Shaun Kapusinski is the Founder of HIFON, a premier community for RIA operations professionals, and the Senior Director of Technology at Sequoia Financial Group. With two decades of experience, he started HIFON as a modest study group and grew it into a thriving network of nearly 300 members. Shaun is also the co-author of The Financial Advisor M&A Guidebook, a trusted resource for technology integration. He is an innovator driven by providing valuable connections and education to elevate the RIA industry, always ensuring that customers win through enhanced operational practices.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
00:00 - 01:00 Introduction
02:22 - 03:25 Frustrated by Networking at Annual Conferences? You're Not Alone
04:24 - 05:37 The Motivation Behind Starting HIFON: Filling a Gap in Operations Networking
07:11 - 08:09 Realizing the Power of Small Group Collaboration
08:27 - 09:17 Try Before You Commit: The Value of a Free Trial Membership
09:32 - 10:45 Why Billion-Dollar Firms and Smaller Firms Need Separate Groups
12:42 - 14:00 Rotating Topic Groups Every Six Months: Keeping it Fresh and Dynamic
15:11 - 16:01 The Rise of Similar Networks: A Positive Shift for the Industry
16:59 - 18:03 The Unsung Heroes of the Advisor Industry: Non-Advisors Who Make a Difference
18:39 - 19:47 Bringing in Outside Experts to Educate Our Membership
22:28 - 23:13 Protecting Our Members’ Privacy: Why We Don’t Share Membership Lists
24:02 - 24:59 Encouraging Member-Led Connections and Engagement
26:18 - 27:35 How HIFON Fosters Communication and Builds Industry Friendships
28:48 - 29:49 The Surprising Openness in Sharing Operational Best Practices
30:46 - 31:35 Creating Wins for Everyone: The HIFON Philosophy
32:23 - 33:28 Unexpected Opportunities: How HIFON Led to Writing a Book
34:42 - 35:55 Why AI Can't Replace the Unique Value of Human Conversations in Our Groups
37:03 - 38:03 The Power of Human Connection: More Than Just Getting Answers
In this episode…
Beyond the successful facade of RIA firms lies a complex operational world, ensuring a seamless experience beyond just financial advice. But who are the people mastering this realm, and what secrets do they hold?
Shaun Kapusinski, the genius behind the operational powerhouse known as HIFON, dives deep into the world of RIA operations. He shares his journey from starting a modest study group to founding a community that now nears 300 members while also penning a comprehensive guidebook on M&A best practices. Shaun discusses the benefits of peer networking, the art of scaling niche-focused communities, and how he navigates the dynamics of subgroup formation. He also touches on the unexpected opportunities from his leadership, such as authoring a highly regarded industry book.
In this episode of The Customer Wins, Richard Walker interviews Shaun Kapusinski, Founder of HIFON, about creating a thriving RIA community. Shaun discusses HIFON and the value of networking in the RIA industry, the key to successfully managing an ever-expanding mastermind group, and the surprising benefits of open dialogue between industry peers.
Resources Mentioned in this episode
The Financial Advisor M&A Guidebook: Best Practices, Tools, and Resources for Technology Integration and Beyond by Greg Friedman and Shaun Kapusinski
"The Winning Formula for Customer and Investor Success With Mark Gatto" on The Customer Wins
"[AI Series] The AI Edge: Supercharging Financial Advisors With Denis Konoplev" on The Customer Wins
"Unleashing Your Potential as a Breakaway Advisor With Jason Barber" on The Customer Wins
Quotable Moments:
"I was able to meet people that were in a similar role to myself and ask them about challenges and issues that I was encountering."
"Once people become members, there's a free trial. We want people to get a trial run, to get a feel for what it's like before they commit."
"We're just connecting operations professionals with those in the industry that they may not be familiar with or haven't heard of."
"Smartest thing, I think, was when somebody suggested, well, what if we broke this up into smaller groups, and you just had small groups meet together at different times."
Action Steps:
Engage in professional networking within your industry: Networking creates opportunities to discuss common challenges and share knowledge.
Explore the concept of mastermind groups for collaborative problem-solving: Mastermind groups, like HIFON, can yield diverse insights and develop innovative solutions through peer-to-peer interactions.
Apply strategic scalability techniques to expanding networks or businesses: Break up larger groups into focused subgroups as a scalable approach to maintain quality interactions.
Include educational components in professional communities: Provide members with valuable learning opportunities from industry experts without compromising the exclusivity of the group.
Maintain an open and sharing attitude in professional settings: Embracing openness, as seen in HIFON, fosters a culture of collective growth and knowledge sharing.
