Only Fee-Only
This podcast interviews fee-only financial planners to learn about how they are helping their clients and serving their specific niches.
Only Fee-Only
#133 - Garden Glove Planning: Getting Real with Matt Zeigler and Ben Tuscai
Matt Zeigler and Ben Tuscai of Sunpoint Investments take a different approach to wealth management. Instead of just managing money, they combine deep financial planning with investment consulting to build real relationships and help clients make smarter decisions.
Their paths into the industry were unique—Matt was a music major, and Ben worked for the Phillies before spending eight years at Vanguard. That experience helps them think more broadly about client needs. At Sunpoint, they helped redesign the firm’s service model to go beyond portfolios and address the full picture of a client’s life.
They work with everyone from young professionals to billion-dollar families, applying the same core principles: track cash flow, build strong balance sheets, plan for life events, and manage risk. For ultra-wealthy families, they focus on education—teaching kids as early as sixth grade to understand money and avoid entitlement.
They call it “garden glove service”—hands-on, practical, and focused on building something meaningful. They also emphasize five types of capital: financial, human, intellectual, social, and wisdom.
Their planning helps clients avoid tax mistakes, close insurance gaps, and navigate big life transitions. As Matt says, they often just “stand between clients and stupid.”
You can follow Ben on LinkedIn or The Advisor Dads YouTube channel, and Matt on Linkedin and Twitter @cultishcreative.
Music in this episode was obtained from Bensound.
What's up, everyone, welcome back. This is the only fee only podcast and, as always, thanks for being here, no exception. This week we have two more amazing guests who are Matt Ziegler and Ben Tuskai from Sunpoint Investments, and they are here to talk about how they went to Sunpoint and essentially revamped a lot of cool things. They brought the financial planning aspect, the deep financial planning aspect, to Sunpoint, which was more of a traditional investment firm when they got there, and they have such a cool dynamic. Matt and Ben have actually known each other for a long time and Matt met Ben when he was doing something completely different, which you'll learn about in the episode, and then they eventually came together and are working together and have such a cool dynamic between the two of them. So enjoy this episode with Matt and Ben on the Only Fee Only podcast with Matt and Ben on the Only Fee Only podcast.
Speaker 2:How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of the Only Fee Only podcast. Today we are very excited to have Ben and Matt on from Sunpoint Investments. I'm really looking forward to hearing how they're serving many different types of families and every member within the family. So, Ben and Matt, welcome to the show. I'll let you guys introduce yourselves individually. We'll start with Ben first.
Speaker 3:I don't know what you want in my intro, but yeah, I've been working in finance for getting close to a decade, which you start to feel I guess you always think you're young and then you start to say those numbers, how long you've been doing this whole thing. Then you're like, oh God, I am getting older. But yeah, been in finance, been with Sunpoint for a little over two years, spent about eight, eight and a half years with Vanguard before this, primarily doing the wholesaling gig, and was in a leadership role there. And then, prior to Vanguard, I worked for the Philadelphia Phillies, which was a cool job but was really hard to make a living. Not sure my wife loved that style of work where I was gone on weekends, holidays, nights, but I got to work at Citizens Bank Park and get to hang out with some of the players sometimes, so that was always interesting. So that's me dad, husband, two kids, two dogs. That's what keeps me busy.
Speaker 1:Love it man, love it man. What about you, matt?
Speaker 4:Oh yeah, I'm just a living adventure right here Almost two decades in finance, which is terrifying. It's been almost two decades since I got my first finance job as a part-time teller. I guess it's getting better around here. I never worked for the Phillies. Ben, it's not too late. I'm still thinking the Phillies job sounds pretty sweet.
Speaker 4:But I was a music major. I was a musician, I did all sorts of stuff like that. Basically burned out on it, became a part-time teller, was really bad at it, could never balance a drawer Testament to my dominant math skills, which is why Ben works with me and it's basically my right hand. And then saw the guy in the corner working in the bank branch. It was like that guy doesn't hate his life. How do I get that job? What's he do? He's a financial advisor. Okay, I got that job right before the financial crisis somehow didn't flunk out. And here I am today on this podcast, which I mean game over right Career complete, if you only podcast, which I mean game over right Career complete. Fee-only podcast. Ben, they're paying us for this right. That's why they call it the fee-only podcast.
Speaker 3:I didn't want to disclose that yet, but wow.
Speaker 4:Might as well get it out. I'm going out on this fee-only guys, so I hope you're ready to tell us what the big money is.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely no. That's awesome man and, for those of you watching along, he does have some very cool guitars in the background. So well, tell us a little bit about SunPoint, like what you guys do, what kind of families you serve, kind of how the firm started, whatever you want to share, to kind of go, and then we'll get into some of the fun nuanced stuff around financial planning, All right, I'm taking this one, ben, and then you're taking the next one.
