So, I hope everyone has enjoyed your session so far. So, I'm extremely excited to introduce our panelists, Cheryl Holland, Caleb Brown, and Eileen Stephens. So, kind of starting with Eileen. So, Eileen's an Associate Wealth Advisor with Coriant Private Wealth LLC. She has a passion for promoting financial literacy for her clients in the community, and Eileen also serves on our awesome NAPFA Northeast Mid-Atlantic Regional Board. Cheryl Holland is the founder and president of Abacus Planning Group. She also regularly appears on top advisor lists and was recognized by NAPFA as one of the 30 most influential people in its 30-year history. And then lastly, we have Caleb Brown. Caleb formed New Planner Recruiting in 2009 to source, screen, and integrate new financial planners into financial planning firms nationwide. Throughout his career, Caleb has mentored, hired, and managed, and coached many career changers, college students, seeking internships and full-time positions in financial planning. Please give a warm welcome to our panelists. Thank you. So, we decided to self-moderate, and I think that's an excellent decision because we have a small, intimate group, and we hope this will be a conversation. And we thought we would start by each of us talking. Caleb's going to frame the industry and really the profession for NAPFA and what's going on in terms of development of talent, what we employers want, what employees want. Then Eileen's gonna talk from the perspective of someone navigating the professional career pipeline. And then I'm gonna talk about what we do in terms of helping our team members be successful and thrive and exceed expectations every year. And then we're gonna open the floor for questions. If you don't have any, we have prepared some for ourselves. So, Caleb, I'm gonna turn it over to you. Hi, guys, everybody. Good to see some of you again. Thanks for coming to our session. This session's really for you. Like Cheryl said, we have some stuff prepared, but we want you leaving here with some answers and some takeaways. I thought it might be helpful, and I did this in my last session, just to kind of get a sense on, maybe if you're a firm owner in here, if you just give us a hand raise. Firm owner, you own a firm, okay. Any job seekers in here, like college students, couple college students? Anybody that's a non-firm owner that's just like, I'm just an employee, I'm just here along for the ride. Okay, all right, so good. We have a good mix, but a lot of firm owners, and that's good. So hopefully we have some good stuff for you today. But I just wanna, and this maybe is a review if you went to my last session, but I really have three primary jobs in the financial planning profession. One is spending most of my time as CEO of New Plan of Recruiting, where I talk to really, I look at thousands of resumes every year. I talk to hundreds of job seekers, either already employed in financial planning firms or career changers or new college grads coming out of CFP programs, trying to help them get entry-level jobs, usually, in fee-only RIAs nationwide. So that's where I spend most of my time. So I was joking in the last section, before I go to lunch, I talk to the firm owners and hear them lament about, you know, I can't find anybody, and everybody's leaving, and why aren't they going to start their own firms and all this other stuff? And then I go eat lunch, and I come back, and then I talk to the job seekers, and they're like, Caleb, we're all these people that wanna hire. I mean, everybody says they want a successor, and I'm caught right in the middle, and I absolutely love it. So that's my primary job. And my secondary job is every spring, I teach at the University of Georgia's financial planning program. So I'm dealing with 100, every spring, 100 new graduates that are gonna, some of them are gonna come to your firms, and just seeing what their questions are, what offers they get from your competitors, like, you know, RIAs, but also like Vanguard, Schwab, what they're offering these people, so maybe we can shed some light onto that. And then thirdly, just a CFP, I've been affiliated with NAFTA ever since I was 19 years old, in just a fee-only space, and just have a small book of clients on an RIA where I live in Georgia. So that's my background. I mean, I thought I'd just kind of set the framework. And some of you may not be experiencing this, but if you're a firm owner trying to hire, right now it's actually easier than it was a year ago. There's, I just saw something on Corn Ferry, there's 30% less job postings out there right now, because firms, there's just not as many firms hiring. There's not as many firms hiring, more candidates applying and available for your jobs, okay? So for the folks that are hiring, you know, and you're like, hey, look, I'm just putting a pedal to the metal, that's great. So try to, like I said, you know, squeeze some human capital alpha out while some of the other firms are putting a pause or kind of, you know, calling a time out. What else? I do see that my new college grads, a lot of times they want to go to your firms, to smaller boutique RIA firms where they can be paid a salary, they don't have to bring on clients, they can learn the craft, or they can learn the craft. And they're, even though they're in their early 20s, still trying to figure out the various channels, and that's one of the reasons why I wrote the book I did last summer, but trying to understand what is a good opportunity. You may think you're offering a good opportunity, I guess here's the point. Sometimes they don't know that. They don't know that, all right? Because when they come to University of Georgia or Virginia Tech or University of South Carolina or wherever they are, 10 different people get up there and they all say they do the same thing, and they make it sound really good because they're representing their firm. And if you're trying to get off mom and dad's payroll and off the couch, it all sounds really good and you want to sign up. So I find myself having to clean up a lot of what I'll call messes after someone's gone to a bad fit in two or three years, and they're trying to get them into a different channel. So I interact with, like I said, entry-level people. We don't do executive placements, so I just thought that'd be helpful and preface sort of the rest of the comments that I might make on the panel today. Good afternoon, everyone. My name's Eileen. I'm so excited to be here talking to you all today, especially with Cheryl Holland and Caleb Brown, who quite literally launched my career. So I thought I'd start by giving a little bit of background about my experience and what I think we will talk about in more detail today. So as Caleb mentioned, I went to Virginia Tech. I was lucky enough to find financial planning as an option early in life, early in my college career, and take classes and graduate, able to sit for the exam. And when I was getting ready to graduate, I knew I wanted to move south, but I didn't know any financial planning firms down there, so I went through Caleb Brown and his company, who ultimately placed me with Advocates Planning Group. So full circle. And based on some advice and, quite frankly, a push from one of my colleagues, I did decide to sit for the CFP exam right away. So I was studying for that when I first started working, and I really attribute my passing it right away to that hands-on experience