The Achieve Podcast - Paul Adams (Sound Financial Group)

Welcome to another episode of the Achieve Podcast, the show where we highlight leaders, creators, and entrepreneurs, those who are building meaningful businesses, shaping their industries, and having an impact. I'm Taylor Baker Baker, your host, and excited today to be joined by Paul Adams, the CEO and founder of Sound Financial Group, and you can find them at sfgway.com. Paul, thank you for joining us today.

I'm so glad to be here.

Oh, my pleasure. This will be a good one, I'm sure. We've already been talking off camera. So for those getting to know you and the company, give us the backstory real quick on how you got into the space and who you're serving.

That's a really, really great question. I recently, I was on another podcast and they just happened to ask me a lot of philosophical questions and I took the recording of the podcast, threw it in Claude And I was like, just write a position paper about our philosophy from this. You know, loaded the transcript in and what it spit out to me, because this one conversation I had touched on many stories I've told about the history of the company, but never all at once. And it really became this. So we recently did this is my point. And I would highly encourage that for anybody who's wondering like who you are in business or anything else, have a conversation with somebody else, have it recorded, have them ask you lots of questions, share all the stories. And then throw it into one of the AI and just say, write me a 7-page paper about this, give it an hour of content and see what happens. You'd be surprised what it'll tell you about your beliefs and understanding in a way that you didn't know. So who we do primarily— I started in the business super young. I was 18 years old, started an intern for a financial firm. So next year I will have been doing this 30 years and it has been an amazing industry to be in. The problem is the structure of the industry. Most of my industry is dominated by what many people call the wolves of Wall Street, but we call big box financial retail. Okay. And big box financial retail is built on a sales model. Now, those advisors can be highly ethical and still be in a sales model, but how you know an advisor is in a sales model is that they meet with you several times, give you quote unquote free consulting along the way. But the only outcome and the only way that they're compensated is to be compensated on you either having them manage money you have or letting them sell you a product. Mm-hmm. And that's always been a big problem for me. It's a little bit like going to your pharmacist and asking for your recommendation when the pharmacist gets commission or gets fees off the drugs. Even the fiduciary registered investment advisory, how you know they're in a sales model is they do a lot of work for free to try to earn your business. Now, have you ever had somebody even just— let's just take the— a very simple profession, a lawn mower. Does a lawn mower ever come and mow your yard and then say, do you like it? Would you like me to start mowing your yard? Rarely, if ever. And it would be a sales technique, not an advising technique from the lawn mower guy. It is a sales technique from the— say, from the financial salespeople. So what we did instead is we changed our model where our first meeting we asked no financial questions. We say, here's our philosophy. If you want, you could chat with us, or you can go listen to 10 years' worth of podcasts and over 543 videos on YouTube from us.

Wow.

Our philosophy is open and public, which means we're not changing something. That sales model of I'm going to change something because I think Taylor is a little more interested in this than this. Instead, we're engaged for a fee upfront that retains us for a year, and we only make an offer to people. That's why we have an application process after the philosophy meeting. Is we need to know enough about them financially to know if it's ethical to charge them a fee. It may not be. And sometimes people engage with us because they like the podcast or read one of our books or saw one of us speak. And the problem is we, we look at every new client as a wonderful opportunity, but it's also a serious opportunity for reputational risk on our part because if we dissatisfy somebody. So the last thing we do that's unique that just kind of Ties into we should be trustworthy first. You know, I'm a Bible-believing Christian, so that's super important to me. So we're the first firm in Washington State to ever get regulatory approval to give our clients a full refund of our upfront fee for any reason in 6 months.

Wow.

And believe it or not, the state didn't like the idea at first, and I had to go to them. I took their mission, vision, values off the state website about protecting the consumers and went back to them and How could I better protect the consumer? And in that industry, my industry, and many of your listeners have probably experienced this in your transaction for maybe getting a financial advisor. What you find is you as the consumer taking all of the risk, although the advisor is the one who should have all the knowledge and they should be the one taking the risk. And so that's why we have an application process. And then if we don't make somebody an offer, which happens, people do apply and we cannot make them an offer. We then for free give them an hour with an advisor because again, ethically, how do we tell people about big box financial retail and the wolves of Wall Street and how that's interfering with their future? And then like, hey, sorry, we can't make an offer. Best of luck out there. So that's a little bit about what our firm does.

