Solving the Biggest Tech Problem in Wealth Management by Creating True Ownership of Your Firm’s Data

hey there it's Mike Langford welcome to another episode of the mar financial advisor podcast on this episode of the show Jud mcrill co-founder of mile marker has with me for a conversation about getting the most out of all that amazing technology your firm has invested in over the years as you'll hear judge share one of the biggest challenges facing Financial firms today is true ownership of their data data about their clients prospects and their business is living in a variety of systems that don't always talk to each other that well that limits the firm's ownership of the data and their ability to run their business effectively and serve their clients to the fullest Jud the my marker team they're on a mission to solve that problem now before we get to conversation with Jud please make sure you take a moment to subscribe to the modern financial advisor podcast on Apple podcast Spotify Google play Amazon the YouTubes wherever you like to get your podcast jam on and if you have a question or a suggestion for a topic or guest hit me up I'm basically Mike lford everywhere on the Internet or you can shoot an email to podcast atfer marketing.com okay let's jump in the data lake with Jud mcrel well Jud mcrel so wonderful to see you welcome to the Martyr financial adviser podcast Mike it's great to be here thanks for having me yeah my pleasure my pleasure so it's always wild this this is a a first in a very long time for me you and I have never spoken together with each other since ever like before today you had a prep call with your co-founder Kyle and now it's just you and me hanging out it's it's just us together yeah no looking forward to it man yeah this be fun exactly well so it's really funny so one of the things I always do in Bri prep calls and I do encourage people we have is like you know you shoot the breeze about a variety of stuff but also you kind of get a feel for like the person's com you know their their what makes them laugh I always jokingly say like how much work is this person going to be as a guest like am I have to really like pull questions out of so I'm excited about this this is like I woke up today a little bit of roulette happening for me so we'll see I and I'll tell everybody how much work or not how much work you were after this all right that's fair that's fair all right well let's let's dive into it um let's kick things off with a little bit of a 60-second elevator pitch from my marker because I I suspect many of the people in the audience aren't aware of it it's a relatively new company so let's dive into it hit us what's mile marker yeah mile marker is the next Generation platform for financial advisers and what it does is it allows you to own your data and control your destiny by connecting all the systems of you know technologies that you use today or maybe sort of use and you're you know not utilizing as much as you could and so you bring that together now you have your own data lake with mile marker you own your data and then you can start to analyze that data through third party tools like powerbi Tableau Etc or we put that into a synthetic layer that allows you to see Rich insights and then share them with all interested parties in fact you can add clients and do client portals you can have advisor portals you can do Transition portals all of that powered by mile marker along with workflows that help you simplify how work actually gets done and then also bring together things like Investments and and all that kind of stuff so so you can actually start to simplify your business in a in a world where it generally is getting way more complicated and you have to have these like crazy org charts to understand how everything works we make that so you can actually focus and move forward and compound in a really awesome way and I'm I'm loving it we're having a ton of Joy just in serving people and getting to know these businesses actually and my favorite part is this past week I got to see one of my clients who actually because of technology can then open up another business line and start to like compound how they're growing because they now have their own API they have their own data they have their own experience and they have advisers that are super happy with it and it's all because we started building this thing a few years ago so it's it's pretty Co pretty cool that's that's fascinating I want to I want to dig into that see if I could kind of pull some threads there and kind of let it people who are listening or in know watching think a little bit more about what's possible because you you you used it a new term I and I say new because honestly I'll put a stake on the ground it's probably only the last three years that the the term data lake has entered the Lexicon for financial advisers right it really I mean it just all of a sudden became a big thing I've been talking to lots of people over the last couple years and you're start starting to hear like hey we need to you know future proof our our our firm and also you know we need to own the data who owns the data it's it's bubbling into an awareness and so that that term data Lake of like all of your data in your firm is centralized and you own it and you have access to it now you can use that data to do other other things it's really exciting without giving away too much of the secret sauce what what are some of the things that you know you mentioned you met with a client who's who's able to kind of start looking at doing other things what are some of the things you think get surfaced by suddenly having access to all your data in the central repository yeah I mean I think the first off you can now start to actually understand number one what you have right so we have all this