The Retirement Trap Nobody Warns You About

[INTERVIEW]

Brad Johnson: Mark, welcome to the show, all the way from Ireland. Glad to have you.

Mark Hedderman: Brad, great to see you again. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

Brad Johnson: I believe the last time our paths crossed in person, we were on a beachside California Future Proof, and it was really cool. You came to a session Shawn and I did. I think it was the second Future Proof a few years back, and that was kind of how we originally connected. So, I know we’ve got some shared philosophies when it comes to our version of Do Business Do Life. I think you’ve titled that Wealthcare. And why I wanted to have you on, I love how you’re starting to think about the evolution of what it means to be a financial advisor, what it means to oversee someone’s assets, what they actually want and need as they transition into retirement. So, super excited to dive into that today. So, maybe we share your side of the meetup out at Future Proof, and we take it from there.

Mark Hedderman: Yeah, I’d love to. So, we, myself, my brother, Luke, my youngest brother, who works with me, and our colleague, Dermot, had the great pleasure of attending Future Proof a number of years ago. And we sat in on your and Shawn’s session, and to be honest, we were blown away by what you guys were doing in Triad Partners, and it just felt like such a natural fit to some of the conversations we were having at home here in Ireland. And the way you guys had articulated, we were like, “Okay, this is a thing.” So, we waited for you guys to come off stage. Unfortunately, you guys are two former American football players. We’re three fairly small Irish lads, so the concept of trying to jump the two of you didn’t go down too well. So, thankfully, yourself and Shawn were very open to having a conversation with us.

And, again, we just wanted to reiterate how, irrespective of where we’re living, how far we traveled to get there, and our accents and whatever went with it, we very much bought into that concept of what you guys were crafting through Triad. So, it was very humbling and privileged to be at Future Proof that year. And as I said, off the back of that, we felt it was imperative for us to attend every year because we live on a very small island, and sometimes it could be incredibly insular in respective ideas. And we felt, why not go over and see some of our cousins in the States and hear from them? And such a big country with so many little niches and boutique ideas, we felt it’s absolutely essential. If we want to get better, we need to go to see the best in the world and hear from you guys.

Brad Johnson: Well, Mark, on that front, first off, it was awesome to come off stage, and I think we had the very last slot, so I will say the crowd had thinned a little bit at that point, but I found it very common anybody that takes the time to share a message from a stage, there’s nothing that feels better than having somebody in the audience say, “Wow, what you shared really impacted me. This aligned, and how could we go deeper,” right?

Mark Hedderman: Yeah.

Brad Johnson: And I do believe the concept of building a business that blesses your life, doesn’t just become your life, and that applies to your clients as well. I think that’s a universal want and human need. It’s not just people in the US, it’s people in Ireland, it’s people all over the world. And it was really cool when we reconnected to see how you had taken that shared philosophy and started to really apply it to your business. And rumor has it you’ve started to make quite an impact, and I believe Future Proof’s going to have you out this year to actually talk about it. So, we’re getting a little preview maybe of what some will see at Future Proof here in a few months.

Mark Hedderman: Yeah, we were very lucky to have the opportunity to come back this year as a speaker. So, I’ll be running the session with my colleague, Kevin Thompson from Texas, former Major League Baseball player, I think, with the New York Mets and the Oakland A’s. So, we’re running a session called Moneyball for Smaller RIAs. And I know, Brad, it’s something you and I have been talking about over the last little while. It’s this concept of let’s rationalize first of all what does enough look like for us and our families? And then, as a result of that, can we help but shape our businesses rather than the businesses shaping as to what we should do with our lives?

So, I’m thrilled. Matt and the team couldn’t have been more accommodating, and it’s a great privilege because I suppose, from an Irish sense, we’re very used to traveling to overseas conferences and hearing from people from all over the world. And maybe at times we have this sense of imposter syndrome that maybe we weren’t good enough, or we don’t have any value that we can bring to the table. And I just felt that over the last couple of years, it was sort of imperative to share the journey that we have here. We come from a very community and family-based culture, and I think where our profession is going, and the drift towards AI is pulling us away from that.

And I felt it was imperative that some of these overseas conferences, being very fortunate to be in Australia this year and New Zealand, I’ll be in South Africa, and it’s really humbling to go and just tell the story from us as community-based businesses, as how we lean in and support those around us, brings so much good and love and value to our own families.

Brad Johnson: Yeah. Well, let’s dive into that because one of the things you shared, and I do see a shift, and I will say, I think you guys are doing all right for yourselves. I mean, you’re approaching a quarter billion of assets, I mean, euros where you’re at, but if you convert it to dollars, 25 million, give or take.

Mark Hedderman: I like to say that, yeah.

Brad Johnson: So, around 200 million, 250 million that you’re approaching overseeing. But the other thing with AI, and I’ve really started to see this trend, is everybody throws everything in AI now, so what’s the proper fee that should be charged? Is that too much? Is that enough? And being in this business 20 years, what I’ve found is if you focus on returns and fees, it is absolutely a race to the bottom. Because now you’re just a spreadsheet jockey. But if you start to focus on outcomes and what a financial plan actually means to the people you help, and how you help keep them on track during the ups and downs of retirement and everything that they don’t always see coming, that is where the value is.

