Transcription
Who are the advisors that find success and find the growth that they're looking for, and then versus those who might struggle?
I remember a lesson, Dave. I looked at the front row, and there was an advisor sitting there, notebook open, just scribbling. This advisor had brought in over 300 million the prior year. And I've just found the most successful advisors that I've crossed paths with the last 15 years, they have that mindset.
If you want to scale any business of substance, it flips from a solo player game to a multiplayer game. What advice would you give to an advisor? When's the right time to hire? Who do you hire? The EA role is the number one missing role in all of Finance.
So the biggest leap is from financial advisor to business owner. You now have to look at it as a business. So now I have divisions. I have a marketing division that's the before, that manufactures the appointments. I have sales, which is the during, the conversion process. I have Ops, which is the after, which is following through on the promises we make, the plans we build. It's not lack of intention, it's lack of execution. It gets you in trouble.
So Brad, you get to talk to, uh, and really coach a lot of different advisors. You've done that. You've done it for years. How can you think of either character traits or, or maybe personality traits, or just, um, or actions? Who are the advisors that that find success and find the growth that they're looking for, and then versus those who might struggle? Can you think of the differences between the two?
Yes. So here's what comes to mind, Dave. Um, the first place I would start is mindset. Um, the biggest difference between the advisors that have success, and it's consistent year over year, versus, hey, I just had a stellar year and then kind of went back to, you know, baseline, um, it's a mindset of continuing to grow.
One of the things we say at Triad is, and one of the ways we curate our community here, who are top achievers by by revenue and by volume in the independent financial advisor space, we say, "We check our egos at the door. No one has ever arrived. We're all lifelong learners." I don't care if you've got 100 million under management, 500 million under management, a billion, five billion. We're all still growing and learning and on this journey as a human together.
And I, I remember a lesson, Dave. This has been a number of years back, but I was at an advisor conference, and there was an advisor on stage sharing some best practices. And they might have brought in like five million of new assets the prior year, which is great. You know, that's, that's a good number for a lot of advisors. And, um, I looked at the front row, um, and there was an advisor sitting there, notebook open, just scribbling notes. This advisor had brought in over 300 million the prior year. Wow. And they were voraciously taking notes down from an advisor that had done a fraction of what they had produced the prior year. And the quote, you know, "When the student is ready, the teacher will appear." I found that to be so true. Um, and you can learn something from everyone.
And I've just found the most successful advisors that I've crossed paths with the last 15 years, they have that mindset. They're constantly growing, they're constantly evolving. Their ego, by the way, I've seen it work the other way too, Dave, where the ego grows as the production goes. And you know what happens? Almost like magic. It's, it's not a good thing. They'll hit this ceiling of complexity. Um, oftentimes the advisor that's the solo advisor that like kind of grinds their way to that 30, 40, 50 million a year, and then they can't evolve to leader and business owner that can empower a team, that can bring on great talent. They cap out. And it's the most frustrating thing in the world because it's like they figured out the game. It's like a video game where they pass one level, but then they can't figure out the next level. The level you get stuck on. I've seen that happen so many times because they stopped growing and evolving and leadership and building a culture that attracts great talent. That's not a natural. You're not just gifted with that.
And, um, the advisors that continue to grow and evolve, and, you know, it's not a big enough dream if it doesn't require a team. That's something we'd say around here a lot. And to build anything of substance, a generational sort of business, you're gonna have to have a story that attracts great talent. And then you're gonna have to learn how to treat them right and keep them around, or it's always going to come back to you. And that no advisor wants the weight of all of the revenue on their shoulders from my experience. They want to be able to actually go on vacation, unplug with the family. And it's a beautiful thing when revenue continues to flow in when you're on vacation. And, you know, it takes a team to do that.
