Bringing Hiring In-House To Support Rapid Growth After Doubling AUM To $600M In One Year: #FASuccess Ep 488 With Joe Schmitz Jr.

Author: Michael Kitces

Team Kitces

Michael Kitces is Head of Planning Strategy at Focus Partners Wealth, which provides an evidence-based approach to private wealth management for near- and current retirees, and Focus Partners Advisor Solutions, a turnkey wealth management services provider supporting thousands of independent financial advisors through the scaling phase of growth.

In addition, he is a co-founder of the XY Planning Network, AdvicePay, fpPathfinder, and New Planner Recruiting, the former Practitioner Editor of the Journal of Financial Planning, the host of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, and the publisher of the popular financial planning industry blog Nerd’s Eye View through his website Kitces.com, dedicated to advancing knowledge in financial planning. In 2010, Michael was recognized with one of the FPA’s “Heart of Financial Planning” awards for his dedication and work in advancing the profession.

Read all of Michael’s articles here.

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Resources Featured In This Episode:

• Joe Schmitz Jr.: LinkedIn | Website | YouTube
• "The 2% Club" by Joe Schmitz Jr.
• "I Hate Taxes" by Joe Schmitz Jr.
• "Midwestern Millionaire" by Joe Schmitz Jr.
• "Peak Retirement: The 5 Pillars To Protect Your Wealth And Live The Retirement You Deserve" by Joe Schmitz Jr.
• Willo
• Kingdom Advisors
• Toastmasters

Full Transcript:

Michael: Welcome, Joe Schmitz Jr., to the "Financial Advisor Success" podcast.

Joe: Yeah, Michael. Thanks for having me. I've watched probably every single episode or listened to every episode that you've done on this. I'm a true student of the game. Pleasure to be here and give back to the audience here. Looking like it's going to be an exciting conversation here today.

Michael: Fantastic. Welcome to being on the other side of the microphone this time around. I'm excited to get to chat and dig into what I think of as the very real challenges in hiring and expanding our teams as we grow these businesses. I really find it's quite difficult for a lot of us as advisory firms. Most of us got into the business to serve clients, not to hire, and train, and manage team members. As industry pubs seem to constantly highlight these days, we're ostensibly in the midst of a talent shortage. Although I actually find for some firms, the bigger struggle is hiring good people in administrative and support roles because it's really hard to find good people. Some of us turn to external recruiters to support the process, which I find can help with the occasional hire if you're doing, like, an advisor here or an admin support person there. But when businesses start growing rapidly, and you're basically in a constant state of hiring, that hiring function almost always becomes an internal business area, like, it's a department of the team. I know you have very much been dealing with this firsthand in a firm that's basically grown from just yourself to 40 people in barely five or six years. You have lived this. So, sure, we'll get a bit into where all the growth came from, but I'm particularly excited to hear how you build the hiring and the training infrastructure that it takes to actually find and hire and train more and more team members quickly.

Joe: It's morphed and there's been a lot of iterations over the years. We're still growing in that aspect. There's something you learn every day.

How Joe Created A Hiring 'Niche' To Find The Right Team Members Quickly [04:52]

Joe: Something we've noticed early on is that you've got to find a niche in who you hire. So I know you talk a lot about, Michael...

Michael: In who you hire. Okay.

Joe: Yeah.

Michael: Keep going.

Joe: Yeah. Because you talk about it a lot in marketing, right? Talk to your ideal client, work with the same person so that you can have the same experience, and you don't have to try to learn 100 different things and be a jack of all trades. We follow that in marketing. We work with specifically those that have $1 to $10 million, those with pensions, we call them "Midwestern Millionaires". I've written books on all those topics. But what I've done is I've taken that same lesson and I've implemented it on the hiring side. And so that's what our team has done. And so we have a specific niche that we know works really well with us. As a young startup firm, our average age of team member here is much younger than the average age of advisors in the industry. And so we know what works well. We are a Christian conservative firm, so we lead with those values and that's something that's really important to us. And so we know that the people that are most excited for those items that want to have fast growth, they want to really be a part of something bigger than themselves with great values, those people work really well with us.

Michael: So I'm curious to stay there for a moment. So you said you're a young firm, your advisor team members are much younger than others. So what does that look like in practice? How younger are we talking about?

Joe: Yeah, we primarily hire out of college. So we have, for example, this summer we'll have an internship program. We'll have about 25 to 30 interns that come through our program. And our goal will be to hire as many of them as we can just because we're at a place where we just are at capacity. We have more clients that want to work with us, and we have the ability to hire fast enough to be able to keep up with it. And it's not from a lack of standards or lack of applicants. We had 5,400 applicants last year, we only hired 19. It's more of just the standards that we hold of how…I just want to ensure that anyone who ever sees my content online, they're going to ensure that they work with a team who they can trust is going to have the same level of expertise, follow the same process, be aligned with what we're saying out there.

And so the actual average age of our team right now, Michael, keep in mind, this is not including my mom who also worked with us. She was actually the first hire that I had when I started Peak. She actually quit her job to come join me. It's been an incredible journey. If anyone ever has the opportunity to work with a loved one or a parent, it's an incredible experience, and it's been an awesome journey. So if you don't count her, our average age is 24 of team members. And obviously, the average age and advisor is 56. So a lot of people like working with us because of that aspect, from both realms. Clients like working with us because they get a team that's going to be there for them, their spouse, their kids, and we joke, their grandkids too, probably. But team members like it because they get to work with like-minded individuals who they get to grow with. They get to be in each other's weddings. They get to see each other grow their families. They get to be through the challenging times of passing their CFP together, the challenging times of learning how to talk to a 60-year-old about their retirement planning. And probably truthfully, our goal is to be there for each other's funerals is what the hope is, is that we can build something so special over the next 30, 40 years that we look back and say, "Wow, look what we've done." So that's kind of the focus that we have.

Why Having A Relatively Younger Staff Is An Asset Rather Than A Liability [08:21]

Michael: So I'm intrigued by the point you made…there's a plus for having advisor team members in their 20s to be able to say, sort of tongue in cheek, but seriously, "No, no, we'll actually be there for your family for multiple generations. Like, not just because my successor or my successor's successor will, because I have a 30 or 40-year career ahead of me to serve you and your spouse and your kids and perhaps even your grandchildren." I feel like there's at least a strong perception...I felt like it was a reality when I was a young advisor that there is some level of age bias that can come from clients. It's sort of the proverbial or literal, do they need to see a few gray hairs to substantiate your credibility and wisdom and expertise? So I guess I'm just genuinely curious, is that not a challenge for you?

Joe: Yeah, of course. And obviously, it is an issue in its own way of some people probably won't work with us because that's the case. But I've seen that over the years, it's become a much lesser concern. When I first started the firm, when it was just me, barely had a brand, had no team members, it was a huge concern. People literally didn't work with me because they'd go, "You just graduated college. I'm not going to trust you with my life savings. I don't even know if you're going to be around." All that is real stuff.

We don't really have it become a concern anymore because in our marketing, we address it. We tell the story about being there for people long term. We paint the narrative, we paint the picture. And it's not like they're working with inexperienced advisors. We require all of our advisors to get the CFP credential or be in process of getting it. So they're working with people that are just intellectually superior. Not only do they have that credential, but again, we're hiring team members who are extremely sharp. One of our traits we hire for is what's called an A-plus player. That's someone who's elite at their role. They can manage stress really well. Yeah, they may look young, but they don't act like it. And we also have people go through intense levels of training. So we have a one-year training program that, in my opinion, is about three to five years of experience if they were to go to a firm somewhere else because of how we've really just leaned into this crowd of people we're hiring. We've had to restructure our firm. And so part of that is we have to lean into training. New advisors with us will probably be in at least five to ten hours of meetings a week on training, and then they'll probably do another 20 hours of training on their own. And then that's in addition to sitting in on meetings and doing paraplanning and, you know, all the additional tasks that an advisor would be required to do so. So that's on the technical side.

So we're getting them ready for that. And we don't have them sitting in front of clients until that is green-lighted and we're confident in it. We actually created our own credential internally to get people to that point. But there's also another side of it. And Michael, you know this, how in the world is a 24-year-old or a 22-year-old right out of college, how are they confident enough to sit in front of a 60-year-old who they look at them and say, "You are younger than my grandkids," in some cases, or kids or whatever it may be.