And let’s start to go through what you call Wealthcare. And I think it started with a friend who was going through some family stuff, and you’re like, “Here’s something we’re doing to check all the boxes. I think it can really help you.” So, maybe share the origin story of Wealthcare, what it is, and what that looks like, and how it’s impacting your business.

Mark Hedderman: Yeah, it’s a very… Well, I suppose the backstory is probably even a little bit more personal. So, we’re a second-generation family business. I joined my parents, actually, 15 years ago yesterday, started with them in the business. And they were running this as my dad was a newly minted CFP and had been in the industry since the early 1980s, but he wanted to break out and create something that was totally holistic. And myself and over the last number of years, myself and my two younger brothers joined the business. And we crafted what we believe was a very successful succession plan over the course of about eight years, self-financed, to allow my parents to transition out of the business.

And where this kind of came from, and we were probably doing this in our own personal lives from a light-touch way, but when my dad exited the business in May of 2021, he was diagnosed with stomach cancer four months later. And it was very difficult for us to process this because he’d been someone who’d lived a very healthy life, wasn’t really a drinker or a smoker, and we were looking at this health debt that he’d accumulated as a result of the work he carried out in the profession. So, thank God he survived. The psychological strength that he had to get through that period, I’ve never seen anything like it. Like, he had most of his stomach removed. He practically ran out of the hospital.

I remember myself and my mom collecting him, and he jogged. He said, “I can’t wait to get out of here.” And it was just this sense of, okay, he had so much to live for, Brad, because my two sons at the time were very, very small, and they were the eldest of the grandchildren, and it was like he now had money for probably four or five lifetimes, but he had no health. So, health is an asset. It was on the liability side of the balance sheet. So, myself and my two younger brothers sat down, and we were very conscious of having a very open conversation about what we felt the business should look like going forward, and that it should move to serve us rather than us serve it. And we contemplated this idea of, well, what could we do to develop as a model that would be preventative for us to potentially not get cancer in the future?

And I suppose this has purely evolved to a point, well, where how can we help that within our families? How can we help our clients? And then how can we help our broader community here in Ireland and overseas? So, where Wealthcare came from was us really trying to strategize to keep ourselves alive initially, keep ourselves as fit and healthy as possible, expand that concept, and move it into areas like preventative health measures. So, our company is Hedderman Financial Solutions, and my middle brother, Ian, his background is a PT. He did a lot of work in nutrition. He’s now a CFP or qualifying as CFP, and the interesting thing is he just took the initials of the company, HFS, and switched it into health, financial, and social.

So, we believe that each person in front of them has three glasses and a pail of water, and the pail of water really has only enough water in it to fill one of those glasses to the full or an even split. And the difficulty is that through all the media and what’s pressed upon us, we felt that we’re not successful in life unless we can accumulate more assets than the next person down the street. And what we’ve tried to bring within this revised or new sector, so to speak, with Wealthcare is we want to put as much of that emphasis as possible into the health bucket or health glass and also as much into the social capital, because there’s no point in having all the money if you’ve totally decreased your health, you’ve crafted a health debt, and you’ve actually nobody within your social circle to spend that money with.

Brad Johnson: So true. I read a book, actually, I heard about it on a Tim Ferriss podcast, probably 10, 15 years ago. You heard of the book, Not Fade Away?

Mark Hedderman: No.

Brad Johnson: You should. Maybe I’ll send you a copy, a little thank you for being on the pod, but…

Mark Hedderman: That’d be amazing. Thank you.

Brad Johnson: It would really align with what you guys do. It was a super successful business executive, a TV executive. I think he created BET and a few of the TV networks that were big back in my day. And had a young family. As soon as he retired, cancer, terminal, like a year to live. And so, it’s his kind of memoir, but he’s got a line in there, something to the effect of, “You can have all the dough in the world, but if you don’t have your health, you’ve cut yourself a really lousy deal.” And there are many different quotes on that, obviously, but it is so true. Many people spend the bulk of their lives and those years where the kids are in the house slaving away to fill the bank account, and then when they actually have time, like, all of the time that mattered has passed, and maybe their health’s not as good when they were younger.

So, I love the approach, very aligned with the approach. Love the name. Instead of healthcare, Wealthcare, so it’s kind of catchy, too. So, I love the three cups: health, financial, social. Can you paint us a little bit of a picture? So, you’re running a financial services firm. Maybe, how many families do you currently serve as a firm?

Mark Hedderman: So, we roughly, per CFP advisor, we’ve roughly about, I’d say, somewhere between 140 to about 160 families per CFP in the office.

Brad Johnson: And how many CFPs do you all have?

Mark Hedderman: We have four. We’ll have four qualified by the end of this year.

Brad Johnson: So, call it 600-ish families you serve?

Mark Hedderman: Roughly speaking, yeah, about that amount, yeah.

