Fee Compression & Plan Design Strategy | Stephen Daigle

[0:00] JD: So sit back and enjoy as this is Retireholics. [0:05] Justin: I'm sure everyone for that voiceover. [0:08] JD: Welcome to another episode of Retire. Alex. We got a special episode today because welcome to the show the show without Chad. I really like the show without Chad because he thinks he knows everything, but he actually has a really small brain. So I hope you enjoy show without Chad. And when we get done, I hope you're all glad because there's nothing better in all of the land than a show without that man. [0:52] Mark: Hey, my favorite thing after our episodes without Chad is you immediately send the three amigos and he hates so much. [1:04] JD: That's great, Ro guy. For you to let everyone know is every time we do one without Chad, I immediately write him in the group text like, oh, that was the best show ever. Oh, my God. Fucking awesome show, man. Just. We were just chilling. Just the chemistry was sick. Justin, take it away and intro our guest and let's get to it. [1:27] Justin: Sure thing, Stephen. Gone are the days where I'm telling our viewers a little snippets. False, some true about yourself. And what we've realized is they'd rather just hear straight from the horse's mouth. [1:38] Stephen Daigle: Great photo. My God, I have botox on my forehead. [1:41] Mark: Good night. [1:42] Justin: Are you interrupting my fucking intro? [1:45] Stephen Daigle: That really threw me off. [1:46] Justin: Jesus Christ. Anyways, so I'm gonna ask you some rapid fire questions that I need you to do your best at answering with one word. Don't think too long. Just say the first thing that comes to your head. Simple enough? [2:00] Stephen Daigle: Sounds good. [2:01] Mark: Perfect. All right. [2:02] Justin: Does pineapple belong on pizza? And if not, please explain why you're wrong. [2:08] Stephen Daigle: Yes. [2:09] Mark: Yes. [2:10] Justin: Would you rather go for a Sunday drive with Tiger woods or take drugs [2:14] JD: with old Billy Cosby? [2:17] Stephen Daigle: Probably Bill Cosby. [2:19] JD: Jesus. [2:22] Justin: If you were arrested with no explanation, what would your friends assume you did? [2:26] JD: Great question. [2:28] Stephen Daigle: One word. [2:29] Mark: Yep. [2:31] Justin: Your best to do one word, but you can keep it short. [2:33] Stephen Daigle: Probably. Probably piss someone off. So I'm a natural. I'm a natural agitator, so perfect. [2:41] Justin: I thought you'd say piss on someone [2:43] Stephen Daigle: when you started that. [2:48] JD: That would piss someone off. Yeah. [2:51] Justin: What is the proper order of making a bowl of cereal for the milk or cereal first? [2:56] Stephen Daigle: Cereal first. All right. [2:57] Justin: Perfect. And last but not least, Brett Favre, a legitimate 501C3 charity. [3:04] Stephen Daigle: Brett Favre is the man. I'm a Southern Miss grad, so. Hey, he was acquitted. He was acquitted. [3:14] Justin: I should have said allegedly. There people got in trouble for not saying. [3:17] Stephen Daigle: It's a legend. It's a legend. [3:18] Justin: So anyways, ladies and gents, the co founder of bid money, Mr. Stephen Dangle. Yes, I know your last name's not Dangle. I just like saying it that way. [3:28] Stephen Daigle: Yeah, like Lieutenant Dangle, right? Yeah. [3:33] JD: I love the Brett Farbera. That was awesome. See, I did that. I jumped on the last name thing. Anyways, let's spin the wheel of ice, get started off proper. [3:45] Justin: You don't have ice. [3:46] JD: I. I left mine in the house. [3:47] Justin: You gotta run. [3:55] JD: Jesus. [3:55] Justin: Hey, Chad O's. We gotta remember this. [3:58] JD: Okay, I'll. [3:59] Justin: You can. You can pay up with Chad next show. [4:01] JD: I'll run and get it. [4:05] Mark: Thanks for waiting, Justin. That was really kind of you. [4:08] JD: All right, Brandon, let's. While they drink their smear, Knoff and mine sitting nice and cozy in the house. Let's. Let's do some headlines. Like, play the headlines clip thing. Oh, no. [4:22] Stephen Daigle: But thought we were gonna stop doing that. [4:25] JD: All right. [4:25] Justin: Brandon's been doing drugs with Bill. [4:37] JD: First off, we have an article Plan Advisor titled Advisor 401k compensation continues to decline. Looks like they got some of their information here from the 26th edition of the 401k averages book. And it talks about book of averages. No, averages book. Right. I get 401k averages book, book of averages. Is it really? Wow, I would have got that wrong before I kind of dive into that. Steven, the 401k book of averages. Are you a fan of this? I mean, definitely. Venn diagrams into your world. So talk some shit about it or tell us. [5:23] Stephen Daigle: You, like, it didn't even know what it was actually. [5:26] JD: So that's talking shit. [5:31] Stephen Daigle: Yeah. New news to me. [5:34] JD: Are you serious? [5:36] Stephen Daigle: Yeah, man. I live in a bubble, man. I live in my city, like, so advisors compensation is declining. Well, you know, I think it goes back to value that advisors are providing. You know, it's like, I think more and more and more you go up market, like, what are you doing to validate what you're being paid? And then as an industry, the number one problem we're facing is everyone thinks that being the cheapest is the best thing to do, which is cutting our own legs out over and over and over again across it, realizing that the client could care less. They want service. They want someone to show up. They want someone to do it. So I think it's a. That problem has been created by our industry. And it's just being amplified to the point that sometimes I think some advisors want to work for free. Like they're a charitable, you know, 501C. You know, it's like, hey, you're doing a good service, but you do have to make money at some point to actually stay in business and pay your bills. [6:34] JD: I love this. I didn't even have to ask a question. And you nailed off like four topics already. No, that's great. The funny thing about it is I always kind of giggle when I read some of these articles. It says, quote, the benchmarking book also found that on average advisor compensation declined by one basis point. That's what I was like. [6:58] Mark: I didn't know you were gonna go there. [6:59] Stephen Daigle: I was like, that's exactly. [7:00] Mark: I saw that. I was like, wait, this is clickworthy. [7:03] JD: What are we doing, man? [7:04] Justin: Those cl. [7:06] JD: That's clickbait title, right? You're like what? One basis point. But. And by the way, I think Shori's backed me up. I was right. No, it's the 4K average book. [7:18] Stephen Daigle: I know. [7:19] Mark: I just looked it up. [7:20] Justin: I saw it in my head. [7:21] JD: You guys, you're fucking with my confidence. Thought I know this shit. But by the way, ultimate, ultimate downplay of all time. The fact that our guest is like has no idea what it is. It's just like little blue book that for the last two decades was hard copy man. And you just buy a copy and flip through it and they've kind of pulled stats from everywhere and now they're probably going to be mad at me. They've. They've moved to like a digital form of it, but it was literally like a physical book. Okay? In it it says a $5 million plan averaged 1.04% in total plan costs, while a $50 million plan was only charged an average of 6.72basis points. Again, Steven, you're in this world. If I do the math on that, the difference between a $5 million plan and a $50 Million and a $50 Million plan is almost 300 and $310,000. Now you would expect that the $50 million plan has quite a few more participants than the $5 million plan. Let's say 500 verse 50. So 450 extra participants. I've always been told that it's the small plans that are getting screwed by high fees. When I interpret that information, it makes me feel like the large plans are the ones getting fucked by fees. Any logic to what I'm saying there? [8:55] Stephen Daigle: You know, I mean, when you break it across 1,000 people and add it up and do that and you say it sounds like it's big and then you realize it's, you know, per head, 200 a person per year and you say, you know, and this is what my argument I've always had because I'm a big fan, ironically, of TPAs, of if they're not matching in the 401k plan. But you have no idea how to discuss. Sorry, I got a drink for that. [9:20] JD: All right, you can continue your thought. [9:22] Stephen Daigle: I don't know the result, but you cannot. [9:24] JD: Yeah, to me. [9:26] Stephen Daigle: Yeah. I mean, if all things are equal, like go at cost. But I've been in enough meetings with different businesses and advisors to realize they don't care. That's not, you know. Yeah. Should you do good? Should you have a fiduciary role with it? But it also means that people need help. They need education. But I've always argued if they're not even matching and you get them to do a safe harbor. So now they're getting 4%, you know, contributed on behalf of the employer to them, you did more to help that person than saving 10 basis points on record keeping. That is so irrelevant to a person with a thousand dollars in their account. Like, we're talking about nickels. And so I think that's where people. Yeah, it's, you know, cost. I mean, things get compressed CITs. But in the end of the day, you know, I think advisors have lost. How many times I have to drink for all these things coming up. [10:19] JD: So you just jump. [10:21] Stephen Daigle: Yeah, I don't know. [10:21] JD: It's called. It's a collective investment