Michael: Yeah. I had some versions of that when I...I came in straight out of college and had someone point out I was younger than their grandchildren, and one client who tried to introduce me to their granddaughter. I'm like, I'm here to be your advisor. I wasn't here for a date. Legitimately happened.

Joe: I've been there too. I think all of us young advisors who were single at the time have experienced that for certain. And I actually had a mentor, similar to what you're saying, Michael, and was actually a professor in college. She runs the financial planning program at the college I went to, Mount Vernon Nazarene, small Christian school here in Ohio. But she told me, she said, "Joe, you're about to leave here where you're an athlete. You talk like an athlete. You're also from a rural community, so you talk like you're from the country." And she said, "You're very young and you're going to be sitting in front of 60-year-olds." She goes, "You better go join Toastmasters and you better find a way to grow up." So we emphasize that to all of our advisors. We make them go to Toastmasters, which is a public speaking organization. We make them do multiple speeches there. And we also have an internal Toastmasters group so that our communication skills with these young folks...not only do we want to remove all the slang language they use, we also have to get them to portray themselves in a very confident manner. We know they know their stuff by going through our training program, now they have to be able to show that. And if we can get both of those done successfully, people don't care because of our brand and credibility that we bring. Most people have watched hundreds of videos. They've read my books. They've seen us on TV. They've read our Kiplinger articles. They trust us. They know we know our stuff. And so that typically isn't a concern at this point, although you'll run into it here and there. But as we've grown, it's just become less and less.

Michael: I think that's an interesting framing of how different it was when it was just you in the early years, when they were coming to Joe, the young advisor, versus when they're coming to Peak Retirement Planning, the firm who happened to have some younger advisors with long tenures in front of them. And the mindset difference that shows up for clients when they're coming to the firm and the person they see might be younger versus the firm is you, and you've got a young face.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. And I think, too, they see that I'm younger and I'm the face of the firm and doing all the content, they just expect it coming in. So that's what makes it also easier for us. So to your point, we may be losing a lot of people because our age, but we just don't see them. Like, they just don't come to us. And there's millions of people out there. And that's the importance of having a niche. That's the importance of just locking into what you want to do because you can't help everyone. And so that's kind of just what we leaned into.

Being Explicit About The Company's Values With Clients And In Hiring [14:37]

Michael: And then I'm curious as well, you said it further, "We're a Christian conservative firm. We lead with those values." Just in an environment, in an era where often religion and values get very polarizing, I'm very curious to hear more of, how does that show up?

Joe: Yeah, it's definitely polarizing in both directions. Some people would never work with us. Some people hate us. We get hate feed on LinkedIn. We get bad messages. We get people who talk bad about us. And that's okay. No problem. They have their right to their opinion. They have their fellow beliefs. We're still going to love them. We hope them the best. And that's just how it is. And so we've been okay with it because of how many people we've attracted that say, "That's me. I want to work with people that are me. They're one of us." And we've had countless people that are going to be lifers with us who have had that mentality.

And when you look out there, most places you go to, as you mentioned, they won't talk about their faith. A lot of places are more verbal in a sense as far as what they require people to do. They may encourage people to use pronouns on their signature box. They may talk about abortion. They may emphasize more about DEI. It's just stuff that like we don't we don't really stand for. We pray in team meetings and we're very outward about our beliefs, and it's just we're very convicted about who we are and what we do. And so I actually had a gentleman come in to me 30 days in and he said, "Joe, I love this firm. I love what you guys stand for, but I can't live up to the Christian values you guys hold yourselves to."

And so when we've had situations like that happen, we're really doing people a disservice if we're not outward about who we are. And, you know, if someone's not a Christian, not a conservative, we are not going to discriminate if they are a great fit to work with us and if they really align with just, you know, the value standpoint of who we are. And so it's something that we just don't want to put someone in a bad situation where they feel like they're in a place that's not home and then they're just going to feel uncomfortable. And so we're outward about it. It's been one of the best things and decisions that we've made in hiring. We've gotten so much more success from that. And we've seen that those, over time, that have not been aligned in those aspects, and especially with how intense we are because we're a results-based business, we've seen that those people have just kind of weeded themselves out, whether we decided it wasn't a good fit or they decided and off we're going.

And, you know, every time that's happened, everyone at the firm has gotten more aligned and more excited about the growth and the direction we're going. And it's just, you are what the culture is. And so, yeah, we've decided that we don't want thousands of people to work with us right now. We want 100 great people is what we want right now. And so we feel like we can find them in that pond. And I just feel like with any organization, you have to go in one direction. And I know a lot of people talk about, "Hey, you need diversity, you need difference of thoughts and opinions." I agree with that. I have a guy on our team, him and I are the most opposite personalities possible. I'm very outgoing. He's very introverted. He's very patient. I'm very impatient. And we have different opinions and beliefs, but our values and beliefs are the same. The difference is how we react to things. And so that's what I feel like is the most important thing in an organization is when you are like-minded, but you can challenge each other in the right ways that are going the right direction.

Michael: I like how you frame that, like we can have different beliefs about the issues, but our values are the same, right? So ultimately we're still aligned on just the criteria we use, at the end of the day, to make decisions about what we're doing with the business, what we're doing with our lives. It strikes me, anyone who's built up business to a certain size has had to deal with the crossroads when you have a certain culture and a set of values, and they go from sort of implicit, they're just kind of reflections of the founder and the folks in charge, and making them much more explicit. You have to actually be able to say what your culture is and what your core values are because you want to be clear in who you attract, you want to be clear in who you recognize, and your managers and leaders need to have clarity so that they're doing it consistently as well. And what strikes me, even as you're describing it, what you're describing isn't different to me than the same kinds of culture and core values articulation any business goes through. You just happen to have them anchored around Christian conservative values is where some of those come from.

Joe: Absolutely. And that's everything. You can anchor a culture around any concept, vision, desire, but what is the best, what is the right thing to do? For us, we felt that is the Christian conservative values that we live out. And for me, glorifying God in my God-given abilities is the most important thing to me. And so, you know, as I've built a business, I want that business to do just that. And I want it to be bold. I want it to be a discipleship and evangelizing business where it's actually impacting others and not just there for financial planning. We're going to be really good at financial planning. We're going to do everything else well, but we're going to do it with a bigger purpose is what our vision has always been.

Michael: And as you noted, it doesn't necessarily mean you discriminate to people who don't fit. But the reality is, if these aren't your shared beliefs, the culture where you have prayer in a meeting may not be the most comfortable for you. You're going to likely opt yourself out the door just in the same reality of anyone who's ever been to a company where you go and say, "Great business, but culture just didn't fit for me. That's just not my style and how I do it." Cool. Then part ways and find the thing that does work for you.

Joe: Yeah, exactly. And we've just found that out over the years that you just have to do that. And we'll never ask someone straight up like, "Hey, what's your religion?" We don't do that. It's just, "Here's who we are. Is that something that you're okay with?" And we ask it seven times in the interview process, or we say it in some way that we are a Christian conservative value because we want them to truly get it, because retention rate is so important. Michael, you know it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars if you lose team members. And for us, it's like we are doing our team a disservice is if we keep on continually having people come in and leave and come in and leave with something that we could prevent upfront. And again, it's hurting them as well because they're going to end up in a place where they're going to not get a start in their career at a place where they could really make a difference because they decided to try this out and it just wasn't going to work at all. So just trying to be upfront with that.

And we also take that approach to on the intensity side, too. So for us to grow as fast as we have in the short time, it's a lot of hard work. Whenever you join a startup that is really growth-minded, you're going to work probably a little bit more than 40 hours a week, you're going to get your hands dirty. You're going to shovel manure, as I say. And so we had a guy come to us one time. He came to me, came to my office. He said, "Joe, I think we need to talk about our feelings more." And my response was, "Alright, well, I don't think you're very aligned with our direction of where we go. We're more results-focused." We have a saying here that we say, get over yourself. Get over yourself when you think that you're too good for the team or that you're the best person in the world, because that's typically not the true. But also get over yourself when you don't think yourself is good enough. You know, a lot of people say like, "Oh, man, I don't know if I'm going to be a good enough husband. I don't know if I'm going to be a good enough team member. I'm not really good here." Regardless of if you're good or not, you have a duty to serve and people are counting on you. So get over that feelings, that emotion. And you've got to be mentally tough to push through for the greater good.

