Welcome our presenter today, Patrick Rowe. Patrick is the CEO of Rockbridge Investment Management in Syracuse, New York. He was the board director for the NEMA region of NAPFA, is a graduate of Cornell University, and has made a big impact on the NAPFA community through his years of work and volunteering. Patrick, thanks so much for joining us. Yeah, Stephen, thanks for having me. So we picked Patrick for this today because, as you can tell from his webinar, Patrick is not old. So he was in our shoes just a few years ago, and we thought that as we kind of kick off this year and our content on career path, nobody better than somebody who recently was a Genesys member who has now reached the point of being CEO of the firm that he works for. So really, we want to start out today, Patrick, by just kind of hearing from you, what is your career looked like up to this point? What are some of the lessons that you learned along the way? What are some of the things that went well, maybe some of the mistakes that you made that you learned from that have resulted in you being where you are? Yeah, Stephen, we can look forward to going through all of those things. And I'll just remind the audience here to, if you have questions along the way, feel free to forward those on to Stephen and NAPFA, because I'd like this to be collaborative, and your questions are going to be a better way to go than just Stephen and I talking back and forth. So I look forward to answering any questions that pop up as we go through this. So to give you a little background on me, so I live in upstate New York, right where Rockbridge is founded. So I grew up about 10 or 15 minutes from where our office is currently located, and went to Cornell, double majored in animal science. I grew up on a dairy farm and still live on the farm, and also economics. So I really didn't know what I wanted to do then. So basically, I was pre-med, did an internship as a large animal vet, realized that is not the route I wanted to go. My following year internship led me to work for Wells Fargo. So I worked for Wells Fargo Advisors in Syracuse, actually enjoyed the advisors, didn't really know much about the industry at the time, enjoyed the advisors, working with them, helped them in my internship do their version of financial planning. So I helped them kind of get up and put data on their client into a system and kind of spit out stuff that was wrong and or some opportunities that they had. So they allowed me to do that for my internship and then all the way through my senior year. And because of that and staying close to them, I ended up working for Wells Fargo for a year and a half out of college. So that was my first job. And I had a great experience in the dark side working for Wells Fargo, but I learned a lot of things that I think put me to where I am today. And I also learned why I wanted to eventually end up at a NAFTA firm. And I think the skill sets I learned in that first year and a half have helped propel me to where I am today. So a year and a half in, I met my two managing partners, Craig and Tony, and started as a 22-year-old at their firm as basically their fifth hire. I was kind of coming on board to work with some clients with my little bit of knowledge that I currently knew, but ultimately to support them and grow with them and kind of hopefully help take some pressure off them as they brought in clients at the time. Awesome. So you know, one of the things that I wanted to kind of ask you is a lot of times, you know, we're in college, we just graduated. I know not everybody here is in college or just graduated, but you know, you take a job that you can take, right? And you just get in there and you start working. So in the fee-only world, you've only worked for Rockbridge. So how did you know that the firm was going to be a good fit for you in some place that you could stay for the long-term? What was that vetting process like for you? Yeah. The main thing is right away, it was just a genuine understanding between me and the owners of the firm. I believed in the vision that they had of Rockbridge and ultimately, I liked the way in which they ran the firm and most importantly, I liked the way that they never managed me. So I grew up, it's probably helpful from a background, I've never had, and I would say even at my time at Rockbridge, I've never had a boss. I've never had somebody that told me what I had to do. I think wherever I was, either working up on the farm, working kind of independently at Wells Fargo as an intern, and then also as a independent advisor there, then even at Rockbridge, I took enough initiative right on, early on, that no one really ever told me what I had to do. They just allowed me to continue to do what I was doing and they allowed me to kind of expand on what I was doing where I was passionate. And as soon as I kind of saw that and saw that they were open and willing to kind of see me flourish whatever way in which I wanted to, I knew that was the place I wanted to be. Yeah. So two biggest questions and I'm going to kind of work into one question. Biggest takeaway from your experience working at a large firm like Wells Fargo and then the biggest difference between that and working for your current firm? Yeah, so the biggest, so Wells Fargo, the office I worked at was probably 60 advisors all working in one location. They didn't have to be working in one location. The big difference is it's 60 advisors all