Return On Relationships with Rory Henry

Before we jump into this week's episode of the pod, I just want to call out that I'm going to be speaking at the Bridging the Gap conference in July. It's July 22nd to 24th in Denver, and I'm actually going to be on a panel with the guests of this episode. So I'm going to be on a panel talking about return on relationships. In my case, I'm going to be kind of weighing in on the return in relationships from investing in your workforce. Rory talks a little bit more on return on relationships when investing kind of in those client relationships. And I think it's going to be a great panel. I'm super excited for Bridging the Gap. It's the only conference I went to last year, and I made incredible connections there. And I would invite you to kind of come check it out. Maybe you live in Denver. Maybe you have a reason to be in town. It's going to be a phenomenal conference. And yeah, so I'm going to be on a panel with Rory, and I'm also going to be speaking about some of the data that we collect on job satisfaction and hours worked. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this episode. Hello, and welcome to the Big Four Transparency podcast. I'm joined today by Rory Henry, a director at Arrowroot Family Office and the author of the book, Holistic Guide to Wealth Management. Welcome to the pod, Rory. Dominic, thank you so much for having me on. I'm a big fan of you and the show. You've been all over the socials. You've interviewed so many of the great accounting folks out there. So it's a privilege to be on the show with you today. Well, thanks a lot, man. A little bit of background. Yeah, we also met a very common theme at Bridging the Gap. And yeah, you were just you're a super energetic, charismatic guy. And I'm always kind of like, this guy seems happy and he's having a good time. Like, let's let's figure out what his story is. So yeah, it's nice to have you on. Yeah, that was a great conference. So many good people at Randy's conference. And yeah, I say, Dominic, in today's digital world, like having face to face interactions, that the in meeting per in person conferences is really a superpower. Like it's like folks like you, you know? Yeah. And, you know, I think the ability to curate the right people getting together is very valuable. Like not everyone can do that the way Randy did it. And so, yeah, so it was awesome. Yeah, I'm a big fan of Randy and they like to call it RandyCon. So looking forward to RandyCon number three next year. Yeah, I will be there as well, for sure. So to kick off, enough about Randy. It's been a Randy love fest ever since RandyCon. So, yeah, so to kick us off with yourself, you're not our typical guest, given that you're not kind of practicing in accounting and you're actually instead you're in wealth advisory. But looking into your background, you actually also started off in tax, much like myself and kind of wandered away from it. So I'm curious to know the background on that. Oh my gosh, that's a great question here, Dominic. How much time do we have? I like to say I'm really sitting at the intersection of the accounting and tax and the wealth advisory world. I've been fortunate enough to really bring the best of the wealth management or wealth advisory world to the tax and accounting world. And I started off with my own tax practice over a decade ago. I built a tax practice management technology back in 2016 to rival Canopy and Carbon. I didn't end up raising a bunch of money at the time. Canopy taxed and raised, I believe, 77 million. They had spent it all on sales and marketing. So I had a failed tax prep software solution that didn't go through. And so I pivoted. And the pivot happened when I was working with Arrowroot Family Office, where I'm the director right now. And I saw all the advances on the wealth tech side and what was going on to be able to do personal financial planning as well as wealth management. And I saw how we can really integrate these services to provide truly holistic advice to clients. And it makes it easier and easier to do so. And coming from a tax background, seeing the trust that we as tax practitioners have with our clients, I said, we really can take the next logical step further and not only do tax returns or tax planning, but start to do holistic financial planning, bring in the investment management, whether it's in partnership, as we'll probably talk about here on the episode, whether we bring it in-house or partner with another registered investment advisory firm. So I really saw the model that we had here at Arrowroot. We are tech fans. We invest in enterprise software many times through a separately owned entity called Arrowroot Capital, which is a private equity firm. And so I saw what we could do as far as technology goes and being able to really connect these two professions that have historically worked in silos. And so I went out and sought out to interview many of the best, brightest minds in wealth tech, as well as accounting and talking about really how we can connect these two professions to really truly provide holistic advice to our clients. That's a long answer there, Dominic. No, it's not bad. And so to dig into that a