#20 Angie Herbers – Transcript

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

advisory firms, business, firms, advisors, financial advisor, people, knowledge, grow, company, client, run, harbors, programs, academy, goal, helping, industry, growth, valuing, consulting

SPEAKERS

Angie Herbers, Louis van der Merwe

Louis van der Merwe 

Welcome to another episode of financial planners, South Africa. Today, I’m really excited to have as my guest, Angie herbers, all the way from New York, Angie is a very big name in the practice management arena. might not be familiar to a lot of South Africans, but it’s absolutely, and your business company is a resource that has helped me in our business, bold and grow our business. So I’m really excited to have you here. Thank you much for being here. Angie,

Angie Herbers 

thanks so much for having me. It’s fun to find to do these podcasts and join and share with with you that knowledge today I’m in Austin, Texas.

Louis van der Merwe 

Ah, lovely, lovely. Yeah. And the South African crowd, is really fortunate to be able to, I guess, hear some of your distilled pieces of knowledge. But before we get there, Angie, do you mind sharing us a little bit of your background of how you got into the financial services industry, for sure.

Angie Herbers 

So I graduated from a CFP register program at Kansas State University. And I fell in love with the human sciences. So how to help people, particularly how to help them build their businesses. So when I was 23 years old, I launched a practice management consulting firm called herbertson company. And in the US advisor space now 20 years ago, this space was a whole lot different than it is now. We have less than 5000 advisory firms that would, we would technically consult with so the target market was really small. It’s much larger now. And over the last 20 years, we have helped financial advisors across the globe, build their businesses, grow their businesses, and do what they need to do to keep those businesses alive and keep helping consumers at our core harbours and company helps advisory firms. We we say that we make them grow and monetize an industry that is growing, but our core, we love financial advice and what it does for consumers and we’re we’re here to help all advisors build that. So it’s been a fun journey. This is my 20th year in the industry. It’s been a fun journey. And it’s great to see so much action in financial advice happening globally.

Louis van der Merwe 

Wow. And you know, picking up on that Kansas State program, you see so many great content from people like Megan lurtz, and people like yourself come from from this school. So it’s wonderful to be able to share that on a global stage.

Angie Herbers 

For sure. There’s a lot of great people out there who have been part of the Kansas State program Megan being one of them. harbors and company just hired actually the department head of Kansas State University’s program, Sonia looter, and we’re very happy to have her to lead her reason company Academy. So there’s so much great talent in academia. And I’m blessed to have been trained by them, and also now have them available to our clients and harvesting company.

Louis van der Merwe 

And you want to go back to the kind of early days where I’m guessing after you finished your studies, you had to make a decision, you know, do I go the traditional financial advice route? Or do I go something else and you pick something else? Or how did that decision making process work that you ended up becoming a practice management consultant?

Angie Herbers 

Well, it wasn’t an easy decision. I’ll tell you that. So just my story, I when I was in college, in my CFP registered program, there was a competition in the industry where they take CFP registered program students, and we compete with other students across the entire industry. And what had happened is, they had given us a sample financial plan. And we were to solve that financial plan and then take what we had done the math that we had done in our recommendations and submit it to American Express financial advisors at the time. And they picked the top six plans and the plan and the team that I was on, got selected as the top six, they flew us to New York, and at the time, it was the very first competition in the industry. And my team won that competition. So as a result of that competition, we were cast on a national stage, myself and my two other team members were featured in a lot of the trade publications, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and as a result of that, we just had quite a lot of attention on us. Back then, there were is a big problem with career tracks. So we were early in graduating from a CFP registered program, there wasn’t that many programs back then there’s a lot now. And we entered into the industry very much still an industry focused on the broker model. And it was not our reality, our reality was we have learned a service based financial advisory model. And more much like what we would see a law school student graduating from or an accounting student graduating from, and we got into the industry. And most of the jobs that were available to us were more broker type of jobs where you go out and you bring your friends and family and you start selling them product and you’re on your way. And I didn’t like that I didn’t want to be part of that. So I accepted a job at a small advisory firm that also had a network of advisers that helped build and grow those businesses. And so I was in this position of I could either go help advisors or I could be a financial advisor. And I sat down and I did all the spreadsheets, I took a money approach to a very financial advisor approach, what is going to get me the greatest outcome? Is it going to be being a financial adviser? Or is it going to be being a consultant, and the numbers were very clear that I needed to stay being a financial adviser, but my heart told me something different, and I jumped, I just decided I would start a consulting business and see where it went. And the beautiful thing about it is I could always fall back on to the financial advisory career if I needed to, and the blessing is I never needed to. And now we have this great consulting business, and we’re helping a lot of advisory firms, and we’re doing myself and the team at harbors and company, we’re all doing what we love, which is helping business owners, particularly financial advisory firm business owners grow their business, and it’s fun to see that impact. If I would have become a financial advisor, I think I would have only been able to impact about 1000 people’s lives. You know, you never know on that you could build a big business. But that’s not what happened to me. But now I know that horizon company has impacted over 500,000 consumers. And that is what drives me every day to help advisors.

