Rachel Elson: How I Became a Lead Advisor at an $8B RIA in 5 Years

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Making a successful mid-career switch into financial advising and then quickly establishing yourself as a lead advisor with a full book of high-quality clients is no small feat. Today's guest has done exactly that. Hi everyone, I'm business coach Steve Sandusky for Barron's Advisor, The Way Forward Podcast. My guest today is Rachel Elson. Rachel is a former high-powered personal finance journalist who made the leap to becoming a financial advisor at Paragon Wealth Management, which is an RIA with more than $8 billion in assets under management. In today's conversation, Rachel discusses her journey from being a second-seat advisor to managing relationships with over 50 households, many of whom are younger tech professionals in their 30s and 40s. She also shares some valuable insights into Paragon's approach to training new advisors through observation, mentorship, and collaborative learning rather than rigid formal processes. She also explains their team-based service model and how they develop systematic frameworks for handling common client scenarios like stock compensation decisions. We also explore Rachel's perspective on what makes an effective advisor in today's environment, including the critical importance of really listening to clients and understanding the nuances of what they're saying and sometimes what they're not saying. With that, here's my conversation with Rachel Elson. You made a transition from being a high-end, high-powered personal finance journalist to being a financial advisor about 5 or 6 years ago. Tell me about your perception of what the career as a financial advisor was going to be like versus the reality of it.

I don't know that I had a lot of sense of what it was going to be. I informational interviewed with probably 20 different firms in San Francisco, and I don't think I was necessarily asking the right questions, but I was getting a vibe. I was getting a sense of what they were like. The one thing is I did not realize how much fun this was going to be. I feel like I am cheating to have a second career that is so much fun compared to my first career, which was also a great career and which was also fun.

Now, is this type 1 fun or is this type 2 fun? And what I mean by that is I just got done with a 600-mile sailboat race, and during the race it was brutal. I'm going to be honest with you. So crew members were talking among ourselves and we're like, this is not fun, but I think When we're done with this, we're going to look back and say, oh my gosh, this was epic. This was amazing. So that's really the type 2 fun where looking back, it's fun. But is it really fun in the moment?

It really is fun in the moment. I have amazing clients and I get to spend my days helping people I really like do smart things.

Okay.

It's hard to argue with that.

So we're going to segue on this for a second because we're here at the Barron's conference and I was having a side conversation with a financial advisor Yesterday. And what she said to me was, how do you deal with being an advisor where I am having so many heavy conversations right now? I have clients come to me saying, I found my spouse passed out on the floor and they died 5 days later. Conversations like that. And she said, it's really weighing on me because I'm a very empathetic person. And how can I continue to thrive in this business when I'm having all of these heavy conversations? So that's very different. From the fund that you're talking about. So, are you having those kinds of conversations? How do you deal with that?

I have some. I have had fewer health-related conversations. I did, like maybe a year and a half ago, because a lot of my clients are in tech, I did have a lot of layoff conversations and those were uncomfortable, but that's a different level.

Or even divorce conversations. It doesn't have to be a death, of course.

Yeah. I've been privileged that a lot of my clients have been healthy, have been happy, have been getting married. And so, I'm sure I will need to handle those skills, but it's not— I'm fortunate that to date, that has not been a lot of my experience.

And related to that, this ability to have those conversations is another thing. So, another thing this advisor was saying to me is that, how do we train people for that? If you're bringing on a new advisor, and I think in your case, but you've had 15, 20 years of life experience as an adult behind you before you became an advisor. So, did you find that to be a challenge at all in terms of having these types of life conversations with people, these intimate conversations about money with clients? Was that an issue at all, or was it like, hey, I'm okay with this because I've been an adult for 20 years already, I've had these kind of conversations, and as a journalist, I ask a lot of questions, so I'm really comfortable with that?

I think actually that's one of the things about being a journalist that helps me is I can ask those questions. And I can tell also, I think, when I'm not getting a straight answer. I think that has been— you hear someone say something and you're like, I think I need to push a little more on that. I think I need to understand that a little bit better. But we are all up in your business. We're a very planning-forward, high-touch firm. And so I could tell you right now which 4 of my clients are going through IVF right now. We have a lot of discussions because our clients are younger and they're still in those household formation stages. We talk about, oh, we didn't get this house, we wanted this, we wanted a baby, we had things that we're trying to do that are challenging. And so we do talk about those pretty intimately.

