#23 H. Adam Holt – Transcript

Louis van der Merwe
Welcome to another episode of Financial Planners, South Africa. Today, I’m really excited to have Adam Holt. Join me all the way from Philadelphia, ln is the founder and CEO over at acid map, who we’re very proud to have as a sponsor of this conversation. Adam, thank you so much for joining me.

H. Adam Holt
Thank you, Louis. It’s a pleasure to be here and spend time with you.

Louis van der Merwe
Adam, it’s so great, because I know how clear you are in terms of the thoughts that you’ve drawn, translate to your presentations and to the audiences. And you spend a ton of time giving keynotes when it’s just wonderful to have you here, like, what’s going on in the US at the moment? Are you back into, you know, face to face presentations? Or it’s mainly virtual?

H. Adam Holt
Yeah. Well, you know, as you know, that I’m a I tell that everybody I’m a recovering financial planner, right, I spent the 24 years as a financial advisor in the States. And I love the business. And really, I think we’re all educators, right? If you have the, if you have the desire to educate, help people and lift people, then you’re an educator, a teacher, and so that’s all the keynotes have been. It’s just a mass spreading of, of a gospel, if you will, of how we can be better for our customers, in our in our own practices. You know, I think the same thing that’s happened in South Africa, where there’s a desire and a demand for financial advice more than ever. And given the fact that we all have just such little attention span left to focus, in many cases on ourselves, and how we can lift ourselves, let alone lift others. I think my big mission has been recognizing how do you communicate quickly, in a way that serves people and gets them empowered, so that they can actually make better decisions now around financial planning and financial advice, and around insurance and investments? That tends to be around that one critical point that we all had as financial advisors, which is the fact finding, right, the collection of data and the and the digging through the financial closet, right? Can we be intimate, and non judgmental, and remove intimidation. And that’s what we’ve been doing it asset map, at least is, is, you know, trying to help people get to a place where, Okay, I’m ready to address a problem. And I now understand the problem because you’ve educated me. And of course, as a result, you know, what happens when people understand problems? They they solve them. And of course, on the revenue side, we tend to have success around that, right, because we, we wind up placing more business as a result in serving people more intentionally. So that’s really been, I think, my focus the best one to use. I don’t think it’s anything different anywhere around the world, right?

Louis van der Merwe
Yeah, you waste no time. Hey, jumping right in.

H. Adam Holt
Why? Why waste time, I have no attention span, everybody’s you know, thinking about doing their emails right now. And I want to make sure they pay attention

Louis van der Merwe
is that we got to have acid map. And so for those that don’t know, acid map really creates a visual picture of your client’s financial life. And you get to take them through a journey of financial planning, where most software out there is really just so far removed from engaging the clients like, so Adam, before we jump into, you know, the software piece and how you got to building that rewind as to, you know, kind of finishing up high school and having to think of a career path. Like, what was the thinking at that point? What happened?

H. Adam Holt
Whatever you want to go back to high school. Yeah, I was. Okay, I was a scrawny kid. No, I don’t think I’m scrawny. But what at high school, gosh, I always wanted to be an architect, really. I am. I love art and pencil drawing and sculpture and furniture building. That’s what I got into as an adult, this building furniture. So when I went to college, my biggest I was a rower in a crew team that went to row at the highest division in our country. So I went to a college where I could row. And I did that for a couple of years and just got burned out from it. And I decided to pursue two majors in a minor because I got to keep busy, right? So I’m one of those people that just does more work than they need to. And I pursued via environmental planning business, and also satellite imagery, remote sensing, like this is I don’t know why I got into this, but it seemed to make sense. And when I when I got out of college, I mean, who who’s hiring that kind of person? It turns out, I went to working for the USDA, that’s the United States Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, get this Global Change Research Program. It’s the largest funded research project in the United States around climate change. I figured, okay, they need to use satellites, they need to use computers out work for them. And it worked for them for two years. And I realized one thing Louis, you want to know was, I love people? I don’t love computers, okay. But as a result, I went to a job fair, and I said, You know what, maybe I’ll try my hand at, at finances. I applied to jobs all around the world. I got offered a job in Goldman Sachs in Frankfurt, Germany, and my mother said to me, you know, maybe you should see if you like finance before you move across the world. And so I went to this job fair, as I told you and I got introduced to a financial service Was his firm who was hiring, I really loved the idea of helping people educate them. And I took a job with them and got through barely got through the interview process. Turns out, they were looking for life insurance agents, I didn’t realize that. So I started in the life insurance industry, like many of us, right, which does a great job of hiring us. You know, at a school, we don’t know anything. We want to create a career. It’s not an easy business. As we all know, I remember, the organization that I joined, was incredibly well respected. So I felt really strongly about that. And the leader of the organization who was, you know, one of the most well known people in the States, I’ll leave on names, because you could always do the research if you’re really interested. But he said, if you’re not thinking about quitting every single day, you’re not working hard enough. I was like, wow, that’s okay. That can be motivating course, I had to experience that we’ve all experienced this right, Louis, look, what am I doing this? Why am I why am I a glutton for punishment, right. But I stuck it out. And I remember there was a there was a seminal moment, which I shared with you briefly, that I think has a lot of merit. We’ve all gone through this. There was a moment when I was I was done. I was about a year and a half. And I was making, I think I made 11,000 us the first year, I was living at home, I didn’t have, you know, two nickels to rub together. I was paying my mother rent. And I was like, I’m done with this. I gotta get a regular job.

Louis van der Merwe
So this is now your, your third your thinking career changed into a?

