Jason Mandel is the Founder and CEO of The Mandel Family Office with a rich history on Wall Street, having started at distinguished firms like Cantor Fitzgerald and D.E. Shaw. He possesses extensive experience in wealth management and insurance strategies, striving to add value and ensure transparency in client relationships. A passionate advocate for client education, Jason authored the book Demand Transparency and devotes time to teaching clients and institutions about financial strategies.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
Jason Mandel's holistic approach to align advisors with their clients’ goals
How Jason democratizes family office services for all wealth levels
Alternative asset classes that may outperform traditional stocks and bonds
Asset-backed lending: a strategy underutilized by average investors
Legal strategies to grow your wealth tax-free
The surprising truth about banks financing life insurance premiums
The correlation between crypto markets and stock investments
Unique investment approaches beyond the stock market
How AI is revolutionizing the customer experience in financial services
In this episode…
In a financial landscape flooded with advice, how do you separate the gimmicks from the legitimate strategies? Is obtaining wealth within grasp or is it just a mirage shaped by our desires for a worry-free retirement?
Jason Mandel, a serial entrepreneur in the financial services industry, sheds light on these pressing questions by demystifying common misconceptions and revealing lesser-known financial tactics. He emphasizes the importance of transparency and education, illustrating how life insurance can be a leveraged asset rather than a mere expense. Jason's approach intertwines strategic banking partnerships and personalized financial planning to unlock a future of tax-free income.
In this episode of The Customer Wins, Richard Walker sits down with Jason Mandel, Founder and CEO of The Mandel Family Office, to discuss the intersection of traditional wealth management and cutting-edge financial tools. Jason explores innovative methods like insurance premium financing and the role of AI in enhancing client experiences. He explains how leveraging various investment strategies can lead to financial empowerment, stability, and diversity in your portfolio.
Resources Mentioned in this episode
DEMAND TRANSPARENCY: Stop Wall Street Greed and Rising Taxes From Destroying Your Wealth by Jason Mandel
"Embrace Technology: Gain a Competitive Edge in Wealth Management With Jeff Schwantz" on The Customer Wins
"[AI Series] AI Note-Taking for Financial Advisors With Daniel Yoo" on The Customer Wins
"Embracing Technology for Next-Level Wealth Management With Reed Colley" on The Customer Wins
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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 talked 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 Daniel Yoo of FinMate AI, Jeff Schwantz and Advisor360 and Reed Colley of Summit Wealth Systems. Today I'm speaking with Jason Mandel, the founder of the Mandel Family Office, 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 is 99.9% accurate. Visit quikforms.com to get started.
Now before I introduce today's guest, I want to give a huge thank you to John Corcoran at Rise25 for introducing me to today's guest. If you have a b2b business and have been considering starting your own podcast, check out John's website at ris25.com. And they will help you start launch and run a successful podcast. All right. Jason Mandel has over 25 years of entrepreneurial experience in financial services and risk management. He is the founder of The Mandel Family Office and president of Caretrust Financial, Jason was a principal of Sky Gem Advisors and was previously a partner at Soundview Strategic Advisors and HM Fund Management, as well as holding positions at LeFrak Organization DE Shaw and Cantor Fitzgerald. Jason, welcome to The Customer Wins.
Jason Mandel 1:53
Rich, thank you so much for inviting me to be on the podcast, I'm so excited. Oh,
Richard Walker 1:57
I'm so excited to talk to you as well. Now, for those of you who haven't heard this podcast, I love to talk to business leaders about what they're doing to help their customers win, how they build and deliver a great customer experience and the challenges to growing their own company. Jason, we want to understand your business a little better. So how does your company help people?
Jason Mandel 2:17
Rich, we take a very holistic view as to our clients wealth into their risk management. Most people hire an advisor, maybe it's a lawyer, maybe it's an accountant, maybe it's an insurance person or money manager. And all of these people kind of have their own agenda. They have ways that they make money, they have their own ideas. And then sometimes they're in conflict with each other. So we sort of sit above those advisors. And we help direct everyone in the same goal that the client has. So when we sit and talk to our clients, we like to outline those goals, a common goal that our clients have might be tax minimization. So you would imagine that the only person to play a role in tax minimization is the accountant. Well, many times we find the accountant is the most difficult person that we're dealing with in trying to deal with tax minimization.
