68 Live at Barron's Advisor 100 Summit!

Kurt Dupuis:

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.

Steve Seid:

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 Liz Lenz, Founder of LenzInsights, a consultant firm utilized by Touchstone Securities, Inc.

Steve Seid:

Welcome everybody to The Whole Truth. We've got a special episode, a unique episode. I had the opportunity along with our good friend, Liz Lenz, who's been on the show many times. In fact, she'll be on this episode. We presented at Barron's 100. Our presentation was focused on value drivers for top firms. So think, Barron's 100 has very much the largest, most profitable advisory practices in the industry. What are those value drivers that folks like that should be focused on?

Barron's is a unique conference. It really is. There's not that many of them where all different firms can get together, share ideas, be around top caliber FAs. It really is a unique environment. There's a few of them out there. Forbes is out there as well. I hear that's a great one. So we wanted to share our thoughts, and it wasn't just Liz and I. We also had Ben Alge, who runs our Eastern Division, Tommy Grout who runs our Southern Division, and Tim Bray, who runs our Central Division. So, along with me with the Western Division, you've got all the DVPs at Touchstone on this episode, sharing our feedback along with Liz. So really, really excited for you all to listen.

People want to know what goes on at conferences like that, for those that don't attend, so we thought it would be interesting to share those things. If you did attend, this will hopefully give you a little bit of reminder about what was covered and inspire you to revisit the topics a little bit. Just to sum up, you'll hear again my feedback and my comments in the next segment when we bring everybody on, but to me the key theme was rapid change.

Let me give you three examples, and these were three topics that were discussed at the conference. The first is around AI. Not going to surprise anybody who's listening to this, but AI, how it's going to affect our business at every different level because we know it will. What does that mean and how we should think about that? So that was a big topic at the conference.

Succession and team planning. We know that around 40% of the industry, if you believe the numbers, are going to be retiring in the next five to 10 years, how do we actually prepare for that? Because I got to be honest, I don't think the industry is prepared for that. It doesn't seem like it. Some folks are, but as a whole, we've got a lot of work to do to prepare transition of businesses, getting employees in place, things like that.

That was another related topic is how do we continue to most optimally work with the next generation? I don't think everyone feels like we've figured that out, that we've got the Gen Zs optimized in our businesses right now in terms of how they work. So a lot of discussion around that. Then of course, the rapid change, the immense volatility that's going on in the markets.

To sum up, lots of discussion around change at this conference. Really, really insightful speakers throughout, and I was just happy to be a part of it. You'll hear more of my thoughts in the next segment. Before we bring everybody on, I want to remind everybody who's listening if you haven't subscribed to our show, please do. It means a lot. It gets us in the queue where other people can see the show more. The show's growing like crazy. We're super proud of it, and just a little bit extra help from our audience is always greatly appreciated.

Now, let's transition to our segment, “Live at Barron's”. Welcome, everybody to a very special episode of The Whole Truth Coming to you from Phoenix, Arizona at the Barron's 100 conference. I've got a special group of folks with me, so really, all of my fellow Divisionals first. We got Tim Bray from the Central Division.

Tim Bray:

Hello, everybody.

Steve Seid:

There he is, making his debut on The Whole Truth. Happy to have you, man.

Tim Bray:

First time for everything. Glad to be here.

Steve Seid:

Absolutely. We've got Tommy Grout, who you may all have remembered from the John Choate episode. Was that the only one you did or have you done a couple, Tommy?

Tommy Grout:

That's the one. We had to reschedule another one and maybe we'll look to get that back on for 2024, but so far this is the second appearance.

Steve Seid:

Happy to have you back. Then of course, two other people who are very, very well known to The Whole Truth audience. We got Ben Alge, who's, I think this is episode 70 of yours, of our 70 episodes you've probably been on all 70.

Ben Alge:

I think it is. That's good for the listenership right there.

Steve Seid:

Then of course our returning champion, Liz Lenz, who has the most downloaded episode over Ben Alge, I just want to point out while you're both on here. So welcome, Liz.

Liz Lenz:

Ooh! Thanks for having me, Ben. Great to see another competitor here on the podcast at the same time. We'll beat both of our scores together.

Ben Alge:

That's right. That's right. Two of us, one plus one equals three here.

Steve Seid:

We wanted to talk a little bit about this conference. There's a lot of questions about Barron's conference from people that don't attend. What's that like? It really is a unique conference in that it's not often that you get a bunch of different firms together, top level producers together, and it creates a very interesting and dynamic conference. Maybe we'll start there in terms of what you guys think of the conference overall. Ben, maybe I'll start with you. You do a lot of these. What's your impression of these Barron's and why is it a bit different?

