Episode Summary

James Werner’s twenty-five-plus years in wealth management reflect not only deep expertise but also a genuine passion for helping clients make informed, confident decisions during pivotal moments. As a Certified Financial Planner and Partner at Waverly Advisors, James brings his experience and expertise to Waverly after Silicon Hills Wealth Management, the firm he co-founded with Tom Brown, was acquired by Waverly Advisors, LLC.

In this episode he discusses how he maintains his process of emphasizing the two-way transfer of knowledge between planner and client, an evolving dynamic that ensures financial strategies align with individual values and goals. He also speaks about key lessons learned from seeing his company purchased and merged with another firm. James champions the role of community in financial planning, highlighting how strong connections and shared values can shape outcomes.

Here’s What You’ll Learn In This Episode

• Introduction
• Finding Inspiration and Joining the Industry
• Lessons Learned From the Merger
• How to Talk About Change with Clients
• Having a Multi-tiered, Value Alignment-centric Process
• Setting Boundaries to Help Clients Make Decisions

Quotes

“I didn’t quite know what I was getting into until I was ready to graduate from school, and I thought, man, I gotta go out and find a job. What’s going on? And I found then I really kind of understood how finance once you started looking for work and internships and things like that, then you kinda start learning how the business separates itself. Until then, you’re just all kinda taking the same classes, and you tell everybody you’re in finance, and, you know, you really don’t know what you’re talking about. But I would say that today’s generation knows a lot more a lot earlier than I did. They’re much more clued into what the potential track would be for a potential career, things like that. I find that the average college age or recent graduate that I talk to is much more clued into industry opportunities and career paths and stuff like that than I ever was.”

“The best way I can describe this, it’s kind of a multi-tier process. I mean, so you start off and you make all these assumptions of what goals are, what your starting position is, what your clients’ feelings toward money are and about money. You know, are they just products of a household that had a good relationship with money or not? You know, there’s all kind of things like that that happen. And when you start off working with a client, it’s a lot like a first date. I mean, the client wants to be on their best footing. You wanna be, you know, the prim and proper advisor. And so, you get about two, three months into this thing before you really realize, oh, they’re a real person with some imperfections here. They haven’t done everything they were supposed to do, and then they realize that you’re just a human person and not a robot. So, you all can kind of talk together. And I think that’s really when you start getting that relationship that has some meaning.”

“I think the promise of the Advisor Growth Community and the underlying group concept that you see here are people with incredible knowledge, really in-depth knowledge about things that I was just so impressed by the knowledge they had, and their ability and willingness to share. I mean, if it seemed like as soon as somebody had conquered something rather than holding on to that secret, they wanted to share it with everybody. And when I first got into the business, that was not the case. Everybody who was not affiliated with your firm was a competitor and you didn’t share with the competition. And you know, I’ve just cut my teeth in that part of the industry. Right? So it’s hard to kind of get away from that. And you work with the AGC for about six months, you’re like, wow.”

“You can have an adviser that has a lot of knowledge, but if there’s no transfer of that knowledge to the client, it doesn’t work. It doesn’t matter how much the adviser knows. And conversely, if the client is in a situation where they don’t trust the adviser, they don’t feel comfortable enough to share what’s going on in their world. But, you know, the heart of advice fails when the circulation of advice falters. And the circulation of advice is not always from advisor to client. It’s not always from client to advisor. I think of it as this kind of circular thing where, you know, something new happens in the market and we’re telling the client, hey, this is available now and it didn’t used to be available, and I think it’s perfect for you. And then the client gets to, you know, take that information and do with it what they will or really think through it, or the client calls us up and says, hey, you know, I just got a promotion or I’ve got this offer. I can take two years severance or I can keep working here, but they’ll probably fire me anyway. And, you know, do you have forty-five minutes to go through this work? And this is a really important thing. I’m thinking about getting a second car or more. Yeah. All these things that kind of, it’s that circulation of advice that I think is just critical to the heart of the advice.”

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• Waverly Advisors
• Michael Kitces

Full Transcript

Sasha: Welcome to the Heart of Advice podcast presented by eMoney. I’m Sasha Grabenstetter.

Connor: And I’m Connor Sung. We’re your eMoney experts. Today on the podcast, we have James Werner. James, first off, thanks for joining us.

