Rich Whalen is the Vice President of Technology Strategy and Execution at Equity Services Inc., a broker-dealer and registered investment adviser member company of National Life Group. Equity Services Inc. creates confidence in the financial future of its clients by supporting financial advisors with innovative technology solutions. Since joining the firm in 2018, Rich has been instrumental in enhancing its technology platform, contributing to improved efficiencies that allow advisors to focus more on client interactions. With a career that began in financial services as an advisor, he quickly became passionate about technology and its potential to improve financial planning processes. His unique perspective on using technology to give advisors the "gift of time" reflects his commitment to optimizing the customer experience and driving company growth.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
[2:42] Rich Whalen discusses how Equity Services, Inc. helps advisors gain more valuable time
[4:28] How the right tech can drastically cut down manual data entry and improve workflow
[6:45] Strategies for evaluating and integrating new technology into an existing ecosystem
[9:14] The role of tech in transaction flow and customer interactions in financial services
[11:37] Rich shares the importance of flexibility and bespoke solutions in technology adoption
[18:25] What is the role of AI in financial services?
[24:18] Why the human element in an automated process is vital
[26:23] Effective techniques for prompting and optimizing AI tools for business use
[31:58] How bad leadership experiences can shape and refine an individual's leadership style
In this episode…
In today's fast-paced financial services industry, optimizing time management and technology is crucial for staying competitive. This saves valuable time for the business and empowers clients to achieve greater efficiency in their interactions. But how can advisors implement these innovative strategies in their firms to streamline operations and significantly enhance the customer experience?
Experienced financial services technology implementation and management professional Rich Whalen shares his journey and insights into solving these challenges by leveraging technology to create what he calls 'the gift of time' for advisors. By integrating automation and efficient workflows, he emphasizes the importance of freeing time for advisors to engage more deeply with their clients rather than being bogged down by data entry and administrative tasks. Rich details how his team evaluates new technologies, ensuring their compatibility with existing systems to enable seamless data flow and minimal disruption. He also delves into the evolving role of AI in enhancing operational efficiency, sharing his forward-looking views on how AI could eventually anticipate workflows and improve decision-making processes.
In this episode of The Customer Wins, Richard Walker interviews Rich Whalen, Vice President of Technology Strategy and Execution at Equity Services Inc., about utilizing technology to optimize time management and customer engagement. Rich discusses how Equity Services gifts advisors more valuable time, strategies for evaluating and integrating new technology into an existing ecosystem, the role of tech in transaction flow and customer interactions, and the role of AI in financial services.
Resources Mentioned in this episode
"Transforming a Financial Services Firm Through Technology With Geoff Moore" on The Customer Wins
"Maximizing Efficiency in Client Documentation With Corey Westphal" on The Customer Wins
"Innovating Fiduciary Risk Assessment for Growth With Mark Friedenthal" on The Customer Wins
"Connecting Wealth Management Firms and Solution Providers With Chip Kispert" on The Customer Wins
Quotable Moments:
"At Equity Services Inc., we create confidence in the financial future of everyone we work with. It's a very sacred duty to help clients."
"Ultimately, my goal is to make the operations of financial services as easy as possible and give our advisors as much time as possible."
"The greatest epiphanies in my career are figuring out what takes more time and trying to avoid those inefficiencies."
"Being able to anticipate actions is one of the really cool breakthroughs I think we're going to have in the next few years."
"Flexibility is our core philosophy. We want to give advisors the tools to create a bespoke environment to meet their goals."
Action Steps:
Embrace AI and machine learning for anticipatory actions: This approach saves time by reducing the need for manual data retrieval, enabling professionals to focus on strategic tasks rather than routine data gathering.
Prioritize integration over novelty: This prevents the inefficiency caused by the need for redundant data entry and ensures a smoother, more cohesive technological ecosystem.
Leverage AI for contextual data presentation: Implementing AI solutions that provide context-sensitive data at critical points in workflows, like account openings, increases accuracy by ensuring users have the right information readily available.
Foster flexible technological environments: Encourage the use of diverse tools and technologies to enable personalized and bespoke solutions.
Utilize AI for enhanced note-taking and communication: Adopting AI-powered tools for transcription and summarization in meetings streamlines the documentation process, saves time, and improves accuracy.
Sponsor for this episode...
