Hi, everyone. Welcome to What Works. This is a show for consortium advisors that taps into over 1,000 years of experience shared by our consortium advisors.

I’m your host, Don Patrick, and I’m here to guide the conversation with guest advisors and lift the hood on what works for them in business and life. It’s all about learning and growing.

So let’s go.

Don Patrick: Hey, everyone. Welcome to the IFG podcast, What Works, and this is episode number 39. And our guest today is William Black of WHB Wealth Management Group—that’s a big word—Milledgeville, Georgia.

William Black: A lot of thought went into that name.

Don Patrick: Yeah, WHB. You had to think about that a long time, right?

William Black: Yeah. Well, actually, it’s my initials, and when I first started my company I was like, people knew me, so I didn’t know what else to do. And I thought about a bunch of names, so I just put my initials in. Back then it was back in the days of A.G. Edwards, and I was like, “Well, I’ll just do WHB,”

Don Patrick: That’s great. Well, tell us a little bit about yourself, your family, and that sort of thing. Are you from Milledgeville?

William Black: I’m actually from Putnam County or Eatonton, Georgia, which is about 30 minutes north of Milledgeville. Small community. I guess compared to some other cities, Milledgeville’s relatively small, but Putnam’s even smaller.

It’s the dairy capital of Georgia.

Don Patrick: Oh, really?

William Black: Yeah. Putnam County used to be known, have a lot of dairy farmers there, and not so much anymore. I think it’s a lot of the dairies have closed just due to the times. But I’m actually from there. But if you were from Putnam, you did everything in Milledgeville.

You went to the doctors, anything you did in Milledgeville. I actually grew up in Putnam County, Baldwin area, which is where I actually have my office now, so I’ve been in this area my whole life.

Don Patrick: So I guess you’re pretty good at cow tipping.

William Black: Oh, yeah. Yeah, I had a lot of my friends—a lot of my friends’ dads dairied, so we spent a lot of time going to their house.

And if you went over to their house to stay, you ended up helping on the dairy. So that was part of it.

Don Patrick: Milking cows, drinking. Bet you got fresh milk, which delicious. So Milledgeville, that was the original capital of Georgia, correct?

William Black: Correct. It was. And a lot of history there.

When you go to Milledgeville, especially downtown Milledgeville, you got a lot of old historic homes there. As a matter of fact, my office, I just relocated about three years ago to a historic home right downtown. It was built in the late 1800s, and so pretty cool area.

Don Patrick: It is beautiful.

William Black: Georgia College, I guess, you have really two colleges there.

You have Georgia College & State University and you also have—GMC has a junior college there. So my wife and I both, after graduation of high school, we went to Georgia College & State University. So I married my high school sweetheart, went to school together through college, and.

Don Patrick: And she still likes you.

William Black: And she’s still here. That’s the most amazing thing in my life, that she stuck around. So yeah, she actually graduated Georgia College with a degree in teaching. She went into special education and has since retired. She retired about three years ago and went back to work part-time for the school, but now she’s retired fully and helps me some at the office with books and stuff.

But yeah, so we’ve been married a good while, have two kids. My daughter actually is a teacher at GMC, the school that she went to high school for, so she’s off the payroll and doing well. She’s teaching eighth grade physical science, and so that was a huge raise for me once she got off the payroll, so that was nice.

Private college is not cheap. And she went to Truett McConnell University up in Clayton, Georgia. I’m in Cleveland, Georgia, so.

Don Patrick: Cleveland? Okay.

William Black: Yeah. So she’s got her own apartment and doing real well, so I was kind of proud of that.

Don Patrick: That’s great. And your son?

William Black: My son actually is at Kennesaw State, and he is in his last year of that.

He actually graduates in December, so he’s about a semester ahead, and he will graduate in December with a nursing degree. He’s gonna be an RN. And he’s currently working at the cardio IC unit there at Kennestone as an — they call it an extern — but it’s kinda like an intern from the business world.

But he’s doing that, and he’s doing very well. Should graduate in December, so that’ll be kid number two off the payroll, so.

Don Patrick: Exciting.

William Black: Yeah. Good stuff. I think his intent is to go back later, so he’ll be off for about a year and then end up going back and costing me more money, so I have to work for a lot longer.

Don Patrick: So he’s gonna go back, obtain another certification.

William Black: Yeah his ultimate goal is he wants to be a nurse anesthetist. So in that field you have to work for a year in a critical care setting before you can apply to school, and then it’s very hard, very difficult school to get in.

So grades matter. You have to have high grades, good references to be able to get in. So he should be able to start that application process a year after he gets out and hopefully gets a job. Fortunately, he’s got an externship in ICU setting now, so hopefully when he gets out of school that’ll give him an edge on getting a job in ICU right out of college, but he just turned 21, so he’s young. He’s got some time.

Don Patrick: And you said he’s a brainiac, so I’m sure he’s gonna get in.

William Black: He is. I guess he gets his brains from his mom ’cause she’s very smart.

Don Patrick: So what kind of hobbies do you have?

William Black: I like to play golf. I’m not very good at it. It’s a very expensive sport for me.

Also, I do a lot of hunting. I have a hunting club here that I manage. We have 880 acres and so we—

Don Patrick: Wow …

William Black: —hunt and fish. Hunt deer, turkey, fish, so it’s pretty fun.

Don Patrick: And you’re also a master smoker? Is that the way I put it?

William Black: Yes. Smoker as in not cigarettes. But yeah.

Don Patrick: Tell us about it. You do this annual thing for your clients. It’s unbelievable.

William Black: Yeah. We do a competition barbecue. We don’t do it as much anymore, but we used to compete quite a bit in competition barbecue. Well, I actually inherited it, but I have a cook trailer that has a big smoker on the back, kitchen on the front, and I mainly use it now to cook for organizations that are trying to raise money, so we’ll cook barbecue and stuff for them.

But yeah, back when we were doing it a lot, we won a lot of competitions. We beat a lot of well-known teams, and we won best brisket in Georgia three years straight, so.

Don Patrick: Oh my gosh.

William Black: Yeah. We got a lot of recognition back when we were doing it, and it’s just a lot of time into it. It takes a lot of time, but yeah.

