Shaun Tucker
Hello, and welcome to the PracticeLab podcast, where we talk with top advisors about what makes them successful so that you can apply those lessons in your own business. I’m Shaun Tucker, the Director of Practice Management here at Capital Group.
When I ask advisors if they have a succession plan, they usually take that to mean, “Have you identified someone to take over your practice?”
But if you want a good succession, there’s much more to it than that. Finding someone to take over is one thing. Setting them up for success is something else entirely. It requires creating a culture of transparency, mentorship and empowerment.
And then what if something happens and that person isn’t available anymore?
If succession planning is simply about identifying a successor, you’re starting from scratch. But if you’ve created the right culture, you have a head start.
That’s the story of Legacy Financial, an independent firm with Raymond James in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Legacy is led by Bruce Dunbar, an advisor with over 40 years in the industry, who plans to hand the practice over to two younger colleagues when he retires. And it just so happens that they’re his own children, Mark Dunbar and Caroline Andrews.
Caroline, Mark and Bruce recently spoke with my colleague Winston Chang. And what we learn from them about how to do succession well is applicable to every practice, not just those that are staying in the family. So, let’s listen in.
Winston Chang
Thanks so much for joining us here on the PracticeLab podcast. Bruce, could you introduce yourself to our listeners?
Bruce Dunbar
Certainly. I'm Bruce Dunbar and president of Legacy Financial. We are an independent firm with Raymond James Financial Services in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and I started legacy 21 years ago, with 22 years prior to that in this profession.
Winston Chang
Thanks Bruce. That’s a long career in financial services, 43 years, mind giving us a quick overview of your career?
Bruce Dunbar
Well, I'll go back further than that, to my history of investing. When I was a child, my grandfather gave me a couple shares of stock in the company that he was an engineer with, and he and my father taught me how to look it up in the newspaper, and started, really started my interest in investing. I was probably seven years old at that time.
Years went by, I did a little investing in high school with some friends through another investment firm, while I was just starting college, is when my father died, and I saw what that did for my mother did to my mother, actually, fortunately, my grandfather, who had started the investing side of things, was alive.
Unfortunately, he then died less than a year later. So I saw my mother and my grandmother going through some turmoil, and I was in college deciding which path to go, and I thought, Gee, I really need to go in the area that I can learn more about investing and helping people. So my first job became my career right out of college in the financial world and worked with a New York Stock Exchange member firm based in Detroit.
I had a mentor there who was just a wonderful, wonderful gentleman, and he taught me so many great lessons about investing and about how to treat people. One of my favorite slogans or sayings that he gave me was, Bruce, you really need to make recommendations to your clients that they can sleep well with he said, it's very selfish advice. And I paused, and I said, How can that be selfish? And he said, Well, if you give them good advice, they're not up in the middle of the night, worried and calling you and waking you up in the middle of the night.
So that worked beautifully. And I began building my career from there, he unfortunately died about five years later. And firms changed. I changed firms. Became affiliated with another Midwest-based firm, and at that at that firm, I was asked to become a mentor of a person just licensed, just out of college, just licensed, and she and I began working together.
So with the firm that had asked us to be in the mentor program, that firm changed from the top down. They came up with new policies that I did not feel they were client centered. That's when I discovered the opportunities here at Raymond James and started the office of Legacy. My younger business partner, she and I had just been together for a couple of years. I brought her in as well, and we began building the operation.
And it was about 18 years in total that she and I worked together before she announced her early retirement. That was quite a shock to me, because she had been my retirement plan, my eventual retirement plan. And as a financial planner, I'm always looking ahead, always planning and so forth. And kind of threw it for a loop. But then I did have the opportunity to bring in my trusted advisors, who I know are very intelligent and totally client-focused.
Winston Chang
I think that’s your cue — Mark, why don’t we start with you? What’s your background, what were you doing up until 2017 when you joined Legacy?
Mark Dunbar
So I was a external salesperson for a business jet manufacturer. I had a territory on the west coast, from San Diego to Seattle over to Vegas, 51 rental cars in 2016 so I was I was on the road a lot with a young family at home, and I was looking at what our next step was in the corporate ladder. And I was starting to interview for those next jobs.
That's when my dad called and said, Hey, would you be potentially interested in joining him back in Ann Arbor?
