How Independent Advisors Can Thrive in A World of Mega Firms with Eric Amar

Speaker A: I think the biggest risk when you run these businesses is to get distracted. It's going to sound very simplistic, but at the core, this is a pretty simple industry at, uh, the scale where I'm working at, right? Those two to $10 billion RIAs, you find clients, you service clients, you take care of your team. Everything else really matters, but not as.

Speaker B: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Next Mile. I'm your host, Kyle Van Pelt, co founder of Mile Marker. And today I am joined by Eric Amar. He is the founder and CEO of Accelerated Wealth Partners, and he is a retired pickup basketball shooting guard. Eric, thanks so much for joining the show.

Speaker A: Thank you, Carl. Nice to see you.

Speaker B: Yeah, nice to see you as well. So here is the first question I love to ask everybody, and you'll be no different. And I know you've kind of got a fun journey here, but I love to ask about how people got into the industry because some people have a really traditional path. They maybe followed family footsteps to get here. Some people didn't even know this was an industry that they could work in. And they came in through the side door after a, uh, different career or something along those lines. But whether their path was traditional or untraditional, I found everybody has what we call a money moment. That's that moment in your life where the light bulb kind of clicked on and you said, this is it. This is what I want to do for my career. So Eric, what was that money moment for you that led you to have this conversation with me today?

Speaker A: It's interesting, Carl. I thought about this because obviously I had the question ahead of time and I fall in the second category, right? I had a pretty traditional career. I was a science grad, went to business school, consulting for large financial institutions. I went to work at a large financial institution and couldn't fit into the corporate world. Maybe I was a little too brash, maybe I was too young, maybe I was too loud, didn't work out, and then got introduced to Rudy, who was the founder of Focus and discovered this rea industry. And I told my wife at the time, I was like, I'm going to be there six months or 60 years. I wasn't quite sure, right? I was like, I don't know what this is. This weird little business is with four people managing money. It's so odd. Uh, this is not big, complicated world, life changing problems. But after six months, I loved it. I found it amazing, the learning how different skill sets matter in life and in business. More so than just having the Right answer.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker A: When you're McKinsey train, it's all about get the right answer, do the right thing. And we'll talk about how some of these mega, um, areas are kind of falling back into that a little bit. And now you move into the world where these people are super smart, super educated, but really more of the chart on the EQ side and it just works. People trust them, they trust in what they're doing. And I was like, this is great. I need to learn from those people how they build the confidence to believe in what they're doing to help people. And so that's how I stayed in the industry for a while.

Speaker B: Uh, I love that money, mama. What, what an incredible time. You probably didn't even know it that you were at the beginning of what was going to become one of the most prominent firms in the whole industry.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, we had no idea. I mean, when I joined the company, been around for maybe six, seven years, but it was very much two founders and a bunch of 22 year old kids flying around the country and being like, well, I'm going to go skiing in Montana. So on my way, gave me three meetings. They hired a layer of three of us at some point in 2014, and we're like, let's get organized here a little bit and attack this opportunity. And my thesis, I'm like, we're buying these firms, we're letting them stay in control and we're going to help them grow. How is not everybody signing up for this? It was hard for me to understand. And then you get into people who say, I want to stay fiercely independent. I care about my people, I don't care about money, I don't care about growth. And you learn all these different motivations of the entrepreneurs and you learn the subtlety of how people's personal motivations really work a lot more than the write answer on paper. Right. And it was fascinating to see. And then obviously things no more than the industry and everybody got into it and you got more, I would say, well known in the world. Uh, people. In 2021, when I was telling people what to do, they kind of knew what I was doing. In 2015, they were like, what the hell is going on here? You know, my mom was like, why don't you go back to McKinsey or to JP Morgan? It's fine there. Just couldn't get there. Right. It was a pretty wild ride and the model was really cool.

Speaker B: That's so awesome. You said something I want to double click on a little bit you talked about a lot of times people think it's about being the smartest person in the room, but really you guys were excellent at eq. That's what made a big difference. Do you think that you have to be born with EQ or do you think that can be developed through training and through being exposed to what you were and being around that type of environment?

