#FASuccess Ep 092: Taking More Vacation Time By Standardizing Workflows And Processes In Your Advisor CRM with Jennifer Goldman

What You’ll Learn In This Podcast Episode

• What Jennifer Goldman Consulting does and who they serve. [04:22]
• The usual tipping point that leads firms to reach out to Jennifer for help. [08:45]
• Why workflow practices are so important. [20:44]
• How to use time blocking to remember to work on all aspects of a business. [22:00]
• How she helps businesses sort out roles within the company. [34:20]
• Which technology firms tend to overbuy. [37:42]
• What Jennifer has seen is typically the most difficult thing for advisors. [44:00]
• Jennifer's career path and how she got her start [59:22]
• What she says makes a big business really big. [1:12:28]
• Jennifer’s predictions for how the way we do businesses operations and efficiencies will change in the future. [1:16:29]
• Why Jennifer Ultimately Decided To Scale Back From A Multi-Consultant Business To A Solo Consulting Firm [1:20:40]

Resources Featured In This Episode:

Full Transcript:

Michael: Welcome, everyone. Welcome to the 92nd episode of the "Financial Advisor Success" podcast. My guest on today's podcast is Jennifer Goldman. Jennifer runs an eponymous practice management consulting firm based in Boston that works intimately with half a dozen advisory firms at a time on their operations, technology, workflows, and processes. What's unique about Jennifer, though, is that, before she began working as a practice management consultant on operations issues, she had a career as a financial advisor herself and then transitioned to operations leadership roles at two more advisory firms before eventually deciding to go out on her own as a consultant to work with even more advisory firms and operations.

In this episode, we talk in depth about what it really means to adopt and implement workflows and processes in your advisory firm. Why an advisor CRM system should operate as the central hub of the advisory business, the 100-client capacity and 5 employee capacity in multi-advisory firms that eventually forces every growing advisory business to start formally adopting standardized processes and procedures, and why exactly it's so important to do so in order to sustainably grow and scale an advisory business, or simply to finally find the time to take a vacation as an advisory firm founder.

We also talk about Jennifer's operation consulting process with firms, that starts with formalizing the roles and responsibilities of everyone in the firm, and then goes to a technology audit of all the tools the advisory firm already has, and only then begins to focus on how to better integrate the available technology tools, recognizing that in today's environment, the real blocking point for most firms on technology is not a need to get better tech tools, but simply a need to adopt better systems and processes to use the technology the firm already has.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Jennifer shares her own journey of building a consulting practice into a multi-consultant business, and why she ultimately decided to scale the business back to his solo consulting firm, not because it wasn't feasible to scale the consulting business, but simply because in the end, she wanted to right-size the business to let her spend less time managing people and more time working with the advisory firm clients that she wanted to work with in the first place. A lesson I think that is particularly relevant for any advisor who finds themselves unhappy in a successful business because they're spending more time in management and less time with clients than they ever expected when they first launched the firm.

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

Welcome, Jennifer Goldman, to the "Financial Advisor Success" podcast.

Jennifer: Thank you, Michael. It's great to be here.

Michael: I'm excited about today's episode because we are going to talk operations and systems. Which I feel like for a few people there may be a couple of people who just,  heard that and have already disconnected the podcast episode. So that's fine. So farewell to you. For everybody else, trust me, this is actually going to be useful. I feel like for so many advisory firms we like to talk clients, we like to talk service, we like to talk marketing and business development and growth, and very few people seem to like to talk about operations and systems, even though you can't actually run your firm very effectively, and you certainly can't grow it beyond a certain point, unless you deal with that stuff. So today, we're going to deal with that stuff. We're going operations.

Jennifer: We're going operations. That's right.

Michael: So, I know we kind of crossed paths many times over the years through FPA world and various advisory firms back when you worked within firms. Now you do more of operations consulting for advisory firms. So, maybe as a starting point, just talk to us a little bit about the world of Jennifer Goldman Consulting and what it is that you do today.

What Jennifer Goldman Consulting Does And Who They Serve [04:22]

Jennifer: So today, I work with a small group of firms at a time, and I am really helping them run their business better. And to take that to very finite details, things like their processes and utilization of their staff and their providers, and how they run the business day-to-day. And then other things like time management and just juggling the multiple hats that they wear and everybody in the firm wears.

Michael: That's a very involved level of consulting. So are you in a consulting capacity or more like, you're going to just work with me part-time for a while while we get through all this stuff?

Jennifer: It feels like I'm working part-time. The reality is, even though I'm virtual, which means I'm not sitting in anyone's office, I'll go visit once, but I'm not there, I'm talking to the firms every week. Sometimes I'm in the "staff meetings" virtually through,  video conference technology. So, yeah, I'm very much a part of it. I'm not a manager of the people. It's more like a mentor. And at certain times, I am part of the staff and doing the work. There are some times when I'm building the processes or I'm changing something in the CRM, or I'm doing a hardcore training. I mean, yeah. So you're right, I am embedded in the business temporarily, without question.

Michael: So what kind of firms are you working with? Who do you do this stuff for? What sort of advisor brings someone in to help with this kind of processes utilization of staff running business stuff?

Jennifer: It's the advisor that's the owner, clearly, that has recognized that they are a business owner and now they realize that they must juggle the multiple hats of client servicing and possibly business development and marketing and mentoring their staff. I think a good word is mentoring versus managing at times. And they want to grow. They know they want to be in business. They know they want what Tibergien would call legacy business, right? It's going to last beyond them. And now they want to get to the next level, but they realize that they can't do it alone. So they reach out to me and other providers to figure out what the right fit is. And sometimes I'm the right fit. Sometimes I'm not.

Michael: It's an interesting transition to me that when we look out there at advisory firms, most of us build advisory firms because we do advice stuff for clients. We give advice and get paid however it is we're going to get paid, and we engage the clients that we're able to engage. And that's the beginning and the end of the business. Our success is dictated by our ability to find clients and get them to work with us, and get them to pay us and compensate us by whatever means. And the more clients I can get, the more I can grow. And then eventually I've kind of got all the clients I can service and do my thing with. By then I'm usually making a pretty good income, and then I just keep retaining them and servicing them. And it's a business at the end of the day that, for most of us, it's built around us as the advisor and maybe a couple of staff members that we can delegate administrative tasks to and maybe some planning work to a paraplanner, but it's you and a subset of team members that support you. And that's the deal. And you can make a pretty darn good living at it.

And then every now and then I think for some of us, we want to grow to a level beyond that, where all of a sudden you're really not going to be the only person working with clients and servicing clients. And then there's more advisors, and then you need more staff to support them, and then you need staff to manage the staff because there's a lot of people. And the whole nature of the business begins to change because your role starts to shift from your ability to acquire and deliver value to clients, into your ability to attract and develop and retain people who will do that stuff. And it's a hard transition.

The Usual Tipping Point That Leads Firms To Reach Out To Jennifer For Help [08:45]

Jennifer: Well, yeah, because at certain times, I think it's hard mentally, from what I've seen is because you think you want it, but you don't exactly know what it looks like on the other side, right? So you kind of step into it or throw yourself into it and you try it out. Then all of a sudden you might have an epiphany right in the middle of, "Wait a minute, why did I want this? I've already forgotten." And so I think that's where you see kind of that tipping point with firms, where we used to call like, is it a practice or is it a business? Is it a boutique versus a transforming legacy business? All the terms that we've made up over the years.

So yeah, I think it's really hard because I think in the end, it comes down to what you really want and what you don't want. And you have to, just like we talked about earlier, sometimes as an owner, owners don't step aside of the entity that they're trying to grow and say, "What is that going to look like? And do I really want that?" So that's what we're seeing out there. And that's when firms come to me. And I think they're at a pivot point. And we could say it's the number of clients or we could say it's the size of the revenue or whatnot, but it's a mental pivot point. They have to make a decision.

Michael: The roots for the business is basically transactional at the end of the day. You might have been a broker-dealer. You might have been an insurance company, whatever the roots were if you go back 15 or 20 years. But if you did this for a long time, you would accumulate, like, a bajillion clients. When I started in the business, yeah, I was mentoring under advisors that were literally 40 or 50 years in the business at that point. They started door to door in the late '50s and '60s and did this for 40-plus years. And so here I was, the young guy showing up in 2000. And the way they started me was like, "Here's 1,000 clients that we haven't talked to in more than 5 years, why don't you call in and check in on them?"

And you could do that because the whole nature of the business was, you just continue to find new people to work with, did whatever you could do to help them, and then went and found new people to work with. And every now and then someone you did business in the past with would come back and do some new business with you, but you would get these just astoundingly large client bases for what was still often no more than an advisor and maybe an assistant, because there were only so many prospects you were ever working with at any one time. You did your work for them, you got business done with them, and then you went on and found the next one. And it was just a wash, rinse, repeat process forever.

The phenomenon to me that shifted as we went to the AUM model is, you see these clients and you do some work, and they don't leave...

Jennifer: That's right.

Michael: ...because they're paying you an ongoing AUM fee. And if you don't want to get fired, you kind of have to keep doing stuff for them. And so, now we have to keep seeing them and servicing them. And the good news is, that means you get a couple years in, and you wake up on January 1st and there's a whole lot of revenue on the books, as long as you do good service stuff for them. So you hire some associate planners and admin staff and people to help service them, and the business gets bigger. Literally gets bigger. You get more revenue and then you can hire more people and you can do more stuff.

And I find for a lot of firms, they make that transition from a practice around them to something that's more of a business that goes beyond them, but they didn't even necessarily do it deliberately, they just kind of literally accumulated more clients and hired more staff to do things for them, and then maybe hired some staff to handle some of the other staff things that you need when you have more staff. And suddenly they're, like, I call them the accidental business owners, which is, like, you've got a sizeable business and a lot of people to manage. And one of the things that's always fascinated me about that phenomenon is, the unhappiest advisors I know anywhere in the business are those accidental business owners.