Talk to me about your training. And again, you've got 20 years of adult experience behind you before you became an advisor, which is going to be different than someone who maybe is 23 years old and is starting out as an entry-level associate advisor or paraplanner or what have you. Walk me through the kind of training that you had. What worked? What didn't work? What do you wish would have been done differently as a trainee advisor?

A lot of it was not being taught to do something. It was simply being in the room and hearing how the conversations happen and seeing somebody else do something right and learning how to do that and learning how to mirror that. We're not a uniform advice provider. Paragon is very committed to having all of its advisors have their own way of doing things. But we have a lot of really smart, talented people. I was able to sit in a lot of meetings for really the first 2 to 3 years, I would say. I was second seat in— for the first 6 months to 8 months, I was not in the meetings. But once I was in the meetings, I was the second seat in a lot of meetings with our CEO and with our head of planning and really understanding how they approach things and just learning to mirror that. And there's certain— sort of ways, language we use, ways of explaining things that get carried on from advisor to advisor. We all sit in the same room. We hear someone else talking about something. The next time I hear— we just picked up a phrase from one of actually our younger advisors. She started talking about thinking about cash and about bonds and such as lines of defense. Cash is your first line of defense. Bonds are your second line of defense. I was like, oh, that's really good phrasing. That's an interesting way of presenting that. So I'm always looking for like ways to explain something, ways to connect.

I'd love another example or two along those lines that you picked up from some of the advisors where you said, oh, well, that's— I like how you phrase that. I'm going to pick that up. Or maybe some commonalities among the advisors where they were saying something similar and you're like, I'm going to do that too because I like that.

So as part of our sales pitch, our CEO always says, we're not going to tell you what to do. We're going to present the information and let you make the decision. And then we iterated it a little bit. And so now we say, I'm not going to tell you what to do unless you want me to. If you want us to, you should let us know and we will push you a little bit, but we want to make sure you're comfortable with that. And occasionally we have a client who hires us to tell their spouse what to do, and that happens too.

Yeah. So you sit in on these meetings. So that's part of the training process. What else is going on? Are you having debrief meetings? Are you having progress reports? Are there tests you need to take? How are they going to know that Rachel is ready to be first chair?

So for a long time in those meetings, my boss would be the lead advisor and I would be the color commentary. Who's going to present this? I'm going to talk about this. I'm watching to see because I'm— we're on Zoom, right? So I'm watching as my colleague is talking. I want to see if the client is tuning out, if they're not paying attention, if they don't seem like they understand. So I'm the de-jargon person. I am the "Hey, can I interrupt you for a second? When we talk about value versus growth, do you know what that is?" I'm the one who sort of jumps in there and fills in the gaps. So by the time I was quote unquote ready to fly, my boss had seen me many times talking to clients. We worked through, for a long time, if I was sending an email to a client, if it was anything other than just scheduling, I would run it by them. If we were making recommendations, I wanted to make sure that my boss was comfortable. That the lead advisor was comfortable with what I was sending out. And we do the same thing with the younger advisors now. We ask if it's something that's material and it's not something that they have a lot of experience with, I want to see the email before they send it out.

Was there an official handoff where you've been sitting in on these meetings and your colleague says to you, Rachel, you're ready to fly, you're going to be the lead advisor, I'm out of here? Was there anything official like that or how did the handoff actually look?

We're not a very official firm. Often it was a meeting had to happen, somebody had a conflict. Hey, Rachel, can you handle this one? Sometimes it was new clients coming in. I can't take on this client, can you take them on? Sometimes it was my friends or my contacts or my referrals from people that were already working with me that would send them along. It was a very organic process, which is probably a different way of saying a very disorganized process, but it worked. There was a flow to it and it I never felt like I was taking on work I couldn't handle. And I don't think my bosses thought that I was taking on work that they were not ready for me to have.

