Before I get started, I wanted to reiterate my periodic reminder that the B2Bahnsen substack is intended to be for those in the financial advisory profession, those aspiring to be in it, or those whose work is adjacent to it. I suspect from time to time that some of the subscribers might be coming here looking for investment commentary (which I do at Dividend Cafe) or some type of ideological commentary (which I do at Bahnsen.com). I think the content here at B2Bahnsen will be annoying to those not looking for a, well, B2B kind of vibe. I just wanted to reiterate my attempt at truth-in-advertising.

I also wanted to shamelessly plug my new book, Profit from the Profit: The Past, Present, and Future of Dividend Growth Investing. The book’s website is here. The Amazon link is here. And if any of you want to buy bulk to give away to clients please reach out and we can accommodate directly with the publisher (at cost). I am excited for how the release went (#1 in its category) and to have an updated apologetic for the investment philosophy we have built our company around. I will say that in addition to an updated and I believe improved traditional case for dividend growth investing, this book adds a philosophical foundation that I hope you will find beneficial. There are a lot of actual and real examples of the strategy applied. Our whole asset allocation process is discussed, even outside of dividend growth. There is even an Appendix with a theological case for dividend growth investing. Profit from the Profit.

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Ok. There really wasn’t a question as to what my topic was going to be today given the book’s release. Dividend growth is not merely an investment strategy we use at The Bahnsen Group. My life and career are deeply intertwined with dividend growth, and I wanted to share the business story here that is different than the investment case. I am very conscious to make B2Bahnsen a place for investment advice or portfolio strategy. I want to add value to the advisors who read B2Bahnsen in the realm of practice management, business growth, and business strategy. I believe all of us advisors are overwhelmed with content about the market, portfolio management, and such, and while I hope many of you read my intentional efforts in that domain, B2Bahnsen is not the place for it.

But I believe advisors can have a better practice management, business growth, and business strategy in extracting some takeaways from how we came to be dividend growth apostles. And it all ties in to the authenticity/differentiation message that is at the core of what I believe about this profession.

Entering the business in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s was, in a lot of ways, an act of totally unmerited favor (grace) by God to any of us who did such. The obvious excesses and absurdities that had permeated for far too long gave an instant moral credibility to any who were not there at the scene of the crime participating in the act. In other words, just by nature of showing up after advisors had loaded clients up with tech concentration, dotcom silliness, margin leverage, and whatever other deadly sins that became status quo in that embarrassing era, an advisor had a clean slate to, well, do the right thing. Prospecting was shooting fish in a barrel then, and I do not believe I am wrong to say that principled advisors may enjoy another such era in the future for very similar (but not identical) reasons. The carnage of 2000 was horrific, and at that point it really was deserved, identifiable, and by no means “an accident.” No one could say, “how in the world was I to know that Pets.com and Webvan would go down?” And no one could say, “a 100% tech/telecom leveraged on margin has always been sensible - this is an unprecedented drawdown!” People got their faces ripped off because the advice they had gotten was criminal - and if the the advisor “facilitated” it as opposed to “directing” it, I see that as a distinction without a difference. An entry level assertion of moral authority in the aftermath of 1999-2000 was not hard to come by.

But something else happened after the initial violence of the dotcom/tech/TMT jackassery. Regular S&P 500 investors, more concentrated in tech than they previously had been because of sector drift in the index, but by no means the caricature of the day (dotcom, leverage, Worldcom, whatever) were also caught into a vortex. As the excesses of the tech bubble burst worked their way through the system, the rotation into value was actually quite healthy. But the re-pricing of risk assets, the events of 9/11, the various accounting scandals that would materialize thereafter, and the mild recession of 2002, all created the closest thing we had seen to 1973-74 in quite a while - meaning: a 30-month drawdown. Each bear market has a different catalyst and different particulars, and the violence of the drawdown matters a lot. Many would say a 36% drop is worse than a 25% drop, but if the 36% drop stops in 31 days and the 25% drop takes a year, I would beg to differ. The ~49% drawdown of the S&P in this 2000-2002 period was pretty brutal, but the 30 month (929 calendar days) period it took to play out was even worse (in terms of the psychology of investors).

So I came in to the business at a wonderful time (I hadn’t hurt anyone in the prior years of a bad behavior orgy), but a terrible time (investors were understandably jaded by the reality of equity markets). They needed more hand-holding and coaching and counsel and empathy and advice than many advisors were equipped to provide. I, on the other hand, was motivated (read: poor), and I was burdened (I thought those things were all my job).

But this does not end there. I am not just writing to say, “things were bad in investor psyches in 2002 and those advisors who really focused on the right counter-cultural messages then did well.” I believe all of that, and I did live it, but I am saying something more. The basic math of what happened to many investors then proved that many assumptions about withdrawal rates and buy-and-hold index investing were flat-out wrong. And while the revelation of these inaccuracies came to be because of an especially low probability event, it was not a hypothetical event. It had really happened. And as equity markets began their inevitable (and monumental) recovery (in this case a 100% move higher from the 2002 bottom to the 2007 top) it did not re-validate the assumptions many had pre-tech bubble burst - it disproved them. Because the market recovered, but many investors did not. The reality of “sequence of returns” risk was not just real, but undeniable, empirical, and for the real lives of many real people, it was devastating. People withdrawing throughout the negative market moment (that lasted for 30 months as previously stated) had so “negatively compounded” their portfolio that the erosion of principal meant that when markets did recover, they were recovering from far too eroded of a principal base to ever heal that investor’s own capacity for lifetime income.

Now, I am well aware that sufficient planning would also have cured a lot of this if it had been done on the front end, but even that presupposes that the assumptions of the planning would have been accurate. And. They. Wouldn’t. Have. Been. I became obsessed with a portfolio strategy that could honor the beauty of long-term equity ownership yet not require me to ever sell something that I didn’t want to sell, whether at a good time or a bad time. In a good time I don’t want to sell good investments because (wait for it), they are good investments. And in a bad time I don’t want to sell good investments, because it means I don’t get to recover when things get better at the same rate (since I have thinned down the base).

And that is when I met Lowell Miller of Miller-Howard Investments, who became my mentor in the arena of dividend growth investing.

As I began studying dividend growth investing I believed (in fact, I knew) that I had found a withdrawal strategy that solved for the paradox of 2000-2007. And maybe that would have been enough for me. It was a solution to the puzzle I sought to solve. And I can make all those arguments until time eternal about why withdrawing fruit from a tree without touching the tree is more durable than cutting down part of the tree in bad times. But what I discovered was something far more than a withdrawal strategy. I found an accumulation strategy that was entirely consistent with my worldview of public equity ownership. I found compounding within compounding,. I found a focus on cash flow and fundamentals that was immune to the “hot dot” of the day. I found a focus on “companies” that transcended “the stock market.” I found a relationship between management and shareholders that simply did not exist in so much of corporate America.

I found something I believed in.

And that is the point of this B2Bahnsen post. I happen to believe my adoption of dividend growth investing in advance of the 2008 crisis was a big deal. I believe that how we have done for our clients inside of their account management over the years has been stellar. But I have never veered from the fact that our fundamental value proposition is behavioral, it is guidance-driven, and it is in the avoidance of the big mistakes. But for me, doing that meant I had to believe in how I was doing it, and I believed in dividend growth investing. I emphatically believed in it. I believe in it as much today as I did in 2006, 2012, and 2018. And that emphatic and authentic belief translated into the story I got to tell prospects and clients over the years.

I have heard pastors give sermons over the years where my response was, “I believed everything he said; I just wish I could tell if he did.” When I hear advisors explain their investment philosophy sometimes, I seriously wonder not how any prospects buy what they are selling, but how the advisor gets the words out of their mouth. The lack of conviction is noteworthy. And whether or not people believe in the tenets of dividend growth investing, what benefitted The Bahnsen Group immensely over the years is that we believe it. It is differentiated. It is counter-cultural. It did give me the chance to talk in my writing, TV appearances, books, and prospect proposals about something that transcended the cookie-cutter messages of the day (let alone the perversions of the day). But the differentiation was nothing more than a by-product of the sincerity, the authenticity, the conviction, the passion. My entire portfolio is filled with what my client portfolios are, and always has been.

Any not only is my portfolio filled with that message, but so is my heart and soul. And that is why we have grown. And that is how all advisors grow - when they believe in what they are doing. And dividend growth is not just an investment strategy that cogently flows from our investment philosophy. It is what we believe, what we do, and who we are.

And to that end we will continue to work and grow. I hope you find your “dividend growth” - no matter what it may be. Because it changed my life and I couldn’t be more grateful. Grateful for the awfulness of 2000-2002, grateful that Luke Theeuwes introduced me to Lowell Miller, grateful that I obsessively studied the craft for years, and grateful that God gave me this part of my identity to share with others. And I;’m not done yet. Not even close.

One common - almost cliche - view is that small firms will get crushed by larger firms in this era of consolidation. Sub-$1bn RIA’s will struggle to compete with the larger firms who have more services, more resources, and more technology, and over time clients will continually leave the smaller firms to join the larger, and new clients will increasingly select the larger over the smaller. This ending is destiny, and right now it is just a matter of how much time it takes to fully materialize. Again, this is how the theory goes.

Another theory starts with that one - leaning into the benefits of size and scale - but allows for a caveat at the other end of the spectrum. This so-called barbell theory either views “large and resourced” on one end as a huge beneficiary of industry trajectories, or “small and niche” on the other end. It is posited as this “expert” did as a pretty striking either-or:

“Huge firms and targeted boutiques will survive. The middle will die out, as they do across every industry. If you can’t win through scale or through targeted services, you will not make it.”

In this scenario, there will be a benefit to small size if the smallness is a by-product of niche and specialization - a sort of elite and boutique firm that has a very defined target in what they do. But other than that, big is better. The “squishy middle” are dead men (or women) walking.

These two theories are quite connected and not really in conflict with one another. Another take getting more op-ed air time these days runs counter to the aforementioned consensus views. It suggests that size will prove to be a handicap and that RIA consolidation and aggregation is creating a “wirehouse lite” world where the benefits of independence will be lost. It envisions a sort of horseshoe theory where the defectors from the bureaucracy of wirehouses end up back there, this time through the bureaucracy of private equity ownership and unhealthy obsession with scale. Rather than predicting the ascendancy of size, this school of thought seems to be predicting a bad ending for RIA consolidation. Some of the proponents of this view are in competing business models and are likely talking their own book, but there are certainly compelling arguments worth addressing.

I will start with what might seem like a total cop-out, and then go on to offer a very distinct and specific view that is anything but. First, they are all correct. No, I do not mean, P, and also not P … But I do mean that there are nuggets of truth in everything that has been said above. Each theory of where the business is headed brings up legitimate concerns and touches things that need to be touched, In all scenarios my concern is primarily with what is not being addressed. More on that later. But as far as the points that are on the table, it should not be hard to concede that:

• There are now and will continue to be benefits to size and scale. Resources matter in how we serve clients. Being too small to have needed resources is a problem.

• There are now and will continue to be problems with size and scale. With greater size comes greater risk of depersonalization, bureaucracy, commoditization, and lost opportunities for touch and differentiation.

• Size can provide economies of scale that are useful to a business. From leverage with your custodian(s) to cost of vendors, technology, and various services, there are economics at play that matter.

• Size can add corporate fat to the P&L, as well. You may get a lower cost per user with your CRM or portfolio analytics tool but you also may have way more red tape in your payroll than you really need.

• There are now and will continue to be benefits to a niche practice with unique specialization and target markets. Deep expertise that is bespoke and different from the crowd creates opportunities that more generalist practices don’t have.

• There are now and will continue to be huge risks and limitations to an excessively niche practice. An abundance of opportunities may be out there that the limited focus of your practice cannot address, and should the opportunity set for your niche be out of favor or reach capacity, the lack of diversification becomes a risk.

• There are now and will continue to be benefits to consolidation and aggregation. Larger firms that use size to drive synergies, eliminate redundancies, and create solutions that more efficiently do some of the back and middle office work that has to be done, while freeing up more space for business development, client service, and profound value creation, have the right idea. Managing the P&L better is a good thing, not a bad thing, and fine-tuning division of labor and efficiency across an enterprise is a noble aspiration for the aggregators and consolidators.

• There are now and will continue to be risks in consolidation and aggregation. Where cultures clash, where costs are cut without a thought to client impact, and where non-strategic assets and resources (human capital or otherwise) are blended indiscriminately, value is destroyed, not created. This is hardly an exception to the rule and it is totally fair to point out the reality and risk here.

At the end of the day, all I am saying is that there are trade-offs in every dimension of this conversation. The most thoughtful, intentional, paranoid, creative, diligent, humble, and resourceful will thrive in the tensions I am describing. When it comes to size and resources and robustness, along with independence, nimbleness, and intimacy, I have written before of my own conclusion - that of a “both-and.” I believe there is a real problem to size for the sake of size and there is a real problem to celebrating a lack of resources in the name of “personal touch.”

I want it all. Sue me.

But all jokes aside, you know who else wants it all? Our clients. That desire for brand, elegance, robustness, competence, capability, and yes, resources, is not going anywhere. Clients want and deserve the best-in-class experience we are supposed to deliver. And yet, of course, they want this in the context of a relationship - one defined by empathy, care, service, familiarity, and trust. This stuff is textbook both-and and it will always be so.

So what did I mean when I send that too much of the aforementioned and debate and conversation has left something out entirely? When we talk about the risks of smallness versus the benefits of scale versus the trade-offs around it all, and attempt to draw it all to a conclusion of “where the puck is going", we are missing one of the most important variables in the entire advisory profession. I believe a lot of these experts do not know. I believe a lot of the institutional investors who have brought capital to the advisory profession do not know. I think some know but are afraid to say it. But I have no such fear:

Through all of the talk about the right model, the right P&L, the right distribution of services and division of labor, the continuum of touch vs. size, the individuality of small practices versus the institutionalism of large ones, let us never forget that advisors are always and forever competing against other advisors, and many of those advisors are unbelievably lazy.

That’s right. Lazy. Or if you prefer, disengaged. Content. Settled. Uncompetitive. Uninterested. So while a given advisor who values their career future and their ability to properly serve clients should care about the model they work in, an economically optimal structure, a successful size and scale, and all of those things … they are actually going to work every day against a profession that has increasingly touted “lifestyle practices” and “work from home” and “work-life balance” and what much of this can actually be best described as: “Tee-times.”

Does the model, size, and platform really matter more than the work ethic, tenacity, and commitment to success of the advisor, themselves? I am sorry, but it doesn’t. In fact, it doesn’t now and it never will. Don’t misunderstand me. I believe the model we work in matters. I believe our operational partners, capital structure, and business alliances matter. I think there will be small firms in the future and big firms in the future and each practitioner should be giving a lot of thought to what type of business they want to have, what type of advisor they want to be. I am actually quite obsessed with a lot of this. But when experts write articles about “which firms are going to make it” and focus the concern around CRM costs, use of AI, time allocation, and how to leverage the back office better, and don’t ever once mention the elephant in the room - I think these editorials are missing the boat.

The future will have an ebb and flow of successful and unsuccessful big companies, and successful and unsuccessful small ones. And yes, I agree that the “middle” is most at risk if they do not have a value proposition rooted to the authenticity of the people who run their mid-sized business (but why that problem can’t be solved is beyond me).

But more than anything in front of us as an advisory profession right now is this: We have an industry where a lot - not all, but a lot - of our competitors are not just disinterested in hard work, but celebrate it and boast about it. There is no model, no structure, no deal, no box that is going to fix that. If you want to thrive in the present and in the future, there is no lower hanging fruit than to outwork the competition.

And I am telling you that you will not find that as daunting as you think.

(1) The vast majority of the industry struggles with organic growth. An easy conclusion to draw would be that good growers are better at “closing” business, and those with subpar growth struggle to “close.” The problem with that conclusion is that it is dead, dead wrong. Every good grower I have ever met has a successful process for opening business - for putting leads and prospects into the funnel. And every business I have ever seen that struggles with organic growth (which is most) has struggled to consistently do this. Good growers and bad growers may very well have the same closing percentage (give or take), but the latter is doing so on way too small of a denominator.

(2) Good growers can articulate a value proposition - a differentiator - with conviction and sincerity. And I do believe that bad growers most often do not. I simply do not believe that this deficiency speaks to closing. I think it speaks to opening.

The below chart speaks to the two barbells that matter in growth of net new assets:

Yes, on one end is the key to constantly opening new leads, prospects, and opportunities. More on this in a moment. But the other end of the barbell is a vital component of NET new business - client retention. And here you get the mathematical reality that when you are not losing clients, the addition of new clients is actually, well, new. +1 added to -1 equals 0 (use a calculator if you must). +1 plus NOT -1 equals +1. So to grow on a NET new basis one must be obsessively focused on the right barbell of client retention, and the left barbell of opening new opportunities. Both-And. Period point blank. And I could end the article there if I needed to, because I believe those two things are really the heart of the matter.

But there is more at play in this two-barbell approach than the math - there is the self-fulfilling reality that when you have properly oriented yourself to client retention, you have properly oriented yourself to attracting new prospects. This is not merely about “referrals,” which is our industry’s answer for lazy people (I have never met someone who told me their growth strategy was “referrals” who grew - not once - ever). This is about the internal dynamics at play - that advisors who deliver a client experience worthy of high client retention have the internal convictions and processes necessary to attract, open, cultivate, and close. Your reputation evolves into a brand. You have the confidence in your work and process necessary to put prospects into a pipeline. You live inside a virtuous cycle of having the right stuff to open new business opportunities and the right stuff to retain clients for life. It is a beautiful thing.

But please re-look at the chart for a second. Note the small bars that so many focus on. “Fee competitiveness” is not a factor in closing business, ever. “Fee fairness” is - don’t over price relative to value and don’t under price. But if you believe that you have ever, ever, ever lost a prospect because your fee was not competitive, you are wrong. People obsess over this issue to their own peril.

I am old school and therefore a fan of written proposals. But that is preference, not precept, and I do not believe I ever closed a client (or failed to close) over a proposal. Not once. People obsess over this issue to their own peril.

I would argue that overcoming objections is actually a problem - not a benefit. You are supposed to be interviewing them to ensure they are a good fit to be your client (read: Nick Murray, all of him). When you reduce the courtship process to you overcoming objections you have shifted the moral authority and the advisory responsibility to the wrong place. The posture has to be a positive and affirmative demonstration of value and trustworthiness. Overcoming objections is how you successfully sell a car or a set of steak knives. It is not how you move from someone from your pipeline to your client roster.

Closing skills are fine but they are usually not a problem. People naturally migrate to their own comfortable style and that is supposed to be enough if the rest has been done right. Demonstration of competence and likability is what OPENS new business opportunities and that is basically how opportunities are closed, as well. I do favor a confident, firm, comfortable, self-assured, even presumptive posture, but truth be told that is not a “closing tactic” - it is just what I assume is the natural and organic style of a confident, high conviction financial professional.

You will notice the gray bar in the middle is a little higher than the others. I do reckon pipeline management to be more important than all the other smaller gray bars. My firm happens to religiously use SalesForce and a quite robust, customized pipeline system within that CRM. But even when we used homemade Microsoft Excel spreadsheets (no one ever went broke using Excel for anything), the point was we had an ongoing process that was organized and systematized. I can’t imagine the process from the left barbell to the right barbell without some form of pipeline management in between.