Ben Alge:

Always different. One, it's a high quality group they bring together, but the unique element of this is most of the conferences we do involve a single broker dealer, a single firm, and with that, you get a lot of the same ideas even across idea sharing. It really adds a different element to the conversation, to the sessions, and people just seem more engaged.

Steve Seid:

Maybe I'll go to you, Tim Bray, next.

Tim Bray:

Yeah, just following up on what Ben said, there's so many people here from so many different firms, and everybody's engaged. Everybody's in all the meetings, everybody's participating. You watch some of these breakout sessions, everyone's got their phone out, they're taking pictures of screens. You also notice a lot of people conversing from multiple firms. Just having a conversation, "What's going on at your firm?" "Here's what's going on at our firm."

Steve Seid:

Tommy, you made a comment about advisor incentives.

Tommy Grout:

Yeah. So my understanding is they pay their own way to get here. I think that to Ben's point, increases the engagement. These are folks that are serious about really wanting to improve their business and take it to the next level.

Ben Alge:

It's funny to see because so much of our work, especially in the wirehouses, not allowed to mix and match, and they tell us we do events and we can't share ideas across firms. They don't want that kind of engagement. And so it's the one or two times a year we get a chance to do it.

Steve Seid:

Isn't it funny, I wonder how Barron's got the approval for that.

Liz Lenz:

I think it comes down to BU being a force to be reckoned with because do they need permission? Most of these advisors are going to go to things that are going to better themselves. And so I always tell people, "If you're only going to your broker dealers conferences, you're going to get a lot of the same things. So I think you've got to mix up. You got to get out of the box at least once a year and start meeting new people. And if you're not, you're probably doing yourself a disservice."

Steve Seid:

What I heard you say is we don't need permission. Is that what you just said?

Liz Lenz:

I'm a ask for forgiveness person first and foremost, but no, we play by the rules. But when it comes to your professional development and your network, that's on you, that's your responsibility to focus on it. So yeah, that's the PC way of saying it in my words. But Steve, you heard what you heard, you and I just presented today…

Steve Seid:

We did!

Liz Lenz:

…to who I thought was a very engaged audience, and I did see people nodding their head and taking pictures. What's interesting is that we talked about growth and we talked about team, but there were sure of a heck of a lot of team sessions, a lot of people talking about human capital, a lot of people talking about comp plans and a lot of people talking about leadership styles at this conference. So it was pretty heavy. It was almost every breakout session had some team or leadership breakout.

Steve Seid:

Thank you for that because that brings us to the two things that I wanted to talk about. So what I wanted to get from you all were the takeaways from the conference as a whole. So what are the common themes you heard. Some of the things that stuck out to you. And then Liz, I want to get into the presentation that we did that I think went pretty well. When we left the stage. I was greeted by this crew here, said, "Oh, you guys did an awesome job." And I trust their opinion. I also, I don't know about you, Liz, they probably wouldn't have been like you guys were awful. So it's hard to determine, right? What did you think, Liz?

Ben Alge:

We wouldn't have told Liz she was awful. We would've absolutely let you know, Steve.

Liz Lenz:

Well, I hope that you guys would be honest with me. This goes back to asking smarter questions, which we've talked about before, is that even if you say, "Hey, how's it going?" And someone goes, "Oh, it's good," then you got nothing out of that conversation.

Steve Seid:

You got nothing.

Liz Lenz:

So you have to very specifically ask, "Well, what did you want more of? What did you want less of? What could we have changed?" And actually had an advisor after our conference or after a session that said, "Hey, I really liked what you said." I said, "Is there anything missing?" He said, "There were four things that you said I wish you would've said again. Can you say them to me because I want to write them down." And that was a trigger to me.

Steve Seid:

So let's start there and then we'll talk about conference takeaways in a second. So our presentation really was on what should top Barron's teams be focused on? The premise was that a lot of the traditional key performance indicators that teams use, the average "financial professional in the industry" aren't relevant for this audience. Talk about the two areas of focus and why you chose those.

Liz Lenz:

This was a mixed audience. Some people are running a very boutique, like small team, super high net worth client, small number of clients like volume of clients. Some people are running firms that are large in nature. They've got 30 team members, thousands of clients. And fundamentally, the way you need to run your practice and what you need to be measuring is different. And for any of these firms to grow, and there's two different strategies of what you're building.