little bit more, so like, you know, there's obviously some, you know, they're both very regulated industries. Like you can't do whatever you want with a tax practice or with a wealth advisory practice. Right. And so how does that kind of relationship work? Like how are you working together with those practices? Yeah, that's a good question. So I think historically, we all know the referral model, right? I'll refer you some business, you refer me some business over on the tax side. And I believe that really model should go away. It should sit in a grave next to the time-based billing, right? That referral model needs to be put to rest. I'm big on relationships, as you know, Dominic. I trademarked the term advisor and the ROAR is for return on relationship. And it's really making sure that we have a deep understanding of our clients, fostering and cultivating that relationship. I always say that we shouldn't be a servant to a service. We should really service that relationship. So from a regulatory perspective, if you really want to get down to it, you know, on the wealth advisory side, you do need to have a license to do investment advisory work, right? A series 65 is what most folks are getting nowadays. There's this pivot towards being a fiduciary advisor, providing investment advice. 1% asset center management is the fee that most charge. So you have to get that license. And then for financial planning, you can do that, which you don't need a license for. Tax advisors can do that. I believe that everybody should have a holistic financial plan. So you can, you know, dip your toe in the water, start doing holistic financial planning as part of your offering. If you want to start doing the investment advisory work, you would need to get licensed to do so. And you can do that under the umbrella of another registered investment advisory firm. So you could become an investment advisor representative under that firm. Basically, you would have to do some compliance stuff for yourself, but really the compliance is done at the firm level. We have folks that are doing that with us. Or you can go ahead and dive right at the deep end and become a registered investment advisory firm. And you'd have to do all the compliance work, the administrative, the operational stuff, but you obviously get the full revenue from that client. So there's a number of ways you can go about it. I always advise folks out there, Dominic, to crawl before they walk, before they run. So working with another registered investment advisory firm to start offering these holistic services to their clients, you could find out, you know, the best practices in doing so. And then if you want to start taking on more of that role, that central role, you could ask for more revenue. And then if you want to start your own firm at that point, you can do so. But I always say that you should probably start out and work with another RIA to begin with. And so when firms are working with another RIA, does that kind of look like there's some sort of like revenue share on the work that gets referred out, essentially? Correct. Yes. So, you know, there's three pathways, I'd say. Oops, I'm sorry. There's three pathways, I'd say. One is there's the promoter or, historically it was called a solicitor, where you can't hold yourself out for offering investment advice. You can receive revenue from that client, though. So you just refer business. You'd have to have a Series 65 license to do so. So that's the referral or promoter-solicitor model. The second model is become an investment advisor representative under that RIA. And you can share fees that way. You know, depending on the workload involved, you know, you can ask for more the more work you do. And then lastly is, like I said, starting your own registered investment advisory firm. And you hold out as the compliance person or the compliance portion of that firm. And you can take the line share, obviously, the revenue. Gotcha. And so you were at an accounting conference, essentially. So obviously this model is like, you know, an important part of your business is kind of like meeting with accounting professionals and partnering with them, I would imagine, right? Yeah. So the goal is, I always say that, you know, you are uniquely positioned as that accounting professional to take on that central role to quarterback the lives, financial lives of the client. You have intimate knowledge of a client's business, right? Many times, the small and medium-sized business owner, you know exactly what their business looks like. You have intimate knowledge of those financials. You know, I advocate for taking that a step further. So not only doing that tax planning, Dominic, but doing the holistic financial planning, doing the estate planning as well. I say that estate planning is really that family office level of care because you're connecting generations. And then you're making sure that you are helping out families in case of any unforeseen circumstances. So estate planning is a big part of our offering. And there's great technology solutions. I have two folks that wrote chapters in the book, Cody Barbo, who's the CEO of Trust and Will. Their technology has been called the