Bruce Dunbar
The way I said it was, I know your company really loves you, and you're doing great there, but I have an opportunity. And he said, ‘Well, just so you know, I'm being recruited by three other companies.’ I said, ‘Okay, let's make it four.’
Winston Chang
Caroline, want to make sure that we bring you up onstage. So tell us what you what were doing in Chicago, up until 2019, when you got that call.
Caroline Andrews
I had my dream job in Chicago, or what I thought was my dream job, until I got here, and a lot of it was taking care of people, and I felt like that was what I was really good at. I had a fantastic opportunity with a wonderful restaurant group and related tech company, and I got to lead their HR team, basically starting from scratch, and I just loved that kind of challenge.
And I loved being able to talk to people about what was important to them, but I found myself being faced with people questioning, what should I do with my paycheck? And it was, well, I would love to help you, but I can't technically do that.
It wasn't until Mark called and said, You should really come back here that I actually gave it some real thought. And between lots of conversations and great support from my husband, we decided to come back to Ann Arbor.
I also wanted to just bring up. It always felt really natural to me, and part of it, I can relate to folks who grow up in a bilingual household. I did not technically, but it turns out that financial fluency is something that comes really naturally to me. We were brought up at the dinner table talking about mutual funds and what dividends were, and I thought that was really normal. And it wasn't until being in adulthood in an HR department, realizing nobody had even heard about what these things are and that you could invest your money and try to grow it and what the stock market was. So I was really lucky that I had fluency in this language without even realizing it, which made the change from HR into financial planning quite natural.
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Winston Chang
I'm glad that you mentioned that Caroline, because that's a piece that I wanted to explore. Your household, the Dunbar household, as you were all growing up, had its own culture, just like any other family. And so at Legacy, you have this preexisting culture, your family culture that you're kind of bringing to work. How has that played out? Tell us how you navigated that.
Mark Dunbar
I can jump in here.
So Caroline's my younger sister. And growing up, of course, there's always sibling discussions and rivalries and picking on each other every now and then and you know, that's always a consideration when working with family. How is your home life? How is your personality gonna work with it. And I have to say, it's been the easiest transition imaginable, working with my dad and my sister. You know, first off, we trust each other immensely. From day one. I can trust my sister with whatever I need.
Caroline Andrews
Yeah, I will say that I find it to be quite efficient, because I've known him a really long time. I've known both of them actually my entire life, and it makes it really easy in a meeting, when we're trying to think, what's next? What do we do for our clients? What are our goals next year? It's like, okay, well, you're good at this, I'm good at this. Let's go and it's very efficient.
Mark Dunbar
We do have very complementary skills. You know, I have a little bit of a tech background, and I love processes and client facing things. Caroline is great with HR and
Caroline Andrews
operations in general are really my jam.
Mark Dunbar
And then our dad's experience with investing and teaching us for the last 40 plus years of his career, teaching us about investments, about how to look at funds and stocks and bonds, and really gives us a complete package as a team.
Winston Chang
I would think that there might be a risk or fear of creating an insider culture, right? So, like, there's the Dunbars, and then there's the rest of Legacy, and people who are part of the rest of Legacy part, you know, feeling like they’re not in the inside circle or on the inside track. So how do you make sure that kind of thing doesn't happen?
Caroline Andrews
I think a lot of this stems from just making sure there's opportunity around every corner for anyone who's interested. There may be a good stage or time and place for someone to take a new, level of certification, and they are all welcome to do that. We really support continuing education, and we invest in continuing education.
I love talking about team building, and I think part of it is, we are a team, and the more cohesive we are, and the happier our team is, it's going to be evident to the client as well. It's going to make the experience of when they walk in the building, they're going to feel a positive energy. They're going to feel that we all like each other. And it's going to kind of make a sometimes a nerve wracking meeting. People don't like coming to see their financial advisor, sometimes surprisingly, because I thought it was really fun, but it turns out a lot of people don't like it.
Bruce Dunbar
Some people equate it to going to the dentist.
Caroline Andrews
Yeah, and by the way, we have some dentist clients.
But a lot of times people are kind of nervous. We're talking about serious money. We're talking about retirement or planning for, for example, assisted living, that's not a super fun subject to talk about. So it's important that our culture and the vibe of our office is very welcoming and friendly, and I feel the only way to do that authentically is if the people on your team are happy to be there and feel supported. So how we come at compensation and team structure, I feel is a little bit out of the ordinary because we're trying to take a holistic approach to the team and to how their compensation is structured. Of course, the base salary is very crucial. We want to be competitive and fair. Apart from that, though, we want to honor what's important to them, paid time off is really crucial. Having that work life balance is really crucial.
