Jeff Schwantz is the Chief Revenue Officer of Advisor360°, a holistic wealth management platform that helps enterprises and advisors accelerate their digital transformation. He is responsible for the company’s revenue generation strategy, execution, and go-to-market approach. With over 24 years of experience in the financial services industry, Jeff frequently presents at industry conferences, executive roundtables, workshops, and seminars. Previously, he has held executive roles at Morningstar, eMoney Advisor, BNY Mellon Pershing, and many more.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
Jeff Schwantz introduces Advisor360° and how it helps people
Simplifying how financial advisors onboard their clients
Jeff talks about their revenue generation process
Partnering with financial advisor firms for growth and success
Who are the ideal clients for Advisor360°?
How Advisor360° evaluates its clients’ needs
Jeff explains the value of helping others
How Advisor360° is leveraging AI in the financial services industry
In this episode…
In today's fast-paced and ever-changing financial landscape, wealth management has become increasingly more complex. As a result, financial advisors face numerous challenges when managing and growing their businesses. Burgeoning financial technology might be the solution.
Financial expert Jeff Schwantz says that by leveraging technology, financial advisors can increase revenue, streamline operations, and reduce costs. However, despite the benefits of technology, many financial advisors remain hesitant to adopt new tools and processes. Some fear that technology will replace the human touch while others worry about the cost and complexity. So how can technology be used wisely to meet the evolving needs of clients?
In this episode of The Customer Wins, Richard Walker sits down with Jeff Schwantz, Chief Revenue Officer of Advisor360°, to discuss how financial advisors can thrive through technology. Jeff talks about Advisor360° and how it helps people, simplifying how financial advisors onboard their clients, and the ideal clients for Advisor360°.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
"Tips for Becoming a Data-Driven Financial Advisor With Jud Mackrill of Milemarker" on The Customer Wins
"Growth Tips for Wealth Management Firms With Aaron Klein of Nitrogen" on The Customer Wins
"Connecting Wealth Management Firms and Solution Providers With Chip Kispert" on The Customer Wins
Five Keys to Powerful Business Relationships: How to Become More Productive, Effective and Influential by Sallie Sherman, Joseph Sperry, and Steve Vucelich
Sponsor for this episode...
This is brought to you by Quik!
At Quik!, we provide forms automation and management solutions for companies seeking to maximize their potential productivity.
Using our FormXtract API, you can submit your completed forms and get clean, context-rich data that is 99.9% accurate.
Our vision is to become the leading forms automation company by making paperwork the easiest part of every transaction.
Meanwhile, our mission is to help the top firms in the financial industry raise their bottom line by streamlining the customer experience with automated, convenient solutions.
Go to www.quickforms.com to learn more, or contact us with questions at support@quikforms.com.
Episode Transcript:
Intro 0:02
Welcome to The Customer Wins podcast where business leaders discuss their secrets and techniques for helping their customers succeed and in turn grow their business
Richard Walker 0:16
Hi, I'm Rich Walker, the host of The Customer Wins where I talk to business leaders about how they help their customers win and how their focus on customer experience leads to growth. Some of our past guests have included Jud Mackril of Milemarker and Aaron Klein of Nitrogen. Today I get to speak with Jeff Schwantz, Chief Revenue Officer of Advisor360. Today's episode is brought to you by Quik! the leader in enterprise forms processing. When your business relies upon processing forms, don't waste your team's valuable time reviewing the forms. Instead, get Quik! using our form extract API, simply submit your completed forms and get back clean, context-rich data that is 99.9% accurate. Visit quikforms.com to get started. Now before I introduce today's guest, I want to give a big thank you to Chip Kispert of Beacon Strategies for introducing me to Jeff many years ago, go check out their website at beaconstrategiesllc.com and attend one of their roundtables. All right, now on to today's guest, Jeff Schwartz is the Chief Revenue Officer at Advisor360 where he leads the sales and marketing teams and is responsible for the company's revenue generation strategy execution and go-to-market approach. With over 24 years of financial services, Jeff frequently presents at industry conferences, executive roundtables, workshops and seminars. Prior to joining Advisor360, he was the Global Head of channels and partnerships and general manager and Global Head of Morningstar Advisor Client Experience Team. Jeff has also served in roles of sales and relationship manager at BNY Mellon Pershing, Allstate Financial and Wells Fargo financial. Man, Jeff, you got a bunch of background there. Jeff is also a contributor to and featured in the book Five Keys To Powerful Business Relationships. Jeff, welcome to The Customer Wins.
