#FASuccess Ep 085: Boosting Firm Productivity With A Financial Planning Resident Program With Elissa Buie

What You’ll Learn In This Podcast Episode

• The benefits of residency programs for financial planners. [13:24]
• What Yeske Buie does and who they serve. [17:05]
• Why she says all advisors should know how to create a comprehensive financial plan with only a yellow pad and a financial calculator. [22:48]
• Financial planning services Yeske Buie provides on an ongoing basis. [26:28]
• What Yeske Buie’s client deliverables look like. [30:37]
• How they write follow-up emails. [37:36]
• Their staff infrastructure. [38:56]
• What their residency program looks like. [47:26]
• The unique way they leverage next-generation talent. [50:00]
• Why the firm has decided to remain on the AUM model. [1:01:45]
• The hardest point of Elissa’s career. [1:07:02]
• Advice to new advisors on how to find the clients you will enjoy working with. [1:09:37]

Resources Featured In This Episode:

• Elissa Buie
• Yeske Buie (YeBu)
• Investment News 2015 Women To Watch
• #FASuccess Ep 082: Insights From The History Of Financial Planning Since The First CFP Class with Ben Coombs
• HP 12-C
• Golden Gate University Financial Planning Master's Program
• FPA Residency
• MoneyTree Financial Planning software
• Salesforce
• Salesforce XLR8 Overlay

Full Transcript: Boosting Firm Productivity With A Financial Planning Resident Program With Elissa Buie

Michael: Welcome, everyone. Welcome to the 85th episode of the "Financial Advisor Success" podcast. My guest on today's podcast is Elissa Buie. Elissa is the CEO of Yeske Buie, an independent RIA with offices in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. that manages nearly $750 million of assets under management for 240 clients with a team of 13. What's unique about Elissa, though, is the way that she and her firm have figured out how to leverage next-generation talent through a financial planning resident program that trains and develops advisors, with the expectation that they will graduate and leave the firm after three years to be replaced by another financial planning resident.

In this episode, we talk in depth about YeBu's Financial Planning Resident Program. How the firm developed an intensive boot camp process to train new advisors in just eight weeks in how to produce the core deliverables the firm provides to clients, the way their financial planning residents gain experience in client meetings while boosting the firm's productivity, and why the firm prefers hiring financial planning residents to a more traditional approach of hiring and developing paraplanners instead.

We also talk about the evolution of how advisors are trained and educate as professionals. The rise of master's degree programs to increase the technical competency of today's advisors, the importance of programs like the FPA Residency program to teach the so-called soft skills of effective client communication, and why Elissa believes that all advisors should at least know how to create a comprehensive plan for clients with only a yellow pad and a financial calculator to ensure that today's financial planning software will then be used as a tool instead of a crutch with clients.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Elissa shares why the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 was the hardest moment for the firm, not simply because revenues turned down with the market decline, though, why the firm has decided to remain on the AUM model despite being a financial planning-centric business, and Elissa's advice to new advisors in how best to find clients you will actually enjoy working with in the long run.

And so with that introduction, I hope you enjoy this episode of the "Financial Advisor Success" podcast with Elissa Buie.

Welcome, Elissa Buie, to the "Financial Advisor Success" podcast.

Elissa: Hi, Michael. Thanks for having me. Happy to be here.

Michael: I'm excited for this episode because you have a really wide range of really cool, interesting stuff you've done. I know you're a CEO for your advisory firm that is very sizeable at $750 million under management and 13 employees and working with a wide range of clients, but you have also been incredibly active in the profession itself over the years. I know you were in a leadership position when the whole big IAFP/ICFP merger happened into what we now know as FPA. You've published a lot of papers around financial planning. You're now an adjunct professor at the GGU CFP program. And so I'm looking forward both to talk about the business and what drives you that, after however many years and years of leadership positions, you still keep getting hooked back into more of them, or you keep throwing yourself in to do more of them.

Elissa: Well, that was a very polite way of saying that, the years and years. I think when you've been in the profession for as long as I have, it's 35 years, there's just... you've been given a lot of opportunity to do some wonderful things. So, I've been a lot of times in the right place at the right time. Just even going back to 35 years ago, there was kind of equal standing between the CFP marks and what used to be called the Registry of Financial Planners with the IAFP. And, I was just in a good place back then that my mentor, the man I worked for, was a CFP, and so that's the path I took. So, there's a lot of synergy and a lot of just great opportunity.

I think that what keeps me in, keeps me coming back is that it's actually just plain fun. Financial planners, as you know, are really nice, fun, generally gregarious people. You don't come into this business because you don't like human beings.

Michael: Indeed.

Elissa: Right? So it's fun. And if you think about where the profession has come in those 35 years, there's just been a lot of change. 35 years ago, we didn't even have computers in the office. So I did return calculations with my HP-12C and a yellow pad and a pen. And if you see where CFP Board has taken the CFP marks over that 35 years, that's pretty incredible what they have managed to make happen. And I know we have a long way to go.

Michael: Yeah, it is an interesting context if we dial it back to when you were getting started in 1983. So, there's no comprehensive exam for the CFP marks. There actually is no CFP Board yet because it's still part of the College for Financial Planning. All of those steps about kind of deepening, expanding the rigor of the CFP marks in that world has come in progress over the time that you've been working and involved.

Elissa: Yeah. And if you think about that in terms of the profession, growing the CFP marks and making them ever more rigorous and really enforcing the Code of Ethics, etc., it's what the public needed, but man, it would have been really easy for the profession to go a different route and not have to have made things more difficult if you will. So, the fact that we did it that way I think is a testament to the kind of people who were in the business. Coming fully to the fiduciary standard at this point for all CFP licensees is... I would say it's a shame it took this long, but I'm happy we're there.

Further on along with your question is, I would say that financial planners are fun and there's been a lot of opportunity. And I was just really fortunate to have some great mentors who invited me into participation with the ICFP and I made a lot of really good friends in the financial planning business. And then with it being so fun to hang out with those friends, being in the profession just, it made me better. It's just, I'm the financial planner I am, and this firm, Yeske Buie, is the firm it is because Dave and I have been so involved in the profession. And, you hang out with the best and the brightest and you just get better and better. So, that's just one more answer to your question of why, kind of what's brought me back in.

And then the final one is the whole mentoring thing. As you get older and you get more successful and there's some space, you have some capacity to spend some time mentoring and teaching. That's probably my favorite piece of being involved in the profession now, and that's the teaching at Golden Gate University and then being a dean for FPA's Residency program.

Michael: And can you talk about those for a moment? I think both GGU and the Residency program, I feel like, in financial planning programs, there are a few that just have gotten a little more well-known over the years. Texas Tech has certainly been prominent for a long time and University of Georgia and Kansas State and a few of those programs that have been there for a long time in a visible way. I find fewer advisors are familiar with Golden Gate University, although you've got a little bit of a unique program structure there. So can you talk for a moment about just the GGU program and what's going on there?

