Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the How to Hire, Train, and Retain the Next Generation of Talent session with Luis Rosa and Sean Tedlasca. So it is my pleasure to introduce you to our speakers on our final day today here. In 2020, Luis Rosa launched Build a Better Financial Future to focus on helping his clients with financial planning, investment management, tax preparation, and planning in a comprehensive manner. Tedlasca is a co-founder of the BLX Internship Program, an internship program designed for aspiring black and Latinx financial planners to get their first job in the financial planning field. Please help me in welcoming them to the stage. Thank you. Thank you, Don. You guys hear me OK? OK, thank you. All right, well, welcome, everyone. Just so we can kind of get a sense of who's in the audience, how many are sole practitioners right now? And how many are multi-advisor firms? And how many are you looking to hire in the next 6 to 12 months? OK, great. Well, welcome. Our presentation's about how to hire, attract, and retain advisors from diverse backgrounds. So we'll share. It's good information if anybody's looking to hire, but especially if you're looking to hire someone with a diverse background as well. Oh, real important questions. Who got their 80s on last night? All right. We have a QR code up here if you want to download the slides. And we also have some resources that we'll share, like a nondisclosure agreement, sample employment agreements if you want some samples there. We'll go over, yeah, where to find candidates, how to onboard and retain them. As well as best practices that we've learned over the last three years running an internship program for BLX. And feel free to ask questions along the way. If we get too sidetracked, we'll stick around afterwards and answer them at the end. In addition to BLX, I also have my own firm. I started seven years ago. I've hired 17 team members throughout those seven years. A variety of part-time, full-time. Currently my team, there's five of us. There's four CFPs, and then we have one back office person as well. And I'm a solo practitioner. I have my own firm, Build a Better Financial Future, currently out of Los Angeles. Mostly virtual, but I've onboarded three different team members and two contractors. So five people total, including some interns from the BLX internship throughout my three years in business. So I've been doing this for about 21 years, but solo for just, I just hit three actually in April. So pretty new firm. First thing to ask yourself is when to hire. A good rule of thumb is when you're at 70% to 80% capacity. I was at Christy Archuleta's session earlier about advisor stress. And one of the common themes was, I've got too much on my plate. I've got no time. And I'm sure probably you're feeling like I'm at 110% or 150% capacity already. But this is as you're thinking about your hiring calendar for the future to kind of bake this into your hiring process. It typically takes at least three months to do the job posting, screen the candidates, interview, give them time to finish up their current responsibilities before they can start at your firm. So you want to plan ahead. You also want to have some time to onboard them effectively, to train them, so that way you're not already swamped. A little bit about my background. I started in May of 2016. I got my first, I looked for help with my work just a year after launching. I was only at $70,000 of revenue at that time. So I've heard some rules of thumb, don't hire anyone until you're at $250,000 of revenue or $300,000. I knew that I wanted to have a practice that was bigger than myself. Also, I wanted to help scale my time. So what I did was I hired Virtual Partners Group. They're a professional outsourcing company. It's a good way to kind of dip your toes into the waters of hiring. I was worried about hiring someone. And then what would happen if I had to let them go? And then they sued me for wrongful termination. I'm worried about all of that. Or just kind of all these worries of like, am I going to have to be accountable to someone from 9 to 5? And am I going to have to give up my freedom? And all of those things ended up not being something that ended up being an issue. So the first person I hired, it was just 10 hours a month. It was just a monthly contract. It was a good way to kind of, there was no long-term commitment. And he just helped me with my CRM a little bit by cleaning up some workflows, starting workflows. I didn't even have an operations manual at the time. Just helped me to kind of embrace my CRM a little bit. So you can kind of start with some small things and then expand from there. I did want some more help, so I hired someone on a part-time basis to help me prep for meetings and take notes during meetings and follow up after meetings. Sometimes it would take me two or three hours to write the notes after a meeting and send the email out to the client afterwards. And now with how we have things set up, I can be done after a meeting with all of my responsibilities and all of my homework and stuff in as little as 10 minutes, right after a meeting. So it really helps free up some time. The person that I hired ended up working with me for four and a half years. She ended up growing into a lead planner. So yeah, that worked out really well. All right, so before you hire someone, you want to figure out what you want them to do. And you hit this one. Thank you. What I did was an exercise. I learned this from, it was a Make Time Institute. And I had a meeting with them and they had me do this exercise. And basically it was figuring out what do you do on a daily basis? Everything that you do, whether it's administrative, whether it's planning, follow up, and so on, jot it all down as soon as it come off your head, right? Then you want to give a dollar value to them. And the way that you do that is deciding if I was going to hire someone to do this for me, how much would I pay them? So I started writing down myself, like, all right, hourly planning, my hourly rate is $300. I started writing down answering emails, scheduling, any post-meeting follow-ups, anything like that, including my social media posting on my calendar. How much would I pay somebody to just do graphics for me, come up with the caption, the hashtags, and post? So I started thinking all of that, just a big brain dump, gave them all a dollar value. And then what that did was it actually helped me figure out my job description because I was then able to rank them from highest to low and figure out, okay, the top three things I'm not gonna hire anybody to do because that'll be replacing myself right now, and I'm solo. So the $300 items, like actual planning, prospecting, those were me. Anything else that was like $20 and below, I was able to say, you know, I can just pay somebody else to do that. And that helped me tremendously to create my actual job description because I knew exactly what I was gonna hire this person to do. And then I was able to translate that into an award document that said, hey, here's exactly what I'm looking for, here's how much I'm paying. My range was like 15 to $20 an hour based on experience. And I ended up getting over 40 applicants for that job posting. And I ended up hiring someone from that. So where do you post? Which is, the next big question was, I didn't know, you know, I'm a solo practitioner, or even if