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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 my past guests have included Geoff Moore of Valmark Financial Group, Corey Westphal of Mobile Assistant, and Mark Friedenthal of Tolerisk. Today, I'm speaking with Rich Whalen, the VP of tech strategy and execution at Equity Services, Inc. And 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 manually reviewing the forms, instead, get Quik!. Using our Form Xtract API, simply submit your completed forms and get back clean context-rich data that reduces manual reviews to only one out of 1000 submissions. Visit quikforms.com to get started. Now, before I introduce today's guest, I have to give a big thank you to Chip Kispert, founder of Beacon Strategies and host of the Beacon Roundtables, where I was first introduced to Rich. Go check out Chip's episode on this show, and visit his website at beaconstrategies.com so you can attend round tables and enhance your business with his team of industry experts.
All right, So Rich Whalen joined Equity Services, Inc in 2018 and today as Vice President of Technology Strategy and Execution, he's charged with growing and supporting the technology platform at ESI. This includes creating new enhancements, adding new technologies, and working with reps on how to best fit the technology into their practice. He has spent his entire career in the financial services industry, starting his career as a financial advisor, working with individuals and families. He quickly became fascinated with the technology he was using and how it can be improved. While at Voya Financial he transitioned from a financial advisor to the technology department at Voya Financial Advisors, where he spent eight years enhancing, expanding and teaching financial advisors about the platform. Rich, welcome to The Customer Wins.
Rich Whalen 2:14
Rich, thanks for having me. It's been a long time coming to join I'm glad we were finally able to make it happen.
Richard Walker 2:20
Me too, my friend, this is great. So for those who haven't heard this podcast before, I talk with business leaders about what they're doing to help their customers win, how they built deliver great customer experience, and the challenges to growing their own company. Rich, let's understand your business a little better, especially from your perspective of what you do. How does your company and you and your team, help people?
Rich Whalen 2:42
Yeah, so at Equity Services, Inc, we create confidence in the financial future of everyone we work with. We have a, my opinion, a very sacred duty to help clients plan and live their best lives. I support our advisors by helping give them the gift of time. And what do I mean by that? What I mean by that is I want our advisors and our representatives talking with clients more and more and actually using our technology less. So whenever we're finding ways to help our advisors be able to open up accounts in a quicker, more efficient manner, integrations that do things automatically, helping our advisors find new prospects, helping our advisors and our reps be able to do financial planning, to do an analysis, whatever they're doing, we're finding ways to make it easier and making sure that they only have to put in a piece of information once and that'll propagate throughout our whole platform. So ultimately, my goal is to make the operations of financial services as easy as possible and give our advisors as much time as possible to talk with their clients.
Richard Walker 3:55
I love that you distill this down to the gift of time, because when I talk about customer experience, and how do you create great customer success, there's so many facets to it, right? Oh, I could tweak this. I can have a better chatbot. I can have faster return time, et cetera. But in the end, you've just distilled it down. It's about, how do I give them their time back? Because who likes to sit on more phone calls or have more issues to work through, etc. So what are some of the metrics in which you can measure whether you're giving time back to people or not?
Rich Whalen 4:28
Yeah, that is been one of the greatest epiphanies in my career, is figuring out what are things that wind up taking more time to do, and trying to avoid those. So we'll go through and look at any new technology, and a lot of times we'll all be wowed, and we'll say, Wow, this is so cool. Look at all the things that it can do, all the bells and whistles. But I always have to take a step back and think, okay, how is it going to be used? And what value is it going to bring? And a lot of times it's coming to what's the data entry? If it's a tool that doesn't really integrate with the rest of our platform and our reps are going to have to spend a lot of time re-keying information, then it may not be the right fit for us.
So we're trying to measure, and I love to have like, great KPIs for this is just a lot of those don't exist at a system level. You can kind of get, if you use a SEM tool, you can go through and get a lot of activity, but that doesn't necessarily measure your key engagement. But long story short, we're always looking for what's the most efficient path for data to flow, because if you follow the data, then the activity and the gift of time will essentially follow, I think. So the more we can make these integrations better, the better off all of our advisors and our clients will be.