information and I think there's this big Delta you have like case studies that come out from Fidelity and others that you know they're like hey advisors are this and most of them are not profitable in these categories and then you're kind of looking at your own business you're like well how much of mine is you know what what what's what's my real situation so fundamentally we're able to help you surface that right away yeah because we can bring that together we have a really great team of Engineers but we're building this more to be a a multi it's a multi-tenant experience for us and then it's a multi-tenant experience for you so what that means is you may have one LLC great but most the people we serve usually have maybe one or two or you're serving other advisors that might have their own DPA and they might have all these different rules and you've been trying to cram all these rules in these third party systems that don't really have the ability to flex and you're just kind of constantly you know compromising the way that your business runs to fit these other third party tools with mile marker we actually bring that together so you can actually bring all of your rules into the cloud have unique identifiers around all of them so Mike is an advisor in Austin Texas and he has business with us here here and here he has these unique fee schedules he has these other advisers that work with him he has an insurance practice over here that we need to connect to he has a CPA relationship that we need to connect to all of that can be done through the power of the data that we have and then it can scale with you and scale with the home office and so then when you log into mile marker which might be under somebody else's brand under somebody else's domain you now have the ability to have a simple way to synthesize everything about your business and then to take action with the home office or a third party that simplifies your life you can do it in a matter of seconds versus writing an email versus using some you know super complicated thing it can directly integrate into the system it actually needs to all because the data is right there in front of you that's pretty amazing what's you know you're still in I would call it startup mode you may feel that you're more out of like we're we're we're fully running 99 you know percent of the way there but um it's an early stage company one of the things I love to to dig into is like what was the origin story for this this thing right so like how did this come to be because it you know it's it from what you were just articulating you clearly have you know deep domain expertise in in the space you spent a lot of time in the space you understand how how how every advisory businesses work what what the opportunities are what the challenges are love to hear about you know what your origin story for my marker was and also like I you know we're supposed to have Kyle on the show but unfortunately like I'm I'm always curious like how do how do people come together right as co-founders like the the old story you know Roy and and and and Walt Disney well they were brothers they were easy to come together but then you hear the Steves you and and and and and and Bill and and so forth so yeah how did you guys come up with my marker what was it what you saw and like yeah how'd you get get together yeah the origin story of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure that's right so no yeah this this is this is us so I I got started in 2004 at a company called Orion and I was number 20 or so in our uh group of people and we were just working to build Solutions off of we had our largest client was our our company down the hallway which is a Tamp and so we were built to serve a thirdparty asset management platform called CLS Investments but then we started to grow and I did a couple years of grad school came back fulltime and then took over onboarding all these new customers our technology was pretty it was it was very much like running off our own servers and doing this remoting and it was slow and we worked to evolve that along the way we started to integrate more and more stuff and getting to work with Eric who's the founder of the firm was was really excellent because he continued to push the boundaries of where we could go with technology and then that led to a spirit of like trying to solve problems and designing things for for a cust customers and I would just I bootleg you know design software onto my my crappy Dell laptop at the time and like started to build things and you know we move mov the company forward and and you know a lot of those things became products inside of our universe and then I got to be you know deeply involved with a lot of these customers in Key Parts of their business the creative plannings the Mariners the Mercers the focus financials all these really interesting companies that were growing quickly Adelman financials another one where were working and solving problems for them and then I realized personally you know there's so many more problems here to solve and and we are just one part of a whole how are these companies really going to cut to break through the ceilings that exist that are part of their technology and part of their lack of ability to connect this stuff in 2014 or so we created an event called fuse at Orion oh yeah and so i' had taken over the marketing in like early like 2011 or something like that and so one of the things that we did is we created an integration event to help celebrate our own API at Orion and we open sourced our client portal and and invited a lot of our friendly people in the industry the money guy Pros the eone's the all these different companies some of which are are now part of these other bigger companies red tail is another example we invited them all to come and