The Importance of Working With A High-Quality Advisor with Plancorp's Ranie Verby (EP.243)

0:29We all need to make smart decisions with our money. how do you tell whether you're getting a high-quality advisor? That's why I asked my colleague, Rainy Verby, PlanCorp's Director of Practice Management, to explain what a financial advisor can really mean, as well as how to spot a true fiduciary at an RIA, because the best advice shows up when life gets messy, not when markets are calm. And Rainy, she coaches our advisors. She is constantly working on tightening the processes that clients actually feel. She's a wealth of information. We're definitely going to talk a lot about PlanCorp, but I do think there is a lot that you can apply if you're thinking about hiring an advisor or if you're working with an advisor currently.

1:07As always, you can find detailed show notes at thelongterminvestor.com. And if you're interested in learning more about working with PlanCorp, there is a link at the top of the episode description inside your podcast app. And now, here's my conversation with Rainy Verby.

1:26Welcome to the Long-Term Investor. Today, I wanted to tackle a question that I often cover here on the show. It's a part of something where I'll say, do you have a financial advisor? Because I'm a strong believer, and I'm biased, that having a professional will help improve your outcomes. But I think the actual question that is more important is, do I have a high-quality advisor? because what separates a truly great advisor from an average one is really important. And so I've invited a good friend of mine, colleague at PlanCorp, Rainy Verby, who is a CPA, a CFP and leads our advisor team and practice management at PlanCorp.

2:05And what she's going to do today is help us understand what makes a great advisor, why that difference matters for your future, and how you can tell what kind of advisor you're working with. So Rainy, thanks so much for joining me here today. Thanks for having me. and I'm really excited to talk about this topic specifically. It's what I love is to grow and develop advisors and make them the best they can be for our clients. So I'm really thrilled to talk about this. You're one of the key players at PlanCorp that works behind the scenes to make sure that we have a great experience. And so maybe we just start at defining what it means to be a high quality advisor in the first place.

2:41That's a great question because there are so many people who call themselves financial advisors. If you're on the golf course, it is likely that somebody introduced themselves today as a financial advisor, but that can mean a whole lot of different things. It can mean an insurance salesman. It can mean a broker-dealer. What you want it to mean is somebody like us who works for a registered investment advisor. And I think it's pretty simple to spot the ones that you want. They're transparent about how they work with their clients. They're transparent about how they get paid. They're really clear up front that they have a fiduciary responsibility to you.

3:16And they're going to talk about that because if they're upholding that standard, it's a big deal. At PlanCorp, we have the CFEX certification, the Center for Excellence in Financial something that I'll say. Center for Fiduciary Excellence. Fiduciary Excellence. There you go. So we have the CFEX certification at PlanCorp, the Center for Fiduciary Excellence, which is a very good sign in a firm. It takes a lot of due diligence and compliance work to get there. So ideally, like I said, they work in an RIA firm and only their clients pay them. Otherwise, you're looking at a broker, you're looking at an insurance salesman, and in that case, there's going to be commissions and incentives.

3:53Those are great starting points. And because you work with so many of our advisors, both through coaching and management and implementing new processes that people use to help better serve their clients, I'm curious if you have, and putting you a little on the spot, any client stories where you could really tell, okay, the work is paying off. I can see that this individual is really striving for excellence and doing great things. Yeah, there are just so many, honestly, to pick from. And it's really fun for me always to see our advisors in the wild with clients. I don't always get to observe their client meetings, but when I do, it's incredibly fun.

4:28And I think what you see is truly just the bond between a client and the advisor and a level of trust that you can't even imagine anywhere else. I mean, I remember being in a room with one of our single guys who has been an advisor for 15 plus years. It's really fantastic, but working with this particular widow and she took me through some of the stories of how they've worked together throughout the death of her husband the following months when she wasn't really ready to make decisions yet and how he had guided her through that process. And the bond was just so clear and strong. They'd been working together for over a decade.