So let’s get back to that far left barbell for a moment. The two things I have said that I swear by which you may find true but inadequate are that (a) Good growers open a lot of opportunities (the key word here is SOURCING - they SOURCE opportunities well), and (b) They do this by demonstrating competence and likability in the most effective venues possible. What many advisors desperate for growth improvement wonder, though, is WHERE and HOW to do this. What does it mean to increase the universe of sourced opportunities? I think it is a fair question, but I do want to suggest that each advisor has to answer it for themselves. My strategy for 26 years has been to demonstrate competence and likability via thought leadership and content creation that reflects my true, authentic self. I did this with dinner events that had two people at one point, then dinner events with sixty people, and now we do 15+ events a year that will touch well over a thousand people in aggregate - but speaking behind a microphone has always been a part of what we do. I added writing to the repertoire in 2008 and haven’t stopped since. Our society’s obsession with multimedia forced me to add podcast and video in the middle of the last decade, but I am still a writer at heart (with a face for radio). But all of it is the same - a patient, authentic presentation of perspective and commentary that people can either like or not like. The mediums have expanded and the audience has expanded, but the intent has not - to be a truth-teller that demonstrates competence and likability with information and perspective that hopefully adds value to the reader/listener/viewer.

To expand our audience we have to be resourceful. For those who are not going to fill their pipelines via thought leadership, they have to be resourceful, too. Networking. Partnerships and joint ventures. COI referrals. Community presence. Social connectivity. I literally could name fifty things I would try if they better fit me and if I hadn’t found my niche that worked for me and my authentic self. The point is that advisors looking for growth have to find their “thing” that actually increases the quantity of opportunity to demonstrate competence and likability.

Opening more opportunities is the key to closing more.

Client retention is what happens when you deliver value.

And delivering value reinforces opportunities for opening more business.

Rinse and repeat.

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One of the things we have to do as advisors is fight the sensationalism of financial media and its effects on our clients. This requires us to understand the outlandish but also the latent reality of that sensationalism - its subtle presence and the sinister incentives that drive it. What we cannot do is ever, ever, ever be ignorant as to its reality. This clip here is a must watch to understand the fundamental dishonesty often involved in the media hype machine. Why would we think the financial media would not panic investors unnecessarily about some market event, when they are willing to routinely panic people about matters far more important than markets?

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We have filled our spots for the first ever B2Bahnsen event in New York City this October 30. We are running a wait list so if you want to be added to that please email here

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I will be talking more about The Bahnsen Group’s recent transaction with Hightower in my next B2Bahnsen.

(1) I hate life coaches

(2) Why on God’s green earth would I think anyone would want me to give any coaching about their life?

(3) The passion I have for the wealth advisory profession is what inspired this effort, and nothing else

(4) See #1

It occurred to me after drafting my thoughts on this month’s topic that there was a risk of blurring some lines here, so I want to be careful. Truth be told, there are blurry lines in a lot of B2Bahnsen posts, but that is not because of anything sinister or subversive on my part - it is because a lot of principles or directives that particularly apply in the advisory profession also apply to, well, life. I don’t want to walk on eggshells in my writing, but I also do not want to offer generic life advice devoid of application to our industry. In fact, I really don’t even want to offer advice that is applicable to our industry - I want to offer my perspective and my experience and pray that it will be useful to some readers. That’s it. It’s on me to be careful in how it comes off to others. But I am just being transparent about the objectives here.

That said, much of today’s post could be edited to take away any context to the wealth advisory profession and my guess is that it would still hold up. It just so happens that this concept is rather universal, even if our context is our business. I don’t remember it if was 2009, 2010, or 2011, but in one of the very first annual Nick Murray symposiums (it was definitely one of the first three, and it was the glorious Marriott Eastside on Lex where he first began the annual and legendary events - may that venue rest in peace) he said something that I knew, then, was universal in its scope:

“You have the life you want.”

I would check my notes for which year it was but they are archived in my old Morgan Stanley outlook notes of many moons ago, and I had an iPad transfer of cloud files a long time ago that did not take so those notes are lost to history. But I am not wrong about what was said and I am not wrong about the impact it had on me. Like most people hearing something like that I immediately went through the mental and instinctive pushback that naturally follows … Many people do not have the circumstances, or outcomes, or conditions in life they want. And Nick did not say they did, and the way I took what he said, all of those things were a completely separate subject.

What Nick was brilliantly doing, at least in my unbrilliant mind, was separating the externalities of life that we cannot control from the things in our life we can control. Our response to things. Our attitude about things. The focus we keep about the future. The effort we put into things. The mental state we create around various circumstances (gratitude for what we have; resilience to adversity; etc.). He didn’t elaborate a great deal because he didn’t need to. It provoked a multi-year campaign from yours truly to think about life in that context. It forced a mature reckoning with the reality of trade-offs, and actually was a major part of my journey in 2013 when I quit drinking forever and ever. That’s for another day.

When someone says “you have the life you want,” it does not mean you weigh what you want to weigh. It does mean that you make choices - maybe even good and understandable ones - that reflect the reality of trade-offs in your life’s priorities. I have gotten in shape as a guy now in his early 50’s but I certainly don’t have the health magazine physique I am sure I would “like to have.” But I don’t want that as much as I want the other things I do instead. This is true for all of us, all the time, and it is not a bad thing. I want to travel to Asia and Europe, but I want to run my business and be with my family more, so I don’t do those big three-week trips that many do even though I could afford to. I have the life I want, and it gets reflected in my decision-making, which reflects my innermost priorities.

What is at stake here is not the validity of our individual preferences and choices - but the need for rigorous honesty about them. It was positively liberating when I took Nick’s words to heart and applied them to my entire business. I wasn’t being a forced to keep a bad client - I wanted the revenue more than I wanted to be free of the bad client, until I thought through it that way - and then I made the decision that gave me what I wanted - freedom from that bad client. I had the choice before, but I wasn’t thinking with enough self-awareness, introspection, and rigorous honesty. I began thinking about almost everything through the lens of agency, responsibility, and my input.

I began to trust God with the outcomes.

And I tried my very best to not be the reason my own goals and dreams were undermined. I tried my very best to get out of my own way. I had the life I wanted, and this realization enabled me to want and work for an even better life.

I have mentioned in B2Bahnsen before that I write a team email every single morning (M-F) to every employee and partner of The Bahnsen Group (now a hundred people strong). I do not miss a morning, ever. Last week I wrote the following:

I am working through a book right now that I will share the name of and more comprehensive thoughts shortly. It is an easy read and one that I have gotten a LOT out of but want to incorporate in a more thoughtful manner over time. But one thing from yesterday morning’s read I wanted to share was less about the general theme of the book and a more anecdotal share that I just want completely and fully marinated into the culture at TBG. We all have things we want to get done. We all have things that get in the way. We all have obstacles to deal with. We all have frustrations in policy, or time, or resources, or something, that might theoretically be an excuse or at least an impediment to getting the things done that we want. And I would just challenge everyone reading this who relates to that feeling or those moments to constantly ask any time something comes up that is preventing you from the result you say you want (I add “you say” because self-awareness is not an easy of an attribute to achieve as we like to think) – and that thing to ask is “What’s stopping you?” It is not a rhetorical question and it is not even a challenging one, like some veiled message of, “you got this – go get it done.” It is a literal question, because actually, what is stopping me from being able to dunk a basketball like I did in high school is, “I am old and not as physically capable and it is never going to happen.” Not everything can be overcome. But when there is something that comes up in our work goals and professional aspirations:

1. I want to receive more leads

2. I want to close more leads

3. I want to generate better proposals

4. I want to respond to clients quicker

5. I want to have a less frazzled way of doing my operations tasks

6. I want to make more money

7. I want to get more clients engaged in planning

8. I want to catch up on my SalesForce tasks

9. I want to do more meetings with [the TBG] Tax [Department]

10. I want to add a Family Office client

Or whatever else you can think of – big or small – to potential things you may want to have, to do, to accomplish … Ask yourself “what is stopping you?” Is it the need to ask Trevor for a certain resource? Is it the need for more clarity on your trajectory with your department director? Is it a more thoughtful program for time management? Is it, ummmmm, better self-discipline (hint: it almost always is). Whatever the case may be, whether the solution is internal, or external, or not feasible at all, just ask the question, and actually seek to answer it. It reflects more agency, and transcends the crisis of responsibility that has dulled the capacity of an entire society.

There is more to today’s message than “you are the master of your own destiny." Specific to your career aspirations, this entire message requires a period of introspection. It forces you to ask the questions as to what you want to accomplish in this business, and what you are willing to do, and not willing to do, to allow those things to happen. And it forces you to figure out what the obstacles are to achieving the things you are willing to do, so you can systematically remove those obstacles, post haste. It facilitates a never-ending period of planning. It also attaches a never-ending period of doing to your planning. And it allows you to pivot and adjust when certain activities are not bearing fruit.

“But you said I have the life I want, and I did the things I needed to do, and the outcome didn’t materialize.”

See, it doesn’t end there in our profession. It is in the middle. You did some activity and the result didn’t materialize. Was your strategy flawed? Was your execution flawed? Did you give up prematurely? Did you exhaust too much into a bad idea? My point is not that if you do A then B will happen; it is that if you do A, you will be given the chance to assess A. That assessment can lead to B or it can lead to a new A, but the point is that these things exist as a continual part of our advisory existence.

I think the secret sauce of this message is understanding that “what’s stopping you?” is not a rhetorical question. Answer. The. Blank. Question. I believe from the bottom of my heart that advisors who limit these sentiments to inspirational quotes or ideas fail to benefit from them to their full potential. What kind of life do you want? And what is stopping you from having it? My friends, I am not suggesting that the answers are going to be easy. But I am suggesting that in asking the questions, in being rigorously honest in getting to the answers, and in doing the appropriate follow-up - hard as it may be - you can take this much further than if it were just a pep talk.

Your boss, your teammates, your employees, your partners, and most of all, your clients, will benefit if you truly ask the question, “what is stopping me from being more valuable to [fill in the blank stakeholder]?” … They, and you, will benefit from answering the question.

And you will have the same thing you already have now - the life you want. You’ll just want it better, and have it better.

Details of the event program and venue will be provided to all accepted RSVP’s.

Please email B2B@bahnsen.com to be added to our registration list. Please provide your first and last name as well as your firm name. Please feel free to share anything about your interest in the event as well.

Capacity for this event is limited.

You will receive confirmation of your registration no later than May 15th.

“Advisors are about to be replaced by some form of technology.”

I am not suggesting that the AI moment is identical in hype and stupidity as the E*Trade commercial moment of 1999 (memories) or the embarrassment of those who thought an algorithmic asset allocation was an existential threat to the advisory profession. AI is a teal technology with true transformative and disruptive dynamics, but it still remains constrained by what it is not: Human. More on that in a moment.

One would think that history would humble those quick to predict the end of the advisory profession. If Taleb is correct that anti-fragility is not merely when something survives an alleged threat but actually comes out of it stronger and more robust, the late 90’s online brokerage world appears to have generated significant anti-fragility for wealth advisors. The incomes, status, and appeal of advisors skyrocketed post-dotcom, creating a bull market for the profession in the immediate aftermath of a short-lived belief that the space would be obsolete. Likewise, the two leading “robo-advisor” companies currently trade ~40% below their peak valuation, despite a screaming bull market that has actually seen the S&P nearly triple in seven years. Betterment remains a private company without a bid, with recent private market secondary activity clearing 35-40% their peak round, and Wealthfront went public (only after basically becoming a generic net interest margin company) and now sits 40% below their IPO price.

But is it different this time? Can AI strike a blow to the profession in a way that Robo and online brokerage could not? Can AI solve for the missing ingredient that online trading and algo asset allocation did not - advice, counsel, trust, and true value creation?

The answer requires an anthropological understanding of the wealth advisory profession that far too few people in the profession seem to have, themselves. I do not merely mean understanding the human person at a deeper level as it pertains to humans as clients but also understanding humans as advisors. The unique faculties of human beings answer this question for us, and what I mean here involves those things that clients especially need, and those things that advisors especially provide. To believe that AI will streamline many back and middle office functions is one thing, or that it will benefit financial modeling, or even replace the need for code that drives so any of our enterprise applications. All of this strikes me as exponentially more valuable than the placing of a trade and the algorithm behind an asset allocation, but it still sits neatly in our ecosystem as “tools involved in our business” - and not even near the fundamental value proposition that drives our business.

I spent the last two days at the Future Proof conference in Miami where the major focus was on AI and technology. Some of the vendors and presenters are doing incredible things, and I am as anti-luddite as one can be in thinking about AI implementation to your tech stack, your service delivery, and other ways that you can enhance productivity. My speech at the conference happened to focus on advisor productivity and discipline, something I divorced from technology entirely (on purpose), but the major emphasis of the conference was tech and AI focused. I came away convinced of two things:

(1) The speed with which AI is getting incorporated into our tech stack is a sight to behold and the power of the technology to be useful in our business is not to be taken lightly

(2) No advisor should dare confuse the role of AI in executing on our delivery of service and experience and the fundamental value that it is we have to offer.

Many speakers at the conference understood this quite well.

The media’s huge focus in the last month or so, until the Iran war helped boot it out of lead position, has been on “AI making software obsolete.” That broader discussion has been almost as unbearably stupid as the discussion about the advisory profession. But my own market-driven commentary on software will still require implementation, consultation, integration, fulfillment, service, etc. - much of which will heavily involve human beings - is a commentary on what I believe about the marketplace, history, and optimal functionality of these technological components. Citadel and Andreesen Horowitz had more thoughtful responses regarding the particular issue of software and AI.

But where I can pontificate with more experience and authority is in the wealth advisory profession, where I know the role of human nature first hand. I know the temptations clients feel to make mistakes, and I know the antidote to those temptations. They are not and have never been robotic, programmatic, intellectual, or digital. They do not exist in code and they are not transmitted in the cyber sphere. Humans and their money are deeply personal things, and the decisions that are made around money require judgment, wisdom, and prudence. The emotional responses that catalyze bad decisions are not fed from bad inputs; they are not eliminated with good inputs; they come from the core of human nature, which Nick Murray has taught us “is a failed investor.”

If I thought the value proposition of the advisory industry was able to be dehumanized I would have worried about the viability of our chosen career a long, long, long time before AI. There are vital services that sit within many of our value propositions. I do not believe AI can or will replace the way my firm manages money, but I certainly believe it can enable and facilitate better and quicker research and data. That is not nothing. I suspect AI will expand upon (but not replace) the financial planning tools and systems many of us use. And I am sure the same is true within much of the estate planning and tax planning many of us do - at least the functionality, the idea generation, the modeling, and so forth.

But no. Not the judgment, wisdom, experience, and collaboration. Not the live talk-through of values, of priorities, of family dynamics, and of lessons learned. What the catch-up contribution to a 401k plan is at age 50 may be really quickly known and implemented with AI, but I will be very honest with you - I already knew it before AI, and I knew where to get it before AI. And I can add 100 other things to that list if I wanted to lose your attention - all informational things I could get before, that now I can get quicker, and that now may be more easily implemented or interfaced into other client deliverables or modules. But in no way, shape, or form can the conversations around the vast array of things that come up in an individual’s life be handed off to something that lacks a soul.

So here is the problem, though. How many advisors have been functioning as if their value proposition was soulless and digitized, anyways? Even before AI, how many only regurgitated their firm’s abysmal, cookie-cutter content? How many formulized an identical investment policy statement for almost every client? How many delivered value to clients but just reading what they could google when a client asked a question? How many avoid face-to-face interactions, don’t know the family, and don’t believe the client’s own values and beliefs influence their charitable practices? How many advisors have been functioning like overpaid chatbots?

This is where financial advisors are going to clean up in the AI moment - if they have a human value proposition, one with soul, rooted to love. Just as the only advisors hurt by Scottrade in 1998 were ones who had dared to make their value proposition “the execution of a trade” [can you even imagine???}, and the only advisors hurt by robo-comedy ten years ago were ones who proposed a strategic asset allocation as the entirety of their proposition (devoid of conviction, activity, point-of-view, and most importantly, behavioral modification), so will the only advisors hurt by AI be those who have a dehumanized value proposition now.

Before I wrap this up, I want to say something about the “cost centers” in our business - the operations departments, or research departments, or planning departments, or other elements that may be divorced from revenue on the P&L, but that represent vital parts of the division of labor for excellent firms. I do believe that parts of the functionality of these departments will be impacted by AI, but I do not believe the underlying message is any different here than what I have offered above to client-facing advisors. Is the expectation I have for my operations department merely to do data entry and facilitate money movement or account opening transactions, or do we also want them to enhance client experience. To be likeable. To be humorous. To generate connection. If back and middle office functions are made easier by AI, will that take away the premium we put on energy, on chemistry, on likability, and on creativity? I don’t believe so.

Many financial offices look like a movie set - they are so generic and prop-filled and, yes, soulless - that the real life office actually looks like what a movie set office would look like, but with no intended irony. The reason my Experience department is AI-bulletproof is because it has taste. It reflects intuition, creativity, and a story. AI can do the non-human parts of interior design. It can’t bring the feel.

The same is true up and down the supply chain of financial services. Take seriously the threat to your business if you are already running a dehumanized business, or if your position is one in which a machine can do everything you do. But if you bring your authentic humanity to your job every day, and if you see the soul of this business for what it is, you will laugh at the AI threat some day the same way I laugh at 1999 ETrade commercials now.

Use this moment to be the most likable, energetic, enjoyable person you can be. One thing I am certain AI will do is make it less necessary for business owners to work with unlikable people. But root your work to love, and you will find the soul needed to be an elite advisory team. And no LLM will touch that in a million years.

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My recent Dividend Cafe on private credit here.

My recent Dividend Cafe on Iran here.

The first ever B2Bahnsen Advisor event will take place on October 30 at Convene in 75 Rockefeller Plaza in midtown Manhattan. Nick Murray and yours truly will be speaking, though I’ll be more focused on listening to Nick than I will be speaking. There will be a breakfast and a lunch, a couple sessions from both Nick and myself, and then a lengthy open Q&A with both of us. And, the event is totally free for advisors. In March I will be sending out an invite for subscribers to officially RSVP, but we will run out of space as demand will be higher than capacity. I know the event is many months away but I am already looking forward to it, both because of my adoration and appreciation for Nick, and because I am looking forward to meeting many of you.

Beyond an event that is over eight months away and instead focusing on one just one day away … If any of you will be attending the Kingdom Advisors annual conference in Orlando the second half of this week, I will be doing a breakout session with Jerry Bowyer on Thursday at 1:15pm (A Theological and Practical Critique of Economic Schools of Thought) and then will be doing the keynote market commentary session at 4:15pm from the main stage (along with Bob Doll). If you would like to try and say hello at some point Wednesday or Thursday shoot me an email (DBahnsen@thebahnsengroup.com) and I will try to find the time for a sideline/huddle hello.