you aren't solo, right, there's just so many places where you can post for a job. So it depends what you're looking for. In my case, I actually ended up using a military spouse through the BLX internship program. The program coordinator herself is a military spouse, and she's, hey, I'm part of this group, other military spouses, I was looking for work, opportunities, and I was like, that's actually a pretty cool idea, because Sean pointed this out to me, that he has hired somebody from a military background before in the spouse capacity, and they already have benefits, so you don't have to worry about paying benefits. They love the flexible schedule, because they might need time in the morning and at night, so my assistant has a chunk of change, maybe four to six hours during the day that she can use. And then also, they don't know where they're gonna live in the next few years. So just knowing, hey, I can continue to do this regardless of where I end up, it's just like a win-win for both of us. And eventually, as her kids get older, my practice grows, and perhaps she will become a full-time employee, so kind of give yourself that leeway to have someone that can grow with you. So here's some common job boards that you can use. If you're looking for somebody to do specifically more on the planning side, power planning, client service associate, the CFP board has a job board, a cfp.net, NAFA has a career corner, so you could do your job posting there as well. New planner recruiting, that's Kayla Brown. Simply power planner, so that's more if you're looking for a client service associate, a power planner. Not so much administrative, necessarily. There are some free ones, if you wanna just post like in the XYPN Facebook group, or FPA Activate. The Military Spouses Facebook pages are great, too. Happy to share that if anybody decides to go that route. Local universities and CFP board programs. One of the things that we have done at the BLX Internship Program is develop a lot of relationships with existing colleges that have CFP programs already. So it helps you kind of not have to do all that legwork yourself, but if you're looking for somebody in person, that could be a great place to get somebody started. LinkedIn is a great way to do that as well. Now you see at the bottom, I have current team members with a question mark. It's because it depends on what you're trying to do. So team members are a great way for you to get someone because they already know the culture, they know how you operate, and they might be able to find you a good fit. But if you're looking for somebody more from a diverse background, and if your firm isn't already diverse, then perhaps the current team member might not be the best option. So Sean's gonna tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, I think it's natural for people to do like pattern matching, and if you're only reaching out to like your current networks, you're probably gonna end up with people that kind of look like you. So you might, if you do have, sometimes firms have incentives to refer people to work for you. So you might wanna rethink that if you are looking for candidates from diverse backgrounds because some firms like say, if you refer someone to our firm, and they stay, you get like $5,000. So you might wanna rethink that policy if you have something like that. Yeah, so yeah, and then tell us about some places that we can look if we are looking for a diverse hire. Yeah, so there's historically black colleges and universities, historically Hispanic-serving institutions within all the, within just the universities in general, there's student organizations like Quad A, Alpha. We've started to build relationships at all of those universities, kind of just one-on-one, and kind of just like developing those networks over time. And I think this is a good time to kind of talk a little bit about like what BLX is and why we started it. We started in the summer of 2020. It was during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement. George Floyd was just murdered, and there was a lot of talk about DEI in our profession, and like panels and things like that, and we didn't, but we didn't see a ton of like actionable things that the industry was doing, the firms were doing. The industry has about like 5% black and Latinx, but those groups represent over 30% of our country, so we wanted to help move the profession to be more representative of the demographics of our country. So we decided to create this internship program where we work with fee-only firms, and we get them a pool of candidates of interns. I think we all know how hard it is to get that first job in our industry, so we thought that an internship was a great way to start, and then it's a low ask from the firm end, because an internship doesn't require, it doesn't, it's not like a super high ask. We're not asking people to hire a full-time associate. Some of the parameters that we look for for the candidate pools is they have to at least be a junior or senior in college, and at least a 3.0. They must have an interest in personal finance, or a major in finance or accounting or something similar, and we interview each firm that's part of our program, and we ask what they're looking for in their next hire, and we essentially are running a recruiting firm, and we match at least three candidates with every, for every role that's out there. We provide training during the summer to help them come in with, already have some information about the industry and the profession so they can hit the ground running. We do things like mock interviews, resume reviews, cover letters, help them put their best foot forward. Also, if they don't get matched, we give them access to the FPA externship so they can build their candidacy for next year. So far, we've had over 400 applicants come through our program, and we are on track to match about 80, cumulatively, over these first three years. Yeah, do you have anything else you'd wanna add? Yeah, and then on the firm side, what we do is we have hired a team that has a human resource background in the advisory business, so they volunteered year one, then we set it up as a 501c3, so we're able to get corporate sponsors, like Schwab, eMoney, so now we're able to pay this team to internally interview every single candidate and every single firm. So it's not just handing the firm out, hey, here's three resumes from people. It's very well thought out, very specific and tailored to what the firm is looking for. The greatest compliment I got was from J.D. Bruce from Abacus at the time. He said, you guys have built a great internship program that just happens to have a diversity focus. So he was very happy with just the process. They've been big supporters. They usually take on four or five interns and hire, I think they did four the first year. They hired all the interns they had taken on except for one. And it's just amazing what we've done so far. We're in the third year now. We had over 200 applicants. We placed 58 interns so far in 42 different firms throughout the country, and 23 of them got job offers afterwards, whether it's part-time or full-time or an extension of the internship. So if you wanna learn more about it, there are some index cards in front of you. For those of you in the back, there's some by the water cooler and some by the black table here, and I have some up front as well. So yeah, we'll stick around if