• “After a career of helping people make financial decisions, one thing is overwhelmingly clear to me: people are not calculators, they’re storytellers,” Jared claims. Humans are biologically wired to connect cause and effect, even if it may be incorrect. The more you want something to be true, he adds, the more likely you are to believe the story that overestimates the odds of it being true.
• If we learn how to second guess ‘easy’ narratives and learn to think more empirically, we can gain an advantage. 
• According to a study done in collaboration with Dartmouth College, University of Chicago, California Institute of Technology and UCLA, less than 2% of people attempting to add value to the portfolio through predictions actually possess skill.
• Over a shorter time frame, the influence that luck plays, both good and bad, is greater. However, as you expand the sample size, the influence that luck plays is diminished, and outcomes become much more predictable.

Resources

Jared Siegel on LinkedIn | Twitter

Email: jsiegel@delapwa.com 

DelapCPA.com

The Success Equation by Michael Mauboussin

Luck versus Skill Research Paper

Memo from Howard Mark

Here are a few highlights from their conversation:

• Vanguard Advisor’s Alpha found that advisors adhering to a holistic wealth management framework could add about 3% per year in annualized returns relative to the average experience. 
• “We’re bad at forecasting the future because the future is simply not forecastable,” Michael claims.
• Vanguard keeps updating its study about quantifying the value of an advisor because they “want to start talking to people in their language.” They aim to help both advisors and customers understand the value of this service.
• Warren Buffet was a stock picker and active manager, but he looked at the numbers and drew the conclusion that most managers don't earn their fee, and much significant wealth is dissipated as a result of chasing a prediction-based approach to performance.
• Being as proactive as possible is always an advantage, but there are times when that’s not the case - there is a time and a place to respond to anticipated things, Jared shares. Michael describes the reactive model within the Advisor Alpha framework.
• “Staying the course doesn’t mean standing still,” Michael tells Jared. Staying the course actually requires an enormous amount of minor course corrections along the way. You don't just get on a boat and suddenly arrive at your destination by doing nothing.
• Roth conversion effectively means you can accelerate the taxes on your tax-deferred money and convert it into tax-free money so that you won't have to pay it later, Michael explains. In an economic downturn, “the account value might be down; an individual's income might be down… Take advantage of that and accelerate taxes when the rate is lower - it might be higher in the future; use those losses to get a little creative.”
• “There’s a lot of noise out there around millennials and Gen Z not being as good as investors…  I actually think it's the opposite. I think they've had a huge head start, and I think we're going to start seeing the benefits of better advice all around,” Michael says. 

Resources

Michael DiJoseph on LinkedIn

Here are a few highlights from their conversation:

• Generative families are those with business that have gone past the third generation in terms of ownership and control; have an identity as both a family and a business; and were large and thriving, though not necessarily in the legacy business.
• It’s fairly common that family businesses don’t last past the third generation, but that has less to do with wealth itself and more to do with the type of people in the business.
• Successful business families make a commitment to the future, Dennis shares. “They developed all kinds of ways in which the family was creating non-financial wealth - they were creating value by educating the next generation, giving to the community, and having wonderful, thoughtful people get together.” 
• In generative families, the wealth creator creates the wealth, but they do not create the generative idea - this is typically done by the second or third generation.
• Jared asks Dennis to describe the roles of the first three generations of a business family. “The shift from the first generation where it's all about one person with no need to collaborate with anybody to the next generation comes when the family begins to have a single family meeting and they talk about their wealth,” Dennis explains. “Is this the business that they want to be in, or do they want to be in another business? Do they want to have a foundation? And they start to have conversations and out of the conversations the family says, ‘We have so much wealth, we have so many issues to talk about - we have to meet regularly.’”
• Self-reliant wealth creators must get over the idea that because they've been so successful, they know how to do it better than anyone else.
• Older generations have to understand that things are different, and should respect those differences rather than try to make things be the way they were before. They’d only be setting themselves up for failure by taking the latter route.

Resources

Dennis Jaffe on LinkedIn

Borrowed from Your Grandchildren: The Evolution of 100-Year Family Enterprises

Dear Younger Me: Wisdom for Family Enterprise Successors

Here are a few highlights from their conversation:

•  The main difference between tax-agnostic and tax-aware strategies at AQR, Nathan shares, is that tax-aware funds think not only about investment styles but also about tax results of individual trades.
• Jared asks Nathan how AQR quantifies the economic benefits of integrating income tax and estate tax planning in a portfolio design. “[We] approach management of that portfolio in tax-efficient ways,” Nathan responds “For example, if you started a program at the age of 40 and continued until 80, the after-tax wealth transferred to the family can be three times larger if you look to achieve tax efficiency and sensible investment strategy across all the dimensions, as opposed to only focusing on investment strategy and completely ignoring the income and estate tax implications of your investment.”
• From a statistician’s point of view, the greater the success, the more attention it gets, and failures tend to fade away into the background. Wealth created by concentrated risk looks great post-factum, but that is because a large portion of the wealth distribution where wealth has been lost is ignored. “A concentrated risk is a constraint for many investors,” Nathan comments. 
• According to Nathan’s research, volatility creates a significant drag on cumulative wealth, and the only way to reduce that drag is to reduce volatility through diversification. 
• There isn’t a lot of information about the after tax risk adjusted performance of strategies, Jared says. It’s difficult to report performance on an after-tax basis because of its nature - individual clients' facts and circumstances, which would impact the net result of an investment.
• Nathan shares what to consider when transitioning from one investment strategy to another. “There are four key parameters to changing a strategy, changing the portfolio tax efficiently,” he claims. “[They are] tracking error, build-in gain, how much leverage you are willing to take, and time.”

This material is intended for informational purposes only and should not be construed as legal or tax advice, nor is it intended to replace the advice of a qualified attorney or tax advisor. The recipient should conduct his or her own analysis and consult with professional advisors prior to making any investment decisions.

Resources

Nathan Sosner on LinkedIn 

AQR Capital Management

Regardless of How You Deal with Low-Basis Stock, Long-Short Strategies Can Help

Integration of Income and Estate Tax Planning

When Fortune Doesn’t Favor the Bold: Perils of Volatility for Wealth Growth and Preservation

• “Families with significant wealth or family businesses often operate within a network of trust - partnerships, contracts, and other kinds of legal and business entity relationships,” Jared says. “In this context, structural capital represents the family’s cumulative understanding of this network and ability to navigate it efficiently.”
• It’s human nature to value things based on how much they cost us. Therefore, you value wealth you are given differently than if you had suffered, sacrificed, and risked for it.
• The key to efficiency is making a checklist - one of the most simple and humble techniques, according to author, surgeon, and public health researcher Atul Gawande. Even the Air Force and leading hospitals use checklists to manage their everyday tasks.
• “The single most important reason for creating a trust in the first place should be to provide a gift that promotes the beneficiary’s real freedom,” Jared advises. “A trust that's well designed should deliver an enhancement to the beneficiary that cultivates a greater maturity and equips them to pursue their own aspirations.”

Resources

Jared Siegel on LinkedIn | Twitter

Email: jsiegel@delapwa.com 

DelapCPA.com

The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande

Preparing Heirs: Five Steps to a Successful Transition of Family Wealth and Values by Roy Williams and Vic Preisser

• Harmony is nuanced, Jared shares, requiring some level of skillful and simultaneous execution. To be well-coordinated, harmony needs balance and complexity. Jared explores what that looks like in wealth planning.
• A family’s human capital includes its individual family members’ physical and emotional health, as well as their resilience - their ability to learn, grow and adapt. Their relational capital reflects each member’s ability to discuss difficult topics together or to collaborate in complex efforts.
• Prior to the Industrial Revolution, wealth transfer was more about the transfer of wisdom and opportunities, not necessarily money. “If you inherited your family’s land, you were still required to work. You had to [put in the] effort, sacrifice and grind… to actually generate income that you and your family could live on ,” Jared explains. 
• Financial capital is merely a tool - nothing more, nothing less. It’s neither good nor bad, but it really begs the question - what are you trying to accomplish with your wealth?

Resources

Jared Siegel on LinkedIn | Twitter

Email: jsiegel@delapwa.com 

DelapCPA.com

Resources

Jared Siegel on LinkedIn | Twitter

DelapCPA.com

• By definition, news is something that doesn’t last, Jared claims. It exists for a moment and then it changes. “As news has become easier to distribute and cheaper to produce, the quality and quantity have respectively decreased and increased, making it nearly impossible to delineate the signal from the noise,” he says.
• “The word status implies a social stratification on a vertical scale,” Jared explains. Hierarchies have existed in society for thousands of years, and new research suggests that humans are actually biologically wired to seek status.
• Gaining clarity about your own purpose informs you of the status games that actually matter. Picking the wrong one lures you into a trap of allocating your time to whatever screams the loudest, and your talent to whatever gives you the fastest reward.
• In The Happiness Hypothesis, researcher Jonathan Haidt concluded that intimate, loving and enduring relationships with our family and close friends will be among the sources of our deepest joy in life.

Resources

Jared Siegel on LinkedIn | Twitter

DelapCPA.com

Choose Your Status Game Wisely - Of Dollars and Data

How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton Christensen

The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt

• Doing well with money isn’t about what you know; it’s about how you behave. You stand a greater chance of making smarter decisions about wealth if you change the way you think, which affects how you behave.
• “Resulting” is a term coined by poker players that defines the tendency to confuse the quality of a decision with the quality of its outcome. In cognitive science, this is called outcome bias, and it’s a dangerous tendency that we’re all susceptible to.
• “Diversification enables us to increase the near-term predictability that many of us need and desire,” Jared shares, “because we can't entirely eliminate uncertainty over shorter periods of time.” 
• According to researcher Jonathan Haidt, we have two ways of thinking that work simultaneously at all times: our gut, which is quick, emotional, and very persuasive; and our head, which is slower and less powerful, but more objective than our gut.

Resources

Jared Siegel on LinkedIn | Twitter

DelapCPA.com

• “Pessimism is not only more common than optimism, but also sounds smarter, is more intellectually engaging, and is promoted significantly more by financial media than an optimist, who is often viewed as oblivious and ignorant of risks,” Jared shares.
• A 15-year study published by the Wall Street Journal found that 92% of active stock-picking managers that make investment decisions based upon their conclusions after looking at the economic predictors, actually underperform their benchmark.
• The probability of being able to predict good performance in advance consistently is minuscule, just like the probability of continually and consistently making accurate predictions is impossible. Diversification is the very best way to reduce your investment risk.
• “When it comes to your wealth, don't pursue a coin-flipping approach,” Jared says. “Rather, embrace five decades of peer-reviewed financial science and leverage the power of planning, not predictions, to support your long-term financial and life goals.”

Resources

Jared Siegel on LinkedIn | Twitter

DelapCPA.com

Here are a few highlights from their conversation:

• You should never use forecasts to time the market, Larry says, as all evidence shows that it is largely ineffective. “Forecasts should only be thought of as the mean of a very wide potential dispersion of outcomes,” he adds. “There are always unknown events that we didn’t even think would occur, so your plan should always incorporate those possibilities.”
• Though the unemployment rate is down to 4%, there has been a massive decline in the labor force that’s willing to work, and an increase in early retirements. In a shocking and unprecedented turn of events, there are now far more job openings than there are unemployed people.
• “I think the Fed has underestimated the risks of [their] excessive amounts of fiscal and monetary stimulus,” Larry claims. “They’re [conducting] a grand experiment here; they think they can tighten quickly enough without pushing the economy into recession or raising rates too much.”
• Typically, with low interest rates supporting higher valuations, you should see higher than average valuations for value. Larry remarks. “To me, the only place that you have risk that valuations are too high is in US large growth stocks… In value stocks everywhere else around the world, valuations are historically in the 100th percentile of cheapness,” he shares.
• While the data has always shown that high valuations predict low future returns, that doesn’t mean they’re predicting negative returns, according to Larry. 
• Jared asks Larry about the helpfulness of economic predictions, and how to prepare for the certainty of uncertainty. “You should always rely on evidence from peer-reviewed academic journals, not people’s opinions,” Larry responds. “There’s a huge body of research that has analyzed investors’ ability to time market, tactically allocate assets, etc., as a loser’s game.”
• All risky assets should have similar risk-adjusted returns; this also includes similar Sharpe ratios, which adjust for returns.

