We’ve all heard there is no one way to skin a cat. Mergers and acquisitions are a non-traditional, quick, and effective way to grow your RIA. In this episode, Alex Chalekian of Lake Avenue Financial discusses how mergers and acquisitions have helped him scale his firm, along with the easy steps a financial advisor can take to get started right now! ABOUT ALTRUIST: We’re on a mission to make financial advice better, more affordable, and more accessible to everyone. Altruist is an all-in-one platform built exclusively to help RIAs start, run, and grow their practices. Our platform saves you time and reduces your costs: You can manage your entire book of business, get performance reporting, and bill your clients with ease and efficiency. Want to find out how Altruist can help you grow? See more at www.altruist.com/advisorjourneydemo STAY CONNECTED: Instagram ► https://www.instagram.com/altruistcorp/ Twitter ► https://twitter.com/altruist Linkedin ► https://www.linkedin.com/company/altruistcorp/
We’ve all heard there is no one way to skin a cat. Mergers and acquisitions are a non-traditional, quick, and effective way to grow your RIA. In this episode, Alex Chalekian of Lake Avenue Financial discusses how mergers and acquisitions have helped him scale his firm, along with the easy steps a financial advisor can take to get started right now!
ABOUT ALTRUIST:
We’re on a mission to make financial advice better, more affordable, and more accessible to everyone. Altruist is an all-in-one platform built exclusively to help RIAs start, run, and grow their practices. Our platform saves you time and reduces your costs: You can manage your entire book of business, get performance reporting, and bill your clients with ease and efficiency.
Want to find out how Altruist can help you grow? See more at www.altruist.com/advisorjourneydemo
STAY CONNECTED:
Instagram ► https://www.instagram.com/altruistcorp/
Twitter ► https://twitter.com/altruist
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EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:
How to find a good mergers and acquisitions deal for your RIA: 6:02-8:59
The red flags and green lights of MMA: 9:23-12:09
The ins and outs of selling your RIA and due diligence: 12:10-17:12
How to retain clients during the acquisitions process: 17:13-19:14
How mergers can help you grow your RIA: 19:15-22:38
RIAs, good partnerships, and starting the conversation: 22:39-26:36
RESOURCES IN EPISODE:
ADDITIONAL EPISODE RESOURCES:
Growing your financial advisor firm through acquisitions
Tips for new financial advisors
For more tips on how to grow and scale your RIA, subscribe to The Advisor Journey on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
ABOUT THE ADVISOR JOURNEY:
Real-life strategies for the modern financial advisor who’s ready to scale. Join Altruist founder and CEO Jason Wenk, Altruist’s Head of Community Dasarte Yarnway, and guests as they share proven tactics, unfiltered advice, and hard-won lessons you can apply to your own practice. These conversations will propel your career to the next level—don’t miss it.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this podcast by the participants are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Altruist Corp or its subsidiaries. No compensation was provided. Altruist Corp offers a software platform that helps financial advisors achieve better outcomes. Nothing in this communication should be construed as an offer, recommendation, or solicitation to buy or sell any security. Additionally, Altruist or its affiliates do not provide tax advice, and investors are encouraged to consult with their personal tax advisors. All Copyright 2022 Altruist Corp.
Dasarte: Altruist is an all-in-one custodial solution that helps you easily manage your client accounts, build custom model portfolios, assign portfolios directly from our marketplace, and easily manage all billing in a single digital experience. At Altruist we help you grow and scale your business with minimal stress. Join the 1,000-plus advisors using Altruist by visiting www.altruist.com/advisorjourneydemo. Altruist Financial LLC, member FINRA SIPC.
Alex: I’ve seen a ton of great partnerships which is what got me to think, I could do this as well, right? One of the things that I've noticed is making sure when you do have those partnerships or, whether it be one other partner or two other partners, finding those that have a unique ability in a different area than you, right? So, if all of us are the chefs, it's going to be really hard in the kitchen but if you find someone that's going to say, okay, I'm really good at this aspect and that's what I really enjoy doing and you can say great because I hate that aspect of the business or I don't really want to do that. It makes a good partnership there.