kind of working against each other with a common roof over their head. And they all liked each other. They did everything, but they were all kind of working towards trying to get the same kind of group of clients in upstate New York. And there was no collaboration. There was no, what are you doing that works well for you so that I can integrate it into how I work with clients. There was none of that type of collaboration. It was just shared office space with a common employer. And our firm, it's completely different. So we look at all clients of the firm, our clients of Rockbridge, and we assign and or have a lead advisor on every one of those relationships. And then ultimately a service advisor and then operations or support staff that works with each client. So each client has like a three-tiered approach and how they get serviced. But we work collaboratively and every client gets the opportunity to utilize the expertise of other advisors at the firm if needed. So that wasn't the case when we were a firm of five. When we were a firm of five and I joined, it was me, Tony, Craig, who are the two founders of the firm, and then two operating staff. So at that point, it was whatever they needed done, I did. And my ultimate goal was to continue to exceed their expectations. If you continue to exceed employers' expectations and you're not rewarded, then that's a good reason to know that's probably not the place you want to be. Yep. Yep, that's a great point. So I think a lot, excuse me, I think a lot of NAPFA firms probably have a similar setup to that lead advisor, service advisor. I think a lot of the people joining us today fit in that service advisor role. So now that you're in the position of this CEO, what are some of the things that you're looking at from your current service advisors to say, okay, you might be ready to maybe take on some more responsibility or be moving towards being that lead advisor? Yeah, the main, and I don't know if this is true in all firms, I think there's an advantage to the way we do this, but we kind of throw service advisors right into the wolves day one. So always going into prospective client meetings, helping prepare financial plans. Ultimately, it's just that creative thinking, right? It's at what point does a person do a good job writing a financial plan versus knowing the values and the things about a financial plan that are most critical to that client at that particular time, right? I think early on, I was, fell victim to it. You want to tell clients everything that you know in a financial plan. And at the end of the day, the more you kind of overload a client with information that you know, the more likely you are not solving the one problem that brought them in to see you that day. And if you don't do a good job doing that, you're not going to have as many clients to work with. And ultimately, what we're all in this business for to do is to bring more clients the value that a fee only NAPFA firm can offer. We have to be better at understanding what a client's needs are, and then ultimately hitting on those needs and then knowing once they become a client, you can tell them all the information that you know over the next three to five years. So I think that's a skill set that is learned over time. And the more time that a service advisor can be client facing to learn that, the better chance that they're going to propel through your firm faster. Yeah, yeah. So I can give a little bit of an example to allude on that because it's easier to say than to put into work. So we have another lead advisor at our firm right now, senior advisor, who is also an owner of the company, and he just turned 30. He, at one point, six and a half, seven years ago, was a service advisor that worked closely with me and some of the other advisors. Now, owner of the firm, significant lead advisor, one of our most valued lead advisors of the firm, and hopefully hiring somebody to work underneath him so that he can kind of continue that progress of training below and allowing people to flourish internally versus just keeping them in a role that they might not ultimately want to be in long term. Sure, sure. So how would you say, and maybe this is something that you guys have at Rockbridge or maybe just something from your experience, but how do you best learn about those client needs and what do you recommend for service advisors to start to build that trust with their clients? So what do you think are the traits kind of needed to know what's most important to a client and why they might be coming to you? Is that a little bit of what you're asking, Stephen? Yeah, like how can we, excuse me, how can we start to move past that just, I know in my head maybe some of the information that I at least think you need to know. How do we move past just the head knowledge down into actually being able to work with and serve these clients so that they see that it's not just, you know, you memorized this maybe in school or you read it in a book, but you actually are able to apply the knowledge that you have? Yeah. I mean, the first thing is just being, you have to listen, right? At the end of the day, you want to talk so much right away in those meetings. You want to tell them what you know, but ultimately in what we call our discovery meeting, you have to be a good listener. And we bring two advisors into that meeting so that the service advisor can take notes so that the lead advisor can truly listen