Participants:
Steve Wershing
Julie Littlechild
Seth Streeter
Julie Littlechild: Now, when I heard Seth talk about his business and the experience that he and his team have created, I just knew I had to get him on the podcast. Seth has redefined, in some sense, the scope of the offer that advisors can provide and they do that through their Inspired Living platform. They provide and curate extraordinary content and experiences for their clients and Seth believes that this is the future of client experience. This conversation will give you a glimpse into what’s possible when you have a clear idea of your target client, a strong vision and the will to pull it all off. And while their experience is legitimately impressive, it’s important to remember that they didn’t start there. That’s the message that I think is so important for all of us. We just need to take the first step toward a bigger vision and watch what happens. And with that, let’s jump straight to our conversation with Seth. Seth, welcome to the Becoming Referable Podcast, so pleased to have you here. Steve Wershing: Seth Streeter: Julie Littlechild: Maybe before we just jump into some of those intriguing things that you’re doing, can you just give us a quick overview of the business? Seth Streeter: So today, we’re at four billion in assets, serving 1800 families. We have a national firm that’s really growing and we’re super excited about our culture. We’ve got an incredible team of over 60 professionals and we have a lot of fun working together. Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Seth Streeter: The value stack has been spoken about a lot in our industry, and how at the bottom of the pyramid, the Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs pyramid, if you visualize it, is basic investment management, which we know can be delivered with a roboplatform for 20-30 basis points. Then, as you work up the pyramid, then you have more customized investments, maybe around socially responsible investing or concentrated stock. Okay, fewer people can do that but still, it can be done digitally. And then three, you get into planning. So now you talk about financial planning and adding value that way, which is a big tenet of Mission Wealth. But again, AI may be coming in, offering a lot of great planning tools. So as you move to the top of the pyramid, which Maslow called the self-actualization, we believe in the financial services arena, that really gets to the coaching realm. The coaching realm is where you can add uniquely human services that will not be replaced by AI or a machine. Inspired Living was really our focus on delivering meaningful, value-add coaching elements that will integrate with the planning and the investment management piece. Julie Littlechild: Seth Streeter: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: Seth Streeter: It’s deeper listening, it’s deeper probing. What that does is it opens up a connection with clients that goes from your head to your heart. That’s where the meaning and the connection really broadens. So we’ve developed programs that are designed to take clients there, depending on where the client is. You have to meet the client where they are. You don’t just start a relationship, starting to talk about the broader life goals, you talk about their financial pain points. But when the timing is right, we do have tools and resources to go there. Julie Littlechild: Seth Streeter: The way that we integrate it is after you ask the questions, create the space, listen and provide empathy, then you need to have some way to provide a framework where they can reimagine their life, they can reimagine how they’re going to move forward. And then, the next component is you have to be able to give them agency in order to do it. You have to be able to support them, and provide an encouraging platform, and peer support and advisor support to really help them believe they can move forward in a positive way. And then finally, you need to integrate that into the financial plan, into the conversation. So it’s not getting lost from the fact that we’re here to help them make financial choices, it’s just an additive element that then can be integrated back, to make the financial plan far more connected and meaningful to the client. Steve Wershing: Can we walk through a sample of that? Because it sounds really interesting, and I’d like to hear how it plays out. So let’s say, you’re talking with a client and you’re asking, “Do you think, at work, that your skills are valued?” You ask those questions and they say, “No. Really no, I really don’t feel like I’m getting valued.” Can you walk us through what the next few steps for you might be? Seth Streeter: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: Seth Streeter: In that conversation I said, “Well, Bob, what do you love to do?” He said, “Well, what does that have to do with me retiring?” He had all his statements on the table, he wanted us to dive into his portfolio, and his profit-sharing plan and all that. So I said, “But, what do you love to do? My job is not just to help you leave what you currently don’t love, but it’s to help you go into what you do love.” His wife luckily spoke up and said, “Well, Bob, honey, you love history. You’re a history buff. You watch the History channel, you read all these books, you