Breaking the AUM Mold: Separating Planning From Investment

The traditional AUM model isn’t going away—but it may not be enough anymore.

In this episode, Brendan sits down with financial advisor and former colleague, Adam Wojtkowski of Copper Beach Wealth Management, to discuss his decision to separate financial planning from investment management into two distinct offerings—and why that shift may better align with how different generations value advice.

They cover 

• the growing role of standalone planning, 
• why younger clients aren’t wired for the traditional model, 
• whether the 1% fee is truly future-proof, 
• how AI is starting to shape the investment process, and 
• why paid lead generation can still drive growth.

If you’re thinking about how to evolve your business model—or questioning whether the “default” approach still makes sense—this episode offers a practical perspective.

Copper Beach Wealth

The views and opinions expressed throughout this presentation are those of the presenter as of date the podcast is episode is published. The opinions or outlooks may change over time with changing market conditions or other relevant variables. 

Transcript

An Unlikely Path

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, everyone, and thanks for joining us on the Advisor Turntables podcast for another episode. This week we've got Adam Wojikowski, former colleague of mine that I've been trying to get on here for a while. Very excited to talk to Adam. He's a financial advisor. He's done some recent business changes that I think will be of interest to our readers. We'll talk a little bit about his background, kind of change his business going into COVID, has had some success with different marketing strategies, but mostly it's pretty interesting to talk to. So this should be an exciting episode. First question, Adam. Copper Beach. Where's the name come from?

SPEAKER_01 0:42

Could we talk about Morgan Wallen first? And that's how we uh that was the last time we hung out. Uh just because I want to mention that part, first of all. Um we went to the Morgan Wallen concert at Gillette Stadium uh six months ago, say nine months ago. I I am compliant, so I did record it to uh myself. Copper Beach Wealth. So um there's a whole bunch of reasons. I mean, you can't it can't be Wokowski wealth. That doesn't roll off the tongue, right? Like that sounds terrible. Um Wojo wealth. Wojo wealth would be funny, I think, but probably would not be great for credibility with uh potential clients. I think so. There's a book, I forget, it's one of the legacy planning books. So I I I really I read and listen to audiobooks quite a bit, um, especially before I started the business. And in the legacy planning book, there was a story about a copper beach tree. Basically, the the premise of a copper beach tree or the story behind it is that it takes something to the effect of 30 years to grow to full maturity. But once it is full maturity, once it's fully grown, if maintained properly, it can last for 300 years or something like that, some crazy number.

SPEAKER_00 1:59

Way more clever than I was expecting. I thought it was gonna be like Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_01 2:02

And I never tell anybody that I never say anything about it. We don't even have like the picture of the tree on this thing because it would have been like too weird. Uh like the little trees are a little overplayed in wealth management. It's and it well, exactly. Well, that's the other thing, too, is that the you know, I'm in Massachusetts. There's not many names that haven't already been picked off the bone around here, like every possible name has already been taken. So I think there's you know, there's a couple

An Unlikely Path

SPEAKER_01 2:27

of other copper beaches, uh, you know, but like at broker dealers, and so I think I'm pretty sure I'm the only RAA with it.

SPEAKER_00 2:33

Yeah, I like I said, way that was way more clever than I was expecting. So how about um tell us a little bit about your background in general? How did you come to founding Copper Beach? I know you've bounced around kind of in this industry for a while, didn't start right away in the industry, I don't think, but um, it seemed like your experiences uh when when we talked before the call, you mentioned kind of starting pretty close to 08, or 08 being kind of during your formative years and then impacting the way you're thinking now. We can get to that later, or you can talk about that now and just kind of take me through college to today in a couple minutes.

