[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Taylor Pancratz, and this is behind the breakaway. Together with my co host, Jason Barber, this show takes you behind the scenes of leaving your captive broker dealer firm and explores the world of RIa independence.
[00:00:20] Speaker B: All opinions expressed on the podcast by the hosts and guests are solely own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of uptick partners. This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not legal advice and should not be relied upon as a basis for any decisions.
[00:00:41] Speaker A: All right, so welcome back to the behind the Breakaway podcast. We're in the studio. We got myself, Taylor, and Jason, and nobody on the ones and twos, so we're just going to do it live.
[00:00:54] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:00:55] Speaker A: But wanted to talk today about Transition day, the actual day that we transitioned and left Edward Jones and went and started our own RIA and what that looked like. Yep.
[00:01:09] Speaker B: So the three of us met in the parking lot before that, and kind of all got there roughly at the same time and met out in the parking lot, said a prayer, and just kind of, it was literally like, from that moment, met in the parking lot, said a prayer, and walked inside. And then we all sort know we had three office staff, and so Taylor, Steve, and Jason, the three of us, we all just split up and kind of each talk to one person in the office. And again, I think it's worth emphasizing to honor our contract terms and to not violate that in any way. And we certainly did a really good job. As difficult it was, probably the most difficult thing was not telling our staff or our teammates, our family. It feels like to, in some cases, literally our mean. Your mother worked in the office. My aunt Steve's sister works with us in the office, and she didn't know that this was happening. And so I think that was another thing, too, that was very. Just kind of made the whole thing just that much more difficult is that these are not just staff that we don't care about. Right. I mean, these are really important people that had a lot of vested time and energy and blood, sweat, and tears, for lack of a better word, in helping to build this business.
Sometimes it maybe seemed a little bit unfair that they didn't have the opportunity to know before they did, but this was obviously decisions that were bigger than just us.
We all split up anyways.
[00:03:16] Speaker A: Yeah. So 10:00 let's kind of back up. So we all got to the office at 10:00 and the staff has already been there since eight. So we walked in, we didn't know.
[00:03:29] Speaker B: If they were going to be on the phone or not.
[00:03:31] Speaker A: Right. We all walked in and decided each advisor would talk to one of the staff members and then tell them what was going on, and then let them say whatever they're going to say.
Whatever happens after that, all you can do is just tell them what's about to happen or what you're doing, and then let them make a decision for themselves.
[00:03:55] Speaker B: And so probably one of the most difficult things in the whole process was telling the staff having that very emotional conversation.
A lot of tears were shed candidly in that whole process because both from me personally, in terms of just the anxiety that I felt of just the whole weight of the entire day and the weight of the conversation and the uncertainty of what their decision was going to be, because I knew that I couldn't ask them to come with, and yet I knew that we needed them and we wanted them to come with, but I couldn't ask them or encourage them to make that decision. It had to be their own decision. And so there was a lot of tears shed by me. There was a lot of tears shed by the staff. Just not so much sad tears, but just stress and anxiety and uncertainty and just change, so much change happening kind of all at the same time.
But it didn't take long for that whole, that was probably, I'm not sure when we were done with that. Probably somewhere between 1015 and 1030, right? Or somewhere there. And about, you think that was probably about, right?
[00:05:17] Speaker A: Yeah, 1015, 1030. And then basically from there, you are prepping your resignation letter, sending it off.
[00:05:27] Speaker B: Which that was drafted by our attorneys.
[00:05:29] Speaker A: Right?
[00:05:29] Speaker B: So you don't draft your own resignation letter, your attorneys will draft you a resignation letter.
We didn't know even prior to short, maybe, I don't know when that was. A few days before.
Where do you actually even send this resignation letter?
How do you even do that?
In our case, and your situation, of course, may be different, but in our case, that was emailed to our regional leader. In our case.
Now, one other thing that in our case, we attempted to make the phone call directly to the regional leader in addition to sending a letter or sending an email with our resignation letter attached.
