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62 Tales In Practice Consulting – Wins & Lessons Learned!

Steve Seid & Kurt Dupuis
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Episode 62

Steve Seid:
Hey, everyone. We're about to jump into our episode with Tom Singler on Tales in Practice Consulting. We did have some minor audio issues. Not too bad. Please bear with us because it's an excellent episode and well worth your time. Let's get into the episode.

Announcer:
Welcome to The Whole Truth, where two wholesalers help financial professionals build great practices and thrive in a rapidly changing industry. We'll bring you the stories and voices from those on the front lines of this change, and we'll have some fun along the way. We're building a community of financial professionals who are growing, forward-thinking, and want to get better. Thanks for listening and contributing to the discussion.

Disclosure:
The views expressed herein are those of the participants and not those of Touchstone Investments. We are joined by Tom Singler, Manager of Investment Strategy Specialists at Touchstone Investments.  

Steve Seid:
Welcome everybody to The Whole Truth from the Bay Area, California. I am Steve Seid.

Kurt Dupuis:
And from Atlanta, Georgia, I'm Kurt Dupuis.

Steve Seid:
We have Tom Singler back. Tom!

Kurt Dupuis:
Very special guest.

Steve Seid:
Tom, welcome.

Tom Singler:
Thanks for having me again. Appreciate it.

Steve Seid:
Yeah, yeah. First time around, you were on the show and we covered a bunch of practice management topics. We're going to do the same today. What we're going to do is an episode called Tales in Practice Consulting. The backdrop is simple here, all of us at Touchstone, but certainly the three of us on the call, we are involved in all these what you would call practice consulting engagements. We've been doing this for years and years. When you do it for that long, turns out you learn things, even Tom, even you learn things, Tom, which is great.
So, we're going to reflect on those learnings a little bit, and we're going to talk about in these practice consulting engagements what has worked, a couple of things that have worked, a couple of common challenges, and then hopefully the audience comes away with all that wisdom, just the good Singler wisdom.

Kurt Dupuis:
Think of the hundreds of hours of cumulative practice consulting experience that is about to be whittled down into a very short podcast episode.

Steve Seid:
Before we even get into that and the initial part of the show, I should remind everyone if you don't know, which many of you don't, Tom Singler is the person in our organization that we go to when we need a recommendation on basically anything. If you need, for example, a nice polo shirt and you don't know who's making the best polo shirts, you call Tom. And that could be anything. It could be like a car. It could be a golf club. Literally anything, the guy can do it.

Tom Singler:
I think after my last appearance there was a question about a crepe myrtle. We found some fertilizer as well to make sure the tree is looking good.

Kurt Dupuis:
That's true, gardening. We talked about gardening and landscaping.

Steve Seid:
Anything! Tom, what has got you excited lately? When you pick up the phone and you're browsing doing your what I would call Singler research, what's gotten you fired up lately?

Tom Singler:
I've been in the market for a new vehicle. So…

Steve Seid:
Ooh!

Tom Singler:
Right now top of mind is cars and always the perennial powerhouse is always golf clubs.

Steve Seid:
What cars are you looking at? What are you thinking?

Tom Singler:
I'm a recent purchaser of a new vehicle, well, used, but new to me as they would say. I went with the BMW X5.

Steve Seid:
Ah! Why did you make that selection, Thomas?

Tom Singler:
First and foremost, the engine. The B58 as is the model in that vehicle. Voted the best engine in the world two years in a row. Also, Toyota just put it in the new Supra, so it's kind of a stamp of approval from Toyota. Also, I was trading in my old BMW and they gave me the same amount that I paid for it four years ago.

Kurt Dupuis:
Beautiful.

Tom Singler:
Free. Free car.

Steve Seid:
Unbelievable that he had a real legit answer to that. If someone asked me why did I buy my Telluride, I'd be like, because I liked it. It looked nice.

Tom Singler:
Because Tom Singler told me to.

