Susie Cranston: Scaling Strategies for Multibillion-Dollar RIA Firms

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The journey to scale a multi-billion-dollar RIA firm requires exceptional leadership and a deep alignment with one's passions. Hi everyone, I'm business coach Steve Sandusky for Barron's Advisor, The Way Forward Podcast. My guest today is Suzy Cranston. Suzy is the president and chief operating officer of Crescent, which is a family office RIA firm with more than $50 billion in assets under management. In today's conversation, Suzy shares her insights on the essence of great leadership. From her early career at McKinsey to her new role at Crescent, Suzy describes why she thinks servant leadership is one of the best models for a professional services firm. She also talks about why many of the most successful leaders have aligned their careers with their personal passions. And she talks about the role that positive psychology plays in how you react to the world around you. We also discuss the rule of 3x and 10x and how it applies to the inflection points that all firms face as they scale from hundreds of millions to billions in assets under management. With that, here's my conversation with Susie Cranston. You have worked for some highly recognized companies, including McKinsey, First Republic Bank, JP Morgan, and now as president and COO of Crescent. I'd love for you to reflect back on the Susie Cranston as of day one, more than 20 years ago at McKinsey, to the Susie Cranston of today in terms of what are some of the key leadership lessons that you learned over those years?

One of the key lessons that I have learned over the course of my 20-plus years working now is the importance of really figuring out what you're passionate about and trying to always orient your career in a direction that aligns with those passions. Interestingly, when I was at McKinsey, one of the things I had an opportunity to do was to write a book on leadership, and we interviewed successful leaders from all over the world. And one of the biggest themes I heard from every leader I talked to was, I do what I do because I love it. And that really stuck with me and has been a guiding force for my own career. And what I've come to realize about myself, just to bring lesson number 1 to full circle, is that I don't have what I would call a topical passion, right? So some people know that medicine is what they love to do, or some people love law enforcement. And what I've realized about myself is that I have more of a functional passion, which is I love to make things better and I love to be of service to the people that I'm working with. If you look at my career from McKinsey to First Republic to JPMorgan and now Cresset, I've always been part of organizations that are very client-centric and all of those organizations have values along the lines of put the client interest above everything else. And that has always been just a really important part of any organization that I join because It's easy for me to get very passionate and excited about doing things when I feel like we're really going to make a difference for somebody and we're really going to be delivering extraordinary value. That would be my first and most important leadership lesson around the importance of figuring out what you love to do and really trying to do as much of that as you can.

So you've been in leadership for the most part for more than 20 years now. Would you say that you have developed a style over time? And if so, what would that be?

I really believe in the servant leadership model of how to lead organizations. There's that great expression from the military that generals eat last, and that is something that I try to practice and think about always. And I think part of it goes back to what I was sharing with you, that my passion is to really make things better and to be of service. And so the servant leadership role very much fits with that. But also I think that there's a lot of research that when you're a servant leader, particularly in organizations that deliver professional services, that I think is a very effective recipe because people delivering professional services are trying to deliver exceptional service to their clients. All the client-facing people that I will get the privilege of working with here day to day are delivering exceptional service to our clients. And in order for them to be able to do that, they need to get exceptional service from the organization. And the organization is not going to know how to deliver exceptional exceptional service unless that is role modeled from the top of the house. I personally subscribe to the servant leadership model, and I also think if you look at kind of what types of leadership models are good in which contexts, I think the servant leadership model in professional services is actually a particularly effective one. A second lesson that I've learned, which has really stuck with me and been very helpful, and I will share in the spirit of hopefully it, it could be helpful to somebody else, is that there's a lot of really great learning in positive psychology about how to interpret what seems like challenging event or experience. And what happens is when you're faced with a challenge, and I often give talks where I'll present a scenario, right? So you're sitting down with a prospect for an important prospect meeting and you're going through your pitch. And then halfway through the pitch, the prospect gets up and runs out of the room. And the question is, what do you think just happened? And what is your interpretation of that situation? And inevitably, when I give that scenario, people have one of two reactions. Either they feel like, oh my gosh, I just blew it. I've lost that opportunity and that went terribly. And oh my gosh, will I be successful in this industry? Will I be able to afford my home? All that kind of thing. Or there's another half of people who say, oh my gosh, they must have been sick. They must have had food poisoning. That maybe their wife went into labor or, or their female prospect and they went into— there's sort of two ways to interpret any challenging event depending on what you construct as the additional context of the situation, right? And I believe that successful leaders try to do a really good job of never assuming the worst and focusing on figuring out what are the rest of those facts so that when you have a situation that the interpretation could go one of two ways, you're trying to be very fact-based about what actually happened. Because most of the time when you're in an ambiguous situation, it's probably not that bad. It's probably not that nefarious. And so the more you can take those ambiguous situations and force yourself to say, okay, what is actually happening here? What do I actually know? What questions should I ask? And get very logical, the faster you can recover from those ambiguous situations.

