Brad Johnson: Welcome back to another episode of Do Business. Do Life. Have Devin Choules here with us today. Welcome to the show, Devin.
Devin Choules: Glad to be here.
Brad Johnson: Well, man, let’s dive in. I’ve really been looking forward to this one. Every time we get together, we always have a good time. And it’s usually some business, usually a lot more life, and either way, we’re having lots of laughs. So, as we were prepping, one of the things that just struck me as we kick this conversation off is you’ve started out really in the securities world, BD license, then you’re like, “They’re not really embracing this whole other side, insurance.” And so, then you went that route. Then 2019 or so, you got the 65, brought it all back together again. But really, as we talked about the last 12 months or so, where your AUM has essentially doubled, where you just told me you did a couple of client events the last few weeks.
You now have $7 million to $8 million of new opportunities from existing clients, which is wild. And it all has really come back to fully embracing holistic planning, income, investments, taxes, healthcare, legacy estate, but not just. I’ve seen this a lot, unfortunately, in finance, where an advisor puts this little snapshot on their website, says, “Hey, we do all this,” but in reality, when you get to know them, they do like one-fifth of it, maybe if the client’s lucky. But you’ve really embraced the technology, the team to truly deliver on that, and it’s making a massive impact on your business. So, if you would kind of share your version of that, the before and after, and how that’s impacting your clients at a higher level, I’d love to kick it off that way.
Devin Choules: Well, thank you so much for having me on. It’s having the opportunity to reminisce and go back in time of where I came from and where I’m at now. The client experience, different things like that, it’s actually been a way to actually see a lot of gratitude. So, I am really grateful for this opportunity to look back in time. I’d started in the captive style world with the insurance companies. The funny part is you say, “Hey, you are BD. And they weren’t insurance friendly,” but I was at an actual insurance company that wasn’t insurance friendly to other carriers. Anyways, so that was part of the…
Brad Johnson: So, they were friendly to their products on the shelf, but not other people’s.
Devin Choules: Yes.
Brad Johnson: Got it.
Devin Choules: And I realized that I couldn’t do that to my clients and such. And so, I got rid of that so that I could go out and get a wider swath of what fit for them. And then about 2015, I learned I had done some in the past, but they weren’t really successful. I learned how to do dinner seminars and how to acquire clients. I literally, as much time as I spend on this thing, you cannot ask me to pick it up and call somebody and try to make them a client. I hate it. When we first started doing this, in fact, the doctor gave me beta blockers because I hate the phone that bad that my heart rate would start going, but I can stand in front of a room of a hundred people and not even bat an eye.
But picking up the phone, to me, was a big piece. But really, when I learned where my voice came from of how to stand up and market in front of a large group of people, that’s what really changed the whole trajectory of everything that has happened in the last 10 years now, has all come from the aspect of finding my voice.
Brad Johnson: So, when you, which it’s cool because I see that a lot in this business where it’s almost sometimes people are more comfortable in front of an audience than they are kind of the one-to-one. I mean, I grew up cold-calling, so I definitely get the phone call anxiety. I had that early on and had to battle through it. But what do you think it is that got you comfortable? Because I think there’s probably a lot of advisors watching or listening in, they’re like, “I know I need to take that step and be able to present in front of an audience,” but they just get stage fright or they kind of walk up and then back away and they never take that leap. What was it that allowed you to just jump into it?
Devin Choules: I mean, you know me well enough to know that I’ve got kind of a big personality. And I’ve never felt intimidated in front of people. And so, that’s never been it. I think what I didn’t like about the phone is the fact that I don’t get to see your face. I don’t get to see the reaction. I don’t feel the connection that way. And so, being in front of a group of people, there’s all sorts of, like, if you’re worried about how to jump into that, one of the biggest pieces, I don’t even know who told me this years and years ago, if you’re having the night where you’re kind of off and you’re trying to speak in front of people, find the one person in the crowd that’s friendly. Hell, have your mom go sit in the crowd and just talk to your mom.
Give your presentation to the one person in the room that is smiling at you, shaking their head, making you feel like you’re connecting with people. It gives you the ability kind of a little, it doesn’t matter if there’s a hundred people in there, if you focus on the one to two people that actually are engaged with you, you’ll forget all the anxiety. All the stress will go away because now you’re just having a conversation with essentially one person, even though there’s 40 people in the room. So, that was a big piece for me when I did start off, I don’t feel like I’m on my game, I don’t know if this is landing, but you find the one person in the audience that is giving you all the visual feedback that you’re doing a good job, and that tends to really help.
But if you’re looking at making a change I can’t say how important it is to be able to do business in more than, essentially, casting your net in front of one person versus saying, “Hey, I even have 40 to 60 people in a room that I can give that message one time how much more efficient that is. So, I’m a huge fan of it.
Brad Johnson: Well, yeah, Business 101, if you can have the same conversation with 30, 40 people at the same time versus having to have it 40 individual times, it just logically makes sense to scale your time. I heard different advice on kind of if, well, number one, if you don’t get nervous, then you’re doing stuff that doesn’t matter and you’re not getting uncomfortable, right? And I’ve always just found like that’s kind of my internal hack. Like, if I’m nervous, I’m like, “Cool, I’m doing stuff that matters that can make an impact.” And that’s kind of my body’s natural reaction to it. And then I heard this might be a little morbid, I heard somebody say one time, “You know, at the end of the day, we’re all going to die and it’s not going to matter anyway, so don’t take yourself too seriously.”
There’s actually something to that of like the world doesn’t revolve around you, so at the end of the day, if you flub a word or two, people aren’t going to remember it a week from now anyway. So, I don’t know if that hits home with you or not. I know you’re a pretty philosophical guy at your core, but what’s your take on that?
Devin Choules: I can get down with that. I really like the idea of, like I said, I like my personality. And so, I always tell people I am who I am. I try to be as genuine as I can be because, to your point, we’re all going to die, and it doesn’t matter. So, as long as you’re being on the aspect, I should back that up with as long as you’re being a genuinely good human.