Jeff Schwantz 1:59
Thanks. Yeah, I've accumulated a few things in the years that I've been fortunate enough to work in this industry.
Richard Walker 2:05
That's awesome. I can't wait to hear more about it. If you haven't heard this podcast before, I talk with business leaders about what they're doing to help their customers win, how they built and deliver a great customer experience. And the challenge is to grow in their own company, Jeff to be transparent Advisor360 is one of our retail partners and offers quick within the platform. But I don't think I haven't fully understand all the things that you guys do. How does your company help people?
Jeff Schwantz 2:29
Yeah, at its essence, we're a technology firm, that helps enterprises and advisors really drive satisfaction. So if you're an enterprise, and you need to make sure that you've got advisor satisfaction, that's a core of our platform. So it's how do we deliver, what does advisor satisfaction rooted in? Well, it's their ability to do their job well, and to serve the households that they serve, that goes from thinking about the lifecycle of an advisor and working with a client. So from a prospective client, how do we help that advisor demonstrate their value? How do we help them to illustrate decision tradeoffs? And then as the advisor is fortunate enough to convert that client? How do we help them onboard? So this is where as you pointed out, where we work with great partners like you Rich and how we have you in your in our overall ecosystem? But how do we convert that prospect into a client? So how do we streamline that account opening process? So opening accounts, if they're managed accounts, brokerage accounts advisory and it's or insurance being able to streamline that? And then obviously, it's when you're managing those households over the long term? How do we again help those advisors really call all of the data that's necessary to be able to tell a client how are they doing, and things that they may need to do differently? Again, it goes kind of back to decision tradeoffs. So managing that household long term, what's their net worth doing? Hoping to think about it? How do they plan for it? So it's really, as I describe it Rich, it's how do we help and all of those moments that matter? And yeah, from a prospect to a client, and really managing that client long term.
Richard Walker 4:12
No, I love that you guys are advisor and investor-focused in centric and how you're looking at this. I heard a horror story the other day from somebody outside our industry, where they have to use a forms tool, there's one of two choices, and that's it. And they actually lose clients over this tool, because there are no other choices for submitting the business that they were doing. And you think about, I want to streamline, I want to automate, I want to build great tech, and this company did all that they have straight-through processing, but it's the worst experience. So I'm curious, from your perspective, how do you overcome that need for automation, streamline all the integration points to actually create something that users want? And they like and they want to use?
Jeff Schwantz 4:52
Yeah, it's amazing. I have very similar stories, just the folks that we have the opportunity to engage with, and I was talking to an executive probably two weeks ago, and he was describing the process that their advisors are going through. And not unlike a lot of organizations, this firm, probably like the one that you've been engaged with said, hey, what we're doing right now is not working. And the story he told was that their advisors, the worst two days of those advisors are right after a new client says, yes, you can think about that. And it's why it's because their onboarding process really, they've done everything to build trust to get that prospective client to say yes. And now it is a very painful process to as I described, to onboard that client, all the things to set up to get the relationship going. And that's a really interesting statement. I mean, it struck us, because there's a better way. And so that's what we're focused on is just how do we help those firms after you get a client or prospective client to say yes, how do we make that all important first impression of like, this is how I'm going to serve you long term? How can we make that an enjoyable experience for all parties. And it's using technology. But it's really, it's the use of technology to actually make that onboarding process less visible, that make it easy. And that's the challenge that a lot of organizations are going through, and it's all of those touch points, again, all of those moments that matter is, how are we there? What's that we provide or others provide that make that a better experience that gets down the path of like, well, it's remember why we're all here. We're all here to help people plan for their long term. And the sooner a client can do that we know the power of compounding, the sooner we can help people do that, the better outcomes they have. So it's just like, everything that we can do to make and streamline that process to make it as enjoyable as possible, is clearly what we're focused on. So I get back to advisor and investor satisfaction. So how do we go from point A to point B to point C, and maintain that relationship to really get to the important stuff?
