Evolving Your Leadership Style And Hiring Process As The Firm Grows From 1 To 20+ Team Members: #FASuccess Ep 451 With Maggie Kulyk

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Resources Featured In This Episode:

• Maggie Kulyk: Website | LinkedIn
• Integrating Money and Meaning: Practices for a Heart-Centered Life by Maggie Kulyk
• #FASuccess Ep 035: Investing In Your CRM And Your Team To Systematically Grow Your Advisory Business with Cheryl Holland
• Kolbe
• The Externship
• B Corporation
• FP Transitions

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Full Transcript:

Michael: Welcome, Maggie Kulyk to the "Financial Advisor Success" podcast.

Maggie: Michael, I am delighted to be with you. I've been a fan for years and so this is very exciting for me. Thank you for having me.

Michael: I so appreciate it. I'm excited to have you on to join us and get to talk about your journey, your growth journey of, I think, just what it takes to really size up the business, size up your team as an advisor. Because I find most of us, we get into the advice business because we have some interest in personal finance, like to set goals and help others achieve goals, and some desire and motivation to serve others. And usually not because we're drawn to hire and train and manage and retain staff. The staffing part is still an inevitable reality that if you have really high client retention rates and you keep adding more because the word-of-mouth builds that at some point there will be more clients that we can personally handle and you have to start adding to your team to create support. And then if you pass enough time, there's eventually so many clients that even with your team to support you, you still have too many clients. And so then we need other lead advisors so they can handle clients, and then they need teams built them around as well. And now you have a team of teams and then the firm has to get good. How do you actually attract the right people and develop them and retain them?

And I know you have very much lived this journey from solo stage starting out as we all do into a 20-plus person team today. So I'm excited to talk about this evolution and how you've navigated this path as you go from hiring your first team member many years ago to 20-plus team today and the lessons learned along the way about how you actually solve this people, hiring, retention thing that we have to figure out as we size up the business.

Maggie: Well, I'm delighted to share the trials and tribulations of that journey. There are many.

What Chicory Wealth Looks Like Today [04:56]

Michael: So I think to kick us off, I'd actually love to hear a little bit about the advisory firm that exists today. We'll spoiler alert this story first about where it is and then go back and talk about the journey of how it evolved to get to where it is.

Maggie: Sure, sure. So where we exist today is, as of next week, we will actually be 21 total team members. We have a client service team. We have a tax team. And we have three advisory teams led by three lead advisors, two level-one advisors, I'll explain more what I mean by that, two level-two advisors, and one associate with another scheduled to join in September. So that will take us to 22. And one person who...a full-time marketing and shareholder engagement person, a full-time client onboarding specialist/new client relationship manager, and someone who also just functions as my, what do we call her, director of analytics/chief of staff really. So yeah, it's crazy.

Michael: Is it strange just to like...

Maggie: Who saw that coming? Yeah...

Michael: ...say all those teams and roles when you actually say them all out loud?

Maggie: I almost had to pull up our website to go...

Michael: You just remember all the people and roles…

Maggie: I remember all the humans. It's just to think about all the role...yeah, for sure. It's really kind of crazy to me that this happened. So I'm happy about it, but it's still kind of amazing. Anyhow, yes.

Michael: So help us understand by how many clients, revenue, or AUM, however you want to...

Maggie: Yeah, sure, sure. So client households, in the 480 range. AUM, about, depending on the day, as you well know, about $760 million. Revenue, we're tracking to a little north of $5 million.

Michael: Okay, Okay. So that helps us understand where where we are today. So amazing firm and metrics, multiple advisor teams, because we've got to handle 480 clients. You know, if I do the math, $5 million of revenue in total, and then if I divide that into 20, 21 team members, I get right around $250,000 of revenue per employee, which is very good, healthy, typical number that we see for firms at the size that they're approaching a billion. So team and metrics, all of it seems to really jive well, that it's going well. So now let's talk a little bit about the team journey to go from Maggie someday many years ago hung her own shingle to give people advice.

Maggie: Right. Right. Exactly.

Maggie's Path To Firm Ownership [08:22]

Michael: Now there's 21 people in the firm. So where did it start?

Maggie: Well, by accident in a lot of ways. So the first thing to know is that I was...you describe a lot of people that get into the business sort of like to give advice and sort of into personal finance. I was like, "I really hate money. I don't really want anything to do with it." I worked briefly in my family business when I...six or seven years when I graduated from college. For reasons that are too long to explain and not obvious, I wound up getting a master's in divinity from Emory, Candler School of Theology at Emory University. I had no obvious career path to ordination, which is what one does when one has a master's in divinity. So instead, thought I would be a professor of religion, applied into the Ph.D. program in the Department of Religion at Emory, was accepted, studied there, finished all but dissertation. And again, for reasons that relate to my personal life, not being able to leave Atlanta, suddenly being in a blended family with four kids, very complex, I found myself without a career path probably right around 2000, end of 2000, 2001, I would say. So I just had...

Michael: Okay. So coming off tech crash environment.

Maggie: Yeah, right.

Michael: Job market is not great for anything at this point. We are right on a recession, in a recessionary environment at that point.

Maggie: Exactly. So I wound up having this sort of interesting experience, one might even call it...sorry to call it, it's true. It's almost a mystical experience of like, get up and deal with your money. And I was just like, what? Like, you don't even do money. What are we talking about? And then I sort of stumbled into this idea that one could do financial planning. And so I had this image of doing pastoral care with money, actually, I thought, what can I do? And I grew up in a family business, as I said. That family business is still alive and well, although I am no longer a shareholder. And the business will be, I think, 125 years old this summer.

So I had a sense that...I had a kind of innate entrepreneurial spirit, right? Even if you're going to be a professor in something, you do your own research, you belong to a larger institution, but you're doing your own thing. Anyhow, I thought, what can I do where I could eventually have my own small little business? So I took my vita...I made it a resume. I sent it into cyberspace, monster.com, as I recall. And I get a call from a guy...so I was living in Decatur, Georgia at the time. I get a call from a guy up in Alpharetta, Georgia, which is 45 minutes north from what was then American Express Financial Advisors. So I go up. They give me a personality test. They have me do a role play where I'm a travel agent helping clients budget how much they can spend on this or that. They ask me questions about my natural market. What natural market?

Michael: Oh, you came from a family business…

Maggie: That's good. Right. Yeah, exactly. So by this time, Michael, I'm nearly...I'm 40, I think. And they send me off to do my Health and Life and [Series] 6 and...or, excuse me, 7 and 63. And I do all those things and I come back, and on July 5th of 2002, so just a few days ago, 23 years ago, they hire me. And I go "client ready" on August 21, 2002. And I have 30 clients in 30 days, having no idea what the hell to do with them.

Michael: Where did you get 30 clients in 30 days?

Maggie: Right. Great question.

Michael: That's a lot.

