Rick Kent: How I Scaled My RIA Into a $10 Billion Firm

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What kind of leader do you need to be to build a $10 billion advisory firm? Hi everyone, I'm business coach Steve Sandusky for Barron's Advisor: The Way Forward podcast. My guest today is Rick Kent. Rick is the founder and CEO of Merit Financial Advisors, which is a firm with $10 billion in advised assets. In today's conversation, we're we explore Rick's journey from starting out as a financial advisor to being the CEO of a large, fast-growing firm. He discusses the pivotal moment when he realized that to truly scale his business, he needed to step back from managing personal client relationships and focus on his role as a strategic leader and visionary for his organization. Rick also shares his philosophy of servant leadership, and the importance of building a strong, cohesive team that's united by a shared vision for the future. He also emphasizes the value of fostering a culture of trust, collaboration, and continuous improvement, or kaizen, which has been instrumental in Merit's success. We wrap up by discussing the critical role of technology in shaping the future of the financial services industry, and how Merit has strategically invested in building a robust data infrastructure where they own their data. And that's a key thing there. And how they're able to use that to try and revolutionize the client experience. Rick's story is a great example of how building trusting relationships, enabling teams, and having an exciting vision for the future can propel your organization to achieve great success. With that, here's my conversation with Rick Kent. You've built a firm, you have over $10 billion in assets, and clearly to build a firm of that size, it doesn't just happen by accident. It's gonna take great leadership. It's gonna require a great culture. I understand that you believe in this idea of servant leadership. So I'd love to hear you describe what that means, how you've applied that or implemented that in Merit as part of your leadership, and how that has affected the culture at Merit.

I think about an organizational chart where typically on an organizational chart, you have the CEO at the top, you have these lines that go down and connect with other C-suite people, and it goes down to other people. And I think in servant leadership, I think what you do is you take that chart and just flip it upside down. The leader is really serving the people. The leader needs to eat last, needs to take care of those people. If you want to grow a business, the more you pour into people and your team, the more you're going to get out. Also, what I think about is people making a commitment in their career. We pour a lot back into the team. We do personal development plans with each team member, with over 250 people, and this is not a compensation review. When we have these meetings, it's really about asking them questions of how we can help them, and we ask them things like, what's your ideal job? Is the job you're in today— is— are you in your ideal job? Do you see something different?. And our goal always is to try to figure out what is the person's highest and best use now that they work for the firm. And it changes as the firm changes and grows, but we try to get them into that role. And to me, when I think about servant leadership, it's about that. It's just really trying to pour more back into the people and realize the responsibility you have to build out that team.

So let's say I'm an advisor, I'm listening to this and I'm like, Rick, that's not why I got into the business. I got into the business, I want to help people, I want to do financial planning, I want to do investment management. I don't want to, I didn't get here 'cause I wanna hire people and manage people and put together personal development plans. What do you say to that advisor who says this is a soft stuff, it's can't someone else do that? How do we get over that hurdle? 'Cause I'm with you, I know this is critically important to build a big business, but it's not the part of the business that most advisors like to do.

It does come back to what do you want? What are you building? The other thing is for a lot of advisors, I think they're, is they ask that question if they really knew the potential of what would happen if they made that investment, either do it themselves and begin hiring the right people or partnering with somebody that could help them with that. All advisors have to feel great about the impact they're having on lives of the people they serve. Another question for the advisor about struggling with, do I want to build out this team? I would challenge them to say, are you okay with just impacting 100 or 200 lives, or would you like to impact more lives? And the answer to that question is going to force them to say, yeah, it's worth the investment to, to think about building out a team. And advisors shouldn't be afraid to realize that there's people around them that can do a lot of the things that they're doing better than them. Now, it's hard for some advisors to see that because I see advisors as they're growing their business Everything comes to them. All decisions come to them as they start building out this team. They're wearing all these hats and they're trying to be an advisor and be a great advisor. If they only knew if they could download some of those things to other people and continue doing what they do best, that the growth would be phenomenal. And I challenge advisors a lot of time. I say, oh, so you're putting the investment portfolios together? Yeah. You doing reviews with your employees? What else are you handling? If you give me an idea, how much time do you spend client-facing? How much time do you spend doing other things? Sometimes they'll tell me 40, 50%, and I'll say, what would happen if you took 50% of your time and spent it in front of clients instead? Could you afford to pay some people?