Elissa: Yes, but I'll be in big trouble if I don't add to your list the Pamplin School at Virginia Tech. That's where most of the younger financial planners in our firm come from. And it's an exceptional program, primarily because the two leaders, if you will, of the program are so committed to it.

So Golden Gate University is actually the longest-running financial planning program in the country, which would also make it the longest-running in the world. It started a similar time of San Diego State University, so we spar with them a little bit. But those are the two longest-running programs in the country.

And it's a master's program, and so it is really well-suited for people who already have their bachelor's degree and want to get a full financial planning degree, not just do the certificate program and take the exam, but they want a full degree. And so at Golden Gate University, you can take the seven financial planning courses, and then if you choose, with only three more courses, you can go back and get a master's program.

And yeah, to put in a shameless plug, right now they are offering basically half price scholarships to FPA members that will cut those seven courses in half cost-wise. So it's just a great opportunity. And there's also a master's in advanced financial planning for someone who's already a CFP, has already taken the seven classes but would like to get a master's degree in say tax, or it's the first financial life planning program in the country. So to that extent, it's a well-put-together school. It was just ranked the number one online adult... and it is a bricks-and-mortar school. There are classes and it exists here in San Francisco. But it's also everything is completely available online. And that works really well for adult education obviously.

Michael: So you don't have to go to San Francisco to do this financial planning master's program, it's in the online master's degree program options?

Elissa: All the courses are available online. Yep. So you can get the whole thing online. And I know you've been a great supporter, thank you very much.

Michael: We spent many years trying to get to the point where a bachelor's degree was required for the CFP marks. I think we finally got there I want to say something like 2006. You can tell when we got there because of the number of people who tried to take the exam right before the requirement came in place. So I think the last CFP exam before the bachelor's requirement came into place was I believe the largest CFP exam cycle ever of people wanting to get in before the rules changed. And so now we're 10-plus years in with the bachelor's requirement and seeing more and more of these master's programs come up. Do you envision that the future of financial planning where eventually a master's degree is going to be required or is a master's degree just a good diligent thing to do to advance your education? How do you think about getting a master's in financial planning beyond doing the CFP marks? Which is already a sizable bar for a lot of people.

Elissa: Right. I don't think that a master's degree will be required. I'm not even sure. I would love to get to a place where it was an expectation. But even back to your point of a bachelor's degree being required for the CFP, it only requires that the person taking the exam has a bachelor's degree. My bachelor's degree could be in basket weaving and then I can get a CFP certificate, you know, take the seven courses. And so I think that we need to up the ante on people becoming eligible to take the CFP exam. That's my personal...

Michael: Like requiring a financial planning undergrad degree or at least a financial planning equivalent. Like some related education, just not basket weaving?

Elissa: Not basket weaving, right.

Michael: No offense to the basket weavers.

Elissa: No, no offense to the basket weavers, but they're not qualified to be financial planners. So yeah, I would like to see the ante upped a little bit in terms of the education because I see a wide range in doing residency programs and in hiring or in interviewing, I guess I should say. I just see a wide range in technical knowledge. And I'm not suggesting anyone should come out of a CFP program knowing 100%. Just dive in. Be a financial planner. You need to be mentored. That's why there's the two and the three-year experience requirements. But the technical knowledge matters. And if you're spending all your time getting technical knowledge when you're first employed, if you will, you're not as far ahead as you could be in terms of all of the relationship building. You know, the interior dimension, really learning how to work with and get to know clients.

Michael: And I know that was part of the origin of the FPA Residency program as well. So maybe you can touch on that a little bit in this span of financial planning education from CFP marks, bachelor's, master's, residency. So where does residency fit into this spectrum of learning to be a planner?

The Benefits Of Residency Programs For Financial Planners [13:24]

Elissa: Yeah, and again, if I were queen for a day, I would require everyone to do an FPA or some relevant residency program. And partially because it just leapfrogs you ahead what it might take. The CFP Board gives three months of experience credit for residency. And I really think that is realistic, it's reasonable. One week at an intense FPA Residency program is going to give you many, many months of experience that... what it would take for you to get that kind of experience at a firm. And it's because it's experiential. You're basically working in teams, "meeting the clients," because two of the mentors roleplay the clients.

And so the residents have literal dialogue with these clients over the course of about 17 years of their life. They come in three different times at three different stages of their life. And they never seem to age a day, but but the case does. And I will just tell you, it's a transformational experience. The residents, when they leave, they are in a completely different place in terms of their expertise and their understanding of how important it is to build relationship with the clients, not just know how to do a tax projection or a capital needs analysis.

Michael: So you show up for a week and basically you do financial planning on a hypothetical clients who are your deans and professors acting out the client situation, but it's meant to be - as you put it - experiential... like a live experiential. You actually get to practice doing live financial planning and I guess get constructive criticism and feedback on what you're doing and how you're doing and how you might have done it better, with the caveat that everybody is there for the same thing. You don't have to worry about feeling singled out. Just everybody is there to learn how to improve their technique of how you're actually communicating all this financial planning stuff to clients.

Elissa: Yeah. That's exactly it. We ask at the beginning of the week, or we basically get permission to give robust feedback... and not to be mean, but these people are spending money and a good chunk of their time to come and get feedback from these very experienced mentors, and so we need to give them what they paid for if you will. So they actually get feedback from - so there are five mentors - they get feedback from three of the mentors each time they do something as if those mentors are like the senior partners in the firm. And then they get feedback from the other two mentors who roleplay the client. So they get different angles of feedback and different types of feedback.

The residents tend to progress as the week goes on. They start out a little tentative, "Oh my goodness." It's hard to be criticized, if you will. I mean, criticize is probably… but it's hard to get critical feedback, particularly in a big setting, 30 people in the room. But, boy, as the week progresses, like, "No, no, no, no, come on, I need more. Get a little more. Be harder on me. Give me more feedback because I want to get better."

Michael: Very cool. So aside from all the work you're doing with Golden Gate University and FPA Residency, and I know you're involved with the Foundation for Financial Planning as well, you, on the side, have this little advisory firm thing. So talk to us a little bit about the advisory firm. What does that business look like? How big is it? What do you do? Who do you serve?

What Yeske Buie Does And Who They Serve [17:05]

Elissa: So first of all, the most important thing to share is that we are first and foremost a financial planning firm. Yes, we charge our clients on AUM, and yes, we have quite a bit of money under management, but we do financial planning for those people. And we can have a dialogue around, "Why charge fees that way if you have any interest in that?" We do actually have a theory there. But the reality is that we are first and foremost financial planning. We just do a lot for our clients. Every client gets a tax projection that compares what our projection looked like for last year and what their real taxes look like, and then what it looks like for this year. And then in '18, everyone is getting shown the difference between their taxes under the new tax law and the old tax law because people are curious about that, "Is it costing me more? Is it costing me less?"