TurboTax of estate planning. You can do a trust for as little, I believe, as $499. A will for, I believe, as low as $199. It might be different now. So it's really providing that service in a streamlined fashion instead of having to sit in an attorney's office, right? Answer very sensitive questions about, you know, who's the beneficiary, right? Who gets what? You can do that from the comfort of your own home. And I always say that, you know, estate planning really allows you to have a full picture into a family's finances. And then it allows you to connect to that next generation of clients. Yeah, I think trust, from my experience in tax, and I was in Canada, so it's a little bit different, but like, I think is where there's a lot of crossover on financial planning and tax, right? So we would recommend it all the time. We'd do estate freezes, which is good for, again, financial planning and, you know, wealth management and stuff like that. But like, we were actually just doing it for tax purposes because, you know, you had a certain tax status at this time that you were going to lose. And so it made sense to do that. In the US, I think an equivalent would be like QSBS multiplication using different beneficiaries of the trust. And so, yeah, a lot of the times you might be recommending a trust anyways. And so at that point, I think it is very natural and it does make a lot of sense to be like, okay, well, we're telling you to get this trust. We're not just going to like, you know, charge you compliance for it every year and file it. You might as well actually like do something useful and productive with it, right? Yeah, that's proper planning, right? And especially we're coming up on the sunset of the Tax Cut and Jobs Act. You know, we have 16 months or so away from that sun setting and that exemption could potentially go down from, you know, 13.2 to 7 million. So there's so many planning opportunities that can occur here for those high net worth clients. And talk about trying to attract those high value clients. Well, I believe to attract those high value clients, you have to offer high value services. And this is something that you can do that only allows them to save on taxes, but gives them a plan for their future. And like I said, it allows you to make sure that you're helping out the next generation as well. Yeah, let's talk about that high value that you talk about. So like tax and just accounting in general, I think has done a very poor job of capturing the value that is being created. And, you know, that conversation goes very, very deep. Like I think some of it has to do with the type of people who are, you know, setting the fees. Some of it has to do with it being difficult to communicate value. But then I think financial advisory is the opposite. I think financial advisory has done a tremendous job of capturing a lot of the value that's provided with the anchoring to the 1% fee and all of that, right? Like... You're so right Dominic. Yeah, why do you think that's the case? That like accounting professionals have so much difficulty like communicating and capturing that value? Well, it's systemic. I mean, look at the history of the professions, right? Where the time-based billing, right, has stood the test of time. And I know it's now pivoting obviously to value pricing and the future facing firms are starting subscription. I write a chapter in my book about the evolution of the value and pricing of the professions. And the tax and accounting profession has had to change their prices to meet all the value they've been providing. And that's difficult to have that conversation. On the flip side, investment advisors have gone from, you know, historically they were the stockbrokers, right? They were the Bud Fox from the movie Wall Street or the Jordan Belfort from the Wolf of Wall Street, right? Where they were just picking stocks. Well, that evolved in the early 2000s to being, you know, money managers, investment managers and doing portfolios and mutual funds. And so you went from that portfolio manager in the early 2000s to then more that holistic financial planner over the last decade or so where we've had to justify the 1% AUM fee. And by doing so, we'd have to do so many other services. So we're not doing just investment management, we're doing holistic financial planning to justify those fees, making sure they have the proper insurance in place, right? Bringing in the estate plan, whether that's through a technology or an estate planning attorney to making sure that family has an estate plan put in place. So you've seen the exact opposite on the wealth side where they've had to like justify, you know, adding services to justify the high fees that they had. On the accounting side, you know, I empathize with those folks out there because many times, who was I speaking with? Oh, Dan Hood. Dan Hood's like, yeah. You know, with tax professionals, they would always have the out-the-door, oh, by the way, you might want to open up a solo 401k and then all you save, you save them $10,000 or $20,000. You only charge them $500 for a tax return, right? So it's interesting, but I think the future-facing firms out there, Dominic, the people that, you