In episode three, we cover everything from fintwit to being a fiduciary, and hear from Vance about common gaps that financial advisors leave in financial planning for their clients.
Transcript
Speaker 1:
Speaking Logicly is brought to you by ETFLogic, the leading provider of analytics and portfolio analysis tools for financial advisors. No information within this should be considered trading or investment advice.
Scott:
Hey, guys, and welcome to episode three of Speaking Logicly. I’m Scott McKenna.
Emil:
And I’m Emil Tarazi.
Scott:
Today, we are joined by Vance Barse, wealth strategist and founder of Your Dedicated Fiduciary.
Vance:
Thank you very much for having me on. It is a sincere pleasure to be here.
Scott:
Yeah, Vance. We met in person at Inside ETFs, right? But a lot has changed since then. Why don’t you give us a little bit of background on you and your experiences in the industry?
Vance:
Sure thing. So I founded Your Dedicated Fiduciary as a fiduciary financial planner after almost 10 years of consulting financial advisors around the country. If we wind the clock way back to 2007, there was an institutional alternative investment platform that had access to big names such as SAC Capital, John Paulson, Winton Capitals, Citadel, KKR, and a number of others. That particular firm, whose name I don’t think I can mention, because for some reason, compliance hasn’t caught up to the way business is doing in 2020. But nonetheless, they had this side project idea of bringing these investment strategies to intermediaries, broker dealers, RIAs, custodians, etc. So I was hired originally to build out the infrastructure of that platform and ultimately to travel the country and consult advisors on how to use those managers for their high net worth and ultra high net worth clients.
Vance:
So I have spent thousands of hours with financial advisors in wire houses, independent broker dealers, registered investment advisors, and last, but certainly not least, family offices. I learned a lot more than I had originally bargained for in that role, because I was in meetings when selling agreements were procured and was able to meet with several heads of home offices because of that role and because the firm I was with was, for all intents and purposes, small. It wasn’t a major household name in the long [inaudible 00:02:58] ETF space or mutual fund space, for example.
Vance:
So I lived out of a suitcase. I loved it until I didn’t. A few things in my personal life changed, and I decided to resign from that role. Took some time off, and I did something that I think most of us fantasize about doing at some time in their life. I grew a great big beard and really long hair, and I rode around the country on a Harley Davidson for about a year, and it was an absolute blast. Now that I am a happily married man and father of two kids, I will tell all of the listeners you should never, ever, ever ride a motorcycle. It is remarkably dangerous. It should be avoided at all times, but back then, I thought it would be fun to do. I did that, and then ultimately moved back to San Diego and founded my firm.
Emil:
Good to cross some things off your bucket list, I assume.
Vance:
What do they say? YOLO, you only live once.
Emil:
What kind of motorcycle was it? What kind of Harley?
Vance:
It was a Harley Street Glide that belonged to my biological father, whom I had never met. I’ve never actually shared that publicly on any podcast, but I grew up having never met my natural father, if you will. We were supposed to meet a couple times. He didn’t show up, but as luck would have it, when a family member of mine had a pretty massive stroke, my grandmother had a massive stroke back in 2014, resigned from my former career. She was living in Morgantown, West Virginia. So I went to Morgantown, and as luck would have it, his widow reached out to me and said, “Hey, I would love for you to have this bike.” So I met her and met many of his friends, and they ceremoniously gave me this Harley Davidson. Then ultimately when my grandmother transitioned to the spiritual side, I thought, “You know what? This is my opportunity to throw a leg over this thing and ride around the country.” It was the experience of a lifetime.
Emil:
Oh, that’s actually a really good story.
Scott:
I’ve heard that story about three or four times now, just from hanging out with you in person and listening to some of the other media stuff that you’ve done. I love it.
Emil:
Yeah, so your origin story is fascinating. So today, I guess you have a breadth of clients. Can you talk to us a little bit more about who your clients are and what kind of problems do they come to you with?
Vance:
Sure. So I don’t really have a typical client, per se. Commonly, they have a particular pain point. It might be that they have an upcoming business sale, or they are tired of the banking blender, or they are related to or friends with a current client who says, “Hey, there’s this guy. His name is Vance Barse. He founded Your Dedicated Fiduciary, and he really starts with a clean slate, tabula rasa, if you will, and takes all of your estate planning, your tax returns, your business planning, your investment accounts, your insurance policies, and really looks in the thorough way to figure out if you have any planning apps.