James: Well, thank you for having me. Of course.

Connor: Of course. James is a certified financial planner. He’s a partner and wealth advisor at Waverly Advisors located in Austin, Texas. He’s an alum of the University of Texas at Austin. He has over twenty-five years of experience, and he’s been an eMoney user since 2006. I mean, let’s just start there. Thank you for your long tenure of eMoney usership.

James: I think that might make me an eMoney OG, so I’ll go with that.

Sasha: We love that. James, as we get started with the podcast, I wanna know what inspired you to pursue a career in financial planning, and how has the field kind of evolved since you’ve started? I’d love to hear that.

Finding Inspiration and Joining the Industry

James: Yeah. So a couple of things for me kinda stood out. When I was growing up, we had a kind of a lower-income class environment. We were never short of money, but we weren’t talking about investing or anything like that. My mom would always get very, very anxious around when taxes came due or when bills came due. It was very much financed as a source of just anxiety and uncertainty around the house. So, you know, not wanting to kind of rebel against your parents by, you know, understanding something they didn’t understand might be part of it. And then I think the other part of it for me is I was privileged to be able to work with a gentleman when I was in high school who owned his own business and gave me a meaningful role in this organization developing an educational program for children in daycare centers that were working through it. And I was just in awe of how much that guy worked and how much he knew about his business model. And unfortunately, he knew so little about finance that it really hamstrung him. So when I went to the University of Texas, I thought, well, I have some of those abilities. I have some of that. And so maybe I can do all that stuff and learn a little bit about finance. And so when I was working, like, two or three jobs when I was in high school, one of the jobs was vending at the Ranger games. And so I would get a lot of cash tips. And so I would go, you know, sometimes I would maybe go two months without cashing a paycheck because I had enough walking around money. And I was a little, to be honest, I was a little concerned about my mom, you know, taking some of my paycheck. So if I hid it, it might stay around a little bit longer. And I ended up kind of going into that mindset and taking a left turn and going into Fidelity instead of a right turn and going into the bank. And that’s kind of what hooked me to investments. So, you know, kind of a different, maybe a different path, but that’s where it all started.

Sasha: I think for so many young professionals now, James, and I don’t know how often you see young professionals, but they always say, like, this is a helping profession, and that’s why they get into it. And it kinda sounds like that’s a little bit of what you did as well. So I’m sure that our advisors can definitely relate to some of that.

James: Yeah. I didn’t quite know what I was getting into until I was ready to graduate from school, and I thought, man, I gotta go out and find a job. What’s going on? And I found then I really kind of understood how finance once you started looking for work and internships and things like that, then you kinda start learning how the business separates itself. Until then, you’re just all kinda taking the same classes, and you tell everybody you’re in finance, and, you know, you really don’t know what you’re talking about. But I would say that today’s generation knows a lot more a lot earlier than I did. They’re much more clued into what the potential track would be for a potential career, things like that. I find that the average college age or recent graduate that I talk to is much more clued into industry opportunities and career path and stuff like that than I ever was. So that’s good.

Connor: It is. And I think it speaks a lot to the changing environment, both I think the profession has definitely changed itself, but the way that we’re training the next generation of advisers has also changed, I think, for the best to help mirror some of the evolution of the advice that’s being delivered or even just the value of the adviser, I think, has continued to shift a little bit. How do you, as you think about, you know, over twenty-five years of experience, what keeps you kind of engaged and passionate about helping clients?

James: Well, I mean, I get engaged with solving the problem and all the different tools and things that are available now and trying to stay up to date as best I can with, you know, technologies and tools of today and not be that guy who’s still doing the same thing they did twenty years ago and trying to justify it. So I would say that’s a part of it, but I would also say that for most people in personal financial planning, once you bring a new family into your company, you’re adding this layer to your ecosystem that just grows over time. So what starts out as a very transactional financial relationship morphs into something quite different from that. And so I guess the industry and the changes that are happening and more importantly, the people that are presenting those changes, that gives me a lot of motivation. But it’s that responsibility and that shared journey that you’re going on with every family and every household that you take on that really is the thing that makes it hard to say no or hard to quit.