SPEAKER_01 3:13

Oh, wow, that's a big time frame to give me. Um the highlights. Okay, all right. So I graduated from college in 03. I have an accounting degree from Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts. I knew by my junior year of college I was never gonna be an accountant, I didn't do any internships. I knew how to pass the classes, but I was not interested in accounting in the very least. Um but I was already three-quarters of the way through the degree, so I got it, right? And my first job out of college was working for a car insurance company on the phones. It was something like a six-week training program, I think, because you had to learn all of the different code. It was people calling in because they just got in a car accident. Like we're like this is not the most pleasant people to talk to. And so I went through the whole six-week training program, and I think I got on the phones for one day. Maybe two, and then I was 21 at the time, so I called in on the third day and I went to the bar with my friend Tim. And Tim was studying for the uh insurance exam at one of the uh life insurance companies, and he's like, Why don't you come do this with me? And I said, I don't know, I just did six weeks of training, I feel like I should probably do that. And this was over the course of a couple hours of having beers at our you know, one of our favorite places back in Worcester, and then the next ideas a lot of great ideas come out of talks like that, and so the next day I called in again, and then we did the same thing. I wasn't sure of my path quite yet, so I needed a second day of that same experience. And um, and then and then I think Friday I think could have been a problem. Well, Friday I called in, I said, I'm not coming back. So um they thought I would give two weeks, and I said, No, that's the worst job I think I could have ever had. I don't want to talk to those people. So I bailed on that, I got my insurance license, I worked for an insurance company doing life insurance, disability insurance, and a little bit of variable annuity stuff for I don't know, a year and a half, two years, something like that. And then I worked at um a bank as not the direct financial consultant, but basically as the assistant financial consultant, I would say. I got my series six in that job. I still didn't know anything. I lasted in that job for less than a year. I was doing two, I was working two jobs at that point to get out of some credit card debt. So I worked at the bank during the day, and then I worked at a cable company at night five days a week, I think it was, where I was selling cable or retaining cable. I can't remember. I think I was selling. I think people would call in looking for cable packages, and I'd be like, Have you thought about HBO?

The Impact of '08-'09

SPEAKER_01 6:00

Which is also a hilarious side note of my path. And so I I eventually got a job with Fidelity in January of 06. I was on the phones in Marlborough, Massachusetts, until sometime in 07 our office got shut down. We got moved to North Carolina. I stayed in North Carolina as a supervisor on the phones for 13 months and then came home. I got a job in the Framingham Investor Center um October 2008.

unknown 6:30

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 6:31

And so I had been on the phones, I had been in a couple of goofy insurance jobs. I didn't know anything. And my office, if you can picture for anybody that's ever been in a um a Fidelity Investor Center, the back then we had a big open space and then a big counter where you could have two lines of people to come in and do transactions. We had my office literally right next to that. So people would come in first and yeah, if I wasn't the if the if there wasn't anybody at the counter, knock, knock, knock, can you help me? So tell people all the time, part of the things that you want to talk about is PTSD. I do have PTSD from 2008, 2009, incredibly so. Because it was the first six months of working with people were the six worst months since the Great Depression. Face-to-face conversation, right? Sitting across a table from somebody, and actually, I was 25, 26, what I was at 27, 27 years old. And um, these were people in, you know, Framingham, Massachusetts, a lot of people wouldn't think of it as being some financial capital of the world by any stretch of the imagination, because it's not Boston. But it's the Boston suburbs, which are very wealthy that go to that office. So we saw large sums of money going up and down every day in that office. And when it's going down like it did in October of 08 until March of 2009, that is a very, very, very difficult thing to look people in the eye day after day when you don't even know what's going on. I was 27 years old and didn't know anything about what was I was learning about the whole financial crisis just like everybody else at the same time as it was unfolding.

SPEAKER_00 8:14

And so historical precedent either.

SPEAKER_01 8:17

No, exact exactly. And nobody knew, right? So I I tell people all the time, I'm incredibly blessed because of who I was surrounded

Transition to Independent Advisory

SPEAKER_01 8:25

with during these trans during these periods of time. My experience at Fidelity was amazing. My the I met people that I'm still friends with to this day from the uh call center, and some of the people that motivate me more than anybody are those people because I see how hard they work and how good they are at what they do. And then you what the place where you and I met. This is hilarious. So it was 2026. You and I both started you started at Beaumont before I did. Yeah. Right? What year did you start? What when did you start at Beaumont? 2012. All right, so I got there in February of 14, I think it was. And you and I, I didn't know this. I mean, in hindsight, I realized this. We were surrounded by some really smart people. I'm including you in that conversation and Dennis. But a lot of the people that we worked with were incredibly accomplished and they knew their stuff. And I didn't even realize it to the degree that I know now. I I absorbed a lot of information from all the different people that we were in contact with on a regular basis. And the conversations that you, me and Dennis would have and and John at lunch, day after day after day. Just the amount of information that I think probably all four of us, you, me, Dennis and John, I think just being able to talk about all of this in a you know group where everybody sort of kind of I learned a lot from you guys, but like we were talking about things that you wouldn't necessarily see other people talking about, I don't think.