Jennifer: That's right. They don't want to be business owners. They just wanted to be advisors.

Michael: No. They started it because they just like doing advising things for clients. And over the span of a couple of years, they went from, "80% of my time is with clients and 20% is just making sure the stuff is done for them," to a world where now 20% of their time is with clients and 80% of it is managing people.

Jennifer: That's right. But what do you do at that point? You can't hire a "business owner." You have a way of working with your clients, and you want to bring somebody else in. Or let's say you want to be "acquired," well, that's, "Oh, now I'm giving up my own brand, my name. But I'm the one who brought in all of these clients, now you're asking me to give up my brand and my name?" Or, "By the way, I have to join you, but now I have to follow your way of servicing the clients?"

And the other thing, we were brought up, and I'm aging myself, you never said no to potential business. I was never trained… I started in as a sales assistant, as you know, with a bunch of rookie advisors and then I became an advisor at Smith Barney, don't hate me, and then I went fee-only. But you never looked and said, "Wait a minute, is this client, not only are they going to be nice to work with, because they probably are, are they going to be profitable enough that I'm going to want to work with them 5, 10 years from now? That I can work with them and say no to other business that won't be good for me?" It was always yes, was never no. You never walked somebody out the door.

Michael: Because the only difference was a really big client… you would spend a lot of time and do whatever you could to I guess win the business. If it was a small client, like, "Well, worst case scenario, I'll spend a few minutes doing the paperwork. I'll help them get to something that's better than where they are now. I'll delegate the rest of it to my assistant anyways. And there's no reason that I need to call on them or see them at any point in the future." That's how you ended out with 1,000 clients you haven't seen in years. So it was fine.

Jennifer: Yes.

Michael: Then we switched to this AUM model, and most advisors I see at the end of the day can't actively do financial planning for more than about 100 clients. That seems to be where people cap out. And some the more intensive you are with your clients, the lower that number gets. So, some cap out at 80 or even 60 or even lower. And so, when you look at it from that end, you're driving a bus with 100 seats, and there are only 100 seats. So if you don't screen who gets onto that bus, eventually the bus is just full and you're done, and there's no way to move forward anymore.

Jennifer: That's right. And some firms break through that 100 mark. I totally agree with you on the 100. What I say to my firms is, "When you go out to that grocery store and you run into your client and you don't remember their name, you have too many clients."

Michael: It's a good way to put it. If you can bump into your client at the grocery store and have trouble recalling their name, you have too many clients.

Jennifer: Okay. I mean, it's a simple thing. It's a joke, but it's not. At 125 or 150 clients, forget clients, spouses, maybe the next generation of your client base called the children, the parents of the clients, that also could be. This is where the rubber meets the road.

It's interesting. I haven't done a full survey of the firms that come to me, but I probably would guess that many of the firms that come to me and are serious are ready to look at that bus of 100 clients and say, "You know what? I have 20 that just don't fit to where I'm going in the future. I need to address that because that's holding our firm back and me back. But that's really hard to do while I'm also realizing that I'm driving the bus, but then I also have to mix it up with the people on the bus, be the client servicer, the advisor…. Yeah.

Michael: So, is your operations work focused around like, "Hey, if I had better technology and systems, I could add a couple more rows to my bus? I think if I had a little more… if I was more efficient, I could do 110 clients or 120 clients instead of 100."

Jennifer: No. Not anymore. Used to be. But when you're at a tipping point of 100 per lead advisor, as I call, or lead planner, the tech now is, and I do incorporate tech, as you know, the tech now is to alleviate the servicing work that the associate advisor, the supporting advisor, the client servicer, their workload. Because my feeling is that some of them want to rise, or I'm hoping they do, and take on some of those clients from the lead advisor and become a lead advisor. But they can't go to that lead advisor and say, "I would like to take on some of these clients and really "own" them. Own the relationship. I'd like you to hand the baton off to me in a client meeting and then that's it." They can't because they don't have the capacity, and they don't have even the time to learn what it takes to be the lead. And so for me, now tech is about alleviating everyone that supports the lead advisor to free up their time to take on the clients that are coming in the door if the firm is growing.

Michael: So the wall for a lot of these advisors you're working with is, and I'm trying to sort of imagine the picture, like, I've got my 100 clients. Or actually, if I'm at a pain point, I probably have 110 to 150 clients, because at that point you really feel like you're drowning in your business. I may have an associate advisor, probably got a client service admin or two. There might be three to five staff around me if this is going well. Maybe I'm even doing this with one other advisor already, so the 2 of us have 250 clients. So we each are driving two buses that are overly full.

Jennifer: And our buses look different. Our buses look different. They drive differently, but yes, okay. Yeah.

Michael: And we just get to this point of like, there's just no more time to do anything and deal with anything except reacting to all the things that the clients want.

Jennifer: Yeah. And here's the other analogy. I love the bus analogy. It's like if anybody is married and has a spouse and you have kids or a lot of things going on, you're kind of giving each other high-five as you're walking in and out of the door. The bus drivers, the two lead advisors, are waving at each other as they're driving in different directions, but they're never able to just sit down and talk with each other. It's a lonely business to be a business owner by yourself. And so, when you get that other lead advisor/owner, you crave the interaction. You want that connection too, but you realize, "Wait a minute, I don't have the time." So that's another thing I've noticed too is that idea of connecting with your people or your partner, whatever the business, that's missing. So the tech might alleviate, again, not to add more clients, more people on the bus, but just to free up the time to connect, to come together.

Michael: So talk to us a little bit more about what you actually start doing that changes this. Most firms I know, by the time they're at this point, yeah, I've got a CRM system, because usually once you add it, for most firms, you may not have a CRM when you're a solo because they're all your clients and you probably just interact with them in your email inbox. You might not add a CRM when you hire your first admin staff because you just interact with them every day and everybody knows what's going on with clients. I find for most firms, the moment you add a second staff member, so there's a possibility that one person interacts with the client and neither of the other two are there, now you need a CRM so everybody knows what everybody else is doing for this client.

But by the time you're approaching the 100-client capacity wall, they're usually using a CRM. You've got some planning software or you've probably got some kind of investment tools that you're using, maybe directly from your broker-dealer or custodian, or maybe you bought some independent software. So usually the software - the tech is there at this point, so what's the difference between, they've bought the tech and they're hiring you to help with the tech?

Why Workflow Practices Are So Important [20:44]

Jennifer: Well, a big tipping point is still workflow process, the concept. So at let's just say 100 clients and you have 2 people on the team, at some point, one of those staff people is going to start writing down how things are done. So it's going to land up in Word with some pretty pictures. And that becomes the beginning of your workflow process. Because it's just their way of remembering what's being thrown at them very fast, or because, the third person hired, how are they going to learn, right? They're going to have to sit with somebody else. And the reason they were hired is that somebody else has no capacity. So how do you train somebody when you have no capacity?

Michael: So how do you train someone when you have no capacity?

Jennifer: No capacity. Well, it's workflow and process. It's a business plan that you can articulate. Because if you're hiring younger people, they care about what the bigger picture is. Even if they're not part of every piece, right, they want to know, "Where is the firm going? And why did you hire me? How do I fit in to the big picture?" So between process and that, I would say now not every firm is using this, but there's a tipping point of time blocking systems. So what I see is somebody has hired a strategic coach, for example, and done the buffer system, right, and color system in their calendar. So you start to see time blocking.

Michael: So for people who aren't familiar, what's time blocking?

How To Use Time Blocking To Remember To Work On All Aspects Of A Business [22:00]

Jennifer: Time blocking would be taking your calendar, let's say it's Outlook or G Suite, I don't care what you use, the CRM calendar, and actually putting in, "Every day from 9 to 11, I will work on client technical work. And from 11 to 12:30, I will do client meetings. And from 2 to 4, I will work on the business." It's literally putting in blocks to remind yourself to focus on different areas of the business every day. You put them in your calendar.

Michael: And the idea of it is, now I know I'll do some of the things that I sometimes don't get to because I've literally put a scheduler for myself on my calendar?

Jennifer: Yes. And they don't usually follow it at the beginning, but it's a glaring reminder, "Oh, that's right, I can't work on client work or meet with clients all day. I have these other responsibilities." So you start to see that with some advisor-owners.

Michael: Again, we were talking about these mentality shifts. For a lot of advisors I know it's hard to make workflow and process. We kind of resist it. I do my thing, and I follow my lead.

Jennifer: Follow my lead.

Michael: If you're going to work with me, you'll learn how I do things around here. And that's the way things are done. And if I lose someone then I'll try to find the time to teach the next person how to effectively work with me and the way that we do things around here.

For me, the mindset shift that came with it is, if you're really going to treat this like a business, I mean, if you really want to treat it like a business, businesses grow. So at some point, in 5 or 10 years, you should have 3 to 5 advisors and 10 more staff members doing the kind of supporting things that they do for you today. So if you're going to have to repeat this 3 or 5 more times with advisors and 10 more times with the admin staff you'll hire to service them while you grow your firm from $100 million to $1 billion or whatever your target is, it's going to get really tiring to keep teaching them from scratch over and over again.

Jennifer: Yeah. And I'll give you another scenario. How about you'd like to actually take a vacation and it's longer than three days? That's the new one. The 45, 50-year-old or older that wants to take 2-week vacation and they realize the business is going to fall apart while they're gone.

Michael: Why is workflow process helping them?