you have any more questions about the program itself. But the internship in general, whether you want to build your own or use another internship program like BLX, for example, it's a great opportunity for you to get to test drive a candidate before you make a decision to hire. I was talking to someone yesterday, and they expressed some frustration how they've hired some people that just look great on paper, they interviewed great, and then when they brought them on, they ended up not being a culture of fit or they didn't have as much experience as they thought they did. And with an internship program, you can say, you know what? We're gonna have these people come in from eight to 12 weeks and just try them out. There's no commitment on your end. You don't have to make a job offer. And if they're a great fit, then you can go ahead and do that. So it's a pretty safe way for you to onboard somebody and then make a decision later. So imagine you got a chance to test drive a car for three months, right, before. So that's kind of like the concept there. Yeah, and this internship program's about to start for this season. And then if you're interested in participating next year, you apply in the fall, and then we match you with an intern in the spring, and then they start in the summer. And that's when all our content is. We have a speaker series with like Dr. Daniel Crosby, Camila Elia was a speaker. So we have like really good speakers throughout that summer as well. Yeah, and we also have career changers that come through the program, so it's not just students. So sometimes you might be able to get someone that's already in a different field that has a lot of work experience, not necessarily in financial planning, but they have a lot of transferable skills that you can use. Because you can always teach somebody the tech. You know, I feel like that's the easy part. I myself, when I take on interns, I usually do a tax season internship because the interns that I found had some tax background. You know, I'm an enrolled agent as well, so I do taxes in my practice. So I remember my second intern, when I looked at the resumes, oh wow, they worked at H&R Block and everything. So I was like, and they're already working somewhere else. So I was like, why don't you just come in for tax season instead of the summer? So that worked out great. So depending on your schedule and your intern schedule, you can make it where it might work for you. It doesn't necessarily need to be exactly a certain amount of weeks during the summer. Some firms have extended out beyond to the fall and then create a job from there as well. So it's a lot of flexibility. Yeah, any questions about BLX? We don't want to make it a commercial about the BLX, but. So is there a, as part of your program, is there a specific track for, if you want to bring somebody on, say for a fall semester or a spring semester rather than just the summer? Right now, all their content's geared around the summer. The question is, do we have fall or spring tracks? Right now it's just for the summer. If you are looking to hire someone outside of that window, we have a job board. You can just post the job and then we'll send it to all our candidates and then we just ask for a donation of whatever you feel comfortable with. Yeah, because we have, most people that apply don't get placed, unfortunately. Like this year, over 200 candidates, we may place maybe 30 or so. So there's still a lot of qualified people that didn't get in. So we provided opportunities like scholarships for the FBA externship. We're also providing training for the securities industry exam this summer as well. So we'll provide some scholarships. But then we still have that pool of candidates that have come through. So if you do have a job posting and it doesn't fall within that summer period, we're happy to just share it with all of our candidates that have come through the programs and the ones that are currently in internships. On the website, it says that a requirement is to have past experience hiring interns. I don't think it's a, does it say requirement? I think it's, we would like you to have some experience. Okay. I have preferred for that one. Well, we'll update that. First, if I haven't done that yet. Because we have some, we have had some firms, this is their first hire period and they've hired an intern. And we provide resources like a sample syllabus for your intern, like what you should have them do. And so we provide a lot of support for, yeah, to help you during that period. So we'll have to update that. Yeah, we'll definitely update that. Yes. You mentioned like you had 200 applicants and 30-ish were placed. Mm-hmm. Why the gap? Was it just not enough firms? Not enough firms, yeah. Is that what it is? Yeah. A lot of the firms that participated in the beginning, a lot of them have already hired, so they're not necessarily taken on. See, this is one of the things that we learned initially in 2020. We thought, oh, advisors are just going to take on interns for the kindness of their heart. But what we learned was that people are actually looking to hire. So we're like, oh, okay, well, that's a really good thing. It's not just like, hey, come on and we'll teach you the ropes and good luck. So a lot of them have already hired, right? And I think combined with maybe the stock market not doing so well last year and a lot of the firms that have revenue based on AUM probably were a little shy about hiring. So we didn't get as many firms as we would like. So that's one of the things that we continue to grow. We definitely have a pretty good handle on the candidate side, but we need more firms for sure. Yeah, that was the main reason why we didn't. Yeah, the first couple years we had more opportunities than interns. And so then we really focused on like the schools, associations, and then we got 200 applicants. And now I think maybe we over rotated there and then need to spend more time on this firm side. We wanted to create like kind of like a map, I guess, of where you could find help depending on what you're looking for. So on the right side, these are your traditional like full service recruiting firms. New Planet Recruiting is Caleb Brown's firm. He'll help you create a job posting, provide a pool of candidates for you to consider. That typically will run like $8,000 to $12,000 per candidate placing, depending on how much you're looking to pay the candidate. Simply Paraplanner, I've had a lot of success working with them. They can do part time or full time placements. They have a pool of about 2,000 candidates that are all like looking to get into the profession. A lot of them are looking to work virtually, but they also can have local candidates for you. And then you want to talk about the ones on the left? Yeah, definitely. So the ones on the left, one thing that we wanted to help by putting this presentation together too, is kind of demystify a little bit about if you have that need for someone to grow your team, you don't have to go from zero to 100. It's not like, okay, I need to hire somebody immediately. Like the way Sean did it, right? He just used 10 hours a month for $500 at the time. So there are services like that where you can hire pretty much like a contractor. So they're not necessarily somebody that you're fully onboarding into your team. So you're not taking that much risk necessarily. So some of the examples, Sue Chesney, she has a