Carley Dillon: How We Consistently Deliver Over 15% Organic Growth
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What would your business look like if it was focused on delivering wealth alignment as opposed to just financial planning? Hi, everyone. I'm business coach Steve Sandusky for Barron's Advisor, the WayForward podcast. My guest today is Carly Dillon. Carly is the chief experience officer at Brighton Jones, which is a rapidly growing RIA with headquarters in Seattle, Washington.

In our conversation, Carly shares the strategic framework behind Brighton Jones' success, including how they've structured their regions and pods to deliver a comprehensive client experience that goes far beyond typical financial advice.

She explains how they integrate personal values into financial plans, how they foster a culture of ownership and growth within the firm, and how they scale through a hybrid of centralized support and local expertise across their 19 office network.

Carly also discusses the firm's dedication to community impact from philanthropic initiatives to B Corp certification, all with the aim of helping clients and the broader community live richer lives. With that, here's my conversation with Carly Dillon.

So Brighton Jones was founded in the year 2000 by John Jones and Charles Brighton. We are headquartered in Seattle, but we've got 19 offices across the country. Which is where we are today. Yeah, thank you.

Thank you for being here in person. It's so nice to do an interview and actually look across the table and see somebody. So including our Portland office, if you talk to John Jones, our CEO, he'll talk about our origin story around piloting and pioneering the personal CFO approach, which is really a balance sheet driven approach.

And that's where I come in. So I get to sit as our GM and our chief experience officer, really owning and managing our PCFO business line. And so where are we headed? What are we focused on? We're focused on becoming a wealth alignment company, which sounds like jargon until I unpack it and tell you what we're really focused on is understanding our clients' passions, understanding their vision, understanding their values, and making sure that their time and their money aligns with that. So that's where we're headed.

And size-wise, you guys are pretty big. We are. About 280 employees, about 25 of those that we have grown with in the last year. We're currently at about 26 billion AUA, and we've got plans that right now we're actively trying to open two more offices, one in Atlanta and one in Chicago. So if you're out there and you're a lead advisor in any one of those offices, we're looking to grow. Yeah, absolutely. So what's the AUM? Yes.

AUM is about 10. And roughly how many team members and how many of those are actual advisors or CFPs? Good question. So right now we're about 280 employees and about 210 of those are actual team members who are either giving advice or starting out in their career to become a future lead advisor. So the other 70 are operations focused. So we have a

pretty robust operations team, whether that be our technology team, our people team, our investments team, which is a centralized group in Seattle, our philanthropy team. We've got a bunch of teams that were really focused on helping us scale and evolve and grow those services that we're providing to clients. Does the firm have a vision? And if so, what is it?

Yeah, our vision statement is to make a big impact and change the world. Our mission statement is to help our clients and our colleagues and our global community live a richer life.

But if you hear our CEO talk, it's all about making an impact in our global world. And so we've got lots of ways that we're trying to fulfill that. Part of it is through what we talk about beyond the balance sheet. And so we work very closely with our clients on their balance sheet and offering advice there. But we really want to make sure that we're having impact beyond that.

And so one of the things I get to do as part of Brighton Jones is lead trips of clients to Kenya every year. We take about 40 clients every year and we get to see the work that either their donor advised fund and their philanthropic contributions, the impact that they're having on different organizations. We also just became a B Corp. We got certified as a B Corp. And so that's something you're gonna hear us talk more and more about, but we're really looking to have a broader and bigger impact on the world

than just working with clients in their balance sheet. And for the record, Carly, you did not look at anything when you were talking about your vision and mission. So you knew that. Thank you for that. A lot of firms, they can't do that. So if I were to go, so we're here in the office in Portland, as we mentioned, if I went around to some of the team members here, would they be able to describe it as articulately as you just did? Thank you for the compliment. I appreciate that. And gosh, Steve, I hope so. It's something that we spend a lot of time talking about. I'm

confident and we can do a test later. You can report back and let us know what we do. But I'm confident that the team members in this office know our mission statement. They know our why. They know what they're trying to help clients achieve. Our vision statement, that's big. It's a BHAG. That's a very...

ambitious thing to do. And that's something we're just starting to talk about more often. Definitely shows up on all the pages of our website and our collateral. And I hope that our team members feel aligned with that, right? I hope they feel like they get to work at a firm and an organization that exists to help our global community, not just our clients that we're lucky to work with.

Now, do you have some financial metrics in terms of these big goals? I would imagine there's some numbers that relate to this as well. What do those look like? Yeah, there's lots of metrics that we are, if nothing else, we are a metrics-driven organization. And so I'll tell you a little story and get into the metrics. So one of the things that we've done over the last couple years really well is business planning. So most RIAs, frankly, most organizations don't do business planning, and they sure as heck don't do it like we do at Brighton Jones.

So the process starts off in July and we start thinking about what are the key metrics as an organization that are really important for us to hit, right? What are our retention metrics for us? It's 98%. What are our growth metrics for us? We want to be growing at a 15% clip. By the way, we've hit that every single year. And that's organic? That's all organic. Yeah. We haven't even

gotten into the topic of organic versus inorganic growth yet, but that's all organic. And even more specifically, Steve, what we're trying to do is grow 15% organic year over year and seven and a half percent of that, we want to come from client referrals. We spend a lot of time, we call it having intention and attention, right? We all have great intentions, but you have to put attention to the things that you want to achieve.