Yeah. Yeah. And I think of impact two ways here. So one is you're talking about impact on I can serve more people. Yeah. But then also the impact on if I can hire more people and the impact I can have on my team members and their families and employing people.

Yes.

And so to your point about we have this decision point as an advisor, do I want to continue my advisor role or do I want to become more of the leader, the CEO of a larger, fast-growing organization where my role shifts to being more vision and strategy and building out and hiring people and managing and culture carrier, that sort of thing. So I think that's a key thing. I remember Seth Streeter, another big advisor, he was on the podcast and he said, our firm is all about growth. And he said, the reason why is to us, growth is synonymous with impact. And we're all about impact. And so in order to have more impact, we gotta have more growth. So he said, even though we're quote big, we still wanna get bigger because we wanna have bigger and bigger impact. And that's both on clients' lives and it's also on the team members' lives. So I think, it's all, I think, in how we frame how we think about growth as well. It's not just more problems. More growth equals more problems. More growth, more impact, more opportunities for everybody.

Exactly. I couldn't agree with you more. It's— I'm very excited about the impact we're having on clients, but I think I'm equally, if maybe not more excited about the impact we're having on our team. And I would say one of the things that I was really challenged with as I was going through that evolution was I loved my clients. They're great clients. They're very loyal, very trusting. But looking at the business and the opportunity, and the impact and knowing what needed to happen for us to grow our firm, it was same things. Okay, I can't continue being client-facing. I was also struggled with, I thought, fairly good producer. If I step back from producing, what's going to happen to the revenue of the firm? I struggled with that. And so I put off for a long time bringing somebody else in to take over my clients. And I can remember the communication to the clients. Hey, I want you to know what's going on here at Merritt. Fortunately, we've been growing. The team is expanding. There's new responsibilities on me. And it was— the clients were so understanding. I'm still amazed to this day that— and a few of them hung on. They go, no, Rick, I—

you're my advisor.

I signed up with you.

Don't leave me. No, Rick.

I had some people tell me, if you're gone, I'm gone. Okay. But none of them left.

And did you keep those people or— Oh yeah. Did you personally remain the lead advisors for those who said—

No, no. I moved all my client relationships over to another advisor. All of them, every single one. Okay. And after I did that, I looked back and thought, why didn't I do that sooner? It's one of those big learning moments. And here's why. There's only so much capacity in a day, right? And I'm a firm believer that the mind is very powerful and you become what you think about. So if I'm thinking about clients all the time, I'm going to do a good job of servicing those clients. If I take the equal amount of time that's in the day and think about growing the business and being the CEO of the business and helping the people in the business and building out the team, a lot gets done. I just didn't have that time before. And as soon as I made that— flipped that switch, I started watching the company take off and I thought, why didn't I do this sooner?

Okay, so I want to get inside your head on that last point, which is you're Rick Kent, top-producing financial advisor. I'm doing great. My clients love me. I love my clients. Then you decide Oh, I think I want to be the CEO. I want to grow this thing. So tell me about whether it's a mindset shift. What did you have to change to go from being a top financial advisor to a leader, a CEO, and building out a large, fast-growing organization? Where did you turn to learn? Did you have to think differently? What was that transition for you from an advisor to a leader CEO?