Wow, that's impressive. So as far as the structure itself, how big is the team in the organization?

So we've got 9 total full-time employees. Uh, and they're all scattered throughout the US because the other thing we did uniquely back in 2017 when we started this design-build model where you engage us as the architect and it's a separate choice if you want us to be the builder, you can hire somebody else, you can do it yourself. We're gonna give you the same advice either way. So, uh, shoot, I forgot where I was going with that.

Uh, how big the team again? How big the team is?

Oh yeah. So, 9 total people, 4 advisors and the rest are admin and they're all over the country because we went remote years ago. I've always felt like in a financial firm you have these advisors who make great income and they have lots of freedom and autonomy and then that staff just needs to be there at 8:00 AM every day. They stay there till 5:00. The only way you can have flexibility is PTO. So since we are remote, it gives us the ability to have one of our guys that goes to like NBA Finals, Super Bowls, all of that. As an admin because his friends from college are all hedge fund managers and they send him out ahead. He's an amazing administrator, runs our securities business. But he'll just say, "Hey, can I just work remote because I need to lock down the Airbnb in Arizona a week before and I'm gonna get it all stocked up before everybody else flies out." And we're like, "Yes, that'd be awesome." And we, you know, send pictures. That's the— but that we can give. Like, during COVID one of our team's mom was really sick in two states over, and she was able to go and basically live with her parents for three weeks during COVID while still getting on and working her schedule. Because to her, she wouldn't have done it because she loves us and wouldn't have left us in the lurch. So it's not that we would have lost out on her if we didn't give her the opportunity. She would have never done it and lived somewhat dissatisfied as a result. So we try to give them, our staff, that kind of freedom and autonomy as well.

So what turning points, positive or negative, have molded and shaped the way you think about and run the organization? Mm.

Well, I'll give you probably the biggest is over the years. So I was in college in the late '90s and I was already an intern and had a lot of my licenses. For this industry. And then when I was in class, we had a teacher, a professor, his name was Jagdish Mehta. And I wish I could do an impression of him because he had that beautiful North Indian accent that somebody could read you the phone book and you could just enjoy it with a bit of British in it. Anyway, when I asked him, say, you're teaching everybody they should expect 18% rate of return. But if I tell people more than 12, I could lose all my licenses and maybe be fined or like terrible. I'd lose my career. How can you tell people 18? And he said in that beautiful North Indian accent, "Ah, the regulators have not caught up to the new economy." And I remember grabbing the edge of my desk and just saying, I can't learn from these people. Not because I knew a better way yet, but I knew that teaching something that would get me terminated from the industry was definitely not it. And it wasn't but 9 months later, the tech bubble burst and all of those returns people had achieved for years in these growth stocks evaporated in less than a year. Yeah, but that's the regulators not catching up to the new economy. It's like, no, that's people getting overzealous and teaching other people inappropriate things. But because I didn't have a degree— now, I didn't figure this out till I was in my 30s, but because I didn't have a degree, I felt like I needed to be the smartest person in the room because there was no piece of paper on my wall saying I knew anything. So I began to study ferociously for the next 10 years. On top of that, I averaged about $40,000 a year on coaches over that period of time. Not the people that were willing to teach me for free or take me to lunch or send me on a due diligence trip for a financial firm, but people teaching me real business and client strategy that I had to write very big checks to. And what that did for me that I think separated me was everybody else who finished college. And you probably remember friends saying this, like, oh, can't wait to not open a book again. Well, I never got that because I always felt less than. So I just kept studying and kept learning. And then the entire time, there's some things you can learn out there, you know, whether it's personal development courses, all that, that I think can really lead somebody off track in their career. And so one thing that was a huge benefit to me is that I had the filter of my faith, but built on biblical principles. So when something fell outside of that, the things that tend to distract people in their careers when it comes to coaching events, it just helped me continue to lock in and use effectively the knowledge that's reticent in this amazing book that's thousands of years old. And use that as a filter for a lot of this modern-day stuff. Because if you use it as a filter, you really find out what the principles are versus the tips and tricks some seminar leader is teaching you. So I think that's the turning point. I, I've never talked about it that way before, but I think that's the answer.