Brad Johnson: So, what, and I know this is new, and you’re rolling it out.

Mark Hedderman: Yeah

Brad Johnson: Let’s just say Brad’s a client at the firm now. What does Wealthcare look like, a year in the life, if I’m focusing on health, financial, social? Like, paint me a picture of how you’ve laid that out.

Mark Hedderman: Yeah, exactly as you said, Brad. What I’ll do is give you a flavor of what it looks like at the moment and where we’ve come from, because I think the difficulty is we’re at the infancy stages, but we couldn’t really find a model to emulate, because we didn’t really see anyone who was following suit on this. And I suppose that’s probably given the fact that the global economy has been so strong over the last number of years, and people have been so tuned into this concept of, “Well, we must invest money,” that most advisory practices have seen considerable levels of growth without arguably refining or evolving their service proposition.

Brad Johnson: Yeah. Market growth is, I mean, you could just have a stagnant book and still do okay.

Mark Hedderman: Yeah, and we’re an alpha male egotistical business. And the difficulty with that as a result is a lot of then advisors assume, “God, we’re doing great things, because we’ve 10X’d our growth, and God, don’t change anything.” And I turned 40 in January, and I suppose reflecting on the fact that I’m in the business 15 years, I was looking back on what that initial 15 years looked like. And one of the ideas that we were really keen on was, well, I’d really like to shape what the next 15 years would look like because we are very aspirational about this being a multi-generational business, rather look to sell. And as a result of that, we were very conscious of crafting a business that we got out of bed every morning, and we were really, really excited and curious and passionate about what we were going to do that day.

So, where Wealthcare came from is we’ve engaged with a number of private hospitals in Ireland along with health professionals. We just had a call this morning here with a health professional around various preventative medical treatments, even down to things like these annual blood test works that we’re now looking to implement for clients. We’ve run a number of private client events where we’ve brought in experts in this field, some of whom have actually been clients. And I think it’s really rewarding for those to sit there and listen to existing clients talk about their own health journey and be so open because, as Irish people, that’s something we tend not to be very good about.

We tend to be a little bit closed off. We don’t talk about our health. We don’t talk about our own mortality. And it’s a very difficult conversation because ultimately, that leads for most people is that somebody gets very sick or they pass away, and they’ve effectively no strategy in place. And nobody really knew how things were meant to go. So, our first port of call was could we get the health glass fixed? So, an interesting thing we’re doing at the moment is we’re working with a breathwork coach, our friend John O’Hegarty, and we’re looking to collaborate with him on building an eight-week breath program. And the whole idea is we find that for most people, even the simplest thing that we do 20,000 times a day, most people don’t know how to breathe properly, and that’s where we see significant issues around depression, weight gain, sleep apnea, snoring, because most people are breathing 90% of their time through their mouth.

And there are very, very simple techniques that can be done over the course of the day to substantially improve their ability to breathe through their nose, which 10X’s the rest of their day from an endurance, sleep, fitness, mental health, all those little well-beings. So, our starting point, Brad, is let’s start at the simplest thing. Let’s remove the money element altogether, and let’s get into something that we could get our clients doing on a very regular basis, so we’re crafting that at the moment. And we wanted to kind of go a little bit further with that, as we felt the social capital buckle. So, we don’t call our retirees ‘retirees.’ We call them new season individuals. We’re a very sports-oriented company. We all are currently playing or previously were involved in sports.

We like the idea of a new season rather than retirement. Retirement felt like just too aggressive a term. And in Ireland, in particular, we’re a first generation of wealth who’ve actually hit this new season with assets, and that brings its own complexity. And what we tended to find is that most people, albeit they had multiple funds available to last them many lifetimes, they had no sense of purpose and meaning because all of that was tied into their profession. And things like wisdom and knowledge were diminishing considerably, and we felt these are real risks then for things like Alzheimer’s, early onset dementia, depression, anxiety, loneliness are the true killers for most people aged over 60.

I think the largest form or largest amount of divorce that’s occurring in Ireland at the moment is for those aged over 65. Husband and wife effectively might have spent an hour or two a day with each other. They don’t even know each other apart from seeing each other in the morning and then in the evening. And then you’re putting them together and saying, “Okay, go.” And they have their own pastimes. They’ve had their own interests. So, we wanted to build social infrastructure where we could bring our clients together for private kind of events that were very gentle. And a lot of them didn’t relate back to specifically. We’ve done tax and legal and estate planning work with them, but we want to talk about these softer skills, and we wanted to also bring them together with like-minded individuals.

And what we started to find, which was really unique, was how much feedback we got from just being brought together in a group of 30 or 40 people and just sharing stories, sharing adventures, sharing ideas with one another. We actually found that our clients became conduits for each other’s success, which was incredible. And it was an off-product or an offshoot of this that we really didn’t expect, to the point where we had certain clients get in touch to say, “Would you be okay to provide me with Brad’s number? Because he spoke about something at the event over a cup of coffee, and I’d love to follow up with him.” So, we’re getting all these light bulb moments, Brad, to say more of these.