love history.” He’s like, “Well, how is that going to help me retire?” That opened up a conversation where we started talking about ways, from a financial planning standpoint, that they could change their lifestyle. Their kids were private skills and could shift to public schools. They had a country club that they were never using. Bob was willing to work many, many years if he did something that he really enjoyed. And so two years later, he became a high school history teacher. He and Sue could travel during the summers, which is what Sue wanted to do. Actually, his back pain improved, he lost weight. That was an example where he brought something up and instead of saying, “Well, I’m sorry. Let’s get to your asset allocations, we can figure out how to optimize to help you retire,” I said, “No, this is an opportunity to use this conversation, what’s come up, so I can be a positive catalyst in their life and help them reimagine a different future where they could be much happier.” Steve Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Seth Streeter: She wasn’t consoled by the fact, “Hey, you have more than enough money to spend what you want.” She felt like, “I need to find myself.” So we started talking about what is it that you love, what fills you up. She was saying how she loves to nurture. She goes, “I’m a natural nurturer, I love that.” She said, “I have this home, it feels empty right now. I’d love to give back, but I don’t really know what non-profits to get involved with.” She was at a loss. But, what ended up happening is, in multiple conversations, she realized that she loved doing skincare. Here she was, a multi-millionaire woman in her late 50s, she went and get her estheticians license and she had this amazing bedroom that she turned into, but we planned around her turning it into a home salon studio. She started doing facials for single women, single moms, women through divorces, where she could connect with them, she could nurture them, she had company. She loved it. It wasn’t about the money, it was about giving her a new identity in this phase of her life. Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Seth Streeter: I think it starts by changing what we believe our actual job is. Are you a financial advisor in the business of delivering financial plans and investment advice? Or, are you in the business of human transformation, being a positive catalyst in people’s lives, and you happen to use financial planning as a portal to get there? So I think it’s what is your role, what is your purpose and if your purpose is to truly help people, that goes well beyond the balance sheet. We talk about wealth in 11 dimensions, only one of those dimensions is finance. The other dimensions have to do with your social connection, your physical health, your intellectual growth, your impact in the community, your emotional wellbeing. All these other dimensions is what makes up a life, so as advisors, we have to think about what is our role and how can we best serve these clients. Is optimizing their financial plan and talking about their ROTH conversion the only way you can do that? Julie Littlechild: Seth Streeter: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: Seth Streeter: But then, we also have to think about the evolution of the relationship. As I mentioned, most clients come to us because they have a financial pain point. “I want to retire, I need more income. Should I sell my house? I have concentrated stock. I have a special needs daughter.” We begin the relationship focused on the financial elements. We do ask some of these questions. But, for the first one, two, three years, a lot of the lifting is financial based, like any traditional advisor would focus on. But, what happens after years three, four, five when a lot of the financial plans are in order and you’re just updating, but there’s not as much robust change happening. That’s when these coaching services can be integrated and really well received. COVID was a huge opportunity for advisors to connect with clients. They were longing for connection. They were sitting at home, isolated. They wanted to know their money was safe, but a lot of them just wanted to know their health was okay, that their family was okay, that they could reinvent themself if they were furloughed or if their business was going through hard times. So having these resources available is going to be hugely valuable during transitions and usually, years three, four, five and beyond in the client relationship. So the time allotment really depends on the service model, the client need, and it’s about having it available when it’s needed. It’s not about forcing it down someone’s throat, it’s having it available when it’s needed. And then, having the tools and resources to be empowered to provide the value to the client. Steve Wershing: Our proprietary system will teach you who to invite to your board, how to invite them, the best questions to put on the agenda. We’ll facilitate the meeting and give you five deliverables. Just send me a note, steve@theclientdrivenpractice.com and put CAB, that’s C-A-B, in the subject line and I’ll send you my free report, Seven Tips on Making Your Virtual Client Advisory Board a Success. Ask us about our virtual wine tastings, too. Send me a note at steve@theclientdrivenpractice.com