Now part of it is they might feel that maybe there won't be a role for them if we eliminate taxes, the record keeper role that they play, but we have to explain to them that even though we're seeking to do tax minimization, it does not preclude them from part of the equation, they're obviously always going to have to report and provide tax analysis. And then lawyers, sometimes if we're trying to do this, they may come in and say no, we have a way that we want to do it. And we have to remind the lawyer that even the most advanced trusts that they create for our clients still pay capital gains taxes. And then when we deal with the insurance advisors, they may be motivated to secure a certain amount of commission dollars from the sale of insurance products. And we have strategies that mitigate the Commission's to make it much more exciting for the clients.
And when it comes to the money managers, I always get frustrated with them, because they don't realize that if we can really do our job, well, then we can make the gross return that they generate the net return to the client if we can minimize taxation, on capital gains, for example. So we sort of provide this holistic solution to clients. And that's what we really pride ourselves on. If you're enjoying your relationship with your lawyer your account. We're happy to keep it we're not in here to change anything. But we are here to make sure everyone is aligned and doing what the client wants. That's our important value add, man,
Richard Walker 4:23
I think we all need you. So when I hear family office, I always think of the Uber wealthy family and their team of advisors for their pot of money or their wealth, etc. What does family office mean to you and your firm is very different.
Jason Mandel 4:36
So we actually don't have a minimum net worth requirement to be a client of our firm. That being said, up until probably last year, most of my clients were incredibly wealthy people. And some mostly billionaires are near billionaires, and I decided to change my life when I was approaching the age of 50. And I said, Listen, I want to be able to help everybody. So we've revamped the business. We've added more staff. We have been able to add and help people who have all different asset sizes.
You know, really, it's important to me that a lot of the ideas that I present that we've utilized for billionaires over the past 25 years, are very applicable to everyday people. And I don't even know why Wall Street doesn't allow some of these ideas, the big firms just don't allow these basic strategies that I pursue. And I'm always amazed that people say, Why isn't my advisor offered this to me? And I don't have a good answer, other than a lot of the stuff I do does not provide big commissions. And I guess Wall Street is still very focused on generating the highest commission possible. That's not our mindset, we have this more holistic view of the relationship. You know,
Richard Walker 5:39
I like that. I mean, Wall Street is very money-driven. That's the whole point, let's, let's get returns on our money, et cetera. But I mean, even going back to the 90s, there was this conflict of interest of what you sold if you're a stockbroker, and advisor, whatever versus what you made. And I think this whole shift of especially going RIA, has allowed people to say, no, let's look at the big picture. But you're also talking about something else that I think is important. If you are serving your client holistically, don't you get to keep them longer.
Jason Mandel 6:05
Absolutely. And that's what I've always been frustrated, because so many advisors only limit themselves to stocks and bonds as asset classes. I'm a big believer that there's a variety of other asset classes that are not offered to the average investor, for example, something like asset-backed lending, it's an strategy in which a investment advisor would lend money to a corporation backed by real assets, collateral, maybe it's a fleet of trucks, if the trucks have a liquidation value of $5 million, and a company needs to borrow a million dollars, they could collateralize that loan with the $5 million in trucks.
And therefore, if a loan doesn't get repaid to the lender, the lender has a mechanism to make sure they get repaid their money, they can actually seize the trucks, sell them and get the proceeds from the sale of those trucks in order to get their loan back. That's a strategy that in effect the bank might use. If you think about a mortgage, it's not all that different. Banks take down 20 or 30%, they lend you money. And if somehow you don't pay the mortgage, they seize the property and sell it.
So there's a strategy of investing called asset-backed lending, where you're lending only if there's assets that collateralize that loan, most investors have zero exposure to asset-backed lending loans, which I think is a big mistake, it's a very consistent return. That's just one type of strategy that ultra-wealthy people pursue, yet the average investor doesn't seem to get access to from their advisor.
Richard Walker 7:35
So how do they get access to how do they learn about it? If the advisor is not aware of it? And then how do they participate?
Jason Mandel 7:40
Well, my firm is a big proponent of it, there are some other foreign firms that do it. I you know, I, I mean, my main thesis is, is to Demand Transparency from your advisor, I just wrote a book, it hit number one on Amazon, in the taxation area, Portfolio Management and Insurance areas. And that's really what I want to employ. I really want to make people think about it.
