Jason Early: How Top Advisors Win Business Owner Clients

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If you want to work with truly wealthy clients, chances are you'll be working with business owners. Hi everyone, I'm business coach Steve Sandusky for Barron's Advisor, The Way Forward Podcast. My guest today is Jason Early. Jason is the founder of Rizer, which is a wealth tech platform that's designed to help financial advisors better understand, analyze, in playing around what is often a client's most important asset, which is their business. In today's conversation, Jason and I discuss why business owners represent one of the most valuable and often overlooked client segments for advisors. He explains how many advisors still treat the business just like another line item on a balance sheet, when in reality, it's the central driver of a client's wealth, risk, and future liquidity. He also shares why advisors who want to work effectively with business owners need to start those conversations years before any potential exit and help clients think through priorities like legacy, continuity, and financial independence. We also explore how new technology and AI are making it easier for advisors to turn complex business financial data into insights that support deeper planning conversations, from valuation and risk to succession and exit planning. So if you're interested in working more effectively with business owner clients and positioning yourself as the trusted advisor who helps connect the business to the client's broader financial life, you've come to the right place. With that, here's my conversation with Jason Early. You started a company to help financial advisors be more effective at working with business owner clients. So, I'm curious, what did you see or what did you think was missing in terms of needing to help financial advisors be more effective at working with business owners?

In one word, clarity was missing. And so, we've got this deep-seated belief that business owners need better advice, owners of private companies. Business owners all over Main Street America power the economy. And the demographics are such that there's a big swath of baby boomers that are transitioning and transacting, and they desperately need better advice. And so, again, our whole belief is that these business owners need better advice and, and the advisors that serve them need better tools and technology. And so, the chief challenge that financial advisors have when dealing with business owners is a lack of clarity. These business owners have data that's disparate, it's disorganized, it's all over the place. And traditionally, advisors are put in a position where they've got to treat the business like every other asset on the balance sheet. So if I'm in the advice business, Steve, and I'm sitting with you and I'm going through discovery or fact finder or whatever, whatever it is I'm doing, I'm asking you questions about your balance sheet. I'm asking you questions about your goals, hopes, dreams, things like that. And to the extent you own a business, I'm using a plug-in number. And so that is what we thought was unjust. And so wanted to build a platform that allowed advisors to better understand the owner's most important asset and ultimately give better advice and then ultimately create better outcomes for the owners that they serve.

So, if the business owner has a business of any significant size, if they're doing an exit, for example, they're going to have a deal team, they're going to have an attorney, they're going to have their tax person, they're going to have, who knows, all kinds of people that are on the team. So where do you see the advisor fitting into that? If there is an exit, for example, and there's going to be a liquidity event, lots of money are coming in to hopefully the advisor to manage. What role do you think the financial advisor should play in an exit situation when that business owner already has a bunch of deal people on their team?

It's not if the owner exits, it's when. Every business owner exits their business someday, some way. In the fairytale ending, it's a big liquidity event. They're selling to a third party or a strategic or private equity or whatever it might be. And everybody reads about it in the paper and everybody's happy. But there's all sorts of different ways that an owner may exit their business. Death, disability, dispute, bankruptcy. There's a million ways. And so the best owners are always operating with an understanding of that for starters. But your question is a great one. What role does an advisor play in the the fairytale ending, we'll call it, where there's a deal team and there's a looming transaction. I'm certain that every financial advisor on the planet has uttered the words, I'm the quarterback of your financial plan. Most, however, don't fulfill on that promise. And I think it's largely an incentive thing. The reality is there's not a ton of incentive all the time for advisors to pull in the accountant, pull in the attorney, pull everyone around the table to get aligned, but the best do. And this is especially true with a business owner. And so, when we look at the landscape and we look at the market, all of financial services is starting to surround the business owner because everybody is realizing that these demographics are playing out and there are these baby boomers that are transitioning and transacting and these exits are happening. And the advisor wants to be the one that captures those assets. And so, to your question about what role do they play? It really truly is that quarterback role, but it starts far before that deal team is assembled, right? In our view, for a successful exit to happen, there has to be an advisor grabbing the business owner by the shoulders years before saying, what do you want? What do you want this to look like? How does your business fit into your overall life and financial plan? What's most important to you? What are you optimizing for? Because the easy one is, I'm optimizing for cash. I'm optimizing for the single highest price that I can transact at. But most owners actually, that isn't when we look at the data, that isn't what most owners care about. They care about legacy. They care about continuity. They care about transitioning to the next generation or to employees that have been there with them for 30, 40, 50 years as they poured their blood, sweat, and tears into this thing. And so the advisor's role is to be there. Providing advice leading up to the transaction. And then quarterbacking is that deal team gets assembled and that isn't the advisor's responsibility. They're not going to lead them through the transaction. And so they're experts for that. And they want to be there to guide the owner through all of that. So overplayed, definitely the term quarterback, but I think in this context, it's exactly right.