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 Denis Konoplev of Munin AI, Mark Gatto of CION Investments, and Jason Barber of Uptick Partners. Today, I'm speaking with Shaun Kapusinski, founder of HIFON, and Senior Director of Technology at Sequoia Financial Group. 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 one out of 1000 submissions. Visit quikforms.com to get started. Before introducing today's guest, I want to give a big thank you to Tom Weisner of Adventro for introducing me to Shaun. Go check out their website at adventtro.com as they specialize in helping FinTech scale and reach new heights in their business.
Now, Shaun has spent over 20 years with Sequoia Financial Group and operations roles that started in client service and now have them focused on technology infrastructure and cyber security. Through networking with other operations professionals, Shaun began a study group in 2010 that is now known as HIFON, a community that has grown to almost 300 RIA firms across the industry. Sean is also the co-author of a book called The Financial Advisor M&A Guidebook: Best Practices, Tools and Resources For Technology Integration and Beyond. Shaun, welcome to The Customer Wins.
Shaun Kapusinski 1:58
Thanks Rich. Thanks for having me.
Richard Walker 2:00
I'm excited to talk to you today. For those of you 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 a great customer experience, and the challenges to growing their own company. Now, Shaun, we're going to spend our time talking about HIFON today, and I want to understand a little bit better. How does your organization help people?
Shaun Kapusinski 2:18
Sure. Well, I'll give you the background in terms of how the group started, and I think that will help answer that question. So like I said, or like you mentioned, in 2010 when the group began, it came out of an interest of going to conferences, rubbing shoulders with other ops people, and being able to have those conversations that were very light in nature. They weren't formalized. They were more off the cuff. You'd run into somebody at a session, you talk afterwards, possibly you'd be sitting down at a round table together. So what I loved about that is I was able to meet people that were in a similar role to myself. I was able to ask them about challenges, issues, problems that I was encountering, and ask their experience.
What I didn't like about that is that that happened once a year, or annual right? Yeah, so once a year I'm having these conversations. I'm feeling great about it. I leave, I go home, and I have this feeling like, why am I, why am I kind of not happy about, you know, coming home and essentially leaving that right? You're sad it's over. You want more of that. I want to be able to those people more often. And so for a couple of years, I really didn't have a good way to get connected with people. You trade a few business cards. Not everybody reaches out. If and when you do, it's this one at a time. Sometimes you just don't know where to turn. Lot of ops people are kind of alone in their firm. If it's a smaller firm, there may be only them, right? They wear a lot of hats.
So it took a few years for me to say there's got to be something out there. There's got to be some type of group that gets together and talks about these types of things, beyond just what the conferences were offering. So I had actually heard of one of our advisors being in a study group, and that's where I kind of got this idea there's got to be something out there. So scoured the internet really talked to everybody. I could ask that question, do you know of anything that is ops-focused? Advisors often talk about dealing with clients. They talk about investments, they talk about financial planning techniques, all these things that really weren't my day-to-day, and not that I didn't care about it, because that's the core of our business.
But I knew there was a lot behind that in terms of running the business and the different aspects of client service, technology, compliance, marketing, HR, all these different topics that you need to run a business. And I was dealing with more of those types of topics, but there really wasn't a group to my knowledge out there. I couldn't find one. So I came to that point where I realized, if I don't reach out to some of these people and ask them if they want to start a group with me, I don't know that I'll have anything anytime soon. So that's really where the thought came from. And what I quickly realized is that people were asking me, can we ask others? Do we invite others?
There's people that have asked them, and so they were asking for essentially, can I refer somebody into this group because I'm getting a ton out of it. And I felt the same way. I said, I am too. I'm telling my friends. I'm telling new people that I run into after the first few years about the event itself, we would get together and we'd have those conversations in person, and I'd say, you know what, if you want to continue this conversation, I actually started a group that gets together. We were just doing monthly conference calls at the time, and so that proved to be a very helpful activity for not just myself, but everyone that was joining. And it's really snowballed from there over the past 14 years.
Richard Walker 5:27
So this sounds a lot like a mastermind group in terms of how it started. You're bringing like-minded people together to work on challenges that you guys have to talk it's a peer mentoring group of types. And I mean, I think there's different industries do this in different ways. I know, like CEOs have a group called Vistage. I've been part of that. There's entrepreneurs groups, et cetera. And you're right. I mean, I haven't really seen a lot of this in the operations space. As you started to develop this, and everybody wanted to join. How did you scale it? Because mastermind means it's a small group, typically, and you're at 300 now. So how do you scale that and actually get everybody's voice heard and included Et cetera?