trust, [10:27] Stephen Daigle: but. No, I hear you. [10:30] JD: I hear you a million percent. And I actually am part of that camp. I totally agree with you that this whole industry has been a bunch of wussies when it comes to representing fees. And I've said this on this show many times, that the good, confident, successful advisors actually don't flinch when it comes to discussions around cost and fees and that. And they're able to look you dead in the eye and tell you what they're worth and bill for it and what have you. But I think at the same time, what I was trying to bring up here is we still have to keep our finger on the pulse. We still need to. And I'm surely you agree with that and everything that you've built. We want to know what costs are, what the averages are, what, what's the norm, what's prudent. I mean, you still think that's a fair thing to be intelligent about, right? [11:13] Stephen Daigle: Oh, no. Yeah, 100%. I think it can't be egregious. You know, in the core of our system was being able to shop and compare and make sure that all of that is done efficiently but you know, even knowing that you know yet is the difference in a $45 per head and a 60 like really move, move the needle versus what other value advisor And I think the funds fees, fiduciary people, you know that that's the problem like that industry I think for the last 20 years like it, it changed, that's gone. I mean are we dealing with a shares, are we really dealing with revenue sharing that much? [11:51] JD: Like are there only, only on old legacy things that you stumble on. [11:55] Stephen Daigle: It's and so you're, you're, you're fighting this battle and it, it will probably get to this of what actually matters to the person running the business. And I think that's what we've lost is or even if it's a committee, it's a larger firm, you know what matters to the executive C suite and is it you know, 10 basis points on a fund that to go to a collective investment trust or is it how do you set up a non qual deferred compensation plan to give me as much money as possible and not pay taxes? Because that's you know tax is the thing that moves the needle across any industry. You know. [12:32] JD: And I think that's especially, especially for smaller plans. But I would argue as you go, you go bigger where the tax can become kind of less of an advantage. There's still you know, 20 things you could line up in terms of services that are more important than fees. [12:48] Stephen Daigle: But I'll even say this like we just had a private equity backed orthopedic clinic. They're buying, they're doing, it's about a thousand employees. And what mattered to the 130 doctors? Well they're making $1 million a year their W2 salary. [13:02] JD: Stephen, that sounds like a bit, that sounds like a bit of an edge case. What I was just talking about, what I meant was when you have a thousand, when you have a thousand people making under 100k, you know, you're not going to go in there with a tax advantage design. But I understand your point. [13:17] Stephen Daigle: But no, I'm just, I still think what moves the needle is what matters to the person making the decision. It's them and it's how do you help them better their situation. So if they're making money, which is generally every company, the people that make decisions help them pay less to Uncle Sam and that's the trigger. And, and I think we have Mitch Haber on, I mean he was the master 40 years ago. He said before technology before participant portals, before all this, you had to sell on plan design. Now people get all caught up in widgets and, you know, apps and this and it's like we lost what, why you set retirement plans up in the first place, which was to let you defer money from taxes. Like that's the only reason. It exists in a much broader spectrum than what an IRA can do. [14:04] JD: You know, Justin and Mark, once you back up, we can kind of wrap up this subject. But tell Stephen he's right or tell me I'm wrong here. All the advisors you work with, sorry, most of the advisors you work with still pretty obsessed with what the fee is on that spreadsheet or what the record keeper fee is, what the TPA fee is. I mean, be honest. [14:29] Justin: Yeah, that's, I mean especially for, I think the market we work in, that's [14:32] Stephen Daigle: a big one, right? [14:34] Justin: You know, if our average plans are, you know, in that one to $3 million range, I think it was. Sam so had mentioned it's fun to find those plans where advisors have been asleep at the wheel and haven't been benchmarking the plan. They're charging 35 bips on, I think he had like 30, 29 million right there. And they're completely out of touch right on what they should be making. And so those advisors will see that as an opportunity and go in there and be like, hey, we can cut down your fees. I mean, that's right. Let's be honest though, it's the easiest way to get in a plan sponsor's attention though too. And I don't think you can, you can get upset with somebody for doing that. [15:08] JD: I mean, you're kind of countering, you're kind of countering Stephen here because what we're, what we're saying is that that's actually not what is most important to the decision makers is saving them some money. [15:21] Mark: We're countering it, but we're backing up the statistics, although it's very minimal in terms of the reporting here. But there's a trend happening right now that apparently costs are going to downward. Right. That advisors like we're saying are, are coming in and showing cost savings instead of showing value to say, hey yeah, [15:43] JD: but I'm not going to come in [15:44] Mark: and show you a cheaper price, but I'm going to come in and show you the 10 things that I'm going to do for you to add to your, you know, actual benefit. And the reason why we're doing this and to show positives instead of just a dollars and Cents game. [15:58] Stephen Daigle: Right. [15:59] Justin: And I think they kind of utilize that or use that cost reduction as the Trojan horse to get in there and then show the value of what they actually do. [16:06] Stephen Daigle: And I'm not saying any time you can do it, but will they move a record keeper? Like who wants to move record keepers like first? Like it's, it's painful in, in 9 million different ways. Not helped by the record keepers doing it, but like going back to it and then going to fee compression. I actually have another example because Mike Descenzo is on but you know, introduced to a CPA that, that came in the business but he actually started leveraging plan design. That's all he dealt with with these clients. He took over a nine million dollar plan because it was a basic safe harbor, went to new comparability, upped his fees. So the, the previous Advisor was charging 25 bips. He went to 40 because he said well I just saved you $200,000 in taxes. Clients signed off in a heartbeat. Took it from a JP Morgan advisor. So when you wonder why your fees are getting compressed, you're not creating value like it's 100% fair. And, and, but if you like, and if, if anybody deals with a, I don't even know what is a cp? Certified professional Accountant. Okay, if anyone talked to a CPA and said how are we looking at [17:12] JD: how we charge many fouls? [17:14] Stephen Daigle: Yeah, yeah, no, if we're looking at that, the way they look at it is that if I can save you a hundred thousand in taxes, I'm going to charge a $36,000 a year retainer. Why, why as an industry do we not look at the same thing and like leverage the value we're creating? Because these businesses are making $2 million in profit, 8 million revenue. I think one of the posts like what are they spending on healthcare? It's going up 40% every year. Like they haven't $200,000 increase. So if we're running in there telling them that a bill they don't pay that's coming across, you know, 10 basis points, coming across all these different client accounts, that adds up to $5,000. And you think that matters to them to go through a six month plan conversion like man, we're, we've missed the boat big time like that. [18:04] JD: So I totally agree and I don't want to jump on the soapbox but what I want is for Justin and Mark. I think what Steven's trying to say and I'm backing him up a little bit is hold on, no, no, we need to teach. [18:16] Mark: No, no, no. [18:17] JD: Listen to me for a second. [18:19] Mark: I have to come back to this. You can't. You can't let this go. [18:22] JD: We need to teach financial advisors to man or woman the fuck up and to stop in this silly little race to the bottom. Instead, the two of you are condoning it. [18:39] Justin: I'm not condoning it. You asked a question. If we're seeing that, just. [18:44] Stephen Daigle: You're an enabler. Yeah. You're nurturing the wrong behavior. [18:53] Justin: I'm not saying that's what we're leading with. [18:55] Mark: I'm saying. [18:55] JD: Please comment, Mark, because I have no idea where we're going. We're. [18:58] Mark: We're dealing with two very successful entrepreneurs sitting right here next to us who have very different mentalities on a. How they purchase and. And evaluate services and how they. [19:12] JD: How they also operate. [19:13] Mark: Again, they both have Lamborghinis in their garage, and we don't. Right. And the people that we're working with don't have Lamborghinis in their garage. They're trying to start in the 401k biz. They're trying to build a book of business. And yes, there are times in which you get people who come in and maybe they're not specializing in 401k and they go, you know what? I want to