That's super, super interesting. So if we think about this, the journey that a lot of advisors go on, which is, yes, they're solo, they're figuring it out, they're getting, uh, the knowledge right, they're studying, they're getting a certain, uh, the letters after their names, and then they're doing it and growing a business. And then, yeah, they get to this point. You know, everything's going great. And then there's that first wall. And if they do nothing about it, it's almost like, I'm picturing like the line graph going up. And then if they do nothing when they hit this wall, it's just going to go down. And it's those ones at that point, or earlier, who figure out, how do you know? When is the right time? What advice would you give to an advisor? When's the right time to hire? Who do you hire? How do you get? I've talked to advisors who say, you know, I've thought about hiring an assistant, to a virtual assistant, but I just don't want to pay for for that person. How, what do you, what's the advice for someone who's who's at that level?
The first quote that comes to mind, by the way, I did not coin this quote, so I'm borrowing it from somebody else. Um, "If you don't have an assistant, you are the assistant." And there's no disrespect to assistants out there because, I mean, Brooke, that's my EA. She's world-class talent. I, I can, she's an executive assistant. She's on the org chart. She is beside me. And, um, Michael Hyatt, who I've done a lot of private coaching with, um, his, I, we were asked, Sean, my business partner, and I, were in a private coaching session. We said, "Hey, if you had to go back?" Because he, he ran Thomas Nelson. So for those not familiar with him, he ran one of the top 10 book publishing companies in the country, publicly traded, thousand-plus employees, published all of Dave Ramsey's books, John Maxwell's books. I mean, these are his personal friends. So he's, you know, kind of been surrounded by thought leadership his entire career. He left that to go start Full Focus and grew a team, eight-figure revenue income very quickly. And with, I think, a team of 40 or 50 now. We said, "Who would your first hire be?" Like, without hesitation, he said, "An EA. An executive assistant." He said, "Because my time is my most valuable asset. And if I don't have somebody controlling my time and my calendar, I'm not going to be allocating that time wisely."
And so, when to answer your question is yesterday. Because if you look at how the analogy we use a lot in the coaching at Triad is, you know, you look at other business models and apply lessons from those to the world of finance. I'll tell you what, McDonald's is a hell of a case study. The most successful franchise in the history of franchises. And if you compare a financial advisor, if it was like a McDonald's, well, back in the day, when there had to be a human there to take your order. Now you can just do it on the punch screen. But back in the day, the only way McDonald's made money is if there was a paying customer across the cash register from them. That's similar to most financial advisors. The only way you're driving revenue in a financial services firm is if you've got a potential prospect with money across the table from you, or across the Zoom from you, depending on your model.
Well, essentially, at the simplest form, any activity that takes a financial advisor away from the cash register, away from that meeting, is decreasing the revenue to the firm at the base level. At the beginner level, um, and so oftentimes advisors are, are doing their own paperwork, they're building their own plans, they're the janitor, they're, they're making the coffee in the morning. So any of those activities, because we all have the finite resource of time, that take you out of revenue-producing activities hurt your firm. And many of the firms we coach, it starts with the founding advisor, the partners that found the firm, that's cash register one. And then the next one is service appointments. But so if you have any amount of success, now you have to withhold promises to clients because now you have a growing book of business.
Well, if you look at your calendar, and by the way, I've seen many advisors like, "I can't do an appointment for two weeks." I'm like, "Well, let's look at your calendar." And all it is is reviews. So basically, that would be like a McDonald's where the entire line behind the register is refills, free refills on the cola, right? Because these customers have already paid, per se, and now you just have a line of service work. And obviously, as a fiduciary, as you know, anybody that runs a great financial services practice, you have to withhold promises or uphold promises, I should say. And so now the service advisor model can actually help you. Because you think about it, Dave, if you're sitting there doing appointments all day, and you've got an inbox that hasn't been answered, if you've got voicemail, you know, blinking on your phone, you're actually a horrible service advisor already. So the fact that you hire a service advisor that can proactively communicate quicker, the client experience elevates. But back to the cash register analogy, now you actually don't have to leave the cash register as a selling advisor. You can continue to do transactions, which drives revenue, which creates cash flow to hire a bigger team. So now you can have a service advisor, you can have a planning team.
