Leveraging Technology To Rapidly Scale Growth Delivering Financial Planning To Next-Generation Clients: #FASuccess Ep 481 With Adam Dell

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Resources Featured In This Episode:

• Adam Dell: Website | LinkedIn
• Domain Financial Services
• Domain Money Sample Financial Plan
• Kitces Report: The Technology That Independent Financial Advisors Actually Use (And Like)
• Wealth.com
• Taxfyle
• Money with Katie

Full Transcript:

Michael: Welcome, Adam Dell, to the "Financial Advisor Success" podcast.

Adam: Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Michael: I'm really excited to have you join us today and to get to, I think, really dig into what I view as this fascinating intersection that continues to evolve between technology and humans as we deliver financial planning, and especially to, I guess, the industry we now collectively dub next-generation clients, which is basically Millennials and Gen Z that are the ones we will ultimately be serving 10 and 20 years from now. When I look back ten years ago, the industry take was Nillennials are the first digital-native generation. They will go to digital-first solutions and the robo-advisors like Betterment and Wealthfront will take the entire generation. And that certainly hasn't happened. I know individual advisory firms that have organically grown more AUM over the past decade than Wealthfront and Betterment and all the other pure-tech robos combined.

And so the pendulum then seems to be swinging now in the other direction. No, no, no, the future is not tech, it's humans. So much so that as AI has emerged, I find the view amongst most advisors is, yeah, when consumers' lives get complex, they'll still need human to talk to. This AI stuff is no threat. And frankly, so far that seems to be playing out. I don't know any advisors who are reporting losing any material number of clients to standalone AI solutions.

But I think ultimately the truth is going to be somewhere in between. It's not really a binary, it's all tech or it's all human. Clients clearly have a drive to connect with human advisors and human advisors generally want to do the human things and not the tasks that can be automated or expedited with technology. So I feel like we're entering this third era now where the question really becomes, how much can well-implemented technology accelerate growth or improve scalability of delivering human-based financial advice?

And so I'm excited to talk with you today, Adam, because you are very much building a company that I think lives right at this intersection between being a tech company and hiring human CFP professionals to deliver advice. And so excited to hear what you are discovering along the way coming from a technology background into the financial advisor world about what's the role of humans and what's the role of technology as you build and scale an advice business.

Adam: Yeah, well, there's a lot to unpack there. And I appreciate the question because it's certainly at the very center of what we're focused on at Domain. If you think about any significant technology innovation, it's overestimated at the short term and it's underestimated at the long term. And so the expectation that AI is going to roll into the wealth management industry and just replace advisors at a rapid rate is really not, I think, an accurate reflection of the market. And if you talk to clients and you really dig into what it is they care about, they want a human connection. They want the empathy, the personal experience, and the continuity of relationship that comes with a human advisor. And so while things like AI will absolutely disrupt this industry, I think the role of the human in that equation is still quite important and will persist for some time.

Our approach at Domain has been to use AI to try to make more efficient the back office delivery and try to do as much as we can to make the advisors more efficient in delivering services. And Michael, you and I have talked many times about the rise of robo-advisors, the rise of high-yield savings accounts, and that's done nothing to diminish the importance of advisors in the wealth management space. And I completely agree with you that that dynamic, I think, will persist. But what I will say is that AI is quite a significant tectonic shift in our economy. It's a fourth industrial revolution, and it is going to change every industry, wealth management included.

Michael: It is fascinating to me. I always appreciate that phenomenon around tech innovation that you highlighted so well at the beginning. We overestimate in the short term and we underestimate in the long term. I remember it was 25, 30 years ago as we're in the midst of the tech boom. The discussion in 2000 was in three years, there will be no more bricks-and-mortar stores. All commerce will happen on the internet. Why would you ever go to a store anymore? Because things will just get delivered to your house. It didn't happen in three years. In three years, the tech bubble popped and the companies fell 85%. Now Amazon is worth a bajillion dollars doing all the things that we were actually saying then. It just took like 20 or 25 years, not three years. Even though Amazon actually did that, the last I saw from some of the overall industry numbers, something like 85% to 90% of commerce still happens in person in bricks-and-mortar stores. Even as huge as Amazon is, most of commerce still happens in person.

There's these, just to me, fascinating effects where yes, we overestimate in the short term, but then the technology often does become transformative and we don't even realize the subtle indirect ways it's going to play out. If you told someone 25 years ago, you could be doing financial advice sitting on a beach, sipping a drink, serving all your clients through a Zoom window from a wireless laptop with a wireless internet connection with a virtual background that makes it look like you're still in the office, it would have sounded Jetsons-level fantasy. And that's the version that actually played out. I get really curious when we talk about AI. I was struck even when you said, Adam, the human element is important and will persist and you believe AI is still going to be disruptive to the industry. I'm curious to hear more, where do you see the AI showing up and what has it changed that we don't realize is changing and coming down the pike?

Adam: I think distinguishing between the short-term impact and the long-term impact is important because the long-term impact of AI is really very hard to predict. When the LED emerged as an innovation to replace traditional light bulbs, nobody thought that it would lead to an expansion of vertical farming because you can tune an LED diode to a wavelength that is optimal for photosynthesis. There's all kinds of things that are going to be born out of innovations from AI that are really hard to predict long term. But in the short term, what I would say is the places where AI will have the most impact in the wealth management industry are a lot of the difficult administrative and operational tasks associated with collecting a client's information, parsing their data, parsing their documents, analyzing their spending, analyzing their tax picture, analyzing their retirement picture. A lot of those things are going to be completely transformed by AI and you'll have at your fingertips a thought partner who is working in the background with an advisor helping them distill those insights much more quickly and much more effectively than the tools you have available today.

Using AI Tools To Cut Down On Advisors’ Administrative Burdens [11:29]

Adam: And so we at Domain are very focused on building what we call the agentic back office, which is there's all these things you need to do to serve a client. You need to get an understanding of their goals and values, you need to collect all their information, you need to review their tax returns, you need to get an understanding of their investments, their risk profile, their real estate holdings, all of those things. Each one of those processes we're trying to chip away at using AI as often and as thoroughly as possible.

Michael: To me, much of what you're describing around collecting client info, parsing data and documents, analyze spending, taxes, investments, retirements, from my industry lens, that's usually what we would call financial planning software and the input process analysis and output process of financial planning software. Is that a fair characterization that then you all are trying to build a different kind of financial planning software or am I misstating it or contorting it because we're doing this with an industry lens?