Roughly how many households today would you consider yourself to be the lead advisor for?

Mid-50s.

Mid-50s, okay. And of those, how many of them were existing relationships with the firm that got moved to you over time versus you organically sourced them?

That is a hard question to answer. So there's probably only 2 or 3 that started out with somebody else and then moved over to me. Oh, there are several, however, where my boss and I came in as a team and then my boss couldn't— like, just basically it made more sense for me to continue the relationship. So even though we started together, I was basically the advisor from, if not week 1, then maybe week 52. Certainly within early on in the process or like within the first year, I had become the de facto advisor. And then that probably accounts for, hard to say, but maybe a third to a half of them. And the other half have just come in through, I've already been doing work and someone else has referred me. A handful of marketing connection, like completely cold, but the vast majority were referrals.

Yeah, that's interesting because oftentimes these days it seems like to get new advisors started, they train under the lead advisor and then over time the lead advisor's got way too many clients. So now we're sort of offloading some of the lead advisor's clients to this new advisor and that's how they get started. So I was prepared to hear you say, oh, 90% of my clients were existing clients with the firm that sort of got moved to me over time. But it doesn't sound like that's the case with you.

No, but we had a lot. So I came in and it was fairly clear that my job was to create capacity for our head of planning so that he could create capacity for our CEO. And so I came in and very quickly realized that we needed someone to create capacity behind me and that I was coming in and doing these first meetings with our head of planning. And then I was basically running with it at that point, or I was part of the relationship from the get-go but eventually just it became more my relationship than his relationship. But it wasn't like they had been clients for 5 years and then I took over. Like, for the most part, they're people that I started with, but like I was too junior to really handle them on my own at the very beginning. But I've been in the relationship from the beginning. And part of that's just we've had so much growth on our team. And so like just the number of households coming in, were more than the two of us could handle, just like where every single one was a partnership. So we have split some of those and continued to work with other younger advisors on the team.

Yeah. And I want to get to the growth here in a moment. Are you a CFP right now?

I'm a CFP.

Okay. And that all happened over the past few years since you started with the firm, or what was the genesis of the CFP program?

After I left my last journalism job, I took a year basically to quote unquote, not work. The first half of the year I did a big chunk of my CFP classes, and then at some point I thought I should really be inside a firm and make sure I actually like this. And so I started looking for internships and I informational interviewed a lot of different firms, and I waited till I found one that answered my questions the way I wanted them. And I joined Paragon as an intern summer of 2019. By the beginning of 2020, I had finished almost all of my coursework and I was just waiting for the exam. And so I came on as a quote unquote full-time, but it was really an 80%. We set the salary at full-time. I worked 4 days a week until I took the exam. I thought that was going to be the summer of 2020. 2020 threw us some curveballs. And so it was actually in November 2020 that I sat for the exam, but I already had the experience taken care of because of my journalism background. So as soon as I passed the exam, I could use the CFP® mark.

You mentioned you've done about 20 informational interviews and waited until you found a firm who said what you liked. What were some of the things that you were hearing that you didn't like, and what was it about Paragon that you did like?

This is going to be very controversial. I knew that I wanted to work with younger people in their 30s and 40s, and I asked every firm, do you have a minimum? And what do you do if you have couple, they're both in their 30s, they both work in tech, maybe they work, make $350,000, $400,000, they are going to be very successful, but they're not at your minimum yet. And with the exception of some one-off shops, some individual planners, almost everyone said, they'll come back to us when they have enough. And then I got to Paragon and I asked our CEO, Arthur Ambrook, what do you do when you have these young, wealth, high-earning couples industry calls them Henrys, which I hate, but these high-earning couples and they're young and they're building their lives and making big decisions. What do you do about them? And he said, we work with them because this is when they need our help. I thought, okay, I found my place.