Unfortunately, we were not able to connect. I think that maybe in our situation, our regional leader was busy in a meeting or just was otherwise unavailable, but that was our sort of first objective, was to relay that information verbally in addition to sending the letter. But when we were not able to connect with her verbally, then we just sent the email.
And that happened, I think, right at around noon or somewhere around that time. Frame. So there was an hour and a half there where a lot of it was very important to us, for obvious reasons, that we were not taking any client information with us. We're not taking any client data. We're not taking anything that even remotely looks like it could be associated with client data, because we knew that in our case, that the firm and the firm leadership would be coming into the office to evaluate. And we were very interested in not again, abiding by the terms of our contract, abiding by all of the client information, trade secrets, all that stuff. We wanted to make sure, I think, that you and I had agreed whenever we left that we wanted it to look like we had just been raptured, basically, right. That it was just like, we're leaving everything here. We're not taking anything with us. All of our furniture stayed. In our case, all of our furniture stayed, of course, all the client files, all the client paperwork, everything stayed. Nothing came with us. And we just walked out.
[00:08:02] Speaker A: Yeah, walked out and then showed up at the other office, the new office, and we walked in and our transition team was here, which was a great help. They were here. They were ready for us to start making phone calls. Once the certain regulatory things have to happen for you to be able to do that, you have to officially resign.
The RA has to get created and created, et cetera, things like this. So there was a couple of hours where it was recommended by the attorneys that we don't make phone calls.
[00:08:48] Speaker B: Well, we had to start all of our tech.
That's another thing about one of the things that you just don't think about. What all goes into having to start an RIA from the ground up and why uptick partners is going to deliver so much value to the partners that want to join us. You think about just creating your email address.
Could we have created our emails ahead of the actual resignation? Probably. Would we have gotten in legal trouble for that? Probably not. But at the end of the day, when you are so serious about trying to abide by the terms of your agreement, you don't want to take any chances. You want it to be perfect.
So literally, you break away. You go over to this other building. You're trying to get your website launched. You're trying to send notices to the PR people to launch the news stories.
You're trying to create your email addresses with this domain names and get your Microsoft Office subscriptions going, get your calendar set up, get just everything going.
Meanwhile, your blood pressure is at all time highs. Right?
Anxiety level.
[00:10:11] Speaker A: I think it's very important that for the person thinking about starting launching their own RAA, like we did, just the minutiae details of that right there where you can't necessarily have an email exist that is
[email protected] that technically cannot exist until you've left your firm.
[00:10:39] Speaker B: You can't have an inbox email that is a timestamp associated with it. That is prior to your resignation timestamp. Right.
[00:10:48] Speaker A: Why is that? Because they're going to wonder, they're going to inquire, were you competing with us while you were still employed by us? That's going to be a problem. And so if they ever have to start peeling the onion back and looking at some of the details, if they ever start to get a whiff that maybe you didn't do this by the book, that's going to be an issue where they're going to say, oh, this is some evidence that you didn't play this by the book. So maybe if you didn't do this, maybe you didn't do some other things by the book. Right? And so it starts to kind of unravel. And so you need to that right there, because guess what? You have to have an email to do anything, right? To set up any of your technology, you have to have a domain, an email. And if you can't have that until you break away and actually leave that day, you get this flood of tech that you have to enable and start up and get the subscriptions and get all that stuff integrated and tied in while you're sitting here and you just quit and you're like, what I should be focusing on is remembering who was a client.
[00:11:58] Speaker B: Exactly.
Not trying to set my email up.
[00:12:00] Speaker A: Not trying to set calendly integrations and docusign integrations so that it all works.
[00:12:06] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:12:07] Speaker A: That's something that if you plug in to uptake partners, all that stuff can get set up ahead of time in terms of the integrate, all the integrations of things are already set up.
[00:12:20] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:12:21] Speaker A: So all we have to do is create the email the day you leave. But everything's already working.
[00:12:27] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:12:28] Speaker A: You don't have to rebuild all the tech stack from scratch.