Adam: No, you're exactly correct. So there are, as you know, three dominant software packages that make up the bulk of the financial planning market, eMoney, MoneyGuidePro, and RightCapital. Those software solutions are ten-year-old businesses, RightCapital being the newest entrant among them, they're forms-based and they primarily focus on asset management because that's the orientation of most of the industry's focus.

Michael: It's accumulate money for retirement and spend the money for retirement because we manage retirement portfolios by and large.

Adam: Correct. We've taken a completely ground-up approach, which is how can we build a financial planning solution that is purpose-built for the segment we're going after. And to be clear, our focus at Domain Money is to serve clients who really have graduated from the DIY set of tools, but have not yet entered the accumulation phase of their life. Our client is 42 years old, they have a household income of $250,000, but they have not yet accumulated a million or two of investible assets. And for that client segment, the things they care most about are a spending plan, home affordability, how much can they spend on vacation this year? When can they retire? Do they have the right investments in their taxable investment account relative to what's in their 401(k)? And what do they do with their RSUs [Restricted Stock Units] or other equity as those vest over time? Those are the issues that are most acute to that client segment. And so we've built a financial planning solution from the ground up to address exactly those issues.

And more to the point, because we are so focused on the values and goals of our clients, we orient plans around the key thing that the client cares about. If the new home is the thing that they really are focused on, our plans focus on that. If early retirement is the thing they really care about, our plans orient around that. And that focus on the thing that most matters to the client really distinguishes our plans from a lot of the planning solutions that you can buy off the shelf because those tend to spit out basically boilerplate formulas. And as we all know, clients are all unique and they all have their own special take on what they want their life to look like. And we try to build plans that address those needs.

Michael: So then help me understand more of, I guess, where AI comes into this. I know AI tends to get used broadly. “We are AI enabled. We have an AI thing.” And sometimes it's the whole software and sometimes it's literally one small feature. Some of what you're talking about, I feel like our tools do now. I can gather information on your assets and your saving and project out whether you are saving enough for retirement. I’ve got tools for that. So help me understand what's the...I get the difference in focus. You're working on households in their 40s with higher income, but not necessarily assets to fit an AUM model yet. The industry likes to call those the HENRYs. I don't really like the title, but it's descriptive, high earner, not rich yet, not sizable account yet. I get how the focus is a little bit different because there's more spending and cash flow questions and fewer retirement balance sheet questions. But what's the AI part? Where does AI fit in? What are you doing with AI that eMoney and MoneyGuide and RightCapital aren't doing?

Adam: Yeah, so we take client information in whatever form it comes. So we allow clients to link institutions wherever they have money. We take documents in whatever form they are, whether they're handwritten notes, bank statements, 401(k)s, lease agreements, tax returns. They can dump anything they want into basically a digital folder. And our machine will parse those documents and extract data from those documents and populate all of that into a financial model. And we use AI as often as possible to make that process faster. I'll give you a few other examples of things that seem relatively small, but when they are multiplied by all clients across all workflows, they add up.

So we dynamically figure out what information we need from a client based on what they've told us they care about. We don't ask for just a generic list of everything, although we certainly will take whatever they offer us. And so we're able to discern what matters most to the client based on the things they've told us. And based on that, we pull only the information we need. The other thing we do is we're trying to build a machine that empowers the advisor to be more productive per client. So I'll give you an example. Our clients get emails from our advisors that are generated by the machine. The advisor isn't typing up each individual email saying, "Hey, I need your tax returns for this year," or, "It's time for your next quarterly update," or, "Have you made progress converting...setting up your 529?" A lot of those administrative tasks of pinging clients, reengaging with clients, we've automated. And we're trying to use AI to determine what is the most logical right next step to take with that client and to remove that administrative burden from the advisor. And each one of those small, seemingly insignificant things really add up to a lot of time saving for the advisor.

Michael: So I actually want to understand these a little bit further. I'll start with the last one you highlighted, the follow up for clients, right time for the next quarterly meeting, filing tax filings, need your tax returns, etc. So I guess I'm wondering, does the machine send it out in my name on my behalf as though this is an email from Michael, but I didn't have to take the time to type up the email because it just sends on my behalf, or does the client know the machine is asking? It's Michael's machine because you engaged me and this is our planning tool. Does it look like me or do they realize it's the machine asking?

Adam: It depends on the workflow. So if it's a highly administrative thing that requires no judgment or discernment, we try to get the machine to do it or we are trying to build a machine that will do that. If it requires some judgment, we have the advisor review it before we send anything out to the client. And obviously we're very early in our journey as an early-stage company, but the thing we're working toward is a vision where, to your question, you'll get an email from your advisor, Kevin, let's say. It'll say, "Hey, Michael, I've reviewed your portfolio for the first quarter. My recommendations for changes to your portfolio are embedded in this video that's attached to this email. Would you like to schedule a meeting or would you like me to proceed?" You click the video and it is a digital twin of your human advisor, all generated by the machine all presenting the client...

Michael: Oh, man, it's like AI emulating me talking?

Adam: Correct. That's right.

Michael: I'm trying to figure out how I feel about that. That's 50% cool, 50% creepy.

Adam: Yeah. Well, there's a line that my brother Michael likes to say, which is that the future doesn't care if you're not ready.

Michael: Fair enough. Okay.

Adam: The notion of how will AI amplify the capacity of a human is really the unlock here. I often like to read about innovations throughout history. In the 1700s when the steam engine emerged, Matt Ridley, who wrote this great book called "How Innovation Works," he called it the mother of the modern world. And it ushered in a period where technology could radically amplify the productivity of work. And that is what will happen with AI. It will radically amplify the productivity of human advisors. And the example I gave of a digital twin is really where we are headed. And you see this, by the way, in other industries. There are sales qualification workflows that happen where you feel like you're talking to a real sales representative, but that qualification process, which requires very little human judgment, it's really just a filtering mechanism, that's being done by digital twins today. And so we're focused on mostly administrative tasks today and using AI for that. But what we see over time is that the machine will take more and more pieces of that. And so we're not there yet, but that's the direction and vision we're working toward.