And so I always say...we ask a lot of questions around mental health, too. We found that people with mental health or that lean into mental health typically struggle with us because we just really lean into mental toughness. So I always say that mental toughness is different than mental health. Right? There's some serious mental health issues out there. And so we actually ask questions in the interview process like, hey, how do you feel about mental health? What's your take on it? We even have people listen to podcasts to talk about these concepts, because if someone doesn't have a high capacity for stress, they're really going to struggle in our environment, and it's probably just going to make their concerns worse is what we see. And so I just think that people are too quick to have a victim mindset or take the easy way out. And so our approach is more, "Hey, let's be gritty. Let's push through the hard times and see what comes up on the other side. And I'm sure we'll be better people not only for ourselves, but for our families, for our team members, and for our communities." And that's what we really just anchor on is, how do we grow in every area of our life and just serve? So that's what our mission is.

And so people excited about that, man, they're going to have an awesome career. Someone who wants work-life balance and they want to have a separate life when they go to work than at their home life. No, we want more work-life integration where we're truly living out our values in our everyday life. And work should be what we're called to do. That's the way we see that.

Peak Retirement Planning's Multi-Stage Hiring Process [24:42]

Michael: So now, I guess, let me take one step back. Help us understand the firm overall. You mentioned that you're serving "Midwestern Millionaires" and who you're offering services to. But I guess just give us some context for overall size and scope of how many clients, team members, assets, however you measure and keep track.

Joe: Yeah. So we have over 1,000 clients at this point. And we've got over, I think for the last ADV, we just filed about $630 million of AUM. We doubled that in just last year. So we started last year at $300 million. Now we're over $600 million. This year, we have a goal of adding about $500 million of assets is what our goal is. We're on pace to do that. So we're seeing incredibly fast growth. And that's why that hiring piece we talked about is so important. Because in order for us to keep up with that growth, we have to have great team members be put in place. And so we've made a commitment that we're not going to just grow to grow. We always have a saying, we want to be the best, not the biggest. So that's where we really try to anchor to, "Okay, how many team members do we have? How many clients can we serve?" And then we always ensure that we don't have overcapacity to where we can't serve the clients the way we've promised them.

Michael: And so how many team members is it then?

Joe: Yeah, well, if you ask me right now, it's probably around 40. If you ask me here in two months, it's probably going to be about 60. It's just the way we're hiring, the amount of applicants that come in. If we find great team members, I've given our hiring team pretty much permission to say if you find an A-plus player who has that foxhole trait, which is another value we look for, who's all in it for the team. And then the third trait we look for is rocket ship, you know, someone who's excited for growth as we've been talking about. If they have those three traits and they're aligned with our values, I said, let's hire them, and we'll figure out a seat for them because there's always going to be plenty of work to do around here. And that's just our mindset. So right now, we have shadow days, we have people come shadow. Our next shadow day, I think we've got 15 people coming into shadow that are looking to work with us. And most people that get to that stage in our interview process, it's a really good chance that we're going to hire them at that point. And so, this thing could grow to 100 people by the end of the year. And if it does, we're going to make sure that we have the right resources in place to make that happen.

Michael: So, wait, what are shadow days?

Joe: Yeah. So we have a very intense hiring process. If anyone's watching this, they're probably like, "Dang, this guy's intense. Their process is intense, this firm's intense." So we make people, before they even get to a shadow day, we make them go through all of our training materials, not all of it, but like a good amount. It's hours of content that they're learning more about our firm. So some of it is podcasts I've been on. Some of it is our philosophy on work, as I've shared just now. A lot of it is, "Here's Joe on the radio talking about the values of the firm." So it gives them a full perspective to know, "This is who they are and I know everything about them."

So we also make advisors read all four of my books that I've written to give a full alignment on our planning philosophy and who we are so that they can truly see for themselves, "Is this a place that I'd want to want to work at?" So it's not your typical hiring process. And it's pretty intense. And then once we go through all that, we always do a dinner with candidates. So we do two virtual sessions, we do a dinner. And in that dinner, you can tell a lot about someone at a dinner. How are they treating the server? How are they acting? How are they meeting someone new for the first time? What do they wear when they show up? It's very valuable.

And then if everything goes well there, we do a case study, too, as well. And the case study just sees how they work. If they're going to be an advisor, I want to see how you answer these 10 financial planning questions that clients could ask. I want to see how you answer it. I want to see if you know your stuff, and I want to see what your poise is when you do it. And then we do all that. For operations team members, it's going to be more attention to detail-type stuff to make sure that they're really particular. And we just want to see, how above and beyond are they going to go? The best team members, the best people to work with, are those that are going to go above and beyond with their work.

So we can tell all that through that. And then we get to the point of the shadow day. So we make...I keep saying make. We have people, it's their choice, come in for shadow day for half the day where they get to see us live. And they don't just get this shadow and watch someone do their job, we have team meetings for our entire Monday morning that they get to sit in on. They get to see our intensity. They get to feel our togetherness of our culture. They get to see us. We always do an hour in the morning. We are Certified Kingdom Advisors, it's a credential that we hold that we're very proud of. And we do a lot of our planning around that alignment of how do we help people steward their money in a biblical way. So we have an hour session. It's our CKA study group where we go through concepts of biblical planning of how do we implement it. So, again, going back to the Christian values, we're letting people see that in every part of our process there. And typically by the end of that, they're pretty sure if this is the place they want to be. And if not, we typically found that out much earlier in the process. So that's what that looks like. But it's been a great way for people to get a real-life taste of who we are and what we do.

Michael: So I'm just trying to visualize now how many steps are in this hiring process and how long does it take to go through?

Joe: We move really quick through it. So I always say, rush, but don't skip steps. So, for example, most hiring people take weeks to get back to people, or they never get back to them. We have an internal role that any time a client reaches out, any time a candidate reaches out, any time a candidate applies, we always get back within 24 hours. And oftentimes, we're getting back to people in hours because we just feel that trust is built when you can speed things up. And so we show them that we value their application. We value that this is a career that they're looking for, and we value that they have other options on the table. And so we just want to show utmost respect for people in that way. And also, we don't have time to waste. So we want to get people moving through the process to see is this going to be a good fit or is it not, is how we do it.

So it really doesn't take much. It doesn't take longer than most people. We're typically hiring people in a month or two. So it's pretty stereotypical as far as what the industry would say in hiring. It's probably actually quicker than most. So our first step is they do a one-way interview. So everyone gets a chance to apply with us. We're not just going to look at a resume and make a judgment. They get to show what they want to do. So they do a five-minute video with a few questions that we ask them. We review every single video. And then from there, if we approve it, then they get to go to the next stage, which is a virtual interview. So they do that. If that goes well, they go through our training content I mentioned. If that goes well, they go to our third interview, which is, again, virtual with another team member. If that goes well, they then go into a case study, start reading some of the books. If that goes well, they go into the dinner, and then another book, and then a shadow. And then we typically offer from there. So not a ton of interviews per se, but a lot of work in between it.

Michael: So as you go through this...that was really helpful just to hear step by step. Look, I get like initial interview, ask them a couple of questions, let them submit a video because you're trying to screen and get a sense of who to talk to. Then you've got a virtual interview later. There's a third interview with another team member. I think I'm trying to wrap my head around the training content part. I guess this idea of...this clearly isn't the way you're putting it to candidates like, "Hey, thanks for going through a first-round interview. Here's three to five hours of homework we'd now like you to do." I'm sure you have a much better way to frame it than that. But I think that's what I'm wondering. How do you get people to go through like a bunch of training content and read your books and do the case study when they're still somewhat early in a job application interview process?

Joe: Yeah, I think the best way to put it is people with that mentality don't work with us. So that's the people we're trying to weed out. Oftentimes, even people we don't hire that go through that training material, oftentimes, at the end of it...because you remember we're working with college kids, people right out of college. So they have not a lot of industry experience. So typically, we get, from the A-plus people we see, "Oh, my goodness, this was incredible. This was a professional development masterclass. Man, this gave me a really intentional look at this firm. And like now I get a better grasp to see, do I even want to go into financial planning?" Those are the growth-minded people we want to hire. Again, we don't typically hire people later in their career because you're right, Michael, they probably wouldn't do that. But when you go after the crowd we went to...and that's why it's so important to have a niche of who you're going after, because then they're going to be more aligned with what you have there. But yeah, we've had an experienced team member join us. They were at another firm for over 10 years, and they did not like our hiring process. We actually ended up hiring them, and they didn't like it. One of their feedback was, "Yeah, that was way too much information." And back then, I didn't think that was a red flag. I'm like, "Yeah, that makes sense. I get it." But then it didn't work out because they just couldn't grind. They couldn't put in the work. They couldn't keep up. And so looking back, it's like, well, that was a big red flag. So we've learned a lot and that's why we've gotten to where we are with it.

