I'm Rob Schultz, a member of the Conference Planning Committee and a local Tarrant County resident, so welcome to NAPFA and welcome to Texas. I know all of us will enjoy the session today entitled, How to Find, Hire, Train, and Retain Top Talent for Your Firm, presented by Caleb Brown, a nationally recognized expert on recruiting in the financial planning space. He's co-founder and CEO of New Planner Recruiting, a Texas Tech grad. Spent time early in his career doing exactly what we do as a financial planner right here in the DFW Metroplex. Caleb, welcome back to Texas. Ladies and gentlemen, Caleb Brown. Thank you, guys. Thank you, guys. Glad to be here. I know every speaker says that, but I really am because I grew up two miles from here, so glad to be back. We had a fun topic. Any firm owners in here ever have any problems in their RIA firm with people? Any people? Don't raise your hands. I'm just kidding. Okay, so Rob and the NAPFA folks have graciously given me one hour to solve all your problems, okay? So that's what you're in for today. But in all seriousness, maybe I just get a raise of hand just so I know what angle to go here. RIA firm owners, just give me a hand. Job seekers, any students or job seekers in here? A couple. Any just employees of RIAs, non-owners who are just trying to figure it out and learn? Okay, great. Awesome. All right, so we're going to go through some slides. I will try to save time for questions at the end, so if you can't, unless I just say something just totally you just can't let go, let's try to wait to the end. So what I want to do is talk a little bit about, I mean, Rob touched on this. I have three primary jobs in the financial planning profession. One is I spend most of my time at CEO of new plan of recruiting. So I spend most of my day talking to, in the morning, let's just say, I spend most of my time talking to firm owners about their challenges. I go to lunch, and I come back, and I start talking to job seekers about why they can't find a fit. Okay, so that's what I spend most of my time doing. I want to share some of those insights and trends and some of the stuff that we're doing for our clients with you. My other job is every spring I teach the practice management class at the University of Georgia's financial planning program. So the graduating seniors, usually about 100, have to go through me, my practice management class, before they get to your firms. Okay, so I see what all the firms are offering in terms of comp, employee benefits, what the career tracks look like, why my students reject job offers. So again, I want to share that with you as well. And I am a CFP, as Rob alluded to, and I have a small book of clients in Athens, Georgia, where I live right now. Okay, so those are the three angles. So talk about some hiring trends, how to time your new hires, how do you attract the best candidates, what are some specific sourcing strategies that we use and that I recommend to my clients. And then, as you'll learn, and probably people that are experienced and have been running a business for a long time, finding people is pretty difficult. Retaining them is probably more difficult. So we'll talk a little bit about that. And I'll make sure I give you some actionable takeaways. So let me just talk a little bit about some of the trends that we're seeing. And two years ago, I mean, it was probably as tough as I've ever seen it, just to find somebody. I mean, we had a lot of people hiring. It was hard to get people to leave their current firm. And we had people coming to me saying, look, Caleb, I'm posting on LinkedIn, I'm getting nothing. You know, I used to get 200 resumes, I need some help. So the bear market, economic uncertainty, and then I think higher interest rates really have just caused a lot of firms to back off. So I just saw some corn fairy just put out 30% fewer job postings than this time last year. So now maybe you put something on LinkedIn, it's like, man, we're getting all these good candidates. There's fewer firms hiring. I mean, some of my clients during all this, they're in three groups. One is, hey, higher interest rates, not sure what's going on. Let's just stop everything. Second group, oh, let's just pause this for a minute maybe. I'm not really sure what's going on. And the third group, market downturn, higher interest rates, whatever, just press the gas even further. Go out there and find me some human capital alpha. I know all these big aggregator firms that I'm used to competing with aren't maybe hiring as much right now. Maybe I can get in there and get some good candidates. So I think leading up to this, the calls that I get from people, I always ask them, why do you want to leave? I'm looking at your website, you look like you're in a great firm. Well, somebody left, somebody went on maternity leave, somebody did it, whatever, and that was a year ago, and my firm owner said they were trying to find somebody. We've seen no job posting, we've seen no effort made, and I'm having to absorb the work. I'm frankly just sick of it. So be careful on the, because the firm owner standpoint, it's like, hey, this is great. So and so left. We just kind of relegated this to everybody else, and we're not having to really add any more salary, and my profit margin looks better. This is awesome. Just be aware you could be burning your people out, okay? And I always tell people, even right now, that even kind of after COVID and some of those other things, people are feeling burned out. I mean, you guys are bringing on clients, not hiring fast enough, and they're feeling underpaid. I get that a lot too. I mean, that's not earth shattering a trend there, but just feeling underpaid. So what I tell people is like, look, if your value, especially if they're a CFP and they're on LinkedIn, you got recruiters reaching out to them that will offer them the moon, okay? And the firms will deliver that. Some of your colleagues in your study groups are calling your people trying to recruit them out of there, okay? So that's happened actually here to one of my clients. So just take these people out to lunch. Put your arm around them, and if you haven't looked at comp in a while, maybe you need to do that, and I don't think anybody would be upset if you gave them a 10% raise. A couple other things too, and this is more for the job seekers in the audience, but seeking flexibility over just virtual. Frankly, when we came out of COVID, I thought virtual was sort of here to stay. Kind of wrong on that. It's sort of you guys have gone back to like, no, we need to be in person. I get it. I understand. I'm more of an in-person guy too, but the candidates, you need to be careful because they come to me saying, well, I want flexibility. I want a virtual role. And I say, okay, so you want to go work for a firm even though it's virtual, and you have to be logged on to Teams from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.? That's virtual. That's not flexible. So you've got to make sure you're clear on those distinctions there. A lot of the job seekers aren't. Firm owners, I think you've got that. And then this may not be popular with this group because I know we've got some of the big PE and aggregator firms in here, but people are nervous about this. They know when you're gearing your firm up to try to sell it. Caleb, we're cutting services. They're cutting people. It's all about just bringing in assets. They know what you're doing, so just be aware. And we do get calls when one of these big aggregators comes, like, now we've got somebody in the Midwest. We're in the Southeast or whatever. We've got somebody in the Midwest. We've got someone in the Northeast making decisions. The culture's shifted. So just be aware that that's happening. And I think lastly too, I don't think we had any career changers in here, but we have noticed a trend where the career changers, I mean, it makes sense, right? They're coming usually from corporate America, and they tend to gravitate towards the larger firms, you know, great