You have to think about how you're going to continue to grow at the rate that you've been growing at to stay the top 100 or even the top 500 or top 1000 because there's a lot of other up and coming advisors that want to take your spot. So how do you continue to do that? And the argument that we made, which was in support of a great article that Michael Kitces wrote about the evolution of wealth management firms was that you're going to hit a size wall where you have to figure out, "How am I going to scale my growth or how am I going to be as effective at growing my business as I was before?"

And it rests basically on the strategy and little things that you could be doing to move the needle, but the reality is that you got to get your team to be focused and motivated. If you lose a couple team members, then you're taking a step backwards. How do you keep that human capital focused? And instead of, as you said Steve in our presentation, wholesale changes to your business, we've got to be looking for the little things that make your business different and what you should be thinking about for the next year. And that was the heart of the messaging.

Steve Seid:

These are successful financial professionals and there's probably some that will be like, "Oh, growth is going to come no matter what we do," but there's probably equal if not more, and you guys chime in if you disagree. That said, "We want to maintain the growth. We're not sure that the future's going to be exactly the way the past is. So how do we continue the growth? Again, not just short-term, but long-term. There's a lot of teams that we're dealing with here that are dealing with succession. How do we grow post the founders leaving, things like that." And the other one with human capital who doesn't run a team that doesn't think, "Hey, how do we do this better?" Hopefully those are universal concepts.

Ben Alge:

On the growth side, even the ones that are growing successfully. When we consult with teams, we always ask them, "Are you growing by chance or by process?" And one of those, you can drive, control. One of those you're at the whims of referrals in the market and those kind of things. And so even for the fastest growing teams, putting in place processes to help drive that is a huge benefit, I think.

Steve Seid:

I'm always amazed that some of the advisors that fall into the list that really are... Again, we're dealing with the biggest advisors in the country at this conference, how open they are to actually wanting to get better. Maybe that's how they got to where they are, but it’s just... They were all pretty engaged with that and are constantly saying, "How do I make this better?" There's almost like an anxiety.

Tommy Grout:

To your point, these are some of the largest teams and advisors across broker dealers across the country, and they still have very similar challenges and opportunities inside the business from a data perspective and a household perspective and an investment perspective that someone that's been in the business for 5, 6, 7 years and is still trying to grow, certainly not one of the largest, but inside the actual business from our analysis, it's a lot of the same issues.

Steve Seid:

Yeah.

Ben Alge:

Steve, who was the golf coach you interviewed on the podcast, I don't know, last year?

Steve Seid:

Dr. Rick Jensen.

Ben Alge:

Dr. Rick Jensen. Yeah. In one of his books, he's got that story of Tiger Woods and how he was first in every measurable category, but only by a small measure, and he blew up his entire golf swing, rebuilt everything everybody told him it was crazy because he was already top of his game but then came back and was the best, but by multiple what he was before, it's what we find in coaching too, is that people who are the best, the ones that want to get better, it's fun to be a part of.

Steve Seid:

Yeah, you think you're going to run into these massive egos. And let me tell you, I was going to tell a joke today I didn't, but about how working with this category of financial professional, we're surprised of how little ego we come across. But there are certainly... I don't run into many that are like, "I've got it all figured out at this level." It seems to me there's something about these folks that there's an innate desire to want to get better. It's almost like they can't turn it off. It's like they built it, you think they should... We've got this mega practice, I run X amount of AUM that's top of the industry, and yet they're still not content. There's something interesting about that.

Tim Bray:

They all want to know what others are doing. I'll harken it back to our own firm. Somebody when I had started, who was number one year after year after year, and what he always did on Friday long before we had the reporting that we have today, is we'd get a Friday sheet that would come out and it would show sales, it would show the ranking. And anybody who had sales for the week above him, the first thing he did within five minutes is he called every one of those people to ask what did they do and how did they do it, and what funds did they sell? And I think in that really motivated person who's willing to strive, that's the type of person that winds up rising to the top.

Steve Seid:

Yeah, it's a great point.

Liz Lenz:

You know what you're saying that's different though, that I think is notable here, is that there's a lot of people that will talk about getting better but won't actually do anything about it. And I think the key differentiator, I talked to so many advisors, especially being a coach or consultant, talked to a lot of people that say they want to do the work that say that they want to make some changes, but you give them the task of actually doing something about it and you hold them accountable to it and it's up to them to deliver.