H. Adam Holt
Yes, at right at 24. Oh, 25, I would have been 2526. And this is not too long of a story. But I think everybody can relate to it. I said, Okay, I have to make one ditch last ditch effort. I went to lunch, I asked someone to lunch a family friend, I had no natural market. I’m not somebody who has a significant amount of contacts. Even at that age, we moved from New York to Philadelphia. So we didn’t have family or friends. And I have a single mom who was quite busy. And she was taking care of two parents until she had to restart herself. So she didn’t have a connection or network so much, either. So this classic situation, you got to figure out how to get business in the door. What did I do, I went to lunch with one of the family friends that we had. And I said, Listen, I really need your help. I’ve got this business idea. But I don’t have anyone to call. And I don’t know who to talk to. And she said I don’t have any money. But she took out an app. And she wrote four names and four phone numbers on there said call these people. I called them all I met with two of them. All four of them said they couldn’t do business with me. But I offered one of them at the very end of the lunch meeting I had with her. Who’s by the way, this person who I met with this prospect, a successful business woman whose sister and her best friend were her financial advisors like so there’s no way I’m going to do business with these people. Right? Yeah. I said before I left some loyalty there, right? I’m not going to earn the assets. I’m not taking the insurance. Okay. Should I sit there says, you know, you’re you’re probably five years away from retirement. Has anybody done a financial plan for you? Do you have enough capital to fund us? She says, you know, honestly, no. And I was so surprised, right? How many people work with trusted financial advisors? Nobody’s told them, whether they have the right stuff. I said, Tell you what, we’ve had such a nice lunch, I’m willing to do the financial plan for free, just because it’s great experience for me. And if I can come up with any strategies that makes sense that the other people haven’t done, would you consider doing them? She said, Yeah, sure, whatever do it did the financial plan and I found a gap, something they had completely ignored. And she wound up doing some business with me. And then she referred me to one person who referred me to one person who referred me to the next rest of my entire business. And that literally, that kicked off that my survival. That’s my survival story, Louis, right. As well as what wound up becoming, you know, one of the most successful people in my 30s in my entire company. Because I used planning, as in those days, a sales enablement tool to say, this is what you need this why you need it. Now, they felt more comfortable. It wasn’t about sales. That was that was 20 years ago, please.

Louis van der Merwe
Adam, I want to stand still on kind of those two decisions that you made, like, obviously, the one changing career Early days, I can see this theme of data visualization, creating, taking complex data sets, and, you know, creating a picture. So this was really ingrained early days. But, you know, that sunk cost fallacy that, you know, we want to hold on to the things that we’ve been studying for, how difficult was that first career change? And, you know, like, that second one that you thought, like, How close were you actually to do quitting?

H. Adam Holt
I don’t know. It’s interesting. You ask that because I haven’t thought about it like that before. Because I’ve always been interested in doing lots of things. I get my hands dirty a lot. And I want to fix I’m a problem solver by nature. So I was I like being challenged to so the interesting thing about the prior career was it. It satisfied a lot of my needs to actually solve and think but its speed was too slow, I think working for the federal government and we On top of it showed me you want to get something done, you get a need millions of dollars in 10 years, I didn’t have that time patience. For me on the financial advice side, I found that even the financial planning tools that we had used, which were very technical tools, they’re intended for back office analysis, there was nothing that was helping me communicate technical complexity to the consumer who’s got to make an informed decision with confidence. And the only thing they have to bridge the competence around that decision is this massive technical output, which we all call financial planning, outcome or illustration for annuity or insurance or an investment analysis, or profiler, or policy statement, right? I mean, these things are, these are intended for the professional not as a communication tool to the consumer. And so that’s really where acid map came from. Because I actually applied what I had learned in architecture and design, and data mapping and compressing comp, complicated stuff into its most consumable form. To create asset that took years I created as a map in 2004, for myself, in my own practice, and it wasn’t until 2006, that I got a compliance approved by my firm. But after 2006, and I started using in the field, I tripled my revenue three years in a row. And going from making, let’s say, 30,000, to making over a million in US, is a massive shift in your 30s. Right. So that that catapult was like, Oh my gosh, can other people start doing and we started seeing that kind of result instantly. Within my firm, and starting to use it. That’s why I actually had grew virally actually kind of translate that into how did the past get us to the current? It’s basically by having thinking about the problem differently. And that’s what I think my early career helped my current position. Right.

Louis van der Merwe
Thanks to impatience, we now have a wonderful tool to actually see, you know, what the impact of our decisions is. And we often portrayed to our clients that were saying, Well, this shows us the trade offs and know kind of when we when we talk about trade offs in financial planning firm, is it something that’s discussed enough? Because, you know, obviously, there’s always trade offs in your decisions. And so kind of how much time should we be spending as financial planners thinking in terms of trade offs? Or should it be more in terms of, you know, this is what the future is? And let’s try and create clarity for you. Yeah, I

