Short-Term Hard, Long-Term Easy: Ex-Edward Jones Advisor on Building Beyond $1B

Short-Term Hard, Long-Term Easy: Ex-Edward Jones Advisor on Building Beyond $1B

A conversation with Jason Diamond and Ricky Smith, Founder and Managing Partner of Inspired Wealth Planning.     

Jason Diamond:

Welcome to the latest episode of our podcast series for financial advisors. Today’s episode is Short-Term Hard, Long-Term Easy: Ex-Edward Jones Advisor on Building Beyond $1B. It’s a conversation with Ricky Smith, Founder and Managing Partner of Inspired Wealth Planning. I’m Jason Diamond, and this is the Diamond Podcast for Financial Advisor.

Mindy Diamond:

At Diamond Consultants, we help elite advisors identify the right environment for their businesses to thrive, whether that’s at a warehouse, boutique, or independent firm. With nearly three decades of experience, we’ve guided thousands of advisors and represented more than a quarter of a trillion dollars in assets transitioned. And each year, one in four advisors managing a billion dollars or more who change firms are our clients. Our process is education driven and based on building relationships, starting as your strategic partner well before you’re even thinking of a move. To schedule a confidential conversation, call us at 908-879-1002.

Wondering why advisors change firms and where they’re headed? Are transition deals going up or down? Those very questions and more inspired us to create our annual advisor transition report. It’s the award-winning, data-driven resource designed for advisors that connects the dots between the motivations around movement and the firm’s appetite for top talent. Arm yourself with the knowledge you need to make smart decisions. Download your copy at diamond-consultants.com/transitionreport.

Jason Diamond:

What happens when you stop thinking like a renter and start thinking like an owner? Not just in theory, but in how you run your business, make decisions and show up for clients. For Ricky Smith, that question didn’t come at the beginning of his career. It came 30 years in after building a highly successful practice at Edward Jones and starting to see the business through a different lens.

Today, Ricky is the founder and managing partner of Inspired Wealth Planning, the independent firm he built with Kestra Private Wealth Services. And since launching in March of 2023, the firm has grown to over $1.25 billion in assets under their care across seven locations. What makes this story interesting isn’t just the move. It’s how intentional it was. Ricky didn’t rush into independence. He spent a year evaluating 12 different firms and paths, working through what mattered most. And ultimately, making a decision based on people and alignment, not just economics.

And that ownership mindset runs through our entire conversation. We talk about what led him to reconsider a model he had been part of for decades, how he approached due diligence in a way that gave him real conviction, and why the early phase of independence is less about growth and more about getting the structure right. Then, we get into what’s happened since.

The business growing roughly 50% larger than it was before the move, a breakthrough year less than three years in, and how momentum builds when you’re operating on your own terms. Which is why Ricky offers the perspective that making the leap to independence may be “Short-term hard,” but you’re working toward building a business that’s designed to be long-term easy.

And there’s another broader idea worth paying attention to. Most advisors don’t lack options. They hesitate to act on them. And often, it’s not logic that holds them back, but timing, uncertainty, or the sense that things need to be fully figured out first. Spoiler alert, you’ll never figure it all out. It’s a great story, so let’s get into it. Ricky, thank you so much again for joining us today, so thrilled you’re here.

Ricky Smith:

Glad to be here, Jason. Thank you for inviting me.

Jason Diamond:

Absolutely. So, for context, can you tell us a little bit about yourself, how you got into the business, what brought you to the world of wealth management?

Ricky Smith:

I’m a bit of an outlier. I’ve been in the business 42 years. Most of that time, almost all of that time was as an employee of other firms. You know how that goes. I got in the business through an interesting route though. I actually was a client first. My wife and I decided we wanted to start saving some money and I did a little research on mutual funds granted, this was back in 1984.

So, this is a different world then, Jason. I was able to set up appointment with a local IDS rep, which is now Ameriprise. And she was so enthralled with the fact that I knew something about the business that she invited me to talk to her regional manager and he hired me and the rest is history, as they say. I started with IDS in 1984 and went my way through a few firms along the way. It’s too long a story to tell the whole story. But eventually, I opened the first Edward Jones office in Cordele, Georgia in 1995. And so, I was the pioneer for Jones. Today, now that I’ve left Jones, there’s still four Edward Jones offices here. So, we played quite a strong support thing going here and glad that I did, but I’m also glad that I’m here where I am today.

Jason Diamond:

It’s interesting because we have a lot of Jones advisors who listen and I’ve had the pleasure of speaking to many of them and I’m struck by how proud they are, but also how often loyal and how difficult of a decision it can be to leave Jones. So, I definitely want to unpack that. But before we get there, can you give us a little bit of perspective on the business today? So, you launched Inspired Wealth Planning. Tell us the size, how you set up the business, number of employees, if you don’t mind.