Jennifer: Because it keeps everyone on track doing and working on what you want them as the owner to work on in kind of a controlled fashion that I call quality control, right? And let's be frank, I'd love to say that an owner should leave and shut down. Go to an island where no cell service exists. But we all know what happens, we bring some mobile devices, right? And their laptops. So if you're going to do that, which most do, if you have workflow and process in play, you should be able to, in 10 minutes, take a pulse check of everything that's moving along in your system because you're running a quick report, and then shut down and go back to being on vacation. If you don't, what you'll end up doing, you make phone calls and then you get emails from the staff. It destroys the vacation. It makes you feel like you're not really gone from work. So either reason is why you do this, is what I'm saying.

Michael: So help us understand, again, if we've gotten clients and we're servicing our clients and God willing they stick around because we do beautiful stuff for them, like...

Jennifer: Right. And we know their name at the grocery store.

Michael: Yes, and we know their name at the grocery for virtually all advisors, we do things for clients. We have some way of doing them. Stuff gets done because clients aren't leaving in mass. So what's the difference between, we get stuff done for clients. We have a way of doing things around here and stuff gets done for clients, and the kind of workflow and process you're talking about? What's the difference?

Jennifer: Proactivity versus reactivity. The getting done is, the client reaches out and needs something and then you do, versus the proactivity of a workflow is, reach out to that client and touch base with them and see if everything is copacetic. The difference between doing and what I'm talking about too is what we might call meaningful, a meaningful touch and or a relationship, connection. The doing is predicated...I think a lot of the systems are created around creating an investment report, updating the financial plan, taking a look at their insurance policies, checking out their wills and trusts, right? That's the doing. The part of a process that I believe in is the soft side of things, which is what they value the most in my opinion. I'm not saying you shouldn't do those other items, but the process workflow keeps that client always in motion where you're proactively doing the reach out. And a reach out could be email. It could be phone. It could be doing something that is just appropriate for them.

Michael: I feel like for most advisors, sure, I'd love to do all that stuff, I don't have the time. What's different about what you're talking about that makes all of this magically possible when today I already try to do as many things as I can for my clients and we have no time and I haven't taken a vacation in four years?

Jennifer: Okay, my apologies. In a workflow process, you're assigning most of that work to someone else. That's the beauty. That's why firms start looking at that when they have three people, because, at that point, it's a team effort to service the client. Somebody may be directly doing and servicing that client in the point of contact for the client, but then there's the soft marketing, there's the newsletter and other things that go out and are part of the client relationship. All that can be put on what's autotask or autopilot through processes to your team, where you as the advisor-owner don't need to do anything but yet you feel in control. You feel it's being done. You can see it being done in a system without doing it. That's the beauty.

Michael: How am I seeing it done?

Jennifer: Specifically?

Michael: Again, right? Yeah, right? Because for the average advisor, I do things for my clients. Stuff gets done. It feels like you're talking about a mystical, magical land where everything happens automatically. So that land sounds awesome, but I don't know how to get there from my side of the mountain.

Jennifer: Okay. All right, so let's go specific. Let's use a specific system. Let's use Redtail, Wealthbox, Salesforce, I don't really care, a CRM system, right?

Michael: We can use Redtail. We'll run with Redtail.

Jennifer: Okay, we can use Redtail. So you go into Redtail, and you can run an activity report. You can run a no-contact report to see who hasn't been contacted in some meaningful way, whether task or an event. There are reports in these systems. You can run a workflow report and see your clients and where they are in the process of setting up a review meeting. That might happen semiannual or annually. There are reports in these CRM systems that report back to you as the owner what is going on or not going on with your clients. They exist.

Michael: The idea is if we're actually recording more stuff in the CRM in the first place, then I can start using some of these out-of-the-box reports that they've got in there and start seeing things like, "Okay, who hasn't been contacted in six months? Jeez, I've got to reach out to them again."

Jennifer: That's right. And you're right, if data doesn't go in, there's nothing to talk about here. The data has to go in. So the trick at any firm is learning how people are comfortable getting the data in. I have learned that people don't type as fast as me, but they can dictate just fine. I've learned that road warriors, people that like to be advisors, like to be out of the office and meeting people, which is awesome, but they forget to annotate or put a note in there that some conversation happened. So you have to find the tech tools that work with the people at the firm to get the data in the system so then the system gives you the management reports that tell you, "We're humming. We're moving along. We're doing good here. We're being proactive with our clients and our prospects, not reactive."

Michael: So what have you found works for getting data… what systems work to get the data into the system? Because I know for a lot of firms, this is a challenge. I remember going through this of, I started my career in a firm that had a really good CRM culture. Just everything got recorded in the CRM. It was just part of how things were done. Everything was there. When I came and I had to look up something for a client, I could see everything that had been ever done with them for years and years and years. And then I went to another firm that was also really awesome at service but just hardly used their CRM. And no one could figure out why no one wanted to use it. It was just that no one wanted to use it and they couldn't figure what to do about it.

Jennifer: Okay, but let me ask you back...yeah, let's go back to your first memory of a firm that was really great with the CRM, right? Which is more rare than you would know. Did you want to enter things because your mentor or manager or somebody pulled up a report and said, "Well, look at everything we've done, this is great," or did you just do it because you knew you had to do it? Where was the positive affirmation to use the system? Where did you feel that?

Michael: Honestly, I think, yeah, the positive affirmation for me was really something to the effect of, "Wow, it's really helpful when I go in here and I can actually see everything that's going on. I'm going to do my part for whoever else it is that has to interact with the client because jeez, this is really useful for me." It was sort of a, we just all contributed to the common collective good. I'm sure the firm owners ran some reports and did some things, but we didn't even see that because I was in a paraplanner, client service, admin role at the time. It was just like everybody contributed to this collective client file. It was so helpful that everybody wanted to keep doing it because no one wanted to be the one that dropped the ball.

Jennifer: Well, that's right. Exactly. You didn't want to be the outlier, but you also knew that it was helping you do your job.

Michael: Oh, yeah.

Jennifer: Right? Okay. So what I find with firms, many firms, is a CRM as a rolodex even today, shocking as that sounds. And I do find firms, by the way, that are 10 people deep with no CRM. And it's not part of their mantra because the owners are advisors that love servicing clients. They didn't come in thinking, "I have to put a system in place not only to understand what was going on but to help my people." So they have to learn how to have a staff meeting and give pats on the back by using a report out of the CRM to show everyone that, "This is the way we're doing things. We are documenting, and then we're giving credit where credit is due to people that are really working hard and doing well by the client."

You know, when you said about systems, right? We can have a CRM, we can have a planning software and all that, but what I find is the tipping point is when a firm owner realize that a lot is going on and they need to split their time among the role of a mentor. There's a staff servicing clients, business development and so forth, they need that tool, but they don't really understand what it can do for them because they weren't like you. They didn't come through a business that had it.

Michael: Except then we still get stuck in the things I'd love to do if I had more time that I don't have.

Jennifer: Right. But give it to your staff people. I can't tell you how many firms I've walked into where their staff are crying for maximized use of the CRM. And of course, I say to the staff, "Well, then you do it. Don't wait for the owner. Go do something in it so you can produce a report to show that owner and then you'll have that win," right?

Michael: So there's an opportunity for staff to… if you're a staff member listening to this,  just start leveraging the CRM yourself and show the firm owner up the line some of the useful stuff that comes out of it? Kind of a good opportunity to manage up.

Jennifer: Yeah. And you're a little bit at fault for that with XY, in a good way. But no, but these people are following you, they're following XY, they're younger, and what they're doing now is they're walking into these firms and they're building out workflow process in the CRM. And then they're handing it off to the owner and saying, "We should have been using this all along, now I want to take it to the next level." And the owner goes, "I don't know how." And this desperate goes, "Well, I brought it as far as I can go." And that's when me and other process junkies get the call.

Michael: And so what does it look like when you come into a firm? What starts getting done? What starts changing?

Jennifer: People feel empowered, and the owner starts to relax. Because the owner is so stressed out about all the different hats he or she is wearing, and they feel like they don't have anybody to dump that on. They don't know how to organize it. They don't know how to prioritize it.

Michael: But literally, what do you start doing? What changes?

Jennifer: Oh, so I use specifically?

Michael: Yeah.

How Jennifer Helps Businesses Sort Out Roles Within The Company [34:20]

Jennifer: I use Asana, which is a project management tool, and I let the owner and the staff and I work together to brain-dump all the major improvements we think we should do with the business. And then we put them in an order and we put a timeline on them, and we decide who's going to lead each one. And that alone is the first step. And then after we do that, we look at everybody's roles and responsibilities. We acknowledge that each person is probably wearing three to four hats, and the owner is wearing five to six hats. So we do a role chart, which I do when I speak. And it's an interesting exercise. And people get very overwhelmed because then they realize why they're stressed out is because they're wearing all these different hats and are being asked to switch roles throughout the day. So we do a role chart. It's part of a business plan.

Michael: So role chart is like, who handles the client calls? Who does the account transfers? Who does the account openings? Who updates a plan?

Jennifer: Yes. But I go bigger than that. Think of the first row is the major processes at the firm: business development, new client onboarding, financial plan update, insurance inventory, tax firms with tax, right? Tax return. And then on the left column, I have who's the decision maker, the manager, the senior doer, and the junior doer, which I know are very technical terms, doer.

Michael: Decision maker, the manager, senior doer, junior. Okay?

Jennifer: Yeah. And then I have a second page that's what we would call back office: accounting work, marketing work, payroll, financials of the firm, the CFO role. And I do the same thing. And I do those. So you think in terms of process in the first row, and in the left side column, you think of the level of ownership of what's going on, managers, yeah. So I do that, PowerPoint or Excel. Excel works just fine for all you Excel lovers, which is almost everyone in our industry.

Michael: I love my Excel. You can't pull that out of my hands.

Jennifer: You can't either. I know. And I'm supposed to be the techie, right? I can't. What's the third thing?

Michael: It ain't broke. You don't need to fix that one. Let me keep my Excel.