And I think the timing though here is difficult in terms of what you're talking about saying, oh, it's ideal if the advisor is working with the business owner years before there's any type of transaction. But oftentimes, the business owner has so much of their capital invested in the business that they may not have a lot of money outside of the business to manage. And so, the advisor's thinking, "You don't have $5 million for me to manage, so I'm not going to spend 10 years just working with you in the hope that when you do a transaction that I'm going to get millions of dollars to manage." So, how do you think about the timing piece there? On all of that?

I think that there's a confluence of factors that are leading to business owners being not only great clients, obviously, when they exit and there's a ton of liquidity, but while they operate as well. And so, number one, the data tells a different story, which is I think it's something like 66% of millionaires are business owners, but 90% of those worth $30 million and up are business owners. The wealthiest people own businesses, period. If you're looking at a pie chart, certainly most of their wealth is in the value of that business, but there is money, liquidity, assets outside of the business, number one. Number two, what we've seen from an industry perspective over the last— financial services doesn't move exceedingly fast all the time, although it's certainly moving faster today. But over the last 10, 15, 20 years is a convergence of advice. And so what we're seeing is legacy protection-related focused firms, legacy AUM or asset gatherers converge, tax entering into the mix. And so we're seeing this kind of holistic advice start to really play out. And so I say all that to say business owners have incredible complexity. And advisors are paid for the size of the problems that they solve. And so the more problems you can solve for somebody, the more value you can add, the more revenue you can generate. And so owners in our view actually make great clients while they operate and then certainly at exit as well. And so that we view that as almost the cherry on top. And so we're starting to see that play out.

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Kayak got that right. This idea of going beyond calculations to conversations, because You've got a firm that's using artificial intelligence and technology to do a lot of the calculations. So, a lot of that is going to be automated and not tremendous value-add necessarily, but it's really in the conversations around those calculations. So, tell me a little bit more about how your tools enable financial advisors to have better conversations based on the information that those tools are generating for the advisor.

I think that the best products, Steve, so when you think about who we are, we're a wealth tech provider. We're a software company that licenses our technology to the financial services space. So in our little corner of the universe, I think the very best products are the most opinionated products. And what do I mean by that? We believe deeply, and today more than ever, in financial advice, the advisor part of advice. And so, you talk about conversations. We think that the best advisors ask the best questions. They can pull out of an owner or a client their goals, hopes, dreams, and then align the best financial strategies around that. So, we believe deeply in the advisor part of advice. And so, we are crystal clear on who our customer is. Our customer is the financial advisor. And so, everything we do is about launching advisors into great planning-related conversations. And so from a technology perspective, you nailed it. There are a million things that we can do and we do really well using AI to pull data in. You can think of our platform really in 3 ways: seamless and frictionless data capture, relevant insights, and client-ready deliverables. And so the best products are incredibly opinionated. In our opinion, the financial advisor is the best one to deliver this type of advice to business owners, number 1. And that shows up in the relevance of the insights. So all of the insights that we provide in the platform are from the lens of financial advice. And so how does that show up? People say to us all the time things like, wow, your product is incredibly intuitive or user-friendly or clean or simple. What they mean is you're speaking my language. These are the conversations I want to be having with the business owner. So absolutely valuation is the tip of the spear. Valuation matters a lot. You've got to understand the value of a business if you're going to give great advice. But so what? Then what? That's great. Your business is worth $10, $15, $20 million. But what if it needs to be worth $30 or $40 or $50 million to accomplish your goals, hopes, dreams, all those things? And so helping the advisor have the conversation around here's the value today. What does the value need to be to accomplish those goals, hopes, and dreams? What are the risks that your business faces, either operational risk or equity risk, things like that? And then more importantly, what's your succession and exit plan? Because again, in our view, going back 25, 30 years with the advent of eMoney and MoneyGuide and RightCapital, all of these advisors were equipped with the tools and the technology to deliver financial plans to individuals and, and families and households. But if I said to a room full of 1,000 financial advisors, show me a succession plan that you did for a business owner. The best would show me a Word document. And so in our view, there's a statistic out of the Exit Planning Institute, and I promise I'll land the plane here in a second. There's a statistic out of the Exit Planning Institute that says 75% or 77%, directionally close there, of business owners have regrets after their transaction. So they transact and then they've got all these regrets. Why is that? It's because they exit by accident. They wake up one day and they say, poof, I'm ready to go. I'm done. I'm ready to go. Their outcomes don't align to any stated goals and objectives because they haven't stated their goals and objectives. Nobody's grabbing them by the collar and saying, what do you want to accomplish here? And so in our platform, you're able to understand the owner's priorities and then build a plan that gets you there. And so we think that's critically important.