Speaker A: So some people are for sure born with it. And by the way, just to clarify, Kyle, the advisors we used to work with had infinite eq, right? Uh, we had to get there ourselves. When you come from the consulting world, you learn to influence without power. So by definition you need to understand people's motivation a little bit more. So there's a bit of training from that perspective. And the truth is even advisors have to understand their clients motivations and really get them to agree and to get on board with the program. Otherwise you can give the best advice. If they don't listen to you, it doesn't matter, right? So I think some people are just naturally, they are listeners, they can read people, they can understand, they can mirror them, they just get them to agree. They're just magnets. And for the rest of us human beings, you learn to shut your mouth and you learn to respect people's experiences. It's too easy when you come from certain backgrounds that tend to be a little bit more corporate, a little bit more quantitative, a little bit more I banking Y. Right? And again, there's a lot of those in the industry right now. So I won't criticize too much to come and tell people I know the answer. But then you sit in front of the founder of an R, uh, who doesn't understand half of what you're telling them about your DCF model and all these things. But guess what? They Sat in front $12 billion of high net worth assets and get them to give them full discretion over their money. They have something you're going to learn from. Right? So at some point you have to put your ego aside, understand what got them to be where they are. And then I think you can learn a lot and expand your horizon a lot more.

Speaker B: That's a great answer. And I love the note too about some people are just magnets. Like they probably are born with it. Uh, they're those ones that people gravitate towards them and they don't even know why.

Speaker A: It's crazy.

Speaker B: All right, now I want to ask you, you have this incredible run at focus. I mean you guys were just on an absolute tear for a long time and you Garner a lot of this experience, all of that and amazing run. But then you leave and you start accelerated wealth partners. What was the thesis? Why did you do that? Tell us a little bit about that journey and that story.

Speaker A: The role at Focus was incredible. Being public for Focus from the inside kind of sucked. And I had never worked in a public company before because the business from the perspective of um, the strategy was working really, really well. The public market stock for all kinds of reasons was just not in correlation. And that created a lot of, I don't want to say frustration, but questions internally about we need to evolve our model, we need to evolve the business, we need to integrate more, centralize more, invest more in certain areas. When you're a founder and you're very successful, changing path is pretty hard, especially when you're public company CEO. And so we just couldn't quite get there. So the take private was the right thing to do. Obviously in 2023, the strategy was also the right thing to do and they've been executing very well. For me, it was just not very interesting M because the strategy of putting 90 independent businesses together to create one very large wealth management company, again, right thing to do from a cost perspective, from a synergy perspective, arguably even from the client's perspective. Because if each firm has three investment people, if combined you have 300, I think 300 people in one team is better than 90 teams of two. On, um, paper, it makes a lot of sense. On a spreadsheet in Park Avenue, it makes even more sense. For me, I know what a very large wealth management company looks like, especially when it's all decentralized. It's called Morgan Stanley. And by the way, you're still one tenth of the size, right? So you're pretty far from being there from a scale infrastructure. And it's a hard thing to do. I'm not criticizing, by the way. I have a good friend of Grant who is standing wealth management and what they do is incredible. But RA has never won on size. They never won on being bigger, on having more resources, because otherwise they would never have won. They won on saying, I'm like you. I'm, um, here, I'm in your community, I'm in your industry. I know how you think they win by being slightly inefficient. Well, when we say boutique, my translation is slightly inefficient. Which is my advisor, uh, who's an exceptional advisor as an independent firm, which is part of focus, by the way, spends a little bit too much time with me and I have to stop saying that because I know he got in trouble last time I said that, but he spends a little too much time with me and too much time with my wife and with my in laws. For us is our guardian angel. He's just solving every single problem. He's incredible. If I was the CEO of a $700 billion RIA, I would probably end up telling that guy, spend 30% less with these type of clients and take 30% to go and get new clients. But the beauty of this independent space is that people are, uh, practitioners. They enjoy what they're doing. And so the firm is run by practitioners and therefore they understand how the clients work. When you become very large, you get to people who have never been practitioners in the first six layers of the company. And sometimes disconnects happen. Not always, but sometimes. And this is where over long periods of time, the client maybe is not served the same way again. Maybe it's better, maybe it's worse, but it's not the same. Seeing that I was less excited in the project from a personal standpoint and ah, maybe I've done the focus koolaid for too long. I enjoy working with entrepreneurs who are figuring things out. I enjoy when the companies are small. I think it's interesting. I think these people start their business by saying, I'm going to bring in clients and service clients, and I enjoy working with them, um, when they are the point where it's like, okay, now we build this thing, we know it's working. We have a team of 15, 20, 50 people, right? Okay, what are we trying to build now? What is the company we're trying to build? And I think that evolution, we've, um, done this many times and I love doing that. It's working with the founders. We just had a session with our partner firms in Texas called RE Advisors. We spent a full day with the partners thinking about, okay, what are we trying to build here? Who are the clients we're trying to go after? What services are we going to provide to them? How are we going to build the teams? How are we going to build the infrastructure? And we're at 1.8 billion today is the goal to get to 8 to 80 what most of each of you want to spend. Those are very personal decisions. You're the CEO, founder, advisor, lead sales guy. How do you want to spend your day? Because you cannot do all these things when you get to bigger scale, right? So this journey is fascinating to me because it's so personal and at the same time making a few tweaks along the way without changing the vision and the culture allows you to really take off. So this is what I enjoy doing. This is what we built this company acceleraw of partners. And our plan is very simple. We want to work with 5 to 10 of these entrepreneurs and founders and really help them achieve a bigger vision, which I think is for me going to be very interesting work and hopefully rewarding for that.