benefits, salary, infrastructure, you know, title, you know, whatever it is. All right, lots of people. You've got a department that can send, you know, send faxes or whatever. No one sends faxes anymore, but you have all these departments to do everything instead of going to a smaller firm. It's like, okay, this is a little bit different. And frankly too, and I'm not picking on career changers, is I do think what I've seen is, especially in bigger firms, there's just more places to hide. I mean, a small seven-person RIA firm, you can't, I'm not trying to knock them, but you can't hide anywhere. You're the person. You have to be able to answer all the questions. The bigger firm, it's like, you know, we'll bring in the estate planning department or whatever it is. It's maybe not as big a deal. And I mean, I'll talk to candidates and I'm like, ooh, that person just wasn't that good. I'll see them a month later, they go to a big firm. All right, so again, the big firm owners already hate me. All right, just as a slide here, and I realize your businesses are a lot bigger than this, but I just kind of wanted to just lay out sort of the timing. So if, like, you're a solo advisor or maybe you have a Diamond Teams, if you subscribe to the Diamond Teams Angie Erbers model. Okay, just trying to understand maybe where your first hires need to happen, sort of the revenue levels, the client levels. So we'll just, we'll go through it pretty quickly, but, you know, maybe your first 50 clients, your 250,000 revenue, try to, you know, where's your biggest bottleneck and pain point? It's probably that admin and just people calling in wanting address changes and money movements, that type of thing. So, you know, admin assistant, you know, you can outsource that. You can do an, you know, hire an employee or a lot of virtual firms. There's a lot of vendors. When I got started 20 years ago, you really had no options on any of this stuff. You just had to go find somebody and bring them in house. So maybe anywhere from 15 to 40 bucks an hour to bring them on. So you grow, you keep bringing on more clients, and now you're up to 75 to 100 clients, maybe 500,000 revenue. You know, basic financial planning tasks. Hey, I probably shouldn't be doing all this time prepping. That should be a para planner or maybe a financial planning associate or whatever it is, gathering some data. So maybe you can go with an associate planner, new CFP type, or maybe a client service associate, someone like that. Again, similar options. And then, you know, that's kind of the pricing over there. You can get a recruiter to do this, probably looking at minimum 10,000 up to 30% starting salary. Then as your firm or your diamond team continues to grow, you're down here 1 million revenue, 100 clients, and you're kind of reaching capacity. I think Kitsis and a lot of the guys put out studies on this, about 100 relationships is where most people fall. But you need more help maybe on the advice delivery side, the plan prep, the advice delivery side. So maybe it's an experienced CFP that you hire. Or you could always do something like, or maybe even here, I skipped over this, like on the outsource, like a Sue Chesney or something in Denver, Colorado, who you can outsource your financial plan stuff to. But this is the advice delivery function. It's going to probably be hard to outsource that. I mean, this is why I think maybe some of you don't like the virtual piece, because it's a relationship business. And hey, the Smiths kind of want to see you around. If you work in person, you go virtually five years later. Maybe that's different. But recruiters are probably going to charge around 30% of starting salary. So that's just trying to help you understand sort of the timing. And the hiring cycles I think are interesting too. So our firm is really focused on placing people in their first or second job, zero to five years. The people that we place probably make $50,000 to about $150,000 a year. So I'm not an executive recruiter that's dealing with the $500,000, $600,000, million dollar placements, moving CEOs or books of business. So just understand sort of when I'm giving you these comments where we're coming from. New college graduate, that could be anywhere from three to 15 month time frame. And some of you are like, what, 15? Some of my students, when I get them January 1st at the University of Georgia, I ask them out of 100, how many of you already have jobs? Like 70%, 70% of them already have jobs. And it's usually from the person that had their internship and their internship with. Okay, and that could have been their sophomore or even junior year. So if you want to get to these people, you've got to get to them early. And this is maybe an advantage the bigger firms have because they have dedicated internship programs and a lot of them hire out of there. And just because someone's still available, like some of my students that are still available like in March, April, May, doesn't necessarily mean they're a bad student. They could have been studying for the SIE or Series 65 or even the CFP. I have some of them that take that the final semester. So don't necessarily think that, hey, you haven't got anything locked up, you're a bad candidate. Career changers, the cycle isn't really as important here because there's not like graduation dates. If you're trying to get someone out of a CFP program, like I said, you need to get started probably a year ahead of time. And for the smaller firms, I get it. It's like we don't know when we're going to need to hire. The bigger firms, Fidelity, Vanguard, or the big aggregators, they know exactly how many people they need in Charlotte, North Carolina in 2027. Most of the smaller firms that I deal with, they're just trying to get through the next quarter or the next couple quarters. So they haven't got it that far planned out. But I would encourage you as we talk about the strategy and some of the takeaways to try to get a sense on this. Career changers, they're not really graduating from college, but most of the people we place here are people that are going through the CFP program or have already passed the exam and they're trying to get a job with a firm like yours. And then experienced planners, and I mean like four to six months. Our average time to fill right now is about three months, three to four months. So I was just trying to manage expectations there. And some of you may be looking at this and saying, Caleb, are you telling me it takes longer to hire a new college grad than an experienced CFP, which is what all of you guys want. That's what all the firm owners are going to say. That'll solve all my problems. Give me an experienced CFP and I won't have to train them. I won't have to do anything. Life is great. Yes, that's what I'm telling you. All right, and I think we've got some of the program directors in here, but I know you have University of Georgia and just talking from Luke Dean and UVU and some of these other places. We get like dozens and dozens and dozens of job descriptions and job listings from you. And it's all the same thing. Caleb, we want your 4.0 top female student. That's what all you guys asked for. And I'm like, that's great. That's great. But there's 25 other firms that said that exact same thing. So that one person is sitting there like, ooh, who do I choose? And we'll talk more about that as the talk unfolds. So I told you that earlier in my career I was sort of spending half the day talking to firms and half the day talking to job seekers. And I'm getting these conflicting sort of like, Caleb, we can't find anybody. Where do all these people come out of these CFP programs? And then I go to lunch and I come back like, I can't find a job. I'm looking at financial planning and investment news and I'm like, what's going on here? It's mismatched expectations. So here's what I came up with. Normal distribution curves. So one standard deviation Don't worry about the positive and negative. I just couldn't get everything on the other side. But this is two-thirds