Building Holistiplan: How Curiosity Turned Into an Industry-Changing Tool

With Roger Pine, CFA®, CFP®

November 13, 2019

Featuring

Roger Pine, CFA®, CFP®

Holistiplan

When I sat down with Roger Pine, co-founder of Holistiplan and winner of the #XYPNLIVE AdviceTech competition (previously known as FinTech), one theme kept surfacing: reinvention.

Roger didn’t begin his career in financial planning; he started out as an energy consultant. But after his wife introduced him to the world of planning, he followed his curiosity into a whole new profession. That curiosity eventually pulled him even further, leading him into coding and the creation of one of the most widely adopted tech tools in our industry.

Along the way, Roger navigated unique challenges, working alongside family, figuring out business development and branding from scratch, and balancing the dual identities of planner and technologist. What stands out is how he approached each pivot with patience, experimentation, and a long-term view.

If you’re thinking about building or scaling something new, here are a few takeaways from our conversation:

Stay open to reinvention. Your best work might come from the path you didn’t plan.
Embrace the learning curve. Every shift, whether into planning, business ownership, or tech, requires humility and persistence.
Balance people and process. Innovation is exciting, but what makes it last is how it fits into real client and team relationships.

This episode is a behind-the-scenes look at one advisor’s journey from planner to FinTech founder, and what it really takes to follow your curiosity into something transformative. Tune in for Roger’s story and the lessons you can carry into your own practice.

XYPN Radio Blog signature (1)

Listen to the Full Interview:

Watch the Full Interview:

Featured on the Show:

Roger Pine: Website | LinkedIn
Janet Briaud
"How I Taught Myself to Code in Eight Weeks" by David Sinsky

This Episode Is Sponsored By:

Read the Transcript Below:

00:00:01.160 welcome to xypn radio where your host Alan Moore brings you into a community of the only financial planners who want

00:00:07.520 to profitably and successfully serve Gen X and Gen Y clients if you're ready to get the knowledge you need from leaders

00:00:13.880 in your field learn from forward-thinking advisors and take action on your own goals xypn radio is

00:00:19.680 the show for you here's your host hello and welcome to this episode of xypn radio I am your host Alan Moore and I'm

00:00:26.240 excited to have Roger Pine founder of holista plan and the winner of this year's xypn live fch competition on the

00:00:33.079 show today Roger started his career as an energy consultant before discovering the joys of financial planning his wife

00:00:39.640 was studying for the cfp and he started reading her studied materials and ended up enjoying it really as much as she did

00:00:46.120 they both ended up working at her mom's fee only firm in Texas and worked their way into being Partners in The Firm

00:00:52.879 despite being a very successful adviser Roger got an itch to learn how to code that led him to start building some

00:00:58.920 programs and he ended up building one that he thought would allow consumers to do their own Financial plans he ended up

00:01:04.599 pivoting into building software for advisors and has hit the ground running the holista plan platform allows you to

00:01:10.920 upload a tax return and get tax analysis for you to present to your clients it's a huge timesaver for advisers and Roger

00:01:17.600 has ideas to go deeper on providing in-depth tax scenario analysis as well as ways to use that technology in other

00:01:24.040 areas of their financial plan this was a fun interview to hear his journey from financial planner to Tech entrepreneur

00:01:30.400 uh their platform and Company have a bright future ahead of them when it comes to compliance most financial

00:01:35.880 advisers want to run in the opposite direction but compliance doesn't have to be that big scary monster hiding under

00:01:41.320 your bed our free risk assessment guide will walk you through how to perform a risk assessment one step at a time learn

00:01:47.759 how to perform a proper risk assessment and get access to our risk Matrix and risk assessment table worksheets

00:01:53.200 developed by XY planning Network's in-house compliance team visit XY planning network.com riskassessment to

00:01:59.560 download load your copy today you can find any of the additional resources that we mentioned during the episode at

00:02:04.920 XY planning network.com 229 also be sure to go to XY planning network.com viip to join our private

00:02:11.760 group just for xyp and radio listeners it's the community of advisers we've all been looking for that's there to provide

00:02:17.400 support when we need it the most best of all it's free I encourage you to check it out again that's XY planning

00:02:22.560 network.com viip without further Ado here's my interview with

00:02:27.760 Roger hey Roger Welcome to the show man thanks so much for being on thank you for having me alen I'm looking forward

00:02:33.000 to it yeah super excited to learn about your sort of career path and and work as

00:02:38.120 an adviser and now as a tech entrepreneur you know you've just had this really interesting Journey that I

00:02:44.440 think more listeners are on than they realize I think a lot more of us have started tech companies than ever

00:02:49.840 anticipated it so I guess just to to kick things off can you give me just we we'll walk through a little bit of your

00:02:55.519 sort of career path and you know what what that has meant for you so when you and I first met you were a financial

00:03:01.680 adviser was that your first career or I guess how did you get started in the industry that was career Two For Me Yeah

00:03:08.120 and we met years ago Allan you know we um I remember I remember standing with you at a conference a Napa conference

00:03:15.040 and you had not yet started XY Planning Network and I remember you were you were

00:03:20.280 so pumped up to start and you were like Michael's not ready we need he needs a little more time and and I was like this

00:03:27.080 guy is either crazy or he is on something big I don't fully understand it uh at the time I didn't but it's

00:03:33.840 really amazing to see you and Michael there up on stage not long after I mean not many years after having built

00:03:39.480 something amazing that is our relationship I'm trying to get things done and he's like really let maybe take another week like I don't want to yeah

00:03:46.080 you were so ready so yeah I mean back whenever year that was financial

00:03:51.280 planning is my second career so I spent my 20s as a consultant in the energy

00:03:56.879 industry I worked all over the world I did a lot lot of stuff with energy trading companies uh when I graduated

00:04:04.040 college there was this little place called Enron that was kind of a big deal and they were going to change the whole world and so everyone who knew anything

00:04:11.519 was trying to get kind of in the orbit of Enron and people like Enron well that didn't end well for them but I kind of

00:04:18.440 stayed in that area and did a lot of work on the oil and gas side and I did that for 10 years and the reason I got

00:04:26.000 into financial planning was through my spouse so my my wife Natalie she she was

00:04:32.039 working as a hedge fund manager and very few hedge fund managers even know that financial planning is a career that

00:04:38.479 exists let alone one they'd want to be involved in but Natalie is unique in

00:04:44.080 that her mother Janet Brio started a fee only financial planning firm back in

00:04:50.039 1986 she was one of the Pioneers really and yeah that's that's early early she

00:04:55.440 was one of the first chairs of Napa I mean you know her pedigree is probably unmatched but so Natalie kind of grew up

00:05:02.160 with this world of what financial planning is and so she was contemplating giving it a try and so she starts

00:05:09.919 studying for the cfp exam and back then I don't know how it works now but back

00:05:15.199 then the the college for financial planning would send you this big stack of books for each module and you know so

00:05:23.000 for insurance you get a stack of books for investment stack of books Etc and she's reading through this stuff and I'm

00:05:28.680 kind of looking over old I'm like hey that's kind of interesting and before long I'm just devouring these things and

00:05:35.400 so it reached a point actually where I was like begging her to they would only send you the next round of books when

00:05:42.039 you finish the test for the first round of books right and so I was like begging her to hurry up and take the test so the

00:05:48.120 next one could come in the mail I'm sure she loved this she here she is under the

00:05:54.000 pressure that's awesome so that yeah that's that's how I kind of got interested in it was through her and she

00:06:00.319 did go and join Brio financial advisors in 2007 I joined a year later and I

00:06:06.520 worked there for 10 years I worked as a financial planner for for 10 years at Brio financial advisors so it's

00:06:13.880 interesting I I bet we've had a couple of dozen people on the show that uh that started their career in consulting which

00:06:20.319 baffles me because you know I've I've been in the financial planning Ro for 10 years and like I'm probably just now

00:06:26.160 getting to the point where I would be confident enough to call myself a consultant and work with people so it's

00:06:33.479 always interesting to me how people come out of college and and are wildly effective at what they do so no no shade

