Episode 47 Transcript – Larry Miles

Participants:

Steve Wershing
Julie Littlechild
Larry Miles

Steve:
Welcome to Becoming Referable, the podcast that shows you how to become the kind of advisor people can’t stop talking about. I’m Steve Wershing. On this episode we interview Larry Miles, Principle at AdvicePeriod, a firm with the audacious goal of reinventing wealth management. AdvicePeriod has gone from a start-up to managing almost two and a half billion dollars in less than five years. Larry says the current model of wealth management is broken, that investment management is largely commoditized, and lays out his plan to create a new model to replace it. He talks about how new technology creates the opportunity to create a whole new kind of client experience. He describes how assembling a championship team with a shared mission is critical. We also discuss his new book, It’s That Simple, that describes how to build the service firm of the future. If you want to build a firm that will thrive in the 21st century you’ll want to hear this episode. Let’s hear our conversation with Larry Miles.

Speaker 2:
Learn everything you need to know to form and benefit from a successful client advisory board, from the man who has lead more client advisory board meetings than anyone in the financial services industry. Steven Wershing, CFP, has been helping financially advisory firms create and utilize client advisory boards as a business building strategy for over seven years. And now you can get his best advice for a small fraction of the cost by attending this one day program held just before the NAPFA 2018 conference on October 15th in Philadelphia. By the end of this one day program you will have a complete and thoughtful plan to make your client advisory board a reality, or make a bigger success of the one you already have. What you’ll learn includes, how to choose the right participants for your board, creating an effective board meeting agenda, choosing a venue, what restaurants won’t tell you, choosing the right person to run your meetings, and upgrading the client experience with your board’s guidance.

The program also includes guest speaker Marie Swift, President and CEO of Impact Communications, a thought leader for thought leaders. She is known for bringing some of the industries best and brightest voices together for dialogue and debate. She’ll teach you how to leverage your advisory board and your marketing. You’ll walk out with a complete action plan for getting your advisory board together, or to make your current board a bigger success.

Go to NAPFA.advisoryboard.solutions. One day, October 15th, in Philadelphia can show you how to deepen your client relationships and engage them like never before. Having a conversation with some of your best clients may be the fastest way to referrals and more clients. Don’t miss this opportunity. Go to NAPFA.advisoryboard.solutions to sign up for this event today. That’s NAPFA.advisoryboard.solutions. Now, Becoming Referable.

Steve:
Larry Miles welcome to the Becoming Referable Podcast, thanks for joining us.

Larry:
Thank you for having me.

Julie:
Yeah, great to have you here.

Steve:
So, I’m really fascinated. You know your company AdvicePeriod says on its homepage that the current model of wealth management is outdated, and you’re going to bring something new. That’s a pretty big claim. Can you tell us what that’s all about?

Larry:
Absolutely. Our mission is to reinvent wealth management and there are two big things that we saw, or opportunities or things were wrong with the old model. The first is that it seems as though the historical model of wealth management doesn’t really focus on what matters most to clients. So many wealth management companies are still trying to sell that my asset allocation is better than yours, or I have a strategic asset allocation with a tactile overlay, or I have special managers that you can only get from me in my company, and we just don’t believe that. We think that much of the investment part of the client service has been commoditized, and that you should instead focus on planning.

The second big theme that we saw missing from the old model of a wealth management firm is the lack of focus on technology. It almost seems as though the more successful your firm has been the more outdated your technology is. You almost become a victim of your own success. So, it was a huge advantage to us to start from scratch four years ago, no legacy systems, no legacy technology, we could just focus on what we thought mattered most to our clients. And the trend that we see, and to answer your question about the future model, we see an integrated professional service firm, a firm that can deliver to its clients not just the wealth management services of planning, and investing, and financial advice, but integrated with tax planning, legal advice, but all from the same firm or the same family of firms that makes for a more efficient and more holistic client experience.