of the firms that call me have an average opportunity. That's what I'm going to say. I have a podium, so I can dub, but I'm just going to let that sink in. Two-thirds have an average opportunity. And you know what? That's fine. Caleb, we're fee only. We pay a salary. We have a career track. All this crazy stuff that I would have killed for 20 years ago. We'll let you get in on some client meat. I mean, table stakes. That's what I'm trying to get you to see. Well, Caleb, I feel like I'm offering a good opportunity. You are compared to when you started, but you've got to realize there's 25 other firms in the same zip code offering that same thing. That's what I'm trying to get you to see. So two standard deviations. So this is sort of the dark gray. And I don't know. Maybe this is... Just one second. Maybe this is somebody like, hey, we want to bring you in. You're going to be in every single client meeting kind of like I was when I got started. We really want you to take over our eMoney process or our MoneyGuy Pro process and start doing that and just kind of own that. We want you to develop relations with the clients. We really want you to become a lead planner as quick as possible. So maybe that's a second standard deviation. Or they're taking over like, hey, we have a new doctor program. Our minimum is $5 million, but now we're lowering it to $500,000 and we want you to take the lead on that. I mean, that's exciting. That's kind of compelling for candidates. And you may not be offering that, and that's okay. So the third standard deviation out here. So very compelling story. I've got a great practice, great business or whatever. I'm really looking for a successor. I want to come in. You work for a couple years. Maybe this is someone that's experienced. We meet with the clients jointly for a couple years and you take over my business. I mean, there's a lot of people out there looking for that. So if you're a sports person, and we're talking in terms of candidates, this is somebody who's making it to the pros right here. They're making it to the pros. This is like a first round draft pick. This is the number one overall. This is where... Caitlin Clark goes to this firm right here. She goes to this firm right here. And the problem is, two-thirds of people that call me say they want Caitlin Clark. Caitlin Clark don't want to go there. That's what I'm trying to get you to see. No one threw anything. Sir, do you have a question? No one threw anything, so we got through that one. Let me just set this up for a moment. So a lot of firm owners, when we're talking about the recruiting and they call us and hire us... One second, sir. When they hire us, they ask about employee benefits and how long... They want us to look at everything. And they're always like, well, what should we be offering? So we finally just said, okay, why don't we do this? Why don't we just... All the questions, mostly the COOs ask us, since we tell them, why don't you just ask the people in your firm what they want? They don't do that. We decided to do it for you. So that's the next couple slides where we sent out a 25-question survey to the candidate database at New Planner Recruiting and really trying to understand what Gen Z and Gen Y are looking for. And maybe what they won't tell you guys. We'll see more of this as it unfolds, but right here. Why did they get in the business? How much do they feel like they're fairly compensated? Do they want equity ownership? What's fulfilling activity? So those are the next couple things. We had a thousand responses. 700 from Gen Y and about 300 from Gen Z. That's a decent sample size. So I just wanted to start with this because I look at this and this is probably why you got in the profession. And I feel like they're getting in for the right reasons. They want to help people. Work-life balance was both important. So again, when I have a firm call me and say, I need someone to work really hard and I'm like, what does that mean? Well, we normally work about 60 hours a week. It's like, oh, okay, that's great. I get it, but I don't know if I'm going to be able to get this next generation. That's not work-life balance to them. So they're looking for sort of the 40 hour, they've been told by their parents, you know, the baby boomers, don't kill yourself or these companies. Then they'll bail on you and they won't give you your pension and I know none of you are going to do that. So you can see sort of, okay, we already touched on that. Ability to help people work-life balance. Touched on that already. This may be hard to see at the back, but this is like, what are their, we asked them what are their fulfilling activities. And a couple things I want to point out, that may be hard to read, is meeting with clients via video. Okay, that popped up. Data entry into financial planning software was pretty popular. The meeting with clients all the way up here, in both generations, and then creating financial planning scenarios and financial planning software. I think the takeaway here is just make sure these people are doing some of these activities. If they're not, they're going to call me and say, Caleb, I'm in a CSA position for two years, get me out of here. Get me into an associate plan or role where I can do some of this stuff. But the other thing I want you to look at too, and sorry for the fun here, but opening new accounts, preparing taxes, rebalancing investment. This group did not want to rebalance investment accounts. Trading, so if you've got them doing that, again, I get calls, it's like, man, I really want to do financial planning. That's why I went to Texas Tech. They got me over here doing like trading in Tamarack or whatever. I don't really want to do that. So just be aware of that. Maybe this is just limited exposure because Gen Z is really just getting started, right? And then, I already touched on emphasizing the client piece. Okay, so what do candidates prioritize when looking at new opportunities? Anyone want to take a guess? What do they look at when prioritizing a new opportunity? Like what do you think they look at to decide whether they're going to be interested or they're going to submit an application? Anybody that hasn't looked at the slides yet? Money, okay. Sorry, we're getting there. So that's a different slide. Firm location. All right, so this is great news if you're in Boston, Philadelphia, Dallas, Denver, Austin, Texas, Nashville. What are some of the other hot areas? Charlotte, Seattle, you know, thanks. Yeah, thanks. I appreciate that. If you're in Smithville, Iowa, nothing against Smithville, but that's not where this group wants to go. They typically want to be like, I'm in Athens, Georgia. Well, they don't really want to be there. I mean, they want to be in Atlanta, right? So if you're in one of those areas, great. If you're not, you know, it's a little bit more challenging. And I've got some podcast episodes and some blog stuff, and it's just beyond the scope of this talk to talk about how to source for those people. So you can find that on your own. But firm location, company culture, and again, for some of the bigger firms that have a branch office in every city, like the $300 billion creatives and all, you guys that are part of them, I mean, it's a lot easier to recruit. It's a lot easier to recruit to New York City than like middle of nowhere New Jersey, right? Nothing against New Jersey, love it, but it's just easier. Company culture, that's important. Team member personalities, how long do I get? You know, this is dropping down the list, planning, investment, philosophies. Comp was actually number five, at least on our survey. So they didn't come out and say, yep, just pay me the most. And I actually don't see that as much with my UGA students, because the top students will have three or four offers, and sometimes they'll come to me. It's almost like doing a mortgage refi, right? You got three or four GFEs, like you're looking at everything. And a lot of times they don't take the higher offer, and sometimes that's because