Executive Summary
Welcome everyone! Welcome to the 394th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!
My guest on today's podcast is Christi Van Rite. Christi is the Founder of White River Consultants, a firm that provides administrative family office services to 17 ultra-high-net-worth households, and is on track to generate nearly $1.5M in revenue this year from its specialized services.
What's unique about Christi, though, is how she evolved her career into providing this type of unique family office service after nearly a decade of working as a more 'traditional' financial advisor, when she realized that she had developed a unique skill set to get very deeply involved in the (many) administrative demands of running complex ultra-high-net-worth households, slowly becoming the communicative and coordinative glue to manage each family's financial lives with her 8-person team.
In this episode, we talk in-depth about how Christi provides families with 4 primary pillars of administrative family office services – bookkeeping for their personal financial household, payroll for household employees, property management for their multiple homes, and information and document management – in order to both manage the day-to-day logistics such as paying bills, as well as managing their relationships with their other advisors, how Christi actually manages the financial needs of her complex client households, such as ensuring that all bills and household payroll are handled, while also maintaining a high level of cybersecurity and client privacy, and how, because Christi views her company as just one piece of the 'puzzle' that these complex families work with, she provides administrative but not investment management services, and intentionally uses a tech stack that the client owns themselves, not White River Consultants, so that the client can easily move to another administrative services company if they ever needed to.
We also talk about how Christi made the unexpected leap from traditional financial planning and into administrative family management simply by showing up to the unconventional opportunities as they presented themselves, how Christi avoids the sensitivity of marketing high-net-worth family "success stories" by instead building robust referral pipelines from attorneys, accountants, and even other financial advisors who manage their high-net-worth clients' portfolios but don't actually want to get this far into their top clients' billpaying needs and the associated liability exposure, and why Christi insists on her team tracking their time for everything they do (even though they don't bill by the hour) in order to measure team capacity and the complexity of their work.
And be certain to listen to the end, where Christi discusses how she curates, onboards, and trains highly specialized and competent team members to be able to run with the firm's highly sensitive client interactions, how Christi manages the risk of serving relatively few high-dollar families and the potential revenue loss of being 'fired' by even just one family, by maintaining a high cash reserve with a year's worth of payroll (to give her time to find a new client without having to let any team members go), and why Christi believes that administrative family office services is not only a viable and fulfilling career path for financial advisors, but also an underserviced part of the (traditionally very saturated) high net worth financial services industry, with space for new entrants and advisors looking to do less traditional planning and instead simply want to execute on all the tasks it really takes to run high-net-worth families' complex financial lives.
So, whether you're interested in learning about how to profitably provide administrative family office services, what it takes to make the leap from traditional financial planning, or how to build a highly specialized team to serve high-net-worth clients, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, with Christi Van Rite.
Resources Featured In This Episode:
Looking for sample client service calendars, marketing plans, and more? Check out our FAS resource page!
Are you a successful financial advisor, or do you know of one that would be a great fit for the Financial Advisor Success podcast? Fill out this form to be considered!
Full Transcript:
Michael: Welcome, Christi Van Rite to the "Financial Advisor Success" Podcast.
Christi: Thank you. It's great to be here.
Michael: I really appreciate you joining us today to get to talk about what I think is a corner of the financial advisor realm that we don't get to talk about very much and isn't very visible for most advisory firms, and that's this growing base of services that go to clients, particularly some very affluent higher-net-worth clients, that is, all the other stuff besides the investment management that it takes to keep your financial house in order, especially when your financial house gets fairly complex as you go from millions to tens of millions and up from there, paying the bills get more complex, and now there are people who work in the household and you have to pay them, and there's some payroll rules that you get in trouble with if you don't do. And there's just more stuff to coordinate and manage.
And certainly, there's a realm of our industry that does this. We know them as multifamily office firms that provide a lot of these types of services and often bundle them together, which is not bad a way to go about it. But I almost think of this like the world of Apple versus Google. Some people just like everything bundled together and have it all work out of the box. And others of us just want things a little bit more disaggregated so we can put together the pieces that we like. iPhone people love their iPhones and hate all the stuff you have to do to use an Android phone, and Android people don't like iPhones because they want to do all their Androidy customizations that you can't do.
And there's this fundamental preference I find that some people have of bundled versus unbundled. And I know you live a layer of this with these more administrative but incredibly important services that could be provided into high-net-worth family office environments that starts to show up for people that don't just want it all bundled into one. And I guess I think you've just dubbed this, I don't know if this is your individual label of administrative family office services. So, I'm just excited to talk about what about that means and what's going on in this part of the world where families are starting to unbundle family office services in the same way that so much else in the financial advisor ecosystem is getting unbundled these days.
Christi: Yes. It's a niche area of the industry, the financial industry as a whole, and then even more of a sub-sector of the family office world. But it is quite interesting how the times have changed even from the early 1900s with the Rockefeller family, where it all started, how we've evolved as an industry and how families are rethinking how they are handling the business of the family.
The 4 Tiers Of Administrative Family Office Services [03:18]
Michael: So, I think to kick off, I would love to just dive right into...your firm offers this thing called administrative family office services. So, what is administrative family office services? What do you do for a living, Christi?
Christi: What do you do? I get that a lot, actually. So, we are administrative family office services. Effectively, what that comes down to is, we work directly with families to help simplify their lives. We communicate, we coordinate, and we just get things done. That's the bottom line of what we do. It's a little bit easier to say what we don't do, which is we actually do not run investments, we outsource to a family's investment advisor, their own CPA, their legal counsel, their estate planning, the business attorneys, whoever may be in their life, their insurance advisors or brokers. We are able to come in and coordinate all of these people who are sitting at the table with the family to do work for the family, and we're able to coordinate them in what I consider a project management type fashion, and just give everybody a central location for information disbursement and making sure that things are running on time and that projects are getting done for the family, and keep the family in the know without them having to be the primary liaison or the primary source of information for everybody who's sitting at the table.
Michael: So, can you give us a little bit more detail of just what kinds of work you are doing directly with families? What things are you actually doing? What services, what tasks get done?
Christi: I like to say people typically find us because they need bill pay, bookkeeping, and payroll services. Those are the 3 things, 3 hardcore services that we do in-house.
Michael: So, when you say bookkeeping, I think of bookkeeping relative to, I have a business and it needs its books kept, like I hire an accountant to do the bookkeeping for my firm. Are we talking about that kind of bookkeeping or something different in the context of family?