The other thing you think about, imagine if you went to a McDonald's, you order a Big Mac, and the guy behind the cash register says, "Hey, just a second, I'll be right back," and walks off to make the Big Mac. You'd be like, "What kind of operation are they running here? You know, this isn't very efficient." Yeah. Do it all the time in finance because that's the advisor that goes and builds their own plans. And nothing against that, there's some world-class like very, you know, CFP, CFA designations. But I will say, if your goal is to grow revenue and help more people, any activity that takes you away from the cash register or meeting hurts the productivity of a financial services firm. So that's why many, one of the things we coach on is there's actually three types of advisors. There's a selling or relationship advisor, that's the one meeting the cash register. There's a service advisor, the one loving on and carrying on the clients and upholding all the promises and monitoring the financial plan. There's a planning advisor that might be a little more analytical, kind of think CFA, engineer mindset. They're the one in the back. By the way, if they focus on that, they're building much more world-class plans than you could ever build being a part-time planning advisor in a full-time selling advisor. So that's just a couple. I mean, there you can continue to dissect that all throughout the financial services firm. But that's the first thing that comes to mind, Dave, on like the timing of this stuff.
Yeah, so some of the, the, to sum it up, a few of the, what are they actually going to be doing? Calendar, email, were two big ones, right? Someone who is replying on your behalf or as the assistant. That seemed like two big things. If that takes up a lot of time, just that. Because I'm thinking like for the person who did, who was hesitant, who is hesitant, uh, you don't have to hire a 40-hour per week person, right? You could find the EA, the virtual assistant that has a few things, right? Um, but I, I heard it put once, Dave, to look at the stuff you you absolutely dread. Actually, Dan Sullivan, we just talked about in the podcast interview we just did. Dan Sullivan, I love this that I took from him. He said, "What if procrastination was a form of wisdom?" And so think about your desk and like the pile of paperwork that always piles up on the advisor's desk. Why is that? Because you hate doing it. It's like the, "I will do that when it's the last thing I have to do." Well, if procrastination was a form of wisdom, look at those things that you dread, that are always the last thing you do. If you could write a check and never do that again, the rest of your life, and actually just stop there, you'd be happier. You'd probably show up at home better. You'd have less on your mind. But the truth is, you write a check and never have to do that again. Now, that actually frees up time back to the cash register analogy, where I can actually see more people. And so it not only do you get rid of the things you don't like doing, but you free up time to do the things that you love doing and drive more revenue.
And on the EA front, I heard it put one time as well, "Email is someone else's to-do list." So if you come in and all you do is bombarded by emails all day, basically you've dedicated your time each day to doing other people's to-do lists versus your versus your own to-do list. And so a great EA, inbox management, it's Brooke's school, who's my EA. That I have five emails or less to answer per day. So she will literally answer on my behalf. She'll say, "Hey, Brad's in a meeting. Do you mind if I hop in and help you out in the meantime?" Nine out of ten people like, "Heck yeah, I'm getting faster help here." One out of ten like, "Hey, yeah, just get this to Brad when he has a moment." So now that's the one you need to personally answer. So inbox management, calendaring, do business, do life. You know, the podcast that we do here, that's our mission at Triad. We want to do business and do life. That's integration, not balance, is the way we view it. She coordinates with my wife, Sarah. So before I commit to, you know, say we have a, a client dinner flying in, she is going to check with the home front. "Hey, are there any ball games that night?" I got myself in trouble so many times, Dave, where I just overcommit. We're Enneagram sevens, we, we've got fear of missing out, we want to be at every party. And so I would overcommit and then I would just feel so guilty because I'm like, "Oh, now I'm going to either disappoint the person that I already committed to, or I'm going to miss a ball game." And I just was constantly torn. Think of a great EA as air traffic control for business and life, and coordinating that, making sure you're showing up at the right place at the right time. So inbox management, uh, calendar management, which I mean, those two things right there by themselves could be a full-time job. Um, also bookkeeping. So you think about, hey, I went out, I needed to submit this receipt list, lunch receipt as a business expense. Brooke handles all of that, where she's going to monitor those and get those to the accounting team. So those are the, the three real big ones. And by the way, I learned all of that from the guy that wrote the book on it, Michael Hyatt. I've borrowed many of his, uh, frameworks for that.
