Between Now and Success

Guest:  Amit Dogra , President and COO of tru Independence. tru offers an open architecture platform that provides a full suite of services that advisors need to manage and grow their business effectively. In a Nutshell:  In 2022,  I crunched the numbers from Charles Schwab's 2022 RIA Benchmarking Study  and spotted an alarming trend: net organic revenue growth is almost non-existent in our indust...

Guest: Leslie Y. Tabor, Director of Business Consulting and Education at Charles Schwab Advisor Services. In a Nutshell: Most successful RIA leaders have been very intentional about hiring top talent in this competitive jobs market. But the best of the best are now being just as intentional about diversifying their talent to create a more dynamic culture capable of delivering more value to clients...

Guest: Gayle Colman, Certified Financial Planner®, Master Integral Coach®, and author of the new book The Body of Money. In a Nutshell: Financial decisions are often framed as a tug of war between the head and the heart. But by paying attention to how the whole body expresses feelings around money, advisors can guide clients past their fears and towards a fulfilling sense of sufficiency and inner...

Guest: Terry Foxworth CFP®, CLU, and his daughter, Morgan. Terry is the Managing Partner at Foxworth Advisors in Asheville, NC. Morgan is a student-athlete at Oregon State University where she is a member of the women's rowing team. In a Nutshell: To quote Terry's firm, "Life's an adventure. Plan for it." The TransAmerica biking adventure that Terry and Morgan planned (more or less) for Morgan's l...

Guest: Scott Holsopple, the Chief Growth Officer at Hightower, one of the top RIA firms in the country with well over $100 billion in assets under management. In a Nutshell: How do you think about your personal and professional growth?

Guest: Ainslie Simmonds, President of Pershing X. In a Nutshell: For decades, technology has promised productivity boosts that would shorten work weeks and increase leisure time. But despite all the computing power at the heart of a modern financial services tech stack, I don't think the typical advisor is working any less than he or she was 10 years ago. Perhaps more importantly, I don't think te...

Like Miracle Mile Advisors, the path from where your firm is today to where you want it to be tomorrow is not a straight line up and to the right. You'll face fork-in-the-road moments that will define you and your firm. Antonia Burchman shares how Miracle Mile Advisors responded to their pivot points and paints a path forward for advisory firm leaders who want to grow and deliver a great client ex...

Pam Perskie is the Founder and CEO of Seven Mile Advisory, a multi-family office that works with clients who have significant financial complexity, including business owners, private equity professionals, real estate investors and operators, professional athletes, and entertainers. Pam and I discussed how a successful multi-family office operates, the profile of clients, how her firm charges for i...

Andrew Kaye-Skinner is a Senior Product Trainer for Advisor Group, which is one of the country's largest independent broker dealers. Andrew and I discussed how he taps into his theater and linguistics background to deliver effective training to financial advisors. We also touch on some adult learning theory topics that will help you get your message across whether you're training your team of advi...

Michael Fosnaugh is a Chicago-based Senior Managing Director and Co-Head of the Flagship Fund at Vista Equity Partners (Vista). Vista has over $95 billion AUM and over 20 years of experience investing exclusively in enterprise software. I talked to Michael about the opportunity in private equity and how he and his team analyze and invest in the B2B software market.

Miguel Sosa is a research and product strategist at Bluerock Capital Markets, which has $15 billion in AUM. At the 2022 CAIS Alternative Investment Summit in Beverly Hills, Miguel and I discussed a paper he wrote on Advanced Diversification, where he used modern portfolio theory to deconstruct the three elements of diversification to quantify the benefits of each of those elements. We then discuss...

John Christmas is Co-Head of Business Development and Investor Relations at HPS Investment Partners, a global investment firm with approximately $92 billion in AUM as of September 2022.   John and I talked about how even as interest rates rise, private credit could provide a reasonable ROI with moderate volatility for clients looking beyond the traditional components of the 40 in the 60/40 portfol...

