On this week’s episode of the Financial Planning Podcast, Doug Fritz explains what’s wrong with the customer experience in wealth management, and why advisory firms are turning to technology to fix it.

Fritz, co-founder and CEO of California-based wealthtech management consulting company F2 Strategy, stops by the podcast this week to talk about what our industry can learn from all the services that surround highly sought-after prospects and deliver interactions so seamless that they almost go unnoticed.

He said in today’s world, technology has created an environment where most people have their questions answered and needs met by their apps before they even ask them. But that kind of proactive engagement is still missing in the client-advisor relationship.

He said one issue is that advisors are incentivized to pursue asset growth and performance during a time when clients crave comfort and guidance.

“(As an advisor) I’ve got 40 hours or 60 hours in a workweek. When am I going to plan for my clients?” Fritz said. “I’m busy growing assets. I’m busy doing the thing you’re paying me to do, not the thing that is right for clients.”

Fritz’s industry experience includes working as First Republic Bank’s chief technology officer, where developed and executed the bank’s wealthtech roadmap. He also served as senior vice president of Wells Fargo Wealth Management Group in the years prior to founding F2 alongside his wife and chief commercial officer Liz Fritz in 2016.

During his conversation with FP Podcast host and lead editorial producer Justin L. Mack, Fritz discusses what he believes is next for financial Planning technology, hot fintech trends that are being overlooked, and how complaining about his internship in a Moscow bar led to a decades-long career in the industry. 

Listen to the new episode — as well as to all future and past episodes — by subscribing to the FP Podcast on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

Transcript:

Justin L. Mack (00:02):
Good morning, good afternoon and good evening. Welcome to the Financial Planning Podcast. I’m your host Justin L. Mack, wealthtech editor with Financial Planning. And it is my pleasure to introduce this week’s guest, Doug Fritz, co-founder and CEO of F2 Strategy. Doug, thank you so much for joining us on the show this week. 

Doug Fritz (00:20):
Justin, thanks so much for having me. Been looking forward to this for a while. 

Justin L. Mack (00:23):
Absolutely. Now, Doug is someone who I’ve had the good fortune — and I guess as a result, Doug has had the misfortune — of chatting with before. Whether it be on camera at the Future Proof Conference last year or in the pages of FP, we’ve had a chance to tap in with him and talk about all things wealthtech and just the industry at large. Which has always been great. But this is the first time we’ve been able to bring his decades of industry experience to the FP Pod. If you don’t know him, you should. Doug’s a veteran CTO and wealthtech consultant who leads the F2 team, and he’s passionate about helping firms of all sizes deliver exceptional client and advisor experience. Before founding F2 with his wife and chief commercial officer Liz Fritz, also a friend of the show despite never being on it, Doug was the chief technology officer of First Republic Bank, where he led the execution of the wealthtech roadmap. 

(01:10)
Before that, he was senior vice president of Wells Fargo Wealth Management Group. And while it’s not explicitly stated on any official bio, one of my favorite things about Doug is that he’s always got his ear to the streets, in a sense. The trends, the tech, what’s driving all of it, he takes a personal interest in the movement of the industry. So naturally, we’re going to talk about all that and more this week on the show. But first, Doug, you are a new visitor to the FP 

Pod, at least while I’ve been on the mic. And one thing we love to do here is start at the very beginning … I always like to figure out, how did you get here? What brought you into the world of wealth management and financial services in the first place? 

Doug Fritz (01:55):
Justin, that was an awesome intro. Thanks again for having me. I love these podcasts and I just love the human side of what you do. So hopefully I will at least keep the average, not slip below the average share on this one. 

Justin L. Mack (02:10):
No worries. We love low averages here on the FP Podcast. We’re all about that. 

Doug Fritz (02:14):
Someone else’s going to break the curve for me. But no, the origin stories. I mean,  it’s not unlike a lot of people that have been in this industry for 25 years. My first experience, probably a little bit unusual. I was on an internship program in Moscow, Russia in 1997. And I was super frustrated. I was in a bar in Moscow, a place called Chesterfield, and complaining to whoever would hear me as people in their early 20s might do that they weren’t giving me enough to do. I wanted more experience. I’d spent the last four years double majoring in Russian and international business and I was like, this was what I thought was going to launch my career. So a kind man named Nick Orchard, a Brit working at Credit Suisse, who was a friend of a friend leaned over. And he sort of probably was just tired of hearing me complain about stuff and he is like, let me get this straight. 