Scott:
So there’s a lot of different types of financial advisors, right Vance? How do you define yourself, and how do you fit within that landscape?
Vance:
In the near decade that I spent consulting financial advisors, there are brokers, there are true fiduciaries, there are investment advisors, there are whole life insurance agents whose business cards say that they’re a financial advisor. There’s really no standard minimum value that a practitioner needs to bring to the public. The public is often confused. So I realize that trying to on board clients by inventing a better mouse trap, which in my opinion doesn’t exist. It’s all about low cost, it’s all about tax efficiency. It’s all about tax smart planning.
Vance:
The “I have a better mouse trap”, in my mind, was not a viable strategy for client acquisition, but by sharing that I used to consult financial advisors around the country, many of whom are so-called “award-winning” or “leading”, there are many strategies that they typically don’t provide, either because they’re not specialized in those types of strategies, for example, advanced planning, charitable planning, how to leverage an estate planning attorney to transfer really complex businesses and properties and so forth, or because those advisors are with firms where they just simply don’t offer that. It’s gather assets, gather assets, gather assets, charge the RAD fee. We’ll see you in three to six to nine to 12 months, and onward they go. So I wanted to create an entity where the clients served by that entity understand that the goal is to be authentic, transparent, and bring value in a meaningful way.
Scott:
In general, what do you think are the biggest gaps that most advisors leave open?
Vance:
That is a million dollar question, and I really appreciate you asking it. One, the gap that commonly exists between the tax world and the investment world. You take your right hand and you open it in front of you. Take your left hand and open it in front of you. Your right hand represents the investment world. Your left hand represents the tax world. You would think that at the core of our industry, those two worlds would come together, because for non-retirement assets, investment decisions, buys, sells, etc, can have tax implications, much in the same way that retirement planning, how much you contribute per year can have tax implications.
Vance:
One of the things that I noticed is that CPAs were often reactive. Meaning they got the tax data from the client, they went over to typically [lissert 00:10:22], which is the program that many of them use. They plug and chug, they spit out the return, they go, “Here you go. This is [inaudible 00:10:30] client. Here’s the invoice.” Secondarily is the estate planning that clients need, not because financial advisors and/or financial planners are estate planners. I’m sure that someone out there is both, but commonly they’re not, and it’s not the advisor’s job to serve as an estate planner. In fact, they’re not qualified to do that unless they go to law school and pass the bar.
Vance:
But when you’re a financial advisor, you get to know your clients. You get to know what makes them tick. You understand what their passions are. You hopefully will have access to their tax returns. You can see if they have loss carry forward. You can see if they have highly appreciated concentrated stock. You can see data and information that when paired with what you know about the family, can bring value to that family. So if there are two areas where I hope financial advisors spend more time and provide particular emphasis with respect to serving their clients, it would be in bridging the gap between the tax and investment worlds and really looking at their estate planning to make sure that the documents they need to have in place are not only in place, but also reflective of that which the family desires.
Emil:
That’s a very good point. You say that when you look at tax planning, you have to look at really not just the assets that you’re managing, but really the big pictures. That’s, I think, hard to do. That’s hard to manage and really hard to understand. Have you found software or processes out there that make that easier for advisors?
Vance:
No, I have not. I’d love to invent one so that maybe then we can all hang out on my private jet and my private pool and enjoy the private lifestyle. I’m just kidding. My understanding is that there are a couple that exist. I have yet to truly ascertain academically how a bot or an algorithm can understand the tax laws, harvesting opportunities available and the human’s desires, in so far as what they want to do not only with respect to their investments, but also their estate planning.
Vance:
For example, let’s say that you have a theoretical, highly concentrated tech stock. If you purchased multiple lots of that, often times software will report it as an average cost basis. Now I’m an investment advisor representative who uses Commonwealth Financial Network’s Corporate RIA for several reasons. But one of the things I really love about Commonwealth, and there are many, is that they have a software that allows the conversion of the average cost basis to the very specific tax lot cost basis.