Ricky Smith:

Sure. Glad to. I love it. I love talking about it. So, we launched in March of ’23. I created Inspired Wealth Planning primarily for myself, my team, and my clients. But I set it up in a way that I thought there might be another advisor or two that want to join with us. So, I set it up in a way that would be conducive to that. It’s not Smith Wealth Planning, it’s Inspired Wealth Planning, that sort of thing.

So, we started in March of ’23. By mid-summer of ’23, we had another Engel Jones advisor join us about 30 miles away. So, I really started thinking about what the big business model could look like, continuing to grow my personal business here at Cordele, which has been a fantastic experience. But also at the same time, growing Inspired Wealth Planning is a big umbrella organization, thinking about what that would look like and how that would grow.

Bottom line is we’re starting with nothing 36 months ago. Today, we have seven locations. We have one and a quarter billion dollars of assets under my care, probably about $800 million in assets under management, 10 advised, seven partners, 10 advisors, and 16 support staff. I mean, it’s a big machine.

Jason Diamond:

Holy cow. Well, all right, there’s a lot to unpack there. I’m dying to know how you got from there to here, and I’m sure our audiences too. Let’s back up first. Let’s briefly… I don’t want to make this episode about Jones. But I do want to mention it quickly, especially because you spent almost three decades there. So, what made you say it’s time to go?

Ricky Smith:

There’s a couple of personal experiences that I had that made me realize that the firm had changed in directions that I wasn’t necessarily interchanging to. I don’t know. Somewhere along the way, it became obvious to me this probably wasn’t going to be where I finished my career. And I think if I had to point to anything, I think anybody that’s been at Jones for a long time can relate to this with me. The partnership reacted very violently, very strongly to the threat of DOL and the fiduciary definition that was coming out of that. They were very concerned about that.

And that, in my opinion, is when the center of the universe changed from the branch office and the branch team to the home office. They literally started controlling the words that you use with clients. They had very specific processes you had to do, and that was a red flag for me for sure. It happened so long ago. I think it was probably ’17 or ’18 when Jones really started switching that way. It wasn’t the last straw, but it was the beginning of my journey to think about becoming an independent advisor.

There were a couple of other more personal things that happened along the way, mainly related to not being compensated the way that I thought I should have been compensated. And then, ultimately, a dear friend of mine who was a really well-known guy, Edward Jones passed away, and the way that his family was handled in that severe tragedy made me realize, “Okay, these folks are not as interested in me personally as they used to be. I think it’s time for me to take a step back and reanalyze my relationship here.” That’s when I started really getting serious about the independent journey.

Jason Diamond:

It’s interesting. I’ve heard versions of that story. The first I’ve heard it so explicitly attributed, the DOL piece is interesting to me because people, I think, generally agree with your premise, which almost to a man, even advisors who are still at Jones and are still loyal defenders of Edward Jones would agree, I think that the firm has shifted in a lot of ways from 30 or 40 years ago. And that is largely a shift from more advisor-centric to home office centric. I hadn’t thought of it through the DOL framework before.

So, you then decide it’s time for me to look at independence. Common for a lot of Jones advisors, they say, “If I’m going to leave, I’m not going to another employee model.” There’s a lot of different flavors of independence. How do you go about getting educated? And what does your due diligence journey look like?

Ricky Smith:

A lot of people, as they mature and get better at the business, sometimes they’ll stop taking certain phone calls. They won’t take phone calls from wholesalers. They won’t take phone calls from recruiters. I’ve never been that kind of person. I’ve always taken a call because I’ve always been willing to learn something from somebody.

And over the years, I got a lot of calls from Debbie Wallen at your firm, and we became somewhat friendly. I never declined to talk to her when she called, but I never gave her any indications that I was interested either until I was interested. And so, in probably late ’21, early ’22, if I remember this correctly, I called her out of the blue and said, “Okay, I think it’s time for us to talk.” And we went through a very deliberative process that bore the fruit that is being enjoyed today.

She wanted to know as much as possible about my objectives, about my business, about how I thought the transition would go, all that. And before we got to the end of that, she said, “Okay, here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to make a list of potential firms for you, you to take your time investigating those.” She knows how I am. I’m a researcher first and a deliberate person before I make a big decision. She gave me a list of 12 firms.

So, I told my wife what I was doing, but I didn’t tell even the people in my office. I visited face-to-face almost all of those 12 firms over the course of a year. And I am so glad I did it that way because it was so easy for me, Jason, to eliminate many of the usual suspects immediately. Most of them felt a different version of Edward Jones to me. I’m not being critical of them, that’s not what I was looking for personally.