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Okay. Now for today’s B2Bahnsen topic, held until we were over a month into the new year on the subject of business planning. I strongly suspect a lot of you are thinking, “oh my, another person telling me that it is good to have a business plan … how generic and cliche is this?” Well, first of all, some things are cliches for a reason. But second, I very arrogantly believe that someone actually in your business recommending something (skin in the game) is categorically different than a “consultant” who has never done a sit with a client in their lives telling you. But more important than both #1 and #2 - I don’t want to merely tell you that “having a business plan is a good thing” … I want to tell you why, which is very different than many people seem to think, and I want to tell you what I believe should be included (some of the various components). I will end this brief post with an offer to send interested advisors a copy of our 2026 Business Plan at The Bahnsen Group (more on this at the end of the post).

The obvious answer that many recommend having a business plan is that it formalizes and crystalizes steps an advisor or an advisory team can take towards business growth. The belief is that there is some merit in memorializing action items that one is committing to for their business to grow. In this school of thought, writing down “I will do ten client dinner events” or “I will get my CFP this year” is better than not writing it down. And I won’t quibble - all things being equal, writing stuff down that you plan to do is better than not writing it down, I suppose. But what I think is way, way, way better is writing down this year whether or not you did the stuff you wrote down last year that you were going to do. Goals. Numbers. Activities. All of the above. In other words, I believe the biggest benefit of a business plan is the combined process of looking backwards, and then also looking forwards. I think if you said you were going to do A, B, and C in 2025, that a 2026 Business Plan which holds you to account, for those things, in writing, is the secret sauce. It enables an advisor to feel guilt and shame if they failed to execute on what they said they were going to do the year before, and it simultaneously provides incentive and motivation for the year ahead out of that potential guilt and shame.

“But David,” you say, “guilt and shame are demoralizing, not motivating!” I beg to differ. I believe that self-motivated advisors respond to self-awareness about their own shortcomings, and this holistic process of accountability (goal-setting, goal-assessment, goal-scoring, repeat for next year) gives a formal, written, organized, systematic process for self-improvement (out of self-assessment). It is a tactic for maximizing behavior and motivation.

But it also gives us a chance to do something not enough of us do often enough: Be strategic. A serious and contemplative effort in business planning allows us to think about things in our business that can be really fixed, really repaired, really shed, or really innovated anew. Some of the best ideas I have ever had for TBG came in my “ideation” phase that annual business planning generated. If done correctly it puts you in a frame of mind of reflection and analysis and, dare I say, even a little dreaming.

I do recognize that the process and even the deliverable, itself, is going to be very different for a solo advisor practice versus a larger advisory team, and everything in between. There is no “one size fits all” template here - it should be in your voice, reflecting your unique self. I have done a very comprehensive business plan going into a new calendar year every single year since I began “production” as a rookie 26 years ago. I assure you that my plan looks a lot different now than it did then. Indeed, all of the plans I did as a solo advisor were very different than the plans we have for our collective business now. But the intent is largely still the same - and I will recap here what I believe the key components ought to be:

• A reaffirmation of the various evergreen things that brought you into this business - this calling - your telos. For us it includes our vision statement, our mission statement, our executive summary, and our key cultural beliefs. They are evergreen. We do not change them. They each speak to a different thing about who we are as an organization. And we put them front and center in our plan both to gain alignment with new people we invite into our organization and to reaffirm alignment with all of our people, year-over-year. We don’t take this stuff for granted, and I think a business plan that creates reflection on why you do what you do and what it is you believe you are actually doing is very, very wise.

• A thorough autopsy of your prior year business, quantitative and qualitative, measurable and immeasurable, traditional metrics and more subjective out-of-the-box things that matter for you. I do believe that the assets gathered the year before matter, and having a scoreboard of sorts for all your advisors is a good and healthy thing (there is no “everybody gets a trophy” mentality in our business, my friends). But many other metrics matter, too - from client retention to batting average to specific silos of your business - etc. As a very content-heavy business we track tons of analytics in our output, readership, growth, etc. Assessing results vs. goals for the year prior is vital. But a “year behind” assessment of any quantitative elements of your business that matter isv vital.

• We like to track revenue over time so we can maintain a truly historical view of our business, which leads to gratitude in our culture. That DNA has to be cultivated, and I strongly encourage those of you who believe you are doing something generational or even multi-generational to have some sort of historical tracking in your business analytics. It gives you perspective.

• This may only apply to those of you with over 5+ employees (or more), but we like to track our headcount vs. revenue to ensure we are never, ever, ever under-resourcing any part of our business. I know everyone loves to throw around words like “scale” and “efficiency” but for the life of me I do not know why people think more advisory teams suffer from “lack of scale” than they do “lack of adequate resources or people.” These metrics matter a lot as your business grows.

• For those who are not W2 employees of another firm but essentially have a P&L to own, monitor, and manage, I strongly recommend tracking in your business plan how you are spending money. Not only are the year-over-year changes important, but the percentages speak to priorities, and when you can see what your investment in people, technology, marketing, and such are, you get a chance to see what you actually value.

• Some memorialization on “non-numerical” feats from the year prior is a must. “Joey got promoted to COO” or “Jenny achieved her CFP” or “Tommy closed his first $10mm+ client” or … you get the idea. Totally unique, individual, bottom-up anecdotes that matter to YOU and YOUR business, but don’t necessarily fit into an excel spreadsheet.

• For larger and more complex businesses, I really, really recommend doing the above BY DEPARTMENT. It gets more granular. It celebrates more people. It allows for more nuance and specialization. And it pushes the reflection and contemplation you are after deeper and wider. My business has an Advisor Group, an Operations Dept, Planning, Tax, Risk, Investment Solutions, Content, Experience, and Business Administration. A business plan that ONLY celebrates Advisors success in closing new business might mean you have a culture where Operations is ignored, or where Planning is marginalized. The business plan highlighting the achievements of each department keeps the focus on the integrated, cross-pollinated, diverse, versatile, multi-disciplinary firm you want to be.

• As for the “year ahead,” I already mentioned carving out some room for STRATEGIC INITIATIVES. Let’s not use that term as boneheaded empty jargon. I am referring to big picture priorities that matter for you and your business - new services you want to offer, a new growth initiative, a new technology you want to use, a new hire, a housecleaning project - something real, tangible, and yes, strategic, that serves as a major priority for the year ahead.

• And, yes, the “year ahead” goals need to have something quantifiable and measurable, too. Only focusing on the “strategic” can get you lost in a domain that lacks accountability. Our business is not only a game of numbers, but it is filled with numbers. Assets, revenues, clients, growth, whatever matters to you - set goals for each key numerical part of your business. And I hope this doesn’t have to be said, but amongst the wisdom of those sage consultants who tell you things like this, here is one where they aren’t wrong: Make the numbers enough of a stretch that they are not easy, and make them realistic enough that they are not impossible. Profound, right?

• Set goals for each department of your business (if your business has such departmental structure). The reasons are identical to what I said above so I won’t repeat it all again. But really make this the meat of the plan - and get full departmental input and collaboration!

• If you have multiple client-facing advisors in your business, I strongly recommend getting goals (quantitative and qualitative) from EACH of them. It takes a village. I would not load up the size of the document by having 3-5 pages per advisor, but I would get 3-5 bullet points per advisor, with each one reflecting real thought and seriousness from each advisor.

I know that a business plan can also get into a million tactics about business development -listing all the dinner venues at which you will do events, how many newsletters you will write, or what brilliant LinkedIn mining technology you will use, etc. I lean into this stuff less in my business plans because my philosophy of business development is less tactical and more philosophical, but I don’t really have a reason to be against any of it. I guess I would just say that it should be what feels right to yu.

I believe anyone reading our business plan would learn a lot about our business, but at the same time would never really know what it is going through my mind. And I believe whenever I read our business plan I know what it all is really saying, and these things all exist outside of what anyone else may think or interpret. That to me is the secret sauce - a business plan that is, all at once, readable by others, yet that contains more meaning to the author of it than an outside reader could ever really extract or understand. Just like the accountability that you carry every year to be the best advisor you can be, there is no substitute for the understanding, accountability, and standards that you encounter when you look in the mirror.

“This is a business for self-motivated people.” - Michael Goldfader

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For any who would benefit from a copy of the 2026 Bahnsen Group business plan, please email DBAHNSEN@THEBAHNSENGROUP.COM. I do not mind if you email from a personal email address, but you will have to provide a web link or some form of verification that you are an advisor. We will only be sending the business plan to those we can verify are advisors in the wealth advisory business.

Since I began B2Bahnsen last year I suspect the topic that advisors have asked me to write about the most is time management. Not how we manage money at our firm. And not even how we go about growing our business (though that is a close second). Time management - or more specifically, “what do you do all day?” I always take it as a compliment, and many times the question is accompanied by a very explicit compliment (“you seem very productive - can you tell me how you do X, and Y, and Z”) … Etc. I appreciate the kind words that come, and I very much understand where the question comes from - especially from advisors who are looking to maximize productivity. If you throw in the fact that most of the advisors wrestling with this also have spouses and children, there is a not-unique, widespread issue for a lot of advisors to sort through: How to be more productive, while also maintaining maximum presence in all aspects of their lives that matter.

I have previously hesitated to address this issue as it puts me at risk as sounding like I am bragging about my work habits or day-to-day routine, when nothing could be further from the truth. I have very strong convictions about work ethic, about daily habits, and about maximizing productivity, and I suppose I do believe that over the years I have been able to do well in some of those arenas. But I do not think there is some “special sauce” and I certainly do not believe that my habits and routines are “normative.” I address these issues in today’s B2Bahnsen because (a) A bunch of advisors asked me to, and (b) I imagine that it may enable some to consider their own routines and commitments and adjust/tailor/optimize for their own particular situation in a way that makes sense for them.

Let me start with the easiest part of all of this, and what possibly puts me at odds with countless “consultants” and “coaches” in our business (Dear Lord, and I promise I have a post coming about that crew), but worse, puts me at odds with a whole religion of reels that have permeated such gospel-important venues as Instagram and TikTok: I reject out of hand the general theme of “work smarter, not harder,” and all the other poppycock that is intended to celebrate “not working thar hard.” This is not an anti-efficiency thing for me - it is a recognition that when people talk about how much less work they do, it is not to celebrate efficiency but to lean into less output and activity. It is the most basic human psychology imaginable. Everyone wants to protect their margin, their peace of mine, their sanity - and everyone would like to get more done with an optimal use of the resources at their disposal. But I simply do not believe or trust the meme culture’s treatment of this subject that magically seems to always celebrate some form of, well, working less. I have a different take on the subject.

I knew an advisor once who pulled me aside at a breakfast event we were both attending and expressed concern for how hard I was working. I believe at that time my annual production was $5mm and he said to me, “I know you do 5x more business than I do, but you are working way, way harder to do it; I try to do $1mm a year in 10-20 hours. I am worried about you!”

He is currently in the fifth year of his seven year prison sentence for running a ponzi.

I am going to delve into my own best practices for maximizing productivity in a moment. But I first want to say that there is a belief I hold on to that colors my views on this subject which I am sure is not shared by all. Here it is:

We are paid a lot of money in this business, with unfathomable upside to the work we do, and that level of compensation is somewhat earned by, you know, working hard.

I know some would say, “no, you can build a book, let it go to ‘lifestyle practice mode,’ and you will have always earned that pay from the work you initially did to build it.” Some make prima facie plausible comparisons to building a machine that kicks out widgets, where it all scales so well that your profits are really high in later years with little or no output, but all made possible by the work you did in the early years. And I get where this rationalization comes from, and I even get that some people might believe it (most are trying to talk themselves into it, but I digress). Rather than argue with it, I will just say I do not agree. I think the perpetuity of our fees is morally and professionally correlated to the perpetuity of the value we create, the work we do, the service we provide. And if I have a revenue-to-profit model that I would not share with a client, then I think it is bogus.

I work hard because God made me to work hard. I work hard because I love the work I do and it stirs my soul. And I work hard because clients pay me to work hard. And obsessing over “how one day I can work less” is a pathology that prohibits success.

Hopefully you know the story (I have told it so many times I have lost count) of the Fortune magazine writer interviewing Bill Gates way back when he was only worth $100 million (with a “m” and not a “b”).

“Mr. Gates, you are worth $100 million, yet you famously work until midnight, sleep at the office, and have three-day old pizza boxes laying around. If I was worth $100 million I would never work again in my life.”

“Well, that is why you will never be worth $100 million.”

Some things really are self-fulfilling prophecies.

Once we commit ourselves to a life of hard work and cast aside the cultural love affair with subliminal aggression against productivity, we still have to address one of the trickiest things that can get in the way - the never-ending opportunity to do “stuff” that creates the veneer of being busy, but does not optimize our productivity, impact, and output. I imagine this is true in most jobs, but I only this job. Every person reading this knows how easy it is to allow a new email that came in or a new article to read to get in the way of calling a client, or completing a substantive task. It is human nature, and we are programmed to believe that if we get seven “small” things done that is better than getting one “big” thing done. It isn’t. In fact, it will make you an inferior business, because the businesses that get the big things done win - always.

This requires discipline, accountability, and self-discipline. It requires the self-awareness to understand that the small things are not, as we tell ourselves, things we just have to get done so we can have the headspace to tackle the big things - but rather, avoidance behaviors. There, I said it. We hide behind small tasks to defer the bigger things that take more work, more sacrifice, more output, more creative contribution, more hussle, more collaboration, more discomfort, more risk, and often, a combination of all of these things. I do not know what “system” is best for doing the really big things every single day (Franklin planners for those of you who are old like me, or a 1-2-3 list, or a period of turning your inbox off, or whatever) - I only know that every single one of us needs a system to do just that. I consider myself extremely disciplined and focused, but if I do not systematically and intentionally do this, I fail in my efforts to be productive This commitment to the “big things” or the distractions and time-wasters changed my life.

Here are my practical suggestions for maximizing productivity. They may not work for you. I do not suggest they are all normative (some are more so than others). But they work for me, and this is my substack.

(1) Only you know what the “big thing” (or “things”) you need to do in a given day are. What we all know is that there will be hundreds of emails, multiple meetings, and all sorts of things (some important, some not) that are “have to” things and that can get in the way of the “big things.” Either the night before or first thing the day of, commit to what has to get done that day - something big, needle-moving, and challenging. And make that the order of the day. You’ll be shocked how, magically, all the other stuff will get done, too.

(2) A branch manager of mine when I was an advisor at a wirehouse shared a practice called “D - D - D” that I am a believer in. The second you receive something, as quickly as you realistically can, new mail, new email, new reports, new projects - something - either “deal” with it, “delegate” it, or “discard” it. I used to hold on to so many things so I could “deal” with them later just in case, when really they could be “discarded.” Just make the call right away - discard the stuff that can be discarded and don’t allow it to take up space in your memory bank. If you are in a position to “delegate” things, do so quickly. For advisors with more traditional practices, it may mean tasking something to your Operations department or your junior advisor. For me at this stage of my business it could mean delegating to another leader on my team, or another department director, or to another advisor, or what have you. But if it is not going to be dealt with by me and it is not going to be discarded, then I need to delegate it immediately. From that delegation, some things warrant follow-up and monitoring and other things I can “check the box” - once I delegate certain things to certain people, they are as good as done. That is a life-changing development to have that trust in capable feeling. Now, that leaves stuff that needs to be “dealt” with. I do not suggest that every major task or project can be, or even should be, handled within a few minutes of receipt. Many things can, but all things can be put into a queue. I use outlook and our SalesForce workflow to manage tasks, to create flags for follow-ups, and to assign deadlines for completion. I coordinate these decisions with my own calendar and awareness of my own short-term capacity and resources. I do not, ever, say: “I will handle this in three months.” Putting something out longer-term may seem to be “out of sight, out of mind,” but it isn’t. Your sub-conscious knows it is there, and it will weigh on your peace. I am positive of that. Deal, Discard, or Delegate, and thank you to DD for teaching me that (yes, the initials of the manager who taught me DDD were DD).

(3) Exercise, preferably every single day. “But David, that is time spent not working?” No, it is time spent releasing stress, creating endorphins, and preparing yourself for a healthier, more focused, and more energized day. It is God’s biological way of blocking stress signals to our brain and promoting clarity, positivity, and relaxation. It should be a non-negotiable. For me, I have to do it very early in the morning just based on the flow of my days, but if you are an “exercise after work” kind of person, so be it. But I cannot say enough how brutally important I believe this is emotionally, as much as physically.

(4) Manage your inbox. I spend all my time deleting emails when I am walking down the hallways of my office (whether it is walking to the bathroom, or to see one of my people, or whatever). “Always be deleting” - ABD, is perhaps more important than the ABC of Glengarry Glenross. Along these lines: Unsubscribe to every single thing you can that you don’t need. If you buy something from an e-commerce site, unsubscribe after, or uncheck the box to receive their emails. Add people - lots of people - to your junk filter every day. Religiously manage your inbox, because it is kryptonite for productivity if you let it be.

(5) I am not going down the rabbit hole of talking about sleep. This is not normative. Everyone’s sleep needs and preferences are different. Some people are morning people. Some are evening people. I can’t comment on how anyone else should be because I just don’t know. I wake up at 3:45am every morning because God made me to love mornings, to leave the first few hours of the day, the quiet, the lack of distractions, the sunrise, the whole thing. And it affords me a productivity, especially for the vast amount of writing I do which is pivotal for our business, that I can not find in the middle of the day. Of course, waking up early means going to bed at the right time and all that kind of stuff. I can’t tell people how to be here - I can only say that I know my love of the morning has blessed our business immensely.

(6) Find the wisdom in discerning the need for more meetings versus the need for less meetings. Early in my career and especially in my obligations as a rainmaker I leaned into the need to meet people everywhere I could. It was an appropriate part of my journey at that time, and if you are in that phase of your advisory career, do a lot of meetings - coffees, breakfasts, lunches, cocktail parties, political fundraisers, tailgates, whatever it is that allows you to meet people authentically. But there is also a point where too many meetings can be a parasite. Develop the instinct for when to say no. Use discretion and discernment to prioritize. And whatever it means for you, figure out how you can do more meetings that serve clients and grow business and less meetings that don’t.

I will leave you with an excerpt from the team email I sent my team of 90 employees a few days ago.

“[I want to address] the distinction between being busy and being productive. Sure, this could be a both-and, but I find for a lot of people it is an either-or. The veneer and cosmetic of busy-ness is not hard to create, and neither is self-deception about it. Productivity, though, requires self-awareness and accountability. Joleen sent me a reel over the weekend that really spoke to me. I have worked very hard over the years to be less busy and more productive. In my defense, part of the busy-ness challenge is being the head of the business. I do not think there are many people running a business with their name on the door who ever have the luxury of only doing the things that maximize productive output. I owe it to all of you and the sustainability of this business to somewhat have my hand in everything, to know and care about all aspects of the business, and to never be a hands-off Managing Partner. But with that said, I can get in the way of my own productivity by over-committing myself, by not being a wise and efficient and delegator, by not hiring well, by not being intelligent in how I allocate responsibilities, etc. I also tend to over commit to meetings, podcasts, interviews, speeches, etc. I will not bore you all with the steps I have taken to change this, and anyone who pays attention to my calendar may be shocked to hear me say that I believe I have made substantial improvements in what I commit to … But I feel that I have four jobs (managing money, managing the growth and strategy of this business, managing clients, and managing the day-to-day business and team), and across that four-quadrant asset allocation I have very targeted goals for which ones I want to go up, which ones I want to go down, and how I intend to create such outcomes. More importantly, I try to manage my time in such a way as to not feel good about doing a lot of “things” but rather obsessing over the output, the productivity, and the priority of what I get done. I have learned over the years what grows TBG’s business. I need to do those things. I have learned what makes us a better business culturally. I need to do those things. “Busy” work sometimes has to happen, but it should be minimized wherever possible.