So seven and a half percent of our 15% is coming from client referral. And then seven and a half percent is coming from other channels, including fidelity and self-gen and other categories that we measure. We want to run an organization where people love where they work. And so we've got metrics of success around that. We also have metrics of success around just our people side of the business. How much do we want to grow by? And it's all driven by some internal modeling we have.

And the business planning, is that a top-down process? Is that a bottoms-up process? Some combination of the two? How far does that get cascaded down into the organization? Yeah.

Great question. I'm sure you can align with this and understand this. It's got to be both. Business planning has to be a really artful combination of a tops down, top down approach. Every team member has to believe in having that business plan. And so to answer one of your questions, everybody at Brighton Jones has a business plan. That's all of our service team members. That's all of our ops team members.

And the process starts with having a conversation between our, we call it our alignment team or our leadership team and our senior lead advisors. And our senior lead advisors, they are responsible for running each one of these, we call them regions or pods.

And so we have a conversation around, okay, what are the key areas where we want to focus on? And our guide for that, Steve, is we have this document called our winning formula. And you'll think back and know this after having interviewed John Jones in the past, but we segment our business into keeping clients, giving

getting clients, keeping people, getting people in operations. And so we get feedback from our senior leaders. Where should we focus in each one of these categories? What are the metrics of success? Our COO would love to hear me say that we use our, an OKR format. So objectives and key results from the book measure what matters, but yeah, that's how business planning kicks off. And then what we do is we align as a team. We align as kind of a top layers of leadership and

And then what we do is we go region to region, pod to pod and educate around why these are important. And then every individual brings different strategies and tactics to the table around how they are going to make sure that they are affecting that goal. So everyone's got skin in the game.

Now, is there a difference between a region and a pod? Good question. Yeah, I'm using those words interchangeably. And it's, so we think about, we've got three regions that we break the country up into. So we've got our Northwest, our Central, and our East. And so within each one of those regions, we have what we call a pod. And funny enough, Steve, we let the pods name them

Okay.

And so we have a motto, every pod has a name and then every pod has a motto. And for us, it's kicking ax. And so we make it fun. It's gotta be fun. You've gotta love what you do and love the people that you work with, right? And so we've got regions in those regions, there are pods.

And those pods all have names, mottos, and business plans. And those pods are run by a senior lead advisor. So here in Portland, Karen Harris is our senior lead advisor. And I work closely with each of those senior leads to make sure that we're hitting those business plans and hitting those goals. So is a pod just a physical office location that constitutes a pod? Or could two or three offices in one area be one pod? Yeah, great question.

most often a pod represents a regional office. So we've got Beantown is another pod that we run out of our Boston office. And so a pod is also an office and it rolls up to a region.

Talk to me about the whole client experience process. So you're the chief experience officer. So what does that mean? Yeah, what does that mean? It's funny. When I first took on this role, I had to ask myself, what does that mean? What are my metrics of success? What are the results we want to drive for each client? And the way I've thought about it is that it comes down to people, process, and how they're going to be able to do it.

process and technology. And those are the three levers that I can really pull to affect the client experience. And I say, I pull these, but as a team, we figure out what's most important. And so from the people aspect of it, we're really trying to make sure that we're growing the services, growing the breadth and the depth of the services that we provide our clients. And so we've spent a lot of time talking about messy. Messy is something that is an internal program that we have around mindfulness and emotional social intelligence. And

And so from a people lever, we're deploying more and more people to help us have conversations with clients about values.

Process. Spent a lot of time on process. One of the biggest things we've done to affect our clients' experience is we've created centralized administrative teams. So two years ago, we centralized the majority of our administrative functions, and we've got a fabulous leader down in the Scottsdale pod and region running that team. And so the impact to clients has been turnaround times on opening accounts, consolidating accounts, and

So it's just gone through the roof. We've also reduced our NIGOs, our return kickback rate from Fidelity. And so we spent a lot of time on process and then technology. Technology is what everyone wants to talk about.

about right how are you using tech and so we've done a couple of things one building a new two-sided platform that our clients will use as a communication tool with us they'll use it to view their portfolios they'll use it as their hub to have conversations with our advisory team but the two-sided component is really fun and that it also becomes a workstation for our advisors

And so we've built a layer of technology on top of Salesforce that helps to visualize what are our tasks and what's our day since last contact and what are the things we need to be doing and affecting for clients.

And then also we're constantly in conversations about what next. We have an innovation panel that we do with clients, which is really fun. I have a background. I came from Nike. And the voice of the athlete was something that was drilled into my head here. It's no different, the voice of the client. And so we meet with a group of clients that changes every year and they tell us, what are we doing right? They also tell us what we're doing wrong and what we need to improve on. And tech has been the big thing that comes to mind for us.

So what are they saying to you in terms of what you're doing well and what you can improve? Yeah, they're asking us a lot of questions about AI, right? I think that's something that you're going to hear regardless of who you talk to. And right now, the way that we're thinking about AI is it's just a tool for creating more time and giving our advisors more time back to spend building one-to-one connections with clients, right? So what are the efficiencies we can build? How can we use tools that just give us back more time?

So they're asking us questions about that. They're also asking us for more services. They want more services, right? And some of this is an opportunity for area for us to expose, oh, we do that. Let me tell you more about that. But they want more. They're asking for more philanthropic engagement. They're asking for deeper tax integration. They're asking for just the ability to one, even just have more in-person relationships with their service team.