know, you talk to all the time and I talk to, you know, they're doing value-based pricing on the tax and accounting side. You know, on the wealth side, you know, that 1% AUM has stood the test of time. We don't see much changes in that for the foreseeable future. That's why I think it's such a great business model because it's a recurring revenue that grows over time and you don't need as many touches necessarily as you do maybe on the tax and accounting side. That's interesting. I like the breakdown of how they're kind of converging or like, you know, doing the opposite where one, yeah, needs more and more to justify the fee and then the other one is like, no, the fees need to move because it's so clearly behind. And that's cool to see from someone who's outside of the accounting industry because there's a lot of people in the accounting industry specifically who are just like, they're saying fees, raise your fees, raise your fees. And it gets tiring for some people because you're like, well, are you just kind of like an insider campaigning for this? Or is this actually truly the impression of like educated individuals who understand value pricing, right? And I always say, Dominic, that the combination that I talk about, obviously integrating the tax and accounting world with the wealth advisory world, state planning, I put in there as well, is really the advisor of the future because everybody wants tax savings. That's the immediate value add that you can offer somebody. Hey, Dominic, I'm going to save you $10,000 in your taxes this year. But also having that vision for that long-term financial plan, making sure Dominic has enough money put away to put his kids through their college, right? Or has enough money put in, you know, his retirement savings to have, you know, a life of retirement. So it's a great combination to be able to have both, right? That immediate value out of tax savings, but also a vision of a long-term financial plan to make sure that you're taking care of people's families in the retirement year. Mm-hmm. And do you have any like metrics on what that looks like for like a firm who moves from, let's say, tax-only offering to clients, and then they actually kind of move towards like that more holistic wealth management plus tax service, like what that might look like on a percentage of fees basis? It's a good question. I don't have those figures, Dominic. But anecdotally, what I'll say is, the people that I speak to who actually integrate this model and move to the financial planning wealth management, they're not going back to just the tax world. Nobody jumps back the other way. They continue on, they start offering holistic financial planning, investment management for some folks out there. So you're just seeing this because the value add is so much better. Like I said, if you have that relationship, you know, start providing the higher margin services, right? It only makes sense. You know, whether you do that in partnership or you bring it in-house. So you're seeing firms out there that are forward-thinking, that are instituting this, and they're not going back to the other way of just doing taxes or just doing tax planning. They're seeing that the business model is great. Like I said, it's recurring revenue that grows over time. That's sticky clients. Mm-hmm. Yeah, no, I like that a lot. I spoke with Craig House on here previously. I don't know if you know him, CMH Advisors, and he basically has a firm, well, him and his spouse, and they have a firm where they are doing, I don't know if they're doing tax specifically, but they're doing accounting services. And then there's kind of like a wealth advisory branch. And at the time, like that completely broke my frame. I had never heard of that before. And I was like, oh my God, why wouldn't you do that? That's insane, right? Like, yeah. And so it's cool to hear from you that there's levels to phase in, because I think the compliance of saying we are a firm who is full-blown offering financial advisory, wealth advisory tax, is a little bit tricky from like an independence perspective and from the CPA side of things, that's a little bit tricky. So what you're saying is like you can phase in and you can start making revenue for your firm even just by having a true partner. Yeah, okay. Yeah. Yeah, interesting. Yeah, good. Oh, sorry. Okay, we've been using wealth advisory and family office a little bit interchangeably. And I don't, yeah, I don't want to be like ignorant here. What's like the difference between the two as well? Good question here, Dominic. And I use it somewhat interchangeably as far as financial planning, wealth management. So financial planning, you technically don't need a license to be a financial planner, right? We are CFPs, but people can do light financial planning a lot of times. A lot of CPAs out there somewhat do, somewhat financial planning or light financial planning. So you really don't need a license for that. To do investment management or wealth management, you do need many times a series, I mean, not many times, you need a series 65 to be in a registered investment advisory firm. So that's the license that you do need. Now, a family office, family office