I write this abnormally long team email to encourage you all – leaders, directors, PWAG, and every member of the team – to not delude yourself into thinking that being busy is enough, or something to be inherently proud of. Focus on being productive, of moving the needle, of doing the big things that matter. “Avoidance behavior” is the devil’s tool. Put into practice the habits that maximize your time, your margin, your energy, and your cognitive ability to do your best work. And for pete’s sake, do not procrastinate. Get stuff done. Stuff that matters.”

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One housekeeping note: The event that B2Bahnsen is going to host with yours truly and, far more importantly, Nick Murray, will be on Friday, October 30, at CONVENE in 75 Rockefeller Plaza in the middle of midtown Manhattan. Invitations with a system for reserving your space for this FREE event will go out in March!

I mentioned awards as a part of this annual escapade, and this year was the fourth year in a row that we presented our annual awards to our:

(1) Culture Carrier of the year

(2) Private Wealth Advisor of the year

(3) Most Improved of the Year

(4) Rookie of the Year

We also added, this year, a fifth award … the

(5) “Yes, I can” award (for the person who most exhibits a, “yes, I can” attitude towards their work; we are in the business of problem-solving at TBG)

Beyond those annual awards, we also announce key promotions at the retreat as certain team members are promoted within their departments. And perhaps most significantly, we announce our annual New Partner Class at the retreat, as well. Each year we bring on new team members in to the partnership that is The Bahnsen Group. This is meritocratic but also a massive opportunity for our people to become owners in our business. We announced three new partners this year, two advisors and one non-advisor. This annual tradition is a meaningful part of our culture but also a truly substantive way for our people to build a balance sheet and to become owners, not just employees. It is a special event, to say the least.

Well, now to the point of today’s piece. The other thing we do every year is announce the annual theme for the year ahead. Every year since we left Morgan Stanley eleven years ago we have selected an “annual theme.” I quote it every single day in the daily team email I send each morning, and we reference it all year long to reinforce its meaning for our business.

In 2025 our theme was “Be a Ten!!” and it was meant to capture a number of things at once. On one hand, 2025 was the ten year anniversary of our independence and the formation of when we started this company. We also have our eyes on the prize of being a $10 billion company (we started the year at $6.6 billion and are ending the year near $8.5 billion). But most importantly, the idea was for every single person on the team to find the thing they were best at - that contribution where they are an 8 or 9, and to become a ten. It was meant to reinforce a refusal to settle for really good, or even great, but to push for that elite excellence that is the hallmark of an exraordinary company. It caused us to rigorously look at our own strengths and weaknesses, individually and collectively, and analyze where there was room to “be a ten” yet where we weren’t there yet.

At this year’s retreat, we announced the 2026 theme as “Both-And.” It is one of my favorite ones we have ever had. I truly believe our advisory profession is too often presented as an “either-or” binary, when most things are both-and. Allow me to elaborate.

For The Bahnsen Group, the most important application of a “both-and” reality is in the question of whether or not we are small or big. It is easy for a large wirehouse to answer that question - they are big. They have the advantages of being a big firm, but also the disadvantages. There is bureaucracy and corporate fat, but there are also vast resources and, presumably, sophisticated capabilities. It is easy for an independent business of less than ten people to answer the question - they are small. They may need to outsource a lot of things and rely on outside partners for certain resources, but they have the benefits of smallness - an intimacy, a relationship-mindset, a nimbleness and efficiency that are all great assets. We were once an eight-person firm, and we were small. We are now 91 people and I imagine we end 2026 at or above a hundred people. Are we big or small? Both-and. It is the fundamental tension in our strategy - to truly achieve the best of all worlds. On one hand, to be “big” in that we have deep resources for ultra high net worth planning, a fully equipped tax department, extraordinary technology (both client-facing and internal), a robust infrastructure for content and thought leadership, deep investment capabilities, lots of talent and cross-pollination, etc. And on the other hand, to be “small” in our flexibility, our speed, our relational intimacy, the dynamic we have with clients, our personal touch and care, and in all the business particulars that matter. I loathe big bureaucracy, and I love sophistication. We want the sophistication of being big and the efficiency of being small. If part of being bigger means that we have a more difficult time making decisions, we have done something wrong. If part of staying smaller and deeply personal means that we cannot create a bespoke outcome for a complex client situation, we have done something wrong. We recognize the tension in this, but we reject an either-or outcome. We are committed to being both big and small.

The both-and dynamic goes beyond that example. Most of you have probably been asked before if you were primarily a planning operation or an investment operation. I never want to give any answer other than “yes.” We are both a planning firm and an investment firm. These two things are not at odds with one another. Both-and. Planning has to be a vital forefront in a value proposition, and Investments have to stem from deep convictions and philosophy. No one will pay someone money to manage their investments if they “are not an investment firm.” And no one should pay you for investments if you are “not a planning firm.” The planning and investments are integrated in a proper wealth management operation, and therefore the desire to dichotomize these two things is fallacious. Both-and.

Both principled, and empathetic.

Both personal, and professional.

Both committed to clients, and to our families.

Both loyal to one’s department, AND the team as a whole.

As Marcus Aurelius championed, both resolute (strong convictions) and yielding (adaptable and teachable).

And last but not least, both committed to GROWTH and to CULTURE. It is the great sin of our industry that we pit these two things against one another. A wealth advisory practice that is not growing is going to die. There is too much natural attrition in this business for that not to be true. And a wealth advisory practice that is solely focused on growth will never sustain it, because ignoring culture undermines your mission, and works against the growth you are supposedly obsessed with. Growing is a by-product of running a business that deserves to grow. Culture is what you do each day. It is the organization, the mission, the team, the client experience, the value proposition, all rolled into one. You grow so you can enhance culture. You enhance culture so you can grow. Both-and. No advisory firm is as client-centric as they ought to be without both-and.

If your advisory practice has a 2026 team theme, share it with me (and all the other readers) in the substack comments here. If you have questions about doing a team retreat, fire away. And if have other examples of how we must be both-and advisors, we’d all love to hear them. I am here to both write, and learn

Second, because so many of you use the TBG Dividend Growth ETF in your own investment allocations (reach out if you want more information or need help getting it approved at your firm’s platform), I thought some of you may want our take on the dividend implications (and more) of what appears to be new government policy on owning U.S. public companies.

For those who asked about the event I will be doing with Nick Murray in New York City in 2026, the date is set for Friday, October 30. The event will be totally free for advisors (TBG is picking up all event expenses) and will include both breakfast and lunch. The venue will be confirmed in a week or so and I will keep you posted on how to register when we are ready. It will be first-come, first-serve and more information will be forthcoming very soon.

Finally, if you subscribed to B2Bahnsen because you found me on Substack and had an interest in what I would be writing here, just know that this substack (my only one) is fully devoted to writing to other members of the financial advisory profession. I won’t be offended at all if you unsubscribe upon discovering what this is about, as it really is meant to be a “B2B” offering (business perspective for those within this business). My various investment and market commentary is always and forever at Dividend Cafe, and my various cultural and political ruminations are at Bahnsen.com. Thanks so much!

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I actually have strong opinions about this week’s topic even beyond the wealth advisory profession. I serve on a couple not-for-profit boards, one corporate board, and, of course, am in conversation with various people about various business deals, all the time. In the course of these organic events and occurrences, one encounters a certain vocabulary and engages with folks who believe that certain phrases or “key words” mean something much more than they do. The reason I am bringing up the subject of buzzwords in B2Bahnsen is because I consider it a major red flag for those of us in the wealth advisory profession - a tell, if you will. And I want to offer a loving exhortation to not do it.

Non-profit folks fall prey to using the sort of language I am referring to more than regular people whose careers ought to subject them to market discipline. I have come to believe that this is because so many in the non-profit space are cosplaying - they over-compensating (for reasons I will resist the temptation to diagnose) and find themselves in a make-believe world where they talk the way they imagine “MBA types” talk in a “business setting.” It is kind of repulsive, if you want my honest opinion. I think the word I have heard some younger people us is “cringe.”

Entire Instagram accounts exist to make fun of this “corporate speak” and “MBA buzzword” universe wherein people talk a lot and yet say nothing, so really I am pretty late to the party here. If all I were doing was serving as an Amen Chorus to those who make fun of people who say things like “synergy” and “strategic alignment” than my piece would not be particularly useful (or to be ironic, it would not be “low-hanging fruit” that helps to "move the needle” or capture a “blue ocean strategy.”) But I want to apply a more particular exhortation around this topic to those of us in the advisory profession, because some of us may be guilty of it without knowing we are guilty of it, and I have an out-of-consensus theory as to where it comes from that I hope will be useful.

First, let’s make a distinction: Internal jargon - different from - buzzword cliche gobbledygook. Both can be real problems in the way advisors communicate with the outside world, but they are two different categories. I’ll start with “internal jargon.”

I am not suggesting that advisors stop talking like advisors. When we consider an SMA for a client, and talk about pricing in terms of basis points, and make reference to spreads in assessing credit risk, and refer to the IRR of an investment, I have to think we are mostly using terminology that is reasonably unavoidable in our line of work. In fact, I think we talk to our fellow team members (and other B2B talk) this way much more than we realize. I catch myself all the time moving into an almost different language when I am speaking with our portfolio management partners - both the jargon, the acronyms, and the implied understanding of certain concepts. And I do not think there is anything wrong with this … as long as you realize that your clients think you sound like an alien when you talk this way to them. Normal human beings do not know what SMA’s, IRR’s, or basis points are, and they thinks spreads are for a tailgate, not a measurement of credit risk. The use of jargon in front of clients does not make us sound smart - it makes us sound arrogant or aloof. And worse - it doesn’t communicate anything to the people who pay us to clearly communicate with them, because it gets lost in translation. I have heard some suggest that the remedy to this is for advisors, themselves, to not ever talk like financial advisors. I do not agree. When I talk to my Investment Solutions team I have to be liberated to talk like, you know, someone in the investment business. But advisors have to, and I mean have to, develop the muscle that turns it on and off when we are talking to our clients. Clarity, purposeful communication, and defined terms are so much more impactful to our relationships than words and figures of speech that cause the listener to tune out either because they don’t want to say that they got lost, or because they just think we sound like idiots.

But the second category, very distinct from the first, is what I affectionately referred to above as buzzword cliche gobbledygook. This is not specific to financial services or the reality of investment/financial vocabulary - but rather more generic talk that has become prevalent in our society. I believe it is a mask used by insecure people to cover up their own intellectual or professional deficiencies. It is not a very good mask. And while I do not like it when anyone does it, there is less excuse for competent, best-in-class advisors to do it than anyone else.

Our words have meaning. Postmodernism gave birth to deconstructionism and deconstructionism attempted to teach us that words lack meaning - that they are inherently ambiguous and fluid. This would be news to people who rely on words for information. Words matter, and if we have something to say, we have the ability to say it clearly, and if we are doing our jobs well, succinctly. When we use words that can mean anything, we have said something that means nothing. The modern business vocabulary that hides behind buzzwords and cliches and pop psycho babble speak does so because too many people are trying to justify their own existence. This, sadly, seems to include the MBA douche train establishment, or more charitably, the bureaucrat industrial complex (wait, is that more charitable?).

“Scale” actually has a meaning in a certain context. Do you know how many times I hear someone use the word “scale” when it doesn’t mean “scale” whatsoever? It is horrifying. I have considered ending friendships over it. If what you mean to say is, “we can do this easier,” that is a different sentiment than “scale.” Now, I can turn this essay into fifty other examples, or I can just leave it there and hope you get my point. We have a society of people using figures of speech that don’t make sense, that lack specificity, and primarily reflect ignorance and under-achievement, not sophistication and accomplishment.

Why am I bringing this up?

At the core of my philosophy of what a successful wealth advisory career looks like is the concept of deserved self-confidence. I do not believe one should be self-confident if they don’t know what they are doing, but where someone is capable, competent, and proficient, I believe their success as an advisor comes out of their own self-assurance. They do not fear the outcome of a prospective client turning them down. They do not fear a client wondering why their portfolio was up less than the market last month. And they do not feel the need to sound like a bad McKinsey consultant - or worse, a professor who teaches future McKinsey consultants! I will dedicate a future B2Bahnsen issue to my philosophy of referrals, but one of the reasons I disagree with nearly everything I have ever heard in our industry about receiving referrals from clients is because it all defies what any one of us would want or expect from a top-tier lawyer or heart surgeon. I believe the most successful advisors see themselves for what they ought to be - truly valuable professionals who create solutions for clients who need solutions - and that point of view ought to feed a self-confidence that puts down the path of the piker, and invites a communication style of clarity, brevity, and true meaning.

Buzzwords are a substitute for communication used by people looking for a substitute to real value. My encouragement of the day is to hold yourself and your work in such high regard that you can let your yes be yes and your no be no.

That will generate really strong KPI’s for you … (sometimes I crack myself up).

A few questions and comments came out of the last issue and they are worthy of being addressed:

You stated, “I know that the things which most made The Bahnsen Group successful over the last 25 years were not the various nuggets of financial granularity I have stuffed into my head over this time, but I also know that I have to be true to myself, and I have always believed that my moral authority and trustworthiness was enhanced by my own desire to learn and grow.”

This reminded me of some of your thoughts in “Full Time”, which I’ve purchased for several colleagues, but I wanted to ask at what point does stuffing knowledge into our heads become an excuse for not doing the work to help our businesses grow?

I’m wrapping up my EA after getting my CFP, and I’m contemplating what’s next. I think of your mentor, Nick Murray, and how he would say any letters behind your name don’t make prospects more inclined to talk to you, but I too have a desire to learn as much as possible with the days the Lord grants me.

Sorry for the long-winded email and question, but would just be curious to hear your thoughts on if there’s a particular direction you would look to next.

That is always a real risk – stuffing knowledge into one’s head as an avoidance behavior. I don’t know the solution other than each individual advisor having the right wisdom to not lean into intellectual apathy and on the other side to not lean into avoidance behavior. It takes judicious discernment, not a prescribed formula. I would say that if one if NOT growing their business, but reading a hundred pages of research per day, they probably know the answer.

I couldn’t agree more about the credential deal. Classic avoidance behaviors AND impostor syndrome. I not only believe there are advisors who chronically pursue new initials after their last name to avoid doing the job of prospecting and doing the job of serving clients, but I think it is high time we have a conversation as grown-ups about how the designation industry has become a scam that does nothing – nothing to validate an advisor’s competence, and in fact generally reveals a deficit of self-confidence and even capability. I myself have my CFP and my CIMA, and I do not post them on my business card or email signature any longer (just because I find it odd to run a business of the size I do and hold out those rather pedestrian designations as some sort of signal of competence or legitimacy). That said, we have over twenty CFP’s at our firm and I encourage all of those advisors and planners to show theirs in email signature and business cards (we are a planning-forward firm and that mark indicates something different for them than it does for me). It is subjective and not a hard and fast rule. But I would say that when you get past JD, CPA, CFA, and CFP, and you start talking about an academic degree (MBA? Really?) and a whole bunch of internal industry-manufactured designations that lack the institutional credibility and pedigree of the obvious ones, I believe it belittles the profession, belittles the person, and is more likely to be counter-productive than people realize. I do not say this as any offense to people who are proud of the extra online courses they took and internal credentialing their firm offered, etc. I think people getting initials as a by-product of them obtaining specialized expertise is what it is, but I would say there is power in silence, too. Learning something your competitors don’t know, but not attaching an alphabet soup to your LinkedIn profile, has a sort of self-confident aura to it. The psychology behind this stuff matters. Self-confident advisors do not muck up their branding with initials that make no sense to the outside world. Or at least, they shouldn’t.

As someone preparing to graduate and begin a career in wealth management, I wanted to ask one follow-up question: What practical steps would you recommend for someone just starting out to build both competence and credibility in the field?

Your advice has already been deeply encouraging, and I appreciate the guidance you have shared.

In a nutshell: Read

Reading, preparation, study, becoming a student of the business, becoming a sponge to learn all you can. Credibility comes from confidence and confidence comes from competence and competence comes from diligent study. There is nothing one can do when they are pre-employed in the business but learn. Read FT, WSJ, Bloomberg. Read from other B2B resources in the business. Read about capital markets and economics. That honestly is the #1 thing I would say, with a huge gap between this and #2.

But I also would say that once you are in the wealth management profession, if you have a client-facing role or one where the duty revolves around being in relationship to clients, your soft skills, people skills, communication skills, and EQ are going to matter a lot. In fact, for those whose job is to develop a book of business, and then serve and grow that business, your success comes down to competence and likability. I would begin thinking through your ability to interact with others, to hold a conversation, to develop listening skills, to meet new people, to enjoy people in public forums, to be comfortable with people in private forums, and if I can say the same thing twice in one sentence, to develop listening skills.

So much is up in the air still if you are still in school and not sure exactly what venue or path you will begin in wealth management. But the universals are that your future will be about competence and likability. Develop lifetime habits now of reading, and lifetime habits now of listening. You’ll be shocked the headstart this will give you.

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About four weeks ago now I attended the annual Nick Murray symposium in New York City, an event he began doing in 2009 at the Marriott East Side in midtown Manhattan, and that I attended every single year he ever did it (he moved to the Marriott Marquis around a decade ago). There were a couple years off for the event due to COVID, but this annual event was a “no miss” affair for me, and some of the early events in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis were seminal moments for me in my life and career. The content has always been directly correlated to what Nick’s entire ethos is in his monthly, not-to-be-missed subscription newsletter (where readers perpetually rip him off by paying substantially less zeroes in the annual cost than the value it delivers), but I always found the verbal, in-person delivery, even more impactful than the newsletter. Over the years certain messages from these events either changed or reinforced major elements of my own advisory belief system, and they are hallmark events I will never forget.

• “You have the life you want”

• “Inputs, not outcomes”

• “You do not have to work with a client who does not like you, and you do not have to work with a client who you do not like”

• “They are not interviewing you; you are interviewing them”

There are many, many more, and the newsletter captures these nuggets of wisdom well. But as Nick taught these things to me many years ago they did not merely impact me as an advisor – they impacted me as a human being. My own ethos as a person was enhanced out of his annual events. There was a point a long time ago where I was no longer going to hear something new at one of Nick’s events – he is consistent and rigorous in reinforcing a pretty well-established belief system. In other words, I am sure I had “heard it all” a long time ago. But I wouldn’t have missed one for the world, because I needed the reminders, I appreciated the reaffirmation, and I was emotionally and professionally recharged to be with a peer group and advisory mentor who were so committed to truth-telling.

At the recent event (which Nick has said will be his last year doing this), a group of other long-time attendees and I were talking over breakfast before the sessions began, sharing what our major takeaways were from Nick’s work over the years. We actually spoke a bit about certain things we might disagree with here or there … and yet, what each of us said, was that the undeniable, incomparable value proposition of Nick’s events and writings for us was the mentality he advocated. Certain particulars here and there are negotiable. But the mentality advisors live and operate with if they are bought in to Nick’s teaching is career and life changing. It was for me. It was for them. And I will miss Nick’s annual event a great deal.

