Episode 298 - Randall Stutman: Admired Leadership for Financial Decision-Making

24:36How simple is that? But if you ask me what gets in the way of decision-making, the biggest problem is too many times we actually solve the wrong problem. So we're making a decision about something that's not the problem. And that is because we haven't spent the time to identify the root cause of the issue or the problem or the opportunity. And so as a result, because we haven't spent that time, we haven't admired the problem long enough, we haven't identified the root causes or issues underlying it, we therefore presume what the problem is and we solve it, but it's the wrong problem. And so therefore we realize we still have the same problem we had before, even though it was an elegant solution, we put it in place.

25:11The consequences, implications, symptoms of that problem having gone away. And that's because we solved the wrong one. And that happens a lot. That's so important. We did an episode a while ago with Ralph Keeney, who studies decision-making, and he talked a ton about the points he just made. I'll have to look at that one. He's really smart. So I'm sure I can learn something from listening to your podcast on that. I missed that one. Sorry about that. Randall, are there some decisions that should be made quicker and some that should be made slower, especially given the number of options you're bringing to the table?

25:40You can divide decision-making into two different buckets. Decisions that can be reversed and decisions that can't. By reversed, I mean easily reversed. And other ones that you can't reverse them, they're not very easily to revoke them once you put them in place. Once we make the decision to buy the house and we actually put the money down, it's hard to revoke. And once we decide on the new strategy and we bake that into what we're going to do tactically in our plans and operating budgets and like, it's really hard to revoke it. So you're going to treat decisions that can't be revoked or not reversed very easily, very different than decisions that can.

26:12Naturally, you're going to spend more time with more analysis, with more energy, with just more engagement around decisions. And not just because they're important. Some decisions can't be revoked that aren't that essential, but they still can't be revoked. So you're going to spend more time on those kinds of decisions than the decisions that can be reversed. You're going to treat their decision process a little bit more seriously. you're going to engage with a lot more vigor. That's just natural, but it's not so natural that we automatically do that all the time. So I always advise people to bust up decisions in terms of those.

26:44Just ask the question, can you reverse this decision? Can you revoke it? Would it be not that hard to change course? And if you can change course, then make your decision, but don't fret about it. Go through your process and then figure it out and land on something. And better you act more quickly on those kinds of decisions. Why? Because there's not that big a consequence. I don't mean the consequences aren't real, but we can reverse them if we need to, versus the other kinds of decisions where we can. Again, you guys are treating me like I'm the decision-making expert of the world. I'm not. I just happen to study leaders, so I don't know why we're on this decision stuff, but nonetheless, keep going if that's where you want to go.

27:18Well, we're going to shift right now, Randall. I want to get into some of your thoughts around our world in the business of financial advisory services. Of which I'm a client, so keep going. Excellent. How do you think a financial advisor could or should act like an admired leader? If you think about leadership and making situations and people better, they are leading their clients. And if they're not leading their clients, something's seriously wrong. They should be thinking about who I am, what I am, but also what is it that is my particular situation and how do they make it better? And how do they make me a better partner in the process based on what I need and what I think I want and so forth and so on.

27:54So getting people heard, understanding their risk appetites, all the normal stuff that everybody on your listeners know. But using that work in order to intentionally help improve and grow, not just the assets, but the person themselves, the relationship also, that's a pretty important part of all of this. At the end of the day, this is all about relationships. You and I both know you can do great work and not maintain a relationship. And what a waste of time and energy. So most of your advisors are more in the relationship business than they think, and they're a lot less in the financial advice business than they think.

28:30And I know that's controversial, but I'd argue that one comes before the other. If you're not any good at building relationships, you're not going to grow an incredible practice. At the same time, you're not going to grow that incredible practice unless you offer some pretty sound advice too. So one's more requisite, but it's not sufficient, if that makes sense. Are there any admired leadership behaviors that you think might be unique to financial advisors? No. I mean, relationships are relationships are relationships. And just like leadership is, the best behaviors are universal. They apply in all cases.