maybe the firm knows they're not offering a very good opportunity, so they have to pay more. That's not always the case, but they really, and I try to help them, because let's face it, they're 22 years old, they may not realize it, but where's the mentoring? You know, where are you going to get me in client meetings? Who's going to get you to where you want to go faster? So more on that later. Career track, company reputation, takeaways, a lot of the Gen Y folks are on the job board, so I would tell you to stick to LinkedIn, a CFP career center, the NAPFA job board. You know, there's some good opportunities and sometimes good candidates. Jason Ryan Dorsey and Denise Villa are actually in Austin. They do a lot of research on different, I mean, they're like, and some of the bigger companies, non-financial planning, post jobs on YouTube. Like, I have a 14-year-old daughter, I can't get her off YouTube. The employers understand that, so they're putting job opening opportunities on YouTube. Haven't really seen any financial planning firms do that, but I do like it when I see video bios, I see videos on websites on, hey, here's, on their career center, their career page, here's what it's a day in the life of somebody at XYZ firm. Okay, so it just, it makes these people feel much better about your firm than going to a firm that says, last updated in 2017. Okay, exercise. So, here's what I want you to think about. I mean, we're a little bit in to kind of the talk and got some content, but I just want you to, kind of like our previous speaker, just think about what are some compelling characteristics about your firm and what you're offering that retain your current people, that keep them from leaving, but also attract new team members. Okay, so I just, you know, one of the number one things that you need to be doing, at least for the entrepreneurs in here, is you need to have dedicated time to think about your business on your calendar, on your schedule. If you don't do that, it'll be like, well, got to get the Smith's guy. No, that's got to come first. So, I'm actually going to give you a few seconds just to think about this. I'm not going to call on anybody to share, but I'm just going to give you a couple seconds to focus on this for a minute, and then we'll keep going. Okay, so hopefully something came to mind, and if you're sitting there going, well, our investment process, Caleb, and our investment rate of return, that is not what we're looking for. Okay, I think most of you got that. When I got started in the business, that's what everybody led with. You know, they did not take the advice the previous speaker gave us. It's like, let me show you about our investment process. We don't really care what's going on with you. Okay, it didn't really work very well. Okay, now this is the more focus on the employee benefit, so I'm going to do a quiz again. So, most requested and valued employee benefit, what do you guys think it was? That is a great guess. Health insurance came first, paid time off. Paid time off, it's the work-life balance thing, blend thing or whatever it is, or seeing their baby boomer parents kill themselves, and they get two weeks vacation, and they're working the whole time over the vacation. Anybody had that experience? So this PTO piece, health insurance, I mean, Gen Y, they're off their parents' health insurance, right? So they need that. Incentive comp, retirement plan, and base comp was actually, you know, again, coming in a little bit lower than I would have expected. Gen Z, incentive comp, look at this, interesting. So maybe an inference we can draw there, and maybe if somebody in Gen Z is in here that wants to comment, I mean, are you guys more entrepreneurial? I mean, do you want more on the upside? And the Gen Y are like, hey, we want the base salary, like we want safe, comfort, security, like, you know, yeah, I don't want to take that job where I can make unlimited, because I want to have this, you know, that type of thing. So paid time off, though, here, the gentleman earlier said it, PTO, it just pops up everywhere. It pops up everywhere, and I've got some other stuff. Health insurance, a little bit lower, because they're still pretty much on their parents' health insurance and everything else is kind of the same. So here's what we sort of recommend, and we see a lot, PTO, you know, two to four weeks, plus market holidays. I mean, that's, if you do four, I mean, what are there, eight, nine market holidays? I mean, you're over a month off, really. I mean, you know, I'm looking back at that when I got started, like, that's a really good deal, right? You get a month off. So in your firm, if you don't do this, when you're meeting with these people, just make sure you're reviewing the variable incentive, like just kind of what we see is whatever the base salary is, somebody can earn an additional 10 to 20%, usually an incentive. Okay, that's kind of a rule of thumb to operate on. Okay, so how do we create the best opportunity? So make sure everybody, just before you post something, just try to have a powwow, you know, and just make sure everybody knows what's going on, especially if you're going to list a compensation out there, make sure you've talked to your, make sure everybody, you've checked that, because last thing you want to do is post a job. It's like, oh, that's my job, and they're going to pay someone $20,000 more than me, ooh. You know, the way I would approach that, and I actually had this happen to one of my clients, a doctor client, somebody in their office had all the PA salaries on an Excel spreadsheet and left it on the printer, and they all saw that, and that was a big problem for that doctor's practice. So here's the way, and I try to approach this in my same small business. If someone was able to see the financials and got into my QuickBooks, would anybody quit? That's the question that I pose to myself. So only you can answer that. So adjust compensation, start the process now, even if you don't. See, NAVFA and the other guy, they've got it all wrong. AI, always interviewing. That's AI. That's what AI is in my world. Get the position description, and this is what I see, at least on the firm owner's side, where you're not clear. You're rushing around, you're hurrying, you don't know what you're looking for, and it's like, well, we just hate doing these seven things. Put them on a job description and just put it out there, and we hope somebody will apply. That's not going to get the Caitlin Clark candidate. It might get another candidate, so you just may have to adjust your expectations. Pat, did you have a question? Go ahead. Yeah, I think it's critical. Your point about the AI is always interviewing. Some of the best firms or some of the best students to go to are the ones that are constantly interviewing. They're not waiting for the fall to say, oh, that's hiring season, so I'm going to wait till then. Also, the other thing is the job description. The job description, that is crucial. I have firms that will email me, and they'll say, I'm looking to hire. Here's a little one paragraph about what I'm looking for. That's the only thing that I can share with applicants. They're not going to apply. The way to get the top candidates to apply, maybe your job description needs the resumes you want to see. Make it top-notch, very professional, so when I present that to students, and they see, okay, the top students are going to be applying to those, they take those very seriously. What you're saying is very true. I'm seeing that all the time. Appreciate that. I really do. I already touched on this, so be okay if we can't, I mean, sometimes I'm talking to firms, and I'm just saying, look, everybody else, and they, I mean, it's like, well, Caleb, maybe at the end of the day, what we're offering is not much different than everybody else. You have to maybe come to that realization, too, when you're competing for clients, but also competing for talent. You just got to be okay with that and adjust the standards. Move quickly, and