But many of you will not have to. I am happy to report that B2Bahnsen is going to host an annual day-long event next year where both Nick and I will speak, complete with lengthy open-forum Q&A fireside chat, at no cost whatsoever. It will be on Friday, October 30, and B2Bahnsen will be sponsoring the whole event. Advisors will pay for their own travel and accommodations, but the event will be free. Breakfast and lunch will be provided. We will have the venue confirmed shortly and plans for registration (first come, first serve, of course) will be announced soon. It will only be open for advisors. More to come!

Then the 2008 year would change everything. I was there for 25 meetings in nine days right in the immediate aftermath of the Fannie/Freddie/Lehman/Merrill/AIG/Wachovia failures, when the fate of my own firm was not yet known, and let’s just the mood of the city was “not festive.” I was also juxtaposing, then, meetings with clients in addition to all these manager meetings (I did not yet live in NYC so my time there needed to kill multiple birds with one stone), and on Monday, Sept. 29, I sat at Morrell’s Wine Bar & Café near 30 Rock with a client who was one of my best friends, may he rest in peace, and watched the Dow drop like a rock in the aftermath of the failed House vote on TARP (Dow down -7% and S&P down -9% on the day). It was, well, memorable. But I digress. Essentially, the meetings allowed me in real time to ask significant credit managers, hedge funds, and others inside the market what was going on, and to better understand it myself. There was never an iota of a trade to be put on or a client portfolio to change. It was purely educational for me. One of the hedge fund managers I met with that day would become famous later when they were portrayed in the Michael Lewis book (and movie), The Big Short. At the time, it was just a hedge fund who had a huge short position on our nation’s credit markets (with housing as ground zero). I learned what contagion really was. And I began a multi-year obsession with the causation of the great financial crisis. Years from now I believe there will be two types of people doing public commentary (cultural, economic, etc.): Those who understand the ramifications of the 2008 crisis, and those who don’t.

Anyways, the next five years of these meetings were truly life-changing for me. My business was continuing to grow year-over-year, and so was my confidence in what we were doing for clients, and why. I have always believed that the fundamental value proposition of a great advisor is behavioral modification with clients, and yet never believed that the person doing that ought to be dumber than a rock. I see advisors constantly pride themselves in how little they understand capital markets, and it makes me think that these people believe a good meteorologist is one who looks good on television with a teleprompter. I don’t believe every good advisor needs to fully understand all nooks and crannies of a credit default swap, but I do believe that the moral authority from which an advisor asks a client to trust them ought to be rooted to an intellectual foundation that is not a mirage. I know that the things which most made The Bahnsen Group successful over the last 25 years were not the various nuggets of financial granularity I have stuffed into my head over this time, but I also know that I have to be true to myself, and I have always believed that my moral authority and trustworthiness was enhanced by my own desire to learn and grow. I have used these meetings over the years, especially in those first five years post-GFC, to really understand the capital markets that I have used as the venue for my life and career, and the tool by which my client’s goals are reached. It also gave us additional opportunity for due diligence, for monitoring of strategy, for the basic function of being an asset allocator. But yes, it also gave me the deeper educational attainment that I wanted.

The last decade of meetings have been unbelievable, as well. We now have really entrenched relationships, with some of our partners having hundreds of millions of dollars of our client capital entrusted to them. We are low turnover asset allocators, and have done a lot to simplify the amount of people we call partner. We also manage U.S. equity in-house, with our core dividend portfolio representing something in the range of $4.3 billion of the $8.2 billion we presently manage. Not having six U.S. equity managers to meet with makes this whole process a lot simpler. But other asset classes we use in client portfolios require these relationships, and we delve into those conversations each and every year.

Right before we left Morgan Stanley to start our own firm Brian Szytel began joining me on this annual trip. He is now a co-CIO with me and of course joins this pilgrimage every year. I believe it is five years now that Kenny Molina, our Director of Investment Solutions, has joined, as well. I wrote a Dividend Café in the aftermath of this week’s meetings for public consumption just offering a few high level takeaways. I also compiled ~20 pages of notes from the meetings, reasonably sanitized them, and am happy to send them to any of you if you are interested (email me at DBahnsen@thebahnsengroup.com). None taken if not interested!

Each advisor and each advisory business has a different approach to how they actually manage money on behalf of clients. Ours is one that is more active and engaged than some, but which repudiates traditional “style box” investing for something more true to what we believe. It is certainly true that I have a distinct investment philosophy, and therefore believe certain things that cause me to not believe other things. So I don’t suggest that “all investment philosophies are created equal” – because they are not (incidentally, not all life philosophies are created equal, either, and when one says that what matters is that you stay true to yourself, they fail to realize how empowering this is for sincere idiots). But I do believe that one of the worst investment philosophies (of all the bad ones) is to claim or operate as if you do not have one. And once you have one, as the greatest advisor-to-advisors our industry has ever had, Nick Murray, has taught us: You root your request for a client’s trust to your own moral authority, period. I am suggesting for purposes of today’s post that:

1. Advisors worthy of moral authority have an investment philosophy

2. Advisors with an investment philosophy relying on their own moral authority have grounding for such moral authority

3. The grounding of such moral authority requires advisors to be intellectually serious about these endeavors, yet

4. Never allow the intellectual endeavors to serve as the basis for the moral authority

I think some advisors find a tension between C and D above. I do not. If there is tension, it is tension lightly (and joyfully) held. Know what you believe. Know why you do it. Stay conversant and engaged and serious. And focus your energy on truth-telling. The moral authority is rooted to truth-telling. The ability to tell the truth requires you to know what the truth is. And advisors who find the connection between all these points find the holy grail.

That’s my take and I am sticking to it.

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Speaking of the great Nick Murray, I attended his annual symposium in New York on Friday and will devote my next B2Bahnsen to sharing a few thoughts. He says this last one was his last one, and so I have to take that at face value unless there is a divine intervention. It was very nice to meet some of you face-to-face at Nick’s event. More to come …

I recently read through a rather lengthy deck produced by Cerulli Associates on the wealth management industry. The same week I read this deck a reader of B2Bahnsen asked me to address how advisors can “differentiate” in this day and age. That question, and certain things illuminated in the Cerulli study, serve as the inspiration for today’s piece.

It is my opinion that differentiation is vital for advisor success. This is true for business development (what makes you stand out that attracts you to prospective clients), and to a lesser degree it is true for business retention (what enables you to keep clients for life). One potential counter to my thesis is that solid investment allocation, behavioral modification, and planning implementation are, themselves, so valuable, so perpetual, and so important, that doing them “differently” is not needed to be a good practitioner – just doing them “well” is. I do not entirely disagree, actually. But I am not referring to “differentiation,” necessarily, in those three categories (investing, behavioral management, and planning). By the end of this piece I want to argue for a different definition of differentiation, one that is available to all practitioners.

There are two things from the Cerulli study that stood out to me and are pertinent to this subject. First, the number of advisory firms presenting financial planning as a core service continues to go up (now 82%), and this is no surprise. The idea that planning ever wasn’t a core service is utterly bizarre to me, but the idea that it wouldn’t be, today, is incomprehensible. That said, “offering planning services” can hardly be called a differentiator, and with more and more firms joining the fray, the planning itself must be differentiated. Be it the quality, the deliverables, the process, the skill and acumen behind it, the ability to offer niche planning – the particulars of the planning differentiation are going to matter more than having it on the menu. (I hope this goes without saying). That 18% of RIA’s still offer “no planning services” means we all should be taking every one of their clients. Ready, set, go.

But the other thing from the study I want to mention is that when I began my research to leave Morgan Stanley in 2014 the percentage of wealth management assets attached to “fiduciary” accounts made up 40% of total industry assets ($6.6 trillion then out of $16.3 trillion, total). Today, 56% of assets are in “fiduciary” accounts ($17.7 trillion out of $31 trillion). So note the denominator growth: A LOT of wealth has been created in the last decade (industry AUM has doubled from $16tn to $32tn). But also note that being a fiduciary is becoming less of a differentiator. This is a 40% increase (from 40% to 56%) in one decade. The “fiduciary” label applies to far more (in some capacity or another) than it ever has, meaning those of us holding out that label are far less special than we used to be.

I am not convinced offering planning services or being a fiduciary was ever a real differentiator, but I am sure they could have passed as one in some sense. Much like saying one is “fee-based” there is just nothing that special about it any more. I do not recommend not doing any of these things (being planning-forward, being a fiduciary, having a fee-based compensation system) – but I would suggest they are mere table stakes for the advisory profession, a baseline just for admission.

So what does it mean to differentiate in the wealth advisory space? There are a lot of advisors competing for the same clients, utilizing the same capital markets as tools towards the end of financial goals, attempting to provide solutions to the same types of challenges (that is, the optimal accumulation, preservation, and transfer of wealth throughout the life cycle of a client). The irony in this dilemma is that the more one tries to solve it, the worse they risk making it for themselves (and their clients), and that the more one lets it unfold naturally, the more differentiated they are likely to be.

There are few things more annoying than one who has to manufacture sincerity, or someone who puts effort into effortlessness (spending hours to put off a vibe that you don’t care what you look like, for example). College students who go to great lengths to “not conform” by conforming, en masse, to the most trendy, pro-cultural movements of our day. These exhausting examples of disingenuity are a little more forgivable in young people than adult professionals, but all of it is exasperating. I would suggest there is a strong parallel in the discussion of differentiation. If one “differentiates” by taking a proper and necessary practice, and not doing it because others do it, they may be differentiating, but they are also an idiot. If, however, their own creative, organic, natural, authentic selves bring a differentiated angle, spark, perspective, or color to something, that strikes me as exciting and promising.

Let’s divide up “differentiation” for advisors into two categories:

1. Where you may stand out in terms of your business development efforts – how prospective clients may see you and your value proposition as different from others

2. Where you may stand out in terms of your client service delivery – how what you do and deliver for clients in delivering a value proposition may be different from others

Note that the value proposition is not the focus above. An awful lot of advisors may say that their value proposition is to “deliver solutions for the financial needs and objectives of their clients,” and if 300,000 advisors say something similar, that is an awful lot of non-differentiated sameness in value proposition. But the two things I am talking about above are standing out in how prospective clients see you, and then standing out in your own delivery of the value proposition. And on both of these fronts I know of no other better differentiation than:

Being your own authentic, differentiated self

I believe my firm has benefitted from being outspoken advocates of dividend growth investing. I believe in it with every ounce of breath in my body. I wrote a book on it. I am writing another book on it (coming: summer 2026). We manage an ETF of the strategy available to the world. I write about it every single week. And never in a million years did it occur to me to adopt dividend growth investing as a “differentiator.” The chicken or egg here is so vitally important. In my own studies of capital markets, of what investing really is, of what cash flow driven planning looks like, of where risk premia comes from in equity investing, I became convinced of the merits of dividend growth investing and sought to (a) Master my understanding of it, (b) Implement it to the best of my ability for the betterment of my clients, and (c) Become an evangelist for it. The differentiation was a result, not a cause.

Our business development differentiators all unfolded the same way: authentic, natural extensions of my own personality, interests, passions, and gifts. Content-as-a-service is not for everyone. And of course, the platforms for these things evolved and changed themselves over time. Your own unique approach to client attraction will be differentiated if you make it your own unique approach.

Likewise, delivery of a differentiated client experience does not mean brainstorming how to make your deliverable look different, or how to say something no one else is saying (“work with us, for we are the only advisor you will find that has truly found a way to short soybean futures inside a structured product while writing call options that give you levered upside”). Idiots can be real differentiated. Don’t do that. Unwise differentiation, forced differentiation, and counter-productive differentiation, all lead to bad outcomes.

Differentiation is the by-product of right-sized self-confidence, self-awareness, and inner-conviction. It also is the default reality of God’s creation. Meaning, you have to lean into conformity to avoid differentiation – because we are all unique and different, whether people fully grasp that or not. This is the base of the great mind-easing reality here: Differentiation will come naturally if you do not resist it. Lean into your own style, beliefs, ideas, and particulars. Avoid the temptation to adapt to the culture. Be counter-cultural in resisting that which hurts clients (performance-chasing, fad-investing, market-timing). And be entrepreneurial in considering what parts of your unique, differentiated self add to your value proposition.

A differentiation that comes naturally is the only kind of differentiation worthy of the name.

I was grateful to be on Rob Brown’s Purpose-Focused Advisor Podcast last week talking about my book on work. And for those who missed it, we continue to get lots of feedback about my appearance on Michael Kitces’ podcast from a few weeks back.

Also, if you are a financial advisor (or something adjacent) interested in my musings on the advisory profession, you are in the right place. B2Bahnsen is my substack created for the wealth advisory profession. If you are looking for my investment commentary, Dividend Café is where you want to be. Of course, many advisors may be interested in both, whether it is my recent piece on the AOL-Time Warner disaster of 25 years ago, or my comprehensive assessment of the “big, beautiful bill.” But if you are not in the advisory profession and Dividend Café is what you are looking for, I get it! Non-advisors who unsubscribe to B2Bahnsen will not hurt my feelings (in fact, I recommend it). As my family can attest, there is definitely such thing as “too much David Bahnsen.”

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So with that said and the audience now humbly right-sized, I want to address the different phases of TBG over the years. I don’t merely mean the historical overview I gave a few issues ago, but specifically the different eras of growth I have experienced as an advisor, each with their own unique markers and realities that are worth discussion.

One of the questions I am asked most often is “how have you grown the way you have grown?” It is a flattering question and I certainly appreciate the kind words from other advisors impressed with our growth rate. I entered the business as a trainee with Paine Webber with $0 of assets, $0 of family money, and $0 of inherited accounts, and as I type this I believe The Bahnsen Group will pass $8 billion in assets under management any time now. Both revenues and assets have essentially enjoyed a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of ~30% since I entered the business (in 2001), and our firm maintains a passionate zeal for growth.

That said, there is not a monolithic answer about “how we have grown,” and truth be told, there are really [so far] three stages to our growth. When I talk to the Private Wealth Advisor Group (PWAG) at TBG about our history and growth, I refer to a TBG 1.0, a TBG 2.0, and a TBG 3.0, and our Leadership Team thinks a lot about what TBG 4.0 might look like (I ideate about this all the time). There are absolutely core principles, beliefs, and strategies that have been constant through each iteration, but there have also been different dynamics that I think are worth highlighting. The goal in this B2Bahnsen post is that in sharing our story some element of our 1.0 or 2.0 or 3.0 or all of the above will provide pertinent and useful to your journey as an advisor pursuing your own authentic strategies of growth.

TBG 1.0 was the longest period of the past 25 years (so far). It was essentially the era that would be the most traditional in terms of conventional advisory practices. The defining characteristic of TBG 1.0 was that there was no division of labor in the rainmaking – I was the sole person responsible for business development. Over the years other personnel roles evolved (almost every advisor who built their own practice at a wirehouse remembers the graduation from sharing a Client Service Associate with other advisors to getting your own, and most advisors who grow to such a place at a wirehouse remember the graduation from one dedicated service associate to two dedicated service associates, etc.). There were different attempts with junior advisors over the years, and other such members of the team to facilitate our client service model, but in TBG 1.0 business growth came if and when I succeeded in my own rainmaking efforts. I have shared before what my beliefs about business growth were (from the very beginning of my career), but in terms of tactics I essentially discovered early on that trying to demonstrate competence and likability via writing, public speaking, and the development of natural networks were my preferred practices.

From my first day of production until the day I hit a million dollars of gross (somewhere north of $100 million in assets) I believed I had two full-time jobs: Client acquisition, and Client advisory. The various investment management, financial planning, and service matrix functions were my job to deliver (job #1), and ensuring that I actually had clients to do those things for was my responsibility (job #2). I was good at it, but I didn’t expect I would be. I knew I would work hard and I knew I was determined, but I never thought of myself as especially likable (I still don’t) and I knew it was a very competitive field. I discovered early on that the real key to prospecting was less about closing than it was about opening. I am sure that may not be universally true – I have met people that can’t close a paper bag – but I do not think it is the common challenge of advisors who struggle with business growth. More often than not, having people to put in a pipeline is much harder than the ability to get one out.

I discovered in TBG 1.0 that I was going to close about 80% of the people I actually got to do a meeting with, which I would later find out was pretty high. My challenge was getting to that point of having meetings, and for that I turned to my religion of authentic, organic networks. I sat on airplanes and made lists of things I loved and people associated with those things. I was an Angel baseball fan so naturally I cold-called Arte Moreno, the owner of the Angels after he bought the team from Disney (he did not become a client). I also was a USC football obsessive and had been for a long time. I met a lot of people at USC events, tailgates, road trips, fundraisers, and so forth, and maybe the only thing I had more confidence in besides my convictions about markets was my knowledge of USC football. But many in that world had advisors they had been with for decades, and while there was a certain affinity in place, it was limited in how far it could go. What I had that seemingly had infinite capacity, though, was a lifetime obsession with politics. I had strong opinions, a love for conversation about the events of the world, and a decent ability to meet people in these settings and let nature run its course. I joined political groups, attended cocktail parties, visited conferences, and basically ran the whole gamut of what a heartfelt political junkie would do. It is funny to think about it now because while I remain a person of strong political opinions, it would likely take an armed kidnapping to get me to attend a political cocktail party now, unless somehow I had been roped into hosting it (which happens a lot). My late father was a Christian intellectual known in certain niche circles, but let’s just say it wasn’t what you might consider a “moneyed” niche. I did mailers to those who had bought his books or lectures over the years, and that had the double advantage of either leading to a potential prospect (maybe three times, ever), OR leading to a very nice conversation with someone who appreciated theology and philosophy as I did. That is actually an important anecdotal point: This philosophy of business development, organically rooted to authentic affinity interests, has a pretty decent consolation prize … you get to chat USC football, or politics, or presuppositional apologetics, with someone – even if no client relationship was in the cards.

In TBG 1.0a I found my organic silos of interest and mined them for opportunities to demonstrate competence and likability, and in TBG 1.0b I did the exact same thing, but now had a client base in place so there was room for client referrals, and then there was what would become my primary (or at least most effective) tactic … client dinner events. It was entirely focused on the same thing: Clients and their guests and select prospects in my pipeline, gathered for me to authentically do what I would like to be doing anyways: Talking about the market (only with a microphone in my hand). I succeeded in TBG 1.0 because I barely ever did things that I was “only doing to get clients.” That may feel necessary at times, and I understand many advisors do things they don’t want to do at times, but I was working so hard, exerting such unspeakably long hours, that I had to preserve my energy for maximum efficiency and optimal use, and that meant not draining my batteries with (a) things I didn’t like, and (b) things that didn’t work. And my friends, stuff we hate to do is almost always going to be stuff that doesn’t work. I liked speaking and writing, so I did a lot of it. TBG 1.0 worked for this reason – somehow I was lucky enough to find what I liked, and what I was good at, and who I wanted to do it for, and blend all those things together.