Brad Johnson: Yeah. Not like just saying whatever you want in front of people and it doesn’t matter, especially in finance. So, yeah, compliance, suitability. Let’s make sure we check that box. Well, let’s circle back. So, you were telling me before we hit record here, you had really always, I mean, you have a master’s in accounting, so you’ve definitely geeked out when it comes to taxes and educating yourself. And I know you’ve been using that along the way, your entire, since you started your own firm back in 2014. But you said you took this shift, I think it was around 2019-ish or so, where you truly started to build the team out to be able to deliver on a true plan.
But then, if you really look at the last 12 months, you’ve kind of fleshed out, you’ve embraced eMoney and some other financial planning software, where it’s like, “We’re not just going to talk about it. We’re actually going to…” It’s like the equivalent of building a custom house. It’s like we’re going to do the work. This is custom. It takes time. It takes a team. But the results on the back end of that, you’re literally going back to your existing clients that have worked with you for probably years at this point and saying, “Hey, this is kind of the foundation of what we build. Now, we can expand on it.” And you’ve got $7 million to $8 million of opportunities from just people you’ve already been working with. So, if I’m an advisor, I’m like, “How do I do that?” Like, can you walk through kind of how that came to be?
Devin Choules: Well, the big step for anybody who’s out there that’s what I’m going to call understaffed, you think that you’re doing it okay, there’s kind of a, it’s not a hard, fast rule, but if you want to do $5 million a year of new business or acquire that much from clients, you may be able to get away with you and a part-time person. But if you want to go to 10, you need to have another person. You want to go to 15, you got to have another. You want to have this. And there’s kind of this counting block of what you have the capacity of doing. So, no matter how efficient you think your office is, I mean, there’s the case in point that we were looking at of in 2016 and 2017, it was 5.2, 7.2, 2018 was $7.6 million of total assets.
And then I hired Ashley, and Ashley convinced me that I needed to hire another person to help her. So, I went from essentially halfway employees to having two full-time employees in 2019. Of course, it’s not going to scroll over. We went to…
Brad Johnson: And for those listening that don’t know what role Ashley’s in, what’s she kind of play in the office?
Devin Choules: So, Ashley, she’s played, put her hat on in almost every single position in the office. She’s now the Director of Operations, but she’s done everything from running the back office to hiring employees, to firing employees, to doing payroll. But mainly, she essentially turned into my right hand. She was pretty the Swiss Army knife there for a while. And by her convincing me that I know you brought me on, and she asked for a bigger paycheck than back then that I was comfortable doing, and then within I think two months, she’s like, “Hey, you need another full-time person.” And so, that year we ended up at total assets of $19,634,000.
We didn’t run any more seminars. We didn’t do any more marketing events. The only thing that changed is it allowed me to get better at what I actually do, and that’s meeting and sitting with clients and letting the office do all the office things. And that was a transformative piece of why I’ve always been a big proponent of, chances are you’re just understaffed, is why you’re not hitting that next stride.
Brad Johnson: Devin, can we dive into that because I couldn’t agree more. I literally was just doing a coaching call yesterday. Great guy. Had one team member, kind of probably your Ashley, kind of doing about everything in the early days. They were bringing in about $20 million of assets, and I asked him a question and I said, “Hey, do you view salaries for your team as an expense?” and he said, “Yeah, I do.” And I said, “Well, can I challenge you? What if you started to think about those a lot more like an investment into your company and your team, and how you serve your clients?” And I said, “I think just shifting that mindset of like hiring high caliber people that are going to take the weight off your shoulders and allow you to build a team to serve your clients at a higher level, I think that could really serve you,” which is exactly what you’re talking about right now.
So, how did you make that shift? Was it a buddy that said, “Dude, you’re way understaffed for what you’re doing?” Or how did you get there?
Devin Choules: So, this is a big loop. So, Scott, my lead advisor, we worked in St. George together in 2011 at one of the captive agencies back when I had my BD all the way back in the beginning. Well, as time had gone on, he had moved to Northern Utah, back where we live now. And Ashley and him had worked together for two to three years, and Ashley needed to leave that position. It wasn’t the right fit for her. And he actually referred her to me. That’s when I needed to let somebody go. I had kind of a part-time person that wasn’t the right fit for the speed that we wanted to go at.
And then from there, it was a really easy track record to see that, hey, every time I hire somebody, we bring on more clients and we do it with less work. There were a few years that every year we would go do less and less seminars and bring on more and more clients. And I think that is 100% attributable to staffing correctly. And then where we’re going and where we are now is the next iteration of that, of saying, “Hey, I’ve always done some sort of tax planning. I’ve always done some sort of healthcare, long-term care planning, done some investments here and there.” But now, full circle, now Scott has come over. We took him from a firm about a year ago where he was managing $200 million in the market.
Scott has been huge. When we talked about earlier, my AUM going up, I now have a resource that’s not me. He’s better at it than me. He knows more than me. It’s been phenomenal to plug him into what we’re doing and have that completely taken from me and know that somebody’s better at it than I would’ve ever been anyways. And I would attribute that we’re in this new iteration of documenting everything and having a process for each piece. We take it, and now we document everything all the way along to, what’s your plan? What’s your income look like? What’s your taxes look like? What’s your overall plan look like? And we have it put together.
And what I like about being able to show this is it actually holds the team accountable. If I show you this, I now have to do it, where before it may be, well, yeah, you have some tax pieces, and I’ve only got two employees, so we’ll do your tax planning next year. As bad as that sounds, when you’re one person servicing a couple of hundred people, it just doesn’t work. And so, these are the growth inside of business that you learn along the way, that really what you need to do is hire people that are better than you and then get out of the way.