I know this is not what all the practice management consultants are like, you got to hire really slow. If you do that, Caitlin Clark is going to get recruited out from under you. We want to spend six, seven months sort of getting to know each other and go through a bunch of assessments and all that. It just doesn't work that way anymore. We're going to put a posting up that says, we're only accepting applications for this part, and then we're going to spend a month reviewing them. It doesn't really work that way. It's all a fluid situation in the firm. I'm not saying just hire someone like someone did way back 20 years ago when I was here, like, hey, how are you doing? Kind of get a good feel. Let's give this a shot. I'm not saying do that. I'm saying get a good sense of them, but you just got to move a little quicker. Intangibles, that's what we see. So the intangibles are like commitment to their career, passion for the profession, sense of urgency, initiative. If someone has those four handful of things, can you teach them the difference between a 401K and a 403B? Yeah, yeah, you can. Firms get so hung up on this, though. Well, I really wanted someone with a 3.5 GPA, and this person's got a 3.4, and I just don't know if we should look at it. I'm like, are you kidding me? Come on. That's because they don't see the seat that I'm in like, it's not going to get any better than this. Clear path to growth and ownership, I mean, I think that's pretty self-explanatory. We already touched on that. And then, again, this is where maybe the bigger firms have, they've spent tens, some firms, some of my clients, let's just call it north of, you know, the $10 billion and up firms. Some of you are a part of them. I mean, you've spent significant money in internal training portals and, I mean, whatever, scripts and video practice. I mean, that's what these new planners are sort of drawn to. A lot of them don't want to go to bigger firms, but that training, you guys have the advantage versus a small firm. So my training was, sit next to me, watch me do it, and then ask me any questions, and the next time I'm going to expect you to be able to do it. I mean, and I failed miserably, right? I mean, that's a tough training situation, but that's where a lot of you are. Okay, so, Caleb, finally, we're 20 minutes in this, and you haven't said anything about how I get a name and a phone number. That's all I care about. Would you please be quiet about this? Here you go. How do we get a name and a phone number? How do you get candidates? This is what we do. Send it to your social media. Send it to your mailing list, your vendors, all, you know, your DFA, your Schwab people, your, you know, whoever it is, your money guide pro people, and then follow it up. A lot of you will send it out, and then you won't follow up. It's like, okay, well, I guess they weren't interested. I always talk, and if you've read the book Blue Ocean Strategy, I mean, try to find, you know, the red ocean is, I want that female 4.0 student, or I want that female 3 to 5 year CFP. That's what everybody wants, and if you look at the CFP board stats, it is getting better. Less than 30% of them are female. So, try to hire somebody from other industries. I mean, just look at the mortgage industry right now. Look at, you know, getting somebody out of the teaching field. I mean, they hate their jobs, you know, and the mortgage people are getting laid off. Okay, so there's people out there. If you want to take a little bit more active and aggressive approach, find their information on the website, social media sites, LinkedIn. You can also subscribe to ZoomInfo or HireEZ and get names, emails, and phone numbers, and just call them, and reach out, and email them, message them. That's what we do. You know, like, hey, are you looking? Do you know somebody that's looking? I've got this great RIA firm. You're in the insurance channel. Come over to the good side, all right? That's what I tell them. Here's another thing. Recruit from other financial firms. This is I have all these Google alerts that are set up on my email, like, whenever I see M&A activity or, like, I think Fidelity just had some bad news, like, yeah, there's a whistleblower. They're pushing, like, high, I mean, start calling some Fidelity people, you know what I mean? Like, whatever it is. Mergers, yeah, probably touched on that. Then sort of reach out. So, I know there's a handful of aggregators that once they go into a market and they buy a firm, I know people in that firm will take my call, whereas they would not have. And that's just part of it, because that's my full-time job, but you can do things like that, too, if you want to. Okay, so let's keep going. So, that's how you kind of get some names. How do we retain people? Sorry, this is like, it was a lot to fit on right here, because we gave the candidates a lot of different items to select from. So, how do we retain? So, I mean, Gen Y, they're older in their career, like, hey, I want the equity. I want the equity ownership. You know, I want to be able to buy in. Not overly surprising. Look at Gen Z, though. Mentorship, right? Mentorship, they actually, at least this sample survey, no desire to start their own firm. Maybe that's just because they're just getting into it and they realize how hard it is. What else is important here? Training, Gen Y, that popped up. Compensation, you know, for Gen Z, that was up there. No plans to leave. All right, so that's good. I'm going to start my own firm, and this was less than 2%. I'm going to start my own firm no matter what they do. That's just a risk that you have as a business owner. They can go start their own firm. They can call Maddie and go start their own firm, X, Y, P, and just like that. All right? That's why you constantly, so when I got started, it's like, okay, we're going to give you some mentoring. It's like, oh, Caleb, you hit the 90 days. You're good to go, man. Like, no, you've got to keep reinvesting in me and keep this like anything else you would because that's why I get calls from people that have been there three years. Hey, Caleb, why don't you want to learn more? I've learned everything I can. Wait a minute. I'm on your website right now. There's five other CFPs that have been doing this 30 years. You've not learned everything you have. You got busy with your clients. You're running like, hey, they're doing a great job. Let's just sort of back off. I would encourage you not to take that approach. Continue trying to invest in them and pour yourselves into them. Some of you are like, Caleb, dude, look, I don't have enough time to do that. I'm not doing that. Fine. I get it, but Caitlin Clark, you're going to lose her to the transfer portal. Okay? John, did you have a question? Yeah, I'm curious. How much do you think is demographic difference between generations and what they want and what they're going to get in the future? And why CFPs and all the places and licensures that have been here earlier in their career, therefore, you know, they, again, want a good value-based competition. What makes them want to start in their families and buy in their homes that represent the university area? It's more the latter, the stage of career, and also, too, I think, and just looking back at my own career, a lot of it is lack of confidence, too. I mean, when they're starting out, they're just, the answers they're going to give to the surveys are just different. Okay, a couple more things here for you. So, oh, here's what they think, whether you're committed to their career or not. Okay? Views on leadership, commitment to employee development. So, good news is very committed, somewhat committed, but we have, so what is that, about 30% said somewhat to very committed. Okay, so that's good. The other 30%, maybe we can work on that, but here's some ideas for you. Just where do you think you have grown the most over the last year? Do you feel like you're growing? I mean, you don't really want to ask yes or no questions, but in the review process, do you feel