Growing Through Change: Building a Balanced Financial Practice

Alan: Welcome to Behind the Advisor with XYPN, your behind-the-scenes look at the challenges and victories, fee-only advisors encounter as they launch, run, and grow their independent firms. Join us for a deep dive into the real life stories, frontline insights and actionable strategies it takes to build a thriving, purpose-driven firm on your terms.

We're excited to welcome back Dan Slagel, co-founder of Fyooz Financial Planning, a Minnesota based fee-only firm that he runs with his wife and business partner, Natalie. Together they've built Fyooz with intention tailored to serve successful, fun and authentic couples. In his previous appearance on Behind the Advisor, Dan and his wife Natalie shared what inspired them to launch Fyooz, the personal and professional sacrifices they made, and how working as a couple has helped them more deeply connect with their ideal clients.

You can find the episode to learn more about their story up through 2020 at xyplanningnetwork.com/291. Today, Dan shares how Fyooz has grown up since 2020 from the scrappy startup days to a more refined, balanced firm built for the life they want. We'll talk calendar hacks, real life curve falls like parental leave, and how living through big life moments has made them even better at serving their clients.

Dan, welcome back to the show.

Dan: Hey Ellen. Happy to be back.

Alan: Yeah, amazing that you were on it back right before COVID. So it's like crazy to think that since then we had all of COVID and all of the changes and all the, just craziness in the world since then. So this is gonna be a lot of fun to catch up.

Dan: I feel so old, like just, and I'm not, but I just the past, like five, six years I just, I'm feeling it, like to be transparent, I'm feeling it.

Alan: Yeah I was joking with Michael recently that I used to get invited to boards because they like needed someone in their twenties and now I get invited to boards because they need someone with a decade or two of experience. a really sad realization. Awesome. Let's just give listeners sort of an update again, listeners, if you wanna hear more about the pre 2020 basically the first year in business for Fyooz.

You can go listen to that episode and Natalie's on that as well. But let's start in 2020. The firm was brand new and how things have gone since then, where the firm is at today.

Dan: Yeah, a absolutely. So I feel like, gosh at the time of the recording of our first podcast, I feel like maybe I was still living with my mother-in-law. It when we were trying to bootstrap this business it and make it work now we're on our own. I think from a business standpoint, things have really. Change for us in terms of clients who we're working with. Obviously revenue plays a big role in that. I think at the time of the first podcast, we were serving around 30 ongoing clients. As of today, we're at 70 ongoing clients. The nice thing though with that number is we've really refined who we.

Who we want to work with, and I think we'll get to that a little later on in the podcast. But we're really trying to focus on bringing on the right client as opposed to those early days where it's, take anyone that can fog a mirror.

Alan: Yeah. So how do you define your ideal client now?

Dan: Great question. Ideal clients. So we still have a niche focus on working with couples. I think that's transferred over to what we would call high earning still millennial couples in their thirties and forties. But we've really used a lot of data over the past several years to understand who is the right fit from an income standpoint for us.

That's typically households who make over $300,000 or investible assets and looking at some of the numbers for us, that's right around 500,000 or more. So clients really need to fit one of those two categories to work with us on an ongoing perspective. And honestly and this still holds true, and one of the reasons we started our business was to be more relatable working with.

With couples, they understand what we're going through. We understand what they're going through from a balancing your financial lives from a household standpoint. We just need to also understand like from a personality fit, are we on the same wavelength? And I feel like a lot of our clients, and I think I said it in the first podcast.

Feels like they could be our really good friends. Obviously we need to have some boundaries there. But that just goes to show, who we want to work with similar interests as us similar walks of life and that makes our relationship so much more enjoyable.

Alan: Yeah, it's amazing how easy it is to ignore the red flags with a prospective client in the early days because obviously we need to make it work and we want the revenue. But as you are able to grow and be a little bit more selective, you can kinda listen to your gut. because obviously you've got data to show it.

And also, I assume you have some folks where you just meet and you're like, I can't really pinpoint why. But this is just not, it just doesn't feel right and we don't have to work with them anymore. 