5:06we have so many examples of that similar story where they've just really grown together over time through those hard decisions. I usually only come into meetings when it's somebody who visits PlanCorp for the first time because they found us through the show, through the podcast, through the writing, or when there's an investment specific question. But it's interesting you mentioned that because I feel like when I'm watching a new introduction to PlanCorp, working with our advisors, our advisors are just asking such good questions. And a lot of times when I'm having the introductory call with a prospectively new client, they'll say, well, what how is this work?

5:41I honestly can't predict what they're going to ask you. I'm just always blown away in general. So we're always talking about how can we be the destination for our industry's best advisors? And when I say that, what does that phrase mean to you? When I think about why we're really that magnet for advisors, it's because we've built a practice where we can equip everyone to bring their best strengths to the table and really work there. So our advisors are focused on their clients and they're able to take vacation. They don't look like they haven't slept in three weeks. We take good notes. We take good care of our clients.

6:15Our clients know where we are and that they have a full team of people to serve them. and we're able to handle the payroll, the compliance, the back office, all of those things with folks who are really good at running businesses. So I think obviously we're really proud of our people. You and I both do a lot of recruitment work. When we see a great advisor, we're like, hey, A players deserve to be on an A team. Let's do this together. But I wouldn't say that everything is perfectly natural. I mean, I don't want to take away from the contribution that you work so hard on, which is really building up people.

6:45And I think what's particularly interesting about your contribution in this age and something that our viewers on Cheddar or YouTube or our listeners on the podcast will find interesting is how you've really blended behavioral finance with AI. So I'm actually not going to give you a specific question. I'm going to let you jump off and go anywhere you want with that because I know you're pretty passionate about the topic in general. Yeah, I might surprise you. So you mentioned that I'm a CPA. So I started my career in public accounting and really loved that format. But it's a lot of hard work. And there were a lot of employee benefits that they have to have to retain the employees.

7:21But you don't exactly feel seen and heard. You're there to serve the client. You're there to perform a task or do a job, especially in the beginning. And as you grow up in those levels, you get a little closer to the client work. So when I came to an RAA and became a financial planner, what was really important to me was that interface and being the person who's hearing the clients and hearing what they need, seeing them, caring for them, paying attention to them. And then when I moved into a more management-focused role, I realized that once again, I was back in those accounting days where not a lot of people were paying attention to the advisors and the advisors weren't necessarily feeling seen and heard and cared for.

8:02You know, you start to realize that therapists go to therapy and doctors see a doctor. My chiropractor sees a chiropractor. So helpers need to get help. And I'm not just saying that our financial advisors need financial advice. They do. And we do a very good job of providing that for one another as well. They also just need help. They need rest. They need focus. They need education and development that they don't have to go seek on their own necessarily. They need a lot poured into them as just human beings. And so it's my responsibility and that of my team to really see and hear and care for those advisors so that they are their best self to see and hear and care for their clients.

8:45I know firsthand, a lot of this has shades of the steps you've taken on implementing a behavioral finance program and training at PlanCorp. I would love to hear some more about that, but I want to set the stage for listeners where in our field, people have talked about behavioral finance for a long, long time, but a lot of it was in the context of look at those silly little humans making their silly little human mistakes and not a lot of practical application for it. And so I'm really proud of the dedication that the advisors have to the program, but maybe you can give people a little sense of what the training looks like, what some of the objectives are and what's some of the outcomes that if you haven't had PlanCorp as your advisor before you might experience.

9:28Yeah, I think one of the things we do really, really well is bring that human aspect in. We're careful. You hear a lot of people say that's irrational behavior. It's not irrational. It's perfectly rational and normal because it's how our brains work. What's irrational is asking somebody to rebalance in a down market when they're really, really stressed out about it. What's rational to them is exit and get away from the fear. The irrational is what we bring to the table in the ability to take the emotion out of the game and follow the logic. One of the things I meant to mention above when we talked about what makes a high quality advisor, they're not just looking at your investments, they're looking at your tax planning.