Jennifer: Exactly. Thank you. Please, let me keep my Excel. And then the third thing, I always do a tech inventory. Why? Because I find that too many firms have way too much technology and they're wasting money and mine on it. So we do a full tech inventory.

Which Technology Firms Tend To Overbuy [37:42]

Michael: So that's an interesting phenomenon. And I feel like a lot of commentary out there in the industry these days is like, "There's still too many gaps in the tech stack. There's not enough good tools. They don't integrate well enough with each other." And you're saying most of us have bought too much? What are we overbuying?

Jennifer: Planning software. I find a lot of firms have three different planning software.

Michael: Because I do MoneyGuidePro with one set of clients but then when I get my really technical deeper clients I still do them in NaviPlan. That kind of thing?

Jennifer: Yeah, exactly. Or I just haven't moved over my data from the old system to the new, or I have some clients… so capacity and time, right? Or I'm not convinced that the new system is quite right, so I'm just going to keep that old one at the same time. That's not confusing for the person doing planning prep in the office.

Michael: But I've got my own clients in there. I can't turn it off.

Jennifer: Yeah, come on, just give me the excuses, right? But how about, let's see, two CRMs, like that one. How about that? Same reason. I have data in the old CRM, haven't really moved it to the new CRM. Not convinced the new CRM is going to work. What do you think the staff...? They don't know even what system to go in.

Michael: So you'll come in and do their CRM migration for them?

Jennifer: Yeah. Or I'll say, "Listen, that old CRM, when is the last time you went into it," right? There might even be login information to know. And I say, "We're going to download that to an Excel file. You're going to take that on a zip and put it in your safe at home, and if you really need it, pull that out of the safe." Because garbage in, garbage out. I don't necessarily encourage moving it to the new CRM because then it's a garbage dump, right? Listen, we live in a compliance world. We're told to get rid of nothing. Even though you and I we know the rules are not that stringent. Yeah, so dual CRMs, planning softwares. Multiple research on investments. I can't imagine, I mean, how about the little tools we used to have like the TechCrunch and NumVal. All those little programs that people download under their desktops to do for calculations and each desktop has a different set of tools with a different output to show the client differently so one client's experience is different than the other. Yeah.

Michael: Which just for a lot of us becomes… we do a thing, we find a better way to do it for clients, we do it the new way for clients, but we don't necessarily always fully clean up or clean out or dispose of the old way, and then we accumulate some legacy tech over time.

Jennifer: Yeah. And one might say, "Well, the legacy tech doesn't get in the way of my day. It doesn't hurt my capacity. It doesn't hurt my time," right? Maybe it doesn't hurt you, but when you have more than one person at your firm it does because they're confused, especially without a workflow process to tell them what to do, when, and how. What they're supposed to be using, how they're supposed to be producing something for you to review. So this concept of stepping aside, looking at your business, doing a little bit of cleanup and inventory is actually where you get that productivity boost. But the short moment when you say that, they go, "I don't have the capacity." And my answer is, "Well if you do that, you will have more capacity than you can imagine. Your people will operate better and ask you less questions. But there's got to be a leap of faith." Anyway. So that's number three, I do the tech inventory.

What else do I do? So I do Asana, roles, tech. Oh, and the fourth. So I take the tech and I get visual about it. So I don't care if you're a stick figure person, you're a whiteboard, a glass wall marker. I'm big into, "Okay, when we prepare a financial plan, what are all the tech pieces I use? And what data is flowing from one piece of technology to another?" This makes me look, just with speaking, like a rock star that I'm not, because people don't turn on the data flows between all this technology. They read about it. They hear. They turn on the tech and they forget to finish it with turning on the data flow.

Michael: Or usually I find like, we turn something on, the data is not entirely right, not really sure how to fix it, so we just don't turn it on because we don't want to populate with bad data.

Jennifer: Right. Or duplicate, right? Because we know now with integrations you can turn on, so you have the doubles and triples. Yes. And that takes time. And I appreciate this, right? It takes time to take a step aside, take a look at that, make a concrete decision, and then clean up and turn it on. But again, firms that don't do that get stuck in their own way and then wonder why nobody feels productive, why there is no capacity.

Michael: And where again do you find that firms are usually hitting this wall?

Jennifer: One hundred clients per advisor. Maybe it's because that's when they're reaching out, though, too, right? I'm sure they're hitting the wall earlier, right? They never call you when they're just starting to hit the wall. They're calling you when they're bleeding profusely.

Michael: Right. Right. We don't call like, "Hey, I'm concerned I'm going to cap out at 100 clients. So I'm at 92 and I'm giving you a ring." It's more like, "I might have capped out at 100 clients because I have 117 now and I haven't taken a vacation in four years."

Jennifer: 117 now. That's right. "I'm on the edge of the cliff, please pull me back." Yeah. Yes.

Michael: It is an interesting phenomenon to me, though, that I think like the gut response for most of us is, if you're hitting capacity, you have to hire more people. And,  hopefully, if we're hitting capacity, we've got the revenue to hire more people, because we've added more clients, so we can hire more people. But again, it strikes me that there comes a point for a lot of firms, I've at least sort of found anecdotally, it seems to be somewhere around five to eight staff members, where you may have grown a sizable practice. You're over $1 million of revenue. You're coming up on half a dozen people. And if you're struggling with capacity issues, it's almost never a people problem. It's 5 or 10 or 15 or 20 years of accumulated clients and legacy systems and legacy tools and not standardizing stuff and all the rest that's just kind of cumulatively caught up with you.

What Jennifer Has Seen Is Typically The Most Difficult Thing For Advisors [44:00]

Jennifer: That's right. And I'm not anti-staff by any stretch, but let me say this. I find the most difficult thing for these advisors that fell into ownership, accidental owners, managing and mentoring staff is the hardest part. And yet they're at this tipping point, edge of the cliff. And what do they do naturally? Hire more people. And then they wonder why it doesn't get any better.

Michael: Work has got to get done. Teams tell me where capacity work has got to get done.

Jennifer: Yeah, yeah, we've got to get it done. So you hire the person and then you dump on them. And then this person has no idea what they're doing. And then the owner has the stress of, "Oh, my God, they're not productive. Why aren't they productive? I hired them. We should feel better. I don't feel any better." Okay. And they do that a couple more times, and then the profitability is completely sinking into a deep hole or lack thereof, right? Now we're down to 5% profitability or maybe a negative number if they actually run their PL and look at it.

Michael: Yeah. Angie Herbers has this analogy that I've fallen in love with. That these walls we hit, if you want to get over the wall, you have to slingshot yourself over the wall. And the key part of that is, the only way you propel something out of the slingshot is the first thing you have to do is pull back. Slingshot gets no power if you just kind of fling it. You want power from the slingshot. You have to pull it back first.

Jennifer: And I love that analogy. And I say step aside because these owners think, "I have to stop doing more business development or business or client servicing to resolve the situation I'm in." And if I said that, I don't know what they would do, because I don't know any business that's willing to "shut down" for six months to a year to realign and reopen.

Michael: So what do they do?

Jennifer: Right, you have to do this concurrently. That's where some firms make it through over the wall and most firms don't. And so the way I look at it is, let's get as many firms that really want to get over that wall, to use the analogy, and slingshot and just say, "Okay, maybe we slingshot one person over that wall at the firm, and maybe it's not the owner." And then concurrently you're doing this work. And baby steps. The idea of just brain-dumping, by the way, of all the major improvements you want and then lining them up on a calendar, that alone is actually pulling yourself back or stepping aside. It's progress because it's not up in your head anymore, so your head starts to clear. This theory of at night we sleep and our head clears, or we wake up and at 2 a.m. we write everything down in a piece of paper because we can't sleep without doing that. It's no different.

Michael: So I'm curious for your take. I find the other reason to me that a lot of firms struggle with trying to sort of systematize in standard processes is, clients are different, have different needs. We interact with them differently. Most of us are in the service business, which means we want to adapt to our clients as best they can, which means it gets really hard to systematize something because we hang our hat on customized service individualized to the client. Are we supposed to just get over that? How do we get over, "Hey, I'd love to do systematized stuff, but clients work with us because we cater the needs of our clients and we service them however they need to be serviced, and that doesn't fit your little box?"

Jennifer: Yeah. But here's the thing. There's a core set of services that you offer. Let's just take for example, if I may, a three mix, a planning investment in a tax firm. I'm running into more of those, right, where these CPAs are adding wealth management. So you have three major services. Well, you follow a certain protocol for each of those three. Let's say investments is that quarterly report, maybe. Younger advisors are not doing that anymore. God bless them. Which I think is great. And those are the core processes. But this kind of idea of customization, for example, there's a subset of clients where you should go to lunch with every year, there's another subset of clients that absolutely love to read so you buy them a book every year, I don't mean to be mean, but those things can be put in a simple one or two-step workflow process that the minute you do it, you trigger next year's workflow to tell you to do it next year. You can still give customize to that client while still having a systematized base level set of services that you need to do for all.

Michael: And all of this lives in a CRM?

Jennifer: That's right. Yes. Yep.

Michael: Not in task management tools like Asana that you were talking about. To you this is all in CRM.

Jennifer: This is all in CRM. The tool that you use every day for your general tasks. And hopefully, you can see your calendar, even though we all mostly use Outlook still.

Michael: Guilty as charged.

Jennifer: Yeah, guilty or, G Suite for the younger generation. That keeps telling me it's so much better. That's good. It's fine

Jennifer: Yeah, the CRM is where it lives, right? So you have your tasks, and then you have your workflows that are separate, which everybody at… Salesforce, they're kind of blended together, but there's a way to see them separately. Redtail, they're two separate. Everybody complains they're separate and I basically say the workflows, you're holding up the bus if you have a workflow task, versus a standalone task is something you're responsible for from A to Z, right? Well, Fox also has them broken out separately, which I like. The point is, yes, it lives in the CRM.