And so we take that seriously. With that feedback in mind, we integrated all of our tax services into our pods. Now that you know what a pod is, right? We took our tax team and there's a tax team member that sits in almost all, hopefully soon to be, all of those conversations with clients. And so they're getting more of that comprehensive look.

Given all those services, who's a sweet spot for you? What's the ideal client for Brighton Jones? I think we cater to a good swath of clients. And so I'll go through and talk about maybe some of our personas, and that'll allow us to really dig deeper. So one is a corporate all-star. There's those individuals who are actively in the workforce. They are building their reputation. They're moving up the chain of command in their company, and they're really looking for, they have complex needs, right? They're getting ownership.

They're buying into the company. They are using deferred compensation. And so we spend a lot of time here in Portland. We spend a lot of time with Nike execs. We spend a lot of time with Intel. We spend a lot of time with Columbia and Greenbrier. And we work really well with that audience. We also spend a lot of time with female clients. And so that's something that

actually is feedback we got from our innovation panel, right? There's a females, our female clients are going to be our target audiences. They take on more and more of the wealth transfer in the next couple of years. And so we've spent a lot of time talking with them about how we can cater those services, whether they're corporate all-stars themselves, whether they've recently experienced

a divorce and or if they're going through what I'm going through right now, which is the feeling of a sandwich generation, right? I'm yet raising young kids. I'm raising my children. I'm also caring for my parents. And so that's another real great target for us.

The other thing I think John Jones would love me to mention, our target audience is also family office. We have spent more time and John is actually leading that charge and developing a really bespoke experience for our family office clients. But hopefully that gives you a good idea of whom we're working with.

Earlier you mentioned, was it M-E-S-I? Yes. Yeah. And looking at your website, I see the word like life planning and a lot of stuff related to that aspect. Now, I just had a conversation the other day with an advisor and he said,

I had a three-hour conversation with a client about life planning. That's a lot of time for a client. And it's like, what should we be doing that? How do you guys deliver and have those kinds of conversations such that they don't necessarily take three hours? Or do they take three hours? Yeah. Sometimes they do take three hours, right? And we all want to be... All advisors, anyone listening to this, wants to be in a place where you can take that time. And we talk often about...

what are the explicit needs that our clients are coming to us with? And we want to make space and time to talk about whatever that is. And sometimes those really resonate with the balance sheet. Sometimes we put our CFP hat on and we're like, yes, I can solve those problems for you.

But oftentimes we sit in that crossroads of financial advice and just life with our clients. And they want to talk about what's going on with their family. They want to talk about how they need to update their estate plan, but they've got some real turmoil. And so that's where our messy skills come in. And we have a fabulous platform. All the team members at Brighton Jones are at least asked through our introductory level conversations to

And what it really does, it sounds complicated, but what it really is, Steve, is it's all about asking good questions, right? Creating space to really thoughtfully listen, right? Giving our advisors and our team members the tools to reflect back. What I heard you say is, right, tell me more. And our clients really respond to this. Of course, they don't know we're using our messy skills on them, but what they tell us is that

I trust my team. You're credible, you're reliable, and we have intimacy. And so I'm never going to leave Brighton Jones. I'm going to stay here and I'm going to, in fact, give referrals to my friends and family, but it's just such an invaluable tool set to really make sure that you're listening, you're asking good questions, you're thoughtfully responding. So you have these one-on-one conversations between the advisor and the client. What about on a larger scale in terms of

Do you do like events for clients? You mentioned you go to Kenya every year with a group of your clients and lead a safari or something. So tell me more about what you do at more of a corporate level to take care of clients. Great. What I will say is that we're now starting to lead messy conferences for clients.

and prospective clients, people, we just think this is such a great tool set. So we, in fact, I think we've got one coming up in a couple of weeks, but we walk clients through, give them an opportunity to uncover what their value systems are. What do you value? And I remember the first time I went through messy, I was like, yeah, my values are really clear to me. And I

the more I spent time, it's actually hard. What I value most, it's hard to articulate. And so we lead clients through that. What are you passionate about? And how do you want your balance sheet to align? So that's one of the things that we do. Kenya is a whole nother, a wild experience. We have a foundation called the Richer Life Foundation.

And what we want to do is make sure that we're giving back 1% of all of our revenue and having an impact. And so clients engage in that. Every three years, we lead a campaign to raise money for some of the organizations we support in Kenya. And so we support an organization called Helga, which really helps women to get out of situations and learn how to make sure that they are creating a name for themselves, getting jobs, getting empowered.

We support an organization called the Rubin Center, and it's this amazing school located in one of the largest slums in all of Kenya called Makuru. The other organization we support is KCC, or the Kajahado Children's Center, and they work with kids who have disabilities and really need that additional support.

So we take our clients on a two-week journey, and they meet these organizations. They meet many of the women and men who are supporting and growing these organizations. And then, of course, we do safari. Everyone loves safari. We spend time there, and then we hit a flight to the coast, and we spend time in Califi and really just decompress because...