10:05And really importantly, they're looking at your estate planning. And I'm very passionate to say not just your estate and what happens to your assets after you're gone, but what happens in the last years of your life when you've retired, you start to need medical care, your family is going to step in. What does this look like in terms of your powers of attorney and those legal documents that you need to have? But we also want to be that conduit for sharing how you wanted things to go both before and after your passing. And so one of the things that behavioral finance equips us for as advisors is to really dig into those tough conversations that are awkward and morbid at times, but we really have to do it.

10:46And it's maybe not a surprise to people that our industry is trending younger. For so long, this has been the 65-year-old single practitioner. I'm running my put out my shingle and I serve my hundred clients. More and more, we're a younger practice. So you see advisors who have not gone through these challenges themselves in their own life experience. So where we bring in behavioral finance training really is important to give them reps to help them absorb the stories of other people in the firm. We are really cross pollinating each other. We're working with our more tenured advisors, our second career consultants.

11:21We're helping share stories and we're helping people not shy away from those really hard conversations. They're not hard technically, they're hard emotionally. And we want folks to be comfortable in those situations. One of the things that I imagine, I have a lot of do-it-yourself listeners and not everybody's going to hire an advisor over their lifetime. Even all do-it-yourself investors recognize that a professional will help, but they want to save money. And I'm not here to debate that at the moment. But the thing that I think that gets missed a lot of times is, okay, well, we don't live in a spreadsheet.

11:54And so how do you go about making those decisions? And then when a big life event happens, who do you trust? Because there's a lot of incentives around and it's really nice to have somebody who can take care of things. The story I always tell is that, like I hired someone to mow my lawn when my first kid was born in 2013 and I was paying someone$35 a week. I've slowly gone up the pay scale. I'm actually, there's no chance in the world I'll tell people how much I'm paying per week. It's so embarrassing. But a tree fell on our fence and they just fixed it. And I didn't even know they did that. I realized I'm paying for owned outcomes.

12:29I'm paying for responsiveness. They know me when I email. I love that I can email my lawn people. I'm not just texting some dude or even some group of people. But what I'm getting at here is that I think a lot of times when people think about hiring a financial advisor, naturally they think of hiring someone who knows all of the tax rules and all of the investment due diligence. But in reality, we invest so much time in the human piece of the relationship that you are never going to be able to quantify on your own. I also think that advisors that join us who've been working in other places just find it to be such a breath of fresh air.

13:04I'm going to pivot a little unless you have anything else to say on that topic. I would add into that for DIYers just that I think it's really important in all of our lives to acknowledge that we can't be all things to all people. We cannot be the expert at everything. So you might be really good at investments. That's fantastic. Peter's really good at investments. Thanks. He's not really good at tax. I'm really good at tax. I'm not very good at investments. So I think we know as a firm where we specialize and where we spend our best time. And you as a DIYer are phenomenal with investments. But do you know every estate planning nuance that you need to know to avoid a potential tax situation or to avert a family crisis that could happen because maybe you accidentally thought that, or maybe intentionally thought that this medical power of attorney and this financial power of attorney would get along and make decisions together.

13:58You can't be the best at knowing all of those things. And so where an advisor comes in, I think, is really to help build speed and education in decision-making so you can feel empowered to take that next step. You don't have to really go spend the time doing all the research to know what you don't know and track that down. Just like outsourcing your lawn. I don't want to be the best at mowing my lawn. I just want it to be done and pretty and look great. And to your point, I want the owned outcome. I want that accountability and you get what you pay for. So if you are really looking for the cheapest solution, they're not investing in their talent.

14:31And I know we'll talk more about that later, but the firm has to be investing in their advisors if you want those owned outcomes on the other end of the table. I could not agree more. And on the complete opposite in this behavioral finance spectrum, this very human touch part of advice that we focus so much on is that we have maybe to nobody's surprise been aggressive adopters of AI. And there's a lot of talk in our industry. And again, I think more of our listeners are individuals than advisors, although we have a not insignificant amount of advisors who listen to the podcast. So advisors know all people talk about is adopting AI.