Yeah, pretty simple. And interesting, was at a session here at the Barron's Conference with a gentleman from Wealth Enhancement Group. And he said, as a firm, they don't have a minimum either. He said certain advisors may have a minimum, But we feel if we want to be a financial advisory firm, we're going to work with anybody that pretty much wants our help. Yeah, there's definitely different schools of thought on that. And I don't think there's a right or wrong answer. It's just what's your business model? What are you trying to accomplish here? Who are you best suited to serve? And where I think firms can go wrong is if they're really designed to work with people that have $2 to $10 million in assets, and then they say, oh yeah, we'll take on someone with $250, you're really going to do a disservice to that person because you're not set up to serve them. They're an afterthought. They're not going to get your attention. And so they'd be better off going to another organization that is designed to work with folks that have those asset levels and the probably not as complex financial situation. So I think everyone deserves financial advice, but work with a firm that's best suited to meet the needs for where you are at that moment, where your trajectory is as well.

And there's Just to add a footnote to that, there's a lot of value to the firm in having a client base that's growing wealth. Our median client age, my team, I want to say it's 39 or 40. It was 38, but apparently we all age. So, I think it's 39 or 40. And for the most part, our retired clients are people where someone said, oh, could you work with my mom? Could you help my dad figure some stuff out? We start with the younger generation and then we go up.

So that's a specific focus of the firm, right? Of my team, certainly. Of your team. Okay. As a firm, is that the focus or are you taking on all comers here?

Our CEO is very clear that every advisor should have their choice to have the practice that they want. So there are advisors who focus completely on values-based investing. There are advisors who focus on female founders and CEOs. We have somebody who focuses on divorced and widowed women of a certain age. Very different practices. So, I can mostly speak for my team.

Regarding the growth, and you mentioned here just a little bit ago that the bulk of your clients were really more developed through you or connections or— but somehow started with you.

Small team.

Yeah. So, tell me a little bit more about that. You mentioned you've got maybe 50 households right now. What do you view as your capacity and what are you doing to bring in new clients today?

I don't know what my capacity is.

Are you at it? Are you at it right now?

I don't think I am, but I think there's some reorganizing of the team that is about to happen. I am bringing in new clients today. So one of the interesting things about working with younger clients is they are super referrers. So, I have one client, for example, who came in through a referral service, like a matchmaking service. She referred her sister. She also referred— she was leaving her job. She referred the guy who took over her job. He referred, I think, 2 or 3 other people at that firm. So, now we have, through one referral service, we have 6 clients who've come on board. We have other firms, smaller firms, where they have complex stock issues, where we have numerous people from one original client. It's been extremely— there are cycles in the Bay Area and in tech. Very fortunate to be able to work with people we really like and know that the people they refer will also be people we really like.

And when you get a referral like that, do they just call you? Do they text you? Do they go to your website first and do their due diligence online? Do they check out your YouTube channel or your podcast or your LinkedIn or TikTok or Instagram, or how does the connection actually go from someone's referring to you actually having a conversation with them?

I'm sure they stalk me. I would hope they stalk me. I don't have a TikTok. I don't have a YouTube channel, but I'm a fairly public presence online. You can learn a lot about me online. It's usually just an email like, hey, would you work with my friend so-and-so? He's looking for an advisor or she's looking for an advisor. I'll let you two chat and I'll just reach out and say, hey, let's talk.

So they do like an email?

It's usually an email handoff.

Okay.

Sometimes they'll ask us first. Sometimes they just throw it at us. It's fine.

Okay. So that's a main thing. Would you say your growth right now is just through referrals from existing clients? Is there any—

We also are using some referral services.

Like what?

At different times, these have been up and down, but we have several clients that came in through Harness. We used Zoey for a while. I probably have maybe 3 clients that came in through Zoey. We've done some work with Dateline. I know there's some other channels that are being tried right now. Like we're constantly looking at them and trying to decide which makes sense, but we have a sort of shared doc that we're all looking at where we're looking at all the leads in the flow and who's handling what and what stage they're in. And one of the columns is what's the referral source or how did they find us? Occasionally it's through the website, but much more often when I look down there, it's very much. A client name somewhere. So certainly right now.

Okay. So again, $8 billion-ish firm. And how much of the future growth do you think is going to come from like corporate marketing activities versus individual advisor activities versus— I just was in a meeting today where the firm said we have over 100 people in our sales and marketing department. And so they've got a full-blown business development department that's generating these leads that then get handed off to the advisors eventually. So how does Paragon think about growth from a sales and marketing standpoint?