we rented out a ski house in Park City and said guys come on over let's figure out what we can build together and then we turned it into like a whole event and you know it was something I found a lot of joy in helping run and then I as I realized later I think it was kind of the foundation for us to do something that's more you know more transformational for the whole industry I left or Ry 2015 created a consultancy agency type business and sold that to Carson Kyle and I had been friends from that event from fuse okay and so we got to know each other there we realized we had a lot of similar values realized we saw similar same problems that were not necessarily getting better everyone ultimately had to focus and keep their eyes on their own paper meanwhile you know there's there's a lot of things that we needed to fix at a macro level so I I sold my business to Carson went in there the opportunity with that was for my partner I we got to see get to sit on the other side of the table you know and say all right now we have the technology now we can have the agency let's go ahead and make the decisions we were able to you know have the business have a ton of success and really to you know make the brand stronger make the technology stronger and really to to drive deeper value for for that firm but at the same time I was you know creatively every day thinking about the opportunity cost of not sitting in the other side helping Drive the whole industry forward so Kyle and I kept up kept up to speed he had joined skant and was leading Revenue there and you know that that's very much a deep partnership on Salesforce for me I'm you know more anti-establishment not that I'm against Salesforce but like I I think that I think that there's just there's so much more creativity that we can have with our industry and at the same time seeing what's happening with cloud computing and some of the really good things are out there I think the power of snowflakes and data bricks and all these other companies that are fundamentally reshaping how technology can be done and realizing that who is going to help these advisers actually unlock this you know that's that's us and we're going to help transform how integration has worked historically both for the technology companies but especially for the wealth management companies that are working to become a technology company in and of their themselves yeah and that's where mile Market comes in that's a little bit of our origin story I love it you know I'm super appreciative of you sharing that because one of the knocks or perceived knocks on our industry is how slow the industry moves right you'll hear that people talk about like oh it's a lagger it's it's always and and some of that is true right some of some new technology new technologies will roll out faster in other Industries because they're not regulated right and that's that's really the big deal it's not because we're stubbornly like hey we don't want to embrace new tech it's like hey if something goes wrong with our Tech it affects people's lives in a big big way it can really negatively affect a firm right before we put something on an advisor's desktop we need to make sure it's bulletproof we need to make sure that it's going to be okay with finer and the right like it's it's important right so so with that being said what was fascinating to to just listen to you share there is that you you I correct me if I'm wrong but I think you said you were like employee number 20 at Orion like in 2004 which 2004 seems like yesterday in a million years ago all at the same time but it's it's fascinating like that's a really short amount of time 20 years and now Orion is this massive company right um and you you kind of hit on some of the ways just that the you know the industry evolved quickly right I mean what I think is fascinating about when I think back to 2004 these things didn't exist right nobody was walking around with the smart we had blackberries and stuff like that the Blackberry th you know yeah but more importantly the way for apis weren't a big deal right so that think about it's it's really hard for people to think about like data sharing Web 2.0 was you people what made when people talk about that was like hey it was became interactive we could interact with things but also apps started being able to talk to each other the concept of an API became a thing that became in popular EOS right people started to understand what an API was that I I don't have to write everything I can now take data out of another system incorporate it and repackage it and do some things with it and then when advisor started getting you know the smartphones and so forth advisor started realizing look I want technology that looks and feels like the apps I get on my phone I don't want this complicated pain in the butt stuff stuff to use this this Legacy enterprise software right I want to be able to use stuff right I mean you must have I mean having had a front row seat to this you must have seen this Evolution right it's been pretty a pretty wild ride for you yeah yeah it's been I think the kind of primary systems that people used have have changed a little bit we were definitely part of the move to CRM yeah you know CRM is the center I think at one point in time a fun fact is I think Orion was the top reseller of Salesforce for financial services at least for wealth as a category we LED kind of in that way and it was a great way for us to deploy our software in a in a much better Manner and to further develop our API but then that that then shifted to planning is you know planning plus wealth yeah you know plus portfolio accounting system was kind of a primary and I think you know in the same way I think your you data is going to be at the center of your future client experience I think your data and