Maggie: So here's what happened. So remember, I'm 40, right. And I've been...I know a lot...by this time, I've been around Emory for ten-plus years. And in the Atlanta area, I'm active in my religious community at the time, etc. And when I knew that I was going to do this thing, I started taking people to coffee and saying, "I'm going to do this thing. And you may not be interested, but you might know people who are interested." And I kind of have this...I know a lot of people really find money, kind of there's a big ick factor, so do I. Just I just started talking to people who were like me, really. And the timing actually worked out that you raise precisely because I was seeing people coming into my office who literally had not opened their brokerage statement, for example, in months, and we would sit together and open it. They were terrified. So it was actually a great time for people either who had never had advice go, "Oh, well, maybe I should do this. I really like her. I've known her a long time," or B, "Oh, I've been dealing with this guy and he never called me during the...He never..." I learned a lot from that, "He never called me," line, by the way, which comes in later. And so, now, was I ready to deal with them? Was I a CFP? Was I...? No, Michael. I was none of those things.

Michael: You had your Life and Health and Series 7 and 63, your license. You're legit.

Maggie: I did. But what did attract me to...in all sincerity, what attracted me to American Express at the time was right at the beginning of where they were transitioning from sell these products to, "Hey, if you want to work with people on a fee basis, you can do it. And oh, by the way, you should really be doing financial planning and you really should be charging for financial planning." So I took them at their word. I did that and people gravitated to that. And so, yeah. So then we become Ameriprise, as you know, in 2005. And what was really a solo business with some support continued to grow on a fee-based…and by the time I leave Ameriprise, fast forward many years later, we're 95% fee-based. So, yeah.

Michael: So what was the first 30 days business, though? Was that just anybody I can meet and do any kind of anything with me?

Maggie: A few of those clients, probably...I'd have to go back and check, but there are a handful that are still with me to this day. There were people I knew that had been friends or our friends. They were people that I had met through my work at Emory. Graduate people I was graduate students with, but maybe one of the spouses wasn't just a graduate student, had already had a career. So, yeah, there were a handful that could just fog a mirror, but a couple of those came and didn't last. And they came from here's the stack of people you should call because somebody asked about something ten years ago and you can call them legitimately kind of thing. But the people that were in my network, they stuck.

Michael: Which you had gotten to by starting the networking before you even got fully licensed on board just to say, "I'm going to become a financial advisor. You may not be interested, but you might know people who are," and talking a little bit about your journey and your philosophy.

Maggie: My philosophy of money, which is, "Oh, God, it makes me nauseous. Does it make you nauseous? I understand. Let's see if we can do this together." Really.

Michael: Yeah?

Maggie: Yeah, exactly. And so, like attracts like. And which is why, as you know, this business of serving people in this way can take so many different forms and attract so many...have so many different niches. But I was fortunate enough to, from the very beginning, attract people that I really resonated with in a lot of ways, emotionally, politically, which we'll get into in a minute, sort of worldview. So, yeah. Yeah.

Challenges Maggie Faced With Her Early Hiring [16:58]

Michael: So when did it get to the point that it was too much for just Maggie to handle and you had to actually start hiring someone and get someone to help? Like, when did that page of the journey begin?

Maggie: Well, right from the get go, it was me and a copy machine, right? Because these were the days where everything was...When I think back on it, it just kind of makes my stomach hurt, all of the paper and all of that stuff. But so American Express, one of the things, again, that I was attracted to of their model at the time was that if you got to a certain level of business, you could become a franchisee. So you could run your own franchise. And I really wanted that because I didn't want to be schlepping it up to Alpharetta, which in traffic in Atlanta in those days and still today could be 45 minutes up and an hour and a half back to where I was living.

Michael: So franchisee meant open your own branch location...

Maggie: Correct.

Michael: That was the trigger. This isn't like I'm an entrepreneurial journey to scale my franchise. This is I want to open a branch location near where I am and not have to schlep up to Alpharetta and back.

Maggie: Exactly. And you change from having an employee status to a contractor status because you genuinely were no longer technically, well, really in any way their employee. So the whole compensation structure shifts. And what comes with it is you're basically a business owner. You're a small business owner, which suited me fine. And I was able to do that. So I started in August of 2002. By January of 2004, I became a franchisee. And I had a little office in some friend's tax firm that had an extra office I could use. And they were very kind to me. They rented this space to me. It was near where I lived. And they were also very kind and telling some of their tax clients, "Hey, this person's in our office, we're not financially connected, but she's there," etc., etc.

So by that time, by that January, I needed to get some help. And I remember vividly before this happened, when I was still schlepping it up to Alpharetta, and I was with a cohort of young advisors, young as in just starting out, some of whom are actually quite young, some were 20 years my junior, some people were my age. Somebody said, "Well, what's your goal? Do you want to have a big firm?" And I was like, "Oh, God, no, the last thing I want is to have to deal with managing anybody." This is not on my agenda. And the truth is, for years and years when I would hire someone, I would say to them, and this is a direct quote, "If I have to manage you, I am going to have to fire you." Because, first of all, I had no idea what that meant, really. I had no interest in learning what it meant. And I was just very involved in focusing on my clients.

I was just working my ass off, and I did for years, ten years of 20 or 25 meetings a week, back to back to back to back. And so the people I hired were really, really by any other name, client service folks, right, who would help with paperwork, etc. I did, throughout that ten year period, attempt to bring in other advisors to potentially take some of the business, but maybe also act as a somewhat operations role. And I was terrible as a boss and I was terrible as someone who could hire. I was just uniquely bad at it.

Michael: I wasn't just bad, I was uniquely bad.

Maggie: I was uniquely bad. I was bad in a very special way. I just was like...not that these people were bad people, but I could not...I didn't have the bandwidth to train them. We didn't have good systems. It was a mess.

Michael: Can you I guess expand on that further? Just not to totally dwell the negative, what wasn't working? When you say it was terrible, what happened? What wasn't working?

Maggie: Well, so I will say I made...the best hire I made that really stuck was a young woman who remained with me for probably nearly 15 years. And she really ran the...we were all in person at that time. We're 100% virtual now, but we were all in person. She was at the front desk, the meet and greet, the background paperwork, the expediter of business through home office, which you can imagine. I don't know if you're...you're younger than me, so you may not remember all the battle days of all of the…home office, right?

Michael: I started in the business right around when you did. So I still remember the paperwork...

Maggie: The NIGO [Not In Good Order], right?

Michael: The NIGOs, we mailed it. Okay, we can fax another copy of it.

Maggie: Yeah, we can't find it because we separated it somewhere in the mail room and it will never be reunited again. So all of that, all of the way in which I didn't have discretion over accounts. So any kind of changes or rebalancing had to be done within moments of meeting with the clients so that...I was just like, "Oh Lord." So she was great, a real steady presence, a lovely presence. And she worked with me for many, many years. She was a really good hire. I would say some of the advisors I brought in...and what I learned from this was advisors who were not themselves, to be frank, super successful as advisors, but came with sort of small books. And what I took from that and learned later was I did not have a good experience of bringing in people who had been not great advisors and had small books because it turned out I wasn't comfortable, I think, in it.

