Hey Ryan, great to have you here with with us to learn how to work a little smarter and just been really impressed with with you and Hemington, your company and one, one of the things I've always found fascinated about you is how engaged you are and how intentional you are. In your leadership style comes across to me as a partner with with you and I'm really excited to have you talk about that and talk about your company. And so let's start with that by talking a little bit about your firm. Sure. Well, first thank you for having me as it's a, it's always an honor whenever you guys asked me to participate in anything like this. You know, we've known each other for a very long time I think. We've been working with Orion or or I have with Orion for over 10 years back back while you were server based and it's been impressive to watch your growth as well. You guys are massive now and it's also impressive to see your own individual growth. Randy, it's you know, I'm honored to be interviewed by the president of the firm. So thank you for having me Hemington. Eileen O'Connor, my business partner. She and I started Hemington on October one of 2013. From a firm profile standpoint, we are billion dollars under management. Our average client size is about four and a half million dollars under management. We have a single custodian that we work with and we we have grown without the use of M and A. And we're also, we also have a female CEO which sets us apart in the industry. Great. Yeah, I would say the vast majority of our clients are sub 1 billion and trying to get to that billion. So I think you guys have hit that first bell that many of our clients are trying to approach and so I've heard you say, you know the first billion is the, the hardest to get to. What do you mean by that? Yeah I I I'll give credit to the quote to a long time friend and mentor of mine. He told me that probably a decade ago and and at the time when he said it it didn't really register. And yeah I I at the time I was thinking well what's the difference between 0 and one and one and two it's it's the same process and then. You know that just shows my naivete and and having now grown a company to a billion or helped grow a company to a billion and it really as I was being reflective about this, what he was trying to say was that the hardest part of getting from zero to 1 billion was, was. Doing all the work that is below the surface of building the infrastructure of your company and if you don't have that right, you will never be able to spring up and that by by far is the hardest part. So I'm hopeful through this this conversation and maybe give some people some shortcuts or talk about what we did, how we did it, maybe give some inflection points to hopefully. Help people think through those challenges. Great. Who who was that mentor by the way? I think. I think you told me who that was. Yes, it is Chuck Woodr. Yeah, someone many of our clients will probably know. So what are some of the starting decisions you made that helped you build the foundation of the firm? So there are three main decisions that we made the first one and and. I'll say them in order because I think the order matters. The first one is what will you be known for? And there's two components to this. But the critical point is that you have to be able to stand out in a crowd and as as everybody who's watching this knows, there's a lot of competition in our industry and. You need to be able to stand out in a client or a center of influences head as being the go to person for something. If you don't you will never get a referral. So that's the easiest part. Figure out what you want to be known for. The hard part is the credibility marketing or doing the work to become the expert in that space. So what? What Eileen and I did when we're starting out is that we decided that we wanted to be known as the go to firm for breadwinner women. From that point on, we started dedicating ourselves to doing the research, conducting surveys, writing the papers. And from that point on it was getting into the speaking circuit and developing the credibility. So not only did we want to be known for something, but we also had to be able to to back it up. The second point would be you have to define your service offering. Now if if you think about your service offering, what you're doing is you're saying I'm going to put guardrails around what we do and what that's going to do is inform all of your future decision making. And it's also going to arm you with the ability to use probably the most important word in business, which is no. Now if you think about that, when you when you narrow those guardrails, everything that falls outside of those guardrails becomes a shiny object and you should ignore those. So narrow the guardrails to find exactly what you're going to do and then that decision. Flows into your third, which is investing in your core technology. And I would argue that you do you invest in your core technologies early and not later. I know a lot of a lot of firms say, well, I don't have the manpower to do it, it's really expensive and so on. But I would argue that you want to invest in this early. Because what it's going to do is it's going to push the people who need to be in front of clients, in front of clients. Now if you want to talk about accelerated growth, that all comes from by by being in front of clients, in front of people who refer these core technologies, which we define as your custodian, your portfolio, accounting system and your CRM, those 3 components. Especially if you're partnering with a company like Orion are taking a lot of the back office functionality out of your team, which means your human capital is forward-looking instead of backward looking and that accelerates growth. So one it gives you more client facing time. The longer you wait, the more disruptive it becomes. The more people you have, the harder it is to change to get that right early. Invest in it early, but it also helps you with that. The earlier point of saying no for us, our core three are TD, Ameritrade, Orion and Salesforce. Of those three we prioritize Orion and what we say is for all future integrations, any of the bolt on technologies that we may use, if they don't integrate with Orion, 90% of the time we exclude. So it controls the data, it controls how you you work, it makes everything more seamless and it makes it a