historically was really the ultra fluent. Dominic, the Jeff Bezos, the Elon Musk. I mean, if you go back to JP Morgan's, John D. Rockefeller's what they would have is they'd have an attorney, a CPA, right? A financial advisor, a banker. They'd all be working collectively to advise the family businesses as well as the personal financial affairs of that family. We had the family office name over, I think, 13 years ago. It was because we were doing so much more than just the wealth management or investment advisory. You know, we have an M&A arm, we have an investment bank where we advise companies mainly sell side M&A on technology. So we have that arm to it. Then the family office, we're managing the assets there. So I always say that a family office is really the embodiment of holistic advice because you're really integrating professional services that are working in concert with each other, right? You're the conductor, right? Making sure that the tax and accounting is done properly, that there's a state plan put in place, that they have the business insurance as well as the personal insurance, right? That they have the investment management piece to it, that they have a holistic financial plan, they're being tax efficient as well. So I call it a virtual family office now, folks out there. Those that listen to our audience, you know, they can be that tax accounting, that business advisory arm, right? They can plug into a registered investment advisory firm that can handle the wealth management, the financial planning, you can bring in that estate plan attorney. It's really building that dream team of advisors to provide for the many financial needs of that client. That virtual family office can be accessed by, you know, subject matter experts anywhere, right? And it's just having that great partnership, having that relationship with that client and then trusting the other providers there to provide that service. But the foundation Dominic and I always talk about, oh, a big advocate for, is making sure that folks have that holistic financial plan. Whether you're wealthy or you're wealth seeking, people should have a plan to be able to grow their wealth. Always saying that, you know, we as advisors, we have the ability, because we have intimate knowledge of people's finances, we can help them grow their business and grow their personal finances. And I'm big into values-based planning. I talk about in the book, behavioral financial advice is what we call it, is helping people align their values, I mean, their goals with their values and helping people live in alignment, making better choices for their business and their personal affairs by those values. And we just don't ask ourselves, you know, what we value most many times, Dominic. I know I sent you, yeah, I sent you over an exercise before we had this talk to go over about your top five values. Because I think it's so important to have our decisions emanate from those values, both financial and our personal life decisions, because many times we're just on autopilot in that algorithm, making decisions without really reflecting on what matters most to us. Yeah. Yeah, that was interesting. Like, you're clicking through the kind of values exercise and it's like, what do you, you know, what do you care about? What don't you care about, essentially? And then it makes you refine it to a smaller and smaller and smaller list. And eventually you're like, do I care about family or do I care about money? And you're like, oh man. Yeah, so that's tricky. Do, like, does that change, like, very significantly how your kind of planning with a client is going to go? Yeah, I think it's the, so it's the human first approach. So I'm a behavioral financial advisor, which is just a fancy word of really helping clients really matter, figure out what matters most to them. I'll restate that. I'm a behavioral financial advisor, Dominic. So what that really is, it's a fancy way of saying, I help clients really understand what matters most to them and outlining, you know, their life plans as well as what their values are and helping them make better decisions. Really what it comes down to is make better decisions, not when to buy a stock or sell a stock, right? But outlining, you know, what do they want? Do they want a lifestyle business or do they want an IPO, right? Because that will change what kind of advice we provide to those clients. I'm a big believer in the consultative approach, Dominic. There's an author, Michael Bungay Stanger. He has a book called The Coaching Habit and he talks about the consultative approach versus the expertise approach. I think many folks in the audience, myself included, was like this, where we always felt that we need to have the answer, that we're the answer person, right? We wanted to either tell it because we want to show our knowledge, right? We want to save somebody because we see they're going to make a mistake, I want to save them. Or many times we want to control the issue because people want to control things. So it's really shifting our mindset or our perspective to be curious about our clients and their circumstances, right? So the consultative approach is just asking more questions, right? What