And I want to own that I was not comfortable turning over clients to them. It didn't have the comfort level. Now, was that them or was that me? I would say it was at least 60% me, maybe more. I think I was at a place in my journey where my relationships with my clients were so intimate that the idea of even having somebody else in my meeting taking notes was something I could barely tolerate. I really couldn't tolerate. So there was a kind of like...which was both positive, but it's not hard to hear the negatives of that, right, Michael?

Michael: Yeah. The good news is I have these amazing relationships with my clients and we're well-connected, and they retain, and we drive our fees and grow our business. And at some point I'm chained to them a prison because I can't transition any of them to anyone else and I'm running out of time in the day.

Maggie: Right. I was 80 or 90 hours a week. And the negative of that is my kids at the time were anywhere, when I first started in the business, from two to nine. And if you're hearing this, folks who are listening, you need to understand that my life is slightly different than the average woman's. These were all adopted kids and I was married to a woman and that woman did an enormous amount of the childcare. So gentlemen, for those of you listening, for your wives that are doing a tremendous amount of the childcare, that was more my life than...because I want to be fair. Women listening to this who are more traditional wives and mothers would be like, "What are you talking about? How is that possible?" That's how that was possible. So women who are advisors, you need to get at least one additional wife into your life because you're going to need it.

Michael: We had a wonderful advisor on many years ago named Cheryl Holland, early pioneering woman business owner in the NAPFA world in particular. And I remember the discussion with her, this is probably seven or eight years ago, but she had said at the time, the household obligations plus the business obligations were becoming so difficult that Cheryl said, "I had to hire a wife. I hired a wife to do all the things that I can't do as the wife of the couple because I'm also the primary breadwinner of the couple as well, and this just isn't working." So she hired a wife. Problem solved.

Maggie: I lucked into marrying one, but yes, exactly, who also had her own career, and not insubstantial career, I also want to add, but it had more flexibility at the time than mine did.

Finding A Key Team Member With Complementary Strengths [26:36]

But anyhoo, so it was a lot and it didn't seriously change until about about 13 years ago where by, in many ways, luck and the good fortune of having put out there and into the universe to some of my fellow Ameriprise advisors that I was really looking to hire that other kind of stabilizing other advisor. And so my now colleague of many years, whose name is Mary Shaltis, had been a CPA in her prior life and also a CFO for a real estate group in Atlanta. And upon the death of her father, in attempting to help her mother, in true Mary fashion if you knew her, decided what she needed to do was go get a CFP because she was amazed at the complexity of what her family situation was and she wanted to understand it. So she goes to get a CFP, decides she wants to come into the business, has a contact with another fellow advisor of mine in Atlanta, goes to talk to her. Her name is Margaret. Interestingly, Margaret. Margaret, who is not hiring, calls me and says, "You got to hire Mary Shaltis. She's the one."

So I meet with Mary Shaltis, who has met with several other firms, realizing quickly that most of these other firms are actually really just product salespeople, frankly. And she's attracted to my firm, at the time, and she comes to work for me and is as different from me as you could be...we share the same values. We share the same worldview. But from a personality standpoint and from how one works, think Kolbe here, right? If you know the Kolbe, it couldn't be more different, very systematic, classic CPA, very attention to detail, attention to processes and procedures. And she comes in and she's kind of like, "Oh my God." And I'm like, "Yeah, Mary, I've been waiting for you all my life to show up and help me organize this." And so it's at that point...

Michael: Mary's going to be high fact finder, high follow through in Kolbe world.

Maggie: Exactly. And so it needs time to process, not like me, very classic. I'm a nine on the...what is the entrepreneurial one?

Michael: Quick Start.

Maggie: Quick Start, I'm a nine. And so she begins to lend some structure and order to the place. And she's about my age. She's had a lot of life experience. And I begin to be quite comfortable transitioning certain clients, particularly of a certain kind of personality type, over to Mary and she does great with them, and that just creates just enough space that then I begin to have the bandwidth to do some hiring of some younger team members. So by this point, I'm looking at how old I am. I'm not that old, but I'm not that young. And I really, really wanted to continue to grow.

And I had been in conversation, mostly just out of a favor...I had a client of mine who had a son who was...I think he started coming to talk to me about financial planning when he was 16 or 17 years old. He was one of these guys who fell out of the bed and realized he was going to be in finance. Again, quite different from me. His name was Jacob Newcomer. He just crossed his ten-year anniversary with us yesterday or over the weekend. So I started talking to Jacob when he was just a kid and then when he was in college. And he graduated from college and he was torn because I could have hired him then, but I didn't have to have him, but I was willing to hire him. Or he could go do a job with Siemens. And I said, "Go do the corporate thing. Because if you don't do the corporate thing, you're going to always wonder if you should have done the corporate thing." So he goes and does that. And within about 18 months, maybe two years, he calls me up from the parking lot of wherever he was, he's like, "I really want to come to work for you. Do you have space?" I'm like, "Absolutely." So he starts working.

Shortly thereafter, I hire another young man, who's not so young anymore, named Daniel McNabb who comes to work with us being a...he's a trader and now he's our chief investment officer. And then a few years after that, I hire another young man who is friends with both of these guys. So you see initially the hiring, at this point, the second level, this next gen becomes a kind of networking thing. It's people I know and have known who I hire and then train from the ground up. I paid for their CFPs and their training for their CFPs, totally homegrown, this next group. And of course I would be remiss to not say my now client service manager, whose name is Paul Grabhorn, who is also my son, who started being scan boy when he was 19 years old is now the...he had a little tiny hovel part time by the copy machine. So that next wave is all these close in next-gen people I've known or whose families I know or whatever, which by the way was probably very dangerous, but happened to work out extremely well for me at that moment in time.

Michael: So I guess question or two here, even in getting to this moment where you got to this stage. So, I guess, what was the state of the business by the time Mary was joining you and coming on board in, I guess, I think you said 13 years ago, so 2012 or so? You said you were working a billion hours.

Maggie: How big were we, etc? Yeah.

Michael: Yeah. You're working a bajillion hours a week, really. Can you paint the picture a little bit more of the state of the business?

Maggie: So I remember distinctly at my own ten-year anniversary, I crossed the...so ten years in, so that would have been 2012, right? I, crossed the $100 million under management, $1 million in revenue number. And I remember thinking that was a big deal to get there in ten years. So I remembered that vividly. I'm not kidding, Michael, when I say I have a very large almost blur of the distinctions of some of that time period, almost PTSD, honestly. Because I just worked all the time, right? So by the time Mary comes aboard, we're bigger than that…so I don't know, what are we? We're maybe at $110 million, ish, maybe a little bit more, and I have also...I should say I hired another really kind of call it client service person. Paul wasn't yet really client service. He was really still working part time.