Richard Walker 7:15
Yeah. Now, your role being in revenue generation, it seems to me like you truly care about the product and the experience. And so can you just be focused on revenue without being focused on product? I mean, you guys have a product team, you have all these people doing all this work? How much involvement do you have in the product when it comes to revenue?
Jeff Schwantz 7:35
Very much. So I mean, if you're not, you're not meeting your clients or prospective clients where they need to be. And being a company that's only been around for the last four years, as we spun out of a firm that was focused on serving advisors and clients, you need to make sure that you're meeting your prospective clients where they are. So you can imagine all of the conversations that we're having with the executives and the technical teams in the enterprise, wealth management firms that we engage with, is super important. And I go back to the point A moment ago is when you sit down with a firm, and we understand the pain that they're going through, or the challenges that they're trying to overcome, a lot of it is transformation, but so they understand the bigger transformation need, but they go, look, there's a problem that's right in front of me that I can't get past I can't even look to the future, because I need to solve this right now. And that's super, super important for us being able to listen to that to say, look, we can help you with that, or to be really candid to tell people that we can't help you with something. So that somebody is really clear, so that we're not wasting anybody's time, but it's the ability to go, okay, we understand the problem that you're in. But then I always kind of talk about it in the children's story of if you give a moose a muffin, or if you give a mouse a cookie, what do they always want, they want something a little bit more, but you need to say, look, this is what we know that you need right now. And we can help you with that or we cannot. But then let's look a little bit beyond that to talk about all the other interdependencies that happened right after that. And we understand the long-term game for you is really around transformation. But here's incrementally how you can get there and helping, literally walking and having the benefit of as many years as you said in my introduction, that I've had the opportunity to work with firms and help them solve problems. It's that ability to go hey, I know you're looking at this but there's one more thing right after that by the way we can help you with this thing. But this is the next thing right after that. We want to make sure that you're focused on as well and how it works and then how they should be actually evaluating the decision that they're making right now. And because what we're also finding like there's a need by organizations and well firms to evolve. The expectations are not getting any lower from advisors and investors. Let's say the bar is not going down. It's up going up. But it's how can we get there. And what we're finding a lot of organizations are struggling with is just how to put these things together in a way that's coherent. Well, the technologies actually work together, we're finding a lot of firms that made decisions seven years ago, and they're like, we're not really happy. So we've had to come back. And they made another decision four years ago for a point solution, and now they're back in the market again, because it's not working out. And that's where the opportunity that we have to call a timeout to say, look, we can see what you're trying to do. But like, let's look a little bit beyond just this pain point that you have right now. Why, because you're putting your advisors in your organization through a lot of change management, there's a better way down this path. But it's just that's that pause and figuring out, we see this, but there's probably one thing behind that we want to make sure that you understand as well.
Richard Walker 10:55
I think you bring up something really, really difficult for software companies and service companies, as well as for the customers to try to comprehend, which is the customer wants everything, and they want it now. And software solutions don't do everything. So I think you're right, when you sit down and say this is what we can, this is what we cannot do. And here's what we can do now. And I think the most important part is when you offer them a roadmap and a platform to grow with, so they can ultimately achieve their goals. That is when you start to see the transfer of value from you to them. And for them to start seeing you as a partner versus a vendor. Do you agree with that?
Jeff Schwantz 11:31
Yeah, totally agree. The other part of that, too, is how can you bring others in, that can help with those problems or provide? So it's that continuation of the workflow or the experience that you're trying to put together? So do we provide a lot of things that can help organizations? Yes? Do we provide everything? No? Do we think it's super, super valuable to be able to bring in other partners that we know are an important part of the overall ecosystem? Absolutely. So it's not just our perspective, but one of the best executives. And so a friend of mine is he would do a partner meeting, they would do a partner meeting in their organization and bring all their partners in. And one of the things that they would always say is, what you all do individually is amazing. And thank you for helping our organization evolve. One thing that could make us better is if you guys could actually look to the left and look to the right of each other, and figure out an opportunity of how your teams could work with others that you know are important that are in this room, and come to us with ideas. And in a way so it's not, it's like the old adage, Rich, it's like if you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far go with others. So it's just that mentality of understanding what you can do and what you can't do, and how can you bring in other great partners to as part of that overall ecosystem? How does it work together? Ultimately, how does it benefit the advisor? How does it create efficiency for them? How does it allow them to grow their practices, and ultimately solve, serve more households, if that's what's important for that advisor in that enterprise? which in most cases, it is?