do they want out of life? Like I said, do they want a lifestyle business or do they want an IPO, right? You know, do they want to have more time with their family or do they want to scale the business, right? So I think when we can shift our mindset from being the person that always needs to have answers to maybe asking the right questions, really- improves the level of advice we can provide to our clients. It's interesting. I like that. And I talk a lot about that from even a career planning perspective. So it's a little bit different when you talk about kind of entrepreneurship, owning a business, planning your investments around it. But from a career planning perspective, I talk about that a lot where I think there's a lot of calculus in the accounting industry going on of like, is this potential partner track with you know, the whatever $800,000 a year payout at the end worth it? Or am I actually really happy pursuing this other thing where I might be able to make $250,000, $300,000, but I may have a much better quality of life subjectively, you know, depending on what you're looking for. But I think that's a lot of like where some firms have become a little bit in trouble is that they're doing that calculus. So it's interesting to hear that you talk about how important that is from like a financial planning perspective. I talk a lot about how important that is from like a career planning, lifestyle planning. Yeah, yeah, but that's what what we're both getting at is really life planning, right? Yeah, really asking those questions, just like as you would a family member or friend, like, really, what do you want? Right? What do you want? And that person, then many times vocalize or put pen to paper on what matters most to them. I interviewed Dr. Chrissy Archuleta. She's the head of the Financial Therapy Association, or she created she's a pioneer in the space. She really saw what was going on in financial planning, and then also the therapy world and she's like, wow, I'm getting so many clients that are coming to therapy with money issues. I better learn the money side. So she's now the professor at the University of Georgia, and she says, Rory, we just don't ask ourselves the question of what matters most to us, right? And what's our relationship to money as well, right? Which is formed in our childhood. We can go into all that. I always talk about, really, there's three, three, three things I spend clients on. We're looking at our past, our relationship to money, former childhood, you know, which causes us to make certain decisions in our life. What is our present makeup? You know, where are our values? And then also, where are we at with the many dimensions of who we are? Not just our financial, but our emotional, our social well-being, right? Our family well-being, our intellectual well-being. So where are we at? We use scaling questions. So I'll scale from one to 10. You know, Dominic, how satisfied are you with your social well-being, right? You say, hey, I'm a six, right? Well, Dominic, we'll make that eight or nine, you know? Five more times than my friends, right? Whatever it is, you know? And so looking at someone's present circumstances, and then it's so important, and the research, you know, is great when it comes to really envisioning a better future. And somebody I had on the podcast, Dr. Hall, I mean, Professor Hal Hershfield from UCLA, he wrote a book called Your Future Self, and he did research at Stanford that showed that many times we see our future selves as no different than a stranger. So we don't make choices with that future self in mind. I mean, one of the examples people probably know about is we go to the supermarket and we're hungry, we don't take into consideration that we're hungry because we're hungry in a week, right? We don't need all those groceries, you know? So it's actually the antidote to making better decisions with that future self in mind is creating a vivid visual picture of that future Dominic. Like in 10 years, Dominic, you know, create that visual picture. What does success look like for you in 10 years? Do you have an image in mind on what that would look like? You know, who are you with? What are you doing? Where are you at? And, you know, how do you feel? Yeah, so one of the big things in kind of the values exercise for me was like freedom, where I very much, like I really struggle to work on things once I'm like over them, like once I'm no longer interested or like have kind of like moved on mentally in my head. And so for me, and I've finally gotten my first taste of that here, but is the freedom to like pursuing the things that I want to pursue. So I've always, always, always, always had at least one job plus a side hustle of some sort. And the side hustle has always been what I want to pursue, right? So Big Four Transparency over the last three years, I've been working on it on the side. And it's always been this like thing where I was like, if I could pursue this, I know that I could do, you know, X, Y, and Z, and I could really like amplify it. And honestly, maybe the financial rewards would outweigh that of working at my job, but I wasn't never in a position to really do that. Right. And so