And then above those kind of normal things in health care and those kind of normal compensation benefits, we were inspired to see like, how can we make your life a little bit easier or more comfortable? So we have on site dry cleaning twice a week. We have a quarterly work attire stipend so that you just feel fresh and you feel good, and you know that that's allocated towards feeling good at work and feeling presentable. We have a fitness benefit where if you like to do a gym membership or classes online, or maybe you have a home gym, you have a certain stipend for that. We're just trying to think of creative solutions for their life to make them happy and also feel recognized like not everyone's the same. And it's kind of interesting to see how each team member takes advantage of different offers. So I think that we provide a pretty diversified portfolio.
Winston Chang
A lot of people, they think when it comes to competing for talent in the market, it’s just about throwing the larger number out there, right? But what you’re alluding to, it sounds like it’s much bigger than that.
Caroline Andrews
I think we are long-term investors, whether it's in the portfolios we're designing for a client or the bench that we're designing for our team. We want to really vet everything appropriately. We want to do our due diligence just like Capital Group goes and really interviews companies before they invest in them, we do the same with our team.
And I think it's really crucial to think of this as long term. So we want to invest in their education. We want to invest in making them have time to see their family and make sure their family is happy that they work here too.
So I think that that's our perspective is we are long-term investors, whether it's portfolios or people.
[MUSIC]
Winston Chang
Great. I want to get to the main part of today’s conversation, which is about succession planning. Bruce, before we get into the unique experience of planning to have your own kids succeed you, back up and tell us about what got you thinking about succession planning in the first place. When did you first think about who would take over your practice?
Bruce Dunbar
I'm happy to talk about that. I've seen great examples of colleagues over the years who've done it nicely, others who have kind of put it off to the last minute. Gee, I think I'll retire next week, I better do something about that. I literally early young in my career, a fellow came to my desk on a Wednesday morning and said, Bruce, I'm turning 65 on Friday and I'm going to retire. Would you talk to some of my clients? Oh, my goodness, needless to say, that was not for him. Anyway. It was not a successful transition to retirement.
But I learned early on we have to invest in that next generation. We pick good people, we invest in them and, in a way, we keep our fingers crossed. But it's like many investments. If we do it well, it can turn out really well.
Mark Dunbar
You know, you've been to a lot of conferences. And one of the conferences you told us about was the, you know, succession planning at for financial advisors.
Bruce Dunbar
One conference in particular on our name tag, it had a green dot if we had a succession plan in place. And I sat down at lunch one day, and there was a fellow there more senior than I, but he looked at my name tag and he said, Oh, Bruce, I'm glad to see a green dot on your name tag. And he, of course, had one as well. And he said, look around this room. You know, only half the people have the green dots. So here we are. We call ourselves financial planners, but many of us are not planning our firm.
Caroline Andrews
What's your advice to make a really good transition?
Bruce Dunbar
My advice to an advisor who's going to potentially transition in a business or transition out of the business would be a gentle approach. Take some time, a long timeline, and I mean, a year or two, it worked really, really well. Personally, the best one I've seen is, was a two-year time frame. Others I've seen very, very short that had were much more problematic, part of it is winning the trust of the clients, making sure that they know that this person didn't leave under any duress. That's never been the case, but people have to wonder, why? So a gentle approach.
Winston Chang
I'd like to explore that same story but from the other side. Mark and Caroline, you were coming in not just to a new job, but to a new career. You have things to learn, but you also have your ideas to bring to the table. So how did you strike that balance, and what would be your advice for other younger advisors who are coming into similar situations in terms of striking that balance, like, hey, I need to learn, but I also want to add value, I want to, you know, bring an unconventional background, new perspectives that haven't been considered before?
Caroline Andrews
I think a lot of it is realizing that we're all stronger as a team. When I was little, people would ask me, What does your dad do? He's a stockbroker. Okay. But was very much a solo person operation, and it seems like that that was kind of the trend. Wouldn’t you agree?
Bruce Dunbar
Yes, yeah.