29:03That doesn't mean that there aren't some things that you would do specifically as an advisor. You would do it other places, but you might emphasize it more as an advisor, you know, kinds of things. That depends on who you're dealing with. Let me tell you, I'm in the business of promoting what I do. I run a large organization of coaches, and I've learned this a long time ago. So I deal with a lot of very high level, high profile people, CEO types and everything else. It might surprise you, but when I go into a conversation with those people, which probably are not dissimilar in terms of the client set of your listeners, one of the first things I do when I get in those environments is I try to find a place to disagree.

29:42And people would go, really? I mean, because I've been taught I want to be likable. And I go, I want you to be likable too. I want to be likable too. I want people to trust me. If you disagree with someone and really make a good and sound argument, who does that but somebody that's willing to tell you the truth? And by the way, that tends to be my brand. I tend to be very candid and I don't smash people on the head with truth. I don't want to be offensive or unpalatable with the truth. I always want to be more candid because that's my real role as an advisor coach. So I go in there looking, sometimes I can't find it, but boy, if I can disagree early in a conversation with a prospective client, I go right for the disagreement because I want to prove to them that they can trust that I'm going to tell them what I really think.

30:23Now that doesn't work every time, but it works more in my advantage. At least I've convinced myself it does. It works more in my advantage than the downside. And I build really trusting relationships with people because of my candidness. Now that's me and that's how I approach it, but it wouldn't be surprising to me that a lot of your advisors should be disagreeing with their potential prospective clients more than they actually think. Some people are smiling when they listen to this because they go, I disagree all the time. I'm dealing with people that don't know what they're talking about. That's the simple way of disagreement.

30:51But disagreeing on something truly of substance, where you have taken a position where they have also taken a very strong position, and saying, hey, I want to disagree agreeably, by the way. I want to say, you have a right to your position. I want to say, hey, that makes sense. I understand where you're coming from, but here's what my experience says, and this is kind of how I see it. And so I have a different view than you do. Do that early. Now, that's just one example. I'm not arguing that that's the tactic or strategy of everything, but I can think of lots of things that advisors might be doing relationally that might be a little bit different than we do in most relationships.

31:26If I'm trying to find, you know, with new friends, new neighbors, and I'm looking for a place to disagree very early, that's just not going to go well. But I would with prospective clients in that case. So there are some things we do with clients that are a little bit different, but how you add value, the kinds of ways you build trust, how you congratulate, how thankful and grateful you are, some of the things you do to include people, those are all universal things to building great relationships and they work no matter what arena you're in. I think your disagree point is so insightful, especially, and I assume you do this with your clients, you link that disagreement to the goals they've come to you to try to solve.

32:03Is that a correct assessment? Not always, but usually. I'm just trying to build trust or candidness. I deal with CEOs and some of the most powerful people in the whole world. Everybody in the world wants to tell them what they already want to hear. They find it refreshing. Not all of them. If somebody's willing to disagree and stake out some ground, even if they don't agree with it, they go, okay, here's somebody that I can trust that's going to tell me the truth. Now I have to assess whether you actually know what you're talking about, which is a separate issue altogether. other. But again, relationship before content.

32:33So many things in our world, there are items to do in all the different parts of someone's financial world. This becomes this massive checklist of stuff that has to get done. So I'll link this back to your earlier comments around, it's important to have great followership to inspire people to get that list done. Do you have any thoughts around having a list to help people and to motivate people to get through that list of to-do items? Checklists are really valuable because they help people organize, remind things, remember things. I mean, I think checklists are great. They also help great consistency and the like.

33:05The key is though, not to create them and treat them as so much of a task that they become the focus of your conversation or relationship. That's all. I think if you have to get stuff done, you have to get stuff done. We go to the grocery store all the time. We have a grocery list, but the grocery list is not the focus of our day. It doesn't become the mainstay of our conversation. And it's not even really what we do spend all the time in the grocery store doing. We're checking off our list, but we're also looking at all kinds of things and thinking about where we're going to cook and lots of other things.

33:33You just can't let the checklist dominate and become the overarching focus of the conversation and the relationship. But the checklist is really important. Without the checklist, I forget all kinds of stuff. I have to go back four times. What a waste of time. So I want a good checklist and I want to be able to work through it. Just don't let it take things over. Don't let it drive you. Sticking with the theme of financial advice relationships, what traits of an admired leader do you think a financial consumer should bring to their relationship with a financial advisor? Well, I think they should want a real mutually influential relationship.