get my foot in the door. [19:37] Stephen Daigle: I'm not going to charge a lot [19:38] Mark: to do it, because I see value in doing a 401k plan. In order to do ancillary business across the board with the executives, to meet with participants and to maybe look at some rollover opportunities and other things. Right. Where they're not looking at the 401k plan as the reason why they're in business or the reason why they're making money, they're trying to do it as a way to do other things as well. [20:03] JD: So it's. [20:04] Mark: It could be a loss leader for that. Like, we work with a lot of folks who focus in the. The benefit side, who have clients that. They're doing the health care, they're doing the other. [20:15] JD: Everyone has a right to run their business. They wait, they want to run it. [20:20] Stephen Daigle: Hold on. [20:22] JD: Time out. [20:24] Mark: Stephen, are you a magician? [20:28] Stephen Daigle: Yes. [20:28] JD: What. [20:29] Mark: How did your beer refill itself without you even moving? Did you have. It's the second beer on tap. [20:37] JD: It's got a bartender. [20:38] Stephen Daigle: Is that not part of it? You gotta drink one during the course of the meeting? [20:42] JD: No. [20:43] Mark: Well, you have to drink at least six. [20:45] Stephen Daigle: But for people that believe in fee compression, they probably can only handle one beer. [20:50] JD: Right. Let Me get back to the, to the real point though, Mark, and I, I kind of mean what I'm about to. If we. And again, everyone can run their business the way they want. But that advisor that you described, I think a better situation is to say, hey, how about not fucking up our industry, our 401k industry? And how about realizing that you're going to have certain roles to play with this client and a job to do. Not that hard to train you up to do a proper fiduciary review. Lots of tools out there you can purchase to support you. You've got the support of a third party administrator, the support of record keepers. There's everything you need in this information to actually do a decent fucking job as an advisor for that plan and charge a reasonable fee for it instead of dragging our entire industry down in this race to the bottom. How about you say that to them? [21:43] Justin: I'm not disagreeing with you by any means. [21:46] Mark: Like the saying goes, I'm going to say it wrong personally. You can take a hippo to water, but you can't make them drink it. [21:53] JD: Right. [21:53] Mark: I can't force somebody to do something they don't want to do. I can't force someone to charge 1%. If they only want to charge 50 basis points. That. What am I, what am I supposed to do there, jd, Tell them what they have to do. [22:07] JD: Stephen, I'll let you have the last word. [22:10] Stephen Daigle: I mean, the last word is no. They can charge what they want. I agree with you, Mark. On a path to other products, all we deal with is generals. That's, that's our, that's our mantra. How do you go? But it also means the number one thing that I've heard is people only care about cost. When you set the plan up, once it's set up and nobody's answering the phone, nobody's responding to an email, nobody's doing this. And you ask, would you pay $5,000 so that somebody would answer the fact? [22:41] Justin: Hell yeah. [22:42] Stephen Daigle: Because their payroll person that doesn't know how to upload a file, that hasn't submitted the safe harbor contributions, that doesn't know how to do this. They're like, I'm paying her 60 grand a year to figure this out. Like, I would happily pay you $5,000 to do this for me. So that's the issue now. Yeah. And if you want to fight fees like go compete with Guideline Invest, well, who are offering 18 months free. You know, if you're a gusto subscriber and, you know, human interest and all these. It's like, man, you're gonna lose that battle. Like, you 100%. [23:17] JD: Like, now you're dragging me down. Now you're dragging me down another rabbit hole. Because we get. We let Sampson finally say his line here with Guideline. But I honestly think, Stephen, that human interest and Guideline are these venture capital backed, hundreds of millions of dollars behind them. They're not profitable companies. And so when they're offering these 18 months for free or their current fee schedules that we say are very cheap, they're also dragging down our industry and guidelines. A perfect example, because they're gone. They left. They sold to Gusto, and. And they did. That was not a successful sale. So. So are all these companies going to survive for the long term, or are they just looking for their exit plan to make a bunch of money and kind of leave us in the rubble behind? So that's it. [24:10] Stephen Daigle: I mean, if you look at the battle with everything, all the new plans being set up, like, nobody's putting effort into design value. It's like, how fast can we set them up? Everyone's always said, you pick them all [24:21] JD: five minutes or less. [24:22] Stephen Daigle: It doesn't mean you compete with price. You know, like, hey, man, if that's what you want, stay with it. You know, you have nobody participating. They never explain anything to you. You know, to me, that's the battle that has to be fought, and it has to be fought by people that know the industry, but it has to be fought by people that say, I value my time and my expertise, and I'll walk away from a client. Client. That's the problem is we have people cutting each other's legs out, providing no value, saying, well, I'm going to educate employees. No, you're not. You're not going to go meet with a thousand employees and sit down with them and explain why they should. $50 in the 401k plan. Oh, well, I. I provide fiduciary governance. [24:59] Justin: Oh, you. [24:59] Stephen Daigle: A 338 lineup. Like, you know, that's not worth. You know, and then what else. What else are you doing? Like, I. Oh, I benchmark back through the black book of three years of averages. You know, I've always said this with benchmarking. I'm like, if I'm gonna go buy gas, if I'm gonna buy gas today, do I care what it caught? The average cost over the last three years? Like, no, I care what it costs today. Like that. [25:24] Mark: Did you just. [25:25] JD: Did you just. Did you just diss the foreign K book of averages again? Calling it did you see me? You said I don't even know what this thing is. [25:32] Stephen Daigle: Is your. [25:33] Justin: It rolls off the tongue. [25:35] Stephen Daigle: Read that book every year when it [25:36] JD: comes outstand it' for sure. Well it's like a legacy old man business in our industry that everyone respects and Steve's just shitting on it all night. I love it. Let's move on. I didn't know we were going to spend that much time on that but I love this. I love this. As usual. I love these shows without Chad. Okay, let's do. Did you guys see I'd never heard of this. I'm sure Stephen hasn't. Oh maybe you read it. This capitalized company, were you aware of them? [26:11] Stephen Daigle: Never. My good friend Mitch Haber. I heard about it through IRA Logics so I think something they're looking at. So Ira Logic's the name of drink again. [26:22] JD: Oh it counts. It counts. Yeah. Don't you don't you don't make the rules here, bro. So you had heard about looks to me that they've been doing this in other areas and now they're kind of trying to tap into this B2B business to business check soon. No, no. Okay, I'll drink approach and like bring advisors in and look at 401k type rollovers in that sense. So if I don't know this product specifically and it's hard for me to figure it out via their website but if they have nice slick technology that allows advisors to support their participant clients in these plans to move to rollover money from one record keeper to an individual retirement account or what have you that the advisor is choosing or what. And it's slick and smooth and happens quickly and is modern day. I see that as a pretty cool business model and I think they've got over $100 million invested in them. You support advisor Stephen. I think the rollover kind of world has always been pretty clunky, kind of kind of manually got to reach out, fill out some paperwork. I mean are you a fan of. Do you know that capitalize is what I described and if you don't. If I, if I described it properly would you be a fan of it? [27:46] Stephen Daigle: I think they're the the new approach is aligning with like manifest which is, you know I sell a plan, there's a thousand participants. I'm not going to go meet with all of them to determine that they have $5,000 in a former account. But if they have it I would love to get that into a plan times a thousand to increase Aum so like a hundred percent. You know, I, I think when I look at. Wait, what's under management? [28:14] JD: Okay, keep, keep talking. But that's the, that's the reason I [28:19] Stephen Daigle: have, I have a manifesto that I build of for an advisor. That's in the space. Manifesto. Yes, Mark, but it's simple. Like you need new plans in the front door efficiently where you actually do charge a fee or you can do it voluntarily and just not charge anything. And you'll get the award for top fiduciary next year even though you're living on the street. But once you have these plans in, you're like, you should get as much money in there as possible because that's how most advisors make their money unless they're flat fee. And there's only really three ways to get money in. It's plan design because the more you can get the business via profit sharing. Cash balance. Yeah, yeah. Secondary