Louis van der Merwe 

Well, thank you for that, Angie, it’s wonderful to hear how you’ve said, Okay, I want to take a slightly different approach that aligns with my values. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be, you know, a sales orientated role. And we see that same theme play out in South Africa, where, you know, the default is you become a financial advisor, and you know, you have to generate sales and kind of eat what you want to kill model. Yeah, I want to kind of maybe shift a little bit to the practice management side, what have you seen happens to the businesses that like purely I with that mindset, that need to bring in more capacity, and each of those advisors have to sell to their own client base over time, like, what do you see happen to those businesses that follow that philosophy?

Angie Herbers 

Well, there’s a lot of things that happened first, you know, when we look at businesses that have risen company, we’ve seen over 1000 advisory firms and helped them the one of the major issues that we run into is not that they can’t grow, but rather that they grow faster than their knowledge and their business knowledge is. So what we will see is that they’ll start out as what we call rainmakers, they’ll go out and they will drum up that business, and they’re capable of doing that. And then what happens is that rainmaking function becomes less important and running the business and creating better service for clients becomes more important. And it’s all a product of their success. So what we see is what we see more often than not, is successful advisory firms who have grown and they’ve done very good at growing, but now they’ve hit a wall and the knowledge on how to build their businesses beyond that, what we call growth barrier. So a lot of the work that we do is as a result of success, not as a result of failure. What we see, particularly in the US is it’s great that you start an advisory business and you grow it to a point How do you accelerate your knowledge as fast as a business is growing, and if your business isn’t growing, then how to use accelerate your knowledge to get that business going and stick with it and not give up on it. Especially when we have a lot of m&a activity. A lot of great jobs being offered to financial advisors out there, particularly owner advisors out there, how do you stay on your own path versus joining someone else, that’s a hard decision. But almost always, that decision enters into the minds of financial advisors because they were successful. And I think that I mean, if the, if there’s any advice that I can give, that’s the best advice, it’s celebrate your success, because how you got to this point is not how you get to the next point. And the only way you can let go of the ideas, or the thought processes that you have seen work in the past is to celebrate your success, acknowledge that you are successful, and you are here because there’s a another path that you need to take to get to the next point, whatever that point is. So the goal is to always keep growing at whatever pace you need to and overcome whatever barrier you you run into. And there’s hundreds of 1000s of advisory firms who have done that it just is hard sometimes, and it hurts because it takes time to accelerate your own knowledge.

Louis van der Merwe 

I love this concept of kind of the the knowledge and you know, would that be the kind of institutional knowledge that the business builds up to overcome these growth barriers?

Angie Herbers 

No. So we talked about her present company, most especially her was in company Academy where we, the goal is to accelerate knowledge. So we know that growth at its core, so just any type of growth takes a certain level of knowledge to grow beyond where you are. And the faster you can accelerate your knowledge, the more you will know when you encounter whatever barrier you’re going to encounter. So the goal is, if you truly want to grow, the goal is knowledge acceleration. So let’s accelerate your knowledge. First, who you are and what you want to be, where you want the business to go. And then how to get there, you may not be there yet, but because you have the knowledge when you get there, you’ll be able to maneuver through that barrier faster. So our goal at her present company Academy, we have two divisions in her as a company, we have the academy division, which is a training division. And then we have our consulting division, which is where we do one on one help to help advisory firms. But Academy The goal is just to accelerate your knowledge and see how far you can get without having to go into the consulting room. And then once we do that, if you get into the consulting room, and you’re growing really fast, and we can tell you what to do. So I think that for every business owner out there, or for every financial advisor out there that’s running a business, the first question when you run into any problem is where can I go? Who can I call to help me accelerate my knowledge. And I think I believe if advisory firm owners, all owners did that they would be able to overcome those barriers faster. The very hard thing is we’ve got a lot of solo practices out there. And it’s very difficult to call and ask for help. And I think that those fast growing advisory firms, I guess, it would, it’s good for you guys to know this, but the fastest growing advisory firms are not afraid to say I don’t know how to do this, I need some help. Who can I call? Is there someone in a study group that I’m working with? Is there a friend I can call that knows a little bit about growing a business? Can I join a university program? Can I join her as a company Academy? Can Who can I go to get an answer? And that that then becomes a primary goal of overcoming those growth barriers?