Michael: Well, it resonated to me when you highlighted that, look, is it from the machine or from the advisor? The reality is it kind of depends on the thing. If it has no real need for judgment or discernment, it's more administrative or task oriented, the machine can do it. From the advisor end, that's something I probably would have delegated to a team member. And you've just automated a thing that I was already delegating to an admin team member and basically tell the admin team member, do this consistently in a certain way so it's conducive to automation. Whereas the things that require judgment get an advisor review, which I guess as I'm translating, feels more like how some of the AI note-takers and prep and follow up tools have shown up in our space, which is, yeah, we'll pre-draft an email for you. Of course, you're not going to send it without looking at it. You have to personalize it and make it you.

But let's be honest, it takes a while to draft an email from scratch sometimes. And if you can kind of populate most of what's there and let me edit it, I'll take a 20-minute email task down to five minutes. And that's a wonderful time savings multiplied by all the emails that I send out. And so it feels, in a good way, like you're effectively finding and recreating this distinction that things I would have delegated to someone that does a repeatable task, I might just be able to automate to AI. Things that still require my input and judgment, the AI is just going to prep the work more than me building it from scratch, or prep the email, prep the communication more than building from scratch.

Adam: That's correct. But the line of discernment and judgment will move significantly over time because you will get to a point where AI is good at understanding the fullness of a client's picture and can use reasoning and come up with more judgment-oriented insights that are deliverable to a client. That said, I go back to my original comments about what the client wants. Clients want a human advisor. They want the continuity of the relationship. They want the understanding and empathy that come from that human connection. They want the advisor's personal experiences to inform their own. And as you know better than I, financial planning is a discipline over the span of a lifetime. And people change jobs. They have children. They decide they want to buy a different home. They decide they want to change their lifestyle. And those things require continuity in a human relationship. And I think we're quite a ways away from that being handled by an AI. And so we think the job to be done is to build all the tools, again, in the back office that amplify the productivity of the advisor. And so that's the mission we're marching toward.

Michael: So from the client lens that you highlighted here, I guess I'm curious even what you're finding since you're doing this in practice. I guess this is a twofold question. How much do clients know about the AI layers? Does the client know that the video is technically an AI twin or are they not supposed to realize that? So how much do they know? And the follow up is, and how much do they care?

Adam: Yeah. So we don't lead with AI as a client-facing experience. We want the client experience to feel as human and as personal and as bespoke as possible. And as I said earlier, our financial plans feel personal. When you get a financial plan written by some of the other older software solutions that are out there that I mentioned, they feel relatively cookie cutter because they're really forms-based inputs that generate an output that you then deliver to the client. We want our plans to feel personal to the client. And so, as I said, if the client cares about a new home, that's front and center of their plan and it feels like the plan is oriented around that. And so everything that we try to do for clients is designed to feel personal and connected to their human advisor and the goals and values they've expressed.

Michael: And from the advisor end, in theory, I still get to review anything that is representing me, showing as me so that I can still try to stay comfortable that the AI isn't misstating or misrepresenting me, thus the different workflows of what do you really not need to review? Because we're just scheduling the next meeting with the client. It can be an automated workflow versus, oh yeah, you're going to want to look at this.

Adam: Absolutely. We never offer anything to the client that is substantive and requires judgment that hasn't been thoroughly reviewed by a human advisor. And by the way, not just one human advisor, we have a series of internal checks and mechanisms to ensure high quality where we have financial planners, we have peer review process so that everything that goes out to clients has been thoroughly vetted to ensure its accuracy and correctness.

Michael: So then I got to ask, is there a point where the time savings from the software is offset by the time that it takes to review the software and vet and analyze it?

Adam: Yeah, we measure every minute of every process that our advisors, our financial planners engage in serving clients, whether it's an anecdotal message that they send the advisor on our platform, an email that they send, an in-person coaching or implementation session, as we call them with clients, we measure all that. And so we're constantly looking for opportunities to improve. And so we obviously don't build things that we don't think are going to reduce the time requirement. But in my example of the digital twin, that's what we're working toward. We're not there yet. What I'm describing is a vision that we're marching toward.

Creating Financial Plans That Better Serve Accumulator Clients [29:56]

Michael: So then the other, I guess, big AI use case that I heard there, which we've also seen show up in the independent channels is document extraction, is put your statements, your tax returns, your investment account info, just dump it in one big digital folder and we'll parse through documents and figure out the numbers and ingest them directly into the financial planning software.

Adam: Yep. Your next question is going to be, so how do you ensure the accuracy of that? How do you make sure that nothing's been missed?

Michael: Yep.

Adan: So we have a...

Michael: How much time does it take to review compared to what it would have taken to just go through the same documents and punch in a couple of numbers? Because the typing part's not the time-consuming part, it's the reviewing the documents part.

Adam: Yeah. We have a series of internal mechanisms to ensure accuracy. We sort of come at it from a couple of different angles and we review it with the client. Once we've kind of put everything together, we say, "Is this accurate? Does this look like what you sent us?" As manual as that is. There is no silver bullet. I've reviewed all of the tools out there that promise 95% accuracy on data extraction. The truth is that the machine's just not there yet. We've figured out what pieces of it are easily automatable and which pieces of it require human review. As I said, we're chipping away at it. I'm quite confident that the AI will get to human-level accuracy on analyzing documents and inputting data and coming up with insights. And so we're organizing our business around that eventuality. In the meantime, we're chipping away at the things that are easily automatable.

The way that I would encourage you to think about this is, let's say there are 40 or 50 things that you have to do to prepare a financial plan for a client. Some of those are as mundane as getting to know them and getting to understand what they most care about. Some of them are as complex as, well, how do you rationalize their early retirement goal with their risk aversion to higher-yield investment opportunities with the fact that they had an unexpected housing expense that reduced their ability to fund the various goals for a year or two? The intersection of those complex inputs and outputs is something that no AI can do today, but there are pieces of it that the AI can do. Each one of those things we're just working toward. Our belief is that if we focus on those things and focus on finding the best tools available in the marketplace from third-party vendors, as well as building our own things using AI and other tools, we'll get better at this.

As I look at the wealth management industry at large, I am blown away by how archaic the tools and technology stack are. I spent a lot of time inside Goldman Sachs and understanding Ayco and their wealth management business for the corporate world. I've spent a lot of time with some of the larger RIAs that are out there. And one of the things that's so surprising to me is just how slow this industry is to adopt the latest and best technologies and how little it matters to the industry. Because so much of wealth management is focused on asset management, for most advisors, if they've got the assets and they're at a custodian that is good at managing those assets, which all of them are, the financial planning piece of it is really something that falls by the wayside. And yet, for the client segment that we are focused on, again, that high earner, not rich yet, or the segment that has not yet accumulated enough assets to be interesting to the traditional wealth management industry, for that segment, the things they care about really do require deep financial planning.