In TBG 2.0 we now had a business, not merely a sole practitioner practice where I was the PE coach, the history teacher, and the study hall advisor all at once. I was still the primary rainmaker, and I was intricately involved in every single decision related to our client’s investment decisions (I still am to this day), but we now had other advisors and specialists and key personnel in various aspects of our service model. Brian Szytel was not the first “junior advisor” I had hired – I had hired three or four previously that didn’t work out because they were “junior” … Brian worked because he was not, well, junior. He was experienced, capable, tenured, and smart, and we saw things the same way. I had enjoyed a different streak of business development success in my first decade, but Brian brought mature advisory talent that I needed if I was going to scale further. I firmly believe to this day in a tight limit on each advisor’s individual relationship capacity, and I had hit mine by 2012 when Brian and I partnered together.

(This topic of advisor capacity and relationship bandwidth will absolutely be the topic of a future B2Bahnsen substack).

After Brian and I had worked well together for a couple of years, we ended up hiring a couple new advisors – Kimberlee Davis initially to run our financial planning; Robert Graham initially to run our 401k services; and Don Saulic was the first advisor hire after we had left Morgan Stanley. None of them had a pre-existing client book – they all had professional history and pedigree, and they all were valuable contributors to our team and client service model – but what we did that became the defining delineation of TBG 2.0 versus TBG 1.0 was that we successfully took the components that worked well in TBG 1.0 and introduced other people’s natural networks to the mix. Inviting key people in whatever the natural rolodex was of these newer members to our team provided a whole new level of pipeline and opportunity, and yet we didn’t have to re-invent the wheel. All we did was the same thing as TBG 1.0 (my writing and my speaking), yet in TBG 2.0 we did it with the bench of new people, for the natural pipelines of new people. We could service more clients now because we had highly capable advisors who were true professionals (indeed, Brian, Don, Kimberlee, and Robert are all partners in our firm to this day each running massive client books that on a stand-alone basis would make each one of them one of the most prestigious advisors at any wirehouse). And the natural pipelines of each of our advisors were completely and totally distinct from my own. We basically leveraged a key principle of humanity to our business benefit: The unique individuality of all people. My passions and interests and connections were different than Kimberlee’s, which were different than Brian’s, which were different than Don’s, etc. From roughly 2015-2019 we saw extraordinary business success in TBG 1.0, and along the way added Trevor Cummings and Sean Latimer as additional advisory talent in this same model (these two now run our Private Wealth Advisor Group and are both partners in the firm).

I believe TBG 3.0 began somewhere around 2020, and probably represents a starker contrast from 2.0 than 2.0 did from 1.0. In TBG 3.0 we still were not hiring advisors with pre-existing books of business, and we still were not asking our advisors to be stand-alone rainmakers. In TBG 3.0, we grew through like-minded advisors that shared our belief system, were aligned with our core values, and could cultivate relationships with the increasing amount of people who had become attracted to our content. We began receiving more and more inbound leads as a result of our platform and content. The books I had written had increased our audience, the media outlets that had booked me for appearances seemed to like inviting me back, the weekly writing for Dividend Café had grown exponentially, and the podcasts and other speaking appearances had grown. It was diverse and multi-faceted both in content and medium: Politics, Economics, Markets, Culture, Theology (topics), across print, digital, TV, public speaking, and more (medium).

It is worth pointing out that there was actually no difference in TBG 3.0 and TBG 1.0 for me other than the fact that a lot more people were paying attention. Those topics animated me when I was 27 years old and they animated me when I was 47 years old. I hopefully had more maturity and poise and sobriety in what I said and how I said it, but the same authentic drivers were in place now as then. In TBG 3.0 we grew (and continuing growing) because we focused on advisors who could actually be advisors, who could intimately know their clients and their families, and deliver the client experience we believe in, but did not have to “work two jobs” to achieve this success.

Throughout my career the fatal flaw of financial services has been, in my opinion, that the model is one of “succeed in getting clients, and then maybe we’ll see if you can succeed in serving clients.” Our model turned that upside down – we wanted people who could succeed in serving clients, and didn’t need to focus on a robust pipeline development. We had that luxury because God graciously blessed the TBG 3.0 model despite our lack of intentionality in creating it. It organically happened, and I would like to think we shrewdly responded to it along the way. We now have 22 Private Wealth Advisors and another eight Associate Private Wealth Advisors devoted to client relationships, all working in tandem in our TBG 3.0 model to cultivate the leads that come from our content-based platform, and to drive a client experience that we believe in. It has been a long time since we have had a month with less than $100 million of new business, and we believe our scale stops when our ability to find like-minded advisors stops.

To connect TBG 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0, each obviously unique from one another in multiple respects, I would say that the following principles of business growth have never changed in each of these three iterations or company phases:

1. The need for differentiation. I am sorry. Advisor cannot grow if they are offering nothing different than their competitors.

2. The need for authenticity. I will go to my grave knowing that I discovered this by accident, but the absolute unvarnished truth about our growth in each phase is that has come from authentic behaviors that sprout out of authentic interests and passions. I have never seen an advisor grow who seeks to do it inauthentically.

3. Finally, the need for alignment. We have not been comfortable growing by stacking up unaligned advisors with their own views of investment management, or their own views of client experience, or even their own views of the world. We have protected alignment by building our team bottom-up, home-grown, and with a shared ethos. It has worked for us and I suspect that is because it is a best practice that would work well for everyone, despite the industry’s current obsession with “rolling up” unaligned cash flows. This will play out how it will play out.

Differentiation, authenticity, and alignment – married to different phases of tactics and reality. From TBG 1.0 to 2.0 to 3.0, the more things changed, the more they stayed the same.

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I mentioned that a future B2Bahnsen on advisor roster capacity is a topic I want to address. I should throw out there - I would love your feedback on topics you’d like to see addressed. Use the comments if you’re so inclined to mention things you believe would be worthy of attention. There is plenty on my mind that will fill these pages for years to come, but I am most interested in what may be on your minds, so by all means, fire away.

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I recently read the new autobiography from Barry Diller, Who Knew. Barry does not share my politics, is not someone I have ever met, his personal life confuses me, and he is essentially one of the most successful media and entertainment executives of all time - not a finance or Wall Street guy. But nevertheless, his story has always fascinated me - a non-college graduate working in the mailroom at William Morris Agency to become a personal assistant to an executive at ABC to running ABC’s home movie department to becoming the CEO of Paramount by age 32 to becoming the pioneer CEO of 20th Century Fox to becoming the brainchild behind QVC to eventually aggregating a media and internet empire that includes Expedia, People Magazine, Vimeo, Tinder, and Home Shopping Network – seriously, what is there not to love in all that?

There was a particular excerpt in his book that hit close to home when it came to my own decision to leave Morgan Stanley in 2014 and start my own firm in 2015. I will quote it all here, but have a lot to say to help qualify it and explain its relevance to my own vision with The Bahnsen Group.

His context here was his decision to leave Fox after nearly a decade building it into the most successful network on television. That career achievement came after a decade making Paramount the most successful Hollywood studio, which itself followed his incredible run at ABC where he made it a potent television success. Barry had been an employee (albeit a very, very well-paid one, and a very, very empowered one) at three different companies (ABC, Paramount, Fox), and had done transformative work at all three.

“I had been thinking about something I hadn’t yet acknowledged to myself: that Fox wasn’t really mine; that however I acted as if it were, it wasn’t. I thought then and think now that a good employee does believe and act as if the company belongs to them. But of course that’s an illusion, one I’d been able to keep full faith in with the three companies I’d worked at for a quarter century. But suddenly the reality that this was an illusion couldn’t be denied.

Either you are or you aren’t.

It’s a harsh and binary concept, and not subject to equivocation. Either you are the principal or you’re not. The rationalizing powers of a good employee are endless. Good employees make decisions on a company’s behalf as if they own it. I acted like a principal, but I wasn’t one. I was an employee, and whatever position and power I had could be revoked at any time. I had gone about as high as a corporatist could go. I’d run two studios. I was making more money than anyone in the entertainment business. But as rarefied as all that was, it could be taken away in an instant. All that power flexed so naturally was devolved from real power. I was craving real independence and had a need to stand on my own. And the only way to do that was to take action, but at such risk.

To be truly independent, beholden to no one but yourself, unprotected by the mothering of a corporation - for a lifelong employee that is a daunting proposition. And thus those words - either you are or you aren’t - were banging around my head with increasing force. You can do all the things executives have been doing since since executive-ing began, fantasize and rationalize all you want, but that binary about independence rules: Either you are or you aren’t.

Most people in the entertainment community are living a kind of pretend life. Most of them talk all sorts of big games: they talk about going out on their own, they excuse away their status, they act big and important. Of course, there is nothing wrong with being an employee. I was a productive one for thirty years, and it served me better than well. Being protected is a good thing, often the only way to accomplish what you hope to accomplish. But if you yearn to be on your own, untethered, than you must take action.”

I believe three things about all of this that are all true at the same time, in tension with one another, but not remotely contradictory:

1. Many advisors are meant to be owners or partners of a business, not employees (I firmly believe I was one of these)

2. Many advisors are meant to be employees of a business, not owners

3. There is nothing wrong with either path, other than being in the one that you don’t belong in

I believe some advisors have a very good situation where they are technically a W2 employee. Their manager helps remove impediments that get in the way of doing business. Their compliance department is not a thorn in their side or an incompetent group of bureaucratic know-nothings. Their company’s brand is not a red flag. The tools and resources they have at their disposal help them to adequately serve clients. And they generally do not want to deal with payroll, HR, furniture, legal, and the various scaffolding that goes into running one’s own business. I admit that I think there are less of those good W2 situations now than there used to be – but I believe they exist, and where one employee situation is good, and one particular advisor’s own DNA and career objectives and [most importantly] ability to properly serve clients does not require a different structure, I think this setup is perfectly sufficient for many.

It wasn’t for me. I wanted to do things that a W2 employee at a big firm couldn’t do. I wanted to hire and fire who I wanted, pay them what I wanted, title them what I wanted, and make decisions with the P&L of the company as I saw fit (because it would be my money). An employee cannot spend someone else’s money as they want because it is not their money. When Brian and I made the decision to start The Bahnsen Group we were not in the financial position we are now, but we were willing to be risk-takers with our P&L and our balance sheets to have control. I do not believe every advisor cares about control as much as I do. But those who do, well, they have a choice to make. Is “control” adequate in their current setup, or do they need to consider the journey to independence – to true business ownership.

There are, of course, economic considerations, as well. I did not know the reality of balance sheet opportunity when we started TBG. I under-estimated how much business value I would create by owning my own firm. I already had good income and I already knew I had a path to grow wealth via company stock and annual accumulation of excess income and all that kind of stuff. What I found out was that our business now commands attractive valuations around growing multiples and growing free cash flows, especially for big growers. We were and are a big grower, so we “fell” into that benefit. I would take credit for this if I knew it at the time, but I didn’t. The “W2 versus owner” consideration should contemplate economics, because, you know, we sort of do this kind of thing for a living.

But ultimately, once one assesses the pros and cons of their current situation, considers all of the economic realities, and honestly discerns their own DNA, personality, risk tolerance, and career goals, there has to be an assessment of how it will impact clients. Is there any way in which one’s business structure is helping or hurting the way they serve clients, and is there any opportunity to improve that with a change? Would you being an owner of (or a partner in) your own business drive a better client experience? The answer may be no. For us, it was an unequivocal yes. Our ability to deliver a vast array of content without wirehouse filters was a huge part of our value proposition. The addition of a full-service tax department, the addition of a robust family office offering, the removal of investment filters that favored the firm and not the client, the structural separation of advice and custody, a legal fiduciary clarity, and the formation of a team and departmental structure that was customized by us to serve clients as we saw fit – these were all things that drove a better service model, full stop. Our client experience has improved exponentially since we became business owners.

And the end of the day, that’s the issue. Answering who you are, who you want to be, and how you want to do it – the answers to those questions will shine light on the issue of owner vs. employee. There is not one right answer for everyone. But there was one right answer for us.

****************

Diller said one other thing I wanted to quickly comment on:

“It’s the timing, stupid, for most great business careers.” (playing off of Carville’s famous dictum that ‘it’s the economy, stupid’)

I have been exposed to unlucky timing in plenty of things in my life, but I have been a beneficiary of great timing in many elements of my career. I would rather have not entered adult life in the conditions I did (the premature passing of my father, unable to attend college, etc.), but being “forced” into the Christian music business just as that world was about to have its one and only 5-10 years of industry growth was fortuitous. It was not a business filled with many impressive people, but my timing in (and out) was providentially good.

My entry into financial services was beyond fortunate in terms of timing. I had blown myself up personally in the late 90’s/very early 2000’s with dotcom insanity in the market, but had never hurt a single person with such as an investment professional. The entire business was moving to something advisory and consultative, I entered the business after the market had collapsed and had a totally clean slate. I got to build my business in that context, versus one of mass attrition catalyzed by having given massive bad advice.

Five years later, having built a great solo practice at UBS, I said no to joining Bear Stearns at what would prove to be one year before they imploded. I joined Morgan Stanley and received significant liquidity to my personal balance sheet 18 months before an existential financial crisis. And I hit my stride as an advisor with a high conviction investment philosophy in time to spend the financial crisis years growing like crazy.

I left the big firms for the great terrain of independence in 2014 with just enough years gone by in this new trend that resources existed for the transitional path to be successful, but well before a massive amount of capital and opportunity would follow suit. And I completely re-did my deal with Hightower in 2018, granting me the independence I craved just in time for a major growth spurt and company reinvention that would prove transformative.

I could give plenty of examples of bad timing events in my life, but I am humble enough to recognize that I have been a beneficiary of great timing many times over in my career.

No one is saying - not Barry Diller, and not me - that great business careers are made only by fortunate timing. One can overcome bad timing and one can fumble away good timing. Our responses to various circumstances are profoundly important. But to not recognize the providential reality of timing in how our own careers and business circumstances unfold is arrogant, foolish, and ultimately, may doom us to future poor decision-making as it distorts our own understanding of reality.

Timing matters. And having the humility to see this matters even more.

1. The core of the client-advisor relationship is trust, and trustworthiness, and no advisor should ever work with a client who does not trust them. It follows from this in the most obvious way imaginable that no advisor should ever work with a client who does not follow their advice, or who regularly challenges their advice.

2. While #1 is really all that needs to be said, some important practicalities flow from it. Most importantly, the advisor does not seek to persuade but to be believed. This is literally a verbatim quote from the great Nick Murray. Being believed does not flow from an intellectual process but rather from the moral authority of the advisor.

3. We believe at TBG that moral authority is not declared but earned, and it is earned by truth-telling. Therefore, we seek to tell the truth, all the time, to have strong opinions, to believe in what we are doing, to have and to demonstrate strong conviction, and out of this, to work with those who choose to believe us and follow our advice.

4. One of the core truths we share and live by is that the advisor’s value proposition centers around behavioral modification – that the propensities of human nature (euphoria at the wrong time and especially panic at the wrong time) – require an intervening advisor. We believe that avoidance of the big financial mistakes is not merely a core part of a value proposition, but is worth multiples of the fee that a client pays for it. While we seek to add value in a lot of elements of the relationship and take a lot of pride in our planning services, stewardship of the entire wealth management process, and various other advisory solutions we provide on a daily basis, we will always place behavioral modification at the top of the value chain. We find market timing to be the promise of a fool, best case, and a charlatan, worst case.

5. At the risk of redundancy, we believe that it is necessary to really interview prospective clients on the front end to ensure that they are a good fit to work with us (for the reasons cited in #1-3), and after a client relationship is formed, should there be a moment where it is clear the trust has failed to persist, we believe it is necessary to graciously terminate those relationships. Taking a fee from a client who does not follow our advice is outside of our moral compass.

So take those in as you see fit, but I can definitely say that we have followed those above points pretty consistently throughout the history of TBG (and throughout the origins of my work as a sole practitioner). I surely made mistakes over the years, taking on clients I shouldn’t have or keeping a client longer than I should have, but with the latter it was almost always a mistake of excessive grace and patience – not the far less acceptable motive of “being afraid to lose the business.” For whatever reason, I have always believed Nick and believed the underlying mantra that the advisor’s business benefits from not working with poor fit clients.

Now, this gets me to the subject of today’s B2Bahnsen post: If the objective is to be believed and not to persuade; if the value proposition is behavioral and not market timing; if our practice is focused on planning and solutions and not market prognostication … then why do we create so much content centering around markets and the economy?

Sometimes it is helpful to answer a question by reiterating what the answer is not. We do not create content that promotes market timing. We do not offer a perspective on “things” that is driven by a short-term market outlook. Our point of view is never, in any way, shape, or form, antithetical to planning and solutions. For us, it really comes down to these three things:

1. We create a lot of market and economic commentary because it is authentic to who I am, and the perspectives are authentic reflections of what we really believe.

2. Without any need for elaboration or explanation, I simply love writing, and the process of research, analysis, and presentation of views animates me.

3. It builds trust with our clients. And this is the essence of a client-advisor relationship.

The first two don’t seem to me to require a lot more explanation. Every advisor reading this has read the typical “market bulletins” or “macro commentaries” that pass for punditry out of so many firms and research shops, etc. Without commenting on how good or bad they are, I do not believe anyone would say they reflect an “authentic” perspective. They are purposely vanilla, safe, and boilerplate to the point of being, well, wearisome. It would never concern me if someone didn’t agree with my writing, or didn’t like my writing, but it would bother me a great deal if there were ever an accusation that my writing was not authentic (actually, even that isn’t true; it would only bother me if it were true).

The heavy flow of perspective and content we create is an authentic expression of our own investment philosophy and viewpoint on world events, often blended with analysis of public policy, the Fed, and various macroeconomic or geopolitical occurrences. It avoids what all advisors should avoid (“the market may go down next week”), it leans into what we most care about at TBG (dividend growth, free enterprise, a certain political and cultural worldview), and I never, ever, ever begrudge doing it. When you love something, do more of it.

But what about that client trust thing? How does a business heavy on content creation and thought leadership build client trust? Well, first of all, it does not, if the content, commentary, and perspective were not authentic or based in love. Regurgitated cut and paste of someone else’s vanilla views may be reasonably true (or not), but it is not trust-building. It does not reflect the authentic passions and convictions of the advisor. It cannot, therefore, build trust. But the reason I believe, speaking only for myself and my firm, that we can build trust with an abundance of public commentary, is because it demonstrates to our clients (and prospective clients) who we really are. We are studious. We are engaged. We are workaholic. We are intellectually curious. We are passionate about markets and how they can be used to produce solutions for individuals and families. We are opinionated about matters of public interest. We are thoughtful about our core philosophy. We are committed to a variety of things (behavioral primacy, dividend growth, a particular asset allocation process, what markets fundamentally are, avoiding impediments and mistakes). The benefit for us does not come from attempting to win any kind of argument in our commentary, or to persuade others of our point of view – the benefit is merely the trust that is built in us being truth-tellers, diligent workers, and people of conviction. That’s it. We are not using commentary to say “our car is faster than that guy’s car” or “our predictions are more accurate than that gal’s predictions.” We are not saying “you’ll get 10% with us but only 8% over there.” In fact, any such claims would undermine the entire value proposition, which is to be trustworthy, and anyone saying such poppycock deserves no trust.

I say a lot in public forums (written commentary, podcasts, TV media, video, books, speeches) because I have a lot of things that animate me. I gladly accept the risk that what I say publicly will not always be liked by others, and can even be used against me (“you said Congress was unlikely to do XYZ, but then they did XYZ you moron!”) I take that trade-off without hesitation because I love the process of research, analysis, and presentation, and because it is authentic to me.