00:06:40.039 on on the career it's just it blows my mind so like just out of curiosity what like what type of work were you doing as

00:06:47.160 a consultant because I am sort of curious what what skills you learned from that world uh that have translated

00:06:53.840 into the the you know second and now third career that you've had yeah it it translates very well uh almost you can

00:07:01.360 almost drop Consulting straight into financial planning I mean obviously the the domain knowledge is is totally

00:07:06.800 different but I I was I started out I I studied Engineering in college so I started out on the tech Consulting side

00:07:13.319 I did a little more business type Consulting towards the end but a good consultant I mean I would go into these

00:07:19.879 places 22y old kid I don't know more than them about their own business right

00:07:25.840 I was brought into there was some kind of change that this business wanted to go through they were implementing a new software system

00:07:33.120 they wanted to reorganize the way they did one thing or another and sometimes they needed external help to kind of

00:07:38.560 just think through how they were going to do that a lot of times they already knew it they just need someone to pull it out of them and so the the and

00:07:47.120 sometimes politically it's the only way to get it done right I mean sometimes you have to say hey we don't want to do it but Accenture says we got to do it so

00:07:53.240 here we go you know there's any there's any number of reasons why that has to happen but the job of a consultant is to

00:08:00.039 go in and ask very detailed questions to be a good listener to then communicate

00:08:05.240 back to the client what they already know but may not have thought of in that particular way to bring yes some domain

00:08:12.879 insights in to the table but it's it's a lot of communication it's a lot of getting to know your client and those

00:08:19.360 skills obviously translate you know oneto one to what a good financial

00:08:25.000 planner has to do the type of consultant is different the type of consultant the type of client is different because I

00:08:30.440 was dealing with an industry or a business rather than a human being or a family but even businesses you're you're

00:08:38.120 still trying to build relationships with people you go into this client site you got to figure out what the dynamic is of

00:08:44.440 this family of people who spend all day together so I found when I got into financial planning there was a lot of

00:08:50.560 time to learn just the nuts and bolts of how we do it but the core competency of

00:08:55.839 going into a client meeting and exuding confidence and then following up with

00:09:00.880 good communication like Consulting was the perfect background for that so if

00:09:06.200 anyone's listening here who is a consultant I I I say go for it come on over to financial planning get into

00:09:11.279 financial planning like I said yeah should probably go go through and try to make a list of everyone who came from

00:09:16.320 Consulting because again like I hear that of like oh you could hire a consultant for that I think of

00:09:21.399 Consultants as subject matter expert on which CRM should we select you know Salesforce or sugar and help with the

00:09:27.200 implementation which is a certain level of expertise but in terms of like new programs and projects and and quite

00:09:33.560 frankly as you said people just needing sign off because someone said they had to do it that that all makes sense yeah

00:09:39.240 and project management too Allan you know I mean clients know to they know to save more money and to a lot of these

00:09:46.440 things they know on one level but just the organization of how to go about doing it sometimes they just need

00:09:51.600 external help making that happen you know and so Consultants are able to do that well and I would imagine if we

00:09:58.720 talked to a financial planner who went the other way into Consulting and it does happen they they could tell you that it translates very well in that

00:10:05.079 direction too yeah that that's a really good point so you got into Financial Planning and Did you sort of keep any of

00:10:12.600 that old client base or connections did that feed some new business for you or did you really sort of press reset on

00:10:18.240 the network and and jump into Financial Planning and and start working with a different client base it absolutely did

00:10:24.000 not translate at all geographically I had moved so Natalie and I were living

00:10:29.560 in Europe up until we moved back to United States so we knew plenty of

00:10:35.279 people who might be great clients if we were still living in London England but we weren't anymore and then my my

00:10:41.639 friends and colleagues in energy I don't know I just never even really thought to turn that into what we would do our our

00:10:47.639 firm had a niche our firm is based in and by the way I'm going to keep saying we and our firm I don't work there

00:10:53.480 anymore but it's just it's so close to me that I'm I'll continue to do that by accident but Brio financial advisers a

00:11:01.000 good portion of their clients are academic so there was a niche practice there being in College Station Texas

00:11:07.079 Home of Texas A&M that was a group of people that I had no interaction with

00:11:12.160 prior also right so my my worlds did not the vend diagram of my old and new worlds did not overlap at all pretty

00:11:19.360 much and I will say convincing you to move from London back to uh College

00:11:24.760 Station Texas someone is really good at sales but I I think College Station is awesome but a little different from

00:11:30.440 London yeah you've been here a few times I've seen have yeah come down for for Texas A&M that's really the only firm or

00:11:37.800 F only firm I should say I mean for like a 100 miles or something right like it's a you kind of got a lock on the

00:11:44.120 marketplace down there we were the only game in town for a very long time yes and and I always mispronounce it it's

00:11:50.120 Brio correct that's correct yeah b r AUD mhm that mean d Bri um that's how you

00:11:58.160 can tell if it's marketer because if they say it wrong click then you just know so Brio what type of clients I

00:12:04.760 guess you you said is is this sort of the typical Millionaire Next Door I know y'all were known for having uh and doing

00:12:10.120 a lot of trust work so I guess what were the types of clients that you were working with college professors are very

00:12:16.639 much The Millionaire Next Door I mean that that book could have been written pretty much as a case study about about

00:12:23.160 college professors these are people who not you it's very rare you'll meet up

00:12:28.600 College Professor with $20 million unless it's inheritance but you will regularly see those with 1 to 5 million

00:12:35.600 and they kind of gather that over time almost by accident because money is not

00:12:40.800 a lot of times what motivates that group of people it's it's the status within their profession or whatever research

00:12:47.240 they're pursuing they're Fascinating People to work with because they're they're brilliant they have high

00:12:52.880 expectations for you to know what you're talking about but again money isn't the only thing they're worried about in

00:12:58.240 their lives and so they they're pretty hands off once they trust that you know what you're doing but yeah I mean people

00:13:04.160 living in the same house they bought you know 45 years ago that sort of thing sitting on $5 million with no plans on

00:13:10.560 how to use it very common very common what we what we deal with in that in that market so that so that was was that

00:13:17.839 sort of the defined Niche or just hey you're in college station so therefore you're going to get a bunch of these clients coming in the door yeah that was

00:13:24.760 the I would say just the natural Niche that happened what happens with probably

00:13:29.880 with any Niche is you know the word of mouth starts to spread across the country so while yes we started just

00:13:35.240 because we're in a University Town professors move to other universities or they have research colleagues in other

00:13:41.519 places and so over time we we we developed a book of clients who were who

00:13:46.880 were Nationwide actually International even even all within Academia and that

00:13:52.000 wasn't the that wasn't like the state of Niche like we are an academic only firm it was probably 60% of the client base

00:13:57.720 though okay so what was sort of yours and Natalie's path to you know to becoming advisor

00:14:04.639 sounds I mean you know she you said she joined about a year before you run by her mom and I'll I'll ask about the

00:14:09.920 family Dynamics here in a minute because I I have worked with family and and so be interested to hear your experience with that and but sort of the path to

00:14:17.360 becoming planners or owners or or whatever it is sort of whatever path the two of you have been on yeah and I think

00:14:23.759 our path is very common very typical to what you hear and a lot of these firms

00:14:28.839 where you have a charismatic founder who is used to kind of making all decisions

00:14:34.440 running their own show Natalie came in a year before me and she had she came from

00:14:40.160 the hedge fund world so she they originally thought oh she's going to be slot into the investment side of what we

00:14:46.040 do and maybe some operational type things and that was you know just figuring out a way to go from again

00:14:53.040 charismatic founder to an ensemble approach to doing some of those things that takes time to do in any firm uh so

00:15:00.639 that was her route I started as a pair planner so I you know I started filling

00:15:06.279 out forms and figuring out how to place trades and all that stuff and slowly I

00:15:11.519 started taking more ownership over the client relationships and then I became an advisor under under an lead adviser

00:15:18.839 and then I became a lead ad we didn't have these same names but I became what most people now call lead advisor with

00:15:25.600 you know my group of 70 to 80 clients that I owned at that time so were you responsible at any point in there for