Hiring Staff To Manage The Operations And New Services Of A Growing Firm [34:14]

Michael: I was going to say, what was the team around you at this point? It sounds because you couldn't find the additional advisor that worked for you, team was all the kind of client services administrative team.

Maggie: Correct. It was.

Michael: It's you, three support staff around you making you as super efficient as you can, doing a million dollars of revenue, but working a bajillion hours because you're still the only advisor who can actually do all the advisor things. And so, team can only leverage you up so far before you're also just sheerly running out of time.

Maggie: Correct. Really it's mostly me and Jessica up until that first million, really.

Michael: And do you recall or any sense, how many clients was it? I assume you were probably about volume.

Maggie: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm going to benchmark this. It was probably 140 maybe households, ish.

Michael: Okay. So you actually had a healthy size client household list. This was not a suite of 400 clients with $200,000.

Maggie: No, no. Like everybody, it's gotten larger over the years, but in general, we still mostly, I like to say, work with what I refer to as garden variety millionaires, the millionaire next door. So maybe, probably our sweet spot is two to five, but we do have the occasional ten or 15 or 20, but it's very occasional. We still work mostly with people who've mostly earned their money. Some of them have inherited some of it. School teachers, public service folks. Remember, in Atlanta, we had...had, still have, hopefully, the CDC, things of this nature. So, university professors. Yeah.

Michael: So out of curiosity, were you good at finding natural fit people who could do this or are we just hearing the end point survivors of that system because you had trouble finding these friends, family networking connections that worked and these were the few who just happened to survive through that process?

Maggie: The people in the prior, say pre-first 12 years where I made mistakes is where I was trying to...I was listening to people, consultants saying appropriately, "Mag, you're ceiling. Mag, you're killing yourself. You've got to bring in another advisor. How about this person? How about that person? Oh, I think they'd be a good fit." And so I would try it and it wouldn't work.

So I think that these homegrown folks...because the Jacob and the Daniel and the Dan I described come in after Mary, right, after Mary has arrived and things are starting to stabilize. They continue to stick and work. And there's this small core team that begins to form, which is the team that ultimately leaves Ameriprise at the end of 2017. And those folks stuck and that worked even though I didn't have and hadn't done all the things one might need to do to really then begin to scale. That comes later. These folks, these young guys, they're learning on the job, and sometimes I'm throwing them into the deep end and they're learning how to swim along the way.

Michael: And so for better or worse, you had people who were willing to be thrown into the deep end and managed to learn to swim in said deep end after being thrown in. So are we still in an extension of the stage you'd mentioned earlier, if I have to manage you, I'm going to have to fire you?

Maggie: Yes. Yes, we are. We're still in that stage at that point, and actually for me personally, I'm still at that stage. It's just that I have other people who are supremely better managers and people leaders now than I was around that. So, so yes, we are, but luckily all of the people who come in...I think part of what's happening, Michael, is that at this stage, so say, call it 2012 to the end of 2017, we continued to grow quite smartly and and people are just willing to step in and pick up and do things and learn things. And things are changing. Technology is changing. So trading technology is changing. It doesn't change anywhere near as dramatically as when we leave Ameriprise, of course, that's different, another part of the story. But people are stepping in and doing the work and as the business continues to grow, there's more and more for them to do. So it isn't there they're sitting around waiting for me to tell them what to do. Things are happening.

Maggie: And it was with the advent of Mary, who was a CPA, that we decide, we hatch this idea that maybe we should try and do taxes for some clients. Wouldn't that be cool? And so I'm trying to get my dates right, but probably around 2015, we start that and...

Michael: That's fairly early to move in that direction.

Maggie: Yeah. Yeah. Well, yes, I like to think of us as early adopters on a lot of things, not all of which has been successful, but yes.

Michael: And you're doing that within the Ameriprise environment at the time?

Maggie: Yes, they're allowing us to do that. That was just the beginning of that. There was paperwork to have to sign, but yes we are, and Mary is leading that. And my son, Paul, comes in to help do data entry and various things. And very quickly, they do this for two seasons and basically look at me and they're like, "This is going to kill us. Either we have to figure out how to do this better or we've got to stop." Because you can imagine the overlay of financial planning and tax season. The way we do taxes in this country, how condensed it is season-wise. It's crazy.

Michael: Yeah. Advisory firms are very steady year-round service businesses and tax preparation is extremely not. So it's very hard to mash together an extremely seasonal business on top of a steady year-round service business at the same time.

Maggie: Exactly. So in looking at the impact of the tax business on our client relationships, which had been very, very positive, people loved it, we decide we're going to continue with it, but we need to hire somebody whose full-time job it is to do this, and then begin to scale it. And again, by this time, this is probably, what, late 2017, mid to late 2017, it's right before we make the decision to leave Ameriprise. We put out a job description on ZipRecruiter and we were still kind of...even though I'm living in California by this time, my team is basically pretty regional and we still have a physical office. So we decide to put the thing out for people in...we're looking North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, close in. Up pops a resume from a guy who's in California and, out of the blue...seriously, the Holy Spirit found this dude for us. His name is Jeff Audi. He's with us to this day, of course, and he is an amazing tax accountant, and not just an amazing tax accountant. He was the perfect fit for our clients. I call him the Mr. Rogers of tax.

Jeff was this perfect combination of amazing attention to detail and the ability to be extremely client-facing. And so he joins us and and then we...the story of scaling the tax business is a kind of its own story, but so he joins us and that makes a huge difference. And then we resigned from Ameriprise December 21st, 2017 and pop up as Chicory Wealth in January of 2018. And that's a whole story in itself, but you know what those stories look like. That was its own thing.

Maggie's Decision To Leave Ameriprise And Go Independent [42:55]

Michael: Yeah. I guess I am curious just to hear a little bit of just what drove the decision to leave Ameriprise after, what, at that point, you're...

Maggie: 15 years.

Michael: ...15 years in.

Maggie: Yeah. Yeah. So let me start by saying what didn't drive it. What didn't drive it was any anger or any issues with Ameriprise. I thought they were and continue to think they're a fine institution, their broker-dealer institution. I loved my colleagues. The leadership was good. And I didn't leave over money. In fact, because I still don't really do money, I had no idea what the delta swing was going to...I was shocked actually when I realized how much more money we could actually make being independent. But that wasn't the driving factor. The driving factor was twofold. The first and most important thing was...well, three, maybe, fold. A, I really, really, really, really, really wanted to be a fee-only business. Even though we were 95% fee-based, I really was bought into the idea of being as unconflicted as possible given the circumstances of our industry. Okay. So I know one can name ways in which you can be fee-only and still conflicted. I get that, but I wanted to just move the meter on that. That was one thing.

More important than that though was we had a vision of a brand identity where we were doing seriously socially conscious investing. And what I mean by seriously is being able to buy our own research to do this, which was not going to be possible at Ameriprise, being able to develop our own very separate brand identity, which of course was not going to be possible at Ameriprise, and essentially being able to put this creative energy and this vision of who we were, what we were doing, and who we were wanting to serve into the atmosphere unfettered really.