Richard Walker 13:06
Yeah, for sure. And so there's a lot of questions I want to ask, but I want to ask something that I've been thinking about, which is, how do you know if a customer is ready for the help that you offer? How do you help them see it? I mean, it's the Steve Jobs thing, like the client doesn't know what they want, we have to show them. How do you approach that type of problem?
Jeff Schwantz 13:24
Yeah, that's one of the things that we sit down early in. And when we engage firms just to understand their readiness, and how they're thinking about change. I can tell you, one of the things that we always ask and try to vet very quickly is, are the firm's growth-minded in that they're ready, willing and able to transform themselves? And I'll tell you why I like anything in life. It's, we all make New Year's resolutions, we all do these things, we say it, but are we really committed to doing it? So part of that is sitting down and having a discussion to say, are you really committed, and really ready willing and able to do that? Are you action or eager and going to do these things, and I can tell you, a Nurse is a powerful element for a lot of organizations met, nobody wants to make a bad decision, some options that we ask is just an engaging with verbs. And this isn't anything more than just trying to understand where they are, where they're at, you know, back to how do we meet people where they're at? And sometimes we can go through a conversation and quickly can understand that they want to transform but they may not be ready, willing and able to do it for a whole host of reasons. And that's okay. That's like we always say is yes or no or find answers maybe doesn't do anybody any. Yeah, so it's are you action-oriented? Like, are we compatible, like culturally, that's a super important thing when you think about organizations but you like who you partner with, but also to it's like are these organizations advisor obsessed? And what does that mean? Like, if they're advisor obsessed, that means that they know what they do really, really well in serving an advisor. And I can tell you some firms have lost that focus a little bit where they've said, well, we serve advisors and, you know, suddenly, we think of ourselves as a technology company. And we've seen this kind of transformation, like, we think it's important to be able to provide technology, and to build technology and to do all of these other things. But that can often become a distraction. Like, it's the analogy of everybody loves to build homes, but not everybody loves to maintain homes. That's a big difference. So like the burden of wanting to build something quickly goes away the luster of like, wow, this is a lot to maintain, again, like, think about the genesis of Advisor360, we had a firm that had built technology for advisors that realized that's a big part of it's not just building, it's the maintenance of it, and are we going to be able to be competitive? Are we going to be long-term, being able to maintain the level investment that's necessary to be able to be top-notch? That's a good strategic question. I can tell you right now, there's a lot of firms that are going back and asking themselves, like, who are we really? So it goes back to that, their mindset, where's their orientation? Have they have they really figured out, you know, what's important and how they serve advisors, and what they are, and also, most importantly, what they're not.
Richard Walker 13:24
Yeah, that's so important. I said the story many times that my company started growing fast when I started saying, no, we were not going to do that we're not going to do that this is the two things we do really, really well. So I think it is important to understand that. There's something else that you said, that's really, I think I'm invoking, because I was on another interview with somebody else. And, in fact, he makes suits, custom suits, and I can't wait for his episode for people to see it. And one of the things I really got from him was that you cannot create the best customer experience the ultimate customer experience, if you don't love your customer first. If you don't have that direct passion for their needs, and what they experience, how could you ever expect to build the best experience in your solutions? And tech is really hard. I mean, I know a lot of partners, a lot of vendors out there, they're so good at the tech, that it's only good for an engineer to use. And the engineers or the advisors like, I just can't do it. I can't see myself doing it. You said some other things like you sit down and talk to your customers, you meet with them where they're at you listen to them, but how do you actually evaluate? And what metrics do you use? And what tools and techniques do you use? How do you actually evaluate if you're meeting their needs and creating the right experience for them?