So he actually moved away on me to New Mexico, and there’s not a lot of trees in New Mexico, so he left the smoker here, and I ended up buying it from him. Because I do, as you mentioned, an annual—from time to time—we’ll do an annual client barbecue, appreciation barbecue where we cook barbecue and everybody comes by and gets plates and stuff.

So that’s actually worked really well. And one of the reasons I bought the trailer, ’cause it’s very hard to do that without the trailer is you gotta have a pretty big smoker to pull that off, so.

Don Patrick: So I remember your old office even had that. And was it Wells Fargo that was two doors down from you?

William Black: Yeah, Wells Fargo was in the, they were in the offices down by us, and we would load their parking lot up with… just a line of cars going through their parking lot trying to get barbecue. That was unintentional, but it ended up being pretty funny.

Don Patrick: One of the ways to get after your competition.

William Black: Yeah. Funny story, I guess a few years after that, they started doing, like, a cookout thing with chicken or hamburgers or something for… They started doing that. I don’t know, I guess to copy them, you know? They saw it worked so well, they started doing something similar. But we were selling competition barbecue.

We were providing that, and they were providing, I guess, hamburgers and hot dogs.

Don Patrick: That’s not much competition.

William Black: No, not really. Not the same thing. Yeah.

Don Patrick: Yeah. So how’d you get started in this world, this profession of yours?

William Black: Well, when I graduated, like I said, I went to Georgia College there in Milledgeville, and after graduation…

I graduated in ’92, so it was kind of a, there was a recession going on and… But I was able to get in a local community bank there, Century Bank and Trust. They were hiring, and so I ended up getting hired on there. And my job was really being a loan analyst, so we would, like, review loans for loan officers were gonna make.

We’d underwrite the loan and make recommendations to them as to whether or not this would be a good credit risk for the bank. When you’re in a small bank, you wear multiple hats, and so one of the things I did is I was relatively new doing that, but I also was another job, I had to let people in and out of safe deposit boxes at the bank.

And so a guy came in one day, and he had an old coupon bond. He was literally clipping the coupons from the bond, and he happened to ask me a question, and I said, “Well, we have a trust department here. You might wanna go talk with them.” And so I referred him up to the trust department, and the next thing I know, they came running down.

They were shocked that anybody ever referred anything to them. And so that’s kinda how it all really got started. They came down and gave me a bunch of business cards, and next thing I know, I’m being moved to the second floor of the bank, which is where the trust department was, and got involved in the trust area.

And at the time, they had a discount brokerage operation where customers would come in and just place trades, and you’d charge some discounted commission for that. And I was kind of put in charge of that, I guess, or just when customers come in, I was helping them out. And so I talked to the CEO about maybe advertising that service, so we could maybe get more business.

And so he was kinda all in. He’s like, “Oh yeah, let’s do it.” And the problem was, though, we started advertising, and we did get business coming in, but then they wanted advice. Well, we couldn’t give advice ’cause we weren’t licensed. So I go back and I was like, “Hey, you know, this is working, but we can’t give advice.”

And the banks were just starting to be able to kinda get into this business at that time, so I said, “How about I go get a license?” And he was like, “Yeah, sure, go get a license.”

Don Patrick: You’re the trailblazer.

William Black: He was just—I mean, I was fortunate that he was just willing to do whatever I was saying. I had no idea where, I had no plans really.

So I went and got my license, and then started from there, and got involved in building that business at the bank, and built it up and ended up, again, when you’re in a small bank like that, you wear multiple hats. So I was doing retail business through the discount brokerage or brokerage program.

But then we had a trust department, and I started doing a lot of fee-based business through them, ’cause basically you would do trust and estate planning. I ended up going and getting my certification in estate planning through the Certified Trust Financial Advisor.

Don Patrick: Was that through through Cannon?

William Black: Yeah, we did that through Cannon. It’s an ICBA designation. And it’s a pretty intense program. So we got that, and so I did a lot of fee-based business through the trust area at that time. So I also managed the bank’s investment portfolio for them, the bond portfolio, so I was very familiar with that.

And I was just wearing a bunch of hats. And the cool thing about it is I’m looking back at it, I had my little, back then, I mean, this was before fee-based investors was being cool. I mean, I had really my own practice there inside the bank, and if it was a fee-based client, I did it through the trust program, and if it was a retail client, I did it over on the brokerage side.

So my business model was very similar to what it is now. So it’s pretty cool.

Don Patrick: So you were a portfolio manager.

William Black: I was, yeah. Yeah. I got to the point where I built all the portfolios for the trust department. I was responsible for—it was weird how we used to run it—but I was responsible for, I developed models, and so I had different models in the program, and I designed the models and I built them out and I placed the trades and ran all the investment management for the trust area by the time it was over.

Don Patrick: So placing trades back then, was it one at a time? You didn’t have any tools for that, did you?

William Black: Oh my gosh. No. It was a spreadsheet. I had to develop a spreadsheet, ’cause you had a bunch of clients and segment, had to segregate it out. And so it was a pretty elaborate spreadsheet.

I was very professional building spreadsheets. But anytime you wanna place trades or rebalance, you had to—it was old school, labor-intensive. When I first came here to LPL, I couldn’t believe it. I was like, “This is crazy.” I mean, this is almost too easy. So it was a very, very labor-intensive process, but we did a good job.

Went well.

Don Patrick: You have a couple designations from Cannon? Tell us a little bit about Cannon, ’cause it’s pretty cool, and your knowledge in terms of trusts and estate planning is really deep.

William Black: Yeah. So Cannon is actually located in Athens, Georgia, and how they’re designed is they have different schools around the country depending on what time of year it is.

If you went to… I spent a lot of time at Myrtle Beach in South Carolina in February because at Kingston Plantation, they would have their trust school there because nobody’s going to Myrtle Beach in February, so they could get discounted rates. But it was a pretty cool location.

But with Cannon, you can get all kind of designations from a fiduciary standpoint, and their programs are real intense. So like, to go to trust, like you could go to trust school and get your certification, your CTFA, and it’s a three-year program. You go for a week. You can condense it, but you go for a week at a time, and you’re in class from like 8:00 to 5:00 every day, and then at the end of the week you take a test.