Why don't you speak to your advisor and demand that transparency is to say, Well, why are we only investing in stocks and bonds, stocks and bonds can be volatile two years ago, interest rates went up, and bond values went down, and the stock market went down the same year? So this concept that people have that if you have some exposure to stocks and some exposure to bonds, you'll do fine. I'm not so sure. I mean, I look at the Japanese stock market over the past 30 years, it's been very volatile. And actually, if you look at the numbers, it hasn't produced a real positive return is just choppy, up one year down, down, down, up, up, up, and all of a sudden, you look at 30 years, and you're flat.
SoI believe that if you want exposure to stocks, if you want exposure to bonds, you're better off getting your exposure inside of a protected contract, which would give you the upside of an equity market with no downside. And most people don't realize that exists. You can have the upside of bonds and effect a fixed rate of return and no downside. Yet these products are not really offered traditional Wall Street firms say Hey, you got to buy a portfolio of stocks by the index hold it that not and that is not necessarily a strategy that does well in choppy markets.
And that's one of the concerns that I have is that people should demand the transparency to understand what are the risks in their portfolio, they should find that volatility analysis. And because if they don't, then they're going to be disappointed. And if you're 65 years old, and the market goes down 40% And you're exposed to equities, well that might extend when you're able to retire. That idea is that you may want to look at reducing the volatility of your portfolio earlier than when most traditional wall feet Wall Street firms off red
Richard Walker 9:48
X. I just saw an article over the weekend that some significant number of people who are hitting retirement age just can't retire. They have not made it. Okay, so going back though, the strike As you're talking about, it seems like you learned it because you worked with billionaires. And you were exposed to these things. How does the average adviser get exposure? Because they don't know what they don't know. Right. Right. So and consumers as well, they don't know, to ask for these things, per se. I mean, transparency is a great approach, like, why? And how, but what would you recommend that they do to find out more about these types of capabilities? Or you're mentioning? Yeah,
Jason Mandel 10:23
I mean, the beautiful thing about the internet is that there is lots of information out there, if you if you type in Google, their non-correlated investment strategies, you know, again, people don't even think to ask about this, of course, they think, oh, their portfolio has to correlate to the stock market, it doesn't. So you know, I think adding a firm like mine, on top of the services offered by traditional money managers, traditional insurance advisors, traditional accountants, and lawyers, I think we do add a lot of value.
I mean, the first thing we look at is tax minimization. And we say to people, one way of enhancing your portfolio is to mitigate your tax bill, to how do we do that? Well, if your assets are held by a vehicle, which is not a taxable vehicle, then of course, there's no taxes due on any gains that you have. So that's the first thing we look at, we look at people's tax returns. And if we notice that they're paying capital gains taxes, there are legitimate black-and-white strategies that are in the tax code.
Again, I'm not talking about tax shelters, I don't believe in tax shelters, because the IRS will disagree eventually, on any tax shelter, it's in their interest to disagree, and they're entitled to disagree. If you or your advisor are going to try to interpret the law, I don't recommend it. What I like to do is look at the law and find strategies inside of the law, because then it's very tough for the IRS to ever challenge anything because all you have to do is point to the law, and say this is what we did, it's right here in the law.
So one of the things I love is to domicile my clients assets inside of a life insurance policy. Because life insurance can grow tax-free, it's protected from creditors, and any cash value inside can grow this way tax-free and can be accessed through a policy loan. So you could theoretically live the rest of your life tax-free, because you could live on borrowing from your cash value life insurance. And depending on the type of insurance, you might have products, like Whole Life is gonna give you a dividend every year. Like it's better than owning a CD and a bank or a bond because those are all taxed. Now, if you want to have stock market exposure, that sounds good to me.
But guess what very volatile, you should be prepared to lose money. If you're afraid to lose money, and you still want the upside without the downside, then there's a product called Indexed Universal Life, it's a great product that most people don't know that much about. And it's a great way of getting exposure to stocks without the downside. Now people will argue, well, it has a capped upside, there are many products that are capped. We represent probably 45 different insurance companies around the world. And there are many products that are not kept that give us equity style returns without the downside. And we get full uncapped upside participation in a market index or in a fund.