(03:21)
They’re not paying you and all you want to do is work really hard? He gave me his card. He is like, you show up to my office on Monday and I won’t pay you and I’ll give you a ton of work to do. Two weeks later he offered me a full-time job and I never came home. My job for a year and a half was working in Moscow for Credit Suisse. That’s how it kind of started. It was a Russian equity settlement, which meant that you had to actually find every purchase and sale agreement for a security had to be sent to the company registrar, an actual physical book or a database at the company to change shares. So I think my understanding of our market comes from every experience after that. The true mechanics of our industry. And I did some work back in (the States) as I moved back to New York 1998. I did global equities, trade settlements. I worked for Wacovia for a little while on their fixed income derivatives technology and risk management, which we all know the story of that one. 

(04:12)
And then ended up back at Wells for about eight years. I just got a phone call from a former boss that was a management consultant for a little while and said, we’re at Wells. You get the team back together, come on out and help us run our wealth management technology. So everything kind of led from that. But maybe the correlating thread is just always being in a spot of being super curious about the actual machinery of how things work and then having enough tolerance for lack of sleep and just work ethic. So I was always kind of that guy between tech and ops and the business. So to F2, now I built a whole team. We’ve got 25 full-time employees and 15 contractors of all people that just really understand the industry and the details of how things get done. And so when we give advice, it’s really based on what actually will happen. Not what maybe theoretically could happen, or from an industry zeitgeist they should be concerned about. And people like that. 

Justin L. Mack (05:25):
Definitely. And we’re going to switch gears and talk about two topics that are very important. Technology and cash. And research that F2 has shared showing that tech spending is up right now at a time where so many other things are down. People are leaning into that importance and leaning into that budget allocation, which is really cool, especially if you’re in the market of creating wealthtech or any kind of tech solutions. So let’s talk a little bit about that. First, how the heck are people spending more on technology while other things are being cut back? And what’s driving that direction? Where are those dollars going?

Doug Fritz (06:09):
I love this story. And I love it mostly for the FP listeners just as the broad category because we’re at a fantastic stage where firms that philosophically see their technology, in other words, their client experience and their advisor experience, as an opportunity to win and excel and to grow. They are spending money now on the automation and the paperless and the predictive and the digital and the data insights. Those firms, which actually are the very largest of firms that use technology, continue to see technology as an expense to be mitigated. They are contracting. Now, I’ll be the first to acknowledge, F2’s predominant clients are the small to large independent firms. That’s great. We love it. Our clients are spending more, we’re getting more clients, but we do see the larger institutions contracting. It’s great to be independent, it’s great to be small. If you’re a financial planning organization right now, this is probably a good time to continue to spend and accelerate spending because the big guys are going to stop spending and contract. 

(07:17)
This is your time to get ahead. And if you’re in a large firm, you’re kind of frustrated about the lack of spending and the lack of technology experience. The water’s really nice in the small- and medium-sized shops. There’s a lot of great things going on that people are spending money on. Your second question or second part of that question. So every year we run a research think tank and it’s about 120-ish of the top CTOs and CEOs in the country in wealth management. And this is our fifth year doing this. This is our fifth year of trends this year. The top spend category is on data and digital, which when I saw that we were stoked. But people will probably see that and be like, isn’t that the same thing we’ve been spending money on? It has not been. So data specifically, wealth firms large and small have significantly undervalued the power and the benefit of having their data organized and available and integrated into systems. 

(08:11)
They just haven’t paid attention to it. We’re just … there’s firms that will just plumb data back and forth. That data that goes to that tool and that data goes to that tool and they’ve got this crazy Rube Goldberg version of plumbing of things that just look terrible. And they strip it out and build an actual modern data architecture. Even small firms. We have a bunch of clients in the $1 billion to $5 billion range that are building out really competitive data architecture. So they can start running predictive analytics. They can look for trends in revenue. They look for trends in client attrition way beyond what anybody would think of as a $4 billion or $5 billion wealth firm could do. They’re doing it now. And so we love that and that’s pretty new that the industry is catching onto that. 

