Troy Nelson: Building Strength Through Adversity

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Welcome to The Way Forward presented by Barron's. I'm Ray Scalfani, founder and CEO of ClientWise, and today I'll be your host. What if every door you knocked on in this profession was slammed shut, even at the firm where you eventually built your entire career? And what if just as your career was gaining momentum, you faced a decade of personal loss, trauma, and hardship that that could have ended it all. That's the story of our guest today. Troy Nelson has spent 27 years at Edward Jones, but he only started after being rejected by every firm he applied to, including Edward Jones itself. He made one life-changing phone call. We'll learn about that today. And although he achieved early success, his journey was far from smooth. Over 10 years, Troy faced significant personal challenges, including rejection, burnout, and some pretty serious obstacles. Despite all of this, he transformed not just his practice, but his entire approach to leadership. And today, Troy leads a thriving 12-member team. He's grown significantly and serves as a model of resilience, authenticity, and intentional growth. From sabbaticals that re-energized his purpose to a 3-week silent retreat that transformed his leadership philosophy, his journey demonstrates that adversity can lay the groundwork for impact. We'll examine how Troy's story tells us about succession and team capacity and culture and client results, and why he believes that when a leader gets better, everyone wins. Troy, it's great to be here with you today.

Ray, honored to be here with you.

While I'm not a current client, as a business coach, I feel as though I'm quite familiar with your firm through the work ClientWise does with you and others at Edward Jones. I want to start with your personal journey. You've said that you can't take people where you haven't been. How has your personal growth influenced the way you now lead your clients and your team?

Ray, I think it might be helpful at the top to really define personal growth versus leadership growth, because for me, they're completely intertwined. And so I look at an example of a fruit tree. So if I want a fruit tree to bear good fruit, if that's the leadership part that I'm looking for, to me, it starts with the roots. So you cultivate it, you fertilize it, you water it. So that's the personal personal growth. So if you do that right, as a byproduct, you get great leadership. And so for me, my personal growth, I would say, has changed everything. When I look at myself 10 years ago, I was a pretty mediocre leader. I needed to grow a lot. And the skill sets that make me a great advisor, some of those transfer over to leadership, but a lot of those things I had to learn. And unfortunately, like Ray, I had to learn those things the hard way. And I wish that this wasn't true, but I've learned far more in the valleys than I have on the mountaintops. So my personal growth has changed my marriage. It's changed my family, my team, how I lead clients and how I lead within the firm.

That's impressive. Let's start with you. Your story isn't just professional. It sounds like it's deeply personal. You've depicted a decade marked by trauma and hardship. How did those experiences influence your leadership and personal growth?

So, Ray, let me take you back 12 years ago. So that was at the midst of my burnout cycle where I nearly walked away from the industry.

No kidding.

Yeah, I was so, I was in a bad place. And I remember this like it was yesterday. It was a cold North Dakota morning. I'm sitting in my sauna that morning and I prayed a dangerous prayer that morning. I said, "God, do whatever it takes to grow me, to mature me, to make me into the man that you want me to be." And I meant it. And let me walk you through the last decade of my life because I've had a lot of hardship and trauma. So not long after that, we're adopting my son Sam from Bogotá, Colombia. The whole family's down there. At the end of the first week, we get a call that my father-in-law died in a tragic accident. Oh no. So my wife and kids fly back. I'm staying with Sam. Poor little guy is traumatized, would get up every night and scream for about 3, 4 hours straight. So I was super lonely, grieving the loss of my father-in-law in the middle of an apartment in Bogota. We finally get back to the States. Not long after that, I had a very large outside business deal that went sideways, turned out to be a total disaster. Created a ton of stress. About a year later, I had a longtime employee that I cared for deeply for her and her family, got terminal cancer. And then she came after me and Edward Jones and said I discriminated against her because of her terminal cancer. Well, all the while I saved her job past Family Medical Leave Act 3 times, bent over backwards, gave her a huge donation at her cancer benefit. So it was just this betrayal that was unimaginable and so hurtful. About a year later, I had a certified narcissistic psychopath client who set the record for the longest divorce in the state of North Dakota history turn on me and Edward Jones and say I helped her husband secrete and hide assets. All the while, she had $350,000 she couldn't account for, and he accounted for every penny. So it was this 4-year arbitration hanging over my head.

Oh, it gets worse.

I had a close friend who drank himself to death that had a young son. And my daughter, this is about 2 years later, my daughter went from sprinting in a track meet to 3 days later being medevaced to Mayo Clinic. The doctor said, "Troy, she's probably not gonna make it. If she does, she might be a vegetable and never walk for the rest of her days." And so, Ray, I had some other trauma that's even too personal to share, but because of all of this, I was getting—

This is all coming at you at the same time?