You said two keywords in there. You said force yourself. And so this is the tricky part in that intellectually, I think we'd all agree with what you're saying there. But the hard part is how do I turn what I know I should do into actually doing that. So let's take you as an example. Do you think that you are naturally hardwired to think in positive psychology terms and to look at the, how can I turn this challenge into an opportunity, let's say? Do you think you're naturally hardwired that way, or did you have to practice? Did you have to have certain techniques that you used? Did you really have to work at viewing things differently?

I think I'm generally an optimistic person, but I certainly have moments and days where I can let that amygdala I'm not going to let it hijack my day. And so there are absolutely moments where I've had to work on using some of those tools, right? So there was one time where I had just come back from maternity leave, and so I was feeling a little insecure about coming back to work and my place there. And we had a meeting with the CEO, and the agenda that we had was totally tossed out the window, and we had a totally separate agenda. And so I was driving back from the meeting, and I was thinking to myself, oh gosh, that meeting went terribly. I hope I don't get a bad review, get fired. Hope I can afford to feed my new child. And I was spiraling and the partner that I'd been at the meeting with called me on my cell phone and said, oh, what a great meeting. The CEO really trusts us. He tossed his agenda out and wanted to talk about what was on his mind. And it was just a really concrete reminder that, wow, there really are these two interpretations. And so to your point about how do you force yourself to do it, Martin Seligman is a professor and he does a lot of research on this topic. And so what he said to do is when you're in that moment, ask yourself the 3 Ps about how you're feeling, which is: is this really permanent, that you're going to— whatever you're fearing or worried about is going to be permanent? Is it truly pervasive? Is it going to apply to everything? The third piece: is it personal? Is it really specific to you? And when you ask those 3 questions, that can be a quick way to help reset.

So how do you think about you as a leader? What is your vision for the work that you're going to be doing here at Crescent going forward in the next few years?

As I said earlier, I really believe that servant leadership is the best way to, to lead an organization like Crescent. And as I think about what comes next for Crescent and what we're going to focus on, I think that the secret sauce is always the culture. So I'm a big believer that when people come to work every day happy and energized and excited to do their part for the organization, that is where the magic happens. And I, as a former McKinsey strategic consultant, would even go so far to say that I think culture is more important than strategy. So I think one of the big priorities that I have for myself is that Cresset has been successful because it's built an extraordinary culture. And Eric and Abby, the co-founders, have really done a magnificent job of holding the bar, making sure we bring on people that share that sense of culture and that importance of putting clients first. And first and foremost, maintaining that as we continue to grow is a really important piece of this.

Now, you're based in California Bay Area. As one of the most senior people at the company, how do you do your job from your outpost? How do you work together at a senior leadership level when you're probably in different states all over the US?

One of the things that I believe in over the last 10 years is that each office needs to almost be a mini hub. Every client should have the experience when they come into the office of walking into what feels like a headquarters location, right? We want every space that we occupy to feel like it has all of the capabilities and service that clients would want from any office. So the first thing I would say is that I think that a great design for multifamily office firms is to really have hubs in each of your locations. And by hubs, there might be a designated leader of client service there. We might have a designated performance reporting specialist there, right? So we don't have kind of headquarters in exactly the same way that, for example, a publicly traded company where, you know, 25% of the firm is around the country, but 75% is in one location, right? It's not quite that dramatic. And then the other thing I would say is that if you look at where our team is distributed, we are actually fairly distributed across the country, which also I like because it means that there's always somebody available. There's always someone with their ear to the ground. There's always somebody to lead meetings and drive the culture. I I think for a professional services firm, this is a model that, that is proven and time-tested.