H. Adam Holt
think that’s I think there’s a really good point, in terms of helping people understand the context of the decision they need to make, right, if I’m retiring, do I need insurance here? Do I need some form of investments? Should they be aggressive investments? Why do I need income sources? Do I need a different legal structure? Right? These kinds of questions, I think, are not top of mind, but are secondary to the conversation of we why are we doing this in the first place. So in many cases, most of us who’ve figured out the financial advice game, recognize that we have to give people some level of confidence that we are in a decision position for to help them make good decisions, right. In many cases, we all know our customers are relying upon us to drive the car to make decisions, or at least offer distinctions that they can use to make the decisions that serve them, right. There’s an enormous amount of trust in this. And in many ways, if you break it down, the financial advisor earns or creates that perceived trust, based upon process, right, this process is either off putting, or it compels me to feel like this person is on my team, and we can make better decisions than I can on my own. And I would actually offer to you that acid map actually solved an even more basic problem for us, which is, especially when you have higher net worth people or complexity, they tend to think about their financial stuff there one or two things, right, their business, maybe their big account, right, their large investment account, or their largest one, and maybe their business if they have it or their real estate and or maybe their income, right, if that’s their biggest wealth generator. They kind of ignore all these little pieces that around and I very much think of it like a financial closet. Have you heard of Marie Kondo? Are you familiar with Marie Kondo, okay. If you don’t know Marie Kondo Marie Kondo is a Japanese sensation, who’s written books, and also has a shows now that are syndicated, that talk about organization, and there’s, there’s a Kaizen principle behind this is Japanese principle of basically honoring, respecting and decluttering and that actually serves you and the point that he’s saying this is the following. If you follow that, or have heard of it, is very often we don’t own mentally, all of our junk, all of our stuff that we’ve accumulated over time. And so we don’t ask the question or challenge ourself as to whether it’s intentional and whether it serves us. And so the first job of all of us before we can provide good diagnosis and financial Nice to earn that credibility and trust, right? Is we have to prove that we know what we’re working with. And as a map in many ways for us was to say, Listen, is this an accurate picture of your current stuff? Yes or No? Do I know everything? Because you know that there’s clients that don’t always tell us everything right? Because they don’t think we need to know, they didn’t think that it was relevant. So they decided to leave it out. So if it’s not a current, an accurate picture, then we need to help people get to the place of yes, no, you’re missing this. Oh, you know what my Nana set up some money over? It’s in this bank here? Oh, really? I didn’t know. What is the purpose of that? How does it serve us? Why is it there? Don’t you have a lot of clutter here? Why is everything all on his side, and she has nothing, right? You see this visually, when you basically unpack the financial closet and dump it on the bed. So I think for many, for many of us in financial advice, the key is to help people take ownership of what they actually own, and then decide what is intentionally going back in the closet and one needs to get replaced. And I think that’s an important aspect for all financial professionals. Whether you’re insurance, investment planning, all the different names, we call ourselves these days, financial advisor and such, we only

Louis van der Merwe
do this for decluttering. And just you know, doing a mind up and actually saying, let’s get this on paper. It’s like creating your to do list when you have all these things in your head. And they’re all saying write down the list before you start tackling. And what you’re saying is that apply that to your your finances and organize it and saying, Hey, even almost to the extent you say is the serving you and is this scary thing? Yeah, that’s exactly right. With the clients is that they jump in and this ah, actually, this is my map. And I I guess I want to add this, you know, we haven’t spoken about this before. And just the difference of asking versus them saying and them soliciting the advice, changes the conversation. What did the acid map look like, you know, 15 years ago, and there’s those first, graphs like Did it look very different from what we know today.

H. Adam Holt
Now, it’s incredibly similar. I mean, don’t get me wrong, the first three or four years, we did have to move things around. In the early days, we were we had our technical hats on. And we added pie charts of asset allocation next to the all of them, and we added performance numbers, and then we added tax basis. And then we started turning it back into this technical mess. We turned our x ray machine into an MRI and we’re like, oh, this is so pretty. And we’re like wait a minute, every but now everybody’s like, Okay, now interpreted again. So we said you know what, the key here was to work on this concept called I call it simple, rich, simple, rich, is this is kind of the bridge between technical and simplistic, simplistic, by the way, I believe is a derogatory term, basically taking something that’s that has richness, and you’re basically over simplifying it for the purpose of making it simple. I don’t think that people appreciate that. And professionals, it doesn’t make us look smarter. First of all, so the key to the key to getting something consumable is to make it relevant. So it is difficult, Louis, I have to tell you, it is really difficult to take something that’s 20 pages, or typically in a balance sheet spread, you know, format, write a bunch of columns, and turn it into something that a human can comprehend quickly, and understand and get deeper ask a second question and get that answer from the same presentation. Oh, wait, what’s the next one? Answer that same question from the same presentation that is very technically difficult. I think I think we’ve done a pretty good job over years of constantly cutting. And that’s a that is a principle that we try to apply for everything, our financial planning 30 seconds, you should be able to run it on one page. Okay, that’s what you should be able to do. I’m not spending five hours creating a financial plan anymore. And so we’ve tried to apply this principle to everything, we’re creating an asset map, but it’s not that different from where we started. Because it worked. And it worked for both wealthy and non wealthy people.

Louis van der Merwe
Do you have other rules in your design team saying, Hey, these are the core principles that we’re using when we’re thinking of adding new features or looking at what we’ve