Resources

Larry Swedroe on LinkedIn | Twitter

Here are a few highlights from their conversation:

• Jared asks Diane how she gets clarity on priorities despite having so many commitments. “It comes down to soul-searching and figuring out what's important to me,” she responds. “My family has always been my top priority, and even in the contracts of some of my jobs, I negotiated how much I would be willing to travel. There are a lot of things I did to set boundaries to stay focused, but it was a constant learning process.”
• Diane talks about the fulfillment she experienced in various stages of her career. She shares insights about her time at Trammell Crow Company; how she started, how she moved up, her accomplishments at the organization, and when she decided to move forward.
• “One of the things I learned the hard way was that it’s critical to have the right people in the right seats; if you don’t, you need to make changes fast and not allow them to linger,” Diane says. “Another lesson that I learned is that it makes a huge difference when people understand that you care about them.”
• Diane shares advice for parents. “Make sure your daughters and sons play team sports, because it teaches them how to work in a team environment, and that’s important in the business world. Debate is a great place for your kids to learn and build confidence in their communication. And finally, get your daughters engaged in something competitive, especially if they have to work with boys. It enables them to feel comfortable no matter what gender the person they’re working with is.”
• Jared asks Diane what her experience was like being the only woman on a C-suite board. “I just had this confidence [because of my mother’s support] and my faith was a big part of it. But it really spurred a desire within me to help other women grow in their God-given potential with confidence because I knew that I was not the only one that should be in that room,” she replies.
• Part of the reason Diane founded 4Word was that she didn’t like the fact that a lot of companies weren’t allowing people to bring their full selves to work. She was blessed to be granted that opportunity at Trammel, and sought to help other women get the support she did. “Our vision is to grow a global community of Christian women in the workplace,” she adds.

Resources

Diane Paddison on LinkedIn | Twitter

Here are a few highlights from their conversation:

• “So many of us find ourselves just being reactive with the people that we love most,” Jared remarks. “We borrow ideas that we've observed from other families… and the challenge with that is that it's somebody else's family, somebody else's values, somebody else's solutions. When we apply somebody else's solutions to our own life, they may or may not render the outcomes that we're looking for.”
• A lack of clarity and communication about how a family plans to allocate their resources, can cause tension in their relationship. 
• When we talk about heir readiness and preparation, it’s more than just financial literacy. It involves a holistic approach to all of the capitals that matter to a family. 
• Ken begins family engagement planning by looking at a family’s values. “Values then get to inform really great decisions around how we spend those really key investments of both resources and time,” he adds.
• People are often more purposeful and intentional with their business decisions than they are with their relationships, Jared comments. It’s rare that someone actually takes the time to be proactive about determining what matters most and creates a strategy to protect that.
• Ken shares stories of his experiences with assisting families. “The intentionality about saying ‘Where do we invest our resources financially, socially, and relationally?’ [is admirable]. It’s an honor to be able to help put ideas on paper and make a plan for these families.”

Resources

Ken Weigel on LinkedIn | Twitter

Here are a few highlights from their conversation:

• Running businesses, chasing success, and juggling priorities have leaders charging through life full speed ahead with little time to be still. The purpose of the Mora exercise is to facilitate clarity among clients so that they break the cycle of just continually reacting to what life throws at them. According to Ken, Mora, from Latin, translates to “pause.”
• “What I like about [the exercise] is that rather than prescriptive, it’s facilitated,” Jared shares. “Having somebody else ask me questions that I haven't yet ever thought to ask myself, and then challenge the answer that I'm offering, allows me to see opportunity or challenge framed in a new light.”
• You don’t have the same perspective on your life, your organization, or yourself that a trusted advisor would. As you have been your main problem solver for most of your life, you don’t often stop and recognize patterns between your previous challenges, Ken remarks. 
• “Stillness aims the archer’s arrow” Jared quotes. A moment of clarity on what matters most, and why it does, can add a layer of precision to your execution that would otherwise be absent.
• “When we can get to those places where we’re asking ourselves [what we want to do and what would bring us the most joy] and listening carefully to the answers, we find ourselves at a tremendous place of clarity; it allows us to have more confidence as we make decisions going forward,” Ken comments.
• “[We should] have a culture that allows us to see the benefit of taking some time to take care of ourselves intellectually, emotionally and physically, and the role that plays in our responsibilities,” Ken says.

Resources

Ken Weigel on LinkedIn | Twitter

• “Money has the power to buy one's way out of trouble and mitigate both a lapse in judgment and offset a lack of effort,” Jared says. “When this characteristic impacts the younger generation, it insulates them from the natural consequences that we all learn from.”
• It’s challenging for parents to find the balance between making a child's life too easy, and overloading them with unnecessary difficulties. There’s no surefire way to prepare heirs who are empowered by wealth rather than entitled by it. One suggestion Jared makes is to personalize the wealth conversation to each specific child.
• “None of us had the opportunity to pick our parents, thus being born into a wealthy family is more luck than skill, [yet] some studies have found that those that inherit wealth posture as though they deserve the wealth or earned it,” Jared shares. Teaching gratitude is a good way to prevent this.
• There have been instances where recipients of sudden wealth who weren’t ready to receive it became resentful and thought of it as a burden they didn’t want to carry. Jared encourages wealth creators looking to leave money to their family to start small, as the wealth creators acquired their earnings gradually themselves.

Resources

Jared Siegel on LinkedIn | Twitter

DelapCPA.com

“If you're trying to evaluate decisions, don't skip past the obvious,” he adds. “What’s the starting line? What’s the finishing line? An outcome bias… is the tendency to judge a decision by its eventual outcome instead of based upon the quality of the decision at the time it was made. Results matter, but the outcome doesn't always reflect the quality of the decision. Ultimately, the decision-making process is more important over the long term.”

Resources

Jared Siegel on LinkedIn | Twitter

DelapCPA.com

“It's unclear what the next 5 or 10 years will bring,” he continues. “Having a great plan and sticking to it is going to be crucial by trying to time the market. Not only do you have to worry about when exactly to get out; you must also be concerned about getting back in at precisely the right moment. Being correct once is difficult but being correct both times is even more challenging.”

Resources

Jared Siegel on LinkedIn | Twitter

DelapCPA.com

Morning Brew, August 31, 2021

Wall Street Journal, September 20, 2021

Returns Web

All Time High Anxiety 

**Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. Indices are not available for direct investment; therefore, their performance does not reflect the expenses associated with the management of an actual portfolio.**

• “The proposal includes a new top ordinary income tax bracket of 39.6%. This rate would apply to a single filer with taxable income in excess of $400,000 a year or a joint filer with taxable income in excess of $450,000 a year,” Jared shares.
• “Another notable change to the estate code would be what appears to be a crackdown on the grantor trust planning strategies,” he adds. “It seems as though the intentionally defective grantor trust would no longer be a viable strategy; transfers between grantor and grantor trusts would be treated as a sale. Finally, the proposal includes the elimination of valuation discounts, such as no more discount for lack of marketability and minority ownership.”

Resources

Jared Siegel on LinkedIn | Twitter

DelapCPA.com

Moira Somers is an author, coach, keynote speaker, assistant professor and wealth psychologist. She joins Jared Siegel to discuss financial literacy and the psychological impact of wealth.

Here are a few highlights from their insightful conversation:

• As a clinical neuropsychologist by training, Moira has observed that there is a profound interface between money and well-being; those who had better relationships to and with money seemed to have much better outcomes than those who didn’t. 
• Though we generally consider ourselves to be rational beings, data shows that we may have biological predispositions to making irrational decisions. Moira believes in embracing the totality of the human experience: acknowledging that sometimes we get diverted by things outside our best interest, have trouble persisting in things in our best interest, and are influenced by things outside our conscious awareness.
• Jared explains loss aversion - a concept in behavioral finance which claims we are motivated to avoid things that have negative outcomes - and how it may shape conversations about marketing. 
• Jared sees equilibrium as resource allocation rather than simply balance, and learning how to manage his time creates clarity around his financial decisions.
• Moira says that those born into wealth often do not hear about the struggles and sacrifices that had to be made in order to acquire it.
• Data shows that money can bring us sustainable happiness when we invest it in people and/or causes that matter to us. 
• Subsequent generations enhance family businesses by being more intentional about how to use the business to hold families together. Moira has observed that third and fourth generation business owners are holistically maintaining their businesses, instead of prioritizing profit above all else.
• Financial literacy combines knowledge with emotional intelligence, and skills in delaying gratification.

Resources

Moira Somers on LinkedIn

MoneyMindandMeaning.com

Recommended Reads

Advice That Sticks by Moira Somers

Intentional Wealth by Courtney Pullen

The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt

When Helping Hurts by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert

Raising Financially Fit Kids by Joline Godfrey

The 3 Big Questions for a Frantic Family by Patrick Lencioni

Essentialism by Greg McKeown

• Purpose must be deliberately conceived, chosen, and then pursued, according to Jared. Success is subjective to everyone, and we must each choose what it means to us. If we allow others to define our success, we could spend our whole lives chasing after someone else’s definition. 
• Defining success by an outcome, something out of your control, is more than likely to leave you at the mercy of luck, Jared says. It will never be up to you whether you succeed or not. “The wise man looks upon the purpose of all actions, not their consequences,” he quotes. “Beginnings are in our power, but Fortune judges the outcome, and I do not grant her verdict upon me.”

Resources

Jared Siegel on LinkedIn | Twitter

DelapCPA.com

• Many investors want to know why they should invest outside the US. “Don't put all of your eggs into one basket,” Jared warns. “If you wouldn't make a concentrated investment in one single stock, why would you limit your investment opportunities to just one country?... If you limit the geographic exposure of your [stock] portfolio, you're limiting your opportunity set, which may increase your risk and decrease the benefits of diversification.”
• The US stock market has returned 10% a year on average, but the road to the 10% can be incredibly bumpy. Returns in any particular year have ranged from as high as 54% to as low as -43%.
• “Many believe a rise in interest rates is a reflection of positive economic expectations from investors, while others believe it's more driven by inflation concerns or expectations,” Jared shares. “In reality, it's more likely a combination of all the available information.”

Resources

Jared Siegel on LinkedIn | Twitter

DelapCPA.com

The Randomness of Global Stock Returns 

• “As a wealth advisor, I’ve observed that the most persuasive evidence is whatever you want to be true,” Jared shares. “It's easy to seek out information that only confirms pre-existing beliefs; the incentives for being right when investing are so big that it's hard to think clearly about the decision without getting distracted by the potential rewards.”
• The people lauded as expert forecasters are actually no different from the average person, according to Jared. Forecasters, more often than not, aren’t even held accountable for their predictions, which are often vague and lack specific timelines. Luck is being passed off as a skill.
• Data shows that between 1992 and 2014, there were 153 recessions, of which economists only predicted 3%. “What if economists are more like rearview mirrors helping us make sense of economic data once it's behind us?” Jared questions. 
• “People who want different things out of the same asset create reasonable differences and opinions that can be misinterpreted as disagreements,” Jared remarks. “Different timelines and different objectives should influence how you think about your wealth.”

Resources

Jared Siegel on LinkedIn | Twitter

DelapCPA.com

Michael Burry Predicts an Imminent Stock Market Crash

The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness by Morgan Housel

Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Phillip Tetlock

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

1992 Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Letter

• “I think as business leaders we understand that communication is really a two-way street, and it starts with listening before talking,” Dick remarks. “In any conversation, you should listen before you talk and gain a perspective of where that person is coming from, and then when you do talk, you have to be honest and straightforward.”
• Eye contact makes for more authentic communication, according to Dick. You can also pick up on what a person is or isn’t saying by their tone of voice and mood. 
• The current pandemic has fatigued the average person, Dick says, which is influencing how we communicate with each other. He advises, “I think we have to judge where a person is at today. [We have to ask ourselves] ‘are they able to have this conversation now, or do they need to be doing something else?’”
• Jared asks Dick what people should consider when looking for a mentor. “I think you should seek people who are willing to tell you the truth and say ‘that is not a good idea,’” he replies. “I think you should seek out people who are going to give you a perspective opinion and not just the answer that you want.”
• The best mentors have the most experience. They can offer advice based on that experience; they can share with you what helped them succeed, and they can tell you about their failures, so you learn from their mistakes. They are good listeners and provide excellent encouragement.
• Jared asks Dick what changes the Portland Health clinic may need to embrace over the next 3-5 years. “Due to the emergency of COVID-19, we have embraced telehealth… It can't do everything, but it definitely has a role for the future, and a link to that is the immediacy of people that do their own research into their own health care. You need to have a balance between what you can research on your own and what you can trust a doctor to provide,” he responds.

