What is AdvisorAssist?

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This is the Transition To RIA Vendor Profile Series where we take a look at the solution providers powering the RIA model. On this episode:

Vendor name:

AdvisorAssist

Vendor category:

Compliance

Episode host:

Brad Wales

Episode guest:

Chris Winn

Vendor contact info:

Website; sales@advisorsassist.com; 617-800-0388

Full Transcript:

Brad Wales – Hi, I’m Brad Wales with Transition To RIA and this is the Transition To RIA Vendor Profile Series where we take a look at the solution providers powering the RIA model.

On today’s episode, we’re answering the question “What is AdvisorAssist?” And there’s no better person to ask than the founder of AdvisorAssist, Chris Winn. Chris, thanks for coming on.

Chris Winn – Brad, thanks for having me.

Brad – Let’s jump right in. Could you please give us a little background on yourself and what is your elevator pitch about what AdvisorAssistant is. As you answer that, if you could also, because you’re the founder, give us a little history lesson of how it got to this point from the start. We’d love to hear that story as well.

Chris – Excellent. My favorite question. So, AdvisorAssist was founded back in 2006. To date, we’ve had a very deliberate growth plan. We now have a team of 35 folks supporting about 300 billion in assets, about 6000 supervised persons underneath all those firms, predominantly based in the Boston area.

But there are folks in several other states, mostly due to finding great talent in different spots and a few COVID relocations there. At AdvisorAssist, our core focus is in a couple of major areas. We help advisors with the strategic design, build, and launch of their firm.

So, as cliche as it sounds, it’s like building a house. We’re here to make sure that the foundation is sound, square, and level and then help them to start building and layering on other parts that are going to make their business function and have excellence.

So, the technology partners, the investment philosophy and process, and other complimentary things to what a compliance firm does, those are things where we’re helping to basically set that foundation to build off of.

On our end, we work with firms of all sizes up and down the asset spectrum. So from true startups up to firms, generally about 15 to 20 billion or so in assets. But really one common theme is that they’re truly businesses.

Regardless of size, we work together to understand someone’s vision and their business plan and how we can be partners to help them in executing on that plan.

Stated another way, we don’t have a kind of a cookie cutter solution. Ours is really tailored to helping advisors really achieve their goals and vision. Otherwise, it’d be a relatively boring thing to do every day if everybody was the same and everything was alike.

Now, of course, we have the rules and regulations. We have the SEC and clients in every single state. So we have a lot of regulators that we deal with. To bring it back to what we do and how we do it, for new firms, we help them design what the blueprint of the firm is going to look like and custom build their ADVs and disclosures.

We properly register them with the SEC and/ or the states, depending on the situation, and then strategically develop a plan to help them extract themselves from their current situation. Once they’re up and running and live, we have a series of service levels for ongoing compliance and risk management.

And as you noted, the name is AdvisorAssist. It was very deliberate not to call it something like a mountain or something big and strong and directional. Because really, we look at compliance as one leg of the stool. So our compliance programs are part of an overall risk program where we help them think through everything from external risks to cyber risks to the compliance.

Regulatory compliance is one leg of the stool. So we’re not displacing the other partners and vendors out there. We’re complementary and really avoiding the thing that comes up most often which is the assumption that someone else is taking care of something, which creates the gaps.

But from an ongoing perspective, we built a technology called AdvisorCloud 360. So there’s full transparency in what we are working on versus what the advisor and their compliance team are working on and/ or their supervised persons.

So they can see what we’re doing. We can see what they’re doing. And the healthiest and scariest all at the same time is everybody can see what nobody’s doing. And we design and program the system to not exactly take everybody’s feelings into account. Things either need to get done or they’re either done or they’re not done. That way, nobody gets left behind.

They’re accustomed to the workflows based on each firm’s size, scope, number of offices, regulators, the services they offer, et cetera. But we’ve designed it in a way that someone can’t just overlook a deadline or anything that’s critical. That way, coupled with the way we structured our team, really helps to ensure that clients have a true partner in navigating their year in compliance.

Brad – It’d be interesting whether you agree or disagree with me, I kind of think of it as a compliance consulting firm, but the solution set has kind of expanded over the years. Is that still what you call it when someone says, “Hey Chris, what kind of company is that?” I mean, what term are you using to describe it?

Chris – We’re here to help navigate all aspects of their risks and their securities laws, but we can also serve as their chief compliance officer. In many instances, we find that the regulators expect that the firm have internal compliance and risk resources. So on that front, we basically built what I’ll call the compliance office. It’s essentially the full suite of testing and execution without actually giving up the full responsibility.