It’s over what you went over that week. So you had to progress by taking the test and before you could go to the next week. And then after the third year, rather than taking their test, you could choose the opposite for the CTFA exam. So I did that. I did it backwards. Before I did the CTFA exam, I went to trust sales school, ’cause they also had a sales school which helped in sales process and stuff.

And so I did that first, and then went and got my certification. But the sales school was pretty intense. You did presentations. You had to go and present to the class. You had to present a case. They’d give you a case, and you had to go in just like you would a client and build a proposal, and at the end of the process the professor, you could get three answers.

One is, “I don’t wanna do business with you.” Two, “Let me think about it,” or three, “I’d like to do the business,” “I’d like to close this.” So it was pretty high pressure, but very good program though. And they also have retirement planning specialists that you can get, fiduciary investment management.

They have a lot of programs, and you can go and do continuing-ed through them as well. So great program.

Don Patrick: I didn’t know they had a sales school. That’s good to know.

William Black: Oh, yeah. The sales school was pretty intense. And when I went to sales school, we had this something they called wallyball there that they played just kind of to help people unwind about midweek, and it was basically volleyball on a racquetball court. And we had the sales presentation at the end of the year, I mean, end of the week for the class, and during the wallyball game, I broke my glasses right in the middle.

And so I’m up in front of all these people with glasses all taped up, and that was pretty funny.

Don Patrick: So you got the sympathy vote.

William Black: I did. ‘Cause I said, “Hey, I gotta close this ’cause I gotta get new glasses, as you can tell,” you know? So yeah, it was pretty funny.

Don Patrick: So I don’t know the answer to this, but it sounds like a lot of your training came from Cannon and not the bank.

William Black: True. At the bank, they were very good about letting you just go and get training, and a lot of my training came from the bank side. I mean, as from Cannon, they would send you off to get educated through that. The challenge you have in that environment though is you don’t really have a mentor, so really it was kinda like I was building a business ’cause they didn’t really—

They had the trust department, and they had a head of trust, who was my superior, but they didn’t really have a sales culture or a sales environment, and so that made it very, I won’t say difficult, but you had to be an entrepreneur inside the bank, and fortunately, management was good with that.

Well, they liked it because all of a sudden they started getting new business, new revenue. It was very, very good in a way but you had to kinda learn it by yourself. I didn’t have somebody to kinda feed off of or train me, which in turn I think today makes me a terrible trainer ’cause I’ve never done it.

So it was a pretty good situation to be in. Great start. I’m very fond of my career there because it taught me a lot, and it was a pressure cooker a lot of times. So.

Don Patrick: Really?

William Black: We did a lot of foundations. We managed a lot of foundation. And I really became the front guy for it because nobody else really wanted to do it from that standpoint ’cause you got operationals people, and then you got salespeople, and a lot of times small banks will put a square peg into a round hole, and it’s like they’re not salespeople. They’re operational-minded.

So having somebody sales-minded there took that pressure off of them, and then I was fortunate ’cause I had a good operations team. I didn’t have to worry about that part of it, which I didn’t wanna do anyway,

Don Patrick: That’s amazing. So you come right out of college. You hop right into this profession.

How long were you at the bank?

William Black: I was at the bank for 16 years. 16 years there. We had a big, our longtime CEO retired, and they brought in a whole new team from another local bank ’cause that bank had been bought out. And so they brought their team over to our bank. And my concern at that point, ’cause I was on the trajectory, I think, to become in upper management there, possibly the CEO at some point.

But what scared me about all of this was that you had a new team come in that is known for growing the bank. They started a bank, grew it, and sold it, right? This was back in the time when banks were selling, and doing very well doing that. And the way I envisioned this was gonna happen was they were gonna come over, bring a lot of their clients, really grow our bank, and then end up selling the bank.

But what I didn’t know, kind of suspected, is I made this move in May of 2008, so the bank merger stuff started. The bank sell game kinda went down the tubes and they never did sell it, but that’s the reason I left and started my own practice, ’cause at that point I didn’t really wanna put any more time in and end up working for a regional bank or somewhere where I was just a number producing.

I’m like, if I’m gonna do that, I’ll just do it for myself. I think with the prospects of getting in upper management I thought being over, I made the decision to kinda go and do my own practice and set that up.

Don Patrick: So how scary was that?

William Black: Very, very scary. Yeah, especially for me. I know a lot of people make changes, but I’m not one of those guys that makes a lot of changes.

Don Patrick: I’ve noticed.

William Black: Yeah. I was in and I was like, “Oh my gosh.” I remember Brian Schulstad was recruiting me for LPL. I remember we were at supper, and I was like, “Man, this market feels kinda high. There’s a lot of things that are looking kinda dark. Storm clouds are rising. What do you think about, is this not a good time?”

And it was kinda like, “Dummy, you’re asking this guy who’s trying to recruit you, is this a good time to move? Of course, he says it’s gonna be a great time.” But in actuality, it turned out it was a very good time to make the switch and transition because I came over, of course, the markets crashed in ’08 and clients were following us.

But what actually ended up happening is other advisors and broker-dealers were having trouble. That was back when everybody was, you know, the Synovuses of the world were struggling. AG Edwards, Merrill Lynches, all of them were kinda struggling. Smith Barney was having problems.

And so a lot of advisors were having their own issues and just wasn’t talking to clients. What did I have to lose? So I was very active, holding seminars, doing dinners, bringing in professionals to talk about what’s going on. So my clients were able to go to that. I was getting a lot of referrals, and so it was really a great time to be starting the business on your own, ’cause you were getting a lot of clients were coming to you because you were active and answering the phone and kind of walking them through that time.

So we really grew. I always said, had I known what was coming, I never would have left. So I’m glad I did because it was the best time to do it. So Brian Schulstad was right. He was just right. He was right, but I don’t think he knew he was going to be right. I don’t know.

Don Patrick: Were you able to solicit your clients? What was that like?

William Black: Yeah, it was kind of, like I said earlier, I had two books of business, right? I had the trust business and I did not have any non-competes. And I had the retail business we did through a company called PrimeVest Financial Services. They were owned by Kenard. I think they ended up being bought out by Centerra.