(08:58)
Digital was the one that probably most people would think like, well doesn’t everybody spend on digital? It wasn’t even in the top five last year. Because what was in the top five was direct indexing and tax optimization, which should have been going into the market. We would’ve expected that. But no one was really spending money on the digital interface with their clients, partly because it’s really, really expensive. And you’ve got to get your data together first before you can do it. But more importantly, and this is probably where a lot of our conversations are going to go around advisor persona and working with clients today, is that advisors don’t really want … that’s probably the wrong verb there, but they’re not really always comfortable with a client logging in and seeing stuff without them being in the room where they can answer the questions. And COVID, I think, pushed us over the mark to say now we’ve got clients kind of really frustrated that they don’t have access to their plan and impacts to a life event or even some sort of light modeling that they can do on their own. Or bringing in their spending data to be able to understand if that’s significantly impacting their ability to retire on time. 

(10:04)
Clients overemphasize the value of a digital experience versus advisors. But finally advisors are getting around to saying, I’m going to start losing clients if I don’t have a good prospect or client portal and we really need that. So there’s a big rush right now for digital client experience. 

Justin L. Mack (10:29):
That’s something I definitely want to jump into deeper later on in the show. But what you said too is very interesting, that side effect of the pandemic, and we always talk about the business impacts of the COVID. We’re still feeling them. We’re working our way through them. But I think so many times those are also either motivated by or predicated by the personal impacts. Like you said, the frustration in clients by not being able to go online and find those things that they expect to see, especially during a time period where I think so many other kinds of services in people’s lives were providing additional access because of what they couldn’t provide in real life because of COVID. If I’m working with any other part of my life, anything else that I service either through my computer or through my phone … they’re falling over themselves to give me access. 

(11:19)
So I should have that from my advisor, I should have that from my firm. And that’s very much a personal change that is now having a business impact. So really, really cool stuff and glad to see F2 zeroed in on that. I also wanted to talk about other findings. I know you guys are always doing research. It’s the name of the game for F2, and some interesting findings when it comes to financial planning and technology. Anything that stuck out most in recent research you guys are doing? And what do you see as the next evolution in financial planning technology as we roll to the second half of the year here? 

Doug Fritz (11:52):
So the research that we do, and we’ll get into financial planning in a second, but the research we do is always designed to make us a better consultancy to be able to have data behind decisions. We just love that when you start making decisions around actual data, you just feel better. That’s a good decision and I know it is because I got data. So we wanted to do one on financial planning. We’ve done alternative access data and performance reporting data architecture. We’ve done five years’ worth of research. We’ll continue to do more. But the financial planning, that was the first time we’d ever done that topic, and it was eye-opening. The concept of financial planning … if you look at the industry, there’s been a lot of data published well before we did our study about the penetration of planning within the American investor populace. And it’s always been eye-opening. Not all Americans that probably should have a plan, have a plan. 

(12:56)
And different sources will give different numbers. It’s below 50% in terms of clients that you could argue have a plan that do or do not have a formal plan. And going back to that point, I get really curious. Why is that? What is causing that to happen? What’s the machinery that is either working in a counter mechanism or is preventing that from happening? Because you can go to a financial planning website and enter your information. Basically make your own financial plan. ChatGPT right now gives pretty good financial advice. I’ve never seen anybody say this is completely criminally negligent. It’s not perfect, but it’s good. So why do we have what we have? And so we did the study of 110 wealth firms, asking what were the trends and what were they doing.

(13:46)
And then things that are correlating to that. What types of planning? What types of tools are you using for different planning? Are you going to switch those tools or not? Are you going to keep them, are you going to leave, et cetera. So we want as much as we can. And then you sort of couple that on top of the 25 years of experience and delivering wealth technology in the space, and a couple of critical things jump out. One is that planning is still — and this is not the “planning-only CFP, we basically plan as the critical piece of our value proposition.” I know a lot of listeners are that, right. So they plan because that’s what they do. Hundred percent of their clients have a plan. But that’s not every wealth firm out there. It’s not every advisory relationship out there. 

(14:30)
You’ve got some early viscosity in terms of what we’re paying advisors to do. So again, this is not the retainer-based planning CFP shop. This is the other shops out there, the vast, vast majority of other advisory relationships with clients. And we generally pay advisors to harvest assets. Go get assets. And what we’re seeing is that there isn’t a great correlation between financial planning, the efforts and the effort and detail required to provide some credible advice, and them becoming a client. If we give that information away, if we give that service away early, a lot of effort for someone who may not pay you a fee, in which case you basically just pro bono planned for that client or that prospect. They will plan after they win the client. So a lot of the efforts are based on what do I need to do to get assets in the door? 