Richard Walker 6:02
So I think that's a fascinating view, because you're right. The data is the flow of transactions and work and work items, and really even back and forth between teams. If there's a rejection because something got filled out wrong or incomplete, it is about the data. But I'm also thinking what you just said about you're evaluating if it's taking more data entry time to use a new product or service. So what are the other things you look at when you evaluate technology as to whether it's going to add time? Because, I mean, look, let's be honest, how many MFAs do you have on your phone now, and how hard is it when you have to go through three MFAs to do something, it's crazy, am I really saving time? So how do you evaluate other facets of this?
Rich Whalen 6:45
Yeah, so we're always looking for different pieces of technology that fit into our ecosystem, and we can measure it a lot of different ways. If it's something where information will be able to be popped up and kind of provided in context with what's going on. So reps aren't having to search for something we're realizing, okay, you're about to go do, let's say, open up an account. We know that. Well, here's that client that you were just looking at and finding ways to populate that information. So always trying to understand where the reps are in any given workflow and start being able to anticipate, hey, what's going to come next.
Because I think that's one of the really things I'm looking forward to the most about AI is not as much the generative part, although that's what everything's been focused on lately, getting to the point where we can start anticipating actions and workflows within systems and then bring in the information that says, okay, here's what I think you're about to do. Here's an easy way to go through and do it, or hear the information you're going to need to do that, maybe add a little bit, maybe expand on it, depending on what's needed. And then, okay, let's go do that. So as we get into the AI and machine learning, being able to anticipate actions is one of the really cool breakthroughs I think we're going to have in the next few years?
Richard Walker 8:21
Yeah, I agree with that. And fact, I'm gonna have somebody on my show soon where they have a co-pilot for advisors to help listen to conversations and anticipate needs and bring data to the fore, or even forms and documents, etc. So there's some really innovative things coming up, and I want to talk more about that, but before we do that, if you were kind of to still this down, like you gave me this core idea of the gift of time, which I absolutely love. I'm going to steal it, and I'm sorry, because I just love it so much.
Rich Whalen 8:48
We'll have to do a licensing deal.
Richard Walker 8:49
Yeah, okay, yeah, let's do that. Are there core philosophies that drive how you make decisions about technology? And I'll just give you an example as kind of the frame of reference. Some customers I work with say we want everybody in a Salesforce environment, one system to look at one workflow set, but that everything must flow into that and be part of it. Do you guys have any core philosophies that drive customer experience, user experience?
Rich Whalen 9:14
I think our core philosophy is really around flexibility, and we try not to have a singular system. We have a few in there. We are a client of Quik!, as you well know, so we're a big fan, the Quik! in this service you have. So all of our advisors and reps have Quik! available to them to use for opening up accounts. But in many cases, we have multiple types of tools and in some cases competing technology on our platform, because we want to give that choice of flexibility and allow our reps to create a bespoke environment for them. Now, of course, we're doing due diligence on all of these tools. And we're creating a menu that they can kind of work off of. So it's not just a, oh, let me go pick X, Y and Z. There's thought and cohesion around all of that.
But where we really get into is every representative is running their business and have different goals with that, and we want to make sure for us that we are able to meet our representatives and our advisors right where they are, and be able to give them the platform that they need to run their business. So I would love to say I have this beautiful workflow that goes A to B for absolutely everything, and we have it down and fine-tune down to the nth degree, and there is no fad and no wasted space whatsoever. But as I'm sure you will know, in your design, you have to create on this highway different off-ramps that are going around back and forth to allow people to go, and that's one area where I think we take advantage of that flexibility in having reps come to us and look to us and say, okay, well, I'm not going to be locked into this really narrow space, in this really narrow set of technologies that I can use. We're really broadening our experience, for our advisors and for our reps.
Richard Walker 11:24
Yeah, yeah. So are you guys finding tools and implementing tools to bridge gaps when there's different off ramps, I don't know, Zapier, AI Tools, Data integrations, how are you enabling this to work better?
Rich Whalen 11:37
Yeah. So we're looking, we have a pretty good lineup of, actually, I shouldn't say pretty good, but we have a great lineup of tools and partners that are already on our platform, and when we're looking at them, as I mentioned earlier, we're looking to make sure they have a good fit, that we're not just bringing someone on, because, oh, we still have that, and that looks great, kind of the scroll effect if you're always looking at what's new and shiny in there. But when we're evaluating a new piece of technology to come on, we're really evaluating, how does that fit in with our current technology? Does it work with our account opening tool? Does it work with the CRMs that are on our platform? Does it integrate with our data hub that we have in there and making sure that all of those create time, and we don't add platforms that kind of create a drag on advisors time.