Michael: So you're literally just doing a tax projection for every client?

Elissa: Yes.

Michael: Are you doing tax returns as well? Are you in the tax preparation business as a service for clients?

Elissa: No, we are not. I would shoot myself if I had to do tax returns.

Michael: No offense to any CPAs.

Elissa: No, thank goodness for them. I appreciate them very, very much so that I don't have to do tax returns. But we love doing tax projections because that's planning, right? And then we try to work very closely with our clients' accountants, so our tax preparers, so that we're all on the same page.

Michael: And what do you use for doing tax projections? I feel like this is kind of a gap in our advisor space, that there are not a lot of tools for doing tax planning.

Elissa: No, there isn't. And you're touching on something that is really, really important to us. And this is true with cash flow planning and it's true with... you know, we do use software for capital needs analysis, but I want my advisors to know how to do a tax projection because I don't believe you can do tax planning without knowing how the things you're recommending actually impact the tax projection. So if I do my tax projection using a piece of software, I don't know where the numbers came from. So we actually use a spreadsheet that we've built and everyone has to keep their brain engaged. It doesn't apply as much anymore, but it includes a tab for the alternative minimum tax, and then they have to go over it and look at it and say, "Yep, this all makes sense. I didn't inadvertently mess up some cell or something because, this tax projection makes sense."

And now when they're talking to the client, they can really do a much better job of saying, "So if we did this," or, "No, the new tax law affected you like that," versus kind of the tax projection coming out of what we like to call a black box. We use Money Tree software for financial planning because it's not a black box, because we want our advisors to know, "Where did that number come from?" And if you're not sure where that number came from, Money Tree allows you to go back and back and back. It's really like being spreadsheet-based. It's not spreadsheet-based anymore, but it started that way and it still behaves that way. If I ask you where that number came from, you better be able to tell me, "That's because this and such thing."

Michael: Yeah, I know one of the long-standing differentiators that won Money Tree a lot of business over the years and has kept a very loyal client base is that, unlike most of the other tools out there, there is a crystal clear audit. Any number on any projection on any page, you can get to the underlying calculations of where that number came from.

Elissa: One hundred percent. Yes.

Michael: So it's not a black box. You don't have to wade through every audit trail report if you don't want to, but you can if you do want to in a way that most of the other planning software you can't. The numbers go in and the numbers come out. And you can't necessarily figure out where the numbers came from, which is frustrating if you think they're wrong because there's not even a way to evaluate it or prove it.

Elissa: Yeah. Or it's frustrating if you think they're wrong and it's frustrating if you can't figure it out even if they're right. Because teach me. I want to know where that number came from. We've tried. We have tried. And Dave and I we just... it drives us crazy. We just can't have a piece of paper in front of us that we're like, "Where did that number come from?" And as you say about Money Tree, and this is not a plug... I mean, I don't get anything from Money Tree, we've used them for decades at this point... but you can track every number back to the data input pages. And so, that is just to us the answer.

Financial planners have to be good, in my opinion, and in Yeske Buie’s opinion, have to be good with the numbers, with the calculations, with the results, you know, the output of everything in order to do planning. Because I can after, you know, decades, whatever, and I think our young people can do this better because they know where the numbers came from is to look and see, "You know what? If we do this, here's what will happen. Oh, you want to save this different number or you want to buy that different [whatever]?" And you can almost interpolate like, "Oh, okay, well, that's going to take your Monte Carlo, instead of the 70% number you're probably going to be down in the 60s if you do that much change." "Oh, that's not good." You know, that kind of thing. "Oh, you make that little tweak here, you're going to go from that 65 Monte Carlo to, mmm, 68." "Oh, that's good." And you can't do that if you haven't really analyzed the numbers yourself and you don't really know where the numbers are coming from.

Why Elissa Says All Advisors Should Know How To Create A Comprehensive Financial Plan With Only Paper And A Financial Calculator [22:48]

Michael: Well, and I'm struck by that since you're talking about the importance of having the numeracy and the strength of understanding the calculations and all this number-crunching that happens in the various tax and planning software tools, and you're the dean of an FPA Residency program that, last I heard, you are not allowed to use any of those tools at Residency. You can't bring any of that, the technical calculation stuff. So how do you look at bringing those together?

Elissa: It actually goes hand in hand, Michael. Those actually go hand in hand because what we're actually saying in the financial... well, we're saying two things in Residency. One of them is you don't need the software crutch. If you actually understand the technical aspects of it, you can do it with a yellow pad, or actually, in Residency, it's with a big flip chart and big Magic Markers, but you can do... and your calculator. It can be done.

Also the piece in Residency that's important is that while we do not allow technical incompetence - that's probably a little strong, but you know what I'm saying - technical errors, you can't recommend a Roth conversion or a Roth contribution for someone who doesn't qualify, you know, that kind of technical level. But what we're really talking about in Residency is the above the line piece. So it's the building the relationship, it's the interior dimension, it's the what and who matters to these clients and why, backed up by good calculations. But in Residency, we would never expect someone to have anything remotely resembling a Monte Carlo. We just do straight capital needs analysis. Life insurance we do, human value, capital analysis, that kind of thing. So it is taking an emphasis off of the technical even while you can't be fundamentally incorrect in a technical way. Does that make sense?

Michael: It does. Well, you made a comment in there about, it's one thing to know and use the technology, it's another to use it as a crutch. There's sort of a... you make sure you're using the technology as a tool not a crutch as kind of a way to balance those out. If you know your stuff already, the technology just lets you do it faster, easier. You can do more complex illustrations and tradeoffs so you don't have to rely on the yellow pad or the flip pad. But if you have to use the software and you couldn't explain it with the yellow pad or a flip pad, you probably have a gap in your technical knowledge that may eventually come back to bite you, if only because you'll find mistake in your planning software that you didn't know was a mistake because you didn't know how to spot them because you weren't familiar enough with the numbers to realize that the output was wrong.

Elissa: Yeah. And the other piece just in addition to that is you might miss a mistake in your input. A long time ago we had someone, one of our junior advisors hand Dave an output, a retirement… I guess it was probably a Monte Carlo or a capital needs analysis, and he said, "You know, there's just something wrong with this. There's just something wrong. This number does not make any sense." And the real estate taxes had been inflated at 3% a month instead of 3% a year. And so, it was they had $8 million a year of real estate taxes in their otherwise $500,000 budget 25 years from now kind of thing.

We have two... each of our processes, they're not... we don't have processes written for how to do a financial plan, you just do what you do. But our processes all start with, "Engage your brain," and then they all end with, "Does this make sense? Does what you've created make sense? Look at it and see if it makes sense. Eight million dollars of real estate taxes where the rest of the budget is $500,000 25 years from now, it probably doesn't make sense.