delegated plan. I actually worked for them in the past. What she does is she has an RA based out of Colorado, and she doesn't have individual clients. She basically does outsourcing financial planning. So she has advisors who are her clients that want to outsource part of the financial planning process, whether it's because they don't have enough to hire a full-time member per se. So you can use a company like that to hire CFPs and enrolled agents and all that to help you actually do some real deep planning. She also has another company with Kayla Brown called Planning Zoo. They just started that last year. And what they do is they get students from universities, and they get them trained, and you can do basically what they do is the data entry for you. So if you use like eMoney, MoneyGuyPro, RightCapital, and so on, they have different students working under a CFP professional that are trained in whatever software you use, and you will give them the client data that you receive from your client, all of your documents, and they'll actually just go into your software and do the entire plan and whatever scenarios you want them to do. So that's another great way for you to kind of offload some of that without making a full-time commitment to hiring somebody. So it's actually a really good way of doing it. There are other services like Nifty. I'm sure you guys probably heard about it, where they do beyond help. On the back office side, they do things like helping you with the custodians that you use. So they'll do like the account applications, any ACAT transfers. They also have a service where you can do like social media management as well. So they'll give you a certain amount of hours that you can buy like a package, and you can even have them like post on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, whatever. There's a lot of different things like Buffer or Hootsuite. That's one of the things I use now with my assistant, and you're able to kind of post your schedule for all your social media posts from one place without physically having to log into all different devices. So it's pretty cool. But you can actually hire somebody to do that or a service. So that's one of the things we wanted to really drive home was like if you haven't made a first hire before, it doesn't have to be that scary. You can start slow like this, or you can go to the middle and maybe get an intern yourself. There's a lot of firms that we work with at BLX that already have their own internship program, and it's a great compliment to what they're already doing. So we have a lot of resources that we're happy to share like how to do your own internship basically, what exactly to have the people do for like an 8- to 12-week period so you don't have to reinvent the wheel yourself. Yeah, delegated planning is cool because you can hire someone like Luis who's an EA, CFP, and you get the same planner to work on all of your plans. And from Luis's standpoint, he joined when he was kind of building his firm and kind of can get some additional revenue. So it's a cool match. And then the planning zoo, all the students are doing the data entry, but they're having that reviewed by a CFP there as well. So do you guys actually even have a list of here's the things you have most interns do? Do you give that to the firms? Yeah, Sean has built that. The question was if we have a resource to kind of show the firms what to have interns do. And, yes, Sean put together a template that actually shows a sample syllabus of things you can do. And we've gathered data from other companies that have participated in the program like Abacus that have shared things that they have had the interns do. So we put all that together. Some of them even include Capstone Project, which Sean's going to talk about, which is pretty amazing too. For example, like if you're thinking of adding tax prep service to your firm, for example, to see what that would look like, you can have them do research to exactly what that would entail for your firm, see if it's profitable, if it makes sense for you to do from a time perspective. And Sean's going to give a few other examples. But, yeah, you don't have to reinvent the wheel. There are a lot of resources in that. Yeah, and we have some like we'll share that towards the end, some additional resources. So how to attract top talent. I was in Tim Cochise's presentation yesterday, and he kind of reinforced this. Like the most ambitious, most driven candidates out there, they're really looking for professional growth. They're really looking for career tracks. They want to see the roadmap ahead of them of how I can build my career at your firm and what does that look like. I like writing a detailed job description in plain English so there's no surprises when the candidate starts working for you. My job descriptions are pretty long, like three pages. It's important to have career tracks. You don't have to have it completely built out. I have some samples to share in just a second. But, yeah, candidates are looking for mentorship. They're looking for who's going to be my supervisor. Am I going to learn a lot from this person? What's the check-in process for how I'm going to grow? So you can really sell that when you're in the interview process. In terms of, like, compensation packages, it's pretty common to have a technology budget for when someone comes on, like to help them buy a laptop or an external monitor or a keyboard, like $1,000 or $1,500, and then they can use it just to get their workstation set up. And then a professional development budget, usually that's like $2,000 or $3,000. Ours is $2,000, and the idea is we want them to be able to at least attend one professional conference during the year to cover the flights, lodging, and the conference admissions fees. But those are some common perks that candidates are looking for. When I made my first hire, I didn't have career tracks built out. This is just like a framework to have to share with your team, your potential hire. The bottom track is the typical career path for advisors, where someone starts as a client service associate or a paraplanner or junior advisor, whatever you want to call it. After a year, they grow into an associate, and then they can become a lead planner after that. The top track is an alternative pathway, and so if someone doesn't want to become a lead planner, it's nice to just show them that there's an option for them to go into, like, firm management. Maybe they like operations more, director of financial planning. When I made my first hire, she didn't know if she wanted to be a lead planner or not, and so this kind of just having these choose-your-own-adventure kind of pathways was kind of just gave me peace of mind that, okay, we're not committing you to a certain pathway. The person I hired was a financial coach before, and she found out that she missed kind of the one-on-one interactions with clients, so she ended up going to becoming a lead planner. But this just gives options, and it's just nice to have something to share with somebody. I got this from Caleb as well. Then once you do grow your firm, you do need to develop your career tracks more fully. You do need to have job descriptions for each role. I think I did this maybe after three years in business. I worked with Herbers Consulting. It was a pretty intense, like, three-month project. We used the Diamond Teams framework. We also used the