34:06I don't think it should be one-sided. There's all kinds of different clients in the world. If you're somebody that doesn't value relationships, then go find other people that don't value relationships. You'll have a great time. But I would want somebody, if I was on the other side, to A, I would want to be heard. I want to listen to you, but I want you to listen to me. I want to build a relationship with you, I want you to build a relationship with me. If I'm a client on the other side, I want you to explain the things that I want to know, but I don't want you to over explain the things I don't.

34:31We don't drop our car off to the service people and go, can you explain to me exactly what you did and mechanically like how that all worked? Because no, no, that's what I'm paying you to do. Now tell me, by the way, the bill's bigger than I thought it was going to be. So you must've done some really great work. But at the end of the day, I don't want all your theory. I don't need to know. So are you good at judging what I should want to know and what I need to know and what I would value? Or are you just dumping on me all this stuff to make me impressed by how much you know? Because I don't need your theory.

35:00If I have all your theory, by the way, I can do what you do. By the way, there's way too many people that think they can do what your advisors do. And that's part of the problem. I want you to find the right clients, the clients that resonate with you or that are consistent with your values. But when you say to me, so what should those clients do? It's a hard one because it depends on, I mean, they're going to be different kinds of clients and they're going to have different needs. The real question is, are you finding the clients that should be looking for you too? Because there's a match in heaven there for everyone.

35:30And there's going to be enough clients, by the way. But if you take on everybody, you're going to waste a lot of time and be a very frustrated person because there's going to be people that do things, ask you things that you go, why am I doing this? This is not normal. And the reason is you found the wrong person and they found you. And by the way, you're the wrong person for them too. You need to find the clients that want to find you and then satisfy them in the way that they want to be satisfied. Question for you on goal setting. Do you have any thoughts around the best way for a couple to come to agreed upon financial goals?

36:03They need a target. I think if there's any advice I would give is the more you start from a blank piece of paper, the harder it is to reach agreement. So it's easier for people to riff off of and respond or react to a position or proposal, a target. Give people a target as to what goals we think might be reasonable and start from there. And once you have that target, then you'll know when you have that proposal and there's disagreement, now the key is to find what's the underlying reason for that disagreement. And then we can start walking it through. Listen, here's what I've learned. A lot of disagreement has nothing to do with the content.

36:40It has to do with the relationship. And so when the relationship is not ideal or problematic, it gets expressed through that goal setting process. So people fight over goals, not because they don't agree with the goals, they have a problem in the relationship and they're expressing their disagreement over the goals. They're using that as the forum by which to say, our relationship is not where I want it to be. Trust me, when your spouse says to you, you don't put the top of the toothpaste back on the toothpaste tube, it has nothing to do with the toothpaste tube or the top. It has to do with, do you hear me?

37:15Do you respect me? Am I a partner? Do you understand all the work I do around here? It's a relationship issue. It's not about the toothpaste, but they'll use the toothpaste in order to bring it up. That happens in goal setting a lot too. What do you think is the best way to deliver feedback in an advisory relationship? Oh my gosh, you got help about five, six hours for me. There's so many important things to giving feedback. This will be a little bit abstract, but it'll be worth it by the end. So when you think about giving feedback, the very reason we call it the word feedback is because it comes from a place of power, experience, expertise.

37:53Let me give you some feedback. Let me give you an idea that is important for you. Criticism falls in the same bucket. Now, I know very few people that prefer or like criticism or feedback. If I came to you and say, hey, Ben, I have some feedback. I don't know you. Wow, I can't wait to get it. Very few people are like that. Imagine the feedback message I was sending you is that you need to be more diligent of understanding where the marketplace is in any given moment. I'm just making that up. Now, I can give you a little feedback that you're not as diligent as you should be and you need to have more discipline in understanding the macro environment.