00:15:32.360 business development or uh was it you know just sort of the the the marketing machine was feeding the clients for the

00:15:38.560 whole front yeah really really no and and I I saw our primary challenge when I

00:15:44.839 look at my role and Ali's role when we came in and you could call this business development but it was it was in a

00:15:51.360 roundabout way our task was to change the The Branding of the firm from Janet

00:15:58.120 Brio to Brio financial advisers when when we first started and

00:16:03.600 and Natalie and I bought into the firm in 2011 you get a phone call in

00:16:09.160 2011 and they say you know a prospect would say I'm interested in becoming a client please set up a meeting with

00:16:15.480 Janet Brio right to them Janet Brio was the firm and that's what happens with these you know these solo Founders who

00:16:22.839 then bring on staff and then she's the charismatic founder That's The Branding they they're one and the same and our

00:16:28.560 challenge which took time and I don't know if you call that business development or what but we had to do all the things you got to do like going off

00:16:34.000 and being in the Rotary Club and joining the boards all that stuff that I guess

00:16:39.600 is business development we didn't really think of it in those terms but all those all that standard ground game stuff yeah

00:16:46.040 branding type stuff we had to change the way the community and our own clients thought about what the firm was and and

00:16:53.880 now when they call in they say I am interested in working with Brio financial advisor can I get an

00:16:59.120 appointment with an advisor you know and that takes a long time to kind of turn

00:17:04.280 that Battleship so I I guess in that sense that was our that was our business development task is to that allowed us

00:17:12.079 then to have a much wider funnel allowed us to then also just on board a lot more

00:17:18.039 clients because they weren't just bottlenecked with one person and then you have to have that conversation about oh yeah well you're actually going to be

00:17:24.039 working with this other person I know you wanted Janet Brio right you get the less than adviser even though uh you

00:17:31.600 know just as talented from a a literal financial planning standpoint and that

00:17:36.640 is a it's it's something for people to keep in mind when you're naming the firm is you know back in the you said she

00:17:42.280 started in the 80s that wasn't she wasn't thinking about succession 50 years later gosh is it yeah well 40

00:17:49.480 years later I'm sorry Janet so what 40 years later like you're not thinking about that and so you know that it

00:17:54.799 becomes top of Mind later on and so it is a good reminder for advisers even if you say like hey I'm going to be a solo

00:18:00.000 adviser I'm building a one you know one person shop here maybe I'll have an assistant but that's it that and that's

00:18:06.080 awesome that's fine but it may also be the time in your life and there may come a day where you say yeah like I do want

00:18:11.480 to get some uh value out of this thing that I've built and be able to sell it and it's a lot easier to sell if it's a

00:18:16.840 business and not just a you know a solo practice and so you know moving away from a name can be really hard yeah and

00:18:23.799 we didn't see any value you when Natalie and I bought in we didn't see any value in changing the name to Brio Pine or any

00:18:29.360 of that nonsense because again it would have been the same thing with whoever comes along next you know just keep Brio

00:18:35.400 and go with that it's because it's a word that's kind of a different word we

00:18:41.960 we did keep that rather than changing it to academic advisors.com or whatever

00:18:47.320 because it's so distinct we felt like that was a a brand in in and of itself

00:18:52.400 no it's a great point that Brio does not sound like a name and so people may think like oh I wonder what that is and

00:18:58.480 I don't know if that word is something out there or you know can make something up for its meaning Beyond a last name

00:19:05.400 but good luck something to Google so I am curious about the the Dynamics of

00:19:11.400 working with family because this is something that uh has come up for uh listeners will email me sometimes and

00:19:16.919 and ask because they know that my wife works at advice pay our our payment platform and my mom is actually a

00:19:23.400 bookkeeper with Fab counters one of our service lines and uh my brother was our

00:19:28.919 prior coo before moving back to Texas and so I I have worked with a lot of family in in different capacities so I

00:19:35.280 am curious what it's like working with you know or what your experience was working with your wife because I I can

00:19:41.440 share some of my experiences but but I'm interested to hear yours yeah not only working with with my wife but with my mother-in-law as well it is a

00:19:48.400 double-edged sword the on the plus side you know when you especially when

00:19:54.520 you're talking about a business partner that is a that is is close to I mean

00:20:00.240 that's that's becomes family like it or not but you you you are you are bonded with that person in a very deep way and

00:20:08.280 you have to really deeply trust that person when you start that partnership with that person with us because we were

00:20:15.280 family we we didn't have to we knew that all of us were rooting for each other if that makes sense like we all knew that

00:20:22.640 that underlying level of trust we all understood each other's values very deeply because we we were family with

00:20:28.640 each other and we knew each other right Janet knew her own daughter so bringing your daughter on as a partner in that

00:20:35.200 sense you know everything about well you think you know everything about your kids but you you do I mean you have a

00:20:42.080 good understanding of of what they stand for and what what they're in it for and so that is the positive so we were able

00:20:48.520 to cut out a lot of the kind of dating aspect of finding new partners and

00:20:53.640 working together right that that part we got to go straight by Straight past on the flip side the negative is it adds

00:21:01.919 another Dynamic to your family relationship you know the business is always going to be there Natalie and I

00:21:09.120 are home from work and something's going on at the business well it's not like we

00:21:14.919 I mean we we were not great about setting the boundary of okay we're not going to talk about business or whatever

00:21:20.799 is bothering me or whatever you said in that meeting that's very difficult to do and so that's the piece that takes some

00:21:27.559 work and sometimes people might need to work with with coaches we we did not work with a coach in hindsight maybe we

00:21:33.600 should have and I know some exist out there but that's kind of that you take the good with the bad the good is you I

00:21:41.240 think it's very easy to trust your family in a way that's different from someone else at least from the get-go I

00:21:47.960 mean obviously as you work with a partner hopefully you you earn the same level of trust but the stakes are higher

00:21:54.120 and you can take Liberties maybe saying something in a meeting that's not as professional because it's your spouse or

00:22:00.880 because it's your mom or dad that you would never have said to someone who's not family which can be good but it can

00:22:07.279 also be bad that that can be tough if there are people in the room especially that are not family yeah totally yeah I

00:22:13.320 mean humans like we're we're a social animal right and we have hierarchies and those hierarchies change

00:22:20.640 based on where you are you know if if I'm having dinner at Janet's house it's a different hierarchy than if I'm in the

00:22:27.520 meeting room with her and we're sitting there talking as partners right one in one level I'm the son-in-law just be

00:22:33.799 quiet and eat your dinner and the other one it's like we're business partners let's argue about this thing if we if we need to argue and you and and moving

00:22:41.600 seamlessly across that we always have to navigate that as humans but it just it's just another layer of complexity that

00:22:47.520 that wasn't there before on the balance though I'm I'm very glad we we did it I got to know my mother-in-law Janet in a

00:22:54.559 way I never had before I have a huge amount of respect for her not just is my mother-in-law but as a business owner

00:23:00.279 that's something that I'm really glad I have you know I treasure that yeah I I I

00:23:05.919 really appreciate you've been willing to share that because I think my experience has been very similar where I I would

00:23:11.200 like to be able to say that before I went into business with family you know we sat down and had a really you know we

00:23:16.799 we you know wrote up exactly how we were going to interact at work and all that but of course none of us did you just

00:23:22.600 sort of figur it out as you go and and yeah you'll you'll be eating dinner at night and something about work comes up and and suddenly you know I'm in the

00:23:29.400 position where technically I'm the boss and so you know suddenly I'm talking to my wife about something she needs to go do for work and it's a little weird and

00:23:37.200 and I have to be really careful that you know and like all right like when she's

00:23:42.640 you know talking about work and like okay am I your boss right now or am I your husband like are you just sort of complaining about a challenge right now

00:23:49.159 or am I your boss and like you need me to solve a problem or tell you to go solve it and so yeah we are terrible uh

00:23:56.520 and and I shouldn't say terrible about doing this we have made the conscious decision to not leave work at work

00:24:03.279 that's something we we actually really value is that we bring the personal to work and we take the personal home and we enjoy that interaction but there are