financial planning resident kind of model. So for our team members, they start as a financial planning resident. It's a two-year track at our firm. That gives them time to get the experience under the apprenticeship model. The goal for that resident is to be able to be in the room by themselves by the end of the two years, except for maybe the most complex clients. From there, they get promoted to becoming an associate planner, and that's when they're starting to see clients. They're shadowed by a senior team member. They're helping get prepared for those meetings. And once they are the lead on about 30 clients, we also look at it in terms of revenue, so about $180,000 of revenue that they're managing. They're eligible to be moved to a lead planner role. The reason we picked 30 was that gives them enough experience and enough kind of just variety of clients that they've worked with to kind of build their confidence and expertise. And then once they're managing about 60 clients, then they're eligible to become a senior planner, and then they're starting to lead other team members and kind of develop the next generation. And then from there, there's an opportunity to become a partner. We haven't built that out yet, but that's something I do want to have the mechanics figured out soon. Probably in the next year, the first person is going to be eligible to buy into the firm at that point. That's like a law firm, Sean Scatter. I like your setup. Can you tell us a little bit about the compensation structure in terms of, like, bonuses or incentives for these types of roles? Yeah, so at our firm, we've been fortunate that, like, we don't need to have someone go out to, like, try to gather clients. We've had pretty good lead flow. So we don't have, like, a new business bonus for, like, 25% of the first-year revenue. We don't do anything like that. What we do is we have a bonus pool that's based off of the gross revenue of the firm, and we pay it out every quarter. So for us, let's say we make $250,000 in a quarter, 10% of that goes into a bonus pool, and then it gets paid out to each team member based off of, like, what points that they're eligible for. So our point ranges from, like, 4% of that 10% up to, like, 12%. So you're not paying out that full 10% of gross revenue. Like, that wouldn't be sustainable. Like, that's just too much. You need to leave room for new team members. You need to leave room for people to grow in the firm. But the idea is it encourages our team to retain our clients, to keep the revenue that we do have. It encourages us to assign new clients. So we all kind of grow together, and that's how we do our – so it's salary-based and then this quarterly team bonus. Yeah, that's really cool because one thing we learned is that not everyone wants to be in a sales capacity or business development. So this is a great way to have people incentivize to just really serve as your clients really well and grow within your firm by making sure that they're allowing for newer team members to come in, more clients to onboard, and then everybody just grows with the firm. So it's a really nice structure, and so I'm sure you put a lot of work to building this. It kind of works like at the beginning you're just serving the team, helping the senior team members. Then you kind of go into, like, just serving your own clients, and then you kind of serve clients less, and then you're mentoring and grooming the next generation. And then you can have multiple diamond teams, right, depending on the size. Yeah, we're just starting our second diamond team right now. Nice. Thank you. So aside from the money aspect, right, like what Sean just showed that he does at his firm is a great way to retain people, right? You're providing a clear path, kind of like a law firm, right? I could be an associate and then lead. I could become a partner eventually. That's a great incentive. There are other things that you can do that don't cost a lot of money. Some of them don't even cost any money to help people feel like they could be their 100% authentic selves at work and feel part of your culture, feel like they fit into your firm. So some of the examples, you know, that you can do, it's like floating holidays, you know. Let's say your firm, you happen to close every Christmas Day, New Year's, Thanksgiving, and so on. You can say, yeah, as part of working here, you get two holidays a year, three holidays a year of your choosing that you can take off, whether or not the firm's open, right? So that way you can ask, is there anything that, you know, whether it's religious or cultural that you value that you'd like to observe, then you can go ahead and do that. So that's a great way to make them feel welcome in your office culture without feeling like they have to maybe mask who they are and just kind of like just fit into whatever mold you've already pre-established. Another one, too, is just being aware of dietary restrictions. It's very simple, but if you have an event, whether it's a team building event or an office party or something like that, just ask your team members any dietary restrictions, right? It's very common now to hear about gluten allergies, nut allergies, alcohols and other ones. Some people don't drink. So when they think of an office party, they're just thinking like, oh, everybody's just going to be drinking. Like, I'd rather just not go. And you can say, hey, if you don't drink, we're having these three mocktails, you know. Oh, that sounds delicious. I'll be there. Actually, it sounds kind of cool, right? So there's very small ways that you can do that without spending a lot of money, but they go a very long way to make people feel welcome. And then another one, like Sean was saying, is the equipment. When I hired my first intern, I noticed that during the Zoom meetings, he was kind of, you know, I was almost seeing his nostrils, you know. And I was like, hey, man, like, do you need something? And he's like, yeah, you know, it's like he was a college student. And he was just like, yeah, my room, like I just don't have, like it's not high enough. So I went on Amazon. I bought him a laptop stand. So he had like eye level contact going forward, you know, very small stuff. But the other thing I did was I got him a lighting kit. I myself am very active on social media. So I'm always conscious of like how things look as far as like lighting and stuff. So I got him a lighting kit. It was probably like $60 on Amazon too. So he had even light from both sides because I was having him join client meetings to take notes. So I wanted him to look right, you know, represent the firm world as well and feel comfortable. And then the other thing I got him was a green screen that I saw on Amazon. It goes right behind the chair. It was like $30. And then you can use a virtual background feature and you just change the background. So it's not always like blurred or, you know, sometimes I felt like he was like in a little corner somewhere with like just like whatever clean spot he found that wasn't, you know. So little stuff like that. And it was just so much better after that because he felt comfortable. Like, okay, yeah, I got the light. I could see eye level. So that's a pretty cool way of making people feel welcome as well. So Sean is going to talk about some career expectations that he does at his firm now. Can we stop on that? Oh, absolutely, yeah. I thought a lot more of this session