Steve Seid:
That's right. That's also the main reason. All right, well, we'll try to get some other recommendations maybe throughout the show from you. Anyways, let's get into the episode. Again, the premise is all these practice management engagements, what's worked, what hasn't. As you think about this, what jumps off as something that really works?

Tom Singler:
As we go through these consulting practice management engagements, identify where we can move the needle and what we look to do in terms of that is optimizing the team or FAs1 time, revenue, and risk. And really the baseline to move those three needles in correlation is understanding the value of their time. Once we understand what their time is worth and where they're spending that time, where they're allocating that energy and resources, we can usually be quite effective in maximizing and then optimizing their time, revenue, and risk.

Steve Seid:
I often start a few presentations with, what's your most precious commodity? It really is just time. That to me is you can almost put that above everything. If you don't mind, I'll jump into my first one of what's worked that's probably related. I had number one on the list cutting households. I have never seen an FA, a team cut households and then afterwards say, "I really wish I didn't do that." Never. It's never happened.

Kurt Dupuis:
Well, but there's competing emotions there because you hear the comments like, oh, well Mrs. Smith doesn't have a lot of money. I know they're not an A client, but she's been with me 20, 30 years. You have the pride of running a really high-powered business. It's like, look, she's probably better served somewhere else or in some other way, but that's a really tough thing for people to do.

Steve Seid:
I totally get it. You evaluate whatever portion that you want to look at, but the bottom line is there's a big portion of the book if you're like the average that's not really paying you for your time or what your time's worth.

Tom Singler:
Yeah, you actually stole my number two, which was Supernova works. Echo your original opening line with no one's ever regretted it. As an anecdote, we recently worked with the team in the Boston area and they actually shed 80 households over a six month period, which represented about 25% of the households. But they brought in that same time period by spending more time, allocating more resources towards the top end of the book with the ability to move the needle there 80 million net new assets. It was almost like a one-to-one ratio of millions in the door the households that left.
Now they were able to find a junior FA in the office to partner with to take over those responsibilities. It wasn't a cut them off. But nonetheless, they had way more time in the day to allocate the energy resources to the relationships that had the ability to grow.

Steve Seid:
Not everybody may know, even though we've talked about it in prior podcasts, we know that everyone listening has listened to every one of our episodes. But to refresh on Supernova, it was a concept. It was a book. Rob Knapp wrote it. Was it the '90s or mid 2000s?

Kurt Dupuis:
It's like late '90s, I think.

Steve Seid:
You need to shrink to grow. Like a Supernova, you narrow down, you focus more on what matters, and then the growth becomes more exponential. That's what Tom's alluding to there. Kurt, well, how about one from you? What about what's worked in your end?

Kurt Dupuis:
This first example I'll call the “aha moment” team. Practice consulting by definition requires a lot of data. There's a lot of information. The real art of this, however, is telling a story, really understanding what the problem is, and the data is just supporting that end. We have this tool called the client service calculator, which you input a bunch of assumptions on how much it takes. Let's say you do have three tiers. You're not Supernova. You have three tiers of service, kind of three different archetypes of clients.
You make some assumptions on how much it costs in time to service those folks, and then it spits out, do you have more time to grow or do you not? That's one of the revelatory processes we go through to show folks that they don't have time. I was going through this particular exercise with a really good client. The problem we were solving was it just felt like everything was reactive. They couldn't build any kind of proactive service model because they didn't have time to get their head above water.
We went through this exercise, and not only was there a material deficit, at the same time we were talking about what is ideal service? If you could just snap your fingers and craft this beautiful service model, what would that exist? It would've doubled their workload. But seeing it in black and white, the nitty-gritty, quantifiable detail, I saw the look on their face and they're like, "Oh, this is why we feel like we can't get our head above water." When you see that data materialize in a facial expression or a moment, I love those moments working with teams.