that I was beginning to get in my new career. There's something about physically going through a tax return, paging through it, versus looking at a picture in a textbook. So now when I'm speaking to recent college grads, I always recommend they do that as well. Study and sit for the exam right away, especially while you're still in the studying mindset, because it only gets harder as you're further out and life happens, et cetera. And while I was learning the technical material, I was also learning those EQ skills, which I found just as valuable, if not more so, to creating the foundation of relationship management. So I worked at Abacus for close to six years before I moved up north to be with my now husband, and I joined a firm called Region Atlantic, a great firm based in Morristown, New Jersey, and I worked in the New York City office. Region Atlantic, in 2020, joined a partnership with other financial planning firms across the country. We became CI Financial, very recently rebranded Accoriant. So that's how I went from a 27-person firm to one of about 1,200. So what I can talk today about is my perspective of what a career path looks like at a variety of sized firms, and how ultimately the progression is dependent on the employee. That being said, a manager has a huge impact. They can really shape and expedite the process, so we'll talk about that as well. Outside my firm, I've been an active volunteer. I learned early on the value of getting involved in your local community, and I have volunteered with a number of organizations from local United Way groups, Junior League, and then financial literacy programs like Rockwell Street, Wall Street, I can make a plug for that wherever I can. Well, I do it in New York schools, but it is across the country, and it's about teaching the M in STEM as a career path to women, and the financial literacy skills that go along with it. And I've also been very involved with NAPA, from conference planning committees to regional boards. And I mention all that because networking is a skill, and it's something that as you progress, you're expected to do more and more, yet many of us feel thrust into that capacity with little to no training. And I think it's very important for managers to give that training to their employees, especially if there's an expectation in the future for business development capacity. So I am sure we'll talk more about that in more detail, and I'm excited to go through this list of questions, or hopefully take questions from you all. So as Abby said, I'm Cheryl Holland. I am the founder of Advocates Planning Group in 1998, but I'm no longer president, so I'm doing my own turning of the pipeline in transitions, and we have co-presidents of Advocates now for about a year and a half. I will say that even though sometimes people, talent management's not the word I'm looking for, because you're not really managing talent, you're really encouraging developing talent, is probably the biggest challenge we have in many of our firms, that finding clients has become simpler and more effective for us than how to work with our team members, how to do performance reviews, how to coach them, how to develop them. So I think that when we started the firm, I had no idea. I was really good at basic work habits, like getting my work done on time, and returning phone calls, and I was really good at being a leader, but in terms of all those management skills, giving feedback, delegating properly, teaching people when to consult and when to fly, I was really quite terrible, and I killed a lot of guinea pigs along the way, for which I'm embarrassed to say. You know, it was like, ah, that's too tight of a squeeze. No, you didn't feed me enough. So that launched me on a path of developing a very standardized, what we call leadership pipeline, and so I want to talk about that, because I think when you talk to people, of any generation, of any age, we all desire purpose, and you know what's so beautiful about being a NAF, remember, we have a purpose. All of our firms have an amazing purpose, no matter what your client niche is, you have purpose in your professional life. Second thing is people desire autonomy, and so the ability to do their work the way they like to do it, and finally, we're all seeking mastery, particularly at NAFA. Anybody that's coming to this conference, we're all about mastery. We want to get better, we want to learn more. So our pipeline is really designed around the mastery piece of it, and if you think about it, we all start out, when we launch from college, you know, our basic work habits. Do you know how to get things done on time? Do you know how to manage your time? Do you know how to be productive? Do you know how to say thank you and please? Do you know how to network? Can you manage up? So you start on that path of being exceptional at your basic work habits, and you know what? We all know this, some employees are stuck there. They're good at other things, but because they're never good at their basic work habits, they just don't stay a fit in the long run. It's really tough. The second level that we're coaching on, then, is the idea of getting work done, not your own work done, but getting work done through other people. So, you know, even if you're not a supervisor, you might work on a team, and you're dependent on the operations person getting X done so you can do Y and deliver excellent client service. That's the most difficult turn in the pipeline, right? Learning how to get work done through other people. The next level of skills, getting work done across an organization. So if you've got four or five people, you're no longer getting work done just to others. You're moving your firm forward. That's a whole nother level of skills. And now at Abacus, we're building out our pipeline of skills, behaviors, and resources, like transforming the firm. People next door that chat GPT, right, for AI. We're all going to have to transform some way or another, just as we have many times over the past 35 years at Abacus, of how we're going to relate to this new change that's coming from the outside. So if you think about those are the stages to development, but within that, each firm has its own demand. So at Abacus, we think about, what are your technical skills? Right, so I was in here on tax tips. I'm still having to think about what happens if the lost sun sets. So we're all in a technical pipeline of development. And that can be technical, and it can be soft skills, but you're on a developmental path. And you know what, a really tough thing, and Eileen, I'm looking at you, when you're developing that, that year three to seven is really hard, because you're going for everything's new to mastery, and you're just putting in your 10,000 hours. It's sort of like the middle of the marathon. You know, you're just going to have to get through those miles. Nothing fun or interesting or exciting about it. Nothing to motivate you, but just keep going, right? And so that's what we're looking for in that sort of, what, three to seven years. But we're looking for technical. We look for it in business acumen. So can you network? Do you know how to use processes? Can you manage a project, right? Those are all things you have to develop in people. Then we're looking for relationships, not just relationships with clients, not just networking, but to get along with your team. Does everybody want you on your team? You