Yeah, it's literally over about an 8-year period of time. And so I started getting headaches every day. I wasn't sleeping at night, massive sleep anxiety. And so, Ray, it was literally just a battle to survive the day. And so at the end of this, I felt like I was dismantled, like I'd been taken apart piece by piece by piece, just a pile of pieces on the floor. And I have a life verse. It's Romans 8:28. All things work for good for those who love God and are called according to his purpose. And a little bit of a side story that's kind of funny today. That became my life first my senior year of high school. I skipped outta school early to weld on my snowmobile ski 'cause I wanted to go snowmobiling. I stopped to check my weld, I flip my mask up and the gas tank is on fire. I take off running outta the garage and literally it explodes. It was like a movie set. Like this ball of flames comes rolling out as I'm sprinting outta the garage.

Oh my gosh.

If I would've welded 5 seconds longer, Ray, I wouldn't be here today. And so my parents were awesome. Like, I burned down the house I grew up in, burned it to the ground. But my parents and my mom specifically kept quoting that verse to me. And at the time I'm like, "Whatever, Mom, I just torched the fricking house." Like, how is God gonna use that for good?

Am I grounded? Forever.

And so anyway, that became my life verse. But when I applied it to that 8, 10-year cycle of my life, I'm like, "This is just too much pain. I don't know how any good is gonna come from this." And so I have an executive director executive coach that I've used for years, and she finally convinced me to do this 3-week silent solitary retreat.

Yeah, tell us about how this experience really helped you think about how to lead differently in the future.

Yeah, Ray, I would say it was the hardest thing I've ever done, but the most transformative thing I've ever done.

First off, what is a silent 3-week retreat?

Yeah, so I was alone in a cabin in the middle of the woods on Gig Harbor Island, or outside of Gig Harbor, Washington, on Fox Island. Utterly alone, no phone, no TV, no radio, no nothing. Myself and a journal, and I had a spiritual director that I would meet with at 6:00 AM in the morning. Wisest man I ever met in his 70s. And so, um, I learned so much there, but I think for the benefit of the listeners, there's 3 things that I want to highlight that would be helpful to people. Um, the first thing is after journaling 250 pages of my life story, like I scraped the bottom of the barrel, Right. I learned that I had 3 core woundings in my life that literally have set up my operating system for life. It's why I do what I do. It's also why I do— I don't do what I should do and why I do what I don't want to do. All of those things are found in my story. And so to unpack that and experience that was literally utterly transformative for me. Second thing I learned is that I am horrible to myself. I am my own biggest critic, right? I would say things to myself, Ray, that I would never dream of saying to you or to anyone else. And what's fascinating about that is if you look at the research, most of the people listening to this podcast are really Type A driven, successful people, hard charging. And most of those people are really, really hard on themselves. That's what all the research says. So you can't give to others what you don't give to yourself, right? And so there was one attribute of God that overwhelmed me on this retreat, and that was his kindness. Like, I would weep daily at that. In looking over my life and what I experienced is like, I felt that kindness and I saw God using all of that hardship for great good in my life. And that changed everything. I saw my prayer coming true and Romans 8:28 coming true. And the third thing I experienced, and this was fascinating to me, is I call it the true cost of my phone. So when I got to the retreat, Dr. VanDrot had me turn in my phone for 2 weeks. After 2 weeks, he gives you it back for 2 days. So at the end of that 2 weeks, he set the phone on the table. It wasn't even turned on, and I felt my anxiety level spike.

No kidding. I can only imagine what it's like when you turn that thing on.

Well, C.S. Lewis, a famous author, has a quote, and his definition of hell was getting whatever you want whenever you want it. And I realized with my phone and money, I can nearly get whatever I want— there it was— whenever I want it. And that's not good for my soul. So I realized my phone represents the pace of life that I choose to run at, all the people that are depending on me, all the things that I need to get done every day, all the choices that I have to make. And Ray, what was fascinating is for 2 weeks, my headaches went away. Later that day, my headaches came back with a vengeance when my phone came back. And so coming out of that, I've tried really hard to parent my phone. My phone has a wake-up time, my phone has a bedtime, and I try not to go on it a lot 'cause it does directly correlate to my anxiety level.

Hey, so Troy, thanks so much for being so transparent and honest. That kind of authenticity, I think, will lead to a lot of learning for our listeners. You've been open about burnout. What did taking a break, including the sabbatical you talk about, teach you about resilience and career longevity? Because it sounded like you were ready to check out of the career.

Before I answer that, I want to, I want to go back for just a second. So, so the one more impact that that retreat had on, I would say, every relationship in my life is I realized everybody has a story, right? And everyone goes through hard things in life, right? So before I used to not want to engage in that and have those difficult conversations. But coming out of my retreat, I realized those stories are where the true gold is found. So I am way more curious. I want to enter into my client's stories. I want to go deep with them because everybody craves connection. Everyone craves to be fully known.

That's right. And you bring up that— that's a really good point. We all have hardship.

Absolutely.

Different various experiences or versions of hardship. Yes. But I think you bringing that forward maybe will help others think and reflect for a moment about their own hardships and how it's helped shape them.

Absolutely. And again, when you can get someone to share their hardship, that's when you create a true deep connection. And I love that. And what I love about our business, Ray, the most is that money is a gateway to people's hearts.

What do you mean by that?