Shaun Kapusinski 6:07
Yeah. So really, the easiest thing that we were able to do over time was to break it up into smaller subgroups. So we do have somebody at this point that helps moderate calls. And so that is something I didn't have in the early years, I was trying to do that amongst my day job, and finding enough time to do that was really tough. So breaking it up into smaller groups made a lot of sense. There's also a few different levels of membership within HIFON, and so that allows us to really kind of split people up based upon what they're looking for. So over time, that really was clear. I think one of the first calls that had maybe 20 some people attend was when I realized, oh, this is not going to work. Well, this is going to be hard to navigate. It's virtual, right?
We were doing virtual calls before it was the cool thing to do. And you realize pretty quickly, if you just have a random large group that you at the time, we weren't doing video calls, it was just the conference call. Conference calls. So you couldn't see them. You couldn't, necessarily, I don't even know if we had a list. You might have had a list of the phone numbers, but you didn't have names. I mean, it was just different at that point. So it was getting unwieldy pretty quickly. And smartest thing, I think, was when somebody really suggested, well, what if we broke this up into smaller groups, and you just had small groups meet together different times, I thought, well, there's a little bit of a time investment, right?
If I'm going to go that route, I'm doubling, tripling, quadrupling my time in terms of spending it, but it allowed for us to continue to add people to it. So now, yeah, we have a handful of groups that meet at different times. And we also introduced a discussion board after a few years, and that actually almost alleviated some of the pressure that people were looking for answers faster. And so you can ask more of that soundbite type question and get an answer, but faster than waiting for the next month's call.
Richard Walker 7:56
So you do monthly calls, and you break it out by group, you have this discussion board, which, there's so many online tools now which makes that so effective, so people can interact that way. Do you have a LinkedIn group as well? Did you use other social media channels to build the group?
Shaun Kapusinski 8:12
No, nothing on LinkedIn, other than just having kind of the group out there. So it's not really connected through there, other than having the organization listed there. And so people maybe hear about it, or I post things on there, but in terms of how the group stays organized, we have a membership site. So once people become members, there's a free trial on there. So sometimes people hear about it, word of mouth is really the fastest way that people are hearing about it, or the best way. And they often go to the site. Sometimes they maybe email me and ask, how can I get involved? Or how does this work?
So a lot of times, people just point them to our site. We've got a little video that kind of explains things we've got membership benefits talked about there. And so we want people to do that trial right? We want them to get a trial run, to get a feel for what it's like before they commit to some time and a little investment.
Richard Walker 9:01
So these smaller groups that you have, are people allowed to bounce around between groups? Or did you form them according to some standard or metric?
Shaun Kapusinski 9:09
Yeah, so that's kind of interesting. We definitely get asked that a lot like, how do you decide what group I get placed in? One of the, I'll say, lines in the sand that we drew somewhat early was we had, I'll just say, much larger firms. And today, a billion-dollar firm is not necessarily a large firm, right? You see a lot more than you did 10 years ago, but eight or 10 years ago, we decided that was going to be our line in the sand. And so we essentially had what I'll call larger firms, the billion dollar plus AUM firm, maybe not the best metric for deciding a size of a firm, but it was something and when you have a smaller firm with often less people, they may encounter things that are different than a larger firm that either has more clients or deals with a different maybe set of problems.
Again, wasn't a perfect line in the sand. Didn't totally solve everything you can have a lot of assets and very few people, very few clients. So again, it wasn't a perfect line to draw, but nonetheless, that's where we ended up starting. And said, okay, the larger firms were asking me, am I going to be talking to my peers, to other larger firms? And at first I said, no, everyone's together. So when I drew that distinction, that became a way to have firms that are in that billion-dollar plus talk to other firms that are in that same category. So that was kind of one of the first thing. The second thing was, I was getting questions about the type of firm. And what I mean by that is everything from geography to technology to the niche of the clients. Those were all maybe distinctions that people were saying, can I talk to people that are in my region? I'd like that.
Other people said, well, I don't want to talk to anybody in my region. Other people said, can I only talk to firms that are using the same tech stack as we are? Other people were saying, can I talk to firms that have this custodian, multi-location, and only female advisors.
Richard Walker 11:07
This is one of the reasons I was thinking that they might want to bounce around like this month I care about tech. Next month, I care about operational complexity, or what have you.
Shaun Kapusinski 11:15
Yep, yep. So a few things we were getting requests for certain topics, and realized there were multiple questions coming up regularly that had to deal with compliance, there were multiple questions coming up that had to deal with marketing. And there actually ended up being a lot of questions around CRM systems, specifically Salesforce. You actually had some of those larger firms dealing there. So those three topics ended up becoming effectively a subgroup of its own. So we have those separate calls each month, in addition to the normal, what we call the ops call that everybody is on that often has a lot of tech focus these days, but we now hold a separate compliance call where any questions that relate to that area of the business. Same for marketing and same for Salesforce.