So along the lines of what you just described there, so you've got this technology and then there's other planning systems out there and so on and so forth. Do you find a disconnect between all of the great tools and information and insights that your system provides and the advisor's ability to take that information and have these deep integrated conversations about what's the money for when you eventually do some type of transaction? Do you see a disconnect or do you find that most advisors know what to do with all this information that your system provides? Or do you help train them on it provides all this and here's what we suggest you do with this information to help you be an even more effective advisor? So, I guess I'm asking, where does your technology end and the advisor's responsibility to be a great advisor begin?

That's a great question. I would say at our core, we believe in the advisor. We believe in their confidence and competence and ability to do what they do. Well. We do not believe that they need to reinvent themselves or reinvent their practice to deliver advice to business owners. We think that they are already great at giving it. They're already great at understanding the state of the world, be it financially, pulling out of the client or prospect all of their goals, hopes, and dreams, and then building a plan to mesh those two things together. So whether they're a business owner, an executive at a Fortune 100, whatever they are, We believe advisors are great at that and to serve a business owner, they don't have to reinvent themselves. However, again, the best advisors are really clear on who they serve and, and they build expertise in and around that area. And so our belief is that the technology does the work to pull in the financial data, serve up the relevant insights, and launch the advisor into these planning-related conversations. And so an advisor by way of an example, doesn't have to become a valuation expert. The technology does that. They just need to be able to have the conversation around how does the value of this business translate into their overall plan and does it accomplish the things that the owner wants to accomplish? And so all that being said, there's a lot of surface area and it's becoming more. And I think this is what technology is driving for advisors and what's happening with consumer demand is as advisors gain efficiency, the expectations on their, the surface area or their levels of expertise is rising. So they need to know more about more stuff. And to the extent you're serving a business owner, certainly there are things that you want to be able to understand, right? In terms of, okay, what is the value of the business? What drives value in the business? How are we going to use this important asset on their balance sheet to accomplish their goals and things like that? How can we pull together a deal team? How can we get the right people sitting around the table to execute for this business owner? So yeah, there's certainly areas that you will want to grow your, your expertise in, and we provide content and courses and training, and we've got partners in that regard. So, I don't mean to underplay it, but I think the nature of the question is a good one and that, again, it's our view that advisors are already great at what they do and they don't have to reinvent themselves to deliver great advice.

Let's say that I'm a business owner and I own 10 McDonald's franchises. So, walk me through, you're my financial advisor, we've been working together for 5 years, I've got these 10 franchises. I'm 60 years old and I'm thinking I'm probably going to exit in, let's say, 5 years. So, what does your system do? You're the advisor. How are you going to use your system to help me as this McDonald's franchisee?

