Bill Keen/Matt Wilson: How a Hyper-Local Niche Fueled a $1 Billion RIA

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What if you could build a billion-dollar RIA firm organically by going deep and narrow in your local market? Hi everyone, I'm business coach Steve Sandusky for Barron's Advisor, The Way Forward Podcast. My guests today are Bill Keen and Matt Wilson of Keen Wealth Advisors, which is a billion-dollar-plus RIA firm based in Overland Park, Kansas. What's remarkable about Bill and Matt is they've achieved their scale entirely through organic growth, and a key to their success was to focus on local architectural, construction, and engineering firms, including many with ESOPs. Their strategy was to become the absolute experts in these companies' retirement plans and benefit programs, to the point that even the HR professionals at those firms would call them when they had a tough question. In today's conversation, Bill and Matt share how they built their niche-focused firm from the ground up, how they transitioned from being lead advisors to firm leaders, and how they've scaled their operations while maintaining a consistent client experience. We also talk about the challenges of business succession, building a team with staying power, and the role generosity plays in shaping their firm's culture. With that, here's my conversation with Bill Keane and Matt Wilson. You guys have built a billion-dollar-plus RIA firm, and for the most part, you've built it by focusing on large local companies, and it's all been through organic growth. There's been no acquisitions or anything. I'd love to hear a little bit about the story behind how you decided to really focus your efforts back in the early days in a corporate market and how you're continuing to do that to this day. And is that still working for you?

I'll date myself a little, Steve, coming into the business in the early '90s. Some of the listeners might relate to this. I started at a firm called Dean Witter, and back at Dean Witter, we were asked to open a certain number of households, a certain number of families each year, and raise a certain amount of assets to really to make it in the business. It was hard to even make it in the business back then. And I was one of the lucky ones and worked hard and had that attitude that failure wasn't an option and pressed on. And in that first year, I had about 150 relationships that I was able to open. And I believe I raised somewhere around $5 million. Of those 150 families, And the $5 million, 2 of them made up about $4 million, and the other 148 made up the other million dollars, if you could imagine. Those numbers are going to be close. Okay. And I looked at that even though I was young, coming right out of, right out of college and said, what do those 2 people have in common? The very nice folks just ended up, they had more money, they had money in motion, and they were people that were retiring from local corporations. And they needed some help on what to do with their rollovers, with their retirement. Common sense told me, let's focus on that. So, I pretty quickly made myself an expert on retirement planning rules. And back then, there was income averaging and out of pension plans and things were— there was just the rules and regs that exist today. It was the rules and regs of the early '90s around retirement planning and IRAs and the Roth IRA hadn't been invented yet and just a lot of different things that seemed like it would be smart to understand. And I also had this really interesting thought back in the early '90s at the brokerage firms. It was very transactional, of course. I couldn't understand early how you could invest someone's money without actually having a financial plan in place for them of some kind, without having an objective for managing the money. That concept of having a financial plan that said, how much can I spend? When can I retire? How long will this money last? Assumptions on different rates of return and inflation and so forth. It just seems so obvious that's what we should have been doing.. And the big brokerages just weren't doing that, or we weren't receiving any training on that. So I had to train myself on those things as well. And then pretty soon, as I became familiar with other companies, 8 or 9, maybe 10 different companies in the local area there, I would obtain a client from one of those companies and then just take their benefits package and just study it backwards and forwards and inside and out and be able to talk educated to other employees at their companies about their plans and how the transition could work to retirement and so forth. Sorry for the long answer there, but it really is just very organic back to the very beginning. On what seemed to make sense. And now fast forward 32 years and we still basically are doing something very similar.

And you're getting a lot of referrals from those folks today. Do you think that strategy would still work today? If someone says, hey, I've got this local Fortune 500 company or this big private company in town, they've got an older workforce, maybe they've got an old pension plan. Can you still do that strategy today, go deep and narrow with local companies, or do you think that idea has really been worked over already over the past couple decades?

I'll give you the short answer on this one.

Yes.

Okay.

Yeah.

All right.

It's because the people need help and they want to engage with someone who knows their situation. So if you know their situation, people are much more comfortable having those conversations with you. And now with social media, you can put content out that speaks to them. Hey, if you're an employee of XYZ company, you have these choices you have to make at retirement, come talk to us.