And so we've built a solution to address that. It really does get to the heart of the things that those clients care about. I've been surprised by how little there is in traditional wealth management around those issues. Now, it makes perfect sense, right, because the traditional advisor is focused on asset management. They're not focused on financial planning. We think there's a real opportunity to build a financial planning solution from the ground up using AI as much as possible to serve that client. And we’ve found pretty good success so far.

Michael: I've watched this play out. It's part of what drove our growth at XYPN and even now watching it gain momentum at AdvicePay as well. There's this interesting shift over the past 20-something years in the industry that particularly once the robo-advisor showed up, it got really hard to just do investment management for a 1% fee when you could give it to a robo for half or a quarter of that fee. And so there was a huge reinvestment of firms into going deeper on financial planning. So all the financial planning software companies had tremendous growth over the past ten years. It's now one of the highest adopted software categories in our tech study. And actually, for what it does, one of the highest rated because it is so broadly used. But almost all of us did this off the chassis of an AUM model.

And so we just primarily do financial planning for people who already have assets. That comprises a certain set of problems that crop up when you're navigating that. Lots of things for retirees, some stuff for business owners, other segments that crop up. We just don't have tools and models for clients who actually have complexity. It's just not based on their balance sheet because they don't have assets yet. I feel like the big shocker for the industry was there are folks that...the industry view was if they don't have a big account balance, they need simpler planning. It turns out they really don't. They just need different complex planning. We didn't historically have the tools for complex spending and cash flow-based planning from people who can really pay a healthy financial planning fee. We had simple plans for small balances and complex planning for high-dollar, high-investable-asset clients, and just this big gap around it.

So it feels like you're ending up tackling two different simultaneous problems at once. The industry was very focused on financial planning for people with investable assets and didn't really serve or have the tools for people without investable assets. And, oh my gosh, there's different ways that we can do these workflows now that we have AI.

Adam: You raise a great point. About 20% of our clients, they fired their advisor and they came to us. The most common refrain we get from clients is “This is exactly what I was looking for.” And I would...not to plug our business too much, but if you go to domainmoney.com and you click on “Try Our Dashboard”, you'll see an example of one of our financial plans. They are so different than what you get from eMoney and MoneyGuidePro, RightCapital in that they are exactly focused on the issues that this client cares about. To your point, yes, the financial planning needs of the segment we're going after are fundamentally different than somebody who's got five million bucks. They care about cash flow. They care about a spending plan. They care a lot about expenses. They care about how those expenses impact their ability to contribute to their various long-term goals, their retirement account, their 529, all of those things.

And so, that intersection of cash flow and expenses, in the context of the goals they need to fund, is really the core of it. And to your point, the planning solutions out there don't really do a great job of that, which is why we had to build it from the ground up. Trust me, we would have loved to find a solution out there that we could buy off the shelf to serve the segment that we're going after. We're not averse to using third-party tools. We use lots of them. We use some of the AI note-taking solutions out there. We use Holistiplan for tax projections. We are very happy to embrace the tools available out in the marketplace and are constantly evaluating new tools to figure out how we can do what we do better. But it's just not out there. So I see a huge gap between the needs of the emerging HENRY segment and the available tools, which is part of our opportunity.

What Domain Money Looks Like Today [40:12]

Michael: So in that vein, I think I want to come back to your business, the Domain Money business itself. Because as much as we've talked about the technology and financial planning software and how what you're building to serve HENRY clients is a different kind of planning software and chassis than eMoney, MoneyGuide, RightCapital. You're not a software business, right? You're an advice business. You're doing planning for humans with humans who use technology.

Adam: Correct.

Michael: So maybe tell us about the actual Domain Money business then. Let's get up to speed on, what is the domain business itself? Who do you do? Who do you serve? What do you deliver? How do you charge? Get us up to speed on the business.

Adam: Sure. So before I do that, I want to spend a moment talking about what the segment that we serve cares about. There are about 20-plus million people out there who earn between $150,000 and $500,000 a year in household income but have low investable assets. That is our client segment. And among that segment, they have grown up in an Amazon, Uber, OpenTable world, and they expect transparency and options and understanding of the value that they're getting. And what is clear to that segment and where there is broad awareness is the value of flat fee as an option. Now, AUM [Assets Under Management] is not an evil thing. AUM fees are not an evil thing. For a lot of clients, that makes a lot of sense.

Michael: They just don't work...you can't do the AUM model if there's no A to M. It's a fundamental constraint.

Adam: Correct. So for the segment we're going after, the flat fee model is really very, very valuable to that segment. And so we have found a lot of resonance among that group by doing a few things, I think, very well. One is that we are very clear about what our value proposition is. You get a dedicated certified financial planner. To my point, you pay a flat annual fee. There's no AUM fees. It's a holistic offering. So it's financial planning. We file your taxes. We do investment management. We provide estate planning. Again, we provide very clear pricing. So you pay an annual flat fee, which is one single number in your first year and then it goes down in your second year. We have three tiers of pricing. So $3,200 year one goes down to $1,800 in year two. For our lowest tier, for our middle tier, it's $4,800 in year one, $2,500 year two through however long you are a client. Comprehensive plan, $7,800 per year goes down to $4,500 in year two and thereafter.

Michael: What's the service difference in those tiers? What actually changes as you move across those tiers?

Adam: Yeah. So in the lowest tier in our essential plan, it's essentially a cash flow and budgeting exercise and a review of your investments. You get two meetings with your advisor per year. At the strategic level, you get tax filing included and more time with your advisor. At the comprehensive level, which is the highest tier, you get estate planning, taxes, and more time with your advisor. And so it's just basically tiered based on the complexity of your situation and how much face time you're looking for with an advisor.

Michael: And does estate planning for you mean you're literally drafting documents for them with the tools that do that or are you staying in the planning realm, planning only, not document implementation?

Adam: No, it's document implementation. We do that through a partnership with Wealth.com, which is embedded in our flat fee. So it's all included. So that's how that works. The other thing is...

Michael: And the taxes is also actual prep and filing at the middle and upper tiers?

Adam: That's correct.

Michael: Is that partner based as well?