So again, money is what we help people with every day, but money leads to those deeper conversations, right? If you ask the right questions surrounding money. Like, as an example, I ask all clients, what was it like growing up as a kid? What was money like in your household? How did your parents handle money? And something that's really common that comes out all the time is my clients who are prolific savers grew up with nothing. And they're like, I don't ever want to end up that way. And they have some crazy stories of how hard it was growing up saving money.

And, you know, my grandmother grew up in the Great Depression. As an Italian, her family came over from Sicily, and I remember her sharing stories with me about every Tuesday going over to the East River with a pillow sack to get coal so they could actually have hot water one day a week. And her entire career, I do remember Nana saving everything. She never wanted to get rid of anything. She was the most frugal and careful. So I think your point, the story you're telling is all telling about our experiences in life and how they shape our future.

Absolutely. They set up that operating system.

So tell us a little bit more about this resiliency and career longevity, because I'm really curious that something was extended as a result, and you've had major personal breakthroughs that has improved your leadership in the way that you teach your clients. Yeah.

So on the burnout piece, so one of the things I did is I took a 3.5-month sabbatical, completely unplugged from work.

That seems impossible.

Well, so your response is fascinating because I've spoke to I've spoken to tens of thousands of advisors across the country and I share this and everyone is too scared to do it. I've met 5 people, Ray, out of literally 20,000 people I've spoke to that have done a sabbatical. Everyone's like, I can't pull away from my team. Like, I can't do that. And then my first question is, well, what kind of a team are you actually building that you can unplug for, for 3 and a half months and the wheels are going to fall off, right? That doesn't say a lot about your team. Right?

No doubt. Founder-focused firms fail to scale.

Yeah. And so I wanted to do that to allow my team to thrive and see how they fared. And they did great. But I'd say there was 3 outcomes, Ray, from that. One is I will work longer than I had planned. I had built my plan to retire at 50. I'm 50 today. I'm going to work a lot longer because I realize I really love it. And it's a great way for me to give back and make a huge impact on people's lives. Secondly is I wanted to experience what my clients experience when the biggest source of meaning and purpose is taken out of their lives. You know, most business owners who sell their business painfully regret selling their business because they have a loss of purpose in their life. So I knew that in my head, but to experience that in my heart is a totally different scenario. So it's made me a much better guide for clients who are going through that because I've experienced it. Third thing is that's where my personal mission statement came out of. Is from that burnout and taking time away to really figure out who is Troy Nelson outside of what he does.

What is your personal mission statement?

Yeah, it's to use my gift of influence to help leaders grow in emotional health and vulnerability so they can have even greater impact.

So that's really noble.

Yeah, and it fits, Ray. That's what I love about it is it is the screen that I run everything through that comes my way. So it's so helpful because there's a lot of opportunities that come my way, but I'm like, you know what? Here is my purpose. Here's what I'm supposed to do. Does this align with my purpose or doesn't it? So when it doesn't align, it makes it easy.

No.

Yeah, absolutely.

So walk us through this sabbatical piece. I like that you've been able to share that story with tens of thousands of folks and very few have done it. So maybe you can give us a little bit of a roadmap, like what's the first week like? What's the first month like? And how many times do you get calls late in the afternoon, hey, we have a problem, Troy, what would you do?

So first thing I did is I had a large client meeting and I had in all my clients and I just shared vulnerably where I was at of like, I was burned out and I needed to rest. And I did the sabbatical on purpose. It wasn't just this big vacation. Like, I went into it with the purpose of who am I outside of work? What are my passions? What are my skills? What do I really enjoy? What does the second half of my life look like? What do I want it to look like? Right.

So you were totally transparent with the clients, like, hey, this is the intent. This is what I'm going to do.

Yes.

Wow.

And Ray, at the end of that meeting, I literally got a standing ovation from our clients.

No kidding.

They were like, you go, like, this is awesome. And so prepped the team, right? So went through kind of every possible scenario they could run into, had the right people to call if they ran into something. And so it was great for them because they got to really figure out, you know what, we can do this without Troy. Which, that's what I'm trying to build is something that lasts far beyond me where I'm totally replaceable. So it was great for them to, I would say, gain confidence and gain experience. And it was great for me. And it was, Ray, super disorientating at first. I'm like, I crave being needed and I crave the schedule and all the people that depend on me. And I had none of that. And it was like, wow, like disorientating would be the word. It was like this fog I was in for about the first month, month and a half of the sabbatical.

Well, and I appreciate you sharing that. It sounds like when you said earlier you wanted to experience what your clients experienced, I can imagine somebody that owns a business or a corporate executive, somebody who's highly influential and a lot of people depend upon, all of a sudden that gets turned off. Yes. Now what?

Now what? Exactly. And so that's led to a lot of conversations around purpose in retirement. What does your purpose look like? Because we all have to have purpose, right? And so me finding what my purpose looks like for the second half and the process that I went through, I can guide clients through that when they retire and I can tell them like, here's what it's going to feel like and this is normal. It's okay. You're gonna feel this way, but here's some things you should do about it. And here's kind of a roadmap. And I wanna be there to be a guide to help them along it.