[00:12:30] Speaker B: Yeah. And then find out that you hate your tech stack that you thought you were not going to. That's another conversation for another day. But just the difficulty that goes along with that. So let's talk a little bit about remembering your clients names and kind of how you actually go about trying to reach out to folks when this is all so fresh and you're kind of in this erase, for lack of a better term, to reach the people, reach your clients before they, or as soon as possible, rather right. Before they hear it elsewhere.
[00:13:11] Speaker A: Right. You want them to hear it from you, preferably, and not from the person that their account got handed to, and hear it from them because you never know what they're going to say.
Unfortunately, in our scenario, and I think a lot of people's scenarios, I think they'll take their staff and their staff is going to help remember those people's names a lot.
I know that most people would agree that you can remember a lot of clients if you had to. You can remember a lot of people's names. I mean, you're going to remember at least 100 people's names that are clients. And then your staff is going to remember probably even more names because they're more involved. They're more involved and more familiar with people that maybe aren't in your top people.
That's why it's also critical that your staff comes with you, if possible, is because they know a lot of people's names. They know a lot more than you will, for sure.
[00:14:21] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. So you remember everybody's names, you're writing them down. And this is all happening kind of in that along with the technology and everything else that's going on. In our case, during that call it two hour window where you can't really legally call people because your licenses and firm and all these different things haven't officially been established. But during that period of time, the number one objective is we need to locate these people's contact information. We need to locate their phone number, preferably, because, again, not able to bring that information with us after the fact.
You ever wonder how you get all these political text messages and political phone calls, et cetera? All this information is all out there in the public.
So, you know, whitepages.com, I'm trying to remember all the different ones that exist out there.
[00:15:24] Speaker A: There's like three or four out there.
[00:15:27] Speaker B: That you can pay a subscription.
Uh, and you're able to say, hey, search Jason Barber in Nakadoches, Texas. And you would be amazed at the level of information and level of detail that exists out there in the public domain. It's actually kind of scary.
[00:15:49] Speaker A: They know who you're connected to. They know your family members. And so that's a great thing for this scenario because you're typing in Bob Smith and then you realize, oh, look, there's his wife's name, there's his cousin, cousin, brother in law, brother, daughter, I mean, the amount of information that's out there, if you can just remember one person's name, and it's like the spider web effect.
[00:16:12] Speaker B: It's got every cell phone number you've ever had, every phone number, work phone number, where you work, all the stuff is there.
[00:16:19] Speaker A: So you see a phone number, you don't know if it's the right one, the wrong one, et cetera. You just call it, and you hope that that's the right number. And if it's not, you dial the next one.
And it's a huge amount.
The most work you'll ever do is moving your book when you can't take client data.
It's wild.
[00:16:45] Speaker B: It is wild, and it's unfortunate that it has to be that way, but it makes sense why it is.
[00:16:52] Speaker A: So then you document how you found that person's information.
[00:16:57] Speaker B: You're printing off, hey, I found it. At this time, this page, this URL, here's where I found it, because it's very important that it be documented that I located this information in the publicly available data, that we didn't take this information with us from Edward Jones.
[00:17:15] Speaker A: Yeah. And to do that, it takes time. Yeah, it takes time.
[00:17:20] Speaker B: Meanwhile, what's happening as this is all. As you're doing all of this searching, you're able to probably have, what, a day or maybe two days where you're able to make your first phone calls, where clients perhaps have not heard yet the news. And so that's nice, but it isn't long before what happens is that your book of business ends up getting split up and divided out amongst a variety of other competitors.
[00:17:57] Speaker A: Right.
[00:17:59] Speaker B: And then the problem, of course, lies in that you may have 300, 400 phone numbers or people that you're trying to reach by yourself.
And the competitors, they may be given 50 names to call, and they're given.
[00:18:19] Speaker A: Their actual phone number, and they're given.
[00:18:21] Speaker B: Their actual phone number and their actual email address and their actual address.
[00:18:24] Speaker A: And they can contact them more than one time.