What is that book? Uh, it actually, he wrote a book, I think it's called like, "Be a World-Class Assistant." He wrote that. And then his, I'm trying to, I think they're actually, him and Jim, Jim Sayers, they're, they're working on a course. I don't know if it'll be live by the time this hits the internet, but I think he's doing a course on it too. But yeah, he wrote a book, "Be a World-Class Assistant," or something like that.
Okay, awesome. Um, so, uh, one other, one other tip. Belay, B-E-L-A-Y. Great company. That was how I found Brooke. So she started out as 20 hours a week. The cool thing is, you can grow into this. If this is new to you as an advisor, so Brooke started out at 20, and then eventually it's like, "I need to be at 40." And then the way Belay works, it's almost like a headhunting firm. I actually bought her out of her contract. So it's a great way to test the concept, get used to the concept, and then if you find the right person where you've got that chemistry, um, can actually hire them on full-time. And Brooke, I'm here in Lawrence, Kansas. She's in Atlanta. She'll, she'll see like, if I've got meetings running through lunch, Chipotle will just show up at the door. And she's like, "Hey, so you had meetings running through lunch, and so I went ahead and got you Chipotle." And, oh, that's one other, that's one other tool.
So there's a worksheet I got from Michael Hyatt. Calls it an executive summary. All it is is an Excel doc. It's basically your life on a spreadsheet. So it's frequent flyer numbers, Marriott numbers, like if I'm traveling, where do I want to stay? How do I want to get there? How do I take my coffee? You know, what are the local places that I would order lunch from and exactly how my order would be? My wife's name, my wife's birthday, my kids' names, my, my kids' birthdays, anniversaries. One of his sayings is, "It's not lack of intention, it's lack of execution that gets you in trouble." And so Jim and Brooke, on my behalf, like my wife's 40th birthday is coming up, big birthday. I literally have been that guy. It's like, "Oh shoot, my wife's birthday is tomorrow," because I've been so busy. Now I have somebody proactively looking out on the family calendar, "Hey, don't forget your wife's birthday is coming up in a month. Have you thought about a birthday present? Where's your birthday party going to be at? What do you want to do? Where do you want to have it at? Date night, what restaurant do you want to try?" So it's just like the work-life integration, really being proactive and looking out in advance in the future and just making sure you prioritize what you want to prioritize in life.
Yeah, I think that's awesome. I, I think, Dave, the EA role is the number one missing role in all of Finance. You look at any Fortune 500 CEO, they all have an executive assistant. You look at any top-performing financial advisor in our space, almost none of them have an executive assistant. I think it's the number one gap in most financial services firms.
Wow. I love the, what you said, Belay. You recommended them to me. I'm using them as well. So, and it's been, it's been excellent. So now, were you able to, on the, on the first, was the first hire the one, or did you go through a couple before you found the right one?
Currently is the one right now. Awesome. It's only been a few months, but it's already. And then you, you figure out stuff that you wouldn't have thought about unless you actually had someone who was there to support you and to take some of these things off your plate. So if you can't think of things that they would do now, which I'm sure you can, you know, if you're listening to this, uh, there's even more that comes up when you hire somebody.
So now let's go back. Okay, solo person. Here's this hires the EA or the VA, and they're doing 20, 10 hours a week, and they're, they're taking some of these big things on a do not do list, taken over, freeing up time. But then there's this, this thing that you got to do, which is people management. Most advisors, you don't get into the business to do people management. Some are good at it. I'm horrible at it. And then as you continue, if you continue to grow, then you've got this group of people, and you want to make sure everyone's doing the right thing and things are moving forward. And you become almost like a project manager. If you're the, if you work solo and now you've got a group, and then this idea of culture comes into play, and all these new things, which for a lot of people, it's like, well, I didn't really sign up for that. I want to talk to people and help them with their, their finances and help them make good financial decisions. How, that's to me, seems like a hard transition. Do you have any advice when it comes to this idea of maybe it's leadership, leadership and management, two different things? Maybe it's making sure everyone's on the same, you know, rowing in the same direction, vision? What's your advice to someone who is now they've crossed that first barrier and they're almost still going down because now they're training people, uh, they're, they're writing processes and systems? What's your advice for that person to get to the next level of working with a team?