Speaker 4:So SunPoint starts basically 2017, I want to say Michael Pompeian flees, as we all do, flees one employer because you go oh my God, this sucks how we are taking care of clients. I know I could do this so much better and you finally leave. He leaves, takes an anchor client or two with him, slowly. His team this was from Mercer where they built the private wealth segment from a few billion dollars after they were an acqui-hire all the way up to 90 or almost $100 billion. They leave with an anchor client or two. This is strictly family office work. This is strictly investment consulting work and they set up Sunpoint. So the whole idea from the beginning shine the bright light of transparency on fees, conflicts of interest, stuff like that, and in that world of investment consulting that's a really big deal. So a few family offices, all investment work. They start building that out and they realize, surprise, surprise, as you start to take care of families and their money, they start to ask pestering questions. They start to want to know what do I do with my kids or my grandkids and their education planning? What do I do with this stuff?
Speaker 4:I meet Michael Pompeian somewhere from this head hunter around this time because I am trying and failing to get my CFA and I'm going. I really hate this stuff because see, teller skills, the math not my friend when it comes to getting those test answers Right. But I really liked the behavioral psychology stuff. That all makes sense to me, business owner stuff makes sense to me. And so I get this call from a headhunter. They're like do you want to go work at a family office? And I go hell, no, how did you even find me? You're the worst headhunter ever who would possibly put you up to this task. They're like well, trying really hard to find a fit, michael Pompian, and I looked down into the CFA study guides and I'm like the guy who wrote the behavioral finance chapter and the study guide. I should maybe meet him. And that starts a friendship.
Speaker 4:I started helping him with financial planning stuff he starts helping me with was doing a lot of pension work and stuff like that at the time. And then when I was getting ready to Merrill he was like why would you go anywhere else when you could build the financial planning division up at our firm and expand the offering from investment consulting to financial planning? And I said that sounds like a great idea, but only if I can bring my boy, benny Pompeon, along with me from Vanguard. And then again we landed here on the fee only podcast.
Speaker 2:There we go, I love it. I love it, ben. What's?
Speaker 3:your perspective on it. I mean, I don't have a ton to add, but all of the SunPoint stuff is accurate and of course, maybe the thing that I would add in there too is, with a lot of the family offices, that intersection of investment, consulting and generational wealth and trying to figure out how do we bridge that gap between Gen 1, gen 2, and Gen 3. It's challenging and it's unique and we have a saying inside the firm where it's like when you see one family office, you've only seen one family office. They all operate so differently and they're unique. And I think that that's where, when Jack Dwyer left Mercer to come with Michael over here to Sunpoint, he really heads up our family office division and a lot of that is education, trying to bridge that gap between one generation to the next.
Speaker 3:And like what you're trying to really fight is like this entitlement mindset where you know Gen 2, you kind of know right when you're flying private to Africa to go on a vacation, mom and dad probably have some money and then Gen 3 probably knows when they're getting on a private jet with mom, dad and grandma that the family has some money.
Speaker 3:So there is some entitlement stuff.
Speaker 3:So Jack spends a lot of his time building these education forums and I think he works all the way down with even sixth graders of just trying to learn the basics of decision making and behaviors and why it's important to be a good steward and good for society and not just sitting back and saying, okay, well, there's a trust out there with my name on it, with the eight or nine figures in there.
Speaker 3:I'm good. And you've been able to actually feel some of that education in my work, as in the planning role of getting to work with some of these families, just like all of this time that Jack has been spending and you're like okay, man, gen 2, they don't act at all like they're ultra wealthier in this really wealthy segment. You know, if one family is like Gen 2 is both are doctors and cios to biotech company, it's like, it's so incredible to see and a lot of that you can attribute to like the, the family itself, because you have to have good foundations and then the work that you know jack is is instilling behind the scenes and doing some education. So I think that that's a key component of the family office work yeah, I mean that's really interesting.
Speaker 1:You said that, man, because I think there's this like general conception that if you're a second generational, like second generation right, a lot of times people are like, yeah, it's daddy's money or whatever, and sometimes it is right Like everybody's met somebody. It's like all right, man, you like have you don't know anything about life. Probably you gotta you need to, you need some lessons here. Um, but it's really cool that there's that piece of it because it's like it doesn't have to be that way, right, and and like when you understand how money works and then you know there's a good culture and you have good people around you that are teaching you about it. You don't have to be the the just kind of spoiled kid. That's a second generation, whatever. That doesn't know anything, which is which is just not. The it's not. It's not true. That's a second generation, whatever. That doesn't know anything, which is just not true. That's not the case all the time.
Speaker 4:Never underestimate that. Shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves isn't going to do itself.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that is very real and the data points that you see out. There are the rags to rags and three generations. That's what we're trying to fight against. The data is so skewed, one way that you are fighting an uphill battle. But I think when you start that education earlier, one that's obviously fundamental and don't get me wrong we've met our fair share of prospects, or Gen 2 prospects, where it's like that's great money. You're so late in the game of of you know that you're going to inherit this money and you haven't worked a day in your life.