Steve:
It’s interesting and there are two things that I’d like to pick up on what you said, let me take the minor one first and that’s the technology thing. How much of it is just advisors who have been doing this for a long time not keeping current with stuff, versus just a belief that this is what built this business, and therefore that’s what clients want?

Larry:
We’ve heard both from the advisors that we’ve talked to in terms of why the technology is in the state that it is. Most advisors that we have met want great technology, they want a great client experience levered by technology, but the advisors aren’t necessarily either interested or have the wherewithal to find the best technology, and implement it in their business. Even if they wanted to or even if it was their own business, it just may not be their area of expertise. And so, there seems to be a desire for better technology, but not necessarily the skillset to go out and find it and implement it, which if you think about it much like running a wealth management business, may not necessarily be the skillset of the top advisors.

Steve:
Well sure, and it’s funny because I see a lot of this sort of, if it’s to be it’s up to me kind of attitude with advisors. If I’m going to move into a new office and I need a new computer network I’m not going to do it, I’m going to call a guy to do it. So there are folks out there who can help them evaluate technology, or is it just that there isn’t anybody who’s current enough on the technology to help an advisor sort through all that stuff?

Larry:
Our experience is that there’s certainly someone you can call to help you find a CRM system, or the basics, get your information on the cloud. But our sense is that the fintech space is moving so rapidly, and things become outdated in 12-24 months that there really isn’t an expert that’s out there, or if there is someone that’s holding themselves out to be an expert about kidding you out with all of the technology that you need, it’s probably not the latest, it’s probably dated, because the time you become an expert on a piece of technology or a technology company there’s usually something better or something newer that’s come along. So, it’s really a challenge.

Steve:
Yeah.

Julie:
It sounds like an approach issue, and I wonder if we have a crisis of imagination to some extent, because often when we think about the client experience, which you just mentioned. The idea is, well what can I deliver given what I’ve had? It sounds like what you’ve done is said, let’s imagine a great client experience, and then figure out what technology’s required to run this. Is that a fair somewhat nuanced argument?

Larry:
Yeah. What resonates with me is that yes, we started by thinking about what matters most to our clients, and thinking about that perhaps differently than the historical wealth management model of investments first, everything else a distant second. And that was magnified for us by looking at all the technological advances that were out there. 15 or 20 years ago many wealth management companies including ourselves, my partners and I at our former business, we had to develop technology ourselves. These days there are so many amazing third party coders, technologists that are building technology. You can kind of look at it both ways, what does this technology allow me to do to my client experience? But then also the need is driven by what really matters most to clients.

Julie:
Mm-hmm.

Larry:
And something that you mentioned at the beginning there Julie was that it’s a matter of focus. So many wealth management companies large and small, technology is something that’s done off the corner of someone’s desk. Or they look at technology as an expense not an investment. And we think that’s a massive missed opportunity. Today the firms that are going to be the most successful at implementing the latest and the best technology, and helping their clients, are going to be those firms that have made technology everyone’s responsibility. It’s not longer the IT guy’s responsibility to make sure we have the best technology, it should be everyone on the team from the advisors to operations, everyone needs to be focused on technology preciously because it moves so quickly and it’s so difficult.

Julie:
Right.

Steve:
I’d like to pick up on Julie’s comment too about the crisis in imagination. I remember back in my broker dealer days I went to a conference and was listening to one of the top operations folks from a broker dealer talk about implementing technology. And this is in the days when broker dealers were just rolling out websites for advisors so that you could access records and systems inside the broker dealer through the web.

Larry:
Right.

Steve:
Which was a really amazing thing at that point. And what they were doing mostly was like putting the rep manual up online, and they were putting PDF documents up online.

Larry:
Right.

Steve:
And what he was saying was that, look it’s the power of this whole new idea is not to digitize all these paper things that we’ve been doing, but it’s really to leverage the medium. How much do you think is going on- how much is that crisis in imagination that Julie talked about really advisors can’t imagine a client experience that is outside of what they’ve traditionally done?