Caroline Andrews
So it's very much a one person operation. We are a team, and I think that don't be shy to embrace what you're really strong at there are things that Mark gets really energized about, and there are things that I get really energized about, and luckily, they're very complementary. And we see both sides of a situation very often. I think also having at least three of us looking at a client situation provides the client an even better picture, because we bring these different experiences. Mark and I both had 10 years in a different industry, and so we have real life experience to bring to the table and say, Oh, well, I can see, as a business owner, you might think of it this way, or, yeah, as a giant corporation, you might think of it this way. So I think embrace what past experience you have, and then also, if you can be on a team, I would really recommend it.
Mark Dunbar
Caroline and I, both came from, serving our clients. That was what we did for the last 10 years in our professional careers, before joining our dad. So customer service was number one. And growing up as kids, we always knew about customer service in all the jobs that we did.
Caroline Andrews
We answered the phone, Dunbar residence, Caroline speaking. So we were very good at manners already.
Winston Chang
And how long did it take you to feel ready? What was it like being the recipient of that gentle approach?
Mark Dunbar
I so I joined my dad in 2017 and I was in a different industry, and well, I knew some of the basics about mutual funds and stocks and bonds. We've been talking about it basically my whole life.
The financial planning part of it, and all the intricacies of taxes was new. I knew a lot of the clients from growing up with them, but there were quite a few new ones that I didn't know. So it was really important that I apprenticed with my dad. You know, I sat in every meeting that he had, at least for the first two years, I think every single meeting, we took together, and I took notes. And then by about the first year was done, I started adding some input of things that I saw. And we really got this great repertoire of being able to bounce things off so much so that, clients refer to me as Bruce on the phone a lot when I talk to them, they feel just so comfortable. And a lot of the things that I say are things that my dad has said, and the same tonality and the same way of saying it.
Caroline Andrews
Yeah, luckily, I don't get that same feedback that I sound like my dad, same advice, but different. Yeah.
Mark Dunbar
So there's a continuity of advice, there's a continuity of speech and how we portray things and advice that we give.
Bruce Dunbar
I have had many, many clients say to me over this last few years that both Mark and Caroline have been part of the team. I've had clients say Bruce now I know you have a real succession plan, and that feels really good, and everybody is very comfortable with that.
Caroline Andrews
I love it when Mark hadn’t officially left and it wasn't public knowledge. Oh, that's funny.
Bruce Dunbar
Well, as Mark was committed to me, but had not yet left his prior company, and in all fairness to his company, giving them the proper notice and so forth was important.
I had a client ask me, what are you doing now that you your longtime partner has retired and so forth? And I said, Well, I have some really great things in the works. Oh, what can you tell me about it? I said, Oh, I can't tell you very much yet, but you know, really, really great. I'm really pleased. Oh, well, have you known this person a while? I said, Yes, a very long time, and in truth, literally, since the moment he was born.
Winston Chang
Mark you talked about sitting in on client meetings and creating continuity that way, but there's more to having a practice than just client service, right. It’s business planning, not just financial planning. It’s team management, it's marketing, client acquisition. It's finance. It's, HR, obviously we've talked about with Caroline. What did it look like to create continuity there?
Mark Dunbar
So when I joined, my dad shared a lot of the background information on clients, but he also shared a lot of the background information on the business itself. And he told me at that point, a lot of this information in the warehouse, you didn't know what a lot of these numbers were of other people in the office or of the management, and he was sharing it with me his son, because he trusted me.
Yes, and I was able to take that information and really deep dive into some of the business processes and take some of the responsibility off his shoulders.
When we had Caroline come in, he took some more responsibilities, all the human resources and benefits and things that he had been doing for 20 years, and put that on Caroline's shoulders, because she had that ability to help him with that.
So the fact that he shared the information, he shared the business processes, he shared the financials, he shared, basically he was an open book for us to be able to learn how he does it, so that if he didn't want to do that task, or wasn't able to do that task because he was out of the office, one of us could step in, and there was some business continuity there.
Something that I've seen from a lot of colleagues who are in a similar position, that they're a junior advisor to a senior advisor. The senior advisor doesn't share anything they have their own clients, but one day, someday, down the future, they're going to give it all to this junior advisor. But there's no teaching. There's no sharing of knowledge. There's no sharing of business practices. There's no discussion about the books or the business planning or of the marketing dollars. There's nothing there that says, here's how you do things like I've been doing it. Oh, and by the way, is there something that you see that I can do better, and how we can do it better as a team?