Connor: Get that mental currency, that mental gratification. I think that coincides with your own personal business. And as I think about some of the other shifts in the industry, there has been a great feeling of acquisitions and mergers that has definitely changed the way that we’re able to deliver advice either through our own businesses or through other businesses. Can you talk a little bit about some of the lessons you’ve learned either from co-founding Silicon Health Wealth Management or now as a partner at Waverly?

Lessons Learned From the Merger

James: Yeah. Sure. I think that one of the things I would have gone back and told my earlier self, you know, we always said if you could go back ten years ago and tell yourself different things, what would you do? I would say you really need to start thinking about how you’re going to sell or merge your business a lot earlier than you wanted to. It really should inform almost every decision you make from founding to when you actually have that merger. And I find a lot of businesses, not just in financial planning, but when you start talking about due diligence phases after offer letters have been issued and accepted, you see people going through the financials and go, “Oh, well, I did that because of this, or I did that because of that.” And ultimately, they’re saying I did that because I was only thinking about the moment. I wasn’t thinking about how that would impact longer term. And I think one of the things that helped us in our relationship with our eventual merger with Waverly was how many tools and service concepts we already had in common. So we were already speaking the same language before we started. But it was at the end of the day that culture, the culture of their firm, matched more closely to the existing culture that we had developed. And so when I’m thinking about if I’m giving advice to somebody who’s in a smaller practice, and maybe they’re going to continue on with that smaller practice, but maybe they’re open minded to joining a larger practice, I would very strongly recommend three things. I would say prepare your business today like you were going to sell it tomorrow. I would say think about the impact of whatever you do on your main stakeholders. It’s your employees, it’s the owners of the company and it’s your clients. If you make whatever decision, who ends up, what are the consequences? Do all the benefits end up in the owner’s lap and all the consequences go to the employees and the clients? If that’s the case, you probably don’t have a good way forward. And I guess the third thing I would say is when you think about things like eMoney. eMoney is great because it’s this receptacle of all the financial knowledge that you have about a client. Right? So you got a big decision that’s coming up and you’re thinking, well, does it match their values? Is this something these people should be doing just by itself. Right? And then the second thing is that capacity to do it. Do they even have a chance to look at this. Right? And so those are the first two things that we’re always going through. And as you’re going through those big decisions, most people get well, they focus very narrowly on some bucket or some financial concept, and they have a hard time stepping back and seeing the big picture. When the market’s down, they’re focusing on their account that’s down the most. When they’ve got to make some college funding or when they have an unusual expense that comes up, they start looking at how much money they’re making on their cash management account. When they get a bad diagnosis, they’re looking at their estate plan in a different way than they might have been looking at it before. And so you’ve got all this history that you’ve put into the system and you don’t know when it’s going to be required to spring into action. You don’t really have control over that in some ways. But you always have that backdrop of, how do you prep your clients for the storm? Right? And I was always thinking that the houses that survived the tornadoes, earthquakes, and hurricanes the best are the ones with the strongest and deepest foundations. Right? And in our business, the foundation is based on data and trust. I mean, it is mixed together like concrete and sand. And if you don’t have one, the other one’s no good to you. You can have all the data in the world and if a client doesn’t trust you, it’s not going to be a great relationship. So just to tie a bow around that. As you’re building up that ecosystem with eMoney and as you’re bringing that foundation to a good place for all of your clients, what you’re also doing is building a foundation to present to somebody else to say, hey, here’s what my business really is. And, you know, do I have a home in this larger organization? Is there, you know, what am I bringing to the table and what am I getting? I mean, how at the end of the day, we’re both better off if this is a good transaction. So tell me why that is. And I think you can prepare for doing that without admitting to the world and the universe that you are doing that. I think even if you never sell, preparing to sell is the right thing to do for everybody.

Sasha: It’s a really good concept to be thinking of, especially in the environment that we are in right now. And you’re talking a little bit about client trust, but I want to know, like, how did you tell your clients about this merger and how did they feel about it? Did you tell us the process of the merger and telling clients?