Larry:
I think that is really well said and a huge part of the issue. I talk with advisors all the time and hear things like, “Technology will never help me with this aspect of my business.” Or, “Technology will never be able to automate that.” And I think that lack of imagination, I mean partially it’s embarrassing that more financial advisors don’t embrace technology more fully than they do, and I think it’s a huge opportunity for those advisors who do want to be tech enabled. Because when you start underestimating technology and start deciding certain things that technology can’t do, or can’t help you with, you’ve already lost, you’re never going to see the opportunities if you’ve already made up your mind that technology can’t help.

Julie:
We’re talking about technology, which clearly a huge part of what you’re doing, but at the beginning you mentioned understanding what’s important to our clients. And I’m assuming that’s probably broader than technology. Can you speak to that? When you came in with that focus, what is important to our clients, what were the key learnings for you, and then how did that influence the business that you created?

Larry:
The biggest learning for us, my partners and I over the past 20 years has been the difficulty of trying to beat market returns net of fees let alone net of taxes. We came up in this industry like so many did, and were introduced to it through investments. Our first business was an open architecture manager of managers. We could invest in anything. And we thought given that infinite menu of investment options we would easily be able to beat passive index returns, even after fees. And maybe there was a time where that was possible, but in looking at the last five, 10, 15 years the statistics in our opinion are overwhelming that beating the market net of fees, let alone net of taxes is a losing proposition. Over 90% of managers and most asset classes over any long period of time under-perform. And so, as we thought about, okay well if that doesn’t help our clients, if that doesn’t matter to them, then what does?

And at the same time, we started working with larger more complex clients that really helped us understand the opportunity to benefit clients had much more to do around planning, whether that’s financial planning, whether that’s estate planning, whether that’s just offering advice, that was where the name of our firm AdvicePeriod came from was we just wanted to offer our clients advice, period. And much less about trying to beat the market. So that was a massive learning for us, a huge takeaway, and that’s really what drives our business around what we think matters most to our clients. Our clients work with professional service providers because we’re supposed to be the experts. They want to call us and get good information, good answers on all aspects of their lives, and that’s what we want to provide them.

Steve:
So one of the things that I think keeps current advisors in that investment mindset is the whole AUM based charging model, so you’re focusing more purely on the advice. How do you charge clients for the work that you do?

Larry:
You’re right, AUM is definitely in our opinion a hallmark of the past. It’s a clumsy way of measuring advisor success and to us it’s entirely meaningless. A firm that has large AUM it just means they’re good at selling, it doesn’t mean that they’re providing their clients a great experience. And so, we track AUM because we have to and SEC has us report it periodically, but for us and how we charge our clients, we want to charge our clients a fair fee for the value that we add, whether that’s through managing assets, whether that’s through offering estate planning construction, whether that’s through steering them in the right direction to hire other advisors. And so, we’ve looked at the value chain, we’ve looked at all the different areas where we can help clients and we’ve ascribed a certain value to that. Asset allocation and manager selection it’s worth paying something for that, but certainly not one percent, maybe 20 years ago it was, but these days you can Google asset allocation and get a pretty good one. You can outsource the management of it to a robo advisor or to a Vanguard for basis points. And so, we’ll charge for that but not very much.

And then if clients want financial planning, if they want estate planning based on how valuable that’s going to be to the clients we charge them a fee. Our fee is billed quarterly in advance, almost in like a retainer type of model. It’s incredibly transparent. We’ve turned our belief system into a calculator that we share with clients that says, this is what we think our different services are worth. Clients can opt in or opt out. It’s a dynamic pricing model. Our goal is always to charge a fair fee for the value that we add.