Speaker 3:And you're 49 years old, so there is the other side of this equation. Fortunately for some of these families that have been working with Michael and Jack for two decades two and a half decades that's where it's like you've been able to see this transition over an extended period of time.
Speaker 2:Yeah for sure, yeah. So I mean, where does the education really start? I mean, is it like a trigger that you guys see servicing your client, or is the client coming to you saying, hey, it's about time we start having this discussion? What's that look like, and how does Sunpoint direct the convo from there?
Speaker 4:Well, one of the important things on the bookends of this is and this was a big part of Ben and I joining the firm two and a half, almost three years ago is there's you have the family office, you have the money, you have all the complicated planning stuff and the trusts and the houses and the real estate and all the things going on. And then, all of a sudden, you're going to start distributing it in the houses and the real estate and all the things going on. And then, all of a sudden, you're going to start distributing it, You're going to start passing it down through and you want to pass personal values along with financial values and how we operate in that space. That's a big part of where the firm was founded. The work I was doing previously and a big part of what we bring to the table is well, what if you're starting from scratch too? What if you don't have the family office yet? But the business is taking off? You did a few things right and now all of a sudden, somebody's buying you out, or hey, that real estate venture we took over from dad. We were able to really throw some coal on this fire and now it's really starting to go fast.
Speaker 4:What do we do? Because now, maybe it's they're the ones who go. Our kids just experienced a giant shift in the way our family lives its life. How do we do this? So, navigating both from starting from nothing, building it all the way up to we built it all the way up. How do we maintain or how do we distribute it down? At the end of the day, you're going to gift it or consume it, and you got to figure out what your philosophy is there.
Speaker 4:So to your education approach. This is where the basic tenets of financial planning completely takes over. This is where the basic ten care of both monetarily and psychologically. What's the calendar? What are the events that we know are going to happen? What are the cash flows? What are the taxes? What are all the other crap that goes into money coming in, what's coming out? What is the balance sheet? What does it look like in your generation, across generations, forward in time, backwards in time? Where are there surpluses and deficits that support the cash flows? And then, last but not least, what are those risks? And always asking the question of we're going to do this plan, we're going to have baseline assumptions, but then what happens if you live longer than we expected, If you die earlier, if you get sick, if you get sued, and that is an educational process that starts with the people with the money and then we want to build it out for that whole team all around that person. Ben, you want to add anything to that one?
Speaker 3:No, and I think the interest, like what Matt just covered, is that's fundamental to any relationship Like whether you have $100 million or you have $100,000, you still need to be planning for all of those like what if? Scenarios and they're not all the. What if you buy a beach house or a fifth property? Right, what if we buy the jet? Not all the what if you buy a beach house or a fifth?
Speaker 2:property Right.
Speaker 3:What if we buy the jet? But what happens and part of that team component is what happens when we work Matt and I work with a lot of clients under the age of 40 that are starting to inch closer to this. I'm going to have to navigate the what are my parents going to do? Or what's the living and for some of those it's I'm financially successful at 38 years old or whatever it is for them, but my parents didn't save any money. How am I going to financially support upstream? And we start those conversations pretty early on. That's why we have a component in our foundational deck on the team. We want to know who those people are and we need to know, more than six months out, that that could be coming down the pike in the future to help us adequately plan the cashflow and the balance sheet for those scenarios. So there's so many inner workings of this and you're really trying to navigate the risk management side of life, but not the investment risk management side of life. It's all of those four components that Matt just covered.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, that makes total sense, and that's a really good point, because there's a lot of things to think about. When you guys were kind of coming on right and we're like, okay, we've got investment management, now we're going to include this financial, this thing called financial planning right, what was that like? Like, was there any like tension in the firm? Or like this is the way we do things here, and now we're going to try to throw this in and we're going to add all these additional services. How did you guys come to? This is going to be our process. This is what we're going to do, because I know there are a lot of firms out there that think of themselves as investment managers, but more and more are moving toward that financial planning avenue. So how did that look for you guys as a firm?
Speaker 3:I can speak to when I joined. So as a wholesaler I sold to the four wire houses primarily and I don't want to stereotype the wire houses on this podcast here but more of the work that was being done for about 90% to 95% plus was all in the investment realm, and when you would talk about planning aspects, you were kind of fighting an uphill battle there too. So when I came to SunPoint, we had to build out some of the planning. The planning process had to be built from scratch because we did it Jack did it at the family office level, but we didn't have anything that was working downstream and we wanted to be really careful on efficiencies. There's certain aspects of like data inputs and data integration that you want to be efficient on, but for unique decision-making you don't want to be efficient there. You should be making calculated and analytical decisions that should be inefficient but should be beneficial to the family. So we had to be careful there. I've actually given I love that you asked this question because I've given a ton of credit to SunPoint Because when I came here and I know Matt came just before me we came with a lot of change, which was we're going to build this whole new process out.