Christi: From a family's perspective, it doesn't run too dissimilar from how you would run a business. Once a family gets to a certain point where they have multiple homes, multiple properties everything that comes with each of those properties, just like you manage your own household, each of those households needs to be managed. You start getting private equity, private venture capital, any kind of private investments, all of it needs to be able to come to a central location for the financials to be brought into one place, QuickBooks, Sage Intacct, something of the sort, to be able to help the CPAs throughout the year manage the family's tax liability and just keep up with how things are going.
Some families, it's not a big deal really, they have multiple properties and they write checks, and they enjoy them, and that's what they're there for, and it's not a big priority. For other families who have a lot of things going on in their life, their CPA certainly appreciates when we are able to hand them monthly and quarterly reports that say, "Here's how much we spent here, here's how much we're expecting to go out, here's the income that's coming in from the various investments so we can make quarterly payments," things like that. So, it's not too dissimilar. I say we run the business of the family just like we run our own business.
Michael: Okay. But you're not literally doing bookkeeping into their businesses, into their companies, this is literally their household balance sheet and cash flow state?
Christi: That is correct. It's more personal CFO services and bringing all that together. Yeah.
Michael: I guess I get it. Well, many of us work even with clients in the, I'll call it the traditional financial planning wealth management space, where you're just getting to the point of, can we formulate the client's balance sheet of all their different investment accounts and assets and liabilities and show them what their net worth is, actually takes some work sometimes because their financial house is not always organized and in good order. So, you add 1 or 2 or 3 zeros to that net worth, and there's just more stuff of more complexity all over the place. So, I get it then, to actually be able to go and say, "You're worth $47 million and here's a clean balance sheet that shows exactly where all of it is," is actually a thing that not a lot of them can do on their own without support service.
Christi: That is exactly right. Yes.
Michael: And it sounds like then that dovetails into financial health and tax reporting along with it of, "So, here's how your properties are actually doing. Here's how much they're really costing you. Here's what all the outflows add up to that at least are tax deductible," so the CPA's work is eased, and then we know how to make more accurate estimated tax calculations because we have better numbers. And so, it sounds like some of it shows up on financial health of the cash flow and the tax overlay to it as well.
Christi: It definitely does. One of the things I always find interesting is a lot of families with…the perception is the family is worth quite a bit of money. But even those families can have cash crunches if no one is paying attention to it, because it's very easy to, I'm investing here, and I'm investing here, and this one might pay me back, and this one might pay me back, but I don't really know when. It's very easy for a cash crunch to be a real thing for these families if no one is paying attention to it. And so, definitely being able to put together that balance sheet and knowing where income is coming from and when we might be having spent to go out for whatever investment or whatever reason is a big deal.
That does also dovetail into, we do a lot of property management for our families. These are personal residences, not ones that are being rented out necessarily, but it is also important that we're keeping track of, if we're doing renovations we will actually project manage on behalf of the owner those renovations or those construction projects because we need to make sure that the basis for those homes are staying up to date. It's the same when you sell your personal residence, you want to make sure that you've got your basis correct, so you don't have to pay any more tax than you need to. That's still a thing. These families still care about the taxes that they're paying and where that's coming from.
Michael: So, for those who aren't familiar, can you explain a little bit more, what does property management mean in the context of a personal residence? I get it when we've got renters and then they call and the toilet's broken and someone needs to field it. And if I don't want to be the landlord doing that, I hire a property management firm that provides those services. What does this look like when you're talking in the context of residences?
Christi: For us, it tends to look like a family, maybe they have a property in Montana, they have a property in Florida, and one in California. And they go between the 3 as they as they want to. And so, what will happen is they will let us know, hopefully a few days in advance, not always, but a lot of times, they'll let us know, "Hey, we're actually going to go up to the Idaho property and spend July." No problem. So, my team then coordinates to make sure that the house is cleaned, that our cleaning staff has come in, that we've got somebody doing a walkthrough to just do a double check and make sure everything is still working well, the yard is mowed, just, again, like you do for your own home. And then we will also a lot of times go ahead and have groceries and things like that brought in. The refrigerator stocked, the pantry stocked for whatever the family and their kiddos like to have.
That tends to be what that looks like. Sometimes we also need to do...if we have maintenance and things that have to be done, we will coordinate those services just so the family doesn't have to.
Michael: And so, as you're going through this process, are you... I'm trying to visualize how this works. You hire the contractors locally that it takes to do the food delivery and the house walkthrough and the maintenance work?
Christi: I do.
Michael: They give you a budget to use? You have to get a quote on something and bring it back for approval? I'm just trying to envision, how does this work?
Christi: So, we typically start with, if it's a new family to us and we're just starting to work together, we do go and we will get bids. We do use local folks. If it's a big enough project, either I or one of my staff will go there to make sure that we get the right folks on board. If we're hiring people for the house, we're hiring maid services, cleaning services, we're hiring landscapers, we will typically actually meet those folks in-person and do walkthroughs of the home with them. If it's we need a plumber or the garage door opener has stopped working, we will find a couple of folks that are local, we will get quotes, and then we'll just work with the family to say, "This is what we have. Does this seem reasonable to you? It does to us." And then we will take care of it for them.
Michael: Okay. So, I understand, bookkeeping, property management, and you mentioned bill paying services.
Christi: Yes.
Michael: So, how does that work in practice?
Christi: This is one that has been a bit of an ongoing, how do we do it the best that we can? We started out paying bills like most people pay bills, which is through the client's account. I would have them set up a separate account that that was joint with me, and then we only funded it up to a certain amount. So, we would fund it with what we thought was going to be maybe 2 or 3 months' worth of expenses. And then we do the reporting every month, and they would re-fund the account as we went along. As we've gotten to do more bill pay and as we learn more and just get better at it, quite frankly, we do less and less of that individual paying bills through a checking account service. And we use services like Bill.com, for example, where everything can go in, and then the family can actually go in and swipe right to approve or swipe left to decline. It depends on what kind of oversight the family is looking for.
If we're doing trust bill pay, those need to be documented...that needs a needs a paper trail that is ironclad. And so, using a Bill.com gives us that ability to have that paper trail. So, we've done it multiple ways over the years. Bill.com currently is where we tend to focus with families. Sometimes we'll still set up a separate bill pay account if the family would like to do that, but because we aren't touching the money, as we say in the investment world, it's all through the bill payment system, it's not as big of a thing for me to have a separate checking account for it.
Michael: So, in essence, they'll connect their existing checking account, wherever they tend to household their bills through, they hook it up to Bill.com. You get...I don't even know. Do you share a login? Does Bill.com have an administrator bill payer login function that you can get your own login that has access to their accounts to be able to execute the process?