know, how do you learn? Like, I've had to do a lot of 360 feedbacks with a big gin and tonic on, you know, what Cheryl doesn't do well. And the first year I got my 360, I was like, oh, that's not really me. The second year, when I said the same thing, I thought, well, I'm going to have to have a talk with myself and figure out how to change these things. So all of us have areas that we need to get better at. We need to get stronger in our areas of giving and receiving feedback. Then we look at communication skills. Everybody in here, we have to be able to write a cogent email. Chat GPT will help us, but we're still going to have to tailor it and customize it. We have to make complex topics easy to understand. We have to have good presentation skills, even if they're one-on-one. And many times I think we're moving into a world we need good visualization skills. So not everyone's going to be good at everything, but building out people's skills in communication is very important to us. And basic work habits never change, right? All those skills. So we think about, in every stage, you have to have those five categories, but the beauty development is, I have found, is I can say to Eileen, Eileen, I really want you to get better at appreciative inquiry, or I really want you to get better at networking. Well, I can say that to her, and she's going to be thinking, so what do I do? I've just been dumped deep in the swimming pool, and how do I get to the side? You want to pair resources. You know, is there a class that Eileen can take? Is there a mentor within the firm that's really good that you can pair her with? Is there a book or a YouTube class that she can take or read that will help her get to the next level? So when you think about development, it's in areas that you have to give resources, right? You have to give, when should you expect someone to do it? So big picture, I think, even if you've got two people, they want expectations of how they're going to complete their mastery. They want to see themselves in the future. You, as a manager, want to know, it's great to set one-year goals. It's okay with me to set one-year goals. I really want you to have three- and five-year developmental goals. That's what we all need to get ahead. So how we think about employees and development is, performance review is really, really important to set those one-year goals, but your supervisor's ultimate job is to help you listen to feedback and set those big, hairy developmental goals that fit your desires as an employee. Like Eileen loves financial literacy. Eileen, what else do you love? I love... Is it supposed to be financial-related? Yeah, like, it's your job. Oh, I was, first of all, it's public. Is it taxes, is it estate, is it investments? I do, I weirdly, I like talking about taxes. Yeah, so, you know, should she become an enrolled agent? Like, what does she need developmentally? Well, there you go, but I meant not Eileen, but should she, right, become one? Yeah. So, a lot of people, we do the enrolled, because it's a great thing to take and put on your resume and to learn from. So, how do you help that person match interest, developmental needs, and resources to really have a success? So, that's just broadly how we think about development. I'll talk one moment about performance reviews and then we'll, I think this about performance, I think they're a fabulous opportunity to really listen to what the person's hopes are, what they want to give you feedback over the firm is, and where they see themselves. And there should be no surprises at performance review. Like, when they're writing up their performance review and you're writing up your performance review, it should be an engaging, thoughtful, exciting conversation. The hard work is the daily, monthly, in-between feedback that you have to get. Performance reviews done well are something you'll look forward to. So, we'll talk about that, too. Okay, what questions do we, do we want to open it up to the floor? Yeah. So, I've got a question for you about where a professional manager can come in. Yeah, great idea. Yeah. Yeah. And a lot of times, that's important. In-the-client work, but also kind of manage people. Yeah. You end up hating your job because you're just trying to do what you want to do well. So, where do you, from each of your different perspectives, where do you come in? Yeah. Very large firm. Yeah. I don't know if you've talked to the chairman or the board of the board of directors, but where do you see professional managers coming into the equation? I would say that it's going to be with the coaching department. I'm happy to start. If I'm hearing you right. Repeat the question. Thank you, JJ. Well, yeah. So, the question was, how do we view the role of professional management, coaches, et cetera, in our professions from each of our unique perspectives? And something that, you know, someone in my position is starting to work with is the sales coach. People might call it different things, but what I was referencing earlier is, especially if there's business development expectations, you don't just flip a switch one day and go, your support advisor, to now go bring in a client. I mean, you can, but it's not very effective. So, helping employees develop those skills, I think it can be really beneficial to work with a sales coach. Whether it's, you know, group training or one-on-one, maybe it's an evolution and you start out, you know, people in a certain level, you have like group sessions and you talk together about skills you're working on, helping identify centers of influence maybe to target and work with, et cetera. I think it'd be very valuable. I'll just add a couple of comments. So even like five, just in terms of the size, sort of what I see when people hire professional managers. Because I know when clients call me that want me to recruit for them, and they're the firm owner, and they're the lead business development person, and they tell me they have 385 client relationships, I'm like, something is getting left out. I mean, you're just not able to do all that. So five years ago, I would say, I mean, it was really the mega firms that were kind of hiring people to come in and manage all their planners and advisors. And the CEO that found the firm, much like Cheryl, probably was going back, like, I'm just dealing with my clients. That was like $5 billion and up, is kind of what I'm seeing that. But now, I'll have $1 billion firms call me, and they'll have HR people and other sort of executive, but they'll have hired professional managers. And a lot of times, outside of the industry, from banking, or technology, or mortgage, or something like that. So I feel like every year that goes by, the bar keeps dropping in terms of size of the firm when you employ a professional manager, which oftentimes brings a pretty large investment. Yes, I'm sorry, your name is? Zach. I think that is a question that almost all of us are struggling with right now. Not just do we hire professional managers, or because there's a limit to even that as a resource, how do we develop good managers? Because there's very few people who are naturally good managers. So I'll say three things about it. One, I do think around, gosh, even 500 million people often hire a COO, Chief Operating Officer, who you will interview, and you want to have good management expertise, because they can manage at least the entire operations team much more