Brian Danos: Fee Benchmarking & AI in 401(k)s | Retireholics

[0:00] Speaker A: A world where retirement plans are broken. A team of four renegade ERISA nerds dared to fix it. Justin McNeil, the wild card who plays by no one's rules. Chad Johansson, the technical wizard who can turn anything into a spreadsheet. J.D. carlson, the man with all the plans hiding under his beanie. And Mark Palamini, AKA Robe Guy, the heart and soul of the crew. Together they are retire Hollows, changing the retirement plan industry one beer at a time. [0:33] Justin: Got it. I just want to watch Knight Rider now. [0:36] Chad: Robey, I gotta say, that's a lot of sour cream on that chip there. Those nachos. Like you need to hold back on that just a little bit. [0:43] Mark: I'm not lactose intolerant. [0:45] Chad: Welcome, everyone, to another show. We are the retireholics. We are changing the retirement plan industry one beer at a time. Although I'm drinking a little. Little bourbon tonight. Little bourbon tonight. Let's see a little housekeeping like we used to do. We got to do it these days. Housekeeping. [1:07] Brian Danos: No, thank you. [1:08] Chad: Chap, our champion goes a little different these days. If you've been here in the last few, you know how this works. We're not going to vote at the end. You people out there are going to vote Chap, our champion throughout the entire show. And Brandon will be keeping a leaderboard that he will bring up from time to time. So all you need to do is [1:27] Brian Danos: type [1:29] Chad: CBC and the person's name I'll drink. So like Rob Smith is. Is here. [1:37] Brian Danos: You. [1:38] Chad: You type those three initials I said and then Rob's name and he gets a vote for chat bar champion. And who. Whoever accumulates the most for myself wins the game. I'm pretty sure you can vote for yourself. I mean, test it out. [1:52] Mark: No, you can't. [1:53] Chad: No, you can't. [1:54] Speaker F: You can't have. [1:55] Mark: Challenge accepted. [1:56] Speaker F: If you vote too fast for somebody like you vote once and you try again, it'll stop you. [2:02] Mark: So. Wow. [2:03] Speaker F: So you got. [2:04] Justin: Sucks to be you. [2:05] Mark: Oh, look. [2:06] Justin: Look at that. [2:06] Mark: I got two. [2:08] JD: That was an addition after Kevin Spa voted 954 times. 54 times for one person in an episode. [2:16] Justin: Well, him and Webby do that all the time also. [2:20] Chad: And, Brian, you should pay attention to this. We will be playing acro Sin, so if you say any initialism or acronym, my name aside, you must drink from your penalty drink. [2:31] Brian Danos: What do you. [2:31] Chad: What are. What is your penalty drink tonight, Brian? [2:34] Brian Danos: We have the finest, smokiest scotch you can get from Trader Joe's. From Trader Joe's in my obligatory plastic cup as we do here in New Orleans. Perfect. [2:48] Mark: Yeah. [2:48] Chad: And all you need to do is just take a little sippy sip. It doesn't have to be anything major because, I don't know, you're a rookie. You might. [2:54] Brian Danos: I'm in New Orleans. Come on. [2:56] Chad: You might be in for a lot of trouble. [2:58] JD: Love it. [2:59] Chad: Love it. And with that, Silent J, let's keep it going with the best segment ad ever to retireholics the new new guest intro from Silent J. Take it away. [3:14] Justin: Joining us today from the land of gumbo, fried shrimp, stir fried shrimp, and everything else Bubba was rambling on about to Tom Hanks. He's here to spill the tea on all things participant notices and how he's leveraging Skynet to enhance it all. Brian, have you ever seen our intro this year? Do you know what happens next? [3:28] Brian Danos: I have seen. Yes, I do. [3:30] Justin: All right, so you're ready for the rapid fire questions, right? [3:33] Brian Danos: Let's go. [3:34] Justin: All right, quick responses. Don't lollygag unless you're good. Like Todd Harlow was last week. But let's get started. So what's the best holiday of the year? [3:45] Brian Danos: Yeah. Well, tomorrow, the 4th of July. [3:49] Justin: All right. [3:50] Mark: Tomorrow's the 3rd. [3:51] JD: It's in two days. [3:52] Brian Danos: Two days. You see? Too much drinking. Too much drinking. [3:57] Mark: I like your sty. [3:59] Chad: Yeah. [4:01] Justin: When you were a wee little lad, did you ever go out and collect beads or throw beads or whatever you do out there in New Orleans? [4:09] Brian Danos: Yeah, I mean, come on. Of course. [4:12] Justin: All right. Good fair dealer had pulled off his day in the age of smartphones. [4:19] Brian Danos: Oh, no way. [4:20] Chad: Right? [4:20] Brian Danos: No, he would have been posting everything. Everything. Yeah. Gotten away. You couldn't have gotten away. [4:26] JD: All right. [4:27] Justin: Would you rather fight one horse sized duck or 100 duck sized horses? [4:32] Mark: Oh, [4:35] Brian Danos: let's see. Let's do one horse sized duck. [4:38] Mark: Yeah. [4:40] Justin: I don't know. [4:43] Mark: Hundreds little mini courses, man. [4:45] Justin: Dude, that little. That massive beak just coming down on you, though. Come on. Those web feet. [4:50] Mark: Ducks are. [4:50] JD: Ducks are dumb. [4:52] Brian Danos: Yeah. [4:52] Justin: Yeah, that's true. Is cereal technically a soup? [4:58] Brian Danos: Cereal technically a soup. I'm going with no. No on that one. [5:02] Justin: No. [5:02] Mark: Okay, I kind of disagree, but is it oatmeal? [5:06] Chad: Oatmeal. [5:06] Brian Danos: Ooh, is oatmeal. That's depends how much water you have [5:09] Justin: to put this out to the. To the chat bar, I think. [5:12] Mark: Yeah. [5:12] Justin: So could be a stew like Brandon says. If you were forced to do one of the jackass pranks, which would you choose? [5:25] Brian Danos: Oh, man, it's been a while since I've seen the jackass. [5:30] Chad: You could get your own face tattooed on your back. That would be good. [5:35] Brian Danos: It's funny, I just saw a clip of, like, Steve O was on a Mr. Beast thing, and he didn't realize that Steve O's got a tattoo on his head that's like a dick. And it's like, we do a family friendly show here. No, he didn't realize the guy. Guy had that on his. On his. [5:53] JD: On his head the whole time. [5:54] Brian Danos: Like. No, I love the one. The. The. The motorcycle off the. The ski ramp. That one's cool. [5:59] JD: The ramp. [5:59] Justin: Okay. Yeah, that is good. [6:01] Chad: And Brian, it's. It's. On a family show. We just try not to talk about dicks. [6:05] Brian Danos: Okay. [6:09] Mark: Penis. [6:10] Brian Danos: Okay, fair enough. It's a proper show here. Okay. [6:15] Justin: And here in the chat bar, we're talking about shoving race cars up our rectum, so, yeah, probably family show. Yeah, that's one. All right. And last and never least, on a scale of 1 to 10, how great of an advisor is Nate Moody? [6:28] Brian Danos: 11. Gotta go to 11. [6:31] Mark: Oh, kick him off. [6:32] Justin: And he's not. He's not even here for this one today. I threw him a curveball. [6:36] Chad: Anyway, actually, he actually wrote me on LinkedIn today and said it's so sunny out where he's at and they only have, like, five days of sun every year that he's got to take advantage of. [6:44] Justin: It's not coming. [6:46] JD: I don't blame him. [6:47] Justin: Ladies and gents, the COO of Plan Notice, Mr. Brian Danos. [6:52] Brian Danos: Thanks for having me, guys. [6:54] Justin: Thanks for joining. [6:55] Brian Danos: We're so cool. [6:57] Chad: Brandon, let's get right to it. Let's do some headlines, shall we? That's a great point that Brandon makes. Imagine. [7:14] Justin: What do you say? [7:15] Chad: Imagine how good of an advisor Nate Moody's sister would be. [7:22] Justin: I tried to give him a break on the show, and we just can't do it. [7:25] Chad: I mean, okay, let's. Let's get to something that caught my attention. I'm gonna call it Greedy Gusto. You could call it Greedy Guideline. There's a post on LinkedIn by an old friend of mine, Scott Pooch. He used to be the. The nationwide wholesaler up in the. Oh, he is. He's here tonight? Yeah, he used to be the nationwide wholesaler up in the Bay Area a long, long time ago. I believe he's on the east coast now. He's doing some cool shit with artificial intelligence and helping plan sponsors and companies. But anyways, he made this post. It was a letter from Gusto, powered by guideline, which is apparently, like, how they. They refer to themselves. Now, we were, we were wondering that when the news first came out, or I said, powered by Gusto, by Guideline and said, hey, everyone, with about a month's notice, we are raising our fees from 15 basis points to 25 basis points. Keeping in mind that Gusto has about $10 billion in assets. So, you know, this should, this should bring them in an extra, I don't know, 10 million in revenue, additional 10 basis points. I don't think this argue, this argument, this conversation has to be entirely about the raise and fee. Although I'd like to talk about a little bit, because the bigger point that Scott makes is, hey, let's get rid of these asset based fees. Why are we not talking to clients about direct billable fees that are an employer expense? But let me first go to