So, on the social capital, we’ve collaborated with a local craft coffee business. Our friends in Pinecone Coffee, who are based in North County Wicklow. And for anyone who’s familiar with Ireland, Wicklow is called the Garden County of Ireland. It’s the most beautiful, beautiful place you could travel to. So, we wanted to bring clients down to the roastery to meet with Pierre, the head roaster, to discuss what the process looks like, that they get their own complimentary bags of coffee. They go through this, and they’d spend time with one another. We also have a collaboration with a local honey business, again, based in Wicklow, and we want to be able to bring clients there so that their diary doesn’t go from being stacked every week to them hitting new season and being blank.

We want to create a tapestry for them where we fill it with social events, but we also then block in things like we run events like the family meeting workshop where we encourage them. This is actually something I kind of beg, borrow, and steal from Jackie Wilke from First Trust, which was bringing clients’ children along to have very open conversations about what legacy and estate planning actually looks like. Don’t leave it to chance. So, all of a sudden, we found that none of this really required any AI. This just required the human touch, being genuinely curious, and having a genuine care for the people who are within our community. And we felt that the win and the feedback for us has been absolutely enormous.

And we’re not really measuring that by way of income or by AUM. We’re measuring that by way of the life experiences and the communication that we’re being fed back to from the people that we’re working with, which has been bar none close to excellent in respect of how they viewed this.

Brad Johnson: It sounds fun, too. Sounds like just…

Mark Hedderman: It is. Yeah.

Brad Johnson: Let’s go check out a coffee roaster. Let’s go check out some organic honey producer. And you’re hitting something that I think sometimes advisors miss, because when you look at the technicalities of your job as an advisor, it is to move numbers around to create outcomes. But I think sometimes we get so caught up in the numbers, we forget about the human and the outcomes. And the scary part, I’ve got a dad right now going through retirement, farmed his entire life. It is like part of his DNA. And, like, detaching that is very scary for him. It’s all he’s known. But now the freedom on the other side of that, if there’s actually a plan, that’s what can pull people into retirement, get them excited about it, have a social club of people that are going through the same journey, rediscovering old hobbies they didn’t have time for.

And it really sounds cool that your company is helping bridge that gap. And you look at social, I worked in a corporate job three years before I got into finance. I worked at my prior job in finance for 13 and a half years before Triad. This is just how life works. Without the proximity of day-to-day interactions with most humans, friendships fade. That happens to everybody when they retire, and they leave that network at work. So, now, how do you fill that void so it’s not this lonely retirement?

Mark Hedderman: Exactly.

Brad Johnson: And you’re like, “Here’s a group of people that are doing fun, new experiences, learning, rediscovering things.” How awesome is that to be able to shift from that to what’s next, but actually have a soft landing along the way? So, it just makes sense. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to say, “Wow.” Most people are going to see that and say, “That sounds pretty good.” What has been your reception from either existing clients or new prospects that are looking to become clients as you kind of paint that picture of, “Here’s what we do”?

Mark Hedderman: Yeah, it’s really interesting, Brad, because I suppose initially what we have to… We have to be very careful that they don’t believe that we’ve taken this jump into being kind of yoga people, and we’re no longer interested in the financial element. Like, that has to be first and foremost because to live the kind of lives that these people aspire to do, we need a formulated structure for how their financial life should look. And we outline that to them, but we advise them that as part of that. The financial bit will still remain relevant, but it’ll only be 20% of the overall conversation. And if they’re not comfortable with that, we’re okay. We’re most likely not the best fit.

So, we try and get that part across quite early, and we try to build a very, very, very simple strategy, simple structures. Like, the bits that contain the least amount of moving parts, i.e., complexity, tend to be the ones that work the best. So, what we want to do is drip feed this out, initially, to the client bank to gauge what they felt. And one of the things I spoke to one of our ambassadors. So, we have three brand ambassadors in the firm, one of whom was with me here this morning, Mickey Mack. Mickey Mack is 81 years of age. He’s been in the profession over 40 years. And what we wanted to do was we were chatting to him about this concept of crafting a model called the HFS Elders.

And the Elders model would essentially bring together a number of our new season clients from various professional backgrounds and entrepreneurial backgrounds, who would act as a client advisory panel to us. And the rationale really for that, Brad, is I’ve never retired before. Like, I’ve never reached my new season. And, albeit my parents are there now. It’s unfair for me to make assumptions around what that should look like. So, the Elders model was to bring together a group of our existing clients that we could run concepts by, run ideas past, and also allow them feedback to us, like where are we blinkered? What are we missing?

So, in advance of us rolling anything out to the broader client bank that could completely fall flat on its face on the basis of how we taper the language, we want to make sure that this lands with the specific audience, that they get the most bang of value for their buck, and also that it excites them. Because one of the areas that we worry about is people reach that stage of their life, and excitement is dulled considerably. Let’s say we were talking earlier on, you were mentioning about the incentives trip to Ireland, that was when you were earlier in your career. And if you’ve worked in a profession where all those bits, like for us, I get to travel the world, as we mentioned, South Africa and all these different places, go to the States. At some point in time, that’s going to taper off, and that means a lot of the excitement in your life is diminished.