effectively than the founder or leader can do. So that's one whole area. The second is, I think you can develop and teach good managers. I understand this dichotomy, do I have enough time? And if you think about it this way, every profession has this. My husband's an architect, you know lawyers. You think about your day, you have client work, you have business development responsibilities, and you have some firm leadership responsibility. That may be management, it might be whatever. And your pie is just going to be different. So if you're managing someone, you may have a lower client load than someone who doesn't manage anybody. That might be a way to think about expectations within the firm. Because if you're managing, you're doing business development, and you have a client load, something's got to give. So part of it is, how do you negotiate your pie and your compensation based on your pie? But I also think that, I was just at my study group, and the firms there are like maybe $600 million to $16 billion, all struggling with the exact question. So I think the way I think about it is, I brought several things. We try to have a lot of internal tools on what are the key things a manager should be able to do. Well, first of all, they have to have psychological safety. Big key issue for the whole firm's culture. But that person needs to be someone that you safely feel you can go to and share what you need to share. And employees need to feel like someone cares about their development. We know from the Gallup engagement polls that does someone at your firm care about your development? Way high on importance of the resources. So those are kind of people skills you would need to look for. But then, how do you delegate well? Everybody knows how to do that. How do you give feedback well? So you can teach some of these basic issues. But we're looking to pair as a study group to find a course that we can send cohorts through. Because it's not just managing people. What if you're, I mean, Bailey at our firm now who's been there about 10 years, no, seven. She's starting to manage a lot of projects where she's got different people on her. I mean, management skills are just critical to the survival of the firm. And I don't think you'd ever lay it off just on the professional. You've got to develop those internal skills. I think that's a question we're all struggling with. Wouldn't it be cool if NAPFA put together, I mean, Schwab now has a management program, not for the executive leader types. It's sold out in 24 hours. And they're not doing it again for a year. That tells you the demand. Why wouldn't NAPFA do that for us and say, hey, we're going to hire these three professional nationally recognized that will fit our cultures. And you can send your people through that for $1,500. So I think that's a brilliant question. And like I said, it's the hardest term. But I think you're never going to get out of managing people. And just I think that the thing to do is, is there a way to make it less stressful for you? So we would go into it with a sense of energy, then dread is what I, is my hope, for myself. Does that answer the question? Or do you have more you want to dig into on that? No, no. Sorry. I can't hear you. What were we going to ask ourselves? I've got a question. Maybe can you guys just talk about how you dealt with the managing on the COVID stuff, the virtual? You guys want to talk about that? Sure. How did you guys adapt to that? Because I mean, virtual's a part of it. Firms are coming back, but virtual. Anybody, who works virtually in here? Well, maybe I should, let me answer to that a little bit different. Abacus has always been a four-leaf clover. We have always had virtual, full-time virtual employees for our whole existence. We have always had people that have worked part-time and done a very niche-y job. We've always had full-time people, and we always have people that we completely outsource something to. So our technology is completely outsourced. So we've always had that kind of a four-leaf clover approach. And I think to just say, well, are you virtual, is just not the whole story of how we think about managing our firms. I would say the thing that we changed, is that what you're asking, Caleb, from COVID, was we now have a hybrid policy of being in the office. And I think this is so unique to each firm. We live in a part of the world where people still drop by our office every single day. And we meet our clients. Some of them want to do Zoom, but most of them do not unless they don't feel well and they still want to have the meeting. So I think you have to have your hybrid policy that is client-facing and team member accommodating. So what we do is it's 20%. You can save it up, like I do, and go for a month to Palm Springs and work from Palm Springs. You can take one day a week, and I think there are about five employees every Thursday. They are not in the office. They are working from home. You can do it a week at a time, and then we have people who never work from home. So I think it's so firm-specific, it's hard to say this is the way that you should think about doing it. It's about your team, your clients, and what's going to get the work done best for everybody. May I say one more thing about it? I'm going to be popular. I think when you're a new, out-of-college person, you need to be in the office. It's so difficult to develop mastery virtually. And I will tell you, my team members who came on board during COVID, their development was delayed because they didn't have a chance to sit next to me or Anne-Marie or whomever and listen to me on the phone. I didn't get a chance to say, oh, you know what? I have this meeting. Let's go in here and talk about it. It really delayed their development ever so slightly. Once they've been there a while, then it's up to them to make that path, that career path. I personally have found that those early days of development are much more difficult when you're not together. I laughed when I heard that question because I started at my company on January 2, 2020. And I lived in New York, the epicenter. And the world shut down on March 15. So I had exactly two months in the office getting to know people before it was like, go work in your tiny apartment and not see each other again for a year. I consider myself lucky that at least I had those two months in the office. I do agree that it would be quite difficult to perhaps start at a new company, especially as a college graduate, not having had the chance to develop some relationships in person. I think a positive, that's a bad way to phrase it. But one thing that came out of that experience that I think has been positive is that we've seen that we're able to work well and productively from home. So my company was fully, you'd be in the office five days a week, no exceptions. Then they also transitioned to a hybrid model. So it was come in three times a week. We're starting to talk about, maybe you should come in four days a week, or at least pick specific days that the whole team is there. Because there is certainly a benefit from getting all together physically. But ultimately, my hot take is that it's the person, not the policy, that's going to make it successful. And if you've got a good employee, a truly dedicated employee, then you're going to be able to work well wherever. And if you have someone who is going to, perhaps, take advantage and not be working, then they