Dan: And if it doesn't feel right, there's some, if there's something off and I don't want, I don't, also don't want clients to pay us if it's hard for them. So that's where we have come in and defined income levels, asset levels where it makes sense given our.

Alan: Yeah. Yeah. And it's not, in my opinion, it's not about the income and the assets. It's that, oh, they must have this much income to work with me. It's people with this income have this problem, and this is the problem we enjoy helping our clients solve. So tell me about, you launched what, four months before, five months before the world shut down.

And just how COVID shaped the business and where you're at today. Just, obviously you were just, getting your feet under you as that started.

Dan: Yeah. We launched October 20th, 2019. Yeah I was looking at some numbers before this call, and I think annual gross revenue for 2019. It was like $500. And we saw that and I'm like, oh my gosh. Let's just get rid of that. And then yeah, COVID happened and honestly at that point I talked about it a little bit earlier.

We, when we started our business, we both stopped working at the same time, right? So income was completely turned off. We had done our best to maintain one to two years of savings to live off of, but we. We moved in with my wonderful mother-in-law and her two bedroom town home, and there were three of us there.

And Natalie and I, at that time, like every, like all of our time was spent in our business with that said there's only so much you can do with not a lot of clients. So I recall like going back to pandemic times or right before it, we both decided to take part-time jobs. And we were working. I worked at a running store like 15 hours a week.

Natalie worked at a grocery store during COVID after it happened, like we were both still working at these places. Natalie was still working at a grocery store, like with the mask and like having to sanitize all the carts. And we were just like making it happen. And I think looking back on that it was.

Kind of unnecessary for us to do. I just, I feel like we had a little bit of a scarcity mindset when it comes to pulling from our savings, actually using that. But it was also a really good opportunity for us to still get time away from each other and live, a little bit separate of.

A life outside of constantly working in our business. So that's always like the first memory that pops up when it comes to the pandemic when it comes to our business and Fyooz. Pandemic lessons that I have at that time, again, we were taking calls from anyone.

We were, we had no respect for our personal boundaries personally and professional boundaries. We were taking calls on Saturday mornings. If a prospect needed to meet at past 7:00 PM that's what we were doing. Obviously that's shifted a lot now for us. And I think also the other part of it too is.

Is going into it. And I, a lot of credit to you all, our business was virtual from the start using Zoom. So that was not really a, an issue for us. I do think the pandemic heightened the ability for us to get new clients like a lot quicker. Like looking at some of the numbers for us in 20, 20 21, we onboarded 20 clients each of those years.

Alan: Wow.

Dan: Okay.

Alan: Yeah, it's an unfortunate. I don't know. I feel a little guilt saying this, but our firms tend to do better in really bad economic times, and it's because that's, it's bad economic times. It's tough times. It's when there's chaos and uncertainty in the world is when folks go look for a financial planner.

They want to look for that third party to provide stability. It really was a boom for a lot of advisors. Obviously, we would not wish that upon ourselves again, just for the client flow, but it is a reality.

Dan: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I and the other piece that, I'll just add it in regards to lessons from the pandemic, which just like corresponds to when we started the conversation around fees. You wanna talk, you want to talk about that, I'm sure.

Alan: Of course, I love talking fees.

Dan: When we first started, we were charging, one it was $199 a month, annualized, that's under $2,400 a year.

And part of me thinks so maybe that's why we were also able to onboard so many clients in those first few years. And now that's scaled up for us. Currently, we have a $6,000 annual minimum. But if we look at the average annual revenue per client, for us, that's around 7,200. So it's drastically different, and again, has allowed us to build in more flexibility, build in like more structure with our calendar to make sure we're maximizing, our time in our business and personally as well.

Alan: Yeah, I definitely wanna talk about that. One more question before we move past this sort of section for me, and that is what would you say is the most significant sort of business pivot that you've made since you were on the podcast? Recent or most recently?