There's actually a small group that meets on a regular basis, where, if their team does like department-based financial planning, where not each individual advisor doing their own planning, but actually have, like a team that works on the financial planning, that group actually is quite small, but is a subset and became a subgroup that meets on a regular basis also. So the last thing I'll say as it relates to the smaller groups, or the switching between as you relate the topics, we ended up asking we did a poll, and we asked everyone, what's your preference. How do you want to meet? And the majority said they liked what we were doing at that point, which was we were automatically switching groups every six months, and it was a random rotation.
So other than that larger firm, smaller firm, concept of that billion-dollar line in the sand within those two kind of sub pockets every six months to this day, we still do that, where we rotate the groups that people are in. So they show up to a group meetings every month, if they can make it. And you get used to the people in a good way. You kind of get to know them a little bit, and you have that experience for a six month period. And then we rotate the group so you're in a new group, second half of the year. And that was the most requested way of splitting up the groups. So I'm actually thrilled with that, because I can't imagine doing it by tech, and then you have whatever percentage, 10% love that, and the rest of the people didn't like that. So it was hard to meet everybody's request. But we settled on that way that we actually started out with, which was that random rotation.
Richard Walker 13:37
One of the things I love about that is that you're creating opportunity for people to get to know more people in their industry, because they're getting exposed to more people. And it's not just, oh, I met you. You spent six months with them. You had the opportunity to spend six months with them and get to know them, actually pretty well through that process, and then go to the next group, when you'll have some repeat people you've met and some new people you get to meet. I think that is a fantastic model, and I'm not sure I've really heard of other organizations doing that. Did you hear anybody else doing that? Are there other organizations you'd like to model?
Shaun Kapusinski 14:07
So as I said earlier, at the time that I started the group, there weren't really other communities or networks. There was very few, I'll say, specific to RIA operations at the time. Yes, there are other groups out there, or may have been at the time that were, I saw General COO groups, and they were really any industry. I didn't want that. It wasn't specific enough. There were others that maybe were in our industry, but they were specific to a certain technology, and years later, sometimes those technologies aren't as relevant. So same thing that was a little bit too niche. And that wasn't my preference there. So for the bulk of the years, you could say maybe almost 10 years of running the group, from 2010 to 2020, no, you did not have other groups that I was modeling after.
So I was maybe hearing this network does this, and another community might have this thing out there, and a lot of times it was more of a data point, not necessarily something that I was changing to emulate, but I either liked that I had something different. Other groups didn't have a discussion group. It was only a discussion board. It was only their monthly call. So I thought, well, that's good. I like that. I'm offering something that somebody else doesn't offer today, you do have a lot of other communities and networks that people can join, and they probably do cover similar topics and things that we have. So that's really, I think, a good thing for the industry, right? If 15, 16, years ago, I was looking and couldn't find anything, and today, people actually have a choice. I think that's a wonderful thing.
Richard Walker 15:40
Yeah, I call that market validation. You need to have at least one competitor in your space to know that you're doing the right thing and you've added something valuable. I have to imagine, whenever you build a community of similar type people, there are the outsiders who want in that aren't supposed to be there, right? They're not operators. Maybe they're tech companies, maybe they're vendors of some kind. Maybe they're advertisers. I don't know. Have you had pressures like that? Have you had to fend off the wrong people?
Shaun Kapusinski 16:09
I won't call them the wrong people. I'll just say, we all do something different for the industry. It kind of reminds me when we've gone to universities and you talk about the industry, the profession, starting a career. A lot of times, the students are studying financial planning, and they all think they're going to be an advisor, or they all say, I want to be an advisor. Not a bad thing. The reality that I always kind of maybe brought to the table was, I'm thrilled that you all are studying this. I think you're entering a wonderful industry, obviously promoting the RIA space. But I bring that reality to them that you know, most firms have, whether it's 50/50, 60/40, maybe 70/30, there are people that are not advisors, that support in one way or another, the advisor industry.
And in terms of how somebody might do that often leads to them using the skills that they have honed over time. So that that really, for me, is kind of that idea of, you've got people that do all kinds of things for this industry, and yet, the ones that we're providing a community for are really the, it's like the user group. It's those that are in some type of operations role and have interest in operations. So they could be an advisor, it could be an owner, but it's somebody that can show up at our calls and really have the conversation with us and say, Shaun asks this question, and rich can come back and say, well, here's how we do it at our firm. That was really my kind of deciding factor to say, you need to be working with an RIA. You need to have your firm. So 100% yes, there are those.
