Reinventing Financial Services: Rob Heyvaert on AI, Leadership and Building Enduring Businesses

0:01John Lee Dumas:Light that spark fire nation, JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire brought to you by HighLevel, the all-in-one sales and marketing platform. Today we'll be breaking down reinventing financial services with AI leadership and building an enduring business. And to drop these vibe bombs, I brought Rob Heyvaert in the U of Fire studios. Rob is the founder and managing partner of Motive Partners, a fintech focused investment firm backing companies transforming financial services through technology, data and infrastructure innovation. And today we talk about going from operator to investor to coach, the real AI opportunity, why failure creates better leaders, the beginner's mindset, and oh so much more.

0:40John Lee Dumas:And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Rob and our sponsors. If you are building a real business, you need real infrastructure. High Level gives you website hosting, funnels, email marketing, automation, calendar booking, payments, and course hosting all on one platform, plus award-winning 24-7 support. Get a 30-day free trial and my full bonus stack that includes a 15-minute private call with me and much more at highlevelfire.com. Highlevelfire.com. Fire Nation, if you have a high-ticket offer and need more quality leads, Nexus Install is designed for you. We'll book you 8 to 20 qualified calls each month, then train you to run the system yourself.

1:18John Lee Dumas:Email my team at john at eofire.com to learn more and see if Nexus is the right fit for you. Rob, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. A lot of people believe you have to have success and success has to be seen in certain milestones. And I think I've learned the most from failure, actually. And as early on your path with your idea does not succeed, that is a massive plus for an entrepreneur. Because in my world, endurance and this relentless focus on how to get it right and to pivot is something that was a blessing.

2:00In the beginning, you would argue, oh my God, you want your first company to be very successful. You want your value proposition to be on the spot and everybody embraces it, your clients love it, but it makes you complacent. So I would argue that failure is the key to success.

2:16John Lee Dumas:Rob, you just inspired me. I just honestly came up with a quote in the moment, which is, show me someone who hasn't failed and I'll show you a failure. So you can take that, you can use it, you can hate it, you can disregard it. But that came up in the moment, inspired by you and Fire Nation. We're talking about reinventing financial services. And I want to talk first, Rob, about going from operator to investor to coach, because you've built and scaled many, many companies across across multiple eras of financial services. So share your evolution, Rob, from learning to leading to coaching. Yeah, I call those the three horizons.

2:53So you start by learning. You always keep learning, of course. But then you go into a leading role. And then when everything goes right, you have the luxury of becoming a coach. Some people can be all three at the same time. Some people evolve into these roles through a combination of experience, failure, success, wisdom. There's a lot of stuff comes into it if you think about it. For me, early on, I was a kid, actually, when I was confronted with tech, and I started realizing how important core infrastructure, the back end, as they call it, sort of the plumbing. As I would always say, I don't dress like one, but we are plumbers.

3:29And I was exposed to this sort of plumbing 35 years ago. And I realized that this never went away. So my why has always been, how can I sort of create an infrastructure? How can I create a vision, an idea, a thought, a company? How do I attract people to keep wanting to create a better infrastructure where you can delight your clients and where you can basically create frictionless financial service, which actually does not exist, still not. We made a lot of progress. We have wonderful apps. We have wonderful services digitally. But we're still basically at the beginning of what I would call a digitization of how we deal as individuals with money and how seamless and transparent dealing with financial services could become.

4:16And of course, AI now has yet another amazing promise to do so. But over the last 30 years, for me, it has been about being passionate about one thing and diving into different roles as a result of that. first company, first idea, rally, rally around, no outside money, build an app over the weekend, build an app and try to convince and walk and talk and talk and walk and no capital, nothing. It was almost impossible. People thought I was crazy. I was a 22 year old kid and said, what are you doing starting a company? That's not what you should do. And it became from such poor background or simple background that I did it not because I thought it was noble or phenomenal to do because but i thought if i do this i'm going to be successful and i'm going to be able to get out of this world that i am today so is it as well as running towards something as running away from something and it gave me that drive and now you fast forward 30 years from now you see we have 80 companies across all our different platforms and it's the same philosophy what's the why of the company what are they doing and how they're doing it how can we how can i as individual and now a whole group of people make these entrepreneurs more successful so it started with me being the entrepreneur, then me leading people that are entrepreneurs, and now actually having an opportunity to give capital to entrepreneurs, which is a phenomenal evolution for me.

5:36And I feel very, very blessed to do so.

5:38John Lee Dumas:Rob, we all know about the AI opportunity that's out there, but I want to talk about the real AI opportunity, because you said that software, it's only a small piece of the AI opportunity when it comes to financial services, and that the real value comes from quote unquote, delivering finished work. So what are most leaders still misunderstanding about AI transformation? I mean, there's so much written about it and you can listen to so many podcasts. So I'm sure a lot of people start understanding what it is, but there's, there's two different things. There's the art of the possible and the fact, and everybody knows how smart these models are and how amazing they can do certain things that was not possible years ago because of technology.