So, what we want to be able to do is create experiences, transformational experiences that continue to excite people. Even down to the point of somebody coming up to retirement, and we feel in order to do this successfully, you need to come down through the gears. You can’t pull up the handbrake and skid off the road, wheels spinning, black tire smoke everywhere, because that’s how most people retire. They see the slipway, it’s really, really late, they’re coming up at 100 miles an hour, and they have to slam on the brakes, hit like basically wheel spin their way into it. And we’re like, “No, no, ease your way down.” And if that means you take a day a week, and you step back, and we build in some of the social capital, or we find something else.

Most people say, “Well, I’m going to play golf.” Ireland is, there are more bloody golf courses in Ireland than there are people. We have to remind them, irrespective of how much golf you’re going to play, you’re not going to be Rory McIlroy. You’re not going to become Rory. There’s only one. So, we got to find other areas. And this comes back, I think, a lot to this wisdom and knowledge piece, because we also notice that people of that generation are being sucked into social media in quite a dangerous fashion. So, we spent a lot of time at work analyzing with people. “Before you got into, like, if you’re chatting to your dad, before you got into farming, and we know that’s a family business, what interested you?

So, when you were in high school, and potentially, you had to leave high school to go work on the family farm, did you have aspirations to go and do something different in your life that your pathway just verged? And can we bring that back in now, and not from a monetary sense?” We had an individual at a very high-profile job. He was about to retire during COVID, and he was under a huge amount of pressure and stress. It was a freight business. And we spent a lot of time talking to him about what his real passion was, which was Irish history and politics. So, we went away and found a post-graduate third-level master’s course in Trinity College. We built a framework. We showed him how it was going to be paid for.

We’re lucky. In Europe and in Ireland, university education is very inexpensive. This is a postmaster’s course, a big $10,000 to $15,000, let’s say. An amazing full master’s course. We built a whole model, and we actually showed him where the money was going to come from, and we actually showed him that that money was attributed purely to interest. So, it was like, for him, like a free shot. Now he is out, and he gives tours of Dublin to tourists. So, when you guys are over with Shawn and the crew, we might be getting this guy to give a tour and give a background on things like the 1916 Rising or the War of Independence or the Civil War that was fought, and all these.

There’s a Garda barracks, which is a police station that’s no more than 100 meters from where we stand at the moment. And in 1921, that’s riddled with bullet holes. Now, most people go about their lives and not understand this, but we know our client, Michael, knows all about this. So, his wisdom and knowledge is constantly out researching, doing these things, when the alternative for him was you enter his new season in retirement without a purpose and a plan. And purpose and meaning are really where we’re getting to the nugget of these things. And what we’re finding is you actually can see light coming back into people’s eyes when you probe and are curious about what they are actually interested in, not what you’re interested in, but what they are, and how we can help steer them on that journey to bring that back into their life.

Brad Johnson: That is such a cool story. Number one, my dad’s a history buff, so I’ll bring my dad on that tour. That maybe can be a retirement present.

Mark Hedderman: Absolutely.

Brad Johnson: But you’re hitting something that I want to double down on, that we coach a lot on here at Triad. A framework called is, does, means. I did an episode on this, but in concept, where a lot of advisors get stuck, especially younger advisors, where you kind of have to show how smart you are when you first get into the business, you know? You feel like you have to anyway. And you’re focusing on this product that’s like this magical solution. Oh, it’s this annuity, it’s this life insurance, it’s this asset model or manager, 99.9% of all of your clients care zero about that. It’s like popping a hood and explaining an engine.

Maybe a gearhead cares, but that’s a small percentage. What they actually care about is what you just hit. “Wait, so you can build a plan. I’m here. I want to retire, I’m not sure how, but I really want to geek out on history, and I’d actually have all this time during the day.” But now, the added thing that you did, you gave him a little nudge, gave him a little push, and said, “Wait. What if we go back to school and you can go get a master’s in this?” And like, like how cool is that?

Mark Hedderman: It’s really rewarding.

Brad Johnson: Rediscover something you’re super interested in. My dad’s a gun buff. He probably has like 200+ World War II, like he could tell you the history behind all of them. And I can tell you if there was some program to gun history and the history of all of the guns around the world and who built them and how it played out in wars, my dad would be a kid in a candy shop. So, I just love the intention, the curiosity, but most importantly, putting the plan in place, because to me, that is great financial planning. It’s not the plan. It’s the outcome and what that actually means. And I just have to think that done repeatedly over time is going to grow your practice exponentially, because that’s stuff people talk about.

Mark Hedderman: Exactly.

Brad Johnson: Like, “Hey, my guy Mark put a plan together so I could go back to school and get a master’s in Irish history.” That’s stuff you talk about.

Mark Hedderman: Yeah.

Brad Johnson: Probably shares that on his tours.