Tom Singler:
The average we see when going through that calculator for the first time with a team or FA is negative 440 hours. Think about that. The average team or FA is overpromising 11 weeks of their time. You simply don't have enough time to do it. Do you want to work more? Do you want to hire somebody else? Do you want to provide them less service? Do you want to spend less time per activity, or do you want to identify some relationships that are maybe better suited somewhere else? Those are really the levers you have to pull, but the calculator identifies that immediately.

Steve Seid:
I'm going to add one thing to this on the positive side. What does this mean, the opportunity for everybody in the industry? It is easy to differentiate on the service side, because what they're describing is what most teams are set up with, which is that we want to do this amazing client service, we want to deliver this experience, but structurally it's almost impossible for most to do it. If you are one of the FAs that can get your time under control and just do the little extra things, you can do things that keep clients forever. I know everyone listening is experiencing that.
When you have the opportunity to do that little extra thing, that go the extra mile and you're like, oh, this client's never leaving. Okay, I'll jump into number two because I stole yours, Tom, on what works. I've experienced a lot of false starts in practice consulting. Meeting with the team, we all agree where they want to go. Everyone's excited. We've got the action plan in place. We got the recurring meetings in place. Let's go and take action. And then you come back in and there's some movement, but there's some... That's actually common.

Kurt Dupuis:
Very.

Steve Seid:
You don't want that to be ongoing forever. Don't mishear me that you could just not do the work, but you're busy people and there's going to be some false starts. My takeaway of what's worked is an ongoing relationship with an external or the right internal third party is what's really going to work. I have an ongoing relationship with somebody that keeps things moving because there's likely going to be some false starts along the way.

Tom Singler:
The better way to maybe put that into one sentence is you need to have an accountability coach. Really what we've seen too to help offset the false starts is now what we're doing is we're making the duration between check-ins shorter at the front end. If we do have a false start, we're not waiting a longer period of time to identify what the issue is.
Maybe after the original meeting, it's a one week check in, and then it's a two week check in, then we go to three weeks, so on and so forth. Just seeing your name on the calendar for a five-minute phone call usually prompts some activity because they don't want to get on that call and tell you they didn't do what they were supposed to do.

Kurt Dupuis:
This actually falls in line with another one of the teams or the moments that I wanted to describe, and I will call this the “tough love” team. One of the things that opening up your practice to showing us the data and us analyzing it is it empowers us to have different conversations than we otherwise would be able to have. The one I'm thinking of recently is a very common question that we get asked is, what's working for client acquisition?
I mean…

Steve Seid:
Yep.

Kurt Dupuis:
…maybe not daily, but at least weekly we get asked that question. There's a fun trick, fun game I like to play to throw that back on whoever's asking. It's like, well, what are you doing now to grow? When I get crickets, we have to step back and have some tough love, right?

Steve Seid:
Yeah.

KurtDupuis:
What you're asking me is like some silver bullet where we can snap our fingers and change the outcome. The reason you're not growing is because you're not doing anything for growth. Pick a path and go down it.
What practice consulting does is it puts a relationship in a microwave and allows you to be more candid more quickly. That's the conclusion of my TED Talk.

Tom Singler:
I think too, to Kurt's point, pick a path and stick with it more than three weeks. The constant I see towards acquisition specifically is, “Well, we tried it, it didn't work.” Well, how long did you try it for? Well, we gave it two weeks. Well, why don't you give it six months or a year?

Steve Seid:
Love it. I have something to add here, but I'm going to hold because I'm going to leave it for the section of common challenges because it's related to what we just discussed. OK. Tom, do you have one more on what's worked?

Tom Singler:
Where I see a big blind spot with a lot of teams right now is the value proposition towards acquisition. Right, so if you're talking to a prospect or even your FAs as to what you're providing, the ability to have a rehearsed defined value proposition as to why they should be with you versus the guy down the street or the guy down the hall or gal is a big missing link there. If we think about the three things that you could control within the value proposition of quality of the output relationship, speed of resolution and the cost, generally speaking, you have two of those, but not all three.
But having a actual value proposition as to “why you” or “why your team” is something that is a big missing link when it comes to finding and identifying net new households, net new assets. We have some presentations within acquisition that go through the ideal value proposition as opposed to you can call me any time versus if you call me, you're going to have a response within one hour and resolution within 24 hours. The specificity as to what you provide I think is a missing piece as opposed to the nonchalant, “Oh, you can give me call any time.”
“I may or may not answer, but you can definitely call me.” Just having that detailed availability or resolution service, things of that nature, really play well.