Brad Johnson: Yes. You literally stole the words out of my mouth. I heard that from, actually, a mentor way back in the day that had built like a $50 billion RIA, so he figured a few things out along the way, but his exact quote was, “Hire great people and get the hell out of their way.” It’s kind of that who-not-how concept. But also, I want to pick up on something you said. He’s better than me. And what that shows is humility as a leader. And I think one of the things that gets in the way of a lot of advisors, especially early on, is they’re just cracking into scaling a team, is they have a really tough time admitting that, “Oh, no, I’m actually the best here, but I just need help,” versus, “No, I’m going to hire A-players that, actually, are better than me in many aspects at different things. And now we’re building a team where the differences are the strengths.”
So, if I was to say the phrase, “A-players are always free,” would you agree with that? Even though they’re expensive when you hire them, are A-players always free?
Devin Choules: They’re not only free, but they’re a return on a free investment in that aspect. And that’s where when I talk about Ashley, A-player, she came in, she was already trained inside an industry in a former life before I came to Triad, the idea of employing people was just to find somebody, pay them more than what their community normally would, train them to exactly who you want them to be. And this is going to sound bad but own them forever because they can never go anywhere if you’re overpaying them. But they know exactly this, they know this is the operation, do exactly this. And that has actually come back to bite me some as we’re trying to scale and change what we’re doing and provide more value to our clients is because anytime I hire somebody that knows less than me, they only know what I have the time to teach them.
And so, we’re not getting better. There’s no synergy inside of it. And that’s where when I talk about bringing on Ashley, she had been in the industry for three years. She knew how to book client meetings. She knew how to do reviews. She knew how to do red tail and document things and how to schedule pieces out. Scott, running that at Schwab, he just is better than me. And so, when you hire those A-level players, that’s where things start changing. Shawn, we were at a training in San Antonio a while ago, and he talked about low-level hires, medium-level hires, and high-level hires, and how they work inside of your business.
And what I’ve realized over and over again is that I need to, I or we, as an industry, we need to stop being cheap to say and saying, “Oh, I can pay this person $5,000 less a year, and I can get this person that could potentially do this.” Hire the expensive one. Hire the one that already knows what’s going on. It will create a way better client experience. And as a founder or an owner, it’s a way better experience as well.
Brad Johnson: Well, I mean, you hit the nail on the head right there. Think about the business that we’re in. You are in the business of building trust and convincing someone, my life’s work, my nest egg, that I worked 20, 30, 40 years to build my million, my $3 million, my $5 million, whatever that number is. And now you go cheap and hire a low-level person, that’s the first impression when they answer the phone. And now does that instill trust if they can’t even form a sentence to invite that person into your firm? And so, it’s like when you are in a business where the transactions are monumental from a revenue standpoint and a trust standpoint, it’s even more important.
If you go to a fast food place and somebody flubs your order, not big consequences. Somebody messes up your retirement, there is no redoing that. So, it’s just like it blows my mind how some of those simple business just principles like get missed so often in finance. And it is because I know it’s tough to be a business owner. You’re trying to control expenses. But at the end of the day, if you look on the flip side, the benefit of what it can create as you build that, like you said, now the assets are starting to pour in as you’ve leveled up your team and your services back to your existing clients.
So, let’s go into those couple of events you’ve done the last few weeks. So, how was this communicated in a way where now you’ve got $7 million to $8 million of assets coming on board from clients that you’ve worked with over the years? Like, what are they seeing if you put yourself in their chair, where they’re like, “Man, I got to go talk to Devin and his team”?
Devin Choules: Gotcha. So, the event was a little bit of teaching people about the brand language. So, for years, the brand was where protection is key. We were very protection-based insurance products across the board. That’s what we did. And then I know we’ll get into it a little bit later, but through personal things that happened, I realized that the business that I was building and the life that I had created and what I was being able to give to my clients as a level of service wasn’t anything I wanted anything to do with. Yeah, I think they call that burnout now. I had built a monster that I didn’t want anything to do with. And so, I knew I needed to change everything about it.
And that was part of when I made the move over to Triad was to reclaim my life. But they were so used to that every 90 days they could come see me, have a steak dinner, hear me talk, say hi to me, get on the calendar, whatever that may have been. I mean, for six, seven, eight years of that was it and then we shut down all marketing in that aspect for almost a year and a half, did anything. And so, we went, “Hey, we need to explain to you what’s been going on and how we’ve been leveling up on your behalf.”
And so, with that, we walked them through what we call the five worlds of saying, “Hey, I know we’ve talked about your investments in the past. We’ve probably talked about your income, we’ve talked about your taxes, your healthcare, your legacy in some form or another with a little bit dabbled, but now we’ve taken it and we’ve went from a team of four people to a team of 12 people. We’ve now documented the process. We now have it in writing, how we can put it together for you.” And then Scott walked them through the new software we use, eMoney, to allow us to be able to show them all of their assets. I think the statistic is that 85% of people have never seen their net worth or all of their assets in one page, in one place.
And the amount of people that being able to show them that, “Hey, you can aggregate everything from your bank accounts to your investments, to your annuities, to your life insurance, to your rental properties, to whatever it is, and then to be able to link your kids, to be able to link your attorney, your CPA, your P&C person, so that when the time comes of your demise as we talked about earlier, we’re not getting out of this alive, everybody’s going to die, now your loved ones have the ability of having one phone call and one login, and everything is documented and set forth. And it has been probably the biggest amount of hope is the best word I can come up with that I see just every single retiree or client that we’ve talked to about it, and their just eyes just light up of going, “This has been a deep-seated worry of mine of how do I do this?”
Because chances are they’re right there in that cusp of where they just did it with their parents, and they had to chase everything down, and it wasn’t a fun experience. You’re already going through grief. And so, a huge piece is showing them how they can use that. And that’s been part of my own personal experience of saying I’ve had two brothers pass away in the past four years. Neither one of them had trusts. Neither one of them had anything put together. And so, it was digging through every envelope they ever had to find out if this financial institution, if they owed them money or if they had a deposit with them, and then telling you, “Hey, sorry. You’re not the personal representative. You got to go through probate. You got to do this. And then you can call us back.”