Christi: They do. So, we have an administrator login, and then each family member, depending on who we're paying bills for, has their own login. What's great about it is we will upload all of the bills, we will push them through, do the first-run review. We'll push them out to the family member or to the client to say, "Okay." They get an alert on their phone. It's so easy on the app now on the iPhones. It says, "You have a new bill to pay." You click the button, it does face recognition. "Do you want to pay this bill? Swipe right to say yes, swipe left to say no." And so, because everybody has their own login, we have a paper trail of who entered the bill on my staff, if any edits were made, and who ultimately approved the bill from the family side. So, it's just it's just a nice way to cover our bases.
Michael: Now, I'm going to envision there's at least some set of folks that are like, "I don't want to review all my bills to approve."
Christi: Yes.
Michael: I'm hiring you because that's really tedious and I don't like doing that.
Christi: Yes.
Michael: So, do you, do you get folks that just basically say, "Christi, just look at the stuff. If something looks weird, call me, but otherwise, just pay my bills."
Christi: We do. I still prefer to use Bill.com for its tracking. But a lot of times, especially once we're established with a family and we've set up our systems, we're on the same page, and we've got good historical information, that's a big one for me. If I can see that we're paying the electric bill and it runs about $300 a month for the last year or so, no problem. That's just fine. That doesn't raise any red flags. So, a lot of families will indeed say, "Look, if it's less than $1,000, please just pay it and move on." Some are higher than that, some are a little bit lower than that, and that's fine. We document it. And we even go back and say, in our notes, "Electricity bill for the Idaho house, very similar to last month." And then if it comes out that now this month we have a $2,500 electric bill, that would be the red flag to put in a call to the family to say, "Was there a big... What happened? What's going on? Do I need to get somebody out there?"
Christi’s Process For HNW Households With Payroll And Household Bills [23:12]
Michael: And I think you said payroll services? So, again, I'm assuming this is not in the context of a business like I'm paying the employees in the company that I run successfully that gave me enough dollars to hire an administrative family office. This is household staff, we're talking maids and gardeners and the like?
Christi: That is correct, yes. So, we want to make sure that a lot of people...well, a lot of people pay staff, they hire someone to come in and take care of it and they pay them. But really, if we're going to have somebody who's coming to the house and working on even a semi-frequent basis, it's really better to have them on a payroll system so we can make sure that they are getting the benefits of working for the family. And that everything is, again, I’s dotted and T’s crossed paper trail, is always helpful. So, we will handle payroll services for a family.
Michael: So, what kinds of household employees typically show up here, just in practice? Who hires what these days?
Christi: Housekeeping are the big ones, housekeeping and landscaping, nannies tend to show up pretty regular when there are younger kiddos involved. Those are the big 3. Every once in a while, we will have an actual house manager if the property is big enough, and we'll have them on payroll as well.
Michael: Okay. How big does a property have to be to have its own house manager? This is not my own experience.
Christi: It just depends. So, the ones that I have house managers on right now, they have working ranches for the most part, or it's a working property, it's a ranch or it's some kind of farming family. And so, we'll have we'll have the ranch hands on the payroll, we will have the farmers who are literally working the fields, pulling the crops, we will have them on payroll. The house managers, those typically come in whenever the family is big on entertaining, and they're in and out quite often. And so, they will have a house manager who is overseeing, just keeping, literally the house. The house houses tend to need to be lived in and used. And when they are used on a regular basis, they tend to need a lot of services.
Other things are also built upon our information, just information and document management systems. So, at the end of the day, we're able to do what we do because information can pass easily between advisors and the family. And so, part of what we do to build a strong foundation for a family is gathering and organizing all of their documents, so, their trusts, their wills, any entities that they have, anything that they've invested in, we do, I called it the other day, aggressively kind of outreach to organize and gather documents on behalf of a family. Because typically, what we find is everything that they have, it's either in banker's boxes in the basement somewhere, because where else would you keep documents? Or it's, "Well, I sent that to my insurance advisor because they needed a copy of the, whatever it was, for the house. And I sent the estate document to the to the investment advisor because they needed it to open a trust account. And I sent this here." But there's not a central location for all of this information.
And what we find is, over years, and certainly over generations, we don't remember why things were done the way they were done. I'm guessing everybody can understand this one. You go back to your estate planning attorney because things need to be changed, trusts need to be updated, wills need to be updated, so on and so forth. And you say, "I don't understand why we did this." And everybody at the table just looks around and shrugs their shoulders and says, "Well, I don't know why we did it," or, "I don't know why granddad did it that way." There's no way to know. And oftentimes, that person isn't here to say, "Oh, well, yeah, of course, I remember," if they remember at all. And so, we build all of our...everything that we do is done through a central cloud-based platform.
Every document goes there, every note, every email every project that we are working on with the family's advisory team, everything lives in the central location. And most importantly, the family owns that location. They own their database, they own their information. And so, it's one of the lesser known, but it's actually one of the most important things, I feel, that we can do for a family, is to help them organize and understand what's happening and have a repository for information as the generations go by.
Michael: What do you actually use for this? Is this shared Dropbox folders or Box.com folders, something like that? How do you actually manage documents this way?
Christi: We use a system called iPaladin. It's a group out of Florida. Jill Creager is the founder and owner. I've used this system for probably 3 or 4 years now. I'd like to say we're power users of it at this point. But the reason that I chose it is because it is cloud-based, which is important at this point because our families are all across the country. So, it's cloud-based. And it's built on a secure platform that something has gone terribly, terribly wrong if this ever got breached. And the reason that that's important is because we have passports, we have birth certificates, we have social security cards. We have so many things that are confidential and private information that even the thought of having a data breach is just not... that's not a thing for us.
And so, Jill and I often somewhat laugh, somewhat not laugh, because I keep saying, "Jill, if I could just get my email to go in there, it would save me so much time." And she says, "No, because we can't make that a secure link. If we add that link into the backend system, we no longer have a secure enough platform to... "
Michael: Okay. So, they're really mindful about what kinds of APIs or pathways are even open into the system, because those are vectors for the hacker.
Christi: That's right. That's right.And so, because they don't allow that, we've learned to print a PDF and upload on all of our emails, and it's fine. I would rather do that than ever risk being the data breach. I use iPaladin...that's one of the main reasons I use it. I also use it because again, every family has their own database. So, if at some point we are no longer…I see us all as pieces of the puzzle, the big Tetris game. And if it some point our puzzle piece needs to be picked up and removed and some other group put in there, person put in our place, I want them to be able to be able to replace us and not lose continuity. A family should never have to think about the risk of losing continuity in their information, because advisors change, because they outgrow us because they decide to move to a single-family office. It's as simple as sending an email to say, "Please remove White River as our administrator. Please put so-and-so as our administrator."