And so Tim, in your example, this guy's picking up the phone and he's probably taking some of the ideas and implementing them. It's the implementation phase that really starts to separate, I think the pack of who's going to end up being the most successful versus who isn't. We don't have a lot of people to take action. I worked with this woman and still stay connected to her, her name's Renee Baker, and she said, "I'm not talking about it. I'm being about it." That was code for... One of the things she used to say she loved about us because we would just take action and do it. The top people are the people who hustle. Take action.

Steve Seid:

Yeah. Yeah, it's a great point. Let's circle back to our presentation a little bit again, back to the two key topics of growth and human capital. So Liz, can you summarize some of the points that we covered on the growth side?

Liz Lenz:

Sure. Ultimately, there's two strategies. There's organic growth and there's inorganic growth. So by organic growth, who's my ideal client? How do I want to connect with them? And some of the strategies that we talked about that are making a big difference for people are what does it mean to create enough gratitude and appreciation for client referrals where it becomes a memorable experience versus just a task that you end up completing for your great referral partners.

And then the second being using different medians, which Steve, I want to talk about that with you is, and you should comment on that more so than me, is the use of let's say video or podcast. And Laura from my data cantor, who's a friend of mine, coach in the industry, she found a stat, and it's been something that she's used and it's proven to grow an advisor's businesses, is that 80% of people don't want to read. They'd rather watch a video. So if you're not embracing video or some other media other than text, you might be missing an opportunity, even have seat at the table for organic growth opportunities. But even with a video, we're sitting here recording, this could be a video, but we're using the audio for the podcast and you run a podcast. So I'm sure, Steve, you have lots to say about that.

Steve Seid:

I would, I mean, I'm biased. I'm sitting here doing a podcast, but I do think it's a medium that... Ben's smiling because I even made the comment on stage. I'm like, "Now I get to talk about my podcast." And everybody loved it. No, I do think it's an interesting medium, and I tell the story of getting a call on the weekend by a financial professional who I didn't communicate with very often. I put her on a podcast list, she calls me on a Saturday. She's like, "I'm doing gardening in the backyard. I just put on your podcast and it spurred this idea and I gave you a call afterwards," that's different. That's not something you're going to get from words on your website. It's not going to be something you get from video. It's not going to be something that you get from any other type of consumption.

There is something unique about podcasts, and I think people get very much caught up into like, "Oh, well, if I start a podcast, I've got to compete with Joe Rogan" or, "I've got to produce this much," or, "How am I going to produce all this content?" And it doesn't have to be that. You can produce 10 episodes that live forever and that's it, but that people can consume how they want. So pulling back in the conversation, I think that discussion that we had around different mediums for consumption, people seem to appreciate, and it went back to from the higher level discussion that we had about learning from the tech company's experience. So one of the things that we wanted to emphasize is that your competition right now isn't the financial professional down the hall from a experience perspective, it really is…you're competing with Amazon and Microsoft and Google in terms of the experience clients have.

And it used to be, "Oh, we got to get ready for these types of experience because generation Y and Gen Z or whatever, millennials, they're coming down and this is how they consume." No. The pandemic changed everything. Grandma's on Zoom, the baby boomers are using apps for everything like, "We're here." And so we really got to look and see how can we better the client experience.

Ben Alge:

Or something from somebody that's not Amazon that doesn't have free returns or easy returns now, and you try to return it and you're like, "What in God's name is this?

Steve Seid:

What is this?

Ben Alge:

How does possibly exist in our society today?" It's shifted the entire expectation dynamic.

Liz Lenz:

I shop at Target versus Walmart because I enjoy Target. I enjoy the whole experience, it's nice. It's great. I got some thumbs up. I don't shop at Walmart. But you know what? When I'm on Amazon, I want Walmart prices. I want Walmart prices so bad. I'm going to compare everything to be as cheap as Walmart is. But it's because of the convenience. So you start to really compare the offering and the experience up against one another. And for those of you “Target heads”, I know you're out there, you know exactly what I'm talking about. You really got to pick where you shop and where you spend your time based on your experience. So I mean the outside service offering is, to your point, Steve, it's everywhere. Your expectations are rising. It's because of tech, but it's also because there's also a lot of choices.

Steve Seid:

So how can you up the game? Me personally, I don't go into Walmarts. They scare me.

Tommy Grout:

For Kurt, from a little town in Louisiana, that was a big Friday night. I bet they hung out in the parking lot. They'd go in and get their snack and then they'd come back out and drive home. I'd almost bet my life on.