and not be distracted by having to continue to write down all the things that you need to know so that you can do a good job in the planning process. The other thing is just understanding that if somebody is coming to you as a prospective client, there's a reason. It's not just they woke up one day and said, you know what? I want to tackle moving the most, something I'm very fearful of to another advisor today. It's never like that. It's something caused them to come see you. It was maybe COVID made them think about retiring earlier because they don't like what they're doing. They want to run scenarios. Maybe it was a death in the family. Maybe it was a loss of job and or just ultimately some life experience brought them in. And the faster you can pinpoint what that life experience is, the faster you can focus on the critical thing that will allow them to see the value that you provide, focus on that, do most of your planning around that, and then touch on the other ways in which you can add value. Sure. Yep, yep. So I think somewhat related to that, nobody enters this profession knowing everything they need to know. We may feel like we do sometimes, and we've got some of that knowledge that we want to just rattle off to a client, but how do you make sure that you are continually learning? And then what are the expectations that you have for your team as well? Yeah, that's a good question. So the first thing is, I think everybody at Rockbridge, or at least we hope is curious. Curiosity is one of the traits that we look for when we hire. If you're not curious and want to go out there and be kind of a forever learner, you're probably not a good fit for our firm. But ultimately, we utilize this platform that we're all on right now, NAPFA. I truly utilize NAPFA as a way to get to know other advisors, get to know other people that can help not only grow the firm, but ultimately ask questions too along the way if I ever have anything that comes up. So that's important to me. NAPFA is important. The CE, the education that they provide, the different conferences that we can go to, there's a lot of knowledge that NAPFA spills onto us if we're willing to receive it. But I would say the most important thing that I always do is continue to try to hire people smarter than me. And luckily, that's not that hard. But ultimately, if you continue to hire really smart people, you're always going to build a firm with diverse skill sets that will eventually add value to the underlying client. So I ultimately know my role is constantly going to change. I know what I'm good at. I'm a good critical thinker. I'm good at understanding what the problem is for a client. But at this point, I would probably peg I'm probably one of the worst financial planning writers at the office. And that certainly wasn't the case five years ago. So if that's true, then I'm doing a good job hiring people that are adding value to our clients. Yep, yep. And so somewhat selfishly, I'm going to tack on to your push for NAPFA. And obviously, everybody has at least some involvement with NAPFA. But there really is not a better group to volunteer with. To really reiterate what Patrick said, Patrick, you and I met each other through volunteering and building your network becomes so much easier when you get involved and you go a few steps deeper. I found my current job. I was able to link up with some people that had similar mindsets and were building a firm that I knew that's where I wanted to take my career. There's so many opportunities. Not all of them selfish. It's also a really good way to give back as well. So I would strongly encourage everybody who is listening, who does not already volunteer with NAPFA, maybe to some extent that really you should strongly consider getting involved at a deeper level. Yeah, and going back to that is as you kind of want to progress through your career, the one tough thing about fee-only advisory firms, especially as a Genesis member, or as a young planner for a fee-only advisory firm, you probably don't have a ton of peers that you can go have a drink with after work or do something after work and say, oh, what did you do today? And have really good conversation about the value you brought, what you did, how you talked to your employer about career progression and all that. So utilize this platform that NAPFA provides called Genesis and take advantage of all the other peers that you have that are going through similar things that ultimately will help you frame the right questions to ask to your employers along the way to get you ultimately to where you want to go. In 2009, when I joined Rockbridge, we managed less than 100 million. I think this year we'll probably peg or at least over 1.5 billion on our EDV for 2021. And I would give a lot of the success to our growth to my relationship with NAPFA. So I'm not bashful, I'm not afraid to ask questions. And I have five to 10 really, really good peers that I've learned and kind of built strong relationships with through other NAPFA firms. And I lean on them heavy when I have kind of a critical crossroad and I don't know which way to go. So NAPFA has been extremely important in growing our firm to where it is and also helping me grow personally to get to where I am. Yeah, so you actually just, I think we had a question come in right before you started that answer of how did you build your network as a young advisor? Seems like you kind of just answered it in