It requires the advisor to maintain some level of responsibility inside the firm and be our true partner. So we know what’s happening day in and day out. So that’s kind of our structure. We’re in the category of compliance consulting, but really we’re risk managers and we can be outsourced compliance officers as well.

Brad – If advisor teams are looking at maybe two or three options in this arena, I can give you my perspective. I’ve known Chris and AdvisorAssist for a long time, and I’m happy to share what some of my talking points are, but what if someone says to you, “Why might I look at AdvisorAssist over some of these other options?” How do you usually answer that question?

Chris – Well, right from the first phone call, our calls aren’t really sales calls. They’re discovery calls to determine if there’s a good partnership with one another. Occasionally we have really good conversations with people and we say, look, you might want to join this firm instead of creating your own or from what I’m hearing, you have the resources. You just need a little guidance. We just firmly believe in elevating the industry and helping the folks that we’re talking to achieve their goals. So sometimes they don’t need us.

For a typical firm what we do is get a good understanding of what their goals and objectives are. What do they think they are? Then through the conversation they may have added to those or have refined them. What does their team look like? So do they have resources in their team that they’re already paying for that are being underutilized? And it’s a tough thing, right? So it’s more of a discovery.

If you ask everybody, everybody’s overutilized and maxed out. But when you’re looking at what’s the growth and what’s the planning for the business, we look at can you handle these compliance and regulatory responsibilities internally or do you need a partner that can help you with the various subsets of it along the way. So that’s a very long-winded way of saying is it’s not an all-or-nothing approach for us.

We like to design our partnerships in a way that really helps the advisor focus on the risk-managed growth of their firm and sometimes it may mean that they need the full service and sometimes that service may start off with us as the CCO and doing everything. And we have a one year plan to train somebody up that’s working their way through the ranks of their organization to assume that role and help them with their career path.

Then, life sometimes throws a curve ball. Someone may leave, and they may need to go back to full service again. But we create that spectrum of availability and options so that we can help the advisor optimize their overall workflow.

Brad – I think your answer to this question and the prior ones show that one thing that you deserve to be noted for is technology is everything in life and all facets of running RIA practice, so there’s going to be some degree of technology involved. I think in the compliance space, it would be great if everything could be perfectly automated with technology. I know you guys work hard at your technology as well.

But with something like this, there’s still that human element. It’s really important for advisors and teams that yes, technology is going to help us with a whole bunch of stuff, but they still want to be able to lean on you and your team, because sometimes it can be stressful or unknown, and just to have that human connection.

So for what it’s worth, typically what I point out is that the differentiated advice is the human element is absolutely there. It’s not just trying to all be automated away. So kudos to you for carrying on with that kind of approach.

Chris – Yes Brad, great point. Let’s take the major topic of the year, AI. So there’s many applications popping up where AI is striving to be a replacement for people, processes, workflows, et cetera. We designed AdvisorCloud and our approach towards automation and servicing is that we want to help make the easy things as easy as possible, but to have the transparency, the data, and the relationship to make the things that require thoughtfulness, analysis, dialogue, debate, or all of the above to be productive and effective in real time.

So in our AdvisorCloud, we’re tracking hundreds into thousands of data points about our advisors. And the goal is that we can be monitoring for them and thinking about them when we’re not thinking about them, but it’s not to replace a phone call. A lot of firms are trying to make people users and not partners and drive them to software and just have a centralized team somewhere that fields the questions from the relationship manager.

On our end, everybody’s fully trained to directly interface and interact with the advisor. And we want the phone call. So the one thing you’ll see in our application, in AdvisorCloud 360, that you almost don’t see anywhere else is in the upper left-hand corner, the first thing you see here are the people that are supporting you. Here’s their phone numbers and here’s their email addresses. So it doesn’t take 45 minutes with a Google search to find the hidden phone number to get to the customer service desk or something. You know the people, you know how to get in touch with them.

Then there are the things that are very straightforward and simple, take for instance a code of ethics that an advisor team must sign. No one in the history of this industry has ever said, no, I’m not going to sign my own code of ethics. I’m not going to follow the rules.

So do we really need a highly paid person to disseminate a whole bunch of documents when we know the answer is going to be yes, yes, yes? No, we let technology do it and if the rare occurrence ever comes up where someone doesn’t say yes or has a question, we route it into deliberate processing to follow up and find out what’s going on. So it’s that type of interaction.