And from a leadership team perspective, how does that structure work? And I know Eric and Abby, I think, are probably— I know they're in different states, but do you guys just do Zoom calls once a week, or do you get together every month, every quarter? How does that work from running the company?

So from running the company standpoint, we get together as a management team face-to-face, in-person, quarterly, but we're doing very regular meetings on Zoom. And then also, I would say between the natural travel that happens just to see clients and do various meetings with team members, and then some strategic planning around the quarterly management committee, et cetera. We actually end up getting together in person quite often. And then to your point, we basically use video calls, I would say, several times a day amongst a whole variety of people. So it actually feels fairly present is the best way I can say it, but it is very much in the model of having grown up at McKinsey, like a McKinsey or a law firm in that you have partners, right? Which are our advisors in these different locations. And it's not that one is a preeminent location over the other.

I've worked with a lot of advisors over the past 30 years, and one of the things that a lot of people struggle with is they start out as an advisor, they love being an advisor, they love working with clients, but then at some point they realize, oh my goodness, I've got a business with $10 million, $20 million, $50 million, $100 million in revenue, and now I gotta do all this leadership stuff. So how do you think about your role as a leader and how that evolved over time from you being the person who does the work versus you being the person who gets stuff done through other people? How do you make that shift?

In my over a decade of working directly with advisor teams, I think that there is a certain inflection point that most teams will hit at different thresholds of revenue. But then I think when you hit, and it's anywhere between, I would say, I don't know, $4 to $6 million in revenue, you start getting to a size that requires the work to be more organized in order to make sure that doesn't feel a bit chaotic, right? And so what I have seen best practice teams do is that at some point, as you continue to grow, you start to need to have almost like a chief operating officer for your team. And what that looks like is somebody who is actually responsible for making sure that the work is well organized and that if there are handoffs between different people on the team, that's working well. That all the follow-ups are tracked. And that doesn't mean that the person who's acting as the Chief Operating Officer doesn't also wear other hats, but certainly it means that you need to start adding kind of some structure and process for how the team operates. And I want to be clear, I don't think that there is a single recipe for any— that applies to all advisor teams about what those processes need to look like. Because I think, I'm sure everyone listening to this podcast will know the truth of the statement that different clients want different things. Right? Some clients really want to be called every day and be told, here's the latest that's happening with your investments and how is your day going and just checking in. And other clients say, hey, call me if there's an issue, but I'm hiring you because I don't want to worry about this. And I, I want you to just take care of it. All right. And depending on what your clientele looks like and depending on what your clients need, what that specific process is may be different from team to team, but you do need to start to have a bit of that formal process as you get to the $4 to $6 million in revenue. And then I And I think as your team continues to grow, there are kind of best practices that you want to layer on top of that. So some of the things that I work with teams that I have helped to manage over the years are things like we developed a survey, for example, where we ask every single team member to take a survey and it asks you questions like, do we have a clear process for how we onboard a new client? Do we have clarity about who should be on point if a, you know, client needs a wire to get out? A number of kind of common activities that advisors perform for clients. And you do this survey to see how does everybody on the team think that there's a clear process? Does everybody on the team think that roles are clear? And inevitably there'll be some areas where there is a lot of clarity and other areas where there's less clarity. And so things like that can be a real catalyst to making sure that you are operating as effectively and efficiently as you want to be as you continue to grow your business. Similarly, things like doing regular reviews of your clients and making sure that you understand who's servicing them, what kind of client they are. And the best advice I can give people as they're thinking about how to manage that themselves is to make sure that people are at least on an annual basis and, and maybe even quarterly really trying to take that step back to evaluate what's working and what's not working.

Yeah. A couple comments on what you just said there. So one is, and I wanna credit Matt Sonnen with this, and you talk about really the systematizing and putting processes in there. I think so often when we're trying to get more organized in the back office, we think, okay, I need a new CRM system, or I need a new rebalance system, or let's put some technology on that. And what Matt said was, if you're looking to streamline the firm's operations, he says, I always advise to focus on process, not technology, because if you don't have the process right and then you put the technology in, you're not going to solve anything. So get the process right first and then see if technology it's going to fit. So has that been your experience as well?