I think I used some of the same skills that helped me become successful as an advisor. I mentioned those skills earlier. Those skills are building trusting relationships. And as I built a trusting relationship with a client, the client always responded favorably. They knew I cared. And so I thought, okay, I'm not a Harvard graduate here. I didn't go to Wharton Business School, but I think I know what I need to do. I think I need to use the skills that I have and what I've learned through my experiences, and I need to start building those relationships with people on my team. What I found is that people will go a long way based on the relationship that you have with them. If they know that you have their best interest in mind, if they know that you're going to listen to them, if they know they have a voice, it just means a lot. And if you can demonstrate that you really want to help them grow. So I just use my relationship capital and was with my employees and was able to get great commitment from them. Something else that's really important that we haven't talked about though, and that is Clients, there are certain things they need to know and for them to feel comfortable. When you're working with employees and you want to attract great employees, you have to have a vision that they can plug into. They have to know where you're going. Where are we going? If I come on board, what are we building here? So I think it's very important to have a really clear vision and get that vision communicated out to the employees and then help them understand what they can do to help. And for some of them, you're hiring people, it becomes your barometer whether you should hire those people or not. If they don't believe in your vision and where you're going, then they're not a good fit.

Right.

But so the more clarity you have around that, it helps them decide, yeah, I do want to be part of this organization, nor I don't.

How did you measure your ability to grow and improve and be effective as a leader as you made that shift from an advisor to a leader?

What—

how did you know if you were successful at that shift or not?

I had to be honest with myself. Am I that person? Can I be a CEO? I haven't been a CEO of a company worth approaching $1 billion in valuation. It's a big deal. And so I wasn't sure. So that comes back to the servant leadership way it works for me. I'm going to surround myself with people that believe in the vision that we have. I'm going to surround myself with smart people that can figure things out that I can't figure out. So my job is really at this point managing again, those relationships and building the right team. And I've always been very collaborative, maybe to a point of fault. I do have great leadership team around me. We call it the executive leadership team. And I always put the agenda together for those meetings. But when I go in that meeting, I don't go in there with my personal agenda. I don't try to influence people to think like I'm thinking. I think that takes away from the power. I want people to I want them to be thinking from their own intuition. I want them to be open to thoughts and ideas. I want them to be questioning. I want them to be curious. I want them to challenge the decisions. And I think bringing a group of people together and creating that environment takes the pressure off me to make sure I'm getting it right. Now it's a group decision. It's not all my fault. It's important to create that team and get the right answers for the firm. Collaboration is just huge.

Roughly what size was the firm when you felt like you reached that inflection point where you had to say, okay, either I'm going to stay where we're at right now and just let the market participation help us grow, or I really want to build an enterprise. I can't continue to manage clients. I got to be the CEO, and we really have to build out a leadership team here. Was there a certain size where you hit that inflection point?

I can remember around $300 million or so of assets under management, and revenue just shy of $3 million. I began to think, this has really been great. What an amazing industry to earn this kind of revenue in a short period of time and build trusting relationships and people that you're helping. Wow. It just exceeded my expectations. And at that point, I was beginning to ask myself the question, what do I really want to do? And ever since I was a very young boy, I always envisioned having a business and there's reasons for that. But I thought, I've got an opportunity. I've come in, I've become an advisor. I have an opportunity now to start a business in the financial services industry. And I began thinking about it and realized for me, that's what I wanted the most. I wanted to really build an enterprise as opposed to just being an advisor.

There's this idea called the rule of 3x and 10x, which is that every time you triple your business, or 10x your business, things are going to break or you're reaching an inflection point where you've got to decide, okay, am I willing to take the next step in the business? Am I willing to reinvest in the business for the next leg of growth? So if you start out at— you get to $1 million in revenue, it's one advisor, maybe an assistant or two. I got it covered. Then you go to $3 million like you mentioned earlier, $300 million in assets, $3 million in revenue. Now it's getting a little more complicated. Yeah, I'm making them— maybe I'm making $1 million a year and I can hang out here., and then you go triple that. Now we're at 9 or 10 million. So now we're at 3x and we're at 10x, and now it's a whole different story. And then 30 million and then a billion and so on. So as you think about the different inflection points over time, so you've gone through all of those now from 0 to 10 billion. You've gone through, I'm assuming, a number of inflection points. Was there one in particular where you said, gosh, do I really wanna do this? Do I really wanna do the next leg of growth or do I wanna hang out here? Or maybe I wanna sell to someone else and, then it becomes their problem. So that's question 1. And then question 2 is, you've talked about the vision. So is your vision unlimited in terms of, we put no limits on where we could go, on where we could grow, and what kind of impact we could have? 2 questions there. Was there one particularly difficult inflection point? And then second, do you have a limitless vision here?