Richard Walker 12:30
Yeah, I thought of something else that I would have loved to have known 20 years ago when I started my company. So I'm gonna ask it on behalf of all the startups out there, because how many new tech are coming out into the market right now, especially with the advent of AI? So the question is really around, if you see a new product and they're only a year old, or something like that, how do you evaluate whether you can take them on as a vendor and trust them, etc, assuming they fill a gap, they fill a need. You like their product. You like their experience, right? So all the things you just said, how do you make the decision to work with a upstart, new company? Or do you?
Rich Whalen 13:09
Yeah. So we have some newer kind of upstarts that we're looking at right now. And honestly, it's the kind of at least I'll go way back, 20 years ago, since you mentioned it, when I was first starting out as an advisor, we were taught, or our training was around, how do you answer the question of, why should I work with an advisor that's right out of college? Oh my gosh. And yeah, I'm sure you have breaking question.
Richard Walker 13:40
When I was 26 and I looked like an 18-year-old trying to sell financial services. Oh my gosh.
Rich Whalen 13:45
That's when I first grew my beard was to look a little bit old.
Richard Walker 13:48
Oh my gosh, that's what I did. That's what I did. I raised beard to, like, look more than 18.
Rich Whalen 13:53
To go a little bit yes, and anytime I have to shave this. And it's been a very long time, my wife has said absolutely not never do that again. So to answer your question, or go back to what I was saying on there, the answer was, right out of college, I've gotten the best education on this and up to date on all of the new rules and regulations and the new thinking in this. So I am hungry to earn your business, and I have some of the best training out there, versus other advisors that may be a little bit behind on their training on that now I know for our advisors, that's not the case. We have a wonderful line of reps that are really great students of the business. But now to go back and answer your question all the way through is I really don't mind or care that much how long they've been in business, as long as their solution meets a need on our platform, and they've shown the process that they've done to build up.
So we can help with the support and the training, some of the areas where they may not a young company may not have a lot of resources, as long as the solution makes sense and it can fit into our platform, we'll work with just about anyone. And that's the thing is you're talking with owners, they're really passionate, and they're really willing to work with you. And that's one of the things I love with working about solutions that are a little bit earlier on in their journey, is we get an opportunity to really talk with them and work with them and help design and deliver what that system is going to look like three, five, 10, years out. So now that I've talked a little bit about that and took to flip that Rich, because I'm sure you have tons of people coming to you asking, hey, I want to integrate. I want to talk with you. What are you looking for? What would you give yourself advice 20 years ago, when you were first building now Quik!.
Richard Walker 15:56
Oh man, give myself advice. Don't do it. This is an impossible business. No, you know, it's funny. I was having a conversation today with a potential partner, and I had to tell them, I like what they're doing, and they want to integrate with us, but see, from my standpoint, I know my tech works, but it's going to take time for them to implement support for my team. They're gonna have lots of questions, because it's detailed. They're APIs. It's tech, right? And I said to them, I said, we're getting we're really busy right now. We're growing fast. We have a lot going on. So there's a lot of people coming and asking us for help. So I'm in this quandary of, do I charge a partner to join my ecosystem? And if I charge them, that's going to put them off. But if I don't charge them, I don't know how to support my costs, because it might take two years to get to revenue with them. I might spend 25, $50,000 of my time, my team's time, and get nothing to show for it for one, two, three, or four years. So honestly, I have to kind of come back to this kind of 80/20, rule.
You and I, we work through our partnership with Docupace, who's been an incredible partner. And it's kind of 80/20 rule they're like, they make up for all these failed partnerships that don't produce because they've been so successful and we've been so successful with them. So maybe it's kind of taking the shotgun approach, try it all. See what works. Find the value. I have another philosophy that kind of drives this Rich. The philosophy is a customer will do what a customer can do, and if a customer wants to do something other than what I offer, I'd rather still be part of it on the back end than lose out entirely. So I'd rather build lots of partnerships where I can add value, where I deserve to add value, and still serve the customer and help them, because they're making a decision for their business, not for me. So if I can still play part of it, I'm happy to do that, even if it diminishes how much we play a part of because guess what? They didn't want the whole thing for me anyway.