15:07So we're giving listeners a sense of what our advisors are doing differently, the investment we are making in their human skills. But I will tell you that I have new clients come and say, well, how are you guys using AI? So maybe you can enlighten us all on how the advisor's day has looked so much better and frees them up to work more with our clients. I would love to. And there are so many advisors we talk to out in the field that just how do you spend your day is a question that really baffles people. It's like, I don't know, I just react to emails. That's a terrible answer. So we've consistently tried to build those processes.

15:40So there is a structured way and a way to spend your day that makes sense and you can be proactive for your clients. But what we realized, having advisors manually scrape calendars and files and take notes in a meeting, recap those meetings, even just recapping those meetings, what you might call the history notes to document in the file, that's like a late night tax that they're having to pay. And it wasn't that long ago that people were handwriting those notes. I think those types of things where it is the note taking, but it's the making sure that the scheduler link has gone out three weeks in advance and the following up some of those components that can really easily be automated.

16:18And then now that we have better AI, what we can do to go back through prior meeting notes and really synthesize a great agenda for the next meeting, it's saving us hours and hours of advisor time. And it's allowing them to think at a higher level. We all know that when we're lost in the details, you cannot see the forest for the trees. Let's put AI in the trees and let's step back and see the forest even at that newer planner level. And so we're able to train people on the things that matter more, which is spending more time with the clients, better, clearer questions, more energy just left for their clients.

16:53And to make those observations in a meeting room where I start to realize when I'm just watching the advisor, it's like, oh, you really enjoy talking about taxes and this client really dislikes it. So they have disengaged mentally, but you're still pointing at the board and looking at the Roth conversions that could be done five years from now. I think having those human observations built into our planners at an earlier stage is going going to help them build more meaningful careers really with that human connection at the front of it. So AI is going to take some of our block and tackle work.

17:26It really is. It's going to help us get better. And it's our job to reskill and get better with our clients. I have a few advisor friends who are going to love that you used block and tackle as the description there, just for the record, that caused a little bit of riff on LinkedIn among some corners so that they're just going to really appreciate, especially because you don't like sports at all. So I'm just going to I don't like sports. And I really I rue the advisor who uses only sports analogies, because once you say more than block and tackle, you've lost me and I don't know where you're going.

17:58And we need a new metaphor. Not to terribly sidetrack us, but sports is a really good investment parallel, as is gambling. But I know those are both unpopular. And I lean so hard into food now. I've realized everybody eats. There's a lot of quality links there. So it's interesting as we evolve. Fortunately, you know, I should ask AI to get me some more examples. But in general, I digress. You use block and tackling. I know I have people who text me later being like, look, you have more people say it. Anyways, OK, side conversation for everybody else to listen to there. Let me tell a quick story, though.

18:32You were mentioning the note taker where I feel like people are like, yeah, note taker. Sure. But I watched a new advisor come on to an account and it's great to have notes. but what if you don't read the past 20 years of notes? And that advisor thoughtfully went through the past 20 years of notes and found something that the client themselves had forgotten about. And it ended up and they were so thrilled. And so I think AI is not taking anybody's job. There are lots of tasks, repetitive tasks, tasks that are not super high value that are going to be eliminated. And the thesis that you've made, Rainey, is that there's more time to focus on the client themselves.

19:10I think what we're really concerned about is what you're going to see in big, big, big corporations, not necessarily financial planning firms. But with this added capacity, do you just squeeze more productivity out of your people? We've made a real intention not to do that, really invest in people's career paths. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that, just the sustainability of an advisor career. Because if you're going to hire someone like PlanCorp and you're really buying into the process and the idea that people are great, you would be nice to know that the people are still going to be there.

