Brad Johnson: Welcome back to another episode of Do Business. Do Life. This is a fun one, gentlemen. So, bright and early on a Monday morning. We’ve got Gary, Jaris, and Josh all with us from RPC, straight out of Colorado. Welcome to the show, gentlemen.
Gary Hansen: Thank you, Brad.
Josh Cumrine: Thanks, Brad.
Brad Johnson: Gary, you even pulled the truck over for us. You’re on your way to a church meeting, and so you’re giving us 30 minutes, so this is good stuff.
Gary Hansen: Amen.
Brad Johnson: Well, guys, I’ve really been looking forward to this one. We were just talking before we hit record. I’ve known Josh for well over a decade. We were young CrossFitters that happened to be in finance back in the day, and I remember connecting at a business conference way back when, and that was before I had the chance to know you, Gary and Jaris. It truly is a family business. So, we’re going to try to piece this all together for everybody watching and listening. So, Gary, you founded your firm. Jaris is your son. You started in ‘75. Jaris joined in 2001. Over here on the other side of the spectrum, you’ve got Josh that fell in love with this girl that happened to be your daughter.
And so, he got into the business in 2004, JP Morgan, and then you guys were roommates together, both two separate financial services firms under one roof, and then combined, decided to truly make it a family affair in 2020, to where you combined into one organization. Did I get all that right? Did I mess any of that up?
Gary Hansen: Nope. That’s a pretty good representation.
Brad Johnson: Okay. Well, we better go back to the earliest of beginnings. So, 1975, Gary, you played a little football with BYU. Was it O-line or D-line?
Gary Hansen: Offensive line at BYU. I played at BYU Idaho Ricks College and was a defensive lineman there, but got to BYU, and I was too short. I just couldn’t see over those big old tackles. So, I moved over and mainly did some long snapping. But I was never a start at BYU. Just enjoyed being on the team, so.
Brad Johnson: Well, I bet you could hold your own. You’ve got a pretty firm handshake, so I think you probably held your own. So, young Gary graduates college from BYU. You also fell in love with a girl who was from Tacoma, Washington, who happens to be Jaris’ mom. And so, you go up to Tacoma, and I’ve heard a lot of really interesting origin stories in this business, but this one is very unique. So, I believe it’s with her. Was it with her dad you went into business?
Gary Hansen: Yeah, her father and another gentleman. I had always wanted to get into the health club business and had mentioned that to them when I was engaged to their daughter. And so, we decided to do that. And in the late 70s, or excuse me, in the early 70s, about 1973, we decided to put together a partnership and build indoor tennis and racquetball clubs in Gig Harbor, Tacoma, Washington area. And that’s how it started. And by the way, Brad, I didn’t graduate from BYU. I only went there for two and a half years, so my college. Don’t want to mislead anybody that I’m an educated guy when I’m really not.
Brad Johnson: Well, hey, like I said, you’ve got a lot of education. It’s just real-world education. If anybody that’s watching or listening just wants pure entertainment, just have a conversation with Gary for five minutes, and you’re going to… It reminds me of my dad. It’s like the old school real-world knowledge, which is hard to come by these days.
Gary Hansen: Yeah. Just put me on a John Deere tractor, Brad, and we’ll get along fine.
Brad Johnson: Hey, my first John Deere was a 4640. Are you familiar with that one?
Gary Hansen: Yeah. Not a bad car or not a bad tractor. Those were good back then. My first experience was on a John Deere 60, if you can imagine. Back in 1958, my dad had a farm, and now I drive the 8000, 9000 series tractors on a farm here for the church.
Brad Johnson: Well, my dad, he would tell me how lucky I was because I had a cab and air conditioning.
Gary Hansen: You were. You were.
Brad Johnson: Yeah. Yeah.
Gary Hansen: One day, Brad, I took my wife out to the farm because she wanted to see how I worked. Okay. So, I take her out there getting this half-a-million-dollar tractor with cushion seats, a fridge and an air conditioner, and a GPS. And by the time we were half an hour into this, I could tell that she was just not impressed anymore. She realized I didn’t work at all. Stupid mistake, by the way.
Brad Johnson: Yeah. She’s like, “Oh, another day on the tractor with your refrigerator in there.” Nice. Okay. So, you get into finance, and so you’re forming these tennis and racquetball clubs, but there was like an aspect of finance where you were doing some partnership deals or something back in the day, and that was really what brought you into finance, where you got your securities license. Correct?
Gary Hansen: Yeah. It made sense when we sold memberships to issue some common stock because by doing that, we did not have to pay income tax on the sale of the stock piece. So, we would sell a membership for $985, $750 of it bought stock, and $235 paid for the membership. And that just helped us reduce the tax bill a little bit. And later was the challenge we faced when we got rid of the business was how to deal with all the stockholders also. I’d never do that again, but it just was one of those things.
Brad Johnson: All right. So, we’ll fast forward. And so, essentially, you get into insurance as well later. So, were you doing both securities and insurance kind of all along the way from like the mid-70s on?
Gary Hansen: Yes. I did that for a lot of years. Honestly, we would sell a few variable life policies and a few variable annuities, but it really didn’t bring many assets under management, probably until we moved to Colorado in 1984, but probably for several years there, we primarily just sold an awful lot of life insurance. That’s really where I started. I was moved from Washington to Colorado to manage an office here for Beneficial Life out of Salt Lake City, and we had Colorado, part of Wyoming, and part of New Mexico was the area that I watched over, but it was mainly for life insurance. That was back in the captive days when you worked for one company, and that was sort of how it worked.
Brad Johnson: Yeah. It’s interesting. So, I got into this business in 2007, so I was 26 years old at the time, and it was really interesting to see how a lot of the generation ahead of me had gotten into the industry, and a lot of it were those captive groups that kind of recruited fresh young college kids that weren’t making any money but would knock on doors and tell their mom and uncles, and grandma, “Hey, come do business with me.” It was quite the business model. Does that sound familiar?