and put C-A-B in the subject line. Julie Littlechild: Seth Streeter: The Inspired Talks are where we bring in expert resources and we actually host talks. We will interview these experts, and then we’ll do blog posts, and then our advisors will share it, we share it with clients. Our advisors follow-up with the clients who say, “This struck a chord with me. I’m thinking about my health in new ways.” What happens from the Inspired Talks is we do Conversation Circles in the subsequent month. We have a Men’s Circle and Women’s Circle, so they’re gender specific. If people want to talk about health, we’ll then have a facilitated peer conversation around those topics that are brought up that quarter, related to the Inspired Talk. We talked about our environmental space, do you feel a sense of alignment with where you live and how to find more of that. Also, decluttering and actual hacks on how to improve your space. We talked about transitions with Chip Connolly, and how to find life purpose, and going through the midlife U-curve of happiness. Most recently, we talked to Dan Buettner about health and longevity. These Conversation Circles are groups of 15 or fewer clients with two to three advisors, where we get in, we intimately talk about their thoughts around what if you lived an extra 10 years, how would that affect your life? Tell me about your framework around health, what does it mean to you? As you start to get that peer sharing, that’s another way to provide tremendous value. And then, the final piece are our Wisdom Shares. So every quarter, we do a Wisdom Share program where up to 100 clients can participate, it’s a 90-minute program. We go through each of the 11 dimensions of wealth, and then we break them into small groups where they have 10 minutes to ideate what their top five tips are for having abundance in that particular dimension. How have you found success having an impact in the community? How have you found success staying intellectually stimulated and growing? Then, they come back and present their top ideas to the overall group, and then the group also crowdsources other ideas. At the end of it, we provide an infographic with all the crowdsourced ideas across those 11 dimension and provide that to our clients. It’s a really fun way to hear from peers, to contribute your best ideas and to just think more expansively, beyond again, just your finances. Julie Littlechild: Seth Streeter: I gave my TED Talk five years ago and that was the coming out story for integrating these two. But in the last five years, it’s all been ramping up. I think, honestly, the appetite from clients has been ramping up as well. Julie Littlechild: Seth Streeter: And if you do define yourself as doing more than just numbers, the two dimensional questions, and you do see yourself as an advocate for your clients in all these more holistic ways, well then you can start to say, “How can I be more present to these opportunities that are popping up?” Because as financial advisors, we’re in such a privileged seat where clients are openly sharing with us family dynamics, hopes, fears, dreams, wrinkles. A great example. I was actually sitting with an advisor who is a newer advisor and a gentleman, we were talking about his estate planning and his financial planning. He had plenty of money. As we were talking about gifting to family, he started to get quiet and he started to become emotional. We had talked about his three kids. He brought up that he had three kids, but he only had talked about two of them. When it came to gifting, he brought up with his daughter, how he really, really had deep sadness about the relationship, that it had gone astray. That it had soured a number of years ago and he didn’t know how to handle that when it came to his estate plans. We were also talking about home, and gifting and a mortgage, and at that point in time my advisor was caring. He said, “Oh man, Mr. Client, here’s a box of tissues, take your time.” The guy dabbled his eyes and basically tried to push back the tears. Then, my advisor said, “Are you okay?” He says, “Yeah. Yeah, we can keep going.” He said, “Okay, back to this mortgage,” and he went right to where we left about this talk about gifting this property. That was a window. That was a window to just say, “What’s coming up for you? How would you like this relationship to heal? What would be steps for you to get there? How can we support this? What would success look like?” Just being able to be present with what came up for that man in that moment, instead of shoving it aside, that’s all we have to do as advisors. The issues will come up, we just can’t push them to the side. Get out of our head, get into our heart and be available to how you can serve them beyond ways you’ve been serving them so far. A lot of advisors are doing this already. Most advisors have pretty high EQ as well as IQ. But, we’ve been taught that our job is to open up our calculator or our financial planning software and just run projections and model portfolios. We can reteach ourself that that’s not our only job. And in doing that, we’re going to find lots of opportunities to serve our clients. Frankly, it’s so much more enjoyable. When you’re connecting with clients in this way, it’s so rewarding. You feel like you’ve actually made a difference. Julie Littlechild: Seth Streeter: I would just say you’re too valuable of an asset and the clients need this work so much, don’t get caught doing the work that’s low tier on the pyramid. Find ways to free yourself up to focus at least middle tier, if not upper tier, of the pyramid. There’s 18,000 RIAs out there, the bulk of them are doing the vanilla financial planning and asset allocation. Do you want to be vanilla? If you want to be vanilla, keep doing what you’re doing and you’ll fall into the herd beautifully, and you’ll probably do just fine. But, if you want to separate yourself from the herd, you want to stand out and be the purple cow amongst a field of black and white cows, then start taking some risks and connecting with clients in these ways. Free yourself up to do what’s going to serve you more and the clients more, and it’s going to be far more rewarding. Steve Wershing: Seth Streeter: We ask clients to be so vulnerable with us, and yet if we stay buttoned up, and just prim and proper, and don’t share what’s going on in our life, that’s not really a fair exchange, is it? What connects with you? What keeps you up at night? What lights you up during the day? Share that with your clients, share more of who you are, bring in resources and that’s going to foster these connections. Julie Littlechild: Seth Streeter: Julie Littlechild: Seth Streeter: Well okay, first and foremost, it’s an incredible retention tool. We all know that retaining existing clients is the most important thing we need to do. Finding ways to connect with our clients, especially those have been with you three, four, five years now and you’ve done a lot of the planning, and you’ve helped them update their estate plans, and get their insurance, and refinance their mortgages, you’ve done a lot of that lifting, what have you done for them lately? Well, these types of conversations will open up a whole new value set to deliver to them. So retention is first and foremost. And then, secondly, you are going to be so much more referable because clients aren’t going to just naturally bring up, “My advisor does a great job at designing and implementing my 60/40 portfolio.” That doesn’t come up in cocktail conversation. But what does come up is, “Wow, we were talking about longevity and trends happening in longevity, and how important your pod is, or the people you spend time with is, and having a sense of purpose. My advisor gave me these tools that I thought was really interesting, and this talk that I thought was interesting. It’s right in the same subject we’re having, John, you should listen to this. Let me forward you this link.” That is a referable moment. When clients hear about a firm that’s caring about the whole person, and by the way, we do a tremendous job at managing over four billion in assets, and we use alternatives and we do SRI, and we do a great job at all the blocking and tackling that is the core of a financial planning and wealth management firm. But then in addition, we care about the whole person through these Inspired Living services, that’s a pretty dangerous combination. Julie Littlechild: Seth Streeter: Think about extending who are in a platform way to your clients. What is it that’s you? What do you do in your spare time? What do you love to do? And then, start to share that, and invite your community within those space. If you’re into horseback riding, if you’re into sailing, if you know about art, if you volunteer at the Boys and Girls Club, whatever it is you naturally are doing in your time, take that as a gift, and then expand it and amplify it into your practice. It doesn’t have to be, “Oh gosh, I don’t have a budget to go hire these top rated speakers.” You have people in your community that have a story to tell. Give them the opportunity to share the story. You already have the connection, you have the trust. Clients will appreciate A, learning from them and B, learning more about you and your connection to these other people. Julie Littlechild: Seth Streeter: I realized that we need to look at wealth more broadly, and we need to help our clients look at wealth more broadly. Even during COVID, helping people look at the 11 dimensions, they might be stressed about the financial dimension, but when they start to think about, “Wow, I have spent more time with family, and I have taken daily walks, and I am spending more time in nature. I’ve listened to more podcasts then I ever have.” They’ve outgrown their wealth in tremendous ways in these other definitions of it. It can be a great way to help people reframe their life, and look forward with some optimism and gratitude. And again, to create a deeper bond between you and your client that’s going to be based on something authentic, that you care about and that they care about. Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: If people want to find out more about what you’re up to, where can they find you? Seth Streeter: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: Seth Streeter: Steve Wershing:
Welcome to Becoming Referable, the podcast that helps you become the kind of advisor people can’t help talking about. I’m Julie Littlechild, and today Steve and I have the privilege of speaking with Seth Streeter. Seth is the founder and Chief Impact Officer, which you’ll have to agree is a very cool title, at Mission Wealth.