you, Brian. Responsible businesses have the right to up their fees from time to time. But how do you feel about a, a National Disruptor record keeper that, by the way, they wave the flag of low fees all the time. That's how they win. A lot of this business is talking about how cheap they are. And then to add insult to injury, at least in my opinion, they recently bought this business, you know, so, so Gusto bought it from Guideline. Half of the plans went over the vest. Well, Gusto's got half of them. And so you think when you buy something fairly recently, like throwing a price hike in there anyways, I'm, I'm, I'm not moving the witness. What am I doing? [9:53] Mark: I just call it talking too much. [9:56] Chad: Yeah. How do you feel about a company like that raising their fee by 10 basis points? [10:02] Brian Danos: I mean, first thing is like from a communication point, it's like they talk about how it's calculated and they're just saying we're about to raise it. There's no justification for raising it. I've always feel like if you're going to raise prices, you really need to justify it and say this is why and make few people understand why. [10:21] Justin: The justification is Guideline was doing such shitty business, they weren't profitable and they need to make profit. [10:27] Brian Danos: Right. Right. [10:28] Chad: No, Brian, you're totally right. That's what the experts say. Right. If you're going to deliver a fee hike, let the client know, hey, we've added this, we're doing this now. You're getting this. These are the, all the upsides. [10:38] Brian Danos: Right. [10:39] Chad: As opposed to just, Chad, how do you feel about. [10:42] Brian Danos: And what. One month is also crazy. [10:44] Chad: Like, that's what I was going to ask Chad. [10:46] Brian Danos: That's a crazy Timeline, you know, this should be, you know, it's got to be on your fee disclosures and stuff. Like, so how are you going to roll this out? [10:53] JD: You know, as a plan sponsor, do you now feel obligated to, to take that 10 basis points and make it a build expense? You don't have a whole lot of time to notify these employees that they're going to have a rate increase is. That's who's going to. This is going to get hit by. So I think you might be seeing plan sponsors, if they were properly educated, say, this is a fiduciary risk to me, jump in the cost with no additional service. I got to take on that 10 basis points as a, as a build excuse. [11:22] Chad: Everyone knows I love to pick a debate with Chad, but I mean, Chad, that's, that's not gonna happen. Like, no, no one's gonna do that. All these lands are just gonna take their 10 bips and suck it up and not know anything about it and move forward. Like, I mean, I love small. [11:41] Mark: A small enough number to them that they're like, yeah, it's not that big of a deal really. But if somebody explains the long term impact of that or the other side of the coin, then yeah, like Chad's saying, like, the education part is, is crucial there. Especially if, again, for bigger plans, maybe are getting to the point, maybe looking for alternatives. But I, I was looking at that and I was just wondering, because you were saying it, jd but like the unsettled feeling of if I get a notice from somebody and they give me 30 days or whatever of that with no explanation, no anything, when's the next one coming? When's the next one coming? Is this going to be a revolving door? And it makes me think of like, when, when streaming first became a big thing, it was like Hulu's $12 a month and now it's like 100. Right? So we've fallen into this cycle of just dealing with it, but at least when Hulu tells me they're increasing my price. So like, well, we added 72 channels. And you're like, I don't want those, [12:37] Chad: but okay, can I tell you the ugly truth? And Brian, tell me I'm wrong. You know, executives sat in the boardroom and they said, hey, if we raise this 10 basis points, how many of our clients across the country are going to leave? Someone counseled them and said, hey, it's going to be a very small number. This is what it's going to be. And net net, you know, you're going to make 10 million in new revenue, you're probably going to lose less than a million out the back door. So in terms of running a business to make money, it's kind of a no brainer. So all these things we're saying that are kind of evil or not prudent or not very fair and when you do the math about making money, it just works for the business. But let's, let's move on to I think the bigger discussion, which is what Scott made in a lot of people chatting in his or commenting on his LinkedIn post. We're tackling this concept of shifting fees to the employer versus asset base. And I know we've talked about it on this show, you know, sporadically over the last 10 years, but Chad, the needle's not moved, right? Is that, is that really happening anymore in current 2026 than it was 10 years ago? [13:57] JD: It is, but it's mostly in the startup space because of the credits that are available. A lot of startup plans will now take on more build expense than they ever did 10, 15 years ago because of that. But in the existing plan space, the number of clients that are willing to take an asset based charge. Let me, let me make those two distinct points right there. Take an asset charge and convert it to a build expense is different than having a flat build expense that the client is choosing to pay. But both, we're seeing less and less of that in, in the existing plan space than, than even what I did 15 years ago. [14:32] Chad: Yeah, I, I mean, Brian, where do you stand on that? And in that argument, like I'm assuming you, you like the idea of a build employer cost? [14:41] Brian Danos: Yeah, I mean, I think it's, it's one of those things that if the, they decide to pay it, it's, you know, a way that you can advertise that how lucrative your, your benefits are. Like hey, we take these costs off and then they could, I'm sure you can write that off. Is that what you were saying, Chad? You could write those off as credits and you could write them as a tax credit. So I think, I mean as an expense, not a tax credit as an expense. And I think that's, you know, it's all a part of how you sell it. I think it, it could be a very big benefit of we take these costs on and we're not going to keep adding them in for the participant to, to take. [15:13] Chad: Well, there's, I mean, I'm sure everyone in the chat bar would agree, like there's no better way to to prove you're acting in the best interest of participants than shifting fees from the participants to the employer. I mean that's going to make you look really good in a court of law. And if you never make it to a court of law, it's going to make you look really good in that lunchroom standing in front of the employees, letting them know that you're, you're picking up that price. But again, less. Can we look in the mirror of our own industry right now and realize that even with Chad's example, and I love to hear that, that startup plans see that they're getting these credits. Although we heard from William Mackler that. Did I just refer to him as William? [15:56] Justin: You did. [15:57] Mark: You did. That's because you respect him. [16:02] Brian Danos: That. [16:02] Chad: What is it, you know, 96 of these plan sponsors, there's 80% or I should know better. Sorry Tony. [16:09] JD: It's 6%. Leverage it. 94 do that. [16:13] Speaker F: Yeah. [16:13] Chad: 94 are not doing this. So that plays. That factors into this as well. Yeah. I just think. Here we go. Two things. We'll move on. Both greed and greed. The, the guideline and gusto want to be greedy by, you know, upping their fees and they've done the math and they know they won't lose clients. And sorry, plan sponsors, plan sponsors want to be greedy because they don't want to fork out a check for benefits when some slick salesman tells them they don't have to. And it's just built into the program. [16:44] JD: That's the biggest problem right there. And that was my comment on Scott's post was if, if we get better as an industry of having this conversation of not being the slick sales guy that says, oh, you don't have to pay anything for this plan. Let me just shove you in an A share or put a big wrapper around it. If we could get better at advising clients on the benefits of taking on a build expense, the reduced fiduciary exposure that you just put out there, JD the independence it creates in the recordkeeping chassis and the investments when you go down a build expense route, the deductible aspect of it. If we could get better at simply communicating that, I believe far more plans would go down that path. The problem is too many advisors go path of least resistance. They're not willing to butt heads with a client and try to sell them what's right. They're just willing to go path least resistance and sell it and get out of there. [17:36] Justin: I've been even getting some record keeper wholesalers saying hey, you can even Convert the third party administrator fee, you know, and have it just build to the participants. It's happened a lot lately actually. And I was like, what are you doing? Like that does not. That's