Steve Seid:
I'll just put a cherry on top of this by saying, and the value proposition should be about them. A lot of value propositions are about who we are, what we can do, our capabilities. If you can't bring it back to what that actually means, then it's less impactful. You think about what Tom just said, it's not about, hey, I have all these members of the team that can return your calls. It's like, no, here's what you can expect when you call in.

Kurt Dupuis:
This is one of my favorite rants in this business because my first job out of school was selling appliances. The acronym FAB was drilled to my head, like features and benefits. We love to talk about features in finance, it's got all these bells and whistles, but we never talk about the benefit, which actually means to the person receiving the information.

Tom Singler:
Don't say I or me a lot. I mean, obviously some sentences need to have that in there. But if you focus on the you aspect when presenting, it's a whole different... I think we fall into that too. Focus on the end client and what it means to them, not what you are doing, what it means to them.

Steve Seid:
That's a great point. All right, Kurt, I think you were talking about three teams. Do you have one more for us?

Kurt Dupuis:
Yeah. My third, I'm just going to call it the “family team”. What works with practice consulting is when you get on that inner circle, you sort of become family. Family might be a stretch, but it's when you're greeted with hugs, at least down in the south. You've worked with folks for a number of years. You've helped them with multiple projects through multiple configurations of their team. That's what works, when you have a trusted resource, which I think is what we're aspiring to be.

Steve Seid:
I'll throw one more of what's worked. Teams that I've seen make a lot of progress, they have someone on the team that's focused or coordinating the execution piece. All the team is involved, but that one person is the one that's responsible for driving that change. I've seen that work a lot. I want to add a caveat to this though, and then you guys can comment. If that person is the only one on the team involved, like the only one, and everyone's like, "Yeah, yeah, John's doing it or Sally's doing it," and no one else is engaged, that's a pitfall.
We want somebody that's focused on execution that can help drive this change, but you also have to have some involvement and some buy-in from the rest of the team.

Tom Singler:
You need the COO within the practice management realm, whether that's a real title or not. They're going to head up this piece of the operations where we want to move the business. You need to have somebody that's going to be within the team that takes charge, as opposed to us being the only accountability factor. There also needs to be somebody within the team that you're going to provide that ownership with.
Where if Steve's on the team, Steve tells me to do something, I'm not just going to tell Steve no. It is a tight rope to walk as to who's the best person that has the time and capacity to do it, while also the rest of the team members giving them the respect and ownership of that duty.

Steve Seid:
Let's just take junior partners, for example, because how many meetings have we got in that you got FAs, you got junior partners? Junior partners are hungry. They want to grow. They want to drive change. They want to help the business. Senior financial professional will just say, okay, the junior partner's going to be responsible for this initiative. That's great. If the senior partner then just kind of goes, washes their hands of it, that's less great. You understand what I'm saying? You need someone driving, but everyone's gonna have to be bought in to some degree.

Tom Singler:
Yeah, what we've experienced too in the past is in the same situation where the senior lets the junior run with it, but then says, "Oh, by the way, you can't call any of the clients." It's like, well…

Kurt Dupuis:
Yeah, exactly.

Tom Singler:
…are you really giving them ownership then? They can identify it. But at the end of the day, if you're not going to pick up the phone and do what they can do or what you need to be done, we're really just identifying opportunities for you to sit on and never act on.

Steve Seid:
Let's maybe jump into some things that haven't worked. Do you want me to kick that off?

Kurt Dupuis:
Yeah.