Michael: Because that's the whole point of the database structure. It's not Christi's firm has an account and has ex-client households that are loaded up under their account. It's each family makes their account and grants you access to their account?
Christi: That's right. It's the same reason I use QuickBooks and Sage Intacct for bookkeeping. Even Bill.com. Everything that we do for a family, even the coordination, the advisors, every advisor has a login, as does the family, into their database. And we're able to sort through. Not everybody needs access to everything, and so we're able to give specific access or broad access depending on what is needed. The family truly owns every single piece of information. We don't keep anything on internal servers or hard drives. Everything goes immediately into their database. So, at any point in time, no one is ever held captive, or, "Hey, do you remember 5 years ago I sent you that document? Can you see if it's somewhere in your system?" There's no more of that.
I firmly believe that, A, portability from an information perspective is not talked about in enough. But I hope that we get to a place where families recognize that's important information for them to have and to be able to carry through for the longevity of their family.
I feel so strongly about a family owning their information, that we're using this software. It was built for single-family offices. So, we use it a little bit differently than what Jill originally intended it for, but it works fantastic. They're great to work with.
Michael: Interesting. So, anything else on the list of the core stuff? So, we just talked about bookkeeping, bill pay, payroll services, property management, documents.
Christi: The other things that we do are more one-off. Those are our core services. The one-offs are, we're renovating a house, or we're building a house, or we're buying or selling an airplane, or a boat, a yacht, artwork, those kinds of things that we will, obviously, help coordinate and get the right folks on the team to handle those. But those are our core services to help manage projects for families.
How White River Consultants Prices Its Services [35:29]
Michael: So, now help me understand, how does this work from a business pricing end? What do you charge? How do you set fees for this?
Christi: Yeah. I will tell you that that is something that is an ongoing challenge simply because... I empathize when folks say, "How much do you charge?" And I say, "Well, it really depends.” That's not a helpful answer when you're trying to compare services and things like that. Unfortunately, the answer is, it really does depend. We start with a conversation, "Let's talk about what it is that you want and think you need." A lot of times people, they don't know what they don't know, obviously. And they often don't really know what they're asking for. And so, we have a couple of conversations around just, "How do you run your daily life? Who are you as a person, as a family? What do you like doing? What is in your life? What are the properties, the trust, all of the things that need to be kept up with? And then, what's causing you the most friction? What's giving you the biggest headache? What is the thing that you just think in your mind, I'll get to it tomorrow because I don't want to deal with it today?"
Those are the things that we tend to start with, and then price accordingly. I would tell you most of our families, most of them are in the $5,000–$8,000/month range for our services. And that's because we're doing bill pay for multiple trusts and multiple homes and doing the bookkeeping for those, we are running payroll. It's funny, sometimes when families come, they say, "Just do the bookkeeping so my CPA can be happy at the end of the year, or come April, just help me do that." And then inevitably it's, "Oh, hey, could you do that too? Oh wait, would you do that?" So, then we work through those. But typically, we're in that $5,000–$8,000/month range for services with most of our families. So, it's not super helpful, but it really does depend. There are costs associated with bill pay specifically, Bill.com has a cost. We pass those costs through. I don't mark those up. But it still takes my staff time to be able to do those.
Michael: So, I'm just trying to visualize overall, so $5,000–$8,000/month is essentially about $60,000–$100,000/year. So, these are folks who are like, "Okay, I need help with this, and I'm not doing it. I'm literally going to have to hire someone and then I have to manage them, or I can hire Christi and Christi will make these problems solved and then Christi can manage the people." I'm just trying to visualize how this probably shows up to a family of a business owner that build enough dollars that they've got enough wealth that these are their problems that that's how it shows up. I can hire a person, or for roughly the same dollars, I can let Christi deal with it, and then her firm has to hire the people, and oversee the people, and manage the people, and figure out the tech and all the other stuff that I don't really want to spend mental bandwidth on.
Christi: Exactly. That's exactly right. Yeah.
Michael: And as you think about pricing this, ultimately a bill for the hours business at the end of the day? Are you trying to figure out, "Okay. I think the amount of stuff that you're asking for with the complexity that it involves means I'm basically going to need at least 20 hours a month, and I bill my team at $250 an hour, so you're going to start at 5 grand a month?" Is it that kind of pricing? Is that how you think about it? Or is it different?
Christi: Well, no, that isn’t how I think about it in a lot of ways right now. Billing hours to a client just is not where I want to be. And so, we do work on a monthly retainer model, which is usually that $5,000 to $8,000. Internally though, we do track hours, and I'm a bit of a stickler for it, it's not always loved. But we do track hours. So, we've done this enough times now that I tend to know, I have a good idea of what it's going to take my staff time to handle a trust bill pay account that has 15 to 20 bills a month. I know roughly how long it's going to take my bookkeepers to be able to handle the bookkeeping for that same trust. And so, because we've built up this data, I am pretty good. I don't always hit it right on, but I'm pretty good about guesstimating, how long it's going to take us.
So, we actually, whenever a family is coming on board with us, we do what I call our crawl-walk-run. And during that crawling period, we're doing our onboarding. And that's going to look a little bit different simply because there's just no way to know what shape anything is going to come to us in. And I've actually gotten in trouble on this before. We learn lessons along the way and we modify. And this is one of the lessons that I learned a few years ago. I didn't do it well on the onboarding, and the family told me, and they even sent me their balance sheet and their P&L statement, everything, and everything looked... They said, "We don't love it." And I said, "Well, I can see why you don't love it." They're trying to force QuickBooks to do something that it doesn't really want to do. You have to know how to break something to then be able to bend it to make it work for you sometimes. And that's really, I felt like, the friction that they were feeling.
But then when we started working with them and the QuickBooks were transferred to us, it was apparent very quickly that actually we had to do...we've had to go 3 years back on forensic accounting because they just weren't done well. So, that was the year I learned the big lesson on onboarding. And so, we do our onboarding period a little bit differently. And then at the end of, either if it's 2 months or 3 months, then I sit back down with the family and say, "Okay. Here's where we're at. We're up and walking now, and this is how long I think it's going to take us. This is what I am thinking our next 3 to 6 months monthly fee is going to be. And then depending on what's happening in 3 or 6 months, we're going to sit back down again and we're going to talk about are we still doing these services? Did we add services? Did something change? Did we remove it? And then if we need to edit that fee, then let's do that."