But then you've got someone like Fidelity or you've got Financial Engines and they've got the 401(k) plan and they're doing group enrollment meetings. They're calling these people when they retire. So, they've got access to these people. So, how does a financial advisor overcome the incumbency that those firms have at some of these larger organizations?

It's not easy. You've got to just stay in front of folks. But what we've found, while the custodians have very good people there, they're still not, up to speed on all the nuances, especially with some companies that are privately held or have these pensions that HR might know a little bit about. There's pockets of information within the organization that they don't speak to each other. So that's where we come in and it's, here's how all this stuff works, not just one piece of it.

And I would say too, Steve, that there's a reputation, there's history, there's brand, there's credibility. There's social proof around having done it. So a lot of this has to do with, for somebody listening to this just trying to get started, the good news is it's still possible. The bad news is it takes time to build that credibility. You have to have staying power, and you need to be a thought leader, in my opinion. Now, a thought leader in your industry and a thought leader around whatever niche you decide to go work with and become a specialist at, and have that voice, like Matt said, to reiterate, out there everywhere. Back when I started, you could actually call people. Today, no one answers the phone, really. I say no one, that's an exaggeration. Some people do, but it's different now. It's social media, it's digital, it's webinars, it's ever-present out there. And again, it's consistency. Staying power has been something that's been really important for us because a lot of people you hear today, oh, that doesn't work, or seminars don't work, or webinars don't work, or you name it. But a lot of times folks just aren't sticking with it long enough to see the fruits of their labor, right?

You need that perseverance. Now, tell me if your experience has been different, but it seems 20 years ago, corporations were a little more open to having relationships with financial advisors, maybe allowing a financial advisor to come in and do a brown bag lunch type of thing on some educational topic related to retirement. But in recent times, it seems like maybe they've closed that down more and they're really not interested in doing any kind of stuff with financial advisors. Has that been your experience?

From time to time, we'll have conversations with HR folks, other people in the benefits side, because we have questions with clients and we're just trying to clarify things. And so we try and build relationships with them. We've never really gone down that path of being adamant that, hey, we need to come in there. We just do it on our own on the outside, which for the company standpoint, they're completely comfortable with. But it isn't like we're getting in the front door and getting a recommendation or a, hey, we're holding a class and the company alerts everyone. It'd be nice if it existed, but they have their vendors and that's who they lean on. Even though we know the vendors probably aren't doing it the same way we are, it's just how it works.

I think it's about liability for the parent company, for sure. For the corporation, they don't want to look at the fact that they're backing one specific financial advisor. Now, there are cases where I think advisors have been able to get on site at companies, especially some of the ones maybe you mentioned earlier today where they actually have the 401(k). And if you look at it, when we talk to companies about financial wellness, as we speak to you saying this, we're actually training about a 300-person company right now up in Minnesota on financial literacy, retirement literacy, and talking about their ESOP plan to them. The owners of the company hired us to basically bring financial literacy and awareness to their workforce. So we're doing that as we speak, a program that we've rolled out. So maybe that tide is shifting. As people see this really financial wellness as a benefit to their employees. You have these great benefits, and this is our talk to some of these firms. We haven't talked yet specifically about our niche, which is the engineering, architecture, engineering, and construction field. A lot of these companies are owned with ESOPs. The employees don't really understand how powerful their benefits are, and they may not want to hear it or don't want to hear it from the management or the ownership of the company, but they'll hear it from a third party, an objective third party like us. And so that's an angle that we have been working with and it's been super productive as well.

And you mentioned here a moment ago that you started in the early '90s having these conversations with the corporations. And right at that same time, I was working with Scott Hanson and Pat McClain back in the old Securities America days, and they were doing the same thing. They were working with Pacific Bell Telephone Company. And I remember Scott telling me, he said, We get to know the retirement plan of that company better than the HR people do. And so our objective is we want the HR people calling us when they've got questions about their plan. That's how well we need to know this thing. So do you guys do that as well in terms of really getting to know it? And how do you get the information that you need to be the expert on that particular company's retirement plans and other benefit plans?

When we have clients at those organizations, especially many of them engage with us prior to retirement. I've been getting copied on emails all day about, a local company in Kansas City that is privately held ESOP, and it's having this share buyback program. And we've got nonstop communication internally on how this works and who it impacts because our team is so focused on the financial planning side of the equation for this for everyone that they just eat up all this planning stuff. Like to them it's, hey, we need to understand all this. So they read it and they document it, they look through it, they model it into the financial planning software, how it's gonna work when, shares are coming in over time, and we're able to model that in and present it in such a way to people that they can understand it. And that's how we can communicate it, and we can communicate it to the HR people. Hey, this is how we understand it. And they confirm a lot of times, yes, that's correct, or if we want to verify something. But we've had several comments from them over the years that, yeah, you guys seem to know it better than a lot of people do.