probably would have done that, even if they were forced to be in the office. So I think there's a lot of trust in the arrangement. And I think that a lot of good can come out of it. So I'm fully in support of a hybrid model. And I also believe that it's the new expectation for people coming out of college. I think if you want to be attractive to, and we've got some college people in here, and I'd love you to weigh in. But my guess is, if you're looking at different offers, and one says, five days a week, no exception, you have to come in, and another touts more flexibility, maybe that would be more attractive. And Eileen, let me hook on the word flexibility. Because I think that's the most important thing. I really don't care where you are or what you're doing. Just put something out there, like block the calendar so I don't go wandering around looking for you or try and calling you at home. I'm truly, we are an organization, indifferent. You've got to go home and walk the dog every day, or you want to go to the gym. We have lots of people who do that. If you like to work from 10 to 7, or 10 to 6, rather than 7.30 to 5.30, it's flexibility that you really want to make sure people have. And then it's not just mouthing. It's genuine. We expect you to be a star here. And if you work better doing X, that is absolutely fine with us. No questions asked. Hybrid's nice, but it's really flexibility that people want. Yeah. Just while I was doing that, probably my top priority is looking for firms that have flexibility, so that I can simply have a good health balance in my workload. But also, the other priorities in my life. I was wondering about this question, kind of on the path. Can you best match the culture expectation of a hiree when it comes to employment? I guess I can take that one. This is what we do. In the recruiting firm, we have a pretty exhaustive process. We don't take every client firm that wants to work with us. They have to meet certain standards. Are they growing? Are they offering a good opportunity? Do we enjoy working with them? Would I want to be a client? Would I want to go work there? Those are kind of high. At least, I think they're high standards. So there's some upfront. But if you're not going through a recruiter, I think just trying to learn as much about, and you can learn about, look at the bios. You can pull their form ADV. You can see their philosophies. You can see their approaches. What are their hobbies? What do they do outside? If a diversity stuff is important to you, do they have that on their website? Is that a commitment? Are they involved in their profession? NAPFA, FPA, whatever it is, what are they doing? Just kind of understanding, and maybe if you're just starting, not fully understanding what you're looking for, what's important, but the values, the ethics, the personalities. Do you get along with them? When you interview with them, do you enjoy being there? Do you get positive emotions? A lot of that stuff you can do pre-interview, but a lot of the stuff you can also just pick up through the interview process. This is why, again, I know everybody says it, but you're interviewing them just as much as they're interviewing you. Absolutely. And you should. I have a comment on that. We have a league, where potential candidates come in and just work with us. We call it a work union. We pay them, but it's really about the opportunity to get to know our new team member, and what our new team member does, and then how it all comes together. And I found that to be just amazing, and really, you know, it's so great that they can do that. Absolutely. I have a comment on yours, with potential employees interviewing the firm just as much. As someone who does like a hired firm, or a part-time process for our interns, and you hire them, if they don't ask questions, that is a huge negative. Absolutely. I agree. It means you didn't look at the website. You don't know about our values. You don't know about the others. You don't know. You've got to ask. Or you're not interested, or you weren't listening, which are both bad. Right? Why are you wasting my time? I have, you know, let's talk about managing our pie, about lots of other things. Interviews. Your pie is calling you as you're on the phone. Yeah. I think that's true. Being prepared. As a firm owner, what would I put in like an offer to make it really attractive for college students? We've got two college students right over here. I know my answer, but I want them to go first. Do you guys mind sharing? Mathis, do you guys mind just sharing before? I have a microphone if you want me to repeat. What can a firm owner put in their job description that would make it an offer to make it appealing to a job candidate? Can I hand these out? Mentorship. That's a great answer. What else? Looking for a team member to come along. So like, if you're looking for like a primary service, or like maybe your firm has a specific niche. So maybe you're big into that person and you want somebody who has a heart for that or you're a big, big firm and you want somebody on the same page. I know that that really helps narrow down the firm that I want to look at and then it also helps the firm, you know, get into people who are In terms of specific perhaps flexibility options, I definitely saw earlier that daytime office is a big benefit for a lot of people, especially young people who are generally thinking about how to get progressed at the end of probably a pretty large workload that they're going to have. And a lot, or some of them, if they work hard, would know that they'll have some rest time. That's interesting. I think what I'm hearing you all say is that you're looking for two things, a learning organization. And so one thing I would ask if I were you is how do you keep developing yourself? Because that will tell you a lot about how they're developing other people. And the second thing is I would say tell me a little bit about how you think about the health and well-being of your team. I mean, so that will get you to the values and not just the policies. Those are good questions. I have a comment on that. If you're asking them about flexibility, I, you know, the candidates who I've talked with, when they ask me, can you share an example of when you use your flexibility? Yeah. That's great. That, yeah, there's flexibility in that someone can use it. Yeah. It's not just... It's top down. It's not just the top. Yeah, someone can use it, maybe. Yeah. I think that's true. So, I don't want to dominate questions, so I want to wrap up that discussion. Also, there's four handouts. Oh, my God. Sorry. I passed them around differently from the start. I'm sorry. Oh, no. Oh. There's just both four. Sorry. So, the question would be, one of the consistent pieces of feedback we get from people that we're hiring is their previous firm or company, wherever they were, didn't have a defined career path or upward trajectory or anything like that. One of the things that we struggle with, that I struggle with with my team, is we're new. We just centralize financial planning. We just centralize investments. So, a lot of the career path that we do is all hypothetical. It's all theoretical. Nobody's gone through it yet. So, how do you balance that as a growing firm, right? And from each of your perspectives, as you're thinking through it, how do you balance the career paths that you're creating that really nobody's gone