Yeah, we're only able to call that person one time. So you don't leave a voicemail, because if you leave a voicemail, that's your one phone call. You don't leave a voicemail if you didn't get a hold of them, you hope that's their number, and you call them back.
[00:18:46] Speaker B: Much slower.
[00:18:47] Speaker A: It's a much slower thing, which is why it's very important that you pick your transition day correctly. Right. You want to leave.
If you had your pick, you'd want to leave on a long weekend.
He's on, on Friday. You've got Saturday, Sunday and Monday, hopefully before they really are understanding that you've actually left and they've split your book up and all. And especially if there's only a few times a year that you maybe would leave Jones just based on compensation. And typically those times are right around when tap trips are going on. And so you might have the ability to, if you get lucky, it's possible that there's some advisors in your town that are going to be getting your book, but they're on vacation. They're not even in the country or they're not at home. And so that can buy you some time.
[00:19:44] Speaker B: But in our case, I think we literally had advisors calling clients from, they were on the other side of the earth.
[00:19:54] Speaker A: It's a thing.
[00:19:54] Speaker B: It helps, but it's definitely.
[00:19:56] Speaker A: But if you can ruin their vacation.
[00:20:00] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
[00:20:03] Speaker A: If they're supposed to be on a vacation and instead they're in the hotel room calling, that could be fun.
You're setting everything up until you can actually start calling people. And then you start calling people and you're calling people from, let's say in our case, about 02:00 or so, two or 03:00 until you're maybe seven or 08:00 whenever you're not allowed to call people anymore, but you're just smiling and dialing and letting people know. The only thing you're saying on those phone calls is letting them know where you went, that you're no longer at Edward Jones, you're no longer at your.
[00:20:51] Speaker B: Firm, and you're now here's my phone number. Here's how you get in touch with me because I can't call you again.
[00:20:57] Speaker A: Right.
[00:20:57] Speaker B: This is my one phone call from jail.
[00:20:59] Speaker A: Right. So this is how you get in touch with me because that's all you're.
[00:21:05] Speaker B: Legally allowed to tell them is you're making an announcement.
[00:21:09] Speaker A: It's an announcement, but you have to do it. Right. You can't solicit them because they're going to get a phone call from the advisor that got assigned their account and for sure that advisor is going to ask them if they have heard the news.
[00:21:26] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:21:27] Speaker A: Right. And they're going to go, yes or no. Oh, yes. What'd he say? Right. And you don't want that client to sit there and go on a ten minute talk about.
[00:21:36] Speaker B: They will tell them.
[00:21:37] Speaker A: Yeah. They'll say exactly what you told them.
[00:21:40] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:21:40] Speaker A: Because they don't know that what you're allowed to say.
[00:21:43] Speaker B: Exactly say on phone call another really important reason why you don't tell your clients ahead of your breakaway. Right?
[00:21:49] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:21:50] Speaker B: Because the prior firm will talk to your clients, and they will ask them, when did you find out about this? When did you know? Right. Did you know that this was going to happen?
[00:22:00] Speaker A: Yes.
1 million%.
And then you're going to have the advisor that calls your client and tells just outright lies about what happened. Oh, they were fired. Oh, they skipped town. They're dead. These are all things that are going to be said about you. And so it's just important to understand that whatever friendships that you thought existed, there'll be some people that maybe some advisors that get some of your clients that they'll do the right thing. And, I mean, in my mind, I'm thinking of one where I think they called the client and said something to the effect of, just want to let you know that I've been assigned your advisor. In the meantime, if you need anything, this is how you contact me. This is who I am.
And then left it at that.
[00:23:00] Speaker B: Right, which is perfectly fine.
[00:23:03] Speaker A: Perfectly fine. You're given this client. I'm not expecting you to be like, well, this is how you get a hold of your old advisor. Why don't you go ahead and leave?
But as opposed to what was the majority of the phone calls were, oh, man. Well, your money's safe here.
We don't know what happened to them, but they're gone. But your money is safe.
[00:23:23] Speaker B: They were overcharging.