in in shaping all of that is going to fundamentally be the the center of that Hub and I don't know of a way out after that I think because you'll have your own independent data warehouse every one of our customers has their own independent data model and then they have the ability to control and connect all kinds of different things and and we're seeing some of those systems from 2004 we connect every day the reality isn't haven't changed and that's part of the problem and that's okay because we we understand that we know it we make it modern yeah and and that and and then you don't have to worry about why this is still an FTP site that it's out there I'm like that's fine we update the credentials once a year or whatever however often we have to but like it's working for you now yeah whereas it was broken before yeah well that's thing there's there was an element of like I was about to say if an a broke don't fix it like look sometimes you get you get a piece of technology hey this this works it just the negative with it is doesn't talk to the other things very good right um you know one of the parallels when I was doing the prep call with Kyle that immediately jumped to mind when he he's describing my marker and as I was poking around on your website was like you know what this feels like this feels like zapier it that many small businesses and Enterprises use to connect a whole bunch of different web apps and and Trigger some automations right so for those of you who aren't familiar with what zapier is you can go check it out I'll have it linked up in the in the show notes but imagine a scenario somebody comes on your website they fill out a form and then this little piece of technology in the background says oh when that form's filled out uh go tell chat GPT to generate a quick summary of that person's business right if they entered their company name go check it out and then take that research and plug it into my CRM and then notify me via slack that hey there's a new record uh check it out somebody filled with the form hear some research about them it's kind of like you know you could do all sorts of crazy stuff with zapier right yeah so I know it's not a direct parallel definitely not a onetoone for what you guys are doing but what are this is be kind of fun like what what are some core examples for like that might make the adviser or the executive listening or watching go oh that would be really useful at our firm like what are some of the things you're seeing that people do with my yeah I mean so advisors some trade some don't you know how do you how do you actually do a trade and without keep without putting people in through the the training and all the management of all that well we provide simple ways for you to request trades to change models to run bills to change you know to collect and say my client wants to buy a boat I'd like to have X dollars out of their account you make this all happen without the advisor having to become the technician we we make that all happen a lot of that's creating direct automation inside of the core systems and some of it's really just providing everything in a in a succinct way for the operational team and we found that most of our customers are able to keep a slim team operationally because we've added so much more efficiency on top of what they're doing so business is fundamentally leaner and fundamentally more valuable because of of this whole thing you know what are the things that are actually approved by compliance both for marketing for wealth management how do I think about my whole um experience both in terms of investment management and pl and like planning based Solutions we have a lot of friends in the you know the solutions business whether it's holistic plan or wealth.com or any of

these different things that are really out there and I think driving meaningful experience for advisors the worst thing that can happen and having been on both sides of the house now is you have a really wonderful solution it goes to a large advisory firm that you like should be an amazing client and then you have terrible adoption because that's the reality is you're getting some sort of PDF yeah that tells you hey buddy this is approved please use this use holista plan and you're like how the heck do I use holista plan in this context yeah so what we do is we help bring that to a to a much more meaningful integrated way that allows you to fundamentally better adopt all of it and to give insight to the home office to say hey we're not talking enough about this really cool transformative solution that we have to help with t you know with taxes and and so that's the sort of thing that we get to see happen firsthand and then at the business level we're seeing you know private Equity is obviously very involved now in our industry whereas it wasn't 10 years ago not not to this degree and so every advisory firm needs to start thinking about even if they don't they're not there yet what happens when we have a board when we have a private Equity company that is helping to make us better what are the pieces of data they need to know about our business every day or you know every 90 days is how it's going to be as out of the gate why don't we do this for it every day so it's not a fire drill here's everything you need to know about our business boom right here yeah log in tell me help help me see what I need to see help me reinvent my business so I'm more profitable and and have a higher NPS score all these kind of key performance indicators how do you help me do that our our system actually delivers that to people and it's super fun it's fun for them to see it's fun for me to hear back from our customers say hey just did a board meeting it was amazing we really unlock these really really cool new insights with our data and you know