The first thing that we are going to do is better understand the asset. And so, I, as the advisor, we are going to use the system to pull in all the financial data. So, we are going to understand all of the financial data going back 3 years on the business. So, we're going to seamlessly— pull that in using AI, upload tax returns. We're going to pull all the data that we need into a P&L and a balance sheet so that we can really understand the business from a financial perspective. We're then going to go through in application like a qualitative question flow to better understand what we call the specific company risk. Because Steve, you could own 10 McDonald's franchises and I could own 10 McDonald's franchises and they could do the exact same top line. And the exact same bottom line and the businesses be valued differently because there's risk associated with the specific companies, be it owner dependency or customer concentration. There's likely not customer concentration in this example, but vendor diversity. There's all sorts of risk factors that play into the value of the business. And so we're going to better understand that. And then we're going to deliver insights across all of these areas. So we're going to deliver insights across valuation. We're going to deliver insights across what we call wealth, which is to say, again, how does this asset fit into your financial plans? Because again, I may live high on the hog and I may need this business to be worth $50 million, where for you to accomplish your retirement and legacy goals, you may only need it to be worth $10 million. And so how it fits into our specific financial plans matters a lot. Again, understanding those risks, have I properly protected the equity value that I've built? This is the single most important problem that we want to solve. Because when we look at the data and we look at all the businesses that get run through our system, all of these business owners are running around with tremendous equity at risk, meaning they've built these valuable businesses and they haven't properly protected it. They have buy-sell agreements, but they haven't funded them. And so this is an area that we are attacking with, with incredible vigor as well. Technology is allowing us to do so in, in short order. We're gonna be We're going to be able to read and analyze and summarize buy-sell agreements and show you the hotspots and where you've got gaps and things like that. So, I'm able to hold up the mirror and say to the business owner, here are the operational risks that you face as an owner. Here's the equity risk that you have. And then together, we're going to build a succession and exit plan. So, to that earlier point, I, as the advisor, are going to help draw out of you what are your priorities? What are you optimizing for? Do you have a son in the business? Do you have a daughter in the business? Do you want the business to transition to the next generation? Do you have key employees that you want the business to transition to? Or if that's not the case and you want to optimize for top dollar, we're going to really start to prepare the business for sale because they're— look, if you were to exit today, you were going to go through a process and you were going to sell the business today, the market's going to tell you exactly what it's worth. Willing buyer meets willing seller. You have no control over that at that point. But to your point, if you start 5 years ahead of time, you can understand the value today. You can understand what drives value. Okay, I'm going to reduce owner dependency. I'm going to build up my management team. I'm going to mitigate a bunch of these risks that we've identified to prepare the business for sale to create a much better outcome. And so I say all those things to say the experience is flexible. Again, the best technology platforms today are flexible. In the past, they've been incredibly rigid. And so you can use our platform as an advisor to meet the owner where they are to deliver insights across all these different areas.

One of the things you mentioned is that you ingest all of this information, all this data about the client's business. So privacy is a big issue here. So where does that data reside and how do you protect to make sure that that data is not going to end up in OpenAI's training model?

Yeah, it's a great question. So fortunately or unfortunately, I don't know, we sell into financial services. And so we've got all best-in-class data privacy and data security, all of the things that you need to do. But to answer your question bluntly, we are one of very few, if any, software companies out there with what's called zero data retention, meaning we do not retain the documents. So we are pointing our engine at the documents to get the data that we need, the business financial data, render it into a P&L and a balance sheet, and poof, the document goes away. So we are not retaining those documents. They do not sit in our cloud or in our servers anywhere so that the models aren't training on them. And that policy allows for that.

And are you using any of the models like OpenAI or Claude or Gemini or those like what you're actually using to analyze this?

Yeah, all, all of them. I shouldn't say to analyze it. No is the short answer to analyze it. S is the short answer to extract data. So if you go back, gosh, I don't know, just 12 or 18 months, everybody was using what's called OCR technology, optical character recognition, and Amazon was maybe best in class there, but it wasn't good enough in our view. The performance wasn't good enough. These models obviously are, are moving at an incredible pace. And so we have trained all of the models on all of the financial documents that, that we want to extract data from. So business tax returns, P&Ls, balance sheets, all these things that you can upload into our system. And we have trained our models specifically on those documents to point the models at those documents, go get the number out of the field and render it into our P&L and balance sheet. And the performance is off the charts as we've seen in all sorts of different applications and areas. But the performance is really impressive.