what you just went through, which is just leveraging those opportunities that you have through NAPFA, through other similar groups to be reaching out maybe outside of the sphere of influence of your firm in order to make some connections with people that are going through something similar or have just had a similar experience. Yeah, and I'll elaborate on that question, Stephen. So the one interesting thing about my role is it's always had to change, right? So again, whenever you think about where, it's kind of a cliche, but where do you wanna be when you grow up? I'm nowhere near where I wanna be, but ultimately you have to have an idea, a vision of where you wanna be, because ultimately the role you think you might want might be nothing like you want it to be. So luckily for me, I got in this profession not for financial planning. I just, I really like working and solving problems and I like working with people. And at the end of the day, we use MoneyGuard Elite, we use a bunch of different softwares. I haven't been in one of those softwares in over two and a half years. I don't get to do a lot of financial planning anymore. I get to read and be critical on financial plans, but I don't get to write financial plans. I get to meet with clients and that's going away too. So I'm gonna realize that's gonna go away. If I want Rockbridge to help more people, I'm gonna have to spend more time growing the firm. So ultimately know what you're getting yourself into and make sure it's a direction you want to go. Luckily for me, every progression I've had along the way has actually brought me closer to things that I enjoy, as long as I continue to have some opportunity to work with clients. I just thought that was important to know because at the end of the day, I certainly didn't think that I wouldn't be doing as much planning as I thought I would at 35. I thought I would still be very heavy in the planning side of this business and I don't get to do any of that anymore. Yep, yep. So this I think is a really good question. If you could go back and do something differently, what would it be? Oh, that's a good question. If I could go back and do something differently. I probably would have gotten involved with NAPTA a little earlier because I've given so much value. The one thing I did well early on was ask questions and be blunt to the people I work with. And I think it's okay to do that if you can back it. So ultimately, we all, there's studies out there, there's ways to get as much knowledge as you can about your current role and the role in which you want to grow and kind of progress into. So there's no reason not to be overly prepared as we're planners, right? We should be prepared. You should know your worth and you should know what's expected of you and what other people expect of similar roles around the country. And then the more prepared you are and the higher your ability to exceed expectations along the way is the more likely you'll get to where you ultimately want to get to. The main, if I could have done anything differently, would maybe just understood how quickly things were gonna change and maybe enjoyed some of the, not just trying to get to the next level as fast as I possibly could, maybe enjoyed some of my time spent doing the other things that I'll no longer get to do. But I think I'm happy I'm not going to do there because my ultimate goal is to grow the firm in a way in which we can help more people. And at the end of the day, if that's my mission to help more people, then I've got to put myself in the seat to make that happen as fast as we can. Yep, yep. What you just mentioned about enjoying some of that in between time, I want to come back to that in just a second. But this next question is who first brought up the idea of becoming an owner? Was it you? Was it the two founders of the firm? And do you have any somebody who at some point wants to approach that conversation and how to approach it? Yeah, I'll answer it for me first and then I'll answer it in general. The day in which Tony and Craig hired me, they knew that, they'll joke about it to this day. After they, Rockbridge was most definitely a lifestyle business. They hired me. I think they quickly figured out that the business is going to ultimately change. They need to either put me in a position to allow that to continue to happen with their support or they got to let me go. And they joke about that right away. So it was very clear that I didn't have to tell them I wanted to be an owner. They knew very quickly that I wanted to be. And I probably had that conversation. There was no procedures in place at the time. So it's not like I knew that after year five, I could become an owner or anything like that. So I wanted to be an owner probably a few months after I joined the firm. I think I became a partner of the firm a couple of years after I joined there as a minority partner and then grew over time. But it wasn't, and this is a better question for them. I would say my ownership was warranted, not given. And the more you are warranted or deserving of that ownership, and it should come to you and or you should be willing to have the conversations with the current owners about what that looks like for them because they certainly don't have to participate or share in the ownership of the firm. But in my perspective, there's value in doing so if there's the right people. And they're there to sell and or transfer some of that