Gary Hansen: Yeah. The Al Granum theory, you get 10 people to get three interviews, to get one client. That’s really a great way to make a living for a lot of years. But, yeah, I know exactly what you’re talking about. If I had to do it again, I’d just slit my wrist and not worry about it.
Brad Johnson: So, you really enjoyed it.
Gary Hansen: Look, I survived, Brad. I’m a survivor. I don’t quit. But, man, I tell you, it was a rugged way to make money.
Brad Johnson: Yeah. Well, there’s a reason, looking back, where you’d have these classes of 20, 50, 100, and you look out three, four years later, there’s like one or two survivors left, and they were the ones that were too hardheaded to give up, I think is really how it normally worked.
Gary Hansen: Yep. That was me.
Brad Johnson: Yeah. Well, okay, so we’ve got Jaris and Josh here. So, Jaris, your dad’s in the business. You’re kind of growing up as the kid. At what stage did you realize, “Hey, I think I might want to join the family business”?
Jaris Hansen: You know, Brad, I was involved in the family business ever since high school, which was prior to 2001. I got my insurance license probably in 10th grade or something like that.
Brad Johnson: Really? Wow. Okay. Let’s go.
Jaris Hansen: Yeah. So, I did clerical work for dad at the office, and he used that to funnel commissions off to me, which helped me pay for college and stuff like that. So, it wasn’t like a career path for me at that point in time, but I was exposed to it, and I ended up going off to college, getting married. I was originally going to be an architect, and I enjoyed that. But long story short, and I won’t get into the whole story, but long story short, like I got accepted to the architectural school three years in a row but could never get residency because I was an out-of-stater. And finally, when I did get residency, my wife and I were like fed up with… We actually moved up to Seattle also to go to school in Washington.
So, now I got a lot of relatives up there. Went there to go to school. We got sick of the weather, got sick of the traffic, and we’re like, “Let’s bail out.” In the meantime, I was working for a dot-com up there, just doing some accounting on the side. And this is 1999, 2000, 2001. Everybody knows what happened with the dot-coms there.
Brad Johnson: Yeah. We know where this is headed.
Jaris Hansen: Sitting in the accounting department, I could see the writing on the wall. It was clear as ever. I was like, “This company is not going to last, which it certainly did not.” And at that point in time, I was like, “You know what? I think it’s time to go home.” I called dad up on the phone. I said, “Hey, listen, like this job is not working out the way I thought it would. This industry is going to explode any day.” And we bailed out, came back to Colorado, and I’ve been here ever since.
Brad Johnson: Very cool.
Gary Hansen: You know, Brad, Jaris didn’t tell you that when he went up there, I said, “Jaris, when you get tired of the rain, call me.” So, when he did call me that day, he said, “Dad, it rained for 84 days straight.”
Brad Johnson: The old, “I told you so,” from dad. Those are always fun. Yeah, I’ve got a few of those in my… Dads get a lot smarter after you get out of high school, I found out. Alright, cool. So, Jaris, you come into the firm, and then, Josh, so this is 2001. And then, Josh, you were in the business in 2004. When did you join the family? When did you actually get married, and everybody meets up here, but you’re not together yet? What year did that happen?
Josh Cumrine: Yeah. So, Mal, who happens to be Gary’s baby, I stole his baby, which was a bold move.
Gary Hansen: And by the way, I’ve never regretted it, Josh.
Josh Cumrine: All right. We’re doing good.
Brad Johnson: You’re good. Hey, you’re off to a good start here, Josh. Let’s not mess this up.
Josh Cumrine: Nineteen years in and I’m validated. So, yeah, we got married in 2007, but I was still with JP Morgan up until about 2000, late 2008, early 2009, which kind of similar to Jaris, I was going through the financial crisis, transitioning from a captive to an independent. And that was a tough transition, but one we’ve never looked back at.
Brad Johnson: And so, when did you all join under one roof? When did that all come together?
Josh Cumrine: That was about five years ago. We seemed to make decisions based on crisis around us because that was right at the beginning of COVID that we decided to finally stop being roommates and be an actual business and partnership.
Jaris Hansen: We were under one roof prior to that, around the time what, Josh? 2007 or 2008? Around then?
Josh Cumrine: Yeah.
Jaris Hansen: We started officing together, but we didn’t actually run as a single entity until 2020.
Brad Johnson: Alright. So, this is where we get into the real part of the conversation. So, Jaris, you were saying right before we went live here, one of the things, and I think it was as you all kind of came together as one firm. So, 2020, which coincidentally that was when Triad was formed too, November 1, 2020. So, apparently, COVID is going on. Let’s quit our jobs and start a business. Good timing. And so, you’ve been financial advisors, but one of the themes that I saw is when you came here, it’s dad, it’s son, it’s son-in-law, that were kind of, I wouldn’t say you were independent parties, but it was kind of like you were all running your own playbook as three independent financial advisors.
And then there was this kind of coming together of like, “Hey, let’s start to structure this like a business and kind of divide and conquer.” So, I would love to hear like, what were some of the inflection points or realizations for you guys as that kind of started to evolve in your thinking?
Gary Hansen: I think for a lot of years, I had to do this on my own. I came out of a captive system where they provided a lot of help and training, but it was designed to drive us to their specific products. And when I finally, in 1992, told them to take that job and give it to somebody else, there was a situation where I struggled for many years. I made a fair living and everything, but, man, alive. Just, I could see that the intensity of what I was trying to do would kill me in the next 15 years if I kept doing it.
Brad Johnson: Gary, was it just the amount of hours it was taking? Was it just stress? What, well, like if you describe what you were going through.
Gary Hansen: Yes and yes. I had a rule. If I didn’t have two appointments a day set up for the next week, I’d work Saturdays, and I worked a lot of Saturdays. And just the beauty of what I did is I could always coach my kids’ basketball and other teams they were on. But at the same time, people, when you’re doing what we do, don’t realize that every morning you get out of bed, you’re unemployed. You got to go do something to make a living. And I’m an Enneagram 8, so I’m just the kind of guy that wants to get stuff done. I don’t think it through very well sometimes. The best thing I ever did was the day I said to Jaris and Josh, “Listen, let me get the hell out of the way, and you guys run this business because I don’t know what I’m doing.” And, boy, I’ll tell you, we’ve done so much better since then.