H. Adam Holt
built? Absolutely, we do. It actually has to go. He meant in the in the first early days, really, my goal was one page or not nothing. Like if you can’t get it to one page, there’s there are plenty of books out there. There’s one I think it was I can’t remember what it was called. There’s a story that the basically the I’ll summarize it really quickly, gentlemen says okay, you know, here’s my recommendation, boss, here’s 80 pages on what we should do. And he says, Okay, do me a favor, to put this into five pages and then come back and a couple weeks later, because back I got it to five pages like this is really great. Get it to one page. I gotta take it to the team. I ain’t kidding me. So he takes it he finally gets it after all this time, the one page you can imagine what happens. Eventually he says I gotta take this up to the board. I needed on one paragraph, right? So compress your 80 pages into a paragraph and the person’s freaking out, right? He’s like, Are you kidding me? I’ve got all this information. You’re going to miss? And he says, I need to know whether make the deal or not. Right? I need to know whether you will I know you got a thought process. Can you get me to the place of what should I do, Louis? Like, should I buy it? Should I sell it? What should I do? And that’s what we really need from our technical experts is we need to, we need their confidence to come to the table, say, here’s all this fantastic research. But here’s your presentation. As a result, the answer your question is everything an acid map, if it doesn’t fit on one page, I don’t want it. So you have to get it to a single Tear Sheet. Or else it doesn’t deserve to be on the platform. That is not easy, especially with compliance. So yeah, we have some small text at the bottom. But the key is, we think this way, we can consume a single page. And if we’re all looking at that same single page, nobody reads ahead, right? Nobody’s you have to stay on point. And that’s really important because you get it done, and you move it to the next. And that process is pretty, pretty similar, literally globally, we can focus for a little bit.

Louis van der Merwe
So when you hire people into your team, like is that a key piece that you’d bring up and saying, okay, you know, be able to simplify? Or like you said, simple reach within your process, or kind of what is the hiring process look like within your team?

H. Adam Holt
That’s really funny that you asked that question, because by you asking that I realize, I don’t know the answer to that, we tend to the people that have joined asset map, there is a there is a very specific requirement, we have an asset map, and that is, you have to communicate, and you have to be a good person, we try to figure that out, are you someone that we’re gonna want to run this team with? Right? Because if you’re not good in the in the, you know, if you’ve got a bad attitude, like, it’s, it’s not gonna last very long anyway. So we really go after that. And we try to bring in people from completely different environments, we know from at least my prior experience, that bringing in an artist architect into financial planning was not the best hire from a probability standpoint, right? I’m not aggressive. I’m not assertive. I over explain everything clearly. And, you know, that’s not really good for life insurance. But that being said, it took me to literally revolutionize that company. Because there that entire company in the United States 5000 advisors, asset map is the number one use tool and the highest performing tool in the entire company, they adopted my process, because they saw what I was able to do for myself. Despite having tried to teach me a different process, when I start there, we were able to actually literally revolutionize this, this global company. Innovation happens when you start answering or challenging problems in different ways. And people have always thought about it. And that’s, that’s what I think we’re looking for here too, is we want to bring in people that are going to not think the way that we think but they’re also going to be great people because we still want to be on the team with them. Right? That’s, that’s really cool. That’s critical.

Louis van der Merwe
I love that because the communication is actually what you know, SMF facilitates communication between the advisor and the end client.

H. Adam Holt
That’s true. That is all it’s about. Do you know that actually, one of the funny things where I think we’ve we’ve tried to be different is we’re not trying to create a better financial plan. We’re not We’re not saying that any math, spreadsheet, cashflow burndown insurance strategy is better than another, we don’t know that. And they’re going to be different four or five years from now than they are today. They’re going to be distributed differently, they’re going to be priced differently, just because that’s the nature of everything, what is going to be what is going to be the common scenario for all of us. And in financial advice, we will all have to prove that we know the client. And I say prove by the way, not just a fact client, we actually have to be able to attest to it when you know, God forbid something comes back on US legally. Did you do all the did you do the process? Right? Did you find the facts? Can you back it up? Can you support it? Right, this compliance component of prove that you know, your client. So we all have to do that no matter what, whatever the products look like in the future, and how we’re paid by the way. And as a result, the key is to elevate the advisors experience as opposed to the technical experience.

Louis van der Merwe
Yeah, love that. We already seen that through our colleagues in Australia. You know, it’s all about the case notes. Is there an additional note on the on the file when the compliance department comes in? And like you saying it’s about the experience for the adviser and then subsequently know the client gets gets a massive benefit as well. I want to touch a little bit. Yeah, please on on this kind of focus on integration of systems talking to each other. And I’d love to hear your view on kind of a financial ecosystem. Where is the place for these more technical tools, you know, these MonteCarlo simulations, the pie charts that you were talking about? Where does that sit? And how like doesn’t need to speak to other tools? Is that even important?