Financial Planning Services Yeske Buie Provides On An Ongoing Basis [26:28]

Michael: So when you talk about being a planning-first firm and doing all this planning work, so can you talk about what else you're doing or what that planning process looks like for clients beyond - you noted the tax projection every year - but what are you doing for clients on an ongoing basis in the planning realm?

Elissa: So our plans and the updates are individual reports that are held together by the planner, okay? So what you're really getting is... we don't print them out and type up a bunch of boilerplate or even a bunch of... you know, it's the output and then you deal with the planner and then you get follow-up emails that say, "Here are the things you're going to do and here are the things we're going to do and here are the things that are still outstanding for us to talk about." So, everyone has a net worth statement. And if they are not currently retired, okay, not currently spending from their portfolio, they get a Monte Carlo analysis with all of the backup that goes with that. You know, the, "Let's talk about your cash flow and what you're going to spend in retirement," that kind of thing.

A tax projection for planning purposes because we do... there's not all that much you can do, but man, you want to talk about doing a Roth conversion for 35 clients maybe at the end of the year, you better have some tax projections ready to lean on to do that. If they are spending clients, they have a safe spending analysis every year. And then we have an estate flowchart. So it shows how their estate documents flow their assets at the first death. And if it's a married couple - or not married, but a couple - it's at the second death. And an estate tax calculation. Because even though the majority of our clients do not have an estate tax issue with the new estate tax laws, it's still helpful to know who's getting what. You know, how often people look and go, "Whoa, the kids are getting... oh, that's too much. I need to change what I'm sending to charity," etc.

Then we do what we call... we call them templates just because they are templates to get filled in, but there's one that shows people's account beneficiaries, another one that shows their estate documents, including executors, who holds their health care power of attorney, who's the secondary person for that, who is the trustee of the various trusts, etc., etc., and where those documents are located.

Michael: So it's kind of like estate documents and key people?

Elissa: Yeah, exactly, exactly. That would be a good name for it. And then we have one that is insurance, and so it has all the insurance that we can get information on, including property and casualty insurance when we can get that from clients, and it has whatever we've recommended to them in terms of taking their social security or what they're currently doing if they're already taking their social security. That's pretty much our financial planning output. Obviously, we add to it as people need something else. So we have clients who have options. Well, clearly, they have an output of what their options look like. And clients who are receiving deferred comp. Okay, well, so we chart showing how that money is going to come in over the next 5, 10, 15 years, whatever.

So there are things added to it, but it's basically a bunch of outputs and then we just go over each and every one of them. And we start with what we call the YeBu Map, which is just a pretty piece of clip art basically with boxes on it. So you've got a financial hygiene box and you've got kind of a near-term box and an intermediate-term box and a retirement/legacy goals box, and then it's a picture of mountains and a stream and there's a cloud in the sky and that cloud... it's a nice, big, white cloud, it's not a rain cloud, their live big goals. So if there's something someone really wants to take a safari or write a book or own a beach house or spend time with their grandkids in a way that is going to entail some not just money resources but time, you know, some impact, some effort, that goes in there. And so that's kind of where we start with clients just to say, "What's up? What's new? What's changed? What's the same? What do we need to know?"

What Yeske Buie’s Client Deliverables Look Like [30:37]

Michael: So help me envision how this... for a new client how this planning meeting comes together. So you go through a data gathering process, then you start creating this series of analyses and outputs. It sounds like a lot of these are one-pagers or designed to be a one-pager. Like, "Here's the one-pager on your net worth. Here's the one-pager on your tax projection. Here's the one-pager on your estate planning flowchart, your account beneficiaries, your insurance policies." You've got this group of different one-pagers in various areas that you've made, and then you just give them the stack of one-pagers? Do you bind it and put it together or are you still writing an executive summary and action items and that kind of stuff at the front? What does it look like when you get to delivery and plan presentation?

Elissa: Well, it's all delivered on their Client Private Page. So it actually links to PDFs and they're all just listed out. When I said them to you, other than the map, what I said is basically the order they're in. If you can just picture a two-column list of links that say "account beneficiaries," "estate documents," "estate flowchart," da, da, da.

Michael: Okay, so, name, URL link, name, PDF link, name, PDF link.

Elissa: Yep, exactly, exactly. And one of the nice things is you're going through it with the client and it's like, "Oh, we misinterpreted something or something changed, that's easily fixed. By the time you get home - or at least by the end of the week - that report will be redone and will be reposted for you." So it's always there for them. They can print it out. We have a couple of clients who do want actual hard copy when they come in to meet, and that's easy. We just print it out for them. It's still on their Client Private Page because that's where we keep it all. And there's an interesting thing, Michael, doing it this way for us, is you always know what the most current report is because it's the one on the Client Private Page. And, I clearly date documents and stuff, but I'm just saying you'd always readily get to the most current document.

There's also a page on their Client Private Page that has a task list and a questions list, and so we keep track of just... it's not a comprehensive task list. Comprehensive task list goes in a very comprehensive email after the fact. The task list on there is just something to remind them of the big stuff, or if there's a question that we really need to remember to ask them, or almost more of a case of, it's the nagging place for the client. It's like, "Gosh, do you know that we've been asking for your estate documents for the last five times we've met?" That kind of thing. So there's that.

And the Client Private Page then has the financial planning reports. And then it has the portfolio reports and it has another tab on it that has what we call tax reports. It's really their billing statement for back in the day when it was... the fees were deductible, and whatever their IRA required minimum distribution was, if they have one of those or a Roth conversion. It's got that. So they know how to get stuff readily to their accountants. And then we have a resources page, which is really our investment webinars, including our investment philosophies on there. Resources page is the same for everyone. It's a place where they can readily go and securely upload things to us and that kind of thing.

Michael: So what are you using to power this Client Private Page with all the different stuff? The things you're discussing here about the column of links of, "Here's the various reports and your downloads and a task list page and resources page." I don't feel like this fits very well into standard advisor technology tools that we have. Is there some tool I'm not aware of or did you build something? How do you actually deliver this?

Elissa: So we're using something that is so old it's actually not... it's no longer supported, it's called WordPress. And it's something I don't know... Dave kind of created Client Private Pages, right? He was one of the first ones ever if not the first ever. It's been 30 years that he's been doing something like this. So I'm not the expert on it, and it doesn't really matter because WordPress isn't really supported anymore, but it is nothing more complex than literally uploading PDFs and having a link.

Michael: Yeah, I know WordPress still powers a lot of sites. I guess you had a plug-in you made, or created, that powers it and keeps it going on the back end. I can sort of imagine that there's still a couple of tools out there in WordPress that let you do member logins to access things. So you're just... you're running your own WordPress site.

Elissa: Yeah, that's exactly what we're doing. And we're switching, like I said, we're switching to something new that I think is going to be a little more interactive for the clients, but it’s just... I mean, just the layperson's translation… that's not for you, you're not the layperson, but for anyone else listening... it's a bunch of tabs on our website that have links to PDFs, and we just upload new PDFs each time we redo it. And yeah, each time we redo them, I should say.