we play then a small part in that we just help connect it all I love it I love it I think it's such an important thing you old you know you need to work on your business not just in your business and and advisers are no different than any other business owners right you know they it very often it's easy to get swept up and the dayto day and not take that big you know call it a you know 30,000 foot level like how's the business doing right can I just look like how are we doing are the things that I am working on are they having a positive impact on the the growth and the profitability and the valuation of the company um really really important stuff uh you know one of the other things you mentioned just now was the adoption rate for certain Technologies and I'm so thrilled that you brought that up because I've had experience with this with with with companies that sell into the advisory firms and wealth management firms and that's a real problem right because sure I can show you technology and you can go this is awesome I'm going to use this I can understand the value and I'm willing to pay for that technology but the reality is you were already busy you were already using you at 100% capacity of your time if you will even if some of it's wasted time but like you're you're already doing stuff and so it can be very difficult for an advisor or a team member at an advisory firm to become adepts at every piece of technology that's on their desktop right and to have to do all the things and so very often what ends up happening is adoption weigh is or just never takes off or or is really small because it's just it's hard right like it's I've got you I've got this financial planning software I've got this CRM software now you telling me about this holista plan thing I got to learn how to do as you know using that as an example right it's it's just just so much versus being able to like hey all right let's make sure they all talk to each other let's like lessen the burden on adoption curve and so forth um one problem and this is where you and the myomarker team com in is most of the folks most of these raas are really small businesses right even the ones that were like hey that's that's a pretty good size raia they got 10 billion dollar AUM you know the average Raa firm has like five advisers and less than 10 employees you know a 10 billion ra might have 25 employees right we're not talking you know large companies these are smbs so they certainly don't have a dedicated Tech Team one of the things that jumps out to me and I'm excited about is mile marker is not a DIY service so it's not like you know hey I'm buying this technology and I think this this is where we we're getting towards solving that adoption problem where you're not just saying click download figure it out by watching a few of these YouTube videos you guys are actually coming in and doing it for them working with the team right to help them get up this not a DIY type solution yeah no I mean we we we are productizing as much as we possibly can to make it scalable really for ourselves but for you as the advisory firm you're not going to have to know how to do these Cloud configurations and things like that and you know engineering to reduce compute and you know having helping make sure that you have enough RAM and servers and all this like you know you I think a lot of times people and you know somebody's asking me like who are who are successful CTO in our space I'm like man I don't know that a lot of CTO that have come into wealth management have had an opportunity to have success because you know they come in they're like I think I went through the wrong door because I'm being asked to deal with all of my people's computers and firewalls and all this other crap that's like not at all you know into building something net new for our space I mean there are a few that have had success but largely I think a lot of it gets misbranded and it's really an IT role inside of a company and even then those individuals are not necessarily supported in a way that they can actually drive meaningful meaningful change I talked to my friend Stephan llo over at ser and you know we talk on that and they're like a really great exam example of a firm that's that's doing a lot of really tremendous stuff but because he's built a team around it and for us we give people you know a comparable bandwidth to his team but also the endless potential of your your ability to take this data and move it forward because we we'll support you we give you tools and we we're creating more and more tooling so you actually can build out your dashboards you can build out your workflows and all those kind of stuff with things that we're we're rolling out here now but largely we're not leaving you on an island you're here in a way that you're going to be able to get the progress you need without having to inherit new FTE to do it and the people that you have are going to be a lot more proactive in their posture because now they're going to be looking at at data and they're going to be looking at proper case loads and understanding where your workflows need to continually improve whereas a lot of times is you're running a triage center before yeah and and that's that's a fundamental shift that we're able to see advisors take or advisory firms take it's so important because I I think I've just dealt with it so many times where advisers get a bad rap for being like not technical it's it's not that they're not technical listen they they know how to use a lot of Technology right and they're smart people right but like all of us it can be overwhelming to just figure try to figure out how everything works I mean heck yeah we produce podcast and video for you know our company and and every once a while I'm struggling with like why isn't this thing working right