Louis van der Merwe 

It’s wonderful how we’ve seen the communities, you know, combine across borders, you know, geographically, physically, and to always be able to share these experiences that we’ve had growing a business because someone else might be going through that same process or same step that you’ve had and you know, I would almost equate it to a mini MBA, trying to run over central planning business. For sure.

Angie Herbers 

It’s a MBA in practice is what I call it. So I don’t have an MBA, I was on a speaking speaking stage one time and someone asked me you know, what, What experience do you have And I said, Well, 20 years running a business and helping other people run a business. So there is a lot of knowledge that you can gain from people who have been there. And I think it’s important to, to reach out to all of those networks, and there’s a lot of networks out there that are cross border, that we’ll be able to help advisors across the across the world, you just sometimes you just have to find them, and you have to take the time to find them, as opposed to getting overwhelmed with your own problem at hand. Many advisors that come to us on the consulting side, especially the firm’s that are so low and smaller, they have tried everything within their own ability, and they’re somewhat at a breaking point of I just don’t know what to do. And I think that’s, the faster you can get to just submitting, I don’t know, and reaching out is, is how, from my experience with the best business owners grow, they stay very curious. And they try not to do whatever they’re trying to do in isolation. So it’s great that we’re seeing a lot of communities expand for the benefit of financial advice across the world.

Louis van der Merwe 

And Gee, there’s this concept of thinking of kind of 10 times bigger, you know, imagining your practice 10 times bigger, and thinking how that would then run, I’m wondering if that is a helpful way to look at it. And if that’s not maybe, you know, a growth barrier that is too far in the future versus kind of what you’re experiencing now.

Angie Herbers 

So we’ve gotten a lot of pushback over this very question over the last 20 years. So I have a background in the human sciences and the human sciences say if you can’t acknowledge where you are, you can’t go where you want to go. So what we see more often than not, is that that many advisory firms have these growth goals, maybe it’s 10 times revenue, maybe it’s seven times revenue, maybe it’s just getting to a million in revenue, maybe it’s getting to a billion and a qm and the human sciences tells us that if you start thinking about the goal in the future, you become the goal in the future in the present. So however, the company takes a different approach, and I do believe that this is one of the core reasons why we’re able to get firms to grow and then grow very quickly is we have firms acknowledge where they are, here is where you are. And that’s okay, the glass is full today. And once we start to tear down any of the expectations of where they think they can go or where they think that they want to go, we start to see them solving problems in the immediate moment in the solving of those problems in the immediate moment creates the growth, which is a little bit counterintuitive, because a lot of people will tell you, you need to make a growth goal, you need to try to 10 extra revenue, you need to figure out where you’re going. And the fastest way that we see firms grow is first figuring out where you are, and celebrating that and accepting that. And then from there, we see firms grow sometimes exponentially, because they’re staying focused on this is where we are today. And this is what we need to do today. And all of those that focus on the today creates a domino effect in the future. I just had a conversation with an advisor on the consulting side yesterday. And he was struggling with not hitting his goals and objectives for 2020. And thinking that he did something wrong. And I just said to him, what what if we took all the goals that you have, and we just put them in the trash, which is very counterintuitive to what a coach would tell you. Or even your friends and family would tell you what if we did that, and he didn’t know how to operate in that mindset. So I said, let’s just throw them all away and focus on what you are doing today. And it just relieved so much stress and anxiety about what might happen in the future thinking too much about the future. And we were able to get to the core issue of his growth problem. And then now take action mean this is a day later take action to solve that problem so we can move things forward faster. So I’m not saying don’t have goals. I think goals are an important part. But sometimes goals do just as much damage as they do good and you can’t master goals until you can master knowing where you are. In other words, if you’re trying to get to South Africa, you can’t Look at the map and assume that you’re in South Africa, you have to recognize you’re in Austin, Texas. And to get to South Africa, I have to first acknowledge that I’m in Austin, Texas. And let’s start there. And then we’ll take one step, and then the next step to get where you where you want to go. Yeah,