Julie:
I’ve heard of a few firms taking this approach, and I think it’s met with fear. When we talk to other advisors, because clearly they may have high asset clients who don’t actually require the same level of service, and that could change fundamentally. How correlated do you find the assets and the fees being paid to be? Is it still relatively tightly correlated or do you find you have … I know you deal with higher net worth clients, but lower net worth relatively speaking still paying higher fees and vice versa?

Larry:
My opinion is that there’s a certain amount of arrogance that exists amongst financial advisors who believe that they’ve always been paid a certain way, they’ve always been paid a certain amount, and therefore they deserve it, and that’s just what it is. I charge one percent, and I don’t care if you have $100, $100,000 or $100 million that’s how I get paid, and therefore it’s right. And we just don’t think that’s right, that doesn’t seem fair to us on either end. It should be based on how much value you deliver to your clients. And I just don’t know how you can justify charging a client with $100 million dollars one percent or a million bucks a year, that just seems like an astronomically high bar above which you have to deliver service. On the other end of the spectrum the lower net worth, or lower assets under management client sometimes you need to charge more than what would work out to be one percent of $100,000 relationship, because you’re doing so much work for them. You’re helping them with their life insurance, their disability insurance, you’re helping them buy homes, and shop mortgages. If you only charge $1,000 for that you might well lose money. And so, to answer your question about correlation, there’s some correlation but it is dramatically less than the historical wealth management market would have you believe that it is.

Julie:
Mm-hmm.

Steve:
As an aside, one of the things that I’m really interested in seeing is I think that a lot of advisors who are based in the AUM model may start getting questions from clients where they’ve been providing a full suite of financial planning services. And let’s say that they’ve got a million dollars for a client under management, and the client has a million dollars in their 401k or their retirement plan. And so, they go to retire and the advisor says, “Great, well let’s roll it over with us and we’ll manage the whole thing.”

And having the client come back and say, “Well, that’s great and we love you, and you’ve given us great service, and you’ve done it for this amount, but you’re going to apply that same percentage to my rollover, what are you going to do for me when you double my fees?”

Larry:
Exactly. The consumer of the future is going to demand proof of value.

Steve:
Yeah.

Larry:
That’s my belief. They’re not longer going to go along with, well this is the way it’s always been done, this is how I’ve always been charged. They’re not going to do it. There’re going to be more tools at the consumer’s disposal to evaluate the results that they’re receiving from all their professional service providers, not just wealth managers, but attorneys, and accountants, and so it’s going to be incumbent upon the wealth advisor to prove and demonstrate this is the value that I’m adding, this is the fee that you’re paying. You can decide if it’s worth it, but I can quantify it for you. The level of transparency, the demand of transparency has increased already, and I think that, that’s just going to be a steep upward trajectory going forward.

Julie:
I just love that this is where the discussion is taking place because at some level I’ve always thought it’s not whether it’s fees, or commission, or AUM, or what it is, it’s is it justifiable? And is it what the client needs, wants, and expects? And if you can justify a different model then knock yourself out, but this is about what the client wants, right?

Larry:
That’s right. If you always go back to what’s best for the client, what’s in the client’s best interest, that has to be at the foundation of any successful long-term business. You might get away with not putting the client first for a little bit of time, but it’s going to catch up with you. It’s so much easier to focus on what’s right for the client, what’s fair, and that’s going to help you not only have great client relationships, but that’s going to help you grow your business.

Steve:
And it’s sort of proof of concept. You’ve gone from establishing AdvicePeriod and going to 1.6 billion over the course of four years, which is pretty dramatic. Can you tell us besides these ideas, what kinds of things enabled you to do that?

Larry:
Yeah, and we’re actually again, AUM’s not a big deal to us, but we’re at almost 2.5 billion these days. There is a huge benefit to us of starting from scratch, no legacy systems, or the way things had always been done. Focusing on what we thought mattered most to clients, and then investing heavily in technology and just getting our beliefs out in the world, we have found to be a helpful way of attracting clients who are looking for something different. Who are asking some of these same questions Julie that you mentioned, by putting our information out there with the help of great podcasts like this, and blogs, and white papers that we write, that helps attract folks to us who have a similar belief system. That’s been huge for us.