Caroline Andrews
I want to get on that, too. I really appreciate a big difference of my dad's way of sharing and coaching and mentoring is so different than what I've observed of some other advisors that have junior advisors. What I hear from some of their teams would be, Oh, back in my day, I did this, and I want to make sure they go through that same thing, whereas our dad has been sharing what happened in the past, more of just as context, saying, should we think about this differently? This is how I did in the past. But that doesn't mean we have to do it that way now, and I really super appreciate that. I think that would be really good advice for anyone listening, is be open to change. Of course, share the context. But I think the more flexible and open minded you can be, the better your business will be.
Winston Chang
Bruce, we've talked about the upside, the benefits of the unique way in which you all have done succession and keeping it in the family. But when you read some headlines, or you look at other case studies, there are also challenges that are unique to succession planning within families. For instance, just as an example, some parents, what they face is that their children just aren't ready when they need to be right? So it's like, okay, I have to stay on for, what, five years longer than I had hoped to, I have to retire later, or maybe I don't know if they'll ever be ready, how long do I have to wait to find out? So Bruce any advice for advisors who are doing succession your way?
Bruce Dunbar
I just say I have excellent children, and then you can trust them. That would be my advice across the board. To all of our professional investor colleagues.
Many, many years ago, our three children were very young when a friend who owned a business and had more children than I did, said his plan was he was hoping that all any of his kids would eventually join his company, but he was going to insist that they had 10 years of other experience, other job experience after college, and I just tucked that away. And then, as our kids were growing, my wife and I we gave them lots of educational opportunities, and they literally, at one point, Caroline and her husband were the close ones. They lived in Chicago, only a four-hour drive away. They were the closest of our children and Mark and his wife Southern California, and our older son was in Portland, Oregon. So I was like, okay, they really spread out. Yet when I had the opportunity to first bring in, then Mark and then Caroline, they each literally had 10 years of professional experience elsewhere. I could not have designed it better. I just could not have planned it.
Mark Dunbar
I think a big thing though, Dad, is that when we came in, you treated us as having experience coming into the business, you know.
Bruce Dunbar
They had different experience, different [inaudible].
Mark Dunbar
You didn’t start us off as interns. You respected that we had knowledge from outside financial planning. And so when I came to you with ideas of here's what I saw working at larger corporations and processes, and you were receptive to that. And I think a lot of the people that I talk to who don't have successful relationships with their mentor or their parents is that they're seen as the junior. They're seen as, less knowledgeable than they are.
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Winston Chang
I’d love to talk about some of those ideas Mark and Caroline brought to the table. Pretty open-ended question but could you tell us what some of those were and how they’ve worked out?
Mark Dunbar
I think one of the things my dad said early on was he's trying to find a reason to say yes to change, and so my role in bringing new ideas and new thoughts into our company was to convince my dad to say yes.
Bruce Dunbar
And most of them have worked really well. Some have not, but that's not a problem that we.
Mark Dunbar
I thought they all worked well.
Bruce Dunbar
Don't say that too loudly. I shouldn't.
Mark Dunbar
So I was working with my dad for two years. I'd come into this, this office and when I first came in, there were eight or 10 filing cabinets full of paper in the main hallway. There were these telephone lines running all over the place because they were all connected to their desks. There were old computers. There were all these things that I said, You know what? In my experience, it's best if we are mobile and we have a lot of paperless stuff, you know, from my experience driving all over the place, in California and Oregon. So some of our first projects were to digitize our business, and some of the efficiencies that we have gotten from that have been pretty immense, especially considering what we went through in 2020 and having already gone through the digitization process.
Bruce Dunbar
I'll jump in there. In March of 2020 on a Friday, we left at noon, and by two o'clock that afternoon, we were all at home working and up to speed, because everything was digitized, as Mark said. It was a part of the investment that we had gone on for the prior couple of years, spending the money, spending the time, to put in these systems.
And in my case, I'll just say I trusted Mark to be able to put that together well, and he certainly did.
Mark Dunbar
Before I came in, we had a CRM. My dad used a CRM. It was mainly an address book. From what I can tell. There were sparse notes on it. There wasn't a lot of detail.