People don't know that exists. So I think that's an important part of the equation is educating yourself and looking at that. And when we wrap a client's portfolio, and they may like private equity, or venture investing or real estate, all different asset-class or asset-backed lending, as I was describing, you can get those exposures inside of an insurance contract. Any success you have any growth is completely tax free. And when you want to access that money, the owner of the policy can borrow against the cash value.
And that borrowing loan is normally completely tax free, as long as the policy does not met, which means it becomes a modified endowment contract and loses a lot of the tax benefits that life insurance offers us. And again, clear in the tax code. This is not Jason Mandel developing these brilliant ideas. This is just black-and-white insurance. It's one of the simplest ways that everyday people can benefit and have tax-advantaged portfolio performance without the same volatility as long on the equities or long on the bonds. Yeah.
Richard Walker 14:20
So I love the things you're saying I heard a tax advisor say you can do you can write off anything in context. And the other thing he was pointing out was that the tax code was written mostly to incentivize behavior, not to punish people. There's very little in the tax codes. It's actually punitive. Most of it is to try to help people direct their energy efforts monies into things the government wants to see. So if they want more low income housing, they give me more credits for that, that kind of stuff. Yeah, and I think you're talking about that to some degree.
Jason Mandel 14:50
The job Act is a great example of that, right in 2017. We saw this law passed that gave accelerated depreciation. The government wanted to generate significant purchases and Things like construction equipment and aviation. And by doing so by giving people 100% Depreciation up front, on the purchase price, now it's dropped last year was 80%. This year 60.
These numbers are very compelling for businesses to go out and buy new equipment because they get these tax benefits. So I, I agree with you 100%. Rich, I think the government wants us to act in a certain way. They want to create, you know, invite environments where we're companies are doing well. And I'm a big believer that if you look at those laws, and you look at the tax law, you will find great strategies mitigate taxes right there, black and white for all of us to say,
Richard Walker 15:37
yeah, so here's the other thing I wanted to bring up, which is the education part. Are you a fan of tick tock? Are you on tick?
Jason Mandel 15:43
Yeah, my daughter is a huge fan. I'm not personally using it regularly. But I do I appreciate the fact that it's communicating. Everybody's really amazing. I mean, people I know, I love it. I mean, they're really able to do business on it and share their information.
Richard Walker 15:56
So I do, I'll admit, I'm addicted to it. But here's the thing, I see a lot of different financial advice going on there. I mean, let's put crypto aside for a minute. Because there's a ton of that. But people are talking about these life insurance contracts that you're talking about. In fact, they say hey, don't you understand the very wealthy, they live off loans against life insurance, and this is how they pass on money to their heirs, et cetera. And part of me feels like well, this is coming through tick tock, do I really trust it? Is this really truth? And you're saying the same thing and you're somebody I give a lot of respect to for what you're doing? How do you think you and other advisors overcome that? The Internet problem of learning on your own versus trusting somebody like yourself? Do you see that as a problem? At times?
Jason Mandel 16:40
No, I actually think it's helpful, I think somebody's going to open their mind to an idea that they see on TikTok on social media in some form. And then hopefully, that person is going to do extensive research. And when they do that type of research, we put out a lot of content on LinkedIn and other platforms. And you know, hopefully, people will see that it's a legitimate strategy. Now, the way some people do some of these strategies, I have some issues with it, I have to tell you, I'm very concerned that people are promoting ideas, and that the consumer may not be able to afford continuing some of these programs.
So it's great for the advisor, who again, doesn't employ the enhanced cash value riders that I like to use, which mitigate commissions, they want that full commission, they get people to buy, and then two years later that people can't afford it. So I am concerned about that, I think it's very, very important. One of the tools that we use in order to help people to ensure that they can afford, the programs that we create, is we draw an analogy between using a mortgage to buy the home that you want to live in, and a car loan or a lease to drive the car you want to drive.
And then when we talk about your tax-free retirement plan, or tax-free income plan, we draw an analogy and say, Well, what about the value of going to a bank and getting the bank to pay the premiums for you on a program that will lock in a certain amount of tax-free income later in life. And the argument a lot of people have is, well, I didn't know banks do that. And they do. Banks love to do insurance premium financing, because most of these contracts are principle protected, which means that the bank cannot lose value, unlike real estate, or a car, which of course loses value, the minute you drive it off the lot.