Speaker 3:We're going to start marketing. We're going to build this whole new process out. We're going to start marketing, we're going to do webinars, we're going to write a newsletter, we're going to hire a marketing firm to help us out with all of the production and stuff. And we did everything in probably eight or nine months. So that's discomfort for the rest of the firm. And everybody was just like yeah, do it. Just tell us how to do it, we'll go along with you guys and we yeah, you have to like it comes with education.
Speaker 3:You have to come with some persuasion and come to the table with hey, who are the right stakeholders that I'm going to need to be on board with these things? But most of the firm, I mean especially. I give Jack a huge, huge amount of credit. He was like I don't know how to do this stuff. Just teach me what I need to do to write on LinkedIn and let's record videos. Now, him and I record videos every other Wednesday.
Speaker 3:I love that, so it's like that is a perfect example of somebody saying I know the investment consulting world better than almost anybody and I do planning and I do family services, but I'm willing to learn all of this other stuff and how to do it, so it actually wasn't that challenging. Now I have been asked quite often by peers in the industry that have made a similar jump to me what was the approach? Can I have the blueprint for how you did it and it? And it's kind of tough because sure, I could give you what Matt and I kind of built behind the scenes before we put it in front of the team. But we had a team that wanted to learn and get better and do these different things. If you have somebody that's closed-minded, that's going to be a 6, 12, 18-month process before you start to really open their eyes, which we honestly didn't battle that before you start to really open their eyes, which we honestly didn't battle.
Speaker 1:that, yeah, I was getting ready to say it's great if you can have the blueprint, but if you don't have people that are willing and open to learn and integrate new things, your blueprint doesn't really matter.
Speaker 2:It doesn't matter yeah.
Speaker 4:Once you've seen one RIA, you've seen one RIA right. The common denominator that's important to mention here is there was a focus on behavioral finance, not just the labeling of the cognitive foibles and like oh, now you're anchoring, let's go fix you, or anything like that. I was like no, we are. Everybody has different ways that they approach and solve for the world. So the job of the advisor is to basically understand, not to diagnose, not to fix, but just go. Oh, this person's going to trip over this type of thing consistently when it comes down to making these decisions. And because that's in the core DNA that the firm is built on, that allowed us to come in and go great, we've got the financial capital side of the equation locked down. So that's already there. But the financial side is, and one of the many things we came in with this is the one piece of advice I'll give like come in with the ways you explain things. So one of the parts that Ben and I love to say is we talk about everything about garden glove service. I loathe the expression white glove service. I loathe the concept of like oh, you want me to be your butler. Or like check for dust, what are the white gloves. No, I'm here to get my hands dirty in the name of growth when you hire Sunpoint. We are here to get our hands in the mud and build something with you.
Speaker 4:So, yes, we're going to be worried about your financial capital and financial stewardships and all those things. But the financial planning work and this is the beauty of it where it scales across generations and a lot of money to no money who wants to have it? We're going to start by talking about human capital. We're going to start by talking about your intellectual capital, your social capital. We're going to start to talk about the other forms of the wisdom and what you're going to pass forward onto different generations. And go, what's your core philosophy around these five areas Extra credit to Jay Hughes generations. And go, what's your core philosophy around these five areas Extra credit to Jay Hughes Guarding glove service. Look at the capitals. Map that all out for people and all that behavioral psychology maps right over it. So that's the part that I think made it easy for us to build out.
Speaker 4:Well, I say easy A ton of work, a ton of work, but easier than fighting the uphill battle of like what I was doing before when I was at Merrill and I'll throw the wires under the bus. It'd be if I even said the word tax in an email. I'd get flagged and six managers are calling me and it's going okay. But I set up the 401k for the business, which is a tax shield.
Speaker 1:But like I'm not allowed to talk, about that, if I put it in writing. You don't talk about what it is, though, matt, but like I'm not allowed to talk about that, am I putting it right? You don't talk about what it is, though, matt.
Speaker 4:We don't talk about what we do as compliance. Yeah right, yeah, yeah. So we are very much aware of that frustration, yeah.
Speaker 2:So what's the team dynamic look like? How many households are you guys serving within the firm, and where do you see SunPoint growing with all these offerings?
Speaker 3:I mean as a firm. I don't know the exact, maybe it's two, is it two? It's two? Something I think is the household number now. I think we're up to seven advisors across that 200-plus mark. And where do I see it growing?
Speaker 3:I mean, matt and I have been very fortunate, probably the past five weeks here, with some unprecedented growth that would not be feasible to keep up. You couldn't expect it to keep growing at the rate it's growing, nor would we want to, because at some point you have to navigate the services versus the growth model and so that at some point we're hiring because we're growing so quick. We've hired a paraplanner to join us in August. He interned with us for two years and so we were really excited about that and that should provide a little bit of relief for me and some others here. But we've had some acquisitions.