And it can go up or down, that's not the priority for me. But the big thing is, I'm not going to go back. If I mis-bid, basically, a client for those first few months and we spend way more time on it than I think we're going to need to, I'm not going to go back to a family and say, "Oh, I'm really sorry, actually, we spent an extra 10 hours because of whatever it was, we're going to bill you for that next month." That's not a thing for us. We will adjust going forward if we need to, and that additional work is going to continue. But because of that, I've gotten pretty good
Michael: So, how do you price onboarding now? Do you still have some just, I price it higher and tell people it will be lower at some point in the ongoing run rate, but I don't know until we get through the initial onboarding, I'll give you a quote then, and you get their buy-in to a higher number out of the gate?
Christi: Yes, that is what we do. And in fact, if we get in and it looks I only need one month at the higher rate to get everything coordinated, because we do go back and check. This is another lesson I've learned, you can't just accept books and accept that they are gospel and they are correct. You do have to go back and do at least a minimal amount of forensic accounting to make sure that what you're looking at, you can rely upon. So, the first month will typically be maybe 50% more than what I think it's going to take going forward, but that could last 1 month, it could last 3 months, it just depends on what shape they're in.
Michael: So, if you're 5k to 8k a month on average, onboarding stuff might be more like 7K to 12K, 8K to 12K...to leave you some room?
Christi: It could be. And if I'm just wrong and it doesn't need anything, I am more than happy to give some of that as a credit back for the next month. My goal is not to have a huge profit just because we're in this onboarding period. But I've definitely learned the hard way that I do have to account for the unknown. And truly, until you are able to dig in and put your hands around some of these things, it's just really hard to know.
How White River Consultants Finds Its HNW Clients [46:10]
Michael: Okay. So now, help us understand where business, where clients come from. Who... Or I guess even before I get to who, where they come from. Who buys this? What is the typical profile of a client in this service with you?
Christi: Many, not all, but many of our clients are entrepreneurs, and many of them are serial entrepreneurs. So, they've built several businesses, and they are either retiring, and now they want to go travel and do all of the things that they haven't been doing while they were building their businesses, or they're still building businesses and they want to run the business, not the business of the family. And so, they see hiring our firm as a kind of one-stop-shop to keep the plates spinning. They don't want to have to focus on...they hear their CPAs saying, "Hey, we've got these tax loss carry forwards. Let's make sure your investment folks know about that." Your estate planning attorney is saying, "Hey, we haven't done anything here in the last 6 years and you've bought 4 more properties. We probably ought to do something."
And your investment advisor is saying, "Hey, we really ought to think about some charitable giving." All of this is coming at them, and they really just want to focus on running their business. And so, all of that can now come to one central location. And if enough people are saying the same thing, that's when we're going back to the family saying, "Hey, all of your advisors sitting around your table right now are saying that this is a really important thing. Can we focus on this for the next 6 weeks?" Just to get everybody's attention, because it's so easy.... Even if the client knows they need to get it done and they want to get it done, life happens. And life happens for the estate planning attorney, and for the investment advisor, and for the CPA.
And so, if there's someone managing projects, managing those updates or those changes, then it's very likely that they're going to get done much quicker. The estate planning attorney didn't have to pick up and put down the file multiple times, which costs money every time they do. Same with the CPA. And so, you're so much more likely to get things done because someone is managing it for you. And then, "Okay, family, we're done. Now, let's please get a time and date for you to come and sign all of this," which is another whole other issue. But we can just move things along much more quickly and efficiently because everybody's not waiting on the family to come back and give them an answer necessarily. We can say, "Give me all of your questions." And many times everybody has the same question. So, rather than the family answering it 4 different times, they answer it once, and we disseminate all of that information to keep everybody moving.
Michael: Is there a typical, I guess, income or net-worth level that defines when clients start to show up for the service or just where the math starts to work for them that this feels like a comfortable, reasonable number for them?
Christi: Yeah. From my perspective, I think the math starts making much more sense in the $40 to $45 million range net worth on the lower end. We actually have a client who's sitting at the $35 million mark right now, and he's more than happy to pay for the service because at this point, he's like, "I couldn't do any of this. So, it is what it is." It makes a little more sense, I think, that $40 to $45 [million] on the low range. Most of our families sweet spot is in that $60 to $150 million net worth range. We, of course, we have a couple below, and we've got several above that are our outliers on either side. But that tends to be where we are the most useful and purposeful for a family.
Our higher ones, we tend to bolt, what I call, bolt-on, to other family offices. And so, they will hire us because they need more bandwidth to do their work. The family's renovating a house or they want to buy an airplane, they want to do a couple of things, and the family office is sometimes focused more on investments for the family than they are these "softer" services. And so, they will hire us as a bolt-on either for a specific project. We had a big construction project in Texas that we oversaw for a family, and when that wrapped up, we said, "It's been great working with you. Call us again if you need us." So, they call every once in a while and say, "Hey, how's your bandwidth looking? We got something coming up." So, we will bolt on to other family offices as well as do work obviously directly with families.
Michael: And so, what is it that defines $40 million-plus? This starts to make sense? Is there some, you think of it as your fee as a percentage of their net worth or what tends to make $40 millions, like, "Yeah, this makes sense," and $25 millions like, "I don't know."
Christi: I try not to think of it as a percentage of assets because our work really doesn't depend on the asset level itself. It depends on the complexity that the family has built around them. So, typically, not always. Again, we have a $35 million client who has built such a complex structure then I have a $400 million family who's not half as complex. So, it really depends on what they've built. But when you start getting into multiple trust accounts, you've inherited multiple trust accounts, and those are multi-generational, you have several properties that you have that you're trying to manage across the United States, and you're a busy family, that tends to be, when it starts making sense, to have someone like us, because $60,000 to $100,000 or more a year, you could hire someone and just literally have them sitting in your house or traveling with you.
Obviously, we don't travel with people. We're not quite that concierge. There's a lot of things we will do, that's not one of them. So, you could hire someone for the same amount. The purpose of having a firm like ours is we have the expertise and the depth to be able to handle a multitude of services and go and hire other people, go and find the best for you for a specific project so you don't have to keep someone on staff just for one thing. You hire them when you need them, and then you it's a balloon that can expand and contract as needed.
Michael: I was going to ask at the other end of the spectrum, when they're getting north of $150 million, if they're not hiring a service like yours, what are they doing? Is that the point where they really do just hire their own person that either sits in their house or travels along with them?