H. Adam Holt
You know? I have a lot of challenge with this topic. I’ve spoken a lot about it globally now. And I have the you I think enjoy General in this, this voice, I have the unique experience of being both a financial advisor, living it in the field running a firm growing a firm selling a firm, and then running a FinTech that actually serves those advisors. And it is certainly table stakes that you have the capacity for these tools to talk to each other. In other words, they have to be built on a framework, what we call an API, RESTful API, which basically just means there is a glossary or a lookup directory between systems, they could connect to each other like their Legos, right? They’re all built on a Lego concept, you can keep building onto it. That’s critical today. However, I have not seen a real idealistic, truly integrated financial tech, everything talks to each other perfectly. There’s no redundancy, there’s no double entry. I haven’t seen it yet. And it’s hilarious that we’ve been talking about it for so long. And nobody really has pulled it off. And you know why they’ve never pulled it off. Because it’s incredibly complicated and expensive. And the funny thing is, is that the systems that have gotten close enough to actually fully integrating with each other, the advisors don’t use it, they don’t use it. So it seems idealistic, that we would have all these tools talking to each other. And it would be perfect, right? But then the advisors don’t care in the field we find in general. Now, there are certainly some of you that are listening who are like, no, no, no, no, that’s what I want. And that’s what I need. And that would be great. The problem is, is that these larger companies and vendors like ours, even ours, we just don’t have the capacity to handle all of the connections that need to happen. So we’re all getting away with, let’s say, 20% of the capacity to connect, because we know at least everybody will use it. It’s an 8020 rule, right, you can invest for the four or 5% of the population that could actually you know what a great example that is. So aggregation has been a really big topic in the United States, which basically means the customer can aggregate all of their accounts all over the place onto one portal or one dashboard. It requires, as you can imagine them the client puts in all their passwords. And it either goes out to the custodians and the different companies and it pulls in that information. Now in South Africa, you have a fantastic system where it is centralized for most of the for most of asset management, right? In the States, we don’t have them. So you can imagine how complicated this can be 1015 different logins for different companies to pull the information is in the largest company that provides the service, fantastic product 20% of the advisors that buy that product, for the purposes of using it actually execute it. Okay, well, that’s pretty sad. So 20% Actually, we bought, it’s like buying the weight system 20% are actually using it. Okay, set it up in the first year. By year two, only 20% of that 20% is using it. So 4% of the original population is actually still going to the gym, proverbially. But we have to buy, we have to build that. So my point in saying this discipline, data aggregation has been data, aggravation for the field force. And the reality is that most of us in the sales side, we can get by with a yellow pad and a pen and a calculator. And anything that slows us down, tends not to get high priority. So I know that there’s this, this is sacrilege in many ways for me to say this as a tech manager. Because we have over a million people and asset mapping, we just crossed $1.4 trillion in us in the system, it’s a massive amount of information, shouldn’t that data go to somewhere I think it should go to CRM, it should go to investment management tools. And in many cases, if you’re not using us for financial planning, financial planning, so those three as Michael Kitsis says all the time, right is one of our bigger thought leaders, financial planning, CRM and investment management should be all integrated. And if you can tag on your, your, let’s say your profiling tools like what we do, or risk management, those are, those are good integrations that you should seek to do. But don’t worry about getting it perfect, because that’s idealistic.

Louis van der Merwe
I love that it’s kind of you, you build a new expected that they would come but only 4%. Stick around to actually use. Yeah. And a better question would be to ask, well, actually, you know, what should we be focusing on? When we look at our, at our tech stack as a financial advisor that, you know, let’s say we’ve been in the industry for five or six years, what do you see as the piece that’s missing, you know, from your users that might already have acid map? Like, what are the pieces that they’re struggling with?

H. Adam Holt
There’s a couple things that I think advisors are missing, in general, they don’t understand it yet. And it’s really this question of the data side. So one of the things that I’ve always thought about it from when you start out early in the practice, you’re literally just trying to feed yourself, right? So if you’re a hunter gatherer, you’re going out you’re prospecting and you’re just you don’t have a farm yet you don’t have a residual base of income or business or clients coming in. You’re a hunter gatherer, right over time, when you’ve you’ve figured out how to feed yourself, you start planting seeds, right? And that’s really the start of your practice. Eventually, if you have an asset management business or recurring revenue model, even through insurance, then typically you start getting revenue. But all of a sudden, what happens is all those seeds you’ve planted, if you’re able to stick with the farm, they becoming overwhelming. And now you need to add staff right now you get now you can’t pick all the fruit, half of its going to rot, it’s not getting paid attention. So you bring on staff, now you bring on another advisor, now you bring, and you grow your firm, and you start building out a full form and your problems change, right, Louis, the problems that you had at this moment in time are not the problems you had when you started. And guess what, they are not going to be the same problems. 510 years from now, why? Because if you continue to have success, what all of a sudden you realize is, you’ve got a bunch of farms that nobody thought about how you planted it, you were just trying to survive, right? You got, you know, you got your soy here and your wheat here. And it’s intermixed with the corn, and it’s like a mess, and you it’s totally disorganized. So almost all of us go through this process were like, Okay, we got to clean the house, put everything back in rows, because it’s going to be easier to farm now. Maybe we’re not going to keep this crop. And I’m using this analogy, because hopefully all of us understand it. I’m going to delegate this, we’re not taking care of the wheat anymore, we’re going to have these juniors handle this. And we’re really going to focus on the apples and oranges. Okay, I’m making all this up. Hopefully you can see this in your mind. The point of the story is that eventually we get to the place where we’re actually running a business or running a farm business. And what we need to know to be more efficient or take it to the next level, is we need to understand the data. In the analogy going back to financial vice, one of the things that we realize in our firms, we get to 1600 clients, these are households, like wow, this is fantastic. Okay, celebrate the success. What did we do to get here, all the failures we had to get here as well? What’s the next problem? The next problem is how do I make sure we’re giving contextual advice to those people? How do I do I know actually of those 1600 households who’s under insured right now, right now who’s driving around without their seatbelts on, because as their advocate, I should be able to tell them, I should be able to reach out and say, I’m looking out for your financial interest. And I know we’re under insured in this situation, and we need to solve the problem, call me for 15 minutes, we’re solving this problem. And that’s what you get out of recognizing, if you don’t set up the data early, when you arrive down the line, it is a total mess. So what am I telling you to do? When you when you actually install technology into your platforms, make sure there’s a way to get the data out. One of the things that we focused on over the past couple of years is can we give people data analytics from the very beginning, so that when you set up your farm, you can actually I can You can tell me how many people have wheat, how many people have soy, how many people have soy, but no wheat, how many people need soy, but don’t have wheat, etc, etc. So So I think this is a real key, when you want to sell your practice, eventually, you’re going to need to know this, because that’s going to be the true value of the opportunity to so I think that’s the missing piece is we haven’t been trained in our business to understand big data around our own practices. So we don’t set that up upfront. Right. That’s, that’s why I think we’re missing it. And so we’re you’re gonna see a lot of this innovation, I think, in the near future. That’s one of the things we’re focusing on heavily. Now,

Louis van der Merwe
I love this theme of kind of visualizing data. And you know, we know with, like you mentioned big data and data analytics, how that’s such a massively growing field where people specialize in data analytics, yet, we see very little medium or smaller sized financial planning firms use the tools or even have access to the tools for the data in their business to tell a story to say, like you mentioned these crops, like where they planted, you know, what are we thinking about the weather, we’re talking about weather predictions, instead of thinking about how our forms are laid out.