Resources

Dick Clark on LinkedIn

Q1: Is focusing your investments solely on dividend-paying stocks a reliable investment strategy? [01:15]

• Common misconceptions lead many investors to prioritize dividend payments at the expense of diversification, flexibility, and total investment return.
• Dividend payments aren’t guaranteed - in 2009, 50% of dividend-paying companies either eliminated or reduced their dividend payments - for investors looking to earn an income from their stocks, they should focus on their total return, not just dividends.

Q2: What impact would a proposed tax hike have on the stock market?  [06:05]

• As part of the Biden Tax Proposal, various spending programs were included, of which some will be paid from an increase in taxes.
• While tax changes, specifically hikes, are always a source of angst, investors should be careful to extrapolate the impacts of tax policy on their portfolio. 

Get in touch with your team member at Delap to talk about your personal mix of investment products, and how tax hikes might impact your own portfolio.

Resources

Jared Siegel on LinkedIn | Twitter

DelapCPA.com

• “Family businesses are among the world's most enduring and ubiquitous economic and social institutions,” Jared comments. “Through the foundation of social relationships and communities, successful family enterprises are incredible engines for generating wealth and expressing the owners’ values about business and the community.”
• Successful families that have been able to manage wealth across three generations for over 100 years demonstrate the following six qualities: 
• shared values and core purpose; 
• relational resilience; 
• long-term business resiliency, 
• growth and development; 
• education to the next generation about personal freedom and family responsibility, stewardship and values; 
• commitment to the community beyond the family.

Resources

Jared Siegel on LinkedIn | Twitter

DelapCPA.com

The Family Balance Sheet 

• The real goal of life should be about flourishing and independence, Jared says. Independence doesn't mean that you'll stop working; it means you only do the work that you like, with the people that you like, at the times you want, for as long as you want. At the same time, flourishing can be defined as a state in which all aspects of life are good, a state of complete and utter well-being.
• We all want wealth and more options. However, successfully navigating the abundance of choices and options created by more wealth while juggling the complexities and stress of wealth requires a certain skill set.
• “Isn't it ironic that within the biggest economy in the world, the wealthiest country in the history of the world with more choices than ever, we're still not happy? More money and more choices alone doesn't actually create more flourishing,” Jared shares. “With so many choices, people are more likely to experience paralysis than liberation.”
• When we really have clarity of purpose, it can lead to success; when we have success, it can lead to more options and more opportunities; when we have increased options and opportunities, however, it can dilute our focus, our efforts, and increase our overall stress.

Resources

Jared Siegel on LinkedIn | Twitter

DelapCPA.com

The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less 

Barry Schwartz: The paradox of choice | TED Talk

Here are a few highlights from their conversation:

• Being surrounded by a team of energetic leaders has made his transition into the position of CEO much easier, Earl says. It would have been more challenging to take on the responsibility without their comforting support.
• Working in public accounting afforded Earl the opportunity to coach others; it brought him satisfaction to help people gain experience and develop the necessary skills to pursue their dreams and excel.
• Jared shares that Earl was involved in his interview for Delap. He commends the company on its commitment to living its mission statement. Delap prioritizes their employees’ goals and aspirations over the organization’s objectives, so that if an employee wants to move on, Delap will assist them in every way possible.
• People consider money as a metric to measure success because it is often correlated with a level of professional achievement. Other important investments, such as interpersonal relationships with friends and family, are not as tangible or as easily gathered as money, so they are harder to measure and easier to forget.
• Teenagers can be debilitated if they do not have perspective about the necessities for living. Earl speaks about his experiences mentoring adolescents about financial literacy.
• Earl’s “favorite mistake” was when he decided he wasn’t good enough to continue attending university, because it led him to the desire to improve himself and build relationships to help that goal.
• A failure is temporary, Earl says. 
• The first step to combating team dysfunction is to be open, vulnerable, and build trust.

Resources

Earl Pierce on LinkedIn

DelapCPA.com

• It’s easy to assume that acquiring more money will create more choices, power, freedom, security and experiences. In many ways it does, but all these things don’t automatically create flourishing. Flourishing isn’t an accident; it occurs when life is lived intentionally and on purpose. 
• In order to flourish, you must do well across five domains: happiness and life satisfaction, physical and mental health, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, and finally close social relationships. 
• Wealth is not limited to finances. Other aspects of wealth include spiritual capital, relational capital, and social and community capital.

Resources

Jared Siegel on LinkedIn | Twitter

DelapCPA.com

• According to Jared, people often think that more professional success creates more financial success, and that more financial success creates flexibility and flourishing. However, that is not always the case. 
• We all know the age-old adage ‘money can’t buy happiness.’ “There is no evidence saying that people who earn or have a lot of money are happier than those who don’t above the poverty level,” Brian claims. 
• “People don’t change until the pain of their circumstances exceeds the pain of the change,” Jared says. He asks Brian how we can create the necessary pain to trigger change in our lives before we have a real crisis. “A goal is inherently disruptive, as it is a planned conflict with the status quo,” Brian replies. He talks about the four S’s for developing goals.
• When people are fully engaged in what they are doing, there is a sense of satisfaction, regardless of how mundane the activity is. 
• “A lot of people have limiting beliefs [about themselves and their abilities] that keep them from doing things they like,” Briam remarks. “I think it’s important for people to write down what they want out of their life. I’ve had many people do this and most of the time, it’s achievable… it’s a self-worth issue.”
• You have to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. In becoming your best self, you have to be willing to be vulnerable. “Being comfortable with my limitations, strengths, not shying away from opportunities in fear of messing up… that’s what makes life exciting and meaningful to me,” Brian shares.

Resources

Dr. Brian Liebreich on LinkedIn

Waking Up: Stress Management Principles for Effective Living

Here are a few highlights from their conversation:

• Anna shares, “To succeed with a college application, you need to know what the admissions officers are looking for. Ultimately that’s the only audience that matters in this process.” 
• There are many great colleges, and with some research, students can find one where they can thrive. “One thing students should consider while trying to find the right college is their preferred learning style,” Anna advises.
• Jared asks Anna to identify some of the things that positively impact your chances of admission. Your GPA is the first thing, she responds, and then how rigorous your classes are. Co-curricular activities and your community involvement are also assessed. 
• “There have not been any dramatic changes in the admissions process because of the pandemic,” Anna claims. “Your test scores no longer have to be a barrier, if for whatever reason you are unable to show a strong test score, but ultimately they were never more important than your high school performance.” SAT and ACT scores add very little value over and above your high school transcripts.
• Jared asks Anna to unpack the finances of attendance. Oftentimes the listed or “sticker” price of tuition is not what some students end up paying. Anna describes some of the methods that colleges and universities use to financially aid students.
• While admissions officers can look at what you post online, they do not have time to audit your social media accounts, so silly Tik Tok videos would not jeopardize your attendance. However, offers can be retracted for serious offenses like discriminatory or abusive online behavior. 

Resources

Anna Ivey on LinkedIn | Twitter

AnnaIvey.com | Blog

InlineCoach.com

How to Prepare a Standout College Application: Expert Advice that Takes You from LMO* (*Like Many Others) to Admit

Here are a few highlights:

• “Good is the enemy of great,” Jared quotes. In an ironic twist, it has been shown that good performance can lead to cultural complacency. Often, culture is a category that is both core ideology and something that needs to evolve. It can be difficult to simultaneously juggle the preservation and progress of culture, but it is not impossible.
• Jared shares several definitions of culture and gives examples of corporate leaders taking action to shape the culture they desired in their companies. “Culture, like the organizations that create them, must evolve to meet new challenges,” he remarks. “All cultures are aspirational. The point isn’t to be perfect; just better than you were yesterday… Culture begins with deciding what you value most.”
• According to the book Primed to Perform, there is a spectrum of motives for why people perform an activity. The first three are directly linked to the activity that drives performance, referred to as a direct motive. The last three, or indirect motives, are further removed from the actual work itself and frequently harm performance. 
• “Inertia is the most indirect motive; your motivation for working is so distant from the work itself that you can no longer say where it actually comes from,” Jared explains. “You do what you do simply because you did it yesterday. That leads to the worst performance of all.”

Resources

Jared Siegel on LinkedIn | Twitter

DelapCPA.com

PrimedtoPerform.com | Primed to Perform: How to Build the Highest Performing Cultures Through the Science of Total Motivation 

Here are a few highlights from their conversation:

• Maggie shares her professional journey, which took her from accounting to becoming CEO of Santiam Hospital. She explains how her diverse professional background helped her tackle new problems within a familiar context. 
• “One of the things that fascinates me about healthcare is [that] its roots date back to early traditions from thousands of years ago; in Babylon, China, Egypt, etc...” Jared remarks. “It’s a persistent industry, but it’s changing so quickly.” He asks Maggie to identify some important cultural traits and strategies that enable organizations to remain resilient but flexible in the midst of change. 
• Maggie comments on the professional culture of Santiam Hospital. “We have this independent streak that brings and breeds independent thinkers, which keeps us independent,” she says. “... our culture has been driven by our independence, so we can be a community-based hospital that delivers what the community needs.”
• Maggie remarks, “We spend a lot of our time at work, but what is our purpose there? I think what it comes down to is relationships; to me, nothing matters more than the relationships we can forge together.”
• Jared asks Maggie about the role culture played as she stepped into the CEO position in the midst of the pandemic and whether it was strengthened or stressed during that adversity. “We made the courageous decision not to lay off or furlough anybody, and it brought us closer together,” she replies. “As an organization, we thrive together, or we take a hit together.”
• “The strength of the individual is the team and the strength of the team is the individual,” Jared quotes. He asks Maggie about the process of using the positive attributes of independence and individual creativity for the collective good. “A significant part of [the process] is listening to what part of the autonomy people are willing to give up to have a better whole,” she shares.

Resources

Maggie Hudson

Here are a few highlights from their conversation:

• Markets are forward-looking, and don’t go up just because the economic news is good, Larry explains. The markets only go up when the news is better than expected. Only unexpected events matter because being able to forecast the economy well still doesn’t accurately predict what the markets will do.
• A likely scenario is that due to current economic conflicts, the value of the American dollar will be lessened, which will provide a tailwind for foreign assets. Another likely scenario is that the massive deficits in the economy will potentially cause central banks across the globe to dump dollars, as they did in late 2018.
• Jared asks Larry how the market is currently pricing inflation. The 10-year nominal yield provides a proxy for the projected percentage of inflation, he responds. Additionally, he shares what role commodities play in protecting yourself and your long-term purchasing power. 
• Being a value investor is a hedge in your portfolio against the run-up in commodity prices, Larry comments. “Throughout history, value companies have historically done well during inflationary periods,” he says. “That’s part of the reason value stocks have outperformed in the last year.”
• Gold is an awful long-term investment that has provided zero real return for the past 2000 years. It’s a good inflation hedge, as it tends to do well in short bursts due to inflation, but it goes through much longer periods of bad performance. 
• Larry recommends that listeners move their assets out of their estates before the changes in estate taxes take effect next year. “It might be prudent to start looking at gains now because capital gains rates are going up regardless of what’s going on,” he advises. 
• Regardless of who is in the White House, there will almost certainly be massive tax increases over the next decade. “If deficits can’t continue, then they will end; it’s only a matter of when, not if,” Larry remarks. 
• According to Larry, the four horsemen of the retirement apocalypse are: high bond prices, high valuations, aging populations, and that populations are aging longer. 