Speaker 3:We've added a couple of advisors, rob Moody most recently.
Speaker 3:He came over from UBS and then Ryan Heidenreich came over from American Century and I think what we've learned is people come in here doing something very differently and it's not that constrained where it's.
Speaker 3:Hey, you need to conform right now to what Sunpoint is doing. Obviously we want everybody kind of walking in the same direction or you're going to have big issues. But when we brought on somebody like Ryan, it was like, hey, I don't have the capacity to do this financial planning thing. It was like, hey, I don't have the capacity to do this financial planning thing. I can plug all their data in MoneyGuard Pro and click, go and hand it in PDF, but other than that, I don't have time for that. So him coming here to be able to offer something different with insurance evaluations I know we do a lot of work with you guys there Tax planning he has a whole investment team behind him, led by Lee Boudour, so you're like being able to really expand the offer for these clients has been a big tailwind for him. Specifically, it's just clients consolidating assets and we've grown quite a bit organically while acquiring or having other advisors join us.
Speaker 1:That's awesome, man. Now it seems like you guys are growing and it's been cool to know you guys for a couple of years now and to be able to see the evolution, because I mean, we started talking when you were pretty close to like brand new at some point. I would say, right, it's neat to see you know where you guys are at and how it's growing. What's a good example Like? What's a win that you guys have had either in a financial planning case recently or as a firm, where you know somebody brought something to you and you guys were really able to come out on the other side really proud of the work and kind of alleviating some of that pressure on the client's end.
Speaker 4:I mean there's we should give examples at a couple of the different tiers, because I just think it's interesting and this is the kind of stuff that we've run into and it's also testament to each advisor. So number one we serve every client as a team. Nobody's just servicing a client as, like, a solo practitioner or whatever.
Speaker 2:Love that.
Speaker 4:Everybody's coming as a team, it's at least the advisor, and then it's what levels of support staff are directly involved, and for many clients it's the main point of contact. Then they have an investment person, a planning person, an operations person. That's part of that relationship with the client and with family offices. Just to broaden out what Ben said, if all you're doing is working with multiple hundreds of millions and billion dollar families, none of them come and just like, oh, it's just one guy or one gal. It's like, no, you get them, but then you get the 12 people around them. So household headcount is always a thorny thing for us. The more complicated, the more high demand and high touch those questions are. You might only be able to serve 25 clients, somebody who's doing mass affluent or whatever else. I know I measure my capacity around. I don't want to be taking care of more than 80 households after being at a company where it was like you could handle 150.
Speaker 4:You're fine and you forget your name by the end of the day every single day and looking at that. And same with support staff. How many people can support staff handle before they can't deliver that service? So we think I don't want to say we think too much on that, because I don't think you can ever think too much on that. So a few wins, some things that have looked like. We got a really great referral for in the hundreds of millions of dollars a partnership. Two people came in and they went. We were tremendously lucky coming out of basically I'm going to just go venture angel, we'll go in that category. We had some really great investments that spawned a public markets portfolio. That spawned some other portfolios. It bloomed in size. These guys are not very old in this partnership and they went. We all of a sudden need help with tax, we need help with what do we do next and we need help with not screwing this up because we just hit 16 consecutive grand slams.
Speaker 1:Basically, yeah right, it's a lot of grand slams, it's a lot of grand slams.
Speaker 4:That's not a normal scenario, but when you find yourself in that you turn to somebody else you know. And luckily they turned to another client of ours who was like why don't you come talk to my people? Because you just lucked your way into skilled, you just skilled your way into this situation. Who can help you? And a big part for them was on the tech and the op side way, underappreciated. Most family offices are still run on basically Excel spreadsheets. It's not.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4:It's not a good look, oh we know, it's not a good look, and how are you supposed to crunch numbers on risk or thinking about any of that stuff if you're all in Excel? So they came to us with a big part of it just being can you help systematize reporting for like two partners and then their families business partners and then their families, business partners, and then their families, when we have all these assets scattered across all these places and that's a frigging lift, but that's something that we've been doing for a long time. We have systems, processes and procedures. So that's one category of a win.
Speaker 4:Another category of a win and these are some of the ones that I think Ben and I have been the most excited about, because it's such a planning focus, not an investment focus is at the smaller scale. Stuff starts working for people and it's usually. I'm thinking of a case where we had a very successful person in the investment industry in a management capacity. He was getting presented with a new job opportunity basically found us because of doing stuff like podcasts and things like this and when. I like the way that you guys think, I like the way that you talk and, most importantly, I think you can talk to my spouse, which is the biggest compliment you can give us is I think you can talk to my spouse so we show up for them.