But when we’re talking about the strategy of an advisor, marketing and advertising reviews, bringing on a new team, how to design, or how to address a new rule, we don’t do those by just by push and say, well, let us know if you have any questions. We get together, we have Zooms like this, and face-to-face and help them implement and make sure they understand the what, the why, and the how.

Brad – I think it’s just like financial advisors themselves, even if something in theory could be automated, there’s still comfort in having that interaction, hearing it directly, being able to have that conversation. And for advisors typically you only create an RIA in most instances one time, it’s not something you’ll ever be good at doing from volume and so I think that human element is always going to be important. So you validated my point. Chris didn’t know I was going to toss him that softball but I think it speaks for itself.

Chris – Well, Brad, it’s funny. One of the things I often say to advisors is, I’m not only here just to help you get the business off the ground, I’m also here to help you sleep at night while you do it. AdvisorAssist has done this over 4000 times, myself over 3000 and you’re only going to do it once or you’re going to find me and have me killed. So that’s really what the key point is, they only need to know how to do it once and then we’re going to train them on how to keep themselves safe once they’re there.

Brad – I just want to clarify, and I think you’ll confirm, that AdvisorAssist is both state and SEC. For those that don’t know, that’s generally based on your AUM. There’s a couple other nuances that could change that but generally if you’re 100 million or above it’s SEC, if you’re below that it’s state. So just to confirm Chris, you do do both SEC and state at AdvisorAssist?

Chris – That’s correct. Yes, both advisors with the SEC and the state as their regulators, those that are transitioning between the two generally, and hopefully it’s those that are moving up to SEC because their assets are growing.

Also, we deal a lot with mergers and acquisitions where you may have an SEC firm where two partners have unfortunately decided to part ways and they need to split into two state-registered firms or on the flip side an acquisition where the succession propels someone forward into an SEC firm. So we’re helping navigate all of the geography and the transitions of material changes to their business as well.

Brad – People understandably need to know what something like this costs and I won’t ask you to give specific dollar amounts because there’s so many different scenarios and things change over time, but how do you typically build the price?

So I usually express it that there’s two main parts to this. What does it cost to get it stood up on the front end to kind of get you to day one and then what kind of support do you have going forward? You alluded to obviously some different levels of support. How do you typically approach or build that price? What can people expect to build the pie?

Chris – Well, you hit the nail on the head in terms of approach. So on the front end, it’s more of a project-based fee so we kind of understand the scope. It’s to safely get the advisor and their team from point A to point B, build all the tools, and train them. And so we generally do that on a fixed-fee basis, where we collect half the fee when we get started and half the fee when we successfully complete everything that was in the scope to kind of keep alignment with our partners. The pricing generally will vary based on the complexity. So how many regulators are we dealing with? How many different offices and people are we dealing with?

Some firms, you know, look at someone’s asset size and their ability to pay and that drives the price. We look at it from the perspective of what does it really take to do the work? So it’s not an automatic increase based on one’s assets to launch and build a firm.

Then once they’re up and running, you’re correct. We earn our fee generally in a similar manner to most of our partners, our advisors. We have a scope of work that we perform on an ongoing basis and we’re paid either monthly or quarterly as we earn it.

For that we have a few different levels of service. And the goal here, of course, is to make sure that we have an alignment with one’s needs so they have the ability to adjust their level of service within the relationship.

For our smaller state registrants, we have a compliance essentials program where we cover often everything that they need to keep them on the right side of the rules and regulations for the state; reviewing advertising, all the filings, communicating with us. So everyone has the same general blueprint, but arguably a one-person state firm has much less complexity than a 10-person SEC firm.

Once firms get into multiple people and supervision, that’s where we have some potential division of labor. So if the advisor has internal resources that can be deployed alongside us to assist in some of that, we have that approach where we can be doing the core of compliance and then have them do part of the testing along the way.

For those that don’t have the resources or they have a rapid growth plan or other factors where they wanna keep their firm nimble, we essentially can take on not only the core of compliance where we’re doing all of the filings, reviewing the advertisements, maintaining policies and procedures, and monitoring for securities laws, but we can get read-only access into the advisor systems and perform all the testing.

The custodial partners out there will give us read-only access into their system. We get read-only access into their books and records systems, their portfolio reporting systems. Then we can do the fee billing reviews, the email reviews, the text reviews, the personal trading reviews, client suitability reviews, things of that nature, and report back on a regular basis to compliance and management to let them know how they’re doing.