Steve:
To sort of explain this concept you’ve got a book coming out called It’s that Simple, about building the financial service firm of the future. So, tell us a little bit more about what you envision as what that future firm looks like.

Larry:
Yeah that was a really fun book to write, and it’s coming out this fall, because it describes what we believe in at AdvicePeriod, why we’re building our business the way that we are, and what we believe in. And many of the things we’ve talked about already today, but the idea is that the firm of the future is going to have to deliver value, it’s going to have to prove that they deliver that value to their clients. And to do that we believe it’s going to have to be a combination of all the technology that we’ve discussed and the technology to come as well as amazing people. You have to have great people providing the services, you have to have top tier folks in all aspects of your business to deliver that client experience. Whether it’s directly or indirectly everyone at a wealth management company, everyone at a professional services firm touches the client. Sometimes it’s obvious, relationship manager, sometimes it’s less obvious someone that works more in the back office, but you have to have great people, you have to have great technology because that’s what clients are going to expect and they’re going to demand it.

And as I was mentioning, consumers are more informed, and they’ll have more tools at their disposal to evaluate all of us, then they’ve ever had before. If you think about the way that most folks find their advisor you ask friends, you ask a family member, it’s not necessarily the most robust process. But these days with all the online tools, and the social media it’s much easier than ever before to understand what it’s really like to be a client at different advisory firms. And so, if advisory firms are not embracing that, if they’re not managing their own message, then it’s being managed for them by someone else, and you’re probably going to lose.

Julie:
So you mentioned, Larry, team there, and it’s such a big issue obviously and a challenge for a lot of firms to recruit, and retain, and develop talent. Is there anything different in the approach that you’ve taken either to recruiting or to developing the team to ensure that they have that same vision?

Larry:
Culture is key to everything we do, and that starts by having a very clear mission. Our mission is to reinvent wealth management. I think you could ask virtually anybody at AdvicePeriod and they would tell you that’s our company mission, and here is my role in helping us accomplish that mission. So having clarity of mission is critically important, and that drives our culture. We have to let everybody know what we stand for both at the company as well as in the market, because if you want to stand out, you have to stand for something. That’s the way to attract new business, that’s the way to attract the best employees that you want.

And like I said, you have to have those folks at every level. And so, we’re very purposeful with our culture. We have a saying around the office when we think about building our championship team if there isn’t a cultural fit, nothing else matters. There’s no such thing as, well this person’s a great teammate, or this person would be a great fit, but there just isn’t a cultural fit, there’s no such thing. You have to be a cultural fit, because teaching folks how to use our technology and how to deliver our client experience is much easier than trying to teach someone a new culture, a new value system. And that’s very much what we mean by our culture, it’s what do we value? The honesty, and the integrity, and the pursuit of excellence.

Steve:
And so, Larry if you’re bringing someone new onto the team how do you clarify that, or assess it? How do you get those shared values and mission through the whole team?

Larry:
It starts with the tip of the spear is putting out in the world our belief system so that when someone is looking for a new opportunity, or someone had heard about us and they’re researching us they see what we believe in, and either consciously or subconsciously they can start to decide whether or not they would fit. Once we actually start speaking with a candidate our first two interviews are entirely cultural based. We want to understand what motivates them. We want to understand what makes them happy, because we have this crazy notion that happy employees translate into happy clients. And so …

Julie:
That’s madness Larry.