Adam: That's correct. We do it through our partnership with Taxfyle, which as you know, is the largest embedded tax filing solution provider out in the market. There's a few other things that we've done that I think have contributed to our success. One is that it's a very tech-forward experience. So we digitally onboard you, you meet with your advisor over Zoom. Most of the interaction with the platform is a digital experience. And so that very much appeals to that segment. Our branding is very much aligned with the client segment we're going after. We generate a lot of content. We provide a lot of free calculators. We do a lot of webinars. We do a lot of social media posting. And so all of those things combined present to the segment we're going after a value prop that very much resonates.

Michael: And so now help us understand what it adds up to. How many clients? How big is the team? What's the, I guess, revenue? AUM wouldn't apply for you since you're not in the managed money business. Help us understand what this now has grown to for you.

Adam: Yeah. So we'll add a little over 150 clients this month.

Michael: This month. Okay. That's a big monthly number. Okay.

Adam: So we're growing quite quickly. We're onboarding about three new advisors per month. We expect to do about $10 million in revenue this year. The business is growing quite quickly and we're doing all the things that you would expect us to do to scale the operational side of our company to support that massive growth.

Michael: So what are clients and revenue in total?

Adam: So we have about 1400 clients. And as I said, we expect to do about $10 million this year.

Michael: And how big is the team? I guess it's a moving target by month, but...

Adam: Yeah, that's right. We're a little over 40 employees and I expect we'll be 50 by the end of February.

Michael: And how long have you been doing this? How long have you been out to market to grow to 1400 clients and coming up on $10 million of revenue?

Adam: Yeah. Our first year was really 2024 and we spent most of that year really figuring out how to deliver the service we're delivering now. 2025 was when we really started to ramp our client acquisition. And 2026 I think is the year that we'll really break out with consistent, meaningful month-to-month client growth and expand our service offering. In 2024 and in 2025, we didn't offer asset management. We would help clients make changes to their portfolio wherever they currently custodied their assets. This quarter we'll launch asset management. By the way, there's no AUM fees, but we will manage your assets for you. And we'll roll that out this quarter. And we'll roll out additional features as we continue to build out our product roadmap. We listen very carefully to our clients. And we are responsive to that listening and try to build more features that they ask for over time. And so our value prop and our product offering will continue to expand as we grow.

Michael: And so you're living the world where, unlike most other firms, if you meet our asset minimums, we'll do all the financial planning for you. You're now living in the reverse, which is if you pay our planning fee, we'll do unlimited asset management for you.

Adam: That's correct.

How Domain Manages Advisor Capacity And Compensation [49:07]

Michael: Okay. So how does this work from...I'm just trying to envision the advisor capacity or perspective. How many clients does an advisor handle...I guess going through onboarding because it's more intensive less your higher upfront fee, how many clients is an advisor expected to service ongoing? We're just trying to visualize where these intersections of all this technology to makes us more efficient, but we're also still trying to maintain a human touch, relationship business. So how do you all think about advisor capacity at this point?

Adam: Yeah, great and important question for the client experience. So we max out our advisors with 150 clients per advisor, which is a very reasonable number of clients per advisor. And we have a very well thought out client ramp where when we onboard a new advisor, they basically spend a number of months learning how to do what we do. They then spend time working alongside one of our existing advisors and helping them generate financial plans for clients. And once we feel like after they have basically written financial plans with other of our advisors, we feel like they're ready to be launched out into our client community, we'll get them onboarded. They're expected to do eight to ten financial plans per month. And so it's a very reasonable workload per advisor. And what we expect is that over time, we can make those advisors more efficient, to my point earlier, using AI to amplify their capacity.

And so that is the journey we're on. And what we have found is that there's an ocean of advisors out there who are really sick of pushing products. They don't want to sell life insurance. They don't want to sell annuities. They don't want to be compensated based on how many products or how much commission they earn selling products. They just like doing financial planning. And so that is a very compelling part of our business. We don't push any products. We don't compensate advisors based on their commissions. We just provide financial planning. And so that dynamic radically changes the relationship between the client and the advisor. And it gives the advisor the freedom to do what they are actually intending to do, which is to provide unbiased objective advice, being a true fiduciary to the client.

Michael: So how does comp work for the advisors then? Are these salaried positions? Are these revenue-based positions? How does it work?

Adam: So we compensate them with a full-time cash salary. They also receive additional compensation for performance metrics around things like retention. And most importantly, they receive equity in our company. And our equity, we believe, is our most valuable asset because the technology we're building is so unique that we think it will be obviously very valuable. The other important thing to talk about, Michael, and maybe you're going to get to this in your questions, is our distribution model.

Michael: So where do 150 clients a month come from? Because I'm presuming the other aspect of this for the advisors is there's no prospecting. There's no business development. You're queuing up 150 clients a month, just figuring out how to onboard and absorb them is more than challenge enough. So where are all the clients coming from?

Adam: Great question. So you're right, our advisors don't do any selling. When the client shows up to the advisor, the client has already made their deposit and are ready to get going. So our advisors don't do any prospecting. Our clients come from a variety of sources. About 10% of our clients are coming from referrals, which is something that we're very happy about and very proud of.

Michael: You only have so many people to get referrals from when you were only getting going in 2024. Not negatively, just it takes time for a referral pipeline to build.

Adam: That's right.

Michael: I'm actually impressed it's 10% already.

Adam: We get a lot of clients from just our organic content efforts. We do a lot of webinars. We have a lot of, as I said, free calculators. We do a lot around our blog. And so just organic web traffic. We have a number of paid channels where we advertise on Google and Meta and some of the more obvious places to look for clients. But quite uniquely, we have a very large affiliate program. And our affiliate program is different than most. A lot of affiliates will read a description of a wealth management firm's business and tell their audience that it's a paid advertisement and move on to whatever content or information they provide to their audience. Our affiliate relationships are quite different. We deeply embed with our affiliate partners and provide our service and our technology on a white label basis or on a co-branded basis. So we have a partnership with a great influencer named Katie Gatti who has a...

Michael: That's "Money with Katie?"

Adam: That's right. She has a newsletter called "Money with Katie." She has a very large audience. And we provide our services on a co-branded basis to her audience directly on her platform.

Providing White-Label Planning Services For Planning Firms Without The Capacity To Serve HENRYs [55:36]

Adam: Similarly, we partner with other wealth management firms. So if you are...

Michael: I have a million dollar minimum and can't actually serve HENRYs well, but they keep showing up because we have marketing.