Since 2014, I've published 678 podcasts and the vast majority were interview shows. In 2022, I published 45 shows. Here are 10 ideas from my top podcasts of 2022 that particularly resonated with me and my audience (in chronological order). You'll hear ideas from: Lisa Salivi Denise Shull Scott Keller and Vik Malhotra Scott Hanson Julia Boorstin Carrie Melissa Jones Lynne Twist Jess Bost Dr. Presto...

For the eighth time, I begin the New Year with 3 carefully chosen words meant to remind, motivate, and guide me on my road to making the New Year my best year yet. It's called the My 3 Words exercise. My 3 words are printed at the top of my Daily Outcomes sheet (my prioritized to-do list) so I see them multiple times a day. By being thoughtful when I identify my 3 words and then reviewing them on...

Michael Bradley founded Bradley Wealth in 2002. Today the firm offers high-touch financial planning and alternative investments to high-net-worth clientele. Michael and I have known each other since my days at Peak Advisor Alliance, and I was excited to catch up with him at the 2022 CAIS Alternative Investment Summit in Beverly Hills. We talked about his evolution from being a corporate executive...

There's no one predefined path that will lead us through the challenges and heartbreaks that we all face in life. Often times the best that we can do is learn to accept and explore our emotions while remaining open to the opportunities in front of us. That willingness to explore and grow can help us heal, and help us redefine who we are going forward. In today's adventure episode, I talk to Jess B...

Shannon Larson is the Senior Vice President, Platform Management and Product Development at Advisor Group, the nation's largest network of independent financial advisors.  I spoke with Shannon at the 2022 CAIS Alternative Investment Summit in Beverly Hills about how she and her team manage a shared service model, as well as how alternative investment products are helping their advisors offer more...

David Copeland is a principal and co-founder of Strategic Wealth Partners, an RIA firm with approximately $3.7 billion in assets under advisement as of December 31, 2021. He founded Strategic Wealth Partners in 2008 after serving as Senior Managing Director with Mesirow Financial for 21 years. He has also held investment positions with Merrill Lynch and commercial banking positions with Harris Ban...

You don't reach the summit of 14,000 foot mountains more than 150 times without learning a few things along the way about life, health, and adventure. In today's adventure episode, I talk to financial pros Skip Schweiss and Scott MacKillop. Between them, they've climbed mountains all over the world and lived a life of adventure while building thriving careers as executives in financial services. I...

Ben Harrison is the Co-Head, Wealth Solutions at BNY Mellon | Pershing, one of the industry's largest custodians. I sat down with Ben at the CAIS Alternative Investment Summit in Beverly Hills, CA and we discussed the biggest challenges and opportunities facing financial advisors as well as his thoughts on what's happening in the alternative investment space.

In this series of podcasts, I'm going to talk to financial professionals about their lives outside of the office: the passions, hobbies, experiences, challenges, and accomplishments that have influenced who they are and how they think about success and fulfillment. The first episode with Ben Jones explores his trip down The Great Divide Mountain Bike Route, a 2,808 mile adventure from Banff in Alb...

Should you allocate to alternative investments? For decades,  advisors to the wealthiest strata of investors  offered offered access to investments beyond the traditional stocks, bonds, and real estate. And for decades, there were significant barriers to entry in the alternative space that made it difficult for independent advisors to access the best money managers in the alt space. That's now cha...

Podcasting is a wonderful way to showcase the talents, insights, and creativity of the amazing people that populate our world. In that spirit, I'm thrilled to announce two special series of episodes that I'm launching this fall. The first series of episodes is in partnership with CAIS, the leading alternative investment platform for financial advisors. To explain what we're doing, I asked industry...

Today's guest is Brent Kessel. Brent is co-founder of Abacus Wealth Partners, which has more than 50 employees and more than $2 billion in assets under management. (Editor's note: as of the date of this repost, September 2022, Abacus has about $3.5 billion in assets under management.) About ten years ago I was reading a Buddhist magazine and did a double-take when I saw an ad for a financial advis...

My guest today, Dr. Eliott Berkman, is a tenured Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Oregon, where he directs the Social and Effective Neuroscience Laboratory and conducts field-leading, federally-funded research on goals, motivation, and behavior change. He's also the Associate Director of the Center for Translational Neuroscience, and an author who writes about psychology and...