through? There's no examples. And how do you reconcile that with people that are asking for more definition in terms of what they're asking for? Yeah. So, you're living in beta, which we all are at some level, right? And that's a very hard place to be. Could you repeat the question? Oh, I'll repeat the question. So, Zach asked the question, his firm is new, and they know they're going to grow, and they have that mindset, but a lot of their career path is hypothetical, and their younger, their newer team members are asking for more concrete examples and structure to that process. Is that a fair summary, Zach? Yep. So, I think they're, one of the greatest things my management coach taught me is she would say, first of all, you need to tell that person what vision you have for them. So, I could say, Zach, wow, I work. I watch how hard you work, and I see these two skills you have, and I know that one day you are absolutely going to be in the running to be head of our business development or lead our tax planning team or whatever. You know already what you can see in them. Just saying that to someone doesn't answer the structure, but it gives them confidence that you have a vision that they will internalize for themselves. The second thing is, you know, I think very strongly because advocates didn't have this forever. What we have now isn't what we had when Eileen came, but there was always opportunity. And so to say, oh, what do you want to do? We've got 1,200 problems we're trying to solve here because we're new and growing. What turns you on? And give them an opportunity to lead in that. So give them a concrete opportunity. I think those two things help. And then just start building out what you can. You know what? 80%, like, perfect is the enemy of done. So even if you just have a one-page write-up and hand that to people, I think that's, if you feel like they have to have something concrete. But I think if you give them personal vision and you give them, oh, here's 1,200 things that need to get done. You pick two and support them in that. I think that goes a long way, Eileen, in making the person feel they're on track. I agree with that. As, you know, someone who's in the midst of that himself, I think what's important is the vision, what you're heading to. You need to be in agreement about it because if, for example, if my goal is to be a partner and I'm working with someone who doesn't see that, that is very important to know. Transparency is key. You've got to know, set expectations on both sides about what you want, what skills you need to be working on to get there, and a general time frame is helpful. It doesn't mean, you know, I'm not going to promise, you know, the new hire that they're going to make partner in three years, but it's generally helpful to, in part of the setting the expectation process, say something like, we typically see candidates, you know, in a paraplanar role for X amount of time, and what can help is instead of tying it exactly to a number of years, you can say, while they're learning these skills, and then after that, you know, they move more into a secondary advisor capacity, then they start leading the relationship so on and so forth, and again, tie it to the skills rather than a specific time frame, because that way everybody knows what you're working towards. It's something that you can revisit during your reviews, and it is, we use this word a lot, you know, smart goals, measurable, the difficulty is not every single goal is, you know, as tangible, as measurable, but I know at least for myself, I want to track my progress against something, and I want more than an abstract, oh, when we feel you're ready, so I think thinking that through, setting expectations together, and regular check-ins will go a long way. And may I say one more thing? Oh, go ahead, Kevin. I was just going to say one more thing. I just kind of go back to the flexibility that has been thrown around a lot here. I mean, that's kind of a cool opportunity, like, hey, you're the guinea pig, but you get to help shape this. I totally agree with that. That's exciting. I mean, that's a little more, I mean, not, and I said earlier in the other session, I mean, generally, I think people would like to see sort of the printout and all that, but a lot of us got started. We didn't have that. We got to carve our own path. That's right. I mean, there are still candidates out there that are, they would just kill for that opportunity versus like, oh, I got to go tax manager, tax senior, like at some accounting firm. Like, that's boring, right? They don't have any say-so. They can't move the needle, whereas what you're providing, you can move the needle. That was exactly what I was going to say. That's really exciting to be there, and just frame it that way. Like, we're making sausage, but wow, you're going to make it with me. I love that. We've experienced it, failed with it, improved it, et cetera. One thing I suggest, maybe it's so they can solve this up. That way, it's in their control. Absolutely, I agree. Self-assessment too. Plus, it lets you know how disconnected they may be from your self-assessment, which is important. When you talk about self-assessment, do you typically speak to what that means at your firms? Self-assessment and giving feedback? That means it's up to you to be able to develop it, especially if you're hiring. That's a big question. That would be a good conversation. Yes, so the question is, what does self-assessment look like at our respective firms and our respective experiences? Self-assessment, to me, is an evolving process. I think one of the best places to start is by revisiting last year's review, last year's performance review, and perhaps goals that you set last year. Thinking through, hmm, what were my goals and areas to work on at this time? How do I feel I've made progress, or haven't I? Think through that. Also, think through what my next goals would be. Cheryl mentioned it should be a mixture of the short-term and the longer-term. It's important to have a holistic view. I think that's a good first step. On the other side, your manager should be doing the same for you, thinking through where you are compared to last year's review, etc. Then you both should get together and have a conversation together to bridge that gap. If someone says, wow, I've really mastered this skill, and the manager says, hmm, let's talk about that. I think these are some additional opportunities to explore. It's important to have that conversation. Just real quickly, because I know you have other questions. What I do with my employees is we have weekly check-ins, and then we have these quarterly conversations where they have to fill out some stuff and come to me, or their manager, or their supervisor, and lead. Then we have an annual where the manager is going to them. Like what you were saying, I want them to drive most of it, if possible. I'm going to answer it in a slightly different way. I agree with all of that. We have essays that you write at the end of the year, self-assessment, that we go over with people. That's very powerful. But I think a lot of real-time feedback is super important. I think the most important thing I've learned the last five years is something Suzanne Peterson taught us at NAPFA, the feed-forward concept. Because when you give someone feedback, they kind of freeze, and they can't fix what you just said they didn't do right. If you come