As you would imagine, Steve, after you've traveled to see these organizations, you've seen the big five, and then you need time to process. And coming full circle to Messy, that's where we use a lot of our Messy skills to help us understand what have we seen and how do we then want to take an impact. You've also talked about the balance sheet a handful of times here. So explain to me how you connect, say, Messy to the balance sheet.

and how sort of balance sheet financial planning differs from quote traditional financial planning, or are they one in the same? And you guys are just going a little deeper that way. Yeah, that's a great question. As I mentioned earlier, we host these innovation panel conversations and we talk a lot about how can we add more services and we hear clients asking for more, but what they're very clear to tell us is that initially right now I hire you to be my financial advisor and

I hire you to manage my balance sheet. I hire you so that I can retire or so that I can make sure that I'm doing generational gifting or like I hire you for a specific reason. But then as we build trust with them, they realize, oh, you guys can do so much more. And those conversations build. So we spend time talking with our team members that you got to make sure that you're credible on the balance sheet. And then we work our way up.

And so for some, that's, hey, I want to learn about PESI. I want to flex those skills. For others, it's, I want to get more involved in Women Living a Richer Life, which is a community group that we have for women. Or I want to spend time in Kenya. So it builds over time. And we talk about it around moving clients up the value stack, right? And so if you think about everyone's got their own version of Maslow's hierarchy, we do too. And so we talk about the first stage is really investments only.

On the next stage is investments plus planning, which is really our sweet spot. We want to help you with the investment allocation, but also we want to do planning. And then it's total balance sheet management. Our clients are asking us questions about their entire balance sheet and that's beyond the balance sheet. And that's, we're on this journey towards building everyone to that stage four.

Let's talk about how you actually deliver all that from the structure of the advisors. And just walk me through, it appears you hire people like out of college or new people and then work them through all the way up the system. So walk me through what...

it looks like the career path for an advisor that would start with the firm as a new person. We do like to home grow people because I think we do work differently than many of the other RAs. And so in the ideal, we're hiring somebody who's a year, maybe a year or two out of school. I guess even more ideal, they've interned with us during school and then they come right out of school and they come in as an advisor and we're

with some of the things I've mentioned earlier around centralizing administrative work, what we're really focused on and making sure those entry-level advisors are getting exposure to actual planning, right? They're in the meetings, they're asking questions. And so they spend a year to 18 months, year two, really in that advisor role, soaking in the experiences. Our expectation at that point is that they've passed their 65, right? They're able to give advice and they're really getting, immersing themselves in

And then we progress people up to senior analyst and spend another probably 18 months there. Once you pass your CFP, we immediately make you a manager at Brighton Jones and you are in more client meetings. You are absolutely delivering advice. And then what we like to see is that everyone is on a journey towards becoming a lead advisor, right? If you're in our service team, your future goal is to become that lead advisor.

And some of our lead advisors become senior lead advisors. And that's really a focus on growing the business and helping to technical coaching to our teams. So hopefully that gives you a sense of where we're working towards. Yeah. Talk to me about the compensation along the way. How do you structure it? Whether it's salary, bonuses, percentage of revenue. Yeah. One of the things that we've done in the last couple of years, there's two things that I think have made a meaningful impact on our business is

And the first we eloquently refer to as our zero to 60 model, right? And it really is just our firm's best thinking on what it takes to grow those pods from $0, right? A new market starting out to 60 million. And so what we've done is we've looked at, okay, we've got new markets that we're starting and how do they get support? How are they getting support from existing markets? And we call that our hub model.

Now, when you say 60 million, you mean 60 million in revenue for the pod? For the pod. That's exactly right. And it's a blueprint. Think about it this way. It is a blueprint for one of our new markets to say, ooh, okay, so at this point, I should have this staffing, right? I'm going to start off with a lead advisor in one of these markets. And the expectation there is that they're growing and they're bringing on new clients. And they're going to need some support from what we call an assistant, right? An associate, right?

and they're committed and they're gonna wear lots of hats. And so we've just built this really clear progression around how do you staff and it takes a lot of the pressure off of the teams.

Those stages of growth are really designated by the revenue and the number of clients that you're servicing. And so you can look at any one of these stages and know, oh, okay, a mature market that really starts at a $4 million revenue mark, right? A mega market, what does that look like at 15 million? And so it's a great resource. The other thing we've done to your question around compensation, and I'm going to add on ownership, is we've created something called a career journey.

And many of the RIAs and any firm, even outside of this industry, has probably experienced that transition of going from a founder-led organization, right, where you've got 10 people, 20 people, but now we're growing, we're scaling, we're becoming more of an enterprise. And so what we do twice a year is take team members through that career journey, which

What does it look like from a compensation standpoint from day one? Do you get variable compensation? What does it look like from a profit share? When can you get ownership? When can you become an owner from an R-share perspective? And when can you buy in to be a B-share owner? And what we've found that does is just immediately put skin in the game. Oh,

I see what I'm working towards, right? I see how growth has an impact both on me as an individual and how I can personally grow my compensation and I can help our team and the company grow, right?

I know if you walked out there to any one of these team members, and again, we'll test it. If you ask them, why is growth important? They would say, one, because it allows us to hire more team members. Two, because it allows us to help more families. And three, because it helps me to grow on my own. I want to make more money. We really spend a lot of time talking about why is growth important.