Steve Seid:
There might be a few rants going on here, Kurt. Be warned.

Kurt Dupuis:
Uh-oh. Sidebar.

Steve Seid:
We might do the sidebar. No, I'll start with something pretty gentle, which is that people that are not inclined for business development, it's really hard to then get them to the point where they're going to be a rainmaker. I've seen it over and over again. You got a person on the team, they're a financial professional. They deal with a lot of clients. Another partner on the team's like, well, we really want to grow.
We really want them to grow. They're not bringing in the new households. Let's develop a strategy. It can be done, but it's hard to just mold a rainmaker. That's not to say you can't have strategies, but to take someone who's completely not inclined to go hunt and make them hunt, I don't see it. I'll pause there. I have a solution for this, but I'm curious of your guys' feedback.

Tom Singler:
I think what I'm seeing most right now is some of the firms are pushing towards teaming, and so there's a lack of roles and delineations of responsibilities as they form these new teams. And so, we get a redundancy across the newly formed team, where it's some cases it's teams in name only.
Sometimes they're siloed books, but they sit next to each other in the office. But if you actually want to be successful and grow, I think the understanding as to who does what well is a big piece of that. But just identifying roles and responsibilities and what that looks like is something that a lot of individuals as they form the team never do.

Kurt Dupuis:
What we know is if you have a successful practice today, and let's say you've been in this business 20 years, what you've done the last 20 years to be successful is not what it's going to take the next 20 years. Yet we are largely playing by the same playbook of 20 years ago. Cold calling is the easiest example of that. But we're also at this watershed moment where we have generational differences meets technology where the more senior folks want the younger people to do things the same way.
It's just not going to be a recipe for success. You have to be more creative. KPIs, personality assessments, Kolbe assessments, all of that's got to be part of it. But I also think there's some Simon Sinek in here too. When I hear people say growth, I immediately now am trying to train myself to think why. What are we really solving for? Because in a lot of cases, growth is not actually the objective. In a lot of cases, it's human capital development. I just want my junior person to be able to be a senior person and buy me out at some point.
It's like, okay, well then if that's your truth, say that, or it's just I want more time to spend at the lake. There's something else going on. Growth is a guise for a lot of things in this business and it covers up a lot of errors.

Steve Seid:
I think it's a great point. In my mind, it's not just to absolve them of generating new business or increased revenue or whatever it is. I mean, another way to think about that is like, okay, let's say we want to grow, but we're not going to do it the old way, as you described, which is pick up cold calls. Well, can we focus them on something that actually could result in growth but is more in their wheelhouse?
An easy example, which we repeat over and over again, is client experience. Okay, partner X, your job is to go in and evaluate what our client experiences is today…

Kurt Dupuis:
Right!

Steve Seid:
…and take it to a whole different level, or to run our client events. They can be involved with this. They can be involved in business development growth, but they're not getting in a... Starting to show up for random events and networking in ways that are just...
They're spinning their wheels because, one, the game has changed, as you described, but two, they're not that person. You guys ready for a little rant here? I'm going to change subjects a little bit, and I would even put this into the most frustrating thing for me in this particular industry. You ready for this?

Kurt Dupuis:
Oh, I'm ready.

Steve Seid:
I know you are. You love when I get all angry. We're going to move over to the portfolio consulting side. Our industry, as far as I can see, and you guys challenge me on this if you think I'm wrong, is set up in the following way. Wholesalers want to sell five star funds to financial professionals who want to buy five star funds and then complain when things underperform. The table is yours.

Kurt Dupuis:
Easy Google search, Morningstar Mirage, Wall Street Journal article from several years ago. The data's there.

Tom Singler:
If you look at the study, five star funds underperform the most because you bought them at the top and you end up selling them at the bottom. If you're going to buy a five star fund, at least make sure that manager is consistently in the top half or top third of that peer group as opposed to just chasing the hot dot and finding somebody that got lucky over the last five years. I think too it's really interesting when you talk to financial professionals about their view on individual equities versus mutual funds. Why do we always buy individual equities at the bottom, but that's when we sell mutual funds when we should be adding more?