Brad Johnson: Well, if we rewind, because I want to get Jaris and Josh’s take, but just for our perspective for those listening and watching in, so if we go back to 2022. So, 2022, 11 million of total assets between annuities and assets. 2023, we’ve got 16 million of total assets. 2024, just under 40 million of total assets. In 2025, as we record this, it is October 13th, 2025. So, about two weeks into the last quarter. You all are at 38 million year-to-date with quite a bit a year to go. So, about to be a record year. And after another 2 million, everything is bonus from here compared to last year’s record year.
So, if you look back, what Gary just said, when did that happen? Was that 2022 where it’s kind of like, “Hey, you guys are going to kind of run the business,” and Gary’s still going to be a producer, but how did that all come to be?
Jaris Hansen: So, Gary, I would say, stepped back a little bit more from running the business probably six or eight years ago. It’s been a while. The problem is that Josh and I didn’t know how to run this business the right way. So, he turned the reins over to us, but we still continue to run it in a really, really haphazard, disorganized way. We were three advisors. We had two full-time staff that worked for us, that helped with various things. And we thought we had things running smoothly, but looking back, it was a dumpster fire, really. I remember the first time, Brad, we sat down with you and Shawn and a couple of the other guys at Triad, and we explained to you what our day looked like. You guys just shook your head and told us we were crazy. Like, Gary and I were having meetings together nonstop.
Brad Johnson: Did we say that? That was kind of rude.
Jaris Hansen: We needed it. We absolutely needed that because we had to wake up to the fact that we were running this completely wrong, right? Gary and I were in every meeting together. One of us would be sitting down after the meeting for 30 to 45 minutes, taking a file note, putting it into the CRM. The other one of us would take care of all the paperwork and the service work. And we are spending not only in an hour meeting, we’re spending one or two hours outside of that just prepping for and getting ready for it and following up on it. But not only that, we took four or five meetings before we ever got a commitment from a client. And we would do all this work and lay out all these products and all these strategies. And we would sit down in front of a client. It’d take us four or five meetings to get a commitment.
And you guys were like, “Whoa, like back the train up here. We need to figure out how to fix this.” And once we sat down with you guys and you helped us understand the proper way to run a business, I feel like we finally were able to get our stride, do what we do best, and hire people on the side to help us with all the other things that we were back then doing all by ourselves. And I feel like, Brad, I feel like it feels good to say we’re going to hit $40 million or $50 million of assets this year, but honestly, I feel like we’re just barely getting this plane off the ground. The sky’s the limit. And we’re at the point now where we feel like we finally understand how to do it. Now, we just need to put fuel into this thing and get it really going hard.
Brad Johnson: Yeah. That’s such a good point, Jaris, and I’m starting to become the old guy in finance. I guess I’m going on almost 20 years now. But that is such a common thing where it’s almost like, all of that, what you just explained, where you’re doing four or five meetings, building the plans, going back to your architect background, right? You’re architecting these, what you believe to be great plans to help people. But you’re doing all of this work before the other side of the equation, the prospect has made the commitment, right? Yeah. And so, what I’ve seen, and it’s been awesome to watch you guys because you’ve been incredible students, a lot of advisors, it’s like a one-way street where they’re just give, give, give.
And it’s like, “What do you think about this? What do you think about that?” And now you’re stacking all these decision points that are complicated where when you take a little bit more of an approach of collaborative, of like, “Hey, we’re willing to do the work, but only if you’re willing to move forward, if we’re putting things in front of you that can help.” And so, it’s like more of this joint approach to where you’re getting those commitments before you do a lot of the work. And whoever wants to hop into this, because I know this has been a joint effort, but how has that just mindset shift changed the approach in appointments?
Jaris Hansen: I’ll jump in, but I can see Josh probably has a thought, but it’s relieved so much pressure. Back then, it was us trying to push things onto the client nonstop. And when we finally learned that the– like, our job is not to sell products, is to sell ourselves and to sell our process. And as soon as we learned that, that’s when the switch went off. We have a lot of people who are probably ready to use us after we have one meeting. We insist on having two because we want to actually share with them a little bit high level what we’re going to do for them. But I don’t know, Gary, Josh, we probably have a 95% closure ratio on the second meeting for people that are qualified. And we’re not doing any planning or we’re doing very, very minimal planning, I should say. We’re not running illustrations or putting together detailed plans. So, it’s minimal work on our side. We’re getting that bought into the process and the philosophy, and the rest is history.
Josh Cumrine: Well, and Brad, any time you leave the ball in the prospect’s court that you’re doing it wrong. There’s nothing more unsettling than not knowing when you’re going to actually close a prospect. Jaris and I, we would put– well, Jaris built this elaborate planning software. I mean, elaborate. It probably might even put other planning softwares to shame, but it was so cumbersome that I think it really overwhelmed a lot of these folks that we met with. Not that the software itself was bad, but it was just, okay, what am I deciding on now? What are we talking about today? And we get down this road where we just didn’t know, like, when are they going to say yes? And a lot of time, yes never came. And so, when we adopted the mindset of transfer of belief as opposed to selling products, that changed our whole entire world.
Brad Johnson: You know where my head goes, guys, and I see this happen with a lot of advisors, especially younger firms with maybe less confidence in where they feel like they have to sell something, the concept is process over product. And if I go back to Gary’s days when he was getting health clubs off the ground, imagine walking into a health club and saying, hey, I want to get fit. Maybe I need to drop 10 pounds. And you show up and the guy’s like, hey, what do you feel like doing today? Maybe lift, go bench today, even squat. What are you feeling?