Oh, that's fantastic. So that makes a lot of sense. We've heard a little bit about your personal story, and I, again, appreciate you being so vulnerable and sharing all of that with us. I wanna talk a little bit and shift gears about your personal, from personal to maybe your more professional home. You've been with Edward Jones your entire career. And early on you experienced rejection, even from Edward Jones, before making that one call that changed your life. What were those early years like for you?

Yeah, so the quick story about that. So my dad trained financial advisors. I knew it's what I wanted to do from a young age.

No kidding. So he was in the business.

He was, yep. So every night, halfway through dinner, on would come Moneyline with Lou Dobbs. So the first half of dinner, we'd catch up as a family. Second half, we'd watch what's going on in the markets and talk about investing. I'm like, I am going to do this from a young age. And so my dad said, Troy, Edward Jones has an amazing training program. That's where I would go to work. So they were my first choice, but they were down to being my last option. So newly married, just graduated from college, walk to the mailbox, living in a double-wide trailer in Fargo, North Dakota, pull out this letter that says, we regret to inform you that you do not meet our hiring criteria. So I walked into the house.

No kidding.

Picked up that old '90s cordless phone and called the lady whose name was at the bottom of that letter. And I just said, you know what? You have a really hard job 'cause you have to look at a sheet of paper and determine who Troy Nelson is and if he can do this. And I said, respectfully, you got it wrong. Let me tell you all the reasons why I'm gonna have a huge impact on people's lives. And I made my case and she was humble enough to say, I think we got it wrong. We'll let you go through the process and see what happens.

That or she needed a quota. No, I'm kidding. No kidding.

Ray, either one, I'll take it.

That's good. So, okay, so working out of a double-wide trailer, being a young, newly married person to becoming the firm's top advisor within 6 years, what drove the growth?

Well, they say there's no substitute for hard work, which there isn't, right? Actually, a fascinating study came out and said North Dakotans are the hardest working people in the whole country. So North Dakota was number 1, Alaska was number 2. We're a pretty hardworking, resilient bunch in North Dakota. I would say I took that to an extreme. So newly married, I went to my wife and I said, sweetheart, I want to do in 5 years what takes most people 25 years. Holy smokes. But here's what it's going to require. I said, you're going to get a date night Friday night. Outside of that, you're not going to see me. And are you okay with that? And if she would have said no, I wouldn't have done that. But she said, have at it, go for it. So I threw myself at it, Ray, and I work like a machine. And so I think if you couple hard work with authenticity, so that's my is my number one core value, coupled with vulnerability, right? Coupled with I'm a really good problem solver. I have the ability to really take a problem and bring it down to its most basic form and be creative in how I solve that problem. And then I'm really good at communicating solutions in ways clients can understand and act upon. So I'm using stories, analogies, I'm drawing some stuff out because clients aren't going to do what they don't understand, right? So I think the combo of hard work, authenticity, humility, vulnerability, being a great problem solver, and being a great communicator, those were like rocket fuel for my growth. So things just took off right out of the gate, started from scratch, didn't know a soul, and within 6 years was the largest office in the firm.

That's tremendous. Thanks for sharing those attributes. I'm interested in the platform you chose. Obviously, your dad recommended Edward Jones. Edward Jones gets oftentimes framed. It's a, it's a huge firm. I mean, 22,000 advisors. Advisors, and it is, it itself has transformed pretty dramatically, especially in adopting teaming. I've noticed recently the work our firm is doing with Edward Jones, but you've previously listed a short list of things, your top 10 list that you wanted to see the firm evolve toward, and many of them have now occurred or are on track to being accomplished. Give us a little take on what you think about Edward Jones as a platform and how does it support the expansion of the impact in the firm you're building?

Yeah. So over the last 3 years, the firm has literally changed more than it has in the previous 24 that I've been there. I mean, it is fast and furious. A lot of people don't like that, right? Because they don't like change. I love change. And so this is stuff that I've been literally waiting for for well over a decade. And so I love it. If I'm honest about the teaming piece, 12 years ago, I kind of got the rug pulled out from under me. So we were running a team not like I wanted to today, but a scaled-down version of that, and obviously doing that with great success. And the firm came to me one day and said, you can't do this. You're doing it differently than everyone else in the firm, and that presents a business risk to the firm.

How long ago was this?

This is 12 years ago.

12 years. Okay.

My response is, "Well, look at our results. We're obviously getting results that are radically better than anyone else. Why don't you adopt this?" The answer was no. Ray, I almost left the firm.

It seems really short-sighted.

It does, yes. The previous leadership just had a different view. I nearly left the firm. I did a deep dive on all the other firms, did heavy due diligence, visited home offices. At the end of the day, when I looked at my pros and cons list, moving was probably the right thing to do in the natural. But I approached it the way I approach all big decisions. I took 5 days up in my cabin, spent time fasting and praying, and just felt led that I was supposed to stay. And it was really hard because I had to go back to doing mundane tasks that didn't add a lot of value to my clients' lives. And it was really, really hard. But I can tell you today, I am so grateful I stayed because my top 10 list that I had, Ray, and that came from David Letterman. I watched that growing up. He had his top 10 list. Yeah, right. And so I created my top 10 list and everything on that list has either changed or is changing as we speak. So the firm is literally transformed. And what I love about what we're doing today is when I bring them a good idea, in the past it was like, no, we don't do that. Today it's like, that's a great idea. Let's figure out how to make this happen. And that is a total game changer from even 3 years ago in the firm. So they're truly letting me be the CEO of Nelson Wealth Management and trying to give me all the tools, the tech, the resources to do it the way I want to do it and to run it well.