So is there an angle that you try and find in in order to initially get the attention of the people at this company? For example, maybe it's something with their executive compensation program or selling their stock options or converting their stock options, whatever the case may be. Is there typically something that will grab their attention and say, "Oh, I didn't even know that about my plan.

Maybe I should talk to these guys." There has been, but I think more so there was events. And I think Bill can speak to that. These different organizations maybe go through these reduction in forces and things like that. So then it creates, hey, there's something to talk about.

Even back in the early to mid-'90s, I was working with a company and I would hold lunch meetings right next door to where the firm was headquartered. And I remember, again, young guy, but I had rented out this room or I wouldn't rent it. It was whoever would show up would get to go through the buffet and the manager allowed me to put up my tripod and talk about this upcoming VRIF, Voluntary Reduction in Force, that was being announced. And I had the details of it. And I understood how diversification of their stock worked. And I just understood about some of the things that these folks needed to understand about. So I remember going there for 2 years every other Wednesday. And that was just a standing— that's how it was. And whoever showed up— and the word starts getting out. You start taking care of people, and the word gets out. And I would just pay for whoever showed up at this buffet for lunch. Have a little meeting in the back room. And evolution of that, we've continued to do events all the way up through COVID. I think in 2020, Matt, we had— do we have 45 live events before COVID Yeah. Today we're doing more like 15 or so with a lot of webinars has taken the place, but very focused, very niched, very detailed on certain aspects to these plans. Now we will speak at like the national ESOP conferences. Our room was standing room only. Remember our breakout session, Matt, there? We have a booth at the ESOP conferences. I have a book out that's called Keen on Retirement, which is a fun little play on words, and a podcast as well called Keen on Retirement that's been out for 10 years. Hence, there's that staying power I'm talking about. The subtitle of my book is Engineering the Second Half of Life. So, it really speaks to that niche. Now, it doesn't preclude anyone else. They just see engineering the second half of life and think, that's Sounds good to me, but for engineers, it even speaks to them a little more. But so we have a nice booth, we're handing out the book, we're talking to a bunch of HR people and owners of companies that have ESOPs, and we actually have a breakout session on how to communicate your benefits to your employees so that they respect and appreciate them. So that's again another example of the evolution of an event, getting in front of people and having an impact in telling our story and building that, again, building that credibility. Around the marketplace, which I think is really important. And with social media and other avenues, you can then continue to build on that credibility nationwide, really.

And do you guys target, let's say, the senior leadership of the company, or do you just market in general to a specific company or specific companies, and whoever wants to work with us will work with them? Or how targeted or not targeted do you get within a company?

It would be the latter. So it's just, hey, are you an employee at XYZ organization? Because the benefits for the most part are the same up and down. Yes, there might be slightly different things with the C-suite, but we define this— we're big EOS proponents. We've been operating under EOS since 2019, and one of the things they really make you do in that is define your target market, like truly define it. And we went through that process and we listed it out, and it's— when you look at it, it's— that's the rank and file. It's not the C-suite. If you were to just say that's who our target is, And that's for us, it actually feels good because now it's like all the marketing material speaks to that target and it's just the employees for the most part. Yeah, it's great. We do pick off C-suite and executives, but the employees are the ones that are the bulk of the clients.

And I think in your particular case too, the employees are rolling out with over $1 million or $2 million and maybe some cases $3 million. So it's a lucrative niche.

It sure can be, or sometimes quite a bit more. And it's not all about the actual dollars. It's about fit and that type of thing and the type of person we work with. But they all seem to be grateful, humble people as well, too, in this kind of AEC field that we have a specialization in. And I say we have that about— I don't know, Matt, what do you think, about 40% of our— maybe 50% of the firm's clients are employees of these types of firms?

And would that that correspond to the assets as well? Or would the asset level that those people comprise be more than just their representative percentage in terms of households?