auto enrollment. [29:01] JD: Auto enrollment. Auto auto increase. Yeah. [29:03] Stephen Daigle: It's like getting participants more engaged. But that's tough when you have the middle income, the Alice demographic that says hey, I'm struggling, I got debt, I've got all this other stuff. But the third part is, hey, I was at this job, I had a simple. I did this. And like, yeah, over time I've got $10,000. There's not an advisor in the world that's going to go set up an IRA for a $10,000 account, an individual retirement account. But, but if this service can be tapped in like a manifest, get the money into the plan so it's consolidated, I think a thousand percent win for any advisor out there. Because yeah, the back end of this is that when they get terminated or when they leave, you have to capture that on the way out. That's, that's the three pillars for any advisor on here because we've. It's crazy to me how many 401k focus advisors do not even do IRA take rollovers. [29:59] JD: Yeah, they don't do that. [30:01] Stephen Daigle: And you have. Yeah. Or individual retirement account rollover. But like an IRA logics. An individual retirement account. That's not even the name of the company. These are basic. Unless you don't like making money, which I know a lot of people don't. They're against it. [30:20] Justin: I hate that. [30:21] Stephen Daigle: Dude, it's really terrible. But you know I pulled for an advisor and account the other day. $100 million plan. There was 27 million and terminated employees sitting in the plan. Nobody wants them there. The plan sponsor doesn't like, obviously the advisor doesn't care, but I'm with you. [30:44] JD: I mean that situation, it depends. But I think what you said, which is super on point, which is rollovers into the plan, which by the way, I honestly have never really given that a lot of thought. Some type of like organized, efficient, scalable process to get money into the plan of rollovers, then at the same time being cognizant of when the money's leaving. We know Ed Murphy's aware of that and empower are focused on those rollovers. So I know we've always been huge advisor advocates on this show, so I'd love to see them do that. I think what they need is tech to do it more efficiently and maybe this is it. I have no idea. Maybe we'll have a spotlight of them in the future. Tod, we have a. We have a limit in the amount of words you can use in the chat bar. [31:32] Stephen Daigle: Yes. [31:33] JD: Okay, let's. Let's have a little fun and let's go to our Fin Talk segment, which is really one of my favorites. [31:42] Mark: Brandon, I hope you use the one by these gals. [31:46] JD: I really do. Are they on TikTok? I need to follow them. Are you just talking Instagram stories? [31:56] Stephen Daigle: They were. [31:56] Mark: They did an Instagram post for April Fools. Yeah, it's pretty good. [31:59] JD: Steven. This is where we play a, you know, a real or a tick tock. And usually it's business related or 4K or I'm changing that a little bit, but here we go. Brand play is a few or one. We'll discuss this one's first. Oh, God. [32:21] Stephen Daigle: When my wife saw this, she said, can he buy a Tesla to drive [32:27] Justin: or a driver? [32:29] JD: You know what this is from, right? Wrestling. [32:31] Justin: Yeah. [32:33] Stephen Daigle: Wall Street. I love the. [32:36] Mark: The part where before it where he's driving just fine. [32:39] Justin: Yeah. [32:42] JD: Oh, Tiger [32:47] Mark: wins. It's not funny. It's not funny. [33:00] JD: Yeah, well, guess he's not gonna be at the Masters this year. Okay, we'll move on to another one. I didn't know that was gonna be the first one. [33:08] Stephen Daigle: You should never do. You. [33:09] JD: Yes. Do you really not? [33:12] Stephen Daigle: Hell no. [33:12] JD: You've never done it ever. You never wanted to do it? Oh, yeah, I wanted to. Maybe you should do it. Nah, I think you're bad. [33:20] Stephen Daigle: I can already tell you're a horrible influencer, Mark. [33:25] JD: You think Devin does that? [33:26] Justin: I was just gonna say the same thing. [33:28] Mark: Devin's shameless. [33:29] Stephen Daigle: He just. Yeah, he just does whatever he wants. [33:30] JD: Yeah. [33:31] Mark: Hey. [33:32] Justin: Company Christmas party. [33:33] Mark: Nah, tomorrow. Our office is closed. Tomorrow. I didn't know that I scheduled not only meetings in the Morning, but I have work golf in the afternoon. I. I didn't realize we had an office out of office day. [33:45] JD: This doesn't Our internal. [33:47] Justin: Supposed to put that on our calendars. [33:49] JD: This doesn't hit as hard for us. The same way it doesn't hit hard for Steven. It's like, you guys playing golf is kind of part of your gig, so it's not really a calling thing. But can we go. [34:01] Mark: Can we go back? Like, since I've been with plan design now, 15 years almost. Can I go back, like, 16 years? When Chad moved out here and started working for you? I would be sitting in my cubicle at my desk job, doing my thing, right? And he would call me at, like, 12:30 on a Wednesday and be like, hey, man, let's go play golf. And I'm like, I'm working. He's like, well, so am I. But, like, I'm gonna go golf. And I'm like, I can't just leave and go golf. He's like, yeah, you can meet me [34:28] Stephen Daigle: in, like, an hour. [34:29] Mark: So I would literally pull the whole, I'm not feeling good, I'm gonna. I'm gonna go home for the day kind of thing. [34:36] Stephen Daigle: So. [34:36] Mark: Chaplain. [34:38] JD: Oh, I've done Steve. Stephen. I'll tell you that right today, no lie. Two of my sales team, and my sales team is only six people. One was at Torrey Pines, and the other one, I called to ask him something, and I said, was that like a wedge? I just heard. He goes, yep, my 60 degree. So Chad was hitting golf balls and Devin was at Torrey Pines. [35:03] Justin: It's a little different for Chad since he has it in his house. [35:06] Stephen Daigle: Wait, so when you. When you sell on service, but I'm not getting responses for two weeks, this is what's happening. [35:12] JD: Yeah, well, these. These guys aren't. Is this white glove? [35:14] Stephen Daigle: Is this the white glove? Most golf clubs are white. [35:19] Mark: Yeah, yeah, [35:23] Stephen Daigle: we've got you. We got you. [35:26] JD: I had planned to go with the business ones first and the funny ones second, but Brand's going a different route. I like it. All right, play us another one, Brandon. Steven, you're not. You're not writing emails with Chat GPT. Are you all drinking? [35:59] Mark: No. [36:00] Stephen Daigle: No. Oh, man. [36:04] JD: Are you using it in any way? Like, for work stuff? [36:09] Stephen Daigle: We, you know, not Chat gbt. I mean, we've looked at integrating. You know, I would say the Chat GPT is a. What is it? What does that even say? I don't even know. [36:20] JD: Something. [36:24] Mark: Three letters, dude. [36:26] Stephen Daigle: Okay. Is there anything. [36:28] JD: I love how Stephen, like, says the penalty. And then he says it says it [36:32] Mark: again, making sure just verify. [36:35] Justin: Or he says the actual word and then says the acronym. [36:38] Stephen Daigle: Right. Whoever started it asked about Louisiana. You know, drinking is a way of passage from the time of five all the way through life in Louisiana. [36:47] JD: But God bless you. God bless you. Artificial intelligence in your business. [36:52] Stephen Daigle: Yeah, there, there's applications. I laugh. I said, we're still sending, you know, PDF documents unfilled out to set up. [37:03] JD: PDF is a stand for. [37:07] Stephen Daigle: Is there anything. [37:08] JD: Yeah, this is. I think it's a document format or something. Go on. [37:13] Stephen Daigle: Okay. But yeah, it's pretty hard to discuss AI when your industry is. Oh my goodness. Like it's. It's very difficult. [37:23] JD: But what about this? [37:26] Stephen Daigle: Like the number. [37:27] JD: Can I ask you. [37:28] Stephen Daigle: Can I ask you challenge that we've seen and where we've like looked at. Artificial intelligence replaces advisors at some point have to talk to somebody. And Mitch Haver and I have discussed this. Like, your job is to meet new people every day. And as an industry, somehow we've forgotten and maybe because people came up in a service role, a customer relationship role, you have to call and introduce ideas to people and be afraid to be told no. Like I, I'm not interested. But it's been insane to me to see that people that are very high up plan specialists. Napa that. When was the last time you added a new client? Napa's one Golly. [38:18] JD: Association of Planet Virus. Well, let me ask you this then. Less on the like artificial intelligence kind of customer service Vibe. But are you familiar with like Vibe coding and the stuff that Claus doing? Because I'm imagining you've worked with a lot of people to build software as a service for you and kind of customize that approach. That whole world is changing in a big way. [38:41] Stephen Daigle: And Vibe coding is unbelievable in getting you a proof of concept template. The challenge where people are going to get in a lot of trouble, gonna [38:50] JD: have bugs and stuff. [38:52] Stephen Daigle: It's wrong when you're getting into very specific things. And what I've explained is that there's subjective where think of most of our lives. It. It's your opinion. That's what we like us like people listen to this because your opinion goes one way or the other. It's politics, it's this. But then there's the fact and the subjective