I love that distinction, the, the principles versus the tips and tricks. Yeah, it's the quick gains versus the long game. So when you think about your, your outreach, your messaging and marketing systems, What's been working well to attract and retain good clients?

So what's funny is, so as I said, we've had the podcast a long time and we have never really marketed the podcast. Like sometimes we put an ad on a video or something like that, but what it has been for primarily is we're not gonna work with everybody.

Mm-hmm.

And as a Christian, how do I know I know things that are going to massively help a lot of people, except it doesn't make sense for some people to write the check to learn the knowledge. And it doesn't— and I can't lower my price to give them the knowledge because if I do that, I'm not— I'm, I'm somehow I'm either taking something away from another potential client that could use my level of horsepower, or I'm compromising for my family, which seems like not a good idea to do for a client.

Yeah.

So We do the podcast so that we never have to feel bad about saying somebody's not a fit because all they have to do is invest a little bit more time. We're unbridled on the podcast. We don't keep anything secret. We just published, was it early this year or late last year, our annuity stacking strategies that just change retirement income for people. And we don't even love annuities, but we found that with high interest rates and the current mortality, rates, you can get an 8% rate of return for the rest of your life on a chunk of money so that the rest of your money can grow further. And we don't like it, but the math makes sense. We just publish that whole thing and we put it all out there on the internet and people can use it if they want to. The other thing that's done for us is we used to do all the regular things that financial firms do for their clients. You send the birthday cards and you get them chocolates at Christmas and just, just that little relational touch. And then I don't know, maybe it was the beginning of COVID or we had just had a person leave and something changed in the system. We quit doing it, but we were doing the podcast and then we're like, holy mackerel, we don't have to do all the stuff all those other people do because what we're giving our clients is not something that's going to increase their caloric intake for the day, but something that could actually increase their knowledge today. And they choose to use it or not. But there's something that changes in them knowing it's a resource. So we, we do get some clients from the podcast, but the greatest place we get our new clients is all from introductions. And we tell clients that who are the people that if let's say you're working with us and it all goes to plan and let's say you decide that you're going to be done at 63 or 55 or whatever it is, and you're inviting all of your closest friends to Hawaii to celebrate your retiring and you are not going to need to work anymore. You have reached what we call durable financial independence for the sake of a work-optional lifestyle. And you made it. And you invite your friends to go celebrate with you. And they say, how were you able to retire so early? Yeah, I've been working with this firm and we meet quarterly and they have a totally different philosophy and they coached us over the years and helped us avoid a lot of the errors we saw our friends make. And the person would be like, why? Why don't you tell me about them? Mm-hmm. I was like, whoever it is, it would break your heart to hear them say, why didn't you tell me about them? You should introduce them to us. And what that does, because of how our process is shaped, the first meeting is here's our philosophy. We're not going to ask you any financial questions. You're going to be able to take some of what you learn from us and put it to better work in your finances, whether you ever work with us again. And so it'll— and we tell them upfront, like, our whole purpose of this philosophy meeting, if Taylor, you introduce somebody to us, I would tell them outright, my goal is to impress you so much in this that you just thank Taylor Baker Baker for what you learned today, even if we never meet again, because I want Taylor Baker Baker happy with me. And if you're somebody that we could care for, I want you to know about it. But there's no offer to even be made in our first meeting because you have to apply to become a client. We need to make a good assessment there to know if it's even ethical to make somebody an offer and then they need to make a really clear choice. So like no sales stuff. We get to the end of the application meeting and I'm like, we would be of help. Would you like— and if I notice any little bit, I'm like, hey guys, I'm not here to convince you. Let's just break and let's schedule a— you guys have all the talking you want, prepare questions if you want, and we'll just talk in 2 or 3 days for 15 minutes and let's just complete really well either way. And it makes life so easy for us and everybody else.

I love that. It's so beautiful. And, and I love that your philosophy, like, let's give, because it always comes back, whether you call it karma, whether you call it luck, what you call it blessings, like, whatever you want to call it, it comes back around.