Michael: So it strikes me as you framed that, that some of this really is a function of who you're hiring and going after in the first place. If I'm a younger rising college student and I'm also just still trying to understand, what the heck is financial planning really? What do you do? Like, what am I going to do if I get the job that I'm applying for because I've never done it before, that the training content, the case study, is also effectively giving them a visualization of, "Here's exactly what the job is. Here's what you'd be getting into. If you are having fun with this, you'll probably want to lean into it, and this is going to go well. If you don't even think this is that fun to learn about and try out in an interview, that's probably a good signal. This might not even be the career for you. It's cool. You're coming out of college. Try other things. It's okay."

Joe: And you have to remember too, Michael, I don't want to be arrogant with this by any means, but it's just a reality. The firm we've created is an incredible opportunity for a young person to join. What other places can you join and be sitting client-facing within a year, go through an intense hiring process where you have a team committed to just helping you grow? And most firms, they don't have training programs built out. And these bigger firms out there, they have training programs, but it's all self-centered. It's all about, "What can you invest into me? Bring your project to 100. Go sell all your friends. We'll keep the relationships after you don't make it because only 10% of people make it out of college." And it's garbage.

And so we've just tried to reinvent that of, "Hey, if you are a young advisor and you're really elite and you love our values, there is not going to be a better place for you to work," because whenever you can join a growing startup, your upside is unlimited. You can do whatever you want in that environment. You can do whatever role, you can have whatever impact, you can make a lot of money if that's someone's goal. And so we always encourage it. I mean, a lot of our advisors are making six figures a year or two in with us right out of college. And they're having even more upside moving forward, but they're expediting their growth. They have compound interest in their career by joining a firm like ours. And so that's one of my advice for young advisors out there, people in college is go join a firm where you can put your fingerprints on things right away so that you can truly grow. When I started in the industry, I started with a firm where I was able to sit with clients right away. And I learned so much through those experiences of just getting your feet wet instead of sitting as second chair on sessions for three to five years like a lot of firms do. You're just not going to learn as much. You're not going to have as much upside.

How Joe Sources Candidates For Roles At His Firm [37:49]

Michael: So now tell us about how you get the volume and engagement of applicants that you do. Because there are a subset of folks who are listening saying, "Look, I get the steps and what you're trying to filter down, but I'm pretty sure if I did that process at the end of the filtering, there literally wouldn't be anyone left in the queue." Right? You know, "If I'm going to eliminate a certain number of people in the process, I still need a certain number that come through at the end so that I can have someone to hire." So it feels like the level of filtering and winnowing that you're doing only works with a certain volume of applications in the first place to winnow down to the point where you get these folks that perfectly check all the boxes that you're looking for. So where does the applicant volume come from to make all this work?

Joe: Yeah. It's probably a good thing to note this here, too. We got fired by three different recruiters, Michael. So people don't like to work with us when it comes to hiring because of how particular we are. So we have tried the other options out there, but they just couldn't find the people. They said that they were spending too much time. And so they said, "Hey, we're not going to work with you." And that was fine. And so from there, we had to build out our own hiring system. And I like it that way better. It's just you get to control more of it. It's more from an excellence standpoint, in my opinion.

And so what we do is we post job postings everywhere. Handshake is a great one for college students. We use Indeed. LinkedIn, we do stuff on. And so we have a lot of hooks out there to have people apply. One of the most successful things that...I'll say probably two things that have been most successful.

One is I speak at a lot of universities. So we've got two Christian universities, Cedarville University, Mount Vernon Nazarene University, also Ohio Christian University is another one just in Columbus. There's three that are within an hour. And so I speak at those universities. And again, those are our target niche. It's like going into an employer where they have all the clients that you serve and you get to pick up multiple clients every time you go speak. So it's the same idea with hiring is just go where you're going to find people. So we spend a lot of time there. Ohio State's right in our backyard here. We're two miles from campus, our office. So we do a lot for their program as well. And we've seen a lot of success from that of just building our brand at those universities, being a place that these students can go to, even if we don't hire them, to ensure they're going in the right direction, providing them resources, speaking for them, just giving back to those programs has been big.

And then I would say the second thing is our LinkedIn presence. I'll name-drop Jason Wenk here. He'll love me mentioning him here. But, you know, we talk about this often. He loves our LinkedIn on our team. He goes, "Man, I just wish that more young people would just follow your content and implement it." He goes, "Too many people are entitled out there. They need to value hard work." He goes, "I love what you guys are doing." And he goes, "It's not just you," he says, "it's your entire team who's bought in to the culture, to the mission, to this idea of work hard." And, you know, we have multiple people on our team that are active on LinkedIn that just draws attention to who we are. And so we've gotten team members just from our LinkedIn presence. And most people that have gone through our interview process have found us or seen us through those places. So just trying to be out there, just like marketing. We just tried to have the same mentality I've built with marketing with the firm, do the same thing with hiring. We have our own hiring messaging. We have our own marketing that we do with hiring. All of it works well together.

Michael: So can you explain a little bit more just what are you doing on LinkedIn? What is your team doing on LinkedIn?

Joe: We are the same intensity I'm sharing today. So I create content specifically...again, niche marketing. I create content specifically for young professionals, so those that are in college or after college, and I just lean into what we talked about today. So I do a lot of content about, "Hey, if you're in your 20s, stop listening to people that say that you should not value your work. If you're in your 20s and you're single and you have no kids, like you should be working 60-plus hours a week and building a future for yourself and family so that when you do have a family, you can truly prioritize what's most important at that time." So we do a lot of content on that. And just, you know, again, our team's just leaning into that. It's who we are. And we just have a lot of fun banter back and forth. So, you know, if you see one of our team members post something on LinkedIn, you can probably find three or four or five of us having a conversation just like we would at the office. So, again, people get to feel how family-oriented we are. I work here with five friends from college. I've got a buddy from fourth grade that works here. We've got many team members that are family and friends that work here as well. That's been another big way we've hired is just from our personal network. Right? Hire people that are close to you. But we hang out all the time, and we hang out outside the office. We go to church together, we go to the gym together. We actually have a gym at our office. We go to dinners together. We have fun experiences that we get to share with each other. And I think that's so important to have a work culture where it's family-oriented. It just makes it so much more meaningful to build it with people close to you.

How Peak Retirement Planning Narrows Down Its Candidate Pool [43:06]

Michael: And so when you cast this wide net, can you come back to how you actually start winnowing down the list and the criteria, what you're looking for? You've mentioned a few traits that you track along the way. But I'd love to hear further, what are the filters? How do you winnow down when you get these huge volumes of applicants that you're trying to get down to? I think you said like 5,000-plus applicants for 19 hires.

Joe: Yeah. Like I've shared...I can kind of just concisely share exactly what we look for. But we have three traits that we funnel everything through. And so I mentioned them earlier, but it's an A-plus player. So just truly someone who's just elite at what they do. You know that person isn't going to drop the ball. A players hate working with B players. And we've noticed when we've hired B players, our A players get so frustrated. And it's not because they don't love those people. It's not because they don't care about those people. It's because they care so much for them. And it's holding them back because they're trying so hard to help them grow and they just can't get there. So we've just made a decision that it's like, all right, we're just only going to hire A players and just make everyone's life here easier. And it's harder to do, but it's so much better when you can do it successfully.

Michael: What does that mean in your context, though? I feel like A-plus player is still kind of a subjective thing to some people about what they look for to constitute an A-plus player. What does that mean in your world?

Joe: Yeah, for example, four or five of our team members have been valedictorians of their high school graduating class. And so just intellectually superior is one. We actually do this too, Michael, I didn't mention this, but we require people to do a typing exercise in our hiring process. And we've noticed that people who have a lower typing score are less successful with us than those that have an extremely high typing score. So we require them to do tests on that to see where they stand. And again, typically if you can type quick, you're typically quicker intellectually, you're quicker in getting things done. And I think that can also resonate with that A-plus mentality as well.