And I feel like a lot of advisors from Shirley, like trying to be kind and meet people where they are. They aren’t structured enough where they’re actually leading the way of like, hey, we have a process. If you want to go from here to here, those goals in retirement, we have a track, we’ve helped other people just like you. Let’s go ahead and talk about how we can do that. And at the end of today, if that makes sense, we’ll go ahead and plan a second. If not, that’s okay. We can part as friends.
And just by having some confidence and some structure and them knowing you’re leading the way versus they’re leading the way, that like, I mean, when you look at other business models, it just makes sense. But for some reason, in finance, we screw that up all the time. Are there reasons, like if you look back to your psychology, what was it that was causing that?
Gary Hansen: We didn’t have a process-driven approach, Brad. The beauty of what we do now is that we have certain things that we insist on happening and we want to make sure that our clients buy into the process. As Josh said, we’re not here to sell the latest hottest grade annuity or life insurance contract or anything else. We want to make sure that people understand this five-peak process that we use, and they buy into that. And once they do, then we can build very comprehensive plans that’ll take care of all the concerns that they have.
And our motto here at the office is we want our clients to sleep well at night. We call it the swan approach. So, that’s the basis is we want to make sure that they understand that we’re not held or scaled through and there is a process. That’s what’s made the difference when all of this is said and done.
Brad Johnson: Would you say, Gary, on that note, you’re focusing more on the outcome as opposed, like the why versus the how? It’s like, hey, now we know why you want to get here. Let us just do the bill back to Jaris’s architect background. It’s like, we’ll do the architecture, no problem once we understand where we’re headed.
Gary Hansen: That’s correct. And if clients don’t buy into that process, God bless you. We’ll love you. The door will always be open unless you’re a jerk. But we’re going to do our best to take care of you and help you. But no, I had a guy come in one day with $2.8 million and he wouldn’t buy into the process and wouldn’t disclose the information he had. He wanted me to manage $400,000 of it. I said, no, not going to do that. And so, we just have to be selective. And I think, here’s the bottom line for me. I think people want advisors that provide leadership, put the rest of it aside. The rest of it doesn’t matter. They want people that can lead and give them direction so they are comfortable and confident for the path ahead.
Brad Johnson: Well, on that note, what that takes on your side, Gary, because you let revenue walk out the door, right? Here’s 400k that you could have managed, but that would’ve been kind of going back to the product sales guy because it’s just like, okay, well, let’s sell you like a sleeve for that portion of your portfolio. But it’d be like asking Jaris as an architect, hey, go build me my dream home and here’s five 2x4s over here. Good luck. Right? Like, you can’t. What are you going to build with part of it? And so, I love that you’re so committed. You kind of stood your ground. You’re like, hey, if you want us to help build it, cool. Let’s go. If you don’t, that’s all right. We’ll be here when you change your mind.
And that commitment is where I see people waiver. They’re like, oh, I’m committed until– oh, never mind, I’ll just pick up this one on the side because that’s some revenue I could make. How hard was that for you three to just really hold the line and stay committed once you figured that out?
Jaris Hansen: It was tricky initially. And 5, 10 years ago, we would’ve jumped at the chance to manage $400,000 for somebody to us that, back then, that was a decent-sized client. But we’ve learned that that just creates problems down the road. If we’re serving a tiny piece of what somebody needs, then we’re not really serving them fully and we’re not able to give them what it is that we really are good at, which is a full comprehensive plan.
And it’s taken a little time to build up the gumption, the confidence to be able to walk in and say, hey, listen, like, we can tell this isn’t going to work between the two of us. So, we’re just going to need to part as friends. And if you’re ready in the future to have another conversation about what we can do for you with your entire plan, then let us know. And we’ve had some people come back after reflection and say, okay, let’s talk.
But Brad, back in 2020, I remember as we– well, it was 2022 when we first started engaging with you guys and you started teaching us how to do this. Those first few times going through the things that you taught us were a little bit nerve wracking as we were talking to people and saying, hey, you’ve got a, what you call your good news/bad news script. I remember the first time I gave that, it was with a client that we were meeting with over web video, somebody we met online, and I was so grateful because I could put it up on the screen and read it word for word. And I didn’t have to do it in person. And the guy at the end was like, yeah, it sounds good. Let’s go.
Brad Johnson: And, you’re like, dang it, it works.
Jaris Hansen: Like, wow, Josh and Gary and I, all three of us were like, I can’t believe what we’re actually getting people to say yes on the second meeting.
Brad Johnson: I’m so glad you said that, Jaris, because one of the things I’ve seen hold people back in coaching is the what if, like, you’re in your own head. And one of my business coaches who you all know, Michael Hyatt, actually, he borrowed this from his wife, Gail. He says, wait to worry. So, we create all these narratives in our head of like, well, what if they say this or that? It’s like, or what if it works? And then I just simplified my life. And it’s crazy once you make that leap of faith, where you’re like, okay, I’ll get the commitment for us to move forward with the build, it changes everything from there on. It’s like, I’ve been doing this the hard way the whole time.
Jaris Hansen: And it’s an immediate confidence boost and all of a sudden, we are off to the races.
Brad Johnson: Yeah.
Josh Cumrine: And honestly, it’s better for the client, Brad. Like, anytime they’re trying to serve two masters, there’s always going to be the comparison game and it’s just going to stress the client out. So, aside from getting all the assets from that client, it is the right thing to do. Period.
Brad Johnson: Imagine having two architects to build your dream home, right? How’s that going to work? All right, Gary, so I’m going to tee this one up. Okay? So, you mentioned leadership, great advisors. You’ve started to view it more as leadership versus being an advisor. Going back to your BYU days, that 400k guy that you let walk out the door, I heard it a long time ago, your best coaches in life don’t always tell you what you want to hear. They tell you what you need to hear. And I found that to be very true. Some of my best coaches, they weren’t my favorite when they were coaching me, but they sure did push me, I sure did learn a lot and they pulled more out of me than I thought was possible. How much of that do you think applies to a great coach, to a great financial advisor? What are your thoughts there?