(15:22)
It’s proposals, it’s showing historical performance, it’s showing the things that we really don’t want to do in order to drive people towards more of a planful experience or planful relationship with us. So we’re a bit like dual personalities. We say we plan and we lead with planning, but yet so few of our clients have a plan. Or if they do, it doesn’t happen until 90 days or 180 days after we bring the client on board. And there’s all kinds of arguments as to why that would happen, but we just don’t. We’re incenting advisors on asset growth, not on longevity and client success. I know as a retainer model, that’s a phenomenally genetic change to how we pay advisors and how businesses are set up. I like it. It’s just not going to radically take over the wealth management world because when you do a retainer like it or not a fee-based advice model, this is not perfect, but does correlate the performance of the portfolio with revenue for the advisor. 

(16:19)
Is it right? Of course it is not right. If I’m up 10%, do I really care that my fees are up 10% for that client? I could bet the farm and shoot for 50% accretion of the client portfolio and then lose everything because I’m going to put it all on black at the roulette table or something. You’ve seen portfolios that look like that. So we’re incenting advisors for growth. Once the client’s there, the incremental correlation between fee revenue and their success still sticks us to that model. There isn’t even an economic mechanism to push planning. And then if you’re saying, hey, I want you to grow as an advisor and I want you to be happy and kind of curate the COIs, what part of that is planning for me? So I’ve got 40 hours or 60 hours in a workweek, when am I going to plan for my clients? 

(17:06)
I’m busy growing assets. I’m busy doing the thing you’re paying me to do, not the thing that is right for clients. And so we get left behind technology compensation, these things sort of fall in the wake of that knowledge. And so the planning tools are kind of there. You want to use a planning tool, go ahead and use whatever you want to use. As a firm, I’m not going to spend time integrating data in the planning tool into the CRM. Which, by the way, the current planning tools and every other tool you’re using for performance reporting in your CRM? Terrible native integrations. Just bad. Fidelity is the best on eMoney, if you’re using Fidelity. If you use Fidelity as the custodian and you have eMoney, the tightest integration of those things together. If you’re using eMoney and you’re with Schwab it’s different.

Justin L. Mack (17:48):
Right on. And with that, we’re actually going to take a quick break and enjoy a word from our sponsors. But when we return, we’re going to jump right back into our conversation with Doug Fritz, co-founder and CEO of F2 Strategy. Stay locked. We’ll be right back after this break. 

And welcome back to the Financial Planning Podcast. I’m your host Justin Mack, and we are jumping right back into our conversation this week with our guest, Doug Fritz, co-founder and CEO of F2 Strategy. And Doug, right before the break we kind of talked about experience from the advisor side, but I want to jump into talking about something I know is very important to you. Client experience. Presenting one from our industry that is up to snuff, that is high level, that is engaging. And unfortunately we don’t always present those experiences to clients. So tell me a little bit about what you think about the experiences we do provide, how can we get better and what is the industry like? 

Doug Fritz (18:47):
Yeah, great question. So the client experience, if you want to distill it down, it’s super helpful for me and for our clients is you distill that down into a concept people can understand. Because people are different, they have different levels of expectation, different depths of their desire to engage in the decision-making process around their portfolio versus some clients who are just avoidant. I don’t want to talk to you, I don’t want to touch my money, I won’t even answer my phone call if you call me. And ultimately when we distill down what a great client experience is, it comes down to this concept of a benchmark on return of investment in time. And the reason why we love that with advisors is that it’s a concept of a benchmark, which we all really know and can appreciate. And you think about the Amazon experiences … the predictive, “answer before I’ve got the question” kind of services that are surrounding our clients with mobile apps and ChatGPT. And things in the movies and the shows they watch are they’re being served up as a predictive nature based on past experience. 

(19:51)
That is nowhere in our industry at all. But that’s the benchmark that our clients expect from all their experiences when they engage with us. Our clients’ benchmark for working with us and our efficient use of their time dealing with their wealth and with them in a conversation goes up and up and up all the time. And if you look at the average firm, we’re barely incrementally improving and there’s a big gap between the service and the experience most wealth firms give. And it’s a huge reason why we’re seeing aggressive growth firms putting money into technology. We can shorten that, we can make that more predictive and we’re going to gobble up more and more of those relationships as time goes on. I think that’s what’s driving a lot of the investment in the technology right now. 