Larry:
… it’s madness, isn’t it? Yeah. Revolutionary. And so, we really want to understand what makes people happy, and so we do a behavioral survey like so many firms do. We use the predictive index, it’s a very easy survey that you can do in five or 10 minutes, and really helps us understand in what situations will this person be happy versus where they’ll be stressed. We ask them for their experiences. Again, the open ended questions about tell us a time when you were the happiest at work, what were you doing? Who were you doing it with? What are your dreams, what are your ambitions? What’s your vision for your future? And we want to understand if we think there’s a lot of commonality. When we look at a cultural fit it’s not the proverbial beer test. Is this a person we’d enjoy hanging out with? Of course there’s some element of that, we’re all on the same team, but it’s really not a social dynamic, it’s more about a belief system. We’re curious how they handle themselves. We pride ourselves on following up very quickly on respecting others, on showing appreciation. Are these things that we experience with these candidates with our first two cultural interviews?

And if they pass those tests then it moves into, okay can they do the job? Do they have the knowledge, the aptitude? And that usually takes the form of what we call our experiential day, where any candidate whose interested in coming to work with us has to commit to one full day in our office, almost in like a simulated working experience. And so, if you think about who’s going to do that, it’s going to be someone who’s committed. That person’s taking a vacation day from their current employer, they’re coming into our office for a full day, that’s a huge commitment. That person is opting in to wanting to be a part of our mission. Someone who’s just interested in a new paycheck, or who’s going to give them a signing bonus, probably won’t do that, in part because we don’t offer signing bonuses when people join us. So those are some of the things that we do.

Steve:
So you talked about the importance of values and mission, and then how do you break that down into roles. So, when you said before people on your team will say, “Here is our mission and here is my role in it,” how do you get clarity for your team members on that and then how do you make sure that all of the puzzle pieces, all the roles fit together into the whole that you want to build?

Larry:
Yeah. That is mission critical. We have grown, we’ve had as you mentioned the good fortune of growing fairly rapidly where we’ve gone from one office and two advisors just two years ago to now we have 12 or 14 offices and 30 some odd advisors all over the country. And so, we’ve gone from a company where we could fit everyone in the same room to now we have folks in four different time zones. And how do we create that same culture, and continue to build it as the business changes?

And the easy answer is communication. I personally spend a lot of time communicating with our team that’s based here in Los Angeles, as well as our smaller offices across the country, explaining to them this is what’s new with the business, what are you seeing? Asking a lot of questions, helping them understand what we’re trying to accomplish, helping them understand what their issues, opportunities, and challenges are. Understanding what resources they need to excel. And making sure that when for example, I meet with our operations manager who handles all of the account opening, and wires, and trades, that he and his team are very familiar with exactly what they need to do to help us be successful. communication is key. Asking a lot of questions, explaining what we’re trying to accomplish, thinking six, 12, 18 months ahead of what do we need to do today to be ready in six months or in a year? That sort of communication, planning, detail orientation is key.

Julie:
We talk on this podcast about becoming referable, and it’s quite clear that everything that you have talked about makes you more referable, how does that translate into growth for you? Do you see a connection between the way you’re building the business and increasing referrals, and how do you go about that?

When we think of referrals or meeting new folks, it’s both meeting new advisors who want to bring their business and plug into AdvicePeriod, and join us as almost like a franchisee, and we attract those advisors by shouting from as many different areas as we can what we believe in. Obviously the second thing part of thinking about referrals and introductions is clients, and we’ve come to the belief that there’s a huge myth that’s been propagated on financial advisors that the way to get referrals is to spend more time with centers of influence. Go out and spend as much time as you can with attorneys, and accountants, and we’ve just seen next to no evidence that, that is a great way of building a business. You’re looking for that unicorn, that person that is going to open up their Rolodex to you. And instead, what we believe is that the best businesses are built by taking amazing care of your clients, and putting those clients in a position to make it easier for them to introduce you to other people that you can help. That’s the best way to build a referral sourced business.

Julie:
And how do you do that last piece of it?

Steve:
Yep.