How to Always Think of the Client First

James: Yeah. So again, you go back to how is this going to affect the client? And since we have custodial accounts at the same custodians that our clients do, and we have our own eMoney accounts that we manage, and we have all this stuff going on for us, and I said, really, I’m just a client that doesn’t pay an advisory fee. I should have the same experience as all the other clients. Right? And so if you look at it from that standpoint, you go, okay. What does this mean to them? Well, we were going to be at the same custodian. We were going to have the same eMoney platform. There weren’t a lot of things that were going to change. The compensation system wasn’t going to change. We had already settled on how our investments were going to be allocated and some of the changes there. And ultimately, I think the client question that I had the most is, if nothing’s going to change, why are you doing it? Which I think is a great question. Right? Because we kind of walk into this stuff and we go, well, if it’s really easy on the client, then they shouldn’t have any objections. Right? Or what’s the difference? And the other way to look at that is, well, if you’re not changing anything, why are you selling? What’s going on here? And that really made me think about it a little bit deeper and think about, well, right now we’ve got access to three advisers who work really hard and try to find me the answers to everything. But wouldn’t it be nice if you had forty-two? And wouldn’t it be nice if you had a whole department that was geared toward retirement plans? And wouldn’t it be nice if you had just the ability for somebody to take a vacation or take an unscheduled absence and you didn’t feel like twenty-five percent of your workforce is gone? Right? And so those were the real world kind of answers to that. And the second part of it is you grow only so far as you can grow in your current ecosystem. And you kind of have to break out of that shell just like a bird has to crack out of the egg, right, before it can grow. I think every business has that. I know Michael Kitces has done a boatload of stuff on this showing, the different stages of advisory firms, and how no matter how efficient you are, you run into that roadblock. And you either get really happy with being that kind of firm and just enjoy it, or if you want to grow, you have to kind of break out of that shell and do it. But to answer your question in a long way, that was the thing. It was to look at it from the client’s perspective and then be really cognizant of what your client feedback is because a lot of times they’re going to give you the just the unvarnished smartest thing you can think of that you never would have even thought of. You’re like, oh, okay. Maybe I’m gonna answer that.

Sasha: But it sounds like you took the time to really understand what the client was thinking. And I think that’s really important, especially when you’re selling your business. So you’re right. Like, that fear from a client of, like, well, what’s gonna change? I can totally understand that. So that’s scary for the client. It’s also scary for you, but you’re ready. And I think that they probably appreciated that transparency that you gave them.

James: Well, and they knew how poorly I was at managing things that weren’t, you know, financially related. So, you know, any kind of merger that would let me do more planning and less, you know, HR was probably a good thing.

Connor: I just wanted to put a I’ll give you a compliment on just kind of the perspective there that is definitely asking that question, what is it going to change for my clients? And also just, as you know, building your own eMoney portal is the first recommendation we make. Like, make your own plan, build your own portal, play around with it, build your own, you know, connections and so that you can understand the barriers, the questions that you’re gonna end up having to answer on behalf of your clients. But then as you think back to the question, the overall process, like, the whole thing, does it make more sense for you where you were at the time to go out and sit down and interview a bunch of people to try and grow to the capacity level that you needed in order for you to focus more on what you wanted to do and where you ultimately delivered the most value, which ended up being, you know, that Waverly was perfectly aligned as far as the way that you were supporting clients and some of the technology that you were already using and a lot of the, I guess, like, overall methodology and values perspective where adding capacity by merging with Waverly, I think ultimately brought you to where you wanted to be personally. It also helps your staff, which I think ends up being a more of a transitory positive client experience for your clients that you brought along with you versus actually having, like, an immediate kind of feeling of a different tech or a different adviser, a different planner that they’re interfacing with.