Speaker 4:And now we're helping this otherwise very successful, very savvy financial services industry person go. How do I vet this new opportunity, how do I think about that in the risk with my wife's job and her very, very successful personal career? What does this mean? What does this mean for our kids? What does this mean for how we pass stuff down with the multiple properties and whatever else? How might we screw this up? And here's a successful 40 something by every measure. But now we have to reimagine their entire life, how this stitches together and back to answering those risk questions. And then the smallest end of it, because I don't want to gloss over this, because it's not sexy or exciting. We've got so many families where it just keeps on blossoming out, and it's in fact.
Speaker 4:This morning I had a conversation. It was the third child, so I started taking off. Taking the mother's parents were my initial clients and then it was G2 became the core client. I helped the husband retire early, like 10 years ago, and now I think we're working with all three kids and it was the last of the three kids came today and wonderfully successful. It was basically like I'm just too busy, I got too much going on. Now it's basically mom, dad and all my siblings are like why haven't you called Matt in bed yet, Right?
Speaker 4:And it'll start off as a small relationship. It's not going to start off as anything big, but it's just. He's asking some investment questions. First, who have you looked at your tax returns with? Like I don't have time for that either. Who have you reviewed the insurance policies with? I don't have time for that either. And I know and Ben and I talk about this a lot it's the whole churn thing. Our industry is full of people. It's like oh, we want to capture all the retirees, we want to capture this, and then people are inevitably phasing out. And that's why at some of those big firms, you have to have 150 clients, because you're going to lose 20 households to attrition every year.
Speaker 4:Because you're just riding and dying on performance or whatever else and what I take every day of the week is even if it's not a billion dollar family give me the $5 million family where, all of a sudden, I have three or four kids who all have the potential to strike up into that same range and the parents in some kids, some of these cases, are like I'm not leaving them, anything, like they're fine. Basically, I want to live a good life and then give it all to charity at the end. Let them figure it out. We did a good job raising them and to me that's that's. That's a dream scenario. That's a dream scenario too.
Speaker 1:So those are they figured it that we figured it out. They can figure it out too. Yeah, we hear that all the time. Some of the wealthiest people in the world, as a matter of fact, do that.
Speaker 3:So yeah, no, it's that. So those are like qualitative wins. No-transcript. I have it this morning.
Speaker 3:New clients speaking of this is like the fifth family member that's been working with Matt and wife she's getting married. They sent us their insurance policies. It's like you're paying what? For an auto policy. It's like, oh, you just kept going up in price.
Speaker 3:And you start to look at things. You're like and then the house, by the way, is covered for $200,000, but the house is worth 650. And so those are really easy quantitative figures to point at and be like okay in insurance. And then, of course, in tax, where it's like husband and wife are making $750,000 a year and they're like, oh, we always did Roth. It's like, yeah, you always weren't in the 47% tax bracket either, so maybe we should rethink that. And it's like, oh, by the way, just that one tweak is going to save you $7,000 in tax this year and maybe $2,500 over your lifetime just for this decision that we're making. So the quantitative things of just preventing people from making bad decisions, it's really impactful and I think Matt says it sometimes when we're on prospect calls, like we're just trying to stay in between you and dumb, and like that's if we can do that in. Like all of these different areas you are going to have, the outcomes are just going to go up. You know five X on on on all of this.
Speaker 4:And, to be fair, the statement is I'm going to stand in between you and stupid which I'm always scared to say out loud. And I get the look of horror. The first time I say that in front of like probably the first time I said in front of Ben Ben falls out of the chair. Like listen you're paying us good money to stand between you and stupid and if stupid's over there and you're over here, you're going to be happy you paid us.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and everybody's got it's that up and down the family tree thing. Like I want to go up and down the trunk, I want to go down the roots, I want to go out to the branches, and it's so much better to work with, like do good work for good people. Once you find a good family, why do you need to go out and chase the 30th new client from LinkedIn or something?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah for sure. Well and I like the point that you made, Ben, too it's like, yeah, we've always been doing a Roth. It's like, yeah, when you were 16, you could probably eat an entire pizza and not gain any weight. It doesn't exactly work like that. When you get older, right, they're like we can't just do the stuff that we used to do. You got to switch it up. No, that's cool, guys, For financial planners that are out there, because you guys really do have your systems processed together. You've been able to really make an impact in the firm with what you guys have brought to the table. For those financial planners that are out there. They're like I feel like I know what I'm doing, I feel like I know who I want to go after, but in terms of building out our processes and getting things where we want them to be to, where we know what we're going to take every client through, but I don't know where the hell to start. What would you tell them?
Speaker 3:Matt has to answer that, because I think what I had was, when I came to SunPoint, I had the CFP. I was so excited but I had zero practical experience of delivering any plan or having a real-world conversation with a client. So I had to sit with Matt and just listen and just okay, what are the questions that he's asking? And 70% of them have nothing to do with planning and everything to do with emotional responses and how they're navigating decision-making. So I think that that's really important. But the process is trying to figure out what are your clients going to connect with. Trying to figure out, like, what are your clients going to connect with and how are you framing that in a way that some type of like pattern or like.
