HighTower's Weissbluth on Need For Solid Financial Plan (Audio)

by two point seven percent. The SMP five hundred index down four one to drop there of two tents of one percent down, Industrials down forty six, a decline of three tents of one percent, and nastank is down twenty three points, a drop of five tents of one percent. The ten ure down twenty thirty seconds, with the yield of one point six one percent. Gold down seven ninety renounced the thirteen thirty seven, a drop there of six

tents of one percent. Crude oil surging four point three percent that after the inventories report up a dollar ninety four a barrel forty forty four right now on West Texas enemy the a crude I'm Charlie Tellerton. That's a Bloomberg business flash. You're listening to taking Stock with Bim Box and Jatholeen Hayes on Bloomberg Radio. What would you do if you fired yourself? Would you rehire yourself? Well, let's find out a little bit more from Elliott Wis Blooth.

He is the founder and the chief executive High Tower Advisors, helping to manage over thirty billion dollars in assets for clients. He's based in Chicago, but he joins us here at Bloomberg World Headquarters in New York. Elliott, thanks for being here. Good to see you. I mentioned this idea of hiring and firing yourself because I know that is something that you do every year. Explain what it is this means. So I have to give full credit to the inspiration.

Andy Grove at Intel is famous for this technique that he did with his management team, and I've adopted it and made it pretty personal and adopted it on the team. And the general idea is that you can't get to a state of mind where you can forgive yourself for all the things you did wrong the year before unless

you actually fire yourself. Have a candid conversation about all the things that you you didn't do exactly the way you would hope that they would turn out, or the judgments you made that in hindsight, maybe you would have made them a little bit differently. And it's a bit of a tongue in cheek exercise, right, because there's something funny about firing, and you fire yourself. But then, of course, after you've smarted the wounds of being fired, you have

the good sense to hire yourself back. And it's the hiring yourself back, I think where there's a lot of magic that can happen inside of a way of a person thinks about decision making, because if you're the new guy, then you don't have any obligation to all those crazy decisions the old guy did, right because after all the guy. So you go through that process and what it allows you to do is say, well, if I was the new guy showing up here for the first time, what

are some of the things I would change today? And that frees your mind to say, Okay, here are a couple of decisions that I'm gonna make today, or judgments I'm gonna make today, and they may not be massive profound, monumental shifts, but they might be very important changes that you're going to make to begin a process, or to begin a conversation, or to accelerate or decelerate part of the world around you. And that freedom is is pretty

powerful and pretty liberating. So I guess every year you've rehired yourself so far, I think you'll probably rehiring yourself, maybe tough for some years another. So sure with us last year, what was the number one thing that you didn't do correctly? You said, oh boy, you believe blew it, Elliott, And then the new Elliott got to say, okay, here, so I'm doing So we a couple of years ago, we had a strategic plan to optimized part of our business.

We knew we had built a platform that a lot of advisors used, and we had a strategic vision to take it and apply it to a different part of the marketplace. And we knew intellectually that it would make sense because it was a good idea. But what we hadn't done, and what I hadn't done, has taken the time to properly fully evangelize all of the people that had to make it happen. And it's not just the

CEO and a couple of leaders in the business. You need to have a consensus if you're going to really take on a strategic shift, and so I had moved too quickly ahead of the people that had to make

it happen. And I recognized that. But in the process of firing myself and rehiring myself, I realized how important it was to go back and re evangelize some of those people and really get them on board in a way that when we renewed our energies in the first part of the year, they would be much more engaged and much more involved in making the that that sort

of activity a success. As a result of that, this year, we're on track to have the greatest growth year we've had since we launched the business, and a lot of that was because many of the people that didn't really feel included in the conversation were properly brought into the conversation. They hit the ground running with a different level of energy, and it was largely because I had failed to properly evangelize them and bring them to where they needed to

be to make the initiative as success. I'm not going to ask about the biggest concern that registered investment advisors have, which is your force of employees so to secure. But what are some of the things that they're coming to you with that they're getting from their customers. What kinds of questions are they coming to you with. Well, I'll