Larry:
A couple things. I get to work with a bunch of our advisors across the country in kind of coaching and helping them build their businesses. And one of the easiest tactics that most folks overlook is letting your best clients know that they’re your best clients. Let folks know that you love working with them, that what you’re helping them with is exactly what you’re passionate about. It has to be authentic, I mean everyone’s got those favorite clients who when they call you, you’re excited to talk to them, you’re excited to help them. Let those folks know who they are, and what it is about them that you enjoy so much. Clients love hearing that, and it helps them think of other people like themselves that you could help.

Steve:
So Larry, I’ve got to take a little issue with something you just said.

Larry:
Please.

Steve:
You talked about centers of influence not being the best route to get referrals, and I will agree with you that most advisors do it really badly, so that if you look at the statistics of how many referrals advisors on average get from different sources, that COI is going to be near the bottom of the pile. But I don’t think that’s because the idea doesn’t work, I think it’s because they’re just bad at it. And if we think about the opportunities, your clients may bump into somebody who needs what you do occasionally, and it may come up in conversation occasionally, but a center of influence meets those people on a full time basis, and just has a lot more opportunities to refer. So, I’m more inclined to think that if you can describe that special experience that your best clients are seeking, that you deliver, and you can describe that to a center of influence and say, “Listen, we’re not looking for everybody that you work with, but when you find somebody who’s looking for this particular kind of experience, keep us in mind because we’re that firm.” What are your thoughts about approaching it that way?

Larry:
So here’s been my experience. My experience has been that, there’s a mall very close to our office here in Los Angeles, we’re in Century City, and this mall is full of restaurants. And being Los Angeles most have al fresco dining. And as you walk by these restaurants you will see the same trust and estate attorneys, the same CPAs every day. And everyday they’re being taken out to lunch by a different wealth manager, it’s a bank one day, a trust company another, an RIA the next day. And I just think that the competition for their attention is so intense that it may be that the advisors aren’t very good at getting the referrals from these folks, but it may also be that these advisors, these so called centers of influence already have the wealth managers that they’re going to use, and the chances of you breaking into that, and becoming their go-to person is very difficult.

Julie:
Right. So, it is a competitive space, no doubt. And it’s interesting as well that the reality is that different things seem to work for different people. I think the approach that you’re taking works absolutely for you. I’ve talked to some who do get business from centers of influence, so it’s interesting to look at that. I know that we’re just coming up to time, and I feel like I could talk to you all day about this, because who starts saying, we’re just going to turn the industry upside down? I love it. Did you always have lofty goals, Larry? As a child?

Larry:
I think that my partners and I as well as our entire team at AdvicePeriod, we’re very curious. We are proud of the business that we’ve built, and we’re more than humble enough to realize that we don’t have it all figured out. And that pursuit of getting better, of doing a better job for our clients, of doing a better job for our teammates, that just kind of pursuit of excellence, of trying to get better, always get better. That’s fun for us. I think as we’re talking about earlier for some people, some advisors, for some firms doing things differently, change makes them nervous, makes them uncomfortable. For us we embrace it, we want to do things differently. And so, for us this is just a lot of fun, it’s what we think makes sense, and we’ve never enjoyed working more. We just feel very, very fortunate for the opportunities that we have.

Julie:
Yeah, I love it. And even in the face of fear I think just asking that question, could things be different? Or are things changing and do I need to change? It’s just asking a question, it doesn’t mean you’re going to step into the abyss.

Larry:
Exactly. It’s that simple. Asking the question.

Julie:
Yeah. It’s that simple.

Larry:
Thinking about how it’s going to be different.

Julie:
Hence the book, I love it. We’ll make sure we get connected to all of these things that you’ve mentioned in the show notes, and thank you so much for your time. It’s been an absolute pleasure talking to you today.

Larry:
Julie, Steve thank you both for having me on I really appreciate it.

Julie:
Hi, it’s Julie again. It was great to have you with us on Becoming Referable. If you like what you’ve been hearing please do us a favor and rate us on iTunes, it really does help. 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. Thanks so much for joining us.