I don't know if that answers your question, but I mean, it's a it's a hard thing, and I think newer companies, the challenges especially. Let's turn this over to AI. How many companies are coming up saying, oh, we're an AI company. And what does it mean, right? So how do you use that? How do you know it's going to be around? And I'll give you a premise just to kind of lay this out. Everybody has access to the same LLMs, the same chatGPT, Claude, Gemini, whatever. So how are you different then?
Rich Whalen 18:25
Yeah, the secret sauce, as with many things, is going to be in humans coming up with the ideas and then figuring out the ways to implement it creatively. They can say I kind of break AI into kind of two parts or two different kind of companies in my mindset. One is all kind of like the existing tech companies that are going to wind up adding AI into their tools and their technology. And I think open AI and a few others will probably cringe when I say this, but we're still probably two, three, maybe even four, years away from seeing really robust AI solutions in embedded technology leaders in what they're doing in the financial service industry.
I sit on a few committees, and I was in one committee where their company was showing us, kind of what they're doing internally with AI, and it's some pretty cool use cases that, going back to my gift of time, are saving a lot of time internally, but it's gonna be a long time before that is turned over to their clients to go through, because the stakes jump experimentally when you have clients using it, whether that's a wealth management firm like myself, our representatives and our advisors, or even clients go through. So that's one view or one kind of side, and then the other side are the companies that are what I'm kind of calling, AI-first, where they are finding cool use cases that's leveraging kind of the existing, generative AI piece that's coming in. So there are plenty of companies. I was at a conference which, Rich, have you ever been to the Future Proof conference?
Richard Walker 18:28
No man, and I am so remiss not going this year. Everybody's like, where are you? Where are you? My team went years in a row, but I have not gone.
Rich Whalen 20:28
Yeah, it was a fantastic conference, one of the best ways to see all the different technology that's out there in the industry. If anyone's interested in FinTech, I recommend you go to that conference, because you will learn a ton. But in those we saw a ton of different AI companies. One of the biggest ones was note-taking. So what are those companies that are coming in and sitting in on Zoom meetings, doing the transcription? But now I've seen probably maybe five or 10 of those, and there's a lot of those, but there's one company that took it to the next level. And so not only do they do the transcription and record everything, but in the transcription, they link to the meeting with the exact timestamp of what was talked about. And then they have AI that have come in and now said, okay, well, what are the takeaways? And you can train it to say, here are the things that I'm thinking about as an advisor's perspective.
Kind of almost create your own chatGPT for generating notes out of the transcript. And then once you have all that, you can then convert that into an email it'll go through. Now, none of this is automated, yet, as far as going out to the client automatically, we still want to have reps, eyes and ears as you're looking through all of this. But there's one that they took very simple premise that has many competitors, and I think they took it to the next level. So those are kind of like the companies that I think we're going to start be using and adding in in the next year or two, in that generative AI space, and then three, four years out from now, we're going to see other companies start adding in other areas of AI, like we were talking about earlier, with the kind of anticipation within a workflow, but also other areas of machine learning and data cleanup and data scrubbing that are going to be really transformative in our industry. Go ahead Rich.
Richard Walker 22:38
It's fascinating to hear this, because I have other people echo this too, about you can't just automate the output the publication of some email or campaign. You still have to have a human review it. And man, when I became a financial advisor, I joined my mentor in his business. And one of the things I did, before I had clients or enough clients to work on, is I automated our systems. And I remember we had this really customized financial plan system we put together, and then I built a Monte Carlo simulator to go inside of it. And so what was fascinating about Monte Carlo simulation, by the way, at least my version of it, and I'm maybe not the best at it, but look, I have enough math. So my version showed that if you do straight line, you're going to save 10% a year. You're going to earn 8% a year. You're gonna have this much inflation, all that. If you do a straight line, after you do the Monte Carlo simulator against that straight line, you only have a 5050, shot of hitting your goal.
And so then you use the Monte Carlo to up your savings or rate of return or whatever. But my partner, we're going through all this and we're coming up with these great plans. And he says, but Rich, I don't trust the computer. I don't care how good the plan looks. That's like saying I'm going to drive from Los Angeles to Las Vegas without stopping once for gas, never having a flat tire. There's no roadblocks, there's no detours, there's nothing that's going to stop us. That's not true. So he says the idea of a financial plan is to check in at various milestones and make sure you're on the right path. So now you're echoing all this about AI, I still don't want to trust the computer to give me the final output.