like we're and we're in this all this Tech stuff all the time and and I'm I'm I'm frustrated by it and and I spend you know half a day trying to like you know talk to people at whatever company trying to like why is your solution bonking out on me or something like that so and same thing happens for advisers so having experts come in and kind of do it for them but also you know walk alongside them as as they come up to speed is always helpful um what to dive into something that I'm I'm sure many advisers are curious about it comes up a lot on on on shows it's it's AI right artificial intelligence is you know very similar to data Lake it's becoming a really popular topic that we have to talk about anytime we're talking about technology for the advisory firm and during the prep call Kyle said that AI is only as good as the data in the models and I thought that's spoton and I think you know he's not the first to say it but it's it's important for us to to talk about um so AI is going to be is reliant on the information it has to reference and you know the way to to put it for advisers to truly get it is like imagine a Monte Carlo model that only had the past 10 years of data in it for the S&P 500 it would not be that useful for your clients right yeah so um so H how do you in the team at my marker think about ways to avoid the garbage in garbage out Pitfall and it may not just be AI but I think it's particularly important in AI as as these models are going to be important and advisor is going to start relying on them very soon right yeah but you must see it in other areas also as you're you're you're connecting systems like is this good information coming in here or is it bad information right so yeah there's there's two different approaches we take but over overall all of it all advisory firms need to own their data yeah because you need to have your data in a way that you can control it you can actually protect it you can then use that for powering your own AI yeah and so we do that fundamentally out of the box everybody has that go so that's that's where we we we sit there right now we also have a Services business that actually helps you with the data hygiene whether that's Alternatives business or your fee and revenue business or it's your general data and you know across the board we we have Engineers that will work with you to help help you make sure you understand true north on all of this information and and what's accurate make sure it's reflected properly from a go forward basis and then that allows you then to harness AI with that data confidently and and I think there's going to be more and more happening with data hygiene and AI in the future but you have to be careful not to have a lot of generative stuff in this as well because it will it'll start to hallucinate and add things that are just not there yeah and so like that's that's this whole new moment and that moment is it's right now and then it's going to change and so the I think about it a lot like got these paddles back behind me and so I think about rowing as kind of a metaphor a little bit but like the river is running fast and it's going to be running faster especially as you get you close to the ocean and you need to jump in is but you also know need to know what kind of vessel you need and that's really the big the big challenge everybody has and so our whole thing is we're we're powering your progress along the way you're going to be an AI company not a matter of if it's a matter of when right and how you do that is going to be through a partnership with with us we're going to help power you to do that well with confidence and totally with compliance your compliance team is going to feel confident because it's going to be super clear how this all works and how your data is secure and and all of that but that's that's exactly where we're we're built for this moment to help companies transcend this next this next phase I love it I love it I think it's it's so I love you mentioned the whole like AI can hallucinate there because it's you know it's not truly a a brain right it's not truly an artificial brain it's but it is still try to learn right like you it's it's based on like a lot of if this happens then this is the logical thing we talk about when you ask an AI tool to write something it's making assumptions on like what words or group of words are likely to come after this group of words right based on the other things I know so it's looking at a model and it's kind of making inferences and so you know having a team like your is looking at the data that's going to go into the reference model for just coming up with interesting stuff or or or correct stuff so and we're we're still in the early Innings of of how a lot of this AI technology is going to impact advisors we may be at a scenario where in in a few years where once your data lake is built once you have really good data in there and you've walked the kind of handheld an AI tool through let's say Financial planning conversations and so forth you might be able to in the future just say go right and have confidence that something good is going to come out of that and then you can add some color on it afterwards but we might not be there yet um what I was on on the site one of the things that you'll notice if you do go to the myomarker website and that'll be all linked up in the show notes is you you you hover over each team members like you go to like the the the leadership team page you'll see each person transform into a Lego character I love it so first of all I'm a huge fan of like playfulness and Whimsy I always say it makes you more approachable it makes the business like people like feel like oh okay I don't have to be too stiff when talking these people are gonna you know relax and so forth so I I got a couple questions on