H. Adam Holt
Very true, very true, and how we’re gonna how we’re gonna optimize that, because we can’t help also, when you have a business wonder how can I do this slightly better, right? If you have that entrepreneurial mindset, you’re, you’re always thinking, that’s how you got to where you are, in a sense, right? You’re building something, you have ownership over, and you want it to be effective and efficient. And you want to get rid of waste also, by the way. And I think it’s you The problem that you have when you create a successful practice or firm or entire distribution arm is you need to know where to focus your time and attention. And that’s the key to the data side, tell me all the clients that are approaching retirement that have no critical care solution, but have assets that can afford it, but probably can’t self insure. That’s a condition that’s I need to know those 15 people because we need to actually reach out to them and solve the problem for them, because that’s the standard we’ve set for ourselves. Now, we all might be thinking that, Louis, that we look after our clients best interests all the time. But if we don’t know that there’s an issue, you know, with one of them, how are we supposed to bring it up? Because we’re managing all of this in our minds, we could wait for the annual review or we could call them before we had a solution. I just found out unfortunately, a friend of mine passed away in his 40s Unfortunately, it was COVID related. You know the first thing I’m thinking is how come I did it? Did I call them and make sure that they had the right life insurance protection that their their state was or did I wait wait to the Wait for the annual review when I bring it up and he says I don’t want to do it, right. That’s that’s a standard that we have to hold ourselves to, to look out for people. And I think that’s going to be an expectation by the way of their consumers that are paying for advice, not just once a year or twice a year, all the time. You’re looking out for us all the time, not just when it’s convenient to your calendar,

Louis van der Merwe
we see the shift away from sales where it’s almost it feels, it feels like a bad word. You phoning someone saying, Hey, can we make sure that everything’s in place? Yet? That’s part of your fiduciary role. If that is your that is your client.

H. Adam Holt
It is true, right? I mean, can you imagine I guess, if physicians were in a place where, listen, they told you, here’s what you need to do, you need to take this take this drug to serve based upon which, and then they never give you a prescription slip, right? Expect that you’re going to go to the pharmacy and tell them something complicated. No, I tell me which drug to buy? And how much to take, and how often to take and give me the instructions. I’m hiring you not just to diagnose the problem, but I need you to solve the problem. Should I be upset that the pharmaceutical company makes money by creating this? No, they’re saving the planet, right? It’s part of the we’ve all bought into this process of capitalism. So let’s, you know, let’s get over it. But it’s true. The sales in Derek and I talked about this in our podcast, sales has been associated with a negative experience, because most consumers want to buy they don’t want to be sold. But the reality is that nothing happens in this planet until something is sold. So I think we have to also give credit where it’s due. We do position typically as a financial advisor. So pretty much everybody in the States is now positioning as advice. First, we call this leading with advice. And if you’re someone who always leads with advice, then hopefully that’s something that that connects for you. But we can’t ignore the fact that we still need to help people by whether that’s going to be through a digital marketplace in the future, how we get compensated. Just really the question I think many of us are trying to figure out is, is the same level of compensation or how are paid going to persist in the future of financial advice, delivery? That is the real question. I think we need to get to,

Louis van der Merwe
I want to stand still, you mentioned that you sold a firm? What were the kind of things that you wish you wanted at that point we use selling your firm that you maybe didn’t have,

H. Adam Holt
what were the things that I wish I had? Well, I’ll tell you what I did have that really made it possible. Instead, because I was brought into the firm, I joined two individuals who had joined their practices, they were individual insurance estate practices, two of the top advisors in the whole country decided to merge. And they were small teams, right with a couple assistants at the time, back in 2000. They were looking for a young person, I was at the right place at the right time, I had made a selfish little name for myself by leading with financial planning as a young person. That was a little rare back in 2000. And so I joined them to start an investment team. The reason I tell you this, because we focused very heavily on supporting our, our infrastructure, we had two advisors, myself, who was a junior advisor, I carry the bags at all the pair planning all the financial planning, we had an underwriting person, person who did all support and calls. And then I had eventually a person who supported me and doing all illustrations and presentations. And the reason why I tell you that is because we focused heavily on roles. We ran the organization very much like I came from a military family. So we had this idea that everybody’s cross trained in at least two roles so that if we ever lost somebody or there was sickness or a family situation, or they left for some reason, employment, we never lost anybody employment wise, because they just they actually still work there. We have people working 30 years already, which is really funny. What is why is that relevant for somebody who’s thinking about succession we had in place, I was able to literally sell my firm my portion of the firm back to my existing advisors, because we had thought about succession, we have somebody who’s always a decade older, and an advisor who’s always a decade younger than everybody, obviously exception, the 20 year olds. And the reason that’s important is because we thought about succession when we built it, just like we thought about data, when we built asset map, how am I gonna get the data out five years from now when I care? And so that was why having a team members with by cells that we already had clear understanding of the valuations that companies funded with insurance, by the way we actually did what we tell our clients to do. I think we really just tried to walk our talk and make ourselves a model of how we were going to tell our clients to to live. And so when we needed to execute, it wasn’t difficult, really. It was a clear understanding and most more than anything, we had built up so much trust with each other, that we knew that no matter what the kind of where we would have sticking points on the exit values, that we would always work it out. We agreed. So I think the key is setting yourself up by having the right infrastructure, doing what you already know to do. And finding the people that you can work with your strong communication and that you trust and that’s that’s really isn’t that the key to pretty much everything, everything else will make work. Right? But if we have those things we can we can weather the storm.