not normal. [17:53] Chad: Well, I love Tony's comment of you know, 40 years we're saying, hey, if we can just get better at this Chad. I mean I feel like that's a Chad nuggets moment of. I mean would you go so far as to say that advisors could be more successful with prospects if they would hone their skills on this concept and get in there and say hey, you're being wronged. Like why the do you have these asset based fees? Let's turn these into employer costs. It'll protect you as the employer in your fiduciary thing. It'll create a, you know, an expense that you can write off for your company. And, and by the way, and we didn't say this but all, all you experts know this. In small plan world or medium sized plan world, who's got the biggest account balances? The fucking owners do. And so the owners are the ones getting sucked. You know, they, they're the ones with the millions of dollars that have these larger asset fees on. [18:47] Mark: Yeah, Jenny, how does that feel? [18:49] Chad: We have, we have. What's our, what's our rap fee, Chad? It's just our advisor comp. [18:54] JD: Basically I think 10bps. [18:56] Mark: Yeah, well and in, in, in that world too that we operate in. A lot of the times record keepers have realized this and most of them do have a build expense so they, they've recognized that as well. [19:08] Chad: I want to be really clear for everyone. I was actually looking at our 401k plan the other day because I had to, I had to do this little distribution thing since Hurry left. And you know who's got the biggest 401k account balance on retireholics? [19:23] Mark: Chad? [19:24] Chad: Brandon. [19:26] JD: I believe it. I knew it immediately. [19:30] Speaker F: Yo, I started when I was like 22 and I just. [19:33] Mark: What a great example seem to be Tristan. [19:37] Chad: What a great example. Let's spin the wheel of ice. [19:40] JD: Oh, let me, let me make a comment. [19:42] Speaker F: You asked a question in Google which helped. [19:45] Mark: He didn't ask me a question, Chad. [19:46] JD: You did, you asked. Would, would advisors position themselves better and win more business? What I would say, I don't think that having that conversation is going to win you a takeover plan per se unless you intelligently go in and say right now you're at 20 basis points. I would rather go build expense and flat bill. And here's why you're growing at $1.2 million a year. Let's go ahead and lock in that cost horizon for you instead of letting that bill grow every single year as having this be a percentage of assets. And there are a number of record keepers now that are comfortable going to a flat build expense. It's not like it was 10, 15 years ago where it was really hard to find. So an advisor does that. They will differentiate. [20:30] Justin: Kind of in the spirit we were talking about earlier. When you're capping it like that, how often do you see record keepers raise their flat billable, you know, as a plan grows participants, stuff like that. I've never looked into it myself. [20:43] JD: It depends on who you're looking at. You know, if you're going with one of the modern chassis that are just a base and per participant they, they haven't raised. But if you're going with something that's looking, for example, you see it in the insurance space, hey, we're a, we're a $7200 flat base a year but you got to use our fixed account or stable value and these target. Now if you make a change in the investments, it affects that bill. But I haven't seen them come back and adjust that flat bill structure in any of the groups we've been working with. [21:12] Chad: I just think Chad to, to piggyback on what he said and I'm going to even go in the like mid to large market when you're in a competitive situation and let's say like three others are presenting and you know damn well that the odds are that those three others are probably just going to go asset based because that's what the industry does. Why not take a chance at, at being the one that's different that says hey, I have a different concept and if you want to protect yourself, even do it as a, hey, it's your choice as a plan sponsor. I just like to advocate for this because I think it's a great way to go and that would make you look really good in front of people that you're trying to win their trust, you know, and that they want to make a decision that they're comfortable with. That said, would say a lot about your personality if you learn how to present that properly. So I think that's not to be all serious, but I think that's a great way to go. Don't worry, Brian, you're totally safe. [22:13] JD: It's going to be all tonight. Going to be all right. [22:16] Justin: Yep. [22:17] JD: Told you. It's Ryan's gotta sit and Talk by himself. [22:21] Chad: You guys ever have a problem opening these things? [22:24] Mark: No. [22:24] Chad: No. [22:26] Speaker F: Arthritis. [22:29] Mark: Justin, why don't you ever wait? [22:31] JD: He never. Because he knows how slow he is. He tries to do it so he can look quick. [22:34] Mark: Supposed to be fun. That we all do at the same time. [22:37] JD: All right, well, now JD's going too. [22:39] Mark: Yeah. [22:42] Brian Danos: Smear it off. [22:47] Speaker F: Remember when Justin drank two at once? [22:50] Mark: Oh, yeah. [22:51] Speaker F: Oh, wait, I got it. Hold on. [22:55] Justin: Do you really? You've had this waiting for a while. [23:02] JD: Justin, you're wearing the same shirt. [23:03] Justin: Yeah. [23:04] Chad: Have something prepared. [23:07] Mark: I do, but figure it out yourself. Man, I don't remember this. [23:10] Chad: I must have been drunk. [23:12] Brian Danos: Oh, my God. [23:18] JD: No. That's impressive. [23:22] Mark: You know how I know you have a drinking problem? [23:24] Chad: Who needed to do this? [23:25] Justin: I'm on this show. [23:28] Chad: Tell me you have a drinking problem. [23:30] Justin: Jesus. Taking forever. [23:33] JD: That's impressive. [23:34] Mark: Good. [23:34] Speaker F: Yeah. [23:35] Chad: Diabetes in a bottle. Okay, let's talk about plan notices. Since we got a plan notice guy here. I'm going to give you a true story about myself and my father, Brian. My, my father, Brandon and I's father founded our third party administration company in 1975. And I was in an argument with him like 20 plus years ago. And we were using a technology at the time to send out safe harbor notices via email. And what my dad had done in the 70s, 80s, 90s was send it via U.S. postal Service. [24:18] Brian Danos: Right. [24:19] Chad: And basically think for everyone out there. Think like if I'm emailing you one. What did I do? [24:25] Mark: United States Postal Service. Okay. [24:29] Justin: I thought he actually said it. [24:31] Chad: I thought I did too. [24:32] Justin: He said it. [24:33] Mark: No, don't try to suck me into this. You're right, Mark. [24:37] Chad: Okay. [24:37] Mark: Yeah. [24:39] Chad: And okay, back to the story. [24:41] Justin: Oh, he said the United States. Okay. [24:44] Chad: And we, we could track the emails and it's gonna. When we talk about plan notice tonight, the company. This will make a lot of sense for everyone. But we could track these emails to see whether they were clicked on, opened and looked at and hold on, Timeout [25:00] Mark: ruling from the rest electronic mail. Is he allowed to say the letter? [25:05] Justin: Oh, no, yeah, it's fine. [25:06] JD: Yeah, it's a word. [25:08] Mark: Yeah, it's a word. [25:09] Chad: Okay. And we had a horrendous open rate, Brian. I mean, I can't remember exactly, but I want to say it was south of 30%. And my father, who was a lifelong third party administrator, micromanager, type A. That's fine. Question mark person was shocked by this. I mean, he literally pulled me in the conference room and was like, hey, Young Turk, we can't do this. Like this is, this is out of hand. And I said to my old man, I said okay, let me ask you, how many of the letters that you've been sending out for the past 20 years, you gray haired old, do you think were opened and then placed on those. Remember those little, little containers you'd put your, your hard copy mail in and you'd sit them there on the corner of your desk and how many you think just sat there and never got distributed to participants? Cuz I would venture to guess it's pretty similar to my emails that weren't opened. Why do I bring this story up, Brian? This probably happens with 404 A5. This happens with safe harbor notices. I'm sure it happens with auto enrollment and qualified default investment alternative notices. Like there's a problem with notices being delivered all across the country, right? [26:33] Brian Danos: Yep, definitely. Yeah. So you have the, you have the D.O. department of Labor's tax brain, the electronic delivery standard, which is a valid method. But we started off working with a lot of 3 16s who really wanted to make sure those notices were delivered. And so we developed a method where we send out the email and like you said, you could track to see if it was open if they actually got it or not. If they don't, you send a reminder and then if not, then we move to multiple other channels. We send by text message, track that. If they open