where what does AI do to do that? Because like when you get into plan design, artificial intelligence. Sorry, but now when you get into this, you're like, what is a safe harbor match? Do you need AI to tell you that it's what a safe harbor match is. You need artificial intelligence to tell you what a rata profit sharing is. [39:40] JD: So like that's where I think I would challenge you to say that first of all a lot of the products and obviously I'm biased on this but a lot of the products that are being built are kind of artificial intelligence built into code. And so it's kind of like a modern day version of software. And how much artificial intelligence you're infusing into is really up to the developer or the creator. But artificial intelligence as like a real kind of machine learning. It understands a question can be a really valuable part of that ecosystem. To where to your question is our whole job every day to your kind of funny point there is to explain to advisors and people what a safe harbor is. What a safe harbor match is why it's 100% vested, what you could do to add on a profit sharing and what that means. And I believe that artificial intelligence is very well suited to answer a lot of those questions. Sometimes better than a human being. Because even Fred Reich can only hold so much in his brain. And that's not true with artificial intelligence. [40:46] Stephen Daigle: Well no. And I agree. When you look at and I would segment our industry into two spaces like the specialists who are predominantly who's on here and who you talk to and who goes to Napa which is what 10,000 advisors choose to ask. [41:02] JD: I think. [41:03] Stephen Daigle: Yeah. [41:03] JD: It goes to. Sorry are part of the membership. Yeah probably yeah but but out of [41:08] Stephen Daigle: 330000 financial advisors that have a license to go out and solicit business and when you look at these larger broker dealers, registered investment advisors all the other got marg. I'm getting there. [41:25] JD: Nice. The. [41:27] Stephen Daigle: The generalist are really where the path is because they have relationships. They just don't know what to do. And I think this is a great [41:38] JD: time for them to be able to. [41:40] Stephen Daigle: It's an unbelievable time because you have state mandates, you have secure 2.0 credits. Where do you find wealth? Small small businesses. That's that's who has money like the. The doctor, the plumber production person. Where do you sell life insurance on key man Buy sell like all this [42:01] JD: stuff like and it's not even just the. Everyone mentions the doctors and attorneys and all this stuff. It's also the guy here in Texas, you know two miles down the street from me that's got a warehouse that's building widgets and he's got 20 employees. That guy's doing a lot better than you realize. [42:18] Stephen Daigle: Like I have the greatest story. A home builder building spec homes, you know, like Dr. Horton type, you know, Meritage. Yeah. 400 homes a year, cranking. Wait, Dr. Horton is. [42:33] JD: Oh, why does he repeat it every time? [42:36] Stephen Daigle: I'm like, I'm so confused by this whole thing. But now I'm going to tequila. But I say Dr. Horton, [42:45] JD: clip that. Clip that, please. [42:48] Mark: That replaces JD's vodka comment. [42:53] Stephen Daigle: The greatest example of this. JD, like a 42 year old semi pro hockey player, starts building houses, making money, doesn't care anything about the 401k trying to build, doing this, and then all of a sudden out of nowhere, he sells the company for $80 million. [43:10] JD: Jesus. Yeah. Wow. [43:12] Stephen Daigle: Isn't that the dream of a wealth manager? But if you never had a relationship with him, how would you ever get that money? Well, how do you get a relationship? [43:21] JD: I mean that's a. You gave like a great win case of like this huge moment. But I would argue that there's all these, there's actually like a book written about this. It's called like the, the Silent Millionaires or something like this where it's like all these small business across the country where the owner or partnership are just doing really well. And I don't mean an $80 million payout, but I mean these guys are making $800,000 a year. They're clipping it every year. Not a problem. It's a great business. And they don't, they need people to help them anyway. [43:52] Stephen Daigle: I totally agree. [43:53] Mark: I'm just, I'm just, I'm just surprised Justin ever told us he sold his business for $80 million. [43:58] JD: Yeah, you know, [44:04] Justin: I didn't tell J.D. [44:05] Mark: about that yet. [44:06] Justin: Mark, thanks for, you know. [44:07] JD: Okay, throw it out there. [44:10] Stephen Daigle: I think the big path as an industry we have to change is that 401k has been looked. Is there an acronym for 401? Yeah, it's been down, it's been looked down on because it doesn't produce a lot of revenue to the firms that manage it. [44:25] JD: You know, comparatively, comparatively speaking, to them, insurance. Yeah, right. [44:30] Stephen Daigle: The second they realize that this is the path to wealth, to insurance, the whole game changes because we have partnerships with independent marketing organizations, insurance marketing organizations. Sorry, that where the path is trying to do life insurance, annuities, this. But they don't know how to sell a 401k plan. And I think that's where the industry. We need to change and be like we're the gateway. Like we are really the gateway. Target these 6 million small businesses that between state mandates or tax credits or this or just they're making money and they don't want to pay the government and we can help them get there. And there's no infrastructure to support it. None. Even with what guideline Bestwell have done, we still have 5 million businesses and every day there's probably, you know, what, 300,000 setting up and doing this. To me, as an industry, we spend too much time beating each other up and not focusing on how do we go support this, how do we make enough. Because all I've ever heard from specialists is there's not enough money in startups. We'll do other things. Like they need it, they want. Like they want. [45:47] JD: I would, I would argue, I would argue that's because we've been. And by the way, I was just trying to break up the ice in my cup so I could put it into my vodkas. But narrows doing it with a flathead screwdriver because I'm in the garage. I would argue that these small businesses would actually be willing to pay a flat fee of 5 grand or 7500 or even 10k if sold properly. I think we're just so obsessed with the 50 basis points on a startup, which is ridiculous. The whole industry should shift and just. I think the clients would be happy to stroke a check for, you know, whatever. [46:25] Stephen Daigle: I. We flat fee the CPA. I mentioned, you know, any startup, $5,000. Commercial painter and. But he saved him 100,000 in taxes. Why would he care about paying $5,000 to set a plan up? [46:39] JD: I pay my business certified public accountant, probably nine to ten grand a year. I think just because he handholds me, he does certain things. I trust him. I like his way of doing business. I could get it for a third or more than that, less than that. But I just, I think that it's. We should really shift that as an industry on these startups since that's going to be the new landscape. Here's a funny thing. I'm totally okay with the two planned Tonys winning a lot of this business and I want to support them and kind of level them up a little bit. But it would be nice to see the kind of experts or the very capable advisors getting down in that small space and we help them do it by saying it's okay to just charge, just charge the fee. Let's move on. This is a good show because you guys are taking my subjects too deep, which is great. I'll just have to kick some out in the end. Let's go to. There was an article from, I think it was foreign case specialist about how Gen Z and millennials, Brandon were looking at, you know, life entrepreneurship. And I wanted to talk about entrepreneurship. Americans Rethink advice. Success in the Modern American dream. A new service suggests that Americans are rethinking how they get their advice. How parents provide financial support to adult children. I'm an example in this one. Sort of, kind of. And even what financial success looks like according to 2026. Well, Fargo money Study, there's been a shift towards entrepreneurship as a form of control and independence. So I want to ask you, Stephen, you're an entrepreneur. Is this a gig for everybody? Like, is this what Gen Z should be doing to 00, right? It is. [48:29] Stephen Daigle: Look, you know, unless you were maybe handed something by your, your parents. [48:35] JD: Oh, he just took huge stab at me. [48:38] Stephen Daigle: I'm sorry. [48:38] JD: Huge stab at me. [48:41] Stephen Daigle: I think we need, I, I saw you say it. We need like a nepo group. Like a, like the k for the 401k Nepo, like there. [48:50] JD: But anyway, sorry. Are there plenty of my peers, my brothers? [48:53] Stephen Daigle: There's a lot, There's a lot. They hold themselves out as self appointed Gary Vees. [48:59] JD: But anyways, I mean, hey, daddy handed me the keys of the car. What do you want me to do? Go on, keep. [49:04] Stephen Daigle: I'm not mad at it. I'm jealous. I'm jealous. [49:07] JD: So entrepreneurship for the young people in this world, is this their way to financial security? [49:13] Stephen Daigle: You know, if they were built to go through failure, then yes, but