ownership too. Yep, yep. So going back to what you said about enjoying each stage, certainly this is true for me early in my career. Thankfully, this was a non NAPFA firm. Newer employees were supposed to keep your head down, do what is just right in front of you, get this work done. Yeah, you can go places someday, but just get the work done today. They want you to focus on the job maybe rather than the career. I think it's also though at the same time, unrealistic to step in and expect the firm on day one to have mapped out all 30 years and say, okay, year five, you're gonna be an owner, year 10, you're gonna be an executive. So what do you think is a good balance between that short term, obviously we wanna enjoy but not get overly comfortable in where we are at the beginning, but we can't come in on day one and say, okay, turn over the keys to the kingdom and tell me what date I get to take things over. So what's a good balance between that short term and long term view? Yeah, that's a great question. So it really depends on the size of the firm you join too. So when I joined, there was no, like I said, there was no operations manual, there was nothing to follow. I had complete trust and I had to have complete trust in Craig and Tony and I had to have complete trust that if I exceeded their expectations, I would get to where I ultimately wanted to go. I will say that they knew where I wanted to go all the time. It was never, I had a great rapport with them and I could be open with where I wanted to get to and they helped set me up to succeed. And ultimately, I also helped them succeed, right? So it was a mutually beneficial relationship. Right now, if somebody joins our firm, we have that in place. We have a career progression where they can see what it looks like to join as a kind of level one associate advisor and they can see what it looks like to be a service advisor through all those different levels and ultimately a senior advisor and or partner. What I'm less, what I am leery to do is put dates on that because ultimately, I would like somebody to go through that as fast as possible. They go through that as fast as possible, there's a reason they went through it that fast and it's only beneficial to the client and to me as another owner of the firm, right? Seeing someone successful is a good thing. I would like someone to progress as fast as possible. I'm not gonna put a date on that saying that you can only be an associate advisor after year six because if anyone did that to me, I would have left the day they did that, right? So I understand how I, I'm my own worst enemy because I understand what I wanted and what I needed and firm boundaries for me don't make sense but firm boundaries and understanding career progression for some people do. So we make sure that we have an understanding of career progression but no timeline on how long it might take to get there. It means that you have to have some open conversations along the way of why you're where you're at and why you might not be where you want to get to but I think those open conversations are better than having career timelines that people have to reach. The other thing that I would say, it's just going back to saying, just see the writing on the wall a little bit, right? If you join a firm and you're in your early 20s and there's advisors that have been there 10 plus years in their 30s or 40s and they don't own any of the firm and your goal is to own part of the firm after five years, unless something drastically changes or you've heard something, you probably aren't at a place where ownership is gonna be spread to you at the space and kind of at the timeline you're looking for. So just look big picture, don't understand the dynamic of the owners of the firm and it's okay if there's a lot of ways in which you can progress with or without ownership, just understand those and don't be afraid to ask those questions, probably not year one, but don't be afraid to ask those questions after you've kind of proven yourself. Yeah, yeah, that's good. So I think there's a lot of wisdom to what you just said about you're gonna lay out the career path but there's not gonna be dates and there's not gonna necessarily be some of those things where handle 50 clients on your own, then boom, that proves that you're ready to be there. You don't necessarily wanna infuse all of those really stake in the ground things because somebody could be emotionally ready at fewer clients and somebody could be emotionally ready at a lot more clients than that. So what would you say are some of those really big determinants of, okay, you've made it, so you've been an associate planner, you're ready to move up to that next level. What are, for your firm with your culture, what are the really big things that you pay attention to? Yeah, so I'll just look at advisors looking to become partners, right? Because that's kind of where this question's going. The main way I look at it is since we, I would say 20% of the clients that come to Rockbridge come from our marketing efforts, which is something, remind me to talk about that later on if we have a moment. But another 40% comes from individual networks of our senior advisors and another 40% comes from referrals from our existing clients. So we have internal metrics of what a senior advisor ought to be managing from a revenue standpoint, but the alternate determinant, if someone is a service advisor in my mind or a lead