Michael: So all the other fancy tools that are out there are just overkilling what can actually be a very simple process of just, give clients the one-pagers they need to see where they stand?

Elissa: Right. And there's something, I don't know, maybe it's just simplistic, but to me, there's something elegant about having everything standalone a little bit. Now, we do... everything is in Money Tree so we're pulling it together there. It's not like we're not making sure everything is coordinated if you will. But I don't know, just having, "Oh, client wants to talk about this in depth and not that," we're not ruffling through a bunch of pages, or even we're not ruffling through a bunch of PDFs that are all attached. You’re just going to each individual. Now, when we do an initial plan, we do do a PowerPoint for that, and it is super high-end in terms... high-end, you know what I mean… a 30,000-foot level. Yeah, not high-end, high whatever, big picture.

Michael: High-level. Big picture, 30,000 feet. Yes.

Elissa: Yeah, high-level, big picture. Yeah. So it's super big picture, but it talks about what the client, who matters to the client and why, and what the key drivers are and choices and consequences, all the stuff we teach in our capstone class. And outstanding challenges and questions, and then, again, just high-level recommendations. But the real planning work is sitting in the room with the client and then the follow-up afterwards, including a very detailed email, again, that says, after every meeting who's going to do what, when, how, and what are the other outstanding items that haven't been decided yet or have been parking lot, tabled, whatever you want to call it.

How Yeske Buie Writes Follow-Up Emails [37:36]

Michael: So you've mentioned kind of the depth of these follow-up emails a couple of times. So can you talk to us a little more about just what this is, how you do it, who does it? What's the deal with emails? I feel like we all tend to send emails to clients with some frequency because there's a lot of communication and that, but you seem to be doing something a little bit different here.

Elissa: Yeah, our emails are so actionable. We send lots of emails to clients but the follow-up emails, we like to say they are all actionable items. And we tend to write them in bullet form, you know, like paragraph, "It was really nice to see you. So happy to hear that you got a new puppy dog." That kind of thing. And then, "Here are the things that we're working on," bam, bam, bam, bullet, bullet, bullet, bullet, bullet. "Here are the items you were going to send us, bullet, bullet, bullet, bullet, bullet. Here's the link to upload that securely. And then here are the things you're taking care of, bullet, bullet, bullet, bullet,” that kind of thing. And then we follow up regularly.

So it's not complex, but it's not 15 pages of, "Here's what we did in the meeting," it's, "What were the actionable things that came out of the meeting?" So the clients know what we're taking care of for them, what they want to take care of based on their own goals, and then, again, what's kind of outstanding that we need to make sure we address?

Yeske Buie’s Staff Infrastructure [38:56]

Michael: So you have all of these tools that you've created and then you're doing these in-depth emails and annual tax planning projections and the rest, so can you talk to us a little about the staff infrastructure of the firm? How do you get all this stuff done? And particularly when I'm thinking about things like doing tax projections for every single client, that's not a trivial amount of time multiplied across all the clients that you're doing this and updating all of these one-pagers. I'm sure it gets a little bit easier once you've made the template, but that's still a lot of just detail work that's getting done. So what does the staff structure look like for the firm to do and deliver all of this?

Elissa: So it is a lot, and it's where being a financial planner is, it is time-intensive. It's much easier to stop at asset management. We have a structure where each... if you can picture our CRM, each client on their very front page in the CRM has four slots. And one... they say "1C," "2C," "3C," and "RFPC." So that means first chair, second chair, third chair and resident financial planner chair. Now, rarely, if ever, are all four of those slots [filled]. Each client does not necessarily have four people, four financial planners backing them up, but different people have different levels of expertise.

One set-up might be the first chair is Dave Yeske and then the RFP chair is Ryan, one of our residents, and then there might... there's probably going to be a second chair or a third chair in there. And that's going to be someone who is a... we call them lifers. I know it makes it sound like prison, but it's not, but the people who we anticipate being with us indefinitely. So it's a little bit like a training hospital. And we actually use it as an analogy. But what's really important to point out, and you talked about - before we started we were kind of framing this conversation - and we talked about struggles and challenges and maybe even failures that companies have learned from and that kind of thing. So we may be a training place, but we have, over the course of quite a few years, figured out how to be productive in that way, okay? So it's not like, "Oh my gosh, are three people doing everything for this client?" It's like, no.

First of all, when our new financial planners or resident financial planners - they're treated the same - when they come in, we do what's called boot camp, and they learn how to do these tax projections and the estate flowcharts and how to read an estate document, how to do an estate calculation or estate tax calculation. And all the template information or all those account beneficiaries, that's all in our CRM. So we're keeping track of it there, and then it just prints out to a Word document. Well, then PDF obviously.

So the various tasks are assigned and the work is done at the least senior level possible and then passed on. So in my example, if Ryan is doing tax projections for five clients, well, he may pass them by Lauren Stansell, one of our lifer financial planners, or he may pass it directly to Dave. It just depends on capacity and maybe whether the client is someone who Dave knows their situation best and so it makes sense for him, or in the case where I know the client best. I was using Dave as an example just because he's not here. So there are layers, layers of expertise if you will, but first, everyone who comes in goes through this boot camp and learns how to do all of these reports if you will, and, of course, how to use Money Tree and how to actually read a tax return and translate that into a tax projection for the coming year, and so on and so forth.

Michael: So a couple of questions here or comments. One, I'm struck by what I feel like is a very straightforward philosophy but one that is not embraced in a lot of firms. That work is always done by the least senior staff member first and then passed up the line for review. I know we talk a lot about, "Hey, you've got to free up your time by figuring out how to delegate things down," but I feel like you're coming at it from a whole other level when you say, "No, no, no, no, it starts at the least senior member and it just moves up the line as it needs to be reviewed. Don't start at the top and delegate down or you won't delegate enough."

Elissa: Right. And it starts at the least senior after they've been through intense training. So we used to - and I was talking about challenges or even failures - we used to do it where it was kind of bouncing back and forth. And so each second chair had to train each third chair or resident to do each individual tax return, tax projection… not anymore. We now spend an intense seven or eight weeks, the first seven or eight weeks new people are with us, and they spend an entire week on tax projections. And they might do 25 of them. Oh, wait, you just saw how now if I have 2 new people how 50... and there'll be a lot of work for the supervisor, for the second chair or Dave or I to do in this, okay? But we just got 50 tax projections done in that boot camp time period.

And then the next week they'll do... they might each read 15 sets of estate documents and do 15 estate flowcharts. And then the next week they're going to be moving into Money Tree working on the templates, and then on safe spending analysis. So by the time they're done with that intense, right, they're pretty… they're not perfect by any stretch, but what is getting passed up the line, if you will, is pretty darn good work at that point.