And about three quarters of the way through my search, what I realized was that everybody’s got payout, everybody’s got product, everybody’s got alternatives, they got things I can’t do now. Not everybody had people that excited me that. So, I started then focusing on a different metric for the change. I wanted to see what people excited me that gave me confidence to make this humongous step. By the way, I was 65 years old at that time. It was a very unusual position.

A lot of the people I talked to thought that I was looking for a check and a checkout. And that had not Ricky. That’s not what I intended to do. I did not intend to take a check and go enjoy it in the sun. I intended to build a business. People that got me though, I narrowed it down to three firms. The people that got me, I really connected with. And ultimately, I chose Kestra Private Wealth Services because the people decision I made there made all the difference in the world.

The people, not just Scott and Rob, you’ve talked to them before, Rob Bartenstein, Scott Wilson, not just them, the founders of Kestra Private Wealth, but even the people at Kestra Financial that came in to do dog and pony shows with me and that I got to meet individually. So, ultimately, I tell people this all the time, I made a great people decision. I didn’t make a decision based on the highest payout. I didn’t make a decision based on the most gadgets and gegos. I made a people decision that I’m super comfortable with and I’m glad I did.

Jason Diamond:

I’m like grinning from ear to ear with so many different components of your answer, which I had no idea you were going to say some of those… First of all, thank you for the kind words about Debbie. I’ve paid a lot of money. Our firm has spent a lot of money on marketing through the years and that might have been the best free advertisement worth gold. So, thank you for that.

I also just wanted to add, 12 firms is a lot. It sounds like that was the way you approach due diligence because you know how you’re wired as a person and as an advisor. There’s plenty of advisors I just want to point out who would say three to five firms is a more appropriate list. In your case, it sounds like 12 was the number you went with. What are your thoughts on that? Just a desire to be completely thorough?

Ricky Smith:

Yeah. And I’ve done the same thing building investor portfolios and models for clients. I’m the kind of guy that’s going to dig through the whole pile first, but I’ll start chunking out the things that don’t fit for me pretty quickly. And this is funny because as we’re going to talk about how I built Inspired Wealth Planning. But as I started building Inspired Wealth Planning, most of the people that came to me, this is what they said. The guys in Waycross, very interested in the firm that came to me. They’re not Edward Jones. They were friendly competitors of mine. And their managing partner called me out of the blue one day after I’d left and he said, “I don’t know where you decided to go, but I know how much trouble you went to find the right place. I want to talk to whoever you chose.”

Jason Diamond:

Wow.

Ricky Smith:

Okay. That’s a pretty good endorsement there, but they did. It was a perfect fit and they became part of Kestra Private Wealth, and then became part of Inspired Wealth Planning because of that. And almost to a T, I could tell you the same story of every location. The Edward Jones people trusted my judgment. They came unquestioned.

The guy in Moultrie, John, he’s been in a business 29 years, almost all of that with Raymond James. Although, he started with A.G. Edwards, he’s that kind of guy. By the way, Jason, I’ve never met anybody that started at A.G. Edwards that I didn’t think was a really good advisor, right That was a good start in place…

Jason Diamond:

Absolutely.

Ricky Smith:

… like Edward Jones used to be. But they all came to the same place, “You’ve done the research, tell us what you found.” And they all decided to join with us. So, I’m glad that I have that reputation. But I’m also glad that I went to the trouble of doing that. I think it helped make my decision a really confident decision.

Jason Diamond:

Well, and you have the reputation because advisors know that’s how you’re wired, so they could trust that you were thorough. Yeah, that makes sense.

There’s one other thing you said, and I don’t know if I would’ve brought it up, but because you did, I’m going to ask you about it, which is age. And you mentioned you’re in your 60s. I’m only bringing it up because we got this question a ton from advisors, either “I’m too old to move” or “I’m too old for independence.” Give me your thoughts on that topic.

Ricky Smith:

Well, I’m glad you decided to bring it up because I’m not the least bit afraid to discuss age. By the way, I have to discuss it in my office often. Are you going to be here a while? Especially new people. The people that are with me that came with me that knew me for 40 years, they’re going to be doing. So, I’ll be 69 this year. I’m not afraid to say. And I have zero intentions of retiring. I have every intention of growing. I don’t mind telling you this, of the seven offices that we have with that Inspired Wealth Plan, and I’m the biggest individual producer and I intend to stay that way, and that’s just the way I’m built too.

So, I do and to have to address age periodically. So, I’ve told our group, we’ve got these seven locations now. We can continue to grow horizontally. We can add opportunities as they come up, but the biggest opportunity for us as a firm is to grow internally, is to grow organically. And all of us are focused on that. I’m focused on it as they are.