advisor or senior advisor, is the ability to be revenue generating, not client managing, right? So managing client relationships is a critical job, but a lot of people can do that, right? A lot of people can manage client relationships. There's a lot of people here that might only want to manage client relationships, but the next step is how do you monetize those client relationships and continue to get clients to refer you, bring in more money? And there's traits and skill sets that I think are valuable in doing that, but ultimately how do you monetize the opportunity given to you to manage 150 clients or something like that? How do you monetize that to make the firm more valuable and ultimately bring in more clients that align with the goal of the firm, if that goal of the firm is to grow? And we want to grow, so there's people that might manage 75 to 100 clients, which is great, but if the referral numbers and all those things, it doesn't matter if they've been there for 15 years, unless they're bringing something else to the table, it's how do you monetize and align and grow that client, those client relationships by getting them ultimately to refer you. Yep, yep. So I think that's important. Yeah. Okay, so a few other questions kind of similar to that, and we've hit on some of these already, but just to bring it back around, so when you're building out your team, what are some of those most important, and maybe some people on this call already have these, in which case pat yourselves on the back, but if not, what are some of the skills, what are some of the personality traits that you're looking for when you say, okay, this is somebody that's going to come and join our team and really help drive us forward? Yeah. so it's twofold and I think one is we want a diverse skill set. So clearly, investing in yourself, if it's credentials and stuff like that, I think it's important. At the end of the day, we need that. We need people that are helping make sure that we have a wide skill set for our clients. But ultimately, that's not the most important thing to me. It's really understanding the business, willing to, kind of the mentality of nothing's ever beneath me. I grew up on a farm, so I'll go back to, I've spent plenty of time shoveling shit. I've cleaned a lot of barn, I've cleaned a lot of stalls, I've done a lot of work that most people wouldn't want to do. At the end of the day, there's nothing that's beneath me and at the end of the day, that skill set and that mentality is really important to me. Somebody that comes in and just wants to work with million dollar plus clients and doesn't care about doing some of the other work that ultimately everyone has to do to be able to work with, one to five million dollar clients is something that I look for. Ultimately, just that genuine curiosity to be a continual learner and somebody that works well with others and works well on a team. Because at the end of the day, that's very important to the type of firm we're trying to grow. Yeah, I think that's what's most important to me. Self-starter, you need to be a self-starter. I have expectations of what I want something to look like, but I don't want to tell you how to do it. I'd rather have you do it. At the end of the day, no one wants to be told what to do. I don't really tell anyone what to do. I just have ideas of what I want done and let people figure out how to get it done. Because ultimately, there's probably a better way than how I did it. You just hit on, I think, a lot of very important elements and a lot of that has got to be captured in company culture. What is the level of importance that you place on culture? What is it that you guys at Rockbridge do to make sure that you are building and creating a culture that is going to be sustaining the company going forward? Yeah. The amount of times we've heard and talked about the word culture over the last 36 months is a lot. It's hard because we're trying to grow really fast. Sometimes growing really fast is not inducive to maintaining the culture that we once had when we were a team of seven or eight people. We continue to do events where we get together. We continue to have a collaborative office where everybody is approachable. My office is dead in the middle of the office and I don't have a door on my office. We continue to create an atmosphere and a culture where collaboration is most important. Being in the office, understanding remote. Some people have some ability and willingness to want to work remote, but being around each other and feeding off of each other at the benefit of our clients. It's the culture we have. We used to become like a family culture. I think we're just past that now. We're a firm of 18 employees now, where we'll probably be a firm of 30 employees or more in the next five years. That's going to continue to change. At the end of the day, the ability to talk to and or approach anyone at the firm at any time and feel very comfortable doing so, I think it's important. Yeah. You mentioned you joined at about $100 million. You guys are at 1.5 now. That's a lot of growth and there's going to be continued growth amongst clients, among team members. A lot of us, I think, also work for firms, maybe not quite the size that you are now, but we work for firms and we're all planners. We want to go someplace. What are some of the hidden, but potentially dangerous aspects of growth and scaling that we need to be mindful of as we