I had a conversation with an advisor recently and asked him about how do you compensate your advisors? And he said, basically what we do is we look at the investment news survey and we want to pay our advisors in the top quartile because we never want to lose an advisor because somebody else is paying them more. So do you have a overall philosophy about compensation for advisors? For example, like that guy, like I want to be in the top 25% of a particular survey and

Do you want to pay above market, at market? Do you feel like, hey, cash comp is just a piece of it, but we've got all these other amazing benefits that when you add it all up, it really puts us in a top tier. How do you think about that philosophically? Yeah. Can I say yes? Yes. Okay. I just answered my own question. I mean, you

Yes. One, we do benchmarking. We do competitive benchmarking because we want to make sure that we are compensating our team members fairly. And then, yes, we make sure that we talk to them about what does profit share look like? We make sure that we are incentivizing them with variable compensation. All of our lead advisors, going back earlier to the topic of business planning, right? There are variable incentives to hitting your goals. And so we want to make sure that's really important. And then ownership is something that...

from a Brighton Jones. And I'm not sure who you were talking to earlier, but for us, we are an employee owned organization, right? We do offer team members the ability to buy in. We do make sure that as they hit a certain point in their career, we're giving them our shares. And so we spend a lot of time talking about that opportunity and how that is an opportunity for wealth creation. And that is something that differentiates us in the market. If you go to our website and

and you look at our we're hiring page, right? We lay that all out really clearly. And time after time, we have team members that come to us and say, oh man, this opportunity to really be an owner of this organization. In fact, we're about to kick off our ownership nomination for this next year. And I've got all kinds of team members saying, how do I get in? What do I do? I want to be at Brighton Jones for life. And it's

Hopefully that answers your question and then some. Yeah. And in terms of expectations for an advisor or a team of advisors, if you're a lead advisor, you're supposed to be managing X amount of revenue. How does that work? And this is also something that as we get to grow and scale, we spend more and more time talking about. And so what we do now is we have three different levels of lead advisor. It's a simple three to one concept. And

And so what we are asking our newest, our entry-level lead advisors to really focus on is that we expect them to manage about $1.5 million of revenue of clients. And so that works out to be, depends on the client size and the market that we're in, ends up being about 75 to 100 clients.

And so they're busy. They're in the early stages of becoming a lead advisor. They also have growth goals. And so we're working on them with that. That next level, that level two, goes from about 1.5 to 3 million. And so that's what we expect them to manage and what we're hoping to do and

Steve, this isn't easy. It's easy to say, but in application, it takes some time. We want them to be managing less clients over time as they progress to a level one lead, and that revenue hopefully also increases. By the time you reach that level three lead, you're managing $3 million about.

And hopefully you have about 65 to 75 clients. And so what we want to do is that as our advisors mature, as they grow in their knowledge, that they're working with our most complex clients. They're working with clients that they've really worked to build relationships with over time. And there's fewer of them. So they can spend more of that time allocation with each one of those clients. And how do you...

make the segue to go from a level one to a two to a three, because the level one clients aren't going to be the same as the level three. So how do you make the transition from one advisor to another? Yeah. Steve, we've got a lot of spreadsheets that we're using to track this. It is definitely an art and a science. And so we talk a lot about, we don't want to be the firm that's holding on to clients. We want to make sure that we are exposing advisors and

to new clients and really from a client perspective, right? If I put on my CXO hat, the thing we talk about with clients is that you're adding team members to their relationship, right? They're not experiencing this hard transition of I'm losing somebody, they're gaining other team members. And so I mentioned that because it's really important. We hear from our clients time and time again, like I'm celebrating in your success.

I get to have new team members come into my life and they have different perspectives, same philosophy, right? But they add something new to the relationship. And so what we try to do is that as those lead advisors are, we're seeing that revenue progress, they're introducing new team members to the relationships. And so that provides for upward mobility for those new advisors that are coming in

And of course, we're trying to consolidate some of those relationships as those people become more senior in their roles and responsibility. What does the structure look like if I'm a level one advisor? Do I have an associate advisor working with me and a financial planning associate versus, say, a level three? How do those teams look? Are they very different? They don't really look different.

Again, if you think about how we have a pod structure, what we really know works effectively is having this opportunity for advisors, lead advisors to work with various service team members, right? So I know that Thaddeus in our office is going to provide a huge level of coaching that's different from some of our other lead advisors. And so we want that commingling, we want that spaghetti matrix. But at the end of the day, each lead advisor really has that two to three person team that's supporting them.

Okay. So again, we're here in Portland. So talk to me about this particular office. Like how is this structured? How many advisors are here in the office? How many roughly clients might you be servicing out of this office? Absolutely. So our Portland office opened in 2015. So we should be celebrating our 10 year here pretty soon, which is exciting. I put that on my to-do list.

So right now in our Portland office, we have a senior lead advisor. She is the person I go to around how is our growth looking like. Now, would she be a level three? So in the ideal, she is working on some of our most complex clients, but we really want to free her up and eventually get her off all client responsibilities. So she's really sitting at the helm of the office and helping us focus on growth.

We're in a transition. She was newly promoted to that role in this last year. So she's still on client, but in the ideal. So I'll mix a little bit of actual with ideal. We've got that senior lead advisor. And then in Portland right now, we've got two lead advisors that are fully loaded with clients. We have a level three lead advisor, Katie, who just got promoted this past January, which is awesome.

And then Thaddeus. And so in Portland, we have about 240 clients. And so each of them are really full. We're actually hiring another lead advisor right now. So again, if you're listening to this, if you know anybody, it's a great place to work. So Ideal State 3, Current State 2, our senior lead advisor is working on some of those clients.