like you're growing here? Is this where you want to be? I mean, go there with them. Ask them that. Don't try to guess and just be like, okay, well, they didn't bring it up. I guess everything's okay. They may be intimidated to bring stuff like that up. That's why we do these surveys. Use, you can use Gallup, that you can do anonymous surveys and send this out. I know some firms do that every quarter. We use that in the recruiting firm and some of the other things. What does growth look like for you? Okay? I mean, what if it's like, well, I've been here six months and I want to be a lead planner in two more months. Like, whoa, whoa, we need to know that. Okay? Like, let's, we may need to revisit the career track and sort of the skills that you have. Great segue into my next slide. I think I would have planned that. Here's Gen Z, Gen Y. How quickly do you think you should be promoted to lead planner? I love the confidence with the one-year folks here, but I don't know if they completely understand, because I remember when I was in my very first client meeting, I had the opposite approach. Like, oh my gosh, I could never do this. This is so hard. But here's what you want to focus in on. I mean, between three and five years, I mean, but five years, everybody, that's sort of what we came back with. Yeah, so after five years. All right? So three to five years. So if you don't have a path for these people to get on some sort of lead planner situation within five years, they're going to leave. Okay? And some of you have probably had that happen. And I have some firms that call me and say, look, Kevin, we just don't work that way. We cannot promote people that quickly. I'm like, okay, we're just going to have to keep hiring someone every 18 months. Okay? And you have to be okay with that. Equity ownership timeline. This is, I think, important to the firm owners in here, right? So again, love the confidence with these people. Within two years, I expect to be an equity owner. I really appreciate that. But I mean, it's five years, and I've got probably a handful of podcast episodes where people I've placed either career changers out of school and they've become partners within five years. It is doable and you've probably had some people like that. But definitely within ten, I don't know, we had ten percent of Gen Z maybe because of what John said earlier, hey I don't even expect it, you know, I'm just getting started, I don't know. And two, just so you know, so I'm fair and balanced, one second, I'm fair and balanced. When they tell me that I say, do you understand what that means? Oh and a lot of times it's a compensation piece. I get to make more money, I'm like whoa, no, hold on, let me explain the other side. You have to deal with all the headaches and the mess. And then sometimes I can walk them back, so you guys can thank me later at the happy hour, but it's, a lot of times they don't know what it means, right? So I have to really try to coach them on that. Yes sir? So equity ownership, that's all kinds of flavors. How does somebody who's entering, they need to know that it's mail order, they need to know that it's a valuation, or they expect to keep it in their mind. There's so much more than I want equity. I think just laying out something in the career track or, well, it's easier for me to recruit to firms that I can point to their website and say look, we've either placed these people in this firm and now they've worked their way up to an equity owner, or the firm has hired FP transitions, they've got the value, they're actually doing stuff. Because a lot of your peers, nobody in this class, this group, but a lot of your peers are like yeah, yeah, equity, absolutely, absolutely. And they haven't done anything and that person stays there three years, has a bad experience and they tell all their friends and word sort of spreads and they're a little bit sort of gun shy. But yeah, but it's in the career track, I think, just if you do what you're supposed to and, I mean, hopefully you have that laid out, like here's what you've got to do, like bringing in revenue, here's what you've got to do on technical skills, here's what you've got to be able to do on the management side. If you get to these, absolutely, that's on the table. But some other firm owners are like no, it's not on the table. Fine, just like I've said every other slide, you may just have to adjust your expectations. I'm not saying that you've got to parcel out your firm. I'm not saying that. Okay, I don't want you to take the, all right, so we already covered all that. What else? Okay, how do we feel about their compensation? Oh, this is important. Do we feel that they're fairly compensated? 60% Gen Y and Gen Z said yes. Okay, so I feel like that's good. They feel like they're fairly compensated. Okay. Again, I think just going back, asking them in their anonymous survey, you know, how do you feel about your compensation? What's the most important? Instead of guessing, like I talked about at the very beginning of the talk, instead of guessing, just asking them. You know, because to John's point, it could be a stage of life, like, oh, PT, it could be, hey, I've got a bunch of young kids, I need a lot of PTO right now. Later on, like, hey, I really, you know, I don't need health insurance, can you just give me that in cash? I mean, just work with it. I'm not saying you need to have 20 different compensation strategies for all 20 different people in your firm, but even if you don't do anything, I think the fact that you're engaging them on this is better than what an average firm is going to do. One second, let's get through this and then we'll come back to it. Okay, what else? We got that. Oh, okay, this was a follow-up question. This is cool. So, okay, you said you weren't feeling fairly compensated. What kind of increase is it going to take for you to feel fairly compensated? Okay, I thought it was a decent follow-up question. 50% of Gen Z who say they're not feeling compensated, 10% increase. Okay, I kind of touched on that at the very beginning on the trends that we're seeing. Gen Y, over 30%, 20% increase. Okay, maybe they're, you know, they're getting started in their career, they've got to get their student loans paid off or whatever it is, or maybe they got kicked off the health insurance, or maybe they're having to do two jobs because you haven't hired somebody, you know, that certainly happens. But I just want to have you have these numbers as a reference. People are going to leave if their compensation doesn't go up, at least with inflation. They're just, they're going to call me and say, find me something else. Okay, so that's it. I know you guys aren't doing that and you're giving them raises and looking at this every year and they're growing, but you know, it's just, that's just part of it. They're going to call, it's built in the culture I feel like. Okay, this is an interesting slide. I tried the best I could to put all of the reports and the data out there, but it's not apples to apples. Okay, so let's just try to walk through this in the next few moments. So, let's start with the salary report that our firm does. It's internal, so we're talking to hundreds of candidates every quarter, and what we do is we ask them, because in some states you can't ask them what they're making, but I can ask them, what is it going to take for you to make a change? What are you expecting? Okay, so that's what we're, and that's where we come up with paraplanner, zero to two years, kind of someone out of school, and this is what like Vanguard, Vanguard's offering 65 to 70 to new college grad, zero experience, no CFP, no series 65 to go to Charlotte. Pretty low cost of living. They're going to get trained for six months. You're competing with that same talent pool. So, if you send me or Tav or someone a job description that says I'm going to offer someone 40,000, there better be a lot of training and mentoring or something going on there to make up for that, because that's who you're competing with. Sort