Steve Seid:

You manage him Tim, is Kurt hanging out at Walmart, probably now, actually. He probably goes in there, gets his party favors for the night and hangs out in the parking lot. Agree or disagree?

Tommy Grout:

Well, I don't know that I've seen him going to Walmart. Now I'm from Minnesota, which is the home of Target. So I totally get the whole Target conversation here. I just go where Kurt takes me, but he's never taken me to Walmart yet. Maybe next trip.

Ben Alge:

I think Kurt's done a few client events at the Walmart parking lot. Just get a few advisors together.

Tommy Grout:

Where else can you get your tires changed, haircut, do some banking and pick up eggs? It's the one-stop shop. You can't do that-

Liz Lenz:

It really is everything you could possibly need. You're going to start to go to the places that offer a wider variety of those services at the same point in time, and it's a one-stop shop for you. So it's a really interesting concept, and applying it to our industry is tough to think about, but when you start to look at the size and scale and what some of these firms are doing and some of the resources that are being developed, you're going, "Yep, it's happening to us too."

Some of the bigger firms are continuing to win time and time again because they have the size and the scale to invest in the technology and resources to provide more at scale to you at a custom perfect level of experience. Which brings us to the inorganic growth. We had to talk about buying practices and rolling them up as a strategy for growth as part of the presentation, but there might be a lot of service and operational changes that you have to be making within that purchase business in order for you to continue to get the size, the scale, the efficiency and the capacity, the stuff that you guys are talking about with advisors all day long to be successful and have a successful investments that the multiples that we're seeing for these practices.

Steve Seid:

So I want to sum up, we didn't cover everything on this podcast, so we went down a couple of avenues, which I love to do on the podcast, but in terms of growth, I'll sum up some of the key points. So raising the experience level first with your referral sources next with your target market. We talked about learning from tech and some of the suggestions just there. There's a long list we went through, which I won't go through on this podcast. We talked about M&A¹ and some opportunities, and then we went to human capital management, which is a really universal topic and we won't go through all of our recommendations there.

Liz Lenz:

A lot of people focus on human capital challenges and place a lot of the emphasis on what needs to change for the associate. And I think it's important here that we talk about what needs to change from a management perspective and from a leadership perspective. Because the reality is that most people in this industry did not sign up to be a manager. That was not part of the job description as an FA trainee.

They didn't go, "Oh yeah, and if you do really good at this and if you grow a lot, you even get to manage people." Nobody was going, "Yep, that's the role for me." Because the reality is managing people's really hard. Professional development plans, tying those professional development plans to strategic business plans and thinking about how to really measure and reward respective associates is all about how good your management skills and your leadership skills are.

And if you can at a certain level start to focus on not, "How do my associates need to improve?" But, "How do I need to improve in leading and guiding them?" The end ripple effect is the associates who are willing and able to grow and develop as your next generation leader or even as a workhorse for you, are going to be able to do it because you're providing the right type of pathway for them to get there. So I think that we should be looking at people who are in official and unofficial management roles and putting more pressure on them to be better leaders. So that was my point. But I think another piece of this that people loved was the book recommendation.

Steve Seid:

By the way, I'll ask if you guys knew about that book The Love Languages, had any of you read that? Tim, did you know? Well, for our audience, for those who haven't read this, the original book, it was on the five types of Love languages. And the idea is that if you could understand your partner better and how they like to be loved and understand that and give them what they need, then we could have much more longer healthy marriages. And it was a pretty big book. I don't know if it was like an Oprah book or something like that, but it was definitely a big deal for a while. And the follow-up book was about workplace appreciation languages. So if we put money aside for a second, we all know we want to get paid. We all know we want more money, fine. Let's just put that aside.

Beyond that, how can you show appreciation to your employees? Because people want to be appreciated in different ways, and I won't go through the full list, but a couple of them are like words of affirmation. So some people after they do good work, want to be recognized, whether that's individual praise or at some kind of awards or whatever it is, that praise is what they appreciate. One of the other ones is worth mentioning is quality time. So some people want one-on-one time with the boss. So again, I won't go through all of them, but if anybody wants a copy of the book, reach out to me and I'm happy to get you a copy. So anyways, we did... I know we went through a lot of that fast. That was the two parts of our presentation was about growth, was about human capital. What else did you guys hear from the conference?

Was there anything that stuck out to you that surprised you that you heard a bunch, et cetera?