Maybe, I don't know if I call them pressures, but there were those questions people had asked, hey, I love your group. I'd love to get involved. I'd love to be a member. How can I join? Yeah, I'd say I appreciate the interest. Early on, I really didn't have any avenue for people to be involved, so it was a little bit of just, I'm sorry, but we're just, we're composed of those that work directly with an RIA, because we're answering questions that really only somebody that works in an RIA can answer. What I learned over time that I was maybe missing out on and started to do, probably, I don't know, five, six years ago, was using the expertise of somebody from a custodian, from a tech vendor, from a compliance consulting firm and allow them to help educate our membership.
That was a really common question I was getting, how do I get better educated myself, or how do I educate a new member to my team, somebody that maybe is newer in the career or newer in the industry? And I realized, oh, I was probably missing out for a few years by just kind of sending those folks away. They're not the wrong people. They just weren't right for the membership. They were right for something else, and it took me a couple years to figure that one out. So now we hold these private webinars a couple times a month, and invite them in and say, greet us like you were going to a conference. And you've got this group of operations folks, oftentimes the ones that integrate new tech and that are responsible for the operating day to day kind of behind the scenes, stuff that could be marketing, could be compliance, could be HR related, and help educate us to do our jobs better.
My favorite example was one year was actually a conference session, but I use this as an example to really share with other people that might be presenting. And it was a company that did recruiting, and they actually told everyone, here's our 12-step process of recruiting. They went through all the steps. Session ended, and they basically asked people, raise their hand if you think this is a good process, if this is thorough, if this is a great way to hire people. It was probably more than five years ago, so maybe it's a little different today, but at the time, but at the time, yeah, all the hands went up. This is great. Thank you. You've educated us.
You've given us a lot of good information that we could use in our own practice. Now they said, keep your hand up if you do these 12 steps in your recruiting today. And slowly, one by one, all these hands are dropping. No, we don't exactly do this, and that's really all they needed to say, because they didn't have to really push themselves. But they made the point, hey, I'm giving away a lot of good information, but I'm also helping you recognize the reality that you probably don't do this today, and you may not drop everything to try to build this for tomorrow. So if you want to call our firm, if you want to hire us, that to me, it becomes a win-win, because they are educating our folks. They are spending time with us, giving relevant examples of all the firms that they might have worked with, showing the value in the work that they do, and then basically leaving it up to them, right make it easy for them to show up, attend a session and make a decision for themselves.
Richard Walker 20:44
I think it's actually pretty hard for vendors to kind of get their heads around, how do I educate and not just make myself the hero of the journey? Because, I mean, like, I'm a tech vendor in this industry, so it's so easy to say I've solved this problem. Here's how we did it. I solved this problem. This is how we did it. And whether that's a technical problem, a leadership problem, etc, we all have our experience to draw from, but to then break that down and bring it to an educational front is, I think it's a real art. And that story you're sharing, my gosh, man, to have such a strong punchline, like I'm going to educate you on exactly how it works, and then who actually does this? That is brilliant. Let's go back to your membership levels. I mean, are all your members operators? Or do you now have a membership level for outside interests of some type, clearing firms, custodians, whoever?
Shaun Kapusinski 21:30
I don't. So we've still stayed in kind of that operator model. The way that we include folks that are not with an RIA is we offer from that time, we don't share a list. That's one of the things our members have been somewhat protective of. They have enough people that are marketing to them on a regular basis, so there's a level of trust, I'll say with myself, that they know I'm going to put someone in front of them that's going to help educate them, but they also know I'm not giving away that list after the meeting for them to start getting a bunch of calls or emails, and they value that. So I've been fairly protective to stay tight to that, which is why it ends up becoming, if a consultant is going to come and kind of share education with it, with us, with the membership, that's the value that our memberships looking for.
And then oftentimes they are presenting something that you just pointed out, right? If they recognize, oh, maybe you don't do this. And so you want to call me, you want to follow up, put the kind of the onus on somebody in our membership, to reach out. We end the calls and say, hey, how can these folks get in touch with you if they have questions, or if they want to know who to go to when they do/ And that that usually is the, I'm not saying it's just a billboard and they're hoping somebody sees and calls them, but they're, they're given a chance to basically say, they're problems in the industry. Here's what our firm does to help solve them. We're going to tell you a lot of the answers, but it's helping people kind of recognize, if you don't have a solution that's similar to this, but if you don't know where to go, I'm a resource, right?
So we're really just, like you said earlier, not just connecting people to each other within different firms, but we're connecting operations professionals with those in the industry that they may not be familiar with or they haven't heard of a lot of times again, that's what I think I've heard over the years is that people may not have time. They don't make time to do research. So if they're looking for a company that helps put forms together, are they doing all the research? Are they going to just trust their initial Google search? They probably would want to put in more time. I'm not saying I've done all the research, and I'm only putting in front of them the best option that they should choose, but I'm often putting in front of them an option that they would consider, and that many other firms, often hyphen firms, have used.