Mark Hedderman: Yeah, and I think like what we have to reflect on, there are two elements that I think that are really interesting. And the first one is like this, like I have to retire to get away from this. But in order to retire from something, you have to retire to something. And I think what’s possibly worse, and it’s a danger because this mentality has slipped into Ireland very heavily, is we have to remind people that money is only the vehicle, it’s not the outcome. And in order to truly live life as well as possible, we have to ensure that we’re meeting the other needs, and whether that’s family, community, health, your social capital, they are as important.

So, trying to steer people at all stages of their life to remind them about what true wealth actually means, because being rich and being wealthy are not the same thing. And the concern that we tend to have is we as a culture in Ireland are shifting very, very rapidly. Having come from an agricultural base that was very impoverished to now leading metrics for multiple US multinational companies and having a burgeoning financial services sector, we run the risk of forgetting what made this country and the people from this country so special. And we feel it’s incumbent on us, and it’s our service to the state in order to remind people where they’ve come from, and how them understanding their own value set helps shape and benefit the next and multiple generations to come in this country.

And we hope that as a result, because we have such soft power influence across the globe, that that reflects well on our friends in Canada and the US and South Africa and the rest of Europe and Eurasia. It doesn’t matter. But we feel it’s incumbent on somebody to hold their hand up and say, “Do we have our ladder up against the right wall here? And can we be really, really distinctive about helping each person shape what their own life should look like?” Because each of us, Brad, is running our own individual race. We just got to determine what that race looks like for us and not be led by what others perceive to be success. Because as we spoke about earlier on, like for us, our success is not weighted to getting to a billion euros of AUM. It actually holds very little currency with us.

But the excitement that we have when we guide these client journeys around what they’re interested in, and they’re curious about, is incredibly rewarding, and it actually springs us and our team up out of the bed every morning, and you can actually see it. When clients come in, they see that because they engage with each member of our staff, and they can see how passionate they are about trying to help that journey. But being able to land with somebody and ask them, “How is this working out for you?” to genuinely show interest in people and their lives is actually a rare commodity in today’s society. And we just feel, well, why not be a little bit different and double down in that space?

Brad Johnson: You hit a phrase there I want to double back on. You said being rich versus being wealthy, and those are two very different things. And can you dig a little bit deeper and explain what that means in a real-world appointment, and how you have a conversation around that, that somebody that’s focused on the numbers in the bank account or investment brokerage account going up and to the right versus wealth, which is actually putting it to use on stuff that matters? How do you navigate those conversations?

Mark Hedderman: Interesting enough, Brad, we tell a lot of stories. And I tell a lot of stories about what myself and my own family do around the adventures that we take. So, myself and my wife, Hillary, and my two sons, Shay and Rory, spent the month in Australia last November with family. And it was fortunate for me. I was speaking at an event in Perth, and I just felt like, “Look, we tend to aspire to do these big, hairy, audacious goals and trips when we retire, but what right do we have to believe that any of us are going to make it to retirement?” So, what we tend to find is we talk about these stories. We talk about the conversation that we would’ve had with yourself and Shawn at Future Proof.

And the fact that when we finished that conversation, we went to the locker to get our towels to go onto the beach to have a swim in the Pacific Ocean, and that as we sat on the beach, we watched a pod of dolphins go by in the waves, which was probably as influential for us in terms of our experience as it was having and listening to yourself and Shawn. So, what we’re trying to really help people visualize is, well, what does that look like? Like, what do you need to get out of this for you guys to sit there and total all of the life that you’ve crafted? And, yeah, it’s a wonderful concept to go to the bank account and have independence and freedom within the bank account, but when that number is solved for you individually by us, hopefully helping you rationalize on what your ‘enough’ looks like, then it’s all about freedom and independence of action.

And our job then becomes pushing individuals to go and start spending that money. Go and use it and use it accordingly. Don’t wait. Some people want to be in the newspaper when their estate goes up that they had 5 million euros in their bank account. And we’re like, “Don’t be one of those people.” They’re very rich because they had all the money in the world, and unfortunately, obviously, no one to share it with. They’ve nobody that they had compassion or maybe love for in their life, because maybe the financial element that was there led to acrimonious splits with the people who they truly cared about. So, we tend to find that we don’t have an analytical or a scientific way about presenting this, Brad, because it tends to be very individualistic.

But what we try and do is explain stories and bring to reference stories that are going to be of interest to those individuals. And then they say, “Well, maybe I could start, and maybe I could formulate this, and maybe I could have my own dream.” And one of the rationales, we have all the 14 highest peaks, all these 8,000-meter peaks here behind me on the wall. And what we’re trying to highlight is, yes, we all climb, and we all aspire to summit our own mountain, but these mountains are all very different. So, yours could be K2, mine could be Everest, Shawn’s could be Annapurna. Still the same challenge. We all have to get to the top of the mountain. We just need to rationalize what that specific journey looks like for each of us.