Yeah. Welcome, Seth.
Thank you so much, excited to be joining you.
Oh, yes. We were on a panel together some time ago and I was listening to you talk about your business, and the entire time I was thinking, “I’ve got to get you on the podcast because I want to learn more about this.”
Sure. Mission Wealth was founded 21 years ago, in the year 2000, by Brad Stark and myself. We really founded the firm based on four key pillars. Number one, we believed in independence and objectivity, this is before the fiduciary model was really commonplace as it is today. Two, we believed in comprehensive financial planning. Brad and I were two of the youngest CFPs in the state of California, and really believed in that approach. Three, we wanted to be proactive and make sure we had a meaningful service model that we proactively delivered to our clients. And four, we wanted to integrate with other professionals. Attorneys, accountants, bankers and so forth.
Well, that’s half the battle right there.
Yeah.
I’d love to dig in on, you mentioned a meaningful service level. What I’ve found particularly intriguing, although there’s a couple of things you mentioned there I’d love to dig in on, was something that you’re calling the Inspired Living service, which just really jumped out at me as something so unique and so different. Can you talk us through what that is?
Sure. Let me start with the why, why we really developed this program.
Is this something that you offer to all clients, for your top clients? How does this actually get integrated into the work that you do?
Yeah. Some components of it are offered to all clients, and some components are offered to middle tier, and some components are only offered to the highest tier. Just like in a service model approach, we have unique elements designed for the appropriate audience.
Right. That makes sense.
And Seth, what kinds of things go into that coaching element at the top of that pyramid? What do you do there that distinguishes from the financial planning piece?
Yeah. Well, we have a number of programs which we can get into, and I can talk about the specific programs. But, I would just say overall, it’s about evolving the discovery conversation with clients from two dimensional to three dimensional. It’s going beyond, “Okay, let’s talk about your asset allocation, and your mortgage and what your home is worth,” to asking questions like, “Hey, do you feel a sense of place in your home? Do you feel in your career like you’re being valued and that your contributions are really leveraging your gifts in the way you want them to?”
It sounds like a really robust, deep conversation and I’m going to talk about some of the tools that you use to support that. But, one of the things that’s come up as I’ve been talking to advisors over the last little while about having deeper conversations is there’s almost, “Well, what do I do with the information? If I’m talking to my clients about these things and they tell me I don’t feel a sense of place in my home, where do I go from that?” How do you think about that?
Yeah. Well, our first and foremost job is to listen with clients, so just creating that safe space for them to share is really huge. The second step is to empathize, to really try to understand what the client’s going through and to feel what they’re feeling as they’ve just sold their company or just gone through a divorce. Or, they’ve just retired, they’ve just lost a spouse. Life transitions are where this coaching element really can shine.
Sure. Well, I have two client specific examples I could share.
That would be great.
Great.
One is I met with Bob and his wife Sue. He was a corporate attorney, made a lot of money, seven figures. Beautiful home, lavish lifestyle. In the financial planning discussion he was like, “How soon can I be done?” It was like that, “I’m grinding out.” He was traveling a great deal, this is pre-pandemic. He actually had back issues so he was in a lot of pain, flying all the time. He was miserable.
Interesting.
Powerful example.
Yeah.
Did you say you had another example? Because these are really great, to bring these to life like this.
Sure. Yeah, I have another example. A woman, she was in her late 50s and when we met her, she was just going through a divorce. She had a lovely home, plenty of assets, I knew she’d be fine financially. But, she also was really sad. Her daughters were off to college and beyond, so she was empty nesting. Here, her husband of 30 years and being a mom, both of those changed shape, as a spouse and as a mom.