James: Yeah. I think, the best way I could put it is if our practice was more niche oriented. But when you think about that, I mean, if you’re only doing one thing and you’re doing it really, really well, then you can do it for a lot of people. And so those type of businesses are just absolutely destined for organic growth. That was never my value add. That was never my strong suit to be able to focus on one thing. I was always kinda ADD and not able to stay out of any part of, you know, somebody’s business. So, you know, we would be in the cash management, the estate planning, the retirement plan. We’d be all over the place, tax planning. And so when you’re doing that kind of work, I think you’re limited to the number of households that you can service and serve well. And so part of the merger when you think about merger, it’s not really about growing so much. It’s about finding a home for all those clients that you’re not willing to serve because we have a capacity problem in this business. We do not have a problem of, you know, financial advisors not having enough clients. I’m sorry. That does not exist. What we have is we have a problem of people wanting financial advisors being able to find them under a service model that fits their needs, you know, regardless of what their underlying financial, you know, wherewithal looks like. We have a problem with that. And so for me, every hour that I was spending on HR, I know I kinda poo-pooed it earlier. But, I mean, every hour that I was spending doing something other than financial planning or management was an hour that I was kinda stealing from myself that I could have been using in the first place. So my biggest barrier to growth or personal growth was myself. Was not wanting to release control over that. And I you know, there’s another partner here, Tom Brown, who’s probably gonna laugh when he hears this. Because, I mean, he does ninety percent of that. I only did, like, ten. And still, I think my ten percent cost us to, you know, even more time than we use. But the point is when you’re bringing your stuff when you’re merging with another entity, hopefully, you can offload. I mean, We’ve offloaded all of our HR stuff. We’ve offloaded just I mean, headache after headache after headache. It’s not that they don’t get addressed. It’s just that they don’t take, you know, our time. And so now we’ve freed up more time to work with clients. And so that’s how we grow. And, you know, so there are different ways to. I guess there are different ways to label growth, and there are different ways to think about it. But I think for me, when I think about growth, I think about how much of my time can I spend doing what I wanna do, and what I’m good at during the day versus the alternative? And that’s definitely grown. So that’s growth for me, I guess.

Sasha:  But it sounds like you get to do what you’re really good at and what you wanna do. So I think that’s a win for you, ultimately.

James: Yeah. I mean, on most days, it feels like it. Today, you know, today notwithstanding, but we’ll not. It does definitely feel like this.

Sasha: It’s good. Yeah. I do wanna ask a little bit about your clients and make sure that you kind of reach not only their values, but their goals and make sure that approach is aligned with each of them. So how does that look when you’re working with clients? The value alignment, making sure the goals are unique for them.

His Multi-tiered, Value Alignment-centric Process

James: Yeah. I think that’s the best way I can describe this, it’s kind of a multi-tier process. I mean, so you start off and you make all these assumptions of what goals are, what your starting position is, what your clients’ feelings toward money are and about money. You know, are they just products of a household that had a good relationship with money or not? You know, there’s all kind of things like that that happen. And when you start off working with a client, it’s a lot like a first date. I mean, the client wants to be on their best footing. You wanna be, you know, the prim and proper advisor. And so, you get about two, three months into this thing before you really realize, oh, they’re a real person with some imperfections here. They haven’t done everything they were supposed to do, and then they realize that you’re just a human person and not a robot. So, you all can kind of talk together. And I think that’s really when you start getting that relationship that has some meaning. And when I talk about that, I mean, as an advisor, you ought to be able to push back on your clients. Because if all you’re ever doing is just agreeing with whatever your client’s ideas are, then you’re not serving as an advisor. And so the ability to push back and motivate in that way is super important. And I think if you’re looking at every relationship you have and say, do I have the ability to do that? That’s a great barometer on how good that relationship is. Then on the other side of it, you have to be organized enough from a data standpoint and have a staff that’s committed enough to know what are the areas where you need to pull the client forward. What are some of the things that they’re not doing that they would never do if they were by themselves, but you need to make sure that they address? I mean, do they have an estate plan that makes any sense? Have they really looked at their estate? Do they really know from a dollar standpoint? Who’s gonna get what? Who’s gonna control what? Have they thought about the worst case scenario? Have they thought about how these things are going to go? You know, those sorts of things. Because what I always find, you talk about how you talk to clients during the storm, during when the market’s falling, twenty percent in six months, or when they just lost their job, or when there’s some negative dynamic change in their life. How do you talk to clients? Well, the thing is, it’s how you talk to them before that happens is the point. Right? It’s how you set the table. It can be very hard as an advisor not to fall into this trap where if a client’s having a really good income year and a really good investment year, you don’t take that step back and go, “Hey, here’s what everything looks like from the ten thousand foot view.” Because if you don’t do that, everything’s good and it’s going to be a quick meeting, and it’s going to be a fun meeting, and it’s going to be a good meeting. But you don’t get the chance to step back and go, “We’ve talked about twenty percent of your assets here. The other eighty percent are over here, and they’re kind of doing the same thing they were two years ago. So let’s not get too excited over the performance of this small account.” Right? And so then if you’re constantly doing that, if you’re constantly being the wet blanket when all the client wants to do is celebrate, and you’re constantly being the optimistic figure when the client just wants to be miserable, then that’s how you maintain that balance. And you just have to do that because over time, what happens is we all get recency bias. We all worry more about what’s happening in the current and project that forward much more so. And it causes us to change our plans, defer our plans. It causes us to ignore otherwise rational advice that we’ve already kind of put in place. And I think it starts with not how you deliver bad news. It’s how do you manage good news into that inevitable period where you have to deliver bad news. And I think if you do the one thing, the former thing well, the other thing is easier. If you never get bad news, if you only get good news, then good luck. I mean, it’s just not easy to make that transition. But that’s how I think about it. I mean, I’m sure every adviser has a little different take on it. But I feel pretty strongly about that. That when I’m going into a meeting that I know is going to be really strong, not because of anything I did, but just because the environment as a whole was good, and maybe the client’s doing great at work or whatever, right? If I know that, I start looking for things that I can pick. I start looking for things that we’re not accomplishing that we should. Right? Because that’s a perfect time to introduce.