And once we’ve accomplished that task, we move on to the next one. So, by very open conversations, without the reliance on huge tech, without the reliance on analytical studies and 45-page financial planning reports, what we’ve tended to find is we’ve come full circle on this thing. It’s about having conversations and actually understanding where people are at and knowing where they came from. And only then can we help them rationalize what their end goal should be, and how we then visualize what the next bit should be for them. And sometimes, as we spoke about, the money bit is there, but what we started to notice is the money element is diminishing in respect of its own importance to the overall conversation.

Because all we have to do is reference, “Well, what’s happening in each of your circles within your family? Where is their real health? Is there any mental health disorder happening? Where can we help steer that, that the people within your life and community? Hopefully, not that they don’t have to deal with it, but that they have measures to work their way out of this.” Because I think we need to deflate people’s interest and not that we’re taking the value off the money, but we got to start putting the value into these other areas, because otherwise we’re just chasing for the sake of chasing, and more will never be enough.

Brad Johnson: Yeah. Well, the goalpost always moves. At first, it’s, “I need a million dollars in the account.” Then you hit a million, then it needs to be 2 or 5 or 10. And it’s interesting you make the analogy with summiting a mountain. I heard it said a long time ago, that’s a great analogy for retirement, but if you look at your working years, that’s a lot like the accumulation years, which is climbing the mountain, right? Like, I need the nest egg to hit this magical number that probably has nothing to do with the math, but everything about a big round number you heard is the number, a million, 5 million, whatever. So, you reached the summit, and then it’s like, “Cool, I can retire.” But that’s only half the journey.

Now, you got to get back down. And so, the analogy in our world is you went from accumulation to distribution, but the problem is you’re still thinking like that penny-saving accumulator, and you’re scared to spend it. You’re the broke millionaire or broke multimillionaire. And so, what I hear you saying is you’re rewiring the thinking by really opening that conversation of what’s the aspirational stuff you’ve been wanting to do and didn’t have the time or money to do, now let’s go do that stuff. And I believe, and I think you were kind enough to gift this to the viewers, you have a bit of like a checklist that you’ve put together, a one or two-pager. What do you call that?

Mark Hedderman: Yes. The life care planning document.

Brad Johnson: Life care planning document.

Mark Hedderman: Yeah, I have it. There’s the hard copy. It sits on the desk here beside me.

Brad Johnson: And is this how you navigate pieces of that conversation? Is that more the checklist that your team goes through when putting the plan together? How’s that play in?

Mark Hedderman: It’s a really interesting piece, on the basis, Brad, that it kind of, again, it comes back to some of the earlier bits we spoke about, where people don’t have this sort of legacy plan in front of them that if something goes wrong tomorrow, I have products here. And the products are great, but I have no real correlation or symmetry to what they should actually look like. And what we found is our role has become a specialist, like almost like a quick reaction for us to be brought in when somebody’s terminally ill, and they’re trying to scramble to find all the bits. And for us, we found that very psychologically taxing because we were working with a lot of people who we knew weren’t going to be around in three and six months’ time.

And we were like, “God, if only we could get out in front of this and help steer some of the conversations.” So, the document itself, it took us about a year to prepare. And what we were trying to do is help navigate that journey and put the importance back on those three glasses we spoke about, was not only the financial element, but also the health and the social well-being piece. And we really wanted that booklet to be something that a family could together reflect on to discuss what they might like to happen if somebody is ill, that they could share amongst each other, which again, as I said, this is an Irish trait. We are not good at this at all, so we need to change the dynamic of the conversation.

And that they would physically have something available to them, that if they went under a bus the next day, that there were no potential outliers to say, “Well, Dad wanted it to be treated a certain way, and he told me this, and he told me that,” that it could lead to an acrimonious split. So, what we did is we printed these, we gave them away to our clients. It listed all their care needs, their private medical insurance details, their legal and estate planning, but then some of the softer touch skills in what message would you like to leave to your family? Like, who should be notified in the event of your bereavement or ill health? And we’re sort of at version 1.0 on this thing, but we found that the demand was so great that we just had people out of the blue asking us, could we send them copies?

So, even for our listeners and guests on the podcast today, I’m delighted to provide a soft copy of the PDF to anyone who likes this, and they can key that into their own Canva and effectively change the branding to whatever they like. And they can use this in US eyes effectively the version that we have here, because we’re not treating this as intellectual property. We’re delighted to give this away whoever feels it’s of value to, because we know, irrespective of where this goes, that it may be one family that’s slightly better off, that in the event of one of these major illnesses or bereavements happening, that they actually now have a game plan.

And it’s a starting point to try and help steer the narrative conversations that we have more mature conversations. Like, it’s interesting, we talk to people who would tell you all about stocks and bonds, and I did this, and I have money here, but you ask them, “Well, what if you get sick tomorrow? What’s the plan?” And they just go mute. So, we’re like, well, how do we shift this and be on the front foot? And that’s stage one of a number of documents. We’re prepping a wellbeing document at the moment. As I said, that will include links through to that eight-week breathing class that we’re working on our workshop.

And these are all little areas, Brad, that we feel we can actually have open architecture to craft and design things that have never really been done before within our profession, but can move the needle forward for the people that we’re working with.