And you can— farmers have been planting seeds and waiting for fruit for a long time. And what a lot of people are doing is not planting any seeds and then wondering why they don't have any fruit.

Yes. So true. I mean, you give the instruction manual to anybody to fly a plane doesn't mean they can fly it, right? You're like, here's all our information, let us fly the plane for you if it makes sense. Yeah, yeah, love that. So when it comes to your sales and marketing, where do you still see opportunity or money on the table?

Hmm, it's a good question. I would imagine if we could get the podcast actually making money. Like, I don't know that we waste money in marketing given how we, we gain our clients now. Like, our— the thing's very different about us because it's the firm's responsibility to attract clients. Our advisors have— and this is way different than any firm I know of— our advisors have zero business development responsibility. Now, you know, they bump into somebody, they get along with them, they decide to take them through our process, that's great. But nobody in our firm other than us as owners and partners have any responsibility to attract new clients to the firm. Their job is to be really good caretakers of the people in their care. Our people aren't hunters, they are farmers. And everybody knows what it's like to be in the room with that advisor that has built their career on commission-only sales and there's a certain hunter mentality to them. So, but so I don't know that we have any wasted money in marketing because we're, we're pretty lean on that. But where I do see a big opportunity would be if the podcast ever caught on enough, but it hasn't been its purpose. But if it— I mean, if it kicked off $2,000 a month, well, then we could call it a skunkworks. We could just waste $2,000 a month on all kinds of things to see if they'd work. And, and I will say one thing I've enjoyed more recently is I've been doing reaction videos to the crazy— like, I just did one on Coffeezilla on his channel Voidzilla, did something on this new preferred stock that promises 11% every year forever, and it's got a lot of holes. And I just did a reaction video where Coffeezilla is talking about as a scam, and then I'm able to narrow it down. But this is how this kind of thing affects your personal balance sheet, and this is how this that looks seductive, because keep in mind, the reason lies work, like high rates of return or whatever, because we want to believe they're real. That's why they work. And so then we take something like that and then make it more applicable to your personal balance sheet in life rather than just kind of a general, like, oh gosh, stay away from that scam. But you're not— you may not learn from that video how to avoid the others.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Wow. So with all the talk around like the AI and automation, where have you guys found ways to utilize that? Those are most tools.

Well, one is we have this one particular software that is pretty outdated, meaning none of the tools do anything special and they're simple future value, etc., and they're wonderful tools and we pay a lot for them every year. Well, one Sunday afternoon, 2 months ago, I rebuilt on my own in an afternoon. Like, by mean afternoon is like 3 hours. I rebuilt that entire software suite, or it's 95% of what we use, in Claude. Wow. Where now I have these saved little files that open up in Chrome and do everything this expensive software does. Now, we haven't finished working out the kinks to totally replace that software, but it was a little bit of a big mind opening. For instance, back when you were, you know, in the typical designing software world, what you had to do, you design software, got a database, client information, etc. Well, now I could run a bunch of calculators for Taylor Baker Baker that we looked at and assessed. I just put them in a folder, the PDFs of them, right? Yeah. And then let's say you say, hey, could we go back to that calculator and use it again? I don't need a database. I can put that PDF in Claude and say, make it a calculator again, and it'll just reproduce the calculator with all the same numbers in it. And then we can change it. You want to see it 5% instead of 4%? So I can rebuild the software without needing database or anything else. We've used it, of course, for the things like reviewing documents for clients. But one of the biggest ones we have is we periodically meet people that have a type of investment called a separately managed account. Okay. And in that account, instead of having a mutual fund that inside of it has thousands of holdings, they directly hold like 3,000 different securities. Okay. Now, can you imagine the 150, 200-page statement?

Yeah. Wow.

We now can load that into our AI portfolio tool and it will, it has to chew on it a while, but it will extract every single position and then give us what that portfolio is in total so that we know how much a small cap, how much is this, how much is that. That task by itself, just the data entry into a tool that would have done it for us, would have taken one of our staff like 6, 7 hours. Yeah. And we just told our staff, and I highly recommend this for anybody because AI is going to scare your team regardless industry you're in. We started with our staff of, we're going to have you work with our operations head and you adopt projects to have Claude do the things that you want to do the least. The things you least like about your job is what we're going to teach you how to use AI for first.