And then we have in the middle of the team, we've got a senior manager who is newly appointed and working to get more time in reps. We've got an individual who, and I don't want to jinx it, she's going to be sitting for her CFP any day. So hopefully a new manager. And then we've got a senior associate and then two brand new advisors, entry-level advisors that have come in. So it's a growing team.

The other thing that we haven't talked at all about is we also have a full-time business development person in this office. And so that's not on the service side structure, but it is somebody who is dedicated to really thinking about our pipeline, thinking about our growth. I tell her all the time, I want you to wake up thinking about what's that fidelity relationship or did we ask for that client referral and she's just doing a phenomenal job. Again, it comes back to that intention and attention.

Let me tell you, she holds all of us accountable. Although I am not directly involved in the service team in the Portland office, she sends me messages all the time around my growth numbers. And then we've got our tax lead advisor who is also in the office and he supports both the growth of the business, meets with every one of our prospects alongside of our service team, and then works with each one of our clients to make sure they're getting that comprehensive tax planning, but then also helps the majority of our clients actually with the compliance side.

Let's dig into the business development piece. So you talked earlier about organic growth. I think you said about 15% per year is what you target and you basically hit that every year. Just break that down for me. What's the model there? What are the different sources, the different channels where you're targeting that 15% growth? Yeah. And one of the things I'm focused on this year is pausing to celebrate. The fact that we hit 15 plus percent of organic growth every year is something that

is just truly remarkable. And so I mentioned to you before we started the recording that we just had our Get Keep Summit, which is something we do every year. And we celebrated that. We had an award ceremony, formal attire, awards, trophies. So it's something we're really proud of. But your question around how does that, the channels and growth and how do we break that out?

So seven and a half percent, as I mentioned earlier, is really dedicated to client referrals. And so in our business plans, we have, we have strategies and tactics. We have names. We have people that we know love to partner with us, our existing clients that really want to help grow the business. And so our BDT member holds us accountable. Every time we have one of those meetings, she's asking us, how did it go?

Okay. So talk to me about strategies and tactics because a lot of advisors, I don't want to ask for a referral. It's a little awkward. Like how do you have a referral conversation or what is the process to get more referrals? I love that you're asking this because it can be awkward, right? It sometimes is a muscle that you need to build and it takes time. You gotta find what works for you.

At this Get Keep Summit that I just mentioned to you, we invited clients to come and actually tell us how do they like to be asked for referrals? What role do they want to play in referrals? And what they shared with us is, hey, listen, we're getting remarkable service. We remark about Brighton Jones all the time. Just ask me. Just

Just ask me. I want to be part of your success. And so hearing that from the clients was really empowering. And I'm sure some of our advisors will take that direct tactic, right? I heard from you, you're satisfied. I heard from you that you want to just be asked and they'll do that.

For others, it's all about just building that intimate relationship, making sure that you are going to the baseball games, that you're engaging with those clients on a philanthropic level, supporting the organizations they support. So you're building that relationship over time and it just becomes more natural.

What are we doing? What are our strategies and tactics? We talk about, we actually have a playbook. Steve, we have a client referral playbook. We have lots of playbooks, but our client referral playbook really talks about the foundational service. So what is our service standard? What are the things that we expect our advisors to do? And what we've learned just by looking at the data is just by doing what we do really well, which is meeting with our clients at least twice a year, ensuring that their needs are met, running their balance sheet regularly,

We get about 4% of client referral without even asking. It just happens. And so our focus this year is going from that four to seven and a half. And

And so some of the strategies and tactics, we've got conversations around how do you engage in estate planning with our clients? So how do we make sure that as we're talking to you about this estate plan that you need to have or the estate plan you need to have updated, building that relationship around who are the people that you are going to have eventually take care of your children and what support do they need? What planning do they need? And all of a sudden this light bulb goes off for clients. Oh, I love working with Brighton Jones.

I want my friends and family too. So that estate planning conversation is one of our strategies and tactics telling our growth story, right? What we learned from our client panel is that we want to help. We want to be part of your growth story. And so talking about our career progression, talking about our growth plan, clients want to be a part of that. And so those are two of goodness, eight strategies that we have right now. And all we ask our advisors to do is pick one. Just

Just pick one that feels authentic to you, right? Pick one and let's work on that. And so in each one of their business plans, and I've audited this, I know it's there. They talk about their strategy and they talk about who they're going to use it with. Excellent. All right. So we've got referrals from clients. So that's one channel. What are, I think, three others? There's five, but self-gen is a big one, right? And so going back to those levels of leads, my expectation is that our brand new leads, they don't have a ton of self-gen yet. Right.

But our level one leads who have been doing this for 20 plus years, self-gen is a real strategy. And so it's just intention and attention. Who are the names? What are the circumstances you're putting yourself in? What are the boards that you're on? What are the events that you're going to attend? Whom are you spending time with to ensure that you're getting those self-gen? So self-gen is another channel. Fidelity. Fidelity is a big channel for us. And so we're very intentional about building those relationships.