Well, it's clear to 12 years ago, go from not allowing teaming to today, you lead a team of 12 folks and, you know, the business is not founder-focused. You've got an incredible team of professionals. I want to I wanna talk about succession and growth for a moment. The industry is an industry that talks a lot about planning and a lot about the future and a lot about helping clients transition and achieve life goals. And yet the industry has such a problem with succession. When you look at all the data points around succession and McKinsey's latest research about more than 100,000 advisor shortfall over the next decade and the number of advisors retiring, You've talked a lot about this success, success and succession and growth and how they go together. What do you mean by that?

Yeah, for me, succession and growth again go hand in hand. And so, Ray, I always like to start with the problems I'm trying to solve. And so here's the problems I was trying to solve, both in terms of growth and succession. So one, I wanted to build something enduring that lasts far beyond myself or any member of the team. Number two is I wanted to serve more clients more completely. So there's a lot of people that need our help. Up, right? So I want to serve those people, and then I want to serve our current clients even more deeply. Third thing is I wanted to create the best client experience possible regardless of who is on the team or who retires. And the fourth thing is I wanted to create capacity to serve all generations of our clients. I think of us as a family serving families, right? So when I looked at those four problems, The best way for me to solve those 4 problems is growth, right? So I bring on more members of the team. I pass on all the knowledge, all my experience, right, over 27 years of doing this. And that is my succession plan is internally in the team. And I'm trying to play my small part of bringing people into the industry that are from outside the industry. So as an example, I just hired my best friend who's been a missionary for 30 years. But he's going to be amazing at it because he can connect with people deeply. But he's like, Troy, I don't know anything about planning and investments. And I'm like, guess what? We got it. We're really good at that.

You got a great team of technicians and advisors.

Absolutely. I said, but what is hard for me to train is to build trust and rapport with clients and go deep with clients. That's way harder for me to do than financial planning, asset allocation. Like, that's table stakes. We got all that. But you got the intangibles that I'm looking for.

What you're describing is such a departure from the traditional investment manager focused solely on fee on AUM as their model. And you talk much more about completely serving clients more completely, going more deeply. It sounds like a little bit of a family office. Tell us a little bit about the value proposition, the deliverables to the client? What does that really look like multigenerationally in your firm?

Yeah, so I mean, it starts with, even before this was in fad, I was doing financial planning from day one, right? And that involved, I was talking to people about long-term care insurance from day one and the risk that they face. Many clients right now have collected millions of dollars on their long-term care policy. We would involve their CPA, their attorney, again, Today, that's all table stakes, but I was doing that from day one before it was in vogue.

It's table stakes today, but so many are still trying to adopt those services. You're, you're already many, many years ahead.

Well, and then I would say we have the team and then we have extensions of our team, right? So outside experts that we partner very closely with. So I have an expert that I use solely for Social Security and for health insurance, and she's awesome. Them, right? We have an attorney who comes into our office every single week to meet with clients. I'm regularly meeting with their CPA. I got health experts. Like, I've lined up a local radiologist to do full-body MRIs at a huge discount for all clients. Like, everyone who's 50 and up should be doing a full-body MRI every couple years because you're going to catch anything that's going on. So if you don't have have your health, it doesn't matter how much money you have. So we're talking about meaning and purpose and health and family. And we have a whole outside team of experts that we can bring to bear almost on any situation a client faces.

Brilliant. How is adding team members and expanding your office space affected your ability to grow?

So I think big and I tend to go big. So I just bought a 43,000 square foot office complex.

Holy smokes.

And gutted the whole top story. It's 12,000 square feet. So we're going from 2,600 square feet to 12,000.

You are thinking big.

I am thinking big. And I kind of went over the top. I'm a playful guy and I love to have fun. So I put in a huge curved golf simulator, shooting simulator, sports simulator, outdoor cigar bar, outdoor patio. It's just a great entertainment space.

Sounds like a community space for clients to even want to come Absolutely.

We've got a pickleball court in the indoor parking garage, right? So that's great. My team loves to come to work there every single day. Amazing views, amazing place to come to work, amazing place to entertain clients, have client events. And so I built that with the idea that someday we're going to be 30-plus people. And so I'm not going to have to move again. I have the room internally to grow to that size.

Okay, that's awesome. That's helpful to think about how big you think. Tell us a little bit about acquisitions. You know, the industry today seems like this furious merger and acquisition kind of world where inorganic growth is outweighing the focus over organic growth, and that's not been true for you. Why is culture fit non-negotiable? Why are you focusing on organic growth? Like, these are foundational to your success, but they're different from what we see maybe in the industry at large.