00:24:09.840 some folks who just who need and prefer to compartmentalize and that's totally fine you just need to be on the same page so one of you is not doing it one

00:24:17.200 way and the other trying to do it the other yeah I I think I think the reality is anyone with a bit of entrepreneur

00:24:24.320 blood in them it's very hard to compartmentalize like you're always kind of bubbling up ideas about that and and

00:24:30.960 we have fun with that like Natalie and I are both in businesses now she's still at Brio and she's the managing partner

00:24:36.039 there and I'm doing my new thing and we still talk about work all the time because we both find it fascinating and

00:24:42.399 we it brings us a lot of meaning to our lives so but I think it's probably maybe

00:24:47.960 a little easier now that we're in different businesses than the same one but still know the business I think it's

00:24:53.360 I I I hate to quote statistics off without having in front of me but something like 80% of of Partners or

00:24:59.679 spouses can't tell you the correct job title or job duties that their spouse

00:25:05.520 has I mean like in the end most couples don't actually know what the other person does and so when you work

00:25:11.080 together you do and you know exactly what they do because you you know you're you're there for all those conversations

00:25:16.559 and you know it's really cool to be able to know the personalities of the people that they're talking about if they're having this you know they had this

00:25:21.760 really cool moment at work or or a struggle with a client or with a you know with a another team member to be

00:25:27.080 able to talk about it and know that you know all right I know who that is like they probably meant well and you know be

00:25:32.200 able to talk about it but again good and bad and and I do want to also preface this by saying there are some listeners

00:25:37.919 who are thinking there is no way I would ever work with my wife or my mother-in-law or my brother and that is

00:25:44.000 totally fine okay that doesn't mean your relationship is less than uh ours because we have we have worked with our

00:25:49.799 partners uh every relationship is different and that is okay so you just have to know yourself and and be willing

00:25:55.279 to just be authentic about that so I'll I'll put that preface out there so so you're working as a adviser you're

00:26:01.840 climbing the small business ladder coming a corporate ladder would be unfair step

00:26:07.600 your the step stool you know you're you've become a part you've bought in as a partner your

00:26:13.000 wife's taken over his managing partner and I presume you have an idea talk to me about sort of the the initial sort of

00:26:20.640 idea for holista plan and and how this ended up you know sort of coming to be

00:26:26.039 yeah so you know I was talking about how our task was really to institutionalize

00:26:32.919 not just the brand but even the way the business worked when you transition from

00:26:38.120 charismatic founder to an ensemble practice you're starting to do things like take the knowledge that's in that

00:26:45.240 one person's brain and spread it out and institutionalize it and create written processes and have your systems enforce

00:26:52.360 those processes that was a lot of the work that we were doing and I found that to be really fasc ating work the idea of

00:27:01.120 really really the motivation was always like can we do more can we do more for clients and there is there's always

00:27:07.559 that's the thing about something like financial planning there is always another thing you could look at you could look at their whatever it is every

00:27:13.880 single day if you wanted to you could haul out a new document every day it's not practical because we don't have the

00:27:19.880 efficiencies to do that but anyway the point is we were trying to do more and more and so that meant trying to find

00:27:26.080 more things to do but also the efficiencies that'll allow us to deliver those new areas of planning in a way

00:27:32.720 that that we could do it well and that we could do it completely and it wasn't just Janet or the lead advisers doing it

00:27:39.080 was something the full company could do and so that meant building institutionalized processes and then it

00:27:44.840 it moved to what I like to call an assembly line approach I think in xypn y'all are calling it a financial

00:27:51.559 planning calendar but basically instead of just hodg Podge hey you're coming in next week let me look

00:27:57.159 at all your estate stuff and this it's okay it's October I'm looking at everybody's estate stuff and it's May

00:28:03.000 and I'm looking at everybody's tax return and it's June I'm looking at everybody's benefits or whatever it is

00:28:08.799 the reason I really like that approach is you start to see amazing insights

00:28:15.880 into how to do things better when the whole company is looking at tax returns at the same time and you're all running the same checklist your new ideas are

00:28:23.080 starting to Bubble Up about how to do it faster here's another thing we need to look at I saw it on this return I really

00:28:29.559 enjoyed that process and just getting better and better at doing more and more

00:28:34.960 financial planning work for clients yeah and I'll say most firms don't operate that way I I I love uh kitus has a quote

00:28:41.320 in one of his sort of the future financial planning presentations and he talks about how today we have a meeting to find out if we needed a meeting yes I

00:28:47.799 think we're I think we're too reactive as as a profession right and so you know

00:28:52.880 if you but if you sort of structure out and say okay in October we're doing this thing then your team team knows a month

00:28:58.159 out you what data needs to be collected and then what needs to be analyzed and and I I'm it's very rare that you're

00:29:04.240 going to look at a tax return and be like okay everything's good moving on like there there's going to be something

00:29:09.480 there and so yeah to your point we we call it an we provide an annual service calendar but it really is just

00:29:14.600 structuring that planning process to say what are you going to do and and when are you going to do it whether each client is on their own schedule I like

00:29:21.120 your way of every March or every October we're doing the same thing but really helps to streamline and and probably

00:29:27.440 catch a lot more stuff than when you're just sort of like ad hoc reviewing a tax return whenever it shows up and and

00:29:32.640 hoping you catch everything absolutely and you know you start to build template you know because you're starting to

00:29:37.760 write the same email over and over again right well then you the company starts to build a template and you improve upon

00:29:43.200 it as you go I I I just really enjoyed doing that and improving how we

00:29:48.799 delivered Financial Planning and so that that might have been The Germ that kind

00:29:54.000 of grew into what holistic plan is today another thing that happened and this is five or six years ago is I had a New

00:30:00.760 Year's resolution I take New Year's resolutions very seriously and one of mine I can't remember what year it was

00:30:06.559 is I'm gonna I'm going to learn how to make uh Dynamic websites like I really

00:30:11.720 was interested in doing that I I'm not a artist I can't paint things or sculpt

00:30:17.440 things I I do some theater type things but the idea of having a have an idea

00:30:23.799 for a product and then being able to create it and make it exist in the world was really really appealing to me and

00:30:30.600 you know if you're an inventor you got to go get a factory to manufacture it but with software you can create it and

00:30:37.120 then you can distribute it very efficiently and so that idea just really appealed to me and so in the background

00:30:43.159 while we were doing this other work I was teaching myself how to code I said I was an engineer in college but you know

00:30:49.480 that's like this is what an if statement is that was about all I knew so yeah I started learning that and I started

00:30:55.600 building systems for our own firm so you decide you know to teach yourself how to code you know you mentioned

00:31:01.200 earlier a little bit of a background in engineering but was this this was sort of your first foray and learning how to

00:31:06.360 actually write code and so what was that process like yeah so I found randomly

00:31:12.039 some blog post that said here's how I learned how to make websites and I just

00:31:17.159 followed everything in that blog post and it would the blog post was like this is six weeks to be able to create a

00:31:22.320 prototype startup web company or website and so I followed that and it's true I

00:31:27.440 was able within like a month and a half to be able to make a very rudimentary set of stuff and I just kept working at

00:31:34.159 that and I built systems then that we used within the firm um all of our billing the way we route some of our

00:31:40.840 trades throughout the firm that was all on code that I had written and so I was kind of learning how to do that and so

00:31:48.399 what happened is about two years ago I could not get out of my head the idea that

00:31:54.840 we've got something here with this assembly line approach to doing financial planning but the reality is

00:32:01.399 it's still incredibly inefficient I mean planning is at best scales linearly I mean we had

00:32:08.200 260 clients and like 13 employees which is great I mean we gave really white glove service to these clients that we

00:32:15.000 had but there's a lot of people out there who really need financial planning help and the high net worth clients is

00:32:22.200 literally the 1% and there's 99% more people out there who need this stuff

00:32:27.760 and so I was thinking all right what is a scalable way to deliver financial planning the first the first technology

00:32:35.279 I thought of is one you've probably heard of it's called a book very scalable right extremely scal