that and if they still don't open the text message, then you go and you get the first class mail and that's what you're doing differently. [27:14] Chad: I mean I'm going to save the plan notice pitch for a little bit later. I just want to talk about the general concept here, but I would imagine what you're doing too is you're sending to each individual participant. We're talking emails right now and we can get into this, but let me, before we get there, let me pivot a little bit. Go to you Chad. Is it still true that many of these record keepers create the 404-A-5 fee disclosures for participants and that is the plan sponsor's job to go find that on this on the site and then deliver it to the participants? And how often do you think that's happening? The way that to, to. [27:53] JD: To tell you how bad it is. There's our number of them that don't actually create the 445. They give a template that then the client has to complete as they put in their own data points, then save it as a PDF, then provide it to participants. Am I becoming fewer and fewer. [28:10] Chad: But am I being a chicken little here or is this, are we all in agreeance that this is a show all across the country? Like participants are not getting the notices that they're supposed to be getting, I [28:23] Mark: would say the three letter type of document, Adobe Acrobat. [28:29] Brian Danos: So the other real problem is that even if the record keeper or whoever's making the notice sends it to the plan sponsor, often the plan sponsor we're seeing is just hitting four at all and they're sending it to their employees. And I'm like, well what advice for terminated? They're like, oh yeah. And so like they don't even, they're, they're, you know, even if you get the act of get it, you're missing a whole group of people. So it's, there's a lot of layers of not getting noticed. [28:56] Chad: Well, let's, let's get to the terminated ones. But let's also talk about like electronic versus hard copy. I think a lot of people forget that because we're in such a modern world where we're so comfortable with email that we forget that you can't just by default send email to everyone for these types of notices. It's still true, right, that they need to have like a working email that's part of their day to day. Unless they've filled out some consent that says hey, I don't. So now go ahead and send it to, you know, sexy 69@gmail. I'll take them there, but otherwise, you know, and I don't want to pay. How do you know my email address? That's where we send your paychecks. [29:47] Mark: What paycheck? I don't open them. [29:50] Chad: No. But Brian, this, this probably is misunderstood not just by plan sponsors, but even by financial advisors, I'd imagine. [29:57] Brian Danos: Yeah. And it's definitely. We're seeing across age groups. Right. So the younger generation does not use email at all. They want to text point and you have the middle group that uses will look at email and then the old older crowd just wants paper. So it's also broken up by age group, which is another. What is the preference? [30:17] Chad: What is the Department of Labor stance on Sen Safe harbor notice via Snapchat? Is that approved? [30:23] Brian Danos: Right, right. It's not. Well, you know what's interesting and the missing in the, the 2021 guidelines, they did say for the missing participants best practices. If you could find social media, it just says social media, which is very nebulous and very hard to find. But it is in there. They do talk about that Well, I [30:44] Chad: mean, I would think, yeah, for older people, you could, you could send them a message on Facebook or something. I say, okay, so let's go there. Let's go to the missing participant one, because I definitely think this is like, I, I always apologize for this analogy, but I continue to use it. This is like the redheaded stepchild of this type of stuff where like, no one wants to pay attention to this. Like, you get these terminated participants, they've got a balance. It's. It's small or it's not small. Let's say it's north of seven grand. They run off and you just aren't keeping up on what address they're at. People are moving everywhere these days. They're so mobile, potentially this participants forgot about it. Maybe they haven't. But what plan sponsors don't realize, and I'm pretty sure that, no offense, financial advisors. I'm not sure you all remind them of this at your fiduciary review meetings as much as you want to. And I get it because it's messy. You don't want to, you don't want to step in this, this area. But if you're to ask plan sponsors, you kind of hinted at this earlier. Brian, are these terminated participants in account balance participants? They would be like, well, no, they left us eight years ago. [31:56] Brian Danos: But. [31:56] Chad: And then let alone the ones that are missing that you don't. This is a huge problem that I don't think people even pay attention to. [32:03] Mark: Right. [32:04] Brian Danos: And the funny thing is what I always say, nobody calls their ex employer and tells them they moved. Right. So nobody updates their, like, you know, this is, this is a focus for the audits. You know, the do audit. They, they really said the Department of Labor audits, they do. They do focus on this one terminated. You know, that is a big thing that they're, they're, you know, they want to make sure that they're being treated, treated equally and treated the same way. And like, yeah, it's a huge, huge problem. And it's, you know, there's a lot of faults to, you know, across the board is, you know, record keepers make it hard to get your money out. And so if you, if it doesn't roll out and there's just not good information for people of how to, what to do after you've left a company and how to take ownership of that. And so, yeah, it's really important to find those people and get them the information they need. [32:58] Chad: You know, so you need to take a sip of your scotch for your penalty so hold on. [33:04] Mark: Chad's questioning my [33:07] Chad: is Brian. [33:09] Mark: He said the acronym but then he said oh I said Department of Labor. [33:13] JD: He didn't say Department of Labor the second time though. He said it again. [33:17] Chad: Yeah that's a classic double. So let the record let the record show that he's got two we we [33:25] JD: used to do hashtag not the typical well we started that again tonight. I feel like I'll say it if an advisor steps into a finals and talks about the separation process for participants and the need to continue to send them notices and how we can build a process around helping them get their balance out of the plan to stop this liability to the the plan sponsor again a differentiator that advisors could look at and say this will set me aside from somebody else in that room. [33:53] Chad: I feel like there's a theme here of the non sexy topics could be your way to win new business because everyone else avoids them and if you tackle them head on you're going to look like a real pro in front of these people. And I'd imagine this conversation as ugly as it sounds of termed participants with a balance even missing participants. It's kind of music to a human resources ears like they want to know that they're hiring someone who's on top of this and understands it and can guide them in the right direction. So I I think hashtag not your typical advisor is is a great theme Chad that that we're going with right now. What do it there was oh this is where I want to go Brian to wrap this up. Does it does the employee Benefit and Security Administration you know the the arm of the Department of Labor do they actually come down on these people? Are they disqualifying their plans? Are they billing them $2,000 a day because they didn't send out their safe harbor notice? Like is this really or is this all fear mongering? [35:03] Brian Danos: I mean we've heard. We've heard of larger companies going under larger audits and this was not properly notifying terminated participants. What did cause that the one I saw to be to be billed and it was like it was a daily rate. I'm trying to remember what it was like 25 bucks a day or some or something kind of daily 100 a day or whatever until they got the notice. So they had a. That was just one of the points. It's not I guess it's not super widespread but I have I have seen an example of should be though right. It should be something people focus on. [35:43] JD: Well it's part of their Fiduciary responsibility. But what we're hearing is it's not, it's not being looked at proactively. If it does come up, it comes up during an audit process or a whistleblower. [35:55] Brian Danos: Right, people. [35:57] JD: But not on not receiving notice. [35:59] Mark: Oh, whistleblower. Is this a pun for the World Cup? Are we segueing into that? [36:06] Chad: No, here I was going to segue to this. You might not get fined by the Department of labor, but it's possible. Like as an example, if you're not giving a safe harbor notice and so in effect you're not letting a participant know that there's a match and that participant therefore then does not defer. In theory, if those participants got together, they could come