Louis van der Merwe
Yeah, drinking the Kool Aid, like doing the actual work that we tell our clients to do pay the premium to do that internally. You know, I can I can see how you think do you think in the future? And how you simplifying data, that simple reach come through again? Are there people that are kind of supporting you, you know, like mentors or coaches that you look up to that have really helped you through this journey? Or kind of what are the things that stand out?

H. Adam Holt
Oh, there’s no question. I mean, nobody gets anywhere on their own. Really, it as much as I tend to think that I, I did it as a loner. I definitely had a lot of notes. By the way, don’t get me wrong, right. There’s plenty. Everybody can get along there knows why it won’t work. But yeah, I had I had beside my mother, who was a, you know, a fantastic champion of me even still to this day. Thank you, mom. She actually introduced us to coaching very early on, by the time I was 16, or 17, I had basically gone through all the Tony Robbins events on in person. So that was a life coaching experience that I got really early on earned learned communication style, learn how to understand people and forgive and also move on and a lot of things that we we probably learn more often or 40s and actually seek advice around. So I got that early. So thank you. And then my two mentors were really critical. Andy and Andy, they were the people they were we always called I call them basically my surrogate fathers. They trained in this business and they lifted me they catapulted my career. 10 years there’s no question. They also invested in me when I said I wanted to do asset map and I was scared to actually take other people’s money they said we’re behind you. So they were huge supporters of me even today, and probably the most influential person you know, for me, has been my right hand man Thomas. And Thomas says I’m leaving out last names because to protect the innocent but the but the bottom line is you know, he’s he’s been my we can a joke. It’s been my compliment in running these businesses a fantastic executer and communicator. And he always hold me to account even just this morning, Louis, he was he was asking to challenge my thinking on why I’m doing certain things and forced me to get out of my comfort zone. So I have people around me that have that have been supportive. I’ve been very blessed in that area. But I think it’s critical. Every I’ve pretty much had a coach on staff are on on retainer at some, at some level. I think that’s a great testament to athletes, right? They always have a coach, even the number one person in the field has a coach. Why? Because they don’t see everything, they can’t see everything. And they need that feedback. They need a mirror.

Louis van der Merwe
Yeah, it’s great that surrounding yourself with with the right people and getting the people to bring out the best in you. I want to talk a little bit about how you got into South Africa and kind of how that process works. And maybe for a lot of the people listening they will know they’re the local team, but they probably don’t know the backstory can can you share with us like how they

H. Adam Holt
I don’t know they wanted to tell the backstory. But you know what actually is it is actually a great story looking backwards. If you know Gary Binney and Kirsty and, and, and Jonah before them part of the original team, they experienced asset map, I want to say they experienced it through Michael Kitsis, who promoted it, or at some point or talked about it years ago, four years ago, maybe five years ago. And what I think they saw and I don’t, I’m putting words in their mouth, so I apologize if they’re listening to this, and I’m saying the story wrong. My understanding of the story was they saw how acid map had was ability to solve a standard problem that we all have, which is can you get an A client and advisor on the same page? Literally, can you literally just say, Yes, we understand each other, you understand the set of facts, I understand these set of facts. Here’s my intelligence applied to those set of facts, which is you need to move this around, we need to get rid of this or you’re missing this, what can I fix? What can I feel? And that’s a universal thing. We always knew that acid map worked cross culturally in the States, multiple languages and currencies, but we didn’t know if it was going to work. jurisdictionally? In other words, could I put it in a different tax environment or different legal structure, slightly different. And so that was a big experiment for them to basically say, we want to we want to leave our jobs at a companies that you all know and work with every day, and be entrepreneurs and take this process to the next level. And they’ve done a great job championing that vision. And what’s the possibility if all financial advisors used asset map in their fact gathering process? And that’s really where we’re seeing if you’re not familiar with asset map, it’s, it’s a client profiling experience, where you can visualize what’s going on in the household. And yes, we do financial planning because I think it’s a commodity man. We should be able to tell somebody if you’re on track for retirement, but the core of what we do is the asset map report tends to be the big, the big draw, and they’re showing that 1000s of people have been touched ready in South So it’s, it’s really great to see they’re they’re pioneers. And we’re excited to see what’s happening in South Africa. It’s, it’s, it’s the result is, by the way, Lee devisor, making more money, right? So, in a sense, they’re saving time or they’re making more money and their clients are happier. That’s a pretty good formula for success. So I’m really, really happy they’re doing that process.

Louis van der Merwe
So Adam was, was this the first taste of waters outside of South Africa in terms of acid map, putting their flag down?