was going to be on integrating people from diverse backgrounds. And I feel like we can touch more on some of the cultures and like, you know, like the African-American culture, the, you know, Muslim culture. Do you guys cover any of that? I mean of what to learn and how to make them happy to be there, know that they can be their authentic selves and, you know, have two-way conversations about what we need to learn. For sure. Yeah, no, that's a great point. I think what I would recommend, NAPFA has the diversity, equity, and inclusion certification. And I did one of the modules on that as well actually. That you can really take a real deep dive there. I would highly recommend to do that because, yeah, unfortunately in this format, we probably don't have enough time to get into stuff like that. So we're going to do it on a very high level. The DEI toolkit and the DEI certification really go, talking about some of the things like cultural biases that we all have, that we don't really necessarily even know that we have it, just because of how we grew up and so on. And we go into very specific details about race, disabilities, sexual orientation, all kinds of stuff. I would highly recommend you do that if you haven't yet. And I think, yes, sir. Thank you. Thank you, John. So John is part of the DEI committee, so if you have any questions there or you need any resources, thank you. Yeah, we wanted to have like a hybrid of like, these are best practices for hiring people from diverse backgrounds and then just how to hire and onboard candidates in general. I think the question that you just asked is a perfect one to bring up with your teammates about what do you need from my end to bring your authentic self and then giving examples of what would be appropriate. Because if you ask that, they might not know what I could even ask for. So giving examples of like, do you need any special technology, special, holidays that you might need off, just so they can be like, oh, OK, maybe I need to put this on the calendar that I have these holidays that you don't traditionally get off. We'll also share some of the key learnings that we've learned from BLX towards the end as well. Thank you. So maybe this one, this is just like if, maybe we could focus more on that, Carolyn, kind of those sorts of things. This is more about if you haven't ever hired before, just to get a sense, have people hired before, a raise of hands? So maybe this one isn't quite as, I don't need to go quite into detail about this, but when you do hire someone, you want to have a process of checking in with them. I think at least weekly, when someone just starts, we do like a 30-day, 60-day, 90-day check-in process. And then we meet with them quarterly. And then we use career expectations. So it's like, this is what I want them to complete or be able to do. And then I give them space for them to enter things that they want to be able to do by the end of the 30 days. And then we check in with them. So some of us have hired virtual employees before. And to me, I remember when I was hiring my first employee, I was concerned about just data security. And I was like, how am I going to make this work with somebody that I've never met? So the first thing I did, we did a background check. So there's this company. It's part of the resource. We'll put the QR code at the end again. And it was like $40 to $60, depending on how deep you wanted to do the background check. So it wasn't that expensive. It's not like you had to have an account with them or anything you can pay as you go. So I did a background check. And then in terms of technology, one of my favorites is LastPass. I'm sure a lot of you use it. So I got really comfortable with it because I was able to create a folder, give access to all of the things that I needed them to have access to, but I was able to very quickly remove that access if I needed to, just for my peace of mind. And you can start slow. You don't need to necessarily give your team members full access to everything immediately. Like for example, one of the things I originally did when I used Dropbox to share documents, I disabled the download feature as just another measure of like, OK, I know they can't download any document. They can just open them and view them if they don't have any need for it. But Sean pointed out to me, like, hey, if you have somebody that works in your office, they can easily bring a flash drive and take that anyway, right, or email it to themselves. So there's no like foolproof system. But this gave me a lot of peace of mind. A lot of the communication that I do is via Slack. So this is pretty cool because you can just chat with your teammate in real time without having a lot of emails go back and forth. And you can also see if they're currently available or not. So that way, you can keep some sort of balance as well. You can Microsoft as unavailable so that people know what to expect and when to expect a response. Some companies use Microsoft Teams. It's kind of like a marriage between Zoom and Slack where they use it for virtual meetings, but also a lot of different channels and chatting with the team members and so on. And then the Google Suite. You use Google in your office, right? Yeah. So you can assign an email address. So even if it's an intern, like for example, in my case, I have intern at buildabetterfinancialfuture.com. So every time I get an intern, it's the same email address. I just change the name of what it looks like when the person receives the email. So it looks personalized to the intern, but it's still the same email address that I have access to. And I can easily just, everything that I've given the intern access to is based on that email address. So I can just log in and just shut it off very easily. So that way, you feel good about your security. And the last one that I use as well is Hotspot Shield. It's just a VPN. So if you're at a hotel, an airport, coffee shop, in my case, since I was hiring college students and stuff, sometimes they might do some work from their school library or something. So I just gave them a license to Hotspot Shield so they can log into a public Wi-Fi, but then go through this VPN. And it kind of masks the address. And you don't have to worry about somebody probably hacking their connection and having access to your client data. And then some people do, I just started doing this with my employee where going forward, I actually give them a laptop as opposed to have them work on their laptop and just go through a Google Drive or something. Now it's like, hey, here's your actual work laptop. And you can even, if you want to get fancy, there are ways where you can remote wipe a laptop if you set it up right with your IT people. I haven't gone that far, but you can do that. That's actually a thing. So I was happy to see that. And I was like, wow, you can kind of like find my iPhone and if you have that for a laptop, you can just like wipe it in case it gets lost or stolen. Yeah, another one I like, one of my teammates, he was working from home, like his family home. And someone had a bird that was just like kind of chirping throughout the day. And so Crisp is a good plug-in that mutes the background noise that I paid for him to have. Oh yeah, that's nice. Zoom also has a background noise reduction feature as well. So I've tested it out. I'm a heavy typer. And I've asked somebody, hey, can you hear me typing? They're