So, we’re going to be growing with second generation advisors soon. We already have a couple planted in other offices, but we’re going to grow as a firm because we’re going to grow smartly. We’re going to grow organically inside each office. So, I’m not afraid at all to address the edge thing. And for anybody to sit down there, and I have lots of friends that are sitting out there at Jones and other places that are saying the same thing, if your mindset is that you want to continue to grow personally, then I have a way to show you… I’ll show you how to make that happen.

The first guy that joined me is exactly my age, by the way. He’s 69 years old too. So, I hope that I’ve been an inspiration to people to make a change. But I want to tell you anybody that’s sitting on a great business that there’s an opportunity for you to change your life by changing your mindset just a bit. I mean, I’ll go ahead and tell you a little bit about my philosophy in that regard. Whether you built the business at Merrill or Smith Barney or Morgan Stanley, I mean, or Engel Jones.

For the most part, you’re a renter of that business. You’re a renter of that space. You’re renting literally office space. You’re renting a business model and a system and a platform and you’re renting the brand. If you would prefer to own your own outcome, it’s not that hard to do. I mean, you just have to make a commitment to get over the little things that are hard to begin with. Our mantra as we started this journey from our team was short-term hard, long-term easy. Let’s get the short-term hard stuff over as quickly as possible and we’ll move on to the things that we really enjoy.

Jason Diamond:

It’s so true. First of all, I say short-term pain, long-term gain, 100%. Your answer is fantastic, and I’m inspired by it personally. I want to push back on one thing. You’re talking about if you want this, it’s not that hard. And I can tell within 14 minutes of speaking with you, you have a tremendous entrepreneurial spirit. But also, just a personal spirit and you have an energy about you.

For some advisors, this doesn’t come as naturally. And I think where a lot of that stems from is the client piece. How are my clients going to react to this? And/or what are they going to think about leaving a firm like Jones? Let’s say, even Table Jones, any firm, for a relative unknown in the independent space, can you talk to me a little bit about what that experience was like both in your head? Were you worried about it? And then, how did it actually play out?

Ricky Smith:

Well, it starts with where you’re at in your own seat now. If you’re what your industry would call a lifestyle advisor, if you’re not growing, if you’re not meaningfully involved in the business today, then you’re probably not going to have a really good transition. But if you’re different, regardless of age, if you’re meaningfully involved in the business, if you’re meeting with your clients and being in contact with your clients, then the transition shouldn’t be that difficult because the problem we have is that most of the concern we have about moving the clients is between our ears. It’s not really, in reality, a big problem.

Jason Diamond:

That’s how my golf game is too.

Ricky Smith:

No doubt. I think it was Marcus Aurelius, the stoic emperor that said, “Don’t get stopped by imagine problems.” So, if you’re imagining that’s going to be a problem, guess what? It’s going to be a problem. But my experience and the experience I’ve seen with the people that join me is that if you handle it’s all about the narrative. But if you’re not really engaged in the business today where you see it, it’s not going to go that well for you when you make the transition.

So, for some people, renting is appropriate, Jason. I mean, they don’t need to be owners. Some people just need to continue doing what they’re doing and retire out and go away. For those that are entrepreneurs that want to be owners, that want to own more of the outcome for themselves and the clients and the team, there’s a way to do that.

Jason Diamond:

Yeah, I would totally agree with that. And especially in this ecosystem or this industry landscape, the horse race is so competitive. There is a legitimate case I could make for every, and I think I’ve made it on this podcast. For every channel or model, maybe not for every individual firm, even forget the rent versus buy equity book ownership argument.

There’s some advisors that just prefer the brand and the scaffolding and all the support and the easy button. It sounds like for you, that wasn’t the case. And to me, that’s the beauty of the current ecosystem. You’ve had success now in telling that story. So, I want to talk about that.

And now, you’re sitting on the other side of the table. Most advisors think of this as almost a two-step prop. Get out of my captive environment, launch my independent business, and then I want to start thinking about growth. So, you obviously have a very growth mindset in everything you do, but the growth you laid out, I don’t remember the exact metrics, but pretty extraordinary in three years. What’s been the secret?

Ricky Smith:

The secret is knowing that what we were getting into. And I realized that ’23, the year that I left Jones was going to be a year transitioning. I didn’t worry about the metrics. I didn’t worry about the growth. I worried about the relationships. That’s all I focused on.

So, the year of transition was ’23. The year of building the business and growing the business started in ’24. I learned systems. We built our tech stack. We started to understand how we could operate differently than the way we operated in the past, ’25 though was a breakthrough, ’25 was absolutely the breakthrough year.