Louis van der Merwe 

it sounds like this kind of concept of moving from output goals, more to input goals, to say, these are the things I need to be be working on instead of vanity metrics, you recently spoke about, you know, not chasing additional staff and creating more capacity. And, and that resonated so much with me, because we see that in an industry that celebrates assets under management and staff and amount of clients, which I guess creates an expectation that if you’re not reaching these goals, you are not doing everything that you can or you’re not, you’re doing something wrong,

Angie Herbers 

right. I think that I mean, this is human nature, human nature is we want something more most of human nature’s driven by desire. And the desire for for more is prevalent in all human. So it’s natural to think about where you want to go, it’s natural to compare your firm to other firms out there, it’s natural to look at other firms. But what’s not okay is if you bring that to the internal and say, what I have is not enough, because it absolutely is enough. And if you are out of business, then you’re doing something, right. So let’s look at what you’re doing. Well, let’s see how we can maximize what you’re doing well, and let’s focus solely on the business that you have, if we put all of the energy toward the business that we that you have versus the businesses that are out there that may be perceived as bigger or better, then one day you might wake up and realize, wow, I just achieved what you know that business also achieved just on a different timeline. Sometimes you’re ahead and sometimes you’re behind. And it doesn’t really matter if you’re ahead or behind. It just matters. If you’re taking a step forward and in taking a step forward is the best, from my perspective. And from what we see with clients is the best perspective to have to gain a fast growing business. But it’s difficult for for humans to do because it is human desire is human nature. And we all desire something more.

Louis van der Merwe 

Yeah, these are financial planning problems that we struggle with with our clients yet we don’t translate it back to to own practices, language, I’m wondering what are the what are the common problems that you see come out today, you know, things that surprise you, things that you maybe didn’t expect, could be a growth barrier or problem to practices.

Angie Herbers 

I think the thing that I didn’t expect, I suppose, when I started the consulting business is how much financial advisors understand personal finance, but they don’t understand corporate finance. And what I mean by that is personal finance is very similar to a corporation, you’re making investments in a future goal, and you’re wanting to see a return on that investment. But when you get integrated into your own business, you lose your objectivity. And you forget that to make a business grow, looking at a financial perspective, you have to invest back in it, it’s no different than the market. In order for your investments to grow, you have to continue investing in the market and at least start with one investment and then adding to it so that you can get the compounding effect. So what surprises me about most businesses is they don’t make investments in their own business, to push it forward and then wonder why it doesn’t grow. That’s the first thing. The second thing is and this competes directly with. The first thing is financial advisors. I’m so surprised at how small they value themselves. We’re in a service based business. This is a professional services business, you’re giving advice for living, it’s an intangible, and it’s hard to put a number on it. But you the financial advisor and any financial advisor that you hire, has a value you may not see it on your balance sheet like you would see a machine but there is value there and the goal is to maximize that value and value it properly. So I see many owner advisors, not valuing themselves Paying themselves their value, and being unhappy once they get larger about their own compensation, their own growth, track their own profit margin. And, again, this is a little counterintuitive, but if you get frustrated about how much work you’re putting into the business and how little you’re getting out of it, you have the opportunity to change that. You can value yourself, you can pay yourself, what you know what you’re worth, and what you can afford. And when you do that, you will run your business very differently, and your business will feel differently. So it surprises me that advisors don’t value themselves more and don’t understand how to invest in businesses to make them grow when it is, you know, it is part of personal finance, understanding that

Louis van der Merwe 

and is that a is that a balancing act, you know, extracting capital from the business, but also valuing yourself enough to be able to extract from the business?