like, nope. The dog's barking. Yes, sir, in the back. So I do a study with RedGel every year about technology that's being used in the industry. I'll say right now, about the majority, 90% of the industry is using Teams. And all the students I have in my program, they're all using Teams. So if anybody has any questions about that, I can help you as well. Oh, awesome. OK, thank you. Yeah, if anybody has any questions. Teams seems to be very highly used with a lot of the firms. Sure. Thank you. These are, again, some resources for you. The sample NDA, sample employment agreement. This is an example of an operations manual that you could have your team build out. Another good tip is to just record yourself on Zoom. If you're going to do something more than once, you want to document it as if you're going to do it 1,000 times, and writing out the detailed process. What we do is we just have the details in the operations manual, and then we have the high-level steps in our CRM. Yeah, my first intern actually created my SOP, because I didn't have one. And that was part of his task, was let's actually create a to-do for everything that we do. What I found really helpful was I was doing Zoom meetings with him anyway, and then sharing my screen and going, hey, here's how you open an account, and do this. So I'm like, why don't I just record it? I don't know what gave me that idea, but it was a great one. Because now, as I've gone through several employees, I now have a folder that I share as part of the onboarding process. Say, hey, here's exactly how to open an account. Here's how to access MoneyGuy Pro, or when a client onboards, here's the workflow. And they can literally see the recording of me talking, going through it step-by-step. And they just do a monitor, just pause it as they do it, and then continue. So it helps, because they're not always reaching out, how do I do this again? And it helps them feel comfortable with the process. Eventually, they'll do it without watching the video. But it's a great way of doing that, and it doesn't really cost anything. Just record yourself on Zoom, and just start labeling different things, account opening process, and so on, and putting them in different folders that you can share when you onboard. So these are some of the best practices and some of the learnings that we've found from the BLX program. Luis was mentioning the Capstone project. All the firms that participate in our program, they put down what their interns are going to be doing, and then we share that amongst the firms. Some examples are, you want to put down a list of things that you're thinking about adding to your firm, or a project that you maybe haven't had time to do, and you want to add to your firm, or a project that you maybe haven't had time to dedicate to, and then giving the intern a choice of what they wanted to do. So one was cross-border planning. If you're thinking about adding that as a service offering, integrating tax planning into your firm. I had my intern look at, what if we wanted to offer estate planning within our firm? So how do you work with smaller clients? They can do research on client segmentation and service packages. And then they work on it for the eight to 12 weeks of the internship, and then they present it to the whole company at the end. It's a good way for them to have things to do on their downtime. And then also, you don't want to just give the intern administrative tasks if you're thinking about hiring them. You really want to test their capabilities as a teammate. And giving them a meaningful project is a good way for you to see how they think, see their presentation skills. You can also use it as an opportunity for them to build their network. So if you're thinking about adding a tax practice, you can introduce them to your peers that already have a tax practice at their firm. And then they can interview them and learn from them. So that's been a great thing that has worked well for the firms and the interns as well. And they can be small projects, too. They don't have to be this large thing. Like, hey, I'm thinking of adding taxes to my practice. I've done several projects with my employees. One of them was, I got a notification from DocuSign saying, hey, you're about to exceed your envelope number. And I'm like, what are you talking about? I thought I had unlimited signatures. And then I learned the difference between an envelope and a signature with DocuSign. So it turns out 100 envelopes was my max. So I was like, wow, what do I do now? So I had them just research. Hello sign, DocuSign, Dropbox sign, and go through the pricing, how many envelopes are included, and so on, and then present to you. Here's my research. Here's the one I recommend. Here's why. I did the same with my phone system. Do I use a virtual system, like Ring Central, versus having an actual phone? And it could be a small little thing like that that helps you run your practice better. So it could be a range between small little projects like that, all the way up to something that impacts the firm in a major way. I saw somebody had a hand up. Yes, sir. AUDIENCE MEMBER 2 I just wanted to mention about having interns meet with other colleagues that have other folks in the practice. I was talking to an advisor earlier. They do that at our previous firm, where they would have like an intern swap for a day. I had a colleague and friends that were nearby that maybe had other specialties. They swapped interns for the day to give the interns a different access to an experience for the day. I like that. Yeah, that's really cool. I've heard of doing rotations within your firm, like one rotation with the financial planning team, another with the investment team, to give them exposure that way. One thing I had my intern do was how to trademark a phrase. And they actually trademarked a phrase for me and then started that process while they were an intern. Man, you're getting your money's worth, bitch. An intern buddy, or just like a spin-up buddy, is at best practice, someone that they can meet with weekly that's kind of at their level to just answer any questions as a peer. If you don't have one, we had like Uziel at BLX, who would offer to meet with anyone if they wanted to talk to someone that's kind of not like their boss, just like about the challenges that they're facing. We mentioned the internship as an extended job interview. Making them feel welcome, adding them to your website, announcing it to your clients, introducing them and inviting them to client meetings. Getting that exposure to client meetings is so valuable, and clients are pretty welcoming to have the intern attend the meetings. You just say, this is my intern. He or she is going to observe and take notes, and then the intern introduces themselves, and then the meeting proceeds from there. I've never had a client turn down when I've said, hey, I have a new intern. Because what I did was, when I first hired someone, I would send out an email to all my clients with a photo, a little bio, and like, hey, help me welcome so-and-so to the firm. So they're already new, and then when it was time to meet with the client, I would tell them that the intern was going to join us just for note-taking purposes and so on. And they would come on, on Zoom, introduce themselves, say hello and everything, and then eventually just go off camera and just take the notes. But nobody ever had any type of issue with