SPEAKER_00 9:56

Yeah, there was a lot of definitely a lot of diverse opinions and a lot of it it was a m unique model, I think, compared to the rest of the trying to be more for sure than I think your average wealth management shop. Yeah, I agree with that. Strategies that we've now become all these separate businesses that emerge from it and people that have gone kind of their own way since Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:20

And so I I left uh I left uh Beaumont in the summer of 2019. I was fortunate enough to get an opportunity to work with a company called Smith Sally and Associates. They were a they are uh registered investment advisor, headquartered out of North Carolina. They um by sheer luck had uh a great connection with one of those people who I met at Fidelity back in 2006, and they took a chance on letting me open up an office for them in uh in Boston. Boston. I was in uh Walpole.

SPEAKER_00 10:53

Boston on the letterhead.

SPEAKER_01 10:54

Yeah, exactly. Uh but it was uh that was a good opportunity, and then COVID hit, and then the world went bonkers. I lost both of my parents in 2020 and 2021, and that sort of gave me the safety net to try and work for myself for the second time. I left out of the story that I left Fidelity because I thought I could start my own thing back then. I lasted all of three months. I I I quit thinking I knew everything at the time. Every entrepreneur is a serial entrepreneur, right?

SPEAKER_00 11:26

Nobody does it plus.

SPEAKER_01 11:27

That's it. So I I once uh once both my parents passed away, I'm an only child, so I you know I got the house, I got whatever they had for a retirement account, and I took that and basically said, you know what? I'm going for it again. Let's do it. And I had a pretty good plan in mind, and I think the plan is sort of worked out to this point, and you know, four years in trying to figure out what's next.

SPEAKER_00 11:50

Yeah, well, it sounds like what's next might be this uh press release business change you've just sent out. You can correct me if I'm wrong, but my interpretation is right now you're running kind of the traditional investment advisory, uh independent investment advisory business where you're charging a fee on AUM, you're doing financial planning as part of that fee, but you're basically getting paid via the assets that you're managing, kind of the traditional model. Um, my interpretation of the press release is that you're trying to split the business from that integrated um model to a separate financial planning and separate investment management business, but just kind of wanted to hear first, just describe exactly what you're doing in your own words, and then we can talk about the why a little bit and what you think the benefits are.

SPEAKER_01 12:39

So the why, I think we're really good at what we do on both sides of the house. I feel like we have a solid product on the financial planning side. I already have a business where we do assets

Building the Financial Planning Side of the House

SPEAKER_01 12:51

under management, right? Like that's been the way that the business has grown. But I I kind of sit here thinking, I don't know, I think the future might be more in the planning side of things. I'm not sure I want to chase a UM any longer, the same way that I have to this point in my career. So we hired two people, one of whom was already a certified financial planner and had a ton of experience with a lot of the same software that we were already using or that I was already using at the time. And she came in and completely in the first six months, she cleaned up all the operations. At my heart, I'm a business owner, I'm an entrepreneur, I want to go out and tell all the potential clients about my business. I don't love doing all the behind the scenes work, you know, I think. So she spent the first six months sort of like tying the business back together, I think, and like feel like a real business, you know. And then the next six months she spent sort of like creating this financial planning process using Wright Capital, which I knew they had good software, but I had grown up using Money Guide Pro for the last eight, nine years, and I think both are great programs, but I think Wright Capital's their user interface is is a little bit better, I think, because it we I think we have a little bit more better control over how you illustrate the net worth to people, and she's really good with the technology side of it, and I have 20 years of experience. So between the two of us, she knows all of her stuff from a financial planning perspective. I'm a certified financial planner, certified private wealth advisor, and a certified investment management analyst. I just don't necessarily want to get into the software anymore. I don't want to do that part of the job anymore. And she's really great at that, and I think there is an entire generation of financial planners that are also really great at that. I think it's they want the their value is in the planning, right? And I'm 44. I think I'm kind of at this perfect intersection of the old way of doing business, which is assets under management.

SPEAKER_00 14:53

And where I think before the call, you're the oldest millennial.

SPEAKER_01 14:56

I'm I'm I'm pretty close to the oldest millennial, October or type millennial. You're a smack in the middle. I had this conversation. So okay, I had this conversation with some a couple people recently. To be considered a millennial, it's 1981 to 1996. Can you imagine than you think? That is an enormous range.

SPEAKER_00 15:17

Could you imagine if if your parents are baby boomers, you're a millennial?