But I did; there was a non-compete with PrimeVest. I consulted with an attorney about what I could and could not do. And basically the advice was, don’t take anything with you. So no paperwork, no customer information, none of that. You can’t call and solicit those clients. You can advertise and say that you’ve made a move, but you can’t. If a customer calls you, the goal was you could talk to them about it, but you really couldn’t solicit their business unless they said, “Well, I would like to come over.”

Then you could go and solicit to them. So smoke and mirrors. But yeah, It was just a change for me. I mean, it wasn’t anything negative on the bank necessarily. They were just going a different direction than I wanted to go. Maintained a good relationship throughout it.

I didn’t really go and start bashing the bank and bad-mouthing them. I did it the right way, I feel. I just, I did it and opened my doors and started doing business. But again I never once talked negatively about them because that was a decision I made, not something they did to me.

Don Patrick: No. So how’d the clients find you?

William Black: Through advertisement. They would go to the bank and I guess that would be like, “He’s no longer here.”

Don Patrick: Where’s William?

William Black: Where’s William at? And I’d been there 16 years, had a lot of clients, but small town, words spread pretty quick.

And not all client, anytime you do something like that, you have surprises. You have clients that you thought would have definitely moved that didn’t, and you have clients that did move that you didn’t think would move. There were surprises on both ends, but you just kind of have to keep your head down for a year and just kind of go.

Don Patrick: What year did you join IFG? It’s been about 10 years.

William Black: 2015. I joined IFG in 2015.

Don Patrick: So what made you make that move? That was another wholesaler.

William Black: Yeah, I know. Another hard decision.

Don Patrick: It’s Dev. It was Dev, wasn’t it?

William Black: Yeah, it was Dev Shaw. I don’t know if you remember, but, well, you, sure you do.

At LPL, you could be your own principal, and I was a principal. I went and got my principal’s license.

Don Patrick: Actually, I think they mandated it back in the day.

William Black: Yeah, back then you have to— Yeah, I think you did. You had to have your 24—

Don Patrick: I thought it was the weirdest thing ever.

William Black: I know. It’s like, I got my 24—

Don Patrick: You’re supervising yourself .

William Black: “This is crazy.” Well, and that’s why I named my company WHB (Wealth Management Group). I was gonna have a group, right? So I’m getting a 24. I was like… And they changed the insane rule where you were supervising yourself, and it went over to in-house supervision, and you were gonna have to pay some nominal amount.

It’s like $5,000 a year. So it really wasn’t enough for you to go, “Well, I’m gonna do something different.” But that just got me thinking. I got to researching around and found there were companies like IFG out there and actually there’s some company in North Carolina, I don’t remember the name of it, and I was asking Dev about it.

And Dev was like, he kind of knew me, knew my practice, and he said, “You need to probably go talk to Don Patrick with this group up in Atlanta.” And so I said, “Okay.” That’s where I started the conversation with you guys and got that going. And that really the decision wasn’t necessarily driven solely by that $5,000 fee.

It was really a—you’re an island. I have my own practice. I have an assistant. But with LPL, you were a number, you were an island and I just thought it would be cool to have other advisors, you know, be part of a program, which I’m a bigger voice at LPL and then have other advisors that you could call and run ideas by run things by.

So it all worked out.

Don Patrick: It’s the Brain Trust. That’s what it’s all about.

William Black: The Brain Trust, yeah.

Don Patrick: That’s what it’s about.

William Black: Yeah. Even then, I was nervous when I started my own practice. I was just as nervous joining the Brain Trust, ’cause it was like—And I was like, this is one more element of complexity that I don’t know that I want in my business.

But anyway, there was never buyer’s remorse, but I was always nervous, like, “Are these guys really who they say they are?” So it took a while, but I mean, it all worked out and it’s one of the best decisions I’ve ever made from a business standpoint, just being part of the team and the culture and just a lot of great people.

Don Patrick: I agree. Were you doing financial planning when you started the business at the bank? You probably weren’t, right?

William Black: No, at the bank, keep in mind that at the bank, everything was real manual. So everything I did, good Lord. Financial planning, you didn’t really have a system. And so when I came, I mainly did investment management.

I did the profile and how do you wanna manage the money and we did mainly investment management. And then when I started with LPL, kind of same. I kind of just kept following that model for a while and just doing mainly investment management, risk management, that kind of thing.

Don Patrick: And then you did expand into financial planning?

William Black: Oh yeah. I mean, that’s primarily we got in, was doing more financial planning and then of course when I joined you guys, that just kind of in solidified that and continue to do that.

As a matter of fact, I have trouble doing business the old way where somebody comes in, just wants to manage money. It’s always with us, we lead first with a plan and we do the plan and then we base the investment management off the plan. So we’re planner first now and do a lot of detailed planning for clients.

Don Patrick: So what tools are you using for financial planning?

William Black: We primarily use WealthVision. So whenever a client comes in, we do the profile. I mean, really, I do two meetings for new clients. First meeting is just conversational, getting questions answered, information from them and then any additional information we need, as we were going through the plan or if they didn’t have it, didn’t know it, we’ll follow up and get that data in.

And once we get it all in, we do everything in WealthVision and create all our plans inside of WealthVision. Then we have a second meeting, which we lay out the plan. Really we do the retirement plan, what’s it look like in retirement? If you’re in retirement, where are your spending needs, those kind of things.

So we do that, and then we also try to balance, well, your portfolio matches what you’re doing, or you need to make some changes here. In addition to WealthVision, we also use Riskalyze. I guess it’s still named Riskalyze under Orion bottom line.

Don Patrick: I still call it Riskalyze.

William Black: Yeah. So it’s Riskalyze to me.

But we use Riskalyze, and Riskalyze really allows us to kind of show their risk. ‘Cause I mean, we’re in a risk management business basically. We’re not investment management, but you’re risk management, right? And that’s a great program that helps. I think it helps when you’re meeting with a new client ’cause you can show them where their current portfolio is from a risk level and compare it to what you’re planning on doing from a risk level.

‘Cause a lot of times we run into a situation where clients just they didn’t know the risks they were taking, you know? And so once they see it in that format, it makes sense to them and you’re not talking about growth and income model or 60/40 or 70/30. You’re talking about risk scores and upside, downside.