that. If for some reason you're not comfortable with that, or compliance doesn't allow you to, I would say at the very least, see if you can record a client session so that the intern or your new teammate can see it. Because it's really important to expose them to financial planning and how you do things behind the scenes and in front of the client as well. Yeah, and we encourage firms to be open to virtual candidates. It really expands the pool of applicants that you have to choose from. It also improves access to the industry for candidates. And if you do want to help bring more diversity into the profession, you have to kind of get comfortable with the idea that they might not have experience. If all of the job postings require one to three years of experience, it's just hard to get that first job. You're just going to be excluding such a big population. I think, Daniel, you said there's three times as many jobs for three to five years versus an entry level job. It's about 10x. Yeah, it's like 10x if you look at the job postings for an associate advisor versus a client service associate. So that's part of the reason we like the internship program is to kind of help build your talent pipeline. Yeah, we had some firms that did pretty creative stuff with the interns. So they got, let's say, a virtual intern that was not even in their state. But then they flew them in. So some firms flew them in a few days. They kind of got to meet everyone at the firm and then fly back out and finish out. Some firms, depending on their budget, one of them, I was just wowed. I didn't even think of that. They actually flew someone in and had them stay in temporary housing the whole summer, doing the whole internship. I was like, wow, that's pretty cool. And then actually made a job offer if they wanted to move and then work in the office. So you can do it in certain ways where it's not just like, hey, this is a person I never met. You can still find a way to integrate them into the team, even if they're remote. Yeah, and you want to mention the last two? Which ones? The toolkit. Oh, yeah. So we talked a little bit about those. So NAPFA DI toolkit, I know they had it done here earlier in the conference. An amazing resource to download. We also have the BLX website. If you go to the resources section, we have a link to that DI toolkit as well. So that's easier to find. And then the DI certificate program, which I did one of the modules for. It's really good to go real deep into exactly how to just make people feel welcome, how to hire them, train them, and help them succeed at your firm, specifically for diverse backgrounds. When you look at the numbers from the CFP board, it's over 96,000 CFP professionals. And the latest numbers, people that identify as black or African-American, 1.9%. And Hispanics, Latinos are also like 2.9%. So combined, they're less than 5%. Women were like 23% of the industry. There's also a big age gap. There's more CFPs over the age of 50 than there are under the age of 30, by a large amount. So we need to do a lot of work, because a lot of the times when I speak to younger people, now it's better. But I remember when I was in college, there was no financial planning program. I had no idea that you could be a financial planner. I think still people think we sell insurance, or maybe manage, or just manage assets. So there's that misconception there. So I think having a career track where people can see themselves learning, it goes beyond money. People definitely want to feel like they have access to a mentor, resources like education or the technology budget, like attending a conference once a year is pretty cool. It's a pretty great experience. So we have the bar code again, I think, for the resources. You can download those. I would recommend still run them by your compliance consultant, or your in-house compliance person if you have one, because you might have to tweak them just to meet your own requirements. And when I hired contractors seasonally during tax season, I had a sample employment agreement. And I was able to give it to my compliance person. And they just kind of tweaked a few things just to make sure I was doing everything right. But yeah, the bulk of it is there for you guys to use and make them your own. Yes? AUDIENCE MEMBER 1 Question about, so you get the intern you find, right, you start your thing. What about on the compliance side? What did you say? Give them their own email, that kind of stuff. But what do you have to file? It depends on how many hours they're working. What do you give them access to in the CRM? What are your guardrails you put up, I guess, to make sure that you don't get in trouble as the firm? Yeah, so great question. So what do you give them access to? And it depends on what they're considered. So you speak to your compliance person. If they're considered an access person, you're going to give them, like in my case, when I first hired interns, they didn't have access to my custodian. So they couldn't log into a client account and see account balances or trade or anything like that. It was more on the administrative side. So I contacted, I used MoneyGuy Pro. MoneyGuy Pro was able to give me a temporary admin license for the summer, which was pretty cool. They didn't charge me for it. So my intern had access to MoneyGuy Pro. Then I shared access to Wealthbox and a Dropbox folder, Slack. And I think that was about it. It wasn't a lot. And I just kept those via LastPass, so I was able to very easily deactivate those. And when I spoke to my compliance person, if they were only administrative, they didn't have to be registered with the firm or anything like that. And I made them sign my Code of Ethics. And I have an employee manual as well. And I have them sign that. So those are the only two documents that I recall. Code of Ethics, employee manual, and that's pretty much it. If at some point they become access persons that have access to your client account data, then they might have to have more requirements. Like every quarter, you might have to get access for their own investments to have on file and things like that. I guess for inside of trading and stuff like that. But yeah, compliance would definitely let you know exactly. Or even, I don't know, a lot of us are ex-YPN members too. You could just log into their compliance hours and ask them that, and they'll guide you. You can add things as you build trust with them. So I don't give access to TD Ameritrade for a while, until you feel comfortable with the person. I think for California, I have an independent contractor agreement. The I-9, there's just a couple of basic things. You don't have to update your ADV or anything like that. Yeah, and then the other one, too, to consider is speak with your accountant. Because it depends on your state whether they're considered an employee or a contractor. So that sometimes is a fine line. Everyone that I've brought in as an intern or an employee, I've always just made them W-2. And the seasonal tax help, then I've made them 1099. Because I wasn't dictating hours or anything. It was like, here's these 10 returns, and work on them on your own time. And then they'll just do the returns on their own time. So that was the way I was able to make that distinction between W-2 versus 1099. Cool, any other questions? I think we're out of time, too. Well, thank you. Thank you.

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