And in our new markets, this is one of our, obviously, one of our leading strategies. And so the percentage of growth in our new markets, I'm asking our new markets to grow by 100 or 200%, right? Just based on their starting run rate revenue and their ability to grow. And so we're building relationships with those WOS advisors, making sure that they understand how...

how we distinguish ourselves. What are the services we provide, right? You look out at RIAs and you can see this almost sea of sameness, right? Everyone's website has that couple walking on the beach, but we believe that we are actually doing those services, doing them better. And so making sure Fidelity understands that.

You're going to laugh when I tell you we have a fidelity playbook too. But we believe those strategies to be very similar for climate referral. There's a little sports metaphor coming out here. Yeah, absolutely. And so another channel that we have, this is small. It's small, but we want to be intentional about it, is Winback. Right?

Right. So Brighton Jones, we have a 98% retention rate, but that means that 2% of our clients have left. When a client leaves, we send them a survey. I personally reach out to them and ask, what can we learn from this? What we've done better? And so we've identified clients that we want to win back. And so we've got strategies and tactics for that. So we've got client referral, fidelity, self-gen, win back, and then digital. So digital isn't something we've spent too much time talking about yet.

And for us to be really transparent, it's a key opportunity area for us. And so right now our ask of our advisors is to help us generate content, right? You are the experts and we ask them to sign up for pieces of content. And then we as a business will allocate what we expect to do in digital revenue to that pod or to that region.

There's a couple extremes here in terms of how advisory firms build their business. So one is you take, say, an Edelman model, a Fisher Investments model, where it's all about

Sort of corporate marketing where we generate all these leads and then we just have advisors who do nothing but just advise with clients all day long and they're not expected to do business development. So you've got the corporate model. Then you've got the other eat what you kill model where the advisor is expected to bring in the business and service the business. It sounds like you're.

a little bit in the middle or a hybrid in the sense, I just heard you say you have a full-time business development person, but then you also have pretty clear expectations on each advisor is supposed to bring in business. So

Talk to me about philosophically how you think about the business development process and how do advisors determine how much time am I going to spend serving my clients versus, oh, I got to hit these numbers because I'm being measured and Carly's going to sit down with me and go over these numbers. And did I get enough referrals? So how do they strike that balance between client service and, oh, I got to bring in new business? Yeah. You asked a lot of good questions there. I'm trying to break them down one by

I think the first one is philosophy, right? What is our philosophy? And I would say, are we in the two middle of those extremes that you provided? I'd say we're really where we want to find ourselves is that our advisors are such brilliant, gifted people. And we think the best person

to advocate for our services are them, right? And our business development team members, they are there to support, right? They're there to drive accountability to their pipeline. They're there to help open doors, right? They're there to help us be efficient with our time. And so we walk this fine line and it's hard, right? Around,

How do we maintain that? And because our business development people are great, right? They could be in there just selling full time, but we want them to tee up the advisor. We want the advisor to really be at the heart of that relationship. And so that's our philosophy and narrative. That's really what we're trying to achieve.

One of your other questions in there was... Like how do they allocate time between serving clients versus, oh, I got to hit my numbers for new business. Time allocation. Yeah. If there was a magic wand that I could wave and just say, hey, we've got the perfect allocation of this time. I'd love to have that, but we don't. One of the things we think about at Brighton Jones, and this is just helpful information

coaching to our advisors. If you think about that construct of getting clients, keeping clients, getting people, keeping people, and you think about them as levers, right? One lever is always shaking, right? You might've just lost a client and you're behind on making sure we hit 98% retention, or maybe our growth has slowed. Something has changed there. And

And so I love to use that as a tool for time allocation, right? Where do you need to spend some time now? Where's the shaky lever? We also spend a lot of time just talking about prioritization, right? We, as a company that does a lot for our clients, we have any number of initiatives or priorities or focus areas. And so we spend time. One of the, I think the greatest uses of my time is to work with our senior lead advisors to help us prioritize, right?

Right. And so I'll give you a peek into current priorities right now. We just did Q4 billing. Right. So we have to make sure we're billing. We took on CTA, so Corporate Transparency Act, which many firms chose to stay away from. And so that's another priority. And then growth has always got to be one of our top priorities. And so...

that's how we try to think about it. Not perfect, but at least it's some type of kind of North star that guides our advisors. You also mentioned earlier about you survey clients. You spend a lot of time talking to clients, getting feedback from clients. So how does that survey process work and how do you ensure that you get a lot of those clients turning those surveys back in? Yeah. We,

We spend a lot of time talking about surveys at Brighton Jones. I think it's one of the best tools we have for getting feedback at scale, right? The best feedback, of course, does always be, hey, Steve, what feedback do you have for me? But let's start with what surveys we send. So we send an annual survey that goes out to a client on their birthday, meaning not their actual birthday, but their Brighton Jones birthday. And so this is just one data point. And of course, the metrics that we're driving as the outputs of that survey are NPS, which

net promoter score, overall satisfaction. We're also thinking about just generic comments they give us around what are the additional services, where do they find value, what could we do better? And so that goes out once a year.

One of the things that we started doing, I'm going to say in January of this year, was we started attaching a client survey to a recap of a client meeting. You come in for a meeting, we do a full review. As part of that, you get a recap and embedded in that recap is what we call a client review meeting survey, a CRM survey. And the

that has been a game changer for us because it's real time feedback. You just had a meeting. You just got advice. You just built intimacy with that advisory team. And clients are telling us how that was. They score it on a scale of one to five. And then they leave comments around what should we keep doing? We ask them, what do you want us to keep doing? What do you want us to stop doing? What do you want us to start doing? And so they tell us.