that sure one is how'd you go about choosing the Lego figure which was the best comp for yourself and each person like what did you let I pick your Lego or did you guys each yeah yeah it was so here's the The Prompt and this is super fun I actually started doing this with my kids okay and I I first the the the most neutral OB creature to do this with and creature reason I said is our dog I have a dog named nacho and so I just took a picture of Nacho and put it into I think it was Dolly at the time I've used M Journey kind of use all these things but like I put it in the dolly and I said hey turn this picture into a Lego character and it's super fun it's actually a fun thing to do with if you have kids to spend some time and like do that and then eventually you put each other's pictures into this which people feel differently about their their image being used in AI in any context you got to be really respectful of that but we just did that for fun and I just I did a few of those and we went to a team Retreat I'm like hey guys I made these if you guys are interested in the version of you in Ai and everybody's kind of like that's kind of cool and it was it was so so good like in terms of how how well it was making these and just the the fun that it put into that so we decided to do that for everybody that's fantastic I love it yeah look I was gonna say like what's awesome about is it's it's a natural parallel right because you as a team and maybe this is where your brain was at but you're dealing with building blocks right for technology and we're trying to get data to talk to each other and be more useful so I guess it leads me to a question as we kind of you we you know rounding third base here heading for home is what do you see as the core building blocks for raas to be effective in 2025 and Beyond right we're getting towards the end of the year here you clearly they have some you know key technology CRM whatever but like what do you think are the kind to be the core building blocks going forward yeah I mean I I think it's going to be an imperative that you're adding a a data you know some sort of data storage some people are probably doing it locally because they're afraid I can assure you that the security that's being used in the cloud is superior to whatever you have in your closet yeah at your office yeah and so I think having that is going to be really imperative I think you're starting to see that you have now redundancy in some of the systems especially as you're doing m&a or even recruiting advisors now I have I used to just be in wealth box but now I've got red tail now I've got Salesforce because I keep bringing these people over do I make them move systems or can we can we make the make it so they can stay in this bespoke system that at least bespoke to us like like like smart office or something like that that's less common with the broader ra channel do I have to move all of it no you don't have to like mile marker can help you connect all of that so you see it in a single paint of glass but you're not having these advisers have to rework how they've done things you're you're lowering the bar to to be able to do business with you and then you can start to simplify and move people over to that that path and you can like there's so many solutions like you know that where it's just preference-based like I want to have the tools I'm a I'm a Craftsman I I I want to have the right tools for for my trade and you will have different ones in your toolbox and that's okay but how do we start to to bring that together into one unified experience without us all compromising and being disappointed that I can't use FP Alpha because you don't have it on your approved list yeah and so like there's sorts of that's the scenario we see a lot but it starts with having your data together and then starting to unify The Experience around that at the home office level and then and then being able to give that agency back in a in a way I you know I that is such an important thing that that you just brought up that I had not even remotely considered is employees have preferences right people we all have preferences for the the tools or the the paintbrushes we use or whatever you know in in my industry it's like you know I we're using a solution called D Vinci resolve for our editing and and and production post- production work but a lot of people are using Adobe stuff and some people are using Final Cut and other Solutions and if by the way if you're an adviser rolling your eyes it's okay it's fine but like there's no reason why you couldn't use those if the data was set up so it could be hooked up appropriately right we've got all the original files or whatever and same stre you're talking about using a variety of different crms or or financial planning tools or whatever if you if you acquired an advisory business and brought them over are you going to force them to all migrate or you like Hey listen it works great so long as the data gets into our data Lake and we could all pull from the data and for some reason you get hit by a bus and an advisor has to take over and they're going to use their preferred solution pretty awesome yeah no it's it's it changes how everything works in a really wonderful way because you know everybody everybody gets what they want they want the control and the data at the home office level for compliance but you want to be able to use the tooling that's important to you obviously this takes a little bit of everybody kind of getting used to the new environment that exists but it's it's very much the future and I I can't tell you how many people I know of joined firms and they're like well now I've got to use this computer I don't like I got to deal with this you know this system and this system is and like I've actually accidentally tricked