tell you. I was in Minneapolis Saint Paul last night and I welcomed the new team UM into Higower and a fantastic financial advisor, a veteran of the industry, and a great group of his clients joined to welcome him into his new office, and we went to welcome him

to High Tower. And what I heard at that room, and I heard as I was was reading the clients and over the cocktail hour, is what I'm hearing a lot of, which is that there's a significant amount of um uneasiness about the markets and there's a difficulty today with with opportunities that will create yield for clients. And so there's a strong sentiment in the community to not reach for yield, to not to not do things differently because the markets today are are difficult for a lot

of advisors to find opportunities. So it's a combination of market environment coupled with a sense of an easiness. And I think that uneasiness is fueled not just by maybe the political landscape in this country, what's happening, what's happening around the world, things like Zeka. There's a whole variety of things that are playing into it. But the levels of uneasiness we're we're hearing, you know, literally from around the country are are pretty high well. And we do

talk to advisors. We understand it's it's very difficult to keep the risk low for your for your client and also get them the kind of returns that they would like to have. Uh more broadly than especially at a time like this, they've got negative rates and you know, bond yields negative around the world are so very low, or fixed income isn't helping that much. Dividend pain stocks

maybe a little bit played out, that's a possibility. But what can and should a person expect from their advisors It first and foremost, making sure I don't lose money. What is the number one thing I should be expecting them to do? So, I think the most important thing for an individual to think about is do they feel that their financial advisor has built a comprehensive plan for them and their family, and it may not just be limited to the technical financial plan which maps out various

needs that a family may have. It's is the financial advisor looking at today's market in context of the person's total wellness, how they think about where the family is going, where the needs are going to be. Because we focus much more on the total picture, if you will, then what might be happening is different for a wealthy customer that you you probably have a lot of those versus somebody who's just hoping will have enough money to live

in retirement. Obviously there are differences in those needs. But I think that if you're thinking about a person's well being and how they think about their relationship to money, everything is contextual in terms of the quality of their life, the quality of their health, educational needs, retirement needs, and everybody has those needs. They may just have different quantities and different complexities with that with those stages of life.

But a person who's thinking about retiring at one income level is going to have similar life stage issues even if they have many more dollars, so the complexity may change. And obviously a person with a lot of money has a different set of problems than a person who has has more modest income, but emotionally and from the way they are going through their lives, they're having similar experiences Elliott. According to the Council for Economic Education, they do a

survey of the States. The study found that seventy parents experience at least some reluctance to talk to their children about financial matters. So how do you become a financial grown up? It's a great question in some ways that that makes the case obviously for a thoughtful financial advisor, because if the mom and dad are having some difficult times having these conversations, this is where a good professional

can engage. You know, one of the things that we have to start talking about is the relationship between money and and total wellness. And if you look at the data, a lot of the stress that comes from divorce, a lot of the stress that leads to people calling into hotlines, UM, a lot of the reasons that people feel uneasy about life can in many ways be tied to their money. Yet, people don't tend to think of their financial advisor the same way they do as a doctor or a lawyer.

They think of the financial advisor more as a tactician or a strategist to deliver a certain routine a certain return. I think if if the good financial advisors that are out there have figured out that the way they can add a lot of value is actually by broadening the way they interact with the families and the people, and the opportunity to do that, I think it's fantastic when you have parents that need a third party to talk to their children about about how to think about money.

Fifteen seconds left. How do I know when to fire my advisor and move on? It's a very difficult question to answer in but I would say that the first the first indication that you have the wrong person is when you get the sense that they're they're trying to constantly sell you something and they have a new thing to sell you rather than trying to build you a long range financial plan for your future. Well, short answer, but long on wisdom. Thank you so much. Elliott Wisbloo

founder and CEO of CEO of High Tower. He is talking to us about financial advisors, talking about what you should look for in them and more, and we'll hope you'll come back soon, Elliott. I'm Caffeine Hay's along with pim Fox, and this is Bloomberg