Rich Whalen 24:18
Yeah, at some point, maybe we'll get there. But in my opinion, there's something about the human experience when we're sitting down with people talking about one of the most sensitive topics that they have, which is their livelihood. Let's face it, I mean, money is fantastic, but money in itself, doesn't do anything. It enables you to do what you want to do, whether that's not to work, to be able to travel, to be able to support the causes that you love. That's why we all do what we do, and that's so sensitive and so personal. I don't think clients are at a point yet where they would even they I don't think they would trust someone who was going through it and just sending these caps, because we can all still tell what is AI at this point. Now, look, maybe that'll change in five, six years, and we can get a little bit more efficiency in that.
But even then, I think we're always going to want to know, because ultimately, at the end of the day, I trust you Rich. You trust me, that's what's going to come in. We're not going to get to a point, I think, in the next 10, 15, years, where we can just automate everything. Can we find ways to make things easier? Are there ways to go online and set up an asset allocation or something else? Yes, and I may not have to talk to an advisor to go through and do that and pick one for me. But when it comes to the more complex areas of, hey, how should I take money out and in what order, in what way to do the goals that I want to do, that's still where we're going to want to sit down and have a conversation with a real person.
Richard Walker 25:55
So I presume you play with chatGPT or some equivalent, periodically, maybe every day, like I do, and I would also presume you become better at interacting with it, prompting it and giving feedback, right? Yes, but if you think back to your first time using a chatGPT versus now is the difference, and this is the difference for me, is the difference how much context and information you give it before you ask it to help you figure out a problem.
Rich Whalen 26:23
That's it. We all started kind of using it just like Google, and asking it questions, and absolutely you are correct. In fact, I was working with, I've been encouraging, and actually I took inspiration Rich from this very podcast. I know you set a goal for your team, for every one of your team members, to find a way that they could use AI in their day-to-day life. I've heard you talk about that a couple of times. I stole that, so maybe we'll have to redo that licensing agreement we were talking about earlier. But I've stole that, and I've been working with my team to say, hey, how can you use AI for this? How can you use AI for that? And so I was having one of my employees, go through and come up with a communication that would go out to our advisors. And he sent me the communication say, okay, this is okay. Send me the prompt that you used.
So he went through, he copied the prompt in, and it was a decent prompt, but I looked, I was like, what you're really missing is the context of, why is this going to matter for our advisors and our representatives? What's this going to do for them. Once he put that in, he basically took us the same prompt and just added that little bit of context. The output was night and day. And one of the other things that I've recently started doing more and more is, whenever I've finished, kind of my prompt will go in and start saying, okay, you can ask me three questions about this prompt, whatever questions you want, and then it'll ask me the questions. And inevitably, there's usually one thing in there that I was like, oh, wow, that really is good information that it needs in order to give me the results that I want.
Richard Walker 28:14
Yeah, no, that's amazing. So I'm going to share with you what I think is one of my best uses, or really successes with chatGPT right now. I decided I wanted a sales consultant. I wanted chatGPT to help me figure out some sales strategy stuff that we're working on. And then so I started to say, write me a prompt to be my sales consultant, etc. And then I stopped. I'm like, if you were going to be my sales consultant, and here's the parameters, my company type, the sale type, etc. What do you need to know? It gave me 21 questions to answer, and I kid you not Rich, it took me four hours of just talking to record all the answers, which I took the transcript of and fed it back in. So it took a few days for me to get the time to do all that, fed it back in. It asked me two more questions to clarify. Took all that in. I then took I was on a couple podcasts where we talked about sales like that. I took some notes and conversations from customers. I put that in.
So now it has all this amazing, amazing context to become my sales consultant, but what I'm getting at is those 21 questions that asked me is now a file that I can give for any other purpose in my company. Okay? So if we're doing marketing, if we're doing team development, if we're doing analysis of something, that's content we can use, because it talks about the history of my company. Who are my partners? Who do we sell to anything, right? Because it was about the business. So this is amazing piece of content that fuels any other language model I'm going to use, and then it can do other things. So I've had it build me a sales training manual, an amazing one, by the way. I'm like, we didn't even need one. I'm just like, do it. It's like, okay, I know everything about this. Here's the other cool thing, because I spoke my answers, it now knows my voice, so every response it gives me is in my tone and my communication style. I don't know, I highly encourage people to do that for their own companies or their departments, or their leadership style, anything like that, because it's so powerful.