myself into taking a job instead of like you know finding a partner that actually can transform how I work and it's been so fun for us to see our customers that are recruiting advisers be able to better serve them because now you can now you can have more control and you're more wholly empathetic in the way that you work and it's what you should be looking for if you're looking to join another firm are you investing in data are you investing in workflows that don't feel like work are you helping you know what's the time to hear back back from you if I request something is it like a modern customer service experience or is it just some like really Antiquated old broker dealer model and and I think that's going to be really what separates the future here yeah no I agree I I love it I love it and you know the the war for talent is ongoing we've talked about this so many times in the show but uh talk to an advisory firm that's growing who isn't trying to recruit more Talent right it look is they they don't exist right you're always looking to bring on good people and good people want to work where the resources are best right they they want to work for a tech forward company a company that's got it stuff together if you will well we only got a couple minutes left here but I want to close out on a kind of a fun note because I yeah I always encourage people to go check out and listen to read or watch some of the content that our guests are putting out right like want to learn more but you know want to get smarter about this you in the team have a podcast the connected advisor and a newsletter that you publish both of those regularly so I highly encourage listeners and viewers to go check out both and now I'll make sure they're linked up um how are you finding that each of these regularly produced assets are providing value for mile marker as a firm and and each of you as an individual right like I said each of you you as an individual if Kyle were here you know he'd be yeah but like because I get value out of producing podcasts but and I know what mins are but what what what are some of your what what you guys get in there yeah I mean I think it's it's most just my own my own musings a little bit on my newsletter but I think it hopefully inspires other people to rethink how they work this week I'm you know kind of talking about Australian actors and the propensity for success in a closed ecosystem and why that happens and what that means for our industry like that's what my Friday newsletter is gonna be about spoiler alert that's awesome this this will probably come out that'll probably come out a little bit before the podcast I imagine but like you know it's it that's where my mind's at like I I really want to be thinking about these things and synthesizing things that are happening in the broader world to where we're at and and how do we how do we really challenge the status quo here Kyle's really spending time on the the connected advisor podcast to unpack where advisors are at today and where they really want to go like what's the truth there what what's not in these broad surveys that we get yeah you know how do these unique businesses you know how do they evolve and change in the way they need to to serve their clients and to to be become more valuable for all their stakeholders love it love it yeah I I agree with you it helps you articulate your thoughts better like you the more you talk about something the more you whether you're writing it down or speaking it out you get your thoughts together and then you also develop a style and it people start resonating with it people are coming out to check oh you know judges published a news new newsletter I want to read it because I can hear his voice when I'm when I'm reading the newsletter or when I'm listening to him on a podcast or whatever really does help I I think it's great so if you're not doing one make sure you're doing one in the audience yeah for sure where else can people follow you along you're active on LinkedIn you're active anywhere else where people like hey I need more mainlining of Jud in my system you know I think I'm sort of still on X I don't know I just signed up for Blue Sky yeah I'm on Blue Sky follow me over there too yeah I mean I don't I don't even know how to even tell you your handle on Blue Sky at this point but like you know like there's there's there's that but like I think we're largely in LinkedIn and and just working to become more and more uh integrated and just doing a better job of communicating in general but like I'm I'm proud to be part of this industry I think it's got a lot of really wonderful things it does for people uh and we're so excited about how to help Propel it forward and into this next next realm perfect well Jud thank you very much for coming on the show it's been great yeah thanks Mike appreciate it thank you very much for listening to and or watching this episode of the mar financial adviser podcast it's always fantastic to have you with us huge props my man Jud mccre for coming on the show I learned a lot I hope you learned a lot I'm kind of like excited to nerd out about this type of stuff more it really is pretty interesting to think about like all this investment we've made in technology and then it's like oh I need to learn how to use it so that it benefits the business to the fullest I just I've over indexed on technology let's get it talking to each other so really cool stuff that the mile marker team is working on as always if you have a question or a suggestion for a guest on the show as I mentioned please do hit me up and uh if you haven't done so already give us a follow and lastly make sure you're being nice to each other we'll see you next time on the financial advisor podcast bye

2025-01-03 12:28

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