Not just whether they violated any rules or not, but how do they stand and stack up to others? Are they missing things? Are they trending in the right direction? So that compliance testing is an offering that we have that basically sits on top of the compliance consulting.

So when you asked the question earlier, how do we frame this? We almost look at it as more as like a compliance partnership instead of compliance consulting because, depending on the needs of the firm, we have different scope of what we accomplish for them.

Brad – So if I’m an advisor, and I hear this from advisors, a lot of times they’ve been at a captive firm, where compliance has always been part of their occupation, but they’re not directly responsible for it. So they think how am I going to manage the compliance as my own RIA? Of course that’s where we’re using a solution like AdvisorAssist.

But no matter how much I can outsource, if I’m the advisor, no matter how much I can put on your plate or you will do for me, there’s still gonna be some things that I need to do or people on my team need to do. How do you train or how do you help those new RIAs that are using your service get trained in what they need to know, what they need to be doing, and to know that they can figure it out and they are capable of doing that but someone has to guide them on it. What does that look like?

Chris – So we take a 360 approach on that. So we do core training before a team goes live. And then once they’ve transitioned to paperwork, we train them again because of the classic drinking through a fire hose of all of the things they need to learn from new custodians to new technology to compliance. We take the assumption that, if we’re all lucky, half of it remains fresh in people’s mind after all of this. So we circle back to make sure that other half takes root as well.

But from an ongoing perspective, we have calls generally monthly with most of our firms where we’re going through not only a compliance calendar, but really topics that we’ve designed for them in their year of compliance.

So things that have more reach into a firm past the CCO, we will do recorded and/or live calls with their supervised persons to talk through the rules and the things like texting and social media and various other items to make sure we get across that it’s not just a policy manual, go read it and you’re expected to follow it.

But then people ask scenarios and real life questions. We’ve designed topics by month, a collection of topics by month, that we adjust at the beginning of each year to have a CCO series and a broader compliance series for the team where we do webinars.

We have the monthly email. We have white papers and content. So every month items go out on specific topics and they become part of an agenda for the next regular scheduled call, but also we get them out in advance so that hopefully folks have a chance to read those in advance of our structured call or they bring it up on their next ad hoc call with us as well.

We save all of that content so that, let’s be honest, everybody just jumps out of bed each day and says, I can’t wait to go read some regulatory content. Someone may be up late and can’t sleep and would really like to know what the rules are that are coming up. So they have direct access to that. We take that approach. Any time there’s something where there’s change, we also have a formalized process. So, again, no one gets left behind.

So we track to make sure that it’s not just, hey, we sent an email, you should know that there was this rule change. We have a formalized process that ensures that the policies and procedures were adapted to how the firm’s going to handle a regulatory change. We track that everybody had formal meetings and that all their documents are updated and signed off on to meet the new change. So we put some formality around a lot of things just to ensure that full, complete approach.

And then lastly for those that we do the testing for, we have that back end validation to say, well, we’ve talked about all these things in practice, are they actually doing it? And if we find exceptions to that, we jump right on the phone with the advisor to help course correct, train or whatever is necessary for the firm.

Brad – I sometimes tell folks that are already independent, maybe at an independent broker-dealer, and they came from a captive world prior and they’re maybe a little nervous. They wonder if they can figure this compliance stuff out and I point out and say well there was a time you didn’t know how to do payroll either right because you were at a captive and that seemed scary, unknown.

But guess what, you figured out the vendor to rely on, there was a learning curve and you got the process figured out. Maybe there’s some things you change over time. But guess what, you got it in place and it’s entirely doable and I think compliance is the same way.

There’s absolutely a learning curve. There’s responsibility. But once you kind of get it figured out, and assuming you got the right partner, it’s entirely doable. You kind of spoke to a lot of how that support works

Chris – Yes, absolutely.  You’re actually hitting on something. One of the biggest objections that some of the larger firms try to throw out there as a scare tactic to keep people around is you know how scary and complex the compliance world is and how many millions of dollars we spend on compliance.

And while that’s all true, it’s really not fair because you have a team of four people leaving that have their own their cohesive team, their workflows, their business model. Yes, there’s the same rule set if they’re, SEC as an example, all following the same set of rules. However, their common denominator is of four, not thousands of unrelated people across the country.

So a lot of the larger firms have designed compliance processes around like, we know you and we trust you, but really we don’t trust you. So we need to double check every single thing that you do. And one of the key things that a closely-held advisory firm can do is really institutionalize risk. They can build into the day-to-day of what their operations are. And we help teach them all right, while you’re in trading, here are the two things that we want you to do.