19:40even if they're in slightly different roles over time. That's exactly right. And so an advisor burnout is very real. And I think we experienced it during 2020 and 21 more than ever before, because we were seeing, again, advisors are skewing younger and they've not lived through the same markets and the same level of pressure. This is a different generation that was equipped to deal with stress and pressure in different ways as well. So it is really important that we pay attention to those advisors and their burnout. We have always been very clear that capacity comes first. We are not trying to squeeze profit margin out of our people.

20:15We want everyone to have the capacity and the love and care for their job that they want to go seek new clients, that they want to talk positively about what they do and be out in the world. And I'm a big fan of saying, don't bring your whole self to work. Bring your best self to work. And I think the more hours you can spend building those other, we talk about the rooms in your identity house, that you are not just a financial advisor, you are a parent and you are a sports fan and I am a reader and a bookworm. We have those other identities and the more we are nurturing ourselves as human beings, the more our best self shows up at work and it's the self who wants to be interfacing with clients, not the one who's drained from responding to emails until 11 o 'clock last night and since 7 a.m.

21:01this morning. I remember us bringing in a speaker a few years ago that really just talked about having a gratitude journaling practice. And I think the best thing I saw come out of that speaker was at least three of the advisors on the team reached out to me and said, you know what, this changed my habit of picking up the phone first thing in the morning. It's my alarm. I shut off the alarm. I look at my outlook. I stopped doing that. I put it down and I just thought of three things I was thankful for. And maybe they didn't write them down. Maybe they did. Maybe they built a whole practice, but just not looking at their phone first thing in the morning tells me that they're now taking a little bit better care of themselves.

21:39They're able to start up and their brains not in 10 different places. We know that humans can't actually multitask. We just think that we can and we do several things poorly at one time. What we want is people really focused on that client experience, being able to be proactive, not reacting to your email. I think the better care advisors are taking of themselves, the better advisor they're going to be to that client at the end of the day. And it's our job as a firm to enable that and really model it and push it. All of our leaders, we made a decision years ago that we were not gonna send messages outside of business hours.

22:14And we have stuck to that as a leadership team four years now, and that matters to our teammates. So with AI, you're right, people are gonna milk margins and people are gonna say, I can serve 300 clients now because all I have to do is go into the meeting and then go into the next meeting. That works for a little while, But we know that humans can't have 300 relationships and sustain them really well. That's not the depth at which we want to know our client. So we want to go deeper. That means we work harder to be whole humans who can go deeper with fewer people. You can all hear and see how passionate Rainey and I are about wanting to be the destination for the country's best advisors.

22:50And I am going to now use a sport analogy only because I made fun of it earlier. where when you think about, well, the Dodgers are buying everybody, the Yankees, you can go play for the Yankees or the Dodgers. Even if you're not one of the players on the field, a lot of what's exciting to go work for one of those organizations is they have the best players on the field. And if you're a fan of one of those teams, if you're going to be a fan of a team, you want the team not with the best manager or the best executives, you want the best players. The reason I am having Rainey share all this background is I think it's really important before we get into how do you tell if you're working with a high quality advisor, just to understand some of the investment that goes in behind the scenes at a firm with resources that can bring in and be the destination for the country's best advisors.

23:37And what are some of those things that we're trying to do to make their lives better? But let me now turn then to Rainey, if listeners are trying to evaluate their own advisor, or maybe they haven't hired advisors in the past, but they've interviewed and just decided not to go down that road. What can somebody do to tell the difference between a high quality advisor versus, let's just say, a warm body? If you've not hired an advisor yet, I think it's maybe a little different in the questions you ask. And you certainly look for all of those same components. But you want it when you're talking to an advisor for the first time.

24:09A lot of times you're not talking to your day to day person. You're talking to the rainmaker. You're talking to the guy who's networking and shaking hands and out at all the events. That's great. Are you going to serve me day to day? at PlanCorp, often that answer is no, but we're going to say, nope, but this person right next to me is because we're on the call together. So you want more than one person in that room really getting to know you. And then it comes down to, is this a person you want to spend time with? And more importantly, is this a person the non-financial partner in the relationship wants to spend time with?