To the degree it generates interest in our firm and our way of doing things, that is a blessing for business development. I may be under-stating that point, but only because I am humble and honest enough to know that I never knew this would prove so valuable in building trust. What I know is that (a) It has proven productive for us to be earnest creators of authentic content, and (b) If I sold vacuum cleaners for a living and didn’t benefit in any way from doing it, I would still do the same thing, even if the audience was just me and my three closest friends.

Writing the Dividend Café has proven to be a real refuge for me over the years. I mean that very seriously – it is a therapeutic process to do the reading and writing that goes into it, and has been one of the real blessings of my advisory career. I truly believe I will be doing it for the entirety of the rest of my life. I have written things I regret. I have been wrong on things. And yet, through it all, I really believe our posture on being significant creators of commentary, opinion, and perspective, has built trust – for no other reason than I believe we have been trustworthy. To that end we work.

And this week’s topic is very much in that vein, as I am 100% certain many advisors have done this differently and yet been successful in their own way. This topic, is that of hosting client events.

It’s important for me to lead with how subjective my way of doing client events is because I am probably going to sound really opinionated, very quickly. But I am not pretending when I say that I fully recognize how others have done this completely differently and it has worked for them – so don’t let my strong tone get to you. I am writing about what has worked for me, and that’s it.

So here is my first rule when it comes to client events: Never, ever, ever let anyone speak, but you.

Whoa. Wait a minute. Isn’t this the exact opposite of what many do? Isn’t the key to a great client event having a money manager, or a wholesaler, or some brand name person from your firm speak? Aren’t their subject matter experts who can come in and blow the socks off of your clients and prospects with their knowledge and experience? Why do firms invest so many resources into client events leveraging the intellectual capital of the firm if you are supposed to be the star? And isn’t it worthwhile to show that you are the host, the connector, the coach, the integrator, and by putting other people on the stage with you, it actually reinforces you as a generalist with a vast array of talent around you or behind you?

Meh. I’m not buying any of it. I know some have done it. But I believe it is a huge missed opportunity, possibly counter-productive, and always sub-optimal relative to what the single greatest point of providing clients and prospective clients an open bar, sea bass, and filet mignon. To demonstrate competence and likability. (Remember??)

I believe that client events work when the people there (clients and prospective clients) leave with a distinct impression of you – of your convictions, of your beliefs, of your seriousness of purpose. I cannot say how that gets done when all you are is an opening act, an emcee, and/or a bill-payer. That reinforces you in a way that may be sub-optimal, if it reinforces you at all; it might possibly cause you to be forgotten all together. There are a couple things that can happen when you allow a money manager (or God forbid, a wholesaler), to be the main event at your client dinner.

One possibility is that the guest speaker bombs. I would say this has a 70% possibility of happening, and for those who have forgotten risk-reward trade-offs, that is very bad math. Many money managers are dry, numerical, repetitive, and charmless – and those are the ones I like! But another possibility is that the manager crushes it – there is wit, humor, engagement, all good things. Even in that case, how does it benefit the advisor? That good will and those good vibes do not accrue to the audience growing in appreciation of your competence and likability, and some part of your value proposition just got defined in an inter-connection to a particular money manager – one who could be gone in three months (i.e. they leave their firms all the time; you choose to use a different manager in the future; or any other number of possibilities that render that speaker choice a bad idea).

Whether the speaker does a good job or a bad job, there is limited upside for the advisor in connecting with the audience, and connection with the audience is the whole point of the dinner event. Indeed, connection with clients and prospective clients is the whole point of our business. Building and maintaining trust is our calling here on earth. I am not suggesting that there is no limited vehicle to do this with a guest speaker, but I am suggesting it is just that – limited.

But even apart from what can go wrong (a bad money manager speaker, a good money manager speaker who captures your value proposition, a wholesaler talk who, shall we say, isn’t singing from the same hymnal you are are about fiduciary duty, etc.), there is a massive opportunity cost that has to be discussed. You have successfully done in setup for this event what can only be described as “very low-hanging fruit” for business development success: You have filled a room with people, you have presumably selected a venue that speaks to the class and style you carry your practice with, and you have arranged for a captive audience to hear you talk with a microphone and a podium. In other words, you have a bully pulpit, which is a not nice way of saying you now have some moral authority – some gravitas – a ball teed up in the good grass – and you are going to hand it all off to someone else? I am sorry, but I can’t for the life of me understand why this would be a good idea.

And the reason why? You surely have something to say in your own voice. You surely have convictions that got you into this business to begin with. You surely have a point of view, an investment philosophy, a daily passion around what you do for clients, a process that is differentiated and unique, an ability to preserve wealth and create value – that absolutely deserves to be shared. And you must have a voice with which to do all this. Why would you mute yourself, and turn on someone else’s TV, even if you technically brought that person to the event?

There is no greater way to build client trust than for clients to hear your convictions, demonstrated likably and with the competence that surrounds your daily endeavors. There is no greater way to add to your pipeline of new business than for new prospective clients to participate in this public demonstration of conviction and trust-building. Adding in a delicious duo of sea bass and filet is just icing on the cake – the entire deal comes down to you commanding a microphone, and not outsourcing the secret sauce – not the sauce on top of the protein, but the secret sauce of your ability to authentically share your point of view. These events are powerful opportunities, if you let them be.

There are a lot of other best practices worth sharing as well. I believe many advisors built something out of doing all-prospect events – that is, event after event where they did mailers or whatever else to get guests there, and they filled up the seats with visitors, many of which became a part of their pipeline, and many of those who presumably became clients. Again, I cannot speak normatively to what is best for everyone, but I never found that to be the most effective strategy. For years upon years upon years, I did quarterly dinners that were for CLIENTS. I had nothing to sell, no product to discuss, and no gimmick to offer. I was just there to discuss the market, the economy, my point of view on current affairs, and to do so authentically, in my voice. I wanted to dampen media hype, not lean into it. I wanted to emphasize the wisdom of what we are already doing (why else would we have been doing it?), not pivot to an “act today to save your portfolio” BS message. And did I mention, I wanted to demonstrate competence and likability. So I did two things that almost instantly turned these events into wild success stories for me and my business:

1. I devoted about 30-40% of the time to a wide open, no holds barred, Q&A. By the time dinner was done and before the crème brulee hit the table I was in open season Q&A, and we would go all over the map topically (wherever guests took things). It provided me a chance to be quick on my feet, to demonstrate versatility, and to reinforce confidence that I knew my stuff. And I loved it (still love it).

2. I filled the room roughly 70-85% clients, with roughly 15-30% prospects. This was the secret sauce. Many advisors can’t do this. They tell themselves, if I am going to go to the trouble and expense of these events, why would I sink so much cost into people that are already clients? This is a terrible way to think! The reason is that when you surround 15-30% prospects with 70-85% clients who love you, who believe in you, who are a part of your business and operation, you have created a home-turf advantage that is unstoppable. I do not believe I am exaggerating to say that over 80% of those “prospective clients” (i.e. guests) who attended these events over the years became clients. This mix of clients and guests all at once built rapport with clients, added value, gave sticky and meaningful content to those who paid us a fee for sticky and meaningful content, and then pragmatically provided a venue for a soft, passive, non-threatening, non-salesy way of demonstrating competence and likability.

Come for the wedge salad, stay for the formation of trust.

I did a lot wrong over the years, I am sure. In my rookie year I spent about three months of trainee salary to charter a yacht around Newport Harbor to talk 529 savings plans, and had one person show up. I booked the wrong venues. I tolerated people drinking way too much at events and being a distraction to the serious people who were there. I could go on and on. I made mistakes.

But overall, over the years, these events have been inseparable from the core building of our business. We now have offices in ten different U.S. cities and we do at least one client dinner event (with 10-20% guests, of course) in each city, every year. I will do this until they carry me out. As long as I have something to say, I want to say it in my own voice. And paying for dinner gives you an ability to do some powerful things. As Ronald Reagan once said, “I paid for that microphone.” Well, when you pay for the microphone, you may as well put it to use.

If you have been in the business longer than five minutes than you know that what happened the last ten days (and counting) is the stuff our business is made of. Real drawdowns, real sell-offs, driven by some real news event, the outcome of which remains highly uncertain, are categorically different than what passes for “volatility” most of the time. In my career it has been the dotcom implosion, 9/11, financial crisis of 2008, European debt crisis of 2011, COVID hell of March 2020, and now Trump trade war of 2025. Some were more mild than others (this one is tops for mildness, so far). Some were much, much longer than others (I’d take a deeper, shorter drawdown over a more shallow but longer drawdown, any time).

But all of this is a little unhelpful in that all of these incidents are now being talked about with the gift of an outcome. We know how it ended. It ended, with an ending, and then with investment portfolios resuming their inevitable march higher, assuming the portfolio has been constructed with some sense of decency and sense. However, in the various moments recalled above, there was no known ending while they were playing out, and the questions that surrounded some of them were pretty legitimately scary.

“What if the U.S. quality of life turns to fear of daily terror attacks?”

“What if the next attack is nuclear?”

“What if more U.S. investment firms go the way of Lehman?”

“What if they nationalize the U.S. financial system?”

“What if this recession turns deeper?”

Notice I left questions from the dotcom implosion out. First of all, I didn’t have any clients yet, and second of all, what would I say to “what if Pets.com never comes back?” Ummmm, “good,” or, “maybe we will all learn that the bigger the party, the bigger the scam,” or, “Super Bowl commercials are how I craft my short portfolio,” or, “it seems like we might now focus on this 17^th century idea that companies have.” Sorry, of all in my list, that one was the healthiest of all of them – and if I am supposed to be sad for someone suffering a nasty hangover after a terrible bender, I am not doing great in the empathy category.

But there is another reason the dotcom implosion doesn’t count: The market wasn’t even down. ONE market was – one sector – but large cap value, the Dow, a diversified equity investor – wasn’t even down. It was a face-ripping moment for huge risk-takers, but it was not a systemic period of uncertainty for all. The other moments were.

I am always and forever going to be one who came of age out of 1990’s excesses and into 2000’s excesses, with lessons learned from the former, and experience gained in the latter. The financial crisis of 2008 was the seminal moment of my career because I actually was a big producer by then, had a balance sheet, had a family, had a book – had something to lose. But far more importantly, I had clients who were scared. In 2000, I did not. All things being equal, I would rather learn the lessons of dealing with bad markets and scared clients in something different than the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression, but my ways are not God’s ways, to put it mildly. And as they say, go big or go home. So that real lesson of massive down days that just don’t stop, the reality of global de-leveraging, the phenomena of markets selling off on bad news, then selling off more on what you thought was good news, these things have happened in each “real sell-off” of my lifetime, but only 2008 also came with questions of the existential viability of my employer, the existential viability of all Wall Street, and America’s entire stupid piggybank blowing up (the home equity fantasy). Those were the times that tried men’s souls, and everything since then has felt like child’s play by comparison.

But 2011, 2020, and now 2025 were real, and they did add fodder to what the subject of this article will soon be. But even then, I believe all of the challenges I have felt in post-2008 market sell-offs are some form of PTSD from 2008 (I am being serious), and were never substantively close to the experience of late 2007 through early 2009. The COVID deal was nasty, and it had its own complicating circumstances (like the world being shut down), but even then I believe the anxiety of that market drama was still linked to my “original trauma” – the period of 2008.

I should interject here – I was not in the business in 1973 and 1974, though I spent much of that time under water, if you count amniotic fluid. I was 13 years old during Black Monday, and I was a young man during some of the 1990’s hiccups. I have studied all these periods immensely, too, but have reserved my references in this piece to ones I professionally experienced. I have no doubt other historical incidents offer their own reinforcements, and in some cases, nuances. But you get the idea.

So back to the moment at hand, and to the important part of all this. Our clients. I have written already about the importance of only working with clients who want and follow your advice. I also realize that sometimes (though not very often) it takes a 20% drop in markets and a “this time it’s different” sounding news event to separate the wheat from the chaff. I want to suggest the following five things for you as we go through the Trump trade war, wherever it may take us:

1. While there may be some clients who you realize you have to cut loose in this period (those who become rude with your staff, rude with you, or who commit the unforgivable sin – abandon a good plan). Be as patient, empathetic, communicative, and understanding as you can be, but do not tolerate abuse of your people, and have some self-respect when it comes to yourself. Give them some grace, but don’t become a punching bag. This is basic stuff.

2. Now, let’s take the half-empty glass of #1 and talk about the half-full glass … Go to incredible lengths to never forget those clients who gave you encouragement, love, support, and confidence in these times. Memorialize in your mind and heart those that send letters of faith and reinforcement. These are the clients who keep you alive, and they are plentiful in times like this; don’t be guilty of only letting the negative experiences be remembered.

3. Here is a really tough thing for me to say: Is a rapidly dropping market hard for you because clients are nervous, or because you are nervous? Do you believe the things you say to clients? Do you know in your heart the reality of history, the reality of macroeconomics, the reality of how markets work? Do you believe that risk premia comes because of periods like this, and not having them is not possible? Do you need a gut check (and mind check) before you take your clients through these periods? Just asking.

4. Who are your five most nervous clients, just in terms of personality? Not abusive. Not harassing. Not rude. Not stubborn. Just nervous – vulnerable – wired a bit on the fearful side of things. Have you called each of them? Not email – telephone. Are there more you should call? What can you do besides mass communication (I am assuming that as table stakes) to touch these people?

I should provide some clarification and caveats on this point #4. My firm basically puts out a market communication every single day. Most advisors do not, and most probably shouldn’t. I will do a future piece for B2Bahnsen where I explain why we believe that this content is vital to our business, yet does not contradict our fundamental belief that daily (or weekly, or monthly) market commentary is nearly irrelevant to the real-life outcomes of clients. So I will leave you in suspense … But as for our approach to communications, I live for our commentary and missives, and we have built a business around heavy use of written content, podcasts, and video. We have a real content machine at our firm, so that is happening whether we are talking about great markets, normal markets, bad ones, or collapsing ones. I understand the level of content we put out is rare, but I do assume there is something you put out at some regularity that authentically reflects who you are. My point in #4 is some level of targeted communication above and beyond whatever that normal content delivery is. And the objective of the communication I am referring to here is not your perspective on tariffs, or an update to asset allocation, but rather, “how are you feeling, Mrs. Smith? I wanted you to know you are going to be just fine, Mr. Jones.”

5. Have you found the time to be opportunistic today? This is one of the great secrets of our business. Bad markets are, first and foremost, when you earn your fees, protect your clients, and preserve relationships that are meant to last a lifetime. But they also are, after all that is covered, the lowest hanging fruit you will ever find for new business. You know why? Because when markets are down across the board, and over half of advisors out there have failed to be trustworthy. Over half of advisors get exposed in bad markets for their lazy, effortless, visionless, thoughtless approach to this business. You couldn’t get in front of some of their clients aside from a bad market because the S&P 500 was up and the client was not upset enough about their terrible advisory experience to break out of their inertia. That all changes in bad markets. This is your chance to be an authentic resource, and see where it goes.

I have no idea what tariffs will be on or off today, what bond yields will do, and what cabinet member is going to be persona non grata with the President and which one will not have the relevant advice du jour. I do know that a worldwide trade war is worth more than 20% downside to the S&P, so this may not be over, but we may be in a trade war capitulation. All of these things are unknowable. The rapidity of the April 3-8 decline may have made it seem more traumatic than it was, but we can only say that know because of the white flag waved by the President on April 9. All of this is somewhat unknowable which is true every single day, of every single market event, even apart from the specific one we happen to be living through.

And through all of it, from dotcom to 9/11 to the financial crisis to the COVID moment to the trade war, and to whatever we inevitably go through in another few years, there is always and forever only one question are clients are actually asking us:

Am I going to be okay?

That is it. That is what this whole thing is about.

What you do to ensure that the answer to that question is yes is your divine mission. How you communicate and articulate it is how you sustain your access to that divine mission.

I do not write today to make the claim that every practitioner should be starting their own business, largely because I actually do not believe any such thing. I also am not writing today to criticize the wirehouses, particularly the aforementioned firm (Morgan Stanley) that I left ten years ago. I became a Managing Director there and spent eight glorious years of my life and career at Morgan Stanley, most importantly through the paradigm-shifting period of the financial crisis. I simply don’t have anything negative to say about my journey because it was my journey. I also do not have opinions on what someone else is supposed to do or not do – in so much as each person’s specific goals, situation, partners, team members, contracts, client dynamics, economics, personality, giftedness, and a whole lot of other things that go into where and how one incubates their business all matter. Don’t get me wrong – I have very strong opinions about what I did, and why I did it, and what it has meant for me, our clients, my partners, and our whole business. But those are opinions about us, and not necessarily normative to any of you.

So just so we are clear: I am an evangelist for the RIA world of entrepreneurial wealth advisory practitioners, but to my core I am an evangelist for the wealth advisory profession, regardless of channel, company, or specific context. B2Bahnsen is for advisors of any stripe and size.

But today is a story about our journey at The Bahnsen Group, how, why, and what took place ten years ago today and in the years that followed. Let’s roll …

For purposes of this article today I am picking up my story in the midst of the financial crisis in 2008. I was well into my career at this point, had built a great practice at UBS, had left UBS to join Morgan Stanley, had fully transitioned my book, had brought my assistant with me, and was in the process of building out a team at Morgan Stanley. I had become a chairman’s club producer and was really happy with the state of my business. My conversion to being a dividend growth equity investor was fully complete, and that was a game-changer of its own in what it meant for our process and client experience. But as many of you know, the second half of 2007 and the entirety of 2008 represented an extraordinary period in terms of the issues advisors dealt with in holding client’s hands. This was a period that I am very proud of in my business history as despite having an entirely fee-based business, I grew substantially in 2007 over 2006 and again in 2008 over 2007. The math of this is very easy to explain: When market values are down and you are fee-based, the only way for revenue to grow is … wait for it … to have more clients and assets than you had before. Put differently, if asset levels drop by X, but new business grows by more than X, than you are net net better off than you were before (I promise you this checks out). My business grew in 2008 when the world was ending because I worked 18 hours per day talking to clients, communicating, writing, speaking, and explaining what the hell was going on. It was very tempting to hide under my desk on occasion, and certain events in September and October of 2008 were utterly gut-wrenching, but I leaned into everything with gusto and fearlessness, I went on a limb to defend my firm, and I lost no clients – and gained a lot of other people’s clients – and to this day, with $48 million more annual revenue than the $2mm or so I had then – I am more proud of that business preservation and growth than almost anything I can remember in my career.

But it came at a cost. My daughter was born in 2007 and I was really, really forced into business preservation mode in 2008. My oldest was only three years old. It was not an easy time, and I frequently had to choose business over family in this period, and my wife is a saint on loan from God for how she supported me in this period. It also was not just hard because “I worked hard” or because “I had to endure client anxiety and fear.” It was hard because the stress on me, personally, was unspeakably high. I am sure many of you relate. I did not actually know that my firm was going to make it, some of my dear friends at Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch and so forth were not so lucky (either seeing their firms go under or switch to new bank owners), Morgan owed me large earn-out bonuses that I needed and didn’t know if I would receive if they went down, and of course, the actual balance sheet impact of MS stock, my own real estate and assets, etc. was hardly unaffected by everything, too (I received my deferred comp balance from UBS in the form of MS stock in early 2007 at $71/share – in Oct 2008 that stock was $9). So it was just a brutal period.