And here, these insurance contracts are guaranteed not to lose any value. So if you were to finance it with a bank, and especially if you use my strategy with the enhanced cash value rider, the policy, cash surrender values are very high. And because they're very high, you don't need to post a lot of collateral with the bank. Because the policy itself that's being financed provides most if not all, of the collateral that you need with a bank. And people don't realize that this is possible to have the bank as your partner. It's a very compelling way to fund a plan that could give you a lot of tax-free income later in life.
Richard Walker 18:55
I'm among these people that didn't realize this. So let me repeat this back and see if I got it. You're so I think about life insurance is kind of like a mortgage like you can't skip a payment you can't miss out. It's it is a permanent expense, quote, unquote, in your life and your cash flow,
Jason Mandel 19:11
we can say right away. No, I think that in addition to the fact that some of these contracts are very flexible, and they have extra cash inside of them, if you miss payments, it doesn't matter. You can actually adjust it later. So I would I would definitely think that statement we should alter we should say that it depends on the contract. What you're referring to his term insurance term expires without a premium payment it would lapse, but cash value life insurance normally has a lot of excess cash inside the contract. So missing a payment, the policy would not lapse right away. It might last for several years. And in certain cases, we do 10 pays or five pays. And after a payment period of five or 10 years. You don't need another premium dollar you paid up.
Richard Walker 19:52
So you're also saying that the bank can help you finance those payments in the early years. And
Jason Mandel 19:57
for all years, potentially that premiums are due banks. sign on. Absolutely. Banks are interested in this asset class because again, unlike real estate, which is a core part of their lending, there is no risk of losing principal because these contracts are principal protected. And business loans that banks make are obviously much more risky because a business could fail. Here you have a double A credit insurance company, that's guaranteeing the principal and the bank is putting money into the contract. And in most cases, the contract value can never go below the amount of money that's put inside of the contract by the bank paying those premiums. So banks are bad. I've taught many banks about it. Surprisingly, many banks didn't understand.
But real estate property is not that different from insurance property. There was a Supreme Court case that your listeners can look at 1911 Grisby verse Russell, the famous jurists, Oliver Wendell Holmes ruled that life insurance is property, so people can really understand it. And they can do what they want with this type of property. They can borrow money against this property as well with a bank.
Richard Walker 21:00
Yeah, that's outstanding. Hey, I forgot to ask you, what's the name of your book that you have. It's
Jason Mandel 21:04
called Demand Transparency. It's on Amazon. And they type in my name, Jason Mandel and Demand Transparency, it'll pop up. And we have a 99-cent version. And if anyone is unhappy as a digital version, if you're unhappy, I'll even send you the 99 cent, I'm making $1. They'll make money if they're unhappy. And I vary it now. But we're giving all the money to charity. This is not about selling books. It's about educating because I really do want people to demand transparency from their advisors. It bothers me that accountants just take a record of what you did and tell you what you owe. I believe that accountants in order to survive in the coming years, they have to proactively present ideas. And there's a lot of good ideas in this book, to help accountants be more proactive and more value add with their clients.
I think I'm bothered by lawyers who when I talk to them about private placement, life insurance, which is wrapping your wealth inside of insurance, they say no, my clients not right for that they're not worth $100 million, I have to remind them, I say your client paid a lot of capital gains taxes, this strategy allows the growth of cash value tax-free, this is the reason people buy insurance. And in PPCLI, there are some real negatives to it, for example, you can no longer control your own cash value, you're not able to say okay, I want to buy this stock that stock the way you would, in your own account at Fidelity or Schwab, when you hire a third party manager, that manager is managing that money.
So you have to be comfortable doing that and many people are not they want to manage it. So it doesn't fit their criteria. Or I have clients that want to own all their wealth in one stock, you can't do that you need to diversify, no more than 55% Any one investment, no more than 70 and 80 to 80% 83 90% a force, you end up with five different investments. And you'd be amazed at these wild Bitcoin investors, all they want to own is Bitcoin. It doesn't work, you have to diversify amongst you know, at least five different investment assets.