[00:23:24] Speaker A: They were overcharging you, and they're being investigated. They're being looked into. Like, that's all we can say.
Very.
[00:23:34] Speaker B: So and so is about to retire.
[00:23:36] Speaker A: Casting a lot of doubt and really just kind of throwing mud at your reputation and the things that the relationship that you have with that client to try to form a wedge.
[00:23:50] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's the best way to think about it, is that the reason why we brought 90% of our business is because we have deep, meaningful, long lasting relationships with our clients.
But the competition, because of greed, human nature, whatever you want to call it, they are going to do whatever they can possibly do to try to drive a wedge between that relationship, in that relationship that you have. And thankfully, the majority of the time that your client is going to see through that. The majority of the time. But occasionally they won't, or it'll take them a long time to understand that. And that's really frustrating and very surprising and disappointing, probably. I think you and I agree. One of the biggest surprises in the whole thing was just how greed affects people and makes people do things that you would think that they wouldn't do. But it's just kind of, again, going into it for the next advisor. I think if you just understand this and understand the reality of that, that makes it a lot less difficult to deal with. I think for us, it was just because of the fact that it was a surprise.
It's like if we would have known that going into it, that like, hey, these people that we've known for 30 years are going to stab us in the back. The people that you see them at church on Sunday, and then they stab you in the back 12 hours later.
[00:25:27] Speaker A: Or they just call you. Yeah, they're like shaking your hand at church, oh, that's so great. So excited for you. That's so great. And then they'll call your client the next day and be like, oh, they're overcharging you. They're ripping you off.
[00:25:37] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:25:37] Speaker A: It's wild. Yeah, it really is wild. What's another thing to keep in mind and that it's important to just kind of keep a perspective about, is that it's not going to be a fair fight.
You are, by nature, you are trying to move your book with your hands tied behind your back, and you've got the previous firm, in our case, Edward Jones, is out there with no gloves on. Right. And if you feel like, oh, what I'm going to do is I'm going to try to even the fight and I'll take client data or I need to do something because they're not fighting fair. So I'm not going to fight fair. Well, what ends up happening is that Edward Jones has a lot more money than you do. They have a lot more money to hire really good attorneys to bury you in Tros and paperwork and all these things. Meanwhile, their advisors are out there doing some things that, in my opinion, are very gray areas in terms of whether you're even allowed to do.
[00:26:49] Speaker B: You have to stay above that.
[00:26:50] Speaker A: You have to stay above that. Exactly. That's the best way to say it is you have to stay above that approach because they're going to do that because they can, because they've got the lawyers to defend it. You can't because they're going to bury you in Tros if you even think about doing something that they're doing. So it's just this, you have to understand going into it that it's an unfair fight. You're going to feel the whole time that they're disparaging you, that they're doing things unethical. And that certainly this can't be right.
There's got to be some justice. And it's like, no, the reality is it's not fair. It's not fair. It's not going to be fair.
[00:27:32] Speaker B: The fair is in October.
[00:27:34] Speaker A: Fair is in October. That's right. It's not going to be fair. But the reality is what you have in your corner is the relationship with the client, and that's something that they don't have. So they have to do it a different way. They have to create all these other tactics. The only tactic that you have is your relationship. Your relationship. And that happens to be the strongest.
[00:27:56] Speaker B: And that's all that you need.
[00:27:57] Speaker A: Right.
[00:27:57] Speaker B: That's all you need ultimately, at the end of the day. And so thankfully, we're very thankful that we didn't have any kind of major legal issues. We didn't get a Tro, we didn't get into a lawsuit, and yet we were still able to have a lot of success because ultimately, at the end of the day, clients decide where they want to do business and they want to do business with people that they have a relationship with.
[00:28:22] Speaker A: Well, what's something that is a red flag? A red flag would be you move a tremendous amount of your assets in the first week.