Vance:
So let’s take another example where you have a family who’s an advisor, or as the case may be, former advisor, loaded them up into high cost, tax inefficient mutual funds. Most people, unless they have a pain point, like their financial advisor. One of the things I’ve noticed in onboarding families is that they might look at me and go, “Oh, you want my tax returns? Well, my current gal or current guy hasn’t ever asked for that. But sure, I’ll give it to you. By the way, I seem to have this really annoying capital gains drag every year.”
Vance:
Sure enough, I can look at the schedule D, and I think for compliance purposes, I have to share I’m not a CPA, I don’t offer tax advice, I don’t offer tax preparation services, etc, etc, etc. I do, however, look at tax returns typically daily to really understand the fact pattern for the estate. So if I look at the schedule D and I see that every year there’s 10,000, 20,000, 30,000, 50,000. I had a client with 85,000 in capital gains because of the tax inefficient mutual funds that the former advisor had put into their non-retirement accounts. I can take that investment account and those specific holdings, and I can convert the average cost to the tax lot specific cost, because then I can look at which of those specific tax lots are at a gain, which are at a loss, which are roughly break even.
Emil:
Yeah. No, that does make sense. I think it’s certainly stuff that’s near and dear to what we do at ETFLogic, things that we’re studying more and more. Certainly gets into the weeds, but we love the weeds. I guess jumping around a little bit, very curious about where you see some of the big regulatory headwinds or tailwinds that there are certainly a lot of regulatory changes that have shown up over the last year, notably things like Reg BI. Curious what you think about that. How do you see it shaping the industry?
Vance:
I think the Reg BI was a step in the right direction, but my personal opinion is that it was a baby step. In medicine, you, as a licensed doctor, have to take the Hippocratic Oath, which is first, do no harm. It boggles my mind that we don’t have the same thing or a very close equivalent in financial services. The public doesn’t know what the public doesn’t know, to quote the famous Rumsfeld quote, which was not a very good one, but the point is the public doesn’t know about financial services. So when Reg BI was passed, depending on a financial advisor’s affiliation, for example, are they an RI only? Are they an investment advisor representative or IAR only? Are they broker dealer and RIA? Are they a hybrid? Are they dual? The client doesn’t know the difference between those two typically. Like overwhelmingly typically. To allow financial advisors the opportunity to provide a form, but have additional and multiple pages of disclosure that the client is to read and thoroughly understand, I just can’t really wrap my head around that, because let’s back away from the ivory tower theoretical universe and come back down to reality.
Vance:
You’re serving a busy client or you’re serving a retiree. Are they going to want to sit around and read through pages and pages of legalese that use very contextually specific nomenclature and information that they’re more than likely not familiar with and go, “Okay. Well, this is regulation best interest.” So I’m not bashing Reg BI. I think it’s a step in the right direction. My personal belief is that we should have a true fiduciary standard that requires financial practitioners to adhere to the absolute highest degree of integrity, morality, and ethics. I don’t know if we’ll see one any time soon. I know that not everyone agrees with me, and that’s totally fine. Sometimes I think that there are institutions that don’t want a fiduciary standard, because for example, it might not be in the best interest of their clients to charge them an advisory cost and simultaneously put them into an asset management company, or said differently, investment products of an investment firm that they own.
Vance:
I just go, “Come on.” That’s almost like the barber shop model, right? So we’re going to charge the barber time for the chair, and we’re also going to charge the client walking in. So let’s go ahead and charge for investment advisory and, theoretically, financial planning and possibly some trust planning or trust administration, etc, etc. But while we’re doing that, we’re going to also put you into our portfolio models, which conveniently might have investment products that are managed by a company that we own. I think that educated consumers are realizing the inherent conflict in that model, although I could make the argument that if those products are in the best interest of the client, and that’s a whole separate conversation, then it might make sense. But I think you catch my drift. I would love to see the day that the financial practitioners are required to bring maximum value and serve clients in a way that is truly in their best interest, not just with respect to products, but also strategy implementation and in between.
Scott:
So I hate to get political, but it seems like in this administration and recently a lot of the rules that have been coming out are very pro putting the due diligence on the end investor, right? So Reg BI and the ETF rule, for instance. Do you think that might change with any kind of political shift that might happen?