Yeah, 2 great questions. The first one is, It's just me personally, but as I was on this journey and let's say I hiking the mountain, so to speak, and I got to a certain plateau, I was able to look over the mountain a little bit and was the future was always more exciting to me than the past. And so every time I would get to this new plateau or inflection point, as you spelled out here, I got excited about the future and continue to get excited about the future. And I think about the impact on the people, the impact on the clients, The great work that's being done, the opportunity that can be created, the new ideas, the new ways of doing things, becoming more efficient. So for me, the future always pulled me forward. I never felt, you know what, this is good enough. Let's just park over here for a while. Because what would happen if you do that? And I know this industry talks a lot about lifestyle advisors. So it really doesn't take that much for an advisor to build up a really great revenue stream. For himself, and he can begin to take off on Friday, and he can work 3 days a week. He can pretty much do whatever he wants to do. We call them the lifestyle advisors. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, and I don't think that everybody should have an appetite to growth, but you're asking me. And so I thought, for me, I just get excited about the future and to continue to grow. And for me, I'm challenged with what if I do decide to pull over and hang out and be satisfied with this level of success. I ask a lot of people to follow me. It wouldn't be fair for me to say we're stopping here. It's not fair. They've given me a lot of their life. They've trusted me. So I feel obligated to continue doing the best I can for them. So I got to keep going. As far as the vision and where is it going, is it limitless and what are we going to do? That's something else that's very exciting. So I get asked the question a lot. We do a lot of acquisitions. I mentioned that to you. So I'm talking to people and their question is, Rick, what's the endgame? I love when I get that question. I said, let me help you understand something. There's really not an endgame. I know some aggregators are in the market and they're building and they're after that multiple and they're, they see the great value that can be created in a very short period of time. I get it. Is it what I want to do? No. I've cast a vision for what I want Merit to do and what I want Merit to become. And one of our core values is kaizen. It's actually a Japanese word. It means never-ending improvement. When do you not have never-ending improvement? It never happens. You always are improving. So my job as a CEO is to cast that vision. We're not building to sell. We're building to have more and more impact. We're majority owned. We can do whatever we want. And I'm casting that vision and a lot of people are behind that vision. And there'll come a day where I can't be the CEO and I'll step aside and I'll take great pleasure to look at that firm and to know that they're going to continue on doing what they were doing while I was there.

You've talked about vision a lot.

Yeah.

I think you've described what the vision is. But I would love for you to just tell me succinctly, when I ask, Rick, what is the vision for Merit Financial Advisors? How do you respond to that?

We were at an executive leadership meeting not that long ago, a year and a half, 2 years ago, and somebody had been there for a couple of years said, what is Merit? Why do they exist? Deep question, right? What's the purpose? Seems like we're growing a lot. We're making a lot of acquisition. What's the purpose behind what we're doing? And so somebody in the meeting said, ask Rick, he's the CEO. I shut it down. I go, I'm not giving you that answer, but I'm going to ask you and everybody on the senior leadership and the executive leadership team to come up with that answer. Because I had my purpose and my why when I came in, but we're a different company today. Why don't we answer that question together? So we took time. Broke out into committees, sent out questions, got feedback. And I can remember one of the— one of the president of the company said to me, Rick, we're wasting a lot of time on this. We can just hire somebody and they'll come up with a why. And I go, no, I want to know why. I want everybody to know why we exist. We spent a bunch of time on it. So we came back and the answer was we exist to enrich the lives of those we serve. That's why we exist. And we thought about what does enrich mean? That make— they're better off. Who are we talking about? Enrich the lives of those we serve. Who do we serve? Easy. Clients. What about each other? What about the team? We exist to enrich their lives too. What about our vendors and our partners in the industry that's helped us tremendously? We want to enrich their lives too. So that's why we exist, to enrich the lives of those. That's our why. And then the purpose can be a little bit different than your why, but it's— we came up with both of those statements. The purpose behind what we do is we want to become the RA of the future. And what that means to us, I've heard other people use the term, but what that means to us is that we want to revolutionize the client experience. Where I think this industry is headed is that we got to be a lot more than, hey, we manage money, we do financial planning, we can help you with estate planning by bringing in an attorney. Yeah, I think pretty much everybody does things like that. Our goal is to figure out different ways that we can create real value for our clients that you wouldn't normally think of it in the financial services. I can give you some examples, but it's like, what if our clients have aging parents that need help? Why don't we help them? What if they are concerned about cybersecurity at home? I think almost all of them are. We've got smart people that work for us. Why don't we help them? It's those kinds of things that— how about their children? Do they have the proper estate plan set up? Most of them don't. How about we help them? For us, the IRA of the future is finding different ways that we can create real value. And if you think about it, if you have a pipe built already into a client's life, that pipe being that you're helping them financially, that's very important to them. That pipe is established already. Now think about running different lines through that pipe that's already established. Hey, I'd like to help you with some other things too. I hope we get to a point in the near future when one of Merit's clients is talking to a friend, right? And the friend says, hey, you're a client of Merit.