It would be higher on the asset side. And speaking back to Bill, when he was doing these seminars and when I started working with him back in 2002, we would have these seminars with these companies, but also there would just be mailers too, just generic seminars to the population. And you'd just start to see, hey, some of these folks that work at these engineering companies, they tend to make more. Just good salaries and they're good savers. It's like there's a lot of positives with working with these folks, right?

Yeah, we get teased a lot at conferences just like this. The Barron's conference that we're at, we were talking to our other firm owners and leaders and they say, what's your specialty? And we tell them that we work with engineers because a lot of financial advisors try to avoid engineers. They think that they're too high maintenance or too detail-oriented or too picky or you name it. And what we've found— maybe I shouldn't share the secret here, Matt.

I—

oh, please do. Lots of ways to do business. Oh yes. But they're planners by nature. They're engineers. They're paid for their brains. They charge a fee for their brains, essentially. They have deep networks. They respect consultants. They respect people hiring others outside their field of expertise. Relationship-oriented, project-oriented. So if you do what you say you're going to do and you have a checklist-driven process that you actually follow it to a T and you're precise, you build trust with those folks over time. And they're some of the best folks you could ever engage with. And they typically live within their means for the most part. Again, they're investors, savers. A lot of them have history of being in the markets very long term because they built their wealth that way. So they have a respect and an understanding at least of market volatility. You're not dealing with someone that just had a huge lump of money dropped in their lap like a lottery winner or someone that inherited money or a professional athlete that has no understanding of market volatility and calls you the first time the market's down 1% even. Not that we don't deal with folks that are concerned about market volatility. I'm just saying if someone has wisdom from the journey of wealth building over a lifetime, it's a much easier engagement to help them make the right decisions going forward. So really working with that niche has been wonderful for us.

To summarize, what I'm hearing is first, this market niche idea, working with a corporation, public or private, you think that's still a valid opportunity today. Second, you have to persevere. So it's not, oh, I'm going to do a couple of webinars and see who shows up. And if they don't, oh, this doesn't work. But you got to be there. You mentioned you've been doing this for what, 30 years or so now? That's right. And you've got the podcast you've been doing for 10 years. You're doing YouTube now. And so I'd say that's second. Third is really be a thought leader. So you've got to become a recognized expert on a particular company or companies retirement plans and, you know, be recognized for that. I can think the fourth one would be you got to know that plan better than the HR people. So again, it gets back to being that recognized expert.

That's right. I think you hit them pretty good there, Steve. I really do. And I think it's still a very valid way to establish your business and build a financial—

Yeah. And I think that applies to any way that you want to build your business.

Yeah.

Let's segue here. I got a couple more topics I want to talk about. One is I heard you say checklist financial planning process a couple of times here. So I want you to tell me What does checklist financial planning look like? How do you deliver that?

Anybody, especially a fiduciary RIA, or anyone for that matter who's practicing in the financial planning field, is going to have some sort of a questionnaire that they walk clients through, and hopefully some sort of a way of taking that information that they gain about the client and the client's family tree and their history. And if there's a partner or spouse, how did they both get into those very seats they're sitting at that moment in that initial meeting. What's their life look like? What's their relationship with money? And there's lots of different ways to do an intake meeting, if you will, and start gathering that data. And then pivoting over into who does your taxes? Who do you have an estate plan? What does your insurances look like? All the things that we talk about as any financial planner that going through a process would talk about up to and including now pivoting over into the dollars and cents and the decimal points and all of those things. Assets, getting truthful about where someone stands, helping a client or a prospect just get truthful about where they are today, which truth is the starting point. It's not the ending point. It's okay, now we know where we are. Let's make a plan. And so for having a way to walk through that each and every time with a client so that it's consistent, the process actually starts to sell itself. Walking people through that with, whatever the culture is of your individual firm, if you're listening to this, so that it supports the culture of your firm. The questioning is a client experience, just the questions, being a good listener, documenting things, and then taking that data and running it through some sort of a checklist that you've created that says, how do we make sure we don't miss something? There are a lot of rules and regulations out there, whether it's tax or IRA rules or pension law, state planning rules, how do we run that through there without missing something and how we do it consistently each and every year. And so that the client experience yet is extremely consistent and it's correct. And we're not only missing things this year, but we're making changes today that could affect somebody years down the road. And we're thinking through all that and we know how to communicate it as well. So not only are we doing it, we're communicating it to folks so they understand the value of it.

And is this a literal checklist where you've got a piece of paper in front of you that's got 50 items on it and you go through each of those with them to see what applies and what doesn't apply?