Resources

Larry Swedroe on LinkedIn | Twitter

Here are a few highlights from their conversation:

• A valuable asset as a marketer is understanding where the client, content, and company intersect. It makes collaboration with salespersons run much smoother.
• LegitScript functions as an extension of a company’s compliance, risk, or trust and safety teams. They use their deep expertise in combining technology, data, and human insight to find criminal or fraudulent behavior that might be happening on the platform. 
• Jared asks Scott what factors contribute to having healthy and unhealthy founder-CEO partnerships. “Ninety percent of this [successful partnership] lies on the founder’s shoulders… It takes humility to allow someone else to call the shots for the good of your company. If the founder’s mentality assumes positive intent, they will be more receptive to their partner’s input,” Scott replies.
• Building trust is essential to the organizational health of your company. Scott shares how he started building trust by reaching out to every employee at LegitScript when he first partnered as the CEO. At that time, the company had 125 employees. He prioritized 125 one-on-one meetings as his first order of business because he wanted to initiate a personal relationship with everyone.
• Jared asks Scott how he manages the competing priorities of customers and team members. “I always look for the triple win: solutions that would benefit the company, the employees, and the customers. LegitScript is mission-driven, and carrying out our mission successfully helps our customers, which helps the employees as they are dedicated to the mission, and benefits the company and its shareholders,” Scott responds.
• The current virtual state of business is difficult for sales and marketing teams because so many of the ways these teams connected with prospects and customers in the past have been thrown out. However, an advantage that they have gained is that true account-based marketing has accelerated. 
• Scott explains how to find product-market fit in a blue ocean strategy. “I like to get a deep and intimate understanding from the customer’s perspective of what they do before and after they use your product or service; that points a signal to things your business can potentially explore,” he shares.

Resources

Scott Roth on LinkedIn | Twitter

Here are a few highlights:

• Jared talks about his journey and experience being a podcast host. “Starting a podcast has been a lot of fun, but it's [also] been a humbling experience,” he shares. “Learning how to do anything new is always a little bit difficult, but it’s a lot more challenging when you're doing it on a public stage where your lack of experience and skill is impossible to hide.” 
• “Stillness is to be steady while the world around us spins to act without frenzy; to hear only what needs to be heard,” Jared quotes. He briefly describes the role that stillness plays in the pursuit of happiness.
• Jared believes stillness can be an intentional antidote to a stressful and busy life. However, it should not be an excuse to withdraw from the affairs of the world; in fact, it’s a tool that lets you do more good for more people. 
• Many people consume news in order to fuel and confirm their existing beliefs rather than to learn. This creates stress and noise, and steals an opportunity for stillness that we would all benefit from.

Resources

Jared Siegel on LinkedIn | Twitter

DelapCPA.com

Inflation, Higher Taxes, and National Debt Webinar, Wednesday, June 2, 2021 | 12:00 – 1:00 PM

Here are a few highlights from their conversation:

• “Most people confuse trust with the ability to believe that somebody is going to do what you want them to do,” Jordan claims. “In the professional world, trust is less about somebody doing what you want them to do and a lot more about ... being able to predict their behavior… Trust is about being authentic.” 
• “Your legacy and wealth is only as secure as your family is united,” Jared says. He asks Jordan what measures families should take to foster unity and avoid conflict. 
• Jordan describes his father’s strategy to grow the company’s productivity and credibility in difficult times. It’s all about giving the best possible experience to their customers, he tells Jared.
• Customer dissatisfaction is a learning opportunity, according to Jordan
• “By sacrificing today’s cash for tomorrow’s investment, the family members who came before me made opportunistic investments that we can take advantage of today,” Jordan says. “The [decisions my father made] created a footprint that allowed us to grow and diversify our revenue.”
• The leadership at Pape Group focuses on supporting the layer that has the most interaction with their customers. Those in that layer are empowered to make decisions that keep the customers happy, Jordan shares. Those at the top declare a destination, but give their people the tools and flexibility to figure out how to get there.
• Building a great team and empowering them to make decisions can help you get more done in less time than doing it yourself.

Resources

Jordan Pape on Twitter

Pape.com

Here are a few highlights: 

• Jared explains classical conditioning and its origins. “Researchers have been able to pair these insights with new technologies to dig even deeper and identify new insights in how we make decisions. I believe these insights, if applied to our lives, offer an opportunity to make more profitable financial decisions,” he remarks.
• Even though we are 99.9% unaware of dopamine release, we are 99.9% driven by the information it conveys to the other parts of our brains, research says. Neuroscientific studies have shown that human emotions are rooted in the predictions of highly flexible brain cells, which continuously adjust their connections to reflect our newest reality.
• There is a striking similarity between the brains of gamblers and the brains of cocaine addicts and morphine users. Neuroeconomics suggests that the first step to gaining better control of our financial decisions is realizing how little control we actually have.
• “Understanding how dopamine influences our financial decisions is an important first step to becoming a more predictable and profitable financial decision-maker,” Jared advises.

Resources

Jared Siegel on LinkedIn | Twitter

DelapCPA.com

Your Money and Your Brain: How the New Science of Neuroeconomics Can Help Make You Rich by Jason Zweig

JasonZweig.com

Inflation, Higher Taxes, and National Debt Webinar, Wednesday, June 2, 2021 | 12:00 – 1:00 PM

Here are a few highlights from their conversation:

• President Biden’s tax proposal may raise as much as $3.3 trillion over the next decade, Jared says. He is expected to raise long-term capital gains tax on wealthy Americans to 43.4% with the inclusion of the Medicare surtax.
• “I think this is an exciting time for us,” Joe remarks, “in terms of looking for new opportunities and structuring things differently. It’s going to create some more tax drag for a number of taxpayers but it definitely brings new opportunities.”
• The estate tax exemption has never been higher than it is today. Biden’s proposal may revert that exemption down to $3.5 million per person. This provides taxpayers with a window to do some estate planning, Joe says.
• Planning can be a great way to deal with the inevitable change that the future promises, Jared advises. Tax and financial plans are strategic scaffolds to navigate your priorities. 

Resources

Joe Seifert on LinkedIn 

DelapCPA.com

2021 How Might President Biden's Tax Plan Affect Me? 

2021 High Income Taxpayer President Biden's Tax Plan?

Here are a few highlights:

• According to research, happiness may depend less on how much of each resource is available to us and more on how much we focus on each resource. Perhaps the most important factor is how we choose to spend our time and money.
• People who are time poor are less happy, less productive, and more stressed out. Ironically, physical wealth can exacerbate those problems.
• Our interpersonal relationships have a powerful impact on our health, a study says. More than money or fame, close relationships are what keep people happy the most.
• Thinking about the economic value of our leisure time can actually undermine our ability to enjoy it, especially if it's not living up to our perfect ideals in our minds.

Resources

Jared Siegel on LinkedIn | Twitter

DelapCPA.com

Tristan Harris: "How to Unhijack Your Mind from Your Phone"

David Miller is the Chief Technology Officer of Dynamic Light, a company that develops next-generation technology for blood flow monitoring. He chats with Jared Siegel about their neurotechnology, entrepreneurship, and mindfulness.

Here are a few highlights from their stimulating conversation:

• Dynamic Light was created based on David’s work on laser speckle contrast imaging.
• David says the hardest transition during this experience has been moving from the sense of “I know the technology” to the sense of “I don't really know how people are going to view it.” 
• Innovators like Steve Jobs have the ability to take the perspective of not only the short-term market but also the long-term vision.
• Hardware and software are being created to profit off of our shortening attention spans, Jared says. If the product we use is “free,” then we are the product.
• The essence of mindfulness is how long you can stay attentive to the task at hand, David says.
• Heart Math is a technology created by Dynamic Light for heart rate variability training.
• The human brain is on average only 2 to 3% of your body mass, but at any point in time, it consumes about 20% of your blood.
• To David, meditation means getting in touch with his internal subjective experience.
• When you jump into cold water, you get an extreme flight or fight response from your body, even though there’s no visible threat in front of you.
• Joy is the meeting place of selflessness and intentionality, Jared quotes.
• David would like to be remembered as someone who encouraged people to cultivate their inner sense of compassion and kindness.

Resources

Dynamic Light

David Miller on LinkedIn

Here are a few highlights from their conversation:

• “Exit planning combines a plan, concept, effort and process into a clear, simple strategy to build a business that is transferable through strong human, structural, customer and social capital,’ Jared explains. The future for you, your family and your business are all addressed by exit planning through creating value.
• The three main factors that influence transition timing are: personal timing, business cycle timing, and private capital markets timing. Jared briefly describes each factor and the roles they play. 
• As a company’s earnings increase, so does its value, Dave shares. Some internal organizational factors that contribute to its value are the strength of management, good internal controls and accounting systems, and sales contracts.
• The only certainty in life is uncertainty. The best business owner is one who has contingencies in place for the most common business uncertainties, which are death, disability, divorce, disagreement, and distress. By having a plan for each, they pursue financial unbreakability. 
• By giving your non-voting shares to family members while keeping your voting shares, you can gift value without surrendering control, Dave briefly explains.

Resources

DelapCPA.com

David DeLap on LinkedIn

Know Your Gaps

The 5 D's: Have you planned for these contingencies?

Here are a few highlights:

• A study done in 2008 revealed that professional money managers and stock pickers usually have none of their own money invested in their own funds. Very few actually invest in their own funds because they know the odds, Jared says.
• Vanguard and the Wall Street Journal have done research spanning a collective 15 years which shows that active stock pickers typically underperform their benchmark. According to Jared, the long-term track record of active managers is abysmal.
• “Money won’t buy us happiness, but it sure would help us avoid misery,” Jared advises. “Our values and beliefs about money form our foundation, that’s our ‘why,’ which creates the destination, [and] once we define the destination, how we get there becomes more clear.”
• The second step to wise money management is designing an investment thesis that is informed by financial science and decades of academic research.

Resources

Jared Siegel on LinkedIn | Twitter

DelapCPA.com

SPIVA Scorecard

Indexes Beat Stock Pickers Even Over 15 Years

Vanguard’s CEO on the Future of Investment Management

Here are a few highlights from their conversation:

• The average person is good at identifying problems, but very few people organize and take action to address those problems. Vanessa’s family taught her that “You can talk till you’re blue in the face, but action is where it really shows.”
• “A huge part of what we do in raising our kids is exposing them to different people and opportunities.” Vanessa explains how she instills humility in her children and the importance of demonstrating kindness. “Values are caught, not taught.”
• Vanessa shares what she likes most about real estate.
• Jared has observed that many people have successful, lucrative businesses, but their real wealth ends up being in their real estate. He asks Vanessa about the principles and the do’s and don’ts of real estate as an asset class.
• People tend to like investing in real estate long-term because it enables an easy transfer of generational wealth. Currently, interest rates are historically low, so now would be a good time to get into real estate, Vanessa advises.
• Landlords are having a difficult time during the pandemic. Vanessa reviews how COVID-19 has impacted her professionally. “Multifamily has been hit hard by the pandemic because of the widespread governmental policies with regards to rent,” she says. 
• “I feel like Millennials and Gen Z’s have been hurt the most by [COVID-19 professionally] because of how their careers are supposed to evolve,” Vanessa claims. “They’ve been at home and have not had the opportunities to learn from their colleagues or further their relevance in their respective industries.” 

Resources

Vanessa Sturgeon on LinkedIn | Twitter

TMTDevelopment.com

Here are a few highlights from their conversation:

• Elateus is the exclusive provider of a comprehensive behavioral assessment for the US and North America called Prism Brain Mapping. They use Prism to help recruit, build and develop high-performing teams. Kellen briefly describes the work they have been doing.
• Due to the sudden thrust into the virtual workplace, people are still trying to figure out how to work remotely and how to adapt their teams to the change. The pandemic has provided Kellen’s company with the opportunity to coach others in virtual team building. Kellen and Jared liken the experience to a new year on a college football team.
• “This is what you do, not who you are.” Kellen shares the advice a former colleague gave him when he was struggling with his identity. “[People] like to put you in a box [based on what you do], but it’s important to understand [your value]. Identify what can get taken away in a heartbeat, and what can’t, and place your value in what can’t,” he remarks. 
• Jared asks Kellen to describe his career-transitioning experience. “I was nervous because of the fear of failure and the unknown,” he replies. According to Kellen, the fear of failure and the unknown was a boogeyman that motivated him to seek alternative opportunities where he could apply his unique skills.
• In a lot of ways, we are products of our environment, Kellen comments. It’s all the more important to be mindful of the environment you choose to be in and the people you allow within it. He talks about the people who have been most influential in his life.
• “One thing I didn’t value [enough] early in my career is how important it is to connect with who you’re leading,” Kellen admits. “One of the things I failed to do was to connect better on an individual level and show a greater amount of empathy.” He and Jared discuss the significance of displaying empathy as a leader.
• “[Life] is like walking through the woods with a flashlight; what’s right in front of you is really clear, but once you get ten or twenty feet out in the distance it’s sort of shadowy,” Jared claims. “The only certainty we have is uncertainty, so creating optionality around your life and plans is a good way to live.”