38:27That produces resistance because it comes from a place of power. It says, I have the experience. I have the expertise. I'm the one with the knowledge. And that's why I'm giving you this feedback. By the way, I'm your advisor. And so I have the power. That same message, I can reduce power by offering some advice. Advice is the same message, by the way, but it reduces power. So I can say, can I give you some advice? And you say, sure. What's your advice? Now, advice I can accept or reject. And it comes from your experience, but it doesn't come from your authority. Same message. My advice is that you have a more macro-oriented view and take more discipline to understand what's going on in the marketplace.

39:03Now, I can reduce power again by calling it a suggestion or recommendation. Can I make a suggestion? Sure. What's your suggestion? My suggestion is that you learn and I help you learn how it is that you can have a more macro view and so forth and so on. Now, same message, except I simply reduce power. Anytime power is high, people resist it. As power gets lower, people resist it less. All the advisors should not be in the feedback business. They should not be in the criticism business. They shouldn't even be in the advice business. They should be in the recommendation and suggestion business. If they start thinking like that and acting like that and describing things like that, they're going to find that people have a higher degree of receptivity.

39:42That is so basic in the way I think about things. It doesn't even bother me to give it to your whole audience. So I'm happy to talk about that. Now, we know so many cool things about feedback, how the best instructors and teachers and leaders and coaches get feedback that I really could spend a tremendous amount of time and tell you a lot of the magic that we've learned over time. But just starting there is so important. Just reduce your power and start describing things more in recommendation and suggestion, and you'll find that people respond very differently to you. We are all in a similar business.

40:16We provide advice to people. Do you have thoughts or experience around how often you should connect with the person you're helping to build out an effective relationship? There's no exact right answer. Your instinct is probably more than less. People that aren't able to sustain relationships generally don't have enough cadence and frequency of contact. And so the question though is through what mediums, by what value am I going to connect with you? So I give you an example that is a personal pet peeve of mine. I have insurance. I have multiple insurance agents. I live in different places. And every one of them works in the same organization.

40:54They don't know that I have other agents probably. And they all call me once a year. Actually, they call me twice a year. The first time they call me, they always piss me off because they call and wish me a happy birthday, which is on their checklist. Now, I don't know these people. And by the way, birthdays are not a happy moment for me anymore. The idea that somebody I don't know calls me and wishes me happy birthday is enough to put cream cheese right in my shoes. I just want to do anything to get away from you. And if it weren't for the fact that I actually coached the CEO of this particular organization, I'd probably change insurance companies just for that reason.

41:25How dare you treat me so unrelationally as to put me on a checklist and then do something that is highly relational in a way where we don't have a relationship. As you can tell, I get energized by this. But the second thing is they call me once in a while and they'll say, hey, can we review your policies? And again, I don't know you. It's not a bad idea to review my policies, but wouldn't it make a lot more sense to have a little bit more cadence with that? Say, hey, by the way, we noticed this in your policies. And by the way, this is something, this is a trend going on in the marketplace. And then by the way, we're in your neighborhood.

41:54And if you'd like us to stop by, then all of a sudden you say, can we review your policies? I go, this is somebody that actually cares about me. This is somebody that's thinking about my business. This is somebody that's thinking about my insurance. This is somebody that wants to have a relationship with me and that is actually engaging me. I think your instinct is cadence and frequency matter. I'm going to guess that it happens to have a minimum seasonally. In other words, I have no contact with you at all for a whole season. All I get from you is something in the mail from you, a statement or whatever else.

42:24We've gone way too long for you to sustain our relationship. And my guess is it's a lot more frequent than that for most people, depending on the size of their clientele and so on and so on. But you can't sustain a relationship and to keep a conversation alive unless you have at least a quarterly cadence to real connection, to real conversation. Not just a hello, not a Christmas card, not a, here's a question for you, here's my e-letter. By the way, e-letters are the most ridiculous things in the whole world. Nothing could be less relational than e-letter. Put me on some mass distribution and tell me some amalgamated form you're telling to the rest of the world.