It is. We know going into the meeting which things generally apply, so it's not necessarily like we're asking them questions that wouldn't apply. Bill and I have been doing it for so long, we have it memorized. But we have a team in place too, and part of training that team and helping them learn about, okay, how do you take a client through this process? It's like we've created a document and they fill it out for every new client meeting. It's filled out the same way so that all new hires, they all get trained on exactly. So it's not like Bill says one thing, but what this guy does it differently and does it slightly different. It's no, everyone follows the same process. Yes, they have their own voice and their own personality, but the client gets the same experience.

Okay. Yeah. And that's the key thing is it's a similar client experience, but it's delivered by diverse personalities. I may connect with you and I may not connect with Bill, for example, and, but the process is the same. So hopefully the outcome will be similar.

And the data, the relevant data and next steps and actionable items are all captured in a way that's very efficient from a workflow process in our Salesforce CRM too, which I think is, it's one thing to do the meeting, but now it's how do we follow up? How do we do it efficiently and consistently across the board?

And what do you use for financial planning software? What are some of the tech tools you use?

The biggest one we use is MoneyGuidePro. We've had, subscriptions in the past with eMoney, just didn't use it as much. Just run everything with MoneyGuidePro. And there's some tax software, Holista Plan, some Social Security analysis tools and things like that.

So let's talk about tax for a second. Obviously there's a big difference between tax preparation and tax planning. So tell me, what do you guys do in that area?

That's a big piece of ours. And I think this is— it speaks to the engineers too, because they are planners by nature. And funny story, we've had engineers who would fill out their own tax forms in paper, like by hand. And up until a few years ago when they stopped printing the forms, like they would get upset, oh, I can't go get the documents now at the library because the library doesn't carry them anymore. So yeah, they don't want you doing that. But just going through the tax planning process with them every single year and tons of checklists related to that because there's different things that are important to people, whether it's charitable giving, whether it's Roth conversion strategies because they're looking to gift to the next generation and want to do that. In a more tax-efficient manner. Maybe in some cases it applies to everyone, but we go through those checklists usually twice a year.

And do you do tax prep as well or no?

We do not do tax prep. We find that most of the clients, they've been doing it themselves. They're comfortable continuing to do it themselves. If they don't want to, we're happy to provide a recommendation. So we've got a handful of folks that we'll recommend them to, but we don't do the tax prep, just all the planning, which For the most part, ones that are doing it themselves, they might have some questions when they're filling out the forms and we can help them figure out what to put in what box.

So, Bill, you started the firm, like you said, in 1992-ish, early 1990s. Matt, you joined about 10 years later. You both started as advisors, obviously. Now you're leaders of the company. You've pretty much segued from being an advisor to being in a leadership role. That's a big transition. So walk me through how that worked for the two of you. Is it still a work in progress?

Yeah, I think it's— anyone in a leadership role, it's probably always a work in progress. One of the things that, that we realized, it was probably 9 years ago.

And what size was the company at that point, roughly? After—

was it a couple hundred million? Maybe, maybe $300 million. We were in 300 meetings throughout the year and it's that's not sustainable if we want to continue to grow. Like, we can't just be in all these client meetings. And we had some junior folks that had joined us and they would help, but they were still relying upon us. And a business coach of ours just really put us to task to say, you've got to figure out a way, if you're going to grow this business beyond just yourselves, how to get out of those meetings on a day-to-day basis and put a process in place where The client is still getting the same experience. You know, no one's losing anything. It's just taking a step back so that you can focus on growing the business.

Yeah, for sure. There was a few points in my kind of journey that have been super meaningful. One was getting started. One was founding the firm in 2014. That was a huge step to come out of a wirehouse and make a full—

So just start your independent firm.

Yeah, make a full transition, a full break over to just a full RIA at that point. The next was actually getting out of client meetings. And I say that not because I don't like being in client meetings. I love being in client meetings. But I realized to confirm what Matt just said, that was a huge point for us to be able to trust that if you're listening to this, you know how hard it is if you're a firm owner or you're in our industry, how hard it is to get in front of one prospect, to have one prospect come to your firm with their paperwork and their assets and their life and say, help me. Like a lot of folks, maybe next gen, don't understand how hard it is if you work for a firm that's providing you leads and clients. Don't realize how hard it is to just get in front of one person. And so we did. I do understand how hard it is to build that organization that attracts clients so that we can have new prospects coming in to our firm that want to come with us. And so when that's the case, you say, what's the biggest, best opportunity to make sure that prospect that's sitting in front of you has the best opportunity to come on board with you. So, getting to a point where you say, "It's not me or Matt, it's we're going to trust other people," was hard. But when we did, it was a huge step forward. And then finally, a fourth one was when I stepped aside from the day-to-day mostly and Matt became president of the firm as we sit here today. Matt became president about 3 years ago and everything operationally rolls up to Matt at this point.