Speaker 3:For us it worked as like a slide deck and you have to remember the first one that you put together is never going to be the one that you use. So, like, the first one that I built was 26 slides. Matt was like what the hell is that Like? This is? They're never going to be able to do this for somebody. So it's like all the iterations of us working together and then presenting it back to the firm so that and asking for help. I think we work in an industry today where people are more willing. I know from the connections on Twitter and LinkedIn, if you have questions, just being able to shoot somebody a message, the amount of times that.
Speaker 3:I've asked Tom Kobelman a question as important as that guy is for him to just take the second to be like hey, here's the link to that article and here's how I think through it. People do that, cody Garrett, too. Like you think about these guys that have like ballooned in this industry and are super popular you would think wouldn't have time for you. No, but like everybody wants to help everybody and I think it's like being okay with just accepting the fact that you're not going to know everything and you can ask for help. But I mean, I learned a ton from matt, so like I'll yield the rest to him do you learn by doing stuff?
Speaker 4:You learn by listening to shows like this. This is why we think it's awesome that you guys do this, Plus you guys do this, so I'm pretty sure that's how we found out who you were. Yeah, Because both Ben and I came from compliance purgatory and had to fight our way on the social media and then go we're the cat that got outside. It was like what the hell do I do now?
Speaker 4:I haven't looked at this window a long time, but now I'm overwhelmed by inputs and so you get out there, you start networking, you start piecing it together and for us I know I threw it out there earlier, but it's like knowing those five capitals, knowing that every single client we sit down and walk through and this was something I just learned, getting my reps in and developing this process, where I didn't really have a mentor, somebody to explain this to me, so I was always piecing stuff together, but kind of helped that. I wanted to be a music producer, where you sit down with somebody and they go. I need this to sound more yellow and you can't laugh, you have to go yellow.
Speaker 4:Got it, but then it's a riddle and it's a puzzle. You got to figure out what the hell yellow means to that person, and that is. You just need a system. So I think of it. It's almost like the deck is basically like Mad Libs. It's just this format that we can have a dialogue with a conversation, a conversation with a client. It's going to go in all these directions. But they start to go here's this thing, and mentally and Ben had to learn how to do this Mentally they throw something out there and you go, oh, that's a calendar item.
Speaker 4:Mentally, they throw out a document. You go, oh, that's where that fits on the balance sheet. But now that they put that there, I have a cashflow question because I don't know why they're still doing those Roth contributions and they will hand you all the puzzle pieces if you can just sit down and talk to them. I keep saying this, ben, you haven't seen this yet, but I need to recreate this. I made this for an old team that I was a part of and it was like this, like two-sided laminated thing, and on the one side was Woody from Toy Story and on the other side was Liam Neeson from Taken and there were two images and I was like this is all we do and this was my pitch to the team and we're doing all this defined benefit, wellness program stuff for people.
Speaker 4:It's like this is all we do. You've got a friend on the woody side. Like every single time somebody calls you, you have to remember you've got a friend and you flip it over and say you know, I have a certain set of skills. Over and over again you leave out the.
Speaker 1:I will, I will fight, I will kill you.
Speaker 3:I was like where are you going with? This is two total opposites of people. That's good, though it works.
Speaker 4:This is this is how you succeed in our industry, though, yeah, to be a little bit crazy a little bit. You know fun to hang around with um, and that's important too.
Speaker 3:Yeah, good relationships.
Speaker 4:Yeah, you were allowed to have fun in financial services. Did you guys know that? Yeah, believe it or not. Believe it or not, man.
Speaker 3:When you're on podcasts like this. I'm going to mention this because I've never got to mention it on a podcast, but it's fascinating because when I was wholesaling at Vanguard, matt was my first. He was a client of mine, so when he was at Vanguard, that's how Matt and I met when Matty met Benny.
Speaker 3:Matt and so I'm on a recorded line every single day and my manager, kathleen, would have to listen to these calls and she was like you're always talking to this guy, matt. Every Friday Matt would meet with me at 10, 10 or 10 o'clock in the morning for like 30 to 40 minutes to teach me how to be a wholesaler. And she was like I've never she's like I've been wholesale, I've been in wholesaling. She was at Lincoln before Vanguard. I've never seen this before, but like it's really good. And we didn't have a training program in place at the time. So Matt was like my training program and we stayed friends after that. And he was actually the one that was like hey, I think you should consider that leadership role that. The management team was like hey, we really want you to take this job. And I was like I don't know, that just seems really like like a dumb career move. And Matt was like I don't know. I think like you got to have foresight here of like is it what you want to do next? No, but is it going to give you the skills to be more marketable for whatever life is going to throw at you in the future? Sure, so I wound up taking the job and six months in, I was like I know why Matt had me do this and, of course, I passed the CFP.