Wow, that’s amazing.
Yeah. That’s really powerful, too.
You have, I know, a really robust platform of content and whatnot that I’d love to talk through. But, there’s also the skills side of this, I assume, which sounds the most fundamental to me. What are the right questions? How do you know when to ask them? Is this something that you developed in a really intentional way? Is it just something that you’re just naturally really good at?
Well, we have been working to develop it and to make sure that our advisors have training to be able to offer these types of deeper questions and resources. Some of it comes to be more naturally. I think everyone has these natural gifts, we have to get out of our head to be able to access them. Because we’re trained, as financial advisors, to know about estate planning, and taxes, and investments, and economic theory, and we’re in our head so much. So we have to let go of that, and we have to just connect with the human.
Is this platform, this training that you developed, something that is internal? Or, is it something that other advisors can access?
It is internal. We have done trainings to larger groups. But frankly, we built a platform that’s expanding with partnerships with firms that want access to these coaching services. So we have the ability for firms, let’s say they’re a two, three, four person firm but they believe in this coaching model, want to provide these deep connections with clients, we have ways that we can partner with them where they can get exposure to these programs and provide that for their clients.
Okay, great.
Let’s talk a little bit about doing that kind of work for folks. You’re going way beyond what many people consider the traditional boundaries of financial planning. What kind of time commitment is that with those clients? How do you work that into your process? How much contact time do you have with clients, to help get them through this kind of a process?
Right. Well, some of it can be done at scale, especially in this virtual world of ours, when we have speakers that come in on each of these 11 dimensions. So two weeks ago, we had Dan Buettner, who wrote the book The Blue Zones, all about health and longevity. He studied pockets of people who live over age 100, and live with vibrancy over age 100. He came in and talked about what are the lessons from The Blue Zone. That was something our entire client base could benefit from, listening to that and I did a Q and A with him.
We’ll get back to the show in just a moment, but I wanted to make you an offer in the meantime. This is Steve Wershing, from Becoming Referable. You know, with everything that’s changed over the past year, your clients needs and priorities have changed as well. How has their outlook changed, their goals? What do they think of what you’ve done well during this trying time and what can be improved? A virtual client advisory board will give you those insights and more.
Well, I guess that’s where the platform that you’ve built comes into play, because it’s not just always the conversation, it’s the content and whatnot. I think, if I’ve got it right, there are four elements to that. There’s the library of content, Inspired Talks, Inspired Life Wisdom Share and the Conversation Circles. Do I have that right? And then, I’d love to talk about each of those because they’re quite fascinating.
Sure. Yeah, those are the four main programs that we have that we’re rolling out across the firm. Content is simply having resources, podcasts, TED Talks, articles on these themes that matter most to clients. We curate content for clients across these themes.
What proportion of your clients are actively using this? As I mentioned, I could be assuming, but it’s probably incredible for some, and then you’ll have some that it’s like, “This isn’t my gig.”
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I think it grows, over time. Right now, I would say it’s about 25% of our clients are active. I think that’ll only grow, because this is a relatively new program for us. This has only been in the last year that we’ve really rolled out all of these defined programs in this way.
I can imagine. It sounds daunting. It sounds incredible and daunting at the same time. I have to imagine there’s people listening going, “Are you kidding me?” Which, I guess if it was easy everybody would do it, as they say. But, are there baby steps for advisors who appreciate what you’re doing but are maybe not going to be delivering on that scale?
Sure. I think it starts with, again, defining what is your role with clients. Are you here to deliver an 80/20 asset allocation with rebalancing tax loss harvesting and one financial planning update per year? Is that your job? Or, are you here to help your clients achieve their dreams, and to empower them to move forward in their life in whatever ways matter most to them? Start with defining your job.