We've just started hiring for that. To date, we've done almost no marketing and we use the Harnesses and the Zoes, platforms like that. We've done a small amount of PR, like really fairly limited marketing. We just hired someone who's rethinking that and he's assessing what's working, what's not working, are there better ways, are there other ways to handle organic growth? If this team over here in San Francisco closes really well, do we just send everything to them or do we find other advisors within the firm who are also like, who have other specialties or who want to grow or have other regions that might make sense? So that is a TBD, but I think that Paragon has had both inorganic and organic growth. Inorganic sounds awful. We've had growth by bringing in new advisors and new firms, and we've also had organic growth within our own team.

Let's go back to your development as an advisor. Compensation, of course, is going to be a key piece of that. And you and I, we were talking offline, you mentioned that there's some changes that are happening, but How do you think about the compensation as it worked for you or didn't work for you and any high-level thoughts about compensating a new advisor?

We right now, and certainly over the time I've been here, have defaulted to largely salary. If I have a young person who's working on our team and they have the choice between helping us serve a $25 million client, versus going out and finding a $300,000 client, it's obviously a much better use of their time to have them support the $25 million client. So, I don't want to incentivize someone for bringing in small business when they can help retain the large business. So, I think that's fine. I think there's an inflection point where I am, where other advisors on the team like want to get to a point where we're recognized for the work we're doing and the client base that we're working with. If you do it too soon, then you don't have enough client base to be able to have that work out. I think I said the one thing I will tell you is that I took a pay cut from journalism to come into this field, and I'm back above it now, but it took a while. But I think that was— we talked through it multiple times in the phase, and there was a, like, should I get paid this way or that? And I feel like it has been the appropriate conversation along the way?

Yeah, comp is one of those things where there's never like one way to do it. Each firm, they fiddle with it and they make changes, and typically there's lots of different variations of it. But one way I like to think about it too is, are you a servicing advisor? Meaning, hey, we don't have you in place because we want you to bring in a whole bunch of new business. We've got plenty of clients. We just need advisors that can take care of these people and service them. So that's probably going to be more of a heavy base salary plus some kind of bonus comp versus— I mentioned this firm that has over 100 people in sales and marketing. They're going to be very focused on variable comp based on how many people you bring in because they're not really designed to service those people after the fact. So you just have to come up with a compensation program that is fit for the purpose of what you're trying to accomplish, because generally people are going to do what you pay them to do. So if you have a high variable comp, then they're going to do the stuff that's going to give them the variable comp versus if you want them to just service clients, it shouldn't be a variable compensation plan. Give me the base salary kind of thing. So I don't know if you think about it that way too, or differently, or—

I don't really think a lot about the service versus— we don't have a sales team. So just to be clear, clients ask, are you going to be my advisor? And I'm like, I will not be your only advisor. You will have a team. We always have a team approach, but no one in their right mind would hire me to do sales. I'm the advisor. I want to work with you because We seem simpatico because I think you've got a lot of growth ahead. I think I can help you make a lot of good decisions. There's a lot of good work we can do together. But like that notion of being a service advisor, it doesn't quite work with our team. We'll have a lead and a second advisor, but they're all part of the relationship.

So as you reflect on the past 5 or 6 years of your development as an advisor, what do you think about that? What was good? What was bad? What do you think you would want to do different? What advice would you have for leaders saying, hey, if you're trying to train new advisors, here's some key things I think you should think about?