Resources

Kellen Clemens on LinkedIn 

Elateus

Casey Corrigan is the Vice President of Sales at AskNicely. Casey is passionate about helping businesses extract value from their data to improve their overall business results via customer experience. He joins Jared Siegel to discuss the significance of the Net Promoter Score, and how it can help you earn the passionate loyalty of your customers while inspiring the energy, enthusiasm and creativity of your employees.

Here are a few highlights from their conversation:

• There are very tangible benefits to understanding what makes a great customer experience, delivering it more consistently, and listening and engaging your customers, Casey remarks. He talks about the origin of AskNicely and explains their mission.
• According to Casey, organizations that use feedback to improve the individual 1-to-1 customer level, as well as their service standard and the way that they deliver it, experience significant revenue growth opportunities. Jared asks Casey to distinguish between the terms ‘customer experience’ and ‘customer engagement.’
• Jared and Casey discuss insights from ‘The Ultimate Question.’ “The best way to measure retention, loyalty and future growth is by asking this simple question: “On a scale of one to ten, how likely are you to recommend [our business]?” This metric makes it easy to distinguish your customers from your ‘promoters,’ who are those most likely to stick with you and refer you to their network.
• The London School of Economics determined that for every seven points of your Net Promoter Score (NPS), there is an average increase of 1% in revenue, Casey shares. “The influence of the customer has been democratized,” Jared adds. “Twenty years ago, you could bully a customer and get away with it because their ability to share that experience was limited… now that everyone's got the capacity to capture something in a digital experience and then share it… [that would] leave the types of impressions that you don't want.”
• Jared asks Casey what feedback looks like in an organization that has mastered NPS. 
• “An outcome doesn't really knock people's socks off if it's exactly what they expected you to deliver in the first place,” Casey comments. “Customer loyalty is established through positive emotional connections, surprising and delighting people, and the way that your frontline staff treat your customers.” 
• A Harvard Business Review article claims that behavior is best changed when you emphasize the positive in a 6:1 ratio; identify 6 things you are doing well and 1 thing you need to work on. 
• Establishing a Maslow-esque hierarchy of needs of both your customers and employees can skyrocket customer experience, Jared shares.

Resources

Casey Corrigan on LinkedIn | Twitter

AskNicely.com

The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth by Fred Reichheld

 Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow by Chip Conley

 Admired Leadership

Here are a few highlights from their conversation:

• Chris credits his success to his dedication to providing value for people and educating himself. “[A PhD] is not what makes you educated,” he remarks. “What makes you educated is the problems and opportunities you deal with on a daily basis… the problem I help people solve every day is what makes me a reasonable operator, combined with my experience.”
• In the past 50 years, no new thinking in management has appeared, according to Chris. Pre-existent models were just shuffled around. Additionally, research shows there is a 70% probability of failure every time you try to do something new. Successful change is dependent on three variables, Chris says, which are readiness, capability, and belief system. The average firm is not successful with change initiatives because they lack one or more of these variables.
• Jared likens resistance to change to the force of inertia in a car. “One of the first things you learn as a driver is to be careful where you look because that’s where you’ll end up,” Chris says. “If you keep staring at the fence you’ll drive into the fence.” He talks about the importance of focus and trusting your abilities.
• Real learning comes from doing. Coaching gives you the confidence that brings you to the start line, but to move forward you have to take a step. Chris shares the five steps to change readiness and three factors that influence belief systems as a variable for successful change. 
• Chris shares advice from a method of therapy that can be applied to business. “Whatever is working, do more of it. Whatever’s not working, stop doing it and try something completely different.” 

Resources

Chris Mason on LinkedIn

Mindshop.com

Here are a few highlights from their conversation:

• “There are a lot of different textures to our identity”, Jared comments. “Who we are at the office is just another mask we wear.” 
• Overnight success isn’t a thing, Sarah remarks. Success involves a lot of hard work, dedication, and struggle. When you see others’ success, you may be tempted to assume their experience was linear, but what you see is often just a fraction of their story. She shares some background into her professional development and explains why giving yourself grace to make mistakes promotes growth.
• It’s easy to get wrapped up in your anxiety and apprehension toward the future. While having a strategy is good, worrying about things outside of your control doesn’t solve anything, Natalie advises. 
• Natalie and Sarah talk about how relationships influence career development. According to Natalie, mentors are people you interact with every day and have friendships with. Additionally, they are those you look up to, whose work and ideas you study and implement into your daily life. Sarah shares how hearing other people’s stories have helped her. 
• Jared encourages listeners to take time to show their gratitude for the people who have impacted them along the way. “It’s easy to be impacted by somebody and forget to tell them,” he says. Gratitude requires intentionality.  
• Jared asks Sarah how she juggles the various responsibilities that come with her various roles as a leader, a mother, and a wife. Sarah says that learning when to say no and how to depend on others is what helps her manage her responsibilities. “Every yes is a no somewhere else,” Jared adds. Natalie shares her framework for identifying what to say no to and briefly talks about why it matters.
• Things don’t get easier as time goes on. New challenges and struggles will always present themselves, but they offer with them the opportunity for constant growth.  

Resources 

Sarah Padfield on LinkedIn

DelapCPA.com

BreneBrown.com

Natalie Heacock on LinkedIn | Twitter

How I Built This

Think Again by Adam Grant

Here are a few highlights:

• According to studies conducted by the Exit Planning Institute, 99% of business owners agreed that having a transition strategy is important for both their future and that of their businesses. However, 79% had no written transition plan, 48% had done no planning at all, and 94% had no written personal plan.
• Value acceleration helps measure the values of your intangible assets against other organizations within your industry.
• “You can seldom improve quality by cutting costs, but you can often cut costs by improving quality,” Jared remarks. “The wrong cost-cutting can impact your long-term growth and reduce your overall long-term value.”
• At its core, all authentic growth depends upon customers wanting more of what the company offers.

Resources

Jared Siegel on LinkedIn | Twitter

DelapCPA.com

Here are a few highlights:

• Value acceleration is a process that uncovers the answers to personal, financial, legal, and tax questions in the operations of a business. The aim is to maximize the value of the business at the time of exit, minimize taxes, and protect, harvest, and manage personal and professional wealth.
• We all have biases that we may be unaware of. “Knowing what you don’t know is wisdom,” Jared remarks. Often, people are likely to find themselves falling into the ‘I’m not biased’ bias, which prevents them from discovering and managing their biases. 
• Jared believes that getting wealthy relies on different skills, mindsets, and approaches than staying wealthy. Staying wealthy typically involves a combination of frugality and paranoia, whereas getting wealthy centers around accumulation. “People who stay wealthy save like a pessimist and invest like an optimist,” he quotes.
• Tomorrow’s success is not guaranteed, and nothing binds it to follow in the footsteps of today. Strategic financial planning ensures that money is accessible to you whenever and wherever you need it. A well-built plan supports adaptability, resilience, and optionality.
• The Dunning Kruger effect is relentless in preventing people from achieving wealth. It is a cognitive bias that dictates that we are hardwired to overestimate our own competence when it comes to things we know little about.

Resources

The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness by Morgan Housel

Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World - and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling

ABCs of Behavioral Biases

Here are a few highlights from their insightful conversation:

• Fundamentally, our lives become the sum of our decisions; goals are a way to focus our attention and time, Jared says. “If you want to be happy, set a goal that commands your thoughts, liberates your energy, and inspires your hope,” he quotes.
• You create belief by writing down your goals, according to Craig. Putting them on paper allows your mind to wrap around them and creates the belief that you can achieve them. 
• Scott shares insights from books about leadership that impacted his professional journey. One such insight is that integrating positive affirmations and goals into your morning routine helps to build confidence and combat imposter syndrome. Additionally, breaking down big goals into smaller goals that you complete consistently over time establishes good habits.
• When you have a strong locus of control, you are less likely to fall prey to inaction or victimhood. People with a strong locus of control are generally more happy and successful, Jared remarks. 
• One of the most difficult yet simplest things to do is keep swinging when you’re in a slump, Scott comments. The consistency of the little things you do is what helps you achieve your goals and even exceed them. “Goals are there to help us develop good habits, and then they take care of themselves,” he adds.
• Jared asks Craig and Scott to comment on the importance of saying no. Sometimes your contributions to shared goals may not be helpful, Craig replies. You can assist by supporting others as they achieve their goals and not standing in their way, and focusing on what you’re good at. Spreading yourself too thin trying to achieve too many things at one time can do more harm than good, Scott adds.
• Telling people about your goals activates your pride, which pushes you to achieve them, Scott shares. Craig advises listeners to remember that goals will be there the next day, so avoid trying to cram everything into one day.

Resources

Scott Williams on LinkedIn | Twitter

DelapCPA.com

Craig Wanichek on LinkedIn 

SBKO.bank

Atomic Habits book

How Will You Measure Your Life audiobook

Here are some highlights from their conversation:

• Jared shares his professional background, from college football, to being an entrepreneur, to eventually joining Delap LLP, and then becoming the head of their wealth advisory sister company. 
• Bart asks Jared to describe his role as wealth manager. It’s a combination of ethics and values and the science of financial decision-making, Jared replies. Most importantly, the client is the one with control over the type of relationship they form and the conversations they have.
• Not all goals are created equal: they can be categorized into needs, wants, and wishes. “Creating a plan that delineates needs, wants, and wishes allow us to inform future decisions,” Jared says. 
• A common denominator among first-generation wealth is a commitment to work ethic; the wealth was a by-product of their passion, it wasn’t their primary focus. It’s important to be intentional about transferring the values that created your wealth - instead of the value of the wealth - down to your second generation because it could easily be squandered.
• Dedicating time to count your blessings daily can wire your brain to see the positives in life and be more grateful. “Gratitude is the ramp to joy,” Jared claims. In order to have joy, you must first have gratitude, which requires reframing your intentionality.
• Bart asks Jared to give insight into his purpose for starting Success That Lasts, and how it has been fulfilling that purpose. “I started wrestling with this idea of ‘Hey, we all want to win and be successful. I wonder if there's a way to be intentional about questions so that it's a facilitated process versus prescription,’” he shares. “I wanted to use Success That Lasts to learn, so I don't sit here and lecture… I wanted to share what I'm learning with our community… and start a different type of conversation.”
• Bart talks about the impact that Jared and Delap LLP have had on him as a client. He shows his appreciation for the time, effort, and consideration that they have invested in him.
• Transparency is a good thing to foster with your children if you are an affluent family, Jared advises. You should ensure that they know early about the wealth the family has, why they have it, and how they think about it. He has observed that transparency serves as preparation for when children get older and become involved in the operations of the family business. 

Resources

Jared Siegel on LinkedIn | Twitter

DelapCPA.com

Here are a few highlights from their conversation:

• Dan believes that 95% of financial media is misleading noise which drowns out the sound, academically-based information about the only intelligent and responsible way to invest. The financial media is oriented towards alarmist news that causes anxiety and prompts activity, which is the worst thing for investors. 
• According to a Harvard study, those with meaningful relationships are happier than those without. Listening is a key component in forming strong and meaningful bonds with people, but it is a skill that few seem to be doing. “Right now the world feels like everyone has a microphone and something to say, but they won’t listen,” Dan says.
• Dan has observed that in business contexts, people are generally not interested in what advisors have to say: they are interested in how advisors can solve their problems. In order to effectively serve their clients, advisors must elicit information instead of conveying information, because an unknown problem can’t be solved.
• Another Harvard study found that talking about yourself is one of the most highly pleasurable activities you can engage in, as it activates high levels of dopamine in the brain, and even more so when someone else is present to hear it. After implementing this research into interactions with his clients, Dan was able to generate almost 50% more assets under management in 1 year than he did in the previous 5. 
• People can generally tell when they are being manipulated or being sold. You must be genuinely interested in what people have to say and not just chase your self-interest, because they can tell when self-interest is involved as well.
• Jared asks what the balance should be between eliciting information and sharing information. There is no formula, Dan replies. “If you trust this process, there will be a natural flow with most people. They will enjoy answering questions so much that they’re not going to show a lot of curiosity about you.” Additionally, the balance is one-sided more often than not.
• “The ability and skill of listening and asking courageous, original questions is a big differentiator in the noisy world we live in,” Dan says.