back to you. And if you had to fix it. So this is not like a penalty, but you got to actually fix this. Yeah, you're on the hook, plan sponsor. And that does happen. That happens where they have to pay for it. But I don't want to like fear monger myself. I think the reality is in general, in the small plan space, I don't think these people are actually getting dinged for this stuff now. It doesn't mean as a plan sponsor, I don't want protection. And Brian, I'll let you have the final word. Like if you said to your clients, hey, you're never going to ding for this. So would you like to do it the illegal way or would you want to do it the legal way? I think they'd say I'd really prefer to do it the legal way just in case something goes wrong. But, but Brian, finish this out. [37:16] Brian Danos: Yeah, and I don't think the audit is a scary thing. As much of what we have seen is when there is a termination for cause or a termination that didn't go well, they're the ones that are going to complain the most. So I remember there was one where a company didn't send the blackout notice and the terminated employee said, oh, I couldn't get my money because he was, you know, and he just raised the stink and made, you know, made it really difficult for them. So it wasn't an audit, but it definitely made, you know, their time difficult and something they had to deal with that they would have preferred not to. So that's a great one that everybody gets those. [37:50] Chad: That's a great one that we didn't even touch on. When a plan converts, Chad, 15 million is going from principal to empower. You think the termed participants are getting blackout notices? That's not happening in a lot of Cases. Okay, Brian, let's play. It's not a game. It's kind of a game. Let's look at things on social media. [38:15] JD: Yeah. [38:15] Chad: Talk about them. It's called can we do something different? [38:20] JD: I'm so sick of it. [38:21] Mark: This is great. [38:22] Justin: I love this lamer game. [38:25] Chad: This is great. All right, Brian, just play one. You're gonna work. You're not gonna. [38:34] Mark: Okay, this is good. [38:36] Chad: You're gonna listen to every word that comes out of my mouth. You're not gonna blink without permission. Your world is mine, and I'm not your manager. I'm your boss. [38:52] Justin: This is every sales call on Monday morning with Chad. [38:55] Chad: Dang it. [38:56] Brian Danos: I. I actually. [38:57] Chad: I put this one last and. Because I wanted this to spur a conversation. So we'll come back to this for. [39:04] Justin: Well, we can't come back to it. [39:08] Speaker F: So polite to Claude. I. [39:10] Chad: Like, I'm afraid of it. [39:12] Mark: Right? I am too. [39:14] Chad: I say please. [39:15] Brian Danos: I say. [39:16] Speaker F: I'm like, can we maybe? And then I congratulate it. I'm like, that's perfect. Thank you. [39:22] Brian Danos: Yeah. [39:23] Chad: You ever say thank you? [39:24] Brian Danos: Yeah. Oh, yeah. [39:25] Chad: Um, Brian, I do want to. I want to pivot to a deeper tech conversation, which we'll tackle at the end of this. But. So let's just go to the next. [39:34] Brian Danos: We did. I will say an antidote. We did have a developer that was. That swore the. The meaner you were, the better result. Well, I gave out and I was [39:42] Chad: like, I don't know, but I can see that. [39:46] Speaker F: I think they're wrong. This is why I've changed my behavior. When I was a dick, it seemed like it did things just a screw with me and wasted my time. It started working out. [39:58] Speaker A: You. [39:58] Justin: You're cool. [39:59] JD: You. [40:00] Brian Danos: Right? [40:01] Chad: Hello, Claude. Good morning. How are you? So nice to see you. Let's get started. All right, next one. [40:07] JD: Bean got a hard stop at 12:30. [40:11] Chad: Okay. [40:12] JD: You've got another meeting. No, I just don't want to be here. [40:20] Justin: This is Mark every morning. Good morning. In a sales call. [40:22] Chad: I love that, by the way. What up? And first of all, I think maybe we've talked about this before. The. The hard stop is a professional thing to say, but it is kind of a baller move to get in those things. Be like, hey, I got a hard stop. And, you know, whatever. But I'm just. You guys saw this. I don't have to reset the guys. Like, you got a meeting now. Just want to get the fuck out of here. Brian, do you. Do you give hard stops on your Zoom meetings? [40:47] Brian Danos: I really should Because I'm late too many times to my next meeting. [40:53] Chad: So you know what I'd like to do, Chad? I want to give a hard stop when someone calls me on the phone. That's what I want. [41:01] JD: When they tell you. When they tell you they need two minutes and then it's like 16 minutes later, right? [41:06] Chad: Hey, I just need five minutes of your time. [41:09] Justin: Sorry. [41:10] Chad: No, it's not. You guys are all very good about it. It's other people that work for me that drive me bananas sometimes. Thank you so much for your hard work, though. I appreciate it. Okay, next one brand. [41:19] Speaker F: I'm looking for an email with the term budget proposal in the subject line. [41:22] Justin: Sir, here's every email with the letter [41:24] Speaker F: B sent in 2019. [41:25] Chad: Oh, well, if it helps narrow it down, my boss, Megan actually sent it this morning. Oh, no, she didn't. No, I saw it. I. I saw. [41:33] Brian Danos: That's impossible. [41:34] Chad: My calculations have never been erroneous. [41:36] JD: Oh, yeah? [41:36] Speaker F: Well, I just scrolled down on my phone and found it. Oh, my God. Good news. [41:39] Chad: I found it. [41:40] Justin: I found it. [41:41] Chad: So glad I could help. [41:42] Speaker A: I found it. [41:42] Chad: You didn't do anything. Oh, yeah. [41:44] Speaker F: Here's a reminder. [41:45] Chad: Reminder for a meeting that took place 50 hours ago. Let me know if you need any more help. [41:48] Mark: What. [41:48] Speaker F: What the. [41:53] Brian Danos: By the way, have you. [41:54] Chad: Have you used co pilot at all? I mean, do you. [41:58] Brian Danos: Yeah, that's what I say. He just need to turn co pilot on and it does. [42:01] Chad: That co pilot for your email sucks. [42:05] Brian Danos: Well, it saved me today. I. I didn't have the company I needed the company I in. And I know I've sent it a million places and I didn't want to go. [42:12] Justin: There it is. [42:13] Brian Danos: Yeah. Oh, there you go. Right? And then. [42:15] Chad: I mean, that's an underhand softball for copilot. Of course you'd find that. But I. It was my son that told me, hey, bro, copilot's popping off in Microsoft email right now. And you know me, I love artificial intelligence. I was like, oh, shit, let me do this. Like, let's try this. I failed and failed and failed. The thing could not like that. TikTok is not far off. [42:40] JD: No, the search capabilities of copilot within the inbox is terrible. [42:44] Chad: Terrible. [42:44] JD: But copilot's ability to. To like, read through an entire, entire email chain and help give you a basis for starting the next conversation. It's really good. [42:56] Chad: Okay, I. Yeah, I don't. We're going to talk more about artificial intelligence in a moment. [43:02] Speaker F: All right. [43:02] Chad: Brandon, we've got another one. Yeah, [43:11] Mark: Fever. [43:13] Chad: Here you go. Fever. You're drinking the juice. [43:18] Mark: You reading it, Mark? [43:24] Chad: Okay, we've played that guy before and I mentioned we've seen this. He's my favorite little guy, but yeah, golf. Come on, Harlow. You gotta love that one. When your scramble partner only plays good with a couple of transfusions in them. Devin loves himself. Transfusions on the golf course. [43:43] Justin: J.D. [43:44] JD: you should know that at the start of the member guest, I brought Mark and five or six other playing people into the locker room and made them take shots prior because I know when Mark's skill set comes out. Okay. And we also made a couple of guys who have yet to have. What's our penalty drink? What's our original. Yeah, sorry, Mark, take the Lord had to get in their heads. [44:14] Chad: Let me ask you this, Chad. If a human, say Mark, for example, gets better with his golf game with a couple of drinks in him and we have sales goals for a year in 401k plan sales, why wouldn't we take that same approach? Why wouldn't we counsel him to take a little nippy nip in the car in the parking lot before he walked [44:40] JD: in to present excited he is right now. [44:45] Chad: Brian, Brian, am I off base? [44:48] Justin: Mark, for the month of August. [44:52] Mark: Oh, this is all, this is all being recorded, right? [44:55] Justin: I don't know. [44:56] Chad: I'm just saying like if it works, it works, you know. Okay, we are, let's go to the, the conversation. Let's pretend we just watch one of those artificial intelligence fin talks. Brian, I know you're a tech fan. You've clearly talked tonight about dabbling in, in artificial intelligence and the different models and stuff for context. I actually also partner with another person on a, another company that I own that does artificial intelligence for the financial