Rich Whalen 30:17
That's pretty cool. I'm gonna use that so I've, selfishly, I created a chatGPT specifically for LinkedIn. So anytime I do a LinkedIn post, I started by training this generator with, like, all the past content that I handwritten free AI. And so I've plugged that in so it's got already a sense of my tone and my cadence for writing. And now that it's generating posts, I'm still editing it, going through, putting in my authentic self into those posts. But every time it's going through, and I'm re-training in and it's learning on all those previous posts that it's created, but I love it, I'm going to ask it, see if it can get me all those questions to ask me about my career and other points of views and things like that. That's a pretty cool way to really supercharge the chatGPTs that you're creating.
Richard Walker 31:12
Yeah, honestly, it's amazing. Man, I just realized how long we've been on this, this conversation, and I want to keep talking to you, because I love talking to you, but we got to wrap this up. So before I ask my last question, what's the best way for people to find you and connect with you?
Rich Whalen 31:25
Yeah, I love having these kind of conversations. Probably LinkedIn is the best way to find me. You just search Rich Whalen, and I'm pretty much the only ones that comes up. So if not, I'm right there with Equity Services on the name. So it's pretty easy to find me on that. You can also check out our website, equity-services.com you can learn more about Equity Services and everything we do and reach out to us there as well.
Richard Walker 31:48
All right, so as much as I love talking about AI, my last question is actually my favorite, who has had the biggest impact on your leadership style and how you approach your role today?
Rich Whalen 31:58
So Rich we were talking a little bit earlier, and I've listened to a few of your podcasts, actually, all of them. So I've heard this question a bunch of times, and I've been thinking about, how am I going to answer this? And I'm going to flip on its head a little bit, because I won't say any name, but what I will say this is, I am a firm believer that you can learn anything. So part of how I've become a leader is from being the exact opposite of some of the leaders that have not been that great in my career. So I obviously don't want to name games, but I have learned a lot about how to be a leader by saying, you know what, I've been in this situation, situation didn't feel that great, or I don't think it was handled well. How would I do it differently?
And that's helped fuel a lot of growth in how I treat people and my employees. So I encourage everyone out there. We have a lot of great mentors out there. I have some wonderful mentors and people that I've met along the way, but you can learn just as much from those that you're like, wow, you know what, that wasn't a great experience. There's something else to do. Learn from that, and incorporate that, and then you'll be the type of leader that you want to be.
Richard Walker 33:15
Thank you for saying that. I love that man, and I have done that too. I've had so many bad jobs that I didn't like, and I learned, okay, I don't like that type of style of leadership or management or company or environment or culture or whatever. And that is actually what drove me to define my company culture before I even started this company, because I realized what's going to make me happy, what's going to empower me. And man, I got plenty of stories of bad leaders, and managers. I worked around that. I said, oh, I don't want to do that. That did not feel good to me. I bet it would feel terrible to do it to others, dude, you're smart. That's awesome.
All right, I got to wrap this up. So I want to give a big, oh, sorry. I'll wrap this up and you can say goodbye. So I want to give a big thank you to Rich Whalen, VP of tech strategy and execution and Equity Services, Inc, for being on this episode of the customer wins. Go check out Rich's company website at equity-services.com and don't forget to check out Quik! at quikforms.com where we make processing forms easy. I hope you enjoyed this discussion. We'll click the Like button. Share this with someone and subscribe to our channel for future episodes of The Customer Wins Rich. Thank you so much for being here today.
Rich Whalen 34:23
My pleasure. Thanks for having me Rich.
Outro 34:27
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Unknown Speaker 34:43
Equity Services Inc or ESI, member FINRA/SIPC is a broker-dealer and registered investment advisor. Third-party entities are independent of ESI, unless otherwise stated. In Colorado, Missouri, New Hampshire and Wisconsin, Equity Services Inc operates as Vermont Equity Services Inc, representatives of ESI. The discussion of artificial intelligence or AI does not constitute a change in the allowable use of AI by ESI representatives beyond guidance published by ESI compliance.
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