1,000%. I think it is a very common mistake in our industry to say that technology will solve a problem when actually the process is what needs to be solved, right? So it's very easy if a process is chaotic to say, oh, we just need to automate it. But what I think people fail to realize often is that technology is the hardening of process, right? So if we say we're going to automate how to open new accounts, That means we're going to take all the steps that people take today manually, and we're going to make that now forced steps that everybody takes in lockstep. And so what happens a lot of times is 3 people on the team are actually opening accounts in different ways. And if you're opening an account in 3 different ways, which one do you choose to code into the technology? And what happens in larger scale is let's say you're 100 different teams and you're automating the new account opening process. If you do that in a way that only one team likes, it can be a real disaster and kind of a waste of money. Money. What you need to do first is say, hey, what is the single approach that we all want to take for how we open accounts? And then that should be the technology that you automate. But I completely agree with the observation that process is often the heart of any technology failure because the hard work wasn't done upfront to align the process before you tried to automate.

As you think about advisors that want to grow their business, how do you think about the technology piece in terms of If I'm looking at a new system and I'm anticipating growth, how far out in the future should we be thinking that, okay, if I get this piece of technology, that might support me until I get to this size, or should we even think of it that way? How do we think about planning for technology to scale for growth?

Interestingly, when I joined First Republic in 2013, we had about $30 billion under management and it had been an amalgamation of a few different acquisitions that First Republic had done. So they bought Starbuck Tisdale, they bought, I think, 4 or 5 different RAs. And as a result, we had 7 different performance reporting systems, 4 billing systems, 3 portfolio accounting systems. And I always like to throw in a partridge in a pear tree because it's just this litany of different systems. And really growing that business from $30 billion to $275 billion, which is is where it was when First Republic was acquired by JP Morgan. I have seen, I think, almost every single technology in the market. And you are exactly right that the technology that you want and that candidly makes sense from an expense standpoint when you're a smaller firm, say sub $5, $10 billion versus the technology you need at $20 billion versus the technology you need at $40 billion looks very different. And it makes sense, right? Because you can't afford to do a full-scale Salesforce implementation, nor would that make sense when you're a smaller firm. But when you get to a certain size, that's actually what you need because that's the industrial-grade solution that will scale. So a couple things regarding your question on how to think about that. The first thing I would think about is if you're still in the stage of being a smaller firm, the integrations are what kills you always, right? So what gets really tough is how do you get your, you know, performance reporting system to talk to your trading system, to talk to your portfolio accounting, billing, like you have all these pieces. So If you're on the smaller side still, I think the first thing to make sure you're looking for is what can you get that's pre-integrated, right? So Adapar, for example, has performance reporting. It has billing capability. It can handle a lot of the alts flows through Canoo. So that's a pre-built integration, right? Versus if you look for kind of the best of each individual solution and you try to cobble those all together, that's a lot of headache to get it to operate in an integrated manner. So I think on the earlier days of a firm, I would say look for things that are pre-integrated so that you don't have to worry about that integration. The other thing I would say that is really important, and if anybody can be spared the brain damage that I went through trying to clean this up and work on this over the years, I, I would like to pay it forward in this podcast, which is making sure that your data is as clean as possible. Because inevitably what will happen as you grow is that the technology you can afford and that makes sense at one size, as you continue to grow, you will need to swap things out. I'm talking now at the small end. I'll talk in a minute about what happens, I think, at the, at the final stage where you get to the, what I call industrial-grade solutions that you never have to upgrade again. But as you make those upgrades as you go, having a consistent, clean set of data is really important. And as you think about negotiating with partners, understanding kind of what is your access to the data going to look like and who's going to store it and will you always have access to the data under any circumstance? Those are important questions to ask. Ask, because if you, for example, want to upgrade your performance reporting at some point and you don't want to lose all the historical history for your clients as you upgrade to the new system, you do need to make sure that all that data is stored somewhere accessible. You can get at it, that kind of thing. So those are the two things I would call out if you're more in the kind of starting end of the spectrum. If you're getting to a point where you're growing and you think you need to get to more of the industrial-grade scalable solutions, which for the record, I think happens around $30 to $40 billion. That's, I think, the size where you start to feel like, wow, we really need the industrial-grade solutions. The industrial-grade solutions are what I call the proven technologies that everybody knows that have worked at scale at other firms, right? Because what we have lived through, certainly at First Republic, and what I've seen a lot of other larger RIAs live through is inevitably, as you grow, if you have a technology provider that's maybe really fantastic, but not proven to operate at scale yet, you start to feel the growing pains with that vendor, right? So the vendor is like struggling to keep up, because they don't have enough server capacity to handle all the volume that your clients are doing. And then your clients are having a bad experience or being impacted. And all of a sudden you guys are in this growth curve together, whether you wanted to be there or not. So when you move to those industrial-grade solutions at around $30 to $40 billion, that's where you make that final pivot, because at that point, if you're going to upgrade, you should go with the system that will carry you to $100 billion, $200 billion, a trillion, whatever you aspire to grow to.