Michael: Okay. So then what are the other two traits?

Joe: Yeah, so foxhole is just simply being there for your team member. That one's an easy one to really understand. But you know when someone's there for themselves, are they looking for a career or are they looking for a job? And we want people that have a purpose bigger than themselves is what we see. Are they going to really want to grow and serve thousands of people as we grow? Because we see it as this firm's got a servant's heart. We're going to grow as big as we can by doing it the right way. And if someone's excited about that, they'll do well. But if someone comes in and says, "You know what, I just want to serve 100 clients, I want to do things my way. I'm not going to worry about helping other people here grow." We expect from our experienced advisors, their number one role with us is to coach. And we have a saying that says always be coaching. And so we try to...my number one job as CEO and founder of Peak Retirement is not just to make big decisions for the firm, it is to always hold our standards, always to be coaching and holding people accountable and helping them grow and helping them duplicate myself to just have more leaders around the firm. So that's really what that foxhole mentality is all about.

Michael: And then what's the third in the list?

Joe: Yeah, rocket ship. So just growth-minded. Again, kind of the things that we've been saying, it's like, this person, are they going to want to, just as I explained, sit back and just relax, or are they really wanting to do something bigger? And so joining the startup right out of college, working extra hours, it requires a lot to be special. And one of the sayings that I always say is like, I can't wait when I look at team member number 50 who joins us and I look back 30 years from now when we're thousands of team members big, we're one of the biggest RIAs out there and we get to look back and say, "Look what we've done together." That is the most important thing is to for me. My biggest why at this point is providing opportunities for our team to find complete fulfillment in their work, to find a home where they can feel like they can be themselves. And for us to just completely win. We have a standard here. It's win or go home. We are results-based. People are paying us good money to help them steward their hard-earned life savings. We have to get results for them in order for them to have success. So those are all things that are key and part of that rocket ship trait.

Michael: So, how do you evaluate these? I kind of get A-plus player of like things you can pull off of resumes or transcripts, although the typing test is an interesting aspect. What else are you doing to suss out who meets the three traits criteria? Are there tests? Are there questions? Are there other things that you're doing?

Joe: Yeah, we have a ton of questions that are very direct, very challenging, I would say. One question we ask people is, "How are you growing in every area of your life? Personally, professionally, physically and spiritually?" You can learn a lot about someone, not what they say, but how they say it. So that's one question we ask. Another question we ask is, hey, if we were to offer you today, like, how do you feel? And typically, if someone says, "I don't know, I'm not sure yet," okay, that's a huge red flag versus the person who says, "I would drop everything for this opportunity. This is incredible. I would love to join a group like yours. You guys are the best. I love what you guys do. I love your values." Okay, like that's probably going to be a more successful team member. That's going to be a lifer with us. So just by the questions we ask.

And we try to tailor those questions based on the candidate, you know, what are the things they showed in the last interview that are concerns for us? You know, we just try to really dig deep on things and just hit it head-on instead of...we don't have a cookie-cutter process. We want to challenge the things that are going to be deal breakers. Deal breakers if they exist, we can't move on. And so we just challenge things hard and ensure it's a good fit before we move to the next stage.

Leveraging Tech Tools To Efficiently Manage The Hiring Process [49:48]

Michael: So now talk to us about the team infrastructure you've built to actually do and run this. You said you used to do it externally with recruiters. You brought it internal. But I don't know, is that one person? Is that two people? Is that five people? What are the proverbial seats on the bus? How do you do this when you're hiring and working through so many people?

Joe: Yeah, it's a startup, so I would say multiple hands are in the pot to help it be successful. So that's key. But we have a lot of...I mean, we're a young firm, like I mentioned, we use a lot of technology. So everything we do is automated. When all the candidates come through, I mean, it's really easy for us to weed through everything. We've built Salesforce out to just be so efficient, so we're not wasting time. We just press a button, and the next steps in our process happens. We don't have to create custom emails or do any of that. Everything is really well-built. When we decline someone, we hit an X, and it sends them a decline email, and we're moving on. So just having the systems and processes in place has been key. But it obviously takes a commitment from the people as well. But we just try to really empower people to like, "Hey, you've got to make decisions. You've got to be able to, you know, use your discernment of what you think is going to be best," because, you know, if everything just funnels to me on every little decision in the hiring process, we're not going to get much done. So that's been a big part of it.

But we have multiple people that are involved in the hiring process. So, each of the interviews we do, we have a different person. So some places would have one person do everything. We want to see how they interact with multiple different personalities. We have people that are stronger asking certain questions than others at certain phases in the interview process, depending on their role, who's going to be in that position. So we've got all that built out well to know who's going to be on which interview. But again, it's only two virtual interviews, a dinner, and a shadow. That's all the time it takes us. Everything else is on their end, which makes it really easy for us.

Michael: So, how many people are in this department? And just like how many have to be hired to hire this many people?

Joe: Yeah. So I'll just give you what it's been for the last three months is realistic, six months maybe, because it's going to change ongoing. But for what we've done, we have one person whose sole job is hiring. So they're looking at all the applicants. They are doing all of the second interviews after the Willow, after the...it's called Willow, it's a platform we use for the one-way interview. So after that, they're doing all of that. So they're weeding through everyone. They're doing all the groundwork. They're doing all the communication with the candidates, answering any questions, doing all the hard work. They're able to handle that pretty well. And that person has...again, startup, they're doing other tasks like helping with events and things like that as well. So again, very efficient in how we're doing it.

And then we have other team members that just simply step in to do the interviews and help make decisions. So we've got another team member that does all of the other virtual interviews that we do. We have one that typically does all of those. And then for the dinners we'll just utilize...we've got probably about five different people who really stand on values, are really direct, and can really have fruitful conversation with people at dinner to set expectations for who we are. And then the shadow day, typically, I'm the one doing that final interview with them to ultimately make that decision to move forward or not. So not as much work as you would think. You've got to really build it out. But we've got it done to a point where we don't have to have a huge headcount to help with that.

Michael: And then who builds all the systems and process in...I think you said in Salesforce? I don't know if there's a separate applicant-tracking system as well. So what do you use and who builds that? Are you the gifted system process person that makes all the tech do the wonderful things?

Joe: Yeah, funny, funny joke. But I am definitely not. I mean, one of the biggest things I've learned in what we've done is hire incredibly great people and get out of their way. And that whole "who, not how" concept, right? Don't try to figure out how to do it, just find someone who can, and they're going to do it way better than you, and they're going to have empowerment. But no, we've got an IT team specifically that helps with all of that. And we've done a full integration of Salesforce to make all of our systems really smooth. So we've spent a lot of money and time on that, and it's been very valuable. And so they spent all the time getting all that in place. Basically, we have...you'll like this, Michael. So every Monday we have a group that meets, and we call it DOPE. And we like to name it after the concepts of DOGE, Department of Government Efficiency. But instead we call it DOPE, and it's Department of Peak Efficiency.

Michael: Okay, because you are Peak Retirement.

Joe: Exactly. And so I'm in that. And I am a big part of that group, along with some of our other team members that are more innovative, tech-forward, all of that. And we just sit there for an hour every Monday and we just brainstorm. Hey, what can we do? The question we always ask is, how can we get the same results but simpler? Right? And we try to do that with everything that we do. And I think that's going to be a big part of the growth for us is just keeping focused, not trying to serve a thousand different clients, just staying really focused.

Michael: So, who else is in that, in the Monday DOPE meeting?

Joe: Yeah. So one of our guys who runs the advisor side of the operations. Another guy who runs more of the client service operation side, someone who runs marketing. And then one of our IT guys is in that as well. So it's a small group. We try to keep it that way. And we have specific roles for that type of meeting, like you can't sit down. You've got to have your thinking caps on. High energy. Don't waste time, all that fun stuff.

Michael: You can't sit down.

Joe: Energy flows when you're standing, Michael. I didn't make the rules, but it works.

Michael: Okay. Is that a common thing across many meetings at Peak? Meetings are standing meetings?

Joe: No, not necessarily. Just for the DOPE, I guess. But you're right. We probably should implement in other ones if it works out well. Right?

Michael: I'm sorry to all the team members who weren't bringing comfortable shoes that now you will have to.