Yeah.

What do they charge? And I love for the answer to be, I'm not totally 100% sure. I think it's around this base, 101% or 18%. But it doesn't matter because they create so much value for me. I wouldn't ever think about it. I get a lot more value than what they charge me.

I can tell you that. So as you think about the vision and the purpose, is it truly aspirational, meaning you can't really measure it, or do you actually try and measure your progress toward this vision and your progress toward this purpose? And how do you communicate that? And how do you make sure that vision and that purpose is 100% permeated throughout the organization?

Yeah. And this also, the vision, the purpose, and another thing that ties in here is the core values. And I couldn't agree with you more. A good test to walk into an organization and talk to some even high-level people and go, tell me about your mission statement. And they go, well, wait, let me go back to my desk. I'll be right back.

Oh, let me look at the plaque on the wall.

Let me go down the hall. Here's the plaque. Okay, I got it. Yeah. So it's a great question. We've been at this for a while. I can remember going back a few years ago, we set a goal in the firm to create 100 plus one experiences. What's a plus one experience? A plus one experience is an experience that you can create for a client that they'll never forget. Everybody has great client service and clients say thank you, but when can a client say they did this and I'm never going to forget it? That's a +1 experience. There's a lot of ways to do it. One year we said we're going to create 100. The goal is 100. So we're coming back to the company-wide meeting, go, we got 30, and here's the stories, here's what we did, this is what the client said. This year, first of all, we have a committee that's focused on creating value for clients. We're publishing stories about what we're doing for these clients and the client's response back to the firm. We're also publishing stories for the people in the firm that created the value, right? So they were the one, maybe they were the client service person that went the extra mile. And so these were getting reported back on a regular basis in our company meetings. They're seeing the progress that's aligned around our mission and our why. And the core values are really important too. So we have 4 core values, try to keep it simple.

And those 4 core values are?

Yeah.

So you knew I was going to ask.

I was going to ask. Everything starts with a relationship. Remember I told you how I got started and most advisors get started, they build relationships off of— to me, everything starts with a relationship. And when I started to build the company, I thought I got to build these relationships. Hey, relationships are one of our core values and it's really important. Also, we really believe that in a relationship, you have to respect people. You can disagree with them all day long. That's fine. But don't talk about them behind their back. Don't bring negativity to solve a problem. Respect them. Respect your coworker. So relationship's important. Next is team. We're huge on teams. It's the team approach is the reason why we're so successful. We have over 21 teams at Merit. So there's client service teams, there's a marketing team, there's a compliance team. Just goes on and on. Teamwork is so important. And it's— you also get more satisfaction out of what you do when you're on a team. There's solo sports and there's a certain amount of satisfaction. I look at the team sports and I watch the team members, how they react. And to me, I'd rather be a team player and I want my team to win as opposed to me doing it alone. So teams are second core value and really important. And we talk about that a lot. Third, I already mentioned to you, is kaizen, Japanese word. It means never-ending improvement. We got to constantly get better all the time. And the fourth is about the future. It's about growing our business, thinking about the future. Kind of talked about it earlier that once you get to a certain point, no, you can't stop. You got to keep going. Those are our core values and we talk about them a lot and we try to live them. It's important to live them out. And if something comes up, you can say, that's a good example of kaizen right there. That was a good example of a respectful relationship. That was a good example of of the core value. And we give awards to people for living out the core values.