So, less than three years into this, I was having my breakthrough experience. And the breakthrough was when I realized if you’re going to leave a place like Jones or Merrill or any other place where you’ve connected yourself to a brand, you need to understand from day one, they’re not all coming with you. There’s some folks that are going to surprise you. They’re not all coming with you. But if you’ve done your job and you’ve stayed in touch and you’ve built relationships and not just portfolios, most of them will come with you.

And the thing that I discovered that I wasn’t expecting, one of the things I wasn’t expecting is that when I created this new brand that became a boutique experience, more people were willing to come with me now than were willing to come with me when I was at the big box. I did not expect that. So, by the end of ’25 was some 30 months into the experience. I had a pretty successful practice at Edward Jones. I was a Forbes list best in state advisor a couple of years while I was there, one of the top advisors there. We’re at a minimum 50% bigger.

In my personal practice, we’re 50% bigger than we ever were at Edward Jones. By any metric you want to measure, assets under care, assets under management, assets per client, revenue, personal income, all those things. We’re 50% bigger than we were. And it’s because I didn’t expect that boutiquiness to be such an attractive thing.

Now, the other thing that was attractive, I’ll have to admit, I had an edge there. A lot of people were looking at me like, “Good grief. This guy should be retiring, but he’s building a new business. Let’s go see what that’s about.” So, that was pretty interesting. We also, I didn’t mind doing this. I had it in mind all along. We built a beautiful building. Not only wanted to become owners of the business, we wanted to become statement owners of a wealth planning practice.

So, we built a beautiful new building. The fact that it was right next door to my old Edward Jones office was just coincidental. I didn’t do that on purpose. It just happened to be an empty lot. So, everything I’ve done is by design. I mean, I don’t normally let anything happen by default. I’m always a design person. And not that I try to be a control freak, but I try to design everything that we’re doing. And I think the design has come through in my local business come through for the inspired wealth planning business too.

Jason Diamond:

Do you think that success begets success? I guess what I’m asking is, do you think that the next 25% or 50% growth will be easier than what you just bid off? Or do you think law of large numbers kicks in and this becomes then a challenge? Or is every dollar equally hard?

Ricky Smith:

No, man. Momentum is momentum. And what you build momentum is Newton’s law. Once you got forward velocity and you got momentum, it’s not going to stop. If you keep doing what you’re doing, it’s not going to stop.

So, I had one of the biggest successes of my career Monday of this week, and I’m so proud of it because this is why in 42 years of doing this, I never closed a big case from start to finish virtually. I’ve not even met these clients. They’re in Orange County, California of all things. They were referred to me. They’ve had plenty of financial advisors in California that they’ve worked with, but they never connected.

Even over Zoom, they liked probably the absent, but they also liked the nature of the way that we do business. And as of Monday, they committed. They signed all the papers to do ACATS on a substantial relationship. And I’m excited about them because I like them, but I’m also excited about the fact that we’ve learned some new tricks and we’re able to use technology to our advantage. That’s not going to stop. In fact, I’m scared of that, Jason, because it means that I could grow bigger faster than maybe I’m prepared for, so I need to get prepared for that because I think there’s another spurt of growth coming from that type of activity.

Jason Diamond:

Well, that’s certainly a balance, I agree. I mean, you can sometimes become a victim of your success if you’re not staffed up or scaled up to the appropriate point. The flip side is you can’t pre-scale the growth too much because you don’t want to kill your margins. I guess there’s a couple of things I want to ask you a little bit more about. This can’t all just be about your age and the story is really compelling and people are energized.

There has to be also some things in the toolkit that you can do better or that you can at least do now that you couldn’t necessarily do before. Are there any tangible examples of things where you’re like, “I am a better financial advisor today than I was five years ago because of this.”

Ricky Smith:

Definitely. And one of the things that I’ve done is I restructured my approach to the business period. And I’ve always enjoyed having a simple approach that people can relate to, but building in as much complexity as you need to in the plan.

So, I have gravitated to what I call the bucket approach. A lot of people are familiar with it, the now soon later approach to finance. And it’s become such an ingrained part of the conversation that I have. I don’t even have to think about it anymore. I love talking to people about, it’s a goals-based approach. So, it’s literally matching your priorities and your concerns, your goals with a financial arrangement that is risk and based on what you’re trying to accomplish. And people are really attracted to that.

And what I discovered is that, even though it’s a simple approach, it’s not just for small relationships. Every one of the big relationships that I’ve been able to cement in the last two or three years starts with that approach and people like it because it simplifies their life. So, I do think that’s part of it. I do think the toolset that we’re able to use, we’re using e-money, we’re using the list of plan, we’re using all the normal social security analysis tools, all those things that help people make decisions.