Dan: Oh, there's been so many. It's hard to pick. I think the biggest pivot for us has, when we first started we just really loved the idea of. Both being in meetings being that like couple, that's a financial planning couple that clients can feel like we're, like their friends that they can talk to money about, right?

I thought that was a lot of relatability to us. But after really understanding our calendar, our capacity we've pivoted from that. So we're, we switch off meetings with clients. We still don't take a siloed approach with client households, but what we do is we switch off every meeting with a client.

The one meeting that we'll still both be a part of is that initial discovery meeting when we onboard a new client, because I still think that's really important that we're both there to hear clients share, a lot of their vulnerabilities with us.

Alan: That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. And again, you work with your spouse and life partner and that can be a lot, right? So can you talk about your sort of calendar management and how you're structuring your days so that you are working the appropriate amount, but not stepping on each other's toes too much, and also opportunity to spend time with your kids and have alone time, all the different components.

Dan: Yeah. Yeah. It's a lot to balance. When we, before we started our business, we had a shared Google calendar, and I feel like that changed our lives because I'm Na Natalie's personality for those of you who know her. Would agree. She is super social. She's just and she's an extrovert to the point of sitting on the couch bored at night, oh I need to hang out with a friend.

And within 30 minutes she's out the door and I'm the exact opposite. I'm like, if I'm, have, I saw like an Instagram reel on this and I was like, oh, that's me. And it was like if I don't have a week's notice of a plan, I just I get upset. I can't do it. It's but then once I'm there in the environment, then it's okay, I, then I become a little more extra.

Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So that's how both of us work. So the calendar is super important for us. Obviously open communication around like. What does each per person want? What do they need? How can we let the other person have that is really important. From a business side, we've structured our calendar where we meet with clients three days a week.

So Tuesday, Wednesdays and Thursdays. Mondays are internal meetings. A lot of internal team meeting. Then Friday it internal meetings in the morning, wrapping things up for the week. And then afternoon is really just get some prep done tie up some loose ends and take a half day if you need it.

Alan: Do you have any employees at this point?

Dan: We do, we have an associate planner on our team. Jesse and Jesse's been with us for, gosh. Three years now. We first she started as an intern and has worked her way up as an associate planner with us.

Alan: So how do you handle management? Does she feel like she has two bosses, or do you or Natalie take the lead as a, as the manager of Jesse?

Dan: Yeah. Jesse with, she'll probably tell you, we, she has two bosses. She works more closely with Natalie especially when it comes to the planning work. Meeting prep a lot of mentorship. That's where Natalie comes in. And then I think my role in that is just being that unbiased third party to check in with her, see how things are going, what she like more career tracks is where I feel like I'm able to come in.

But we, there's only three of us, so it's a super small team. Obviously when it comes to a business, there's somewhat of a. Hierarchy in who makes decisions and whatnot. But, I obviously want to see us like the three of us as equals with equal say, in, into our business and making sure things are, that we're all, that we're all in alignment with where we want to go and who we want to be.

Alan: Absolutely. I feel as, you're, at least I know you to be extremely heavy user of technology and building efficiency and time management and all of this, and I feel like advisors have the choice when they have a lot of extra time. They can either or they create time for themselves.

They can either work with more clients, they can work with their current clients a whole lot more. Or they can actually take some time off. And it sounds like y'all have really chosen that last path, which I'll say is probably the most rare, the least chosen path for advisors. So can you just talk about I guess was that conscious?

How did y'all make that decision and how does that work? How does that sort of show up in your business?

Dan: Yeah, it was. It was something that was really important to us from the beginning that we structure our calendar to still allow for a lot of free time. When we first started our business, it was just the two of us, and we didn't have a child at that point. We didn't have a lot of obligations, but it was really important for us to go explore, like we love being out outside, being outdoors.

And in order to do that, we had to really. Be proactive in blocking off our calendar.

And by doing that, and setting boundaries, I as well with clients is super important. And when we first did it was like, oh gosh, like clients are gonna be so upset that they can't reach us and they, I don't think they care.