Oh, there's just so many places to go with that. Um, it is, it is a common struggle. Um, it's actually, it's, you know, the book, "What Got You Here Won't Get You There." It's that, that, that. It's so, I see it over and over, and it's super frustrating to a lot of advisors because it's almost, you hit this ceiling of complexity, and you're not sure how to break through to the next level.
So, um, in simplest form, if you want to scale any business of substance, it, as a successful financial advisor, it flips from a solo player game to a multiplayer game. And the tough part about being a great financial advisor is almost every single advisor I've ever met in life started out as a solo game. In fact, most of them got horrible training, um, kind of thrown in the deep end, and they were the one that didn't drown. Everybody else in their class, 20, 50, 100, everybody else is like out, they're washed out of the business. They were the one that figured it out. They grinded their way through it. They problem-solved their way through it. They were a survivor. And what's so tough is the moment you flip over and you have to start empowering a team, it's so frustrating when the advisor that's been doing this 10, 15, 20 years has all this knowledge in their brain by the school of hard knocks, and they have to slow down. They have to watch somebody blow a couple sales, fall on their face, skin their knees, and not lose their mind and have a calm demeanor about it. It's like parenting, Dave, right? And if you want your kids to be anything in life, they're gonna have to stumble a few times along the way. They're gonna have to build the character, and you have to be patient, and you're gonna have to allow that to happen. And so that's kind of the first mindset you have to, you have to start with patience and empathy and go back to that time when you were the 20-something-year-old advisor just getting into it and realize like, they're not going to come into it with the same skill set that you did 20 years later.
The second thing that comes to mind, you mentioned it, vision. No one can follow anyone that doesn't know where they're going, or if they do, you're all going to be scattered, running all over the place, and it's going to be a whirlwind of chaos every day. And so taking a second, um, we typically coach on three years. It's long enough out there that you can make dramatic changes, but it's not so far out it's unattainable. And so we work and we coach on a three-year vision and really clarifying what that looks like. And if you think about it, like we were just out in Vegas together, think about like the Vegas Strip, for those that have been there. You can look out, you can see, you know, the Caesars or, or, you know, the kind of notable, uh, casinos. And you're not exactly sure how far down it is, but you know, "Hey, if I just keep walking in that direction, I'll get there eventually." That's a great vision. You don't have to have the how you're going to get there. In fact, a great vision, you shouldn't have the how. It should be aspirational. It should be, "We're not exactly sure how we're going to get there, but we're going to find a way. We're going to empower a team. We're going to all work together for the collective goal of the vision." So vision, alignment, then how do you align the team to execute on that? Then execution. Most financial services firms, it's execute, execute, execute, whirlwind, whirlwind, whirlwind, appointments, appointments, chaos. "Oh shoot, we didn't hit our goal for this year. Oh, we, uh, had five people quit on this." And then they wonder why. Well, nobody knew where they were going. It wasn't a compelling vision.
Look, Elon Musk, the one thing that guy knows how to do. I'm not saying I agree with all of his work practices and his hiring and firing and all that, but I will tell you what the guy knows how to do. He knows how to create a compelling vision. "We're going to Mars. We're, we're building a rocket that's reusable. We're building sustainable, uh, transportation with Tesla." He knows how to create a compelling vision. And the right people join that. The people that aren't scared of working 100 hours a week, but they are going to get a person to Mars. That's who's at SpaceX right now. And so it starts there. And then the culture side of it. There's one other thing. Our industry tends to look at the team as an expense versus an investment. And if you look at building a team, like, Dave, if I'm like, "Man, this guy's pretty good at what he does. He crushes it on YouTube. He's a pretty intelligent guy. I think he builds great financial plans for for his clients. Man, I'd love to have Dave on the team." The only way I'm going to get a Dave, solo, is if I have a compelling vision, and then I have a culture that attracts great talent and great humans, and I pay them incredibly well. I have great benefits. You look at most financial services firms when they're small, they have no 401k, they have no match, they have no healthcare. It's literally like, look at any baseline business out there. Benefits. You need to be, that should be the minimum is healthcare, some sort of retirement plan, some sort of match, some sort of, you know, vacation package. And then if you want to hire great talent, they're already working somewhere. They already have a great job. They're probably getting loved on by their current company because they don't want to lose them. And so you have to look at acquiring great talent. This is one of the things I've learned at Triad. We've gone from zero to 60 team members in about two and a half years. Screwed a lot up along the way. But one thing we've learned, no different than you need to if you're going to acquire clients to your firm, go from prospect to client, you need to have great marketing, and then you need to have a great process that attracts them, that your firm is better than the one they're at, or the one down the street. I see so many advisors that are incredibly gifted at that with their own clients, and then they suck at that with their own team.