Angie Herbers 

Yes, it’s a it’s a balance. But it’s also a preference to me, you have 100% of the decision making ability, if you are an owner advisor on how much you pay yourself. And I think that the reason that many firms don’t pay themselves, at least some level of value is because they’re trying to, for lack of a better term, keep up with the Joneses. They’ve got their friends down the street, you have 10 employees, and they have three and instead of no focusing on valuing themselves and what they have very present in the moment they’re focusing on how do I get to 10 employees. And that’s not a way to run a business, the way to run a business is value the service that you are offering, find people who match those values, and then continue to grow over time without thinking too much about what is being done on the street. I can tell you having seen 1000s of firms. There are firms out there that many people know that aren’t running so well. But they look really good from the outside. It’s what some inside that matters. And I think it’s important that people, advisor owners get very comfortable with where they are at celebrate where they are at. And once they do that we have seen time and time again that they grow, and they start to grow very quickly. that builds a confidence in them in their knowledge. And then we accelerate the knowledge, usually through something like carburizing opening Academy. And once that knowledge is accelerated, then they’re much more comfortable running the business. And they’re not thinking about alternatives anymore.

Louis van der Merwe 

Yeah, we tend to compare up and not down. We look at the the really successful businesses instead of just saying, oh, let’s celebrate where we are.

Angie Herbers 

Right? I have a lot of clients who use the glass half full analogy is the glass half full, or is the glass half empty. And I say neither one, the glass is just the wrong size. Your glass is full right now. Now we need to figure out how to transfer all the knowledge that you’ve learned into another class that’s a different size and fill that glass up. So I think that if you can come to the table with the idea that everything I have is enough, then what you’ll realize is you’ll gain a whole lot more.

Louis van der Merwe 

And you would you’re talking about kind of sounds like mindsets and blind spots. But I’m wondering how do you help someone to cultivate the right mindset, the kind of growth mindset that you’re talking about and actually being comfortable with where you are instead of just, you know, comparing up the whole time?

Angie Herbers 

Well, harbor is a company does it quite bluntly, we have a term in the consulting division, when we have advisors who start to compare, we just call out the word story. And what that means is, and the clients tend to, they start to learn what we’re doing. But we know that they’re just telling them as themselves a story about the person down the street, they don’t really know what the person down the street is doing. And so we just very quickly have to break down those stories. The herb doesn’t have any consulting division isn’t a coaching division, a coaching division would lead you to the answer so that you can come to the conclusion on your own. Our goal in the consulting is to tell you the answer, but in order for you to accept the answer, or come back with a different idea that enhances the answer. We have to break down all those stories, whatever story you’re telling yourself, may or may not be true and we have to get you very, very Much into what’s happening today, and not focus on all the stories that you begin to tell yourself as a business owner that may or may not be true. So the simple answer is we just call out, that’s a story. Let’s move on. That’s a story. Let’s move on. So

Louis van der Merwe 

a lot of that the stories, there’s probably just assumptions that we’ve made about other things that might be true or not. Yeah, it’s

Angie Herbers 

assumptions that we’ve made, it’s expectations that we’ve put on ourselves and others it’s beliefs that we’ve let in that may or may not be true for that particular client. It’s thoughts about how business should run, it’s, it can even go to information that you’ve read in a book, every client is different, there is no client, that is the same. But if we can break down the stories that they’re telling themselves, then we can change the behavior the fastest. Now, I will say, not everybody works well like that. Some people don’t want their stories to be broken down. And that’s okay. But on the consulting division side of things, if we can’t get the stories broken down, we can’t move forward. And then we would need to send that advisor to a coach to help them work through the the truth and the entry of this whatever is they believe.

Louis van der Merwe 

So this comes back to your earlier comment saying that you need to get to a point where you know that you don’t know all the answers, and that you’re happy to reach out to your community. And at the same time, you’re building a wonderful community for financial planners across the globe. Tell us a little bit more about that, you know, how did that come about that you said, Okay, we’re gonna open up the doors and you know, shave what we’ve been doing for the last 20 years?