(20:36)
And so what does that mean? It’s really that for every hour that I spend thinking about my wealth or thinking about my advisor, my portfolio, I want the maximum return on that. A good example would be if it’s midnight and my wife just got let go from her job. She got early notice that she’s out of a job and she knows her salary and compensation is three-quarters of the family take home and suddenly we’ve got two months of severance. That is a tremendously anxiety inducing moment for me and for my wife. And what do I do? It’s midnight. I have anxiety. I want to displace this anxiety. I want to give this anxiety to someone else that they can take on. That’s a moment to cement a relationship with an advisor and I don’t want to text my advisor, she’s not awake. 

(21:32)
What do I do? I want to be able to go to a website or engage with someone at that point in time. At eight o’clock in the morning when they’re up and running, I get a text back saying, got your notice. Here’s what my availability is. Let’s talk this morning about how we’re going to deal with it. I’m on it. The traditional wealth management experience isn’t like that. You try to call someone or email them, maybe they get back to you. It’s a bad experience. In other words, it’s a really bad return on investment in that person’s time to deliver that. The other one is just how predictive we can be with clients. Clients of a certain age generally have the same questions. Are we engaging them before they have the questions? Are we educating them? Heck no. We’re just waiting for them to ask questions. And if not, they don’t want to know I’m not going to deal with it. That kind of lack of prediction and lack of thoughtfulness shows in the underperformance versus that benchmark. 

Justin L. Mack (22:26):
That kind of reactionary engagement that we’re so used to. If it comes up, we’ll cross that bridge when we get there. But if not, we don’t necessarily need to go to that part of town. And I think that’s a good callout and just what we expect as I would be someone who would be on the client side. What I expect out of that engagement should be immaculate because everything else I touch, every other piece of tech in my life, every other service I work with, it just works. It knows what I want before I do. Thank gosh because I don’t always make the best decisions. So I think it’s just the desire to see that coming from wealth management as well. 

Switching gears a bit, I want to get into an ongoing big news story that we’ve been following, and I know F2 Strategy has been all over and something that will, as a result of the technology change, lead to a lot of different experiences for the clients and the advisors impacted by it. I’m talking about the TD-Schwab merger and that technology change. Just wanted to pick your brain a little bit because we are rolling towards it, there were a lot of big deadlines and big dates related to that merger around holidays for 2023. They’re all happening right now. What do you think the near term future holds for custodians as this change is upon us? 

Doug Fritz (23:33):
So first, I think that the TD-Schwab conversion is a massive shift for us as an industry, and the very nature of those two players and who their clients are and maybe were at one time and aren’t anymore leads to a disproportionate amount of emotion into it. I’ve been through my share of mergers with Wells, Wachovia and others from the outside in. And we don’t have a  relationship with Schwab or TD. So we’re entirely not encumbered at all in terms of what we’re saying here, but they seem to be doing the right stuff. Is it hard? Oh, it’s going to be hard. Oh yeah. People need to put time and energy wise beforehand. If you think this is just going to wake up magically and be converted, you’ll be disappointed. It’s like there’s a test coming and you may be smart, but if you don’t study and you don’t spend a semester or two getting ready for that sucker, you’re going to have a really, really bad time. 

(24:36)
So we went out earlier this year with a five part series. Again, no one funded it. We said the industry needs some unbiased viewpoint about what to do to get ready for this. That’s just a translation of what Schwab and Schwab folks put out there, but also just a commonsense guide to how to deal with it, which was not funded by anybody but F2. That’s been really well received. A lot of folks have come back and said, thank goodness that’s there. I think for custody broadly, where is this going? Certainly it puts a game changer into custody-land. You’ve got Schwab and then Fidelity and Pershing and sort of a long thin tail of other services. What I’m really excited about is where firms like Altruist have actually, in my very skeptical opinion, moved significantly forward with their offering.

(25:32)
We’re putting in Altruist, they’re building out lower cost ETFs, kind of a streamlined experience. Not a robo experience, an advisor experience, but it really works well. If I sound surprised, it’s good. I was always like, yeah, no one can be good that hasn’t been in the industry for 20 years. The other one is just to be paying attention to is the old, we call it (broker-dealer) custody platforms. So the Broadridges of the world, the LPLs and the BD platforms, as well as the large wirehouses.