And I’ve been able to, even though I’m not a niche advisor, I’ve been attractive to many people that are on the verge. They’re preparing for retirement or already stepping off into retirement, and they like the fact that they’re talking to somebody that’s of a similar age that can help them because I understand the place that they find themselves in. So, we get a lot of business from that sector of the world, which is a pretty big market, people that are on the verge of preparing for retirement already stepping into retirement.

So, our toolkit, our tool set and my skillset is evolved around that. And that’s why I use the bucket approach. The bucket approaches for me is a great way to eliminate one of the biggest risks I’ve experienced in my time as an advisor sequence of return risk, which can be a killer for somebody that steps off into retirement at the wrong time.

Jason Diamond:

Yeah. No, it’s fascinating. Thank you for giving… Those are really good examples. A couple of other things on that, you mentioned Kestra Private Wealth Services, and you mentioned Rob and Scott as part of the reason, if not a main reason, why they stood head and shoulders above the competition. Was there anything else about them? Because you did extensive due diligence, so I think you’re uniquely qualified to answer this and looking at 12 firms, what else when you looked at… Or even just broadly, what were you looking at in a firm where you’re like, “Yeah, that’s the one?”

Ricky Smith:

Okay, great question. And I really didn’t know what I was looking for. I didn’t know what he didn’t know when I started, but I figured it out halfway through. So, Edward Jones was the mothership. They took care of everything, and I didn’t think I wanted to go all the way out here and be completely and totally on my own, but that’s what I found. That’s what I started with. I started with the major players on the pure and independent side.

And then, oddly enough, what I wound up doing was narrowing it down to three firms and all three of the firms had a different approach, more of a concierge type of approach. So, it felt to me, and I think this would appeal to anybody coming from Merrill or Jones or someplace like that. It felt to me an intermediate space. I’m still the owner, I’m still independent, but I have a slightly higher degree of support.

And that’s what I discovered. I don’t mind telling you, I looked at Sanctuary Commonwealth and Kestra Private Wealth, and I think I made the right choice. I feel like I’m with a firm that has a rising trajectory. They give me credit where credit is not due, but since I’ve recruited all the people that are here, Edward Jones, I’ve recruited all the people here that are Inspired Wealth Planning, but every time they have somebody coming from Edward Jones that might be interested in Kestra, they say, “Ricky, would you have a conversation with them?” So, I’ve had conversations with a lot of people that are transitioned and made the decision to go to Kestra, not because of me, just because it felt like the right fit for them.

So, I like the supported model of Kestra Private Wealth. There’s a couple of other firms that had a similar model, but this one was just perfect. And couple of that with the personal relationship that I was able to develop with Rob and Scott and others, all the support people there that may I had all the difference in the work. I was not shopping for the highest payout. I was not shopping for the best financial deal.

If you do that, in my opinion, you may not make yourself a better advisor, just a richer advisor. If that’s your goal, fine. There’s better ways to do it than what I did. But I don’t think that’s what most people want to do when they’re leaving those employee models and going into independence.

Jason Diamond:

I actually think that advisors sometimes get wrongly a bad rap of check chasing just because there are such lucrative numbers being thrown around. But more advisors that I speak with fall, probably not as strongly as you do, but more similar to where you fit, which is I’m not evaluating firms based on transition deal alone. It’s maybe the tiebreaker, if you will, where I looked at three firms and I feel these two firms are equal, so the economic package becomes the deciding factor. I agree with that approach.

I want to ask you, despite your commitment to the business, your energy, your growth, do you wrestle with or think about succession at all? It’s such a hot topic in our industry in terms of making sure advisors have next gen and the right bench of continuity. Give me your thoughts on that.

Ricky Smith:

Yeah, I think about that question often, Jason, my wife and I talk about it too. And what I’ve come to the conclusion is that I’m in the most peaceful place I’ve ever been in my career. And yet, the only thing nagging in the back of my mind is this question of succession. How do we do that? Thankfully, I’ve got partners that we have a reciprocal agreement.

So, if there was an emergency, my business would be taken care of. But that’s not a long-term solution. Absolutely. I’ve spent a lot of time with firms like FBTransitions. I’ve talked to Philip Paul many times. I have another appointment with him coming up in the not too distant future. I’m trying to figure that out as are most people my age is not easy though.

Jason Diamond:

I know. And so, figuring it out looks and feel like what would ideal look like to you? Because I assume part of the vision for going independence was, I own equity, I own this enterprise. And it’s fair if you haven’t thought about it that far. Just am curious if you seem like you’ve got a strong diligence on this, so.