Gary Hansen: Well, I think they’re exactly the same thing. I would rather have people know that I’ve told them the truth and that they can accept and deal with it any way that they have to, regardless of how they feel about me and how I feel about them. Let’s just be true to the things that we feel inside and do our best to support good people. And at the same time, I don’t know if I dare use this word, not prostitute ourselves in how we do it. I think that too often, we’re worried about being politically correct and all this, but let’s just be honest and truthful with people and life will be good. Mark Twain once said, if you tell people the truth, you don’t have to remember anything else. And I believe that, I think that’s one of the great things ever to keep in the back of our minds.
Brad Johnson: So true. So true.
Gary Hansen: I got to go.
Brad Johnson: Well, my man, thank you for joining us. Good luck with the church meeting, and we’ll let Jaris and Josh hold it down from here.
Gary Hansen: You’re in good hands.
Brad Johnson: All right. We’ll see you. So, let’s go back, Jaris and Josh, as we– do you have any thoughts on that as far as the leadership that Gary just shared as far as kind of telling them what they need to hear versus what they want to hear?
Josh Cumrine: Yeah. Gary says some– he actually said a lot more nice in that setting. He usually says, I would rather be trusted than loved. And we do use that with folks that we meet with and I think that really resonates because they know that we’re going to just shoot them straight and shoot them honestly, Brad. Like Gary said, people want to be led. They don’t care about the financial products that we’re using. Yes, they care that they have a plan. Yes, they care that it works, but how they get there oftentimes is irrelevant. And so, they want somebody to lead them along the path, and that’s what we’ve become really, really good at over the past few years.
Brad Johnson: How have you seen the net worth go up since you, what I’d say, transition to selling a process versus a product?
Jaris Hansen: Drastically, for sure. And I don’t handily have those numbers ready in front of me, but just anecdotally, I would say that our average prospect size has been well under a million dollars for a number of years. But just in the last few years, most of our prospects are in the one to two, maybe two to three-range. And that’s who we tend to work with these days. And we do really well with those types of clients. Back in the old days, I used to think that’s a really sophisticated person, that’s someone with a high net worth, but right now, that’s kind of average for the people that we deal with. We have landed a few larger clients that have been really good to us. But yeah, the bread and butter’s right there in that $1 to $3 million range that we’re talking to most days.
Brad Johnson: How often do you see, like the conversation we had earlier where it’s 1, 2, 3 mil where they’re like, hey, I’ll just throw you a little bit and test you guys out versus my guy or my girl? How much do you see when you’ve kind of drawn the line like, hey, here’s what we’re here to help build? If you want to entrust us with that, great. If not, no worries, we’ll be here. How does that kind of draw on the line? How have you seen that? Does that attract more over where in the past, you would’ve just gotten a little piece and now you’re competing with two, three different advisors?
Jaris Hansen: Yeah, it does, for sure. Yeah, those types, we’ve had conversations with plenty of people that say, they’ll start going down the road of, oh, I think I’ll give you a million dollars to try out. We’ll see how it goes. And I got to say, let’s back this up a second. Let’s think about this. If you want us to do our best work for you, then I need to understand what’s going on everywhere. And I can’t be like having to coordinate with someone, their advisor and how he’s managing our portfolio and try and do my half as well. And 9 out of 10 times, they’re like, oh, yeah, I never thought of it that way. Okay, and when you think about it, most of them say, yeah, let’s move forward.
Brad Johnson: Yeah. And you guys are also, I know as you’ve grown and evolved, you’re also incorporating some tax planning. Probably some estate planning along the way. It’s like, how am I going to do a tax strategy where I’m not controlling half of the equation?
Jaris Hansen: Precisely.
Brad Johnson:, It’s impossible really.
Jaris Hansen: And people are so used to going to the vending machine and just, with financial advisors and using this guy for that and that guy for that and that person for the other thing. And we’re just trying to help people simplify their lives. You don’t need…
Brad Johnson: I heard it said one time, unfortunately, a lot of retirees, their retirement plan is kind of like the kitchen junk drawer, where it’s like, oh, here’s the annuity I bought 15 years ago. Here’s the 401(k) from my old job I never rolled over. And so, if you think about that, I mean, there’s actually professional organizers out there that you can hire to come in and kind of organize your stuff. And they love that stuff. It’s kind of you guys are the financial equivalent of that sometimes, right, where you’re kind of sorting through this mess of random products they picked up over the years from different advisors.
Josh Cumrine: We used to use that analogy a lot. What does your financial junk drawer look like? And we are here to help you organize that. We are here to help you make sense of everything that’s in there. And if what you have doesn’t make a lot of sense, let’s put together a plan to make it make sense. And that resonates with folks. It’s funny, a lot of times folks aren’t looking for a silver bullet, Brad. You know this, you’ve been in the industry long enough. They just want some guidance and they want to plan, like put some structure around what’s going on in my life. And as simple as that sounds, that’s what most folks are after.
Brad Johnson: Yeah. So many industries, if you look at them compared to finance, they kind of mirror similar human needs that are solved. But I look at one of my favorite trips I ever took in my life. My wife and I took our whole family to Italy for three weeks. We took her mom and dad and visited the Vatican. Her mom’s grown-up Catholic school her whole life. That was like on the bucket list. And I was like, man, that’s a lot of moving parts. I’ve never been to Italy. I’m not even sure how we’d get around. I don’t speak the language, obviously.
So, what we do, we hired a travel agent that had literally booked dozens, if not hundreds of these trips already. She interviewed us, kind of cherry picked the areas we’d go see. Okay, you love wine, go to wine country here. You want to go see some history. Okay, we’re doing the Amalfi Coast, we’re doing Isle of Capri. But I was like, wow, that was easy. And it took all of the heavy lift, all of the stress, and it was the most beautiful trip ever. And I had no stress along the way.