out of a client meeting, and you notice something that you want to do with them, you might say to them, hey, Emory, how do you think that went? Nine times out of 100, Emory's going to go, oh, man, I super flubbed this piece up during our meeting debrief, and next time I want to learn how to do better. But if she doesn't, it's a chance for me to say, hey, when we were doing this next time, what might you do differently? Give her a chance, again, to self-assess, to pick up on what she could do differently. And if she doesn't say anything, I would say, you know, next time we're in the meeting, and the ball gets tossed to you, and you don't feel comfortable where you are, just say, I don't know the answer. It's a completely cool thing to do. I've done it a million times. So she knows next time she can do that. But give her an opportunity. So I love this feed-forward concept. I love about it's not. Now, that's only in places that are minor self-corrections. You still have to know how to give the feedback that's tough, like you haven't showed up for work on time in two weeks or a month or whatever. Those are harder. But I think this real-time, constant self-feedback, and this is an aspirational, like I don't love that kind of thing, but I've learned to do it. But my younger team members who grew up in that culture, they give feedback to me and each other in a heartbeat. And so I think it's just a long vision of getting there, but to me, that's as important as that assessment at the set down, if you can get to that point. And you have to invite it. Like, I always try to sit down and say, Caleb, you know, gosh, I really screwed this up. What could I do differently? Or, hey, feedback for me from that meeting. What did I do well? What did I not do well? And be genuinely open to hearing all of that. When I was 22 years old, the very first client meeting I was in, after the meeting, the senior planner came to me and said, what do you think I could have done better? And I have never forgotten that. I mean, I'm like, you've been doing this 20 years. I've got nothing. Like, I mean, it was amazing. But it's just going back to somebody's asked about the culture earlier. I mean, they're wanting to get better. They're wanting to work on themselves, not going across like, hey, I've been doing this a long time. I got it now. I got it. What's Dan Sullivan say? Arriving is the enemy of thriving. You don't want to be there, right? You always want to be a green banana is the way we say it. Green banana. Cheryl, I'm so glad you said that. I do think the real-time feedback is so important. We talked about earlier how you shouldn't have any surprises in your performance review. I feel like that's easier said than done. Oh, totally. And the way that you prevent that is by creating the culture of feedback. And that's not – it's hard. It's not going to be achieved one time by asking that question. But by regularly modeling, you know, the senior advisor saying like, hey, what should I have done differently? And that helps all the employees feel comfortable asking and delivering feedback. And what I'd also like to add that I think is important, it can be so easy to get caught up in the, you know, constructive side of it. What should I do differently? It's important to give positive feedback too. I think that's overlooked. That's feedback I had to give, you know, in my company. And I think about a book years ago. It's called Switch by Chip and Dan Heath. And it's all about bright spots. You know, what went well and what can we replicate? So tell someone that they did a really good job at, you know, presenting this analysis. And, you know, then they're going to keep doing that, et cetera. So create the culture of regularly asking and giving both positive and constructive feedback. And Eileen, I'll just add on to that. What I love is learn how to give good praise before you learn how to give good feedback because they're related. If I say to Caleb, good job, Caleb, that's nice. But if I say, Caleb, I love the way you prepared for this meeting and I love the way you brought us together as a team and I'm so appreciative of having an expert here with us on the panel, that feels really different. So this is part of the initial model. So I started working on this. So feedback is based on rights and that sort of thing. So you voted. That's awesome. You may be able to vote. How have you seen the difference in feedback? How do you provide it? Well, I think direct feedback is good. So did you mean it was insensitive? Oh, my goodness. Threw the phone at you while they were telling you that. Yeah, okay. Yeah, I had one of those bosses. Is it less sensitive now? How are you doing? Well, I think it's super important to know how the brain works and we all do. When you're in fright mode or flight mode, your cortisol goes up and everything shuts down and you don't hear anything. So you really don't want to ever, it's a whole psychological safety thing where you have to create an environment where the feedback produces oxytocin or dopamine. And it can rather than the fear response. And so I think that's the basic thing. How do you do it in a way that your own personal style? And many people, I mean, I love direct, my direct clients, I'm so grateful for them. They do it in such a way I don't feel threatened by it. I feel grateful. It's a gift. You know? One thing I would say that might be really fun to do and thought about, I think we did when we did Austin's Butterfly. So there's a wonderful YouTube video. It's seven minutes. It's called Austin's Butterfly. And it's a kindergarten class where Austin drives a monarch butterfly. And all the little kindergarteners' kids are sitting around like, Austin, you know what? If you drew his wings a little taller and you put some dots here, like, and he's so excited to get that feedback. It's a real classroom. So now at Abacus when we hand out something, we're like, okay, here's my Austin's Butterfly try. So it's part of our culture to even laugh and say, I need your feedback. But I would watch that video. And every time you have to give feedback or get it, that video can make you feel super happy about seeking a better butterfly outcome. So that's what I would say is how do you create the dopamine? How do you create the oxytocin through the process? But be direct. You need to put an extra dot on that butterfly. If you're yelling at your people, that's not going to work. I get calls every week like, hey, I'm in a great firm. But my manager's just kind of taking that same approach. So that's not going to work unless with Gen X and Gen Y and Gen Z. It's not going to work with anybody. It's not going to work with anybody. However, I did have an internship supervisor who was trained from that same person that came back from World War II and they survived. And they don't say good job. They don't say good job to your point. And he punched me in the mouth the whole summer. I mean, he was just knocking me over. He was just boom, boom, boom. You are screwed. Now, where's this story going? And I tell you, it created some thick skin and some character that helped me navigate and probably get to where I'm at. So kind of with Cheryl, not all bad, but you've got to be careful that he almost put the flame out because he was knocking me down so much. So you've got to be very careful. I mean, I'm in the millennial generation, right? So you've got to be maybe a little more gentle, a little