Joe: Yeah. Half a day, that can be pretty intense.

Michael: So then, as you're hiring all these people and seem to very much take it seriously about making sure you're hiring good people on the team. What do you still do in the process? Like, where is Joe in hiring and bringing team on? Is this a full "who, not how," you've got great team members that do this, and you get a list of the cool team members that are coming on, or do you still stay more plugged in on this part?

Joe: Yeah, there's two sides of that, right? Yeah, I'm very much empower and delegate. I feel like I've done that really well over the years or we would have never gotten to this point. I'm also extremely in the trenches with our team. I'm at the office first one in, last one out every single day. I love the work we get to do, and I love the people we do it with. And there's a lot of sayings out there that say that when the CEO is the hardest worker, the firm is going to be the most successful. And any successful CEO out there, that's who they are. They get in the trenches. And if you don't know your product and you don't know your situation, it's going to be really hard to be successful. And so I want our team to see that I'm in the trenches, but I have to be careful with it because if I'm in the trenches too much, well, then I'm just getting in the way, and I'm also not allowing myself to think about vision and strategy and execution that's needed for the firm. So there's certainly a balance.

But on the hiring side, we do a Monday meeting every Monday where we go through our candidates, we go through philosophy, we go through strategy, we go through cases that we've had during a week of how we would have handled them differently or how we could have been more intense with it. So I'm involved in all of that. I watch a lot of the interviews to give coaching to ensure that we're truly aligning with what we're trying to come across as because it's so important. It's basically sales for hiring. You have to train people to understand how to communicate with people to help them make a decision, whether it's us or someone else. So I'm very involved in that and, like I said, involved in all the final interviews. I fully believe that if anyone is a leader of an organization, if you are not part of hiring, you are making a huge mistake. Because if you're not the one responsible for the vision and the culture, I don't love that. I think that has to come from the person who has the most passion, the most...has been there the longest. I think there's a lot of value in having someone who fully gets it.

Using Multiple Synergistic Marketing Tactics To Add Hundreds Of Millions Of AUM Per Year [58:57]

Michael: So now let me take a big step back and zoom out a little bit further. So Joe, where does all the growth come from? You're hiring a bajillion people and like adding hundreds of millions of dollars of assets every year.

Joe: Yeah, we have a marketing machine. And so we have a lot of different funnels. YouTube has been a really prominent one we've had lately. By the time this episode airs, we'll probably have over 200,000 subscribers. It's just been growing rapidly and we get so many people that reach out to that. We have, right now on average, about 35 people a week who are qualified that reach out to us. We actually had 90 reach out to us one week, but it was just too much. So we had to weed them out. So we created a questionnaire on our website just to make it more specific. But we can't bring on 35 people a week. And these are all people that are coming from...I've written four books. And so three of those books, the "Midwestern Millionaire" we talked about. Another one I wrote is called "I Hate Taxes." Again, leaning into those conservative values typically. And then the other one is "The 2% Club," which is those with pensions and a million more saved. So we wrote books just about our content. And then I write for Kiplinger. So I do two articles a month for them on their Adviser Intel group. We do a lot of TV segments. We do a lot of workshops in the community. So we just go all into marketing. And so that's allowed us to continually have leads come in. And I'd actually consider ourselves like...people say we're a financial planning business. And I agree with that, but I actually think we're first a marketing business, then we're a hospitality business, then we're an IT business, then we're a hiring business. And then we are a financial planning business in order to really do this at scale. So that's kind of our mentality with that.

Michael: So help me understand further, what are you doing on YouTube? What are you doing with the books? I know plenty of folks who have tried to start a blog or a podcast or even gone down the path of writing a book, and they're not bringing in dozens of qualified leads per week. So what is it you're doing that's driving such outcomes?

Joe: High volume. We do three videos a week on YouTube. One of our KPIs for our marketing team... I don't give our marketing team a KPI and say, we need this ROI, we need this amount of leads. I don't look at things that way. I'm a big sports background. I always believe in trusting the process. So something we tell our marketing team is you just have to stay on the treadmill. So if we stay on the treadmill and we produce content regularly, it's going to start hitting, it's going to start building. It's going to start compounding and all of the results will come if we do that. I also feel like people mistake how hard it is to do good content. And you would understand this, Michael, because you do great content. Standing in front of a video and talking is not a skill set for everyone. And so I don't think everyone should go out and start a YouTube channel, even though so many people have success with it. But if you're not going to do well at it, you're not going to pick up traction.

And so in all of our content, I've done so much public speaking training. I've been a student of the game and learning how YouTube works. You've got to commit and go all in. But also, we keep things so simple. So our main marketing messaging, as I shared, we only talk about four things in marketing, and all of it just repeats, and we go into tangents on it. But we talk about our one-stop shop. So we do tax prep, we help facilitate estate planning, help with Medicare, do everything the client needs, all in one place. That's one marketing message. The other one's a "Midwestern Millionaire", those with a million-plus that are hardworking, frugal, diligent saver. The other one's a 2% Percent Club, which is those with pensions, a million-plus saved. The fourth is I Hate Taxes. So those are all the four books that I've written is on those messaging items, and we just keep it consistent. We keep it simple. We talk to our ideal client. And the biggest thing why I think we've had success is we keep it at a fourth-grade level. And people love simplicity and they can connect with it. And so that's just what we've leaned into.

Michael: So, can you tell us a little bit more about the nature of the videos themselves? What literally do you do? Is this 30-second snippets? Is this like 90-minute interviews? Is this 10-minute explainer videos? What do you do? You show up and get all these people engaging.

Joe: Yeah, we have an extremely good video editor, graphic designer. And they always joke, they say that they make me look good. I always joke with them and say, I think I make your guys' job easy. But I would not say it's because of my good looks or anything. But we typically do 15 to 20-minute videos on YouTube. We've found that shorts don't really work well for us and what we do. But just everything's educational. Everything is just me talking on some topics on those four points that I mentioned that are the problems that those people face. What are the questions they're asking our team? What are the concerns that people have in retirement? And we're talking about it and giving them some education and some takeaways that they can make sure they can implement there right after they watch.

Michael: So for folks who are listening who want to look at this more for themselves, this is episode 488. So if you go to kitces.com/488 and scroll down a little bit to the show notes, we'll have a link out to the Joe and Peak Retirement Planning's YouTube presence if you want to see more of what this looks like. Joe, how do you ultimately drive action off of these? If they're following you on YouTube and watching the videos, what's the next step to actually get them to show up as clients or as prospects, at least?

Joe: Yeah, trust the process. We've done over 500 YouTube videos. And so you just have to be consistent and you also just have to add value. No one's going to watch your content unless it's valuable for them. People don't just type in YouTube, "Find me a financial planner who can help me with this." No, it's like, "I want to learn more about Roth conversions. I want to learn more about pension planning." You've got to meet people where they are. And oftentimes, people don't reach out and schedule time with us until they've typically watched like 100 videos. So it takes a lot of time to build that momentum.

And starting YouTube was rough. You're going a year or two filming videos and you're just thinking to yourself, "What in the world am I doing? This is such a waste of time." And then all of a sudden a video goes viral and there you are. You've got leads coming in and it feels like the greatest thing in the world. But again, you've got to shovel manure in order to get there is something that we found. So I'd say just patience and just being thorough with it, but just perfecting your speaking skills. I've done hundreds and hundreds of speeches. I've done hundreds of times of critiquing others to just study what public speaking is to be successful at it and what's going to be engaging and connect with people. And so it's all the grit work it takes of success. Right? No one's successful overnight. Everyone watches YouTube and will be like, "Oh, my goodness, you just got 100,000 views on that YouTube video. One of your YouTube videos has almost a million views." It's like, yes, but I mean, it took a lot to do that video. It wasn't just me turning on the camera and saying, "Yeah, let's get a million views." No, it's like all of the work that came before that.

Michael: And ultimately, is there some kind of call to action? "If you want this help for you, schedule a meeting," or, "Download our e-book," or do you do a whole like funnel in that way, or are you solely living education and let them find their way to you of their own volition?