Ben Alge:

Just how prevalent succession planning is. I mean, there were so many sessions around succession planning, questions in sessions that weren't on succession planning, still about succession planning. We all hear about the silver tsunami coming through this industry, but it's alive and well and people are concerned about it and people aren't prepared for it. So any solutions out there on succession planning side, I think you're going to have a pretty big audience here in the next five or 10 years.

Tommy Grout:

So maybe not as much as what I heard, but just what I've observed people outside of our industry, if they were to think of what would be presented at this conference, it would probably economic data, stock strategies, asset management type stuff. And while there were a lot of asset managers here, I think there was one topic in the breakfast this morning, and it was optional but it was economic related. Everything else was practice management related…

Steve Seid:

Yeah.

Tommy Grout:

…practice consulting, ways to improve your business, improve your team processes, whatever it is. Even for me doing this now for as long as I have, it's still shocking.

Steve Seid:

To me, the thing that stuck out related to what you were talking about, the words I wrote down was pace of change. So we know for example, that hey, we got to get millennials on our team, the next gen because we've got to get the team the next gener-... Well, they're here now. We had a topic, a speaker last night that talked about AI. AI's here. And so these things that we thought that were coming down the road seem to be happening now, and the rate of change seems to be accelerating. And it's really interesting that a lot of the advisors at the conference and a lot of the speakers were about that. It's almost like there was a nervous energy. We know we need to change here.

Tim Bray:

The gentleman who was talking about AI yesterday, it was basically, you don't need to be afraid of AI. It's not coming to replace you. It's not going to replace the relationships that you have with people. It's only going to enhance what you're doing with people. And I think if people take that approach to it, long-term, if we have it all under control, I think it'd be a positive.

Liz Lenz:

I think where it will replace you, especially with tech, is this non-differentiating pieces of your business. So the stuff of like, "Oh, we have excellent operational service." Well, join the club, so will everybody else, because everyone's going to have automated processes and tech to get this stuff done in a few years. So you better know who your ideal client is. You better know what makes you a category of one for that particular person.

How sticky is my relationship with my clients? Is it built on me just being a buddy and there and I've got a personal network, or is it because I've got a personal network, but I've now got a process and offering that makes me unique to these particular people's needs? All the tablestakes stuff that people used to say, "Service differentiates yourself." Well, not anymore. It's more about the advice. It's more about what you're giving to that ideal client and how you understand them better than anybody else. So you got to double down on that now before it's too late and a robot starts pretending to be you.

Steve Seid:

I really didn't see many advisors, at least at this conference, that were afraid of it more about how do we use it? I don't have to do all this manual work on client reports or things like that. There was a lot of cool ideas being thrown around about how AI could be helpful. So to me, I don't know, it felt almost like an innovation conference. That's the way it felt like to me. Well, hopefully we gave you guys a good sense of what's been going on at Barron's 100. Any concluding thoughts?

Liz Lenz:

I've been to another Barron's conference before, but this is top 100 advisors in the country. I actually was surprised. I assumed like many people that the silver tsunami would mean that everybody we hear was of the same demographic. I actually saw a really good mix of people in the room of different ages, clearly at different stages of their business. So what it tells me is that even if that main advisor couldn't come, they're probably sending a delegate or somebody else.

And I love that because at these conferences, you're going to get invited as the lead advisor to a lot of this stuff. If you can send your next gen person or your implementer to something like this to open their eyes and get them motivated and excited, I think this is a great opportunity. So go to a Barron's conference. You're probably going to find a lot more diversity of the different types of people there than you thought initially.

Steve Seid:

I feel like we should get some advertising from Barron's for how much we're praising them on this podcast. It's amazing.

Liz Lenz:

We want to be invited back, Steve, that's how.

Steve Seid:

Is that what it is?

Tommy Grout:

That's right.

Liz Lenz:

Yes.

Steve Seid:

We're going to send him this podcast and they're going to invite us back. I think we'd all say on this that it's probably worth it as an organization to check out. So with that, I want to thank the crew for joining us today for sharing some insights on the Barron's Conference, and this is The Whole Truth, stick with us.

I want to thank everyone for being on the show today. Liz Lenz, Ben Alge, Tommy Grout, Tim Bray. Great discussion, great conference. We're going to skip Costanza Corner this week. We'll come back with that next time. Thanks for everyone for listening. We'll see you next time.

Touchstone and Lenz Insights, LLC are unaffiliated.

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1 M&A is an acronym for Mergers and Acquisitions

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