Michael: Well, and to me, it makes an interesting point that on the one hand, there's this question like, "Oh my gosh, how do you do... how do you maintain all these different one-pagers for all these different clients?" And it seems like it can be very staff and labor-intensive, but the flipside is, yeah, so if you're in a growing firm that's hiring people, you will have a steady flow of new talent that needs some busy work to do. And it's not just busy work for them, it's learning boot camp work for them. It's live practice that they need. And so, the client gets the output they need, you've got the staff to do the work and they're getting the learning experience that they need of how to do these things so that eventually they can do it more independently and then less has to come up the line and then you end up a better place.

Elissa: Yep, exactly. And I don't know if I've explained one of the pieces of philosophy behind our Financial Planning Resident program is that, as you grow your lifer planners, right, they want more responsibility, they want to be considered for ownership, they want to work with clients one-on-one with clients, etc., which is fantastic. But as you grow, you can't necessarily continually have every person move to that level. So then what a lot of people do is they have paraplanners to support those lifelong financial planners.

And so our thought process is, let's not have paraplanners, let's have full-on qualified financial plan program, CFP Board-registered program graduates come in and learn that work, and they will be much better educated to support those lifelong planners than someone who didn't go through a financial planning program. And as long as we can design a training program (boot camp) that can get them up and running rapidly, we can afford to have that kind of every three-year turnover of residents, and we're also sending out young people who are three years out of school who are really well-trained and ready to hit the ground running for other firms.

How Yeske Buie’s Residency Program Is Structured [47:26]

Michael: So can you talk a little bit more about just this resident program structure you're talking about? You've sort of framed them as, "This is in lieu of paraplanners," but what is it? What is the Financial Planning Resident structure that you've created?

Elissa: So, yes, it is in lieu of paraplanners and really important to make it clear that it's not that they are doing paraplanner work. They're doing real financial planning work. We often run... well, we have regularly run our hiring process where people can come in and they can say whether they want to be a resident... they want to apply to be a resident or an associate financial planner. And then when they come in the boot camp is the same, everyone gets the same benefits in terms of FPA membership. They get their CFP exam education and prep and time off for taking the exam and all of their CFP Board fees and etc. So they all get supported in that same way.

The difference is that it is structured in a three-year system where, just as an example, in the last year, we try to work with them to figure out what it is they want to do next and build a portfolio almost, if you will, that will help them market themselves. So if they're interested in going to work for a large firm or they're interested in going to work for a smaller firm or they're interested in starting their own business, kind of putting together the work that they've done, summaries of the projects they worked on, examples of plans and work that they've done so that they have something to show people who might be hiring them. Now, that's all aspirational because we've had some people leave and start their own businesses, which is just wonderful. And we haven't launched many to other firms yet, but we hope. We have people who say to us all the time, "Wow, when you graduate one, I want to talk to them."

Michael: So why go down this road? I feel like for most firms, their biggest challenge is finding good talent and finding the time to train and develop them because it takes a while to train a new financial advisor in the firm before the firm can really get a return on dollars, a return on investment for all the training that it did. And you've got a structured program that trains and develops them, and then when they get to the point of really being productive, it's three years and you send them away. So help me understand this.

The Unique Way Yeske Buie Leverages Next-Generation Talent [50:00]

Elissa: Yeah. So there is one piece of it in that I think we believe we do a really good job of training now that we've gotten this boot camp in play and we're happy to launch young people out into the profession, but I don't want to pretend that we're doing it completely out of altruism because that's not it. There's actually a business model piece to it, and it is back to this paraplanner piece and getting better trained, better educated I should say, better-educated people coming in than a paraplanner. And there's nothing wrong with having a paraplanner in your firm. I think it's a brilliant idea. These young people are coming out of CFP Board-registered baccalaureate or master's programs. They have all of the CFP Board registered program education behind them. They've done a full financial planning degree, and so they are ripe for our training program, our boot camp, etc., to really, pretty soon in, be very, very able to support with ongoing supervision, of course, but we're very able to support our planners at a high level.

Now, let me tell you the actual bottom line piece, though. Let's just use round numbers. Just say that you'd hire a new planner. I'm going to kind of do it by the cost, but just kind of an average number. So let's say you hire a new planner at $50,000 and then a year later - they've done a really good job - and so they get a raise to $60,000 and a year later they get a raise to $66,000 or $70,000 or whatever. Oh, and then the year later they get a raise to $80,000 or $85,000 or then $90,000, okay? Well, at the end of our 3 years, we were replacing that person with a $50,000 employee.

And so it's not... I'm really happy to give nice raises to people who are going to stay forever and who maybe will be on an ownership track forever, you know what I mean, but long-timers hopefully forever. But, I hope people consider us generous in how we pay. But if it's people who are not necessarily on that track, you can't have everyone moving to that level. You can't have every new person you hire moving onto that track unless you're growing at a pace that is probably not a pace that we're interested in. We do a lot of work for our clients, and so there's a... we grow very purposefully if you will. So does that make sense, that description of the kind of the business model piece?

Michael: Yeah, it does. That’s one of the challenges if you're growing at a moderate pace but not a superfast pace, if you're hiring lots of talent, you can only create as many avenues as you're generating growth in order to create them. So if you're not growing fast enough, you can't possibly move up all your people. Which means either you're going to lose them and move on anyways.

Elissa: They leave anyway, right? Yeah.

Michael: Or they won't leave because they've been there a long time so you keep giving them raises. So now you're paying them more because you're giving them time-based raises, but you can't give them much more responsibility because there's no room to move them up if you're not necessarily growing at a high rate. And so they get stuck anyways, but you get stuck with either expensive employees for their job or unhappy employees because they're not getting raises and moved up.

Elissa: Or both.

Michael: So when you just create the assumption like, "You're going to have an awesome three-year runway with us and then we will help you launch on to the next thing," they are less fixated maybe on the next dollar raise. You don't have to have the obligation of figuring out how to move them up because you're going to move them on. And as long as you build what you have, the training structure so that at least if you're only going to have someone on for three years you can get more value out of them more quickly, the math works.

Which now in this context makes a lot of sense as to why you invest into a boot camp. The ROI for the firm of building out a really structured process is, you may not have a rapid rate of growth where you're hiring a lot of people, but because your residents turn over, you will move through a lot of people and have to regularly train new ones, but you get an ROI because you get to reset it to new salary every time they come on board. That's the ROI for the business is you manage staff costs for this level of the grinding work that has to get done: tax planning projections, update the flowcharts and the estate documents and the account beneficiaries and all that stuff that needs to get done in a labor-intensive manner where you have to manage your staff costs.

Elissa: Yeah, and that was a really good summary. That's kind of exactly it. And... well, for everyone listening, to realize that yes, there's a lot of stuff that... a lot of analysis work that's getting done, which if you're a financial planner you can actually kind of like that piece. And I know you like that, Michael.

Michael: Yep, I love my number crunching.