00:32:42.799 scalable like you write everything you know down in this book and then you can sell it and you sell it to a thousand people and now a thousand people know

00:32:49.240 everything you do about financial planning um I quickly discovered that

00:32:54.720 writing a book was a good way to not have very much fun and not make any money which are two prerequisites I have

00:33:01.080 for any business venture I enter into so that was not that was not it for me and

00:33:06.480 and also in the back of my mind I knew I wanted to do something that was software based and so I said okay forget a book

00:33:12.399 let's build like a consumer facing kind of Choose Your Own Adventure uh financial planning system that would

00:33:18.760 allow them to enter things about themselves do you have children do you not how old are you or you know and then

00:33:24.760 it would kind of spit out some financial planning recommendations that you could start to kind of self-help

00:33:30.519 build your own financial plan and I actually built a whole product on that and and I was beta testing it and it did

00:33:36.720 not take it didn't take for I think two reasons one I was not built for what that type

00:33:45.840 of product needs which is a ton of educational content I mean I mean I'll

00:33:51.679 give you an example acquisition is tough oh I mean well it's it's the you know holist I'll I'll talk about holista plan

00:33:58.320 for a second I know we're getting there but like holista plan I might have one line where I read your tax return and I see that you've got some charitable

00:34:04.919 donations all right you're married and you've got $20,000 with the charitable donations to a financial advisor I would

00:34:11.960 just say hey you know I see that you've got charitable donations of 20,000 this

00:34:17.119 year if you double that up using a Donor advised fund you can get a $40,000

00:34:22.599 itemized deduction this year and then take the standard next year and most advisers no 80% of what I just said but

00:34:30.000 if I'm going to try to explain that over like a video like a YouTube or like a

00:34:35.079 blog post to somebody who I've never seen and they're they're on the consumer side I mean that's that's 30 minutes of

00:34:42.119 background this is what an itemized deduction is this is what a standard deduction is this is what a donor advis

00:34:47.399 fund is and I was realizing like that's going to take all my time is building that stuff instead of getting into code

00:34:53.839 which is what I wanted to do and then the second thing is I don't don't think you know people hire financial advisers

00:35:00.280 because they don't want to do this stuff like they don't want to sit through 20 hours of learning about it to do it they

00:35:06.119 they want you to do it they want you know again we were talking about Consulting earlier a lot of these

00:35:11.800 companies knew the things that they were that they had to do but a lot of times they brought in a consultant to help

00:35:17.920 actually make it happen the accountability the organization the expertise yes to help

00:35:24.000 make it happen more efficiently but people know which just they don't necessarily want to do all

00:35:29.160 those steps and so anyway so that was my consumer facing company and so at the

00:35:34.280 end of 2018 again my I take my New Year's

00:35:39.359 resolutions very seriously I share them with with some of my friends and I I shared with my this group of friends

00:35:45.000 like I'm gonna figure this thing out in 2019 or I'm G to give up and I said I'm gonna try to do something that's now

00:35:51.520 advisor facing does the same thing I really liked that Choose Your Own Adventure concept it's B basically a

00:35:57.319 very detailed checklist if I know these things about a client then these are the

00:36:02.480 probably the recommendations I would make to that client and if I know these other things I would change them this way that was the core of it that I

00:36:09.400 really really wanted to work on and so I shared that and that was 2007 or New

00:36:15.520 Year the end of 2018 so New Year of 2019 this year oh wow and then one of my

00:36:21.240 friends Kevin loer who's a adviser based out of Virginia around February we started

00:36:27.560 talking and he was really interested in this idea so February we started holista

00:36:33.200 plan and that was what it started out as was really just an enormous Choose Your

00:36:39.920 Own Adventure basically I I showed the original prototype was like all these

00:36:44.960 boxes where you'd fill information in about your client and then it would spit out some I'm I'm careful not to use the

00:36:52.119 word recommendations these are observations you the adviser make the recommendations but that's what it was

00:36:58.119 and and Kevin took one look at it you know my my screen with like 800 boxes on it and he's like I'm not filling that

00:37:05.800 in and and I'm not asking my client to fill that in and he was the one who had

00:37:12.000 the Insight of okay the software needs to read in these documents to gather this information we need to pull this

00:37:18.560 information from where it already lives and not ask some horrible you know some

00:37:24.599 person in a terrible job to enter it all in and that's that's really what it became it was it was the marriage of this what I now know is called an expert

00:37:31.599 system which is a system that takes in inputs and spits out uh observations or

00:37:36.720 recommendations and this idea of reading in documents the OCR the optical character recognition piece that that's

00:37:42.920 on the front end of that and that's that's holista plan we started in February and had a beta out in May and

00:37:49.760 then xypn live is when we kind of became mildly famous you know because we won

00:37:55.560 that we won that competition with at that time we had like 50 not even maybe 30 customers at

00:38:03.280 that point but we had an idea that seemed to really resonate with people that's awesome so I want to dig more

00:38:09.760 into holist I have a couple of questions before we get there back to your five years ago teach yourself to code New

00:38:17.040 Year's resolution I'm just curious if you used any particular course or program or if that was just all

00:38:23.680 self-taught it was I did I if I can dig

00:38:29.000 up this blog post I will send it I don't know if you have show notes that you use but I I've sent this one blog post to

00:38:34.920 other people because it it I mean this thing changed my life but yes there are some there's a lot of good stuff

00:38:41.720 online Udacity is a is a um that's a self you know teaching I took their

00:38:48.280 beginner programming course and that took me through you know building some stuff there's some online tutorials I

00:38:56.640 think one of them was called Learn Python the Hard Way I think is the name of it again I can send you this stuff

00:39:02.400 but but then when you really want to start building Pro like a product a

00:39:07.440 thing that you can interact with and that you know you log into and it's interactive there are these web

00:39:13.160 Frameworks and the one I use is called Django DJ NGO and they have a great tutorial just

00:39:19.599 on their website and if you go through that you you have to do some of that foundational work first to know just how

00:39:25.119 to set up your computer to to run Python and stuff like that but I I I can

00:39:30.400 guarantee within a month and a half you'll be able to build a usable site

00:39:35.640 that you know it's not going to be holistic plan but it'll do something I think my first site I built was a

00:39:41.400 shopping list for my family so like my wife and I could both log in and we could add stuff to the shopping list and

00:39:46.920 then when you're at the grocery store you could pick things off the shopping list there's much easier ways to do that

00:39:52.000 now but back then that was kind of a novel thing that was hard to find so that was the thing I built and then it

00:39:58.480 just kind of went from there so that was that was going to be my second question was what language did you really focus

00:40:03.839 on because most web most web interfaces CSS or HTML sounds like you learned some Python and then are using this platform

00:40:10.599 for it yeah Python and then you got to learn your HTML and your JavaScript that

00:40:15.839 it's kind of in that order that you go and then the second question was going to be about the transition from you know

00:40:21.599 from your full-time job into holista plan then I want to dig into the tech but uh can you talk about sort of the

00:40:26.880 decision there and you know I don't know I'm assuming you could have gone part-time or or done you know done

00:40:32.520 something else but sounds like you had a clean separation and and then ended up launching this product so just sort of

00:40:37.640 curious about that yeah I wish it were cleaner honestly Allan you know

00:40:43.079 I it's it's like uh I'm 41 so maybe I was hitting my midlife crisis my first

00:40:48.520 of many midlife crisises I don't know how many I'll have but I I I really was interested in this problem and I was

00:40:55.640 finding myself working on it late at night you know you do your job and then you get the kids in bed and you do your

00:41:01.240 exercise and then from like midnight from 10:00 pm. till midnight I was working on this other stuff and I wasn't

00:41:07.800 ever really going to move the ball forward if that's how I was working on it and so it was a difficult decision to

00:41:16.119 make but it was the right decision to make I I said look I I need to give up my client relationships and of course

00:41:23.319 that is very disruptive to business when one of your lead advisers and one of

00:41:29.480 your owners of the business says hey I'm going to go off and do my this other thing and I think to mitigate that to

00:41:37.359 some extent did it a little bit halfway and we should have done it all the way so basically yes we did we did take away