H. Adam Holt
You outside of the United States? Yeah, it was the first. Yes, it was the first real concerted business effort, as opposed to dabbling it. We do have customers now literally all over the world. But I would say South Africa is definitely the was the starting point of it outside of the states. And it’s exciting to see how far you guys have taken how that’s affected affected your practice and your world, which is really fun. So thanks for that being the opportunity to contribute to your experience and, and earn a place on that team. Yeah, so we’re excited for where it’s going. There’s some there’s a new project, actually, we’re about to reveal in the next couple months, called signals, which is the ability literally to apply artificial intelligence to imagine a red light green light on your dashboard that says this family is under insured, right? You can’t hide from that, right? It just there’s a problem. If we, God forbid, have a loss of something, you don’t have the money to cover it, which means you better bring up that conversation. So we wanted to get to a place where every advisor experienced or new veteran or rookie is going to be able to say I can do a fact line and the system will tell me, You know what, this is something you should talk about. Right? If mathematically, I’m worried about it, double check, please double check. Let’s look at what that looks like.

Louis van der Merwe
Yeah, because you have the data, but you don’t necessarily want the system or the robot to do the conversation. That’s where the human piece comes in.

H. Adam Holt
That’s right. Right. I want to know there’s a there’s a there’s a problem with reactor number four, someone go down and check it out. Right? It may be a false positive, right, Louis, there might be there’s some information that we don’t have. Or the client doesn’t care, by the way, that could be something else. But we need to be able to tell, just like you walk through the, the the metal detector in the airport, right? And the light goes off. And they’re like, Okay, you got keys in your pocket, right? It could be benign, it could be something or it could be something really serious, we want to stop you in check, right. But we can’t let our clients go through life walking around thinking they’re fine. When they’re not, we need to be the champions of bringing that up to them. Right. I think that’s what true financial advocacy is. And if you’re going to charge a fee for advice, I think you also have to look at checking on the store every once a while, when the clients not asking. And that means the system has to help you do that. Right has to tell you listen, these are red lights, these are yellow lights, go check it out. Or prioritize this. Don’t prioritize that. But make sure you do something don’t do nothing, right.

Louis van der Merwe
That’s like bread. Davidson, who’s a practice management consultant, always his clients just want to know that they’re okay. And that’s, you know, give the data to back it up, show them that they’re going to be okay, and if they’re not going to be okay, at least help them to get to a point where they’re in a better position.

H. Adam Holt
Agreed. Totally agree. That is what they want to know.

Louis van der Merwe
I don’t what’s the what’s the kind of team 15 Year Vision for acid? Matt, once everyone already has an acid map on their fridge? Like what everyone has? What happens after that?

H. Adam Holt
Well, when everyone has an asset map, then that’s a good question. I have a I have a funny vision. That is to put asset map on every refrigerator on the planet. What does that mean? Well, you and I probably you have children now. And when you’re when your child starts drawing or creates our art, or what we call art, it’s going to mean something to you. And it’s going to be placed likely on your refrigerator or near your kitchen or a place where you live in the States. One of the one of the common visions is your refrigerator basically has magnets and pictures of your family and the phone number for the doctor. And you know that the things that you need to find everybody knows where it is because it’s living in the place where you live all the time, but finances gets ignored all the time. And I’m not to say that we need to put our finances on display, what I what we need to do is we need to recognize and own our own financial inventory, right that which we consume. Because that serves us and helps educate us. And it shows even to maybe our children that these are important things to recognize, because there’s just a Bismil education financially right in our entire planet. We just don’t take the time to educate. And so if it lives on the fridge, then the the analogy for me is that it has importance as much as some of these other things and it’s also consumable, aka it’s on the foot. Now, what does that mean? Actually, it means that we think that financial advisors will start to use asset map as the proverbial X ray for all financial wellness. So when you go into a hospital, right, you have something wrong with you and the X ray is an easy diagnostic tool. Everybody can see the results. Here’s where the broken bone is or here’s where the dark spot is, or I don’t see anything wrong. This is not a broken Some things require an MRI, right? Really deep problems, I call that financial planning tools. Some problems just require physical therapy, okay, go do some stretching, okay, we could just solve that problem, something’s in between. The reason I say it to you that way is because I think asset map is going to become a diagnostic standard, just like a balance sheet, or an income statement is a standard for for, let’s say, financial advice in the tax world. I think asset map is going to become the professionals, diagnostic tool for communicating what’s going on in people’s lives. That’s our goal. But that means that the consumer needs to also have access. And so we’re working very diligently on giving consumers the ability to have and own their asset map over the long haul. Because I think one of the bigger challenges is that I’ve realized in financial tech, Louise, that we’ve retained ownership of the data and the experience at the adviser level, and we’ve not empowered the consumer to do anything on their own until that meeting once a year. And that’s a that’s a failure, because we’re not helping people get healthier, we’re making them more dependent. And I would like to see asset map basically be in the hands of the consumer, where they’re literally choosing to share it with the advisors and professionals they work with in reverse. We may still very Bay as professionals, the distributor of the technology, because we all know, consumers don’t make the best choices on their own. But they have to get it. And they have to own it. And they have to learn to adopt it and take over it. And I think that’s that’s the key to the future. And that’s why I think we can do it on everyone’s fridge.

Louis van der Merwe
And then that’s a wonderful vision, and congratulations with the progress that you’ve already made in the 1.5 trillion of assets that’s been displayed in these maps on people’s fridges and showing the progress towards their dreams. I mean, it might sound cliche, but these are the things that, you know, we help people to plan as a financial plan and getting to do that. It really has changed the way we do business for the beta. And I look forward to seeing what you and your team get to create and the team in South Africa to distribute. And I wish you very well with with the rest of that journey.

H. Adam Holt
Thank you and thank you for everything you’re doing an industry thanks for your leadership and for making the effort. It’s not easy. So we do appreciate everything that you’re doing for everybody else. Thanks, Jesse. All right. Have a good one. Cheers.