Elissa: Right, exactly. I love nothing better than doing a tax projection, I have to admit. But they also get to meet with clients. And so that's another piece of the description of the Financial Planning Resident Program. They're in client meetings maybe from the first week they're in the office. So you might have a 1C and a 2C and an RFP in there. And yes, that's labor-intensive. That's a lot of man or woman power in that office, but the work that that takes… so first of all, the 1C is hopefully not doing much of the analysis work or follow-up at all, right? They're being the brains in the meeting. They're being the expertise in the meeting, I should say. There are lots of brains in the meeting. They're being the expertise in the meeting.

Then the second chair or third chair, whichever one it is, and that simply depends on how far along someone is in their career path, that person is taking some notes but really being aware of the analysis that has been done, backing up the first chair. When the first chair says, "Okay, did we remember to include that pension?" You know, "Yes we did." "Oh, thank you very much." And then, on top of the analysis, the follow-up analysis afterwards. And the resident is taking really good notes on their iPad. They all get iPads when they come to work for us, and they're taking the notes. And so that is really incredibly high and best use of those people. And they're getting to meet the clients and they're getting to see how an Elissa Buie or Dave Yeske explains or describes whatever it is we're describing after doing it for 35 years. That's a learning right there.

And then when the meeting disbands, Dave or I, we get to go just do whatever was next on our task list, and the second chair gets to have a brief meeting with that resident and go, "Okay, so let me see what you... yep, yep. Good, good, good. Yep, you got that. Okay, let me look... I'm looking at my... " Because maybe they just took higher-level notes, "Oh, don't forget this piece we said." "Oh, okay, great." "All right, now go draft a follow-up email." And it was going to come from the second chair, not from the resident, but the resident is going to draft the email, the follow-up email. And sure, that takes some training and some management up front, but man, they get really good at it. Hopefully, they get good. It's one of the things we test when they interview is how well they write.

So if you think about that level of leverage and then the second chair gets to go back to his or her office and go, "All right, I really need to dive into this estate situation with this client or this tax situation or whatever, have that conversation with the estate attorney while the resident goes and does the follow-up email."

Michael: And so what are you using to just track all of this activity when you have these many people on the firm touching the same client at once? CRM systems get really, really important, so you can literally figure out who did what and what was the last communication to the client. So what's the CRM hub for your firm?

Elissa: We use Salesforce. And we use Salesforce in a way that when we bought it, we bought an overlay that was specifically for financial planners, and then we have customized it within an inch of its life.

Michael: What was the original overlay system that you had?

Elissa: XLR8.

Michael: Okay, you started with Salesforce XLR8, and then you've done your own customizations further from there?

Elissa: Yes, exactly. In fact, we used to internally call it XLR8, and then after about four or five years, we said, "Yeah, it's just not anymore. We're just going to go back to calling it Salesforce."

Michael: Just because you evolved it even further for your model, what you guys are doing?

Elissa: Yeah, exactly.

Michael: And so are you actually doing Salesforce customizations internally? Did you take on a team member to do that or you work with some other outsourced firm now that helps you do all these Salesforce customizations?

Elissa: We’ve done it internally. We have an employee who is just... I mean, much of the staff knows how to do some of the customization, although we're very process-oriented about customizing. It's not just willy-nilly, "Oh, let's add another... " You know, because that'll make you crazy. You don't just add fields. Well, we have one employee who's just... she's particularly… she's our Salesforce expert. And so we spend a lot of time talking about, "Well, if we're going to take on this, this is something new we need to really be looking at for clients," or, "This is something we have not been maybe as structured about, all right, how can we use Salesforce to be able to do this better in a way that allows us to track?"

Salesforce is literally our lifeblood. We would get rid of every single piece of software, everything before we got rid of Salesforce or before we got rid of our CRM. I'm not saying we would never be open if we found something better, but we would never get rid of our CRM. Everything goes in there. And we have codes for [things like] in call, out call, office meeting, blah, blah, blah. And then all the notes go in there. And I am terrible at it but staff is really good at sorting and finding what it is they want to find. And when these new, more junior financial planners or residents come in, when they're assigned their clients, they go back through the CRM and they might read years' worth of emails and meeting notes to get up to speed on what's going on with the client.

Michael: So remind me of the business metrics again for the firm overall, of your AUM base and the number of clients.

Elissa: Yeah, so we have about 240 clients. And of course, that's more human beings than 240, because lots of them are couples and...

Michael: Right, 240 household units.

Elissa: Household units, exactly. And we have about $750 million under management, 13 employees with an opening for a client service... and that does not include Dave and I, so really 15 employees.

Michael: Okay. And so I want to go back to this point that you had raised earlier. I think you said the firm is predominantly AUM fees on that $750 million asset base. I'm not sure if you're predominantly AUM fees or exclusively AUM.

Elissa: Exclusively, exclusively AUM fees.

Michael: You're not charging separately for planning at all.

Elissa: No.

Michael: So just talk to us about that. I know you've done this for a long time, you've seen a lot of different models evolve and come in and go out over the years. So how does a firm that's as planning-centric as yours decide to focus into a purely AUM business model?

Why Yeske Buie Has Stuck With The Aum Model [1:01:45]

Elissa: So I think that there are a lot of interesting ideas floating around out there and being used by various firms charging other than AUM. I believe that the dialogue of negotiating fees is frictional… I'm not going to say loss, that's not fair, but you get my point. It does take some capacity. So that's one piece on it.

Michael: Just to clarify, so just charging any other kind of fee, your concern just puts more discussion on the table and any level of discussion is just going to take some momentum away from you? Is that the context?

Elissa: It's just taking some time, exactly. And again, I'm not saying any of this to fault anyone else's method. This is just our philosophy. So here is the real piece for us. We look at financial planning and asset management as kind of two separate and distinct things. And it's the assets, the savings, and how things are invested and how it does over the long-term that fuels, to a large degree, the goals of the financial plan, right? Not exclusively. There's lots of others. There's human capital, there's time, there are all kinds of other resources, but it is in the context of what we're dealing with with the clients that the assets fuel the financial planning goals, and so we simply have the assets fuel the financial planning fees. It takes the entire dialogue off the table.

When we had the market downturn in '08 and '09, we had clients sit across the other side of the table for us and go, "Your revenues must be way down."

Michael: "Yeah, good, just I'm feeling some pain. I'm happy to know you're feeling a little too. Let's get through this together."

Elissa: Yes. Yeah. "I think you can empathize with me better because you're feeling it too." As you just said, "Let's get through this together." And the other piece is that we are... you know, kind of back full circle to where we started… one of the reasons to stay really involved in the profession even if it's not volunteering but it's going to conferences and it's reading your stuff and reading things and listening to blogs, etc. is that you know what's going on, right? You talk to people about it. We're not a very big bank or brokerage firm, in the whole scheme of things, we're a teeny tiny firm. We can change our fees tomorrow if we want to. Within 30 days, we can have a new ADV and we just start charging a different way. So if there's a need or a desire to change, we will do that. No question. But so far, just, it works for us. It seems to work for our clients.