lot easier to to produce reports provided by his answer questions for clients. And the last point I would say about investing in the technology is that that these are all great pieces of software. You need to align your softwares 2.2 which was your service offering. Orion, Salesforce, they all give you the component parts to build a Ferrari, but most people aren't qualified to drive a Ferrari. So you need to define what type of car your company is going to be and then narrow that software to be exactly that and an example of what. What we did, and you may not like hearing this, is that we said I or I say I said was I don't want people in our company to become experts in Orion. And so it was, it's a it was a deliberate effort on our part to make sure that only a handful of people know how to go do a deep dive in Orion and what we wanted to do was take those handful of people. And concentrate their efforts on getting that data out and putting it into the CRM so that an advisor can spend 90 plus percent of their time being outward looking and not backward looking. And so our team purposely organized our systems and narrowed the systems to just give them the information they need to do their jobs to produce reports, to answer the questions, to run the analysis. Without having to understand all the different bells and whistles of those core technologies, so really narrow those and align those technologies to what your service offering is. Well, I've had a front row seat to your Third Point on the technology side and helping me with that and just been a great engagement partner on that side. So you've done a great job of putting the right people and helping to to nurture that and build it. Really fun to hear that. The other two points the what to be known for in the service offering, I think those are golden and very helpful. Can you talk about some of the inflection points that were most pivotal in your your company's growth? Absolutely. The, I think our first inflection point was right around when we hit five people and when thinking back. Eight years ago when Eileen and I were signing a personal guarantee on office space, we signed a six year lease. We didn't know if you're going to be successful. It was a very nerve wracking thing to do and the office helped 5 people and we thought, wow, if we fill this place up in 5-6 years we'll have done, we will have done something right. At the end of the first year we were doubled up in our offices. And it just, it happened really quickly and that was that was the point where we realized why we don't have a practice, we have a business and this business has the potential to be multigenerational. And to me that's the inflection point where you have to say or where you have to go out and develop or choose a management philosophy for running your company. We chose the traction process. The another popular process in our industry is called Rockefeller Habits and there are many different processes. The point I would try to make is kick your management system and stick with it and understand that all this is is the process to get everybody in your company aligned, speaking the same language and ultimately moving in the same direction. So that is, this is a very important component. I think we started that at about eight people. I wish we would have started it at 5. Now you're not going to be able to implement every component of whatever management system you choose at the very beginning. So I I would encourage you if you're going to start with one of those to focus on three points. Let's say first is vision, second process and the last is measurement. And every management system will have some version of these three things. But the vision components very simple. You need to tell people where they're going and it needs to be out on the horizon so they understand every decision needs to be made to get to that direction or or get to that destination. Next is process at around 5 people you you're starting to have. A lot of activities that are repeatable, so processes defining what those repeatable steps are, documenting them and trying to systematize them as much as possible. The earlier you start on that, the better. And documentation is very important because it's the documentation process that's going to ultimately train the rest of the team and bring them on. So if you're just doing it verbally, you're missing the opportunity to make something ever. Last part is measurement. If you're using Orion, you're using your CRM. Those two systems are housing an amazing amount of data and I would you need to figure out what the data points are to measure the success and the goals that you've set for yourself. So if you said we're going to that. Mountain and each year we're going to make this much progress. If you can't measure it, you can't hold yourself accountable and you and and you won't be armed with the ability to make good decisions, continue the progress of the firm. So I I would say start there. Don't worry, don't worry about being perfect. Don't worry about implementing it all at the same time. Because you won't be able to or you won't do it successfully, but. Sticking with that mountain analogy, you know, I I've always explained it internally that when I say we're going to that mountain, I know personally I'm the type of person who's going to look. If you say we're going there, I'm going to have my backpack packed and I'm going to be out the door in 30 minutes. A lot of people will spend days packing their suitcase worrying about every single detail. I would encourage you to not operate that way because. If I pack in 30 minutes and I start moving and I realize along the way that I forgot my toothpaste, that's not, that's not going to determine whether or not we make it to the mountain. And I can always pull off and hit a 711 and get some toothpaste if I need it. But start making progress and you will learn along the way and you'll start improving along the way. And that's also the the. The point in your firm around five people that you need to start leaning on your relationships so you're not in this, you're not on the in this trip by yourself. When you partner with a firm like Orion or you, you work with the custodian or your investment management firms or product providers that you use. They all want you to be successful. Because if you are successful, they are successful. So if you maintain that