[00:28:32] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:28:33] Speaker A: Why is that a red flag? Because how could you have possibly found all these people's names, phone numbers, contacted them, be able to even create the infrastructure to even move that much money in such a short amount of time that it starts to throw off red flags? Because anybody that's done it goes, you can't do. That's not possible. So you might go, that's another thing that you just have to be. It's like part of it. It's going to be a slow, methodical thing and to do it right, but doing it right is actually slow as smooth and smooth as fast type thing that's going to cause you to not get this big lawsuit levied against you is you're doing it the right way and it happens to be slow, but fast is not.
[00:29:23] Speaker B: You don't want to do fast.
[00:29:24] Speaker A: Fast is going to raise red flags, and you're going to go real fast for a couple of days, and then you're going to get stopped.
[00:29:32] Speaker B: Shut down. Yeah, exactly.
I was even thinking, too, talking about the non solicit letter and that whole process that we went through where we had all of our. Any client, the client is on the phone with you and they say, taylor, I want you to manage my money. I want to move my accounts to you, then the next step is before you really do anything else, before you gather any of their information, certainly before you open up an account, before you've done anything, the client needs to sign what we call a non solicit letter, which is a letter that is just basically, in no uncertain terms, them signing them signing a letter that an attorney has drafted, that just basically says that that's their decision to come and based on our history and has nothing to do with us soliciting them to move their business to us. And so that also, again, just kind of another one of those difficult things when you think about how slow things move. Right.
It's one of those things, too, where it's like, we never had to actually use that letter.
Nobody ever actually accused us of soliciting clients, so we didn't need that. But I'd rather be safe than sorry. And at the end of the day, you need to do that, and you need to do that in that particular order, because that ultimately is what protects you. And to your point about your prior firm probably has a lot more money than you, and they can make life difficult just because they want to.
That was part of the process, which also slows things down a lot. But we felt like was really important and an important thing that helped us to reach our objectives, but most importantly, to do it without ending up in a courtroom. And so we thought that was good advice, good legal advice in our case that we were given.
[00:31:50] Speaker A: Obviously, you'll talk to an attorney before you transition. They might give you totally different advice. This is just what we did.
[00:31:55] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:31:55] Speaker A: So this is by no means advice.
[00:31:58] Speaker B: It's just our process.
[00:32:00] Speaker A: But the idea behind uptick partners is that we want to make your transition as turnkey as possible. We want it to be what we would have preferred and wanted had we had someplace that knew how to break away from a captive broker dealer in a way that was efficient and could set up all of the things that you need to have set up beforehand for an RAA, have that already set up so that you can just plug right in, and you don't have to be worried about the tech stack and integrating. All you have to do is leave your office, go to your new office, and start writing down your clients names that you can remember, and start trying to find their phone numbers on the Internet.
That's what you're worried about. Let us let uptick worry about the entire transition operation. As far as getting your real estate set up on the front end, getting your, helping you get your business entity set up on the front end, connecting you with attorneys, connecting you with the marketing team that's going to be established, your brand, and establish your website and talk to the PR team so that they're ready to launch the PR campaign. So that when you leave a few days later, or that day, preferably, your clients are seeing that you've left from a pr campaign that you're putting out, so that they know that this is legit. Right.
[00:33:43] Speaker B: When they google you, they need to see something.
[00:33:45] Speaker A: They google you, they go to your website, it's like, oh, this is a legit thing. Oh, look, there's a news article about this, that it feels good, that it feels legit. And that goes a long ways for people that when you're just able to tell them what's happening and they get off the phone and they google that it needs to show up.
[00:34:07] Speaker B: And that doesn't just happen. No, it doesn't just happen. People think somehow that that just happens. No, there is effort involved in making that happen.
[00:34:16] Speaker A: Yeah. 100%. And so those are the things that you've got to make sure get set up weeks and months ahead of time.
But the problem is, it's really hard to balance that whole thing covertly while you're.
[00:34:34] Speaker B: And you're still trying to honor the terms of your existing contract, which you can't compete. And so you need to have a team of people helping you do this. Right.