Resources

Dan Solin on LinkedIn | Twitter

DanielSolin.com

The Smartest Sales Book You'll Ever Read: The Truth About Successful Selling

Here are a few highlights from their conversation:

• Jared asks Aaron how he stays up to date with the rules, regulations, and planning opportunities of the frequently-changing tax laws. “With today’s age of technology, there’s always a lot of information available at our fingertips, and [staying up to date] requires a continuous investment [of time] in researching and figuring out how [the research] applies to your client,” Aaron replies.
• When it comes to strategic tax planning, clients usually fall into one of two categories: proactive or reactive. The services that Aaron and his department provide are largely dependent on which category the client falls into, but they generally try to go beyond what is required of them, with their client’s best interest at heart.
• Disappointment is a common emotion that heirs feel when a family member passes away and assets are distributed, Jared says. He asks Aaron how he minimizes disappointment in assisting families with estate planning. Communication and clarification are essential to the process, Aaron shares. 
• Aaron often has clients in their forties to fifties who have taxable estates but don’t necessarily understand why they should be addressing it urgency.  
• Aaron explains how changing one’s residency affects their tax plan. One factor that largely influences a client’s decision to change residencies is the opinions of family members, he shares. 
• If you want to have a value-centered, goal-driven tax plan, you must factor in a variety of different things, including tax expense management. Jared reveals why some clients may choose proximity to their family members over saving money when it comes to changing residencies.

Resources

Aaron Newell on LinkedIn 

DelapCPA.com

Here are a few highlights from their conversation:

• Chris shares that The Table Group, started by Patrick Lencioni, was founded to provide assistance to companies for cultivating and maintaining good organizational health. 
• Jared asks Chris to make a distinction between the two types of trust. The average team’s foundation of trust comes from being able to predict one another’s moves, because they spend a lot of time around each other. This is predictive trust. “Great teams have a foundation of vulnerability-based trust,” he says. This type of trust is present when team members are willing to lay down their guard, admit mistakes, and not be defensive.
• Organizational clarity involves how leaders communicate and reinforce their goals, vision, and disciplines, ensuring that everyone is aligned with what they are trying to accomplish. 
• Chris often encourages his clients to get rid of their agendas for meetings. “This is very counterintuitive, it’s not what anybody learned [to do], but we want to see teams get around the table… and spend the first 15 minutes asking themselves how well they are executing their strategy,” he shares. Additionally, he recommends that electronic devices should not be used in order to keep everyone’s attention.
• Jared asks Chris about observable indicators of organizational health. One such indicator is the way team members interact with one another before a meeting starts. There is a buzz in the air among great teams, and their camaraderie and interest in one another is clear. According to Chris, starting the meeting with this buzz is the ideal beginning for something of such importance.
• The Six Types of Working Geniuses, which is a model developed by The Table Group, identifies six requirements for production. Everyone has two geniuses, which are the two that they are naturally inclined towards, and two working frustrations, which are the two geniuses that they struggle the most with. Chris gives a brief description of the model and how to apply it to the workplace.

Resources

Chris Jenson on LinkedIn | Twitter

TableGroup.com

Meeting Framework

Here are the highlights:

• Luck and risk are siblings: they both play a critical role in our life’s outcome, and they both are guided by things other than our own efforts.
• When we experience personal, professional or financial success, we have to master the skill of knowing when enough is enough, and learning how to be content without becoming complacent.
• “People are frugal in guarding their personal property,” Jared quotes, “but as soon as it comes to squandering their time, they’re the most wasteful with the one thing they have a right to be stingy with.” He talks about how the year 2020 gave us the opportunity to rebuild our schedules around what matters most.
• Developing the daily discipline of gratitude is a great way to create more joy in your life.
• 2020 may not have been joyful for most of us, but we will still find joy when we reflect on the time we’ve spent with our loved ones and how much we’ve grown. 

Resources

The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel

Here are a few highlights from their conversation:

• “The benefit of failure is an objectivity that success simply can’t offer,” Jared tells Ryan. He asks Ryan about the role that failure has played in his life and how he has earned from it.
• Ryan sees strategy as a roadmap to the future. “It’s looking into the future and seeing what we want to accomplish, using tools to figure out where we are now, and filling in the blanks, which is how we get to where we want to be,” he explains. 
• At some point in the future, technology will replace employees in organizations, which is why it is important to identify what we as humans can do better.
• “You have to start with the foundation of trust and build the team on that,” Ryan says. “If you have a truly cohesive team that is completely bought in, you will execute [strategies] ten times [as effectively as you would have otherwise].”
• “COVID has slowed things down for me,” Jared shares. “Some of the things that have been noisy in my life have been eliminated, which has created some space for unstructured time.” Additionally, the current pandemic has allowed him to focus on building his team and learning vulnerability.
• Ryan talks about using the “four helpful lists” as a tool for change management. It’s easy to victimize yourself when faced with any challenge or adversity, Jared says. “There’s something uniquely empowering about deconstructing that process [of the four helpful lists] when I am feeling overwhelmed or frustrated,” he shares.
• Being able to work with different individuals, seeing their strengths and unique value, and collectively coming together to achieve a common goal are the things that have sparked the most joy along Ryan’s professional journey.

Resources

Ryan Boatsman on LinkedIn

Four Helpful Lists

Now-Where-Here One Page

·        Matt shares his story about getting into investment banking, an industry notorious for long hours and hard work. Starting his career right after the dot com bust, the firm was highly understaffed. Matt says this was a great experience, but he’s glad it’s behind him! When he started his own firm, doing important work where he could make a difference to people was a top priority.

·        Jared shares a story about a fishing trip that helped him really understand the value of an advisor. Given that Matt’s company works exclusively with private companies, knowing what to look out for and how to maximize the value is a critical issue. Being a fellow business owner and employer means that Bridgepoint has empathy and understanding, as well.

·        Matt talks about what creates value and interest for a buyer. This can include everything from the quality of your management team to the quality of the finances.

·        Jared and Matt discuss what a company should start thinking about and preparing to sell a business. Often, Matt says, people call a company like Bridgepoint too late in the process. Preparation (and growing the key value drivers!) is everything.

·        Matt and Jared wrap up the conversation by talking about the importance of family, making time for it, and hopes for the next generation. Matt believes that if you can get up in the morning and help people, that is the most important thing

Resources

Matt Plooster on LinkedIn

Bridgepoint Investment Banking

The 6 Financial Best Practices for Year End

Here are a few highlights from their conversation:

• Matt has noticed that clients who have roughly the same levels of professional and financial success often have different effective tax rates. This is due to the ways they allocate time and focus across their businesses. 
• In recent years, the tax depreciation rules in real estate have been very liberal. “[To step-up-in-basis] is a great estate planning tool for multigenerational wealth,” Matt says. Jared comments on the benefits of planning ahead.
• Jared asks Matt how he has helped his clients gain clarity despite the current ambiguity surrounding tax laws. With tax planning, there is often no right or wrong answer, Matt replies. It’s about laying out the options and providing insights on those options.
• Identifying why money matters, and where and why you want it to show up allows you to put together a sustainable plan for the future that is adjustable when change occurs. According to Matt, “[this strategy] allows us to stimulate potential changes and weigh the pros and cons of various decisions, which takes us from something intangible to tangibility.” Additionally, the visualization of the plan and the alternatives creates clarity amongst clients.
• Matt shares one of his most memorable mistakes and how it taught him the value of humility.

Resources

Matt Mattecheck on LinkedIn | Twitter

DelapCPA.com

Here are a few highlights:

• We are bad at differentiating between things that scare us and things that present real danger to our lives because we’re more relaxed around things we are acquainted with, Jared says. The average person is more likely to die in a car accident than in a plane crash, yet flying garners more fear than zipping down the highway at 75 mph. 
• Companies that cannot navigate changes like technology, globalization, and the current pandemic risk becoming defunct. 
• Change is scary because, by nature, it’s unfamiliar, but sometimes a lack of change is actually dangerous.
• “Se hace camino al andar,” Jared quotes. It translates to “the way is made by walking;” you create the pathway itself by stepping into the unknown and embracing change.
• Our emotions may impede logical decision making processes, but using the four R’s can help us overcome that. The four R’s are: recognize, reflect, reframe, and respond.

Resources

How I Built This by Guy Raz

Here are a few insights from their conversation:

• “Often it isn’t the mountains ahead that wear us out, it’s the little pebble in our shoes,” Jared quotes. Perspective is important; something that may seem small today may have the potential to be a disaster in the future. 
• People dislike the idea of life planning because it requires them to stop doing what they’re doing, which they feel they cannot do because their work is significant.
• When you know yourself inside out, you acquire a self-awareness that allows you to have greater clarity for what opportunities are right for you. This clarity helps you make better decisions. 
• A well-updated dashboard gives you the tools to develop self-awareness and allow it to be disclosed in appropriate places for the appropriate people in your life. 
• Jared talks about the Thinking Wavelength, a tool that gives insights into one’s thought processes and patterns. He shares how it has helped him and his team.
• “To be able to have a moment of clarity is to say what’s true about the current moment. We don’t want to only focus on what’s good or bad, but we do want to address the things that are confusing,” Jared says.

Resources

Ken Weigel on LinkedIn | Twitter

• Jerry and Joe talk about the origins of their careers and how they achieved success.
• “It takes a special kind of crazy to have the audacity to create something where nothing exists,” Jerry says, “and to look at the opportunity to succeed rather than all the reasons for failure.” “It takes an optimistic kind of crazy to look at the odds for success and still walk into them,” Jared adds.
• Jerry and Joe share insights about cash, their experiences with clients, and learning. They talk about how COVID-19 has impacted their business and what the pandemic has taught them.
• The difference between a specialist and a generalist is having industry knowledge, according to Joe. Specialists have a higher probability of helping clients arrive at the best solutions for them, and can go in depth with clients about tricky transactions and specific types of issues.
• A common mistake young entrepreneurs make is that, when selling their first start-up, they underestimate how much of their identity is wrapped up in the business. Consequently, they feel seller’s remorse and second-guess whether they made the right decision. Joe shares an experience related to this.

Resources

Jerry Carleton on LinkedIn

ImmixLaw.com

Joe Sullivan on LinkedIn

DelapCPA.com

After the Exit

Off Balanced by Matthew Kelly 

The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman

Here are a few highlights from their conversation:

• If you don't prioritize your organizational culture, it will build itself. Culture is not neutral; it's always growing and evolving. The default culture is one where everyone seeks their own interest, so if you want something different, you will have to manage it.
• The happier and more successful you are in all other aspects of their life, the more effective and productive you will be at work.
• Mark talks about his battle with cancer and how he survived despite being told he had a 97% probability of dying. Focusing on helping his partners at his company be successful instead of his own ego was healthy for him, he comments. 
• Planning your funeral ahead of time makes it financially easier for your family when you pass on, Mark says. Everyone thinks it's a good idea but no one wants to do it because it seems like a morbid affair. Ironically, he claims, it can actually be quite fun.
• Jared asks about Precoa's core values and what they mean to the organization. Mark defines two of them.
• Jared talks about the value of planning.

Resources

Mark Hornibrook on LinkedIn 

Precoa.com

Mark’s book: Fear Not, I Am With Thee: Our Journey with Metastatic Melanoma

DelapCPA.com

Estate Plan Checklist

What Issues Should I Consider Before I Update My Estate Plan?

What Issues Should I Consider If My Spouse Has Been Diagnosed With A Terminal Illness?

Here are a few highlights:

• We often mistake being busy with being important. However, when we’re busy but not effective, it creates stress.
• The foundations for effective time management are laid when you identify your priorities - your “big rocks.” 
• “You waste years by not wasting hours,” Jared quotes. He talks about the dichotomy of being highly effective while also freeing your mind to think in “white space.”
• ‘Chunking’ refers to the activity of hyperfocusing on one task, in which you achieve a state of flow. ‘Flow’ is when you’re so focused on the task at hand that time seems to disappear.
• Jared shares insights about the ‘attention economy.’
• Time is a creative thing; saying “I don’t have time,” is really saying “I don’t want to.”