Jason: Welcome to the Advisor Journey. A podcast by Altruist dedicated to giving advisors the edge they need with proven RIA growth strategies. Each week, Dasarte Yarnway and I will have hard-hitting conversations about the topics that matter most to the modern RIA, how to scale, how to maximize efficiency, and how to effectively reach your goals. It's real advice from people who’ve really done it and we’re so glad you're here.
Dasarte: We’ve all heard the saying that there's no one way to skin a cat. In this episode Alex Chalekian discusses how an early-stage advisor can utilize mergers and acquisitions to scale their business. Welcome Alex Chalekian, how are you?
Alex: I'm good Dasarte, how you doing?
Dasarte: I'm doing really well. I felt like I just said your name super official, like Alex Chalekian. But it's good to have you here on the show with Jason Wenk and I. Obviously, when I come to LA it's always a must that we get together. So, I'm glad that we have you on the podcast.
Alex: Thank you for having me.
Jason: Yeah, it’s a pleasure. I think we're going to have some fun today and this is the early bird disclaimer, but there's so many ways for advisers to get distracted. I think it's really important that everyone that we talked to, they want to grow. A big part of our audience is growth minded advisors and so if they're going to choose a path it's important to have a lot of focus. MNA is an interesting topic the last few years. I think that if people don't understand how to use it right, they can definitely get shiny object syndrome. And kind of like very much stall out on their growth trajectory, or they do it right and it's actually a really effective way to get to that first 50, 100, 250 million, or more of assets if they're looking like an AUM kind of play. Stoked to have you on. Nobody I can think of better to help advise with that kind of scale up journey if their focus area is going to be on MNA.
Alex: Agree with everything you said.
Dasarte: Awesome. Well in this episode we really want to focus on mergers and acquisitions. Obviously, market timing and price and there's a lot of factors that have to do with merging or acquiring with the business. But to start, what's your journey been like as a financial advisor? And what has led you to get into mergers and Acquisitions?
Alex: So, as some of you might know, I've been in the business for almost 25 years now. When I started out definitely MNA was not really something I was thinking about. As I went on my journey in the industry, I realized in about 2003 or so that I wanted to grow with MNA, one of the things I saw with some of my colleagues was how quickly they were able to grow their firm and, you know, almost overnight and that really attracted me. But I didn't really know all the downsides of it besides, just looking at the fact that how quickly we could grow. So, we went down that path. I became an independent adviser at that time. Started to look at some acquisition options and it took a while before we were able to do our first acquisition in 2008. And then shortly after that, we did another one in 2009, we did another acquisition in 2014, a handful of them in 15. And the most recent one we did was in early 2018. So, it's been something that I've been able to do multiple times and made a lot of mistakes and more than happy to share all those with you guys. Because it's not always, as Jason said, you know, a shiny and beautiful and done very well. So that was kind of my journey into MNA.
Dasarte: I got a question on that before we move on. You said that it was a point that you found out that you wanted to grow through mergers and acquisitions. What was going through your head at that time, where you're like, yep. I'm going to take this route and I'm going to do the MNA thing?
Alex: Just growth man. The way I was looking at it was I can either at that time, this is a while ago, but at that time, people were growing with two different ways. So, one was either spending a ton of money on dinner seminars and so forth. And those marketing mailers and you can literally spend 10 - 15 grand doing that and growing in that manner. Or I figured what if I use that money towards an acquisition and that was kind of my journey. I didn't want to do those dinner seminars and do those sales of presentations. So, I decided to focus on the MNA side.
Dasarte: Awesome.
Jason: I'd love to hear, let's just set the stage a little bit around, you're early in your career as an advisor. You see opportunity, we all are probably on those mailing lists. I don’t even know how I got on them. It's like there's somebody in Northern California, they're looking to sell their business, they want four billion dollars for it right now, and that’s maybe an exaggeration. But it will be some dollar amount, here is couple of the highlights, click here to show you level of interest, right? What constitutes a deal that would get you to even perk up, right? Because I see some of the stuff and delete real fast. But what would one that would catch your attention? Yeah, this is something that actually could make a little bit of sense for that kind of again, growth-focused, early-stage advisor, much like you when you wanted your first deal. So, they can get a better idea of what it feels like to actually use MNA in pursuit of growth.