Vance:
It could, and I love politics. I find it academically fascinating. I have yet, in my 40+ years to see a politician campaign on a number of things and then deliver 100% on those things. You hit a certain point of disillusionment. Having grown up right outside of DC, you also become acutely aware that many politicians might say one thing and do another based on funding and campaign contributions. For me personally, it doesn’t take too long to feel grimy.
Vance:
I would hope that if we have a shift in the political winds, or said differently, and I guess more pointedly, if the pendulum went to the left, I would hope that the next administration, whenever that is, would take the initiative to bring a true fiduciary standard to the industry. Scott, I have not made friends in some circles because they go, “Well, just because you make a commission doesn’t mean that you’re a bad person or that you’re violating what’s in the best interest of the client.” You know what? Look at it on a case by case basis. If doing an A share in a 529 plan where the investment holding period is going to be 7, 10, 15, 20 years, 18 years, whatever the case may be, then what does the math say, right? Forget opinion, forget conjecture. What does the data and what does the math say is in the best interest of the client? I would hope that we would see something to that effect.
Emil:
That’s a good retrospective on some of the recent regulatory changes shifting the industry. Beyond regulatory and regulations, what are some of the big themes that you see in the coming years?
Vance:
Potentially higher taxes. The Freasury, which I have dubbed as the shotgun wedding between the Federal Reserve and the Treasury. Eventually that has to get paid, in theory, although we could continue to deficit spend. I remember 20 years ago people going, “Oh, the national deficit is so terrible. We’re going to get crippled in taxes,” and here we are. Right? With respect to the industry, I think we will continue to see fee compression. That’s an obvious one. I think that we will continue to see the regulatory landscape evolve toward a fiduciary standard, because remember, there’s also state level or state specific regulations. I would hope that our industry learns how to maintain compliance but also allow financial advisors to do business like so many other businesses in 2020. I understand the issue with endorsements.
Vance:
I look at other industries and I go, “People use Yelp. People use Google. It’s 2020. West Virginia has high speed internet, for crying out loud. With all the smart people that we have, particularly attorneys, making as much money as they do, we have to have the ability. It has to exist, in my mind. It’s go to exist to allow our industry to conduct business in ways that other industries conduct business.”
Vance:
You know what I did today, gentlemen? I got my hair cut. Yes, I wore a mask. Yes, I wore gloves, and yes, I was careful. It was amazing. I’m like, “Wow,” I went from shaggy dog to current day Vance, and it was truly a wonderful experience. How did I find that barber? I simply went on to Google and I typed in “best rated barber near me”. You know what I did? I read through reviews. I’m like, “I can’t believe we can’t do this in this industry, within reason.” So I hope that the industry provides the infrastructure to not only maintain compliance with standards and regulations, but so that we can, as an industry, conduct business like it’s 2020, not 1987, if that makes sense.
Emil:
Absolutely.
Vance:
Number four, I think as wealth transfers from Boomers to next gen, financial advisors are going to need to learn how to have a meaningful conversation with women, because statistically, men die first, and one of the things I used to see commonly is male advisor, male client, with female spouse. The two men would just talk at and with one another, and it was as if the female had no voice whatsoever. That’s a problem. I think that will affect advisors, and concurrently, advisors need to learn how to have meaningful conversation with the younger generation. We all love to bag on millennials. “Yeah, bruh, I got my headpiece on, bruh. Hashtag, bruh. I’m trending on Twitter, bruh.”
Scott:
Not headset. AirPods, not headset.
Vance:
I hope I didn’t offend you, Scott. Free hugs at Vance’s house, bruh.
Scott:
[inaudible 00:27:47]
Vance:
Anyway, I sit back and people make jokes about it, and they’re largely funny, but that generation is going to ostensibly inherit a lot of money. They are a purpose-driven, meaning-seeking, and very commonly philanthropically-oriented generation, which is interesting, because so many of them grew up staring at computer screens or phones. I’m part of the latchkey generation. Mom and dad both worked. We’d get off the bus. Back in those days, you could just walk from bus stop to your house. It’s like a quarter mile uphill both ways through the snow and the sleet and tornadoes, right? Life was tough, man. But now you have a generation that is very social media savvy, very smart, and they like to see meaning in the things that they do.