Adam: That's right. So there, as you know, are 15,000 independent RIAs out there. Many of them have robust marketing channels and efforts. Often it is the case that more than half of the leads they generate fall below their investment minimum. What do they do with those leads today? For the most part, they don't do very much with them. But by partnering with our firm, we will take those leads, we will nurture those leads, we will sell those leads, we will close those leads, and then we will service those clients on their behalf under their brand. And so we have a large network of RIA partners for whom we serve their clients under their brand. And it's a rev share. And so what's so compelling about this for the advisor and the wealth management community out there is we turn nothing into revenue for RIAs. And so we've signed up about 15 or 20 wealth management firms who have million dollar, two million dollar minimums. And when they get leads that fall below those minimums, we serve them. And so, again, not to plug our business too much, but if you go to domainfinancialservices.com, you can see a full description of how we do our partnerships with wealth management firms.

Michael: And so, for folks who are listening, this is Episode 481. So if you go to kitces.com/481, we'll also have links out if you want to explore further. Adam, so I guess I want to understand just how this part of the model works. I guess from the advisory end, how does the rev share work? Are you paying me like I'm your lead gen source or am I paying you as a sub-advisory fee to service this segment of my clients? Whose client is it who actually collects the fees and pays who in this structure?

Adam: Great question. So on a fully white labeled arrangement, which is the client is served entirely under your brand, the client enters into a client agreement with you as the wealth management firm, and we are a sub-advisor service provider to your firm. So you own the client and it's always your client. And there's just a rev share arrangement between our firm and your firm where we serve those clients. We keep...there's a range of rev share arrangements, but it's anywhere between 15% and 25% is kept by the partner and we keep the rest of it.

Michael: Okay. And you said that's under the fully white labeled version. So I'm assuming there's...is there a different version that's not fully white label? Is there a door number two here?

Adam: Yeah, the door number two is a co-branded relationship for creators and financial influencers who are not registered RIAs. We provide our services on a co-branded basis and we do the same thing with wealth management firms who would prefer not to have our services delivered under their brand. And so we have...

Michael: I can envision some of us are like, I'm sure you're fine folks, but I don't know that I literally want to extend my fiduciary liability exposure to wondering exactly how you do what you do. Why don't we just send you the client? You can do it on your ADV.

Adam: Correct. And under that arrangement, the client is entering into a client agreement with us and we have full regulatory responsibility for that client. It's just a co-branded marketing arrangement. But I will say...

Michael: So the advisor end, I'm now effectively getting paid like a solicitor fee rev share for having made the referral to your firm.

Adam: Correct. I will say that we've never lost a partner. And what we find is that for those RIAs who do the white label path with us, they tend to want to spot check our work at the very beginning of the relationship. So they'll review all of our plans before they're delivered to clients and they'll really want to sort of dig into how we did what we did. After three or four plans reviewed, they just let us run. Because our planning experience is so attuned to the needs of this client type and our plans are so vigorously vetted in our plan preparation process that we really do outperform their expectations. Their expectations are that we're going to generate a financial plan similar to what they get from, again, the three software packages out there that serve this industry. Our plans are so wildly different than that.

Michael: And just to check, as you talk about the different options, I'm just processing through how these work. If they do co-branded, is it the same rev share economics of what goes to the partner? It's just a question of whether it's on my ADV versus your ADV or are there other differences in how this works?

Adam: The economics are better if it's a fully white labeled offering. And so we incent the partners to go the fully white labeled route. We do that because we find that client conversion is higher when it's fully white labeled. Think about it. You've spent a lot of time nurturing leads. They have an understanding of your brand and your firm ethos. And so we find the white label arrangement converts better. And so the economics are better on the white label.

Michael: Okay. And are these one-time rev share payments or life of client?

Adam: Life of client. So we will give you a percentage of the revenue for as long as we serve that client. The other good news is if that client ever accumulates enough assets that they do meet your minimum, we'll hand them back to you. And we have a whole transition process to make that handoff smooth and ensure that the client feels like it's a celebratory moment. Congratulations, you're now eligible for a higher tier of service, and we deliver the client back. Our expectation is that we'll serve these clients for five to ten years. And when they become accumulators and they're ready for the services of the mothership, as we describe it to our RIA partners, we'll hand them back.

Michael: I'm struck in many ways. A lot of us, if we have some kind of asset minimum or client minimums, we tend to develop some system about what we do with folks that we don't have a fit with. I remember the first time our prior advisory firm put a minimum in place, I went and called all the Garrett advisors in the area, which were the hourly for middle market folks, and found the one or two that I really liked that I thought were comfortable to refer to and just said, okay, if I get clients that we can't serve because of our minimums, I don't want to throw them back to the proverbial wolves. I'll just refer them along. We never did a financial rev share agreement, but it just strikes me for a lot of us, we've already found a place to shift these clients that don't fit. So now the question becomes, do you want to just refer out because you're trying to get them someplace or do you have enough of a systematized marketing funnel that this is another way to monetize the lead flow that you're generating if you're actually a firm that's built and scaled some marketing volume?

Adam: Yeah. So great point. And your approach to figuring out how to serve those clients is very common in the industry, as you know. Many firms find some smaller shop to refer clients to. We think that's a mistake. The most valuable segment of this industry is this emerging wealth class. Over the next 20 years, $84 trillion is going to move to that segment. And it's our belief that that's the most valuable segment to win.

Michael: Anybody who can attract a client and generate biz dev tends to have economic value. We all live and die by our ability to do business development. It is the valuable thing.

Adam: Correct. And so we position it to our RIA partners a couple of different ways. One is, hey, let us warehouse these clients for you until they become accumulators. In the meantime, you're going to earn revenue from them. And it will offset your marketing expenses. Because you are spending however much you're spending each month, whether it's $50,000, $100,000, $200,000 $300,000 a month marketing, offset your marketing expenses by getting revenue from a segment of clients that you otherwise today would get nothing from. And so we think it's a win-win for the client and the wealth management firm to partner with us. And they get revenue every year from these clients. And so we have partners for whom we've increased their top line by nearly 40%. And that is a...

Michael: You're just monetizing idle traffic opportunities.

Adam: Correct.

Michael: So from the marketing overall...because as you essentially said, now you've got both consumer channels from paid ads on Google and Meta and the consumer influencer folks like Katie, and then the advisor channels. What's the actual driver for you at this point? Is advisor referrals the primary growth channel for you or are you actually finding the demand on the consumer end and advisor referrals is more incremental for you?