Angie Herbers 

Well, the simple answer is the reason why we did it was timezones we had so herbers in company has been in the US doing consulting for the last 18 years, this is my 20th year in the business. And over those 18 years, we’ve had quite a lot of advisors reach out globally to us and ask for help and or comment on articles that we publish in the industry. So in 2007, I tried to work with a client in Germany, and we kept running into timezone issues. But the information that he needed was, was very educational in nature, he just needed to be updated on human capital programs that we have seen successful in the US client experiences that we’ve seen successful in the US. And his knowledge, which was new, some of it was new to me, I felt like I needed to be out there. So in 2017, I launch horizon company Academy, and the Academy, which just educational sessions and presentations online where you could go buy one educational program. So as people started to buy those programs we had over now 1200 people buy those programs. The feedback that we got was how do we talk to other people in these classes to learn what they’re learning to learn together to get feedback to build a community around what we are trying to do. A good example is human capital. So as you grow, you have to learn organizational strategy and structure. We had many people in her present company Academy who are learning organizational strategy and structure. And they kept asking, What do what are other firms doing? What have they seen work in their hiring processes, in their organizational strategies in their comp structures? and careers? And company can answer those questions, we can come out and say this is what we’ve seen as best but there is a benefit to hearing how one firm got to the place of choosing one comp structure or organizational structure or even down to choosing an employee, how did we choose to hire a lead advisor versus an associate advisor versus a client service specialist. And there’s a great benefit in a community who can share those pathways. The more pathways you learn or the more stories that you hear from others about their journey, the closer you can get to your journey, because without those stories of the journey, then it’s hard to know what the possibilities are, so it feels cumbersome. So what we did, the pandemic spurred this a little bit but what we did is we took the great knowledge of the learning programs of hers and company Academy and then built an app. On top of that, we said, we can have an app that can go out globally, you can get all the education plus updates every week in the education that the consulting team is doing or learning. And you can get the tools that we use for clients to push you along further in your knowledge acceleration. What we’ve learned, we launched the app in June, we have almost 200 people in the app within two, two months, all over the world. And I think what we’re learning is that, that that community environment of us just putting out information, spring knowledge, having those community members ask questions, and then connect with others, is helping bridge the knowledge gap even faster. There’s only so much as a company can do one on one. But there’s much that we can do with the power of harbors and company and advisors out there who desire to grow. And the app was designed to do that to pull everyone together, get the education resources and tools that are was in company has, and share with others positives and negatives about what they’re going through. So everybody can learn faster, the best way to build a business is to surround yourself by really good people. And there’s a lot of people out there who want to learn from others and want to share with others and harbors and company Academy app is designed to do just that, with the benefit of harbours and companies knowledge and resources.

Louis van der Merwe 

Yeah, that’s such a true point, you know, surrounding yourself with the right people because it can be overwhelming look at all the content out there and, you know, trying to figure out what it is that you should be applying. And that comes back to what you were talking about saying, okay, you need to know where you are, need to know the things that you’re struggling with not these kind of, you know, idealistic goal expectations and start working with that and unpacking the stories from that. And right, when you look at the the advisors that you’re dealing with at the moment, what are the type of skills that they’re working on? You know, what are the things that you you’ve picked up on, that seems to be drained?

Angie Herbers 

Well, that’s a big question. I have to think about that for a minute. Because there’s so many, the one that comes top of mind to me is there’s a lot of leadership, education and management education out there. And as you grow an advisory firm, you can choose to stay a solo firm and be on your own. And that is a legitimate choice that builds valuation. Many people call those lifestyle practices herpers, and company just sees them as solo firms that have made the choice to be there. But once you if you decide to move beyond yourself, add partners, add employees, then there is a need for management and leadership education deeper than what you have. What we find. Again, this is also counterintuitive, what we find is many firm owners will go out there and try to get the management help. So how do I manage people better? And what we have learned over the process is that leadership is that skill that’s really needed. A leader will ask questions and be curious, a manager will tell people what to do, and try to keep everything intact and in line. And what a professional services firm often needs, which would be different than a product based firm. So let’s just say you’re selling t shirts. If you’re selling t shirts, you need a lot of managers because there’s machines that you’re working with, there’s people that are doing very specific jobs. But when it comes to professional services, you’ve got professionally trained talent, oftentimes coming from great university programs, they don’t need more management, they need really great leaders to show them the way and to to work with them to bring out the best ideas that they have. So when we look at financial advisory firms, we don’t think that the management skill is lacking. We think that the leadership skill is lacking and that’s just taking the time to be very curious and ask a lot of questions and have a team of people who are sitting at the Same level, as opposed to a hierarchy of people where one person is underneath another person. There’s a lot of research out there, and I would encourage people to Google it. But running professional services firms running professional services firms is very, very different than running a tech firm a product based firm, a, if you’re selling t shirts, if you’re selling cars, even if you’re selling financial products, so that requires service based cultures, and that is rooted in leadership.

Louis van der Merwe 

And so is this different because of the people that you would hire or because of your, you know, the outputs and the client experience that you’re creating, always a combination of both.