Vance:
This is why we’ve seen things like ESG and impact investing really become of interest among millennials. It’s not just millennials, but I’ve noticed that when I receive questions on ESG and impact investing, it’s either from families that really want to make the world a better place, or it’s from younger members of multi-generational families who go, “Look, I realize I’m fortunate that we had a business, or we had real estate, or we had both,” or mom or dad worked for decades at a company and were able to save. “I want to make sure that I do my part to give back.”
Scott:
That’s really interesting. ESG is a big thing that we’re looking at, in terms of our portfolio analysis tools. I feel like every time I do a demo, it’s either a younger advisor under the age of 40 that’s like, “Wow, that’s really cool,” or it’s an advisor that it seems like they’re getting into ESG or even starting to look at it just based on a client request. Like their client is saying, “I want to know what kind of impact my investments have,” maybe based off an article that they read or something like that.
Emil:
Yeah. Those are, I think, a really good overview. One of the things you touched on was this intergenerational wealth transfer. I guess you touched on one of the nuances there is that a lot of that transfer will happen to women, towards women. So very good point about the advisor relationship towards women.
Scott:
Yeah. Your anecdote before about the male advisor only talking to the husband and ignoring the wife, that seems so old school to me that people are still behaving and operating their businesses in those fashions, whether it’s financial services or any other industry. But I guess that kind of goes along with what it is that financial advisors need to do to adapt in order to meet the new demands of this new generation, right?
Vance:
But it’s important for financial advisors to take a step back away from the portfolio management, if they’re even doing that. Many of them, again, plug and chug, put it in a home office model, “See you in three to six to nine, and come to our holiday dinner soiree. We’ll see you then.” But if they’re focusing on the investment, I invite them to take a step back, look at the big picture. Who is the family? What makes them tick? What are their pain points? What are they passionate about? What planning strategies? Very specifically, what planning strategies can you bring into their lives to help them live a more meaningful life of fulfillment, because ultimately, that’s what we all want. What’s the point of jumping on the wheel and trying to run faster and faster and faster to get our heart rate and blood pressure up to go nowhere? People don’t want that. People want fulfillment. In my mind, that’s the job of a comprehensive financial planner.
Scott:
So I have one more question. Obviously we met on [inaudible 00:32:22]. Social media is a very powerful tool to connect with people. I always see a lot of people getting… Advisors especially, you guys are always complaining about getting these messages from these guys who are promising all these leads, right? “I’m going to get you qualified leads.” I’m curious, and I’ve always been a little bit curious about advisors and prospecting. For you, what’s been the most proven strategy for getting new clients?
Vance:
Oh, I love it. I absolutely love it. So I have been seeking the silver bullet, the one thing that takes me from 50+ families to 100 to maybe 150 as fast as possible. I have been seeking unobtainium. I just don’t think it exists. I have a few thoughts to share on this. One, the number of clients I have acquired through social media is slim to none and slim left town. It is rapidly approaching zero, because that’s what it’s always been. I think about this, and I think it’s so funny that social media is so regulated, not because it’s funny, and I understand the point, because the reality is so many of the regulations that we have in this industry are because people were doing those things.
Vance:
It’s not a crime to be a good human, but you can’t, in my mind, on a moral level, you can’t take a full testimonial that was contrived and blast it out to the public. Stop. Come on. Let’s get back to earth. Let’s be levelheaded. Let’s be good people and lead with integrity. Some people might be rolling their eyes, and that’s fine. But again, in my mind, if you are a practitioner in the financial services industry, you, me, and all of us should be held to the equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath in medicine.
Vance:
In fact, Andrea Riquier of MarketWatch reached out to me for a story on this very subject as it relates to Reg BI when it was passed. So on social media, I can’t imagine that the “ideal client”, however people define it, million investable, two and a half million investable, 500,000 investable, 50 million private wealth [inaudible 00:34:59]. People, in my experience, no one’s sitting there over breakfast on a Sunday scrolling through LinkedIn going, “Hey, Janice, get over here. Bring your cup of coffee. I saw this really, really great post. Who is this? Vance Barse. Sent me a LinkedIn message. I only got 39,000 other ones. This is our guy, honey. This is the dude. Where has this guy been all our lives while we have been in the banking blender? Hot dang, hallelujah. Prayers are answered.” I don’t see it happening, right?