Resources

Resources

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown

Free to Focus by Michael Hyatt

Cortana by Microsoft

Video: How to reduce distractions in outlook

Podcast Episodes:

The Neuroscience of Mindfulness with David Miller

Managing Your Time Wisely with Paul Schlumpberger

Here are a few highlights:

• Psychologists have estimated that, on average, an adult makes 35,000 decisions a day. Every choice you make consumes a resource, Jared claims. 
• If we do not prioritize our lives, someone else will do it for us. We need to be intentional if we want to have control over our lives.
• When embarking on a new project or goal, begin with the purpose in mind, instead of the strategy to achieve it. Starting with “why” instead of “what” or “how” leads to better outcomes. Knowing what really matters to us can clarify and simplify many of the choices that we are forced to make on a daily basis, Jared says.
• Jared shares his personal strategy for living his best life.
• The Full Focus Planner is a tool that enables you to tangibly translate your plans into a document, and makes space for the important things in life that can’t be measured in a spreadsheet.
• Those that persevere through 2020 are going to come out of the adversity stronger and better than ever before.

Resources

The Full Focus Planner from Michael Hyatt

Here are a few highlights from their conversation:

• In the real world, we encounter setbacks and temporary failures that can be repositioned as learning opportunities.
• A study from Harvard found that 70% of change initiatives in companies fail. Change is pain; it triggers specific areas of our brains and provokes physiological discomfort. Our biology is change averse. 
• Understanding that change is pain for your organization is important. Effective change management, according to Kyle, comes from engaging the teams and decision-makers in an organization. You need to know what drives them.
• People don’t change until the pain of their current circumstances exceeds the pain of the change.
• Great questions more often than not precede great answers. Kyle talks about instances where he, as an advisor, did not have all the answers or solutions to a client’s problem and had to ask questions until they arrived at the best solution.
• To map out a path forward, we must know where we are now. Jared shares a story that illustrates this point. 

Resources

Kyle Renalds on LinkedIn 

DeLapCPA.com

Here are a few highlights from their conversation:

• A donor-advised fund allows donors to grow contributions typically tax-free and give grants to their favorite charities at their convenience. Jeanne calls it a give-grow-grant. 
• When making estate plans, Jeanne urges families to keep in mind that inheritance is the soil from which their next generation can grow. 
• Jared says that those new to generosity often begin by gifting cash, but that can be limiting. Give the apple tree instead of the apple, as this will be more beneficial in the long run. 
• Market disruptions are fantastic opportunities to capitalize on advantages that aren’t usually present. 

Resources

Jeanne McMains on LinkedIn

NCFGiving.com

Here are a few highlights from their conversation:

• Jared says an estate litigation attorney is like a paramedic or EMT: he is a first responder to bad or failed planning. 
• Even if you have a good plan, Mike warns, it can be rendered null if the beneficiaries are not made aware of every detail. 
• Oftentimes grantors are not specific enough with their instructions and people can easily misinterpret what they mean.
• Gaining clarity as a planner of why the money matters is important because it enables you to make the most suitable plans for your client. Jared sees asset protection as loss aversion; after you spend a lifetime creating wealth, there is a fear of losing it through litigation. Mike discusses the role asset protection plays in estate planning.
• In estate planning there are only three options: you can leave your assets to your heirs, the government, or charity.
• Your reputation is important for credibility, but having a character that backs up your reputation is more important, Mike says.

Resources

Mike Hackard on LinkedIn 

HackardLaw.com

Here are a few highlights from their conversation:

• Things have never been better for those in industries that benefit from remote working. However, in other industries like hospitality and tourism, it is an utter disaster.
• Greg defines mentorship as a fundamental form of human development where one person invests time, energy, and personal know-how to help grow and develop another person’s abilities. He says that it’s arguably the most important work you’ll ever do. 
• Self-care is not selfish, Jared remarks. Taking care of yourself replenishes your energy. You cannot give what you don’t have.
• Mentors are not only people living today. We can learn valuable, powerful lessons from people who have gone before us. Oftentimes they can be just as effective as a live mentor.
• Greg describes life in three stages: the first is the formative stage in which you are the most malleable and willing to receive information. The second stage is when you are 25-55 years old: by then, you have figured life out and are regularly organizing your priorities. The third and final stage of life is when you are 55+ years old: you are at the summit of your career and focused on legacy.
• Transitioning to retirement is often challenging for individuals who have assigned much of their identity to their profession and careers. 

Resources

Greg Sherwood on LinkedIn

QuestInvestment.com

Here are a few highlights from their conversation:

• Technology transforms your capacity to continue to work and add value remotely. It can, however, also increase the efficacy of bad actors looking to steal information and monetize it, Jared warns. Hackers are very active in the current pandemic.
• According to David, the cybersecurity industry’s market value was $156 billion in 2019. The estimated value for 2020 pointed towards $165 billion, which is expected to increase up to $248 billion by 2023.
• Today’s global connectivity grants us many conveniences and privileges. However, we are now more reliant on technology and therefore more open to a wider variety of security breaches. 
• Jared asks David about his approach to cybersecurity. David shares questions he likes to ask clients to get a gist of what needs to be done. You should be aware of what’s in your environment as it pertains to information storage and how it sprawls, he says.
• David understands that non-cybersecurity organizations only have a finite amount of resources they can allocate towards cybersecurity. While you need to be aware of your security, you don’t need to be an expert, he remarks. 
• Social engineering is defined by David as someone using a sense of urgency or supposed authority to convince you into performing an action or divulging information you normally wouldn’t. They usually deceive you by pretending to be someone who has your trust or who has authority over you, to request information. 
• Implementing security awareness training is one of the highest impact, lowest cost things you can do to improve your risk management posture.  
• David talks about the origins of Delap’s cyber practice. What makes it unique is that it was developed at Delap, by Delap employees.

Resources

David Buchanan on LinkedIn | Twitter

DelapCPA.com

Delap Cybersecurity Blog

Delap Cybersecurity News

Here are a few highlights from their insightful conversation:

• The harder you try, the luckier you get. Allan recounts many failures early in his short-lived career in public accounting, and gives words of wisdom about the relationship between success and failure. If you’re not failing, you’re not growing professionally, he advises listeners. 
• While there is some truth to the belief that leaders are born and not made, the reality is that many are made. Three characteristics of great leaders are trustworthiness, acquiring the people’s respect, and great communication skills. The most important one, according to Jack Welch, is the ability to make tough decisions.
• Jared has observed that the most successful leaders have helpful mentors and peers that push them to constantly improve. They pace life with their peers, gain wisdom from their mentors, and generously invest into the lives of other people even early in their careers.This establishes a good equilibrium as a leader between pacing, taking and giving.
• There are three kinds of performers, according to Allan. The first is the content, who stops growing professionally and is satisfied with continuing to milk what he has been doing for years. The second is the climber, who immerses himself in new skills and technologies every year because he is never satisfied. The third kind of performer is the crazy, who will climb to the top of the proverbial tree and jump to another tree. 
• What defines leaders is the school of tough love, Allan claims. Mentors who care for you personally but challenge you directly will elevate your skills as a leader, as they offer continuous support but never pull any punches. Jared shares his learning experience under his college football coach and how his mentorship prepared him to be a business leader.
• The three types of financial partners are: customers who buy a few things from you, with whom there is no relationship so they hold no brand loyalty and eventually leave; clients, who buy multiple things from you, refer others to you and with whom there is a relationship; and cheerleaders, who market in the community for you, and recruit talent and clients. 
• Creating a healthy and wealthy business involves asset building instead of asset milking. Asset builders sow seeds today for a better tomorrow, whereas asset milkers eat those seeds. Asset builders invest the first cut of the year-end profit into improvement and development, whereas asset milkers take the profits for themselves.
• The first year of a merger acquisition is like the first year of marriage, Allan remarks. There is going to be a lot of conforming, compromising, and change that may be painful. It’s not about getting the better of the other, but instead about understanding each other’s wants and needs in order to make a fair and sustainable deal that will stand the test of time. 

Resources

Allan Koltin on LinkedIn

Koltin.com

Here are a few highlights from their conversation:

• Paul has developed an acronym for what he believes are the five sources of fear: SURF-T, which stands for Success, the Unknown, Rejection, Failure, and Time. He uses this acronym to categorize fear whenever he experiences it.
• Entrepreneurship is different from intrapreneurship, Jared says. Starting from scratch as a standalone entity is not the same as innovating within a preexisting entity. Oftentimes for intrapreneurs, the status quo has a tendency to smother innovation. The entrepreneur’s challenge often lies with a lack of teammates whose strengths may compensate for the entrepreneur’s weaknesses.
• Paul prefers to illustrate plans via a whiteboard to better visualize them. He shares an experience in which he created a graphic of a complicated ten-page document.
• Employing the right people with the right attitudes is fundamental to creating your desired culture, according to Paul. Rather than qualifications, he interviews potential hires for character, asking questions that gauge the type of person they are.
• Most issues in businesses do not happen with the individual doing the final assembly but instead occur upstream, Paul says. He encourages open communication between every function of a business in order to achieve maximum performance, as everyone has a unique contribution to make that will benefit someone else. 
• Time is a finite resource, but we can control it by what we choose to do and what we choose not to do, Paul urges. He talks about his personal and professional five-year plan and how he delegates his time. One observation Jared has made is that success begets success: as you climb in your career, opportunities, experience and talent increases. 
• Jared asks Paul what the core values are that he and his wife want to pass on to their sons. Some major ones are: to love and honor God; the importance of physical health; winning and losing gracefully; and the value of money. He discusses how he teaches his sons to work for what they want and how to use money wisely.
• You’ll be the same person in five years that you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read, Jared quotes. The power of books is such that you can gather decades worth of insights synthesized into 200-300 words that took someone 30 years of experience. 

Resources

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey

Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill

Multiple Streams of Income by Robert G. Allen

17 Things to Know Before Leaving Home by Paul Schlumpberger

Here are a few highlights from their insightful conversation:

• As a clinical neuropsychologist by training, Moira has observed that there is a profound interface between money and well-being; those who had better relationships to and with money seemed to have much better outcomes than those who didn’t. 
• Though we generally consider ourselves to be rational beings, data shows that we may have biological predispositions to making irrational decisions. Moira believes in embracing the totality of the human experience: acknowledging that sometimes we get diverted by things outside our best interest, have trouble persisting in things in our best interest, and are influenced by things outside our conscious awareness.
• Jared explains loss aversion - a concept in behavioral finance which claims we are motivated to avoid things that have negative outcomes - and how it may shape conversations about marketing. 
• Jared sees equilibrium as resource allocation rather than simply balance, and learning how to manage his time creates clarity around his financial decisions.
• Moira says that those born into wealth often do not hear about the struggles and sacrifices that had to be made in order to acquire it.
• Data shows that money can bring us sustainable happiness when we invest it in people and/or causes that matter to us. 
• Subsequent generations enhance family businesses by being more intentional about how to use the business to hold families together. Moira has observed that third and fourth generation business owners are holistically maintaining their businesses, instead of prioritizing profit above all else.
• Financial literacy combines knowledge with emotional intelligence, and skills in delaying gratification.

Resources

Moira Somers on LinkedIn

MoneyMindandMeaning.com

Recommended Reads

Advice That Sticks by Moira Somers

Intentional Wealth by Courtney Pullen

The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt

When Helping Hurts by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert

Raising Financially Fit Kids by Joline Godfrey

The 3 Big Questions for a Frantic Family by Patrick Lencioni

Essentialism by Greg McKeown

Here are a few highlights from the episode:

• Antifragility goes beyond resilience and robustness; the resilient resists shock and stays the same, but the antifragile grows stronger when faced with adversity. Jared likens antifragility to muscles which get stronger with strain, trees whose roots grow deeper in strong wind, and the renewal and restoration of the earth after forest fires.
• The pandemic has brought with it new opportunities for companies in the manufacturing and technology industries to recapture previously lost market share and use existing technology to meet a current need.
• VUCA is an acronym for volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, which describes constant, unpredictable change. It was first used in 1987 based on the leadership theories of Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus, and was later utilized by the US Army to train and discover more resilient leaders post-Cold War. A major theme of VUCA sees the failure to learn from failure as catastrophic, and not failure itself.
• Companies are monetizing your attention, Jared warns. Technology companies regularly hire cognitive scientists to engineer a user experience that appropriates your attention on conscious and subconscious levels. Additionally, a common tactic used is the amygdala hijack, in which content is created to specifically trigger a highly emotional, somewhat primal response.
• As the ‘attention economy’ thrives, it distracts you from things that really matter. It directs your focus on things out of your control, but if you focus on the part of your life where you have control, you will be happier and more effective.
• Life is short for those that forget the past, neglect the present and fear the future.