Angie Herbers 

It’s a combination, but it’s mostly different from the people that you are hiring, Listen, I’ll give this example to you, you go out, and you’ll hire another lead advisor who can do advice work just the same as you. And they spend their whole day giving advice to a client, and then you come to them and tell them what to do, it doesn’t work very well. So what you have to learn to do is you have to learn the leadership skill. And we’re working in this together, you both have generally, in the case of you’ve hired a lead advisor, you’re also a lead advisor, you’re just running the firm. And in those cases, you have two equals, from a knowledge standpoint, who can work together. But if you start to manage those people, and or micromanage those people and tell them what to do, you’re messing with their reality, because their reality is they are the expert, they’re giving advice all day long. And now you’re telling them how to do it in a different way, or you’re telling them what to do in the business, it doesn’t work quite as well when you have when you’re hiring professional talent. So that is a small nuance that we’ve seen across the advisory profession that we have sought to change. And we do that through greater leadership skills. And those leadership skills are being curious, asking questions, asking for feedback, not, you know, putting your feet in the sand on exactly what you think needs to do, it’s collaborating more. It’s showing people that you are very valuable to this firm, because you are giving them advice. And we’re going to help you learn what we do on the business side and ask for your feedback. Not all feedback will be taken. But it’s important that the collaboration happens versus those hierarchies that are happening that we see oftentimes happen that hurt the culture

Louis van der Merwe 

gets wonder it’s wonderful, how you’ve just simplified, you know, these things that you need to be be working on. And thank you for that. And I guess that is why you’ve been so successful over the last 20 years, bringing clarity to financial planning firms that you know, struggled to grow and meet the growth objectives.

Angie Herbers 

Yes, thank you. It’s fun. We enjoy what we do all the leadership at arbors. And company is dedicated to helping advisors accelerate their knowledge. And we look forward to serving hundreds of 1000s of more consumers by way of the helping them financial advisor. So we’re happy to do it and happy to welcome anyone at harbors and company.

Louis van der Merwe 

NGO. I saw in the news that you hired someone with a financial therapy background is this Sonia that you were talking about earlier in the in the call?

Angie Herbers 

Yes. We got very lucky to add Sonia to our team. She is a financial therapist, she was the head of the human sciences department at Kansas State University. The reason we have added Sonia to our team is because one of the major requests in her was and company Academy was how to build wellness programs and also how to communicate better with clients around wellness and financial psychology. And then that translates into human capital. How do we better train and work with other employees of our firm to lead them in a more well way. The pandemic was interesting because it brought wellness to the forefront and we’re seeing a lot of turnover within the industry because of programs that were in wellness and we felt that Sonia would be a great addition not only to lead her as a company Academy with all of her academic academic experience, but also to expand programs in client communication, employee communication and help us organize her purse and company Academy. Even better than is now to serve advisors. So we’re excited to have her and very lucky to get her And we look forward to what great things will come out of her as a company Academy as a result.

Louis van der Merwe 

Well congratulations. And I’m really looking forward to the content that you and your team with Sonia has helped with.

Angie Herbers 

Yeah, we’ve already got started on some of it. So we’re excited to see what comes out of those programs. So thanks so much for being a member. And we will continue to provide whatever advisors need as they grow.

Louis van der Merwe 

And as we as we wrap this up, where’s the best place for people to get hold of you and herbison company when they’re ready to, you know, tackle these issues that we’ve been talking about today?

Angie Herbers 

Yeah, great. Thanks for asking that so that you can go to our website, it’s www dot herbers co.com. It’s h er B is in boy er S is in SAM co dot c, o m, so harbors co.com, you can hit the connect button, and someone on our service team will reply to you either on the consulting division or on the academy division. If you would like to join Academy, you can join through I IO or sorry, Apple and Google. Or you can join us on the desktop by going to Herbert co.com. Just joining and you’ll be right in there able to download tools, look at videos at your leisure, and it’s 24 seven, access to anything you need. In addition to that in horizon company Academy, you can also email our service team, and our service team will answer your individual questions. Our goal is to make growth happen and accelerate that knowledge the best that we can and we have opened up the resources at Harper’s and company to help firms do that.

Louis van der Merwe 

Thank you so much for a wonderful conversation. This is all about driving the positive evolution of financial advice. And you’ve been doing it for 20 years. That’s wonderful. Thank you very, very much, Angie,

Angie Herbers 

thank you for having me. I appreciate it. It was fun.