One of the things that we're doing right now, and this was largely at one of our younger advisors' instigation, I want to be really clear, is that we've grown so fast and we were really a startup. We were a scrappy little team and we just grew when we figured stuff out as we went. And now one of our younger advisors is, I need more process. I need more systems. And so really at her behest, she and I have started putting together like, what's a checklist for every new client plan that we're doing? What's a checklist? One of the things that we do because we work with young clients and because they work in tech, we do quarterly quick check-ins around their stock comp. Their trading window opens up. We want to talk about how concentrated they are. What's the methodology around how we think about that? How do we talk to them about it? So there's a checklist for how do you do a stock as percent? Calculation, how do you work with an advisor on that? There's a checklist for onboarding after you've done a client plan. There's a checklist for preparing a review. And so we've been working on a lot of that because we have 2 new planning associates and 1 new intern starting in a like 4-week period, 5-week period. And so we've been trying to make sure we had that all lined up so that we could teach the new people how to do all this stuff in a way that was a little more systematic. And I think that has been helpful to our other advisors and helpful to the new people. And I think it's going to help us going forward. When I came in, I spent the first 2 months of my internship just banging my head against eMoney. And I took some notes and I eventually had a doc that sort of worked inside my brain for how to use eMoney. And then we brought in our next intern and she looked at it and was like, this is helpful. And so she rewrote the whole process doc for using eMoney because eMoney is so flexible and so scalable and every firm uses it differently and there's different sets of assumptions. So she wrote a good clean outline of like how to use eMoney. And so that's now the Bible. So everybody that is using eMoney on our team, like that's the Bible they use. And as they find things like, oh, eMoney changed this particular thing, I'm like, change it on the document, make sure that's codified somewhere. So like having some of these instructions, these checklists, systems in place is very helpful. We, I'm going to add one more thing around the stock comp conversation and the open trading windows. We now have a sort of 4-point rubric that we go through with people. If you're getting RSUs, I'm never going to tell you not to sell, but a lot of people, they want to keep some skin in the game. So here are the 4 reasons that I will push you to sell if you don't want to sell. And we go through that. Last year during one of the open trading windows, I went on a ill-timed vacation. And all the younger associates jumped in and answered the questions. And we had this rubric and we had this framework. And so they were able to just take that and give the same kind of answer that I would've given because they'd be applying the same sets of logic. We want the same pieces of information from the clients. We want the same spreadsheet, the same framework that we do, same calculations. And then we could give a consistent answer no matter who was answering that.

And what happened?

It was fine. They flew.

You said it was an ill-timed vacation. Oh, it was an ill-timed vacation.

No, it was ill-timed because it was during a trading window.

Okay.

I could have planned that a little bit better, but an adventure opened up and I wanted to take it. But I made sure everybody was teed up in advance. We sent some notes before I left. I said, hey, I'm going to be out of town. Advisor X or Advisor Y can handle this. And so when I turned up at the end of the vacation, because I try very hard not to check email on vacation, and this one in particular was a— I was in some more remote places. They handled it fabulously, and they all got much more confident about their ability to answer.

Yeah, and I'm a big fan of checklists, and we had a conversation with Bill Keene and Matt Wilson of Keene Wealth Advisors, and they have a checklist-driven financial planning process. So we talked about that in some detail. So I think that's a great idea. But I'd love to get your take on this. So, one of the other speakers here at the Barron's Conference, another large firm, he was talking about artificial intelligence. And he was saying that the change that you've seen in our profession over the last 20 to 30 years is nothing compared to what you're going to see over the next 5 years. And he said with AI in particular, he thinks that what it's going to enable planners to be able to do on the financial planning side It will do essentially in seconds what it might have taken a financial planner 20 years to figure out and to get the level of knowledge. And so, I'm curious how you guys are thinking about technology today versus the human in the loop. Are you guys having those conversations right now?

We are. Our relationships with clients are so intimate and so warm and we know our clients.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting tech is going to replace the humans, but what do you think tech is going to be able to do that's going to enable the advisor to have more time to go even deeper with those relationships and do just the things that humans can do? Because I think just the things that humans can do is getting smaller and smaller these days because of tech.

I agree. But if I could have that spreadsheet created, the stock as a percent spreadsheet created automatically, Fantastic. But I'd still have to explain why. And one of my clients, I'll say, well, you have a lot of cash by my standards, but you have really like the normal amount of cash for your standards. So let's just leave it there. I have to know which client wants a bias toward high cash or which client has told me over and over that they have a goal X and they want to make sure they can do that. So that piece of it, like the automation of various tools, is great, but the know your client part, I think that part will remain a human need.