And so that brings a little bit of credibility to it, and it makes it easy for them. They basically say, I see I'm getting invited to a session that's put out by this consultant, this custodian, this vendor. It's posted by HIFON. And so they say, I'm going to invest that hour and see what they have to say. And both of us hope that. I hope they get value from attending, and I hope the presenter, gets valued by possibly finding, you know, future clients for themselves.
Richard Walker 24:17
Yeah, I love it. And I have to give you a lot of credit, because I think one of the things that you've done is you've built a pure group. It started by you because of your needs. It's been kept true to that purpose, and it's only those people. There's a lot of groups that get started by vendors. My wife started a weight loss clinic last year. We since shut it down, but she went through that, and she wanted to go join different Facebook groups, etc, and she found one started by another weight loss clinic. She couldn't join it. Oh, it's so brilliant that they did that, because they attract their audience to talk about the problem, and they get to uniquely solve it. But there's a little bit of disingenuity there, just dishonesty.
And it's not dishonest. I don't know the right word, but it's more of like I attracted you to the well, and I'm going to give you only stuff out of my well. And honestly, Shaun, this is one of the things I think about. I think we at Quik! should start a forms community. The business forms Management Association is no longer out there, and there is a community of people who manage and design and build and use forms who need to come together. But I don't want to be that vendor. I don't want to be that oh, it's because we have the only solution. I wanted to actually be open for everybody to talk about, what are all the solutions out there? And again, I don't know that. I have more time in the world, so we haven't done it.
Shaun Kapusinski 25:32
That reminds me of if you were to go to a conference, or sometimes I just tell people if they're interested in joining HIFON. The example I give is if you went to a party, and in your case, everybody there, everybody that walked to that door that I know that I'm coming to talk about forms and to talk about the good, the bad and the ugly, everything in between. And I'm actually excited about that, like I can't wait to go. That's what I want HIFON to be. That's what I think any community should be. Be a part of the community that's going to give you the opportunity to talk and ask questions and be open about things you're experiencing.
That has been a wonderful, super valuable item for myself to be a part of HIFON all these years, I feel like saying I would be dishonest if I didn't say I've benefited the most, right? I've heard the most conversations, been on the most calls, seen everything that everybody asks on the discussion board. And so for me, it does feel like this constant party where I'm rubbing shoulders with all these people that back in the day, I felt like I couldn't find enough of them. And I know there's 1000s of firms out there that maybe haven't even heard of us and what we do as a community, but I'm thankful that there's other communities out there that maybe they have heard of, and they will join, and they'll be a part of that, and they'll hopefully get that value that they're looking for. I also like to say, you also feel like you make some friends, right? You get in touch with people.
There's a lot of times our discussion board, a thread will end with something like, well, let's have a call, let's set up a call and talk. And I'm confident that those lead to relationships that people then have, and then they do go to a conference, and they get to meet that person live, and be able to have those conversations that then hopefully spur each other on and develop into something that helps them long term. That's the stuff I love. I love seeing that I've experienced that myself and for me, there's nothing better than maybe jump-starting some of that by offering this community. So if it ever works out, whether it's you or somebody else that does that for your group or your area, I would encourage it. I think the benefits are worth the cost.
Richard Walker 27:37
Man, you answered the question I wanted to ask, but there's a second part to my question, I was gonna ask you that benefit you personally had derived out of this, what impact it gave you. But my other question is, What has surprised you, like, what things have come your way, what opportunities you never thought would be part of your life are now part of it because of HIFON?
Shaun Kapusinski 27:55
Yeah, so two things come to mind quickly. The first surprise is that the ability of hearing what other firms do, always felt like I'd have to pull this out of people, or I'd have to maybe, like, ask it in a way that made them feel like they weren't giving me all their secrets. And I was quickly surprised having these conversations, everyone was very open to share. It felt like we were all saying, I think if our owners or advisors were talking, they might not be as open with kind of sharing everything. And it seemed like the ops community was more like, listen, I could tell you every top 10 things that our firm does great operationally, and you could tell me the top 10 things that your firm does operationally great.
And if we spared those, neither of us are going to drop everything we're doing to try to go duplicate that, and even if we tried, we're probably not going to get there quickly. So because you kind of acknowledge that, it's almost like you walk in the door saying, hey, listen, I'm going to be open. I'm going to tell you a lot of stuff. Nobody's really doing this with any malicious intent. If anything, it's quite the opposite. I was surprised how much people shared. They're like, yeah, let me tell you exactly how we run a client meeting and do our follow-up.