Jeff Schwantz 17:00
Yeah. Obviously, for existing clients, we're always listening to the evolving needs that we see this goes back to your question around product. And where do we see needs? There's a lot of advisors in transition right now. So how do we help our existing clients back to the moments that matter? So like the moments matter of that advisor, has chose to move them in their practice in their household to another client? Well, how do we help facilitate that? How do we help streamline that there's a lot of trust that goes into that. So it's the tech aspect of it, but it's also know how to engage. So that's something that's super, super important for us. But it's also understanding, back to your question of the whether we can help them or not, it's one of the things that will engage and looking at firms that may need some help. One of the questions we've been asking, I think, one of your episodes that just aired talking about advisors in transition, and what's important to them, and how are they evaluating things? And looking at organizations, one of the questions that we often ask is like, when you lose your advisors, why, and then when you when advisors, why? Like, just back to the, just trying to get to what's important of like, why are we here? What's different now? We've been looking at advisors that have been moving around and asking, you're looking at organizations to say, well, how many years of experience have you lost with advisors that have left your organization in the last 12 months? That's sometimes a painful question to ask, but we're just trying to get to, why are we here? Are you ready, willing and able to like think differently? Do you understand why you're losing that and just being able to provide those perspectives because that helps get down the path of like, Is now the right time to engage? Do you understand what's most important? Have you broken it down? If you understand those things that why you're winning advisors or not winning advisors or why you're losing advisors? Do you understand the core of that with an opportunity to go solve those pain problems incrementally to provide some value. And then over time, like how does that continue to evolve? So it's, again, back to the how do we solve? How do we provide a painkiller right now for the pain that they're having, but then how does it fit into a broader transformation that most organizations are looking at? So it's just back to that, meeting them where they're at understanding, getting to the things of why are we here, now, what's most important, and whether we can help you with one of our partners, ultimately, to help them transform themselves when they're ready, willing and able.
Richard Walker 17:45
Yeah, Jeff there's some things in here that I want to add to it, because I love this philosophy that you're bringing out that it's not about the sale. It's about the transformation. It's about what they're getting from working with you. And if you can even solve their problem or not. And I think that kind of transparency, it builds trust, it builds partnerships, not client-vendor relationships. And it seems to me that you really, really care about people and humanity. I remember, the Beacon Strategies meeting, I saw you, you said something, I can't repeat what it is to help people really engage with what's important to them. Would you be willing to talk about that?
Jeff Schwantz 21:10
Yeah, one of the things that I backed up perspective, one of the things and this is an exercise that I can't say that I owned it, but it made an impactful, it was impactful on me. So one of the exercises I asked people to do is draw a quick circle. And what this represents is almost every board meeting that you've ever been a part of, and you're looking down from it from the top, and at the top of that circle, you put yourself, and then what I ask people to do is to go around that circle and put all the names of the people that were important to them, or that are important to them, that provide that will tell them the things that they don't want to hear what they need to hear, and when they need help, who do you who do they call, so I just asked people to like truly, truly reflective, whatever season they're in right now. Is that their spouse? Is that their children? Is that somebody that I used to work with? Is it a person of faith in their religion? Was it a coach, was it a mentor, who was it in their life, and I just asked him to do that, because for me, it's always having that perspective of who can help you who's helping you, and just taking that inventory. But then I also say the most important thing to do is to actually call and share some gratitude with that individual. And to say, look, you mean a lot to me, and I've just had a chance to reflect. And here's what you've meant to me. And I just want you to know that. And it's amazing the conversations that come back, and some people that I've asked to do that, I do this a lot and the people that I work with, too, that I have an opportunity to coach and mentor and work with. And they're like, Jeff, I don't want to do that. That seems kind of silly. And I said, sometimes you just got to leap. Trust me, when we talk about this. And Rich, I absolutely care about people, this goes back to my sports background, I had amazing coaches in my life, people that were so important to me that told me things that I didn't want to hear, but that I had to hear. And you know when you've got somebody like that, they have nothing but your best interest in mind. And it's kind of what you were saying with the custom suits individual. It's the same thing, just like I am passionate about helping people that's I've had, like I said, great sports, mentors, educators, that have helped me just tremendously. And it's that ability, I know how important it was for me, how do I help others just slow down and what we're doing, and I do the same thing and how we engage really, in all walks of my life, it's just, I'm gonna tell you the things you may not want to hear. But if you understand where I'm coming from, and that's coming from love in my heart, and that I care about you, and that's the same thing that I do in business. So it's that exercise. So part of this is, and where you and I got a chance to meet it was, I don't typically do that the standard approach, it's like, I'm gonna fill people back up. And if nothing else, people come over and say, man, I really appreciated that. Because if we can't connect and talk about the things that really matter the most, which is who we are and why we are the people that we are, and who made us those people like it's back to like, how do we just connect and then if we can help solve another business problem, again, where I can tell you where we can help or where we can't, or maybe that almost somebody, it's what it's all about?