It is an interesting mindset shift. I was having a conversation with some wonderful advisors recently and we were talking about changing the conversation, about going deeper in a few areas. The question legitimately came back, “How do I do that and fit in everything I have to do?” It’s a hard one to answer because at one level you’d think, “This is what you have to do and you have to figure this out.” But, any thoughts on that?
Well, yeah. More and more of our business is becoming commoditized. If your practice entails you spending time focusing on rebalancing portfolios and not using software, focuses on tax loss harvesting, focuses on trying to provide information access, that’s work that you could outsource, or hire someone, delegate, and free you up to do the more meaningful work, which is the client centric connection.
Now, you told the story about the man who was recalling his relationship with his daughter. How can an advisor start working toward those conversations, if something dramatic like that does not come up? How can you start bringing some of these things up when the client doesn’t present it to you like that?
Yes. That’s where doing some broad outreach, so even in your newsletter. We’ll talk about transitions in our newsletter, we’ll talk about purpose, we’ll talk about community impact, we’ll talk about philanthropy. We’ll talk about health. By just starting to bring up some of these subjects broadly, you’re going to find you’re going to get some hits. Curate some articles that connect with you, or book lists that you like, or a podcast group, and send some links to clients. “Hey, I found this interesting.” Share a little bit more.
How do you find this all connects to generating more business as well? At some level, it feels obvious that people would talk about these things. But, can you talk to us about the connection between this and becoming referable?
What’s the business case for going through all this?
Well, I don’t want to be so crass as to say that, but why not?
Yeah. I’ve heard, “If it doesn’t make dollars, it doesn’t make sense.”
Yeah. I can easily see people just talking about this more naturally. But since I asked a crass question, I didn’t mean to but apparently I did, what you invest in the business must be significantly higher on these activities compared to others. You’ve talked about big name speakers, you’ve talked about a platform. Is this just something that you’ve accepted is the new cost of doing business and the new cost of driving deeper engagement?
Yes, it is a cost of staying relevant in this rapidly changing industry, especially if you’re a smaller firm. There are these $20, $30, $40 billion firms that have in-house tax, in-house attorneys, in-house trust departments. How are you going to still charge the same 1% or less and offer a value-add experience to your clients that can get all those other services for the same price? Luckily, this Inspired Living work is a natural extension of who I am and the company I keep. I’ve never had to pay a speaker to communicate with me. These are just friends. These are friends.
I think that’s such an important point because it’s easy to hear these big stories and forget that there’s other ways to do this. It’s just the intent of what you’re doing and what you’re talking about. You did not start this journey with all of this in place, as you said. That was going back a few years ago, and I imagine it looks very different now than it did when you started.
100%. It’s our own narrative. I used to keep this hidden. I was a financial CEO, I needed to be buttoned up and I needed to talk about money. That’s what was supposed to happen. And yet, here I was working with families that had $10 million homes and many of them weren’t that fulfilled. I was taking my kids on service trips to Honduras, and Guatemala and Mexico, meeting people that literally had almost nothing from a material standpoint, and yet they seemed to have contentment, and fulfillment, and kindness. I thought, “How do we wrap our head around this?”
Well.
That’s great. Yeah, that’s amazing.
That was a mic drop moment.
No kidding.
What more can we say beyond that, really?
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, Seth, it’s really fascinating and it’s really amazing what kind of work you’re doing. Thank you so much for joining us here.
They can go to missionwealth.com and learn a lot there. Social media, to our website. They can watch my TED Talk and they can learn a lot about what we’re doing. We share a lot, so feel free to dive in. And then, a partnership conversation, we’re happy to have those as well.
Thank you so much for being here today.
Yeah, thank you very much for joining us.
Thank you for the opportunity.
Hey folks, Steve again. Thanks for joining us on Becoming Referable. If you like what you’ve been hearing, please do us a favor and rate us on iTunes. It really helps. You can get all the links, show notes and other tidbits from these episodes at becomingreferable.com. You can also get our free report, Three Referral Myths That Limit Your Growth, and connect with our blogs and other resources. So until next time, so long.