SPEAKER_01 15:22

But uh yeah, I guess, but like that it depends on which section of the baby boomer generation, right? Like you could be you could be up there and Gen X could be, you know. Um, so but 1996 to 1981, 44 to 29, yeah, those are two wildly different experiences over the last 10 years, I'll tell you that much. So all right, coming back around to the press release, I feel really good about our

Separating Planning and Investments

SPEAKER_01 15:53

financial planning process, and I want to position that a certain way. On the other hand, I've been spending an obscene amount of time staring at my computer screen since uh February 4th, whatever the day before the Super Bowl was. I've been doing a ton of work on Microsoft Copilot analyzing the markets. So I think one of the things that I focused on with AI, and I used it for a lot of different things. Once I turned on Microsoft Copilot on my phone and then on the computer, and I thought this is probably the best financial analyst I could ever get. Right? That's how I thought about it from the very beginning, and that's how I started using it. And lo and behold, oh boy, I've got something I feel really good about now from an investment strategy standpoint. So now I want to position both businesses as two separate distinct businesses, as opposed to where I think historically the financial services industry has been is financial planning is a means to an end. We need to do a financial plan to get your assets under management, and then we'll maintain the financial planning as long as we keep the assets under management, right? Like that's the like that relationship is fine. I not it doesn't it doesn't work great for people under the age of 55, generally speaking, right? Like the baby baby boomer generation has a lot of the money. Gen X and millennials are old enough now to have money, to have real problems, to have economic questions that are really important to answer, and they don't have the assets. Right. So I could either sit here and say, well, I'm gonna keep going after baby boomers with you know significant amounts of money, or I could be one of the first people that says, I think the AUM generation is never ending, but I think the unlimited resources of that generation in terms of trying to get clients. I think most every financial services business in this country, the target is still baby boomers. Some like there's niches for sure, but most places are still geared towards go out and find those baby boomers because there's so many of them. Yeah, there is. We're 20 years into that now. Like baby boomers have been retiring for quite a while. We're getting towards the tail end of that. Right.

SPEAKER_00 18:15

I don't think the next one.

Why this Shift Can Help Future Proof The Business

SPEAKER_00 18:19

I think most of the data shows that the the kids fire their parents' financial advisor. So they're they are kind of like the model, right?

SPEAKER_01 18:27

100%. And it's because they're dealing with completely different issues. It's completely different. There's there's some scenarios, I'm sure, where the family financial advisor has been in the kids' lives for quite a while, too. So then they retain it. I'm sure there's lots of times where the financial advisor has never had a conversation with the kids whatsoever and then is incredibly stunned when they don't get to retain the assets after the parents die. And I don't know. A I just don't want to keep chasing that. I don't want to chase that. 100%. Because I think you know what I think about all the time is lifetime value of a client. Right? I don't I because I if we want to pivot into the marketing perspective of all this, because I think that's where I could kind of like talk pretty much endlessly about financial services. Um, I did the press release because it cost $960.

SPEAKER_00 19:22

Yeah, and it's at like I saw it on Morningstar's site.

SPEAKER_01 19:26

So it looks very Morningstar and Yahoo Finance were the two that I saw that I went, okay, that was worth it. Right? Like that right there is worth it. And on Monday, so today's Friday was April 17th when we're recording this. I I'm getting interviewed by somebody from the New York Times on Monday.

SPEAKER_00 19:45

To just have a little quote in their article. Yeah. Yeah, but do you envision there being overlap? Like, are there gonna younger people maybe won't sign up for the investment management, presumably? I don't I don't know if that's the implication.

SPEAKER_01 20:00

I I presume I I don't know all the ins and outs of it yet, is what I would say.

SPEAKER_00 20:05

But the idea planning is a fixed dollar fee and the you know the the rest is traditional investment management fees. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 20:17

Generally speaking, you know, I think so so there's a uh organization called XY Planning. They have been growing quite a bit over the last, I don't know, probably 10 years now at this point. Um, started by Michael Kitsies and Alan Benjamin, I think is uh the other gentleman's name. I can't remember for sure, um, but I believe that's it. But Michael Kitsies is the godfather of financial planning on the web, basically. And he's got a lot of you know, young financial planners. And I think generally speaking, it's that it's the move of the industry to some degree to hey, I want to just get paid for the work I'm doing to put a financial plan together for you. I don't want the ups and downs of the stock market to reflect my value to you.

SPEAKER_00 21:07

You know, it's just strange and it's mostly gone up. It's been a massive benefit to the industry to have the price in the way it is.