What's really interesting is many of the same dynamics there actually apply to a team. You need to sell a great team member on, "Here's why our place is better than where you're at. Here's the competitive package we're going to invest into you." Great talent, you should be 10, 20 above market. You know, if this role is a 50k role industry-wide in your marketplace, you're going to need, by the way, that person that's already at a firm and already happy, they're not making a lateral move. Human psychology does not like change. So if you're offering 50k, which is exactly what they're making with a similar benefits package, you are never going to get that individual. If you are now at 60k with a compelling vision and "Here's where we're going, and we want to invest in you, and we want to career track, not a job where you can grow once you're inside of this firm." Okay, now that person perks up their head. I'm like, "Huh, 10k pay raise? Oh, I have a career." You know, maybe it's marketing. So if you look at your business, sorry, I'm just firehosing here, but I'm just giving you my stream of consciousness. So the biggest leap is from financial advisor to business owner. You now have to look at it as a business. So now I have divisions. I have a marketing division that's the before, that manufactures the appointments. I have sales, which is the during, the conversion process. I have Ops, which is the after, which is following through on the promises we make, the plans we build. Um, so now I need who's I go from tasks like, "Hey Dave, will you do this?" "Oh, what should I do?" That's the constraint. If Dave is the advisor in charge, every task has to run through Dave. If I move into phase two, which is business owner, now Dave invests in great talent, talent, and marketing, sales, ops. Typically the last division an advisor leaves is sales because they're, they're the one making mistakes. But you might have a director of marketing. Now I'm going to go from task delegation to I've got a person that I've empowered to have a responsibility over the marketing. We use a framework called 108010. The front 10 is the ideation, which would be Dave, the founder, meeting with the person responsible for marketing. "Hey, I'm thinking we might want to do some dinner seminars. Why don't you look at some local venues that are within 30 minutes of our office and let's, you know, they need to be kind of upper level risk, risk level. Let's see what they are and bring those back." Now you've delegated responsibility. They're doing the middle 80, which is the work. So front 10, ideation, middle 80 percent, them empowering them. Here's the missing piece for most advisors, last 10, quality control. This is why people get scared to delegate because they're like, "I get, I gave them the task, and then they were hosting the next seminar, you know, the, the buffet, like what are the Golden Canyon, or whatever they're called, Coyote Canyon?" So because there was no quality control on the back yet, where you basically check their work. And so that last 10 is like, "Okay, I like these two. Let's get dates set." Okay, cool. And then after a few iterations of that, now it's just a system and a business. And so that's kind of that second phase is move into business owner, which is empowering and investing in great team and talent and then getting the hell out of their way, honestly. That's what Ron Carson told me. Said, "Number one thing that's contributed to my success is I hire great people and I get the hell out of their way."
I love that. That 108010. That's super helpful. You said an advisor and then kind of graduating to business owner. I want to ask about the, do you know any advisors? Do you have any stories of advisors who know that the, the kind of paths, two paths they can take, but they don't want to be the business owner? Do they end up hiring the CEO? Or do they, is that an option for people? Or do you just stay the solo and you have a small team, and that's good? You know what I mean? Like, what if you don't want to be a business owner?
Yeah, so there's a few frameworks out there. So the short answer is yesterday. Um, and that's what I love. That's one of the things that just, that's why I've never gotten tired of this business. There's so much freedom to build a business that suits you and serves you in this space. Like, look at your store, you're like, "I started creating YouTube videos." You came up with a unique marketing funnel that served you and how you wanted to build a firm. And guess what? Some people like, "I hate doing YouTube videos." They're not going to do that.