Christi: Sometimes. Some of those folks are starting to look at more single-family office, though, I think that's really more of a historical place. I think more and more families are starting to see the benefit of a more outsourced model like ours that give them more freedom and flexibility to pick up pieces and move around as needed. Sometimes they're going into a multi-family office structure because they feel like they can get maybe a better fee structure. I don't know if that's true or not, but sometimes that's what they want. They want literally a one-call to their one person, and it's all sitting under the same roof. But we certainly, we have clients that are north of that. It just depends on how much control that they want to have, and privacy. We're able to keep things incredibly private. My marketing folks are consistently asking, "Can we just get a quote from somebody? Can we publish something?" And I'm like, "That's just not how we work. We don't." Privacy is literally what we were built on.
How Christi Built A Specialized Team To Serve The Firm’s Clients’ Needs [55:51]
Michael: So what does this add up to just in terms of the firm overall at this point? How big is the team? How many clients do you serve? What is revenue of the business look like? Help us understand how this is added up doing over time.
Christi: So, we are about 8 years old at this point. And there have definitely been some ups and downs in there. Right now I have 8 folks on staff and a couple of others who come in, what I call pinch hit for me, when we're onboarding a new client, and we really need to push through some projects. Right now we have 17 families that we work for. So, if that gives you a little bit of scale, we are very hands-on with our families. And so, there is a point at which I have to, as the business owner, make a decision on bringing in more team members to be able to continue grow the business, to keep that ratio. Some families are okay, they're being kind of a 3 to 1 because they're not super complex. And we've gotten them to a point that we run like clockwork and we have a really great cadence with them.
Some of the families that are more complex, they have their team and they're more 2 to 1 family-to-staff ratio. So, it just depends on the makeup of the clients at that time, what our staffing looks like.
Michael: And so, I'm going to presume then, just given average fees like revenue-wise, this is like $1.3 million, $1.5 million because each family writes a very sizable check.
Christi: Yes, that is about right.
Michael: From an actual staffing end, in traditional advisory firm, we often literally talk about how many clients can an advisor support, and we have our client per advisory ratios. You were just talking a moment ago about 3 to 1 staff ratios versus 2 to 1 staff ratios as clients move up on complexity. But I guess I'm trying to visualize a little bit more what the actual staff structure looks like. Are all of these people in a similar role of managing a complex family relationship? Or is it more segmented in specialized roles internally about who does what?
Christi: We are, I would say, evolving as we speak actually. My staff consists of 4 bookkeepers, 2 project managers, 1 data entry person. And then I have my EA and marketing person, my internal. I have an external marketing company as well. There was a time that I was the primary contact and that worked when we were still quite small, and quickly I became a funnel, hence why we now have 2, what I call project managers. They lead the team of the bookkeeper that is on with that specific family. And then they bring in our data entry person. And then I've got a couple of data entry folks that are kind of our pinch hitters when needed.
And so, they will manage the communications with the clients and then manage the internal team, which at this point effectively is the bookkeeper. And then the projects that I'm on. So, I still run some of the special projects, mostly our construction side. And so, they will be the lead with the family for everything that they need, and keep everything running.
Michael: Okay. And so, I get it. When much of the core of this is around the managing the family balance sheet from a bookkeeping perspective, doing the bill pay, doing the household payroll, bookkeepers form the core of your get-stuff-done basis because these are all functions that people who are really good at bookkeeping and numbers and attention to detail are going to be good at solving for?
Christi: Exactly. That's exactly right.
Michael: And then the project managers evolve in managing projects and managing relationships, I guess.
Christi: Yep. That's exactly right. They're the ones who are making sure that when we're in the middle of a project, that people have the information that they need, that the other people, the other advisors sitting at the table know they have what they need to move forward, or they are getting them the information that they need to move forward.
Michael: I've got to ask, how challenging is this from a staffing P&L perspective for the firm when you live in a world where a client can bring enough revenue to pay for a whole team member with obviously the risk of if a family leaves, you're down the payroll of a whole team member when one client walks? How do you think about or manage when the revenue is that lumpy?
Christi: Well, I can tell you it's not easy, and it is definitely something that does keep me up at night, because it's true. The staff that I have is extremely curated and I don't mean that to sound any other way than they are very specialized. So, my bookkeepers that I have on staff are not just bookkeepers. They are bookkeepers that have worked at firms specifically serving the ultra-high-net-worth client, or they've worked for family offices specifically doing a large piece of their bookkeeping, their books. Because these books look different than just a typical…they look different. They just look different. And again, you have to know how to break the system to then know where you can bend it, and when you just have to say, "Look, this isn't going to work. We need to do a different system."
All of our reporting is custom for families. It's pretty rare, that it's just as simple as spitting out a QuickBooks report and saying, "Here you go, here's your balance sheet and P&L for the month." So, the bookkeepers are very specialized as are the project managers. As you can imagine, they are dealing with so much information. Even if they're only coordinating a handful of families, they're so much coming in and so many projects that are sitting in the system that they're coordinating, they've got to be just incredibly detail-oriented. They have to know what information is important for which projects. And so, being able to listen and have those EQ skills to pick up on what's important and what needs to get filtered through. And also how to deal with different personalities on the team. So, those folks, they're very specialized and they spend a lot of time with me before I put them direct with families and direct with team members.
Michael: So, then where does business come from? How do you find these clients? You said you're 8 years in and have grown this million-plus dollars of revenue. So, clearly you're finding them or they're finding you. So, where, how do you find 40 million enough households that need a service like this?
Christi: Many of our clients are referrals from banks and RIAs. So, there are a lot of RIAs out there who specialize in this type of client or who want to, but they recognize that a family needs services like this, but that they don't want to be the ones doing them in-house. And so, there's a lot of liability that comes with this kind of work. And it can be an amazing way to truly become a bigger part of a family's life. It can also be even quicker way to lose a client.
Michael: Right. There's nothing like losing your $50 million investment client because you screwed up the utility bill and the lights got turned off.
Christi: Exactly. That's exactly right. Which has happened. And it's very easy to see how it would happen. Actually, I do some consulting with RIAs who are committed to building family office services in-house. And so, we will work with them one-on-one to help them set up their policies and procedures for how to do the very best you can to not let things slip through the cracks and how to use the systems you have, and then what else you need to bring in to be able to do the work. Because I can tell you, again, from personal experience, if you're paying bills for 2 clients, it is harder to pay bills for 2 clients than it is to do it for 17 or 20. There's a critical mass whereby you have someone who's paying attention to it and following the policies and procedures and making sure that the I's are dotted and the T's are crossed versus, "Oh, it's Tuesday and I need to pay bills today."