And then they say, “Oh, no, that account’s been closed for five years. Oh, don’t worry about it.” So, it’s been this piece of some personal stuff that I’ve gone through that was just not fun. It’s just been a miserable, miserable experience. Not only just the grief, but all the things to get people’s lives put into a pile. You know, it sounds bad when you reduce your life into a stack of papers. But those that you leave it behind to, I can’t tell you how much they’re going to appreciate you taking an hour, two hours to actually do the planning to make sure that they can settle your estate.
So, that’s been a huge, huge piece of, in these client events of when we’re going back and we’re reengaging with them and we’re showing them, “Here’s all the things that we can do, here’s the professionals that we’ve brought on board to support this, here’s the documentation, and here’s the software that we now are giving you for free to be able to do this,” that’s where those opportunities are coming from, that are coming, I mean, out of the woodwork. These people have been clients of mine for 3, 4, 5, 10 years. I had no idea those assets were there, but they also didn’t know that we could help them with it because our story or our offering wasn’t documented. It wasn’t put there, and as only a solo advisor, I could not do all those things for all people.
Brad Johnson: Well, as I break down, because there’s a lot there, I’m just kind of looking at the big inflection points. Number one, you transitioned from building a team built on ‘I, Devin’ to playing a team-based game based on ‘we’ and expanding the resources, the knowledge base to be able to deliver on it in the first place. Then you go to packaging and communicating to your existing clients like, “Hey, good news. This is the work that’s been going on behind the scenes as we build, like tripled the team size, expanded the software to be able to deliver on this,” to where now you’re kind of previewing the results in advance of like, “Here’s what we could build on your behalf if this can serve you.”
And then the last one that I just love, and it is a little bit morbid, but the truth is, if you don’t do the planning, you’re going to leave your heirs, your beneficiaries in a really rough spot. They’re grieving the loss of you, and they’re having to sort through years’ worth of statements and paperwork. That sucks. So, if you think about the legacy piece of the pie, which I think to most people is important, they don’t want to think about it, but it is reality. You’re almost, to me, it’s like Covey’s 7 Habits, start with the end in mind. There’s like a section in there where it’s like write your own obituary in advance. How do you want to be remembered? And you’re saying, “If you want to be remembered by your family, by your loved ones, from a financial aspect of having your house in order, we can help.”
And you’re like, “If you don’t want this outcome for your family, but in turn you would like this, where it’s clean, it’s documented, it’s all in one place, we can help. Who wants that?” And it’s almost pulling them back into the planning by doing that. Is that a fair assessment of the positioning there?
Devin Choules: It’s so spot on. And I think that we’re not taught because death is always a weird thing and a hard thing people don’t talk about. It’s like death, money, and politics, whatever it is, things you don’t talk about.
Brad Johnson: Yeah.
Devin Choules: It’s not a talked-about piece of how miserable it is to have to go through the grieving and to go through settling the estate, and what it should look like. So, I have actually shifted inside of it, of calling it here’s your legacy plan to your estate plan. Because with the estate plan, is it titled correctly? Who are the beneficiaries? Are they listed correctly? Do we have an IRA going to a nonprofit or a non-qualified going there? So, we have some tax implications inside of it, of making sure that the money that we want to go to somebody goes to them and it goes to them seamlessly, versus my brother Rick. I do not think he threw away single financial envelope in like 10 years. It took weeks of sorting through and finding out.
In a time when things were already tough, it just made it that much worse because you hated what you were doing, and you had to remember why you were doing it. We all must die, so it’s okay in that aspect, but, yeah, if you can create that for your clients, they’re currently having to do that with their parents or they just did, and they’re top of mind of going, “Hey, I didn’t enjoy that.” I would like to not do that to my loved ones. And that’s where I think the power of being able to give them a portal. We call ours the Yes Portal of being able to log everything in and see everything and know where it’s at and save your trust and save your P&C documents so they can cancel them, or your bank accounts, or everything like that. The end in mind will make everything so much nicer for everyone.
Brad Johnson: And that is when you really step back of the work that you get a chance to do, it’s real work. It’s not just, “Hey, here’s an appointment, let’s go ahead and build a 500K financial plan. Onto the next one.” When you really like, step back and say, “These are people’s lives and generational work that you do and done right,” it is like building somebody’s dream home, just the financial aspect of it. It allows them, it’s the vehicle that allows them to, as you call it, live a life of yes. So, if you’re cool with it, like, what does that mean? Like, I know that’s a personal thing for you, live a life of yes, which is something like you’ve incorporated into your brand.
Not only do you want it for yourself, and you shifted from a model where you’re driving 900 miles all over the place with kind of that business model that was eating you alive, which you shifted, but you also want it for your clients. So, what’s the why behind that?
Devin Choules: So, a little bit about how I got there. I like to say in business, the reason why I’m successful is I’m too dumb to know when to quit. If we go back to 2016, I decided that I had an opportunity to open an office in San Diego. I was flying out every Monday, leaving my six-month-old baby girl and my 4-year-old son at home, flying out on Monday, coming home on Friday. Little did the clients in San Diego know that I was actually sleeping in the second bedroom of the office on a futon, showering at the 24 Hour Fitness down the road. Anything to make it work, decided that, while San Diego’s a nice place to visit, there’s at no point in time do I want to live there. That’s not who I am.
So, we came back to Utah. And with that, that’s when we started because of an organization I was with in the protected areas, almost like a franchise, where I couldn’t work, where I lived. You mentioned the 900 miles between offices. Legitimately, from Mesquite, Nevada to Logan, Utah to Jackson Hole, Wyoming over to Boise, I had offices in each one of those places. And it was, I think, if you map it in congruent driving, it’s like 966 miles total if you were to drive from one office to the other all the way through. I was driving 66,000 miles a year or so on average. And I knew that it needed to stop. I was starting to get tired. And then in July of ‘23, so literally probably right about now, two years ago to the day, I have a Sleep Number bed and it said, “Congratulations on achieving 500 hours of sleep for the year.”