more soft in the delivery. Yeah. We'll have one or two more questions and we're done. Sure. I have a question. So for Jen, I think for me, how kind of unrealistic the cycle of all of our life cycles was to build into the film. So since you're recruiting those names as our students, are you saying the life cycle is important or being extended or not? I think that question was for me. I heard, is the life cycle... Life cycle is like the most important, you know, coming after a few years or a job offer is constant. So are you seeing the life cycle at a job or is the younger generation supporting what it is that you now want to do? What I see from some of the younger generations is the moment they feel like they're not growing or not progressing or not getting the positive feedback, they're calling me wanting another job. And I'm not knocking them. I mean, I'm part of that generation, too. And I don't know if that's cultural or sort of apparent. You know, baby boomers, I was kind of blaming the baby boomers earlier in my other session, much to their chagrin, but I don't know where that's coming from. But I think it's just growing up with a cell phone and just not having to wait on anything and not, I mean, it's just a different environment. And plus you've got jobs scrolling through, you know, on social media and you can move anywhere because it's a plane flight. I mean, it's easy. It's just we're transient now. I mean, there's just a lot of factors that make. And I tell my clients this. If you can keep somebody for five years, I'm going to get behind that. That's really good if you can keep somebody for five years. Ten is amazing. I mean, Michael Kitsis and I debate this all the time. He's like, yeah, someone's there a year. If I can't sort of promote them and get them going, they'll last probably another year and then they're going to leave by year three. Well, I would just say two things to that. One, I just don't like when we talk about generations. There's so much more about us than when we were born. So I think go into it too with the lens of I am who you are, you are you, and you have certain desires and aspirations and hopes for your future and your career, and navigate it that way. And not to look so much at whatever where you are in the cycle of generation because I think that can be very limiting on what you can achieve. You're just yourself. You're just different than everybody else. And I would follow it that way too. I don't worry so much about. As Kayla knows now, we hire three people knowing one will stay five years or more. And Eileen came. Eileen, how long were you? Seven years? And what I think about it is Eileen left with so many good things. You heard her say she's good at network, like building a community. I even called her a few years ago and said we have three new people coming. They're all from out of town. Tell me your secrets. And there's other gifts she left us too. I love for people to stay, but I don't worry about them leaving because they did leave. There's never been a single team of advocates who hasn't left us a fundamentally important aspect that has grown our firm. Do I love it? No. But does it worry me now? Fair enough. Oh, you've had your hand up the longest. Great. Cheryl, thank you for your incredible. You're welcome. All the other stuff you shared. And I started that way because it just shows real intention of working in the way that you do internally. And my question, how do you balance that? Obviously, you're on the firm. You've got people to manage, careers to nurture, but you also have clients to serve, you know, to watch over. I don't care about that. How do you balance those kinds of things against those, you know, the baby of the mother that are going to come up every day? This is work. How do you get it all done? Well, remember, I've been doing this for a super long time. So I'm bringing you the shiny cookies that I think are best of all the things I've done. So I think what you're asking is how do you focus on the important and not just the immediate. Well, really, like, do you schedule a time for yourself when people manage an activity? Oh, I mean, I'm looking at Anne-Marie. You answered the question. Yeah, there's a balance, right? Yeah, we went into a three-hour dinner last night. You can't be successful at your job if you don't have a balance. So I think the question is do I have a life balance, and how do I go about that? No, I think so. So it started with failure. I was not a good manager. I had never been managed. I'm a likes-to-run-with-scissors kind of person, but I noticed very quickly that I wanted people to love being at their job. I wanted a healthy environment, and I wanted people to live their best lives. So how am I going to go about doing that? It's been a very long journey. So each one of those handouts, those things just came at different stages. We hired a management coach to teach me how to manage it, and I taught the firm how to manage. Now they teach each other how to manage. The next two or three, four generations below me are much better managers than I've ever been, but at least they know it's important. So I think live in beta. Like I said earlier, perfect's the enemy of done, so do it at 80% and just start running with it. So I just think don't look at this stuff and think, oh, I have to be there. Pick one thing and really do it for a year, and then pick another. It takes a really long time. And my gosh, our list of not being good at it is so much longer than our list of being good at it. True? Yeah, I think from my perspective, the best thing you can do is be transparent and show that you're also working on getting better. I guess I've had a couple of different managers now, and someone saying, you know, these are the steps I'm taking to improve my skills and better able to talk to you all comes across so much better than someone being ineffective and also not caring that it's ineffective. I'm going to close this out on one final thing that I think is funny that no one else may be. So we have two team members that came out about three years ago, and I was teaching them praise about a year in because I'd gone to a little meeting of the newer employees, and they said both of them had come from military backgrounds. One of them had come to us from the military. One had grown up in the military. And they both said to me, I thought this was such BS. You know, when I came here, because was it ooey-gooey? Was it fake? It took them a really long time to believe that when they got praised, we meant it. So what I say that story to say, it takes a really long time for people to trust. Like our clients, it takes a long time for our clients to trust us. You also have to work on speed of trust with the employees. So what we're all saying here together is it takes time to build trust, and you have to show up that way every day. And when you fail and you hurt someone, you do it wrong, you make a mistake, you have to find them and say, I screwed up. How can we do this better? So I love the fact that they didn't believe the praise environment. It took them a really long time to accept a compliment. I think somehow we've come to the end of our time. Yeah, we have. You can come up to us and ask questions. Thank you guys. Thank you.

work environment

career development

feedback

transparency

communication

employee development

firm management

client responsibilities

flexibility

continuous improvement