Richard Walker 24:28
And honestly, this is why I like asking the question, how do you help people not what do you do? What product do you sell? Honestly, how do we help people because I think humans, by our nature depend on each other. And so we have to have fulfillment from helping others. And one of the things I strive for that you're echoing or resonating with me is that I want to be one of those trusted parties at the table for my customers. I want them to think of me as one of those companies who can call to and get the truth we will reflect back the truth to them and just be direct and transparent so that they can make better decisions. I think you make way better decisions with facts versus premises or assumptions or lies. All right, let's switch gears because I love this topic. But there's something else I wanted to ask you about. Advisor360 is a tech company after all right? You guys are building amazing software solutions. Where does AI fit into your business? Is it there yet? You've been focused on it?
Jeff Schwantz 25:18
Yeah, it's probably like every firm. I mean, I use elements of chatGPT, nearly every day and what I'm doing just how I'm thinking through things, helps me process. But like a lot of organizations, if you're not doing something with it, right, now, you're probably missing an opportunity. So we look at the same way, like what's a way that we can help our organizations drive advisor satisfaction, drive advisor productivity, investor satisfaction, productivity, retention, all of those things. So it's just how can we apply it with a very focused way that helps people get the answers like everything else faster, self-service, what can we do? Because that's what people are looking for. It's just, how can I use technology like AI to quickly find a complex topic? And boil it down, just to give me an answer to your point around, how do we drive using data? So that's where we have been focusing our initial efforts is how do we help use AI to surface information faster, to help our advisors, their support staff answer questions that their clients might have? How do I do something like this? So that's where we've initially focused like every firm, there's other more grandiose things that we can think about. But how do we stay focused on focus? How do we apply it very specifically, to a need that we hear our clients are thinking about looking at themselves? And how do we apply it there.
Richard Walker 26:47
And I read a great article yesterday, that gave us a glimpse into what's happening and can be happening. So imagine, instead of going to look in your CRM to find all your clients you haven't talked to, in the past three months, just ask it. Give me a list of the customers tell me, and then go schedule meetings with them and send them messages. I see some tremendous opportunities, especially with what you guys are trying to figure out and help your customers win. But it sounds like you guys took an internal focus first, like how do you individually use AI to make your jobs better? Right?
Jeff Schwantz 27:17
Yeah, exactly. Back to how do we serve the enterprises that we serve? So, we serve the home offices of the large enterprises and what they do in their workflows. We serve advisors, and we're looking at like, understanding what those workflows and what's going on between the two? Yeah, let's focus on it on there. But two, it’s we have data for nearly 3 million US households on our platform. So you can imagine too, so walking the fine line of safeguarding and protecting that information, which is of the utmost importance, how do we make sure that when we're trusted with that data, that there's not something going awry. So back to like, how do we serve on the customer service perspective, not using any of that client data in any of the work that we're doing? It's just focusing on more of those kinds of routine tasks that we're talking about, like the connective tissue between those things. But I would say like, AI can mean so many things to so many people have use cases, like one of the things, setting AI aside if that's okay, we have one of the things that advisors told us and being able to serve their clients, they would spend up to four hours putting together materials to sit down and do a client review, whether quarterly, semiannually or annually for like, oh my heavens, that's a long time. Like, why does it take so without even AI, we're using our technology to be able to aggregate those things. So we literally call it our one-click review. So what used to take four hours now it takes less than 30 seconds to be able to pull together, routine tasks, to be able to sit down and give that time back. So we've been tracking the number of one-click reviews that we've been doing, we actually put on our website that we've said, how many hours have that saved our clients, which we all know, we all have 168 hours in a week. So how can we help, back to productivity, how do we give back time the most precious thing that that all of us are equal on no matter where we're at, in our lives. Time is the equalizer among them all. How do we give that time back and serving those so that those advisors could better serve their clients, be there for the moments that matter and serving the households that they serve?