Clients understand that a whole lot better than they do. Well, this is your income and capital preservation model. Well, what the heck does that mean, you know?

Don Patrick: Exactly.

William Black: And so now you can say, “This is what that means,” and it puts it in very plain English form to understand, and it’s backed by a lot of really detailed data.

So I use that. I mean, I use it when we’re doing financial planning. I like to use that with new clients. But I also like to use it when I do client reviews with my clients because I think it’s a great tool to—I don’t think a client could come in that does business with us and ever argue that they didn’t know the risks they were taking, ’cause every year we go over their risk alliance scores and all of that.

It’s great for the client to keep them on, ’cause clients forget. And it’s great to keep them on board with the program and understanding their risk. ‘Cause the time to figure that out isn’t when the market’s crashing is while it’s up. But it also is it’s good for the client, but it’s also good for us from a liability standpoint because you’ve documented that you’ve gone over all that.

Don Patrick: That’s true. So anything else you use in the business technology-wise?

William Black: Technology, we do use, we use Jump, which is the AI note taker, which is pretty insane. It’s crazy what it’ll do. Just started using that about a month ago, but I was like, “Good Lord.” So AI is really helping in that sense.

So that helps with the notes. Makes our notes better, I think. So we do use that, and I also use Broadridge for client newsletters and communication. Like, if there’s a alert, we’ll get that out to clients and stay on top of that. If something’s going on with a law change or a tax change, we’ll get that to them.

But we don’t just blow them up with emails, but if there’s an alert or something going on we try to send that out to them through that. And also quarterly, we’ll send out a newsletter with different financial planning topics in it.

Don Patrick: You used to use, was it Good? I forget the—

William Black: Bill Good, yeah.

Don Patrick: Bill Good, right?

William Black: Bill Good Marketing System yeah.

Don Patrick: You used that for years, didn’t you?

William Black: I did.

Don Patrick: And how did you use it? And then you moved away from it, and how did that work?

William Black: Yeah, so.

Don Patrick: How did you use his program, number one?

William Black: First of all, Bill Good is not a client relationship management software package which I kind of was trying to use it for that, and it’s very inefficient at that.

It’s more of a marketing package, and the things it did well was you have things where you have what we call the 90-day no call rule, where it’ll print a report for you, and any client you hadn’t talked to within 90 days, you call that client, reach out to them. So that way you can ensure that every client’s hearing from you every 90 days. It also had a huge letters library where you had touchy-feely kind of letters, what are called value letters.

Clients loved those. It had nothing to do with financial planning or anything like that. And the other thing it did well was you could have what we call workflows. They already had workflows built in where you have, if you book a new client, it’s had… It’s called the red carpet deal, where you call them after you, after they sign the document and you get the deal done.

It just automatically assigned tasks to people in your office where you would call, follow up with them, and they heard from you in the first 60 days, they heard from you a lot. So it kind of prevented buyer’s remorse, so to speak, because they were getting the red carpet rolled out, “Hey, how are you doing? Any questions?” Those kind of things,

Don Patrick: And you moved away from it for what reason?

William Black: Because it was not a good client relationship management system and I was very weak in that area, so I actually moved from them to Redtail. In fact, when you called and talked to them about it, they kind of knew Redtail.

They kind of knew that they were terrible at that, and so they kind of teamed up a little bit. But we started using Redtail, and then once I got using Redtail, I just couldn’t justify the—they were going to a different cloud server, and I just made a decision not to continue on with them.

So I primarily use Redtail and just kind of take some of the same modeling and stuff that we did and do it through Redtail.

Don Patrick: Through Redtail.

William Black: Yeah,

Don Patrick: I remember you telling me some of the letters people would like Thanksgiving or something, and your clients just went nuts over these things.

William Black: Oh, yeah, the letters were very good letters. They always had like Independence Day, Christmas, Thanksgiving, and it was some story, you know, real touching story that people loved to hear. And yeah, it was pretty pretty good. The best story there, and this is a funny story, is a friend of mine who’s a client, who’s a really good friend of mine; he would always call up and fuss at me about sending him these letters.

He’s like, “You didn’t write these letters. You send these letters?” And he’s like, “Don’t send me this garbage,” you know? And so his mom was also a client, and I sent a letter out at Thanksgiving, and he calls me after Thanksgiving fussing at me because his mom, they were all sitting around Thanksgiving dinner and his mom said, “Hey guys, I want y’all to read something. I want y’all, I wanna read something to y’all that my financial advisor sent me.”

She was dead serious. She read this letter to him, to the whole family. He was sitting there going, “Mom, you know they didn’t write that.” But she was impressed, right? And I said, “Well, the letters are working ’cause I mean, your mom just sat there with the whole family and said, ‘Hey, my financial advisor sent me this letter.’”

And it was so fun. We still laugh about that to this day, you know?

Don Patrick: I love it. Does Broadridge, are they doing similar kinds of letters? I mean, it’s a little more—

William Black: It’s a little different That’s more email driven. So yeah, Broadridge, through them you do have—you don’t really have any value letters.

It’s all more business. And so you have to come up with that material on your own. But yeah, Broadridge mainly is more alert-driven, financial-driven. They do a good job with their articles though. We have used FMG somewhat, but I like Broadridge’s layout better. It’s more professional.

Sometimes FMG can be kind of hokey in their stuff, so we use Broadridge over that.

Don Patrick: How do you charge for planning? Is it asset under management fees, separate fees? How do you do that?

William Black: No. Financial planning, one of the things we do is if the client has no, like, they come in, they don’t have any assets other than their retirement plans at work that they’re gonna have to keep there and they’re working, that’s the only instance we actually charge for the plan because there’s nothing for us to manage for them.

We just charge for doing the planning. But I’ve always gone against the grain on that. I don’t charge for the plan, and I know that’s probably not good. But my idea is always I close enough business and I think it’s because of the plan, to justify taking the risk of doing the planning and not getting the business.

Again, ’cause it’s a cost of doing business for me. I have time in it, but I just didn’t really end up with the business. But 98% of the time if I do the plan and the plan, when we present our plan, it’s pretty detailed, the client’s gonna do business with us. And so I chose not to charge for the plan.

I do asset management fees pretty much primarily on that. I do asset management. I don’t charge an additional fee for the planning part of it.