Alex: Yeah, that's interesting you asked that question because you don't know how you got on those lists, but I signed up for those lists early on because I was obviously looking to do some of those acquisitions and early on, again going back to 2008-2009 and so forth, evaluations made a lot more sense where when you sat there and kind of pencil things out you can say okay, you know in about a year 2 years, I have a break-even point and then I can continue to grow the business from there. So, I'm looking at evaluations in and I still getting those emails and I was kind of chuckling about it. Just got one, I think maybe last week where it was, I don't know, revenue of half a million dollars but they wanted 1.5 million dollars for it. You know, three times the revenue and when you look at that there was x amount in assets. So, you kind of sit there and you're like, this is just crazy because as you know, one of the things advisors might not realize is a fact that even if you acquire the practice that doesn't mean that all those clients are going to come with you. You know, you can build in things into the contract to protect yourself. But at the end of the day, you have to figure out what are the chances of those clients were assets or Revenue was going to come along with. And in this day and age it's getting harder and harder to justify that just because there's so much cash out there. It's pushed evaluations on the higher end. So, yeah, I like you, I've been deleting a lot of those emails as well. But when you look at it and you want to justify a deal that will make sense one of the thing's is just to take a look at what it is that they're doing. Is there, the revenue, for example. I want to get away from AUM because I know a lot of the advisors are starting to kind of look at different ways of their practice. But if we discuss revenue, if you're paying three times more times or more of multiple, it is going to be very difficult for you to sustain that business. But if you can find a practice that lower in valuation or find someone that's a little bit more local, that's just looking to slowly transition out. That's one of the other deals I've been kind of, keeping a close eye on it. Someone that’s maybe looking for a kind of like a golden parachute. They're not necessarily saying, hey I'm going to sell today. But maybe I'm going to sell in five years, and I want someone that can slowly buy in in chunks and transition me out. And that you're going to have in this day and age. I think I'm much more successful acquisition.
Jason: Gotha. You said revenue multiple like, yeah, 3X, that seems a bit rich, right? There's obviously more to it than that. Are the clients older? Are the younger? Is the revenue coming from commissions? Is it coming from subscriptions fees? Is it coming from AUM fees, you know? Do they manage the money in house in some proprietary way? Right, there's lots of factors, I'm just curious, even geography, I call it the red flags and the green lights, right? Where you be like okay if I fear now if so, I can check list. What are maybe the two or three things if you saw them, you’d be like hard stop, no sense going further here or, this is interesting, I might be a little bit more interested in pursuing it because like these two or three things line up really nicely.
Alex: So, a couple of things for me is to get an idea of how they actually work with the clients, right? So, as you mentioned, whether they are managing the money in house, whether they're outsourcing, are they doing financial planning? Are they not doing financial planning? Is this more of an old school brokerage shop that is just kind of now calling themselves and disguising themselves as a financial planning firm? And then looking at what they are actually recommending to the client. So, when we get into the due diligence part of this, because in the beginning, you know they're going to give you high-level stuff, especially if you're working with one of these companies that are kind of giving you a listing and just saying, hey ABC companies for sale and this is what they are, you know, this is the selling price. They're not really going to give you a lot of detail besides maybe kind of a little matrix of what the breakdown is of assets or revenue. But when you kind of get into the nitty-gritty, like we did with a couple of them during the due diligence process, we found some of the red flags were okay, they sold some products that we would have never recommended to clients, so it's only a matter of time until those things blow up. Maybe let's say non-publicly traded REITs and, you know, some of them that actually got into trouble or, or you're waiting for them to turn into an issue. You don't want to have that conversation because even if you explain to the client, I know this was not us that did it, you still must work with them and figure things out. So that type of stuff is bad. Another thing we, I remember we had a due diligence meeting with one advisor that was selling a practice. And, you know, I'm very organized, right? We've always had for the majority, since we started doing practice acquisitions, all our files have been uploaded in the cloud, very organized in that regards. But you know, it's fine if you meet traditionally an older advisor who still has an old school file cabinets and the files and that's not a problem. We can scan those and get them organized for them but we had one situation where we met with an advisor and he said the files are not part of the sale, so I said hold on, what do you mean? We need to have the information. He's like no, no, you can't have my notes. You can't have the files. You can't have any of it. So, I was like, that was another red flag as like that. It's a hard stop. We're just going to stop right there.