But you know what – it wasn’t that brutal. Because unlike many Americans, I had a job. And unlike almost every advisor in America, my income was not down 30% or 40% - it was up 20%. So two things can be true at once – it was a painful period, and one in which I had ample reason for gratitude for the good Lord’s provision.

So what does all this have to do with my journey towards a 2015 defection to independence and business ownership? In the aftermath of the financial crisis there was a significant angst towards the large Wall Street firms. They had not exactly crowned themselves in glory with their own stewardship of their balance sheets. Some were worse than others (Lehman, Bear, Citi), but all of it was an utterly mystifying display of hubris and idiocy. That said, a lot of the pile-on was misguided, class warfare driven, and somewhat confused. The firms levered up bad assets in a way no reasonable person can defend, but of course they only became bad assets because regular people stopped paying their bills, I couldn’t wrap my arms around the idea that this was all Wall Street’s fault, because it wasn’t. More on that later (it will become important to the story of our success as an independent firm).

2009 and the years that followed were no time to start an entrepreneurial journey. I felt a little bit like what I imagine it would feel to go through a war with someone (the analogy is awful, but it is all I got since I have never worn a uniform). My Morgan Stanley people were my people, they were who I went through the GFC of 2008 with, and that mattered to me. By 2010 I now had three children under the age of five, I was now a Managing Director at the firm, and I was growing, working hard, and taking clients hand over fist from other advisors who had not taken the same approach to the 2008 period that I had (in terms of client touch, robust engagement, portfolio philosophy, written and verbal communication, and tenacious prospecting). I was not thrilled with how Morgan Stanley behaved 2004-2007 to endanger their survival, but I was blown away by the steps Mack, Kelleher, and Gorman took to save the firm in 2008. I had branch managers I liked. I just wasn’t in a mindset of defection, and realty didn’t know anything about independence (yet).

2010-2013 were robust periods of growth, net new asset growth (amongst the tops in the country each year at least at that firm and certainly in my own complex), and there was finally a little branch stability in management (I had four managers from 2007 until 2009, but that fourth would last through the end of my time there). Life stabilized. Income stabilized. My balance sheet repaired. And I have no regrets whatsoever at NOT leaving to start my own firm in that period. In those years I also added Brian Szytel to my team as an additional advisor (junior partner role), and I became best friends with my local manager, who to this day is like a brother to me. By 2014 I had eight people on my team, including Kimberlee Davis and Robert Graham, who are partners at TBG today and would be a key part of our 2015 defection.

In 2014 a lot in my life and journey began to change. I was turning forty years old. I now was large enough in my team’s maturity to realize the advantages of a brand, team, and real practice, but to also see the limits of doing this in the context of being a W2 employee at someone else’s company. I couldn’t really hire or fire as I wanted; I couldn’t really spend money as I wanted; I couldn’t really say what I wanted. I had a lot of freedom as a corner office producer at a huge firm, but I didn’t really have the freedom I wanted. My deal at Morgan was wrapping up and I didn’t need another wirehouse check. I had some decisions to make.

The then president of the wealth management division at Morgan Stanley and I had dinner in October of 2014. I asked him that night what he said when recruits asked him what the real, unique value proposition of Morgan Stanley was. He said, and I will never forget it, “our intellectual capital.” I thought it was an intensely honest answer. He didn’t pretend that the advantage was a better bond trading desk, or syndicate allocation, or more money managers on the platform, or a higher payout, or any other BS where every single person in our business knows that all of the big firms are the exact same. He said something that I have no doubt he believed to be true, and yet all at once I knew that it was not material to me. We managed money in-house in our group, we used MS research but not heavily, but never believed the intellectual capital was the basis of our relationship with the firm. I valued the local relationships, but even the culture of the firm was now naturally and organically, well, non-cultural. All of the firms spent the years post-crisis re-liquifying their now-broke advisors by giving each other big checks to move everyone around the street. It was the right thing to do for the firms, but it now meant each firm (from senior management, to local management, to advisors), was now 1/4^th Merrill, 1/4^th Morgan/Smith Barney, 1/4^th UBS, and 1/4^th Wells. The cross pollination was needed to keep advisors and their books in all the firms, but culture could no longer be a selling point.

And I mentioned I was forty. I was facing an existential crisis. What did I want to do with the rest of my life in this business? I was making great income, and I felt like I was building wealth (deferred comp and all that – I had no idea how inferior that all was to the actuality of enterprise value in my own firm, but that awareness would come later), and I got along great with my local managers. But I could not really serve clients the way I wanted to, I could not run my team the way I wanted to, and something felt inadequate. It felt really inadequate. I began an extensive process into understanding the world of independence. I met with everyone you could imagine. The so-called aggregators were becoming a thing (Hightower, Focus, Dynasty). I met with the custodians. I met with friends who had done the trek to independence. I tried and tried to understand what that world was like.

I became enamored with the fiduciary standard, and my core belief that an advisor works for who pays them. I wanted to work for my clients, legally, not just ethically, and I wanted the freedom to serve them with an entrepreneurial freedom that would benefit them in every aspect of the relationship. It just made so much sense to me, not merely as a talking point but as a core belief. Now, I should say this now because it is very important to me and I have not said it enough over the years: I far prefer an ethical advisor in a large firm with a somewhat conflicted model to an unethical advisor in an independent firm with an unconflicted model. Good advisors find ways to be good advisors. Bad advisors find ways to be bad advisors. But the separation of advice and custody seemed right to me, and the elimination of any revenue that did not come from clients was absolutely right to me.

It was all coming together. I brought Brian Szytel over the wall first, I believe in November of 2014. We traveled to several of the key meetings together and spent hours upon hours whiteboarding what all of this would look like. By late January we knew we were going to use the up and coming wirehouse liftout aggregator, Hightower, to launch our new business. We then brought the rest of the team over the wall, meeting at my then house in Newport Heights at 6:30 in the morning to discuss and plan. All eight of us were on board, and now all we had to do was work through the myriad of variables and planning, secure the office, and prepare for the transition, and be ready to go by our planned date in May of 2015.

At some point a wholesaler decided to tell someone at Morgan Stanley that they heard we were leaving, and so that wholesaler has now cost himself a career’s worth of money (you know who you are, $&%^), and we had to go quicker than expected. The second half of March saw us really pull things together, and on April 1 I met up with the transition team from Fidelity (the primary custodian we chose) and a couple people from Hightower at the temp office we had created as our transition war room at 4675 MacArthur. I checked into the Le Meridien Hotel next door where I would stay for the next ten nights, and on the morning of April 2 at the crack of dawn I met my manager to hand in the resignation letters of me and my team. Within an hour we were on the phones talking to clients, and we would do that non-stop for hours upon hours an days upon days until we had completed the transition.

In the end, we brought over every single client we invited to join us, moved $560 million of client assets within six weeks (maybe less), and by the end of April our actual home at the office I had selected back in February was ready for our occupancy (at 520 Newport Center Drive). At that time we took 3,500 square feet on the fifth floor. Ten years later, we have 17,000 square feet (the entire third floor), and it has been our HOME. I mean, a HOME. No words for the memories we have made in this building.

But it is a weird story to go straight from April 2, 2015, one office, eight people, and $560 million, to ten years later and where we are today. A lot transpired along the way that represents the defining part of our story up until now. First of all, the initial months of independent life were hard. Expenses were greater than expected, we wanted and needed some additional hires, and we were still getting used to different technology, different tools, and different systems. In hindsight it was all small-ball stuff, but it felt like a big deal at the time.

We truly did have greater resources to serve clients. We told our story well, and I continued doing what I had always done in terms of client dinners, lots of speaking, and lots of writing. But now, instead of the weekly email blast to clients of 2008-2014 that I didn’t even run through compliance, we had incubated a Dividend Café brand, a website, a content portal, real social media properties, a video channel, and a podcast (I think a couple of these things came a tad after some of the others, but it was all in 2015 and then 2016). And then two other things happened that could never have happened had we not taken the plunge …

1. I got invited to do a TV hit, and after I did it, I got invited to do another, and another, and another. And much more importantly …

2. A publisher signed me for my book on the financial crisis

Now, as for #1, I will do another B2Bahnsen post some day about the misunderstandings of media when it comes to our business. I did television quite regularly for over a year before we ever heard a single word from someone reaching out to us, interested in our services. What the benefits of media are, and are not, for an advisor and their growth will be a future subject to tackle, but this became an early part of our story. But that #2 thing meant that I got to write my version of the financial crisis, the moral and cultural crisis that it was, and do so with freedom disconnected from the responsibilities I would have to my former employer. That book became a passion project for me, and unbeknownst to me at the time, would open up a lot of doors for how I think about content and platform (also a future B2Bahnsen post).

By 2017 and into 2018 we had several advisors doing business development, not just me and Brian. We had a real bench of talent across our advisory team, and we had grown our operations and other services (marginally). My book came out in early 2018, we had opened an office in New York City, I was doing a fair amount of television, and we had sailed through the $1 billion asset mark and felt that $2 billion was a good new goal to have.

And then in 2018 Hightower sold itself to new investors. This would become an equally key milestone in our future as a business. From 2015 through 2018 we had a particular contractual relationship with Hightower that served us well for our transition and served them well as a growing aggregator of wirehouse liftouts. But as they brought on new investors, a new business strategy, and shortly thereafter a new CEO, I took this moment to re-structure our relationship with Hightower. We brought all human resources, payroll, finance, facilities, benefits, branding, marketing, investment solutions, and so forth in house – and became the sole stakeholder in our own P&L. We also entered into a permanent affiliation with them that gave them the right visibility to long-term economics from us in exchange for the services we most wanted from them (technology, some back and middle office, and supervision/compliance). But it helped to solidly clarify in the marketplace are independence as a brand, business, and going concern. They were still our partners and friends, and still are to this day, and it has been an extremely positive relationship – but we right-sized the re-customized the arrangement to what we knew made the most sense for The Bahnsen Group in 2018. We maintain full ownership of our business and 100% control and autonomy, yet sit under their corporate ADV for supervision, and utilize much of their robust technology suite for our business operations. A true win-win borne out of the summer of 2018 that really catalyzed our business.

I am sure I have gone on too long already, but let me wrap all of this up. In the years that would follow The Bahnsen Group has meticulously focused on serving clients. Our touch points, our communication commitments, the breadth and depth of services we offer, and the very particular and bespoke investment philosophy we advocate and utilize – all gave us something special. For every $500,000 of new revenue we have generated (run rate) we have hired a new employee, and that ratio continues (more or less) to this day. The freedom of independence allowed us to create a platform of content that we believe in – from dividend growth (and the book that I put out on the subject in 2019) to economics to politics to culture to faith to so much more. Our partners have their own content platforms where so desired, and our people are all truly empowered to flourish in the organization. We felt we needed more robust planning so we built out a planning team (our advisors all have dedicated planners that are a cost center to the firm to help drive a massive planning experience for our clients). I don’t want to spoil future B2Bahnsen posts but we added a holistic family office in 2022 and a fully comprehensive tax division going into 2023. We began opening other offices around the country in 2021 to better serve clients on the ground where we had a client nucleus and where we could find or place like-minded advisor talent. The third office opened in the summer of 2021 in Minneapolis, and Nashville would follow six months later. The success stories those two expansions have been represent their own posts some day.

Contrary to popular belief, there is not a ton of operating leverage in this business. If we are to serve clients the way we want to serve them and continue to deliver the client experience we believe in, costs pretty much rise at the same pace that revenue does. We grow profits as we grow revenues, but margins don’t expand (though at least they do hold). That said, the pricing power has been robust, and while we serve a much larger end of the market than we did at Morgan Stanley, our ability to deliver value and offer competitive fee structures has been unimpaired.

I could talk about the ETF we launched in 2023 or the myriad of offices opened since the Minnesota and Tennessee experiments. I could talk about the Risk department we stood up a few years ago to better assess and serve client’s insurance needs, the Content department that curates unspeakable volume of digital content across all of our mediums, the growth of that audience for our content, the maturity of our leadership team to run a real organization, and the steadfast loyalty of our clients through it all, whom we love dearly.

But all I want to say today is to never despise the day of small beginnings (Zech. 4:10). We started ten years ago today utterly thrilled to embark on a new journey. It surpassed our wildest expectations. We sit here now still thrilled to be on this journey, and completely convinced our best days are ahead. Our core principles are in tact, and no matter what type of firm, practice, or structure you have, that is all I have to say to close this out. Hold on to your core principles, and wonderful anniversary events lie in wait for you, too.

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I am grateful for all of the feedback after last week’s post on my underlying philosophy about “prospecting.” I certainly welcome follow-up questions or thoughts any time and hope these ideas will be actionably useful for many of you.

There is another component of the business development mentality that I did not cover last week, that deals less with “what it is” one is trying to do when prospecting (demonstrate competence and likability), and more to do with “the mentality behind it.” I believe there are a lot of likable and competent people in our business who under-achieve when it comes to business development, and the topic of this week’s bulletin is the reason why.

When I was interviewing to join the training program at the Newport Beach branch of Paine Webber 25 years ago, the branch’s new FA manager, Michael Goldfader (who would become a phenomenal manager and has stayed my friend for 25 years) said something to me that he meant anecdotally, but stuck with me in a serious way as I left that interview. His seemingly off-handed comment of “this is a self-motivated person’s business” almost haunted me, except it really wasn’t negative. It was more like it “loomed over me.” I was fairly confident I would get the job, but as the base salary to enter the program was about an 80% pay cut from what I had been making in my prior business, and as I was a month or so away from getting married, “getting the job” was not my financial priority … “MAKING IT IN THE JOB” was much more my concern! I was not going to go into an interview and say, “I have no idea how I am going to get people to trust me with their money but I do know I am going to do it and will not stop until I have succeeded,” but I can say that both things were true. I had no idea. And, truth be told, any ideas I would have had for business development this early on would have been failures. More on that in a bit. My point is that I had to convey confidence in a plan, but I didn’t really have a plan (yet).

But what Goldie said to me was all at once a daunting reminder that no one else was going to have a plan for me, either. The thing I had going for me was exactly what I highlighted – self-motivation. I am sure some hot shots (especially second career guys) come in with a particular rolodex and plan for how they will succeed, but I know the data of how many second career folks make it as rainmakers in the business (hint: it is not good) – and I now know the reason why.

There is no substitute for desperation.

I read this letter saved in my phone and iPad photo library at least once per week. I didn’t have this letter 25 years ago but the mentality embedded in it was very much alive and well in my life.

What the legendary Ace Greenberg is saying here is that a PSD trumps aristocracy, elite education, a rich mommy and daddy, and a strong college fraternity rolodex. In fact, it seems to me, he is suggesting some of those things can be a liability, in so far as they can undermine the motivation that actually drives our success. Now, I know he is talking about investment bankers and prop traders in this note (to a large degree), but the point is the exact same in wealth management – there is a tenacity that trumps any other embedded advantage one may have.

I have never seen someone become a successful rainmaker who I did not believe possessed tenacity about it.

I have never seen someone fail at rainmaking who did possess adequate tenacity.

I can’t say it any simpler than that.

What does it mean to be tenacious? What is this “grit” of which I speak? Well, just as Goldie said that this was a self-motivated person’s business, I believe that “people who get it, get it.” If you do not know what “grit” is, I will say the same thing I say to people when they say, “I am not sure if I have ever had food poisoning.” Ummmm, you haven’t. You. Would. Know. And likewise with grit and tenacity, these are not extrinsic and amorphous concepts that exist as mysteries inside of enigmas. Tenacity is a spirit that says, “I will do what I have to do to succeed, and nothing less.” I believe Ace Greenberg saw on Wall Street a very similar thing that many of us have seen throughout our profession lives – ambition and hunger come from motivation, and motivation is either a by-product of desperation, or a deep character trait that lives within us. Or, for the most successful of rainmakers – both.

What does it mean to be self-motivated? I will provide a handy little list of five suggestions to check your own level of self-motivation.

1. Self-motivated people do not make excuses, and do not blame others. One of the most telling parts of the masterful David Mamet film, Glengarry Glen Ross (with a brand new Broadway adaptation that is absolutely not to be missed!), is the degree to which Jack Lemmon’s character goes to blame “the leads.” You know, “the leads are weak!” I have heard hundreds if not thousands of financial advisors over the years tell me that their branch manager was not good because they had not done enough to “help them grow their business.” Managers and firms are best when they are what I want the government to be when it comes to the economy: Out of the way! Yes, they should remove impediments to doing business, but dear Lord, your manager is supposed to “grow your business”? Self-motivated people never think this way. It is not only futile, but it serves as a distraction from the real work that has to be done.

2. Self-motivated people are relentlessly process-driven. We use SalesForce as the CRM at our firm, and have customized an extremely robust pipeline management system out of that tool. For fifteen+ years before I became addicted to SalesForce I used homemade tools from Excel (they worked just fine). I have no opinion in how someone tracks activity, progress, goals, and all the data points that matter to their pipeline management. I only have this to say: Never once in my life have I met someone with no process, data analytics, or tracking that generated successful results. Never once.

3. Self-motivated people are thoughtful and intentional about what works. You can check a box saying you looked at 50 LinkedIn profiles in a day, an activity that might just be as productive as setting a trash can on fire and putting it out fifty times a day, or you can actually do what works. This is a major difference between rainmakers and pikers: There is a huge satisfaction for pikers in doing prospecting activities that are utter time-wasters. Stop it. Be honest with yourself. Get out of your comfort zone. Be self-aware enough to know what works and what doesn’t.

4. Self-motivated people are accountable. This transcends what I am getting at in point #2 above, but it can’t work with the process described in point #2. But accountability might mean involving your partners, your teammates, your management, your spouse – each situation will be different and unique. But goals have to be set, and accountability must center around productive activities. Inputs, not outcomes.

5. Self-motivated people are tenacious, disciplined, and confident. They do not remember the last missed shot; they are focused on the next one. They do not believe that they need the next client; they know in their heart that the prospective client will immensely benefit from them (note: I did not say they talk themselves into this; I said they believe it when it is true). They reject avoidance behaviors and think big-picture. They have a plan and a strategy – a written one, by the way – and they execute on it.

I have had countless advisors over the years tell me they would do anything to grow their business, only to then hear them tell me all the things they wouldn’t do. It sort of reminds me of this. I cannot believe how many books have been written about sleep over the years, and how few have suggested that one “go to bed X hours before the X hours of sleep they want to get.”

You may be reading this saying, “David, this is all easy for you to say. You had success as a rainmaker, and now you are telling us to ‘be tenacious’ and that ‘self-motivated people make it’ – and there is hardly a lot of secret sauce there.”

I respectfully disagree. I think this is secret sauce. The tenacity and grit that live in self-motivated people drive success in this business, and the five habits I suggested above flow out of such a person. The mentality here is the key; the “secret sauce” was discussed last week. But if you adopt the secret sauce – demonstration of competence and likability in the right forums and venues – and do not attach a mentality of tenacity and grit – I believe the secret sauce will fail.

Go get it. Nobody should want it more than you.