I like that.

And it's really created an embracing of artificial intelligence within our firm rather than fear. I love that. Yeah, so it's been, it's been really good. And we've been pretty technology forward, but it's been really good to make sure our staff can feel safe with AI.

Yeah, I mean, that whole approach and ethos about it, instead of like How do we get AI to replace my staff? Or how do I get my— how do I force my staff to take it? Yeah, the way you're approaching that is beautiful.

Well, I don't know about everybody else, but I've got amazing team members. We built this team because they're people I like. We only bring on clients that we want to spend time around for the decades to come, and we don't hire employees we don't want to be around for decades to come. So it seems terrible to free up cash flow but lose that person. And not only they want to adopt AI more, they feel like they have ownership in it. They have choice, they have autonomy, and they— and we're watching them. And what happens is they get rid of the thing they don't like. All of a sudden they get better at the things they do.

Yeah. Wow. Wow. So looking at the trajectory of the business, if you had to pick one constraint to focus on for the next 90 days and solve, what would it be? Mm.

Next 90 days. So by the beginning of the third quarter, you edit these, right? So you could clip it and get me back in that same position. I actually think I have this written down. I want to see how good my business planning is, but I think I might have one of our biggest constraints already written down. I'm sorry, we're a little over, but at least this Me doing this won't cause it to cause us to go long, but I want to give you a really good answer. So I think the biggest restraint that we have right now is we have used the same CRM for a long time, and that CRM we have some connectedness to some things that aren't connected, doesn't do anything with social, and they don't have much of an AI-forward philosophy. Gotcha. And one of the big things that we do, we take really thorough notes. Not only we take notes in the meetings, but we have an AI recapture that is a specific financial AI that is processing, transcribing, and sending summaries both to the client and to us. But they're all separate systems.

Okay.

We're looking at a new CRM that either brings outside programs in native or is, uh, in inside the tool. The tool is doing it itself. Gotcha. And one of the things, it's one of those that I don't know that— well, I know we didn't acknowledge it as a constraint, but what we did this year, and we're starting to do this across the board, is any software we've had more than 3 years we go back to them and get it re-demoed to us. Okay. Because they add new features, all that stuff. And then if there are things about that that are unsatisfactory, we're now having our operations manager do true RFPs to say who should be our vendor for this. And that's this process we're going through right now. And her ability to use AI to compare these tools and then take that information, make it wildly simple to me and my partner. Unparalleled. She could have done it before, but what she walked us through, instead of it taking a matter of minutes, would have taken her 3 days. Wow. And so what happened before? She didn't take 3 days to prepare. What she did was present us with complex, difficult, inconcise, and un-aesthetically pleasing amounts of information, and then my partner and I have to sort through it.

Yeah.

And so it's enabling her, and now What's happening to her cognitive ability to sort more tasks, hold more responsibility? That's all going up as AI holds the cognitive load that she was holding before. Wow. And so one thing we try to do with all of our employees, advisors, and to the extent we can with our clients, is remove cognitive load, because cognitive load will decrease performance, period.

I love that. That's beautiful. So when you look at your own journey, the wins and mistakes, what lessons stand out to you?

Um, my biggest lesson is you have to plan your personal ambition first. Everybody goes through life, for the most part, following their career. Like, I'm getting this education, I'm going to do this job, and then this sort of the next promotion is the next thing. Or if they're a business owner, it's just the new growth of the business and everything else. And then what they tend to do is expand this. That gives them a certain amount of financial capacity. And then what people tend to do is just live up to their financial capacity over time. And so it's not that at the beginning of their career they started out saying, I really want to go out and drink wine 3 days a week. You know, that wasn't part of their plans years ago, but as their income went up and they have some friends that do it, they just kind of do that too. But it eats up financial capacity when you drift into those things. Yeah. So we recommend to our clients is write out your personal ambition. What do you want your life to look like? I think a very good tool to do this is you can find this online. It's Fernando Flores's 13 Permanent Domains of Human Concern. And I think there's a 13-page white paper out there. Brilliant man. But what you think about is over the next year, in the— pick 6 of the domains like my health, my money, my career, like pick some of those things and just Here's what I want it to look like in 6 months. Here's what I want it to look like in 3 years, 5 years, and then a wild guess at 10. Now, the reason you do that is because that's the life you want to live. Now, to live that life is going to cost something.