I would say the third thing was in the summer of 2015, a beloved brother of mine was diagnosed with a glioblastoma. He was 59. He would die by November of 2016. And it was an enormous loss for me and still is ten years in almost. And I realized that if I was going to do this thing and if I was going to give this opportunity to my younger partners, I needed to get on with it. That I didn't know how much more time I had, but even if I had a long time, the clock was ticking at this stage of the game. And so I remember in maybe July or August of 2017 saying to my team,"I'm convicted. We have got to leave Ameriprise." And they kind of looked at me and they were like, "Okay, when and...By the end of 2018?" I'm like, "No, by the end of 2017, we've got to be out of here."

Michael: I was going to say, you said in July, August you said this and you were out by the end of the year. That's a fast turnaround.

Maggie: Yeah. Well, and that is a sign of the blessings and the curse of my leadership style, which is part of what I've had to modify over time. I used to laugh. I'd say to people, every time I say to my team, "I have an idea," I watched the blood drain from their face. Because again, that's that nine thing.

Michael: I was going to say, it's that nine Quick Start in Kolbe. Like today I had the idea and by this afternoon, we can already be implementing it.

Maggie: Exactly. I'm like, build it? I haven't even sold it yet. What are you talking about? You know, it's that kind of attitude and I've had to really work on that, and have, I think, much more successfully, but sometimes that can come in handy. And in this case, I think it really, really did. One, because we were leaving. Once you make a decision to leave, the longer you dally, the more risk you have that that decision is going to leak out. And you have to be...there are a lot of legalities. You have to be very, very careful about these things. Even though we were leaving as a franchisee and a franchise agreement, there's a lot of things you got to do to make sure you don't break any glass, right? It's its own thing.

Secondly, I think, as I recall, the market was pretty stable and pretty strong. I did not want to be trying to move in the middle of a market downturn. Once you turn your face to something, once it becomes obvious, you must do it and you must do it for reasons that relate a lot to the integrity of what you're doing now and the future of what you want to be doing. For me, I just...we got to go. So we went. And so we leave Ameriprise the end of December '21 with about $170 million under management and about seven folks. And then it just is off to the races in terms of our growth from there on, in a way that I had not anticipated. I had failed to understand how many of our clients, to be frank, were with us despite the fact that we were with Ameriprise, not because we were. Because a lot of my clients are very independent thinkers and they were always a little like, "Hmm, I don't like that you're really part of this larger company and blah, blah, blah." But they were too polite to say it. And again, I want to be clear, not because I think there's anything wrong with that company. It's more emblematic of my client base that's deeply suspicious of large corporate entities.

Michael: Right. When you have a focus on socially responsible investing into often smaller businesses, big corporate, in general, principle doesn't reflect well.

Maggie: Yeah. They're suspicious of it. So then the situation begins to change pretty rapidly as we grow. And again, where are the ways I screwed up? I think that particularly when it comes to continuing to hire and continuing to scale, I was very fortunate with this core team. As we begin to get larger, what I don't stop to do until later, and later with the help of a lot of what is now our leadership team is we don't have, at that point, a really clear career path for advisors. We don't have clear job descriptions. We don't have clear levels. We don't have clear team structure on the advisory front. People who are doing client service, they know their job and do their job. The guy who's doing research on the portfolio, which we do as a team to a certain extent, but who's doing all the trading and responsible for the core, he knows his job and does his job. But scaling advisors and then really mentoring, bringing in new folks, how do you do that? That was something that was very hit and miss in those first few years, not well executed, mistakes were made.

Recognizing The Limits Of Her Leadership Skills And Improving Through Coaching [50:54]

Michael: So, I guess I'm just trying to visualize, in retrospect, do you wish you did that sooner or was the reality we just had to grow to a certain size and get the right leadership team in place so that we could figure this out and then it'll work better?

Maggie: I think it is more the latter. I'll tell you an anecdote that you'll appreciate. I think it was in 20...again, my dates start to get a little wobbly, but let's call it 2019 maybe, '18, '19. I do a couple of things. The first thing is I hire...by the way, I should say, I've had personal coaches throughout my career. I do believe in coaching. I tend to have them. They usually last about 18 months. Then I feel like I've run the gamut and I leave them. And then I go for a while, kind of digest what I've learned, and then typically something comes up and we need to get another one, or I need to get another one. Sometimes there almost have always been personal coaches up until about 2022. So, I get a personal coach. I do a 360 with this personal coach. I get feedback from my team and I realize my leadership skills kind of suck. I'm not giving people enough space. I don't give people enough time to process. Because I'm such a...at that point especially, so driving, driving, driving, I have a tendency to push too hard or push at the wrong places or push at the wrong time. I'm not all bad, but there's a lot, but there's a big need for improvement.

Michael: So when is this 360?

Maggie: This is probably late 2018, 2019, in that range, late 2018, 2019.

Michael: So was there something happening in the business that spurred this in the first place?

Maggie: Yeah. I think I was feeling like, wow, here we are. We've got this business now. I'm realizing, boy, this really is not the Maggie show anymore. It has got to really not be the Maggie show going forward if we're going to succeed. I've got these young team members. I'm not doing a great job mentoring them. And I can see that we're going to continue to need to grow and scale. What I haven't mentioned at this point is, I'm on the verge of beginning a succession plan, a gen one, a gen two succession plan, which again, is part of how we're structured now. I'm feeling the need to have somebody to talk to and somebody to resonate with personally, because I was feeling both a little overwhelmed by what felt to me a new role now. Even though I was still seeing clients, I had taken on something that's clearly looking more traditional CEO-ish position. And I don't know what the hell I'm doing. I'm like, I know really...at this point I'm like, God, maybe I need to go hire somebody else who can do this, because I don't know what I'm doing.

Michael: What was the, I guess, revenue and team size when you're...?

Maggie: When this is happening?

Michael: Yeah. When you're feeling this...

Maggie: We're eight or nine at this point. And we probably...what's the revenue? I don't know. I have to go back and check. $3-ish million maybe?

Michael: Yeah. I was going to say, you must have been somewhere in the $2 million to $3 million revenue range.

Maggie: Right. I was starting to feel the ceilings, right? You've looked at this stuff. And I want to go back to your question about, was the team not quite big enough? So what do I do? I go out and I hire Angie Herbers, because I'm listening to you. I listen. I listen. And it doesn't work. It's terrible. I don't like her. She doesn't me.

Michael: As with any coaching consultant, personalities have to match.

Maggie: And this is separate from my 360 coach, by the way. I hire Angie and Angie's firm to do this thing. And in retrospect, they come in and they do what they do. They say, okay, you need to do this thing and we need these job levels and we need all this stuff. And I'm just like, oh my God. And what I realize now goes back to what you just said. I think the mistake wasn't hers or mine. It was the developmental phase I was in, or we were in. We were not quite ready. We were close, but not quite ready for that. So fast forward.