And what I'm hearing from folks too is, and I think you're saying this as well, is that basically you need to own your data. And so some people are setting up their data architecture such that they have their own data warehouses, or it's their data, they're storing it even though it may originally come from the custodian. They're finding a way to get it into their own data warehouse so that they can create their own interconnections with the different systems. And to your point, if we want to get a piece of software, we've got the data in our source. And so it's easy for us to repopulate the new software if we want to. So is that accurate?

That is absolutely correct. The importance of owning your own data, I think, can't be underestimated for all the reasons you just articulated, Steve. And also because if you look at these AI technologies that are emerging, I think a number of which could be very interesting for wealth management, the underpinning of AI is the quality of that data. So I think that it's always been important and the relative importance of it is only going to continue to grow.

How does Crescent handle the data? What are you guys doing in that area?

We have our own data warehouse and we are constantly building and adding to it. And we are in the process of standing up a data council, if you will, to make sure that we have really solid clarity around the data fields that we're tracking, what they mean, where they're pulling from, how often we're saving we are building in logic checks as we go, right? So I think one of the things that firms can do more and more of with the technology that's available today is having those automated reviews that are done with AI bots or with comparison to other databases to do everything possible to make sure that anything that's obviously a problem or anything that logically can't exist, that you're just cleaning that up from the get-go. And Interestingly, I, I would just say my own experience is that the effort to keep data clean, it's gotta be an effort that the whole organization really gets behind. Because if you're just asking your technology team to keep the data clean, it's never gonna work, right? You have to make sure that everybody on the team understands how their piece feeds into the data quality and why data quality is so important. Because I have yet to be at a company that doesn't want to improve its data quality. That's the evergreen issue. And making sure that everybody is constantly thinking about how they can contribute to that is, I think, the secret to successful improvement over time. I have feel that I have been very lucky in the roles that I've had because I have always had as my responsibility set oversight of the advisors and oversight of operations. And I feel like from a structural standpoint, that is a real advantage because you can't actually operate either one independently of the other. And you have to make trade-offs constantly about what you're going to prioritize between the two, right? I could have my advisor spending all their time cleaning up data, right? But then we wouldn't grow the business and we wouldn't take care of clients. And I could ask the operations team to try to clean the data up by themselves, but that would never work either, right? So there's always a balance of how much do you want to push on one side versus the other. And I think having somebody in your organization who can make those trade-offs and is, is doing that deliberately and consciously is helpful in terms of making sure that you have the right balance between those two factors over time.

How have you walked that tightrope, that tension between, hey, we want the financial advisors to be servicing clients, not spending all their time in the CRM system updating data. So how do you walk that balance there?