Vance:
The same thing, if you’re running a huge company or even a small company, you’re busy. You got kids. You got travel. Your back hurts. You got a mortgage. Maybe two of them, because you got a Lake House. Are you really sitting around and thumbing through Twitter at the risk of wearing your thumbs out and getting some type of medical disease in your joints? Probably not. I fought joining Twitter for so long. I remember when Twitter was the go-to social platform over 10 years ago, and everyone’s like, “You got to go on Twitter. You got to go on Twitter.” I’m like, “One, I can’t edit it. Two, originally, I think you couldn’t delete it.” I’m like, “Maybe I have a misspelling. Maybe there’s a grammatical error. Maybe I just changed my mind.”
Vance:
So I really only started using Twitter about 18 months ago, and I have found it to be very helpful, in terms of meeting other industry folks. The main reason that I joined Twitter was to follow an economist friend of mine. She lives in Dallas. Fantastic thought leader and just I love all the content that she produces. Her name is Danielle DiMartino. That was ultimately the genesis for me joining Twitter, but I never really used it until about 18 months ago, and it’s been largely wonderful. I say largely, because sometimes I’ll tweet something out, and these random people you don’t even know just come chiming in with gallons of negativity. It’s like, “Whoa, I don’t even know who you are.” It’s just so bizarre to me.
Vance:
But getting back to client acquisition, no. I have never onboarded a client through social media. If I do, you’ll be the first person that I call. Most of the clients I have onboarded in the last three years, it’s just been an idiosyncratic, unexpected, unique kind of experience. For example, I hopped on an elevator, and Scott, you know me, I’ve never met a stranger. I get on an elevator. I’m at the University Club in downtown San Diego, and this woman gets on right behind me. I looked at her and I go, “You look happy.” She looks at me and she goes, “I’m fresh out of a divorce and I’m about to sell my company. I am as happy as happy can be.” I’m like, “Well, look at that. Sometimes the universe just has a way of working itself out.”
Vance:
She ended up coming on board because her former advisor, who was at a wire house, had never given her a voice and never talked about charitable planning, and never discussed her tax return profile, and on and on and on. She felt very underserved, not only because she didn’t have a voice, but because in her mind, she had not been provided the value for which she and her former husband were eligible.
Vance:
Another client, I hopped on a flight from San Diego going up to Oakland. It was a 7:00, 10:00 AM flight. Very last person to get on the flight is this woman who sits down next to me and she goes, “Why are you dressed so nicely on a Saturday?” I said, “Well, I’m headed up to the Bay Area to go help this tech family with their high-level money problems.” She goes, “Well, I have a high level money problems.” We just started talking. So there’s been no real science. Again, it’s not a very specific profile. Some financial advisors have a very specific profile that they serve. Railroad executives, that’s it. I don’t have that. The universe has not provided that to me.
Scott:
Yeah, that’s something that I always see debated on Twitter and other social media between advisors, but more and more, it seems like everyone is kind of behind the idea that you should get a niche, and having a real specific investor type is going to lead to more success, because you’re ingraining yourself in a very tight-knit, specific community that has very specific problems, and therefore you develop a specialty in how to understand and navigate those issues for that specific type of person, right?
Vance:
That’s fantastic. I know that there are advisors that are very successful bloggers. People read them. They subscribe, and if they have that funnel to go out into the internet and have people funnel in and reach out to them, that’s fantastic. That’s just truly wonderful. I have not spent much time writing or vlogging simply because I’m just busy doing other things in my professional and personal lives. One other way of acquiring clients has been you do something great for somebody, they like you, and they’re at the water cooler, or they are at the polo match, or the car show, or on a Harley, and someone close to them mentions a financial planning related item, or they ask them, “Who do you have?” And it’s their cue to introduce me, and that has happened. It’s great, but I look back, and I don’t have a very specific client profile that was specifically and consistently acquired through leveraging a media platform or the internet by way of blogging. I think it’s a fantastic model. It’s just not one that I have tried.
Scott:
Fair enough, and I think like any business, you kind of just have to do whatever works for you. If you have a specific way that you’re doing it, you have a niche that you’re in, you can draw people off of social media, by all means, that’s awesome, but I don’t think for financial advisors, it’s that cut and dry that you can just do one thing and everyone will come flocking to you, right?