Kind of a math guy, so I went, “That seems kind of light.” And I looked at it and what I realized was that in the first 200 days of the year, I had traveled 120 days. I was not being a good husband. I was not being a good father. I was being a phenomenal provider, but I was not being the person that I wanted to be. And that’s when I knew things had to change. And then a month later, my brother took his life. And at that point in time, that’s when everything came down and I went, “I’m out.” The business that I have built, I want nothing to do with. So, I’ve got to take some time for myself to rebuild what the vision is. Life’s not just always about money, it’s about being able to say yes to the things you want to. When I was coming up with this language, I finally came to the end and I was like, “I know this is supposed to be for the clients, but I’m pretty sure I’m just projecting what I want for myself.” I’ve been too afraid to be able to spend money, to be able to take the vacation to say, do you know what? I don’t need to drive all over hell and not see my kids and not take them to school on a regular basis.
It’s okay to make some changes and do some planning. And that’s really where that came from, there was the personal experiences. I was already starting to burn out, but then the realization of, hey, I’m not home. And then you add in my brother and I was like, “No, life’s too short. If you’re going to carry those things, if you’re not going to find the positive and look forward to what fills your cup, then what’s the point of this?”
And so, that’s really where the Live a Life of Yes came from, was the idea of while things may be hard, with a little bit of planning and some hard work, you can change everything and you can have the ability to do all the things you’ve dreamt of through your entire life, whether that’s we say going on that bucket list trip that you’ve always planned on, hey, for the last 10, 15 years, hey, when I retire, we’re going to go to Italy, or whatever it may be.
I love food. So, eating at your favorite restaurants, the ability to say, do you know what? Do you want to go out tonight in retirement? Fantastic. But most importantly, living a life of yes is doing the things you love with the people you love. And I don’t even think you need to, on that portion, wait until retirement. That’s really the key to life, is being able to do the things that I believe that people don’t want to live longer, they want to live more. And that’s what our goal is, is to help instill that in people, of giving them the ability to see that they can actually do those things. They can say yes to life.
Brad Johnson: That’s beautiful, man. Don’t live longer, live more. I think we all know those people in our lives that we lost too soon, but the ones we look back and still tell stories about are the ones that did get the most out of their time while they were here. And I can think of a good friend I lost right at about a year ago. Man, he lived a life of more, that’s for sure. And he only had 44 years on this planet, but he made the most of them.
So, I love that you’re creating a business model that’s not only allowing, enabling that to happen through great financial planning, but almost like sometimes people need that nudge, that push where you’re like, yo, like life’s too short, go get it. Like, live a life of yes. And I think that’s so cool to carry that torch. How have you seen that, as you’ve started to share that with your clients, how has that impacted them? Do you have stories? Do you see faces light up? Do you have experiences they’re already doing that they wouldn’t have done without that? What’s that look like?
Devin Choules: Literally, yesterday, the chair I’m sitting in here is where he was sitting. He’s 69. He’s still working, still thinking that, hey, I’m not sure I can retire. And through our yes portal and through the planning portion, he was sitting here and I said, “What do you fear about running out of money? Why are you still working? Why are you not doing these things?” They happen to be going to Great Basin state park here in Utah this weekend, and I know that they were really excited about it.
And the ability to take in the yes portal and the planning and say, hey according to this, with a 99% probability, you could actually live on $154,000 a year and never run out of money. So, through bear markets, anything like this, he has a pension, his wife has a pension, Social Security. Social Security, and they’ve saved almost a million dollars for retirement. There’s at no point in time did he need to work. And when we were sitting here and I was able to show him, not just tell him, but I was able to show him, “Hey, this is what your life looks like,” the amount of weight that you saw melt instantly out of his face and he just kind of smiled was like, “What have I been doing?” Almost probably this aspect of where I’m at in my own journey of saying, hey, this is what I did for 10 years to get where I’m at. And I was too stupid to quit and just kept forcing it. I have that aspect of him going, yeah, why am I going to work? Why am I not doing these things? I’m not going to outlive my money. There’s not a shot ever. Whether it was long-term care, anything like this, you’re okay.
And so, it has been an amazing piece to be able to just not tell people they’re going to be okay, but to show them that they’re okay, and then to take it and like, hey, I showed you earlier, to be able to document it for them and say, hey, look, anytime you’re having those doubts creep in, because we all do, look, it’s all written, it’s documented. You have a written retirement income plan, how much money you can take, where it comes from, it’s all put together. And I really hope that he told his boss this morning that he’s retiring.
Brad Johnson: Being able to witness those moments in person has to be like almost intoxicating because I look at that, it’s almost counterintuitive. Back to you sharing your journey of like, hey, here’s the model I was brought up in, it was kind of grinded out. I’ve got to be the road warrior that’s going to these locations, popping the seminar, doing the sales, moving on to the next one, very much like a Devin’s the guy.
And this gentleman, to get to where he is, to create that financial freedom, he had to do the equivalent of that, my guess is grind it away 40, 50 hours a week, wherever he was working, diligently save, not overspend. And so, it’s almost like, you climb to the summit, the peak, you’ve got the million, the $2 million, the $3 million in the account as a retiree, and now you’re giving him permission to kind of unwire all these hardwired behaviors of like, I have to scrimp and save and not take the trips. You’re like, “Dude, you’ve earned the ability to do that. Now, go spend.” Like, how hard is that for a lot of people where they’re like almost changing these hardwired behaviors overnight? Is that difficult to walk people through that?
Devin Choules: It is probably the hardest thing to do is when you take a super saver, somebody who’s frugal lives within their means is convincing them that they don’t need to save in retirement and it’s okay to spend their money. It’s by far, when it comes to the written retirement income plan, income planning for them, I mean, if you’ve got double pension adjusted for inflation, you’ve got Social Security, like there’s no need for income. And so, for him, I joke with him, your income planning is going to be convincing you that it’s okay to spend that money. You want that new truck? That’s okay. Legacy or estate planning, passing onto your heirs wasn’t high on your list. It wasn’t something that you were like, hey, this is what I want to be known for. Well, guess what? You’re not getting out of this alive and you can’t take it with you. So, you have a spending problem. You need to spend more.