Kurt Dupuis:
That's a great observation.

Steve Seid:
Absolutely. All right, last common challenge for me, I think, in practice consulting that reflecting back has really been a struggle is operational processes and designing that. I'll sit down with a team, they'll say, we want to design an onboarding process, or we want to design a client service process. The implementation is never as good as I want it to be. Has that been a struggle for you guys too, or is that just me?

Tom Singler:
I would piggyback on that and say it's never as good as I want it to be or it needs to be for the team or sole proprietor. It's funny, and I know you've both heard this as well, how many times we go into meetings about practice management or business consulting and they say, "All right, I really want to do X, Y and Z. How do I do it?" There's a lot of them that are ideas guys and they never put the pen to paper. When they try to repeat the process that worked for them 5, 10, 20, 15 years ago, whatever it is, they don't have the documentation anywhere.
I think sometimes just sitting down and us being the stenographer for the team, "If I want to do X, Y, and Z, what would the process be," and then write it down, and then ask somebody else for their input or identifying holes or opportunities to make it more not complex, but thorough. But yeah, it's amazing how many people just don't actually sit down and write out what are the steps to do X, Y, and Z. Same thing with acquisition. What does your onboarding pipeline look like? Who are your current prospects?
What are their potential assets? Where do they work? What's the benefits plan? Things of that nature. Things that us as a collective group, now I'm doing this for a decade plus, think everybody has, but no one actually has one in place. I think just the ability to put pen to paper is a huge tailwind here to become more effective.

Steve Seid:
On this topic, I want to point you to another episode we did, which was Liz Lenz part two. I brought this up to her and she really brought to light away to avoid some of these headaches and implementation, which I think was terrific. She'll do a better job than me, but a couple things she references, first, implement a few pieces at a time as opposed to an entire process. If you're designing an onboard process and we've got all these steps along the way, maybe do it a little bit at a time as to say, okay, we're just going to redo the whole thing and start on Monday.
That's one of the things I thought was really good. The other thing that she referenced was really good was reflecting back after you actually do it. It's one thing to say, okay, we want to do this and back to onboarding. Step one is this. Step two is this. Step three. And with each of those steps, here's what we expect. Well, after you do them, maybe reflect back and say, does that make sense? Did that go as well as we thought? But don't let it derail improving an onboarding process because you run into some small problem in one of the steps. I thought that was really insightful.
Well, thanks, guys. I thought this was a pretty good discussion on what's worked and what hasn't in practice consulting based on all of our engagements. What's the takeaway of the audience? After this, pick a couple of things, a few nuggets. There's got to be out of the numerous things we threw at you, a few things that'll help you improve when you're trying to make these changes or move the business forward. We are going to transition now to our Costanza Corner. We will be right back. This is The Whole Truth. Stick with us.

Kurt Dupuis:
Welcome back to the Costanza Corner where we like to end the show on a high note side. Seid, I can't wait for your story.

Steve Seid:
I think I have a good one. I just got back from French Polynesia, the 10-year anniversary trip. We hit four different islands. There's a lot of islands out there. I mean, people think about Tahiti and Bora Bora. There are just tons of them out there. It's a very, very cool place to go. It's kind of secret, I feel bad saying it on this podcast, but it's not that much further than Hawaii, but way less people go there. But one of the things that was a challenge for us that I didn't know prior was some of the islands have a little bit of a stray dog situation.

Kurt Dupuis:
Uh-oh! Uh-oh!

Steve Seid:
I didn't know this, because normally I'll research a place.

Kurt Dupuis:
How many did you bring back?