of the second chair person, the two to five year person, like middle 80, this is base compensation only. That's what people are expecting. So, you need to look at this, one in terms of recruitment, but also in terms of, are people at my firm, are they roughly in this ballpark? Right, okay, and this is a nationwide survey. If you're in San Francisco, California, or one of these high cost of living, you know, just add probably 30% to this stuff, right? That's one of the reasons why we don't really recruit in those markets anymore, just because it's so difficult. So, lead planner, so this is, and this is where we're different than a little bit of the other surveys, because this is someone sort of right at five years. Okay, they expect to be sort of low six figures, and we see that. I've got some interviews, like again, with people on my podcast, I mean this person could be 26 years old, 27 years old, and they're making $120,000 pretty easily, and like a DC, or Charlotte, or Dow, I mean, if they're in the right firm, and they're delivering, they're doing what they're supposed to. So, that's our stuff. The Schwab, everybody, that's the sort of the gold standard, everybody's like, well, Schwab says it's got to be true. I get that hundreds of times a quarter, I feel like. One second. So, Schwab, the data is older, this is, look, the bands are a lot bigger, less than 10 years of experience, zero to 20 years of experience, you know, 10 years of experience, relationship manager, so here's some other data points, but just know that the bands for the experience aren't as tight as what we were doing. Okay, CFP board just put something out, you can actually go on their website and look at their calculator, it's sort of all over the place, and they're looking at all channels. I'm only really looking at people that want to get into RIS, RIAs, right here. Schwab, mostly RIAs, CFP board is all channels. So, we've got wire house people in there, you've got broker dealers, whatever it may be, and then the investment news, we probably mostly closely align with the investment news survey. So, I mean, part of this is, one, I want there to be some new information, new ideas, but also, it's also, so ideation, but, you know, also confirmation. I want somebody to be able to look at this and say, yeah, all that stuff you brought up, we're doing all that. That's great, that's part of this, alright, to know what these other firms are doing. Alright, so we're winding down here, then I'll take some questions. So, I already touched on this, job description should not be a laundry list or contradictory. Here's what I've seen recently. We're so busy, Caleb, we're growing, we got all this stuff, we need someone to come join us and bring in clients. I'm like, wait a minute, that does not make any sense. I mean, some of you are chuckling, this is the stuff that your colleagues come up with. It is totally wrong. Okay, like, what? We need paperwork filled out. We've got so much bottleneck. We need a CFP with five years experience. Okay, no, people do this all the time. So, this is where some of you guys are, that's when you get north of a billion. You probably need to have an HR benefits person, probably a recruiter on staff. You're hiring a couple of people, you know, a handful of people every year. But for the smaller firms, I mean, that's why we have our recruiting firm. People can outsource it to us. I already touched on this a little bit, but virtual roles just don't work as well for newer planners. I mean, this is an apprenticeship model. They need to be sitting next to you, rubbing shoulders, watching how you craft that email, watching how you dealt with Mary Smith versus how you dealt with Jim Williams. I mean, that's just the way you learn this business. Okay, so somebody in Scottsdale, Arizona, sitting on Zoom, can they learn that? Yes, but we actually have empirical data that says during COVID, the people that started, their trajectory was here. Like, the people that were in person, they just got there quicker, you know, if it was a client-facing planner position. Now, it's fine. You go work in person for five or six years or whatever it is, then you move to Sarasota, Florida or whatever, like, hey, that's great. All right, clients know you. We trust you. We know what's going on. It's a different story. You have a larger pool if you go virtual, but there are some really sort of, you know, sort of cute, cutting edge, a lot of virtual firms, and you're going to be competing with those people that have a lot of attractive things going on and just quicker to hire and quicker to fire is what I said there. So, closing thoughts. Just make sure you're having regular discussions. I mean, I would say minimum quarterly, you know, ideally monthly, you know, just talking with these people about how's it going here, how are you feeling, you know. A lot of you do that right after they're hired, but then you sort of trail off when you get busy. Leverage your profession and the current Gen Y and Gen Z members in recruiting. I mean, try to get your teammates to go out and recruit people, right. Be careful on the compression, the compensation compression. This happens in academia where my wife is, you know, she's been there ten years. She's got people getting hired now that are making more money than she is, you know, so you just, you need to, there's going to be, that's going to be out there, but you just need to be careful. Back to my example about the printer. And then I say, a lot of you probably need to reallocate your resources. You're offering employee benefits that people don't care about, that maybe you care about or you think they care about, so just try to, you know, maybe you hire a consultant or like a survey or something like we talked about. And I think just also too for some of these, especially the Gen Y people that are just starting in the Gen Z, look at the promotion requirements, career tracks. You know, you want to be really clear on, anybody in here, any firm owners in here love having employee reviews? Isn't that so much fun? You like doing that? We have one person, okay, that's fair, great. Okay, and lastly, and again I have the podium here, so we've gone through all this stuff. You just have to be comfortable with, you can do all this stuff, all, you can do everything right and they can still leave. Alright, that's, you're just going to have to be okay with it. That's just part of being the firm owner, being the business owner and everything stopping with you. Two resources for you and I've got a couple copies here that I'm going to hand out in a minute. This is for all of your employees. This is the one I wrote for job candidates. Alright, how to understand the profession. This is what I wish I had 20 years ago when I had no clue and I showed up at your firm and it took me a long time to add value. Alright, so I'm trying to change that. This is for you, the firm owners, so just how to hire people and so on and so forth. So here's my contact information. I'm an easy guy to find, so I think we have a few minutes for questions and I also have a couple books I want to give out. So I know there was a couple people that I told hold, so let's, I think there was somebody before you Taff. Kelly, let's go with you and then we'll come to you Taff. Oh, I'm sorry, I thought I covered that. Usually 10 to 20 percent. Some firms will offer more but that's what we see. Taff. There was somebody at a firm that did a really good job. It was a couple of years back. I had a student that was applying to a firm and in the very first interview process, they discussed coffee with me and the firm said, look, here's, we've done the research and we can show you what coffee is here in this area. That saved a whole bunch of time on both sides of the effort because you had this whole kind of awkward feeling of, well, is it paying me right now or is it not paying me right now? And that whole awkward feeling of it just didn't happen. That firm hired a fantastic person and it worked really well. That whole question