43:01We don't have a relationship. I'm just a checkbox on a list for you. E-letters, great, as long as they're personalized, as long as on top of that E-letter, I call you and want to talk you about it or emphasize one paragraph in it or say, hey, please don't miss this or whatever else. And I include a photo of my most recent vacation where you and I have been before, whatever it might be. But by themselves, they basically kill relationships. So does social media too, but that's the only definition. You made such an interesting point that when someone does something relational, like wish you a happy birthday, when they don't actually have a relationship with you, that's actually detrimental.

43:35to the, I guess, non-existent relationship in that case. If I didn't already have a policy, we would call it stalking. Context matters, I guess. Yeah, exactly. And so somebody you don't know all of a sudden says, hey, can I help you mow your grass? You'd be like, okay, whoever you are, get as far away from me as possible. If that person says, hey, I don't really don't know you. Okay, we've never really met, but I would love to invite you to my organization to learn more. You go, that's great. Okay, let me back up slowly. Yeah, it's called stalking. Nobody wants to be stalked. You have to have real conversation.

44:09Relationships and conversations are so tightly connected, they're basically the same thing. And so I have to find a way to create a real conversation with you. And once I have it, I can't let it die. I have to sustain it. But I have to create it until I have that foundation. Anything I do that's highly relational is going to be very awkward. You spoke to elements of this, but how would you define a successful relationship with an advisor? It's mutual. Both parties are influencing. Both parties are adding value to each other. Both parties are curious of each other. It's not just curiosity on one side.

44:44Both parties are engaged in common goal, obviously. We agree to what that goal is. And both parties have a commitment to the longevity of the relationship. We both expect to have this relationship over a really long period of time. And we act accordingly. That's what I would expect. From a family perspective, do you have any thoughts around how you would motivate kids to get involved in the financial decision, financial planning process? Well, first you have to ask them good questions. That's where it would start, I would guess. Again, it's not my business, but if I was trying to get kids involved, I would want to elevate their status in our conversation and I'd want to ask them a bunch of questions and what they know without having answers like there are no gotchas.

45:25Oh, let me ask you a question. Oh, gotcha. You don't know something that I was hoping you knew or that you should know. I want to ask lots of questions and get very curious about how they think of wealth and how they think of money and what they think in terms of their own careers and things of that nature. And when you get curious and you invest in that curiosity with other people and you ask lots of quality questions, you're going to find a lot of it's going to get reciprocated. Not all of it. You don't control a lot of the other contexts of where these kids have come from and what they've learned and what they're expecting and alike.

45:55But reciprocity, one of the strongest things between human beings and curiosity, energy, interest, inquisitiveness, they're all highly reciprocated between people and kids are no exception. You work with a lot of successful people and powerful people, as you mentioned. How do you avoid outcome bias affecting the decisions of people who have been successful in the past? Separating between outcome and process, you and I both know that we can have some great outcomes with having lousy process and vice versa. We can have great process and have lousy outcomes. We don't control the outcomes. We always control the process.

46:33So how you avoid some of the biases, you control for what you can control for, and you don't talk yourself in to believing that, in fact, your experience, prowess, and everything else is entirely in control. I don't mean you don't have any influence on the outcome. The hardest part about dealing with successful people is they've been successful. And so they believe in their own nonsense. They believe these things that are just spurious, that have no real correlation to their success. They believe those are the driving forces of their success. And they double down on them, which is even weird. And so they continue to do things.

47:06Like I can't tell you how many leaders who are successful despite what I would consider to be an abrasive, mercurial style as leaders. And they've actually convinced themselves it's because of they're so harsh and stern that that's has created their success. And so they double down and they get even as they get more experienced and older and more successful, they get even harsher. They get even more coercive. And it's so fascinating. They learned the wrong lesson from what I consider to be the wrong outcome. So that's the thing you do is you avoid being overly committed and attributing too much of your own influence to outcome and you entirely control the thing you can control, which is process.

47:47So we kind of catch all of rapid fire questions for you, Randall. Oh, wow. This is kind of like speed dating except speed questioning. If you have longer answers, we welcome them. It's up to you. All right. I'll try to be as succinct as I can. Do you have any general time management strategies that you'd recommend for busy leaders? That's your speed question? That's the one you want me to do fast? Wow. Okay. If I was trying to improve someone's time orientation. The most important thing in there is, is you got to start on the hardest things first every day. You can't start on the easy things first.

