategy meetings or tactical meetings. We let everybody get a lot of time off. You know, we have responsible paid time off here, so no one has a set number of hours, and employees love that. It’s very, very flexible.

Eric Brotman [00:21:44]:
And so we don’t schedule routine strategy or tactical meetings in July, in August, or in December. We reserve December for annual planning, for emergencies, and opportunities. I mean, obviously, if a client needs us, they’ll get us whenever they need us. But in general, we don’t schedule the routine things during times where we know there might be other needs.

Roger Silk [00:22:04]:
Did you when you started the company, did you have this model already in mind, or has it developed over over time?

Eric Brotman [00:22:12]:
Let me just keep the show clean and say heck no. When I started, I was a one man show, and I had a full time person who was doing client relations and helping with applications and such, and I had somebody helping with portfolio. I started my succession plan and started selling shares in the company when I was 38 years old. So I have been onboarding shareholders now for 14 years, and we’ve grown where this is truly collaborative. I’m the boss of no one. I manage no people. I supervise no one. I like to coach.

Eric Brotman [00:22:41]:
I like to mentor. I like to teach. I do not like to supervise. Our management team is a number of people who are also financial advisors but help with either the company finances or the company marketing or the company operations and HR. We all wear different hats so that we can spend most of our time doing what it is that we love to do for a living, but also can run the company. We are extraordinarily collaborative. We do quarterly retreats with our team. We do an annual planning summit where we take everybody off-site for a few days, and we recap the year and we plan for the year ahead down to the minutiae sometimes, but it allows us to really have a scoreboard.

Eric Brotman [00:23:16]:
Everyone has their plan to work. We’re all accountable to each other. We declare not only what we’ve done this year and how we did, but what we’re planning to do next year. Each of our employees has an accountability partner, somebody they meet with typically once a month or every other month to go over their plans of work. How’s it going? And it’s not a manager. It’s a peer. So they’re pushing each other and everybody’s pulling together. We don’t have competition.

Eric Brotman [00:23:39]:
We have high fives in the hallway, and I always wanted that. The only thing I knew I wanted was collaboration and not competition. I did not wanna build an agency where it was dog eat dog. I wanted nothing to do with that. I wanted us to take great care of folks and not compete with the guy or gal in the next office.

Roger Silk [00:23:55]:
What are some of the key metrics that you guys watch on a, whatever, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual basis?

Eric Brotman [00:24:02]:
We we watch a number of different metrics. One of them is we watch for the business development, the pipeline of new intakes, how many folks are are coming in the door, and how many are ultimately doing business with us. So that’s a a business development type dashboard. We have a dashboard for and when I say dashboard, it’s literally we use Salesforce Financial Cloud, and there are dashboards for all of this. So I can pull up in one second all of the metrics of the company. We have a a metric to make sure that all of our private wealth strategy meetings have been scheduled or have been held and how many haven’t happened and what do we need to follow-up on. Same thing’s true with prospects in the pipeline. We have metrics that are financial, obviously, against the budget and how are we doing relative to that.

Eric Brotman [00:24:42]:
We have metrics. Each adviser has their own set of goals, and we manage them toward their own quantifiable goals. And, you know, that they’re all dash boarded. Everything. I can look up in a matter of seconds exactly where things are from a pinpoint standpoint.

Roger Silk [00:24:57]:
And you say you’re looking at that dashboard on a, like, a weekly basis, monthly basis?

Eric Brotman [00:25:02]:
It it I think it depends on each person’s role, at least monthly. Our ex our executive council meets twice a month, and we have a a set agenda with the things that we need to do, everything from business valuations to tax returns to employer reviews to all the different things that that run the company. I have a dashboard as the growth officer of the firm to look at how we’re interacting and how frequently with our accountants and attorneys and other centers of influence, how, you know, how we’re reacting or interacting with some of the media, the the webinars that we’re doing. What what is the the marketing department up to? What’s the client relations department up to? The investment committee meets on their own. I don’t serve on that committee, so that’s not one I need to to worry about personally. But there are 6 folks on that committee, and they’re spending time doing due diligence and talking about tactical adjustments to portfolios and and how it’s being managed and alternative investments and everything else. So, ultimately, I would say I look at certain dashboards as much as weekly, but all of them at least quarterly at the very least.