services space. So I'm, I'm all in on this. I'm seeing people on LinkedIn, professional business people. I'm even getting some private messages from some people telling me that I'm calling them in jest, that they're anti AI and they're pro human. Oh yeah, I'll drink. [45:52] Mark: Yep. [45:53] Chad: And so they're saying things like, oh, AI is not going to be able to do this. [45:57] Justin: There it goes again. [45:58] Chad: And artificial intelligence can't. Can't do this. And you, you know, don't forget humans are going to be so important. You're really going to need a human. And I, I want to, I don't want to be super negative here. I get it. I understand that there's still a purpose for human beings, but I think where these people are missing the mark. And I want your opinion on this, is this technology is really powerful. Like it's gonna do a lot of gnarly. That will make a company stronger and the clients happier. And no, you're not going to be needed in that role if you want to supplement humans around it to, to do better customer service. And we can even get in the customer service side of it. I'm just saying I think these people are scared and they're trying to like, put this human first thing forward. And I don't want to get this out of context, but I just, I'm saying, you know, they're missing the bigger picture. Am I an asshole? Am I way off base? Where are you at on this, Brian? [46:59] Brian Danos: No, I'm, I'm with you. I feel, I feel like that people really have always felt this way when new technology comes, right? You go back, Even in the 60s when mainframes came, they said, oh, work's done. We're going to automate everything. Yes, I think a lot of the jobs today will not, will be done by, you know, these artificial intelligences, but there's going to be many, many more jobs I think created in the future. Side note, I'm a super optimistic guy. [47:28] Justin: Back to this customer service. Yeah, Artificial intelligence. Has anyone spent any time trying to call their Internet provider or whatever utility company lately? Like I have and gotten that, that artificial intelligence voice that can't understand about that I'm calling about and I just have to say representative, Representative. Give me. And I said give me a representative all the time and it seems to work. [47:53] Chad: So let me tell you, Justin, I think I'm guessing what you're interacting with right there is a voice that's built on a flow of like a tree chart. It sucks. It's not actual artificial intelligence, like making a decision. And so let me tell you this, and maybe I've said this on the show before, this is my bet for the future. I firmly believe that Silent J will in. I don't know if it's two years, three years or five years, but I think most humans will be comforted by the fact that when they have a question about their Amazon delivery or whatever it is, that they're talking to an AI that's, ah, I'll drink. That's tapped into the database, tapped into the distribution, tapped into the employer's policies, tapped into what payment you made, and is giving you accurate, immediate answers instead of some in, in some other country. [49:01] Justin: I'm not sure artificial intelligence is going to be able to tell me that the last technician that was out servicing the fiber optic box, that they were just at unplug my fiber and put it into someone else's. And that's why my Internet went down. [49:12] JD: But Justin, how is the person that you're talking to going to be able to tell you that? [49:17] Justin: We ran tests. We're like, hey, let's test this. Oh, no, it's got to be the fibers. [49:21] JD: Artificial intelligence can run that same test. [49:23] Justin: No, don't you dare. I hear you through this wall right now. [49:26] Chad: You shut your mouth. [49:28] JD: Jd, I agree with you though. When, when I have something I can throw in right now. A question, a question about the, the weed eater I'm using to knock down weeds outside. If I can load a picture up into chat and then ask the question, I'm rather than Google searching, well, how do I do this or how do I do that this? Way better. It feels way better to be able to do that. And it will go that way on phone calls. [49:53] Chad: Well, I mean, you just compared artificial intelligence to a Google search. I would agree with you, by the way. I, I, I was drunk and in Texas, and the guy who was working on the front of my land left his skid steer, his, like, $275,000 skid steer in the front of my property. And he told me that the keys were in it and I could go drive it. And I walked, got into that thing and there was all these buttons and gears and things. I didn't, I didn't even know how to start the thing. And I did what Chad did. I just started taking pictures with Google Gemini. And the thing coached me through it. Before you knew it, I was mowing trees down in the back of the fucking property with the, with the bucket in the front. But Brian, we were talking more about customer service. And you can already see in this chat bar, people are getting upset. Like they're saying, no, no, no, the humans are better this or that. So I, I just want you to kind of have the final thought here. I, yeah, I mean, I'm not going to lead the witness, but I think [50:53] Brian Danos: right now also, people are comparing to, if you look back, how, how good it is today, like, how, how good Fable is today compared to two years ago. You'd be astounded. I think people are forgetting, like, how good it's getting and how good it's going to get. [51:06] Mark: Right. [51:08] Brian Danos: And the idea is that, you know, you go to a call center right now and they, they can say, oh, yeah, that's great. And they can try to help you, but it's hard for them to take its secondary action. Whereas I think, you know, we'll be able to say, Amazon will be able to say, okay, for any return that's less than $200, just automatically do it or whatever, set the parameters, you know, or like, you know, in our world, most people want to think about their contributions at home with their spouse after hours. I think they would love to be able to call somebody, say, hey, what's my contribution? Oh, can I raise that and actually have it be able to take, you know, raise your contribution amount right there. Take an action. I think that's where we're going to go, where it can actually take actions for you and get a result faster. Agreed. [51:52] Chad: Agreed. And so I, My, my Chad's nuggets for those people out there that are, that are just hanging on so tight to the value of a human. This is my, my take. I would like you to refocus and realize the power of the technology and then figure out where you want to place the human to do something. But, but stop, stop like, like pointing your finger at it, saying, it's not gonna work because it's gonna work and it's gonna change the entire Earth, everything that we do. And so there's gonna be a place for you as a human. So stop being scared of it and start adopting it and figuring out where you fit alongside it. Because I'm just seeing such naive st. Stupid posts out there about like, oh, the human. The human's gonna do it. These things suck. And Shannon S. Words. I'm talking to you right now. No, I'm kidding. I saw your comments there. [52:51] Brian Danos: I mean, people. No, people that work in call centers, like, it's not the greatest job, like, they can get another. They probably not good at it. A lot of them are not good at it. It's a terrible. It's like a job everybody calls that's upset. It's horrible. So why force those people to do that? I think let the AI do that. I got a drink. But, yeah, I think there's more opportunities for new jobs we're not even thinking of to come. [53:18] Chad: Chad, you had a final. [53:20] JD: I just wasn't sure if you were going to get into one of the other topics you had sent out for the show around artificial intelligence. Creating summary plan descriptions that LinkedIn. [53:30] Chad: Well, that was. This was part of the haters. This was part of the haters. That was an example. [53:35] JD: It was so ignorant, the thought that it can't create a summary plan description from an existing document that you couldn't prompt that in there. [53:45] Chad: Yeah. [53:45] JD: And then all of the comments following the post in that article, not the comment, sorry, but the article itself, that was like. Well, you should remember that if it, if, if artificial intelligence creates a summary plan description for you, you still have to deliver it. Well, no doubt you have to deliver it. That's, that's part of it. Like that, that whole. I don't know why that whole article rubbed me so wrong, but it was so naive into what artificial intelligence is [54:12] Chad: here to help with it's fear. And by the way, if you're an attorney who writes these documents, you're ultra scared. You're like, this is your value that you've brought. And I would say that attorney, you need to pivot. You need to enhance yourself and figure out where are you going to fit alongside this. I think also, Chad, people forget they're even doing that on purpose. They're so used to using like the free version of chat, whatever, whatever. [54:40] JD: They have no idea or Grok or Gemini. [54:42] Chad: And so, yeah, if you jump into free Gemini on your phone and you think it's gonna write a summary plan description properly for you, you're probably extending yourself a little bit. But if you're using enterprise level solutions and you're building a custom artificial intelligence thing that's coding something and building. Oh, Tony. Prompt monkeys, you can do some crazy shit. That is, that is codified, it's prudent, it's professional, it's repeatable, et cetera, et cetera. So wake up, everyone, open your eyes and check it out. Brian, we gotta move. Do you want to make some money? Do you, do you, do you invest? Do you invest? [55:23] Brian Danos: I do. I do invest. Yep. [55:25] Chad: Well, I have got a special thing for you right now. I am sitting right next to basically the Warren Buffett of his generation. No one picks investments better than Rogue Guy. [55:41] Brian Danos: Ah, [55:53] Justin: I feel like there can only be one. [55:55] Chad: Yeah, yeah, right. Justin, you quiet. This company, Robe guy, has over 15, 000 employees. I actually use one of their products, Texas Ranch. They have annual sales of 19 million, up 33% from A4.19 million. Sorry, 19 billion, up 33 from A14 billion. 