And let me say this. When people hear me say workflow process, I think they still think they have to close the office doors for a day, work on it all in one day and just get it perfect. No. You can have your people, your staff, if they're working at a certain area, build a draft in the system or on a whiteboard. I don't care where. Walk away and come back to it a little bit every week. But make a goal that a month from now that's the workflow that's going to be built out and looked at by everyone. Give yourself a deadline. I think that most advisors-owners are probably Type A, maybe.

Michael: Yeah.

Jennifer: Or is that fair? Okay, you would know better than me. Okay.

Michael: Oh, yeah. Oh yeah, we have a lot of Type As. Yes.

Jennifer: We have a lot of Type A running around. Okay. So we're overachieving. We want to get it done, and we also have a little analysis paralysis. We want it perfect. We want it perfect. I think the difference is this is...the transformation from being an advisor to being an owner of my own business and not being an advisor was, I had to let go of the analysis paralysis when I did process work and when I ran my own business. I had to know it was never going to be perfect. It was always going to be a work in progress. And so the skill set of the advisor-owner at advisor firm is amazing for clients. It's amazing for technical work. It's not so great some time to be the CEO. You have to be okay with it not being perfect, it not being final.

Michael: I think that's the challenge for a lot of us, particularly in the independent channels. I find overwhelmingly, the primary reason at the end of the day that most advisors go independent is they have a particular vision around seeing the business run a certain way and their client service a certain way, and they couldn't necessarily do that at the firm they were at so they go independent. And cool thing is once you go independent, you get the flexibility to do that. And when you founded the business on the concept that I think a client should be serviced a certain way, so like, "Damn it, I'm going to make a firm to do that," you set in your mind certain standards around how clients are supposed to get serviced. It doesn't feel good if you have to compromise those standards. So is that, like, you're just saying we all need to get over that a little?

Jennifer: Yes. And I'm no different. I may be on the other side and now a provider, no difference. We have to be accepting of giving up a little bit of that perfection on client servicing. That's why I love advisory board help and this idea of having a client advisory board to kind of soundboard things off of your ideal clients. And by ideal, I don't mean the richest, the people you would love to clone and have more clients, okay? Because then they give you the, "It's okay. It's good. It's really good." And I think it's also what owners should be doing more of is finding other owners of other professional services firms, maybe one, maybe two. It doesn't take too many to have as a sounding board. Just swap pain points, things they're thinking about, for somebody else to say, "It's okay. Not going to hurt your clients. It's a good move." Or, "No, that's a terrible move. Don't do it." Right? Be honest.

Michael: I know part of what hit me hardest in the world of being a business owner and going through some of that evolution is - if you don't want to compromise on your standards - I find that basically, people go one of two routes. Either A, I don't want to compromise under my standards, which means I have to review everything. I have to see everything before it gets delivered to the client or goes out the door or whatever it is. And then you still ultimately become the bottleneck, so you can only see and review so many things. Or suddenly you care in a whole other way about how you hire and develop and train the people that work in your business. Because your only options here are, you look at everything or you figure out how to hire people that are awesome enough that you actually feel comfortable not looking.

Jennifer: But how do you become comfortable enough to not look all the time if there's no procedures in place? That's what I don't understand. That's what I didn't understand.

Michael: Right. If you're going to step away, right, if you're going to step away but you want some level of accountability, eventually you still kind of need a standard way things are done so you can track and verify that they're being done that way.

Jennifer: I just think you do to sleep well at night as an owner. I don't know. And then there are some owners that hand off completely everything. They don't even spot-check because they're so desperate to hand it off, right? And then they come back and there's an error or a problem, or the person they're handing it to, you would think that they would love that, right? Thank you for not hanging over my shoulder. And then a year later, that person is not happy at the firm. Why? Because the owner that handed in the work appears to not care, even though that's not what's going on, right? Yeah, I just think... You know what? It's interesting talking to you. I've been doing this for so many years and yet the epiphany is, the firms that talk about process, the firms that talk business, the firms that agree that they want to become better at multitasking, wearing multiple hats, CEO, business developer, advisor, right, are firms that are okay with building procedures that they themselves would follow.

Michael: That to me is kind of the ideal, right? If there's really a particular standard around how you think a client should be serviced, write it down every possible step. Make it your workflow.

Jennifer: But wait a minute. Michael, that takes time. I don't have time. I don't have time to write it down.

Michael: What about you? I'll tell you what it this and then you'll write it down and you'll make me a process.

Jennifer: Right. Okay. But let's say you hire...in all fairness, you hire somebody that doesn't think to write it down. They're sitting there feeding off of you verbally and memorizing it, right? How many times...okay, I'll just speak for myself. How many times if I told something to somebody and say, "Do you have pen and paper with you? Are you typing this?" And they're doing neither.

Michael: Well, being the person that I would have people tell me things and I would almost never have pen and paper and write them down, I'm very sympathetic to that.

Jennifer: Yes, but you memorize everything.

Michael: Well, yeah, I get away with it because I have a really good memory.

Jennifer: Yes, very good memory. Yes.

Michael: But it does make the point again, like, if you have a vision of building a much larger firm, you're going to go through this 3 or 5 or 10 times with more and more staff and team members, so do you want to keep explaining to them from scratch or do you want to just make a workflow and process once and then everybody else that comes in just learns from the standard system, which is both A, faster and easier to teach, and B, if there's already a standard system, you don't have to teach it. Anybody can teach it. Anybody who does it can teach it because it's the standard system.

Jennifer: And it's enough of an outline for somebody to know what they need to be doing. And if they don't understand it, they know they can go ask somebody, right? But it gives them the framework and it gives the owner the structure to be able to check in and know without asking people and hanging over cubicle walls or in the office doors 24/7, "Wait, what do you do with that? What do you do with...?" That's the biggest problem I have lately, right, is these owners that… or advisors... it's not even the owners. They're hanging out at the doors. And, yeah, I just think it's so very important.

Here's the other thing about the beauty of the process that we've been harping on. But the beauty is that you can go and revisit these every year and realize that, with your staff, your outside providers and your tech, you could improve upon them because you have something to start from. It's not in your head, it's in writing. And that's where you start, I love this, knocking off tasks. Like, going through and going, "Whoop, we don't need to do that anymore because we can automate that. Oop, we don't need to do that anymore because it's already taken care of through another thing. Oop, that should be assigned to somebody that we just hired. Oof, now we're making him productive, giving him something to do."

Michael: It's an interesting thing that, once you standardize something, you said some just standard process, "Here is the way that we do things." All of a sudden to me, it takes on another life because then you sit down and say like, "So we always do this thing. Anybody got ideas about how we could do this better, differently, more efficiently? Like, anybody know a piece of tech that could just make this a lot easier?" Like, you can't do that until there's some process you can point to with a bunch of steps where you can say, "This step is a real pain in the butt. Like, I would love to make..."

Jennifer: Right. Or bottleneck in every time.

Michael: "Yeah, I would love to make this step a little bit easier." And you go, "Oh, well, all right then, let's actually change that step and make it easier."

Jennifer: And the beauty is, if you hire go-getters of any age, but certainly younger people, if they're using a workflow and they see a step that over and over just... they're going to speak up and say, "I think we can do this instead." Now they're empowered, and now they're part of the team, and now they're helping the firm. And now you've got a scalable business in the making. That's when it gets exciting, just getting there. It's getting there.

Jennifer's Career Path And How She Got Her Start [59:22]

Michael: So how did you come to this path of work in the first place? Like, you said way back when you started out as an advisor at Smith Barney, like, how do you get from that to this?

Jennifer: A little bit of luck. So I'll tell my story but everybody's is different. My story was, Smith Barney, I was only brought in, fee-based assets, which at the time was completely shoo-shooed but I was insane, and I wasn't making a lot of money doing that either. Transactional business was more lucrative at the time.

Michael: Right. You came in when you're doing...

Jennifer: I was the first woman rookie. It was like smile dial.

Michael: You're doing 1% fee-based business when everybody around you is doing 5.75% A-share mutual funds.

Jennifer: Thank you very much. Yes, that's exactly it. Right. And for me, of course, I'm the young woman in the office. I'm the newbie. I'm the guinea pig rookie. And, "Oh, wow, she's insane."

So then I went from there to...I moved to a suburb office because I realized I wanted to meet with clients. And at that time there was no such thing as video technology, so you couldn't do video calls. And I wanted to be able to kind of pull up to the office versus me getting in my car in the city of Boston and driving to them. So that was the first move. Then I realized, "Wow, this relationship thing is awesome, it's rewarding, and it brings in more referrals." So then I joined Lehman, where I not only had some clients with me, and I was allowed to share it at that point. So I gave some clients to a friend and I took the clients I wanted. And I worked with business owners that were at private companies with boards and was on a couple boards of their businesses. And I realized, "Wow, I love the business aspect." That's where I think I first realized.

Michael: So you started out on financial advisor world and then you ended out looking at businesses because you were working with clients who were...

Jennifer: Right, clients that were business owners but like, "Would you be on my advisory board?" Right? And these were product and services business. It didn't matter.

Michael: So, no relation to our industry. Like, we make car parts or...

Jennifer: That's right. That's right. Or we are a medical company, we're about to make a new drug, right? Okay, something like that.

So then I joined a fee-only firm, which no longer exists, but it was one of the largest multi-family office firms in our industry at the time. And they had a wealth division, and they had a multi-family office. They pulled me on in the MFO side. I worked with aged families who frankly were all business owners. Hey, Yankee Candle, big names. And it was really wonderful. And at that point, the business, unbeknownst to me, was looking operationally to be better, and I was just...I could see all the inefficiencies. We were at 33 employees. We were doing everything in 50-page manual spreadsheets, right? And we were being audited by multi-family offices. So how scary is that to do all your planning work in a 50-tab Excel spreadsheet and worry about one number being found wrong? So I started doing that and honing that in more systematically and efficiently.