Joe: Yeah, so we do a lot of...we call them toolkits. So we give away a ton of our books. Just in Q1 of 2026, I think we gave close to 5,000 books away. And so people can request those and we just send them out to them for free or they can request the e-book or audio book or whatever it is. So we try to, again, add value. Everyone understands that concept. I don't ask for an appointment…probably once every five to 10 videos is all I do. And if someone wants to schedule a 15-minute call, I give them an option to. But it's not a sales call to action every single video. It's more of, hey, let's add value to you. And if you see that this is what you're looking for, you're going to reach out anyway. I don't need to sit there and beg you to reach out to us. And plus, we don't have the capacity for it anyway. But that's just kind of our mentality is just lead with education, lead with a servant's heart, and typically good things happen for all.

Michael: So per the earlier discussion, hiring started with external recruiters and came in. In the marketing context, is this external folks, internal, a mix of each? How have you staffed and allocated for this to make the marketing machine happen?

Joe: Yeah. So we insource everything we possibly can. So tax prep's internal. We believe that...maybe it's my lack of trust for humanity and the world. But I just feel like if you want excellence, you've got to do it yourself. And that's actually why I started Peak. I didn't want to start Peak. I started Peak at a young age and I was just like looking around and I was trying to find a place to work. And I just couldn't find anyone that did it the right way. And so I'm like, all right, well, if you want change, go do it yourself. And so we've just kind of committed to that mentality. So every role, everything we do is all in-house. Full-time graphic designer, full-time video editor, full-time marketing people. Everything is off my plate. And so they are just incredible operators, incredible workers. And so I just step into the studio. I record. All I do is tell one of our team members, "Hey, I'm going to record. Let's make sure the focus is good on the cameras, make sure lights are good." I sit down, they get it set, I just record. And so they take care of everything else from there. And if you don't delegate those items, it's going to be misery. When I first started the YouTube channel, I couldn't even figure out how you upload the thing from your iPhone to your computer. I was like, "How in the world do I get this thing to YouTube?" I tried doing it, it said file too big. And it's like, this is a mess. And then like, how do I get the audio to come through the right way? And so learn a lot. But more than anything, just learn to hire people that understand it so you don't have to learn it.

Michael: So how do you know what you're saying? Are they scripting things for you? Are you just kind of naturally gifted and have enough of these conversations with clients that you know what you want to talk and teach to?

Joe: Yeah, I just talk. It's just like...and again, you said gifted. I'm not, I wouldn't say I'm more gifted than anyone else in that room. I think anyone can do it if you just put in enough reps. And so I've done enough reps to get comfortable in front of a video. But yeah, if someone does video for the first time, it's going to be really bad. They're going to be nervous. They're going to be weird. When you look into a camera and talk, it's different. And so, just getting good at that. But yeah, just reps with it.

Michael: So when you talk about a 40-person team, how big is the marketing team? How many of the people are supporting the growth side?

Joe: Yeah. So right now, again, it's changing. We've got three people that are joining us for marketing here soon. But like over the last six months, we've had technically probably three full-time people in that role. And that's really it. And then we have a couple of people that help out with like events and stuff here and there. But it's a lean, efficient...and I'll tell a story too. One of our marketing people started with us. And they came in with like, "Hey, here's all these ideas. Here's all these things I want to do. I think this is going to work." And I just told them straight up. I said, "Those are terrible ideas." I said, "Do not talk for 90 days." I said, "I don't want any ideas for 90 days. I want you to lock in and learn what we do. I want you to ask me a lot of questions," because I've gone through all of the failures and I've gone through all the successes of what works and what doesn't. And I would consider us a master marketer in our industry of what we're doing. And they got it. They said, "Yeah, that makes sense." Ninety days in, we were trucking and we didn't chase shiny objects. We just leaned into all the things that we're currently doing and we built systems and processes to do it at scale. And so everyone's like, "Man, you must have a team of 10 people." No, we're just really efficient. And we've got those A-plus players we're talking about that can work very well, have a high capacity for stress, and we can just get things done. But it's really streamlined. It's really streamlined when you can get things built the right way.

Michael: So what are the three seats? Is it literally a video person, a graphics person, and a "make all the things happen" manager, leader, person coordinating the other two?

Joe: Yep, yep, yep. Pretty much. And then the current two team members on graphic design and video, they help out with some other things as well, right now on the marketing side, just to ensure that things are... delegated and all spread around. So everyone's busy, of course. We're going to be adding a couple more, two or three more team members that should be joining here in the next month in that department. But it's not because they're needed. It's just for us to get ahead of growth and for us to be able to tackle more opportunities. And so that's more than anything.

Michael: What do you add in that department now? What are the seats or roles that are getting added on?

Joe: The biggest thing we want in that role at this time is just people who understand data. Like I said, we don't really like hiring creative people in marketing. Some firms like that, but we just don't want to be creative in marketing. Do what works, keep it simple. And so we want people that understand data to make small tweaks that make the ever-changing difference in what we do. That's the biggest thing at this point. And just, again, we hire entry-level people to start, so people that just can grow and give them some time to grow without having to be overly valuable right away. That is kind of the structure we have as well.

Michael: So, how do you think about spending in a marketing role? Do you do paid ads and lead gen and those other types of things where there's sort of a dollar spend to get the activity directly? Or is your spend all the team it takes to do the content-y things and try to scale that end?

Joe: Yeah, most of the content stuff, it's just more of the time it takes at this point. For example, doing two Kiplinger articles a month, it takes time to write those well. The YouTube videos take a lot of time to get those looking well. We do a lot of workshops in the community, so that takes some time to organize and get those booked and all that fun stuff there. So, yeah, that's kind of the role, but it's just more so perfecting what we're doing and just ensuring the content gets out there.

Michael: And is there like an allocation or a goal you target? "We want to spend 10% of revenue on marketing things," or "We want a client acquisition cost of no more than X dollars." Is there framing in that end that you use to try to figure out how much are you allocating or what defines marketing success?

Joe: Yeah, I would love to spend more money than what we are, put it that way. I'm a big believer that if you want to make money, you got to spend money. I think that's a huge concept. If you have a vending machine and you can put in $1 and get $10 back, I think we need to find more ways to put more dollars in that vending machine. We try to do that. The problem, though, is we just don't have the capacity from an advisor standpoint. We can't really continue spending more money on digital ads or whatever the shiny objects are out there right now, because it's just like we don't...we're not going to just add a ton of clients just because we can. I know our brand is so great at this point that we could add a ton of people, a ton of clients. But if clients aren't getting served well, that's where my heart is. And I just don't care about...because we actually started...we tried to open up offices all across the country to kind of get to your point of, hey, how do we stretch this marketing spend? We know workshops work. How do we just do them in every city in the country? The problem was is that you get people that go out to another office away from your office. They're going to do things however they want, and it's not going to align with the culture. And we're too particular to have that happen. And so we just found that people were kind of starting their own version of Peak. And it's like, yeah, that's just not going to work. And so we actually tried to open an office in another location and pretty much had 100% turnover with everyone we hired there and no success and lost lots of money. So we just learned our lesson. Let's stay focused. Let's do what works. And let's just not try to stretch this thing, just do it the right way.

Offering In-House Insurance Services For Clients [1:16:30]

Michael: So now I want to come all the way back to the discussion earlier about team size and structure. And I guess just trying to understand how the business model works for you and where revenue comes from, because as fast as growth has been, I usually don't see 40 headcount at $600 million of AUM, just given what AUM fees typically are. So, are there other revenue sources for you besides the AUM side of the business?

Joe: Yeah, so we do...with the one-stop shop, one part of our firm is insurance planning. So it's not a super heavy part of our business. Whenever you can think of insurance, you can think of very sleazy people out there that only try to sell insurance products. And I think that's something that we fully believe in is that in order for us to be the best firm out there, we have to be completely independent, which means that the fee-based approach is what I feel is the best. I think a lot of people would say, "Hey, I think fee-only is, you have no conflicts of interest. You're not going to be forced to to sell an insurance product at a commission." And I understand why they say that, because there's a lot of just bad people out there that only do insurance for the commission, which leads to bad things. But if someone believes an insurance product is right for someone, why would you say like, "Hey, you've got to go down the street to get this insurance product from an insurance salesperson?" Why wouldn't you just be able to do that in your office where you're at?