(26:20)
They’re putting their services into the cloud, they’re expanding their integrations. If you’re like a $180 billion RIA, why aren’t you self-clearing? And we would never put anybody on self-clearing 10 years ago. Why would anybody take that expense? But the actual cost and ubiquity of it, the economics are starting to look pretty good. So we haven’t seen anybody do it yet, but I think it’s going to come. And then the last thing is what we like most about firms going to fractional shares. If you look at the benefit of fractional shares through a slightly different lens … follow along with him. I’m getting ready to jump the shark here, Justin. 

Justin L. Mack (27:10)
Okay, I love it. Go for it. 

(27:15)
All right. So when you’re a 25-year-old or 30-year-old early investor, and overwhelmingly the vehicle that you’re going to invest through is going to be an ETF, maybe a mutual fund, but yet you’ve got Instagram. And the corporate identity of firms that you follow and buy from are really important to you. You have no idea really what’s in your portfolio or any control. If there’s Exxon in there and you’re like anti-oil, it’s in the darn ETF. What are you going to do? Nothing. You can’t take that thing out. So what direct indexing plus zero transaction fee services do is it allows that same individual to have a much more shareholder-type experience that is also translatable to the firm that you’re investing in. So you can imagine Starbucks is a perfect example. 

(28:00)
Starbucks is in a lot of ETFs and a lot of funds. But if I’m a Starbucks customer and now my new Fritz wealth management portfolio, let’s say I’ve got a direct index or a customized portfolio. Now one of the 60 companies that I’m invested in is Starbucks. And Starbucks knows that I’m an investor. When I walk into Starbucks, someone’s like, oh, you’re one of our shareholders. Well, we got an extra shot of espresso for you today for all of our shareholders. First off, you’re like, what just happened there? Then, I’m always going to go to Starbucks because technically I own them. So every dollar or $10 I spend on a latte kind of goes theoretically back to my pocket. And that level of connection between company and investor. Like Home Depot … for an extra five bucks off your next purchase, thank you for being a shareholder kind of stuff. Like, that’s freaking transformative right now. No one’s doing it, so I’m just telling you what no one’s doing yet, but you said it. Our job is to look at what’s coming ahead and see those macro changes that some of these micro changes are going to facilitate. I don’t think we’re that far out from some smart firm custodian otherwise figuring that out.  

Justin L. Mack (29:02):
For sure. And actually speaking of what you’re looking at, always looking ahead. Anytime I talk to you and I get you in front of a microphone, I got to ask you about trends. You don’t have a choice, I apologize. So I always want to ask, what are some of the trends that you think aren’t getting the attention or some of the love that they deserve right now? Things that are big or important happening in our industry, but not enough people are talking about ’em similar to what we’re seeing right now with the data being hot right now. What are some of those things on your short list right now? 

Doug Fritz (29:31):
Gosh, I think this is probably my favorite trend. I hate to be boring on this one, but when I see folks, just when they start doing this stuff, they get so excited. It’s the most valuable practical thing that they do. It’s to build a client journey map. Anybody can do it. It kind of goes to my point around maximizing the investment of return on people’s time working with you. If you don’t build a model of how a prospect goes to a client, and a client to the first quarterly review meeting, or a client to their first distribution from their portfolio, those are kind of really critical moments. If you don’t draw a map of what that looks like and what that client experience looks like, when are they going to talk to us? What are we going to give? How are we going to prep them before the conversation so they’re ready for a great discussion? 

(30:18)
How are we going to follow up afterwards? Good example. You send a wire out for clients and it’s a client that sends one, two wires per year. It isn’t like a fast wire, very active, this person that they’re probably pretty nervous about sending that wire out, but they’re buying a house. They’re putting a down payment on it. They’re paying for the first kids’ college. Call ’em back, send the wire out, call ’em back the next day. Hey, did that go out? Okay, just checking. Send them an email. Hey, did that go okay? Did that work out okay? No time at all. And that anxiety that they had going into that workflow with you, that journey with you is recognized with your emotional response back. That’s a five-minute phone call. Phenomenal value returned back to the client because, wow, they checked. They cared enough to actually call me back. No one does that. It’s those little experiences. I know at First Republic, and it was much cooler to talk about my experience at First Republic before late Q1 one of 2023. But boy, that’s what we were all about. It was like, let’s automate and predict those amazing experiences and they got a good reputation because of that. 