Speaker B: You're a great storyteller, man. I really like that. So there was a lot that I want to kind of I want to explore.

Speaker A: I've done a story to my wife a million times for her to let me quit my job. So I had a lot of purpose,

Speaker B: a lot of practice on that one. There's a couple of threads in there I want to pull on a little bit. So the first one, I want to go back to advisors wanting to remain fiercely independent and being practitioners, obviously you and I both come across these advisors who are incredible at what they do. But I think a lot about this from the perspective of the client. If I put myself in the client's shoes and this is something that I would love to get your thoughts on, which is when they are out looking for advice, a lot of times brand carries the day because you don't know is this advisor who hung their own shingle, are they elite at what they do and wanted to just go be independent? And how do you assess as a client, should I go work with this independent person who's saying they're like me, et cetera, et cetera, versus I know there's a trusted process at a Morgan Stanley. I know the type of experience that the quality control at a focused financial or something along those lines. So, you know, I love the independence of our industry. But when I think about the evaluation period from a client's perspective, how can they be sure or know that they're getting a great experience?

Speaker A: Yeah. The answer is they can't. M. Right. And it's very hard because you're right on paper. How can you not be a client of Morgan Stanley? M. I don't believe Morgan Stanley Jen will be happier with me because I'm plugging his firm. But how can you not?

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker A: I mean they have not only the wealth management offering, they have the bank, the lending, the products, I'm sure discounted access to a lot of stuff. Right. Because of the scale, international capability. How can you not on paper it has to be better. It's more about service and trust than about services. Right. Because the quality is going to be important. But it's hard to judge quality ahead of time. Yeah, right. So I think people make very personal decisions of who do I like, who do I trust? This is my life. And the trust is rarely attached to the brand. And, uh, I would try to get there. I mean, again, obviously the banks are trying to build the trust around the brand and some reas out there are trying to do that. Artificial investments is the best example, obviously. But at the end of the day, most people went back to. And it obviously happened after 08 when the bank lost credibility. They went back to like. And actually I trust Kyle. Kyle is my guy. I don't care what Kyle is. Kyle knows me, understands my things, and I'm sure he'll figure it out. If he's at Morgan Stanley, he'll have great stuff. And if he's outside, I trust him that he wouldn't do something that is of that service to me. And obviously, by the way, that led to sometimes bad outcomes because we know there's bad advisors out there. There's bad advisors because they were training the wrong incentive system. And, uh, you're talking to someone who worked at an insurance company, right, that was selling whole life and annuities and all these things, which can be good, but not always all the time for everybody. And you have the ones that deliver bad outcome because they don't evolve.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: And again, I live in New York. You can drive an hour out to Connecticut and find a 92 year old portfolio manager who picks 12 stocks every year and who manage half a billion dollars for 50 families. And they trust him, they love him, but he's probably not doing the right thing for his clients right at the end. And yet it's working. There's a balancing act between, from a client perspective, you want to trust that this firm has enough capability and credibility without losing the fact that at the end of the day, you just go with your gut. It's hard because there's no credentials. And again, I think it's very much the same for most professions out there. I think when you choose your doctor, you kind of like that they're part of a mega hospital. But again, most doctors are not. Some of the best doctors are now. They have their own private practice. And if they have their own private practice, how can they be better than the guy at Mount Sinai? Well, sometimes they are because they just graduated out of that environment and can deliver the same. I don't know how the clients figure it out. Uh, that's why most of them come from word of mouth, right?