48:20You got to start on the hardest things first. And it just takes a lot of discipline, but it's going to make you so much more productive. And by the way, you're giving yourself a reward because the easier things are going to come later. So you're looking forward to those things. And so you really just have to tackle the hard things. And you have to know what those hard things are as you look at your priorities and look at your tasks and everything else. That's where you got to start. And as simple as that sounds, it's the magic of almost every body that's any good at being productive and time-oriented.

48:46The second thing I would say to you is it's really about being time congruent with your values. Tell me how you spend your time. I'll tell you what your real values are. So you got to look at your time field all the time and say, if I look at this field of time, that is all in my appointments and all my commitments, is it truly representing my values? What I say matters to me. And if it does, then kudos to you. And if it doesn't, you need to make some change. Great answer to that question. This one's probably also not going to have a short answer. What do you think makes an effective meeting? An effective meeting, we know exactly what the outcome we're looking for.

49:18We've already agreed as to what the goal of this meeting is. We know we're making a decision. We know we're about discussing things to generate an idea. We know what the goal or the outcome we're looking for is. We're going to basically make sure that before we conclude this meeting, it's absolutely perfectly clear what our next steps are. And there's a lot of other things that make for great meetings, but if you did those two things alone, that would be a big, big plus. What are some of the biggest impacts in a post-COVID world of fewer face-to-face meetings and more of these virtual type relationships?

49:49What we know is a couple of things, and they're surprising. Number one is people really are more productive when they set their own boundaries. People get more done with higher quality when they're in control of their time, when they work and where they work. No question. The problem is that two things become missing. One is the relationship and cohesion between colleagues and between leaders and the people that they lead gets frayed or fragmented so that people are out of mind. They don't get thought of for assignments. They don't get thought of for promotions. They don't get thought of period.

50:22And then second, it's impossible virtually remotely to get as much feedback because most of the feedback we get are through nonverbals of eyebrows and facial expressions and things of that nature. And so we don't get enough of it. In fact, don't forget, when we get on these Teams, Zooms calls, Google Meet calls, we stare at our own image more than we stare at anything else. We're not even seeing the other person very much. So in the process of that, those are the two things we have to make up for. And we have to figure out a way to make up for them. There's lots of alternatives, but you asked me for speed.

50:54That's the consequence. So I want people to have flexibility, but I also need to create more relational cohesion, and I need a lot more feedback than what that medium allows us to have. You mentioned people being more productive when they set their own boundaries. Are most people self-motivated? I live in a world of self-motivated people, so I'm probably the police officer that only sees crime, and then I think everybody's a criminal. Well, yeah, in my world, most people are very self-motivated, but probably not true. But I don't have a good lens on that one. What I can tell you is you have to have at least a modicum of self-motivation, otherwise you don't get anything done.

51:33That creates the discipline to even get out of bed in the morning. And there are some people that lack that for sure. But what I might say is this. There's a difference between A players, B players, and C players. And A players are highly self-motivated and only need a goal. That's what makes them A players. They just need a direction. They just need to know what you're after, and they will figure it out. And they are highly motivated to figure it out for whatever reason. Intrinsic motivations, extrinsic ones, rewards, whatever it might be. We know that the best players are self-motivated. I don't think there's anybody that's too self-motivated is what I'm getting at.

52:08And so anything you can do as a leader to foster, promote, encourage self-motivation, I think is part of your job. You acknowledged or mentioned that you have some serious selection bias in the people that you deal with. What do you think motivates that sample, the ultra motivated people? Yeah, there are some people that are very much coin operated that are motivated by compensation and other kinds of rewards. No question. And there are some people that are very much motivated by the self-satisfaction they receive by lots of positive feedback and encouragement and so on and so on. But I'm going to tell you that the people that I deal with the most, that makes the most impressive is they have a tremendous desire to improve, to be better.