Or let me tell you how we organized the fields in our CRM systems that it made sense when an advisor came back from a meeting that it was easy for them, the flow that we set up, right? Those were the types of things I was surprised. I just, I don't know why I expected it, but I didn't expect people to be so open. So that was a big surprise.
Richard Walker 29:23
Well, that's competitive nature, right? I mean, I have a product that's competing with others, and I fear they're going to take my secrets, and it takes a lot of time to realize ideas are cheap, execution is hard, so maybe those 10 best ideas the other firm shared with you, you get to take one of them to try to execute on and will it make your firm go. I mean, you're right. Sorry to interrupt. Go on.
Shaun Kapusinski 29:48
No, no, to finish that, I'll say to me that I wanted it always to be a positive experience where a bunch of people would win, right? And so if the individual who joins the membership wins, their firm wins, their clients should win. And ultimately, I'd say the industry, the RIA space, could also win. So if I'm doing things, having these conversations, to your point, somebody takes one thing that's just a little tweak to what they're doing, or send them to a new vendor that maybe saves them time or saves them money, or produces a better result for their clients, those wins all get amplified, right? And I get excited about like, we can have an impact by bringing more people into this community, sharing the things that we're all doing that are great, and hopefully seeing more of those results. So that's kind of the surprise.
Richard Walker 30:40
There's another way to kind of look at this, which is, you do not have a scarcity mentality. There's enough business for you and your oh yes to all win, and you're helping your entire industry. I love that kind of focus, because this is one of the things I love about our industry. Financial Advisors, they care about their customer. The whole idea is to help them achieve their goals. So if we in our roles of technology and operations, can help the advisors achieve more client goals, we're doing the right thing. So I share that with you. That is awesome. Now I hope my competitors don't call me and ask for our secret sauce and forms, but maybe I'll share it with them. I don't know.
Shaun Kapusinski 31:17
That's up to you, right? You decide how much you share.
Richard Walker 31:19
Yeah. So the second thing, sorry, keep going.
Shaun Kapusinski 31:22
Yeah. So one thing that I didn't expect was to have an opportunity to write a book, you had referenced that at the at the outset. That for me was quite a surprise. I have a sister who's a great writer and who writes a lot, and so in our family, she would have been the one that we've all picked would be writing any type of book first and probably also last. And yet, here I had this opportunity through connections that HIFON introduced me to different people and led to this connection that produced essentially a book. And it's been a few years now. So there are times that I don't wanna say I forget about it, but in a good way, I've had people just recently reaching out, saying, hey, I saw this. I think it's going to help us.
There's always M&A activity, and seems to always rise. And so that's really what led us to use the skills we have. Nobody else was really doing it, and that, to me, was just such a great opportunity to kind of jump in and be a part of something that, again, didn't really exist, but I was able to use some of the experience that I've had, and couple it with what Greg had done in his background, and hopefully provide a result that's going to be helpful for others.
Richard Walker 32:28
That's awesome. That's awesome. Okay, we're going to run out of time, but I have to ask you about artificial intelligence. How do you see AI impacting communities and what your group at HIFON's doing and what your members are trying to achieve?
Shaun Kapusinski 32:42
Yeah. So what I've been thinking about the most with this lady is, could you ask one of the tools out there the same questions that are being asked either A on our discussion board or B within our group session? And so far, I'm convinced you can't replicate that, right? It's only pulling so far, it's only pulling from what's out there. Now, if we had something with within, maybe that would just enhance what we provide. But right now, I'm thinking, if you spent two, three minutes, maybe kind of laying out, here's a business situation that I'm encountering. Shaun, what do you do at your firm? Like, how would you deal with this? If you asked one of these AI tools today that question, maybe you get some responses, right? Maybe you get some type of result.
I'm sure you get some type of result, but I'm not convinced you're getting what these communities provide to be able to ask somebody, well, in your experience, what exactly is your firm doing today, or what have you done? That information is not out there for these tools to draw upon. So that's the part where I'm thinking, just like you hear the AI won't replace the advisor, right? My favorite quote, I think I heard recently was, no AI is going to sit with your client after the loss of a spouse, right? So, in a similar way, I don't see any, anytime soon, any type of AI replacing these conversations that we're having based on the complexity of them, and not that there's not information out there on those topics. If you say, give me the forms providers that could help me fill out forms faster and integrate with my CRM and send things off to custodians.
All right, you could get that. But if you say, tell me about the challenges I'll encounter working with Rich Walker from Quik Forms. Yeah, it's gonna come up with zero probably. But if you ask that question, like, what would be tough, right? And somebody says, well, here's things that I didn't think of ahead of time. Here's what I didn't know. Those types of questions, I don't know that all those answers are out there yet, and I think that's where it still holds something unique, to be able to talk with people and ask those unique questions, and you're going to get unique answers.