So, how did you make that transition from you're the lead advisor, you've had relationships for 10, 15, 15, 20 years, and now I'm bringing Mary into the equation here. Mary's gonna be your new lead advisor. How did you make that transition? How long did it take? How did you communicate it? Did you get pushback?

We would have the other advisors join in those meetings and we did it over years. So they were second chair, so to speak, in many of those relationships for 2, 3, 4 years. And even in some cases, like Bill mentioned, we join meetings. It's just we're not responsible for the prep and the post and all that stuff. And it's some cases, it's clients that we still, you know, they just want us in those meetings and we're comfortable to be in those. It's just, hey, just get it on the schedule when it works for everybody. But it did take a lot of time to do that, especially when it was Bill and I and then transitioning to someone else. So we didn't explicitly tell them like, hey, this is your new person. It's just communication just continued to come from someone else that they knew now because they had got to know them and they trusted them. So that trust was transferred. And as they've seen the firm grow, people, they haven't necessarily asked about it. Occasionally someone says, oh yeah, we're so Bill or Matt or wherever. But it was a long-term thing, but it did work out very well.

I hear tell of firms going in and saying one day to a client, I'm no longer your advisor, here's your new advisor. And one thing that when I speak on formats like this, I always say I'm just sharing what's worked for us and I'm always looking to be better and to learn and to grow. But that makes me cringe at telling a client, I'm no longer your advisor, here's your new advisor. Now, it probably works. There's firms that have been able to do that. But for us, to Matt's point, it was a transition, a transition so that it was very natural, which takes a year or two.

Are you, either of you, the lead advisor for any clients today?

No, no. So none of us have any direct, like, responsibilities related to the client relationship. And the way I even look at that is, are clients emailing me directly for the day-to-day stuff? And that's just not the case because the team has, again, continued to do the communication and do the follow-up. And those were the clients that we had at the time when we made that transition. Now, as new relationships are coming on, they know of us, probably saw pieces of content that we put out. But they aren't engaging with Bill or I on day one necessarily. They're engaging with the team. So, it's easy.

And related to that, I often hear from advisors a concern about if I get a referral, let's say the lead advisor's still got some relationships and they get a referral from one of their clients and they think that, oh, the person that's referred to me is going to expect to work with me even though my other associate advisor would be a better fit for them right now. Do you ever run into that issue? How do you deal with referrals when they might expect to work with Bill or Matt?

We do deal with it and we don't necessarily have like hard and fast rules for every situation. A lot of it's, hey, let's just look at it independently and see what makes sense. So part of our process, Bill mentioned a questionnaire. So prior to someone sitting down with us, we always send out, hey, we want some information from you ahead of this meeting. And based on those answers and what comes back, we can determine if it's it's really important for this potential client to sit down with this lead advisor. They can join the meeting, but they can have a conversation throughout the meeting that they oversee the team because they oversee the associate. That's just how that works for us. But the associate is the point of contact, so to speak.

We also have bifurcated business development from the actual financial planning roles at our firm. So we have an intake, Lisa, who does just a fantastic job. She's a CFP. And she'll intake every single person before an appointment is set, and she will determine which part of our team that would be best for that particular prospect, and she'll let them know exactly how the process works. So by the time that prospect gets in front of the advisory team that they would be talking to, they're prepared. They understand how that process might work. I got an introduction just last week from somebody that I went to college with, and I said, the process is you talk to Lisa first. So I'd never deviate from the process. So I said, oh, sure, yeah, we'll talk to Lisa. And so she explained to them exactly how it worked. And she even let them know that Mr. Keene in his role today wouldn't be your primary advisor, but he could certainly greet you when you come that day and have a nice chat, which I did. And it was wonderful. But it's just really setting expectations. I think that's really what it's about, being upfront, communicating and setting expectations and having a process so that you're not reinventing the wheel every single time. You get a new person that wants to interact with your firm.