Then I went to the portfolio center system, realized we were doing everything one off there, so kind of built out a batch system. So I did this all while being a senior planner. And then a week before...

Michael: Realized like you actually like this stuff more than...

Jennifer: I love this, yes.. I was like, "Wait a minute." And also, too, I realized, "Listen, I can only work with so many clients." Like, family office, you can only work with a couple. And I'm like, "This is not what I set out to do. I got in this industry to help a lot of consumers because a lot of people don't want to manage their money," right? So I realized it was wrong, then I realized I loved the business side. We saw that at a very high valuation because we streamlined everything we could. It was really great. And then I joined another firm, and I was planner and COO. Did that two more times. That's when I met you in Baltimore, right? And then I said, "Listen, I want a big splash impact. I know I can do this for multiple advisory firms. I know I can bring that to them." And nobody at that point was hiring COOs. For that matter, I don't even know if, like, Citibank and Google had a COO, right? So that's how I started the business.

And it's completely transferable. It's this concept of, so instead of working with the client and managing their wealth and their investments, and of course, when you're in family office, they have staff, now you're running multiple businesses. And the clients in that case now are not the end consumer, they're the staff at the firms. But process is important. Technology is important. The experience of the staff and the end consumer is still important. None of that changed.

Michael: It strikes me that at the end of the day, like, there are interesting parallels around being in the advisor business and being in the consulting business, like, in and of itself.

Jennifer: This is advisor business. Yeah. Still an advisor.

Michael: You're still an advisor. You're just advising advisors on their business activities. On their business.

Jennifer: No different. Right. You're advising business owners on things that they didn't know or didn't understand or never trained on, just like a financial advisor is guiding and advising a client on things they never understand, their finances. It's educational-based.

Michael: So what was the vision when you went out and launched a firm, like, to be a consultant doing operations work? Right? This was almost 10 years ago, so even advisory world was a little bit different then than it is now. It's like, what was the vision of what you were trying to create in making that transition?

Jennifer: I think the vision was the idea of helping the business be a thriving business and being scalable. And at that point, the tech was pretty simple. You had, I'm not going to say Palm Pilots. I think we were blackberries at the time. You had Redtail, you had install software like Junxure and a few others that were all installed.

Michael: All still desktop-based. Yeah.

Jennifer: All desktop-based. Yep. Redtail was, like, the first. I use Salesforce for my own business because I'm thinking, "Okay, this is the way it's going to go." Because as a business owner, you don't want to be handling the tech. Like, you just don't want to be in the process of...like we used to put disks in to install the upgrades, right? Who wants to do that?

Michael: I certainly remember, like, my most exciting task at my second firm was, I was the one who once a quarter took the Principia Pro disks around and updated everybody's Morningstar with the latest quarterly data. I was so popular. Like, everybody was so excited when those disks came around. They're like, "I've got a client meeting tomorrow, you've got to do my computer first."

Jennifer: That's right. That's right. I laugh. Remember those days. We should have kept some of those disks. But I knew it was going to go to the cloud because the business owners could not keep up the pace. Every month got faster and faster, right? So for me, it was, I first went on the latch of, "Okay, everybody needs a CRM." And that was at a time when everybody thought Outlook was a CRM and probably did for the next five years, right? So that was one play. The other play was...what was another big one that I really focused on? Well, the planning software. We had Navi at the time, right? I can't remember some of the players. I remember Navi and being complicated. Financial Profiles, which is now one company, right?

Michael: Yep.

Jennifer: Right. So, again, I knew it was going to go on to the cloud at that point.

Michael: Which was mostly MoneyGuidePro at that point because NaviPlan was still desktop, Profiles was desktop.

Jennifer: Yep, MGP was the first.

Michael: MGP was in the cloud. I guess, like...

Jennifer: And eMoney was there.

Michael: ...eMoney was just getting going.

Jennifer: It was just getting going, but the thing is, eMoney was on the brokerage side. Like, we didn't hear about it as much on the independent fee-only or fee-based side, right? But it was there. It was not touted. Yeah. So it was about optimizing the...first of all, understanding what those tech pieces could do for you, optimizing those tech pieces.

Michael: So a lot of it, well, I guess in practice, was just, early on it was helping advisors literally transition to cloud-based software.

Jennifer: Yes. Organize their business into cloud-based software so they had capacity to add more clients, because that was the push when we used to talk about having 45 clients and saying, "Okay, I think we can have more now. Like, I think you need to handle more because otherwise your profitability and your revenue wasn't there."

Michael: Yeah, I mean, at the time, I know the concern for a lot of firms was still, like, client security. Like, even then we were talking about firms getting hacked. That's only higher profile now. I'm just wondering, like, how much resistance did you have for firms saying like, "I don't want to go to the cloud, that's not secure, my server is safe?"

Jennifer: Yeah. Yep. A ton. And I actually didn't realize and that it took me a while to get my business up and running because I only would work with firms that were open to cloud-based software. And so, it took a lot longer than I expected. It took three years for that to go mainstream. Like, I would go and speak at a conference, and I would get the boo hisses from the engineers in the crowd that would scare everybody else in the crowd about how they were going to get hacked if they went in the cloud.

Michael: And then a few firms started realizing like, "Oh, I have my servers connected to the internet, and actually, it's easier to hack me. I just didn't know because I never installed a firewall and never monitored my computer."

Jennifer: Well, the IT firms started communicating, like, "Here's the problem."

Michael: Well, I knew an advisory firm that they didn't want to go to the cloud. They kept everything on their servers because that was safer. And then one day, I don't know, like 2012 or 2013 or something, they go into their office and their software won't work. Like, just nothing will load. So they have to get their computer guy to come in, who looks around to figure out why the software won't load. And eventually realized the reason the software won't load is because the server hard drive has no space. So then they tried to figure out why the server hard drive had no space. Server hard drive had no space because someone had hacked their servers and was storing illegally pirated software on their servers. So they had whatever was big at the time, they had a 30-gig hard drive on their server, a gig of it was their business, 29 gig of it was pirated software that a hacker had just parked on their computer. And eventually found out it had been happening for a year and they had no idea.

Jennifer: Well, okay, so that's the point. They had no idea because they had no process in place to look at and double-check their server.

Michael: Yeah. Kind of, there was a lot of ignorance is bliss of like, "Well, I can't see the hacker coming into my office, so clearly my server..."

Jennifer: Physically walking into the server room and plugging into the server.

Michael: "So clearly, my servers are safe." Although I did know one advisor who actually had their servers "hacked." They had, like, a lovely, beautiful glass front Class A office space. 2:00 in the morning, someone came with a brick, put it through the window, went down the hallway to the server room, popped the drop ceiling tiles, went over the wall, unlocked the door from the inside, took it out. Their whole server was gone in about three minutes. And they were all proud of the security system they had and, like, the heavy-duty locks and bolts that they had on their server room door. It was a drop ceiling. They just lifted the ceiling tile and climbed over and then walked out with the servers from the inside. And  then realized like, "Oh, Google servers and Amazon servers have 12-foot fences and armed guards."

Jennifer: Yeah, but the bunkers, right. Like, I got the luxury where you are going into a bunker. I'm like, "Oh, you could never get into that bunker." Unbelievable security. And I would not like to say this but I shall. There is always the disgruntled employee, dealing with one right now. And so when that server is accessible, as it has been in other firms, and I've seen it, where I can just walk into the room, it's a problem. It's a problem. But on the bigger picture, why would you as a business want to deal with that? When I work with businesses, I basically said, "What don't you want to be doing? Okay, great. Now let's find the solution so you don't need to do that, but you do still need to do quality check-ins."

So that was the solution of my business for, I don't know, three or five years: CRM, processes to manage the business but not being the weeds of doing the business. That hasn't changed, right? Now we just get the luxury of adding on a few more great tools like these time tracking or appointment schedulers to keep you focused and other little widgets. But in the end, it's still the core pieces.

Michael: So what else has changed? Like, as you look at how operations consulting and the kinds of, either systems we need or gaps that we have changed over the past 10 years. So back then it was just a lot of adopting CRMs, transition to the cloud and all the integrations and efficiencies that you get when, God bless, you don't have to manage your own servers anymore. So what did that shift to? How has it changed?

What She Says Makes A Big Business Really Big [1:12:28]

Jennifer: I think we went through a spell of we got too much tech. Too many bells and whistles. Too many shiny objects, right? We went through that. And I think now, in the last couple years, it's been less is better. And make sure you're maximizing the use of everything. And I think there's been a focus more on marketing tech. I think any firm that's growing has always been involved in the marketing tech, but now we want metrics. I think the new phase that we're in is we've always dreamed of having metrics on our business. Understanding how many clients we really have, what segments they sit, excuse me, profitability. Now we want the reports. That's the new phase.

Michael: Interesting. Interesting. And that's feasible now just because the tools are getting better, right? They don't just do the basic tracking, enter the data stuff anymore, they're producing more reports?

Jennifer: Yeah, they're producing more reports, but the problem is that we're producing reports in multiple software programs. And what we really want is that master report. We basically want a business plan. We want our business plan and our metrics report, right? So I think that's where we're at a tipping point now. And I think that we're at the tipping point probably because we have a lot more advisors that are turning into business owners, right? We have consolidation in the industry. We have the younger owner coming up, and they get that you need to take a pulse check on the business from time to time. And that's a business report.