So you talked about relationship quite a bit here. Another thing that we talk a lot about in the industry, of course, is technology. And on top of the list there is artificial intelligence. So how is your firm thinking about technology, maybe specifically AI, as it connects with this being a relationship business and one of your core values being relationship? How do you see tech and AI supporting your ability to have deeper and richer relationships with all of your clients and constituents?

Several years ago, came out of a meeting and I was experiencing a lot of success and growth and everything. And, but I had a question for myself because something came up during the meeting about technology. And so I went home that night and asked a rhetorical question. Rick, how's Merritt doing in that area of technology? I thought about it and I thought, all right, I'm going to be honest, D minus. We're not doing good. And there's so much that we could do. And then I asked myself another question: how important is technology going to be in the future? And the answer came back pretty much everything. Look at what's happened, look how technology's changed our lives, just try to get a glimpse on where it's going. There's no way you can see it, it's going to change us so fast. Whether you want to go along or not, sorry, it's going to change you. So at that point, a few years ago, I said, all right, I'm making technology number one priority at Merit.

I'm the CEO.

I can do that. I can do that. And so I went out and hired a consulting firm and they came back with this huge price tag and said— I told them what we wanted to do and they go, yeah, we can do all that. It's going to cost millions. So I went back to my conviction. I said, okay, am I really convicted on this or not? Millions of dollars is a lot of money. And I stuck with my commitment. And today we're very far along compared, I think, to a lot of other firms. We're multi-custodial. I have pipelines built from those custodians to Merritt's warehouse and data gets fed in there on a daily basis. We own that data. If anything were ever to happen with any of my relationships with my custodians, they're not taking my data. It's ours. Having that data once you own it and control it, there's limitless things you can do with it. You can just imagine whatever kind of report that you want. Do you want to know what people between 45 and 50, how much they contributed to new assets last year? No problem. Do you want to know how much the increase was over net new assets coming in? No problem. A lot of people in our industry are dependent on the technology of the custodians they work for, and those custodians have their own business model, right? They're just giving you some things to use. And we have our own, we have our own app. When they log into the Merit app, they can connect all their accounts. They could be anywhere. They can go into their plan after they logged in one time to our app. And we say, wait a minute, let me get over to eMoney and I want, I'm supposed to be at this level right now. Let me check, see where I'm at. They can do that. We want to make things really easy for the client and have everything there and under that technology. And then same thing with the advisors. We want the advisors to have all the reports that they need, the, to get information that they need and to be able to pull that down quickly. So we want to empower the advisor to put that technology in their hands. Going back to the AI question, I think AI is going to have a huge impact. Of course, we have to wait. What's compliance say about it and what can we— I would be anxious to move quicker and to get more integrated with AI and tap into that tremendous resource and think about the efficiency and how fast things get sped up because of that. It doesn't take a computer long to come up with an answer to a very complicated question. All right. Computer can get it just like that. But with AI coming into our industry, which will have a huge impact, it'll be some early adopters, there'll be some people lagging behind. Where do I think it's going? My personal opinion, the client's going to say, that is phenomenal. Great.

Thank you.

I need to talk to a human being because this computer just told me everything I need to know. But I just want to talk to somebody that can confirm that. Just want to confirm. Yeah. Yes, I think we're safe.

I think we're safe there. Yeah. You raise a really interesting question here about the technology because at an earlier session, there was the CEO of a mega billion-dollar RIA firm who was asked about this build versus buy question when it comes to technology. And they said after much trial and error, they decided we're pretty much in the buy side, that we're not technologists, we're not in the business of trying to build our own technology. Sure, we've got to do some. But for the most part, we're going to buy other people and have other people maintain that sort of stuff. Sounds like maybe you're a little different.

No, I don't think so.

Because you got your own data warehouse.