So we do annuity planning for a portion of our business. we work with a retirement crowd who wants some protected. Again, most of our clients have pensions, million-plus, so they don't need as much protected. So out of the assets that come over to us, maybe 10% to 20% of it would go towards an insurance product of some sort that we can get a guaranteed rate of return or we can get market protection. And some of these insurance products, you can net 5% returns right now. So a lot of people like that concept of, "Hey, I can tie up my money for a period of time. I want more of that. I don't want bonds where, hey, different things can happen at different times. I don't want Treasuries where now your 1% fee has to come out of that. Now my net return's not 5%, it's maybe 3.5% or 3% at this point." So that's something that we have just found a lot of value and clients just really like the idea.

But we never push any products on people. I know some people out there are like, "Hey, if you don't do this annuity, you can't work with us." Yeah, if a client doesn't want to do an annuity, we don't have to. We have different options to choose from. But I've just found that people really like that concept. And we can do life insurance, we can do Medicare, so we can help them with all areas. We don't do a ton of life insurance just because our clients don't necessarily need that, they're pretty much self-insured. But they want to do some high-level legacy planning, tax-free benefit. If they really high net worth, look at like ILITs [Irrevocable Life Insurance Trusts], things like that, we can always help with some of those items.

What Surprised Joe The Most Building His Business [1:19:28]

Michael: So what surprised you the most on this journey of building and like rapidly sizing up an advisory business?

Joe: Yeah. I just I think that where we're at now, I just would have never expected it to get there that soon, obviously. I just remember starting the firm and you're having sleepless nights till 1 a.m. and just trying to do everything you can to just get to that first $10 million. I just remember when I started the firm, I had nothing. And I just remember saying like, man, if I get to $10 million, that's $100,000 of revenue. Man, I'll be in a place where I can make this thing work. And then you look back and you're like, "Oh, wait, we have 60 times that. And it's been just over four years." And so it's been pretty fun, just journey. And I've just noticed that every time we've hired someone that has been great, our team has just continued to grow and be better. And it's just really exciting when we add a great team member because it's like, all right, we're just going to continue to grow and be better. And so I'd say that's it. And changing the way I think, just changing the way of...I just remember in the early days, I was so afraid to spend a dollar. I was so afraid to hire someone. I was so afraid to do all the things that truly make scale work and just leaning into that. And you learn so much as you go.

Michael: So what changed that you, early on, were afraid to spend the dollar and reinvest and now it's not so much of a blocking point?

Joe: Yeah, I just think everything, every little hire you make. When you're at that point, you're just questioning like, man, am I going to be able to make this work? That plus just all the marketing spend and the office space, you know? When we bought an office, like, "Man, this is a big expense. I hope this works." Right? So all those types of things. But then you realize, well, it's an investment. It's not a cost. It's an investment.

The Low Point On Joe's Journey [1:21:30]

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

Joe: You know, if anything, the lowest point of my journey was not when I started the organization, it was before I did. When I had to work at other places that I wasn't aligned with it was miserable. And that's why I try to tell people like, go places that you can find value, that you can find a great opportunity for growth. And I really felt like, I don't know if this is the best way to put it, like a caged animal at some of the other places I was at. Literally at one place, I probably worked like 20, 30 hours a week. And that was like me trying to find work. I actually was like so bored. I just went out and did an Ironman. I was like, "I don't even know what to do with my time." And so I just think finding full fulfillment in your career where you have a true why and a true purpose to serve, it's like, man, it's just all the challenges, all the hard times, you're just grateful for them because you know what comes from it.

Joe's Advice For His Younger Self And For Newer Advisors [1:22:26]

Michael: So what do you know now with the wisdom of experience that you wish you could go back and tell you at the start of your career when you were first coming into the profession?

Joe: I ask our team often, I say, what are we doing now that in 10 years we'll look back and just be like, "Wow, we were silly." So that's pretty much what you're asking. But yeah, if anything, it's just lean into who we are. That was some of the advice my dad gave me. My dad's been a big part of my journey. He was never in financial planning, but just a huge entrepreneur mindset. He really taught me how to think and act in business. And I think in order for someone to do what we're doing, you have to have that education, that mentor, that experience to just be wired differently. And so one of the advice he told me is just like, "Do what got you here." This was really early in the organization when I started to have success and a lot of people were saying, "Hey, do this. Do that." He's like, "Just do what got you here. Lean into who you are, believe in yourself, and just do that." And we talked about that a lot today with just the values. And when we started leaning into that and actually making it known what our belief system was and who we are, like, we saw things really take off.

And I think early on in my career, too, I tried to be everyone else. Great thing about your setup, Michael, with the platform you have is that you can reach a lot of people and help them grow. One of the negatives of it is you can get people that chase shiny objects and think like, I want to be them. I want to do what they're doing. I'm going to talk like they are. And if it doesn't come across genuinely, it's not going to work. And so, so many times I'm like, "I want to do what they're doing. They're successful." And then I try and it just wasn't me. And so, again, just leaning into who I am, leaning into my personality, leaning into my values. That's what I wish I would have known earlier. If I could have done that, I think we could have probably even grown quicker and even had more impact.

Michael: So, what advice would you give younger, newer advisors coming into the profession today?

Joe: Yeah, this is something I'm really passionate about is just serving and helping young advisors grow because I've been there. And there's truly not a lot of resources out there for young advisors. It's kind of like there's not a ton of internship opportunities. You just kind of have to figure it out. I had a mentor, very blessed to have this lady be a mentor of mine. She was in the business for 40 years. The advice that she gave me, which I'll give everyone that I ever talk to is, "Shovel manure for the first three years in the industry." She said, "If you can shovel manure for three years, you will always be successful. You will always make great money. You will always have great influence. You will always have great expertise if you just are willing to stick it out because so many people aren't willing to stick out the hard times and they move on to something else without truly seeing their true impact." So we always say stay on the treadmill. We say take the stairs instead of the escalator.

And then the other advice I have for them is just plug in to a growing RIA that does things the right way. Man, I can't tell our team this enough. I tell them every day. They're probably sick of me telling them by now. Like, "You guys are going to get taken care of." When you can join a firm that's growing at the pace we are, there is unlimited rewards financially, professionally, personally. Just exciting. And there's so many firms out there like us and a marketplace that is just in need of great advisors. Just plug into a place that's going to do the right thing for you, that's going to give you opportunities, that's not just going to put you on the sideline and hope for the best. Man, just plug in. And just so many great things are happening.

And just the biggest advice, too, is just grow up fast, you know, become professional as soon as you can. Just be very aware of how you're coming across and just understand the influence you can have at a very early age.

What Success Means To Joe [1:26:31]

Michael: So as we come to the end, this is a podcast about success, and one of the themes that always comes up is just literally that word success means different things to different people. And so you're on this incredible growth path with the firm as you cruise at rocket ship speed towards towards $1 billion of AUM soon enough. So it seems the business is in a wonderfully successful place. How do you define success for yourself personally at this point?

Joe: Yeah, as a believer, I've already won just knowing Jesus Christ died on the cross for my sins to give me eternal life. Man, it just makes life easier after that point. So this doesn't necessarily burden me. I still have a purpose here in this world in the meantime. And so two of my biggest whys at this point it's just the team. I know I've emphasized it all day, but like I just care about the people I work with, and I just know that they sacrifice a lot for our clients and for other team members. And I just want them forever to be rewarded for that and, you know, just use this as an experience that we can always remember. And I just I love being able to bring someone in off the street with no industry experience and just turning them into a rock star. And again, that's not all me. A lot of that is on them and the work they put in, and our team's efforts there. It's just exciting to see it and just allow them to truly live out their purpose at a place where they can do it.

And then I just say the next thing at this point, I've really started to gain a purpose for just teaching young people how to work. I think it's so needed right now. I think that our society, especially the secular society, can just tell people to not work hard. It's not a virtue. It's not something important. And I just think it's leading to so many issues. We need to have purpose in our life. And when you tell people not to get that through their work, they're going to get depressed, they're going to have anxiety, they're going to have issues. And I just think the more we lean into that idea, it's like, you know, this should be a good place to do something good. And that's something I've gotten a lot of excitement with, with all the college speaking and hiring young people and just helping them do it the right way. They can easily be influenced. Young crowd can easily be influenced. And so I just hope to be a positive voice for them there. And, of course, my why is serving clients and impacting the industry. But I just know those first two are the things that are most important to me.

Michael: I love it. I love it. Well, thank you, Joe, for joining us on the "Financial Advisor Success" podcast.

Joe: Yeah. Thanks, Michael. Thanks for having us.

Michael: Thank you.