Yeah. And I'm glad you said that point about setting expectations because that makes your life so much easier. If you set those expectations at the very beginning instead of letting it slide, it's going to make your life so much better. So I think that's a key piece. One other area I want to talk about here is, as I mentioned, you guys are over $1 billion. You're growing like crazy. You have a lot of interest from other firms out there, whether it's PE firms or other organizations that might want to do some kind of transaction with you. Talk to me about how you think about that. So far you're independent, you haven't taken on any outside capital partners. What does the future look like for you guys?

It's definitely a, a new dynamic, probably that's existed for quite some time, but really has ramped up probably in the last 10 years or so in our space. So It is something that we are evaluating because there are a lot of business decisions around what is the next evolution of Keen, Keen 2.0, and how do we want this to look? And based on certain objectives, is a capital partner necessary or not necessary? Right now we've just continued to just do what we do, the basic blocking and tackling and everything else, and it's not necessarily needed a capital partner, but that can change too. We can get to a point to where, hey, we want to do something different and having someone participate with us would be beneficial.

That's right. It's something that we certainly think about. Like I said earlier, certainly don't have all the answers, but I want to be very well educated on the options out there. And this is a great example of being educated about what's happening in the industry. Again, this very conference we're sitting at right now, the Barron's Conference and others that we attend each year. One of the things that I also look at when it comes to a potential partner at some point, a capital partner, is having folks that are, I say, having brains at the table, having strategic smart people at the table with you could be a reason, could be one of the reasons to align with a partner. One thing that we've done is we've scaled our firm and we scaled in our little world that we live in. There's so many firms that's so much bigger and it's not a competition. It's just, there's just kind of factual. But in our little world, we've scaled, we've done it profitably. We've done it ahead of time. We haven't had to take on any debt. We haven't used any of the referral programs. The Schwab, Fidelities. We haven't done that. We haven't, like you said, done M&A. We've never bought a firm. We've always just— everything's been just very organic. So, we've protected the culture of our team. We've protected the culture of our clients. We know the people we take on. We have a fit process for every single client that comes on board as well. So, where we sit today with this experience, there's a comfort in that. And there's a question mark that says, Okay, if you take on a capital partner, are you now required to do mergers and acquisitions, or are you required to do some form of that or something that could compromise the client experience or the— our team member experience? So it's just something that we want to be very aware of. And I know that you have to have almost like a checklist of issues that you come up with yourselves when you're determining if there's a— someday a partner makes sense. The nice thing about it is we haven't needed one.. But we also, we want to be open-minded and willing to learn as well.

So you mentioned culture, you mentioned the team member experience. What I also hear from advisors is oftentimes the team members are going to ask, what's the future of this firm? What, as the founder, as the owner of the company, what's your game plan? Because I'm speaking generically here, let's say the owner's in their mid-50s or early 60s. At some point they're going to want to exit the business. And so, the younger generation is thinking, what's going to happen to me when you decide to do some kind of transaction? A, do you have any of your team members asking those questions? And B, what would you say to them if they ask you about what's the long-term future when Bill and Matt are out on the beach surfing?

One thing we've got going for us, Steve, that helps— at least it helps me— is I'm 56 and Matt is 43. So that's a real nice kind of— he's still got— I still have lots of runway. I really love what I do. And with the team in place and Matt and just it, I'm getting to do the fun things, I call it, which is really neat. But at 43 now, I don't— I shouldn't speak for him, I guess, but I assume— I would assume he's got quite a bit of runway left. So a lot of times I just say, look, Matt's 43. He's got lots of runway left, plenty of years to talk about that question.

But he's got a budding race car career.