it's. The path is not easy. You know, I think so many people in startups think that somebody writes you a $10 million check and says, hey, I hope you don't lose my money, good luck. It's not the reality of it, you know, it's like anybody that's changed anything. You really like the Elon Musk almost losing everything multiple times. Like that's the reality. That, that is the reality. And it. You never go into entrepreneurship on money. You go into it because probably you're on the spectrum a little bit, you know, which my wife says I have, but. And then part two, you just feel like there's a problem that needs to be solved and you obsess over fixing the problem and people charge it where they think, oh, this is cool, this is fun, this is this. And then the second it gets tough, like they quit, you know, and so [50:11] JD: I would, I would back you up to say, even though I took over the family business so I didn't have to like build it from the ground, up. I think they see this on TikTok, they see this on Instagram, they see this kind of glorious life. And what they don't see is like the anxiety and the stress that comes along with it. [50:32] Mark: I'll just say one thing, that I think the generation difference of entrepreneurship has shifted to like people thinking becoming an influencer is an entrepreneurship. Right? And that. Right, just like becoming a professional athlete, it's the 1% club, right, that has become a lot of people's aspirations and goals. Because it seems easy, like, oh, I live on the Internet. I can just become someone on the Internet. I'm gonna post every day and follow all these things, but they're literally making no money. And it's, it is not a career path, right? And so I think it's just this idea of starting a business isn't like, it's not what it used to be, right? Where you would invest blood, sweat and tears in creating something they're creating, but it's content and it's not valuable and it's redundant and it's not worth anything. And if I was a parent, no offense, I have two kids, I mean, I'm getting there. My daughter's 12 now, if they think that that's going to be their lifestyle, great, figure it out. And I'm not going to support that. But if you have other ideas or you can write a business plan and you want to do something that's meaningful, I'm all ears for that. But I am not into this. [51:45] JD: Let's jump, let's go to travel now. Let's go to the other side of the coin and talk about the positives a little bit. Because there is something like really great about being your own boss, running your own thing. And there are definitely those days and those times when you're like, yeah, I don't really have to answer to anybody and I can kind of do things the way I want to do things. And you have flexibility and choice, right? And how you want to do things and what you want to do. So here. But even as I'm saying that, the true honest entrepreneur in me is saying, but I want to share with all those young people out there. But bro, some days I sit and think, like, wouldn't it be nice if like a paycheck just came to me every month? Like, just I didn't have to worry about all the inner workings of it all and how it all worked and my payroll. I'm just a 30 plus person company and I have a big fucking nut to hit every two Weeks, like, it's. It's insane. You know, it's. It's [52:47] Mark: a walnut or a pistachio. [52:50] Justin: I think that's the thing to kind of go to Steven's point earlier, too, and to piggyback off years. Like, how few and far between are those days where it's like, oh, I don't have anything going on, or, I can go do this because I'm the boss. [53:00] Mark: Like, the. [53:02] Justin: The newer generations, I don't think they see that. They don't see the blood, sweat, and tears and the stress that goes into it. And they're not built for. I can't remember what's. What you said, Stephen, but they're not built for those tough times. [53:13] Stephen Daigle: You know, it's like you watch somebody win the super bowl, and you're like, man, that would be awesome. And you don't see the 20 years that they do getting there. And it wasn't. Oh, yeah, I just showed up one day. It was good. It was like, man, it. [53:27] JD: It. [53:27] Stephen Daigle: There's misery before their success. [53:29] JD: To the point you don't see, Stephen, is you don't see the fucking 10,000 of them that failed. [53:36] Stephen Daigle: No. Yeah. Like, I mean, or the people that were alongside of you that. That gave up. You know, like, that's. The other side, is that there's a path in entrepreneurship that even people that you thought were aligned with you couldn't handle it, you know, or they didn't see it. And, you know, even people in your family, that's just saying, like, what the hell are you doing? You know, go. Go get. Go get a job and go get a job from day one. I. I started with Primerica out of college because I know where, like, everyone gets into Primerica. I didn't know that at the time. And I'm 21 years old trying to figure out what to do and, like, knocking on doors and calling my friends with, like, no base salary. And, yeah, like, a million people are like, you're gonna fail. You're gonna fail, you're gonna fail, you're gonna fail. And you've just gotta have this different level of, like, one, like, I'm not gonna let anybody be right, so I'm gonna prove them wrong. But then, two, like, through everything that goes on, you have to go home and be like, yeah, I'm not gonna quit. You know? And so, yeah, there's different circumstances. There's different things. But like you said, J.D. in the end, it's the greatest thing you can ever experience if you go through that process. But I've seen other people raise a lot of capital, get pumped a lot of money that haven't gone through it and they failed later, you know, like they never had the right foundation. So it isn't, you know, you go through stuff, you lose friends, you lose family, you, you know, you lose teammates on the path to do. I believe in this enough to keep going versus yes. You know, like you said, go take a check. [55:15] JD: Felt the same way. [55:16] Stephen Daigle: Like, go be a DCI wholesaler. Like, that's Frank. [55:20] JD: I'm pretty much. Pretty sure he said that twice. I feel your Primerica. DCIO is an acronym. The same way I felt when I came in to take over my daddy's company. On the first day, I. They told me I was going to run the company someday soon. And they showed me my corner office and it had some old shabby wood desk in it. And I was like, what the wait, If I'm gonna start working here, can I at least get a nice desk in my corner office for the job? [55:49] Mark: You kept that. You kept that wood desk, but I don't. [55:52] Stephen Daigle: Was this the foundation of Billy Madison? Are you him? [55:56] JD: Yes. [55:57] Mark: Yes, [56:00] Justin: I was supposed to do today. [56:01] Stephen Daigle: You went back to grade school to prove that you were capable. [56:04] Justin: No, to prove that he's not a fool. [56:06] JD: Actually, I didn't even have to prove anything. They just said, go ahead, you're good, you graduate. Let's do a little bid money. Can we? I've heard people calling it bid money. Bid money. You have grown this baby pretty good. You do several things. I wasn't even fully aware. I just thought of you as this kind of like record keeper comparison tool. When I say kind of, I mean like, I understood it to be a very robust. That's a very difficult build, by the way. As you know, there's so many nuances between shared classes and product types. And you know, are they going to have the fixed or a proprietary target date? I'm telling you what you already know. Like, the amount of moving pieces in that shit is just next level. But you don't just do the record keeping comparison thing. You've got like a compliance illustration, like a design illustration arm. You've got what I've now my whole sales team, thanks to some of your record keeper partners, is using some of your 5,500 tactics. Some you kind of reverse search on businesses that don't have a plan reverse advisor searches. So you've clearly kind of built this thing out. Are you crushing it right now? And it's been, it's been a long Time. And so just give us a, give us one, an update on how, how fucking much you're crushing it. And then tell us about what it actually is. Like what I missed. [57:35] Stephen Daigle: Yeah, I mean it, you know, we're doing well. Like the, the partners that we have, the large firms, you know, we've always been a big firm solution, not a individual advisor solution. You know, and we said we have to solve this from the broker dealer [57:50] JD: down, broker dealers, national aggregators, which I [57:55] Stephen Daigle: would say captive, where the, the revenue is there. The problem when you get in the independent space is there's, there's no margin but still, still need an interest. But to us, we laid out very simply like what's the sales cycle of an advisor? And it's identifying a prospect and having information on them. Because how many times do you get a prospect and they have no idea and you're just like, oh, is this crap? It's like, oh, I need to set up a 401k. But they don't make any money and they've got three employees and they don't know if they're going to stay in business. And you're like, why did you bring them to me? So I think identifying profitable small businesses, it was step one, I think step two was plan design. And it was, we love TPAs, we love the story, but taking two weeks to get an illustration back. I mean, you know, jd, God bless you. Wait, is jd, Is JD an