Scott:
Before we close out though, I wanted to see did you have any questions for us?
Vance:
So my question is when is life going to return back to normal? I’m good on time. You guys can go.
Scott:
Yeah. I meant to ask you that before. It’s been pretty funny now. There’s a virtual event going on this week that I’m participating in, and there’s a whole bunch of them coming up. It just doesn’t feel the same, and it just feels very weird. I hope it’s not the new normal. I think a bit part of our industry is those conferences, right? Now having to do it virtually, and we’ve had to adapt a lot. I think for us, being a tech company, it was pretty easy, but all of our stuff was on the cloud. So it was really quick and easy for us to just start working from our laptops immediately.
Scott:
But curious for you, Vance, being a financial advisor, obviously, I don’t know if you were, but a lot of them were using dinners with clients and in person meetings, having them in your office and stuff like that. How did you adapt to that change?
Vance:
I love this question for many reasons. For me and my practice, the COVID regime in which we have found ourselves is one during which I have made zero changes in terms of how I serve clients. So what’s somewhat unusual about my practice is that while I have an office in San Diego, the majority of the 50-ish families that I serve are not in or based in San Diego. Using Zoom, of course the telephone, and in person meetings where I travel to them is something that I have been doing. So when air travel ceased to exist for a hot minute there, obviously I wasn’t getting on planes, but I was conducting Zoom meetings. Nothing new there.
Vance:
Many of the families that I serve are headed by folks that are on the right-hand side of the age bell curve. They were used to talking on the phone. All my clients have my cell phone. It can be 5:30 in the morning, and as you know, I’m a very early riser. I get east coast calls at that hour, and it might be 9:45 at night, and I can get a call from a west coast-based client. So operationally, there’s been no change.
Vance:
I went to my office only twice in four months, and that was just to college mail, the majority of which was just junk. Any checks and so forth, we had someone going in every day to make sure that any urgent items, specifically client-related items, were being processed. But I just didn’t go to my office. I had 37 voicemails from wholesalers that I just delete, delete, delete, delete, delete. But I did travel to four different cities in the last month by plane, very carefully, I might add. I flew up to Oakland to sponsor the Silicon Valley Horse Show for a client who’s active in that community. The flight was fantastic, because one, there was zero line at TSA, which was a first, and two, most of those seats, like the majority of the seats on the plane were vacant. I simply wore a mask and a face shield and gloves. I had 90,000 gallons of hand sanitizer with me, and you just kind of make the best of it.
Vance:
So I am meeting with clients in person where I travel to them by plane. For me, there’s really been no change, but I do know that for many advisors that have that conventional model of office down the street, all clients go to them, it’s been a challenge, because… Imagine this, you’re an advisor. You’ve been an advisor for 25, 30 years, maybe more. You have all your staff there. They’re at arm’s length, multiple human beings right there in person. That’s what you’re used to. All your clients come to you.
Vance:
All of a sudden, all your staff is remote, you got to pick up the phone? Oh man, I got to dial. Number, number, number, number, number, number, number, number, number, number. Then hope that they answer. I’ve got to click on this Zoom meeting. You look at some of these Zoom calls, and it looks like the phone’s on their chest and [inaudible 00:47:43] you can see right up their nostrils. Like hold the phone out in front of you, please. But it’s been challenging for some, but for me, no issue.
Scott:
So that concludes episode three of our Speaking Logicly series-
Emil:
Just a quick note. Vance, thanks a lot for input. Clearly you’re a wealth of knowledge in this space.
Vance:
Of course. Gentlemen, I sincerely appreciate the opportunity to hop on the podcast and share a little humor, and hopefully bring some levity to the day of listeners.
Scott:
You certainly did. For those who are interested in getting in touch with Vance, you can go to VanceBarse.com. There’s a link there to sign up for his newsletter, as well as his personal contact details, if you want to talk to him about any of the stuff mentioned in this podcast. If you’re interested in our Logicly platform, which we talked a little bit about some of the ESG and tax stuff that we’re working on, you can go to logicly.finance and check out the platform, that way you can get a free trial code for two free weeks right off that website.
Scott:
So thanks again, you guys, for listening. We hope you guys are investing logicly.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