Speaker B: Yeah. Well, Said, man, I think this is a conversation I've been having on this podcast and off. And I kind of keep coming back to this quote. But at Future Proof, Josh Brown said on stage, hey, it really feels like our industry is just rebuilding the wirehouses, but with a different cap table. How would you respond to that?

Speaker A: Well, uh, if you say that, Future Proof, then obviously he has a bigger megaphone than me. I've been saying that for three years. The which, by the way, it's not a bad thing, right? Again, why, why are houses are not bad places? I know. Because we live in the independent space. We have to tell the world that warehouses are bad because they've been the kind of enemy for so long. Let's be clear. I have friends who work at our warehouses. I have friends that are clients of warehouses. They're fine. I don't think this is like a drastic, like evil versus not evil. But yes, clearly, if you're $150 billion, Ria, you're not becoming a warehouse because you wake up one day and say, we're going to sell our proprietary products. That's not how it happens. This is a corporate evolution. Now, your corporate layer, uh, is again, as I mentioned before, a little bit different than your advisory layer, a little bit separated. And then decisions are made in a very rational way. And the rational way is not always the best way. And everybody's dealing with that. I sat with my firm in Houston and I said, Guys, 36% of our clients are 10% of our revenue. Uh, everybody has more clients, obviously, right? Like, how do we solve that? Uh, should we create a different service model for them? And the answer that I had, which is great from a fiduciary perspective, not great from an investor perspective, those are the clients that need us the most because those are the ones that we're saving them from. Bad advice and bad advisors. Right. That was kind of colleagues quotes to me is we're saving them from bad advice and bad advisors. And therefore we know they're, uh, dragged a little bit on our profitability. But we have junior advisors, we have centralized resources, so we can help. Obviously still have good margins, but that's just what it is when you're in a large environment. You don't operate that way when you're in a large environment, because the decision maker is not someone who's been faced to these people. Right? And so in a large environment, and it happened in the banks before U.S. bank, back in the day or U.S. trust, every client under 5 million goes to the call center. I think some big reas are not going to be very far from those kind of things. So again, they have to replicate that. What's interesting to me is that, uh, actually I think the goal of the mega RAs these days is not as much to go towards the wirehouse model, because at the wirehouse model, the advisory is still fairly empowered. The goal is to go towards the private bank model where the advisor doesn't really hold the relationship. The company holds a relationship. If the company holds a relationship, the advisor, uh, at Fisher or creative planning, is a great advisor. Uh, but the planning is not over there. The investments are done over there, the taxes are done over there, the trust and estate is not over there. And you're just a conduit to these different services. And that makes it very sticky. That makes it very easy to manage from a corporate standpoint. And that's how the profit banks operate. The one thing that I will say with Josh Brown, which is interesting, is I don't think we know what is the end cap table for these businesses look like, because it's still an evolution, right, between private equity, now some private credit firms on these people, big international sovereign funds, pension funds, some of them may try to go public, we don't know. So the cap table are still not very set. The single biggest difference for me between the very large reas, even some of the small ones, by the way, and the large warehouses is the, uh, legal restraints for advisors where you can leave a warehouse if you do the right thing. I think if you leave some of the large RAs right now, you get crucified. The other point is really, for me, the evolution of these businesses is the culture is going to be different. Obviously in these smaller RIAs, it's all about family, culture, spirit of partnership, spirit of innovation, quick decision making. The larger RIAs, by definition cannot operate that way. So in the corporate sense, in the cultural sense, it's a different environment to evolve in for the advisors, obviously, where they have more ties, they have more restriction. And so I think this is kind of a big difference and the story will play itself out. We'll see how it goes.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely, man.