mentality, then you're one big team. And this is the point where you should really start leaning heavily on those relationships. Because I promise you, just about every problem that you will run into has been solved by somebody else, and you're much better off asking other people how they solved it. And even if you get differing opinions, at least you hear how other people approach that issue and you can figure out what works best for you. But don't think you're doing it by yourself that that was a good lesson learned at 5 people. That's when I really went head first into study groups and. You know leaning on leaning on our consultants at Orion and and other partners. So Orion is a company that uses traction as well. I have a little different question for you because I want to learn from you what's the, what's the investment or the commitment that you got as a the company needs to put into it to make it work. Like it's fine to go read a book and then do these three things not not probably like that, what's the commitment or level of effort that needs to come in by the leadership. If it's if it's not embraced by the leadership, it's never going to happen. And that was definitely one of our our an area that we learned from. Then in the beginning we kept it at the top and the rest of the firm didn't really care what we were doing. We were speaking a language, we were talking about, you know, rocks and whatnot. And people just weren't. They didn't care because they weren't involved. And that's not. It's not a slight on them, it's just that we we failed at bringing them on and you know that kind of dovetails into the into another inflection point which I would say is 10 people. So earlier five people. We haven't even talked about what infrastructure is and bringing up in the entire firm other than documenting processes and measurement and vision. I feel like at 10 people. That's the point where attraction or Rockefeller habits process really starts to take off. Because in effect what is happening is that the founders of the company or the leaders of your of your company are having to start to let go. And even though at that point they're wearing a lot of different hats, at 10 people you need to start taking those hats off and get it down to 1-2 or three at most. And the only way you can do that is by building infrastructure. And by infrastructure, I don't mean by incorporating technology. I mean you have to have different groups within your organization that are accountable to certain purposes. And this to me was the point at which we truly gained traction within our organization. So we, we sat down, Eileen and I sat down and we concluded that our firm is really organized in three core functions and those functions are sales, thought and execution. And when we came to that conclusion that helped us form the areas of the firm that needed direct accountability and we were then able to elevate people in those areas and give them. You know, the authority to operate and the the, you know, the responsibility to operate and manage those groups then report up and make sure that the decision making of those groups is aligning with the vision of the firm. That was really the point where it it started to work for us. Great. Yeah. It was also the point that we realized that 10 people meant that. We had a bunch of different personalities, and we also realized that the values that we had established when we started the firm didn't necessarily match the firm, the group of talented people we had assembled on our team. Another part of that inflection point was, was understanding that we needed a common language. And I'll probably come back to this point multiple times that you you have to speak the same language, you have to understand people the same way, you have to have the same goals, etcetera. That was the point where we were looking back and saying what is this common thread that we all have as a group and that's when we redid our values. And really started holding people accountable to them because it's back to this concept of letting go. If you're building it properly, you have a system that manages itself in the sense that if somebody is a bad apple and you're trying to pull them in as a new hire and they they just don't work in your organization, it's your values that are going to protect you. And the values just can't be what one or two people have. They need to be the collective values of the organization. And that to me started taking form at about 10 people and they haven't changed since then and I and and also people are very protective of them. So that's something we're particularly proud of. You know it's also it's also the inflection point where. You'd better figure out your hiring by building the subgroup infrastructure. Our biggest mistake was that we were still hiring at the top and giving those people to subgroup and our what we learned was you needed to reverse that and the hiring had to be done at the subgroup level. You know, we also learned that when you're making the hiring decision, it needs to be based upon two things and that is a capacity metric. So you need to agree again on this data component what your capacity metrics are going to going to be. But you also have to trust the people who are running those subgroups. If they say that, hey, we're short staffed, I need more help, we're overworked. Then you need to listen to that, even if your capacity metrics says otherwise. So it gives you the opportunity to bounce two sides off each other, figure out if it's time to hire. But then if the decisions made, it's a subgroup that has to do the hiring because they are the people who know best, far better than me, whether or not whoever they're recruiting is capable of doing the job. Everything beyond that is culture and values for everybody else that that interviews that person. So that was a long winded answer, but traction was a very, very powerful tool for us. Well, it's obvious that it's helped you with your intentionality that we talked about earlier and helped you to see things as they've come as the company has grown and and you've you've had a tool that you can use to help you with that growth so. You you touched on it here right at the end of your answer, kind of establishing a strong culture. It's obviously extremely important not only to attracting and retaining team members, but you know, what advice would you have for