Richard Walker 22:58
So how do you feel about crypto? I'm a big fan. I
Jason Mandel 23:01
think it's great. I think it's a wonderful way of diversifying. Again, I think it's no different, frankly, than owning a stock it, to me, I really do believe that as long as there's more buyers than sellers, the price will go up. And with the changes recently with the institutionalization of crypto, you're gonna probably see more buyers than sellers. And that is a simple recipe for price stabilization, or maybe even price appreciation. But people that buy this asset have to stabilize it in their own portfolios. I am amazed when I talk to people that have massive crypto exposure, and I say, Well, how would you feel? If the same upside that you experienced over the past five years, when debt went down in value? Could you envision it going back to the prices of four or five years ago?
And if the answer is I jump off a bridge, if that happened? Well, you're too highly exposed to that asset. So I think it's really important that people understand and they should not expect an asset that goes up as much as crypto has gone up in many cases, to continue to just go up forever. So whether it goes to a million dollars a Bitcoin, I don't know. But I will tell you most likely it's not going to go straight up. So you should be prepared for some level of volatility. And that's disturbing when I hear people that say, no, no, it'll be straight up. That doesn't make any sense. You really need to size it. So for many of my clients that represents five or 10% of their net worth, if it was to, unfortunately suffer a massive correction, they will not be homeless, they will be able to support their lifestyle.
And that's important to me, because any asset should not be you should not have exposure to it. If it's not something you can handle the volatility on. That's why when clients talk to me about managing their stocks, in most cases, we charge nothing to manage stocks, and they always jump up and down and say what do you mean, how could you not charge to manage my stock portfolio? That's how you make money. I say look, I don't think I deserve it. If you want to manage stocks, open up an account at Fidelity or Schwab or any firm and just buy the index if that's what you want to do because That to me anyone can do, I'm not looking to add value in that scenario, I'm not going to justify charging you for that. But there are other asset classes that people don't know anything about things like asset back, Wendy.
And I say to people, that's where we can add value, we use a platform called Sally Sal i.com, your client, your viewers and listeners can look at it. It's a platform of alternative investment managers, where the cash value inside of life insurance is allocated to these unique managers, their correlation is not to the stock market, that effect, they don't even correlate to each other. It's called an orthogonal return stream. And that interests me, that's where I feel I earn my fees, when I can generate a consistent rate of return, no correlation to the stock market, or the bond market, and hopefully, no correlation to other managers in our portfolio. That, to me is exciting.
Richard Walker 25:52
And I love that attitude. And I feel the same with my customers. If we're not adding value, I don't want to charge your money. In fact, all of our pricing is based on usage and what you're actually getting from using our product. We recently just had a customer say we're not happy we refunded 100% of their money. Wow. Right? I mean, why should we keep an unhappy customer? And ultimately, it's how do you help your customers win? So I like that philosophy that you have. So are you fee-based? Are you making commission off growth? Are you how do you make no,
Jason Mandel 26:21
we are very bespoke in the way that we operate with clients. In many cases, if it's an insurance product, we might secure a fee from the insurance company and not charge the client anything directly. That's one way, if it's in an Investment Partnership, or inside of the private placement, life insurance, we have registered partners of our firm and these people are managing the cash value. And they're charging a fee a flat fee of on the assets that are under management. And that fee normally is reduced dramatically based on the size of the portfolio, because again, it's the same work to identify the managers. We don't necessarily think we have to charge the same fee, percentage, we're able to reduce that fee considerably.
Richard Walker 27:03
Yeah, great. All right. So we're getting closer to the end. But I still want to ask you another question that I love, which is about artificial intelligence. How do you see AI, I guess impacting your world and how you serve your customers?
Jason Mandel 27:15
Yeah, I think it's going to be an important part of the customer experience going forward. Right now we're investing heavily in an AI focused platform that's going to be able to help us give our customers the best experience possible. One of the issues in dealing with let's say, securing a life insurance policy, or tax free income plan, is it's a process, it's probably a 30, or 40 step process. And that process has now been automated, where clients can go into the portal, know exactly where they're at, they have aI benefits. So now they have some support that they don't have to necessarily talk to a human in order to understand where they're at the process and have the entire situation explained to them. So I think that type of automation is going to continue, I think the clients are going to be able to get information 24/7 365.