Michael: It was too much, that type of thing? Not even specific to Angie. I've seen this for some other firms where, I'm trying to sit down and create these career tracks, we've got a million or $2 million in revenue and we're defining out these career tracks for advisors over the next seven to ten years. I'm like, ten years ago, I had $200,000 of revenue. Like I can't think over ten years. I don't know what the business is ten years from now. It's transformed so much from ten years ago. I'm like, I'm really just trying to solve for the next six to 12 months.

Maggie: Well, it was both like that and I think the work that needed to get done, the level of detail work that needed to get done was the people who could do that were not yet ready to do it because it wasn't me. I'm like the visionary leader. I'm not the creator of systems. So my takeaway from this, for those of you listening at home, you have got to make sure you're hiring people who are not like you in terms of skillset. It is the classic, what got you here will not get you there. And recognizing not only is it premature to do this work, it's premature in part because the people that are going to come along to do the work aren't there yet or don't have the bandwidth yet because we haven't grown large enough to give them the space to do it.

Now, it wouldn't be long. It would only be...I think we rehired, essentially, Angie's firm in 2022 for about a year and very successfully put into place levels, a career path, a hiring plan, a crystal ball spreadsheet that projects out. And who is doing all of that work? It ain't me, Michael. It's not me that does the spreadsheet. I remember the first time I saw a pivot table, I was like, damn, who knew you could do that? I'm a liberal arts major. Okay. This is really important. I have a vision, I have the values, I have the culture, I carry that. I think I was a very good advisor and I continue to be increasingly a better and better mentor to my younger team members. But the level of detail you need to be able to work at to do that work, which is so essential to begin to get to a pattern of hiring and career paths and rationality in terms of your growth, I did not have that skill set, nor will I ever get it.

Michael: And so then it becomes, I need a team member with the knowledge and capability to be able to do that. They don't have to know the industry details. You can hire Angie's team in to do it, but you have to operationalize it in your firm. So you need someone who can do that level of detail and think about it across the entire systems of the firm and incorporate it in all the places it incorporates into and be able to operate at that level and not already have seven other fires that they're putting out for the business at the same time, right? They have to have the bandwidth to do it.

Maggie: Right. So the way we solved for that is...the first thing to know is we have three team leads. Mary is sort of leader of leaders, but she also functions as a team lead in terms of advisors. And that three-person team, along with my...I'm calling her chief of staff. She has a slightly different title. I'll tell you what we call her. Her name is Tricia Williams and she's wonderful. And when I hired her, I intentionally hired someone outside of the industry. She'd had something 20 years at Starbucks doing recruiting. And I had imagined that position being someone who would help us figure out how to scale our recruiting and also sort of ride herd over various projects, sort of just keep track. Okay. We call her director of business operations. Great. Makes sense.

So along with her and my lead advisors, they are the ones who work through all the details of like, okay, what specifically must a newly minted associate level-one advisor, what competencies must they have in order to get to the next level, and then the next level, and then the next level, and what would be the salary scale, and then how are they trained and how are they assigned to teams and that sort of stuff? So all of that has happened really with my leadership team leading it more than me. I've weighed in, but I haven't been the driving force behind that...I'm going to use the term bureaucratization, and I don't mean that negatively, the necessary infrastructure that you must have if you're going to continue to attract fresh talent, train them, and have them be the living pulse to continue the growth of the firm.

Michael: So leadership team for you now is the three advisor team leads and Tricia, your director of business operations.

Maggie: Correct. And we have a slightly larger strategic team. In other words, when we have large decisions or we're doing strategic planning, we'll bring in our chief investment guy, Daniel, we'll bring in the client service manager, Paul to do...and we'll also bring in, both because of her...our new client relationship manager who has grown from somebody who was really the greeter at the door, Tina Tyson, 13 or 14 years ago, to this role now where she's responsible for all new client touches, basically getting us from prospect touch to close with the help of whatever advisory team is meeting with that potential client. So yeah, we've grown to this much more formalized but still pretty flat hierarchical structure, more like a series of pods where we've got somebody at the center of the pod who's responsible for leading the work, but there's a lot of cross-collaboration so the people are just not siloed, you know? So yeah, it's been a journey.

What Chicory's Hiring, Training, And Career Paths Look Like Today [1:01:45]

Michael: So how does the...you said you have three teams of teams, you had mentioned levels earlier. So can you explain to us just how the advisory team structure works at this point as you've gone through building your tracks and doing the work with Angie? What is that in your firm?

Maggie: Yeah. So the lead advisor role is one of mentoring and supporting younger associates and even people who advance to level one. So an associate is somebody who comes in and our hiring pattern has been...and this goes back to that thing I mentioned earlier in the podcast where we're not targeted in hiring folks who have books of business. We're really targeted looking at people who are coming either out of school or out of, for example, Amplified Planning's Externships where we're dealing with folks who are coming from diverse backgrounds or changing careers and maybe have gone through that program and either have their CFP or right on the verge of...have as in passing the course, all the coursework and the test. So we really are...I think of it, the analogy I've used with clients is we're kind of a teaching hospital, we're bringing in people who we know we're going to have to teach the business to, but who are coming in with the background, commensurate skills already, the academic background. And in some cases, real familiarity with our tech stack, which makes life easier.

So an associate-level advisor comes in and they're assigned to a team, and which team they're assigned to kind of depends on capacity of the leaders to mentor them and who has what folks they're already working with. And those people, the job of the lead advisor is not to use associate advisors as clerical staff. Their job is to grow them, so it's like don't get comfortable having an associate advisor in your meetings taking all your notes and expect they're going to be there forever. That's not your job. Your job is to grow them to a place where they're competency levels get to a place where they go to the next level associate, which means they're still not seeing clients individually until they get to a level one. A level one, we begin to...depending on the advisor and personalities, they're either seeing potentially new clients if their level of complexity isn't too much and/or we are transitioning existing clients to them over time where the lead advisor is still in the meeting, but we're gradually making that transition.

So level one is defined by a certain...the ability to manage a client well and hold down that relationship, but maybe the complexity level for the client is not extreme, the simpler kinds of folks. Level two...and we also have a kind of revenue target for transitioning a certain amount of revenue to that that advisor.

Michael: What revenue...?

Maggie: All of this we learned, by the way, with the consultancy. So this is not our idea. We took this whole hog from the consultancy. Yeah. Go ahead.

Michael: What level of revenue do you try to put to an associate?

Maggie: Yeah, a level one, we're trying to get them to around $400,000 of revenue before they then go on to level two, which is more like $600,000 to $800,000 and slightly higher level of complexity capabilities. And then at level three...we already have three level threes, but the level three at this moment in our developmental pattern, level three advisors are managing themselves somewhere in the neighborhood of $800,000 to a million. I'm trying to not have them manage more than about a million so that they have time to do the mentoring. Some of them will begin to manage even less so they have more mentoring. Eventually, we will probably have level-three advisors that handle more revenue, but really don't do the mentoring. They're not necessarily leaders and teachers, right?