I really don't like, as long as we're there when they need them. And, when I'm talking about like blocking off our calendar. We run a small business, right? Like you can never at least for me, I've never been able to fully check out. So even if I'm taking time off, it doesn't mean I'm not possibly checking in like at night or when I have some free time, like after our daughter goes to bed.

It's still really important to be in there. I think it's identifying like what is an emergency and what is not and. Having that communication with clients?

Alan: Are you managing investments in addition to financial planning for your clients?

Dan: We are, yes.

Alan: Okay. That makes a big difference, right? If that's the one thing that has some legal obligations attached to it, that if a client emails in for a trade request, we can't, show up a month later and be like, oh, sorry.

Just kidding. 

Dan: Exactly. And the nice thing with our business is clients in their thirties and forties primarily, is we don't, no one's really taking distributions

The portfolio, right? They may be contributing to the portfolio and I need to invest it, but in reality, with technology these days, that takes me, it can take three minutes of my time to get the money invested.

Alan: Yeah, that makes sense. So you mentioned having a kid since your last appearance and it was just, I assume just the two of you. Did you have Jesse yet? When you had your kid.

Dan: We did. Yeah. Yeah. So our.

Alan: Have somebody, but.

Dan: We did have somebody we did, which made a huge world of difference.

Alan: Can you talk about, did you and Natalie, or both of you take parental leave and what did that look like?

Dan: Yeah, so we welcomed our daughter Jay June 30th of last year. So she's almost a year old at this point. We both took leave and it was amazing. So how that looked last year, so Jay was, I think her due date was like first week of July. But what we did is we stopped meetings with clients.

In early June, just in case like something were to happen. What we did is we sent out email communication to our clients and letting them know like the structure of our leave. So how we went about structuring it is we were both essentially off from June, in June, July, in August, and then Natalie remained off through September and October. I went back to work. I took meetings in September and October and then we switched where Natalie came back in November and rounded out the rest of the year in December. And then I was on leave in November and December

Alan: Okay.

Dan: And that allowed us to keep pushing out daycare as far as possible.

Alan: Yeah. Because when you get that first daycare bill it's oh, this is painful. I'm just working for daycare.

Dan: Yeah. It's like where is all the money going now? Oh, daycare.

Alan: Yeah. Non-deductible daycare. So unfortunate. Yeah. That's awesome. because I think that's, those are the types of. Things that, pretty much any advisor, particularly if they're solo or working with a spouse or a partner taking time off any time off is hard, much less extended parental leave.

So were you able to no client meetings, no client communications, or were you jumping on email in the evenings just to keep up? Or was Jesse able to keep things running for you? I'm just curious the logistics of that.

Dan: Yeah, Jesse ran the show. She, and again but I think going back to it like setting the precedent of, hey, here's what to expect from a client standpoint. Clients were super respectful of that and we made it clear if anything urgent comes up. Email, Jesse, copy us on it. And then, when e especially in those first three months, like June through August the idea was, Hey, Jesse, like we trust you.

You've been with us for three years at this point. If anything urgent seems to come up that you need help addressing or whether it's investing or a client response, shoot me a text, let me know, and I'll carve out five, 10 minutes of my time and we will work through it together and then send me a draft of the email and then I can review it when I have some free time and we'll just go from there.

And that maybe happened once or twice in that three month span.

Alan: Wow, that's awesome. Yeah. And I commend you for doing this with your first kid. It took me until my fourth before I ever took actual parental leave, which looking back now I think at the time, it was like a badge of honor of I worked and now it's just embarrassing. 

I left the hospital with my second child. I left the hospital to interview a marketing candidate because there was no one else to do it. And so I just had to, and, or I felt like I had to. But once I finally took leave about I was on leave The same time you were because Max was born in May of last year. It was unbelievable to actually have that time and focus.

And I thought I was helpful with the first couple kids. And I realized I probably was not. And so I would encourage listeners to follow Dan's path, not mine. And spend the time, because you don't get that time back.

Dan: Yeah 

Alan: With that, sorry for the depressing combo. 