Brad Johnson: You have a spending problem in the wrong direction, I love that. Yeah.
Devin Choules: And that’s the moment in time when he literally sat in his chair when I pushed the button and showed him the planning and the yes portal where it just all hit him like a ton of bricks and going, “Oh, my goodness, what am I doing with my life?” And that’s probably, to go back to the moment that I’ve had the piece of where it finally hit me as stupid as it is, my sleep number bed telling me, hey, you’ve only been home 80 days for the year, knock it off. That was probably the same moment for him of going, what have I done?
Brad Johnson: So, Devin, as you were sharing that last kind of real life retirement story, one of the things that struck me, I think when it comes to income planning, number one, it’s crazy how most retirees don’t have a written income plan at all. But I think oftentimes, advisors kind of focus on the do I have enough? Maybe they haven’t quite saved as much as they would’ve liked to, and it’s almost like that foundational piece at the bottom of the retirement plan.
But one of the things, we’ve got a mutual friend and a guy named Matt Dixon, and he kind of applied that to the top end. And I know you’re really starting to dive into working with a lot more higher net worth. And you said one thing that kind of struck me, this individual you were just talking about, I mean, leaving a big legacy behind was not high on his priority list. And I think oftentimes, retirees unintentionally create trust fund babies because they have a spending problem where they’re not spending enough and now they’re going to leave $4, $5, $6, $8 million to their heirs and kind of unintentionally create trust fund babies. So, it’s almost like you have a spending problem because you’re going to leave way too much behind. So, have you started to see, as you start to deal with a lot more higher net worth where that’s an issue too on the top end, not just the bottom end?
Devin Choules: Absolutely. And you were spot on to pick up where I stole that vernacular from, is that training with Matt, 100%, that’s exactly where that came from, of saying, hey, you have a spending problem because this isn’t what you intended to have happened. I absolutely took that from him. But inside of it, we’ve used it in a little bit of a different aspect of, that’s the regret zone is typically what ends up happening is that people don’t spend any money, they’re so conservative, they don’t know what they can spend. They’re concerned that if I spend a dollar today, I’m going to need it tomorrow for care or for taxes or to help a kid out, whatever it may be.
And then they get into their later years, their 80s, things like that, and they have more money than they know they’re ever going to spend. And they wake up saying, hey, I could have taken that bucket list trip. I could have taken the family out to dinner. I could have done these things. But they wake up in the regret zone because they had a spending problem. They just didn’t realize it was the wrong direction.
And so, as I’ve been working with more and more high net worth people, the big piece that I’ve been encouraging them to do about living a life of yes and doing those things is if you’re going to leave a legacy, money is not a legacy, period. I have yet to see a single client, or even in my own personal life, with my parents, things like that, that the money that’s left behind is ever remembered or documented. They know where they spent it. They did this with it.
But my oldest son, his name is Jack, and that’s because my grandpa Jack, with his retirement savings, he did little things like this. He took me 12 miles into town to go to Arctic Circle and have a ranch burger and a dipped ice cream cone. He spent his money while he was alive in the littlest of ways, creating that bond with me, that it was a legacy enough that before Nicole and I even got married, I told her, my oldest son, my first son will be named Jack, and I need you to be okay with that. That’s a non-negotiable for me if we’re going to get married, things like that.
And really, it came from the legacy he left behind in the little things that he did of teaching me how to work when he overpaid me to mow his lawn. I mean, 30 years ago, I was getting paid 20 bucks to do 30 minutes’ worth of work and mow his lawn. I had it made. But to grandpa, he taught me about money, taught me those things, taught me how to work. Or on the other side of something as simple as, hey, he took me to town and spent an hour with me eating a hamburger one-on-one.
Let that be your legacy because I promised that his money is come and gone and nobody can account for and what it did, but what he did while they were alive, that to me is the legacy you want to live or you want to leave to people. Money is nice, but it’s not what people want to be remembered by. As you said, trust fund babies don’t remember where their money went either.
Brad Johnson: Yeah, and back to, I think, what’s cool is you as an advisor, I’ve just had the benefit. When I was 26, I was just kind of thrown into this business and I was kind of in the trenches with a ton of advisors and as they were growing their business and figuring it out and starting to develop that confidence to be able to straight up tell somebody with $5, $6, $8 million, hey, I think you’re kind of screwing up a piece of this. And it’s cool, like as you step into that where your planning backs up the advice you’re giving, that you can really lead people financially down the path they actually want to go down because you’ve seen the good scenarios play out, like your grandpa, and you’ve seen the not-good scenarios play out unintentionally with many other retirees. So, how do you balance the good stories and sharing the aspirational side versus the, dude, if you do this, you might end up where you don’t want to be? Like, what’s the balance in these conversations as you go?
Devin Choules: One of the questions you asked me offline was, what has changed the most inside of your business? When I first started doing this, I’m a very numbers driven person. Numbers are black and white to me, I’m good at math. This is how we solve this said problem or to get to the goal type piece. And the biggest thing that has changed is, is asking the emotional questions up front of what they truly want, what their concerns are, what their desires are. And that has been the biggest shift of the way I do planning inside of here, being able to tell somebody that saved too much, hey, you need to spend this because you didn’t say that this is what you wanted to do.
Before, would’ve just done math and said, hey, you’re okay. And they didn’t leave with any more confidence inside of it because I didn’t do the planning right. I didn’t actually address the concern. But on the other side of when people are coming in and they’re overspenders, I personally hate that because I don’t want to be their parent. I know I’m supposed to be their financial advisor and tell them the tough news as well, but those are never as much fun. Sometimes we get the opportunity to teach people about the different financial tools that are available and shifting their mindset of saying, hey, instead of chasing returns, why don’t you chase income and this solves your problem?