Adam: Yeah. So our consumer business is the majority of the lead volume today, but the affiliate channel is quickly growing and we believe it will be the majority of our acquisition efforts longer term.

How Adam’s Entrepreneurial Background Led Him To Starting A Tech-Centric Financial Planning Business [1:06:25]

Michael: So I want to take one, I guess, quick step back, Adam. Can you just help us understand more of your background? Who is Adam and what were you doing in all the years before you started this financial planning technology offering in 2024?

Adam: Yeah. I'm not a financial advisor. I'm really a serial entrepreneur. This is my fifth startup. I've been building technology companies for way too long, I guess. And I've done them in a variety of industries. Way back in the late '90s, I helped start a software business in the commercial construction industry that we ended up selling to Autodesk. I founded a company that provided backup email systems to corporations, which back in the early 2000s was a real problem. We sold that to Dell. I started a business that helped improve graduation rates for colleges, ended up selling that to Francisco Partners. And then I started a company called Clarity Money, which was an app that competed with Mint. It was a do-it-yourself cash flow management tool. We grew to over a million customers in less than a year.

Goldman Sachs bought it and I became a partner at Goldman and head of product at Marcus, which as you know, is their consumer mass affluent play. I spent three years at Goldman Sachs running Marcus and really digging into this mass affluent segment and lived at the intersection of cash flow and investments. And that really informed my thinking about what we're doing at Domain. At Clarity, what I did was I gave people an insight into their cash flow and a button to press to change something about it. Just to give you the origin story of Clarity Money, I had been a long time customer of Mint, which is a business that was owned by Intuit and they obviously have sunset that business. But Mint is, I'm sure, a tool all of your listeners know well. And I hated Mint because it was...

Michael: Why did you hate Mint?

Adam: Well, for really a couple of reasons, but one is it was a very clunky UI [User Interface] and it was hard to navigate. But more importantly, it was really a dashboard about your past and it didn't give you anything to do for your future. And what I wanted was a tool that could help you manage your cash flow and give you insights into your cash flow and give you actions to take to improve something about your financial future. And what we led with was cancel your subscriptions that you're not using. And that was such a powerful value prop. No matter how much money you have, leaking money on something like subscriptions that you don't use is something that everybody sort of recoils from. And we solved that very simply for the client. And when we did that for clients, it completely changed the relationship between us and the client from, “You're going to try to sell me something, aren't you?” To “Wow, this tool is my advocate. It's here to help me.”

And it really informed my thinking about what we're doing at Domain, which is we want to be an advocate for the client. We don't want to push them products. We want to give them an understanding of their situation, an insight that helps them take an action that will improve something about their financial future. And that's really how I ended up building Domain in the form that I did, which is we're really doing very much the same thing that I did at Clarity, but instead of it being about just cash flow, it's really about wealth management and the impact that cash flow has on that for, again, the segment we serve.

Michael: And again, I can see the connection that the work on Clarity left you cash flow based, which is, again, the planning software gap for HENRYs because ours tends to be asset based. You were already living mass affluent under the traditional wealth management radar because these were not Ayco or Goldman Sachs private clients. I followed the journey. So I guess the question that I have, though, all of these were technology companies. So why is Domain a planning business and not a software business?

Adam: Good question. We have been asked by a few partners to license our software to them. And I am an entrepreneur at my core and I focus a lot on business models and gross margin and cash flow as an entrepreneur. And selling software into the RIA world is really a tough proposition. As you know, how many AI note-taking startups are there that are trying to sell software into the RIA world? How many document parsing, AI data extraction solutions are there trying to sell into the wealth management world? And then the other side of that equation, how much money do wealth management firms want to spend on that technology?

One of the things that surprised me about the industry is how slow it is to adopt new technology and how frugal the RIA world is in spending money to serve clients. And it's understandable, right? They want to protect those 35% to 40% EBITDA [Earnings Before Interest Taxes Depreciation and Amortization] margins that they are able to achieve serving clients. And because clients are so sticky with asset management and because they have done so well over time serving the 55-year-olds in the market, there's not a huge appetite for disruption. And so where I have focused my energy is, again, going after that segment that's traditionally underserved by the wealth management firms and focusing on a value prop that uses the best of technology to deliver an experience that is consistent with what that generation of clients expects.

What Surprised Adam The Most Building An Advisory Business [1:13:47]

Michael: So I guess in that vein, what has surprised you the most as you've gone down this path of building an advisory business coming off a world where the prior four were software businesses? What surprised you the most about this build?

Adam: Well, I mentioned it briefly, but it's just the slowness to embrace technology in the RIA world and the state of that technology stack. It is just shocking to me, although...well, I'll say it this way. It was shocking to me when I first learned it. Once I understood it, it made sense, which is that why fix what ain't broken? These clients aren't going anywhere. We're making a ton of money. I don't need your new-fangled tool.

Michael: Yeah. When you talk a bunch of businesses that can have 97% retention rates with 30% margins, what threat do you think I'm under? What do you think I have? My margins are great. My retention is high. Clients are happy and they're not leaving. I maybe don't really need to change that much anytime really soon. I'll get around to it eventually. I'll just wait and see what's cool and do it then.

Adam: Yeah. And I will say that that dynamic is changing a bit with the introduction of services like wealth.com and Trust & Will, Jump. There is an emerging set of newer wealth management tools out there that I think have the opportunity to break out. But that absolutely surprised me when I first learned it.

The Low Point On Adam’s Journey [1:15:27]

Michael: So what was the low point for you on this building journey?

Adam: Well, it took us a little while to find our way. We tried a couple of different things at Domain before we settled on what we're doing now. And it's very lonely being the CEO of any company, and it's particularly lonely being the CEO of a startup. And going through pivots is tough. I've been through them before, but each one is its own arduous journey. And you've got employees who are relying on you to pay them a salary. You've got employees who are relying on you to figure out what we're going to do. You have investors who have an expectation of a return on their investment, and it's kind of all on you to figure out how to do that. And that's a very tough road to go down. And I'm very thankful for the support that I've gotten from mentors and advisors and colleagues who have buoyed me along the way. And I'm very grateful for the traction we have found at Domain, because it's incredible how a little bit of traction solves a lot of problems.