acronym? [58:49] Justin: No, you're party administrator. [58:52] Stephen Daigle: Is it John? John David? [58:54] JD: It's James Douglas, but it's the one freebie on the show. [58:57] Stephen Daigle: Okay, it is okay. But yeah, I mean it was plan design but then you have, you know, the secure tax credits, you've got all the variability. And I love this. [59:08] JD: You're giving us this kind of ecosystem, this assembly line. [59:11] Stephen Daigle: It's simple. I identified a prospect and I know what they're not doing, whether they're a startup or whether they're only doing a safe harbor. Well, my angle in is what? Where can I fix it? Which is, is plan design. Then I'm getting into, well, what providers can do this for me and at what cost, which needs to include the TPA portion. Everybody failed that. Sorry. Third party administrator record keepers are involved. But you also have, you know, the 338 portion. And as you mentioned, there's revenue sharing and there's discounted funds and you know, from in a million different ways that record keeps so many different ways they price things. And so how do you create consistency? Because that advisor doesn't know but then let's discuss the biggest problem. The client says yes and I have to set this thing up. That's the nightmare. Like, like paperwork from five different parties. [1:00:08] JD: Do you guys have, have you guys built something in that part of the ecosystem? [1:00:12] Stephen Daigle: Everything. Everything. And so we've automated the entire thing where TPA, third party administrator, record keeper, 338 advisor, you know, even 316. It's like even getting into collective investment trust. If you need, you know, agreement signed or managed accounts that needs to be signed by the client, fees paid, documents collected. Now getting into the last mile, which is you guys know, you sell a plan with a record keeper, you have to go load all this data in manually to their systems. And it's like, why, like, you know, why can't that be automated? Like this is, this is where. [1:00:53] JD: I didn't know you went that far. That's really interesting because. Yeah, that's, that for sure is a [1:00:57] Stephen Daigle: pain point and that's the big path. But then the biggest path is crossing into other lines of business outside of us that make sense to the small business owner. Like we're already collecting the census, we're already gathering. If you do a cash balance, you need W2s, you need tax returns, you need this. You have everything you need to evaluate cash management, healthcare, you know, commercial insurance. [1:01:27] JD: So when you say, when you say you or we, is this the advisor using your product, you're trying to create a pathway for them to make additional revenue or are you talking about your firm? [1:01:41] Stephen Daigle: That's what we're building. You know, so we, we build the infrastructure to, to really work to try to solve the inefficiency in 401k start to finish for the generalist advisor. But for the larger broker dealer firms, the next phase is how do we integrate these solutions that these small businesses need. They want to go to one person they trust. And the thing that we've evaluated is JD, if I came and saved you $100,000 in taxes, do you think you would trust me to bring other ideas to you? [1:02:13] JD: Million percent. [1:02:14] Stephen Daigle: 100%. So like that's how I operate. Like bring me value. So now if you want to sell me health care, you know, sell me life insurance, you know, do any of these other things that are way more profitable? [1:02:27] Mark: Yes. [1:02:27] Stephen Daigle: And you just freed the money up to do it because that, and, and that's the anchor, you know, via a partner. [1:02:33] JD: So can I, can I ask, am I housing as an advisor? Am I housing my plans on your tech, like ongoing in some fashion. [1:02:45] Stephen Daigle: So we focused on the front end. Like how do you get them in? And yes, like basically all that, all [1:02:51] JD: that one time data. Not some like ongoing flow of data. [1:02:55] Stephen Daigle: We still have it but we've never wanted to be a practice management system. We were not in RPAG or we were not. [1:03:00] JD: Yeah, yeah, you got it. Drink for that too. Retirement plan advisory group, man. [1:03:04] Stephen Daigle: Like that. So no, it was like think about the market we're targeting as the generalist. There is no plans to manage. There's nothing there. [1:03:13] JD: And if you look 2 plan Tony's. Yeah. 3 plan Anthony's. [1:03:17] Stephen Daigle: But if you look at firms like [1:03:18] JD: an lpl, E Linsco private ledger, Lynco private ledger. [1:03:24] Stephen Daigle: Okay. But yeah, this is a record. [1:03:26] Mark: This is record breaking. [1:03:28] Stephen Daigle: 32,000 advisors and maybe there's 10,000 that have started sold a plan. So you have a 22,000 advisor opportunity that if you can just get them to be two planned Tonys that's 44,000 plans plus, you know. [1:03:44] JD: Agreed. I'm, I'm just, I'm just doing what I really. Because I'm curious. I live, breathe and sleep this industry. I'm trying to figure out your, your business model in the sense that because you've been very entrepreneurial in that you've built this entire ecosystem. So now I'm get, I'm at the point where my brain's trying to figure out how monetize this and so I'm trying to figure out is oh are you just building this beautiful technology where an advisor can really like make the most of this one time relationship where they bring on this plan because as you just told me, you're not an ongoing solution where I'm going to house all my clients. So I'm an advisor. I find this nice juicy 25 million dollar plan, it's got you know, 500 participants. I'm going to use your system because I'm aware of it now, I'm a member and I can get in there and do some design work, I can get some proposals done, I can close this plan and then set it up easily on your things and then you're going to come to me and say hey look at all these opportunities you have to sell this stuff. So then how do you get paid? The vendors that offer those solutions to me are going to like cut you a revenue share or something like that. I'm just guessing. [1:04:58] Stephen Daigle: Yeah, we're a SaaS solution. [1:05:00] JD: So broker dealers, software as a service. All right. [1:05:05] Stephen Daigle: But yeah, so you know, you think I've, I have all these advisors I have no oversight. How do I manage but also make sure they sell what I want them to sell. I make it easy. I put them into what technology should do, which is not all this randomness that's out there now in that you [1:05:24] JD: funnel it down for them. [1:05:27] Stephen Daigle: Hey, I've got these 10 record keepers. I have these five preferred TPAs, third party administrators. I have, you know I'm going to be the corporate 338. I have all of my paperwork, I have all this and now I'm going to go send them out. So think of Shopify for the 401k. [1:05:45] JD: Yeah you, you have your marketplace, but it's your marketplace. [1:05:50] Stephen Daigle: It's built in custom for the person. So you take a, a broker dealer and they say these are our preferred partners. This is what we want to build, this we want to solve for. But you also take partners like what you guys are participating in with capital group that says hey, we want to empower our, our third party administrator partners to go target more of these generalists and drive more business back. How do we create efficiency? So what I've always said is that guideline, human interest solve for. We made it easy. What they suck at is making it a good product and valuable in this. So why not as an industry work together to say let's make the same efficiency but create actual value with a tpe third party administrator integrated. [1:06:37] JD: Nice check swing. [1:06:39] Stephen Daigle: Yes. With legitimate, legitimate record keeper partners that'll answer the phone. Well now because that's people want easy. But JD it's not an easy efficient process right now versus what a guideline can do. [1:06:59] JD: First of all, you never answered my question in terms of how you're getting paid. But secondly, I'm totally okay with the marketplace thing. You mentioned like 10 record keepers. I think you're just throwing a number out there. I see no problem in a kind of curated marketplace where me and his advisor can go and do all of the things in my assembly line or my ecosystem. And I love the technology, I love the way it works. It's efficient for me, it's scalable for me. And so if I'm only choosing from 10 record keepers and a certain amount of these other kind of convergence products you know that you want, I have zero issue with that. I think if it works and we're providing the right service to clients, I think that's great. But I guess I just want you to tell me is if you're okay with is that so, then you just, those companies are feel like it's valuable for Them to be on your product in your marketplace and they pay you for that? [1:07:50] Stephen Daigle: No, no. So the firms that are, are doing it. So the broker, dealer firm, so we have a partnership with Morgan Stanley. They are doing it so that they can empower their advisors to go out there and do it. Assets make money, asset mark that wants to go out and you know, support the 10,000 advisors. They service, you know, so they're paying for licenses to give out to advisors to drive more business back. [1:08:18] JD: So that's straight license, Just giving them license. [1:08:20] Stephen Daigle: Yeah. Licensing advisor to say this creates value, it