And I think the clients are going to get a better experience, there'll be less human error. And clients will be able to really feel that they're in control, and that they're winning. And I think that today, most clients are still exposed to human error, they're still exposed to people getting back to them and taking too long. And I think with AI, we're going to eliminate a lot of that. And I'm happy to tell your listeners that we're investing heavily and within probably the next 30 days, we will be releasing a platform that I think will be revolutionary in the industry. And other advisors are going to be welcomed to use our technology in order to give the client the very best experience. So the client feels that they're winning. That's the key idea here for us is to give the client the very best experience possible. And I am sure AI is going to continue to play a major role in that experience. I
Richard Walker 28:50
love your positive outtake on it. I've had many people say, Oh, I don't know it's going to hurt, hurt people, it's going to lose jobs, whatever. I think most people think it's going to empower others. And what you're actually doing is empowering your client, your client, and other service providers. So I think that's really awesome. Jason, look, I want to ask you one more question. But before I do, what is the best way for people to find you and connect with you?
Jason Mandel 29:12
I'm gonna do something kind of funny that I'm sure a lot of your guests have not done. I'm actually going to give my personal cell phone out. I've had this cell phone for 30 years. And I always say to people, if you ever been able to maintain your cell phone for 30 years, you're probably not a bad guy because you don't have people chasing you or yelling at you. But my personal cell phone is my old New York number. I used to live in Florida now. But my cell phone number is 917 Area code 6032365. That was 917-603-2365 People can text me they can call me.
I shut my phone off at night when I go to bed. Don't worry if it's too late or if you're listening from another area. I am doing this because I want people to feel that they have a chance to talk directly to me? And I think that's really important. You know, down the road, you'll deal with my staff, but initially, you'll definitely be able to talk to me. I also happy about my email address. It's my name jason@themandelfamilyoffice.com. And I'm happy to get those emails and assist people. I think it's important to be accessible. I like to always go home at night after I've returned. Everybody's calling or bare minimum.
I save sorry, jammed up today. But why don't we try to speak later in the week. But I do like to get back quickly to people. It's one of my one of the things I'm kind of old school. I'm 50 years old. And I guess that's sort of the mindset I was taught. I grew up on Wall Street. I started out at some big traditional firms like Cantor, Fitzgerald and DE Shaw. And then I worked for LeFrak family, a family office, all in the 1990s. And then I went out on my own in 1999. And I've been out on my own sets. So it's one of my old school mentalities, which is to return the call the same day if possible.
Richard Walker 31:05
I love it. I love it, a fellow Gen X not afraid. Put it out there. That is awesome. Well, Jason, look, here's my last question. And something I really love to ask people because it just highlights such different views of the world, who has had the biggest impact on your leadership style, and how you approach your role today?
Jason Mandel 31:24
Great question. I think I had the pleasure of working for Sam LeFrak directly, he was the son of the founder of the left rack organization. He passed away in the early 2000s. But, and his son Richard Lefrak and his grandsons operate the business today. But I would say that I had the pleasure of spending time with him, we would talk about his portfolio. And I got so much out of those conversations that I had with him, I learned so much.
And he was a true inspiration to me, and taught me a lot about leadership. He taught me a lot about the importance of really trying to create an environment for your employees in which they feel valued, in which they really understand. And I think you can use a lot of interesting strategies in order to recruit, to retain and to reward your employees. And I learned a lot from him about doing that. And I'm always grateful to the LeFrak family for everything that they did for me and for the education that I got working for them in the 1990s.
Richard Walker 32:30
I love that. retaining people and relationships is one of the hardest things to do throughout your business career. And especially if you focus on your team first, I'm sure that it's pouring out to your customers. And that's how you're able to keep your customers longer to absolutely outstanding. Well, man, what a pleasure to have this conversation.
I want to give a huge thank you to Jason Mandel, founder of the Mandel Family Office for being on this episode of The Customer Wins. Go check out Jason's website at themandelfamilyoffice.com. And don't forget to check out Quik! at quikforms.com where we make processing forms easy. I hope you've enjoyed this discussion, we'll click the like button, share this with someone and subscribe to our channels for future episodes of The Customer Wins. Jason, thank you so much for joining me today.
Jason Mandel 33:13
Rich, I really appreciate the opportunity to share some of this information with your listeners and viewers. Thank you.
Outro 33:21
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