Dan: That's not, it is not depressing. I think it's if we had a kid in our first like year of business or two years, I, things would look so much more different. But I think for us, like we were fortunate to have a child in our. Fifth year of business when things felt like they were up and running and luckily we had, we have Jesse to step in and help.

So I think it really probably depends on where you're at in your business life stage.

Alan: Yeah, definitely true. The folks who are having babies and buying a house and starting a business in the same year, I'm like, okay, that's gonna be a lot like, I can't save you from that one. So can you talk about how, these life experiences, whether it be COVID or, having a baby and working with your partner, like all of these things, just like how that maybe has impacted the work that you do with clients, how you approach financial planning with them?

Dan: Yeah. It's, man, we like COVID is, it feels so long ago. I lost my mom unexpectedly in 2023. And then a month later, that's when we found out about Jay. So for us the past, like 2023 and 2024, we just really focused on our personal lives. That was the first thing.

And I think, when it comes to these like major life events, it was like the, when we first started our business, it was this idea of. We're gonna cater to a market who's going through these exact same things and from a high level, that sounded amazing. But we hadn't fully been through some of those things yet ourselves.

And then to go through it. And then see clients go through it as well. You just have a different it puts a different lens on things, right? Whether it's like an inheritance, losing a parent. Or even bringing in a kid and what comes with that? What are like the financial implications of these events?

Like actually going through it finally. And maybe some of these, like more major ones. I'm not talking about buying a home is still major, like changing your career, right? There's still big deals, but when it comes to like life and death, I feel like it's just a little more touchy. And so I think, for us it's always been about how do we just show up as our, like true, authentic selves.

To our clients, to our network, to people who follow us and share our experiences and, lead with empathy and share real life stories around like, how we personally manage these major life events. I think that's been really, it's been really, special for us to be able to do that with clients. And I think it just it naturally builds more trust in our relationships together.

Alan: It really is incredible how, I don't think we think about this when we're launching firms, but that our clients really are on the journey with us. And I think about the folks who joined XYPN 10, 11 years ago and saw the birth of my first kid and now here I am showing up with. Almost a basketball team of them.

And just being part of that journey and seeing it and being able to have those conversations and obviously I've grown up a lot in the 11 years since we launched and you've grown up a lot since you launched your firm and it's fun to have that cohort maybe that aren't close friends, but still that cohort to kind that sort of help you see the changes that you've experienced over time.

Dan: Yeah. Yeah. AB absolutely. We and like some specific examples of. Helping clients go through within similar life stages and having it create authenticity. I recently I wrote a blog about helping a, like helping a parent navigate finances when the other parent passes away.

And that other parent, the parent who passes away as like maybe more of like the financial partner. And I wrote that blog and I just had a lot of really nice feedback from. From our clients in terms of literally, because I documented what me and my dad and I did after my mom had passed away.

Going to the bank, updating accounts, beneficiaries yada. And I wrote a blog step-by-step things that we did, and I had several clients. I had one client in particular after they read that they held a family meeting.

They created a document that literally was the step-by-step guide that I created.

Alan: That's awesome.

Dan: And I felt so, I felt really good about that.

Something that I didn't I wrote that blog to help of course, but I didn't think it would have that big of an impact where a client of mine would have a family meeting and they would, back in the day, like at an institution like Fin Larger Financial Institution, they would give like a binder of like here's where things are kept and it I forget what the, not like an estate planning binder, but it would just have all this important information. This is before like LastPass probably and all the password protections. But when they shared that with me, that it just felt like I was doing my job and making a difference.

Alan: Yeah, it's so interesting. It's such a good example of that financial planning sits at this intersection of we actually help people. I think this is a helping profession. And that's a great example of, you probably changed the course of some errors lives when they don't have to go digging to try to find account statements and passwords and all of that.

But we, it also does allow us quite a bit of flexibility. This is a career that you can have more flexibility, I think, than many other careers, and we can actually make good money doing it. And I don't know of any other career that actually gets all three of those. Usually, you get one, maybe two and you've really been able to take advantage.