6:24Having said that, there is this unbelievable complexity to take those powerful models and put them in what I would call complex workflows and have context and understanding why something happens and how it happens and when it should not happen. So this complexity that you see inside a financial services institution who has to deal with regulatory stuff or who has to just who has to know its client know how to respond to the client get the right data so this whole notion that ai properly applied in a piece of work actually versus a feature and that's what a lot of people are missing people are thinking that these models are suddenly going to replace everything i completely disagree with that these models are going to be empowering people companies to create value-added capabilities services and ultimately They also, of course, companies that can make that transition from the power of the model to finished work.

7:20And when I say finished work is a better way to deal with your clients. But in the extreme form of financial services, it's actually even better to have better products. So John can be hyper-personalized about John. We know a lot about John. We can give John the right products. We can create marketplaces where people can bring products to John. And John has choice. John has transparency. We haven't seen anything of that. We still are in stovepipes of software and stovepipes of data silos. If you break it all open and you add the power of those models, you're just going to be able to have a much better product.

7:54And it's going to be all about John. So you're going to feel at the center of something versus being the consumer of a standard banking product. And that's a long, I always say, people say, oh, in a half a year we can do this. And in a year we can do this. That's a five to seven to ten year journey. but when those models get used properly and then people and companies and entrepreneurs and people are saying i'm going to make this amazing retail product and you've seen it already there's some companies that were dismissed years ago and the revoluts and the robin hoods they're embracing it so fast that at the end of the day you just get a much better product and you john are going to be much happier because you're going to be able to have access to financial products you never had before.

8:34It was only for the elite. So the democratization of everything is very powerful. And forget how efficient and effective this could be for financial services economy-wise. For the clients and for the employees and for everybody who actually uses systems, it's good news in my humble opinion.

8:51John Lee Dumas:We've already alluded to this, Rob, but I want to maybe dive a little deeper into why failure creates better leaders. Because one of your most counterintuitive beliefs is that success can actually be dangerous because failure does what? It forces adaptation. So can you share a moment in your life, in your journey, in your past where failure completely changed the direction of one of your businesses? Absolutely. When we talk about failure, what we have to know also is attitudes, the way you look at stuff is very important. And the more success you have, I always say the danger creeps in that you think you know.

9:32And the moment you think you know, you're going to be very disappointed because you don't. And I think this, the sense of arrogance or complacency, and I think a French president said it once so nicely, when it's fragile, it's good, because then we pay attention to it. So the notion of constantly having to wonder, are we successful, constantly having setbacks make you just a better person, makes you rely on other people, which creates a network effect to scale your company. And you basically have this resilience that is extremely important. And I remember in 1999 or 1998, I started my second company.

10:09And my idea was to create a set of awesome engineers that would take financial service into the digital age. So we were far ahead of time it's 1999 and we recruited a thousand people mostly with my capital and some third party capital and we were on top of the world we were at one point in time uh building seven out of the 10 neo banks in europe you named the bank we were building a brand new value proposition digitally and it stopped the the whole dot-com thing happened and everything stopped and at one point in time there it was risk off at one point in time there was no more capital and more importantly our clients are saying you know what this digital thing it's not going to fly we got ahead of ourselves let's shut it down so we take we took school buses of consultants out of clients to send them home and ultimately had to let them go and then we all sat together and say why is that what happened and and and so we learned from dot com but we then very quickly pivoted towards saying okay maybe they're not ready for digital but we have to modernize their infrastructure because they cannot serve their clients well maybe they won't serve them on in the internet right now they won't serve them on the in the cloud so we pivoted the whole company we went from a thousand people to 500 people and we pivot the whole company towards what we call core back on back-end infrastructure and slowly worked our way up until of course cloud came along and now uh we have built one of the most phenomenal uh digital banks and now anybody who's not a digital bank is worried about their future so it's it's that ability and the necessity to pivot and then get your team to do it.

11:43I mean, it's very powerful and it also gets sort of adrenaline in your body and it keeps you grounded. I mean, one of the few things I've seen is, I kind of get annoyed when you talk to an expert who's been unbelievably successful. He's just a simple human being that has made a few decisions, that has embraced a few people and that believed in certain concepts. But there's no such thing as super people in my humble opinion.