Richard Walker 29:31
Yeah, well, you bring up something else. I mean, AI is the darling right now. Everybody's enamored with it. It's exciting. It's the new tool. But the reality is, there's lots of ways to solve problems, and AI is just one option to do it. That's right. And you got to remember your core competencies. I mean, you guys have these capabilities. So I mean, that's phenomenal. I remember being a financial adviser, and putting together the plans and how long it took. And we built some software that would try to automate some of that so I get it, man, that's awesome that you're doing that for them. Jeff as we're getting close to the end, I'm gonna have another question for you. And we're gonna have to wrap up here. But before we do that, what's the best way for people to connect with you?
Jeff Schwantz 30:08
Yeah. I mean, LinkedIn is always the best. I'm pretty active on it. Our teams are pretty active it but that's the best way to get most of my contact information is out there. So LinkedIn is absolutely the probably the most efficient way to get a hold of me.
Richard Walker 30:23
Okay, awesome. Yeah, you're out there a lot. So here's my closing question, who has had the biggest impact on your leadership style? Or how you approach your role and what you're doing?
Jeff Schwantz 30:33
Yeah, it's hard to answer like this specific, who, but I think I touched on it a moment ago to just given my sports background, having amazing coaches in my life, it's hard to say exactly one of them, but I'd say it's probably some sports coaches that I had in college, just because of their unbridled willingness to tell me the things that I needed to be better on. And being able to take that and understand it, and apply it and understanding where there were people are giving you feedback, and why. And they're doing it because they actually care. So I'll tell you like sports coaches, but I'd say early in my career, or probably in my career, the team at Pershing was pretty influential. I'd been in our space for a number of years already and had the opportunity, I wanted to help go solve other problems. So the team at Pershing saw the opportunity in me and the kind of my skill set and they're like, is this guy from the clearing background and understanding that? No, he's not. But he's got some of these other skills that that are important to us. And they took a risk on me. And I think that's also I think probably a lot of people will tell you, they're eternally grateful for the teachers, the coaches, the employer, the boss, that took a risk on that person. And I've had all of that in different stages in my life. So I'm just thankful for those people that took a risk on me and the opportunity when I have to sit and talk to talk to talent and to coach people and to work with them. I tried to pour that back into them because of the gratitude that I had from the people that took a risk on me believed in me, and were willing to tell me the things that I didn't want to hear. But I needed to hear to be a better human, a better friend, a better business partner.
Richard Walker 32:20
It is those people that make the difference, right, I was trying to impart to my son's because I can be a little strict sometimes and challenging to them I was trying to impart to them. You don't sharpen a knife on wood, you sharpen it on stone, you need to battle, you need to go up against hard objects from time to time, and you need somebody to share that truth with you and show you things that maybe you don't want to see. So I think it's awesome that you can pull back to those experiences and see how it helped form you. Do you think you're a tough leader?
Jeff Schwantz 32:49
I think I'm a firm leader? I think tough is an interesting word, I'd say firm. But again, one that people know that when I'm being firm, and why I'm nudging, it's where it's coming from, and it's nothing other than their best interest in mind.
Richard Walker 33:08
Yeah, I mean, that's so clear in this conversation, you really, really care about people, and the outcome of your customer. So I congratulate you and finding really an awesome fit for your skills, your background, your leadership and Advisor360 is a great company. So I wish you a lot of success there.
Jeff Schwantz 33:25
Perfect, Rich, thanks for the opportunity to connect here and talk through a couple of things that are important to you and I hopefully important to others. But you know, important for the communities that we have an opportunity to serve both personally and professionally. So thanks for the opportunity just to be able to talk a little bit here today of crunch on those things a little bit more.
Richard Walker 33:43
Yeah, and we should do another one because I could talk about this for a long time. So I want to give a big thank you to Jeff Schwartz, the CRO of Advisor360 for being on this episode of The Customer Wins, go check out their website at advisor360.com. And don't forget to check out Quik! at quikforms.com where we make processing forms easier. I hope you enjoyed this discussion and we'll click the like button, share this with someone and subscribe to our channel for future episode of The Customer Wins. Jeff, thank you so much for joining me today.
Jeff Schwantz 34:11
Thank you Rich, appreciate it.
Outro 34:14
Thanks for listening to The Customer Wins podcast. We'll see you again next time and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.
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