Jason: We won’t sell you the dead bodies. You can't have those, Alex.
Alex: Yeah, yeah.
Dasarte: You talk about the red and green flags, but let’s flip it. So, if somebody wants to sell their practice, What should they be doing, right now, to put themselves up as a worthy candidate to sell to a Alex Chalekian? Obviously, you're not looking right now or somebody else who is looking to acquire a firm?
Alex: Yeah, that's also a good question. One of the things that I definitely ask advisors to do that are looking to acquire practice is put yourself in the shoes of the seller. What would you do if you were selling your practice? What kind of an adviser would you be looking for to sell to? So, I've never really been asked this question, so it's interesting to look at. A seller needs to get organized as well. A lot of times you'll see a seller that is interested in, riding off into the sunset and at the end of the day they realize that okay, I need to get my stuff together and some of them, another red flag is they’ll start, if they’re on the commission side, they'll start selling a bunch of products that kind of front load so they can go and say look at my revenue this last 12 months and all of a sudden you're like what are all these things? That's another thing we would catch is people that would sell a bunch of commission products and make it look like the revenue is higher than it actually was. But to go back to your question Dasarte. We definitely, that advisor should get kind of get organized. Start to look at, if you can't figure out a successor within, you know, and that would be something I would definitely recommend is if you can find a successor within your own practice and most advisers fail at that, because that's not really something that they want to do. Is to identify their successors, talk to them, get to know them for a while, because it's very hard for you just to turn around and say, okay, you look like someone I would sell my practice to and all. Let's just do the deal and be done with it. You need to kind of build that relationship and get all your ducks in a row. There's a lot of things the advisers, on the other side, that want to buy the practice need to do as well.
Dasarte: Okay, so ducks in a row, let's peel that back a little bit, right? How do I get my ducks in a row? So, what specific documents would you be looking for? Are you looking to review somebody's books, talk to us through that?
Alex: I would want to be doing any number of things during the due diligence process. I want to be reviewing your practice, how its setup. I want to see the types of clients you are working with, the types of products you're utilizing or whether you have models that you're using or investments. What recommendations you're making for them. I'd also want to get an idea of how you work with your clients, you know, was it all virtual? You meet with them face-to-face? What are their expectations of you? How often do you meet with them? So, these are all things that we need to kind of figure out to see that, you know, the last thing we want to do is walk in and then all of a sudden, your clients are not going to be happy because they're going to say oh Dasarte used to meet with us seven times a year. You only want to meet with this two times a year. I’ve had that situation with one of the practices we acquired where they would literally babysit everything that they did to the point where clients would not even open up the envelope for their statements that came in until they met with the advisor. That was very extreme, but it exists out there. And then also getting an understanding of your revenue, getting an understanding of your exit as well as I think it's important for a seller to understand and to define how they want the transition to go in and that is super important for both sides for this to be successful. One of the practices that we did acquire we ended up talking to them, figuring out this is how the transition is going to be there in a stick around for a year. And literally, as soon as we wired the money they were gone, they went on a two-week vacation, didn't even tell us.
We were getting ready to start making, you know, calls in and meetings for the transition but they were out of the picture and that was not cool to us. So kind of, that’s some of the ducks you want to get in a row. You also want to talk to your staff. If you have a team, let him know what's going to happen and then figure out what the buyer, are those people going to stay on board, are they not? Are they, you know, what is all those types of things are really important.
Dasarte: You mentioned revenue a couple times throughout the course of the show. When you look at revenue, are you prioritizing recurring revenue over the commissions or the one time?
Alex: A hundred percent, you know, at this point if you have a commission type of business, I would even almost give it a negative multiple because I have to figure out what to do with it. You know, one of the things that used to get me excited, Jason, I know you mentioned, asked this question earlier. When I did have my securities license which I don't anymore. But I used to be able to take over those practices that we're kind of a hybrid and then figure out since the non-recurring commission business was at a low multiple or almost zero multiple figuring out how we can convert those into recurring revenue, thus kind of having that gap there. That worked out real well but in this day and age, especially with us where we are RIA only we wouldn't even want to necessarily take on that business or we would have to figure out what we could do with that.