Well, he enjoys life on the side as well, too. See? So he's got a nice balance in there. We're up to— are we up to close to 20 financial planners now? We've got a nice group of planners and then operations and support, marketing, compliance. We're really building out a firm mechanically, methodically, intentionally, in such a way that this firm can absolutely exist without me there. The firm's name is Keen Wealth Advisors, and I happen to be the Keen at this moment. But it's one of those things where I believe the firm, in Matt's leadership and that next-gen talent, has a long way to go in its life cycle. The other thing that I talk about too, to these young folks coming on board, Steve, is we recruit a lot out of the K-State Financial Planning Program, the Mizzou Financial Planning Program. We have scholarships endowed there. Financial planners of ours are on the boards of those places. We really respect those programs where young people are coming out ready to enter our profession. And I say, Matt started with me as an intern in 2002. And today he is the president and equity holder in the firm. It didn't happen overnight. No, it did not. But he is the president and an equity holder of the firm. And so my objective when someone starts at Keen Wealth is to retire from there. Is that a crazy thing to say? We just heard a speaker yesterday say that your typical young person today will have 13 jobs. But I say, why does it have to be that way if— and this speaks to your question— If you have a firm that is growing and providing that opportunity for those folks to grow and learn and achieve to their potential for them and their family inside your firm, they don't have to go anywhere else. That's what we're hoping to achieve at Keen. And we're doing that right now. We're very organically like we've— I don't want to say we figured out organic growth, but to get us to where we have, we've done this all organically. And I believe you have to have that growth mindset, which is one of our core values, always growing and learning. That when someone comes on board, they understand that we're always going to be growing here at the firm.

So a few things that I always remind folks of is, one, they can see the trajectory and it's, look, you want to be on the rocket ship or you don't. It's just you can make a decision based on that. And two, if you're really good at what you do, there's a book by Cal Newport, So Good They Can't Ignore You. It's like just that sentence. You don't have to read the book. Just understand that it's like if you're really good at what you do, none of this stuff matters. You'll— it'll be fine. You'll be fine here. You'll be fine somewhere else, even in your own just career, just personal life advice.

Yeah, I was just telling an advisor just the other day, I said, because this actual question was coming up in our conversation with them, and I said the best job security any team member can have is just do a really darn good job, because whether you do that at this company or not, you're gonna be in high demand. So just do a great job and you're not gonna have to worry about your future in this profession. Profession. I want to wrap up with one final thing. I know giving back is something that's important to your firm. I think that's part of your culture. So tell me, how do you think about giving back to your community?

Each person may have a different thought process around their own personal giving and generosity, and I totally honor and respect each person's journey around that. For me, from where I came from, I just, I'm so grateful. I don't take any of this for granted for even one day. Very thankful and grateful for the what we've been able to accomplish on all fronts. So, generosity being philanthropic is a big part of us, our culture at Keen Wealth. And so, for the first 5 or 6 years, it wasn't formalized, although over the last 3 or 4 years, we've formalized our generosity, our philanthropic giving program into something called the Keen Wealth Community Impact Committee. And that's headed up by my wife, Carissa. And we vote, I think, 5 or 6 people onto that committee. Every year. Right now, we support about 17 charities, I believe, in our local community. They're all different, all different aspects. And we have something called the Keen Wealth Foundation. So instead of it just being me or my wife and I, Carissa, or maybe Matt writing checks and just saying, oh, we're doing that, it's no, we're going to involve the entire firm. So the committee will bring various charities that meet with our kind of a general values of the firm aspect. And then the firm votes on which charities we get behind. And this has just taken on a life of its own. It's been amazing. Now, last year we did about 1,500 community service hours as well into the community. And I'm hesitant to say a number, a dollar number, but it's multiple six figures that we actually distribute into the community philanthropically each year. Again, not a contest, just something that it's impactful, I think, to our local community. And to our firm. Carissa was asked to be the gala chair for an event last year for Happy Bottoms, which is one of the charities we support. They provide diapers to families in need. A lot of people don't realize diapers aren't provided for your typical help that people get. And now she's running right now on the news in Kansas City, Channel 9, because of her diaper need as a young mother. And she was willing to share that with no shame, anything like that. Just, hey, if it's going to help others, I'll be willing to do that. So these things take on a life of their own, which is just amazing., and our firm gets to feel it as all of us together. And we include our clients as well, whether it's Angel Flight or the Veterans Community Foundation, all these things that we do, we involve clients, we involve our team, their spouses or partners, and we're collectively operating under the spirit of generosity, which is a whole nother aspect to our events that we didn't talk about earlier when we were talking about events. But it's pretty amazing.

Yeah.

Excellent.

So Bill and Matt, appreciate you being on the show today. And if you want to learn more about Bill and Matt, you can visit them at Keen Wealth advisors.com. They also have the podcast, which we'd mentioned, which is Keen on Retirement, and that is directed to the public, but feel free to listen to that as well. So guys, appreciate you being here today. All right, that's all for today. Make sure you like and share this podcast through your favorite social platforms, and for more great podcasts, visit us at barons.com/podcast.

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