I have several golden rules of working with advisors that I have built up in my head over the years. And one of them is try to let advisors be as empowered as humanly possible when it comes to how they service their clients, right? So I believe in the Platinum Rule of client service, which is do unto your clients as they would have done to themselves, different from the Golden Rule, which is do unto others as you would do for yourself, right? And I don't think advisors can deliver amazing service to clients as easily as, as possible if they have a lot of constraints on what they can and can't do, or a lot of micromanagement about what is going to work best, because hopefully you have great people. And I'm very fortunate at the firms I have, I've always worked with great people and let them do their jobs. If that's one of my golden rules, the question is even more interesting, which is then how do you require people to put information in systems? Systems. And the answer has got to be that management holds themselves accountable to making the process of using the systems additive from the advisor's perspective. So the bar that I hold for anything that's mandated for advisors is that it's something that is helpful and additive to them. And by the way, and very importantly, I include anything that is required for regulatory purposes or compliance purposes that is also making their job better because we don't want to No client wants a firm that was in bad regulatory standing or does not have good compliance practices. So I, I assume always that advisors share that sentiment and I, they do. The way that you can ensure that people are using the systems is make the systems helpful and user-friendly. Now, I will say for those of us operating larger firms where we have a lot of diversity in terms of how teams operate and what different people want to use the systems for, sometimes that gets a little tricky because not everybody's identical. But the solution that has worked for me in that situation is if you can create a central dashboard and a central repository of information that is so useful that it is always gonna be the backbone of what advisors use, then they will gravitate towards continuing to use that as much as they possibly can. I am a believer, given the tech stacks that are available out there today, I think having a CRM like a Salesforce Salesforce be the central dashboard that a lot of information flows through is a really helpful way to organize. And a technology like Salesforce has a lot of pre-built integrations into it. So that is a tool where if you make that the place that, you know, you go to for performance reporting, for portfolio rebalancing, for entering trade tickets, for understanding what's happening operationally, if that's the hub you go to, then it's almost second nature that people want to enter that data in from the start. Entered. And as I said, you just had to make sure you have those checks and balances in place to make sure that when the data is entered, it's done in a robust and data-checked way.

I think you said earlier that at First Republic, you had like maybe 7 different performance reporting systems. So the bigger firms that acquire, and we've got all these disparate systems out there, what's the process for figuring out who's going to be the winner here and how we integrate that?

You can't scale when you have that many systems because what ends up happening is all those different options at each step of the client value chain, it ends up creating many multiples of those numbers in terms of what the unique operating platforms look like. So if one person's using Adapar for performance reporting and they're using Pershing's bill pay system, and then another person is using APX, all those different permutations mean that you just can't scale the business. And anytime you change one thing, you're not providing the benefit for everybody universally. And you change one thing and it can have 10 different impacts on 10 different teams, right? So you have to get consolidation at the operating platform as step number one, priority number one, always. And we did that over a period of years at First Republic and learned a real recipe for how to get those systems consolidations done. And what I would say, the first and most important guiding principle is that you don't want to disrupt the client experience. So the way I always talked about it was that we were building airplanes in the sky. And your airplane is at 10,000 feet and you're serving dinner in the first class cabin, and you wanna make sure that any changes you're doing to strap on more engines on the wings does not impact the client experience for everybody that's already enjoying their meal. And what you have to do when you're thinking about doing these system consolidation efforts is you have to understand, one, what's the benefit for doing the consolidation? So how much value do you get for that effort? And then two, How hard is it to do? So like, how much does it touch clients? How much does it change the advisor's day-to-day? How much skill building goes with it? And you really have to have a prioritized matrix where you look at, these are the things that are easy to do that add a lot of value. We're gonna do those really quickly. The things that add a lot of value that are hard to do, you need to start on right away because it will take a lot of time. So to get from 7 performance reporting systems down to 1, which we absolutely did at First Republic, it took us 3 years. Diverse. And we had to do a lot of handholding and training because the advisors needed to understand and get comfortable with the new systems. And we wanted to make sure that it was a good client experience. Where you have those tougher nuts to crack and you have to plan to go slow, I think is— I wish there was a magic bullet there, but you have to be really thoughtful and intentional about how you're doing it.