12:06John Lee Dumas:Fire Nation, Rob's dropping value bombs left and right. And if you think he's even close to rap wrapping up on this, you're wrong. Because we're talking about the beginner's mindset, the hardest raise and more when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Fire Nation, if you have a high ticket offer, but you are not getting enough quality sales calls on the calendar, Nexus Install is exactly what you need. This is a custom LinkedIn client acquisition system built to help you connect with the right prospects, start real conversations and turn those conversations into booked calls. Here is what makes it different.

12:38John Lee Dumas:We do not just hand you a bunch of theory and tell you, good luck, we build the system with you. Dial in your audience, sharpen the messaging, run the outreach, and aim to book you eight to 20 qualified calls each month. Then once the system is proven and installed, we train you on how to run it yourself so you are not dependent on another agency forever. If you have a strong offer, a clear result, and are ready for more quality conversations with real prospects, email my team at john at eofire.com and then we'll set up a call to see if Nexus install is the right fit for you. Simple, focused, and built for predictable, long-term, quality lead flow.

13:18John Lee Dumas:Fire Nation, if you are building a real business, you need real infrastructure. That is why High Level is Entrepreneur on Fire's featured partner. High Level gives you a website builder and hosting, funnels and landing pages, email marketing, appointment scheduling, payment processing, course and membership hosting, and so much more. Everything you need to succeed all under one roof. No duct tape, no juggling five platforms, just one clean system for your business and their award-winning 24-7 support has your back when you need it most. When you sign up at highlevelfire.com, you also get my exclusive bonus stack, a 30-day free trial, a private 15-minute call with me, JLD, access to my weekly live office hours, a digital copy of my book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success, my 50 days to something execution roadmap, and more.

14:06John Lee Dumas:Visit highlevelfire.com and start building your something today. Rob, we're back. And I want to talk about the beginner's mindset. I mean, you talk about maintaining a quote unquote beginner's mind and spotting disruption, not late, of course, but super early. So what signals tell you a market's about to shift? Yeah, it's a bit like innovation. Somebody once said innovation, once you see it, it's too late because you missed the boat as a company. You have to be ahead of the curve. I think the nice thing about financial services is that it's always been the last one. It always took a lot of capital, a lot of technology.

14:46The last one to sort of be creative or innovative because that's a bad word in financial services. You could say, for example, when Netflix started understanding who you were and started giving you recommendations and you have this sort of unbelievable experience, or when you buy a barbecue on Amazon, you have this sort of seamless one button thing. We immediately said when we saw all that stuff, that should be happening in financial services. Now, it's a bit more complex. There are rules, there are regulations, there are specific, I would say, capabilities necessary to execute on it. There's local regulation.

15:21But for me, innovation is let's make it seamless. You'd be surprised how difficult it is to open a bank account, how difficult it is to see if you're even eligible for something, that even get your name right, that even know what you do, what your goals are. So it's that unbelievable ease of use on the consumer side that we're seeing and we've been seeing in the last 10, 15, 20 years that innovation still has to trickle down into financial services. And we have this notion of with two clicks, you can invest like Warren Buffett or with four clicks. So this notion of delighting the client in that journey, which is a complex journey.

15:56It's more complex than buying a barbecue, honestly. But it's still so far away from what to delight your clients. And I think there's a lot to be done. The democratization of AI and everything will allow a lot of entrepreneurs to reinvent themselves. And as Suzuki said, in the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities. In the expert, there are few. It's almost like saying, okay, I've been trading bonds my whole life. And now I see all this technology and I'm going to wake up one day as if a bond is the same as something else. And then you have your white piece of paper. You have your context of history because you've been a trader your whole life.

16:32And now with the access to technology, you can reinvent it. And we're seeing pockets of full reinvention of the value chain of financial service. And that's super exciting. And as you can imagine, that is trillions and trillions of dollars that goes into that industry. So there's a lot to do. But I think we ain't seen nothing yet, as I always say, about the evolution of innovation. But you have to have a beginner's mind. Because that will, and you cannot just do up and flow of ideas. You can't just say, okay, one day we're hot here, so let's do this. You have to sort of have this, what I call North Star, where you say, okay, this is the principle I'm applying.

17:08I want to give all my wealth managers access to every product everywhere in the world, public, private, create full transparency. So how do you decompose that why into what are we going to do? And then how are we going to do it? And which entrepreneurs can do it? How do we work with other people? How do we put them together? It's fascinating to sort of re-architect or rewire financial services, which is a big, big, big mission. But it starts with small things, with small applications, small AI companies now that have great ideas that we fund, we introduce them to the right companies. It's a great journey, John.

17:46John Lee Dumas:I love what you say about the beginner's minds, but I also really love what you're saying about spotting disruption early. Because Fire Nation, at the end of the day, when you see most disruption, it's already happened. It's been happening and it's already happened. So how do you, as an entrepreneur, as a small business owner, how do you get ahead of that curve? And that kind of moves me into the hardest raise. Because you have raised, and I mean literally, Rob, billions in capital. Yet you said raising your first fund was the hardest moment of your career in that specific field of raising money.