So we're not there yet. We're still building to that. The next big transition for us is over the next few years, it's likely that Mary will gradually reduce her hours. She's my age and she's going to probably gradually reduce her hours so she can, again, spend more time being a mentor to some of our younger associates. We have a hiring plan. We already hired another new associate this year. We'll be hiring...we've already effectively hired a second one. He won't join until September. Depending on if we're right in our growth numbers, we may not be hiring another set of associates until 2027-ish probably. But we kind of have this all plotted out. So we'll see how that works, things happen.

Michael: And the plotting out is simply growth of the firm by revenue and clients, and therefore, we need X advisors on Y dates to make sure that we maintain capacity as we grow.

Maggie: That's correct. That's exactly right.

Michael: And it, and it sounds capacity for your firm is really not defined in terms of number of clients so much as amount of revenue they're responsible for.

Maggie: Yeah. And we're trying to get more sophisticated about that too, Michael. We just are instituting a kind of rating scale by client that relates to sort of difficulty. It's a weighted scale that looks at revenue, but it looks at also difficulty to serve. It looks at age, it looks at relationships associated with that client, for example, maybe we have an 80-year-old client who's not really drawing down their assets much. And we also have the next generation of that client, right? So we're looking at trying to...it's a kind of segmentation, should be familiar to you. I'm sure you've heard...it's a kind of weighted segmentation that looks at all of these things. And also both informs the client and the client service model, but also informs team capacity and individual advisor capacity, because obviously you can have one client that takes up an enormous amount of bandwidth where others, even though they might have significant revenue, are actually quite simple. In fact, it's often the case, isn't it?

Michael: So what does the hiring process look like now as you've gone down the road of hiring associates where you're not looking for people with books of business, or it sounds even necessarily with a lot of experience? You're comfortable to grow them. And just the caveat I find for a lot of firms is it's hard to find people...it's hard to pick the right ones who are actually going to grow with you and not the ones who lose interest or change their mind or decide advice wasn't for them or any number of other blocking points. So I'm curious what hiring process looks like for you, I suppose associates in particular as, as well as in general.

Maggie: Yeah. Well, the number one thing that we're looking for and that the associates who are finding us are looking for is our is our mission and values. That's what draws people to us. That is very, very important to the people who...it's very important to us that they are in complete alignment. And it seems to be very important to them that we exist. And so I will say that we've been very lucky. We have not had difficulty since we got very, very crystal clear and we're very forward on what our values are and what we're doing and how we're doing it to find people of like mind who are ranging from their mid-20s to their younger 40s.

Michael: I think you said this got easier when you got clearer on what the values are. So can you, I guess, just share more of what that means or what that journey is, what was getting clearer?

Maggie: So I would say that we always...we've held the values we hold even as our small core team held them, but we didn't articulate them. So we say our mission is to aspire to a more just and sustainable world by helping our clients integrate money and meaning. And then we back that up with a lot of...on our website, for example, which anybody who's looking for a job is going to check out various people's websites by looking at the various things we do, how we articulate that, how we build, for example, our portfolio. We're a very old-fashioned individual stock core equity portfolio. We vote proxies, we do shareholder activism. We have a charitable giving program that we call Chicory 1% For Social Justice, where we donate 1% of our annual revenue to locally grounded organizations working for systemic social change.

We're very, very forward in terms of progressive political values, both in terms of how we invest, but we're a B corporation, also what our whole...we're an employee-owned corporation.

Creating An Internal Purchase Structure To Transfer Firm Ownership To The Next Generation [1:11:43]

Maggie: In about two days, my ownership stake will be down to 44% in this business in favor of my individual team members. At the end of a successful three years, people have an opportunity to buy into the business and they do it by...I basically grant them the shares with a note between them and I, and they pay me back based on profitability of those shares, no profit, no payment. So it's a non-recourse note. I've been doing that for almost ten years now, really. I started with Mary, and then the next gen, and then this is the third iteration. I think this is my fourth iteration this year.

Michael: So can you share a little bit more about how that works? I'm fascinated to hear these kinds of internal purchase structures.

Maggie: Yeah. So how it works is we do an annual valuation. About every couple of years we get an external group to do it. We did our own internally this year, basically it was a discounted cashflow. And then we kind of check it with industry averages, etc., etc. But we do a valuation. The individuals who are up to buy in...for example, which this time around is three folks, one person who's in client service, one who is operations, and one who is an advisor. So it's not just for advisors. We set the dollar amount at...in this case, it's $250,000 worth of, and that buys a particular percentage of the business based on the valuation. I grant the note between them. There's a promissory note with interest. We set the interest at the ten-year treasury as of July 1. So they're paying some interest.

And then every time we do a profit distribution, which is twice a year, the person buying in is obligated to direct 50% of that profit distribution against the note, or they can do more if they choose, and then they keep the rest until the thing is bought out. And we just had our first team member retire from Chicory having owned shares. And the company now is buying back those shares over a ten-year timeframe with interest, same interest rate to pay the retiring shareholder whose valuation went up significantly, notably in those several years. So we're paying them off and those shares are now coming back into the business.

So what this means, Michael, because you can do math and you know that there are a couple of things, that there's an imperative. One is that we continue to grow, sustainably and steadily, but growth is important. The other is there's some likelihood that I die still owning a piece of this company, or my heirs do, and I'm totally comfortable with that. That is a huge value of mine is this legacy that the company remain, its mission remain, and that my team members have every incentive to maintain that. Now, there could come a time when my team members say, "We're going to lever up and buy you out, Mag." And I'm not saying that they won't do that and that I won't be willing to consider that. But I also may function, me and my family may function as the sort of passive 20% to 30% owner that isn't a third party. That's possible.

Michael: Yeah. Yep. So, I guess help me understand further then, it feels like you have an intentionality to be selling and have given at least some flexibility about how the purchase works because the note is built around 50% profit distribution. So I guess just depending on growth trajectory of the firm, that's going to take somewhere between five and 15 years to pay off, just depending on how quickly it grows and how quickly the, the dollars recycle back through. So it feels like you have some intentionality to sell with some flexibility around it to make sure the team can manage the cash flows. And you're also comfortable having some legacy tail stake, like 20% or 30% that maybe never gets sold and continues with the business. So just help me understand more of the thought process of how you're thinking about whether to sell, why you sell, how much you sell. I think you do want to sell some, but aren't worried about selling all. Help us understand that more.

Maggie: Yeah. So the number one reason I started doing this was...for Mary, who is my age, I did it because she was doing...she came on and very quickly became something more like a partner, just in terms of her experience and background and capabilities. And she really wanted to be able to buy in. For the next generation, meaning the people who are 30 years my junior, it was an intent to...I knew I had to get started early so that the price was right for them and that they could reasonably pay off over time, even though it's a non-recourse note, no profit, no payment. So it wasn't like it doesn't appear on their balance sheet, but I wanted to keep them around. I wanted everybody to be incentivized like an owner in the business. I believe in employee ownership. It's an ethic for me. It goes back to, frankly, theological reasons. I believe in the dignity of work. I believe people who work hard and affirm and make something successful should feel the fruits of that. I think it's good for business. I think it's good for the community and the team, the community that is the team. And so it is less about me wanting to monetize and more about me wanting to build the kind of firm that reflects those values really.