So here are the four phases of scale that we coach to. There's the advisor in charge model, which is typically where you start. You're the solo practitioner, surrounded by a bunch of assistants, right? Like very generalized roles. The second phase is business first, or business owner. We now divide the business into an actual business with a marketing division, a sales division, and an Ops division. You can now start to hire leaders in each of those divisions, typically like a director of marketing, a director of Ops. You mentioned like most advisors do not like personnel. Great sales people tend to have not great follow-through, not great like accountability. And so you have to hire your compliments, your differences are your strengths in business. So, so in Colby, that would be a high follow-through where most advisors are high quick starts. If you're good sales people, um, so you might hire a high attention to detail that handles a lot of the personnel to free you up for sales. The third phase is CEO. Um, and so phase one, we delegate tasks. Phase two, we delegate responsibility. Phase three, we delegate the thinking to where now, kind of a COO level, they're thinking about the Ops, they're coming and bringing ideas to you, ideally they're a specialist in this with the track record of doing this before. And so now as CEO, and we'll get to like, if you don't want to be CEO in a second, CEOs are responsible for vision, for the team, where we're headed, and inspiration. Like it's kind of the, um, the Mel Gibson Braveheart scene where he's got his face open and he's in front of the group riding a horse. It's like, that's a great CEO. It's like an inspiring vision that people want to follow. COO is more the day-to-day execution. And then phase four is board member, where I have shares in the company, but I do not have to show up on a daily basis.
And so where I've seen, to your question, where founding advisors can kind of pick their own path. I've got an advisor, we've got an advisor in Chicago. We work with. He'll bring it, their firm will bring in north of 200 million this year organically. They're not buying firms and rolling them up. And so back to marketing, sales, Ops. Most advisors, where they leave last is sales because they're responsible for the revenue, right? They're, they're meeting with clients. And, you know, some founding advisors will bump their minimums to a million, two million, three million. They've got an advisor team that maybe see the lower ones. But if you want to remove yourself, like Anthony did, the advisor up in Chicago, he actually wanted to rainmake. That was what he loved. He loved the marketing, similar to what you're doing right now, Dave. You're rainmaking through YouTube. You're, you're generating appointments for a team. That was his unique desire. That was what kind of brought him joy. He's the TV guy. He's the YouTube guy. He's the seminar guy. Which, by the way, he's got a family. His seminar speaking days, he just retrofits his day. He takes the whole morning off. He does breakfast with his kids. He drives them to school. Because a lot of seminars, they'll be like, "I'm not missing family dinners." That's why I don't do seminars. He's like, "The most valuable hour." He makes about forty thousand dollars of revenue every time he speaks, every hour, because of the ROI of talking with an audience full of qualified people. So it's one of the most valuable things he can do on a daily basis. So he just retrofits his day. So we're on seminar nights, he might hit the spa. He takes, he hangs with the kids in the morning, drives them to school. So he doesn't have this guilt of like, "I'm sacrificing my family to build this business." He just, he just retrofits it. And then he looks forward, you know, "What could it make possible if you actually looked forward to seminar days?" And so he changed his seminar routine and day to where those are some of his favorite days. He loves speaking in front of an audience. He goes and crushes it. And it's one of the most valuable things he could do to drive revenue to the firm. And then he's got a guy named Brian on his team. All he does, he owns the sales division. So Anthony is making it rain appointments onto the calendar. Brian, all he does is he's their head sales guy. He did north of 100 million, I think it was like 108 million last year of new assets gathered by one individual on the team. Because back to the cash register analogy, all Brian did was set up the cash register all day. He has no service work. He has no planning, no follow-through. He just sits and connects all day long, every day. And so when you start to, so you go from generalist in the advisor in charge model to specialist. And what Anthony's developed is a specialist in that role, and in many other roles in his firm. Which, by the way, if you're going to build and attract a great team and a great culture and great talent, great talent wants a career, not a job. So, "Hey, inside of our firm, you start here, and then here's the next step, and the next step, and you could, if you do really well, get up to here." And by running this like a business, not like a financial advisor, you actually start to build these career tracks inside of your firm where people like, "Oh, cool. There's opportunity there. That sounds like a good opportunity that I'm willing to to jump from where I'm at."