Ray, most of the stuff I've learned, I've learned by making mistakes. Unfortunately, there's the easy way and the hard way, and I've had to learn the hard way far too often. I didn't, I wasn't clear early on on our core values and our culture, right? And that caused me to hire at times the wrong people. So let me start with our hiring process because I've totally changed that up. First and foremost, it has to be a culture and core values fit. So we have an expert in the home office who knows our culture and our core values. She's the best in the home office. She does all of our interviews. If it's a go from her, my chief operating officer is next. If it's a go from her, the whole entire team interviews that person. If it's a go from them, I interview that person. And, Ray, here's the secret sauce. So I've realized my wife has a really great BS meter. And so she would come into the office in the past, meet a new team member, and that night she'd say, Troy, that's a mishire. They're not gonna work.

No kidding.

And she was right 100% of the time. And I'm like, what am I doing? Like, she needs to be involved in this process.

Sounds like she could help the whole industry.

She's pretty good. And so the last step of the process, if it's a go from everybody, is my wife and I take them and their spouse or significant other out for dinner to try to get to know them on a deeper level. We want to see how do they treat the waitstaff? How do they talk to their spouse or significant other? And my wife asks really good questions and she can kind of dig deep and see if someone's authentic. And she obviously knows me quite well and what's important so she can say, yeah, that's a fit for your culture and the rest of your team. And she has veto power. And since we've done it that way, I've not had one single mis-hire.

Oh, that's fantastic.

So when it comes to organic growth, we got that down. We're pretty good at it. On the acquisition side, I've only done one acquisition, and that's bringing on my COO role. But that I took very slow. It's someone I've known for 10 years. I transitioned clients to her a decade ago, and we took a year of kind of courting each other. To make sure our vision, our mission, our cultures, our core values aligned. And they aligned perfectly. And she just came on September of this year. And it's been awesome. It's been a total game changer for me.

So what is it just so tough to find another firm to merge into yours because of the cultural fit?

Yeah, because if you're, if you're getting a larger group, right, you, you might have people that fit your core values and your culture, but you have others that don't. And so what I've experienced is one bad apple, you know, taints the whole bunch, right? And so I'm going to be really hesitant on bringing on a larger group of advisors because I'm not sure what I'm getting. And we have such a beautiful thing today, Ray, that I don't want to dilute that. And so if it is the right fit, it's probably going to be onesies, twosies, and we're going to take our time to make sure it's the right fit. And if it isn't, The answer is for sure no, right? But if it's the right thing for them, right thing for us, right thing for the clients, then yeah, we'll bring them on.

So it's clear it hasn't impacted the growth of your firm. So what's working, stick with it.

Absolutely.

I wanna change gears and just talk about the differentiation that you've made in terms of the value proposition of clients and who you serve. What are your thoughts on serving new-to-wealth clients and their families that separates your firm apart from others?

Well, in the past, being a solo practitioner, I felt really bad because I didn't have the capacity to serve the kids of my best clients. Because if I said yes to them, I'm clogging the pipes too much. And I wanted to say yes, but I just didn't have capacity. So one of the things we've done in the new team is we have a new-to-wealth division, and I am really big on having the right level of expertise to match the right level of complexity, right? So we segmented all our clients based on their level of complexity. So now we have a new-to-wealth division where I can go to clients and say, hey, we can now handle your, your kids. In fact, we got great people. We're going to educate them. We're going to take really good care of them. They're served by our team. You know how we do it. So it's allowed us to bring on those, those new clients. And it's been a huge win.

Well, how do you price your services if you're serving sort of, you know, top end of the ultra high net worth, high net worth down to the mass affluent and the kids of your clients?

So one of the things in my top 10 list that I talked about was to have family tree pricing.

What is that?

So family tree pricing rolled out this last April. And so with all of my really good clients, I'm talking to them about this to say, listen, If your kids decide to become clients and we have this new to wealth division, here's how we'll serve them and walk through that, that they can take advantage of your buying power. So they will literally have costs that are 20 to 40% less than what they would pay on their own because we can household you together for buying power. And the parents absolutely love that and are responding by sending their kids. And what's fascinating is some of these kids are quite successful and they're actually helping lower the parents' fees 'cause they got some significant assets. So it's a win for the kids and it's been a win for the parents.

I like the way you term that, the family tree pricing.

Yes.

How do you think Edward Jones is gonna continue to help large ensemble teams like yours in the future?

Well, I look at it this way. What we're creating is a great client experience. We're creating a seamless transition plan. We're able to bring on new advisors and, and put them alongside a more experienced advisor to train and mentor them, right? So the training is top-notch. We have scalable growth and we're building an enduring enterprise. Like, what firm is going to look at that and say, no, we don't want that, right? I mean, it's a no-brainer. So Edward Jones has been very much behind us to say, what do you need to do this? Right. And they're giving us the tools, the resources, the technology we need to make it happen. So I think what's going to happen, Ray, and it already is, is The big are going to get bigger in our industry. Those people that really get it, you definitely see that happening today for sure. Yeah. And I think the best get even better. And my only caveat there, the best get better with great cultures and great leadership. And so I'm doing my part to help the firm learn. So we're going to hold a Teams summit at our office in Bismarck and fly in other top practitioners from across the country for us to share their best practices and ideas. We'll take them deep under the hood of what we're building and why we're doing it that way. We can learn from them, they can learn from us, and we're going to have firm leadership there to be learning from all of us.