Speaker A: Uh, this podcast is brought to you by Turncast. We make game changing content for fintech and financial services companies. Learn more@Turncast.com.

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Speaker B: So we're starting to see another trend. I've heard some people say it's the breakaway of the breakaways, right? Or people who maybe left and they went to a platform and now they're thinking about either leaving and going independent, or it seems like there's just movement happening all the time. You have some people who went totally independent and they realized I don't really want to deal with office leases and all of this other stuff. So maybe I will go to an RIA platform where they handle a lot of that, but they let me be independent. That sounds good. Then you have some people who went to the platform and they're saying, ah, uh, the grass looks pretty green over there. I understand. I've got office leases and stuff like that, but maybe I Should just go completely independent. Like, what are you seeing? Because you have a really unique seat to look at all of this. What do you think's happening there?

Speaker A: I think it's all over the place. I think there's 300,000 advisors out there and there's 200,000 ways they want to live their lives. Right. Because yes, everybody wants the resources. It is the kind of the best of every world. Not just both world, like every possible world.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: It's like I want to have all the resources and all the infrastructure of a mega company, including not having to deal with hr, cyber technology, whatever, whatever. But I want to have the uh, ability and independence to do everything that I want all the time. Oh, and by the way, I want to make infinite money and build equity value at the same time. Right. That model doesn't exist, obviously. Right. And so this is where maybe some people out there will say, well, it exists. This is me. This is me. Right, Fine. That's what people want. And it's human nature, I would say. Right. So we tend to believe at accelerated that the best possible path is again, these 25, 35 people, 50 people companies where you're 2, 3 billion. It's a group of 5, 6, 7 partners. There are decision makers. And I think for advisors to join this type of partnership is more interesting because there's a lot of growth, there's a lot of resources, there's a seat at the table, you can craft the answer. And yet there's enough of a track record of scale of infrastructure that you don't have to start from scratch. There's also an element of loneliness where you don't have to solve every problem on your own. You have three partners that you trust that you can work with every day. So I tend to believe this is the ideal outcome. And I've seen this play out in my old life where companies, by building these partnerships, make the company better, make the client outcomes better, make the growth better, and give great opportunities to everybody to find their roles and to spread their wings in different areas. Again, I think having the ecosystem right now is so rich with options for every advisor. That is great. We had people that broke away from Merrill lynch, billion dollar firm wanting to be independent, wanted to be CEOs within six months. I hate fidelity, I hate Verizon, I hate Orion. I was like, well, this is what you wanted, right? You have to go to the table. These are wires, right. I should be spending my time on. And so this is growing pains again. Uh, there's different models out there. The Beauty of the independent space for the smaller firms right now is that, uh, the technology is going to get them there much faster. And obviously Biomarker is a great platform for that. But the ability to leverage these tools gives you a lot more resources today as a smaller independent than I think you ever had before. You can access alternatives, you can access to lending, you can access to box brand, you can access to everything everywhere. And now with AI, I would say even more so. So I think that's a luxury that helps the smaller boutiques operate at uh, the scale of the mega firms without all the downsides of the big corporate culture.

Speaker B: Yeah, I totally see that. And that's a great segue into the next thing I wanted to ask you about a little bit. We've been talking about broadening your service offering as a firm, but feeling like a boutique, feeling like culture. I think this really is the sweet spot of AWP and what you guys are doing. And a recent firm that from our notes, they'd really emphasize that by partnering with you guys they gained the resources to expand in their region. Expand or access to specialized services. But they don't have to compromise on that boutique level of service. How have you guys kind of threaded the needle to let them continue to leverage the resources they have but live in that sweet spot? You were saying of uh, handful of partners, 25, 30 people like you don't have to compromise.