Richard Walker 32:42
The truth about the question you just said, like, what challenge you're going to have working with Rich and the Quik team or the Quik product, those are questions our customers sometimes ask, and all of them should ask. Right? Because we're in a unique position to have that knowledge with our customers and the feedback we get, right? But that's never published anywhere. I didn't write it down somewhere. My customers didn't write it down somewhere. So how would an AI know it? And that, to me, is the point, how would an AI know what a community knows if the community is not publishing that data.
And not enough people write books on here's the perfect way to do operations, and once they do, it's 10 years out of date, right? Because things keep evolving. Oh, man. So I'm wondering, have you thought about or have you already done? Have you added a custom GPT to your discussion board so people can ask a GPT a large language model about what's already been discussed and said?
Shaun Kapusinski 34:52
Rich the list of things that I would love to do to enhance what HIFON does and has is quite long, so that one is one of those, like, you're thinking about it, but you just, you don't even want to figure out at this point what it would take to do it. I think it'd be great. And I bet in five years, you have this conversation about, what is AI, how's the impact on communities? And I think it's totally different discussion. So I think, like many areas, we're all kind of interested, excited and just curious, like, what will this do? So I don't know. I don't know if that would be a positive or negative, if it would take away from what are people just seeking a written answer, or do they want some of that engagement?
I mean, there's times that people have said, I love coming to these calls, talking to people, and sometimes just getting the validation that, like, okay, I'm not crazy. Like, this is happening in my firm. Here's the response I'm getting. Am I alone? And when 8, 10, 12, other people are saying that's normal, it's good, it's okay, like, you'll get through it. Keep going, like you're doing the right thing. It feels like a counseling session sometimes, like it's not always about, like, give me a formal here's the three, three bullet point answer. So I think that's a component of being part of a group that you actually want to connect with people, not just to find a written, documented answer.
Richard Walker 36:53
Yeah. Okay. So like, I have to give a shout out to a product we use at Quik. It's called customgpt.com. I have no affiliation with a company. I don't even know the people there. I discovered it. I use it. We put it on our API guides. So instead of reading a very long API guide, you can actually type questions or just words, and it'll come back with references and a full description, sometimes even examples of what to do. And it is so fast and easy to put together that I bet you can have it set up on your discussion board in 10 minutes. Anyway, worth looking into it. We got to wrap up. Man, this has been a fun conversation, but before I ask my very last question, what is the best way for people to find and connect with you?
Shaun Kapusinski 37:32
So hifon.org is our website. That's where you're going to find the most information about the group. My email is on shaun@hyphen.org, and LinkedIn is probably the third best way. So any of those three would be great.
Richard Walker 37:47
Awesome, awesome. All right, here's my last question, who has had the biggest impact on your leadership style and how you approach your role today?
Shaun Kapusinski 37:55
So, knowing you asked this question, I thought, Boy, there's a lot of people that I could mention, but I think the one that I want to shout out because we talked about HIFON a big change was when I decided to go from just me kind of running this blood, sweat and tears in the evenings and weekends, to turning it into a formal membership business, right? Essentially taking entrepreneurial route that I never pictured myself in. I'd like to shout out Bob Varus. Bob I'd been involved in for with a few years with his conference, and he was the one that challenged me with a handful of questions about, how are you going to scale this, and how is this going to grow, and how are you going to do more?
And you're going to run out of time, or you're going to get fed up, and you're just not you're going to throw up your hands at some point. I mean, he threw out a lot of questions that just made me think. And so it did kind of fame how I was leading this group, because at first, it was very much do as much as I can, as fast as I can, and if I don't have the time go well. And so he really challenged me to think of it differently, knowing that there would be some risk, knowing that there would be way more of an upside. So I'm thankful for Bob's challenging questions. And it did take a couple years. I'm pretty cautious. I go pretty slow with the big changes, but I appreciate his persistence and the involvement that I've had with his event has also opened opportunities. So I'm very thankful for that.
Richard Walker 39:11
Yeah, what a great person to learn from. I mean, he's had newsletters and communities of his own for a long time, so he's definitely somebody to watch and learn from. He's an industry veteran. That's awesome. Well, hey, I want to give a huge thank you to Shaun Kapusinski, founder of HIFON, for being on this episode of The Customer Wins. Go check out Shaun's website at hifon.org, and don't forget to check out Quik at quikforms.com, where we make processing forms easy. I hope you enjoyed this discussion, will click the Like button. Share this with someone and subscribe to our channels for future episodes of The Customer Wins. Shaun, thank you so much for joining me today.
Shaun Kapusinski 39:46
Thanks for having me Rich.
Outro 39:48
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 you.
Comments