That's terrific. Let's shift gears now and talk about the team because you're describing a bunch of that. How have you organized your team? I think you call them pods. And what effect does that have on client service and the advisor growth?

So one thing in doing research on culture I realized is as your team grows over 10 to 12 people, the culture starts to erode. And I obviously don't want that because that's a huge, huge part of us and our secret sauce. And so I would look at it as we're a team within the team, right? So we have pods of 3 or 4 individuals. So typically a lead advisor, a more junior advisor who's learning and being mentored, and then a client support specialist on that team. And so again, that makes it really scalable because new advisors that are coming on can be part of different pods, learn different styles. We all have have the Nelson Wealth Management way that we do it, right? But stylistic differences are great so they can learn and figure out what is my style and how does Troy do it versus Vanessa. So what we found in those pods, that's really where the culture is transferred to the new people that we bring on. And then we have regular whole team meetings where we celebrate examples of our culture and really hold those up and celebrate examples of of team members going above and beyond in terms of serving clients. So clients love it because they know this is my SWAT team within Nelson Wealth Management, right? And it again allows us to create an enduring enterprise that we can move people around in, in and out and make sure that culture passes on to every single person that we bring onto the team.

It sounds like it's a way that you're able to scale the impact that you have with families. And different members of families. I'm curious if you don't mind sharing with us a little bit of a story where you went deep with a client and/or a team member and it made the difference.

Yeah, so two things come to mind, actually three stories, but so going deep with the client, I just got a call two weeks ago, client out of Fargo, super successful, built a real estate, billion-dollar real estate empire from scratch. Scratch in 15 years. We were at Barrett-Jackson together last year, and a group of guys, and him and I are having a side conversation, and I'm sharing with him some of my struggles with ADD, with anxiety, with not sleeping well, and some of the things that I've done that have really helped me out. And by me being open and vulnerable with him, he did everything that I suggested he look at doing. And so that was a year ago. He called me 2 weeks ago and he said, "Joy, I just gotta thank you. My life has never been better. I have more peace and more joy in my life. I'm doing everything you told me to do, and it's paid off in spades." And he's like, "Thank you for being open and vulnerable. Most guys aren't willing to do that, and they're wanting to talk about how great they are or whatever else." And he's like, "You going there had a huge impact on my life." And then another story is within the team. Is— this was probably a year ago. We do team offsites on a quarterly basis. And for one of our offsites, I did an affirmation exercise where you can find these online. And so it's a bunch of descriptive words. You circle all the words that apply to that team member. And then the rubber meets the road in that you use 3 of those words and use examples from their life of how they served a client or how they interacted with another team member. To really show them that you see them and call that out in them. So I went around and did that for every single team member. There were lots of tears shed, and I wasn't expecting this. We got done and they said, Troy, we want to affirm you.

Whoa.

And so I took all this time to do this, and they just did it on the cuff. And they each went around the room and affirmed me. I was crying like crazy at the end. I mean, it was just this wonderful, wonderful bonding exercise as a team. So you can do something as simple as that. That, but that really moves the needle in terms of relationships.

Give us an example of somebody on your team. Let's roleplay that affirming exercise. I'm kind of curious, how does it work?

Yeah, so you would pick— so let's say Kristen as an example. I'm like, Kristen, you remember everyone's birthdays and you acknowledge significant moments in their life. Like, you see people in that matter. And I love that about you. So it's as simple as that, just calling out the great things that you see in their life and acknowledging that in front of the rest of the team.

Yeah, at ClientWise, we have an exercise we call the high five. We use a platform called 15five.com, 1-5 and the word F-I-V-E dot com. And Troy, it's really fantastic. Every Monday we do that affirming exercise as a team at ClientWise. Where anytime during the course of the week, anybody can high-five another team member, and they do it digitally online, and then it drops into our Slack. So everybody sees the affirmation in the moment, and then it gets memorialized on the Monday morning momentum meeting we call the Mo. And we end Monday morning's momentum meeting with the high-fives, and they read out. So if I gave you a high-five this week, for your preparation for this podcast, for example, which you were incredibly thoughtful and prepared, and I high-fived you, and then I would hashtag one of our company values. It is remarkable to see the team members just really gel together for these high-fives, and we won't miss a Monday Morning Moe without doing the high-fives.

Ray, I'm gonna steal that idea. I love it.

It's simple and it works right into the culture. Okay, I know we're bumping up on time, so let me ask you, as you look to the future, future and you think about financial services and what's going on with your team, what excites you the most?

So Ray, I want to read you something about AI. So everyone's talking about AI, right? And so when you ask AI itself, will financial advisors be replaced by AI? This is how—

Wait, wait, hold on. You asked AI? Yep. That's a great question.

I love it.

I've not thought about that.

Yeah. So I asked AI, will financial advisors be replaced by AI? I love it.