Connor: Yeah. Give them a good flavor of both so that they stay level-headed throughout. And like you mentioned, I think everybody’s got their own approach to doing that via very clear and repetitive expectation setting, or if it is a little bit of the good and the bad in pretty much every opportunity. I do want to pivot a bit. As a long-time user of eMoney, if you weren’t aware, eMoney is celebrating our twenty-fifth anniversary this year. Do you remember when you first started using it?

James: Yeah. I mean, we were on the program in ’06. I would say we were, to say we were great users of it would be an exaggeration. In 2007, I sold half of my business to a client of mine, Tom Brown, who’s now the other management partner and still with us. And Tom was very well-versed on technology. I was not. And as hard a thing as it is to sell half your baby, I mean, when you realize you had that real limitation that somebody else has that skill set. So that happened in 2007. And I think we probably, over the course of ’07 to ’09, onboarded pretty much everyone onto the platform.

Connor: What do you think the most impactful piece of the platform is that has evolved the most since you started using it?

James: The Decision Center is probably easily number one. I know when I was on the eMoney advisory council, and we met in those first meetings in Radnor. I mean, there were a lot of people that wanted to give the client the digital whiteboard so that they could play around. We heard that concept all the time. Let’s let the clients play around. Let the clients play around. And there was a section of advisers that said the clients don’t know what they’re doing. Let’s not let them play around. But the idea behind that, there was such a thing in place at the time where if you made a change to the program, it kind of made a change to the plan, and you weren’t able to just kind of, in a low-pressure environment, put a change in there and then, oh, forget that. We’ll go to something else. Right? Well, the Decision Center lets you do that. Right? It’s like this virtual whiteboard in the sky that you just draw things on, and then when something clicks, you go, oh, well, let’s add that to the plan. That’s kind of cool. That works for us. That’s the single biggest thing. I think for my purposes, what I find myself using is probably it used to be the distribution centers, what they used to call it. But now it’s just the estate planning module of the Decision Center. But I’ll say this. I think that piece of the puzzle solves more problems for my clients than any one thing. Because when you think about it, when people put their last will and testament or trust together and think about how that legacy is going to transition over to the next generation. Right? They always think, generally, they think in terms of their wealth. You know? Here’s my pie of wealth, and, you know, my son John’s gonna get a third, my daughter’s gonna get a third, and I’m gonna give a third to charity. And so they think about that, and it makes sense to them. And then when you run that distribution center or the estate planning calculation, and they see the amount of money that one third of their estate is, then they start thinking, well, I’m not sure Johnny’s ready to handle that. Maybe tell me about those trusts again. You know, tell me about and, wow, that’s a lot of money. That’s more money to give to that organization than I thought. Tell me about how I can, you know, set up a small IRA and list them as beneficiaries. I mean, it sparks more conversations and more moments than any other thing that I do. Because the Decision Center, when you think about it, is a very forward-looking instrument. Right? You’re always saying, here’s where we are and here’s where we’re going. The distribution of the estate planning center is if I died tomorrow, this. And, man, that gives some urgency to people. Because if you look at that screen and it says if I died tomorrow, Johnny’s getting a million dollars more than he should be getting with no guidance, and I can’t let that happen. You know, I can’t, you know, I can’t in good conscience let that happen. And so I think there are things in our industry that are designed to be decisions made in percentage terms that when you look at them in dollar terms, they look totally different. And the ability to do that is I mean, it’s just I’m