firms around culture and leadership things that they could a couple takeaways for them sure probably give more than a couple. I I feel like this is the the hardest part. And this is probably in the 10 to 15, maybe 15 plus people range. And and at this point in your organization as a leader, you've hopefully transitioned from the doing phase to the leading And you know we all get in this, this into this business because we love helping clients, we love doing the planning, we help making a difference in their lives. That doesn't mean you're equipped to run an organization of people that have different personalities. So to me, this is the hardest transition is recognizing that I need to be deliberate on learning how to be a leader while also not being an authoritarian. So a couple things that we did. First, we want to stick with this idea of the common language. So we thought about building self-awareness amongst the team. So say you're 15 people, 15 different personality types. We needed to, we needed a system that allowed everybody to understand everybody else in the organization. And this is typically where when people start using some type of psychometric assessment and take the Myers Briggs for example, you you get. You know, you find out oh, so and so is INTJ. Great. Well, now you have to sit down and think, okay introvert. What is that again? And and what happens is it, it doesn't stick with you and you don't know how to change, how you communicate. So what what we did was we thought, well, let's develop self-awareness, but let's do it in a method that's easy to remember. And I was referred to a book by a business coach. The book is called The True Competitive Advantage and what it does is it takes and it takes the this method and then oversimplifies it by explaining 4 different types of birds. And I won't go into explaining them all, but I'll I'll give you an example of one of the birds is an eagle. If you can, if you understand how an eagle operates, you can quickly pick up a personality type of somebody you're talking to. Think eagle chest out, get to the bottom line, don't give me the whole story. So when you're talking to them, you know, lead with the outcome. If you're talking to somebody who is more of an owl, you know, start with the data because this person isn't going to be able to get themselves to a decision unless they have the data. Right. And so the idea of self-awareness was teaching people in the organization to accept each other for who they are not try to change who they are. And that then allows them to understand that when you're communicating with somebody, it's incumbent upon you to communicate in a manner that they understand, not speaking in in your own manner that they don't understand. You're far more effective if you're self aware. Man can communicate the way they hear. So step one, culture and people was creating that common understanding and self-awareness. And we have fun with it too. Oh, that person's just an an owl, right? They threw compliments around like man and from there that gives us the common language to focus on culture. Culture is incredibly difficult. And it can't be faked. A book that we would recommend or I would recommend is called The Culture Code. But what what we try to do is think of culture as nothing more than a series of tiny connections that you make with people, and they have to be intentional. And as I said earlier, you can't fake it. So these tiny connections are what? Allow you to develop a true and meaningful relationship with your teammates and even your clients for that matter and it makes it makes those relationships stickier. So we think it now in this age where everybody's working remotely and and you know salaries are going up so you can't it's hard to compete on compensation. You can win using culture. Not. I'm not saying we. Don't pay well. It's that somebody can always pay more. So you better have a strong culture and we've been very deliberate and and focusing on that and we found a lot of success and having deliberate small connections with people that happened repeatedly little things. So we just has a great presentation. Text him at 9:00 o'clock at night. Hey, I've heard a lot of great feedback about. Presentation. Great job. That little text is worth $1,000,000 and most people just they just don't think that way. And that's the hard part about the transition of going from somebody who loves doing the planning and helping the clients to leading and it's it's very hard, yeah, that that person needs encouragement to when you probably might get satisfaction on. Building that plan and seeing a goal that's accomplished for your client, but then now you're leading a company, how do you, how do you get the recognition or pat on the back? It's a little harder to to see that when you're working behind the scenes a little bit, but oh great. Are there any other gems do you want to share with us? I would also say that as you're transitioning more into a leadership. Role, you always have to be recruiting and and I don't know where this fits in the whole spectrum of building an organization, but with the growth we we are having, we're hiring about two people a year at this point. And when you're in a tight labor market, you should always have in the back of your head whenever you meet somebody talented. I need their information. I need to somehow make a connection with them because I know in so much time we're going to have a role. They may not fit the role we have, but in the future they would be a great fit for us. And always thinking that manner has been helpful for us and I would encourage other people, hopefully people not in our. Or direct competitors. There's a lot of, there's a lot of clients out there for everybody to to have and you guys have your niche. So there you go. So no, I if someone were to ask me, you know, give me three things. My number one thing I say of what I do to to help people be successful is recruiting. That's the word I use because you recruit outside of your company and you recruit everybody internally and it's the most, I think it's the most important. So I'm glad you said that word meets my narrative. So, so now I I really appreciate your time, Ryan, and a lot of great content that you provided to us and thank you so much for being willing to share it with us. Have a great day. Absolutely my pleasure. Thank you for having me. _1726514278280