Mm-hmm.

It's going to cost two somethings.

Okay.

The cost to do that lifestyle now and the cost to reserve for our old age when people will not value us in the marketplace anymore. And when they do, do we have the financial capacity to continue that lifestyle when we're old?

Yeah.

So you gotta fund two lifestyles only after you know what you wanna do with your life and what it's gonna cost and how much you gotta save. That's it. You shouldn't even look for a job until you know those things. We get dragged around by the nose like a bull with a ring in its nose by our career.

Mm-hmm.

And so as a, for instance, when I make You know, let's say I make $300,000 more this year than I anticipated. You know what I'm going to change about my life? Nothing. I got it just the way I want it. I'm looking out the window at a great big shop I got. You know, I'm going to— I own a tractor. I have 5 acres. I have a gun range on my property. By the way, I do own a financial firm with hundreds of millions of dollars under management, but I do live like I shoe horses for a living. Okay, but, but I have the life that I want. So making more money gives me the capacity, maybe be more generous or make my balance sheet more secure, but it's not going to change the next car I drive. That's not the case for most people. And so what that also does is something that, uh, for those of that are Bible fans, in Ephesians Paul talks about cultivating contentment. I've been happy with much, I've been happy with little. And one of my biggest tricks for cultivating contentment, of being super happy with where I am right now, is you've heard the saying, comparison is the thief of all joy. As many people feel like, I don't have a good enough car, I don't have nice enough clothes, my beard isn't long enough, whatever they feel bad about because of comparison. Well, comparison is the thief of all joy unless you compare yourself to the right things. And so, for instance, I go back and think all the time about what it was like to do this thing we're doing 150 years ago. Like, think about the travel from Northern Washington down to you 150 years ago. When I say I would say goodbye to my family to come see you, I mean, it's goodbye. Yeah, I'm going to be gone for months just going back and forth. And God forbid if winter hits, I might not be back for a year and or maybe not back at all. And even if you went back to the 1950s, I wouldn't make a drive as far as you unless me and a friend of mine who knew about cars, we just went over my whole car to a T. We had a toolbox in the trunk, all kinds of preparation. And now we live in such abundance that people don't even think when they go to work, you know, tens of miles from their home, They don't even consider what they're going to eat for lunch that day until they're hungry. Yeah, I get that wasn't possible 80 years ago. There weren't these level of restaurants everywhere. And so, and the fact that the, let's say, a household making $40,000 a year in Washington, we like, oh my gosh, that sounds really awful. Except that person has a set of luxuries that the richest person in the world didn't have access to 200 years ago. The richest person in the world, maybe arguably most of the luxuries that somebody would have had 100 years ago. Yeah, in terms of dependable car, ability to communicate, having air conditioning, right? That's like, we have all of that now, and it allows you to cultivate contentment, which allows you to tune out a lot of the noise that distracts people either from their families, their personal life, or, you know, or in their business.

Wow. I love that. That needs to be brought up more often. Like, what are you comparing it to?

Yeah, that. And if you— and if you set your personal ambition first, then here's the other thing. I don't care that somebody else achieved more than me because I was shooting for this. I wasn't shooting for whatever you were shooting for. Like how many people we've seen make dire financial mistakes because they're chasing— they heard a friend made a lot of money in a real estate deal and they lose their tails. Because they tried to do the same thing. And if I went and asked them like, what was that real estate deal going to improve in your life? It was nothing. So why? And yet so it's those things by it allows you to turn out the noise and by tuning out the noise, you actually save yourself a lot over your financial career, like which is a lot longer than your regular career.

Yeah, I love that distinction. You're fine. And it's turning out, tuning out the noise.

Wow. There's a great documentary called Turn Out the Noise that you can find, I think, on Netflix or YouTube. That was actually released by a firm called Dimensional Fund Advisors, and that's, that's who we use primarily for our asset management. Very academic institution. But Turn Out the Noise is a bit of a documentary of where they come from in the 1960s up through today.