Michael: Yeah. Well, and I'm struck just in general that, the tools really have gotten more capable around the business reporting, particularly when I look at adoption trends of things like Salesforce. You know, Salesforce has this monstrous adoption in large advisory firms in particular, and it's just because they're so much more capable in building customized reports from multiple systems that pipe all the data in that it's just becoming the de facto business management dashboard for a lot of large firms. Not necessarily cost-effective for small to mid-sized firms. A lot of reports coming out of the box now for some of the other CRMs is quite feasible. But you get to a certain size and complexity where you're willing to spend some of the dollars to do the customization and you just seem to be able to do it at another level with Salesforce.

Jennifer: I agree with you. And I think that's the only system because it's complex, but it's so flexible to do that. On the flip, I see multi-multibillion-dollar firms that are using Salesforce like a rolodex because it costs, and guess what? It's that same idea of pulling back. As Angie said, before you go forward, you do have to step aside and build out what you want or design what you want and then have it built. That cost money and time.

So these struggles that firms go through, let's just use easy numbers. A firm that has 300 clients and 6 staff, right? And maybe it's, I don't know, $250 million under management if you're using AUM. That struggle to get from there to doubling the business and investing in the business and taking a step aside and really thinking about what you want next and then designing it is no different than the struggle of the $5 billion firm or the $10 billion. It's just the numbers. The cost is bigger, right? But I do think, I agree with you on Salesforce, but in a bigger picture, I think that the business reports are not where they need to be yet, and so it'll be interesting to see this next phase of who comes out with it.

Like, let's be honest, I am absolutely sure that Ric Edelman, Ron Carson, these big roll-up names, I'm sure they have good business metrics reports, but I'm sure if you got into the meat potatoes of it, they've spent extensive amount of time thinking about what they should have in those reports and then building, right? That's what makes a big business really big.

Jennifer’s Predictions For How The Way We Do Businesses Operations And Efficiencies Will Change In The Future [1:16:29]

Michael: So what else do you see on the horizon? What else is coming that changes the way we do business operations and efficiencies?

Jennifer: Well, I've said this before, but thank you for letting me say it again. I firmly believe that if...I'll name a few. The eMoney, the Orion, Black Diamond, these client portal systems, I think they're only going to get better, and they're only going to give advisor firms more business data on what's valued and not valued. And I also think they're going to be the way of communicating in the future. So I'm not saying the CRM goes away, but I'm saying, when you get into the office as an advisor in the morning, the tradition is everybody opens up their email, which is the worst thing to do first because you get stuck in that black hole.

Michael: I know, but I love my email black hole. Don't take it away from me.

Jennifer: Right. Why? Because it's your business chatter, right? It's connecting. People want to connect. I get that. I also make the mistake sometimes, okay? So you open the email box first. You probably open the calendar. Better make sure you know what your day is in terms of schedules, scheduled items, right? And then you open your CRM. I think that a few years from now, you will not be opening the CRM first as the third thing. You'll be opening up the client portal/your portal as the advisor or the advisor staff person.

Michael: I'm curious about this, just like, do I open my portal as the third thing or do I just get to the point where the portal pipes all that data into my CRM and I still open my CRM but my CRM has got more stuff?

Jennifer: Well, we'll have to see. We watched like eMoney bring in Redtail tasks, and I thought, "Oh, that's interesting, when are they going to bring in the calendar?" Right? Okay. Then we watched the Black Diamond, and you can have chat and text and schedule a call and all these things. Well, and then there's business management reports in those systems to kind of know, "Oh, who haven't I touched on lately?" Right. So I don't know. It's going to be an interesting phenomenon, and just sitting there watching it, looking for the signs. The tea leaves like anybody else's because I don't know. I don't know.

But I think it more and more, as advisor firms realize that they have to treat it like a business to stay in business and to build legacy and attract great people on their team, that they're going to search for that software where they can go and see what's going on with the clients and the business all in one. And for now, I don't see either system dominating, whether it's Salesforce on steroids or the client portal that gives information. That's the next phase, is the question if the advisors are willing to pay for it.

Michael: No, show me business ROI and I'll pay for it.

Jennifer: Well, exactly. And who's going to do that? The VCs? Venture capitalists out there, right? So, yeah.

Michael: So tell us a little bit more about what the consulting business looks like for you today. For advisors that are actually listening to this and saying like, "Okay, yeah, I actually do need some help because this stuff sounds good and I am not going to build all this system and process stuff myself.

Jennifer: You want to be in the weeds?

Michael: Yeah. It sounds awesome, but not...

Jennifer: Awesome, not what I want to do.

Michael: As long as I don't actually have to do it.

Jennifer: That's right. Yeah. So the consulting business today, for at least me, is very tight. I only work with five or six firms at a time. I give a day a week. I am on calls with the team. I'm on calls with the executives. I'm working inside systems when appropriate. I'm managing the providers and vendors because they're doing so much more now than they used to, which is awesome. And sometimes we're using outside providers to do some of the work ongoing. I was a big fan of using outsourced providers years ago, and that's really gathered a lot of steam. But they also have to be mentored and managed just like a staff person. So, yeah.

Michael: Was there a point where you were doing more with firms in the past? Like, I thought at some point you were managing them more actively.

Why Jennifer Ultimately Decided To Scale Back From A Multi-Consultant Business To A Solo Consulting Firm [1:20:40]

Jennifer: Okay, I'll tell the story. I was up to five full-time people. We worked with over 60 to 70 firms a year. It was very project-based. It would be like a planning-only firm that only does plans and then has to resell the client and hiring them back to do another plan. And I thought I could do it, even though all the other consultants out there thought I was absolutely crazy.

Michael: Because you were trying to, like, scale up to do multiple….

Jennifer: I was trying to scale up. Yeah, that's right. That's right. In an industry where they thought it was all project-based. Like, "There's an end to this project, right?" And my answer was, "Well, no, it's continuous improvement." Just because you built the process doesn't mean next year you might not have to tweak it, because there's always ways to make it better. But they didn't see that yet, right? I was a little, whatever, ahead my time or sideways. Who knows?

Michael: The challenge is you were doing transactional project work and hoping that firms that did some would come back and want to do more, but they wouldn't necessarily actually do that.

Jennifer: Correct. Correct. Yep. And I lost touch with the client advisor firms. It was pretty sad for me at times because I...just like an advisor doesn't want to lose touch with her clients, I didn't either. It's a business development too much.

Michael: So you had gone all the way through that transition from, "I am the lead consultant," to, "I am the lead manager of a consulting firm." Same way like we may go from being an advisor with our clients to being the manager of an advisory firm, you don't get to see any clients anymore.

Jennifer: That's right. Exactly. Exactly what I'm hoping my advisor-owners would do, right, is become the business owner first, advisor second, and slowly let some of their clients be worked with some other...

So, yeah, there I am. Had a small epiphany, health scare, whatever, and basically said, "You know what? I think I can do this differently." We got very lucky in the industry. And I think a lot of people don't know this. The group of consultants, most of us are of a certain age, and we started to realize it wasn't about our brand. And at that time remember I was My Virtual COO. That was the brand. It was well-known. It was out there in the wind. But I realized I wanted to work with other consultants, just like an owner starts to get a little lonely talking to themselves all the time about their ideas, right? But other consultants were like, "Well, I can't work with you because your brand sounds larger than mine, then I feel lesser than you." Or, "We're too expensive as a united front, how do we do this?" Well, consultants have figured out a way to get over that. So now, we're willing to do co-consultant work, which didn't exist five years ago. It's awesome.

So now I have all "other consultants," and I pull them in when I need them, and they leave when they're done, and they're happy and I'm happy and vice versa. I get pulled in. I have a one-time boost call that firms that used to work with me can use to kind of freshen up on something, but the consultants use it as well. And they've adopted that as well. Like, you need me for one time, my technical expertise to help steer the bus straight again? Book a call and we'll do it, and we're all happy. So we've all evolved as consultants out there too.

Michael: So what does that transition look like? To go from having five full-time people and then deciding, "No, I really want to actually get closer to my end clients again." Clients being the advisors you're working with and make a transition.

Jennifer: Well, in the backend, it's heart-wrenching. It's a lot of talking to yourself and others and peers and sound-boarding, and saying, "You know what? This is what I'm thinking. This is how I'm going to offload clients that I have, hand them off to others or just close up the projects and be done." Or it's maybe... at some point, I did go through the exercise, "Should I join another firm," whether it's a FinTech or advisor firm? So you have to do a lot of soul-searching. So I'm not going to paint a pretty picture. Some of this is not easy. I had to step aside of myself and look at the business and myself and take some time. So that does mean lost revenue temporarily that you could be attracting.

And then after I made that final decision, it is offboarding your staff gracefully, finding them other positions at other firms. The one thing about everybody that leaves my firm is they always do better and make more money. So that's awesome for them, and they're happy. So it's offboarding your people tactfully and properly, with good severance. It's offboarding your clients that were probably almost done with you anyways, so just as the projects rolled up. So you have to timeout all your projects and figure out when they're going to end. And then you go through about, I don't know, what did I do, two months where I went super quiet, changed my business name, and then brought out my new website.

Michael: Because you went from Virtual COO to...

Jennifer: To Jen Goldman Consulting, because I couldn't come up with a catchy name. Yeah.

Michael: Nothing wrong with naming your business after your name, kitces.com.

Jennifer: There you go. That's right. You're right, you've never changed it.

Michael: Nothing wrong. Nothing wrong.

Jennifer: Nothing wrong. Worked for you, worked for me. Yeah. And then you email your closest friends. As you know, you take your rolodex out, which at that point you hope is on MailChimp, Constant Contact or something, and you say, "Hello. This is me. Here comes where you can find me." And repoint your old URL to your new, and pick up where you left off. But now you're down to the clients you love and you want to work with and their success stories. And that's the story of transition. Took a year and a half.