Wow. This is exciting. This is great, great stuff. At least for me, super valuable. Well, hey, Fred, hey, back to your YouTube. Like, if it's only you, cool. Mission accomplished. So yes, no, there's going to be a lot. There's a lot of advisors, um, on Streamline My Practice that are gonna, they're gonna love this. We've got two minutes. Can you summarize in two minutes? You, you've got, "Do business, do life." Family is is above work, right? A lot of it's easy to get burnt out, especially if you love what you do. It's easy to work and and work and always be thinking about work. How do you focus on your family? How do you be that dad and also be a successful entrepreneur and advisor? What's, just a framework or idea or tip?
Well, first off, I've screwed all this up along the way, Dave. So, um, nobody's perfect at this. And anybody that says they are is lying to you. Um, there is no manual for being the world's best husband or the world's best dad. Um, but I think it starts with intention. And almost, I think universally, every advisor that I've ever talked with that is married, that has kids, or someday hopes to to, you know, have kids, they all have the intent. But the intent, the way I try to live life is by design, not by default. And back to, I don't know how you'll slice and dice this video, but somewhere along the way, we just talked about an EA. "What gets calendar gets done." And so one of the things we do in my family, um, there's, there's actually, I think I've heard this story the first time in Sunday school growing up. It was maybe you heard it, Dave? It was the parable of where there's this, this empty pitcher. And, you know, this guy puts these rocks in it and he says, "Is the pitcher full?" And the kid says, "Yes, it's like, oh, okay." And then he takes some sand and he pours it in the pitcher. He says, "How about now?" And the kid, like, kind of double takes, and he's like, "Well, yeah, now it's full." Then he takes some water and he pours it in the pitcher. And the truth is, a lot of advisors that I've seen that get to kind of red line burnout, just lack of balance, the way their calendar works is all of that stuff that's poured into the calendar is business first. And so what we do at the Johnson house, once a year, my wife and I, it's around September, November, we sit down with Brooke, my EA, we look out over the coming year and we say, "We put the big rocks in first." And the big rocks are family. The big rocks are birthdays, scripts, the stuff that matters. That is way more important than anything business-related. And now we pour the sand in. The sand could represent the business calendar. And that works around the big rocks. It doesn't, we don't do the sand first and then try to jam big rocks in them. That's one of the things I've seen a lot of advisors. They try to cram the big rocks in after the business is on the calendar. It just doesn't work. And so I think it just starts with intention. It starts with screwing a few things up, and you create systems. I've tried to just surround myself with just people that are further down the path than me. Guys like Michael Hyatt, that are super intentional. And what I love is like, he's, he's told me the, like, Michael, when I sat down with me, it's like, there's a point he has five daughters. He was the CEO of Thomas Nelson. He said, "I was literally on the verge of divorce because my wife sat me down and said, 'I feel like I'm a single mom.'" And this is a guy that's like, such a great human and so intentional. And so I just know like, if he's gone down past of messing this up, everyone has. And so you just try to get people in your life that you can learn from, that are great mentors, that are people that you aspire to be like, and you just ask them. And I found that most of them are really generous humans that just share everything. And, uh, so that's, that's a few thoughts. That could be, that could be a full day conversation, Dave. But that's a few thoughts from my side.
Oh, it's so helpful, Brad. Thank you. Thanks for sharing that wisdom. Super helpful. I'm glad you're in my life. You're one of those guys that you just mentioned.
Yeah. Advisors are going to love this. Thanks for being on the show.
Hey, likewise, Dave. Uh, I've learned a lot from you as well. So great to be connected with you. Thanks for all you're doing out there for advisors to help them level up in business and life. And, uh, yeah, hope this helps a few advisors out there. And, uh, always down for another conversation, so just let me know.
Awesome, awesome. Thanks, Brad.