A financial advisor has to be skilled in a number of different areas. So we're talking about AI. They got to have some understanding of technology. They've got to have some understanding of financials. They've got to have an ability to interact and develop a relationship with another human. They need to have empathy when a client's spouse passes away or there's a divorce or there's some terrible thing that's happened. For you, what was or is the hardest aspect for you to become really skilled at as a financial advisor?

I don't want to suggest that it's all easy because I don't think it was, but the learning, that's the feature, it's not a bug. And a lot of the things we do, I did, but just in different contexts, like having to demystify an investing concept, having to translate some financial or tax concept so that a client understands it is not that different from doing it as a personal finance journalist and explaining something so your reader can understand it. I think having confidence in my recommendations, in our recommendations, is probably— I'm not a shy and retiring person, but I think knowing what you know and being able to stand up and say, I understand the research and I understand why we're doing this and this is why. And we've already made this adjustment, but if you wanted to make this other adjustment, we could do that also. But this is the context, this is the upside and the downside. Feeling able to stand on my own and say that, I think that was probably the hardest. Because what you recommend to a friend is one thing, but what you recommend to a client, it's a different relationship, and you need to be really sure in where you are.

And was there an inflection point or an aha moment where you woke up and said, I'm a real financial advisor, I'm confident in my recommendations, or is that something that's always a work in progress?

I don't think it's always a work in progress, but I think it was a fluid path. I don't think there was an inflection point. I think you just get a little more knowledgeable every day. You— I mean, the constant learning that we do as financial advisors, we go to conferences, we take continuing education. I think that is always a piece of it and you're constantly doing that. And I also think that being at a firm, one of the things that happened is as we have become a larger firm, we have more resources. We have a trading team as opposed to one person. We have a chief investment officer who's fantastic and who can explain things in a way. So if I don't feel confident in my ability to do something, I know that I have resources to call on and people that I can talk to and say, how would you frame this for a client? How should we talk about this? Is this a good option for this client or is— should we maybe not do that? That wasn't necessarily a learning inflection point, but that was a growth of Paragon inflection point where we had those resources. And that's really been in the last year and a half to 2 years that we've really taken off on that direction.

I think you're pretty involved in your firm's intern program. So again, based on your experience the past 5 or 6 years, what advice would you give to an aspiring financial advisor in terms of these are the skill sets that you really need to work on, you really need to develop, this is really going to be critical to your long-term success as a financial advisor. What are those skill sets?

I think that one piece of it is really knowing how to listen to a client and knowing how to hear them, right? Like, not just taking notes, but hearing what they're saying and even hearing what they're not saying. I also think that just Knowing the underpinnings of our plan, like being really deeply rooted in the planning process, in the calculations, in the whatever, gives you a place where you can talk about things. Ideally, all of our interns would become planning associates and eventually associate advisors. So as they are starting to come into meetings and learn things, the first time when they're really talking in a meeting and really presenting, is doing the e-money presentation and going through, because I know that they were in the weeds on that and they know all the assumptions that are built in. They'll be really confident. Are they going to be super confident asking about X personal topic or about what's been happening about somebody's IVF process, for example? Maybe not, but they're going to be really good on the e-money presentation, and that just gets them used to talking, right? It gets them used to presenting and to understanding what they're talking about. And that's the sort of the building confidence, I would say.

Rachel, anything else you want to add for us today?

Thinking about our intern program and not understanding why more people don't take advantage of it, of such a program. I talked to somebody earlier today who said they probably hire 5% of their interns, and I thought, Why would you waste all that time on the 95%? Like, our interns, we want to have interns that come through pre-CFP programs that know they want to be advisors, that their program director has recommended to us. And so ideally, some of them are going to find a different path, right? Some of them are going to decide that this is not the career for them. We have a couple of accounting/personal finance or financial planning double majors who accounting is luring them. Which I hope that it's very satisfying for them. I think financial planning is more fun, but that's their choice, right? They have to grow and become the people that they want to be. But in general, we want to have people that are on that path, and it has been so successful and so helpful for us. Everybody should be doing it.

Rachel, if people want to connect with you, what's the best way to stay in touch?

LinkedIn.

LinkedIn.

Perfect.

All right. Thanks for being on the show.

Thank you so much for having me.

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