luckily, I was able to actually like find some, some solutions, workarounds, like I scaled revenue gradually over quite some time. And then I actually like ended up getting some investors as well, who are going to be coming on board. That's going to be announced at some point. And thank you. And so that kind of gave me the freedom to actually pursue what it is I want to pursue. But in the future, like the ideal would be to have generated some level of financial freedom where the next thing, I don't need to go through that whole kind of rigmarole. I can just say like, Hey, I have runway and I can afford to go and do that. So for me, that's really like the biggest thing. And then there's obviously some like materialistic things where, you know, I have aspirations on that side as well. And, you know, just little trophy things like this and that and having a place to host is huge for me. Well, let's build, let's paint that picture for the audience here, Dominic, of that freedom and where you're at, if there's materialistic things in there, you know, can we have a location? Yeah. Who are you with? You know, what are you doing? Well, so I just got engaged like a few weeks ago. So, you know, I would be with my then in the future wife, you know, kind of like small family. I'm not a hundred percent sure on, on that front or any of that, but, um, yeah, so that's kind of where I'm at on that front materialistic. Like the, the biggest thing for me is like having a large place for hosting, like, you know, dinner party. Yeah, exactly. I like it. All right. So yeah, that kind of thing. No, that's great. So having that dental picture, right. The vivid picture of that future state will allow you then to make better decisions in the here and now, if you're confronted with, do I go buy that, you know, new sports car or do I put more money into that business? You're like, well, what would a future Dominic want? Right. And it's just that pause because it's really a mindfulness practice that, uh, you know, I advocate for because many times we're reflexive in our interactions and we don't take time to really think about the values, the freedom, right. Uh, or that future state, um, to improve our decision-making when it comes to our finances or our life choices. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. That definitely makes a lot. And, and I think the clearer that image becomes, right. Like the easier it is to make those choices. So I, I actually found like, although it's very small and simple, like the values exercise was like, Oh, interesting. Like this is what I, what I'm drawn towards more. So, right. And you could put, put words in front of that. So like, for instance, mine was, let me just pull mine up. Um, let me see if I have mine here. Can I share? Yeah. Uh, I don't know if we can share screens, but. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. Um, let's see. Mine was relationships as you know, probably mine was meaningful work, health challenges and family. So you can like, you could put words in front of that foster relationships, do meaningful work, be healthy, seek challenges, you know, love my family. So if you could put words in front of those, you know, they hold more weight. And then, like I said, when you're, you're faced with a decision, you know, you can then look to those values and, and hopefully that'll make you have you make a better choice when it comes to, um, you know, your finances, your life. Yeah. Yeah. No, I like that. I assume this is a lot of like the content from, from the book that you wrote, correct? Uh, yes. So I, I mean, I have 24 plus thought leaders that I got from accounting, wealth management, behavioral finance technology, and to write about all the different service offerings. So we talk about pricing and value. We talk about tax planning, life insurance, annuities, estate planning, exit planning, marketing, change management. So I basically put together this holistic advice offering with so many great thought leaders in the book, Blake Oliver, Randy Johnston, Seth Feinberg's in there. And then a number of the tech CEOs in the wealth side, really talking about the number of service offerings. And then my contribution was curating all the great behavioral finance people who talk about really this human first approach of uncovering, uh, and helping clients uncover really what matters most to them. You know, asking those questions of, you know, what do you value? You know, what do you want out of your life? I believe that's the gravity, um, that, that holds, uh, all these services together, um, helping people optimize their business, optimize their personal finances. But in the end, my mission too, is really to help people optimize their wellbeing. That's what I'm set out to do. And when we ask the great questions and find out more of what matters most to our clients, we can help them guide them, uh, to that optimal state. Yeah. I like, I like where you're, you're heading with that, where I actually just did an interview with Blake Oliver a few days ago, which is, it might air right before this one, I think. And, and we spoke so much about how like, yeah, wellbeing, like planning your career again, like making sure