creates automation. And is there enough value that the advisor is willing to use this to do business? That's, that's the model. We're not a TPA, we're not a record keeper, we're not a 316. So. But no, I mean it doesn't mean there's not pass out, but it's why obviously we want to align with third party administrators to say yes, there's a service element needed to support this. All of these firms get so wrapped up in record keepers, they don't think like, well, the third party administrators, who's going to support the generalist advisors across our firm? But it's a very disorganized industry. You know, like there's been attempts at, you know, aggregation and [1:09:10] JD: I don't want to be part of the Vuori Group. I mean that's not worked out well. [1:09:16] Stephen Daigle: There's not a lot of, you know, consistency or so. No, it really is that. It's, you know, being able to, you know, great automation, sell to the firms that are looking to do that and have an initiative to grow in the space. [1:09:34] JD: Good for you. And I just, I'm, I am a huge fan of like technology. I think our industry has always been such a big industry in terms of the amount of money we deal with. You know, the companies we're working with, Fidelity, Vanguard, Blackrock, et cetera. You would think that our technology would be like pretty cutting edge. And we've talked about this many times on the show, that it's not, you know, it's pretty like 15 years ago. And so anytime I'm seeing stuff that is more next gen and forward, I think that's great for us. So God bless you and kudos to that. Let's do one more fun thing before we leave. It's everybody's favorite segment. It's what we do here, Stephen, is. I've been missing this. It's not what you think. No, damn it, no. This is all about me. Here, Justin. I was in California and I bought a ranch in Texas. I still got my place back there in Cali. I head back in about a month. But we like to update the community on how life has been out here in Texas. We call this Tales From Texas. [1:10:48] Mark: Howdy, y'. All. Welcome to Tales From Texas. Let's hear all about my adventures. [1:10:53] JD: Stephen, you didn't even look at my cool little graphic. What the. Play it again, Brandon. He didn't even look at it. [1:11:04] Stephen Daigle: Howdy, y'. [1:11:05] JD: All. [1:11:05] Mark: Welcome to Tales From Texas. Let's hear all about my adventures. [1:11:10] JD: Want this old wood desk? Bring me something. [1:11:12] Justin: I just noticed you have a beanie under your cowboy hat. [1:11:14] JD: Yeah, well, it transforms. It transforms from a beanie to a cowboy hat. Did you all know that when you live out here in Texas, scorpion stings hurt like a. Yes, this has been Tales From Texas with J.D. [1:11:32] Stephen Daigle: wait, hold on. [1:11:33] Mark: Did you get stung? [1:11:34] JD: God damn it, I did. [1:11:36] Mark: You did. [1:11:37] Justin: Why did you not tell us about this? [1:11:41] JD: Three hours of immense pain. [1:11:43] Stephen Daigle: Where. [1:11:43] Mark: Where did you get stunning? [1:11:44] JD: On my finger. I've been working all day out on the land with my gloves on. Yeah, I was done, took my gloves off, and then I was driving the can Am back, and there was this big piece of wood right in the thing, and I wanted to move, and I grabbed it from the bottom and bap. And then I looked down a little. Little tails curving up, and I'm like, oh, that hurt. Ouch. Ouch. Damn it. Got in the can. I drove back to the house. Five minutes later, I'm like, holy. [1:12:17] Justin: Is it like stingray pulsating pain? What's it like? [1:12:20] JD: Just a constant pain, man. And I went on Google Gemini. I'm like, how long is this going to hurt for? And it's like. Like, a couple hours and then a couple days. So, yeah, in Texas, watch out for the scorpions. [1:12:36] Mark: Did this happen while you were by yourself? [1:12:39] JD: No, Tracy was with me. But, you know, you write for the funny thing. Since then, I have found some little scorpions in the house. From time. They do this. They get into your house in Texas, and now, here's the problem. I have post traumatic stress disorder. So every little lint ball I see in a corner, every little shadow on a towel on the floor or whatever, I'm seeing scorpions. [1:13:06] Justin: Like, they're holding us through. They can, like, get flat and get under, bro. [1:13:10] JD: They fall out of your. Like, your light fixtures. [1:13:14] Mark: Tristan was saying. Yeah. So wait, hold on. Was this scorpion, like, a big guy, or was he, like. What was he, the bull no, they're [1:13:22] JD: small and apparently much like. Much like rattlesnakes it. The small ones can you up worse because they don't know how to hold back their. Their venom like slides and sheet. [1:13:35] Justin: You got. You got the salt gun. Do you have something equivalent to those guys up? [1:13:39] JD: I got the spray that kills them. I hadn't anticipate all these questions. I love this kush. I. I have a 308 rifle now kush. Just so you know I got some. I got a 9 millimeter pistol. That was last time show you can shoot guns on your property here in Texas, Justin. They are. I squirt them with this thing that kills them and it's a mess to clean up because I first tried to like just kind of man them like them up with a hard object or something. They're like armor. They're. You can't. They're like. Have you ever tried to kill a tick or you try to. Yeah, you gotta get an ass scorpion's like big ticks. You can't kill them. Like you gotta spray em or burn them or fucking you know, nuclear bomb them to get rid of them. Okay everyone, this has been another episode. Retire. Stephen, I appreciate you being a guest on the show. It's long overdue. You have a lot of fans in this industry and you keep doing you and I know you're strong willed with all this. Like even when some asshole like me is trying to press you on. On fees or revenue, you know that as entrepreneurs you build what you build. Yes. [1:14:48] Mark: Mark, can I just say two things? One Stephen, you absolutely character limits shattered record for. For acro sins of all time. For sure. [1:15:00] JD: You're the champ now. [1:15:06] Stephen Daigle: Yeah. [1:15:06] Mark: Number two is you have also set the record for most. Most speaking time of any guest. [1:15:12] Stephen Daigle: By far. [1:15:13] Justin: In a good way. [1:15:14] JD: In a good way. [1:15:14] Stephen Daigle: Yeah. [1:15:14] Mark: No, no, no. That's actually a positive. The positive from all of us. [1:15:18] Justin: Yeah, that's probably another good reason Chad's not here. [1:15:21] Stephen Daigle: He wouldn't have like that the opinionated comments. Is that where those came from? So. [1:15:26] JD: No, it was great. It was possible. [1:15:28] Mark: No, it was actually a good point. Most of the time Jamie doesn't let our guests speak. And this time you just went and he let you speak and that was a big deal. [1:15:38] Stephen Daigle: Well see, you want to know the. The kicker? He was introduced to what an Alpha is tonight. So. [1:15:43] Justin: Yeah. Okay, here we go. [1:15:45] JD: Yes. [1:15:46] Mark: Now that all just came right back down there. [1:15:49] Justin: Yeah, sounds like toxic masculinity. [1:15:55] JD: Can we. Hey, can we bring this back to all about me? First of all. Have you, have you noticed how better I've been in 2026 everyone, the chat bar and being a more hospitable host like getting letting the guests talk. And then I also want to let the alpha know that once this soft hand pussy surfer from California moved to Texas three months ago. I'm slowly becoming a man people. I'm getting fucking hard. It's happening, dude. Texas is changing me. Stephen, thank you so much for being our guest tonight on the show. Thank you for everything that you're doing in the industry. I mean this from the bottom of my heart. Like continued success. Get out there and crush it. We'd love to have you back sometime. Thank you to everyone that tuned in tonight and everyone who's watching recorded version on YouTube, on X on LinkedIn or whatever. Love that you're here. Appreciate you and Silent J and Mark, you guys are awesome. Super stoked to do another one of these with you as the three musketeers without Chad because goodbye from the show. The show without Chad. I really like the show without Chad because he thinks he knows everything but he actually has a small brain. So I hope you enjoyed the show without Chad because he's a. All right everyone [1:17:34] Justin: gonna give them a [1:17:35] JD: complex the industry one beer at a time. We will see you next time with Scott Colangelo of capital and we're actually going to do a special pre national association of Planet Advisors conference deal on a guaranteed income accounts. [1:18:00] Mark: Are we go? Are we going to that? Do we get involved? [1:18:03] JD: Those guys check out. Scott Colangelo is LinkedIn. He's got a really high produced video out there right now. He kind of like does the abs and Cs. No, that's not a drink. And that's what we'll be kind of converting into a show in two weeks. So special episode Retireholics next Tuesday at 10am Pacific is Devin Windell's 401k expedition webinar. So if you haven't signed up for that, please do. It's at www. I'll drink.plandesign.com I'll drink/401k exp for 401k expedition. And that will be our final one of the first five and then we'll go into another five part series. Sorry Stephen for the plugs. This is what I got to do. And yeah we are the retire hugs chain. Your retirement plan industry one beer at a time. Toodle lose everyone. See you next time.