[00:34:47] Speaker A: 100%. So there's tremendous level. I mean, you'll see all the time. You'll see people break away from their firm. There won't be a single news story. There won't be a website. You google them, they'll still be working for their previous firm. It's crazy. If I was a client and got told that my advisor just left, and I google their name and I don't see a new website, I don't see anything about it. You have to wonder how serious this actually is.
[00:35:21] Speaker B: Yeah. Or if I google them and actually, not only do they not have a website, but the website from them at their old employer is still up.
[00:35:30] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:35:30] Speaker B: Okay. It's like, that's the only thing that I actually see.
[00:35:34] Speaker A: Doesn't give me a boat of confidence that.
[00:35:37] Speaker B: Well, what it makes you think is it makes you think something went wrong.
[00:35:39] Speaker A: They got fired. Yeah.
[00:35:41] Speaker B: Right.
[00:35:41] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:35:41] Speaker B: I mean, it makes you think, like, this was.
[00:35:43] Speaker A: Why else would the website not be ready?
[00:35:45] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:35:45] Speaker A: They got fired before they could launch it.
[00:35:48] Speaker B: Yeah. Or at least that would be what you would speculate.
[00:35:51] Speaker A: That's reasonable.
[00:35:53] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
So that's where it's just like all that stuff. It matters. The minutiae details, it matters.
And that's what we want to, and we aspire to help people to do that.
[00:36:07] Speaker A: Yeah, you need boots on the ground.
You need a team of people.
[00:36:12] Speaker B: I think about even our transition people, as great as they were, in a lot of ways, they had never actually opened up accounts at our particular custodian that we were working with. And the folks that were there from the custodian, they are just there, for lack of a better term, to kind of buy you some coffee and buy you dinner and pat you on the back and maybe answer a periodic question, et cetera. And they're very nice folks, but they're not there to actually get work done.
Right?
[00:36:45] Speaker A: They're not allowed to. Yeah, they're not allowed to do that. And so there's this giant chasm between you leave your firm, you don't know how to open up accounts. You don't even know the paperwork that's required to open an account. Then you've got the custodian that can tell you the paperwork that's required, but can't do it.
What you needed is this transition team.
[00:37:13] Speaker B: You need a SEAL team six that knows how.
[00:37:17] Speaker A: That knows how to open up accounts at your custodian, knows the forms that you need and has done it thousands and thousands of times before, so that you don't have to be trying to teach yourself or, God forbid, your staff that just quit and is in reeling from them, just finding out that they've quit their job to go into the next office and go, oh, now I'm going to learn a whole new system. That's not what you should be expecting your staff to do. You should be expecting your staff to just sit back and start writing down people's names that they remember while you're calling the people, and then you're passing that information off to your SEAL team six, to your transition team that's taking that information and opening up accounts and getting that. So there's a tremendous level of, like, you can't expect your staff to be learning a whole new system in the first two, three weeks. It just isn't realistic. And so what you need is you need somebody that's there that knows how to do all this stuff, because the custodian won't. They will not do it. They're not allowed to put in people's information into the system. You need somebody that is. That works for you, and you need a transition team. And that's something that we are very passionate about is having boots on the ground helping you actually open up accounts, helping you actually transition, not just showing you what forms to fill out, actually opening. Filling out the forms, opening the accounts for you, helping you, being an extension of your team as if you'd been with that custodian for years. So that's something that you can't even. I mean, the price tag on that is. It's really hard to find good transition. People that know, they'll tell you that they know you're. Oh, yeah, I know your firm. I can do that. It's another thing to.
[00:39:22] Speaker B: Well, the question really is. Yeah, I mean, the question is, have you actually signed a resignation letter? Have you actually done it?
Or do you just talk about it? You've seen other people do it, et cetera. It's like there's just something about that, that at the end of the day, what you want ultimately, if you're going to do this, is you would want, or maybe said differently, what we would have wanted. Okay. And we would have paid a lot of money to have. I don't even know if there is a dollar amount that you could assign to the value of. If we would have had other people who were there boots on the ground on the day we resigned to say, this is how we did it. This is exactly the process. This is the paperwork. And there were even people there that were administrative people that used to be at our prior firm that can say, hey, I used to be in this role. This is now my new role. Let me help you just build confidence that this is a good decision.