00:41:43.800 all my client relationships we transferred all of them those to other advisers but we kind of messaged it like

00:41:50.359 well Rogers working on something else but he's going to keep helping out on these things and and we didn't do a

00:41:55.920 clean break at first and that was a challenge because you can't do a good

00:42:01.880 job if you've got one foot in each thing and that wasn't good for anybody and it

00:42:08.000 was really only once we made the decision that that wasn't working well that I was really able to to take off

00:42:14.119 and make real Headway on the on the new project and I think honestly the business was better off too once I was

00:42:19.880 fully out because they didn't have to kind of look at each other and be like is is Roger supposed to be doing that

00:42:25.559 thing or are we doing that they they were able to move on and then really

00:42:30.720 decide who is responsible for what of my old responsibilities but yeah that's a

00:42:35.880 transition that's that's not an easy thing to do for any business when you you pull someone out of of that kind of

00:42:42.040 role but they made it and they're doing they're doing just fine without me probably better without me we'll see we'll see about that yeah I mean you do

00:42:49.680 and and this is not a shot at you by any stretch I mean for all of us we we do learn that we can all be replaced no

00:42:57.319 matter how core we are to the business as an owner and a lead adviser with all these relationships and all of that like

00:43:03.599 you can survive losing anyone now you lose everyone that's hard to survive but any one person you you you can make it

00:43:10.119 that doesn't make it easy it just makes it survivable totally and again the family Dynamic was part of it too right

00:43:15.720 I mean I you know it's it's one thing if you've got business partners and you're like hey guys it's not working out I got to move because of my my family or

00:43:23.319 whatever but this was my family so like I wasn't just leaving the business I was

00:43:28.720 dumping a whole lot more work on my spouse right and so that you know you

00:43:33.960 talk about the pros and cons of working with family when it doesn't work out or

00:43:39.400 when you have to make a a a large change like that it's it's disruptive both for the business and for the family for sure

00:43:46.480 and we we had to really work through that for some time yeah so how has that been um you know with with that

00:43:53.079 transition I mean I I was your wife supportive of hey we're going to start this tech company because I mean yeah

00:43:59.119 you've got some customers now but but that means you're reinvesting into the business so you know you you lost that salary so how was that conversation just

00:44:06.640 around you know family finances whether you had been working at that firm or you had another you were at a different firm

00:44:12.960 either way you you went from I'm assuming a comfortable salary to a salary of zero yeah well though remember

00:44:19.240 though the salary was coming out of our business so you you you fire me and suddenly our our profits go that's not a

00:44:26.839 bad way to do it it's a sad reality yeah I as my spouse she was very

00:44:33.359 supportive because she knew that I really wanted to do this she knew that this was always kind of in the back of

00:44:38.800 my mind I always wanted to start a thing I mean I had a lot of I got a lot of satisfaction from coming into a business

00:44:45.119 and helping to transform it but starting something from scratch had always been something I wanted to do so she was very

00:44:51.079 supportive of that my spouse my business partner was the one who got stuck with a lot lot of work when her business

00:44:58.200 partner left right that's my also my wife and so that was that was harder and

00:45:04.520 you know and she was more conflicted about it than just my spouse and you know that's a whole other conversation

00:45:10.359 she could have about how she manage that financially we're you know we're we're

00:45:15.760 very we're very PR privileged that we you know Brio is a well-run business it

00:45:22.680 it supports our family and so we have quite a bit of way for me to pull get a

00:45:28.480 holistic plan up and running and we don't really have to worry like if we would have if we were you know back in

00:45:34.480 our 20s living in a tiny shoe box apartment it's it's just kind of it's different now so you you sort of you

00:45:41.280 went a little bit into holista plan but can you give me just and give listeners the high level like what what does

00:45:47.040 holista plan do today yeah so what it does today we've only got you log in

00:45:53.000 there's three screens total that you see in our in our software so it's easy for me to describe it or give a demo but

00:45:59.000 basically it's for doing tax return reviews tax returns reviews are really

00:46:04.880 should be part of any financial planners toolkit your tax return is a very very

00:46:09.960 rich document that gives you a lot of insight into a client's Financial life

00:46:16.400 but the problem is it's can be quite time consuming it's a ugly document with a million pages to it so we automate the

00:46:24.280 process of doing a tax return view so screen one when you log in you you've got a list of all your returns that

00:46:30.400 you've uploaded if you want to upload a new one you you upload the PDF there's a button to do that the software reads it

00:46:37.119 in it it runs optical character recognition on it and kind of pulls all

00:46:42.240 the the relevant data out of the tax return and on the back side of that is

00:46:49.040 this report that basically in a one two pager has some observations like the one

00:46:56.559 that example I mentioned earlier about the about the charitable donations other stuff like you know hey you're in a low

00:47:02.839 tax bracket this year consider doing a Roth conversion and and on and on this is what you need to do for to avoid an

00:47:09.480 underpayment penalty make sure that you pay at least this amount in in estimated taxes stuff like that and then a lot of

00:47:15.839 it actually is just showing the client some information they may not have even known was in the tax return like this is

00:47:21.520 what you're paying on capital gains this is what you're paying on your next dollar of marginal or on your at the

00:47:27.839 margin of of ordinary income your modified adjusted gross income is this and therefore you are eligible for these

00:47:34.720 types of credits and not eligible for these other things so that's what the report is you kind of have to see it to

00:47:41.240 believe it but it's it's meant to be a full tax return review that you would

00:47:46.880 then be able to deliver to a client in a in a wh labeled branded report the third screen is a scenario analysis so if you

00:47:54.119 want to take it further and say okay the system says that I should consider doing a Roth conversion well let's play with

00:47:59.960 the numbers for 2019 or 2020 what happens if I do a $30,000 Roth

00:48:05.119 conversion oh but we're going to be realizing that capital gain on selling the beach house and you know just

00:48:10.640 playing with the numbers it's scenario analysis and that's it that's the software right now it's it's end to end

00:48:16.319 you start with a tax return and you finish with this report and then also

00:48:21.359 some scenario analysis to kind of talk through the client uh what they could be doing in the future it to me it's it's a

00:48:28.040 critical way to engage with a client where you may not have been been engaging with them before or even if you

00:48:33.920 were it's a way to do it a heck of a lot more efficiently than before no that that's awesome I um you know taxes are

00:48:40.200 are one of those critical components that uh you know we take one class on in our cfp program so I feel like there

00:48:46.520 there's probably a couple of groupings of advisers there's the advisers who just completely ignore taxes and know

00:48:52.040 nothing about it that would be really tough to do I'm GNA I'm going to say that's a very tiny percentage and then

00:48:57.079 the bulk of us took a class or maybe two classes in accounting and maybe worked at a Vita clinic or something in school

00:49:03.680 but in the end like we know enough to to spot BS if you will when it comes to

00:49:09.040 taxes but you know ask me to explain all of the you know nuances of any real tax

00:49:15.040 program it's GNA be a little tough and then you have sort of the third group of advisers who are CPAs I mean I'm always

00:49:20.160 amazed by the number of financial planners who come from the the tax background and really got into financial planning would you say that that holista

00:49:27.200 plan is really designed for all three of those cohorts of advisors or if I have a CPA and I'm a expert on tax am I gonna

00:49:35.040 get your pro am I gonna get your software and go oh I don't need this like no no kidding we've seen I mean I

00:49:40.680 can answer that and say both or all three because I've seen all of them you

00:49:46.200 know if you're if you're a big Ensemble firm and you're already doing a bit of tax planning or a lot of tax planning

00:49:52.520 for you the value is in the efficiency gain and the value is also not just the

00:49:57.680 efficiency gain but the consistency right I mean it's one thing if if you've got 10 employees and one you know 10 of

00:50:03.960 them are doing tax return reviews are you going to get the same exact deliverable every time out of all 10 of those people it's unlikely even if

00:50:11.079 you've got all the best processes and everything so our software creates one

00:50:16.440 consistent report so that's that that's that end of the spectrum the other end of the spectrum and and they're there I

00:50:22.079 know they're there because they tell me is like the people who say you know I knew I should have been doing more tax return planning tax return reviews but I