Justin L. Mack (31:25):
For sure. And like you said, that checking in after a big wire or something like that, that’s extremely anxiety inducing. And I would love it if someone checked in after I made a huge wire send on something, that’s probably a very important life event. But hell, I’m the kind of guy that gets nervous after I send 20 bucks on a Cash App. I want someone to make sure that they got it. I don’t trust it. So anyway, moving on. I also wanted to check in with you, give us a recap. We had a chance to cover the Executives in Residence program that F2 launched. It’s been almost a year. I know we actually caught up about it last fall and talked about it a little bit at Future Proof. You’re giving those big names, those C-level execs, those industry names, something to do that’s a little bit different. What’s new with that and what’s next with that Executive in Residence program? 

Doug Fritz (32:08):
Yeah. Great question. We continue to grow the program. At its heart, it is executives that have a tremendous amount of experience in certain areas. Financial planning, data architecture, trust and family estates. Sort of moving from an insurance model to a fee-based model. Whatever that thing is. They have a tremendous amount of knowledge. And they’re either retired but not really retired. Or they’re sort of in the garden leave era where they’re just kind of between one firm as a merger and then they’re going to another firm in 18 months. But in that interim period, they have a tremendous amount of insight and perspective. And I’m going back to that. I was always the curious guy. I would always talk to the oldest, most experienced person in the organization and be like, “Tell me what I should know now that you would do if you were me.” 

(33:00)
I want your experience. I want your years. I want your knowledge. I want all the things you would never do again, that I would probably do if I didn’t know and just listen and take advantage of that perspective. The Executives in Residence program is to take those people, put them in with our clients so that our clients just help them continue to be better and better and better. We just weaponize that and that we love it. And so more of the same. I think that’s sort of it. And getting our executive residents out more with our clients and out more in the industry. They have so much to share. 

Justin L. Mack (33:50):
For sure. And I’m a big fan of that. The power of that institutional knowledge, very much kind of how I started my career. I started 15 years ago, 16 years ago in newspaper newsrooms, local journalism shops, and I just wanted to talk to the guys and gals who were just doing that job for the longest. They knew everything and they could see a crowd of people and point out every single person that you should know. That’s the well of knowledge. So to all the listeners, talk to your OGs. Check in with your OGs. Respect your OGs. They know way more than you will ever learn, and you can only soak up that game by sitting next to them. So it’s very cool to hear that it’s still going. And then the very last thing as we get to the end of this supersized episode now, we’re going to transition to something that has become a bit of a tradition here on the Financial Planning Podcast, which is ending with some good vibes. And we’ve talked a lot about how you got here, what you’ve been doing this year and what you see coming next. But with all that in consideration, I always have to ask, what do you love most about your job? What’s your favorite thing about this industry and why is it an industry that you’ll always have that curiosity and that passion for? 

Doug Fritz (34:55):
Wow. So I think the thing I like the best about my job, the president and CEO of F2 Strategy, is that I didn’t set out to have F2 Strategy. I founded it to be helpful. And every day I get to wake up and have amazing conversations with prospects and clients, with people in the industry, and I get to connect my passion and my curiosity with their success. And that goes to my own team. I get to lead a team of 25 full-time folks. All of us had operations or support roles at a wealth firm. I get to lead them to do something that they themselves never knew they could do. Go be a consultant and help other people and build out this resource that has gravity towards technology and reliable technology execution and getting your stuff done that the industry didn’t have before in a business model. 

(36:02)
It is so cool to be able to do that and to always be able to find new and cool ways to be helpful to other people. That is absolutely what gets me up every morning. 

Justin L. Mack (36:12):
Very, very cool. Well, I thank you for sharing some of that passion and your time with us this week on the Financial Planning Podcast. And Doug, just always a pleasure to chat. Good checking in with you, man. 

Doug Fritz (36:22):
Awesome, Justin. Thanks so much for having me, it’s great. 

Justin L. Mack (36:24):
Absolutely. And I want to thank everyone for listening to the Financial Planning Podcast. This episode was produced by Arizent with audio production by Kevin Parise. Special thanks again to our guest, Doug Fritz of F2 Strategy. Rate us, review us and subscribe to all of our content at www.financial-planning.com/subscribe. For Financial Planning, I’m Justin Mack. Thanks for listening.