I’d like you to imagine, it’s 2006, it’s the first year that I qualify for Top of the Table. I’m in my office in Cleveland, Ohio, and there’s a knock at the door. And my wife walks in and she asks me, “What did he say?” And I responded, “He didn’t say anything, he just walked out the door.” It was my cousin Larry, he had been working with us for three years. My wife, who probably missed her calling and been a spy in the CIA, had found that he got licensed with another company outside of our firm and was having all the commissions deposited into his personal account. How would you have felt? I felt sad, frustrated, disappointed, a little bit embarrassed.

And so that night my wife and I went to dinner and split a bottle of wine, maybe two, and we started to rethink everything. She said to me, we’ve got to do things differently. Of course I agreed. We started to have the discussion, what can we do differently to not have this happen again. At this point we didn’t have a documented financial planning process in our firm. We certainly didn’t have a career path to incentivize Larry to grow the firm’s success versus his individual income. So we set out on a journey to build processes, to build the company that we want. At that time, in 2006 when I just qualified for Top of the Table, I was just over $500,000 in income in my firm. I’m proud to say now in 2023 it’s over $7.5 million in income. I want to attribute that to what I’m going to give you a brief overview of, and I’m going to do a deep dive in the focus session this afternoon of what you see here on the screen, it’s an advisor career path. I believe our job as leaders of our organization is to attract, retain, and reward top talent. That’s how we’re going to build a business that will sustain itself with or without our personal production.

So let’s go into it for a couple minutes. These five rungs were modeled off of a study that was done by the CFP board. What you see here on the screen, the client service associate and paraplanner are back stage positions. What I mean by backstage is they are not yet client facing. They’re learning. Client services associate is doing tactical duties in the backstage to learn the business but support the business. Paraplanner is starting to do strategic duties. So they’re building the financial plans, running illustrations, investment analysis, financial modeling. They’re learning how to be a financial advisor in the backstage in preparation for the third rung which is an advisor. Now as an advisor often they’re sitting as second chair to a lead advisor or a practicing partner, or the owner of the firm, maybe you. They’re also taking over the smallest clients of the firm. They may even onboard the smaller clients that you have now outgrown. The fourth rung is the lead advisor rung. Now a lead advisor should always have a second chair, they’ve earned that right. The planning comes off of them. A lot of the client-facing service comes off of them that a licensed person has to deliver that advice. They’re the first chair, the second chair being an advisor. Ultimately practicing partner is a way for you to illustrate and inspire advisors that they can be part of the next generation. They don’t have to leave your firm to be an owner. They have the opportunity to advance in your firm to a practicing partner level.

That’s a brief overview of what these five rungs are. Our job, is to attract, retain and reward. We have to inspire. When we sit down in front of a new potential advisor we put this in front of them so they can see the future. They don’t have to be like Larry that feels like they have to leave the firm or they have to do other things to grow their personal income. It’s all about the firm’s success, not just their own.