Don Patrick: It’s all incorporated.

William Black: It’s all incorporated together, right.

Don Patrick: So where do your clients—new clients—come from these days?

William Black: Primarily from referrals.

I’ve been doing this for 32 years now, and finally, I think people just gave up, some accountants just gave up and started referring business to me ’cause they’re like, “He’s been around so long,” or feel sorry for me, I guess. But actually I do have more accountants now. I get some referrals from CPAs.

I’ve just started getting some referrals from an attorney connection I made. And so I get it from that and clients. Also going back to my days at the Century Bank and Trust, well, about three years ago, they approached me about coming back and doing their managing, their investment program for them.

And so we signed a contract where we provide investment management services through the bank now, so kind of full circle. That’s why I said I think I handled it right when I left because I didn’t burn the bridges. And so now we’re actually doing, we get referrals from the bank lenders and stuff.

So we get quite a bit of referrals from them as well.

Don Patrick: Fantastic.

William Black: So it’s primarily referral business. Referrals, not an advertisement, not a marketing. It’s just pretty much referral and word of mouth.

Don Patrick: Do you proactively ask for introductions, or they just happen?

William Black: I have not. It just happens. Yeah.

Don Patrick: That’s great.

William Black: I probably should, but I don’t. Yeah.

Don Patrick: So your contract with the bank, is that like renew annually or something? How does that work?

William Black: As a matter of fact, it just I think matured, but it’s an annual automatic renewal after that, unless somebody decides they want out.

So yeah, it’s a continuous renewal.

Don Patrick: That’s fantastic.

William Black: Yeah.

Don Patrick: It’s almost like you bought another practice but didn’t have paperwork.

William Black: Yeah, pretty much. I mean, you actually—I guess the risk you take there is you don’t own the business, and if they decide, “Hey, we don’t want to use you anymore,” then they could always pull that business.

Or, say, if the bank, I guess, got the risk I have is the bank gets sold one day, and the new bank has that program, you’re kind of out from that standpoint. But the thing is you do a good job for the clients, keep them happy, it keeps the bank happy. Ah, low risk, I think.

And then, ultimately the client, if you’re doing the client, doing good business with the client, ultimately, the question is will they stay anyway.

Don Patrick: Tell us about your team.

William Black: When I started it was me and my sister, who is my assistant, and today it’s still me and my sister. So we actually have a—

Don Patrick: And who’s the boss?

William Black: She’s the boss. She runs the place. So she actually has a—We actually hired, about three years ago, I did hire a part-time position to help as a somewhat of a paraplanner. And it was a lady I had worked with for years at the bank, and she retired, and she’s very good, very knowledgeable.

And I asked her, was she gonna stay retired, and she was like, “No, I’m gonna do something part-time.” And she worked with me, but unfortunately, due to some health concerns with her husband and stuff, we lost her at the beginning of this year. So right now, I am short-handed from a staffing standpoint.

So it’s just me and Renee. But I’m in the process, I’ve built out a—been working on building out a new job because I think the timing was pretty good ’cause I really needed somebody more than part-time, I think, to come in more full-time. So we’re in the process now of searching for a paraplanner-type position, associate advisor.

I’m kinda doing it where I have, they start out as an associate advisor one, two, three, and progress, and I’m kinda want to take that approach and train them in to be a lead advisor at some point. And so that’s kind of, we’ve built that out and that’s the what we’re working on. We just finished it up, as a matter of fact, and we’re supposed to start searching out candidates for that position to—

Don Patrick: That’s great.

William Black: —add to our team ’cause we’re above capacity right now. We need to add capacity big time.

Don Patrick: Yeah. Yeah. So new client gets referred to you, so you have two meetings, correct?

William Black: Right. That’s correct.

Don Patrick: You have the first introduction meeting, then you actually dig in, lay out the plan and those kinds of things.

And then when you’re doing Bill Good, you just pester them for six weeks?

William Black: Right. Exactly. Blew ’em up.

Don Patrick: So with an existing client, what does it look like? Is it an annual meeting or quarterly calls or some. How does that…

William Black: Yeah. So what we did is once we get the client on board now we still pester ’em, you know, after they get the first statement, “Hey, did you have any questions about your statement?”

I let Renee—Renee handles the process because she gets to know them real well, and what that does, they’re very comfortable with her, and so they’re not calling me a lot of times, they’re calling her for stuff that she can do, and then if it’s something she needs to punt to me, I get it. But yeah, so once we onboard them and we get them in that, we’ve actually segmented our client base and we have different service levels.

‘Cause what we were doing is we were doing the one meeting a year for everybody. Kinda got one meeting a year. If they needed something other than that, they would call, we would address it. We’re dripping on them with birthday cards and newsletters and all of that.

But the problem was you were giving your more complex top clients the same service you’re giving your kinda low-end client that doesn’t really want—and from a client’s perspective, I’ve always like, everybody’s gonna get the same service level from us, doesn’t matter how much money you got.

That just come from my background. I didn’t wanna just, I’m not discriminate between somebody who has a $100,000 managed account and somebody who has a $2 million or a $6 million, whatever. But the problem with that model I found was your person who has the $100,000 managed account doesn’t really want you bugging them too much.

They fit a certain mold. They really don’t want it. And so you’re almost were giving over-service to them and not servicing the other customers enough. So we segment our clients, and we have them in three different levels. And so your top clients are meeting with you four times a year.

You’re meeting with them, you’re going over taxes, you’re going tax harvesting, whatever, toward the end of the year. There’s a point in time in there we always go over and review their estate plan. “Do you have a will?” Beneficiary-type stuff. So we kind of separate it out. This is your performance.

We go over risk management of the portfolio. So each meeting’s kind of driven by that. So we meet with them four times a year, but then what it also allows us to do is we can trim back on the clients who necessarily didn’t want to come to my office one time a year, now they have the op—we kind of scale that back and we call them and go over everything with them, have discussions and stuff.

But we can handle that a lot quicker, give them what they want, and a lot of times we’re giving them more than they want at that point, ’cause you can call them more. So we really can streamline that, and everybody’s getting a higher level of service just by doing that. But it’s getting harder to maintain that model.