Roger Silk [00:26:00]:
Mhmm. Mhmm. Eric, as you can see, we’re kinda getting up to the end of the time. Is there anything that that you wanted to share? I think I could go on talking to you for a long time, and we’ll do it offline. But anything else you wanted to share that we haven’t had a chance to talk about yet?

Eric Brotman [00:26:14]:
I I mean, the only thing that I’ll share is that this whole idea of not retiring and graduating that that we use with our clients is something I’m going through personally right now. It’s the idea of reinventing ourselves and moving towards something. And so, Roger, I’ve built a consulting practice, and I’m now working with financial advisers all over the country. And I’m doing facilitations, for retreats and for client advisory board for various things, and I’m having more fun. I mean, I literally feel like my tank has just been completely, you know, refilled and is ready to rock. I’ve been at this 31 years. I have an amazing team around me. I have made myself largely irrelevant to the day to day operations of the business, and now I get to I spend time with other advisers helping them create some of the things that we’re doing that work, and I’ve never had more fun.

Eric Brotman [00:27:01]:
I I expect to do this another 20 years, and and I expect that to be where a lot of my time is spent.

Roger Silk [00:27:06]:
So one one one final question. Eric. With with all your success, what’s your biggest challenge now?

Eric Brotman [00:27:15]:
My biggest challenge is we we always have as a company, we always have the same two challenges. It’s always people and technology in that order. And right now, our culture is excellent, so I wouldn’t call it a problem. I would say that retaining employees is easy, but attracting them is getting a little bit more difficult because we absolutely are growing faster and and have to train them. So I would say there’s that. If I had a challenge personally, it is trying to keep enough focus on the things that bring me joy so that my days are always great. You know, I built something I refer to as the joy revenue matrix, and I’ve done this with some consulting clients. And we use quadrants to talk about what are the things with one axis that make us happy and what are the things on another axis that make us money.

Eric Brotman [00:28:01]:
And if we can spend time doing the things that we love to do and they happen to make us money, that’s where we should spend most of our time. And the things we love to do that don’t make us money, reserve time for that. That’s important stuff in your life. That could be family or volunteering or other things that matter. But the things that don’t bring the joy, if they make us money, outsource them or delegate them. And if they don’t bring us joy and they don’t make us money, find a way to stop doing them. And so I would say right now, my greatest challenge is staying true to that and learning to say no to things that don’t fit in the right quadrants. I tend to say yes all the time, and I’m learning to say no to focus.

Eric Brotman [00:28:37]:
Bill Gates, I think, recently said the the busy is the new stupid, and so I don’t wanna be that. I wanna make sure that my time is being spent doing things that I love to do that are making an impact.

Roger Silk [00:28:47]:
Well, I can tell just listening to you that you are so passionate about this that I think, you know, it’s the old saying, you might do it even if it didn’t make money listening to you.

Eric Brotman [00:28:57]:
Well, the the I’m I’m having fun, and I and I am definitely recharged. And, you know, it ebbs and flows over a career over decades. That’s for sure. But, right now, I’ve sort of found my stride. I I’ve found my my people. I mean, we have our management team is amazing. Our advisers are amazing. I trust absolutely every one of them to do incredible work, and that is an it’s amazingly rewarding to feel like, man, you know, I started this company when some of them were just born, and here we are.

Roger Silk [00:29:24]:
That’s fantastic. Yeah. Eric, where can our audience go to learn more about you and the firm?

Eric Brotman [00:29:31]:
To learn more about BFG, the website is bfgfa.com. And to learn more about the consulting practice, it is brotmanconsultinggroup.com.

Roger Silk [00:29:42]:
Alrighty. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate you joining us. And since it’s the day before Thanksgiving, I’m gonna wish you a wonderful Thanksgiving.

Eric Brotman [00:29:50]:
You too. Enjoy every minute. This was the last activity I had before I’m on vacation, so I feel that coming through me too. So I’m ready.

Roger Silk [00:29:57]:
Well, thank you so much for your time. Really a pleasure.

Eric Brotman [00:30:00]:
Me take care.

Roger Silk [00:30:01]:
Thanks. You too. Bye. Thank you

Roger Silk [00:30:04]:
for listening to another episode of Sterling Insights, stand out and supercharge your assets, where we provide the info you need from successful leading financial advisers, lawyers, and CPAs. Your host, Roger and Catherine Silk, invite you to learn more about Sterling Foundation Management by visiting sterling foundations.com.