Michael: Oh, okay. So, when you're doing it with 2 clients, this is inevitably a one-off accommodation that some team member is doing on top of a whole bunch of other things, which means it doesn't have their full-time, it doesn't have their full attention. They're not really training into the policies and procedures because this is only a small part of their duties. Whereas when you're really in it for a critical mass of clients and you have one or several people who only do this and think about doing it right all day, every day, because it's their full-time role, the quality and the, "Ooh, oops, we made a mistake," risks start going down.
Christi: Very much so. And if you're not in it on a day-to-day basis, you don't always know when the bill service changes how they're doing something, which they do way more often than I would like. We're constantly catching things of, "Oh gosh, that bill didn't go out. Why didn't it go out? Oh, well, it's because something changed on the service level that we didn't see the publication about." And so, we're also going back and double-checking. I mean, anything that gets paid one day, it gets checked again until we can count that as paid and paid to the right person. And so, just going through at the end of the month... I tell people, "We don't have to do your bill pay. We can just do bookkeeping, but if we're doing your bill pay, we're doing your bookkeeping, at least for those accounts."
Michael: So, I get the version of this, even some advisory firms say, "We're working with these clients where we want to have a deeper relationship or a ‘more holistic offering’. And actually doing this bill pay stuff probably isn't really our core competency. So, maybe we'll talk to a firm like Christi's to help to get support." Are there other, I guess, places this crops up? You said you have a full-time marketing person. So, where else do new clients and business development opportunities come from for you?
Christi: A lot of families find us direct surprisingly enough, or they've heard of us. They've been referred from another one of our families. So, they've seen us on LinkedIn and they have a friend who's working with us. That's typically where our other referrals come from. We're active in several of the clubs that are for this kind of family where they're getting together and they're talking about things that are impacting them. And so, it's usually a bank or an RIA or word-of-mouth referral from another family.
Michael: And what kinds of clubs, organizations where these folks gather where you're doing this?
Christi: I've been a member of FWA, the Family Wealth Alliance for many years. There's the Family Office Club. There are several around that a group, if you're interested in doing family office services that you can come into to learn more about them. And then there's some other groups that we get invited into just to talk about what's new and what's happening with services. So, it's not a place that we're pitching services or we're trying to sell services by any means, it's just, "Here's how some families are doing it. Here's how we're helping those families." It's more of an educational group than sales.
I haven't found a great place for those who are physically doing the work, which has been interesting and something that I've started kicking around, having a little group just to be able to have conversations to say, "Hey, did everybody see that Bill.com changed how they're pushing bills through? Did anybody see that QuickBooks is now offering a budget item for families if you're doing a project?" Having more of those tactical questions, so you have your higher level, "I think I want to do this. What is this all about?" And research-oriented and some pricing conversations as well, for sure.
And then, I guess the day-to-day, how do we actually run this business, is something that I have sort of kicked off through our website, just to have a place for people to come together. I think when we are working together, there's so much business out there for these services that competition is not what drives me. I want this industry to step up and to right do and be better for clients and to be a great additional service for the firms that are running them. And so, if we can help each other get better and we do that together, I just think that's all the better.
Christi’s Journey From Financial Planning To Administrative Family Office Services [1:11:25]
Michael: So how did you come to doing this administrative family office work? How did you land in this part of the industry?
Christi: I completely fell into it by accident. I grew up in the wealth management space as an advisor. I started back at Merrill in the early 2000s back before Bank of America was a part of it, if you'll remember that time. And I had moved over to Raymond James after Bank of America came in, and we had a client who was a small business owner in Austin, Texas. And she and I hit it off. And at some point, she called during, well, it was 2008, 2009, she called and said, "Christi, the bank just pulled my loan and I can't make payroll." And I said, "Well, I don't think I can help you with that, but we know some local banks. Let's make some introductions.”. And so, we [my business partner and I] did. I take zero credit for her and her CFO getting them out of that situation.
But what that started was, "Hey, Christi, can you?" "Hey, Christi, how do I?" "Hey, can you take care of this?" And literally, I think someone asked me, "You spend a lot of time in this person's office, what are you doing? How are you helping this family?" And so, I told them a little bit about what I was doing, they said, "Oh, you do family office work?" And I said, "Maybe. Possibly."
Michael: "Is it?"
Christi: "Is it? I don't know." And of course, I go back to my office and google family office, and sure enough, there you go. It's family office. And so, I had the great fortune as her business grew and she took equity money out, and really her business just took off. It was an incredible launchpad for me to start this business because I got to do things that... I mean, we got to buy heavy aircraft and new homes and renovations and just so many things. I got to take her from estate planning, from basically 1.0 to full scale because we knew she was going to be in a position where we needed to have tax shelters and we needed to do some real estate planning and some estate planning. And she had children. And so, how do we protect them?
And so, I had the great fortune to be able to be by her side during that whole time. And as she grew, I just got to keep going. And so, that's really how it all started. And there came a point where I was literally sitting in her office because I would get the fly-bys, I would get the random, "Oh, we're going to do dah, dah, dah." And I'm like, "Wait a minute. Hold on. Come back and tell me more about that." I was sitting in her office a few days a week, and at that time I was still with the company, with RJ [Raymond James]. And my compliance officer, she knew, and she knew that I wasn't doing anything that certainly was crossing a line, but I was also elbowing out the compliance lines. Like, let's be honest. I bless their hearts, the compliance officers I've had have always been really good and understanding, but there comes a point...
Michael: What you're doing does not fit what our compliance services are built to overseeing in financial advisor world.
Christi: Definitely not. And I wasn't doing bill pay or anything like that for that client at the time, but it was still enough that it was making her very nervous. And it was starting to make me nervous as well. And so, at that point, I broke off and started White River, doing purely administrative family office services. I love the idea and the concept that a family can have who they want sitting at their table when they want them sitting at their table or when they need them sitting at their table, and that everybody is giving conflict-free advice. Because if you want to do a new investment, then let's go talk about that investment. Let's go do the due diligence. I'm not getting paid for assets under management. If we need to do some different estate planning and now there's other things that need to happen, for me, it just needs to happen because this is where the client said their goal was and this is how we've all agreed that we're going to get to that goal.