Ricky Smith:

I do think about this a lot, Jason. I consider the ramifications of not having a plan, but I know that if I hire a second-generation advisor, I’ve got to be willing to not only pay and share, but give that second generation advisor a stake in the business. And I’m prepared to do that. One of the things that I believe it was Philip has said many times is, “You don’t give equity to somebody that’s not a rainmaker, but if you have a rainmaker in the office that’s part of your long-term plan, you better give them equity. You better give them an opportunity to be involved in the success of the business.” And I’m willing to do that. This is going to happen to beat you.

Jason Diamond:

I think that’s the right advice. I generally agree with that. And honestly, if somebody’s a true rainmaker, you probably have to give some equity because the market has become so competitive for people who have a book of business and can grow one. So, thank you for sharing that and being vulnerable on a topic that I think a lot of advisors’ wrestles with. Of any age, by the way, you can be 40 and wrestle with succession questions.

I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about the role of an advisor. We have to ask about AI because it’s become such a hot button. First of all, are you getting questions on it from clients? And second of all, how do you think AI plays into the role of a financial advisor in the next however many years?

Ricky Smith:

We have conversations about it. Every review meeting, every new client meeting, I mean, it comes up. And a lot of times, it’s how can we benefit from AI as an investment platform? How does it fit into our investment portfolio? But at the same time, they’re sitting there at the table with me and I’ve just told them that we’re using Zocks, an AI-based transcription service to take notes for me so I won’t have to take notes.

So, we’re doing that regularly. We like it. I’m getting accustomed to it. I mean, it’s not exactly something that I would do on my own if somebody told me that you could do this instead of taking a note. And primarily because it captures everything and it transcribes everything. So, that’s okay. I just have to clean the notes up to get all the, “How’s Grandma doing sort of things out of the notes.” But we’re using it that way.

We’re not using it many other ways, although personally I do use it to sometimes to answer some sticky questions about Social Security strategies or rules for Social Security and IRMA and things like that where I just don’t want to go digging around and look for the specific rule. I can do a query to ChatGPT and it will come back with a generic answer that looks and feels right to me.

So, I do think it’s going to be helpful to support financial advisor. I am not threatened by AI, of course. I’m short-term. I’ll be out in the business in the next 10 or 15 years, but I don’t think even younger advisors should be threatened by AI because AI will never have judgment. It will never show empathy. It will not have the type of skillsets that we have that make us powerful in relationship building. It will have some use in the business, but I just don’t believe it’s going to replace a financial advisor.

Jason Diamond:

I think that’s a consensus, at least obviously this is an area that’s evolving quite literally by the day or by the 2nd, but that seems to be the consensus among firms that we speak with and also financial advisors. And I think some advisors even go further and say, “This could be a tailwind. It’s a way to free up capacity, to your point. I think it can help with some of the more administrative or support type functions.” So, certainly, something to keep an eye on. What about the relationship with Kestra Private Wealth Services? Do you rely on them to some degree to be on the cutting edge of this? How do you think about that?

Ricky Smith:

Yeah. James Poer, the CEO of Kestra Holdings, he spoke to us not long ago. I was invited to a leadership summit, 37 people from around the country at Kestra were invited to just spend a couple of days with the executive team. And that’s one of the things that he addressed. He said, “That we will find ways to use AI to support you. It will never provide the kind of service that you expect from a human, but it will make our lives easier.” So, they’re doing a lot of things on the backside to help us gain some benefit and efficiencies from AI, but I don’t think it will ever replace people.

Jason Diamond:

Do you think that your core function, and to the extent you have a core function, are you more in the people side, I’m a therapist, relationship manager? Or is it more financial planning and investments or is it 50/50?

Ricky Smith:

It’s just funny. People ask me all the time because I’ve been around it a while. How has the role of financial advice changed in your 42-year career? It’s changed pretty drastically, as you can imagine. In fact, I was digging through some stuff in my office not long ago and I discovered, I don’t know if you’ve been in the business long enough or even to remember this. But we used to get, weekly, we’d get a book, a little flip book from Standard and Poor’s that had every listed stock and their closing price on a certain day.

And that’s literally about the only way we had to give a stock quote. We’d get this once a week and we’d give a stock quote and people would still buy stock based on that quote. So, I think that the biggest change that I’ve seen for financial advice in my career is that we were the gatekeepers of information. People would come to us for stock loads, for research, for advice on what to buy, what to sell. We’re not the owners of the information anymore. Everybody owns information now. Everybody’s got that computer in their pocket, gives them access to as much information as I have.