Wow. I'll check that out for sure.

Turn on.

So last question for you, Paul. When you think about the next stages of the business, what are you most excited about?

Growing to stay. At the end of 2023, we had a private equity-backed firm take a really great run at us, and it was a very pleasant experience. And I had checked at the beginning because our philosophy that we teach our clients is very different. And so the first thing I talked about with any acquirer at that time was Hey, you need to know this is our philosophy. And it seemed like we had a very brief conversation, but it seemed like we were pretty locked in and okay. So we went through the entire kind of evaluation, socialization of an offer, etc., and it was walkaway money for me. I could have been done, just, I don't know, run my tractor all day. I'd have plenty of money for diesel. But after settling on that number, We then dug deeper into their philosophy and I found out why we're so valuable to these firms. And it's because if you take the big box financial retail of 95% of our industry and you plopped it on our model, it'll make the owner a lot more money. And my partner and I had to look at each other and say, would we ever— is there enough money that we feel good about having taught everything we taught and then see it all just go up? And we decided no. And so we made a decision then, and that's one of the reasons for our growth. Most people are growing to scale and get their payday. And what we've decided to do is we actually have to grow our team big enough that we have enough people to succeed us, and we need to grow people that also know how to build successors. If you're going to have real legacy, then you have to have practices philosophy and culture that doesn't just make the current team good, but makes the next team as good. And so that's been a big deal for us. So that's why that's been so exciting to me in a little bit of a shift in my worldview, as I view both the way we serve our clients and the way we serve our employees as a type of ministry. And, you know, to the extent that I can act the way the New Testament tells me I should act with people, in the world, the better off the world is and the better off my life is. And so knowing that we're bringing people on and the entire purpose is for them to one day be owners of the firm, and the only hit we take is it's like a 20% hit over market sale of a business like ours when you sell internally, and we're okay with that. So that's what we're excited about over the next 5 years is continuing to grow this team. And what I'm most excited about is we have two of our advisors that are so bright and so smart that when we hire our next couple of advisors, they're going to be the primary mentors of them instead of me and my partner. And that's where legacy really starts to happen.

Yeah. So for those who want to get involved, either want to look at your guys's process or maybe even join the team, they can reach out LinkedIn, sfgway.com, anywhere else you want to send them.

No, I think those are the two. Info@sfgway.com if you know, if you just want to chat with somebody, if anybody wanted to have a 15-minute phone call or even have a, if you knew you wanted to hear our philosophy, like I say, we love sharing that with people. We'd be happy to do it with anybody. And then you can find our podcast. It's called More Than Commas because your life is more, your wealth is more than the commas on your balance sheet.

Ah, it's beautiful.

More than commas. And we just had former Super Bowl champion Jordan Babineaux. On our podcast because he's built a business called Pivot to Win. Like, how do you be at the top of your game in the NFL? And then it's just— and it just one day they say, bring your playbook in and go see the coach, grab your playbook and see the coach. You know what that means? You're leaving that playbook with the coach and you're walking out and everybody knows it. And I've sat with him. We've been at some events and talking to him about it. It's like most of us have never had that because it's not like if your boss fires you as an executive with Boeing, it's like, well, go be an executive with Airbus. Yeah, but this is like, no, this— there's nobody else that employs people for this job but this organization, and you are done. And then what do you do? And so it's his book Pivot to Win. But so we've got great stuff like that out there that we hope could be enriching to anybody and add value to their life, even if they never reach out to us.

Awesome. Yes, definitely check that out. And thank you for coming on, sharing so much wisdom, so much insight. And a philosophy. I love it.

Taylor, I really enjoy it. You brought the best out of me.

There's a lot of good in there to bring out, wasn't hard. And thank you to our sponsors of today's episode, Achieve Fractional, which provides fractional executive leadership for growing businesses. And if you enjoyed the episode, share it with a friend, with a colleague. If you're not sure where your balance sheet is or where it should be and where it's going, reach out to Paul and team, just see what they're doing and see how it overlays and help and bless your life. So reach out and we'll see you in the next episode of the Achieve Podcast.