One of the things that I think is critical, and I say this to advisors all the time, which is your business may not be for sale today, but it should be sellable today. So if you keep that in mind that I'm going to do everything I need to do every day to make sure that this business is ready to sell, and if you do that, that's going to force you to really make good business decisions all along, even if you may not be selling 5, 10, 20 years down the road. Now, talk to me about how advisors can use your system as a prospecting tool to try and get interest from other business owners as new clients.

This is an area that we think about virtually every waking hour. And so, I'll talk about today. And then I'll talk about where we're going in this, in this area a little bit, perhaps without giving away too much. Today, when we think about new client acquisition for advisors and business owners, certainly having this or any system like this as a value prop is powerful. So if I'm meeting with you as a prospect and I say, look, this is your most important asset. I have got to better understand this asset. Here's how we do it. Here's our process. Here's what you can expect from me on an ongoing basis. It's an incredible differentiator. And so to the extent you're already sitting there with the business owner, this is part of your value prop. If all other things are being equal, you versus another advisor, and this part of your value prop and it's not part of theirs, you win. Okay. Number 2, from an event perspective, we're seeing advisors all over the country run really powerful events with business owners and CPAs talking about this as a concept, not talking about Rise or talking about better understanding your business as an asset. And so getting rooms full of people having conversations like that, the best advisors have deep, deep relationships with COIs. So accountants, attorneys, what have you, and they're going to these COIs and they're saying, Steve, this is part of our value prop. This is how we serve business owners. And again, the best advisors don't say, I serve business owners. They say, I serve auto dealers in the tri-state area. The more niche down you are, the far greater your messaging is, the far greater that you can deliver. If I'm an advisor and I'm sitting with a CPA and I say I serve auto dealers in the tri-state area and here's what we do for them. And so, but it unlocks a tremendous amount of referrals. So from a new client acquisition perspective, that's how our advisors are using it as a prospecting tool. We think about all day long, how can we deliver business owners to our advisors? So our advisors subscribe and pay us a platform fee. How can we deliver business owners to them. Data is ubiquitous today, right? There is an incredible amount of data out there in the marketplace. And so just serving up data to advisors isn't interesting in our view, because most advisors don't cold call. They did that in the early part of their careers and they've done everything in their power to never do it again. That's not how they acquire new customers. And so we are building some really interesting technology in and around this idea of centers of influence. And so inviting other centers of influence into the experience, being able to generate referral loops and flywheels in the application as a result of inviting them in and things like that. So we've got some really interesting stuff coming out in short order on that that we're excited to talk more about.

Let's take a look at the future for a moment. So a CPA is typically part of a team here if there's some kind of exit that's going to be happening. There's a lot of disruption happening as we speak in that area of what's going to be the future of a CPA, of a tax professional, when AI is going to be able to basically put your tax return together for you. Now, obviously, there's advice that needs to go along with all of that. But what's your take on that? What is your take on where technology is heading and what that means for the future of advisors, what that means for centers of influence like the tax professionals that advisors oftentimes will get referrals from? How do you see all that mix playing out here in the upcoming years?

I could steelman or strawman both sides of this from an accountant's perspective or CPA's perspective. I could certainly make the argument that it'd be an incredible time to be a CPA, but I think perhaps the stronger argument is that they really better be thinking about how to become more than tax prep, meaning I got to be leaning more into advisory-type activities than just I'm doing 100 or 500 or 1,000. I don't know how many a great CPA does tax returns a year because again, I think that's likely going away in large part or their ability to generate the income, the revenue that they do on a per return basis is going away. That is for certain. So I think we're seeing it play out quite frankly. I think we are, you're watching for a long, long time, there's been a lot of private equity money and strategies rolling up RIAs. You're starting to watch them bolt on CPAs. And I think to serve the business owner, this is an incredible example. Like one of the great value props, if I'm an advisory firm and I'm bolting on tax, they have the business owner clients. I mean, the accountant starts as the de facto most trusted advisor to the business owner. If I'm starting a business, launching a business, I need a CPA, I need a tax professional. So, I have to have them. They are the de facto most trusted advisor typically until the financial advisor comes along, right? When the financial advisor gets in there and builds a relationship over time, they become the most trusted advisor. And so, I think these two, I think the market is demanding and saying like, why are you two professionals not under the same roof? Why are you not the same advisor to me? Like, why can't my financial advisory firm provide tax prep, or at least give great tax advice to me. And so I think that's what, when we talked earlier about the lines blurring, that's what we're seeing. That's why we're building so aggressively around tax planning because you're seeing advisors get pulled by the market or pushed towards, I have got to start giving great advice around tax. And tax doesn't just mean tax prep anymore. That is getting commoditized. And so great technology will allow advisors to be giving better tax advice, having some of that expertise that will still be necessary in-house for a lot of these firms makes a ton of sense for us. And so I think it's a combination of you're watching these worlds collide. Technology will allow advisors to expand the surface area, expand their service offering, and give better advice as a result. So I think it's a great thing ultimately for the consumer. And I think that the CPAs will be under a lot of pressure. Look, Forget the bigger firms, even like the regional firms that have all sorts of diversified revenue streams. We're talking mostly just about Jason Early CPA and Co. that's doing tax returns for 50 businesses. That business model is in trouble.