Brad Johnson: Well, Mark, that’s very kind of you. I’ll tell you the people I love to surround myself with in this space, it’s the abundance mindset people, and that’s very abundance mindset because a lot of people in our space would hold it close to their chest and say, “This is ours and nobody else can have it.” And I love your approach there because, hey, actually, I think you had a friend in the US that you shared that with that was going through a tough family moment, and you sent that, and he said, “Man, this really helped.” Was it his dad that was maybe having some stuff going on?

Mark Hedderman: That’s right. Yeah. We sent it over along with a copy of a book called Irish Stories of Hope and Loss. We tend to be really good, we’re really good post-death in Ireland. Our poetry and music and songs are brilliant post-death, but pre-death, we don’t tell people we love them. And we don’t talk to them about what really matters to us. But when somebody goes, we’re excellent, and we’re trying to change that dynamic, but also change that dynamic for the other people within our space. And I suppose paying it forward, Brad, like, I wouldn’t be here today if yourself and Shawn hadn’t been so giving and courteous with your time at Future Proof a number of years ago.

Like, you guys could’ve just brushed it off, “Thanks, couple of Irish guys. Great to see you. Thanks very much.” But you gave us the time. We had a wonderful conversation. We, as a result, have followed the journey of what you’ve done, and we fed off that. So, like, you have a part to play in what you see in front of you today, maybe unknowingly, because there are elements that we will take from that and implement within our own strategies here, sometimes unconsciously doing that because something that you guys might have said on stage just hit us, but it gets stored back here, and it only comes a crop or a year later when we’re working on something like this document, and then it comes to the fore.

So, you’ve no idea that the little ripple effects that we have in our lives, and that’s why exactly as you said there, we want to make sure that the ripple effects that we’re having in other people’s lives are positive effects because, by God, we know there’s enough negativity out there at the moment. So, let’s try and be on the right side of this thing, and let’s try and help other people out there. Like, as I said, I’m going to South Africa in October to speak to our South African CFP colleagues, and I have a talk called The 100-Year Firm. I’m absolutely, I’m blown away. I’m blown away to be going to Future Proof, but to be honest, it’s incredibly humbling to go to South Africa because I know the circumstances that our colleagues in South Africa work under.

And I have a gilded life relative to what they go through, and it’s not to say it’s all that. It’s not that it’s terrible in any way, shape, or form, but where can we go out and back them, support them with the work that they’re doing for their families and communities? So, I find this, as I’m sure you do, and I know you do from our conversations, it’s an incredibly humbling and privileged position to be in. I never believed 15 years ago yesterday when I started that this is where things would lie in 15 years, and that’s what’s so exciting, and that’s why we’re so curious about this, Brad, is we feel like we’re now only pulling back the curtains on what this adventure could look like and what benefit this could bring to, A, the people we really care about, but the broader financial planning community that we care so much about as well.

Brad Johnson: Well, it’s inspiring. When we… I don’t even remember how you hit me up. Was it LinkedIn?

Mark Hedderman: I think so, yeah.

Brad Johnson: When we reconnected and hopped on a Zoom. But it was really inspiring to see the intention and the time that you had put into building something that I know it already is, and I’m sure you’re at the very beginning stages of what it will be. But how cool is that to not just impact people’s bank accounts, but impact their health, impact what’s next, and give them the little nudge into those hobbies they need to rediscover anyway. So, big fan of the work that you’re doing. Thank you for the kind words. If we could even be a little tiny 1% of what led to what you’re doing, that’s very rewarding to me. And you’ve inspired me to take my dad to Ireland. We’ve got that going too, so.

Mark Hedderman: I’d love to go forth with that. That’s going to be great.

Brad Johnson: Anyway, my man, we’ll wrap this up. I just have one final question for you, and it’s spot on with the topic of this conversation. I would love to hear Mark’s definition of what do business, do life means to you.

Mark Hedderman: I suppose at all times it’s making sure you’re putting your ladder up against the right wall, as we spoke about earlier on. And sometimes we hear a lot about you got to put your family first, but I think you’ve got to be very intentional about putting yourself first. And not in a selfish sense but ensuring you’re caring for yourself and loving yourself and taking care of your physical and mental mindset. And only then, Brad, can you truly be of service to your family, the ones you love around you. You’re no use as a husk. So, you got to be intentional about yourself, and it’ll blossom and ripple effect. The positivity that you can then bring to your own family and your wider community couldn’t be better. So, maybe a slightly different tactic, but just make sure you’re focusing on your own well-being first before you go at anybody else’s.

Brad Johnson: Wise words. Couldn’t agree more. Well, I look forward to the next time our paths cross in person. It’s been too long.

Mark Hedderman: Absolutely.

Brad Johnson: Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with the audience here. I know there were a lot of notes scribbled along the way. And I’ll probably be going back and scribbling a few myself. So, thank you, Mark, for sharing all out as always. And until next time, my friend.

Mark Hedderman: Thanks, Brad. I really appreciate the opportunity. Lovely to see you.

Brad Johnson: All right. We’ll see you.

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