start to hit some of these different levels of growth of clients and employees? Yeah. Growing for the sake of growing is not worth it. You have to understand why you're growing. At the end of the day, it can't all be about the money. At the end of the day, why are we growing? For me, I truly grew up spending a year and a half at a brokerage firm. It wasn't bad, but I didn't like that 75-80 percent of the wealth in Central New York is managed by firms just like my past employer, and it bothers me. I just think that ultimately more people should know about the value that firms like all of ours can bring to the table. I have a passion to grow as fast as we can, which brings a ton of pain points. Client experience, culture, just even transitioning ownership and the expectations of advisors, and what that looks like. It constantly brings up questions and concerns that I never thought, or wouldn't have if we didn't grow nearly as fast. I'm open to all those things. I find them exciting. I find them if we can create more jobs to keep people in Syracuse, and we can create meaningful work, and I can create meaningful friendships with colleagues, that's all positive to me. But at the end of the day, it's not why most founding partners got into this business. At the end of the day, growth has to be for the right reasons, not just because it sounds cool. Yeah. I think that whether we've observed it, there's examples all over the place in corporate America, where growth has happened too quickly for the size of the firm and the detriment that that can have. I agree completely with what you just mentioned there. You said that a few minutes ago, 20 percent of your clients come from your marketing efforts. That's pretty good. Can you spend a few minutes and talk to us about that? Yeah, I'll do two. The reason I wanted to bring it back up was just the marketing itself. The one thing that I think anyone in our roles can do, is do your own SWOT analysis on the firm you work for. What does the firm you work for do well right now? What could they improve on? At the end of the day, what skill sets do you have to fill gaps that aren't being filled today? Mine at the time was redoing our website, redoing our logo, starting to do some TV advertising. We did a lot of things that my founding partners really liked that we did, but probably weren't things that they were passionate about doing. I think that finding ways in which you can add value to help grow the firm, or align with the mission of the firm that fit your skill sets, will be very eye-opening to the owners of the firm, especially if it pays off and monetizes for them. At one point, I would say a third of our business, new business came from people that found us on the website through search engine optimization, eventually TV commercials and other stuff that we did. As we've grown, that number shrunk just because it's grown, the number of clients finding us from those reasons continues to grow. It's just our need to grow has continued to be, it's just the law of the large denominator. At the end of the day, if we want to be growing at 15 percent, it just becomes harder and harder to attain unless clients are talking about us, clients are referring us, and senior advisors, associate advisors, and even anyone on the team is talking about us and trying to bring in people from their own natural network. It's critical, and the marketing piece has just been interesting. In a world where we are, where there's not much competition for fee-only advisors, coming up with interesting ways to differentiate yourself from the competition, and creating commercials around it has been fun, and it's been rewarding. As you grow, and as you have new advisors that are joining your team, new clients, some clients refer friends, they want to work with the same advisor. At some point, that's going to result in service advisor becomes lead advisor, a team gets broken up, clients have got to go one way or the other, and that can be a really sensitive process that I think a lot of firms have to go through at some point. What have you guys done when you encountered that, and what has worked well for you? So I'll start it with an unpopular answer, which is, I disagree. Your answer is just what everyone else says that, oh, certain clients, they'll just never work with someone else, they love me. I just don't think that's true. I think that's just everybody's personal way of saying it. Just at the end of the day, it just makes you feel comfortable to think that clients won't go work with somebody else, but I can promise you they will. My first client that I ever got at Wells Fargo, who followed me to Rockbridge, meaningful client, probably a $2.5 million relationship. I haven't talked to that particular person in a client capacity in over five years. I call her once in a while, I talk to her. She has a completely different team, and I would say once I became CEO of the company, at the time I was managing about a million dollars of our firm revenue. I then reduced that down to about $650-750,000 of our firm revenue, and then now brought it back up and we'll continue to go through that process. Clients will transition, and the way in which we do it on ones that transition harder is I become, I let somebody else lead the relationship, I become the service advisor, even if I don't necessarily do the service work. I'm the secondary advisor on that client relationship. I'm still around. I still