Dasarte: That's awesome. Let’s talk about those clients, right? Because I know my client's. I wouldn't say they're babied but they like working with me, right, and I'm sure that's the same for you Jason. And any advisor that starts a practice. It's something so personal about personal finance, right? So, what's the success rate that you have, when clients, you know, experience the transition between firms? Are they staying on? Are there like what happened to Bill? Do they have questions? Talk to us about that.
Alex: There is definitely a lot of that. So, you have to make sure and I one of things that we've talked to the advisors that are selling their practice is the fact that our goal is to give those clients a better experience, whatever it may be. Whether be through technology, whether it be through our systems, whether it be through our staff. Whatever it is, try to figure out how we can give them a better experience so they can go back to the advisor and say thank you for finding Alex for us, right? As opposed to saying, you know, we know you're out of the picture and so forth. So that transition time frame, whether it be 6 months, a year, or longer is very crucial. Luckily, we've been successful at having a higher retention rate, usually spend about 90 to 95%, and that has to do with the fact that, a, the selling advisor has let them know how they found us. I think it's important for them to explain as part of story, like this is how we identified our successor. We went through this process of talking to x amount of advisers and this is why we chose Alex and his firm. And explaining that story, also explaining that they're going to be on for a period of time to help with that transition. And then we, during that period,
have to make sure that we can meet their expectations and technology is actually, as simple as it is, it's been a huge, huge help for us because a lot of the times advisors that are retiring have not used technology a lot. So, when we kind of show them all the stuff that we're doing and how we can be a lot more tech-friendly for them, most of them, get excited about that and they're happy to work with us.
Dasarte: Awesome.
Jason: So, we’ve talked a lot about acquisitions. Let’s talk a little bit about mergers and I think this is something that actually does appeal a lot to earlier stage advisors. We see it a lot where we have 2 people running solo practices and they go, you know what? Maybe we're better together, right? And they decide to think about bringing two different business together. So, how do you think about mergers, right? Like how do you begin to look for firms to merge? If you're one of those advisors who’s like, you know, we're kind of getting there, we’re growing but maybe I hate some of the operational stuff. Maybe I hate some of the compliance stuff, maybe I hate some of the marketing stuff, you just love working with clients. And I find that perfect fit kind of partner, so to speak. What does that look like? I mean, have you seen some that work really spectacularly well? And I know you've also maybe seen some that have been spectacular bad, so, maybe give some tips on the do's and don'ts with mergers.
Alex: I've dealt with my own merger that was just a debacle and, you know, I've shared that story before. So, they're not easy, they're very tough, just like finding a business partner, right? It's either you can find a business partner, another individual that maybe you've known for a long time, and you’ve worked with and that that could work out well, or it could turn into a disaster where friends decide to become enemies afterwards. And then their situations like you're talking about where there's a lot of these firms that have to do a lot of roll up and then you will merge with them. Maybe you'll get a little bit of equity from that firm and they're kind of more the mother ship, and they're the run the show from miles and miles away, but ultimately, they still provide different services and so forth. So, there's a good and bad in either option. I think one of the things I would warn advisors is, it's always great to say, oh, one plus one equals three, right? And I was kind of the strategy I had when I brought on a partner, and it turned out to be in a one plus one equal to negative and we lost this advisor. Actually, stole a bunch of clients afterwards when they decided to take off. So, it was very difficult for me. So nowadays every time I kind of got excited and I talked to Rosa about, hey, we should merge with this company or so and so approached me, she's like stop it Alex just stop it.
Dasarte: I can see her saying that too.
Alex: I think everyone in this room can, but she would tell me to just focus on what you're doing, you know, and I think it depends on my personality, right? So, I probably may be better off working solo and building a firm that way with people in our team as opposed to just constantly merging with another partner. But as far as the bigger roll-ups, you know, they provide a lot of different systems, services. You know, one of the things that I got frustrated with was I was wearing a lot of hats where I was dealing with a compliance aspect, I was dealing with the clients and working with them. I was also handling HR and the team and being a good leader as well as all the other things that come along with it and managing assets. It was just a lot to do that. So sometimes people feel like if they can kind of let a couple of things off of their plate, they can grow in that regards and they can, but it's, you have to see what you're signing up for, and I would definitely recommend talking to others that have signed up, especially if you're looking at some of these roll-up firms and get an idea of, are they happy? What are some of the downsides? What are things that they didn't think about and then and see how it worked out for them.