While you’re doing those two activities, you’re also going to do this activity. Yes, it’s going to take you another seven seconds to go do this while you’re doing the other two activities, but it’s going to save you an hour and seven seconds later, right?

So those are the types of things that we try to help, and that’s really where we kind of intersect with their other partners. So if you’re choosing this portfolio reporting system, the CRM system, these are the reports that we think that you should be running, or if we’re doing the testing, here’s what we’re gonna be running, and here are the things that we think you should be doing on your end to help make this as effective and efficient for you as possible.

But if you just wait until the end of the year, compliance can get really expensive, right? The rework, the amount of time and disruption. The goal of our model and our approach is to incrementally validate and correct along the way as needed so that it isn’t a material amount of time that’s being taken from the advisor. We don’t shut down a business to do compliance. We just help them have a compliant business.

Brad – Yes, get them over the hump, get them over the initial learning curve and then have a smooth path or at least a strategic path. I agree.

So before we can get to that point, we’ve got to start with the first conversation. I’ll get here in a moment, if people are interested, how best to contact your team.

I always like to help advisors and teams set expectations so if they were to reach out to you or someone on your team, literally what does that first conversation look like? So if I’m an advisor, I reach out, I’m with whoever, some wirehouse. I say, “Hello, I’m gonna start an RIA. I’ve been told or I’ve been watching that video you did with that Brad Wales guy, talk to me.” What is covered in that first conversation?

Chris – Yes, I mean, the first conversation is really getting to know what’s driving their needs. What are they like about what they do today and what do they wish they could change? And how do we have impact into that equation? So most of our calls are really discovery calls. They’re not sales calls, right? We’re here to help partner and we even tell some of our partners, if you have a client or even yourselves that have a situation, we’d be delighted to be involved in every single situation.

But we don’t need to be. And if someone needs us, and we can be of value even just to answer a question or to get our opinion on something we’re not even going to be involved with in the future, you know my phone number. And so people do take us up on that.

So these first conversations are several things. One is it’s getting to know one another. It’s understanding what their goals and aspirations are and whether we have the right mix to help them achieve those and to help kind of lay out a blueprint of what they can accomplish.

And then find out who else they’ve been talking to for complementary items, such as transition-related support, technology, custodians, et cetera. And if they don’t have those in place, help get them to the other complementary partners out there. And essentially what we say to them is look, you’re trying to assemble your dream team. We’d love to be part of it but let’s make sure that you have the team before you show up for the game and here are all the things that you need to do sequentially.

The compliance we can offer; we’re often not the longest part of the duration. So to design, build, and launch a firm from a compliance standpoint, we’re generally constrained by the regulators and their timeline, not our timeline. We can do it very rapidly. But we want to fit into the overall timeline of when is it optimal for a team to resign. Are they targeting a holiday or a quarter end or a month end?

What technology partners and transition partners are they using to participate on custodian calls and other items there? We make sure that we’re sitting there as a partner and sometimes a fly on the wall to make sure when someone’s talking about fee billing, we have their ADV and client agreement that we drafted in front of them based off of our mutual discovery and decisions.  For the final decision, we make sure that another side conversation isn’t confusing the terminology.

So really that first conversation is just setting that framework to say, look, it’s a process and we’ll be here. And here are the other people that you really want to talk to and help make sure that you assemble the team that will help get you to your end state.

Brad – Chris alluded to it; they are at the mercy of the regulators. It’s got two parts to it, what Chris and his team do and then what the regulators do. Unfortunately, the states are all over the place. Some of them are much quicker than others. So it’s hard to generalize how long would a typical state one take because I know it’s all over the place.

So let’s take an SEC one; I think it’s easier to earmark. In a measured pace, we’re not doing a fire drill, the other pieces are being worked on as well. For just your part, meaning draft up the ADV and everything that needs to be done and get it approved by the SEC, ideally, how much lead time do you typically want on that? Again, SEC, states, all of it.

Chris – Well, I guess I’d answer a different way. What we generally do is say, when do you want to be live?

Is it realistic? And then let’s work our way back and set the milestones for the things that you’re going to need to accomplish. And we’ll let you know when we need to file by in order to accomplish that goal.

So with some of the state ones, we know they can take longer, we’re earlier in that duration versus an SEC has 45 days by statute but very tight to a 30-day timeline. So often things like the marketing, branding, the website, and procuring some of the technology might take longer than that five- or six- week period. So we’ll time when we do our filing. But we also tend to be inputs to a lot of other things. The custodians generally have a business acceptance process.