That's great.

And so here's one of the key things, human connection and trust. Financial advice often involves sensitive personal situations, and clients need the deep trust and contextual understanding that only a human relationship can provide.

Oh, that's fantastic.

And so that's everything I think we're talking about today. So I want my team to be trusted guides for clients, right? I look at us more as, in a way, counselors, executive coaches, is we're a resource for anything a client is facing. I want to be that first call no matter what's going on in a client's lives. And so my wife has said, Troy, you should have been a counselor. And I'm like, well, I kind of am a counselor. You're doing it. That's what I do every single day. And so that's where the real money is. That's where the real value is.

Well, you know what's great about that? Trusted guide, counselor, executive coach, first call. You didn't say a portfolio manager, tax advisor. I mean, you're doing some of those things as well, but it's the human aspect that's the differentiator here.

100%. Yep. Everything else is table stakes. We better do that well, but how do you go above and beyond?

That's great. Thanks for sharing that. That's a real surprise, but I appreciate you dropping that in there. How do you anticipate the upcoming wave of advisor retirements? And we've been saying for decades, the advisors are retiring, the advisors are retiring, and now we're bumping up. With a large percentage of our industry over the next 5 and 7 years exiting. What do you think about that?

I'm kind of taking a different track. So if you build it, they will come, or if you build it really well, they will come. So I'm focused on building out my team in the very best way I can because we already have people approaching us that want to partner with us. And so I have no doubt we're going to have tons of advisors saying, Man, you guys serve clients so well. I want my clients to be served by you guys when I retire. And that's going to happen in droves. And that's great. But again, I'm going to come back to, is it the right fit for our culture and our core values and our team? So when those opportunities arise, the answer is yes if it's the right fit. But if it's not, we're going to say no. So we're going to do our part to help and make acquisitions. But it's going to be slow and methodical, and it's got fit.

That's terrific. We are seeing more and more teams recognize that you've got to remain relevant in the eyes of the client. So you talked today about this human aspect of connecting with clients and team members at a deep level to make an impact in their families multigenerationally. We actually see the only way that happens in ensemble structures, meaning not just the team, but, but a true ensemble where everybody plays a different part, but those parts work well together. What do you think about the industry and Edward Jones specifically continuing to evolve to support these ensemble practices in an industry that's been primarily lone rangers?

Yeah, I would just say it's, I mean, it's not the only way in my mind. So it's kind of a choose your own adventure. So there's some people that are going to say, I'm not willing to tackle that, and that's okay. Right? So to me, the firm needs to have numerous paths for people to choose and just make sure those are really solid and they support them the best way possible. I do think I think what we're building is a better way to do it. And I think the firm gets that also. So to me, it's kind of both and of give us everything we need to do this well and replicate that as much as you can across the country. But you have other people who are gonna choose a different path and you need to be able to accommodate them.

All right, let's begin to wrap up. If you could offer one piece of advice to advisors listening today, what would it be?

I would say that your story matters, um, and take time to dig into it, um, because it's really why you do what you do. And if you take time to go deep on yourself, that's going to pay huge dividends for your team, your client, your firm, and your community.

Okay, so after hearing your story, what do you want most for people to understand about your journey and your mission going forward?

This is gonna sound super countercultural, but I would say to embrace hardship, to embrace pain and suffering. Because if you embrace those, for me, I would say God has helped me get better and not bitter from that pain and suffering. There's always stuff to learn from that. And I would also say I've been on a journey, Ray, of what I would call success to significance. So for a lot of years, I was selfishly chasing success, hoping it would fill this void in my heart, and it never did, right? So I'd also tell you, success is a little overrated, but significance is where it's at.

It never gets old.

Yeah. And to me, significance is, for me, it's God first, my faith, and then it's others-focused. Success is many times self-focused. Self-focused, sure. Significance is other-focused. And I love the quote that my fruit grows on other people's trees.

That's beautiful. Troy, thanks for joining us on The Way Forward today.

Ray, it's been great.

You know, your story reminds us that leadership isn't just about growing bigger teams or managing more assets, that it's about becoming the kind of leader who can guide others through challenge, growth, and change. I think you'd agree with that.

Absolutely.

You've shown us that vulnerability is a strength, even in today's podcast. I really appreciate your transparency and authenticity, and that sabbaticals, 3.5 months long, can actually inspire creativity, and that succession and growth are true truly linked. So thanks for that. I appreciate it. For our listeners, whether you're leading a solo practice to today or running a large ensemble, for me, Troy's insights highlighted the importance of investing in yourself as much as your business. And because when leaders grow, everyone wins. Until next time, I'm Ray Scalfani, and this is The Way Forward presented by Barron's.

This podcast was brought to you by Wells Fargo Advisors. Looking for a firm your clients can't outgrow? Wells Fargo Advisors offers financial advisors full balance sheet solutions with wealth planning, investment products, banking, and lending that meet the needs of affluent to ultra-high net worth clients. Build your practice your way and on your schedule with independent and employee model options designed to meet your needs today and tomorrow. Learn more at joinwfadvisors.com.