Like I said, that’s why I’m hiring somebody else. That’s where I judge where my capacity level is because when I had the other employee, I was able to do that, but now I’m not. I’m struggling to keep up with some of that, so we’re having to onboard somebody else.

Don Patrick: It’s a good problem to have.

William Black: Yeah, I guess. It’s tough, though.

Don Patrick: It’s normal and yeah.

William Black: Yeah.

Don Patrick: Back to the portfolio management, so you still run models, you still ETFs, mutual funds primarily, I think. Is that correct?

William Black: Yeah. Portfolio management, I’ve always managed, going back to my bank days, I designed the model.

I created my model, designed it, very control-oriented over that. Didn’t wanna go to, I call it canned models. And I’ve done that my whole career. I’ve done it even now. But we’re very disciplined. I don’t have 20 models either. I have non-qualified models, and then I have qualified models.

And we cover the bases from anything from a 20/80 portfolio on the low end to 100% equities on the upper end. And design those but, again, trying to create efficiency in the practice and the growth we’ve had. And also, you can’t do everything well, right? But I’m stubborn, and I’m slow to change, and so I’m not doing pre-packaged, you know?

But what I found was I spent a lot—my value added is doing the financial plan and meeting with the client, not necessarily trying to run money. But I still love that part of the business. I’ve always done it. I’m very analytical. I have a lot of engineer clients because of that. So really kind of the bridge, the two came together, BlackRock, I guess due to the relationship I have with them.

They have a program that they presented to me where basically I manage my models, but I have a team there that will actually run my models. They have it in their analytical program software, and whenever they make a change to their allocation, we have a meeting, and I have my own website with them that has my models in it.

It tracks the performance of that actual model, even with the changes. It provides rationale for changes. And so as a matter of fact, we just met earlier today ’cause we made a change to the models, and they recommend making shifts based on what they see, and so we’ll make those adjustments along with them.

But I have control over it if I don’t wanna make an adjustment. I say, “I don’t like this. Can we look at this?” And they will work with you on that. So the thing I like about it, it gives me the control still, but now I have a team that’s sitting there looking at what’s going on in the world that I may not be privy to because I’m spending a lot of time doing planning, and I’m not able to keep up with all that.

So it’s a really good process because now I have a system where I’m actually able to have a very more disciplined process in the model and also have all the documentation and support rationale for what we just did. So I’m covering all the bases there with that, and it’s very time-efficient.

It saves a lot of time. Otherwise, I’m sitting around studying markets and trying to figure out when to make a change, what to change. This way, they’re probably studying it more than I am, and they have more resources. So doing a better job and I still have the final say-so and input in that.

So it’s been a very good. I’ve been doing that for about a year now, and it’s been a very good relationship there.

Don Patrick: That sounds great. And who does the trading?

William Black: I do the trading. Yeah, they just print, but when the models change, I just go into ClientWorks and run the trades.

Don Patrick: Using the LPL tool.

William Black: Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Don Patrick: And prior to BlackRock, how did you do your research on funds specifically and ETFs?

William Black: Yeah, I didn’t really have a resource. I read a lot. Even before I left the bank and right after I started this, I was always ETF/mutual fund, so I had a mixture of both in the portfolios.

So I had a blend, and I would just kinda, based on research I would do, I was really strategic. I wasn’t really trying to be tactical, and so I knew there were certain bases I wanted to cover. I wanted a certain percentage of my portfolio on, no matter what was going on in the world, large value, I wanted to cover large growth, midcap, et cetera.

And so then I would just run and through Morningstar, I would run my screens and pick, okay, what’s the best large value fund out there. And then so that would show me, and that’s how I would select my funds, and then I would monitor them based on performance and everything each quarter.

And if I needed to change one, I would change it, but I did have a very strategic model, didn’t really change from it too much, didn’t do any rotation or anything like that. The thing I like about what I’m doing now is I do have a little more of that in there.

Don Patrick: So BlackRock is doing most of that for you now? Or is it a combo of you and them?

William Black: Yes. Well, it’s a combo. It’s not all BlackRock funds. I mean, I have a mixture of ETFs for BlackRock and other funds that I have in the portfolio. So they help, and they’ll recommend, “Hey, this fund’s not performing.” And so it’s kind of a combination.

But yeah, so it’s not exclusively BlackRock funds. I mean, I think they—I can’t remember the number. They want you to have a certain percentage into it because they’re investing a lot of time in you, and they’re creating this website, so you can have it all tracked, everything right there.

So very good process for somebody like me who don’t wanna give up control completely.

Don Patrick: Yeah. No, it sounds great.

William Black: Yeah. And the documentation’s very good too. I mean, it’s a lot of—it’s not just like—It’s very detailed as to why you’re making a move you’re making,

Don Patrick: That’s great. I was gonna ask you what kind of challenges you’re facing, but you already shared that with us.

You’re at capacity and you’ve created a job description. That’s the biggest thing ever and you’re getting ready to try and solve that problem.

William Black: Yeah, I mean, the biggest challenge I do face is, right now, is just capacity and employee, and I’ve been working a lot with Andrews, and he’s probably tired of working with me on it.

But the challenge I have—my inner fear, and I expressed this to Andrews, is I hire somebody, and they get in here, and I’m like, “What are they gonna do now?” And I can’t keep them busy. I mean, that’s kind of—I know that sounds dumb, but that’s a concern.

But what I’ve done is I’ve—with his advice, I did create a job, I had a job description, and this is very hard to do because you haven’t had anybody in that position. So I went in and said, “Okay, how much time per week does it take to do each of these things?” And so I came up with, like, 38 hours with what I’m looking at so far.

And there’s projects. I have two projects ’cause I would like to change from Redtail to Wealthbox. But I just haven’t had time to do that. And then also, there’s other projects I need help, I need somebody to do. And so I actually built out the job description to kind of mimic that.

And one of the things that’s very good now in helping you with job description is AI. You can kind of put in what the position looks like and it really speeds that process up, and it’s helped out a lot. So I’ve got it all built out. I actually have a candidate in mind who will be perfect for the job.

And I’ve already mentioned it to them, and they’re interested, but I don’t know. It’s gonna be a situation where you kind of have to take a step back for them to take a step forward, and whether or not they’re willing or can do that, and we haven’t gotten that far. It was just more of a, “Hey, I may be hiring somebody for this. Would you be interested?”