Our first year with the new CRM, we had a little over 3,000 entries into it, which averaged out to about five connections per client per year that year. Now we're just over 9,000 entries per year, which is about 16 touch points per client per year. And it's not just that we staffed up more, that we added more people, or anything like that. You know, we're up two people since when I started, but the average activity per person is about 50 per month at the beginning, and now we're at just over 100 per month.
So we really instituted a culture of recording our interactions with our clients, reaching out more frequently, and it gave us a lot a bigger depth of knowledge of our relationships, and being able to share that relationship with our client team, with advisors.
And a lot of what we did, I started off with bringing in standard operating procedures. I started recording things if I saw us doing it more than two or three times in a week, I wanted a standard operating procedure, so we did at the same time every time, and didn't have to think about it.
Caroline Andrews
Yeah. And I love it, because our team now is like, oh, there should be an SOP. Oh, great.
Mark Dunbar
They go ahead and write it for us. We don't have to build it for them. And they're optimizing it, and they're changing it organically for us. I give Caroline a lot of credit, with her attention to detail, she really took and ran with the standard operating procedures.
I like the idea of it, and I made a couple of them, but it's something that wasn't my passion to create standard operating procedures, but.
Caroline Andrews
Yeah, I think partly with my background in human resources, you have to be really attentive to process and procedure, legally speaking as well. So that was a nice thing to reflect upon. Bringing those skills to the table here, is how can we standardize, make sure that everyone's getting the correct amount of service, being respectful of the client relationship.
Mark Dunbar
So I think getting back to what are the benefits of these standard operating procedures and CRM and all the different technologies we've implemented, it means that we have capacity, now.
When I came in, we had a couple clients leave in the first year because they didn't feel like we had serviced them enough, and we didn't have the ability to see that we weren't doing that.
And now we have something that we can measure. We can, you know, repetitive tasks. We can, make sure anybody in the office can do them. And now our capacity has expanded threefold. Now we feel like we have a lot of breathing room. We have time in our day to do planning. We're not jumping from one fire to another because there are no fires. We just have everything planned out, just like we should.
Caroline Andrews
We have really healthy habits, just like it's important to have those in your daily life, outside of work. I think we have great habits and routine so that when something unusual happens, we actually have the capacity and mental bandwidth to deal with it.
Mark Dunbar
And from a client standpoint, I know they've appreciated it. We've had a almost 200% increase in client referrals just this year from last year, and of those referrals, two thirds of them have become clients so far.
So we've had a massive amount of referrals, and they're the type of people we love to work with, because they are friends of our clients. You know, they are exactly the type of people that we like to work for.
Caroline Andrews
We get a question a lot of what's your minimum, and how can we be your client? And I love what my dad has always said. What have you always said?
Bruce Dunbar
We only work for nice people.
Caroline Andrews
I think it's really important for our team to know that that we fully support our team and that we only work with nice people, so that if someone's not nice to our team, they are not part of our client base anymore. But that doesn't happen anymore.
Bruce Dunbar
I think another thing that we've done, and I give Caroline and Mark so much credit for ideas for client events.
Traditionally, for the last 20 years, we've always had until COVID, we had an annual holiday dinner, and certain clients would be invited and due to their efforts, we've now had some wonderful, wonderful opportunities. And clients are like and they're not all investment related. Many of them are, but others are not.
One of the events, which had great, great success, we started by holding a training here in the office for all of our team, and we had the Red Cross come and it was on how to utilize an AED. We purchased one for the building, all in an effort that if a client was ever here and ever having an issue, we would not only have the equipment on hand, we would all have the knowledge.
Mark Dunbar
So a couple months after the training for a team at our office, my parents were down and playing pickleball, and a couple courts over, they heard some commotion, and somebody was having a heart issue. My parents knew right where the AED was, and because they were part of the training that the rest of our team went through, they ran over, got the AED equipment, hooked it up to the woman, and it saved her life. They were able to restart the heart. The paramedics came and took care of her and saved her life.
And so a couple months after that, it was right around Valentine's Day. We held a client event for any client and their friends, and we even invited some of the public to it, to give Red Cross certification training on AEDs. And we actually held it at a pickleball facility down the street, and our clients loved it, and it was such a unique experience for them. Many of them said they'd been meaning to take the training themselves, but didn't know where to take it, or how to take it. And the conversations that came out of that, in our meetings and in some new client meetings as well, that came out of it was a really great response to our team training.