Resources

Summer Reading List as recommended by Jared Siegel:

1. The Ride of a Lifetime by Bob Iger
2. Trillion Dollar Coach by Eric Schmidt
3. Competing Against Luck by Clayton M. Christensen
4. What You Do Is Who You Are by Ben Horowitz
5. Stillness Is the Key by Ryan Holiday
6. Hatching Twitter by Nick Bilton
7. Super Pumped by Mike Isaac

Recession Checklist - Ideas to Prompt a Planning Tactic

Here are a few highlights from their conversation:

• Being surrounded by a team of energetic leaders has made his transition into the position of CEO much easier, Earl says. It would have been more challenging to take on the responsibility without their comforting support.
• Working in public accounting afforded Earl the opportunity to coach others; it brought him satisfaction to help people gain experience and develop the necessary skills to pursue their dreams and excel.
• Jared shares that Earl was involved in his interview for Delap. He commends the company on its commitment to living its mission statement. Delap prioritizes their employees’ goals and aspirations over the organization’s objectives, so that if an employee wants to move on, Delap will assist them in every way possible.
• People consider money as a metric to measure success because it is often correlated with a level of professional achievement. Other important investments, such as interpersonal relationships with friends and family, are not as tangible or as easily gathered as money, so they are harder to measure and easier to forget.
• Teenagers can be debilitated if they do not have perspective about the necessities for living. Earl speaks about his experiences mentoring adolescents about financial literacy.
• Earl’s “favorite mistake” was when he decided he wasn’t good enough to continue attending university, because it led him to the desire to improve himself and build relationships to help that goal.
• A failure is temporary, Earl says. 
• The first step to combating team dysfunction is to be open, vulnerable, and build trust.

Resources

Earl Pierce on LinkedIn

DelapCPA.com

Here are a few highlights from their conversation:

• One’s ability to create content is easier, faster, and cheaper than it possibly ever has been, which may lead to a disintermediation, says Jared. This phenomenon has created an echo chamber of content where businesses are clamoring for attention.
• Some of the greatest opportunities are born out of adversity.
• According to Ann, the financial crisis of 2009 was a blessing in disguise for her business; if it didn’t happen, she might not have had her current mindset which enabled her and her business to grow.
• Business owners cannot control the economy or the coronavirus, but they can choose how they respond to it.
• Self-care is not selfish: it is important as a leader within your family and organization to figure out how you are energized. Ann finds emotional, spiritual and physical renewal at the spin studio, where she works out her stress in order to be the best version of herself to her family, team, and clients.
• A byproduct of success is profits and opportunity.
• Conscientious capitalism is the intersection of need, passion, and opportunity, Jared says.
• Good leadership during this time of crisis involves striking a balance between maintaining a sense of optimism and morale and being realistic.

Resources

Ann Smith on LinkedIn | Twitter

A.wordsmith.com

Here are a few highlights from their conversation:

• People often say accounting is the language of business; Shannon says that her start in the accounting office taught her the transactional side of the business.
• Honesty and integrity were core values instilled into Shannon and her brother Scott by their father. His mantra was: never lie, steal or cheat.
• Culture is a living, breathing thing that must be cultivated every day. It’s like hygiene; you have to do it daily in order to stay healthy.
• Two fundamentals of Shannon and Scott’s partnership in running the family business are trust and respect. Shannon says they work well together because they are different and possess complementary skills that help them navigate the business.
• Shannon says her consumption of books enabled her to grow as a leader.
• Whatever you allow is what your culture becomes.
• According to Shannon, navigating through the current pandemic as a business would have been significantly more difficult if they hadn’t taken the time last year to focus on a culture journey with their employees.
• Jared emphasizes the importance of communication during the crisis: it eliminates the opportunity for misinterpretation.
• Generous people are joyful because the psychological benefits of giving include joy, a sense of significance, and a sense of impact.
• Dick’s Auto Group’s priorities for the next 6 months are ensuring employee safety, and profitability.

Resources

Shannon Inukai-Cuffee on LinkedIn

Dick’sAutoGroup.com

Here are a few highlights from their conversation:

• Growing up with little wealth gives you a different appreciation for money.
• Alex believes that the younger a person is, the more important it is for parents or grandparents to make them understand that they need to work for what they want.
• Money buys you things, experiences, and impact. You’ll spend some, give some, and save some. Once you have enough things, the opportunity to invest in experiences and impact is infinitely rewarding, Jared says.
• Gaining clarity about the client’s visions and values is important to the financial planning process because understanding what matters to the client shines a light on what they want and makes the process easier.
• The more complex people’s financial situations are, the higher the demand on the financial advisor.
• The role of a CEO is to be the voice of the company and the cultural frequency holder.
• Anyone who possesses altruistic attributes can be a good leader if they stay true to their values and help facilitate good to happen, Alex says. Leadership can be learned.
• Alex’s company culture promotes a passion to progress, to serve others, and to do the right thing.
• When business owners are selling their companies, they have to make a binary choice: either sell and walk away with maximum profit, or sell and stick around to ensure the business is being run with efficacy.

Resources

Alex Potts on LinkedIn

BuckinghamAdvisor.com

Here are a few highlights from their conversation:

• The rapid onset of COVID-19 has introduced business owners to a new level of economic and financial uncertainty.
• The Mountain Group works as a shareholder representative and specializes in financial restructuring, bankruptcy, and acquisitions/divestitures. 
• Kevin was hired as a CEO at age 24.
• Jared asks Kevin to give some advice to business owners who may be fearful for the future of their businesses. Kevin says the first thing they should do is come to a conclusion of how long the impacts they are facing are going to last, in order to build a general framework to operate on.
• Self-care in these times is not selfish; it is the equivalent of putting your oxygen mask on first before assisting someone else.
• To determine the priorities business leaders should be focused on during difficult times, the core market, distinctive competency, and ways to preserve them must be identified.
• Kevin likens a turnaround to a business fire: regular people run from fire, but leaders should be like firefighters and run toward it.
• Being a CEO is a season of life and it eventually comes to an end.

Resources

Kevin Adams on LinkedIn

The Mountain Group

Here are some highlights from their conversation:

• Jared advises that in the current global state of chaos and disorder, we should remain focused on important things. Our attitudes and belief in our identity are connected to our ability to navigate this moment of uncertainty.
• Anthony’s tagline is “Make success second nature.”
• When you’re able to close the identity gap between who you are and who you want to be, you are able to shift your identity.
• There are seven interconnected levels of the self mastery loop: identity begets beliefs, beliefs beget thoughts, thoughts beget feelings, feelings beget actions, actions beget outcomes, and outcomes shows you your environment.
• What you create creates you; which is to say that over time, the work that you do creates a different person inside of you.
• Cognitive dissonance is our desire for alignment.
• It’s not a requirement to have a singular life altering moment you can attribute to being the reason you changed; just waking up and deciding you don’t like your current circumstances and identifying your unhappiness is a valid enough reason to change.
• Anthony believes ego is everyone’s greatest obstacle.

Resources

Anthony Trucks on LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter

AnthonyTrucks.com

Here are a few highlights from their stimulating conversation:

• Dynamic Light was created based on David’s work on laser speckle contrast imaging.
• David says the hardest transition during this experience has been moving from the sense of “I know the technology” to the sense of “I don't really know how people are going to view it.” 
• Innovators like Steve Jobs have the ability to take the perspective of not only the short term market but also the long term vision.
• Hardware and software are being created to profit off of our shortening attention spans, Jared says. If the product we use is “free,” then we are the product.
• The essence of mindfulness is how long you can stay attentive to the task at hand, David says.
• Heart Math is technology created by Dynamic Light for heart rate variability training.
• The human brain is on average only 2 to 3% of your body mass, but at any point in time it consumes about 20% of your blood.
• To David, meditation means getting in touch with his internal subjective experience.
• When you jump into cold water, you get an extreme flight or fight response from your body, even though there’s no visible threat in front of you.
• Joy is the meeting place of selflessness and intentionality, Jared quotes.
• David would like to be remembered as someone who encouraged people to cultivate their inner sense towards compassion and kindness.

Resources

Dynamic Light

David Miller on LinkedIn

Here are a few highlights from their exciting conversation:

• Jared quotes his former coach, “A goal would be the measurable, specific activities that precedes the outcome or result.”
• Trust is the key to leadership, Dave says.
• You’re not a leader until you have a follower, and while being a leader means stepping out, it also sometimes means following.
• The difference between music and noise is coordination.
• A book is a life hack and a leveraged experience. 
• What differentiates one professional services firm from another is their people, their culture, and their execution.
• Jared repositions failure as education.
• People don’t change until the pain of their current circumstances exceeds the pain of the change.
• Not all decisions are financial decisions, Dave teaches.
• Our understanding of wealth changes over the years.

Resources

DelapCPA.com

David DeLap on LinkedIn

Here are a few highlights from their informative conversation:

• Only 3% of family businesses make it to the fourth generation, Jared shares.
• Mark says that the typical reactions to conflict are fight, flight, or freeze, which is an internal withdrawal or another form of flight.
• There is a difference between vulnerability and transparency, according to Mark. Transparency is sharing information about yourself, whereas vulnerability is disclosing your most personal information, potentially providing someone with something they can use against you to bring you down.
• There are three lies about our identity, Mark quotes. The first lie is “I am what I have,” the second is “I am what I do,” and the third is “I am what others say or think of me.” If these lies are the basis for our identity, we will never discover our true identity. 
• Sharing your feelings when there is conflict is practicing healthy communication. Keeping resentment to yourself creates bitterness which eventually will upset family dynamics.
• The two sources of conflict are misunderstanding and selfishness. The antidote to misunderstanding is clarity or clear communication, and the antidote to selfishness is confession.
• “Always” and “never” are not fair fighting words, Jared says.
• Family businesses are the backbone of our communities.
• Problems scream, but blessings whisper.

Resources

The Family Business Teeter Totter: Balancing Those Two Wor(l)ds

Here are a few highlights from their conversation:

• Jared says that SALT is incredibly dynamic: it feels like there is always another complicated new law to comply with.
• Harriet explains how the Wayfair law has impacted businesses.
• The new CAT is a gross receipts tax, Harriet says. She explains how it is calculated.
• Taxpayers are supposed to register for CAT when their Oregon gross receipts or commercial activity reaches $750,000. 
• Jared asks about potential planning opportunities the CAT presents for business owners. Harriet describes both the opportunities as well as the traps surrounding CAT.
• SALT laws are crafted to collect the most tax possible.
• The state of Washington has a creative way of collecting taxes from businesses.
• Harriet has some advice for business owners to help them limit their tax exposure.
• There are over 12,000 separate tax jurisdictions in the USA. 

Resources

DelapCPA.com

Here are a few highlights from this week’s show:

• Leadership is not about a title, Bart says. It’s about helping others reach their potential.
• Like a kaleidoscope, success is not one dimensional, Jared says. Its many textures include:
• Happiness - what really makes you happy;
• A sense of achievement; 
• Purpose - you're contributing to the world; 
• Significance - you’re positively affecting those that you care about;
• Legacy - you’re helping others find success.
• Bart says that success has to be defined in reverse as well. He decided from the start that there were some trade offs he wasn’t willing to make. “When you put first things first, oftentimes you're able to find room for each part of the kaleidoscope,” he says.
• When you feel love for people, you’re able to receive positive energy and love. One of the greatest things we can do is trust ourselves and trust others. Trusting people is a gift that allows you to have genuine interactions. 
• Bart describes how he filters opportunities to decide what he will dedicate his time to.
• Bart teaches his children to be good stewards of wealth.
• To achieve something great, you have to be willing to attempt something bold. That means making mistakes at times, but it also means having remarkable results.

Resources

Bart Dickson on LinkedIn

Essentialism by Greg McKeown 

DelapCPA.com