I feel like that’s a perfect analogy for retirement. Like most retirees, they’re like, okay, I kind of have had that done for you, plan where the 401(k) just automatically comes out of the paycheck. The healthcare’s automatically covered from my job. And then all of a sudden, it’s like, well, I have a million dollars. I think I did okay. Now, what? It’s kind of the do-it-yourself plan when you retire. And it’s kind of like, okay, cool, we’ve done this hundreds of times before. You want to go see the grandkids a couple times a year. You want to check off the bucket list trips. It’s like, it’s kind of the equivalent, really. If you think about financial planning, you guys just are giving them peace of mind and like, no, we got you. No worries. We’ve done this lots of times before. Do you see sometimes at the end of these meetings where you finally deliver the plan where there’s almost like a weight off their shoulders where it’s like, I don’t have to stress anymore? Like, what sort of real things are happening in those appointments on the backside of those plans?
Josh Cumrine: We hear that sentiment all the time, Brad. In fact, we partner with a radio host who endorses us here on one of the big stations in Colorado, and this is just a recent one. This gal became a client and she’s kind of had a pretty rough situation. And after putting everything together, she called into this radio host who in her mind referred her, which he did, and told the whole listening world how grateful she was that she had a plan. It wasn’t anything elaborate, Brad, at all, but just not only knowing that it made a difference in her life for her to put us on blast to pretty much all of Colorado was pretty dang cool. So, that was just a recent example that I could think of, but it was powerful to hear that.
Brad Johnson: Well, okay, so I want to dig in there. Just going back to what Gary– well, you all have said it, but we were selling products because that’s what we had been trained to do in finance and that’s what a lot of firms, when you first come up, you’re trained to sell their products to now building a plan that involves a process. At what stage did you start to change the wording and the verbiage and name your process to where now, all three of you were saying the same things, regardless of who they were talking to? When did that transition happen?
Jaris Hansen: That happened in 2022 when we joined you guys. We had tried to brand it prior to that, but it never stuck. And all three of us, we still have our quirks and we’re not completely 100% aligned, but we’re pretty darn close these days. And clients hear the same message whether they’re talking to Gary or Josh or me, which is a relief for a lot of them, honestly.
Brad Johnson: Well, I look at it, you’re all three different humans. And that’s perfectly fine. But if you’re at least cooking with the same recipe, that’s going to be really key, especially when you scale. You hire the next sales person outside of you three, and then the next one and the next one. There has to be consistency and congruency. What was the name of the process, the financial planning process that you guys ended with?
Jaris Hansen: The Summit Retirement Guide is what we call it. So, being a…
Brad Johnson: The Summit Retirement Guide.
Jaris Hansen: We love the mountains. And so, Gary mentioned this earlier in our conversation, he calls it the five-peak process, right? There’s five peaks that we need to be able to tackle when we get ready for retirement. So, we call it the Summer Retirement Guide.
Brad Johnson: And this lady, I’m curious, when she’s talking about it on the radio, did she use the words? Like, did she say, hey, yeah, I’ve got this plan, the Summit Retirement Guide? Because sometimes clients pick that up, sometimes they don’t. Was she actually referencing it by name or some of the verbiage that you all use?
Josh Cumrine: She didn’t in that specific one, but funny enough, the host, he uses it like probably more than we do, honestly. He’s really, really good about using that Summit Retirement Guide title, which is cool. So, yeah, it was referenced, just not by her.
Brad Johnson: Yeah, well, so there’s a lesson here, and this is just a business lesson, but I think we underappreciate it in finance. I remember this was probably almost 10 years ago now, I was talking to a firm that at the time had gone from zero to a billion under management in like less than 10 years. So, I’m like, wow, that’s pretty incredible growth. And then I asked them, I said, well, what do you do for your clients? And they said, well, we do financial plans. And I was waiting for the rest of it. And then that was it. That was the sentence. And I was like, okay. And then I go, I’m not trying to be rude here, but what do you think your competition does for their clients? And they’re like, and then they kind of look at each other and like, probably build financial plans. And I’m like, yeah. So, how do people know the difference between them and you?
And so, back to you, look at all of these businesses. The fast food industry is notorious for this. Like, McDonald’s doesn’t sell hamburgers. They sell Big Macs. They’ve literally branded the most commoditized product in the world, a hamburger, and then put a couple extra ingredients, a bun in the middle. But the truth is, it’s just a hamburger, but they put a brand around it and they have a recipe for it. And by doing that, now people can talk about it in a way that, like, imagine if you had to explain a Big Mac without calling it a Big Mac. So, there’s this placement called McDonald’s and they’ve got this special hamburger, and it’s like, it’s a double, but it’s got a bun in the middle, and then like some special sauce and then some pickles and lettuce. Like, it would take a ton of work.
So, imagine now, you’ve packaged it in a way where it’s transportable and easy to communicate because, otherwise, what are they going to say? Well, they do incredible income planning. They manage my portfolio too, my investments, and they do some tax planning layered on top of that. Oh, yeah, and then there’s healthcare and legacy. And by the way, like, whatever’s left at the end of the day for our legacy and estate plan, they do that too. Like, how hard is that to describe, especially for people that don’t live in our space? So, have you– let’s go back to the branding and verbiage because I know you guys have done a ton of work there. What little sound bites or nuggets have you found your prospects or clients just kind of grab onto and then it’s easy for them to talk about again? Have you seen some of that stuff start to catch on?
Jaris Hansen: A little bit. And to be honest with you, Brad, we’re considering tweaking it a little bit just because we came up with some verbiage that we really like. We’ve sat with it for a year or two and have decided that we like it, we don’t love it, but we’ve used the word confidence a lot. Confidence is an important word. So, we want our clients to have confidence in the path ahead so we use that quite a bit. Sleeping well at night, that’s an important concept. So, things like this we use. As far as specific branding, it’s all surrounding those concepts that I’d say, I don’t know, Josh, what would you add to that?