Speaker A: Our model is a little bit unique in the space in the sense that we're going to do five of these partnerships, right? So we are investors in these businesses, we take a stake into these businesses and we're only going to do five because then we really want to get to work with them. M and thinking about what to build, but also sitting with them and building it together. Right? They're very curious about tax and trust and estate. And are we going to do it in house, are we going to partner, are we going to have expertise but execution done elsewhere? All the models are on the table. I think when you run a successful firm that has a couple of billion dollars under management and a 30 people team, you, you want to make the right decisions a little bit faster. And leveraging our expertise and our team to get there faster I think is what has drawn people to us, where we are helping them right now. Think about branding, think about client segmentation, think about operating model, think about services. M and A can be a beautiful thing when you want to build out services because you merge with a company that is very tax centric and hey, great, come be our Tax offering and we're better together. The whole concept of being better together really works. When you sell into a firm that has 200 billion under management, they have all the stuff, they don't need.

Speaker B: You right?

Speaker A: When you join RE Advisors in Houston, it's a bit of a different angle. And so we think this is a model where you can pick and choose your battle and you have a partner that can bring capital, expertise, knowledge, but also roll up their sleeves. The model I, uh, did not want to create is a model where we are just a capital solution. We're not a capital solution. We don't have a set framework, which is very confusing for, especially for some intermediaries. I don't want to do 500 deals and have a preferred equity return on 500 businesses. Maybe that's a better way to make money. This is not very interesting to us. We want to work with again, five, seven, get to work, build exceptional firms. And the firms we're going to build are going to be either regional super players that understand their ecosystem and their world, that's our Texas firm. Or they're going to be niche players. We're big believers in a niche ecosystem where we have a second partnership that we haven't announced yet with a company that's uniquely targeting tech employees or employees of tech companies. They do the taxes, they manage the money and all the things. You can build a leader nationally with a niche because again, you know your audience, you know what they need. We know how to build it, we know how to execute it, we know how to scale it, we know how to market it. And from attraction of advisors perspective, you'll be part of the leader in that space. Clients want to avoid us and therefore every advisor would rather join us and build a company that's a leader. I don't know about you Kyle. I don't go to restaurants that do pizza, sushi, steak and ice cream. Right. Places that do one thing really really well. And obviously I'm French so I have to be a snobber on these kind of things. So I think that armys that are hyper specialized work really well. If your specialization is business owners, corporate executives, athletes, wealthy families, women, those are not niche. This is just everybody in the world. And I think it's hard to be very customized. We like to be customized, we like to be thoughtful. And so this is kind of what we bring to these firms that are going to partner with us is the expertise, the execution, the capital. Our structure is more friendly because we're high conviction investors. So we take regular stakes in our businesses. And I got to tell you, I wake up on Sundays at, uh, four in the morning thinking about how we're going to make Texas more successful. I don't think people do what we do, think about the world that way as much as we do.

Speaker B: So we're. That's awesome. So maybe an ignorant question, but is it find five and hold them forever? Is it kind of. All right, we've got five, and there's a wait list. So when something inevitably happens with one of these that rolls, off we go, you know, we find another one. Like, I love the model of saying we're not trying to go out and just do as many deals as possible. We want five partners. This is who we can serve the best. But inevitably it leads to the question of, okay, what happens when you have five?

Speaker A: Yeah, and that's why I anchor my thing, five or seven. Because if number six comes up and it's the best for me, the universe, then obviously we'll stretch a little bit. It's definitely not going to be 10 once we have five. Yeah, we get to work. That's just what it is. We just get to work. We don't really want to hold this forever unless we do. We have the optionality to do either of those things. I learned from Rudy that when you receive funding from people, you owe their money back at some point. And we have investors, and so we need to give them money back at some point. And same thing for these RIAs that are going to give equities to their partners. And when your partners have equity, part of your job is to make sure they have liquidity at some point. And so I believe there's a natural cycle of equity recycling. Our job is very simple. And again, we think about those things, but not as much as you would think, Kyle. We think about it as, uh, find great companies that have great people that we want to work with, great underlying businesses that we think will attract clients and other advisors, get the deal done, which is obviously not easy these days, and then just grow these things, grow them the right way, build great businesses, and I think at some point, good things will happen. I don't think about, um, the future too much. I'm like, hey, if we do the right things, if we build a firm in Texas that has 8 to $10 billion, great organic growth, great culture, great set of partners, I think good things will happen either with partners, more liquidity, maybe more liquidity. Maybe we'll just stick around. Unclear to me at some point.