Michael: And do you get anxious or concern about the whole, like, your $5 million client doesn't take twice as much time as a $2.5 million client, how can you charge them twice as much for the financial planning work, which isn't necessarily different?

Elissa: Yeah, it's a great question and it's something that as you can imagine, with 35 years under our belt, we've talked about quite a bit. So different clients need different things at different times. We have clients now who pay us pretty substantial fees and we're doing a good job for them but they're not complicated, okay? But 10 years ago, they were really complicated and a whole lot lower fees were being paid. So it's kind of, it's a case of all the fees coming in are supporting the firm, and then we're giving clients... I hope our goal, certainly, is to give every single client everything they need. And sometimes that means people are going to be paying a pretty high rate for what they're getting and other people are going to be paying a pretty low rate. And odds are pretty good that that will flip around at some point down the road.

But it's also not... it's not time, it's expertise. Or I'll even go to wisdom. They're paying for kind of our constant diligence and our real knowledge of them so that when they call me, someone... or we have an update meeting or something, I can give them what I hope is really excellent advice in a tenth of the time that someone else might do, but only because they've been with me for that long, right? I've been doing it for that long. I'm not saying other people are not as smart as I am, I'm just saying it's that constant diligence and built relationship that makes it so that, you're right, it's not going to take as much time for someone who's been with us a long time because I know their situation really well. But that doesn't mean they're not getting the value that they're paying for.

Michael: So you have this successful firm, $750 million AUM, 240 clients. Your average client is a multimillionaire, you've got a good growing staff base, so as you look back, I'm just wondering, what was the low point of this journey for you? Where was it hardest in the evolution and growth of the business.

The Hardest Point Of Elissa’s Career [1:07:02]

Elissa: You know, it's been... there are lots of challenges to it. There was never a time when it felt bad except in late 2008 and early 2009 when we were just... I was honestly walking around pretty much nauseous. And I'm really not exaggerating, it was pretty much... my heart was in my throat all day every day. People were just in so much pain.

Michael: Because of the stress of what was happening in the business or because of the stress of what was happening with the clients?

Elissa: Well, it was both, but it was the stress of what was happening with the clients. The clients were in so much pain, and it was so frightening, and it was taking every ounce of energy to stick with our absolute fundamental belief that it's all going to be fine. If it didn't... my line was, "If this doesn't come back, all bets are off anyways." It doesn't matter where you put your money, the world has come to an end. I've got to laugh about somebody who was saying, "Well, should I buy gold?" And we'd say, "Well, you know, if things get bad enough that you actually need gold, men with guns will come to your door and steal it from you. So that's probably not a good idea either."

And of course, the other thing was that the business was struggling. I looked around one day and realized that every single person who worked for us, every single one was the primary breadwinner in their family. And we didn't reduce anyone's salaries, but it was tough. That's the only time where, just, it was so bad.

Now, there have been challenges just growing. For me, when my first marriage ended and I have this business and I have two daughters who I'm raising with my ex-husband. I was never a single mother. He's a great dad. But there still... that's a lot to balance, you know, trying to be the mom and 100% responsible for them when they are with me and then trying to build a business. So, there have been plenty of challenges, but that's the risk/reward paradigm. Nothing wrong with that.

Michael: And even that didn't persuade you to move away from the AUM model as a way to stabilize your revenue through the inevitable next bear market that's going to come?

Elissa: Well, it would have been disingenuous to do that at the bottom, it seems, "Okay, never mind, no AUM. Everyone is going to get a $3,000 financial planning fee." If you had done it beforehand, great. And then once the markets turned around, it was a... you know, we believe in the way we charge. And again, we're open to changing, but it didn't seem that timing was going to work.

Advice To New Advisors On How To Find The Clients You Will Enjoy Working With [1:09:37]

Michael: Yeah. So any tips to young advisors looking to become an advisor today and start a firm, aside from YeBu has a great Financial Planning Resident Program? But what's the advice you give new people coming in to start their advisor careers?

Elissa: Really put some thought into and get mentors to help you with and have conversation with your peers about your value system around financial planning and then stick with that value system. If your value system has to do with people truly living an exquisite life, seek out clients who want financial planning to help them live an exquisite life. If your value system is more money is better, great, go for it. Seek out clients who want to accumulate as much money as possible. But just know what your value system is and stick with that.

Don't work with people you don't have respect for. Don't work with clients, don't work with co-workers either, but don't work with clients you don't have respect for. Work with clients where you go, "Oh, I'm so excited, so and so is coming in today. I can't wait. I always have such a great meeting with her." That's really the biggie. And that's easy for me to say. I have a business that supports me well. I know there's money. People have to earn a living. You know what they say, "If you build it, they will come," kind of thing.

Michael: And it's an interesting point, There's always been a saying in the industry in general that we tend to work with people like us. People do business with people they know, like, and trust. We tend to like people similar to us. But you have an interesting point that just working with people like you, you may just enjoy them more and enjoy the work more and being a planner more.

Elissa: You bet.

Michael: So as we wrap up, this is a show about success, and one of the things we've always observed is just the word success means different things to different people, sometimes different things to us at different stages in our lives. So as someone who's objectively built what anybody would call a very successful advisory business, how do you define success for yourself at this point?

Elissa: I have... long story short, I was raised by two wonderful parents, one of whom grew up in the Blitz in London, and so she had a serious scarcity mentality and it rubbed off on me. And I now don't live... I have everything I could possibly need financially, and so that to me is a huge success. Not that finances are the only measurement by any stretch of the imagination of success, but it's nice to feel that there's enough.

The other piece is to be in a position where I get to spend so much time giving back. If you could see how this firm - and we didn't even get to that part - but if you could see how this firm runs, we are bringing in three owners, three new owners, and they are 31, 27 and 27. Everyone in this firm is half my age or maybe just a little more. Dave and I leave a week from today to go to Africa for three weeks and we have done virtually no planning around, "Oh, my gosh, what are they going to do when we're gone?" Because they already know what to do, they run the place. So that's huge success, too, that I just have this firm of young people who are just freaking amazing.

Michael: Well, very cool. Well, thank you for joining us and sharing that story of what you guys have built and how you built it. I appreciate hearing it.

Elissa: Well, thank you for having me on. You know financial planners every bit as well as I do, we love to talk about this profession and our companies and our history, and, "Let me tell you another thing." And yeah, so I appreciate...

Michael: Thank goodness or we wouldn't have a podcast. I love that we love to talk about this.

Elissa: There you go, exactly. So I very much appreciate the opportunity to come on and talk. It was great fun.

Michael: My pleasure. Absolutely. Thank you for joining us, Elissa.

Elissa: All right, bye, dear.