00:50:29.400 just haven't been doing it and this helps me do it so for so for some it's the efficiency for some it's really just

00:50:35.280 the access to a checklist that they haven't had before and and to the latter

00:50:40.799 group I think I think it's I mean it could be transformational for them because they're able to deliver a

00:50:47.480 product that's at the same level as those other guys I was talking about that big Ensemble firm that's been

00:50:52.559 building their checklist for 15 years you you know year after year building on that

00:50:57.880 infrastructure we've got all that in the software so now someone who's just a solo they're able to deliver that same

00:51:04.839 level of detail uh that The Ensemble firm is so that that's actually the the

00:51:10.240 the side that makes me really excited as it turns out those big Enterprise firms are the ones who maybe bring more

00:51:16.599 license money to the table but I I I I'm committing to working with both ends of

00:51:21.960 that spectrum because I think the combination of the two of them I think really move the profession forward you

00:51:27.880 know my my goal Allen when I started two years ago I said to myself if I could

00:51:34.720 just impact a thousand people you know Brio had at the time about 260 clients

00:51:40.640 and I just kind of multiplied that by roughly four and I said a thousand people if I can impact a thousand people

00:51:46.319 and get them better financial planning that would be success for me and we've already as of this morning done tax

00:51:53.680 return reviews on over three ,600 tax returns you know so I've already managed

00:51:59.520 to go beyond what I ever thought I would do in my wildest dreams so now I just got to lean into it and see what we can

00:52:05.640 do next which is I think enable planners of all Stripes to to do better work with

00:52:11.160 for their clients so like you uh I you know I was part of of starting a tech

00:52:16.480 company with a background in financial planning I however was not smart enough to go learn how to code which hurt us

00:52:22.319 which is its own story uh since we got we got taken by a Development Group early on because I didn't know how to

00:52:27.440 review their code because I couldn't read code we we figured it out so thanks to thanks to the team pull pulling it

00:52:33.319 all together talk to me about sort of you know you were an adviser now you're a tech entrepreneur and and maybe a little bit you know sort of what what's

00:52:40.960 different about your day-to-day and and the life of of you know being in Tech versus financial planning service

00:52:46.960 because uh I know we have some listeners that have an idea for for Tech that they want to build and but they're not quite

00:52:52.520 sure what does it mean to be a you know a tech entrepreneur so uh any insight on

00:52:57.839 that yes well the good news is our backgrounds as financial advisers as

00:53:04.280 financial planners really helps us in this industry because our standards for delivering

00:53:11.960 service as financial planners and financial advisers the level of empathy that we bring to the table in that

00:53:18.000 profession is wildly different from what is expected or what is the norm in in

00:53:23.599 the world of software right so I think we're able to really wow people when we actually care what they

00:53:29.880 have to say to us and we respond to their emails with some empathy so that's a huge leg up that we have as financial

00:53:37.000 advisers there have been challenges one thing that one thing that I am still

00:53:43.079 trying to get used to is when especially working for a firm where you're you know

00:53:48.640 you trying to deliver very high working with high net worth families White Glove

00:53:54.160 service we really strove to push out a perfect product every time with

00:54:01.200 software you're sometimes pushing out a product that is good enough but not

00:54:07.640 perfect and in fact you're you're always chasing Perfection with software there's always more tweaks you can do there's

00:54:13.160 always more features you can add there's always a bug you can fix and that can

00:54:18.920 really wait I mean when you're used to being able to really just work on that email for an hour before you send it out

00:54:25.720 to the client and now you know you're pushing stuff out much more quickly in a

00:54:31.040 software environment that that has been something that I've struggled to to get used to I feel like morally I'm I'm used

00:54:39.040 to a different level of product that I'm pushing out I'm not saying holista plan's trash but I mean that the the

00:54:44.640 reality with software is like there's there's always little things you're trying to fix you know what I mean especially when you're new and so that

00:54:51.480 was a thing I had to get used to and then related to that is on the the customer service side I mean we holista

00:54:59.280 plan now has more subscribers than we had when I worked at

00:55:05.200 Brio than clients that we had at Brio you know we have we have many hundreds of subscribers now not in the thousands

00:55:11.520 but hundreds and serving them in a way that is up to the standards that we're

00:55:17.400 used to as financial planners is challenging to do they don't all get the three paragraph email that explains

00:55:23.039 every Nuance of what what they're asking you know what I mean and so that's been a thing that we've we've had to try to

00:55:29.240 turn the battleship on but I think on the whole what's been I think it's truly an advantage though that we have that

00:55:35.359 background I mean not just knowing the domain but just having those expectations for ourselves to get back

00:55:41.240 to people the same day if we can to you know that's going to help us in the long run as we set the the tone of the values

00:55:48.160 of what our companies about and and and how we're going to interact with with our clients it's it should be the way

00:55:53.520 that advisers work with their clients that that's kind of the vision we have for our company I'm sure that's how

00:55:58.559 you're approaching it with with yours as well you know it's we that's in our DNA that's how we operate no it really is a

00:56:05.920 great point that just the volume of questions that come in and and what's messed up you know whether there's bugs

00:56:12.520 in the system I mean you're just you're responding in a different way it's you don't have uh a couple of days to go run

00:56:18.640 a bunch of analysis and try to figure out you know what's going to be the next choice you know it's like you got to get it fixed or at least provide a work and

00:56:25.280 then go get it fixed and so definitely the the day-to-day is definitely different and and one of the challenges

00:56:31.400 like any entrepreneur is you know where to spend your time is it better to have a a sub 30 minute response time on

00:56:37.799 tickets well that's great but that means that you can't really get into flow when it comes to coding anyone who know who

00:56:43.839 is a developer or has worked with developers know like I mean they they can get into a flow and and write what

00:56:49.079 appears to be a month's worth of code and a day but if you go in and interrupt them it'll take them a day to get back into it and so you know th those are

00:56:56.200 tough decisions when you're by yourself or working with some contractors and that sort of thing so just again just

00:57:02.119 very different just curious to hear your experiences on that oh yeah totally yeah we're we're living that for sure right

00:57:07.400 now it's fun though you know what's great though Allen is our clients are financial planners who are like the

00:57:13.359 greatest nicest people most supportive people on the planet and so like even

00:57:18.920 when something's going wrong and again I I'm making it sound like the thing's a hunk of junk but I mean we I don't think

00:57:24.280 it is I think is a great product but there's things that can be improved and people are like so supportive about it

00:57:30.200 it's amazing and so that's been really gratifying to be able to work with people who get it and and they see the

00:57:37.359 Promise and they're they're rooting for us to succeed that's been wonderful yeah I I will say when you start double

00:57:42.599 billing their clients they do get a little angrier uh as they should that was our Alpha product three years ago so

00:57:48.799 if you're listening now that can't happen anymore yeah you know early on when we launched our Alpha product you

00:57:54.480 know it was a client could click pay but if it if nothing happened they clicked pay again and then pay again and then

00:58:00.079 pay every time they clicked it would create a new subscription payment and so you know again one of those things that

00:58:05.839 every time we tested we just clicked the button once we didn't think about clicking it three times and you know

00:58:11.520 every single client apparently decided to click that button three or four times so we were like wow look at all these subscriptions and and we started like oh

00:58:18.559 no it's all the same name so anyway Lessons Learned From Tech that is software development right there yeah

00:58:25.160 you you spend 10% of your time building the thing and you spend 90% of your time learning ways that people use the thing

00:58:32.440 in ways you would never expected we had a bug recently where uh someone was adding an analyst account you know and

00:58:39.160 it's just a sort of a admin and you can add one just fine but if you go to add a second one without refreshing the page

00:58:45.000 it was it was throwing an error and you're like oh my gosh like and again you just don't know and when you find it you fix it but that is a very different

00:58:52.880 sort of project management in in technology is very different than project management in financial planning

00:58:58.839 I'll say and maybe there's lessons to be learned there about how to improve our planning process you know with some of

00:59:04.799 the agile you know sort of development processes that that have come out of out of tech software development versus