Speaker B: Yeah, I love it. I appreciate the, uh, candidness there too, of, hey, you know, I don't have all of those answers figured out, but I know where I'm starting and that's perfectly okay with us right now. That's fantastic. I know you said you don't like to think about the future too much, but I do want to move into a segment of the show where I'm going to ask you to get out your crystal ball. And as you're helping these firms, let's say it's three to five, position their business for what's going to happen in the next couple of years. What are you thinking about? What are you asking them to think about? What are some things you see coming around the corner that you want to be ready for?

Speaker A: I think the biggest risk when you run these businesses is to get distracted. It's going to sound very simplistic, but at the core, this is a pretty simple industry. At the scale where I'm working at, right? Those two to $10 billion RIAs, you find clients, you service clients, you take care of your team. Everything else really matters, but not as much. M My number one goal when we work with our founders of our two partner firms right now is let's stay focused on take care of our people, take care of our clients, bring new clients, right? This is the core. And that's already pretty hard to do,

Speaker B: by the way, right?

Speaker A: M this is not obvious to do for most people. Don't get distracted by shiny objects. Don't overthink things. Let's stick to that. Let's do that really well. Let's execute the basics really well. Let's have a very stable foundation and then we'll think about other services. Obviously Everybody's talking about AI. Obviously it's talking about the big REAs control 90% of the assets or some crazy stats, right? Because they buy everybody and people haven't quite figured out how to live yet, even though they want to. It's all of that where I think over the next two years, I don't control global wars and global macro events, but at, uh, the very core of your day to day life, I don't think the world changes that much. Again, you will have better tools that will make you infinitely more efficient. I think marketing and brand building really will matter a lot more than it did before. And advisors tend to be, as you know, pretty weak at this. So, uh, we're focusing on that, we're focusing on people. At the end of the day, you have to take care of your people. If advisors leave, even if you have covenants, it's just not great as an outcome. So over the next two years, what we tell our firms is let's do the right things. And yes, we're going to play around with AI. Uh, we have a lot of work we're doing already around this topic. Of our first two firms, it just so happened that both of them are very heavy on marketing and kind of thought leadership. One of them, Lance Roberts, has, uh, you know, half a million followers across various channels because he's been doing this for many, many years. And he has a following of people who like hearing his content and his thoughts on investing, the thoughts on the team around planning. So you can see how in today's world, that becomes even more attractive than it used to be. Right. A few years ago. And same thing with our second firm, where the two founders are very active online and have a pretty unique brand. So we tend to be drawn towards that and just execute against what you have that's really scalable. So I don't think you have to change the world. And if you think back to the last 30 years, again, RE's have become better, but the relationship with the clients and the hiring of talented advisors, that's kind of been the same. Yeah, hire good people, take care of your clients. Now we're trying to be more thoughtful about marketing, about M and A, about technology, but you've been doing that anyway for the last 30 years. So the topics are not that different than it used to be before.

Speaker B: Yeah, it makes me think about the kind of famous Jeff Bezos quote because everybody was like, oh, uh, what's Amazon going to do? And he said, we're going to focus on what's not going to change and build all of our strategy around what's not going to change. Right. Customers are going to want things to get to them as fast as possible. They're going to want the most affordable price. Right. They're going to want it to be convenient and easy. We're going to build our entire business around those things. That will never change. And we'll adapt to the stuff that does change, so long as it emphasizes those things. It seems to make me think about what you said. We've got to be able to find clients, we got to be able to service them well because they're all going to want good service. Right. And then we've got to be able to take care of them and take care of our team at the same time. Those will not change when it comes to building an RIA, whether you have a billion, 10 billion, 100 billion. Those tenants are the same.