SPEAKER_01 21:15

No doubt. And I think so the I think the answer to that is it's benefited the incumbents. Right. Right? If you're if you're an incumbent, so it's a strategy to get you into that. Yeah, you want to keep the assets under management because you get paid on it. I've always I've had I've said to people for a long time, I'll believe the financial planning as a as a like disruptor when the big institutions

Why the 1% Fee Doesn't Always Work Anymore

SPEAKER_01 21:39

aren't charging a one percent management fee uh any longer, because everybody's defending the one percent management fee. I've sort of done a bit of a one eighty on that because I think everybody believes that. You know? I I think everybody sort of just believes that the one percent fee is sort of like baked into the cake for the rest of our careers. And I'm not sure of that. It's been Impressively resilient, right? Like it has been impressively resilient. I mean, for all the talk of fee compression, it's been the opposite.

SPEAKER_00 22:09

I think costs of operating the business have compressed in that time as well.

SPEAKER_01 22:15

Well, I I mean I think generally speaking, where uh there's a Kitzy's article from a few years ago probably that talks about it wasn't necessarily a fee compression, but a value expansion, I would say. Like most RIAs are not just doing investments, they're doing real full wealth management with full-on teams, with a payroll.

SPEAKER_00 22:38

A lot of people don't want to be in like our side of the industry, the asset management side, because you've got the market fluctuations, there's a benchmark, it's it's frankly like a more stressful business to be in. It scales better, right? But it's it's much more stressful. If you can sell a discrete product that is untethered to the market, obviously that's a but but I think both the fact that they've both been intertwined just hasn't hurt. And it sounded like that that's also part of your motivation is I think some of some of the taste that we've seen from the younger generation is because most of their work life they've experienced a market where you can just buy the S ⁇ P 500 and it's worked the whole time. So why am I paying anyone for that? I can get that super cheap now. All I care about is the planning, like, you know, how do I how do I make sure I'm getting a mortgage I can afford? And the accumulate the the problems you have when you're accumulating are way different than the problems when you have when you're approaching retirement, which you're obviously already alluding to. But I think also they've uh perhaps taken for granted how easy investing has been under this regime, and it probably isn't going to be that way going forward. And if you're tethering, if your model, like it's been to the benefit of the 1% model, if your default positioning is the SP or some mixture of bonds and SP, that's been a tailwind, you look great. You haven't had to maybe even build a like portfolio that a financial planning software program might tell you you need to build to meet your volatility target. You've probably been able to take more risk by not diversifying away from that. And and it's all been to your benefit. So I assume that people are a little bit jaded. Um and maybe that is another reason to split the model, but I think it's part of the reason that people that there's been an increased focus on planning versus the total picture of investment and planning because beta is super cheap and beta has been great.

SPEAKER_01 24:35

I think that's a big part of it, right? So I'm 44 and I started in my chair at Fidelity in the office in 2008. That was 18 years ago. How many financial advisors in my age bracket ish are still around? If they are, they're pro older than me and they remember it, but they're probably pretty wealthy at this point, and they're probably just enjoying their you know, their book of business at this point. If you're younger than me, you probably don't remember 0809. You weren't working in the industry in 0809. I didn't feel any pain. You didn't feel any pain. I didn't feel any pain from the tech bubble bursting, but I'm aware of it. I was in college at the time. I

Don't Want to Chase AUM

SPEAKER_01 25:22

I knew about Enron. Uh, I got my Enron t-shirt in the other room, I think. Um I just I I think that there is a there's a significant amount of complacency. I don't want to play the same game as everybody else. That's I think the other thing is I don't that does I don't enjoy that game. I enjoy talking about the markets and what you mentioned before about people don't love the asset management side of it because it's it can be stressful. I think that's why I like it, because of the competition. Scoreboard. How are we doing?

SPEAKER_00 25:51

So I just wanted to get to so you're separating the business, financial planning, asset management. Probably there'll be tons of overlap between, I'd imagine your current clients are probably gonna sign up for both, but maybe the way you grow in the world.

SPEAKER_01 26:04

So actually, so just as a as a preface, nothing's changing with my existing clients. My existing clients are every like you're going to open up two new businesses, one that's financial. I'll open up two, I haven't done it yet, but I'm gonna open up the LLCs and we're gonna figure out how to market both independent of one another because I think that there's value in both, and I think we're good at both. And so that's what the plan is.

SPEAKER_00 26:28

Mm-hmm. And I assume your existing clients' portfolios are gonna be somewhat representative of your views that you're expressing on the asset management side.