[00:40:25] Speaker A: You speak your old firm's language to the staff so you can go, this is how you do. Remember how you used to do it like that. This is how you do it in the new world.
[00:40:36] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:40:37] Speaker A: That's something that you can't google that, right?
[00:40:40] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
[00:40:41] Speaker A: That's important for people to understand that there's a tremendous level of. And what that does is that lets you leverage our expertise and our experience and our team so that you don't have to be worried about, like, how much more time does that buy you for talking to your clients? And you know that when you get off the phone with that client and they say yes, that they're going to have a good experience that you're not going to have, as we like to say, you have to go on an apology tour after you talk to that client and they don't get an email with the non solicit letter. It just doesn't happen because people don't even know how to do your. Your staff has never used docusign, right? They don't even know how to log in.
[00:41:29] Speaker B: Yeah, we just created it five minutes ago.
[00:41:32] Speaker A: Right. Exactly.
[00:41:34] Speaker B: What's the password? I don't even know who created it. I don't know what the password is.
[00:41:37] Speaker A: What's the process? What's the flow of, when I get off the phone with this client, who do I tell that they are good to go? And what happens next?
[00:41:45] Speaker B: You remember in our case how we went months and didn't even have wealth management agreements get signed because we didn't even know that. Oh, that's something that you actually do at the beginning in the account opening part.
[00:41:59] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:42:00] Speaker B: Stuff like that where came to my mind.
[00:42:02] Speaker A: Stuff like that where you're just going, look, there's got to be somebody out there because the reality is there's ibds that you can transition to and they'll tell you that they'll help you move your book and they have people that will come in, but at the end of the day, you're paying so much money over the next five and ten years in terms of actual money and compliance headache and technology limitations. For what? For that peace of mind that you're like, oh, well, this is what people leave and they go to the IBD channel.
The reality is, if you can get to the full RIa channel and get the transition, a better transition than the people get when they go from the captive broker dealer to the IBD channel, you get a better, more custom kind of white glove experience transitioning to full not. Why would you not take advantage of that? Because you've got so much more service, especially when you're even talking to clients. I bet you, we probably look at this, I bet you have more success moving clients to the RAA channel. I bet more people follow you to the RAa channel than they do when you move your book to the IBD channel.
Because when you're talking to people, you're able to sell them on this vision of what you're now able to provide. I'm talking about like down the road, when you can actually solicit these people, you're able to actually sell them on why you left and the value add that you can provide. And it's not just, well, I can make more money over here.
No, I'm doing this for you. I'm doing this deal to provide a better service and outcome for you. That's why you should follow me here.
That's how you're going to get all this new money and that's how you're going to grow. It's like you don't need to go take a pit stop in the IBD channel because you think that's how you're going to have the best success transitioning your book and limit your growth from a compliance and technology perspective and services offered, get a better transition experience and have the upside of growth in the following years and happen to make more money, too.
[00:44:24] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
We have more control and more ability to offer whatever services that you want to offer.
[00:44:32] Speaker A: And you don't have to move it again because you're definitely not going to want to have to move your book again. Exactly. Right.
So if you're in the IBD channel and you're like, okay, well, I finally have outgrown this, now what do I do?
Well, have fun talking to all of these people again and being like, remember that time we did that, how awesome that felt and how crazy that was.
[00:44:53] Speaker B: Or your staff, we're doing this again.
[00:44:54] Speaker A: Or your staff, right?
[00:44:56] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:44:56] Speaker A: Right.
It just becomes so difficult to get yourself geared up to move again.
[00:45:05] Speaker B: At the end of the day, don't move your book twice. Move your book one time. Go. There is no further higher pinnacle in terms of independence, in terms of control, in terms of payouts, in terms of whatever it may be, than being a fee only independent Ria.