that you're pursuing the things that like actually align with what you want so that you don't put your head down, pursue what you're told to pursue and then look up one day and go like, wow, this sucks. Um, so it's cool that he's part of the book as well. Um, yeah. What was it like writing the book? Like, what was the process like, how, like, how did you kind of get yourself to do that and just kind of look at the blank page and get through it? That's the, yeah, I can get writer's block, uh, Dominic. So, you know, it is, it's a tough process because you want to, you want to get so much information out there. Um, and you want, sometimes you nitpick and, you know, you'll go over chapters and, you know, you'll edit it out and then you'll add stuff back in. So it's a, it's an interesting process. Uh, I actually, it took about 15 months and yeah. And it was actually getting a lot of contributions from others too that took some time. Um, you know, I got 20, like I said, 24 plus thought leaders to contribute chapters or portion of chapters. So it was getting that work and then trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Um, you know, my part probably, I don't know, 30, 40,000 words. Um, so yeah, it's difficult because you want to provide everything that you know, that's up in here, the audience, but sometimes you got to cut down, right. And, and make it digestible. So I try to, I try to do that. Um, but I have so many great people that I've interviewed, that I pull from, um, that are forward thinkers that are innovators when it comes to their subject matter expertise that I tried to, you know, to illuminate in the book. And hopefully readers out there will gain some insight about the power of really holistic advice, you know, making sure that, you know, we have these services working in concert with each other. Uh, they shouldn't be working in silos because one decision affects the other. Um, and then also having, you know, that, that human first approach and, and really, like I said, helping people uncover what matters most to them, uh, living in alignment with their values and then really mapping out a plan for, you know, having that dinner party with your, your friends and having that freedom to start that side business if you want Dominic, right. Um, so like I said, that mission to really help people, um, find out what matters most and hopefully optimize their wellbeing, uh, for them and their families. Awesome. Well, I've, I've been very curious for a long time and I have no idea if like trying to start a firm or whatever might be in the future might not be like, who knows? I'm, I'm really just kind of a linear person and I'm like, I'm focusing in on this and I have no idea what's next for me. Um, but like, I have been very much won over by the idea of a holistic approach where once you get that client, like why not offer them all these things they need, um, and like really kind of maximize that relationship return on relationships both for yourself and for them. Right. Because already the hard part is for them to trust you and for you to win their trust and show them that you are trustworthy. So I think that that makes a ton of sense for any kind of accounting professionals who are listening, who may want to go down that Avenue. What is the, what is the like preparation? What's the process like to get your series 65? Yeah, that's a good question. And I think when people, uh, in the profession here, like, Oh, I got to take an exam. They think of the CPA exam, right? Yeah. Like no way. I, I've had people pass it in two weeks of studying. It isn't too difficult. It is not too difficult. I want to say it's easy, but it's not. If you put your mind to it and you put the work in, you can get that license, uh, you know, and the series 65, it can transform your business. You know, one of the, uh, the contributors of the book, Susan Bryant, she has a company called unbox advisors. You know, she got the series 65 and she's running with this model and really talking about integrating professional services and building that team of advisors. And she's not looking back. You know, she's talking about holistic advice, talking about, you know, building your business, building your wealth. Uh, so I believe it's a, it's really the, the, uh, the firm of the future out there. That's going to be this integrated, um, offering, whether you bring it in a house or you partner with, you know, other great people out there to truly provide, you know, a value added offerings to client that, that, that making that makes sure that, that these services are working in concert with each other. Awesome. Well, that's, that's cool to know actually. So for anyone listening, a few weeks could be all it takes to kind of get this thing. You know, I recommend reading the book, reading a little bit more, learning about holistic, you know, holistic financial planning and, and being able to kind of provide that bigger picture. And so I'll make sure I link the, uh, the book in the show notes and, uh, yeah, thank you so much for coming on Rory. Thank you, Dominic, so much for having me. Uh, I appreciate it and keep up the good work. I'm a big fan of, uh, everything you're doing over there.