And with that, I often walk through people when we get to the growth section of their money and I talk about, hey, this is only good for legacy and for inflation. We as a country have been taught that we need more grow, baby, grow. We need more and more and more. And that’s the only way that you can retire is to grow that money extensively. When in all reality, there’s a whole list of tools and opportunities that you can use to actually solve those problems way more efficiently. And so, that’s where typically, when somebody has a spending problem on the other side, especially right now where interest rates are high, you have a really unique opportunity to kind of give people a get-out-of-jail free card. They can use less money to get more income that’s guaranteed.
And so, it’s been an interesting time of taking the emotional side of finding out what people really want, but then also still having to layer in reality is reality and math is math and this is all you’ve done. So, we got to have that conversation of if you spend this, and that will go back to our yes portal software as well, of me being able to show you, see how that line ends at age 81, that means because you’re out of money. And being able to visually show that has really helped as well of getting people back in the boat of going, oh, well, yeah, I plan on living past 81. I should probably adjust my spending. Visuals have been huge.
Brad Johnson: Well, and layering that with a real-life story like your grandpa Jack and he spent that money on you. And those are like, think about the ROI and the legacy he left behind on probably like a $5 hamburger and shake back in the day. And the ROI on that spend, because he also didn’t delay it to where now, I’m sure as he got older, the physical stuff goes away. He probably couldn’t take that trip with you like he could, but to your point, a lot of people defer, defer, defer, and then by the time they actually try to adjust, their health isn’t there to actually take advantage of spending the money anyway. So, it’s almost like the spending should be and probably could be front loaded. And then as health starts to decline as you get older and you can do less of the go years, it’s like, well, you don’t need as much anyway because you just don’t have the physical ability to take advantage of it. Like, do you tend to see that be a trend with a lot of retirees?
Devin Choules: Yeah. And that’s exactly the regret zone that I was talking about is, is that people wait too long to get their planning right. And then they realize that they could have done these things. They could have gone on that trip. They could have taken their grandson out to lunch. They could have done these things. And then they end up with, well, I didn’t plan on leaving a legacy, and now that’s how I am going to leave this money. I’m leaving money, not a legacy because I didn’t spend that with them or on them.
One thing that, I’ll share this because it’s a legacy piece that I love and I’ve been talking with all my clients and people who come in that are in this situation. I’ve told my parents for years, “Hey, stop buying me birthday presents. Stop buying me Christmas presents. I’m an adult with adult money. I’ll be okay. If I want something, I’ll go get it. I don’t need a gift card to the local sports store to go spend.” That’s not what needs to happen, but what we have done is we’ve shifted them getting a cabin at one of the local lakes here where all the grandkids, great-grandkids, kids all show up and spend two to three days a year together making those core memories. And I promise more than anything is that that’s the legacy that my kids are going to remember about their grandparents is that they created cousin time.
So, giving people the opportunity of, like, this has probably been one of my favorite pieces, is helping people envision what’s possible and giving them, every one of them, when I tell them that, like, oh man, that’s such a great idea, my kids would absolutely love that. I would love that. If, as a grandparent, you get to see what your true legacy is, not your money, but what you’re curating for your family. I know that was a little bit of a tangent, but I absolutely love that portion.
Brad Johnson: No, dude, do you want to know how life works? I have my first cousin from California who literally, right, behind the window, as you said, creating cousin time, she’s walking up with her two kids to create some cousin time back at the house. So, it’s funny that you just spurred that. And I look back to my childhood. Both my mom and dad had multiple brothers and sisters, and some of my best memories growing up is the cousin time from just family experiences, and then you get older and you have your own families and that stuff disappears with your own cousins. And it’s like, how can I create that for my kids?
And I love the intention because at the end of the day, money’s just a tool. Like, okay, so if your game your whole life is to have an imaginary account that you log into electronically and your goal is to create extra commas along the way, in my opinion, you’ve really failed at the game of life. You can’t take it with you. And so, I love that you’re not only creating plans, but encouraging your clients to take advantage of the time they have.
Well, I know we’re kind of ticking down the minutes here. We’re going to have to do Episode 2 on AI because we have not even touched that. And you are literally, of all of the Triad members, probably you, Nico, maybe a couple others have embraced AI more than any other and just the automation and systemization of the plan building. But if we give a little teaser for maybe the next round, if you were to give an advice to advisors out there that haven’t embraced AI in how they help serve their clients or automate things for their team, what would be the first step you would take?
Devin Choules: Well, the first step I would take is to shame them into starting to use AI. For well over a year now, my take on AI isn’t that it’s going to replace my employees, it’s going to empower them to give my clients better service and better direction. The first thing that you should do, the easiest, is a note-taking app. We personally, just so you know, Zocks, if you see this, here’s your plug. We love Zocks. Their integration of what they’ve done, what they’ve created, it allows you to take a full recap of your meeting. You can take it and load a template of how you want the notes to come out to you. They’ve now added a query tool that allows your assistant or your new business person to actually query the meeting and say, hey, what am I supposed to do here? Or what did they say about this? And it pulls it all forward.
Your team doesn’t know what’s in your brain. They don’t know all that they heard. They didn’t sit in the meeting and get it. But it is a phenomenal resource to give the ability to get what the client actually was looking for back out of the meeting. So, first one would be is to adopt some sort of note taker for you. And yeah, there’s so much more.
Brad Johnson: I knew it’s going to be tough for you to turn off. Well, we got a little time, so maybe phase two, what I’ve seen you do that’s been really cool. And with AI, I’ve said this before, but just for those catching this for the first time, I think a lot of people think of it like, it’s like an Excel spreadsheet, like a tool. And what I’ve seen you do is embrace it like a teammate. This is like a digital human resource that I can feed things to and that all of your team can have a teammate beside them to help automate, help systematize, help accelerate how we get to the end of whatever the task is we’re trying to do. So, maybe talk about, because I’ve seen some really cool things you’ve done with some GPT engines where it’s almost like an on-demand coach when it comes to your seminar presentations. When it comes to that, that workbook that you held up, actually, taking the Zocks notes and feeding it into some sort of an output, what are some other just quick use cases?