18:19John Lee Dumas:So what did that experience teach you about trust, about credibility, and most importantly, about long-term relationship building? I have to say the model works in the sense that when you go ask for capital anywhere in the world, in Europe and North America, the most places where we work, you have people that are willing to listen. And it's their job to judge if they should entrust you with your capital, if you earn their trust. And there is a whole industry that's been built on that trust for years, traditional private equity industry. So nobody was waiting for Rob Haver 10 years ago to start another private equity firm.

18:53But they listened because that's their job. But what they heard from me is, yes, Motif consists of very formidable investors who've done it before. But we are indexing on the hands-on operational and innovation capability that is necessary to judge an investment because we're a temporary owner to create value for that company and then to let that company be bought or be taken to another owner. So that whole journey, we made a big argument in 2015 that we're better positioned because of our investor-operator-innovator model than anybody else. And we show our track sheet of all the founders and what they did.

19:37And we're very impressive. A lot of operational transformation, a lot of 2Xs, 3Xs, 4Xs, a lot of very, very, very, very good numbers. But they had to believe that we could translate in a traditional private equity construct. And it took time. It took a first deal we did on our own. And it's that persistence again and that continuous dialogue. And then you have the early adopters. I would call them the entrepreneurs within LP saying, you know what, I've been in GP land, I've been in private equity my whole life. And I saw when somebody really knows the business well and somebody is a good operator, he or she does a better job navigating either success and get to success faster or solves problem quicker.

20:21And so I think that journey, which was a two-year journey, was hard, very hard. But those are now our most loyal LPs. they've seen us create top quartile performance and they've been extremely excited about what we've done but you could probably have said three six months in we're not getting the traction so it was that constant telling your story and proving what you can do it was hard it was very hard but and what i actually think now is so beautiful is of course we've scaled dramatically and we still have the same investors. And then later on, people who do their math said, oh, I want in, I want in.

21:01So the second fund was actually the international, big large institutions came in. Then we had an amazing, like Apollo, one of the largest alternative investors in the world, saw our work and wanted to be part of our journey. So it just kept on growing. And we kept doing what we do well, identify interesting companies, be a great owner, try to create as value as much as possible and provide liquidity for investors. So we're at cruising speed now, I would say. And it's fascinating to see that all that energy, all that capability comes down to culture. And we've created this culture alongside investing and operating, innovating, that we are a consensus-driven organization.

21:42And we keep talking to each other. Should we make that investment? How do we make that investment? And we've created, I think, a different profession now. that's an investor that is as savvy as an operator needs to be, and at the same time can bring that innovation to bear. So we feel pretty good about our – because at the end of the day, you cannot be in the morning in gyms and in the afternoon. You want to be in technology. In the evening, you're buying restaurant chains. That's good for generic GPs. For us, it's all about you know where the puck is going, and because of who you are, you can go spot these trends like you say, John, and you can come in there, be a good owner, and then let it grow and let it be given to people for success going forward.

22:28Yeah.

22:29John Lee Dumas:Rob, you've dropped so many value bombs here today. I mean, we talked about you going from operator to investor to coach, the real AI opportunity, why failure creates better leaders, the beginner's mindset, you know, spotting disruption early, the hardest to raise. With everything that you've talked about here today, Rob, if Fire Nation is like, I want to learn more. I want to connect with Rob and this company. What is your call to action for our listeners today? A couple. First of all, don't do tomorrow what you can do today. I think the sense of urgency today that exists and that should sit within you and that makes you restless is a very good thing.

23:07And the second thing would be this tremendous amount of curiosity. So I have a hard time sleeping the last couple of months because I have so many things to read, so many things to listen to. And it gives me so much energy. And then translate that energy in real actionable stuff. Go do it. Go talk to people. Launch your ideas. Sense of urgency and curiosity are very important. And then last but not least is I I honestly think everything comes down to with whom you go on that journey. More than the content of more than anything else, it's the people that surround you, that'll complete you or that'll talk you up when you're down or that will give you that extra skill that you're missing to go to the finish line or that give you that energy that you sometimes need to go through a test phase or something else.

23:57So it's people, surround yourself with people that are, in your perception, more capable than you are and that bring you value on your journey as an entrepreneur is more important than being the solo big chief of a startup.

24:11John Lee Dumas:Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. And of course, as Rob was just talking about, I'm sure he surrounds himself with amazing people at all times. And you, Fire Nation, have been hanging out with RH and JLD today. So how about you keep up that heat? And for links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com. Type Rob in the search bar and the show notes page will pop right up. And Rob, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. John, good to talk to you.

24:42Thanks for having me.