And I think from an advisor standpoint, as the tax business gets disrupted, I think that's going to put a lot of talented tax professionals on the market. And I think that's a good opportunity for advisors to pick them up. And now, expand your tax planning business, not tax prep, but tax planning business by picking up these folks and making them part of your team. So that I think is a potential good opportunity there.

I think that's a great point. Look at the American College of Financial Services as an example. Look at where they're going and what they're doing. I think in the, in the last, and I think they've said this publicly, I think in the, whenever they rolled out their tax planning designation in the last 12 months, I think it was their fastest growing designation ever. And so, that tells you that you've got advisors that are seeing where the puck is going. They're going to get education in and around this area so that they can start delivering better advice in and around that area.

All right, Jason, I want to wrap up here with a couple more things. So, one is I want you to tell me what you think is either the biggest mistake or the biggest missed opportunity that you see advisors having here as it relates to working with business owners. And then the second part is going to be give me 3 takeaways here, 3 actionable steps that if someone's listening to this and they say, hey, I love what I heard here, I think I want to get more deeper, more effective in working with business owners. What are 3 things that you think they should do? So, one biggest mistake or missed opportunity and then 3 actionable takeaways here.

I'll give a two-parter as it relates to the mistake and the biggest mistake in our view. And of course, we're biased, but the biggest mistake in our view is ignoring the business owner. We think it's the single most important client segment you can serve. Again, we think they're the best clients while they operate, and then they've got this cherry on top that if they've built a transferable business or a valuable business that, you know, and they transact, the liquidity can double your practice in a day. It is an incredible organic growth driver and segment to focus on. So the biggest mistake is ignoring them. The second biggest mistake is, is paying attention or having business owners in your book of business and treating that asset like every other asset on the balance sheet. Because someone, you know, that has technology like ours will come along and, and better serve that business owner. So if you're not paying enough attention to that asset, it's the one that they care— they think far differently about their business than they do their holdings in the Mag Seven. That I promise you. So pay attention to the asset and treat it differently. 3 takeaways. Look, if you're an advisor, if you're in the advice business and you believe what I'm saying, you believe my nonsense that, that it's the most important client segment and you want to get more serious about it. Again, I'd go back to the niche conversation. We don't think business owners are niche. We think that they're everywhere, but the advisors that serve them best really niche down inside of the client segment. And so really understand who your ideal client profile is. What is your ideal client? As a business owner, is it auto dealers in the tri-state area? Is it HVAC companies in the Midwest? Whatever it is, get crystal clear on who that ideal client profile is and then don't keep it a secret. Build deep. This next one is advice that everybody knows. This is not new, but nobody wants to do it. It is go and it's spend years building deep relationships with the ecosystem around your ideal customer. So who are the accountants that have the customers that you want? Who are the associations where your customers hang out? Who are the attorneys that work with a lot of people in that segment and build deep relationships? It's consistency. It's not intensity. It's not boom. Today we serve business owners and we built a new website and we built a landing page and we ran a marketing campaign and it didn't work. It's showing up. For long periods of time, being crystal clear on your messaging and being intentional about who you want to serve and who you do serve. So I think those are probably the two most impactful things you can do.

Excellent. All right, Jason, if folks want to learn more about you and the firm, where would you send them?

risr.com, R-I-S-R dot com is our website and we're there and we're certainly on LinkedIn. We'd love to hear more from you.

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