Steve Seid:
I'll research a place, and if I know that that's going to be the case, Becky and I just won't go because we'll spend all day going to the buffet or restaurant and feeding the stray dog. You know how it's going to go. I don't know how I missed it this time. But we're on some island. It's called Rangiroa. It's not even an island. It's like a strip of sand. If you want to look it up, it's really funny. It's called an atoll. It's just basically a strip of sand in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It was the fourth island we were at. The past couple of islands we've got in, we're feeding the dogs.
We're doing it, but I could just tell that it's starting to get to my wife. It's becoming a problem. I said, okay, really quickly I got to focus her on something. Because you can't solve the whole problem obviously, so you got to focus on one thing you actually can, right? Yes, we did find one dog that stood out to us that was clearly not being taken care of by any. Because some of them were being taken care of loosely by people. They just let their dogs live outside. It's just a different viewpoint. It's hard for us to understand, but other places don't necessarily...

Kurt Dupuis:
Or maybe even adopted by staff at the places or something.

Steve Seid:
Yeah.

Kurt Dupuis:
They throw them a bone.

Steve Seid:
They don't look as good as the dogs in the US when they live outside because they're a little mangy and things like that, but in a lot of cases they are being taken care of. Anyways, but one we decided and thought and I think rightfully so. It was not necessarily being taken care of. We're on this strip in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and we've got to figure out how to get this pup on a plane back to Tahiti, how to capture it, how to get it back to Tahiti. Is there a person there and a vet that we can bring it to?
By the way, everyone speaks French. Try calling a vet in Tahiti when you don't know a lick of French. I'll land this plane because this story could go a lot longer. We got the dog to Tahiti. The people on the flight probably hate us because you imagine how this thing smelled. I mean, it was bad. This is a bad day, and it's crying the whole time, by the way. We're just like, okay. We got him back. Thankfully, we found a vet in Tahiti that is now boarding the dog, because we got to get all these treatments done to be able to import it through the CDC and all this stuff.
For example, it has to be 28 days after they get a rabies shot before they can even go in. That's a full month. My wife in a couple of weeks is flying back to get our new dog Ranga…

Kurt Dupuis:
What!?

Steve Seid:
…after Rangiroa, and we got another one in the Seid family. That's what I got. Good one?

Kurt Dupuis:
That was the logical ending to this story, but I thought it's so illogical that it can't actually happen. But sure enough, you come through you. You did land that plane. You have an adopted dog from French Polynesia now? Well, you will.

Steve Seid:
Not here yet, but will.

Kurt Dupuis:
Oh my gosh!

Steve Seid:
If there's anyone who wants to hear the extended story, please reach out. I'm happy to tell, because there's a lot of funny details here, like my wife riding round on an electronic scooter around the island trying to find any dog carriers because there really wasn't and found one in the back of some small little grocery store. Craziness. That's what I got. I'm out.

Kurt Dupuis:
Congrats on the new addition to the family.

Steve Seid:
On that note, thanks everyone for listening. We'll see you next time.

Kurt Dupuis:
Thanks y'all. You can find The Whole Truth and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. We'd love it if you took the time to rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. It helps others find the show. And for more episodes of The Whole Truth, go to www.touchstoneinvestments.com/thewholetruth. That's touchstoneinvestments.com/thewholetruth, all one word.

1 FA is an acronym for Financial Advisor

Disclosure:
Please note that this content was created as of the specific date indicated and reflects views as of that date. It will be kept solely for historical purposes and opinions may change without notice in reacting to shifting economic, market, business, and other conditions. Touchstone funds are distributed by Touchstone Securities Incorporated, a registered broker dealer and member of FINRA and SIPC.

Disclosure:
This commentary is for informational purposes only and should not be used or construed as an offer to sell, a solicitation of an offer to buy, or a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security. Investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principle and fluctuation of value. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

Please consider the investment objectives, risks, charges, and expenses of the fund carefully before investing. The prospectus and the summary prospectus contain this and other information about the fund. To obtain a prospectus or a summary prospectus, contact your financial professional or download and/or request one at touchstoneinvestments.com/resources or call Touchstone at 800-638-8194. Please read the prospectus and/or summary prospectus carefully before investing.