SPEAKER_01 26:37

Yeah. I and I I've sort of already explained that to all of them. So I sent an email about a week and a half ago to all my clients with a couple of PDFs about sort of the culmination of what I was already working on with existing clients. Right. And it's it's not a deep, it's not like we're

Using Co-Pilot

SPEAKER_01 26:56

we're not doing some 180 on the investment management side. It's more of there was a realization somewhere probably around February, January or February of this year, I think. Lucy and I, Lucy's my co-pilot, that's not Microsoft co-pilot outside. Um, she and I were doing a review with one of our clients, and I it the the performance on the specific date of her his account was April 9th of 2025. And I saw how well we were doing since that specific date on his portfolio review, and I went, huh. We're doing pretty good. And once I realized how good we were doing, it sort of like set off the competitive juices of of going, I was right. I was right. Yeah, this is this is useful to more than just my client base. Exactly, exactly. That's what it was. It was I've got something here that I don't I don't want to hire more people. I don't want the stress of hiring more people, is what what I'm saying. And hiring people or hire or bringing on clients, right? Because every client that I take on is not just a number to me. These people are putting their trust in me, their their their life savings in me and my decision making. And so I don't I don't take that lightly. And so I like we're around 75 clients, and personally, that just feels like plenty for me right now. I can maintain real relationships with those 75 people and the two people that work with me at Copper Beach. Well, and my two kids. That's the other thing that I have to think about balancing is uh if I hire somebody to be a junior advisor for me, how much time do I actually have to spend with that person to make myself feel comfortable with them representing my business when I have two small children?

SPEAKER_00 28:48

Right, so I think the natural avenue for growth is the investment side.

SPEAKER_01 28:54

You're already doing it, but you get to distribute it more widely. Exactly, which is what I've been talking with you about. Like we've talked about a lot, like there's a lot of different distribute like you're in one specific distribution channel that I don't do anything with at all. I'm in one that that you don't you guys don't do anything with at all. There's a handful of other ones that I'm aware of that I just haven't had to pursue yet. And now I'm thinking, okay, now I think I've got something to pursue. And so to be perfectly honest, I I'm doing

Marketing Strategies For Financial Advisors

SPEAKER_01 29:24

some of this by the seat of my pants, right? The press release was sort of just okay, this is $960. All right, let's do it. How could I got to put the picture together? You know what the funniest thing about the press release thing is? I literally put my camera on the five-second delay, set it, ran over here, took the picture, and went right back. And that's the picture that's on the press release. And so uh I didn't look that closely. Now I will. Yeah, yeah. No, it's uh I I only bring it up because it's funny. But I knew what it would cost me to get my name in front of real publications, and I know the credibility that comes with that. I know the credibility that comes with me having a good Google profile because that's another reason that we have as like strong of a business as we have is when we did ask our clients to to you know rate us on Google, they did to the point where we just won some financial advisor award that I still had to pay for, but we won it. Um, but I do, I don't know. I absolutely will because you see these in people's offices all the time. Right. Just so everyone knows. We pay for these things. It's 200 bucks to get the plaque to put on my wall. It's worth it, but yeah, I pay the 200 bucks, especially for the one from Google, because Google matters.

SPEAKER_00 30:41

Um arguably, or the Facebook. I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 30:49

I mean, it's I'm I'll give I'll give me gate, I'll be the Google generation, not the Facebook generation. I think the I think the Facebook, I think the Facebook generation is all that's getting negative, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 30:57

That's getting negative repercussions. Google's still in pretty high esteem. All right. Um just a little bit more on the marketing, super quick, maybe. Oh, oh, oh, oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:08

I'll do a quick minute on that.

SPEAKER_00 31:09

So the ROE, like you've always been somebody, I think, that was not afraid to spend money for leads and evaluating a lot of different channels. What's worked, what hasn't. Two minutes, then you'll for other advisors listening.

SPEAKER_01 31:21

Smart asset. They're the best. Honestly, we're buying leads, and I can't even keep up with them right now. We're trying to figure out how to process them as best we can. Smart asset. I've been using them since we worked together at Beaumont, and they work. And you have to spend the money. My plan from the very beginning was that I know I'm not going to pick up the phone 500 times a day. I'm not going to go knock on anybody's door and say, Will you hire me? But if I can pay money to get in front of somebody and talk to them about myself and my business and what we do and what we believe in, I like my odds. And so um the first ended there.

SPEAKER_00 32:02

That works for me. All right, hey, Adam, we'll be back.