might get a call or text from somebody that I brought in that feels like they're one of my good friends or just his family. But at the end of the day, clients benefit from having a person that they can call and have uncomfortable conversations with that aren't necessarily you. I think that's one of the benefits that we have is that my aunt doesn't need to call me if she wants to take $40,000 out to do something and she feels guilty about it. She can call her advisor and I'm just a member of the team. I think ultimately, as soon as people hire the right people and trust them, give them the experience they need, clients will easily transition to them. It's a fear. It's a fear thing. Because at the end of the day, this business is about the clients that you work with, and the clients are the value. Some people are just more reluctant to transition those clients to the next advisor. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't transition it to the next advisor if I didn't think they could do a better job than I do. A lot of it's the teaching, the mentoring, and the proactiveness of that service advisor. Once that service advisor is going to provide a more proactive experience than I can, and I think they're capable, which goes back to hiring smarter people than you, then the client is significantly better off if you're willing to make that transition. Yeah. Do you think it also makes it easier on your clients that if they understand the why that you're growing because you're trying to serve more people, and not just serve more people for the sake of making more money, but serve more people so that they, the client, are better off as well. Do you think that makes that transition easier for them as well, rather than just, I'm graduating to other clients? I mean, so yes, I think you can spin it any way you want. You can say you're growing so you can hire more talented people, so you can have a more talented team that you can work with. But at the end of the day, clients want to make sure that it's like everyone else. Everyone wants to, if you go meet with somebody, they want to talk about themselves. Most people aren't good listeners, right? At the end of the day, clients want comfort, and they want to know that you're there for them, and they ultimately want to know that your growth is not going to affect them. If you're growing, that's okay. That's good. If client experience suffers, that's on you. The client can never have an experience where their experience with you during growth has been impacted. For me, it would be if they still worked with me, because my focus has to be held elsewhere. If they didn't have that transition, their experience would be affected negatively. That brings up, I think, another good question. You mentioned as long as the clients are satisfied, do you use any tool or any process to measure client satisfaction on a regular basis? Good question. If anyone has a good one, let me know. We've done surveys in the past. The ultimate measure of this business doesn't have a ton of attrition, so saying that you have low attrition is great, but everyone on this firm, if we're doing a good job, we probably have low attrition. If clients are referring us and the amount of growth that we have from clients talking about us goes up, then we're doing something right. Yeah. That's awesome. Well, excellent. Those are all the questions that we have. Patrick, thank you so much for being willing to come and just have this conversation with us. I think it's been extremely valuable. Any final thoughts that you have for us before we break for today? No. Again, feel free to share any of my information with anyone. If they have questions, I'm more than happy to chat with anyone offline if they would like to. But don't be afraid to talk to the owners of the company or who hired you. Don't be afraid to take on responsibility or try to take on more responsibility than was given to you. At the end of the day, if you exceed the expectations of the people that hired you, you should get rewarded and that reward will hopefully come to propelling you through that career progression that you ultimately want to get to at a faster rate than if you didn't speak up and talk and let them know what you ultimately want to get to. Because at the end of the day, if your employer doesn't know, it's hard to actually fulfill that. Yeah. Well, that is fantastic. Obviously, not everybody is as awesome as Patrick is, but a lot of great people. Just to harp back on a few things we touched on today, I would really strongly recommend here coming up pretty soon as NAPFA does start to reach out for volunteer opportunities, I do strongly recommend everybody gets involved there and go to the NAPFA conferences as well. Because a lot of people are going to be there. In Boston, Patrick was the one that was facilitating the large firm forum. You really do get just a lot of really great ideas and you make a lot of connections with people that can help propel your career or give you that really good idea that you can bring back to your firm to add a lot of value. Patrick, thank you so much for today. Everybody who joined us, thank you so much for being with us and I hope you have a great rest of the day. Yeah. Have a great rest of your week, guys. Take care.

Patrick Rowe

Rockbridge Investment Management

career journey

financial planning industry

continuous learner

company culture

transitioning clients

trust

firm growth