2024. Their price to earnings ratio, it's. It's negative. They have a negative price earnings ratio because they're unprofitable. [56:29] Mark: Well, let me tell you what that means. [56:31] Chad: They have a market cap of approximately 2.25 trillion. The ticker S, P, C, X. You know what I'm talking about. It's Elon It's SpaceX. Do we buy it or do we sell it? Robe guy. [56:54] Mark: One second. [56:55] Chad: Yeah, Drink your magic potion so it [56:58] JD: gives him all the answers. Right there. [57:03] Chad: Ah, there it is. [57:06] Mark: Okay, let me take you back in time when cavemen used to look up at the moon for. [57:19] Brian Danos: Oh, oh, oh. [57:21] Mark: To figure out, like, if tomorrow was gonna rain or if they were gonna kill a buffalo to. To eat, you know, like, now we have a crazy person who has a company with cars, with batteries and things that shoot up in the space, and we just trust him, like he's a God to some degree. And I think in some ways, I kind of think he came from the moon. I think the first ever moon landing. I'm rather confident we brought home an egg and Elon Musk was born out of that. Kind of like Game of Thrones in a way. Riley just carried him around for a bit, and then he came out and there's probably 45 clones of him in his dungeon somewhere under his offices. So we have repetitive. Elon's just happening. [58:13] Chad: But it is odd how he gets so much done. [58:16] Mark: It really is. Yeah. So anyways, that's all to be said that I think everybody on this show can agree that a wise person would just buy it, right? Because I. I think we're just at a point where, like, what else is there really don't kind of got us by the balls. And it really makes me want to say don't buy, because I want to be a naysayer. Usually I am. Usually I'm the guy who's like, don't do it. Don't fall for it. It's going to be the next MySpace. Never. Not going to exist in a few years, but worked out pretty good for Tom. I think he's just crazy enough to keep this thing going. So I'm in. We'll buy it. We'll buy a little bit. We'll sprinkle a little in. There's a lot of people that will [59:02] Justin: spend money on here. [59:03] Chad: I didn't. [59:04] Justin: I didn't know what to do. [59:06] Mark: Hey, Justin, like they say, don't let them know your next move, buddy. Never. [59:11] Chad: So can you give Brian, like, specific advice? What percent of his portfolio? [59:15] Mark: Brian? So, Brian, I'm. I'm accurate here. Your portfolio is probably worth about 1 1/2 million dollars, and I'm going to say that you should probably take out a second mortgage on your house and bump that up a little bit. By the way, spine print, this is not financial. Don't. Don't come back and sue Me, But I always count. [59:43] Chad: I always count on cursive. [59:45] Brian Danos: I love it. [59:45] Chad: It is. [59:46] Mark: This is real. [59:47] Chad: You should be paying. [59:47] Mark: I think you should put about six Bitcoin on this thing. [59:50] Brian Danos: All right, got it. [59:52] Chad: 360,000 bucks. Okay, great. [59:55] Brian Danos: All right. Yeah, I'm in. [59:56] Chad: All right. [59:57] Speaker F: Perfect. [59:57] Chad: Nice. Thank you. Mark and Brandon, I feel like the. The drunk stock tips on the website needs a refresh, so can you politely ask Claude to. No, no. Sorry. Chap. Our champion. Chap. Our champion needs a refresh. Sorry. [1:00:12] Speaker F: I was going to say we haven't done drunk stock tips for a chapter champion. [1:00:16] Chad: My bad, my bad. Okay, final, final, final. Here, Brian. Let's. Let's give the pitch less. Let's talk plan. Notice the company. Tell us about the company. When did it start? How many employees? [1:00:33] Brian Danos: How. [1:00:33] Chad: How has it grown? How's it been going? And then give us the problem, which we kind of talked about earlier. I think we all know the problem, that it's difficult to properly follow the. The rules with regards to participant notices. So then let us know about the product, how you guys solve that. [1:00:49] Mark: Sure. [1:00:50] Brian Danos: Yeah. Just quick overview. My background's in tech. My business partner, Michael, he had an RA. He had about 80 plans. 20, 21. Oh, yeah, there you go. Best practices came out on missing participants. He came to me. We were partners in another company. We're ECD at the time. He came to me, said, brian, need technology in order to follow this. So we built that to make sure his plan stayed compliant. Then we had a couple other friends, talked about how hard it is to send, noticing all the notices, and so we built software from there. We grew, and, you know, we're 20 employees now. [1:01:24] Chad: Did you honestly. Did you honestly assess the problem from just a small circle of friends, or did you also look out and everything we just talked about earlier and realize that it was a shit show? [1:01:35] Brian Danos: Yeah, both. Both. Yeah. So we've got a lot of. We had some really good people, like in the beginning, Jeff Atwell at Fiduciary Exchange. I don't know if you know Jeff, but he helped us out. A bunch of different people helped us out in the beginning, and we really sat down and learned how difficult this was to stay compliant. And to do it right, like you said, is. It's. It's not an easy thing to do. And that. That's how we built it. And we've had some great clients. Partners along the way that have kind of helped us grow and fill, you know, build these gaps. And so, you know, it's. We take the Drudgery out of sending notices, keep them compliant, report on it all. So if your plans are audited, that we will take on any of the liability for that. We just make it easy and we handle the missing missing participants. And I see Kevin in the chat. We've started working with Pinchecks and some other custodians to actually identify missing participants that qualify for rollouts in cash outs. And we have a new product that helps automate that process. The whole rollout process. [1:02:41] Mark: Did you roll out price increase with that as well? [1:02:45] Brian Danos: Wait, the Rolex? [1:02:46] Chad: No, no, you're talking about the south of 7,000. [1:02:50] Brian Danos: 7,000, yeah. [1:02:52] Justin: Give it a. [1:02:53] Brian Danos: Basically. Well, here's the thing is like what the typical thing that we do in order to send notices. It's easy to send notices. The hardest part is figuring out who needs to get what notice because all the data at different record keepers comes in in different ways. And so normalizing that data is very hard to normalize that data to get it into standardized format. So we spent a lot of time doing that just to know who needs to get noticed. Right. [1:03:18] Chad: Can I ask you on that? How hard were the headwinds? I didn't think about the fact that you needed data. Shame on me. From and from record keepers. They're not the best group of companies to just offer that up to some new startup that's trying to do something. So was that difficult? Is it still difficult? [1:03:37] Brian Danos: Still difficult, yeah. Yes. Basically we have to get direct access from the TPA to get authorized to be able to log in to get that data. Oh, sorry. Yeah. Tpa, you don't have to. [1:03:48] JD: Don't say the games. [1:03:50] Chad: Do you understand the rules? He's not the first one to do that. [1:03:56] Brian Danos: Come on. This isn't really a penalty for somebody from New Orleans. So that's fine. [1:04:02] Chad: That's how I feel every Thursday. Brian, [1:04:07] Mark: that's a pretty important question about your, your business though. [1:04:10] Brian Danos: Go ahead. Sure. [1:04:11] Mark: How much money and how long did it take to come up with the name? [1:04:16] Brian Danos: Oh, well, yeah. [1:04:17] Chad: Did you outsource that to Madison? [1:04:19] Mark: That was like. I mean, did you have a whiteboard board session? [1:04:23] Justin: I feel like they probably made it during Breast cancer awareness Month. [1:04:26] Brian Danos: Yeah, yeah. [1:04:27] JD: There is a. [1:04:28] Brian Danos: There is a reason and here's the reason. [1:04:30] JD: Yeah. [1:04:31] Mark: You're like, let's just get to the point maybe. [1:04:33] Brian Danos: Yeah, yeah. So most of the time when we're sending emails and we are sending it from some, you know, we, we white label it. So we'll send it from the TPA's. The TPA's email address twice. [1:04:48] Chad: Weak link. [1:04:49] Mark: I think you're just doing those on purpose now. [1:04:51] Brian Danos: Yeah, so we said we sent it from there and so it's branded with their logo and. And it feels like it's coming from them. But the only thing is when they, when they click on the link, it does go to our site so we can monitor and see who did it. And at the top it says plan notice on the URL. So it is generic enough that name that nobody actually questions. [1:05:12] Chad: Okay, fair enough. [1:05:14] Brian Danos: Right? [1:05:14] Chad: Still pause for a moment. Just pause for a moment. Kev. Kev, baby. It's Lynsco Private ledger you so shut up. [1:05:23] Justin: Third party administrator. [1:05:25] Chad: Jesus. I was about to ask you, Brian, if you were focusing your distribution more on like plan sponsors directly financial advisors. It sounds to me like you're. You're obsessed with third party administrators, you little creepy dude. [1:05:43] Brian Danos: Third party ministry work with record keepers and third party administrators are our main clients. We have some direct to plan sponsors that we do work with, but I would say the bulk of our business either comes from third party administrators or record keepers. [1:05:59] JD: I think that's where you would want to position yourself. Right? [1:06:02] Speaker F: It's. [1:06:02] JD: It's harder to go after the one on one fight with advisors. There's more scale in those two areas. [1:06:09] Justin: I don't know. [1:06:10] Mark: I threw up the leaderboard for. For pounding. You are man. [1:06:15] JD: Nobody ever beats jd. [1:06:16] Mark: No. [1:06:17] Brian Danos: What's the record? Yeah. [1:06:19] Chad: Oh, the record. [1:06:19] Mark: You're nowhere. You're nowhere when it comes to these boards. [1:06:23] Chad: You're nowhere near the record. I don't. [1:06:25] Brian Danos: I don't know slacking here. [1:06:27] Mark: Getty's liver nose. Yeah. [1:06:29] Brian Danos: Yeah. [1:06:30] Chad: Okay. I'm learning new things that I did not know and. But we'll just use this as the plug SL pitch part of the show. So everyone out there listening, advisors. There's no plan sponsors that listen to this, but other third party administrators. It's plan notice.com and go check it out and inquire and we'll watch you guys grow. How. How has success been? [1:06:58] Brian Danos: Like, it's been great. [1:06:59] Chad: Yeah, it has. [1:07:00] Brian Danos: Like it's. It's definitely been. It's definitely one of those things we found. Nobody likes sending notices, man. And it's like one of those things that it's. It's so. Especially in November when you, you know, most of the plans have to get their annual notices out. It's a hard time. And so we were able to make that so much easier. [1:07:18] Chad: Do you. Do you. Have you tried to. Are you integrating with or having strategic Partnership conversations with companies like Actuarial Services Corporation and Daytair. And [1:07:33] JD: I don't know how to. I don't know if the other ones. Yeah, Fred Todd Williams. [1:07:38] Brian Danos: Yes. Yes, you are. Yes. Right, right. And so, yeah, we are. We're working with them, and we're working with the pension pros of the world that also have integrations with them so that the notices can flow directly to us and it's much easier. Yes, all that. [1:07:53] Chad: Interesting. [1:07:54] Brian Danos: Okay. [1:07:54] Mark: All right. [1:07:55] Chad: Land notice, everybody. [1:07:57] Brian Danos: I'll tell you one. Funny, funny. Because of the AI discussion drink again. Michael brought me to conferences and they're like, a lot of people are like, this is great, I need this. And I said, okay, we checked the checkbox. So it's a compliance thing, right? And I always ask people, do you actually read the notices? And nobody in the industry actually read the notices. And like, it broke my heart a little bit. I'm like, this is kind of, you know, what are we doing here? And so we do this thing where we developed video summaries, basically the ability to take the notice, and we still Deliver the full PDF notice, but also give you a 2 minute video summary that makes it in plain English of what in the world this is? What is a fetus. [1:08:42] Chad: I like that. So check the compliance box by doing what we have to do. Because we've laughed about that for decades in this industry. Like, a summary plan description is written for the participant, and you might as well be reading a fucking adoption agreement like it's right. Lawyer speak. So you're doing a little short video. Yes. Silent J. [1:09:05] Justin: Raise your hand if you've read any of the plan notices that you receive on an annual basis. [1:09:10] JD: I mean, I've read. I've read a. Like, singular. That's why Brandon has the highest balance. [1:09:17] Justin: Yeah, I haven't read a single one. [1:09:23] Chad: So then you have no understanding why you're not getting your safe harbor match, huh? Justin, we carved. No, no, we. We carved out a group. It's an exclusion. It's an exclusion. [1:09:39] Brian Danos: It's just. [1:09:40] Chad: It's shaved head, bearded. I don't know. I forget what it was. But okay. Brandon, can we get a. Can we do. Whoa, Kev. Baby's getting a couple late minute votes. [1:09:53] Mark: But, but, but the. Those three letters. Oh, it counted. How did it got. Oh, cdc. [1:09:59] Justin: Huh? No, no, he. He corrected it. Tony corrected it. [1:10:02] Chad: Drink justice. Oh, God damn it. I see, I see that's. [1:10:05] Justin: Yeah, well played. [1:10:06] Mark: He did that on purpose. [1:10:07] Chad: Not a double vote. That's a correction. Can we get a leaderboard because I believe the time has expired. Who is the chat? Kevin's the chat bar chairman. Again, by a. Oh, yeah. [1:10:20] Justin: By a narrow margin. [1:10:21] Chad: Okay, [1:10:24] Justin: Todd brought it. [1:10:25] Chad: This parlays nicely because. God damn it. I was gonna say our next guest on Retireaholics in two weeks is the hardest working man in 401k. Drum roll. [1:10:41] JD: Brandon Carlson. [1:10:43] Chad: Kev, baby Kevin. Be here with us. Have you seen this guy on link? [1:10:52] Mark: I think Kevin's gonna win chat bar champion while I guess, I think the first person ever to do it. [1:10:58] Chad: Yeah, that could happen. But honestly, have you seen him? The guy is at. [1:11:02] Brian Danos: Yeah, he's everywhere. [1:11:03] Chad: Horse races, your local pizza, banana ball. Yeah. [1:11:07] Mark: I mean, minor leaguer. Yeah. And he's taking selfies and he's dressed up, he's steaming. He's just a beast. [1:11:15] Chad: My God, the guy is networking like I don't think I've ever seen any one network, period, bar none in this [1:11:23] Mark: industry, get people shaving his beard and stuff. I mean, it's. It's impressive. It's impressive. Yeah. We respect. Yeah. [1:11:31] Chad: Maybe we can learn something from him. Chad, Hashtag. Not your typical advisor on what it's like to be for sure the. The. Just the. Yeah. The hardest working guy in 401k. Thank you to you, Brian, and Plan notice for giving you the thumbs up to come in and be with us tonight. We appreciate it. You've been a phenomenal guest. Not as great as Todd Harlow last time, but, you know, those are. That's a high bar, Brian. [1:12:03] JD: That's because Mark and I were here this time and. And we kind of took it away from me. Sorry. [1:12:08] Chad: But you're definitely. You're up. [1:12:10] Mark: I would like to say that, Brian, your. Your taking of the penalty drinks was the best the guest has ever done on time, taking the doubles, laughing about it, doing it for fun. Like, I. I don't know. You know what? I like Todd, but he made me feel like. So. You know what, Brian? I disagree with jd. [1:12:33] Justin: You weren't even here with Todd. [1:12:36] Brian Danos: Well, you know what? [1:12:37] Chad: You know what? [1:12:37] Mark: I don't care. I like Brian more. [1:12:40] Chad: Okay, Brian, Brian, I would say if you looked at. If you compared yourself to all the hundreds of guests that we've had over the last decade, you're definitely in a top percentile. Like, you would not be a mutual fund removed from the core menu. You would stay in place. And lastly, you would not be a. [1:13:03] Mark: Disclosure. Disclosure. I didn't read. [1:13:05] Brian Danos: There you go. [1:13:07] Chad: And lastly, I would like to thank you all out there, the audience, for tuning in. I know it's 4th of July week or wherever the you lazy call it. I'll be. I'll be grinding in the morning, working hard. [1:13:21] Mark: You. [1:13:21] Chad: You go and do what you do. And thanks to anyone else who's tuned in. Like I said at the top of the show, and I'll see it at the end. We are the retireholics. We are changing the retirement plan industry one beer at a time. We'll see you next time. Brandon, play some music.