There's this idea, I think it originated out of Silicon Valley, and it's called the rule of 3x and 10x. And it's the idea that every time you triple your business or 10x your business, you reach an inflection point. So for example, how that applies to our profession is let's say you go from $0 to $333,000. That could be one person. You're working really hard. You're just trying to put food on the table. Then you triple that from $333,000 to about $1 million. And now you're like, okay, I probably need 1 or 2 support people to help me. Money. Then you triple that to $3 million, and now you're like, okay, I got to get a real CRM system instead of Microsoft Outlook, and maybe I need some financial planning software. And then from there, you go from $1 million to $3 million, which is a 10x from when you started out at $333,000. And it just goes on from there. So I think that's a good framework to think about when you're going to be reaching these different inflection points and We touched on a little bit about how you think about at what point do I need to get the next upgrade of my technology stack, but connected with that, it's like, how do we decide the build versus buy decision as well? So we have so many fintech software out there that we can buy a lot of this stuff, but when you get to a size of a First Republic or you get to a size of a Crescent, it's like, we gotta build some of this stuff too, or we've gotta build the connections, or we've gotta build our own data warehouse. Yeah, we can use some off-the-shelf stuff and we can use Amazon's cloud service and so on. But how do you think about this 3x, 10x rule idea and then also the build versus buy decision where that might slot into that?

I have not heard that 3x, 10x rule before, but I think that is a very accurate rule of thumb, because it is true that, you know, what the inflection point is around can evolve. But certainly at each of those inflection points, you know, there are new challenges and new kind of expertise areas that you almost have to build out, right? And I also think that the other thing that probably happens as you reach those points and you take a step back is you have to continue to evaluate the external environment too, right? Interestingly, as I talked to some of the family offices that have chosen to join Crescent, for example, a lot of them talk about the resources that are required to keep particularly the wealthiest families in the country to keep their information secure or to have the scale to provide the full range of services that those family offices would benefit from. And, and I think that external environment combined with the internal growth, you're right, does keep a very active market for M&A activity in our space for sure. Companies grow. I think it is always helpful for leaders to have a pretty realistic assessment of what their skills are. And some leaders are great strategic thinkers. They love to be thinking a couple steps ahead. And so maybe continuing to grow the business is on their own is like exactly the right approach and something that is right in their wheelhouse. I found though that also there are other people where there's a certain size business that, that is a great fit for their skill sets. And, but they don't really want to take that next step. And at some point, either that means that they have to think about selling, as you said, or think about what is internal succession within their organization. And can they find somebody who maybe wants to be that strategic thinker to take them to the next step? It is always an evolution that leaders are having to contend with. And what I have found is that the leaders that fare the best at those inflection points are the ones that have a good good, honest ability to know what their strengths and weaknesses are so that when they get to those crossroads, they can be realistic about, hey, will this be fun for me? Will this be fulfilling for me? Or is this going to actually not be something that brings a lot of joy to my day?

I think First Republic Bank is an interesting example here because you were there for a large part of their massive growth. So tell me about the inflection points during your tenure there in building up an advisory business.

My ultimate conclusion coming out of the last 10 years is that for the investment management needs, financial needs of family offices, I believe those are going to be best served in the RIA channel going forward. Part of why I say that is that the banking industry is getting increasingly regulated, as it's always been highly regulated, but the regulatory environment is not slowing down, right? And if you look at what family office style clients need, it's going to be challenging for some of those needs to be serviced by banks because, for example, banks can't handle all the taxation pieces. They can't do certain parts of the alternative management process if the alternatives are not part of the, the bank's offering. As I take a step back and, and answer your question on what are some of the lessons learned, I think that there is an evolution going on around where these large families are going to get their services in the future. I think one lesson is that we're going to see movement out of some of the traditional, more bank-affiliated investment shops into the RIA space, and that the services that clients are going to want are increasingly how firms will differentiate and compete. So I think another lesson that I took away from the last decade of my career is that clients don't always see the investment piece as differentiated. It's a table stakes item. So you have to have an incredible investment platform. That's absolutely the case. And you have to do well at the investing piece. But what differentiates a lot of firms is the service that's provided on top of that.

Well, Susie, this has been great. If folks want to stay in touch with you and connect, what's the best way to do that?

I am on LinkedIn, and I would be happy to connect with anybody who, who wants to chat. Thank you so much for having me though, Steve. I've really enjoyed our conversation, and you have definitely honed in, I think, on some of the things that have been the bigger learnings over the last decade and a half. I, I appreciated the chance to get to talk with you today.

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