Speaker 3:The day I passed CFP July 8th 2021, I text Matt, he calls me and he was like I knew right away. He was like I'm thinking about leaving Merrill Lynch and I was like I knew exactly where this is going. I was like he had he saw six years in advance. It was like I like this guy enough, he's going to get his skill set. He's listening, uh, and I joined sunpoint. This is the best part. I had never met matt in person, never. That's amazing.
Speaker 4:So, yeah, everybody wants to find like the hot stock or the hot whatever and all this bullshit in life. And at the end of the day, it's just you got to find good people and hang on to them and that's yeah. Somebody told me two of ben's. Yeah, somebody told me two of ben's prior colleagues told me they were like we have this guy who's really promising, he's really actually into planning, and then I meet ben and I'm like this guy actually cares about irma and stuff like yeah, that's true, that's sick, this guy is issues but,
Speaker 4:how many people I have met who are this emotionally damaged that they care about in irma. I need to to stuff this into my pocket and hold onto it forever, because these are some magic seeds and they're going to take me up to the land of the giants and all that stuff. So it's investing in those relationships and that's back to maybe that's your full circle. Master plan here, peter and Brock, is to take us back to the family office. Stuff is how are you going to take care of your people? You're making as much of an investment in them as anything else and we think cross-generational, we think long-term, we think mentorship and passing values and I love that Ben shared that story because we want to live and breathe that every single day. That's what we do. It matters. It matters a lot. It's good on you guys for getting us to share these stories, yeah.
Speaker 1:That guys for getting us to share these stories. Yeah, that's what it's all about. It only took us 130 episodes to get deep into this man. It's practice.
Speaker 4:We got practice. Oh, practice man, we're talking about practice.
Speaker 1:Yes, that's right. We're talking about practice, not a game. Not a game, no for sure. Well, anything else, man, that you guys thought about or that you want to share, or get out there before we part ways here.
Speaker 4:I want to say this you need partners in this business, and Ben made the point earlier. We need people like you guys in the business that we can lean on with questions. One of my favorite things about coming to Sunpoint and Ben and I put in the deck together and the whole financial planning process was we were always in captive ecosystems. Where they go, the interest of the clients must come first or we're a full fiduciary, and this is how we do things, how we take care of people. But this is the best product ever. This is the best financial planning software ever you go, but it can't do all these things. They're like well, it's the best one we've got and that's the one you have to use. Or here's our people and you have to use them. And that is the biggest. Sorry for swearing multiple times in your podcast. It's the biggest piece of bullshit ever is oh you're a fiduciary.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:But you can't offer them all these things. So it's our tech stack, and what we use for clients involves so many different resources and we only have a deck because we have to export stuff and piecemeal it all back together. The professionals that we use. We have people like you to help with our insurances and all the other things where we need a network of people and a network of resources to do the work we do, because everybody is unique At the end of the day. We have lots of stuff that rhymes. We're all people, we all do stupid human stuff, but we've got little wrinkles and nuances and other things and that's all personality matching. That's all human stuff all the way down and other things, and that's all personality matching.
Speaker 1:That's all human stuff all the way down. So yeah, that's. I love it. We could have saved you guys a bunch of time. You guys, we didn't have to do the investment world at all, you could have just gotten your insurance license permanent insurance. Us Army knife. It fits everything, for every reason ever, and you would.
Speaker 4:life would be so much easier if we just could have embraced that, I know.
Speaker 1:If we just only ever saw TikTok in our entire life. No, that's awesome, man. Well, you guys are awesome. It's always great to get the chance to talk to you both. For those that want to follow along with you guys on social media because you put out great stuff or follow along with some point, how can they do that?
Speaker 3:I'm on LinkedIn, at Ben Tuskeye on LinkedIn. That's primarily where I do everything, and then Dave Rath, another fellow advisor, friend of mine that we've become pretty good buddies over the past year and a half. Here we have a YouTube channel, the Advisor Dads, or just all the challenges of being a dad while trying to be a professional at the same time and how we navigate a lot of the financial complexities of our own lives. So those are the two areas that I'm on.
Speaker 4:So Sunpoint Investments. We'll say that first and foremost, sunpoint. We have an E because we're fancy. On the end of point, don't forget the E. And investments is plural, because why would you have one, why would you only have Sunpoint Investments? Why would you do that? Multiple investments we're fancy like that. Yeah, I'm Matt Ziegler on LinkedIn. That's I before E, except after Z, as my mom taught me to say, because no one can say or pronounce or spell my name still. And Cultish Creative on Twitter. I still hang out on that hellscape because I still think it's fun and you can find all I do, all these podcasts and all this other mess of stuff.
Speaker 2:So it's all on cultishcreativecom. If you want to hear more about my madness, love it. Well, ben and Matt, thank you so much for your time today.
Speaker 4:I really appreciate it. Thanks guys, Thanks Peter and Brock, Thanks.