52:47And their learning orientation is what makes them so different. And they're motivated to learn, not so much to reach outcomes. Their notion is, if I'm not getting better, if I'm not learning, and if I'm not engaging and recognizing more things about what's happening both to me and everybody else, then I would lose the desire to do what I'm doing. And so they are learning machines and they're self-motivated to learn more than they are toward outcomes and other kinds of intrinsic even or the kinds of rewards. I really liked that answer partially because I got some confirmation bias. One of my benchmarks, I don't know if I ever thought about it as something that motivates me, but I always want to be able to look back to a previous point in time and be embarrassed about how little I knew about something that I now know about.

53:33It's a great one. Not knowing what you don't know is a pretty big deal. So second to last question, Randall, can you talk about what you see happening in the next 12 months for your company, Admired Leadership? We're excited about Admired Leadership. As you know, we write field notes every day and they go out to tens of thousands of people and that's great. And those are free to anybody, admiredleadership.com field notes. And we love our platform and our coaches. We continue to hire more coaches and train them up and we're having more success with our behavioral view every time. We are probably the largest coaching firm of full-time employees in the US.

54:04We don't know, but we suspect what we are. But the thing that I'm most excited about is we have a digital coach that's about to come out. And that digital coach is informed only by our data. That is by our field notes and our transcripts to our webinars and our conferences and those kinds of things and our white papers and things that have been happening inside our place for years. We think our answers and our content is better than everybody else. Just like, well, I hope we do, but we really think it's different. And so this digital coach, which has a snarky attitude, by the way, which I think is really fascinating, we call him Alex.

54:37That might be her. It's a gender neutral name, Alex. And Alex, when you ask Alex a question, Alex uses our data to give an answer. And here's the other cool thing about Alex is when you ask Alex a question that doesn't have an answer, that's any good that our data is not good. I'll get the question and then I'll create the answer and then they'll go in our database. So it's going to get better and better over time. It's going to be a great tool. Our own coaches can't wait to get their hands on it, and it'll be part of our platform and things like that. So I'm excited about an AI digital coach that'll get more better and better.

55:07Initially, it'll just be text, and you'll be able to select from six voices, but it'll eventually over time have an avatar, and you'll be able to interact with it. As AI develops, we're going to be as cutting edge as we can initially. But again, if you use any other AI device, it's going to pull from the entire world of the internet, which is why it gives you such mediocre advice. The advice is all solid, by the way. It's just not interesting. And it gives you too much of it. Our digital coach, Alex, is exciting. He's going to come out here shortly and I'm anxious for it. And hopefully it's a big splash.

55:38That is very cool. I'm a big fan of your field notes and I believe you write most of them, right? Most of them. Excellent. They come out every morning. They're fantastic. Final question for you, Randall. How do you define success in your life? I'm a lot of influenced by people that I've asked that same question to. And I've changed my view of what counts as success drastically throughout the course of my life. And the thing that has created my success or my definition of success most recently, and by that I mean the last 10, 15 years, goes like this. If you ask the majority of very established, very successful leaders, what defines success, they will unequivocally tell you it is how many people they matter to.

56:18So how many people, not that they used to influence, not that they once had impact on, but how many people do they matter to right now? That to me just resonates with me and it just makes too much sense. And so I've started to gear the way I think of my own success and the way that I think about how I want to be successful in the future about how many people can I really matter to. Now, I don't mean matter just in terms of influence. I want to have a relationship with people. There's a reason I don't write books. There's a reason I'm not even on social media. I'm not even on LinkedIn. I don't want people to find me.

56:49And it's not because I enjoy my privacy, although I do enjoy my privacy. And it's not because I'm scared of haters, although haters, I can't even imagine. I haven't had any haters yet, but that's just a matter of time. What I really value is relationships, real interaction, real conversation between real people. And so how many people can I have real conversation with that I really matter to, that not only value my advice and counsel, but value me as a person and that I matter and I value them. And so that to me is success. And the more, the better. The more we die with, the more successful we've been.

57:20Very few people look back in their lives, truly at the end of their lives and say, I should have tried a different strategy. I should have spent more time investing. It's all relationships that become the foundation for how they define themselves and define their success. And I've learned from them and I agree. It's a beautiful answer. Randall, this has been an incredible hour. Thank you again so much for joining us. No, pleasure. Thank you for having me. Anything I can ever do for you guys, you just got to ask. Thanks, Randall.