Most of them have a committee which, it’s often a formality, but there’s a review of the investment process, the risks that a firm will pose, the people that are part of it. So we tend to front end load a lot of our work and then we are waiting from a timeline. But to get back to your question overall, I think for a typical SEC firm, a good healthy timeline is to give it somewhere between 90 and 120 days. Some firms plan for a year or more, which is good.

And that’s why I say we slot in the timeline of when we do things. But we also are trying to manage to keep people safe. So we don’t want to have too many moving parts and too many things out there with a firm too far away from launch, just in case somebody on the team inadvertently emails each other a new org chart or a seating plan or the blueprints of the new building they’re moving into, whatever the case may be. We coach on those things, of course.

The items that often take a little bit longer tend to be things that have the creative process and other items there, but it’s also cyclical. So if naturally when you look at major holidays, a lot of firms tend to use those long weekends and quiet periods to get a jump on launching their new firm. What a firm definitely needs to do is also look at the availability of all of their partners and all of their resources when they go pick a final date. So it’s all well and good to say, well, we’re going to do this in 57 days and be done by month and quarter end.

That’s great if we can get them there from an ADV and a filing perspective, generally speaking, but if they don’t have the ability to get a website done and they’re six back on the portfolio reporting system transition queue, they may want to rethink that date.

So it’s really situational, but we can get someone up and running as quickly as five weeks, depending on the regulator. But often they want more time to just make sure they’ve got the other i’s dotted and t’s crossed.

Brad – Yeah, I agree with you. The best path is to try to map out that target date first and then go backwards into it to figure out what works best for that. And even that’s not a simple exercise as you alluded to. There’s different times of year where it’s not ideal to necessarily be trying to launch a firm, let alone personal reasons the advisory team might have of things they need to work around.

So a process is certainly something Chris can help with to try to map that out and he and his team of course know what the regulator and the third part of it are and what that needs to be built into it as well.

Chris – And one last thing. You’re helping them to drive other decisions around other partners and technologies and things of that nature. The best way of describing it is we’re here to speak up to make sure that things make sense. We’re also here to adapt and make sure that we fit into a bigger plan as well.

Brad – It’s a piece in the cog, but a very important piece in the cog and often one of the most unknown pieces in the cog for many advisors. So again, I think that’s where the human component really pays off on that front. So speaking of the human component, for folks that are listening to this, watching this and say maybe AdvisorAssist is a good solution for me to be exploring, what is the best way for them to have that initial conversation that we talked about?

Chris – We don’t really have a sales department. Everybody is a consultant working with clients. Many of the new firms that are launching or looking to choose a different partner will reach out to me directly or one of the other partners, Brian Young. We also have an email that’s sales@advisorsassist.com or our phone number, which is 617-800-0388. Our website is advisorassist.com.

So any of those channels are how someone can reach out to us, they can self-schedule the time that fits for them. They can email us, they can call us. But really, the key goal is that we’re here to help whomever wants to reach out for discovery. Sometimes firms are ready to go yesterday and sometimes firms are planning for 2028 and everywhere in between. So that’s all helpful for us and we’re happy to be part of that equation.

Brad – And I will vouch for that directly while, if I did my math right, you guys are coming up on your 20-year anniversary next year. Did I write that down right? Yes, congratulations in advance. That’s a fantastic milestone, almost 20 years in.

Chris is the founder. He’s got a whole team of people. I still hand out his email and phone number and he takes those calls without hesitation. So credit to you; I think 20 years in, if you wanted to, you could say I got other people that handle that. And I get you do have capacity constraints, you don’t actually do all the steps, but I appreciate you taking those conversations and I think it’s just a testament to your dedication to the firm.

Chris – Well, it’s funny, 21 or so years ago, a center of influence said, well, let me get this straight. You’re going to be a compliance consulting firm that’s very heavily focused on strategy and then mindful of ops and technology. Aren’t you doing too much? And I remember thinking to myself as I’m having lunch is this guy crazy or am I? So here we are now 20 years later, 20 plus years later, it’s confirmed that I’m the crazy one, but I’m still having fun doing it.

Brad – Good. Speaking of time, I appreciate you carving out time to be on today’s episode. Again, in the show notes, we’ll have the contact information and whatnot, but Chris, thanks for coming on and helping us explore what is AdvisorAssist.

Chris – My pleasure and I appreciate you having me.

Brad – Thanks, Chris.

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