And then operationally, how do they respond to that? Great question. So it comes in through, we use a tool called Marketo and we get the response, the advisor. Is it an email that's sent out? Yes, it is an email. It is an email. So the advisor, when the client responds, the advisor gets a copy of the survey. I get a copy of the survey, the whole service team, and we powwow, like we talk around. But does the survey go out via an email to the client? Yes.

We are working to make this more efficient, but you'll get an email and it has a link to a survey that says, Hey Steve, would you fill this out? And then the feedback comes back in an email form to us so we can respond. Okay. So I'm hearing all these wonderful things and I've been around this business long enough to know that when you look under the hood, sometimes things aren't quite as rosy as it may sound publicly. So what, what is challenging? What is difficult about running a multi-billion dollar RIA firm these days?

One of the most challenging things, and I think it's also our... You talk about your strengths, and your greatest strength is often your greatest weakness. And so one of our greatest strengths is our ability to adapt and change, right? We talk about change as our competitive advantage all the time. And yet, Steve, change can be hard, right? Change can be disruptive. Change can make you curious as to the why. And so I think...

again, our greatest strength is our greatest opportunity and making sure that we are communicating the why behind change, right? We recently did some work to realign pods to different regions. And the question of why comes up, right? And our ability as a leadership team, as an organization to make sure that we're clearly communicating is always going to be an opportunity for us. And I think

We can get better here, right? We, talking about surveys, as employees, make sure that we do a quarterly poll survey. Our team members are really transparent, and I appreciate this, about where we have opportunities to improve. So change management is a big thing for us, communicating change more effectively, communicating the why behind change, and really just as a business, making sure that we are articulating the opportunity and why we want to be able to change rapidly.

Sure, there's other things, but that's the biggest focus area and part of my business plan, right? So we talked about advisors having business plans and hold them accountable. I'm being held accountable to making sure that we manage change more effectively. I think the other thing that we're working on is just integration, right? And so you've heard me say often about all the different services we provide, and

And yet, if you talk to our clients, you think about the client innovation panel, they're giving us feedback that sometimes it doesn't feel like they're all consolidated. Sometimes it does feel like a little onesies and twosies.

And so we're looking to affect that. We want to make sure that that feels comprehensive, that feels cohesive versus, oh, I had a one-off conversation. You brought up the technology here, so we could have a whole separate conversation about that. But just at a high level, like what are some of the key pieces of software that you use? You've mentioned Salesforce. Yeah, obviously our CRM is Salesforce. On the marketing side, we use Marketo. We use a company called Lytics.

to help us do some predictive work. We use Wealthscape, we use Buyall, we use Tamarack, some of the key names that many of the other advisory firms use. But those are some big platforms. And so if I come back to that integration and feeling seamless, we're trying to figure out the connectivity with all of those. On the people side, we use Paycom and we've got a couple of other HRIS business systems that we use. But we're tech heavy. And I think that we're trying to figure out, as I mentioned earlier,

We're building our own two-sided platform. And so how do we make sure that we're integrating that and removing some of the redundancy, right? So there'll be a period of time when our advisors are working in Wealthscape and in Tamarack and in Salesforce with

But the long-term vision is that we can consolidate those and really make sure that they're working more seamlessly. We'll probably still use all those platforms, but they'll be working in the interface, a new interface that makes it more cohesive. So tax is obviously a big part of what you deliver. So what do you use for tax preparation and planning? Don't leave the tax team out. So we use CCH. We started utilizing a couple years ago was a third-party resource called TaxFile.

And I know many of the firms are also using TaxFile and it helps us with first and second review. Domestic partner, a really great resource for efficiency for us. All right, Carly, what have I not asked you? What are you just dying to share here? You've asked me some really good questions.

I think the thing that I'd love to share is just our three to five year vision. And what are we going to spend more time focusing on? No shortage of opportunities, but I'm excited about the future. I think we are very lucky that we get to work with really smart people who care about our clients. We're going to continue to talk about wealth alignment, right? So I've talked to you a lot about balance sheet management and focusing on wealth alignment. And that really just means understanding our clients' values, understanding their passions and connecting those to their balance sheet more often.

So that's something that we'll spend a lot of time over the next three to five years, continue to grow organically, right? That is as one of our secret sauces. Will we look at inorganic growth in the future? Probably, but our sweet spot is really that inorganic growth.

Working on female services, working on women-led services is something that you'll see more and more from Brighton Jones. If I could be so bullish as to call out, like, I want to have a female-only service line in the next three to five years where women can come and really get the additional services they need, get that counsel when they're going through those tough life moments.

And then increased ownership, right? I want to make sure that we are focusing on empowering more and more of our team members to become owners in Brighton Jones. So pathway to ownership is something we will continue to focus on. And Carly, if folks want to connect with you or learn more about Brighton Jones, what's the best way to do that? You can find me on LinkedIn. So that's the first thing, Carly Dillon on LinkedIn. That would be great. And then stop by our Portland office or find us on our Brighton Jones website. Excellent. All right. Thank you. Awesome. Thanks so much, Steve.

All right, that's all for today. Make sure you like and share this podcast through your favorite social platforms. And for more great podcasts, visit us at barons.com slash podcasts. Take care and be safe.