Of all three of those, which is, and obviously there's always a balance between, yes, you could work more and make more money, but you get to make that choice, which a lot of careers don't allow.

Dan: Yeah. Yeah. And we're working with a, our business coach right now, and I think that those are some of the ongoing conversations that we're having is like. Where do we want Fyooz to get to? What do we want it to be? And I think for us, the hard part is we have this finite window of what seems to be five years.

If we only have one child where we want to maximize as much time as possible. And it's the balance between do we grow and still maximize time? Or how do we do that like in unison together. So that's the, that's the game that we're currently in or trying to figure out.

Alan: You preempted my, one of my last questions here, which was what is the future vision are you thinking in these tranches, these time tranches, if you will, of okay, for the next four to five years, like this is our focus, time balance is the most important. Then after that, maybe we'll grow the firm, or is it a, I don't know, a what is the plan or what sort of the vision or have you gotten that far yet?

Dan: Yeah. The vision is growth, but it's always been sustainable growth. I look back to those early, like 20, 20, 21, and you're bringing on, you have months of three, four clients and we're just, our firm isn't built to do that from a capacity standpoint. And I don't think we really envision growing beyond where we're at right now in terms of who we have on our team.

So we need to just make sure that the three of us collectively. Are creating the right paths to making sure we're all in the right seat, like doing what we love the most and making sure like our business is able to thrive in that structure.

Alan: Yeah, and I hope listeners have heard this from me before, but you can make different decisions over time, right? And what's right for the business today and what's right for your life, maybe different than what's right in five years. Different what's right in 10. Like they're, these things change and I don't know, we think of, I feel like we think of decisions as permanent.

Oh, I only wanna work 20 hours a week. And it's oh, that means I can only work 20 hours a week for the rest of my career. And it's no, that's not how that works. So you get to choose one day if, when you're ready to change that. And that can be a really hard realization, but, it's just financial planning just turned in on ourselves, which is really hard to do without a coach or a planner to do it with us.

Dan: Yeah, it's, it is that five year window that we're looking at right now and in five years we'll still be really young relative to our industry. So I don't view it as time lost. Like I just, I think that's just a lot of time gained with. With our loved ones and what's important to us.

Alan: When it's getting really clear, and it sounds like y'all really focused on how much, answering the question, how much money do we actually wanna make and how many hours do we wanna work? Most advisors can't answer that question. How much money do you wanna make? It's always just, a lot more than I made last year.

And then you never really know when you. Hit when you score, like when do you win? When do you cross the goal line? Because we never set that number. But if you can work backwards and say, this 70 hours I wanna work, this is how much money I wanna make, the rest can fall into place.

But if you don't have that, we just end up working more and more because there's always something else to do to make more money. There's just always gonna be a list. So Dan where can folks find more information on Fyooz and you and Natalie?

Dan: Yeah. I think the easiest spot is to go to our website, which I think we'll probably put in the show notes. Fu Fyooz financial.com. We have an

Alan: Is spelled F-Y-O-O-Z, so F-Y-O-O-Z, financial

Dan: The phonetic, it's the phonetic spelling of the word Fyooz. We're also on Instagram. Not as lively there, but something new we're working on.

We're actually working on a podcast, Natalie and myself, taking a spin on us sharing more about how we go about managing finances as a couple and just trying to create another outlet for couples to one, find us and also to understand that they're not alone in some of the conversations that have in your household around money.

Alan: Yeah, we'll have to get a link to the podcast when it launches and we'll drop it into the show notes as well. Dan, thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the show and give us an update on how things have gone over the last five years. It's been an incredible journey and I can't wait to hear what sort of this the next phase looks like for you.

So thank you for taking the time.

Dan: Awesome. Thanks Alan.

Alan: Listeners, thanks for hanging out with us on Behind the Advisor. Want more bonus content from this episode and future episodes? Subscribe to our email list at join XY pn.com/bta. Remember, it's all about helping people live their best lives here at XYPN. We'll catch you on the next episode.