And the answer was yes, so we’ll see.

Don Patrick: That’s where you’re at.

William Black: So hopefully, keep my fingers crossed, that turns out to be… That would be all, be a great candidate, I think. I think we would make a good team, be great.

Don Patrick: That’d be great. So what do you love about the profession? You’ve been doing this three decades plus, and what do you like about it?

William Black: You say three decades, that makes me sound old, man. Three decades. Yeah, I think the thing I like most about it is just people. Meeting people, new people, hearing their stories, being involved in their life. For somebody like me, I think it’s, my scary is one day I’ll be irrelevant.

That’s why I’ll probably never retire. I’ll die at my desk. My wife retired a few years ago, and I was talking to an attorney, and we were working on a case. He says, “I hear you’re retiring.” I’m like, “Where’d you hear that from?” I was like, “My wife retired, but she instructed me I can’t retire.”

And I was like, “I’m not near ready to retire.” But I think the reason that what drives me is that’s the part of the business I enjoy doing, is just kind of hearing people, hearing their stories, and help provide solutions to what they have going on and seeing that come to the end.

I mean, I’ve had clients for a long time. I’ve had clients for 20-something years, and it’s always nice to go back for long-term clients and look at your plan and say, “Hey, did this work?” And so it gives you confidence, so going forward that, hey this does really work, you know? But I think that’s really what drives me. I just enjoy people. And seeing people.

I enjoy all the investment stuff too. I like investment, I like analytics and I get all caught up in new technology and what it’ll do, and I love doing all that. But I think the biggest driver is you can wanna do all that, and you can do a good job at all that, but if you can’t convince the person on the side of the desk that you can do a good job none of the resources matter, right?

So I enjoy meeting them and getting to hear their stories, and I think one of the things that really makes us, like differentiates us from other people is we have a very welcoming, laid back environment in our office.

Don Patrick: It’s more like a comedy club.

William Black: Yeah, it is.

Don Patrick: It is so funny.

William Black: I think people meet us and go, “If these people can make a living, anybody can.” So there’s no excuses, right? I mean, that’s the way it is with clients. Once we get to know them, it’s we’re joking, we meet their families, and it’s not like you’re doing business. I mean, of course, we get things done. It’s almost like we’re doing things that they don’t realize we’re doing because we make it fun, we make it comfortable.

Office environment’s very friendly, very relaxing, and it’s not uptight, “Hey, this is a business meeting. Let’s get right to work, and let’s go through all these widgets.” We’ll have a conversation, in two hours we just had a conversation, but they gave me everything I needed to do needed in order to do the plan for them.

So I think that goes a long ways. It also goes a long ways ’cause when, you know, my client base is aging, but I know their family. I do business with their family, so that’s important. Yeah.

Don Patrick: It is important. Are you in a mastermind group?

William Black: I am, yeah.

Don Patrick: And they haven’t kicked you out yet?

William Black: No, they tried, but I wouldn’t leave. No. Yeah we had to do a reboot on our mastermind group about a year ago, but it’s working well. We have a good group, very helpful on a lot of topics. One of the reasons I joined IFG was to have colleagues that you can get ideas from and get help from.

The problem that you can have even in that scenario with IFG, it’s not IFG’s fault, but you can still be an island at IFG. You have to be involved. And the mastermind group is a great way to get you involved with other advisors, and you get to know them real well. So I think that’s a huge value add and one of the big things.

I mean, out of that, you get to know advisors, you know their practice. And for me personally, what came from that is obviously I have a continuity plan with an advisor in my mastermind group, ’cause I know how they run their practice. And so if something happens to me, I’m leaving my clients in good hands. Good hands. I have all that buttoned up.

Don Patrick: Fantastic. Well, I’m gonna ask you a couple fun questions. So use three words to describe your talents and strengths.

William Black: I really think I’m a good listener. I listen. I kinda learned that from my days at Cannon.

In sales school, one of the things they teach you is an interview process where you ask questions and then you shut up and let the client talk. If you know me, I have a problem with shutting up and letting somebody else talk, so that was a big thing. But I do I listen well. I’m very analytic on that. That makes me good, I think, on the investment side ’cause I’m very analytic.

And I guess I would call myself a critical thinker. If there’s a problem, something comes up, I think through it and kinda come up with a resolution. Don’t panic, just think through it, you know?

Don Patrick: Yeah. I would agree with those three for you. Absolutely.

William Black: Yeah.

Don Patrick: So one last question, what’s something surprising about you that most people don’t know?

William Black: I would have to say one thing is I was—cook competition barbecue, we’ve already talked about that. I think a lot of people are surprised by that. But very good barbecue.

Don Patrick: Yup. I won’t call you a smoker again.

William Black: A smoker. I’m a smoker. I’m a great smoker. Yeah. Yeah. I think another thing may be surprising I’m very involved in my church.

I’m a deacon at my church. I teach Sunday school. Been teaching Sunday school for 20-something years.

Don Patrick: Oh my gosh …

William Black: I’ve been doing that a long time. And we do a lot of mission work through that. And so I think that’s kinda something that’s unique.

Don Patrick: That’s great. Well, William, this has been a lot of fun and like I said, I won’t call you a smoker again.

William Black: Best smoker in Georgia.

Don Patrick: Best smoker in Georgia. Anyway, I wanna thank you. We all love these podcasts and interviews, and taking the time to do it and share it with all of us.

William Black: Yeah. Well, thank you for putting the work into it. I’ve enjoyed listening to other advisors and I think it’s great, especially for a young advisor coming into the business.

Man, I wish I had these podcasts to listen to when I was starting out.

Don Patrick: I know.

William Black: What a resource it would’ve been.

Don Patrick: There’s so much knowledge that comes through these things. Right. Even with experienced advisors, you always learn something,

William Black: Oh yeah. Well, I appreciate you doing it. Thanks a lot.

Don Patrick: Yeah. See you, William.

Well, that’s it for today’s show. Thanks for listening.

If you’ve got something to share, send an email to dpatrick@thebraintrust.net. We want to know what works.

Until next time. See ya.