So, now what people are looking for is judgment. And one of the most exciting relationships I’ve acquired in the last few months is the chief financial officer of a publicly traded company. And he came to me as he was preparing to retire and he said, “I can do the numbers. I’ve got a master’s degree in accounting. I need somebody with judgment, with seasoned judgment to help me make decisions.” Financial advisors are still very critical in helping people make decisions that require seasoned judgment.

Jason Diamond:

And sure, what you’re saying is you believe one of the seismic shifts, and I agree, that we’ve seen is more from the investments and product to the people and empathy and the… And to be honest, that lends itself to the less replaceable by AI argument, I would think. And I think you agree.

Ricky Smith:

Yeah. And early in my career, again, as I progressed, I remember the early days of discount brokers that were going to put us out of business.

Jason Diamond:

Robo-advisors.

Ricky Smith:

And then, robo-advisors came by and that they’re going to put us under business. And people still rely on humans to help them make decisions. And we had a great conversation with a lot of our client yesterday. Tears were shed because we’re talking about family, we’re talking about legacy, we’re talking about things that affect multiple generations of this failing land. And you can’t do that with a program. You have a person that has to be able to be involved in that conversation.

Jason Diamond:

Yup. Well said. All right. We’ve got time for one more question. You are the quintessential in my mind, highly successful, highly I think comfortable, could absolutely have stayed put. There was nothing forcing you out the door. You could have run a very happy life and business by not doing a thing, and it in some ways would’ve been easier. What’s your advice for other people in that seat? Because there’s a lot of them, and now being on the other side of it.

Ricky Smith:

There’s a couple of things I want to share with you here, because I think this is really important. Creative people, entrepreneurial type people, always have something on their heart that they think they would like to accomplish or do, but their head talks them out of it, so many times, always the timing is not right. It’s got to be perfect timing. I don’t have the right team. I don’t have the right staff.

I want to tell you this, that when there’s something out there that’s critically important for your happiness in the future, you need to act on stuff like that. You just don’t need to sit there and wait until the perfect situation arises. Whatever’s on your heart, whatever that one thing is, it could be the one thing that changes everything for a lot of people. Done is better than perfect. Go do it. Doing makes the difference.

So, I had this great advice from my guy when I was in my transition. I was dragging a little bit because it wasn’t going quite like I expected it to early stages. I was at church on Sunday, my wife and I were, and this guy was, he and his wife were missionaries in Africa years ago and he’s a very wise guy. He’s good client. He’d already moved his account from me and he’s British. So, when he talks, he sounds really smart.

So, he said, “Brother Ricky, you seem to be down a little bit this morning.” And I said, “Well, it’s just not going the way I expected Bill. I’m struggling with all the things that I’m having to leave behind.” He said, “When we were in Africa, we had to move from place to place many times. And we developed this idea that helped us through it.” I said, “What is it?” He said, “All change involves some loss.” And it’s like my mind exploded. I said, “Say that again, please.” He said, “All change involves some loss.”

So, I extrapolated that a bit. And what I realized was that loss is not necessarily a negative indicator. Lost maybe an indicator that change and growth are coming. I like that a lot. I always tell people, you’re going to have to expect to leave something behind. You’re going to have to expect to have some losses, but losses probably, if you think about it in every aspect of your life, financial, physical, spiritual, emotional, relational, you’ve got to change and lose something if you want to grow and make things better for whatever reason.

So, the other thing I’ll tell you, I’m going to leave you on this because this is a meme that was on the internet one of my clients sent me that helped me tremendous.

Jason Diamond:

I love that ending with a meme. Please do.

Ricky Smith:

It says, “Support those who support you, call those who call you, ignore those that ignore you and never chase anyone who’s comfortable losing you.” Bingo. There you go. Just build your life by design the way you want it to be, and I promise you, you will enjoy the ride. If you have the right attitude going in, you will enjoy the ride that I’ve enjoyed.

Jason Diamond:

This was one of my favorite episodes. I’m struck by your mindset. You have the most quintessential growth mindset, and it’s inspiring. Honestly, I feel energized. So, thank you for sharing it with us. Thank you for coming on. I can’t wait to see what the future holds for you because I know it’ll be enormously successful.

Ricky Smith:

Thank you so much.

Mindy Diamond:

As a financial advisor, you hold yourself to the highest standards of integrity, honesty, and credibility. You are successful because you take your professional responsibility seriously and are dedicated to your clients. But are you living your best business life? Are your goals aligned with your firms or could a better option exist? Should I Stay or Should I Go? Is a book written with you in mind?

It’s a self-guided journey that walks you through the key steps that we take with our advisor clients. This strategic thought process and roadmap to professional self-discovery is designed to help you ask the right questions and think critically and objectively, whether you’re considering change or not. Learn how to get your copy at diamond-consultants.com/thebook.