never surprised at how much that impacts somebody. And I think the third thing I would say is, you know, there’s a thousand different reports that you can get through eMoney. But there is a personalization of a report. There’s a concept where a client is gonna hit on one or two reports and they’re gonna go, oh, yeah. That’s my report. They won’t even call it the name of the report. It’s just, have you got my report ready? Have you put my report into the portal? Is my report ready? Right? And so that’s a test on two fronts. Right? It’s a test on, number one, do we know what their report is? Right? Do we know their situation well enough to know what their report is without having to ask them? So that’s a good thing. And then the second thing is, you know, how did they take ownership of it? Well, they probably had three or four different reports that we’ve been going through, and at some point, they settled on one. And so the ability to go into their individual site, how they look at the eMoney world and favorite the reports that are really their reports and let the other reports go into the background is super helpful. Because no two clients pick the same report. If they all did, it’d be easier. We would just have two reports, then be it. But they all have different reports. But if you’ve got somebody who has a report that they really get a lot of benefit out of, let’s say the five-year cash flow report is something that a lot of our business owners really like. They don’t believe in looking forward farther than five years because the future is too uncertain. But they wanna look at it in a little more detail than just a graph or a line drawing of things are gonna be good and your wealth is gonna go from the left to the upper right-hand corner. It’s gonna grow over time. They wanna see, you know, what makes that out. What am I projecting my earnings to be? What are you projecting my taxes to be? What are the expenses? What are the one-time expenses? All those things that the five-year show. Right? And so when you factor that in, that becomes their report, well, then you know what the baseline is for all your future conversations. And the last thing I’ll say for the advisors out there who might not have worked with us very much, that ability to create your own personalized dashboard. But if you don’t know this, you should learn it. If you can go in and create it’s kind of like nine little widgets or six widgets that you can go in. You can put, you know, different reports where you want to put them. Awesome. Because all your engineering clients want a dashboard. Even if you create it, they’re gonna have a better one, but that’s not the point. The point is you’ve got one and that you’re monitoring. So that is a very cool feature. I bet fifty percent of the people who are listening to this podcast aren’t using it or don’t even know it exists. And so if you could put that together and make that a favorite of your clients along with what their favorite report is, you’d probably get better engagement.

Connor: A lot to chew on there. I just wanna reinforce a couple of things. Number one, the Decision Center in our build-out, I remember in twenty thirteen when that thing came out, and it just appeared one day. Even for us internally, it just popped up and we’re like, what is this advanced planning setting thing? Basically. And now it’s, you know, the flagship product for eMoney. And I think the delivery of advice there, I couldn’t agree more that it helps visualize and personalize in a way that just it’s a proactive tool. It’s a reactive tool, but it definitely, I think, engages clients at exactly where they’re at and helps deliver advice, but also kind of proactively engages new conversations like some of the state ones that you’re bringing up. The five-year cash flow is always a fan favorite for exactly the same reasons why you talked about. Right? It’s detailed enough for a long enough time period, and then you can always zoom back out if you wanna look at the, you know, whole picture, and then aspects of the client portal with the report section. And then the plan summary report is the dashboard. I’m assuming the customized page. I totally agree. You’ll just continue to give feedback and, um, make sure they move stuff around. Were there any other key best practices, features, reports that you tend to lean towards quite a bit?