That's a big deal. That we had to build. Yeah, but there's so many other platforms that you can— we just went through that analogy. It's okay, we want this, but what would it take to build that? Can we buy a chassis that has a lot of the stuff we already want and then add on top of it? So it's a combination of buy and build. Okay.

Yeah. So it gives you— sounds like the maximum flexibility that maybe some of the core technology pieces, you've got other people who are core technologists that do that, and then you can maybe build some of the interconnections between the different systems into your data warehouse so that— because the key thing I hear from you is you want to own your data.

Yeah.

You want to make sure if you change custodians or someone goes out of business, it doesn't mess up your business. You got all the data. You can decide what information you need. You can have your own AI that you train on your own data to give you the information that you want. And that can be a competitive advantage for you if you've got that.

We can create— and this is where we're going to take this— we can create the client experience that we want to create. If you're using technology that you don't own, or how do you use it to create the client experience you want? If I want the client to see certain things, I want them to know how their performance is being calculated, or if I want them to know how important planning is, I can take them down that path with the technology, meaning you can create the path, you can create the experience. Think of it that way.

And what I like about that is if all you're doing as an advisory firm is you're using other people's technology that every other advisor can use, there's no way that you're going to be able to really differentiate. Sure, you can around the margins, maybe in how you implement it. But in terms of the experience, you mentioned you want to revolutionize the client experience.

Yeah.

Really, the only way you're going to do that is if you own your own technology or at least own your own data. Yeah. And then you can determine how you want that experience to be received by the client.

Yeah.

So how you're actually delivering that, I think, gives you a bit of a competitive advantage there. Now, that's the hard part too, because you got to build it and that's not easy. And most advisors didn't get in the business because they wanted to be technologists. And so that makes that difficult.

It goes back to what we were saying earlier. They didn't get in the business to build teams and get more people and they didn't get in the business to understand technology. I got a big education there. What are these people? I never heard of these terms, the data architect, the data engineer, the product manager. Prompt engineer now. Yeah. Who are these people?

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's right. Yeah. All right, Rick, this has been great. What haven't I asked you? What's something that you're just burning to share with us here today?

We're here at the Barron's Conference and I think about, I see it happening out there. The advisors are connecting with people, they're learning things, they're being challenged themselves and thinking about, okay, if this guy's doing that and this company's doing that, what can I do? And I just want to remind all the advisors that are listening, boy, you have a tremendous potential, and I'm going to say somewhat even a responsibility. You have knowledge and wisdom that you can help a lot of people. Don't take that lightly. Think about the value that you can create, and it's fun, right? I love this business. It's a lot of fun, and it's pretty rewarding when you can create value for the clients you serve, the team that you're building around you. So I would challenge our listeners to think about that.

Yeah. And along with that, I'd say since we're at the conference, we hear all these great ideas. Yeah. Every entrepreneur, they've never met an idea that they don't like. And so it's easy to just, oh, that's great, let's do this, let's do that. And then the advisor gets back to the office and they tell the team, oh, we're going to do this and this. And then it seems like, what? So it's pick your spots, have your vision, and make sure whatever it is that you're doing is fully supporting the vision and don't go down a whole bunch of side roads and get sidetracked and distracted. Be clear and focused and move forward with that.

And one other thing I'm thinking about as we close out here, challenge yourself and ask yourself how much of your team, wherever you're at today, and the company growth is running through you as an individual. The most successful firms have figured out it's all about teams. It's all about the team and developing the team. So I would challenge the advisors out there. You mentioned about they get these ideas and they run back and they're telling their team about all these. How about getting your team involved where they're coming up with that idea? Just think about how much you're doing today and all the decisions that you're controlling and think about letting go of that and let some other people have some say-so. Yeah.

And you know this better than anybody, but the less important you are to the firm, the more valuable your firm is going to be.

And there's no question.

No question.

Yeah.

All right, Rick, what's the best way for folks to connect with you if they want to learn more about you and what the team at Merritt is doing?

Yeah, we have our website, Merit Financial Advisors is our website. There's a lot we have out there. Excellent. All right, Rick, thanks for being on the show.

Thank you. 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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