Speaker A: That's exactly right. And I would say the team piece is really key and, uh, critical because of capacity issues and the shortage of advisors. And I would argue that in 2026, people would rather work at a small firm than a big firm. People want to be empowered. They want to have flexibility. They want to have a great, uh, culture. I think that's going to be the advantage of some of the firms that we're going to work with over the mega ones where big warehouses or some of the big RMAs are in constant battles with their employees that have left. We don't have this problem. Right. People want to work with us. They want to grow. They're growing with the firm. The rising tide raises all ships. So I think this is why I, uh, love the place where we are in the industry and the segments we're targeting, and that can help build really, really cool firms.

Speaker B: I love it, man. All right, we're going to move into the final segment of the show, which is what we call the mile marker minute. Series of lightning round questions. Aim to get to know you a little bit better outside of all the industry stuff. So are you ready for the mile marker minute?

Speaker A: Absolutely not.

Speaker B: I appreciate the candidness, though. All right, Eric, if you could travel anywhere in the world you've never been to before, where would you go?

Speaker A: Oh, I need to go to Patagonia, and I need to go to the Himalayas.

Speaker B: Okay. I love that. Well, and that might answer the next question. Are you a mountains person or a beach person?

Speaker A: I'm actually a beach person, but that's why I only go to these places, because I never keep taking the time. I'm a beach person. I like to be warm.

Speaker B: Uh, I like that. Okay, we talked about food a little bit before. If you could craft your perfect meal or the perfect meal at a restaurant, tell me what that is and what that looks like.

Speaker A: It will have some kind of ice cream for desserts, that is for sure, that I know for a fact. Is it some kind of steak or pizza? Something like that? Pretty simple. I don't know. Some kind of ice cream. That's the one thing that I can tell you is there will be ice cream for the house. You can play around the edges.

Speaker B: I love it. Because that's a perfect segue to the next question. Which is what is the best flavor of ice cream?

Speaker A: Oh, hazelnut. Hazelnut. Passion fruits are two of, uh, the key ones. Chocolate never hurts. Vanilla never hurts, but hazelnut is superior.

Speaker B: Okay. I love that. And, uh, when you say hazelnut, are you thinking like, Nutella or is it like more of a pure hazelnut?

Speaker A: Kyle, come to New York, Italy. Hazelnut gelato.

Speaker B: Game over. That's it, right? Okay. I love it. All right, so the name of our company is mile Marker. Mile markers are a symbol of progress along the journey that you are going down. And we believe that your journey is never done and that progress never stops. But as a result of that, I love to ask people this question, complete this sentence. Progress equals blank.

Speaker A: I guess learning. I've learned more in the last two years. That probably did in the eight years before that.

Speaker B: Wow.

Speaker A: By building this company from scratch, by learning how to raise money, learning how to not have infrastructure. As we learn every step, every mistakes that we made, obviously we progressed pretty meaningfully in our evolution.

Speaker B: Fantastic. I love that answer. All right, final question for you. There is an alternate universe, and in this alternate universe, you have a career that has nothing to do with financial services whatsoever. In that alternate universe, what is Eric Omar's career?

Speaker A: That's easy. There's two answers to that. Some kind of basketball coach or basketball player, which that would have to be a very far universe. If I was not doing this, I would love to be in some kind of biotech. I think over the talk about change and progress. By the way, I think over the next 30 years, what's going to happen in biotech with some of the quantum stuff that's happening, some of the gene editing that's happening is going to completely change the world. M and as much as AI for financial planning and taxes is interesting, but not really. The medical evolution will completely change our entire way to live life.

Speaker B: What a way to end it. Man, I love that answer. Eric, thank you so much for coming on the show. I really enjoyed this conversation. I think it was full of a lot of really good insights and wisdom on what it looks like across the landscape of the RIA space and the wirehouse space for that matter. And the unique perspective you have on those firms that are in the sweet spot to grow right now. So thanks for carving out some time to come and share your wisdom with our audience.

Speaker A: No, thank you, Kyle. It was a pleasure and looking forward to speaking to you. Um, soon.

Speaker B: Yes, likewise. Okay, everybody, that's been another episode of Next Mile. Please make sure you click, follow or subscribe wherever you're paying attention to this. And please leave us a review so that people can find great episodes like the one I just had with Eric. But until next time, enjoy every Mile.