Devin Choules: Quick use cases, if you want to know the type of person, if you’re doing public presentations and there’s a speaker that you like, I’m an advent user of TikTok and Instagram reels, and it’s filled full of people that speak for a living, whether that’s Vanessa Van Edwards, I can never say that guy’s name, anyways, just because I can’t pronounce it, or like Alex Hormozi, or if you wanted to use Robert Cialdini, you take somebody who’s written a book that you want to speak like them, you want the essence of them, you can go to your chat bot and say, “Hey, learn all the things you know about these humans here.” And then with this criteria of me trying to create the engagement, social proof, call to actions, whatever it may be, you can give it a list based off of the people that you want to sound like and say, “Hey, how well did I do?” Rate this out of 10 in each one of these sections and it’s going to give you instant feedback.
In years and years and years of doing this, the problem with working with a typical coach on your speaking is that it’s an hour to an hour and a half recording that they’re listening to, but every time you stop and you take four seconds to talk about one section, it’s like, oh, well, we made it through the first 15 minutes and it took us an hour to do so, and we can’t get back on the calendar for another month. So, in all honesty, it sounds bad. You never really get that coaching of how everything went.
What I love about AI on that portion is I can get a direct instant. The other day, I did it before I even walked out of Ruth’s Chris. I hadn’t even hit the threshold of not even the restaurant of the door to leave the room I was presenting in, and I already had a Devin, your call to actions were really weak. You did not say, hey, if this, then this. Sign up. Come in. Do this. And it was a big piece of being able to know in the moment while you still have that so fresh in your brain, you can take it and unload so much of that instantly. And then the very next night, make that change because you already have the feedback.
I will give you a little bit of a ChatGPT itself wants to be your best friend. So, sometimes you need to tell it to be mean to you. Otherwise, it’s going to tell you did great. And everything is puppies and rainbows and unicorns. So, it’s not gospel truth, I’ll put it that way. But it is an amazing way to get instant feedback out of a client event to know how well you did.
Brad Johnson: Yeah. It’s funny after we had some time together in Utah, I was using the voice version of ChatGPT, where you just talk to it like a human, basically. And I had it rate me on something. It’s like, oh, you’re very good at that. And I was like, no, critique me transparently, like 100 is world class, 1 is horrible, give me a number. And I had to do that two, three, four times before it would take me below like a 98. And it’s like, okay, well if I’m really critiquing here, and so, to your point, but back to treating it like a teammate versus a tool, just like you would somebody on your team, hey, no, give me the truth, I can take it. I can handle it. I’m here to get better. You almost have to train it to be a little more direct and blunt with you versus kind of sugarcoating things.
Devin Choules: You can, and this is where we’ll get too deep and we’ll go for another hour, but there is a simple adjustment in your settings in your chat where you can go in and say, hey, I want this for all of my chats to rule over everything. I want the bot to sound like this and put in there, say that you’re an advisor, you’re a coach, you are a business mentor to me. Please make sure that you don’t, I don’t know, gaslight, that you don’t say, hey, everything’s okay. Your job is to help me solve problems that I can’t see. And so, you can put it there and that way, anytime you ask it any question, it’s going to use those rules to grade, where’s the best place to buy this? It’s going to apply that to every single search, every single thing that you ever give it to it, because you told the brain at the very top, this is who I want you to be for me.
Brad Johnson: Yeah. Well, there’s your teaser, folks. I can tell you I’ve been in a room with Devin, and when it comes to AI, he definitely nerds out, geeks out on this in a really good way. So, if you’re watching this on YouTube and you want that version, you better drop GPT or something in the comments, and then we’ll come back for round two and do some screen shares or something fun. So, well, Devin, as we wrap, man, our conversations are always fun, man. I had a blast. And my final question for you is, what is Devon’s definition of what it means to both do business and do life without sacrificing one for the other?
Devin Choules: In the aspect of being able to do business, when I came to Triad, you guys very much give all the painted pictures of what this is supposed to look like, that you don’t have to have, what do they always call it? Work-life balance, the cliche of that, and I think you said it’s work-life integration, that they can be a little bit of both. By taking it and being able to grow my team and knowing that I can be out of the office, that I can be present as a father and not have to worry, hey, is the office burning down? Are clients being taken care of? Is payroll being met?
What it’s allowing me to do is little things, like I don’t drive 60,000 miles a year anymore. I take my kids to school every single morning. I tuck them in at night, every single night. The wife and I get to go on vacations. So, this aspect of before building a business and acquiring money was at the cost of everything that I held dear. And now, it’s no longer that. I have the opportunity to truly do business and I get to do it with great people. Last night, the team went out to karaoke altogether. There may or may not be a video floating around. I hope nobody sends it to Brad. But we got to do that.
And then, the doing life of, I’m going to go home and probably go swim with the kids this afternoon. And I don’t have to forego one for the other anymore, like I did in a past life where I was, again, an amazing provider, but I was not a husband and I was not a father that I wanted to be. So, that’s what DBDL does and means to me is that I get to do the things that I actually want to be on this earth doing and not one for the other.
Brad Johnson: Well, dude, that makes my day, my week, my month because, I mean, it was also a selfish pursuit of Shawn and myself who did a version of what you’re talking about, where we sacrificed one for the other. And I know that was something that was a deep need for us as we got older and hopefully wiser. And it’s cool to see how that’s now impacting you. And that’s the beautiful thing I’ve seen about Triad is it’s almost like this gravitational force that pulls in people with similar wants and needs like that, to have a blueprint to build it on. So, man, that makes my day.
Devin Choules: Yeah, thank you.
Brad Johnson: And so, appreciate you. It’s been awesome. And the more we get to hang and the more we get to know each other, it’s been really fun doing a lot more life with you. And I think we’ll be doing that in a really fun place here in about a month or so.
Devin Choules: Yeah, excited.
Brad Johnson: So, we’ll see you in Maui, all right?
Devin Choules: Okay.
Brad Johnson: All right, my man.
Devin Choules: See you, Brad.
Brad Johnson: Until next time, we’ll see you.
Devin Choules: All right. Bye.
Brad Johnson: Bye.