Josh Cumrine: Well, I think Jaris brings up a really good point, Brad, and this is something that I think I hope your listeners pick up on, just because we arrive at a solution. We call it our Summit Retirement Guide, and we use the terms like confidence for the path ahead, sleep well at night, but you still iterate on those. You build on them. They’re not set in stone. Like, yeah, we’ve evolved our business drastically, but we don’t for any stretch of the imagination feel like what we’ve built is it. We’re still continuing to evolve and we’re working with folks at Triad to really help improve our messaging so that it resonates just that much more because there’s so much more that we could be doing to better how we serve our clients. And a lot of that surrounds language. I mean, Chris Smith was a powerful resource for us. Language, it really changes perceptions of people. And we took that to heart.
Brad Johnson: No, Chris, who has helped a ton of our members over the years, and he helped Triad when we were getting off the ground, and I know one of the things he says a lot is language creates. And it sounds kind of woo-woo, like, oh, yeah, that sounds good, Chris. Yeah, it’s a good sales pitch. But in reality, it is the truth. If you look at anything that exists today in the real world, there has to be some sort of inspiration to will it into existence. And one of the things that you both hit that I think is really important, that holds a lot of advisors back, they want it to be perfect. They’re like, oh, well, like, let’s tweak it and tweak it and tweak it. And then you’re, a year goes by, two years goes by, and nothing is ever launched. And it takes a little bit of faith and it takes a little bit of like, thinking of it like software, like the software on your iPhone when they roll it out, it’s not 100% done. There’s bugs always, but how do you find out the bugs? You put it into use in the real world.
And the analogy I make with verbiage and wording and financial services, it’s kind of like being a great standup comic. So, those little sound bites you all just rattled off, how do you figure out the stuff that hits? Like a standup comic, how do you know the joke’s good? You go use it in the real world and then you look and you get audience feedback. And I know you two have been in meetings where you’re like, ah, it clicked when I said it that way. I got the head nod. The light bulb came on. You’re like, okay, I’m using that again. That’s in the rotation now. Or they had no clue and it went straight over their head. Okay, throw that away. I’m not using that framing or that verbiage anymore.
And so, by getting these things, like when you call it the Summit Retirement Guide, the cool thing is people are like, oh, summit, oh, retirement. I want to get to the peak. It’s like there’s analogies there that hit and then you start to iterate off of them. And we’ve seen that happen at Triad. I’ve seen it happen with tons of advisors over the years. Once you get it out in the real world, it’s never done. It’s continuing to grow and evolve just like your company does. And that’s the beautiful thing about it. Then it doesn’t get old and stale and boring.
Jaris Hansen: One of my favorite things to say to the team, and they get tired of me saying this, but it’s a work in progress. Not just our verbiage and our branding, but everything that we do, it’s a work in progress. And as business owners, you learn every day that there’s a new problem to deal with. There’s something you haven’t thought of before or you get to a new stage in the business and there’s a new issue that you have to deal with and figure out how to solve. And I get people asking me all the time, team members, what am I supposed to do in this situation? And my response usually is, I don’t know, figure it out. Let’s come up with a plan. This is a work in progress. We’re going to get better at this and then we’re going to move on to the next thing. It’s an adventure every single day to continue to create the things that we need to be successful.
Brad Johnson: Well, and back to financial advisor versus business owner. I’ve heard over the years, oh, the financial advisor mindset would say something like, oh, this is why I don’t want any employees. I’m just going to go back to doing this all by myself with one assistant. And then, now you’re living Gary’s life working Saturdays, right? And both are hard to be a great financial advisor. That’s kind of hitting the red line. That’s hard to be a great business owner that it comes with different challenges, but those are still hard.
And you all were at the launch where we brought Jocko in. And he’s got a, we’ll throw this in the show notes, but that little, like, it’s a two-and-a-half-minute video titled Good. And to me, we just rewatched that the other day as a team with our executive team and it’s like, somebody comes in and quits unexpectedly, good. Lose your biggest client, good. And yes, it’s a complete reframing and it doesn’t always feel that way in the moment, but it’s like, oh, this is an opportunity to improve our business, our process. And it identifies the things that break so you can now build them stronger so it doesn’t happen again. And now it’s more scalable at the end of the day. But I do think as a business owner, you almost have to have that good mentality because, otherwise, it could eat you alive. If you’re like, you could just feel like you’re beat up every day.
Josh Cumrine: Well, and what’s powerful too, Brad, it allows our team to have ownership in what they’re doing. It’s not always dictated by Gary, Jaris, or myself. We let them have some ownership of it. And oftentimes, those solutions that they come up with are probably better than we could have come up with if we’re being honest.
Jaris Hansen: Yeah. Back when we had a team of, there was a three of us, plus a couple more, we had a team of five that was trying to run this business. We’re up to 12 now, a couple more in short order. Long ways to go, but I remember back then, Josh and Gary and I were working jointly on a client that was fairly large, pretty big. This was before we learned, I’ll call it the Triad way, right? Before we learned how to be efficient in our process. And we had had three or four meetings with this one client. It was a big case, couple million, $2, $3 million. And back then, this was like, when we’re producing $12 million a year, this was a large percentage of what we’re going to get. And they came in one day and said, you know what? This isn’t going to work for us. We’re not interested.
And the three of us felt like we had just been smacked with a ton of bricks. It was really discouraging. And I’m not superstitious, but we went and got Chinese food that afternoon and I had a fortune that I pulled out of the cookie and it said, it can’t rain all the time. It can’t rain all the time. And I was like, you know what? That’s true. What is it that we’re going to learn from this process that’s going to help us the next time around? Because it’s not always going to be like this. And we’ve learned that there’s going to be ups and downs in the way that this business runs. And the ups are great, but the downs, those are learning opportunities to help us grow and to become better. So, next time we run into that problem, we can smoothly sail through it. And it puts a lot of good perspective on things when you can just accept things as they come and move forward.