And so, to be able to truly give unconflicted advice. And sometimes that advice is, "I think you've outgrown us." I think we're to a point now, you asked earlier what happens at over $150 [million in assets], there is another firm that can step in that actually I am close with them, JDJ. Actually, I think they're called Maestro now. We will work closely together if a family outgrows or the complexity outgrows what I feel like we can logistically provide a high level of service to, I will happily make introductions and help them find someone else. Because I would rather have them happy and know that they are taken care of well than just try and figure it out as I go and maybe miss something because I didn't know what I didn't know.
Michael: Interesting. Now as you look at this journey, what surprised you the most about building this kind of family office service?
Christi: The time that it has taken for me to educate and to teach people that there's another way, because administrative family office service, first of all, you say family office services, in most circles, even among the ultra-high-net-worth, they look at you and like, "Okay." And then you say administrative family office services, and I get a deer in the headlights, "So, what do you do? That doesn't tell me anything." And so, trying to educate the difference between an MFO, a multi-family office, a single-family office, and an administrative family office, that has been, I think, probably the most surprising thing.
The Low Point On Christi’s Journey [1:18:26]
Michael: So, what was the low point for you on this journey?
Christi: Well, I would say because we are such a hands-on service, and you certainly hit the nail on the head a little bit earlier, we have to have a highly skilled human capital to do this work. And so, building a business that can sustain that high level of service, it means you have to pay people. And I believe you pay people. I believe you pay people for good work and you pay them well. And logging into the business checking account and seeing it go below a number that I never, ever thought it would go below, that was probably the low point of realizing that this really has to grow and I have to do a better job making sure that I have the staff to cover, but not too much staff. So, finding that balance for sure.
Michael: What happened that made it get that low?
Christi: I hired someone to come in and looking back, I could have waited probably another 6 months to hire them. But because I can really only hire my bookkeepers a couple of times a year to not completely make whoever they're working for quite angry and would I feel be ethical about hiring them away, it was the time and they were available and they wanted to come over. And so, I made the decision to go ahead and do it. But it certainly, certainly kept me up at night for a while. So, I think anytime whenever a business owner logs in and sees a number that makes them go, "Oh, that's not okay. That's not good." These people depend on me. I have single moms with kiddos and that's a big deal to make sure that payroll gets paid on time every time.
Michael: So, is there anything different you do now on that basis from lessons learned?
Christi: I have a much larger buffer in our business savings. We spend where we need to. But I am much more diligent about making sure that there's always a year of payroll in the bank, actually so if that does happen where clients come and for whatever reason decide not to stay or it's time to move them on, that losing that one client does not mean that I need to go down a staff member.
The Advice Christi Would Give To Her Younger Self [1:21:42]
Michael: So, what else do you know now about the business that you wish you could go back and tell you 10 years ago when you were thinking about launching this?
Christi: I think a couple of things. I think it would be, don't offer services that clients aren't asking for. That's a big one. The things that I've thought...
Michael: Well, what was the one you tried that didn't work?
Christi: It was the hands-on, like going to families' homes and being physically present with them. I realized quite quickly that that was not going to be a scalable for me personally or for the business. That was one I tried and didn't work or I realized that it wasn't a good place for me to be. I've also just changed the way I did things. Of course, we were doing the bill pay a little bit differently in the beginning than we do now, and that's after learning and really recognizing where our risks lie. I also think when I...
Michael: Sorry. Just I want to make sure I sense that's when you shifted bill pay from doing joint accounts with folks to using like Bill.com overlaying your accounts?
Christi: Yes. That's correct. I don't really know when it happened, I couldn't pinpoint the exact timing, but there was a point at which I recognized just how much liability I was putting on myself and the firm by doing it that way. Even though I have insurance specifically to cover that, we have so much insurance. Most E&O policies are not going to cover it. Most business operating policies are not going to cover it. So, if you're doing it and you think you have it covered from your other insurance, there's actually a good chance you don't, if you haven't had a very specific conversation with your insurance agent. I felt very lonely when I started the business. And so, I didn't realize that there were others out there. And I'm still constantly, anytime, like, "Do you know someone who does administrative family office services? I want to talk to them." And so, building more of a community from the beginning I think would've helped me. It helps me now, but I think it really would've helped me in those early stages.
And don't get distracted. My goodness. There were a few years that I was distracted by a client project because it was easier to do that than it was to continue building this. And it hurts my heart to say that, but it's true. And so, there were several years that I spent focused on that client and that project and I wasn't building my business. And fast forward, that project is wrapped up and then I look back and think, "Wow, okay. I really wish I had done that differently." So, don't get distracted. Lots of things are going to look good, but that doesn't mean that they shouldn't be filtered out if they're not ultimately the goal that you're headed towards.
Michael: Any other advice you would give younger, newer advisors coming into the industry today if they've got some interest in this direction in the long term?
Christi: I would say, be careful who you take on as a client. Once you choose your avatar, your person, the profile that you want to do business with, be careful about going too far outside of that. It's so easy when you're starting up and you're trying to get going, you're willing to take pretty much anybody that will pay you. And I completely understand that, [but] there's a flip side to taking anybody and not all money is good money. And so, just be careful about onboarding a client who is not who you are really targeting just because you need to bring someone in the door.
What Success Means To Christi [1:26:31]
Michael: So, as we wrap up, this is a podcast about success and just the word success often means very different things to different people. And so, you're on this wonderfully successful path in building out this business, administrative family office services and coming up on $1.5 million of revenue, and so, the business is in a wonderful place. How do you define success for yourself at this point?
Christi: For me, it's seeing my staff living the lives that they want to have. That for me personally gives me a lot of feeling of business success. Also, I see us working towards our business goal of giving half a million back to the communities that we live in. I can see us marching towards that and getting a little closer every year. So, it's things like that because I know that if my staff, if they are happy and they're living the lives that they want to have, and we're hitting our giving goal and hopefully exceeding it in the next couple of years, if I can make those things happen, that means everything else has taken care of itself. It means clients are happy. It means we're growing. It means that I'm living the life that I want to live with my family. So, if we're hitting those, I know we are successful,
Michael: Wait, how does this giving back to the community thing work?
Christi: So, we are committed. Our 2028 goal is that we are giving half a million dollars back to the communities that we live in. So, my staff, we're all over, we're not just here in Austin because our families are all over the U.S. And so, we all have the places that we like to volunteer our time and our talents and money. And so, we as a company have agreed that we want to give half a million dollars back into the communities that we support on a day-to-day basis. So, we're not there yet, but everybody, we are all diligently working towards that goal.
Michael: I love it. I love it. Well, thank you so much, Christi, for joining us on the "Financial Advisor Success" Podcast.
Christi: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure chatting with you today.
Michael: Thank you.