And I got the idea from FP Transitions years ago and started doing it. And it's had the effect I've wanted it to have, namely people are...We're 100% open book. Our financials are published every month. Everybody knows how we're looking. We run a clean book. I've never done one of those things where I ran everything I possibly could through the business. And so it's just part of the value of transparency and that inculcates everything we do for our clients, for the way we invest, and for the kind of business we are. And to me, that's the great...that's the legacy I want. And I kind of hope other people notice this and think about doing it themselves, really doing it.

Now, does it involve trust? Yes, it does. But you know what? Everybody who hires us, it involves trust. And it's worked for me very well financially. It's grown the business from a purely monetary standpoint. I get to translate some things into capital gains that would otherwise not be capital gains. Would I make more money if I held on to it and then pulled some ripcord and sold out to some, get ready to bleep, private equity firm? Yes. But my clients care about things that are about more than just money, and so do I.

What Surprised Maggie The Most On Her Journey [1:19:38]

Michael: So as you've been on this journey, what surprised you the most about building the advisory business?

Maggie: I think if you told me that I might love it 23 years ago, I would have been surprised by that. It has not always been easy, but I think the thing that I most love and have been surprised by is how much I really, really love my team and how much I really, really love our clients and, despite all the work, particularly in those first ten or 12 years, how unbelievably fortunate I feel to be doing this work in the world. I really, really do feel very fortunate.

Michael: So just help me understand more, 23 years ago, you would have been surprised if someone said you were going to love the business so much. What did you think was unlovable about it that turned out to be lovable?

Maggie: Well, I thought I might love the client work, but I didn't imagine building a business. So the question was, what surprised you about building the business? You see what I mean? So, I thought when I entered the business, gosh, if I could steadily make $100,000 a year, wow, that would be awesome. Which would have been a lot more than I would have made as a professor. That was my financial standard. So I've also been very surprised by how much money I've made, to be frank, and I've been surprised by how much the business has grown in terms of its value. Now, valuations might be a little high. We'll see. Time will tell on these things. But the journey itself wasn't something I imagined, and I just feel very fortunate.

The Low Point On Maggie's Journey [1:21:27]

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

Maggie: Well, I think the low point coincided with the death of my brother, to be frank. I remember thinking, I've ground it out this far. Should I just keep grinding it out and just hang it up early and just be done? Do I have anything left in me that's really for that next level push, the next level of creativity, the next level of a future for this team? Do I have that? And so there was about a year in there where I just really didn't know. I didn't. And before his death, I'd been writing a book. I didn't think the book would ever finish. It did ultimately. But it caused a very significant rethink and it was a bit of a Y in the road. And that was a pretty rough time for me. And voice in my head was like, "No, you do it. You can do it. Do it." So yeah, probably that.

Michael: And then that's what triggered the...

Maggie: Leaving Ameriprise, and the creation of Chicory Wealth and all of the things we're doing now that I really am grateful we're doing, really love that we're doing. Yeah.

Maggie's Advice For Her Younger Self And Newer Advisors [1:22:54]

Michael: So what else do you know now in this world of hiring and building teams and leadership? What do you know now you wish you could go back and tell you from ten, 15, 20 years ago when you were early career?

Maggie: Yeah. Well, the one thing I didn't say about the hiring that I think is important to say is, in terms of the process, I am the last person now to meet a candidate, never the first. And by the time the candidate gets to me, my team has already decided they're awesome. So importantly, I'm at the tail end of that process. And I get veto power if I pick up on something I don't like, but I've never vetoed anything so far. And so, yeah, I'm really not at the center of the hiring process now in terms of the actual logistics of it. So that's important to note.

Michael: Why?

Maggie: Why? Because I am a person of enthusiasms and I tend to fall in love with people very quickly and easily. And so it's important to have people who are a bit more sober in front of me, I think, and I think that's right. I think the thing that...probably the biggest takeaway of this whole journey for me and the thing I would tell my younger self is, you are definitively going to change. You must change and you're going to know it by how uncomfortable it is. And you've got to just keep trucking. It's never comfortable to realize the old, what got you here won't get you there. And you definitely have to get out of your own way. If your goal is to grow to something a boutique-style firm like we are, right, if your goal is to not remain a solo practitioner or a small firm, which is a perfectly legitimate goal, I will say sometimes life will just push you in a direction and it's very...my perception of staying small or not growing is...I have this voice in the back of my head, which is the nine again, if you're not growing, you're dying. I don't know that that's actually true. That may be one of the things that is just a lie that I've told myself that has served me over the years, but I do have an impulse to continue to grow. And I don't dislike change, but I'm usually...I know the change is really important when it's uncomfortable. And that's kind of a drag, but it's what it is.

Michael: Like when the team comes and says, "You like every candidate, so we're going to remove you from the process…

Maggie: That's right. "I'm sorry, Mag."

Michael: ...until the end."

Maggie: Exactly. Which, again, I trust my team and I trust their commitment to the values and they are laser focused on it.

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

Maggie: Be as authentically who you are as you can be in every interaction with anybody, client, potential employer, be who you are. Be clear about who you are and be who you are. I don't frankly know how people run firms where they're working with folks, I'll give you an example, whose values they find difficult to handle. This just may sound very judgmental, and probably is. I just feel like, work with the people that you resonate with, that you really like, and who share your worldview and you will be very, very happy. And if you try and conform yourself to something purely because it's "business," I think that's a recipe for disaster, particularly in the kind of business we do where it can be so personal. So be who you are. Don't be afraid to be who you are, whoever you are.

What Success Means To Maggie [1:27:25]

Michael: So as we wrap up, this is a podcast about success. And just one of the themes that comes up is that word success means very different things to different people. Sometimes it changes for us as we grow and evolve through the process. And so you're on this wonderfully successful path with the firm as you're a 20 member team and $760 million of AUM and the business is growing along so well now. How do you define success for yourself at this point?

Maggie: I think continuing to hold fast to our values and our culture, to not be afraid to do hard things and take stands that some people, who otherwise wouldn't necessarily be our clients, might not like. And legacy, for me, I will know...the next move for us now is a more formal board and eventually the next CEO, I guess, or a clear leadership team structure beyond where we're at now even. That transition will be very, very important. And I think if I can be part of that transition and then be out ten years and look back and have them continue to thrive and grow and be who they are, still doing what we're doing in the world with that same set of values, that would be extremely successful. I would feel extremely successful.

Michael: Very cool. Very cool. I love it, Maggie. Thank you so much for joining us on the "Financial Advisor Success" podcast.

Maggie: Thank you.