Jason: I think the more practical, and we welcome everybody to listen to the advisor journey, right? It’s all a very big open conversation. That said, I think the bulk of the advisors are probably going to be at a stage where they're not looking to sell to a big roll up, right? They’re probably at the stage where they’re like, I want to really grow this thing and sometimes it is one plus one equals 3. Maybe you haven't had one personally you chose to, you want to build a team and manage a team versus have a partnership. Have you seen some good partnerships that worked really well and then if so, can you share what you’ve observed that made them really tick for for those who are thinking about possibly merging?
Alex: Well, I’ve seen a ton of great partnerships which is what got me to think, I could do this as well, right? One of the things that I've noticed is making sure when you do have those partnerships or whether be one other partner or two other partners, finding those that have a unique ability in a different area than you, right? So if all of us are the chefs, it's going to be real hard in the kitchen. But if you find someone that's going to say, okay, I'm really good at this aspect and that's what I really enjoy doing, and you can say, great because I hate that aspect of the business or I don't really want to do that. It makes a good partnership there and then everyone can kind of focus on their area and help grow the firm. The other thing to look for is those that have similar visions. You know, a lot of times, even if you're an adviser and you've been working with someone and you've known someone for a long time, they might have a different vision. They might have a different goal and you want to avoid that like I ran into the same similar situation. I love my brother. At one point, we were partners in the business but he likes to take it easy and he likes it, you know? For him the business was a different approach, and I was kind of like, always a first and the last to leave working, tough, and we had just different ways of doing things and it unfortunately would cause issues. So if you can find someone that has a similar idea and vision and also bring different items to the practice it can be a real good partnership.
Dasarte: I definitely agree with that. I think it's even more important for advisors to lead with vision. I wanted to talk about, just those 7 steps that you mention, right? So, when you're in this meeting what happens, how is it, where do you start? Are you just building comradery in the first conversation like hey man, you might have something I don't want but let me get to know you, what is it? What does it look like to begin that conversation on acquiring a practice or potentially merging a practice?
Alex: Yeah, hopefully you’ve had a couple of conversations before you're at a point where you want to see if this makes sense. A lot of the people that we've ended up acquiring are those that we talked to before. One of them was an advisor that was part of our study group, you know, that initially liked us and said, I'd love for you to be their successor and then eventually it turned into they were ready to retire, and we took over. First things first, I would say for yourself as well as the selling advisor is to do evaluation, okay? Just like we do with planning. If we don't know where we are today how we going to know where we want to go? And so, it's really important. I think the advisor for themselves to do evaluation, get an idea, and that also will differentiate you from a lot of the other advisors that are looking to buy, but have never done, you know, an evaluation on their own practice. But the first thing, step number one is, the selling advisor needs to get evaluation done. Kind of get that removed because one of the errors I made was we didn't have this selling advisor get evaluation done. And then, all of a sudden when evaluation was done, they started having the conversation about, well, I can get a little bit more from this firm and they would pin us against others and have that conversation. And you don’t want that. You want to just take that off the table. Say, this is what it's worth. We agree to that and now let's move forward.
Dasarte: I love it. Well, it's a lot of things to consider when merging and acquiring a company. Obviously for the selling advisors, make sure you got your books in order, make sure that you're organized. We don’t want you to be going through file cabinets like you mentioned before. And make sure that you understand or know what type of firm that you want to sell to. And I think you mentioned again when looking for firms that you want to acquire, vision the way that they serve their clients, right? How they navigate their business. If they plan on being a part of the business through the transition are all important things for you. This is a lesson for me so thank you for inviting me to your master class. I think this would be a good time for us to transition into our rapid-fire questions. My first question for you, Alex, is what is the most interesting thing that you read this week?