How to Set Boundaries to Help Clients Make Decisions

James: Well, I think inside the office, I think having, if you can, have your younger advisors set up those scenarios on, you know, in the Decision Center. I think that’s super helpful. They’re most likely much better at doing it than you are anyway. And the idea is, you know, that they get a chance to see what all those different options are for the client. The other thing I would say is don’t just put in the options that you know the client’s gonna consider. Put in some things in there that you think they might even say no to. The Decision Center shouldn’t be a yes center. It should be, “oh, no. That’s not about us. We don’t do that.” If, for instance, if a client’s talking about making a gift, don’t be afraid to put a larger gift in there as a potential decision maker. Don’t let the client say that this is the amount and that’d be it. This is a virtual whiteboard that has no meaning at all until it is agreed to by the client. And so I think it’s really helpful to have that conversation both ways. If we wanna look like, what would the world look like if inflation was higher than it is today? Well, we also should look at what the world does. Look, if it’s lower. And I know we all think we know the future, but whatever we’re looking at, if we’re looking at high returns, we need to look at low. If we’re looking at high inflation, we should look at low. If we’re looking at low expenses, we should say, well, what happens if we decide to really, you know, spend some more money? What’s the problem? What does that look like? Right? The decision maker and the Decision Center should be, in my mind, upper bound and lower bound region with all these choices. Right? It’s like a menu of a fancy restaurant. And do I want to go with what I know is good, or am I ready to take the plunge and go for the special that I may like or may not? And to me, that’s what the Decision Center is all about. You know, so getting to that point, and until you get there, I don’t think you get a seat at the table on those big decisions that clients are really thinking about making. You know, do I give eighteen thousand dollars a year to my kid now for the next ten years? Or what if I gave him a hundred and fifty thousand now? Those sorts of questions that we answer every day. And they’re big, meaningful questions. Right? How much support do I provide my family today versus how much do I provide when I’m gone? And who are all the other benefactors at the table when I make a decision? When I make a decision, who else wins? Do my kids win only? Does the IRS win? Who wins? Because that’s always what people are looking at. You know, it’s like, okay, is this a win-win decision? Well, it might be, but is the other party that’s winning the party that you want to win? Just those sorts of things. And I think that having that really robust setup where nothing’s off the table on Decision Center is super helpful. And you won’t get there with everybody, but if you have somebody that’s really open to it, don’t be afraid to push the envelope and see what happens.

Sasha: I think that’s the beauty of financial planning, though, is the option to give them more options and let them decide with the Decision Center. So I think that’s really lovely. Twenty-five years is a lot of advice and guidance, so a lot of handling the storm. What’s the one thing that keeps you up at night as you think about our industry and helping your clients work through their concerns?

James: Oh, man. Uh, capacity. I guess it’s probably the biggest one. It’s being able to be available to give the solution when the problem presents itself. And whether that’s me or whether that’s the, you know, the giant we, whether that’s me or Waverly, that’s a worry. And I think to the extent that the Waverly merger closes the books as an unquestioned success, that will be the fear that gets lower than us.

Connor: And hopefully, we continue to enable from a tech partner perspective that efficiency and capacity so that you can do your best work in actually delivering planning and building relationships with your clients. But as you mentioned, we do have one last question that we ask every one of our guests, which is how would you define the heart of advice when it comes to financial planning?

James: I told you guys I thought I had an unusual answer to this question, but I may not. But so I think it’s that communication level between the client and the adviser. And when I think about that, what I’m talking about is you can have a very healthy heart, but if you don’t have any circulation within the body, it’s not good. Right? So you can have an adviser that has a lot of knowledge, but if there’s no transfer of that knowledge to the client, it doesn’t work. It doesn’t matter how much the adviser knows. And conversely, if the client is in a situation where they don’t trust the adviser, they don’t feel comfortable enough to share what’s going on in their world. But, you know, the heart of advice fails when the circulation of advice falters. And the circulation of advice is not always from advisor to client. It’s not always from client to advisor. I think of it as this kind of circular thing where, you know, something new happens in the market and we’re telling the client, hey, this is available now and it didn’t used to be available, and I think it’s perfect for you. And then the client gets to, you know, take that information and do with it what they will or really think through it, or the client calls us up and says, hey, you know, I just got a promotion or I’ve got this offer. I can take two years severance or I can keep working here, but they’ll probably fire me anyway. And, you know, do you have forty-five minutes to go through this work? And this is a really important thing. I’m thinking about getting a second car or more. Yeah. All these things that kind of it’s that circulation of advice that I think is just critical to the heart of the advice. So that’s my answer that I’m sticking to.

Sasha:  James, as a daughter of a previous doctor, I love the idea of, you know, the heart and the circulation, And I just think that’s a really wonderful and unique answer to end us on. So Oh, okay. Thank you for coming. Yes. Yes. But thank you, James, for being on. We’ve enjoyed you for sure.

James: Thanks, guys.

Connor: Thank you.

Sasha: Till next time.

To listen to this episode and other full episodes of the Heart of Advice Podcast, visit our YouTube or our Spotify channels.

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