Brad Johnson: So, on that thought, Jaris, it’s really interesting. One of the things, fortunately at Triad, we haven’t lost a lot of members over the years. We’ve had a couple. If you’re building a community based on doing business with people you want to do life with, growth minded, check your ego at the doors, sometimes you don’t always get that right in the onboarding process. And we’ve had members leave that aren’t here anymore, and you can get bitter and point fingers at them, or you can get better and say, hey, let’s look in the mirror. What opportunity do we have to learn from this? We call it an after-action review and we learn and we continue to iterate. And I think, just on that note, that the big client that you swung and missed on, I think it’s really easy in life. It’s a lot easier to point fingers the other way. Oh, that client didn’t get it. They were a do it yourselfer. Their wife’s in big trouble if anything happens to them. I’ve heard it all over the years.
But in reality, it probably means something could have been tightened up in your process or your communication, simplifying what it is you actually do. And I just love the heart behind that because you guys continued to grow and learn and say, hey, we got to continue to adjust how we do this because there’s some clients we could help that we’re just not getting. And I find the humble students in this game always win long term if you can set your ego aside. I don’t know. Does any of that resonate with you? Because you guys have always struck me as humble learners in every interaction I’ve ever had with you.
Josh Cumrine: Very much, Brad. Like, when we first met in Triad, and not that we’re trying to turn this into a commercial for you guys, but the first thing you guys said to us was we needed to check our ego at the door. And that hit hard or hit home so hard because that’s who we are. This business isn’t about ego, even though a lot would lead you to believe otherwise. We know, we’re going to write $50 million or move $50 million of assets this year and we make mistakes every single day. But you know what? We’re grateful for those mistakes because those are what are going to allow us to get to $100 million and $250 million and beyond. The humility in knowing that that’s going to happen and being okay with it, but taking that and running with it and building on it, that’s been what’s contributed to where we are today. Bottom line.
Brad Johnson: Yeah. Well, guys, I think that’s a good one to kind of tie a bow on this conversation. I know you guys have a full day ahead of you, and it’s Monday after all. So, I know Gary’s not on here, but one of the things that I’ve always loved from the three of you, every time I get a chance to interact, there’s just, there’s, yeah, you guys push each other. Yeah, you’re family, so I’m sure sometimes you butt heads, but there’s such a mutual respect that you guys have for each other and it’s awesome to see. So, I would love to just wrap the conversation. I’d love to hear both of your definitions of what does do business, do life mean to you. And I know there’s a lot of it combined because it is a family practice. So, one of the two of you wants to jump in on that one?
Jaris Hansen: I’ll go first, Brad. Back in the day, I used to think that if I was busy, I was being productive. And I’ve met plenty of people in my life that are a terrible example of this, but they wear their busyness on their sleep like it’s a badge of honor. I’m so busy running to a thousand different places all at once that I can’t hardly control my life. They think that’s a good fit. I sometimes feel like that’s the way I live as well. And I have to constantly be checking myself and saying, listen, like, do I really not have enough time to go do this thing with my family or go help this person, right? Did I have another social event at a church or whatever? And what do business, do life means to me is, like I can be intentional about business and I can be intentional about life and I can have plenty of time for both. Sometimes it’s combined. You have Triad experiences I need to bring family to. Those are amazing experiences where I can be doing some business at the same time while having a good time on the beach. But this whole idea of I need to make sure that my life is lived in a way where I can be there for the people at the most, whether it’s business or life. And if I do it right, if I focus on the things that are most important, I’m going to have plenty of time for people and I’ll be successful at it without having to feel, like I’m about ready to run out of my wit’s end because I’m so busy all the time.
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Brad Johnson: Yeah. Yeah, well, I mean, it’s been really cool just from this conversation to hear how you’ve really invested into building a structure that enables that, Jaris, which is, that’s like one of the most rewarding things for me is to be able to see that transformation in a lot of the members we serve, like you all. Josh, you want to share your thoughts?
Josh Cumrine: Yeah. I have thought a lot about this and I hope my answer makes sense because I wake up every single day excited to do what we do because I get to do it with the people I love. So, to me, there’s no delineation between work and home life. To me, it’s all just one. Every day is awesome. Every 24 hours of every day is just– it’s just great for me because I get to be with Jaris, I get to be with Gary. Our team is incredible. I love them all dearly. And I get to go home and I don’t feel like I have to “separate” office life from home life because I have three sons that all very much have an interest in what we do, and eventually, want to be a part of this business. So, I get to bring those experiences home and share them with them, and they get excited about that. And to me, that is the true business-life integration. I don’t have to balance it because like you always say, Brad, balance is a myth. And I believe that wholeheartedly. So, the fact that I get to live in a world where the lines between business and life are blurred, that’s doing business and doing life to me.
Brad Johnson: Well said. I know we’re all dads on here. I was not an entrepreneur– you guys were longer in the entrepreneurial journey. I’m only five years into this since we started Triad. But what you just reminded me of, Josh, is this was after a founder’s retreat, I think this was two summers ago. And Nash, my middle son, who was like 12 at the time, he comes home and he says, “Dad, how much do you get paid if you work at Triad?” And I go, “Well, that depends on the role,” right? You got to have a job description, right? First gentleman. But it was really cool because he had just kind of, think about a kid going to those experiences and seeing adults that get along, enjoy each other’s company, but that’s also their work. And I think, like if Triad can be the place that inspires the next generation because we’re creating an environment where those two worlds of business and life can coexist, that’s a pretty cool dent to put on the universe, I think.
And it was really cool to see my son start to be attracted because he’s like, wow, those people you work with are actually kind of cool. Like, what’s that look like? How do I do that? And so, I love that. And Jaris, I know you’ve got a few kids too, so I don’t know if they’re going to get sucked into it or not, but pretty awesome if that’s how– there you go. Well, gentlemen, I always love every conversation. Thanks for carving out this time. So much wisdom shared in here. I appreciate your humility and just keeping it real as always and look forward to the next time we get to hang in person and do some life together. So, thanks for joining today.
Jaris Hansen: Thank you.
Josh Cumrine: Thank you, Brad.
Brad Johnson: Till next time.
Jaris Hansen: Okay.