Michael: I'm fascinated by this phenomenon of right-sizing your business around what you actually enjoy doing in the business. I think it's, again, in that world where so many firms, particularly these days, kind of end out being accidental business owners because we accumulate clients with recurring revenue and then we hire staff to service the recurring revenue and then all of a sudden there's a lot of clients and a lot of staff and not a lot of time and no more vacation and we don't get to do the things we like to do in the business anymore, that it's really, really hard for most people to ever well, A, sometimes even just realize that they're unhappy in their business and why. And that that's why, because they did it because they like seeing the clients and now they don't see the clients anymore. And then being able to come to the table and say, "I have to actually right-size my business."

And I think that most people view it and think of it and experience it as downsizing the business. I had all these clients and staff and people, and now I'm going to have fewer of those. But to me, the language matters. It's, there's not a magical prize for building the biggest business. You build the business that's right for you, that makes you happy and makes you feel like you're having impact in the world. But right-sizing your business is hard sometimes.

Jennifer: Well, yeah. Do you remember when we talked, like, six months ago and I said I had to check my ego at the door? And I'll be honest, and I don't want to sound like I'm too granola, but I had to read for a while about the ego and what it meant and what is outside of your control and in, and going through that emotion of, "I'm a failure." Like, I went through all of that. My poor husband and family, and frankly, all my peers around me, right? Like, going through it.

So when I said it took a year and a half, the mental part took me a year. Just like a good major improvement at a firm, it's the planning and the mental that takes so long, but when done well, the implementation is smooth sailing. So once the decision was made, I felt good in it. My gut felt really good. Which I wrote a blog about this, right? I think men trust their gut way more than women do. I wish women would do more of the gut check and trust. Once I got it, I knew I was good. And then the implementation was smooth sailing. It wasn't that hard.

Michael: And was there a particular breakthrough moment that, like, got you over this hump or got you through to reach this moment of clarity that said, "Okay, I'm over and I'm good with this, now let's do it," and then it happened pretty fast?

Jennifer: I wish I could say I walked outside one day and just, boom. I mean, no. I went through tranches, unfortunately. And one tranche was letting a few staff go, right? And that was really hard. That was really hard. But then I saw they were successful. So I had to start with something, and so I let a staff person go and eased off on the number of clients, right? And then I saw that they were really happy and successful where they went, and I was happy. And then I did another, and then I was happy. And then I let some clients go. I thought that was going to come back, nope, they were fine. Like, I had to do it in tranches. Because again, I'm a giver and I wanted to make sure everybody else was happy.

Michael: Well, it's an interesting transition experience of like, "I let someone go and help them, hopefully, land on their feet." And they did land on their feet. And they did well, and that makes it a little bit less scary to do the transition with the next one.

Jennifer: Let me make an analogy back to a firm. Working with a firm that is going to let go of clients that don't fit anymore and are just not working out. Like, it's taking the firm back too many steps to move forward, okay? And it's also the firm owner realizes, "I would like a nice tight-knit team of people. Instead of having 15, maybe 12. Instead of having 1,000 clients, about 500," right? They have to take the baby step of letting some clients go gracefully and then realizing those clients were better off. And when they see that, and they did, then they let more go, and they let more go. And guess what happens in the office? Everybody feels better. But the clients that were let go gracefully, feel great too. They're thankful and referring business that's the right business. It's no different what I did than a firm that realizes that that right-sizing is right for them as well and it gets them to the next level, but they have to go through that. And they do it in baby steps to get positive affirmation that it's right.

Michael: So what's the vision for the business going forward from here? Like, you're working with a base of firms. You've already done the version where you add more firms, more consultants, more firms, more consultants, didn't like that path. So is the vision going forward simply like, "I'm going to have five or six firms I work on at a time,  give them a day a week each and rotate through the week? And, like, we're just going to keep...we'll help some firms get to a good place and then we'll get hired by another firm, and just continue that path."

Jennifer: Absolutely. And I always offer the boost call for the firms that need that quick boost because, again, it's in my blood to keep helping. You know what I mean?

Michael: So they can just, like, hire you for an hour or two of your time to...

Jennifer: Yeah. Because then I don't feel bad about saying no all the time. I don't know. Maybe some people can do that. I'm not great at that. I'm not great at saying no.

Michael: Yeah. I'm not either. I've always had a challenge with that, right? It's an interesting approach to say like if you're trying to figure out a better way to say no, ive yourself a comfortable out, a comfortable path, a comfortable way to say no. So the comfortable way that you set yourself up to say no is just, "I can't work with you an ongoing client, but here's what I can do and here's what I charge my time to do that. But this I can do for you, would you like to work together?"

Jennifer: Exactly. And do it in a way that manages your time well for you. And that's where, like...everybody knows this, I've been a die-hard since I started the business about an appointment scheduling system. But I was a die-hard with it, not necessarily because I could give everybody a link to my calendar, because it kept me on the straight and narrow of juggling everything in my day. Otherwise, I take every random call, help everybody, and I would never get time to breathe, right?

Michael: Oh, so, like, you don't take the inquiries for the boost calls, you send them straight to your scheduler and they can...

Jennifer: Yeah. Everything goes through my Calendly on my website. Calendly is a software I use. Ten dollars a month if you're a Salesforce user, $8 a month if you're not. I used to use TimeTrade back in the day. That was the first appointment scheduling software out there. I grabbed that like you wouldn't believe. Yes, and I use Calendly. You go through that and you use that, and that sparses out my boost calls between my client calls, between my provider calls or calls with business friends like you, right? So it keeps me, again, like I said, on the straight and narrow, I don't overwhelm myself too much. Because then my head isn't good for other things. I need to leave time.

Michael: Because, in essence, if someone is interested in a boost call, they just go on your calendar. If there's time then they can book and buy your time. And if there's not, there's not. But they're not talking to you so that then you can feel guilt and say like, "Oh, I don't have any time or capacity, but, oh, I want to help you, so I'll move this one appointment to help you."

Jennifer: That's right. Even when I do, right, when I move my appointments, let's say I do because we all break our rules using our system sometimes, right? I still click on my Calendly link to see when I'm next available. I don't book in between. I don't look at my actual physical Outlook calendar. I know what it does to me. It's no good, right? So, yes, so you go on my website and you get a choice. You can do a sales call or you can do a boost call. The boost call is paid. The sales call is to learn about my long-term engagement services, right? But I never am saying no then. Like, it's a wonderful feeling. Advisors need to feel that. It's a great feeling. It's a great feeling.

Michael: Yeah, I have to admit, it was a big mental shift for me to reach the realization that if you do well enough with business development and attracting business opportunities in, suddenly the whole nature of your website and the way that people contact you and reach you is not actually just about enabling them to reach you, it's also about giving them pathways and choices to screen out people who aren't a good fit and make sure that they get to the resources they need but that you don't actually talk to every possible person that possibly wants your time, because you will run out of time. If you're good at marketing, you will run out of time. If you're not good at marketing, you can talk to every prospect.

Jennifer: That's right.

Michael: So are there other, like, plans or aspirations or things in the back of your mind that you're still poking around on or, like, this is your path and you're happy with your path now?

Jennifer: Why do you have to ask that question? I'm working on it. I'm hoping for an epiphany that I know won't come in one moment. I don't know. I know there's something...I will say this, I'm kind of new to being back in this model of working with five or six firms, and I'm feeling that I'm going to run into something really, I don't know, exciting next year for some reason. And there's literally nothing in the works. Like, I'm just feeling that way, that I'm onto something bigger. But I am working on myself and kind of opening my eyes to other opportunities however they come. So, yeah, there'll be something. I don't know what it is.

My current goal is, if I could get a firm in each area of the country, I didn't like to fly before, but I would like to see parts of the country that I've never seen. And I think it would be fun to see them through the eyes of firms that live there. So that is my thing. I have a few cities that I have yet to visit that I'd like to. So short-term goal.

Michael: So at a personal level for you, this is a podcast about success, and one of the things we always talk about is just the word success means different things to different people, different things to us as we go through all these iterations of building businesses and then right-sizing businesses. So as you look at this now for yourself going forward, like, how do you define and think about success for yourself?

Jennifer: Now I would say if my mind is calm, I have reached my success point. I'm constantly still struggling with helping so many others and solving their problems that I never feel calm. I know that sounds like very touchy-feely. I don't know how else to say it because I'm going through this kind of epiphany myself. The calm, like, I'm on the right path, I'm doing the right by others, and good things come my way. Like, I've never been the type, I'm a Type A crazy, to sit back and let things come to me, I'm always going after it because I was brought up that way. It was just how my brother, sister, and I were all brought up that way. And so I think success will be when I start to see that things come my way without me scrambling and running toward it all the time. That'll be success.

Michael: Well, very cool. I hope...

Jennifer: I hope it happens.

Michael: Yeah, I hope the path of finding...

Jennifer: So far it is. So far I'm getting a taste of it.

Michael: Finding your calm is a pretty good starting point for that journey, right? It's the cruel irony of most business development growth. Like, when you finally get to that comfortable point and everything is calm and it's going really well, that's when cool new opportunities come along and mess all of it up again but in a good way.

Jennifer: But in a good way, right? That was meant to be. And you want to be in those new opportunities because at that point you can be. And that's the difference. I think we always have new opportunities in front of us and we don't see them because we're in this, like, whirlwind of reaching and grabbing and thinking we need to do this and read an article, "Why am I not doing that? He's doing this." I think the calm is when you really hit your mark. And, so I'm told we do that in the late 40s, early 50s. I'm not sure. But I also think the calm is when you hit your mark and you have the bigger impact. And I'm all about that for the consumer. Like, that's my ultimate goal.

Michael: Amen. And I can't wait to see where your calm takes you next.

Jennifer: Neither can I. But I have to be patient like you.

Michael: Yes.

Jennifer: Yes.

Michael: Well, thank you for joining us and sharing your journey through all of it. I appreciate your willingness to share.

Jennifer: No, I appreciate you. You know that.

Michael: Well, thank you.