Bruce Dunbar
When I welcomed everybody there and told them that they knew what they were going to be expecting, I said, this is not, of course, an investment talk. However, we are investing in the health of our clients. We're hoping that you all get a lot from this. And as Mark said, the response was fantastic.
Caroline Andrews
We even got an email from a client that we didn't realize he was a volunteer firefighter, but he said, Thank you so much for holding this client event. It's really great to have more people trained on this. It really helps us first responders. So turns out, having more creative client events, it's really crucial to have the investment related ones, but then also to have client events that think about the whole client, the whole person. Much how we think about our team structure and how to support our team. We're thinking about this as holistic financial planners. So yes, we want to provide the investment advice, but what else is important to them? Probably long-term health.
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Winston Chang
Maybe a fun question to end on. Caroline you talked about, you thought your dad was just a stockbroker when you were growing up. You came in and realized there's so much more to it than that.
So in that vein, Caroline and Mark, any perceptions of your dad's job that you had before from hearing him talk about work at the dinner table that were debunked after you became an advisor?
Caroline Andrews
Our dad is basically the nicest guy you're ever going to meet. So he made work seem really fun and great all the time. And it is fun and great, but it's also very hard.
Yeah, so that was a big realization is, oh my goodness, we are dealing with people's very serious money. This is super serious. We don't take ourselves seriously, but we take our work seriously. That's a big difference.
Mark Dunbar
And actually one, huge learning point was 2020, when COVID hit. Our dad had experience with the dot-com bubble burst, with a financial crisis, with the flash crash, and the ‘88 and any number of experiences. And while it was a different news story, he was able to provide us some context when, the markets were going crazy and everybody on TV was going crazy, we called every client that month of March of 2020 to calm them down, to say, hey, you know, we have good investments. We have good companies. It's a different situation, but it's very similar to things that we've seen before, and we'll make it through it. And so I think etting that context, you know, I remember being at the table in ’99, 2000, 2001 I never knew if the dot-com bubble burst affected his business at all, but knowing what I know now, I'm sure 100% it did. And so that’s a different perspective that I have from growing up at the dinner table versus what I saw in my professional life as a financial advisor.
Bruce Dunbar
To that point, what Mark just said about some of the history in 2020 as we talked to clients, we related to them, any of them of certain age or older, they could directly relate to me when I would say, you remember the television show, which I could name, of course, as Dragnet, they would begin the episode with the stories you are about to see are true, but the names have been changed to protect the innocent. And I said, we've not been in this exact situation before, but we certainly have had other crises, whether they be political or economic or various war-type maneuvers over the years, but with history as our guide, we can get through these things.
Mark Dunbar
And one of the guides that we give to every client is the ICA guide on the markets and how Investment Company of America has navigated these troubled waters since 1934.
And real funny story is, I, you know, the expired pamphlets Dad would bring them home, and the wallpaper in our fort under the basement stairs was the ICA guide. So we grew up with, with knowing about investments and mutual funds and long-term investing and the wall of fear and all these things that, at the time, didn't sink in a lot. But thinking back on it, it's really has come into use.
Caroline Andrews
I think the calm and fun nature of our dad at the dinner table, just reassures me now that, I mean, he already saw a ton in his career, but he was still able to go to dinner and be a family man and smile and so that really helps when clients are really worried. Luckily, we don't have that a lot now.
Winston Chang
Warms my marketing heart to know that ICA papers not just getting used but recycled. Yeah.
Caroline Andrews
I think we're supposed to shred those.
Bruce Dunbar
Oh no, they got the prospectuses too. Don't worry, I gave them that.
Winston Chang
All the legal disclosures are there, OK, good.
Mark Dunbar
They were also investors in ICA at the time.
Winston Chang
I think that's a great note to end on. Bruce, Caroline, Mark, thank you all so much for joining us here on the PracticeLab podcast. Really enjoyed hearing your story and if folks want to learn more, they can just visit you at what go legacy financial dot com?
Caroline Andrews
That’s right. Like go team go.
Winston Chang
Go team go. Love it. Thank you all.
Bruce Dunbar
Thank you.
Shaun Tucker
Well, that’s it for this episode. We really hope you enjoyed this conversation with the Legacy Financial team. If you liked what you heard today, hit the subscribe button and consider leaving a rating and a review, because that helps other advisors discover this show.
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