We entered 2025 doing about $150,000 a month in sales and we exited '25 doing $650,000 in sales. And that's a lot of growth. And so a lot of the frustrations and problems and issues that seem to be front and center, a lot of those seem to fade away a bit when you're growing at a rapid rate. One of the lessons that I've learned from a great entrepreneur is that if you focus on the things that are working and you pay less attention to the things that are broken, if the things that are working are significant enough and important enough, the rest really doesn't matter very much. And what I figured out in our business is that our planning solution is so good and it so squarely hits the needs and issues of the segment we serve, that that was kind of powerful enough to buoy us through any valley.

And by the way, a similar thing happened at OpenTable. I was an early investor in OpenTable and involved early in the company. And we went through a period where we basically almost ran out of money. And it was a dark time in the company's history. But the core value proposition was just so powerful that there was almost nothing you could do to kill the company. And I would like to believe that what we've built at Domain is such a powerful unlock to serve, again, that underserved segment, that there's almost nothing that can happen that will derail us from our mission to effectively serve this client at the right price point, with the right solution, and delivered in a way that is delightful for the client. So that mission, to me, is very exciting and keeps me going and kept me going through a lot of dark days.

Michael: So then I've got to ask out of sheer curiosity, what were the earlier pivots version of Domain that got left behind as you iterated? What were the versions or the theses that didn't work out before you got to this one that's getting traction?

Adam: Well, we had a very low cost, $59 a month, unlimited access to a CFP. We hadn't really built anything to do financial planning. And so we were just scrambling to serve clients and trying to figure out how we were going to do that at scale and realized, well, this isn't going to work. So we did a lot of variations of that before we figured out how to do planning in a way that was scalable and repeatable. And really, that's the core of it, right? Because you can have a very talented financial advisor who is so experienced and so capable that they can kind of handle anything that a client throws at them. But then you can have a less experienced and a less capable advisor. And unless you have the system and processes in place to support both of those scenarios, you really can't scale.

And so while we obviously endeavor to hire the highest quality advisors, and we have this whole vetting process, and you have to have a certain number of years of experience, and you have to come from a certain kind of shop, and you have to pass a number of challenges that we put in front of you…we basically won't even interview you until you have done a challenge for us, which is we'll give you a sample set of facts and ask you to generate a plan around it. And it's really a technical exercise to understand your caliber as a CFP. And so all of those things, we didn't have any of that stuff. We didn't have a core planning engine. We didn't have a process to train our advisors. We didn't have a process to scale delivering our services. And so we needed to build all of that. And by the way, we're still building all of that because we're a very early company in our journey and have a lot to build and a lot to prove.

Adam’s Advice For His Younger Self And For Entrepreneurs Approaching The Financial Advice Space Today [1:22:02]

Michael: So what do you know now that you're a couple of years into this building journey that you wish you knew earlier, that you could go back and tell you from a couple of years ago coming out of Goldman, Marcus that would have expedited all this?

Adam: Yeah, one is that there really is a mismatch between how fast technology moves and how fast this industry moves. And I underestimated that. And that's been something that we've had to figure out how to navigate. I'll give you an example. We onboard three to four new advisors per month. And a lot of these advisors come out of large shops, Fidelity, Northwestern Mutual, places where they have learned how to do what they do and have been institutionalized by that process. And we have to kind of reset their brain and teach them how to operate at warp speed because that's the speed at which we're running. And we've had to help them relearn how to do things that they've spent five, ten years doing just a certain particular way. And so that's been an interesting challenge to try and solve.

Michael: So then any other advice you would give entrepreneurs, technologists looking to come into this advisor channel today?

Adam: I'm surprised that somebody hasn't built a really useful aggregation tool for this industry. I built an aggregation tool for the mass market with Clarity Money. You link all your accounts, you can see your net worth, you can see your expenses, you can see your cash flow. There are tools out there that are built for the RIA community. And I'll say this with a great deal of respect, they all suck.

Michael: For what it's worth, our advisor research surveys would say advisors broadly agree with you. Account ag is pretty consistently one of the lowest-rated categories. We all want it. The promise is beautiful. The delivery and resolution of broken links and all the other stuff that comes with it continues to leave much to be desired.

Adam: Yeah, it's clunky. It's not user friendly. And it is a huge thing that, again, the segment that we serve for all the reasons I've previously mentioned cares a lot about. And so that is a big opportunity.

Michael: Did you have to rebuild your own account ag layers to do your planning software?

Adam: Yeah, we've had to build pieces of that. And we're in the process of rolling out account aggregation for all of our clients. And we'll do it in a very careful way for all the reasons that I learned firsthand building Clarity Money…broken links, miscategorization, certain institutions aren't supported. Some people think bills are one thing and rent is another. Some people think your insurance payment is not a bill. There's just a lot of nuance to it that gets complex really quickly. So it's not an easy problem to solve, but it's easier today than it's ever been. And with AI, it will become easier. So that's an opportunity out there for entrepreneurs and technologists who are looking for a problem to solve.

What Success Means To Adam [1:26:02]

Michael: So as we come to the end, Adam, this is a podcast about success. And just one of the themes that comes up is that that word success means very different things to different people. And so you've objectively built and exited multiple businesses successfully. You've lived the business journey. How do you define success for yourself personally at this point?

Adam: Yeah, as I said earlier, I like problem solving. I like the journey of figuring out the puzzle of a thing. And it's very rewarding to serve people. I still run into people who used Clarity and say, "Oh, I really love that tool, and it really helped me understand what I was doing with my money, and thank you." And that's very rewarding. And every day we deliver financial plans to clients. And if you watch the response that we get from clients when we do that, there's really this aha moment where they are really delighted, emotionally elated by the experience of, wow, somebody really dug deep into all my stuff, my spending, my savings, my investments, my equity, my retirement plan, our real estate, our desire to vacation more, and they put all that together in a format that I can actually understand. And that is a real moment of delight that we get to deliver every day to clients. And so that is incredibly rewarding to me and drives me to do even better at it.

And of course, I love being on a journey with a group of committed souls. We have an incredible team at Domain Money that I've assembled brick by brick. Bill Gurley has this great line where he says, "There's something really cool about a small group of people doing something that should be impossible." And it should be the case that Fidelity and Schwab and Bank of America have provided a wealth management solution for the mass affluent segment. Why the hell have they not done that? And we're endeavoring to solve that problem. And that's a very exciting thing. And it drives me and motivates me. And we're marching up that mountain. And there's nothing more motivating than growth. And so we continue to grow fast and we continue to try to execute well.

Michael: Very cool. Very cool. Thank you, Adam, for joining us on the "Financial Advisor Success" podcast.

Adam: Thanks for having me. It's been great.