Alex: The one of the most interesting things I read this week actually, was The Gap And Gain and this is a book by Dan Sullivan. I'm part of their coaching program and it's interesting to look at how a lot of us as entrepreneurs, unfortunately, even though we achieve some goals were constantly not happy about that. We're always looking, and it’s this moving target, and there's an adjustment you have to do in your brain of, okay, this is my goal, this is my ideal and you're never going to kind of reach that ideal. Think about, like, when I started in the industry, I was like oh, if I can just make $50,000, everything will be great and then it became, oh, if I can only bring in 100,000 and then 250. So, there's always this moving target and you constantly feel like you're not a, quote un quote, success and it basically wants to readjust your brain in thinking about always, you know, looking backwards, right? So don't be looking at the ideal but look at from where you started to where that goal was and how you achieved that and look backwards and say look at where I'm at and, based off of that, just kind of rewiring yourself. So it's really been a helpful book.
Dasarte: Taking time to smell the flowers, right? There you go, there you go. Go ahead Jason.
Jason: Love it. In this episode we talked about MNA as a growth strategy. I realize you probably can't close an entire deal in one week, right? So, you've obviously done really well outside of MNA, growing your business, caring for clients, generating referrals and organic growth. So, what’s one thing an RIA could do this week to grow their business? That's probably not MNA, but some of those other good things.
Alex: I would say sign up and work with some sort of a coaching firm. That has been very helpful for us. If you are not able to find a coaching firm, I would say look at being part of a study group. Just people, colleagues, have been very helpful. They're always teaching us new things, we learn from each other and that's been real helpful for my practice and I think that’s something really easy to do.
Jason: Awesome and I couldn’t agree more. There’s a saying I love. Is to become the average of the five people you spend the most time with, right? So, choose them wisely.
Alex: So, I'm in good company.
Dasarte: I’m probably bringing down the average here.
Alex: No way man.
Dasarte: I’m just joking.
Jason: So, very few advisors have ever gone independent more than once, but you haven't and I think it's actually near one of those things that a lot of people were listening to the advisor journey. Some are already RIAs, many of them, but a lot aren't. You know, and they're kind of at that decision point, how should I do this? If I should, how do I do this? So, for someone who's a veteran of independence, and again, just recently, fully independent. Dropped all the securities license and everything, What's one bit of advice you'd give them as they think about starting that RIA full independence journey?
Alex: One piece of advice would be to talk to another person that's already gone through that journey, someone that's gone fully independent. Be able to pick their brain, find out what were some of the pitfalls, the blind spots and just learn from them. Trust me, most of these individuals would love to talk to you. So, there's no harm in asking and in kind of picking their brain.
Jason: I'd be remiss if I didn't mention before we do a full sign-off you know, Alex has one of the best people I think in our industry to follow and follow his work. So, if you're listening to this and didn’t already know Alex which is probably not very many people. But make sure you follow him on social, keep an eye on what he is doing with his business. He's doing some really exciting things not just on the MNA and growing like avenue but doing some really, I think, important work as a relates to addressing some of the financial literacy issues and kind of creating access to financial advice. So just really a joy to have you on the show. And I really hope that people follow and learn. I mean, we really need to have great mentors and, like you said, most people, young advisors, would be shocked how accessible us wily veterans? You know, we've been around the block, we’ve seen a lot and a lot of times we love to share and to mentor and to teach. So, thank you so much for being on. And again everyone, make sure you follow the work that Alex and his firm are up to. Dasarte, you want to take us home to the finish?
Dasarte: Alex, thank you so much for joining us again on the advisor journey. We appreciate you. Go follow Alex, go follow Future Vest and everything that he's doing. He's making an imprint on the financial services industry. Again, if you want to listen to this podcast, the Advisor Journey, make sure to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn. And be sure to subscribe at your favorite podcast platform. I’m Dasarte Yarnway, along with my co-host, Jason Wenk signing off, until next time.
Thank you for listening to the Advisor Journey by Altruistic. Don't forget to like, review, and subscribe to future episodes. Each advisor’s journey is different, and your results may vary. While we hope you find this information helpful, success cannot be guaranteed. Also, Altruist and its Affiliates do not provide tax or legal advice.