of what should we be paying kind of already takes care of because they brought the table. Here's the actual coffee that we can answer. This is a reasonable coffee. And I would say, to add on that, I would say your top candidates, well, like sometimes out, like people that I'm not sure about, I'm like, I'll give them some homework and see if they'll come back and they'll follow up. It's like, you're the financial planner. You go, you create a budget. The top candidates will already have created a budget. And they'll say, so this is what I need. I've looked at the cost of living. I've looked at Sperling's and other stuff. And they're going to be coming to you saying, and hopefully, and I think it's this, I mean, you're already seeing where the non-competes are basically, we're done with those, right? I mean, and you're going to see where every, every state's going to require you to put the, and what we do is like minimum, you know, base compensation range starting at, so I'm not getting people, because I don't want to waste my time. I don't want to take them to your point through a, you know, couple week or couple month recruiting process. And it's like, oh yeah, I really wanted 225. And this is like a $75,000 a year job. Like, no, no. Stuff like that happens. And firm owners get, waste tons of time doing that. So making sure you're on the same page. But again, the intangibles, like I said, the candidate, that's what you want them to do, you know? And just, I'll stop there. What other questions? Yes ma'am, right here. I'm wondering if you think that there's some of a mismatch in the new academic programs that have come up over the past 15 years. There are programs that, according to your research, there are some candidates who think, I want to spend more time doing all kinds of different scenarios and stuff like that. And the firm owners of, if you want to be a teacher, you need to bring them in. And you just, it's just, it's not very obvious. Fair point. Is there an expectations gap between graduates and what places they would like to go? Is there, the question is, I think it was on tape, expectations gap. Yeah, yeah. And I think there's also, and variously, I'm not throwing any CFP programs under the bus because I came out of one, but there's also, and this is going to benefit this group, but I had people like, you only, you got to go fee only, you got to go fee only. So they are benefiting you guys as well. But yeah, I mean it's, you know, go, a lot of them will say just take the highest job offer, you know. You see that more with the MBA programs, right, because they're ranked and they're listed. It's like, they're not, that's why, you know, when I have a client that says recruit somebody from this school, I'm like, no, because they're not going to be interested in your job. Because they can go to Wall Street and make $200,000, they're not going to be interested in a $60,000 a year job because that's going to knock them down on the best MBA list, right. So there actually are some firms that require, you can be a lead planner and you don't have to bring in business. So, you know, I'm just throwing that out there. I mean, so, and they know that. They have other people that go there. So it's like, we have a marketing machine. We just need you to service these people. You know, maybe your income is not going to go up as fast enough because you didn't source the business. But I do certainly think that's why, part of the reason I wrote the book, and there's some scripts in there, it's like, hey, here's some reasonable expectations, I think, for promotion. Yes, sir. So what are some of your best practices on how fast you set your hiring process? Great question. So the process that we use, I think just, you know, a quick resume screen, you know, LinkedIn profile, that's probably more important now than the resume. And then just getting them on the scheduling on a video or a phone call. Then we have them go through quite a bit of testing, but that's after we've already gotten them excited and kind of already in front and had an initial conversation with the firm. We have them do the Colby Index. We have them do a writing assessment. We have them do a little case study in the financial planning software that the firm that we're recruiting for uses, where they have to input some data. I mean, it's a lot of work. And we tell them, and I mean, I told you guys earlier that it's like you can't put up too many barriers because you'll lose them. So what I've always stuck to is if a candidate's really interested and they're not going to go through our little exercises, they're probably never going to be able to make it at one of our firms because it's going to get tough. There's going to be some tough times in these smaller RIAs. And I'm sort of daring and begging the candidate, even if they look great on paper, to look at me like, Caleb, no, I'm not going to do this. I can go over here and interview with this other NAFTA firm and I only have to interview one time and they gave me an offer, like, well, sorry to lose you, but you probably should take that. So I can afford to do that because I'm a full-time recruiter. If you're a business owner, you probably can't, but you need to have some sort of assessment that assesses their cognitive ability, the affective ability, so the personality and the conative, like a Colby Index, like they're doing. So thinking, feeling, and doing. All right, we've got two minutes. I've got one more question, then I want to give away a book right here in the vest. In order to fulfill their part of the desire to move up in the position, they'll limit the team plan and all that other stuff. They have to stay on that track. And we're in a draft where they're trying to find operations people that have the knowledge, the skills, and the ability to be able to do the planning work, not the planning work, but the operations work that the planner communicates to them, and they need sort of good collaboration. I mean, where do you go to source high-quality operations people that understand the planning profession and the role and the knowledge that you need that can break through the draft of the book, within the operations draft? We don't recruit operations people, so I'm not going to be any help to you, but just some, I mean, people out of law firms, out of like banks that have dealt in sort of white collar, higher net worth people. But, I mean, I get asked every time, somebody calls me for an associate planner, like, hey, can you also get us a CSA or an ops person? And the answer is no, I can't. I don't have the database, and they're just, they're very tough. So, I have a, if you want to come find me after, I have another recruiter that can maybe help you with that. All right, so I got, I want to give away, so let's see, anybody's birthday today? May 9th, anybody's birthday? Hey, anybody's birthday in May? Yesterday. Yesterday, all right, Taft, you get one. All right. All right, so one of the jobs, oh, he's got one. All right, who was the other one? Give it to that guy right there. All right. Okay, this is a job seeker. We're going to go to job seeker now. So, who is, let's see, what can I do on this one? Who's a sophomore in here? So, any sophomores? Any freshmen? All right, we got a winner. Here we go. Okay, back to firm owner. Longest NAPFA tenure. Who's been a member 20 years? 25 years. Can anybody beat him? All right, sold to the gentleman back there. All right. All right, one more for the job seekers. What else? NAPFA, how long have you been a NAPFA member? Let's see, less than a year. We'll do the shortest tenure. Less than a year. Who's been less than a year? Less than six months. Less than, well, there's much of them. Less than a month. Month, one month. All right, we got a winner. All right. Thank you, guys. It's been a lot of fun. Enjoy the conference.

Caleb Brown

top talent

financial planning firms

attracting talent

retaining talent

benefits packages

compensation packages

recruiting strategies

job descriptions

employee growth paths