00:59:10.599 trying to create the perfect 100 page plan actually you know creating a resilient system that that's responsive

00:59:17.119 to the client there there's probably some lessons to be learned there I'm I'm not the one to teach them I'm still learning about you know how to how to

00:59:25.160 or how to run a team of developers now rather than just me and my mom's basement coding away it's that's a whole

00:59:30.760 other that's a whole other set of skills that I've never had to do yeah a whole other thing so as you look forward I

00:59:36.440 mean if you're able to share sort of what's the vision for holista plan I mean you know you you can go super Niche

00:59:42.599 and just be the world's greatest tax return analysis software you can go maybe uh deeper into tax planning and

00:59:49.039 maybe start doing tax projections and tax returns I don't know that all of that software is pretty terrible you can

00:59:55.440 you know probably use your OCR technology and and some of the ideas to do this for insurance documents or

01:00:01.760 estate documents so I guess I'm just sort of curious what you see for at least for the next year or two sort of the direction that that you're trying to

01:00:08.160 to go with holista plan it's hard to say I'll tell you why like when we started

01:00:14.680 the the the second thing you said was what our original vision for the product was in fact when we started the product

01:00:19.839 my original prototype wasn't even in tax we started with proper pretty casually

01:00:25.359 because it just had fewer fewer variables to enter and that was kind of what we did with the Prototype you know

01:00:30.640 if your car is this old and your Collision coverage is this then maybe you think about this if your net worth

01:00:38.000 is this and your umbrella coverage is that maybe you know so it was that kind of stuff and in fact that code still

01:00:44.599 lives down in in the underbelly of of the of the system and our original Vision was exactly that which is these

01:00:51.720 same Concepts this ex this expert system thing we could keep applying it to other parts

01:00:57.200 of financial planning Insurance even estate the more and and also those

01:01:02.559 things can start to talk to each other I mean right now for example if I see on your tax return that you have Schedule C

01:01:10.119 income so you're self-employed I can spit out a recommendation that says an observation

01:01:16.680 sorry not a recommendation I can spit out an observation says hey I see that you're self-employed you may consider

01:01:22.720 contributing to a self-employed a solo 401k or a SE Ira but I don't know my my

01:01:30.079 software doesn't know if you already have a solo 401K but you the adviser know that but

01:01:35.920 if I was able to pull in information from say the portfolio management system now I have two things I can work

01:01:42.000 together on another thing that the tax return doesn't have your age so I can see yeah I mean I can kind of guess at

01:01:49.240 it because there's a checkbox if you're over age 65 you know but I don't know if you're eligible for qualified charitable

01:01:55.559 distributions from your IRA because I don't know if you're 70 and a half I would love to pull that in from the CRM

01:02:01.920 system and so my point is like I would love to start to create a much broader

01:02:07.200 Mosaic of information about these clients and spit out even more detailed information about them that's that was

01:02:13.200 the original vision for holistic plan I still think we'll probably experiment with that but I'll tell you we are way

01:02:20.279 deeper in tax than we ever expected to get and there's just more you can do yeah that that's a NeverEnding pro

01:02:26.400 project if that's all you ever want to do so yeah and and and really our our approach has been listen to advisers

01:02:35.160 about what they want I'll give you a good example of that we we had no plans

01:02:40.400 to ever make a scenario analysis screen those those that software already exists you know the stuff that we do with OCR

01:02:46.799 and with the report and the expert system stuff that's pretty unique that's not out there anywhere else the scenario

01:02:53.160 screen there's other software that does that my firm used uh tax tools I know BNA is and other software a lot of

01:02:59.440 people use we didn't want to build that but a lot of advisers were like hey you

01:03:04.559 need to dump this information you're reading into BNA and tax tools and I look up those systems and they don't

01:03:09.960 have a way to import data and so people were like I love your software but I you got to be able to I

01:03:16.640 need to be able to do scenario analysis and so we're like all right well we'll we'll build a scenario analysis screen

01:03:22.319 and so that's been a big part what the software is now and that was never part of our original plan had you asked me

01:03:28.960 six months ago uh and now we're starting to get the question of okay I'm doing scenarios this year and next year but I

01:03:36.000 want to see a 30-year projection of what do I do if I do those four years of Roth

01:03:42.359 conversions between retirement and turning 70 and a half and then I you know those sorts of more detailed

01:03:48.880 scenario long-term scenario plans our software doesn't do that right now and

01:03:54.960 so I suspect we will do a little bit of each and we will listen to advisers

01:04:01.799 about which ones they value and that's where we're going to go I really trust the community to be smarter than me or

01:04:09.160 Kevin individually about about what's going to land with the software but

01:04:14.440 remember I mean my my original motivation was I want to bring financial planning to more and more people and so

01:04:20.599 if you know if if it were just me a mad scientist in my BAS I'd probably say let's let's use this technology and and

01:04:27.720 spread it out let's look at estate Let's help people look at Insurance let's look at benefits and basically everything in

01:04:34.839 that in that annual Calendar let let's make it all those pieces much more efficient I would love to to do that one

01:04:40.839 day I love it well Roger thank you so much for for taking the time to come on the show and and share you know just

01:04:47.520 about your journey uh which I think is just so awesome from from life as a consultant to Life as a financial

01:04:53.039 planner to Life as a tech entrepreneur and the the software is awesome obviously the the winner of our fintech

01:04:58.559 competition which we had I'd have to go back and look 24 or 25 uh original submissions and six finalists so that

01:05:05.799 was not an easy win uh there was a lot of awesome Tech Platforms in there so uh congratulations on that and and wish you

01:05:12.520 the best for moving forward so thank you again for taking the time Allen I just want to thank you for doing that fintech

01:05:18.240 competition I it's uh obviously it was life-changing for our business it's such a great way to invest in the future of

01:05:24.920 our profession it's a way to it just injects new energy into what what's

01:05:30.559 happening the financial planning profession there's now a product out there holista plan that has hundreds of

01:05:35.920 people on it and and improving it and hopefully improving the work we do for clients I think to a large degree

01:05:41.480 because that competition exists so so thank you well awesome well thank you for that when it comes to compliance

01:05:48.160 most financial advisers want to run in the opposite direction but compliance doesn't have to be that big scary

01:05:53.319 monster hiding under under your bed our free risk assessment guide will walk you through how to perform a risk assessment

01:05:59.039 one step at a time learn how to perform a proper risk assessment and get access to our risk Matrix and risk assessment

01:06:05.160 table worksheets developed by XY planning Network's in-house compliance team visit XY planning network.com

01:06:11.319 riskassessment to download your copy today be sure to join our VIP community at xylan network.com viip to hang out

01:06:18.720 with other xyp and radio listeners ask questions for future mailbag episodes with myself and kitus and finally find a

01:06:24.799 community of like-minded financial advisers thanks so much for joining me today we'll see you next time you're not

01:06:31.079 alone and you're not crazy it's scary starting building and growing your own financial planning firm and that's why

01:06:37.000 we put together a free private Community just for you the cuttingedge financial planner go to XY planning network.com

01:06:44.680 svip or text xypn radio to 33344 and join a network of thousands

01:06:51.559 ready to change the lives of Gen X and gen my [Music]

01:07:05.200 clients

Unlock behind-the-scenes content—subscribe now!

Featuring

Roger Pine, CFA®, CFP®

Holistiplan

See all

Ways to Join

Use Cases

Advisor Success

Case Studies

Emerald

Add-ons

Sapphire

Case Study

Topics

Resources

Events

Building Holistiplan: How Curiosity Turned Into an Industry-Changing Tool

With Roger Pine, CFA®, CFP®

Featuring

Roger Pine, CFA®, CFP®

Listen to the Full Interview:

Watch the Full Interview:

Featured on the Show:

This Episode Is Sponsored By:

Read the Transcript Below:

Unlock behind-the-scenes content—subscribe now!

Featuring

Roger Pine, CFA®, CFP®

Share

You May Also Like

How to Mine the Market to Find & Maximize Your Niche

How Resilience and Community Paved a Path to Success

Providing a Personal Client Experience in a Virtual Firm

XYPN Makes it Possible