A Conversation With John Foard

Financial advisors aren’t being replaced by AI, they’re being freed by it. Yohance Harrison sits down with John Foard, co-founder of Crown Advisors, to unpack how small firms can use AI to reduce busywork, improve note-taking, hire more people, and deepen human connection in client meetings. They cover industry fear vs. reality, compliance upside, meeting note-takers like Zoom AI and Hazel, and a rapid-fire “Marry, Divorce, Date” on advisor tech. 

Links mentioned:

crownadvisorgroup.com

Email: info@crownadvisorgroup.com

Social: Crown Advisors and Retire Stronger.

 Recorded after Future Proof. 

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Transcript

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John Foard 0:00

AI is going to progress to the point where it will probably allow us to hire more staff. To be honest with you, like again, there's three people in our firm serving more people, Right? Because it's going to give us the time and the ability to serve more people. Absolutely, 100%. If that does not happen, I'm going to be sorely disappointed in the future of what AI is going to bring, quite frankly.

Seth Harrison 0:30

You are tuned into the Only Only Human podcast, where financial advisors learn how to stay irreplaceable in a world of AI. Only Human explores strategies for advisors to leverage the unique human edge and thrive alongside technology. I'll be back later with some important announcements. Until then, here's your host, behavioral financial advisor Johans. Enjoy the show.

Yohance Harrison 1:00

Welcome everybody, back to Only Humans, sponsored by the Money Script podcast. So happy to be with each and every one of you today. This is a podcast that is made specifically for individuals like myself and my good friend John. We are in the financial services industry, specifically we are financial advisors. So we spend all day talking to other people about their money. So I have with us today John Foard. He is the co-founder of Crown Advisors llc and he is happy to admit that we are not the same height. Though we may look as we're sitting down, we are not the same height. John, welcome to the show. How are you?

John Foard 1:37

I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. This is awesome. I really appreciate you having us on today.

Yohance Harrison 1:42

Yeah, no, I'm excited to have you on. We've got some fun stuff to talk about. I am fresh off the airplane from Future Proof. I was out there hanging out with thousands of advisors and hundreds of providers of technology, providers of services, providers of platforms and custodians, etc, all for financial advisors. And the purpose of the Future Proof is exactly what the title says. The goal is to future proof us as an industry and help us to become better stewards for our clients so we can help more people. A common theme at those events is that we are not each other's competition. We're not. Our competition is Neiman Marcus. Our competition is Ferrari. You know that. That's our competition. It's the other things that you, that you do with your money that may not always be as responsible. So that's who the true competition is. We hope that everyone can find a financial advisor that they can enjoy working with and get some good results with and help get them closer to their financial goals. So. But this is Only Human. And in Only Human we are talking about implementing AI into a Financial advisory practice and how to understand that it's our job to also stay human, that it's our job to utilize those tools. So I wanted to start, John, if you would give us a little bit about your background in coming into financial services, and then fast forward to when your practice first heard those lovely letters AI. And how did it make the team feel?

John Foard 3:12

Yeah, sure, happy to do that. And so I've been a financial Planner now for 26 years. It's hard to believe that it's been over two and a half decades. Right. This is my second firm that I've been an owner of. I sold my first company back in 2011, went, stayed in the industry, and went to work for others. Some big box names helped build some smaller RIAs along the way, and then decided I was ready to do it again. So I started what is now Crown Advisors. Yeah, my wife was questioning my sanity at that point when I made the decision to go back into owning another firm again.

Yohance Harrison 3:49

She said, is this a midlife crisis, John? Can't you just go buy a Harley, John? Just get a Harley.

John Foard 3:56

Yeah, yeah, it was. I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna deny the fact that it probably was partially a midlife crisis happening, quite frankly, but the reality is, and I'm glad I did. And so that's where we are today, Crown Advisors. I do have a business partner. His name is Bill Kearney. Not on the show with us today, but wanted to give a shout out to him while he's holding the fort down in the office today. So you asked the question about when we first heard the scary term artificial intelligence or AI, and yeah, I mean, we, we heard it and got familiar with it. I mean, just as quickly and as soon as everyone else was starting to get inundated with all of the information about AI. And I will tell you that we. I feel like our firm has been kind of at the forefront of adopting AI in our. In our platform and in our. In our business. But we'll talk more about that as we. As we get into the podcast. But. But, yeah, I mean, we heard about it just like everyone else. And, you know, I'll be the first to admit we were. I wouldn't say skeptical, but we were very much keeping things at an arm's length to make sure we understood what was going to be happening and how it was going to play out. But that's it. That's the fun thing about technology is it continually tries to improve our lives. And I think that's where we are today.

Yohance Harrison 5:12

You know, John, we've been in the business around the same amount of time. I actually just celebrated

Yohance Harrison 5:19

24 official years as a financial advisor. 25 or almost 20, I think. Same amount in financial services. My first day to meet with new clients was supposed to be September 12th, 2001.

John Foard 5:35

Oh. Oh, man. So.

Yohance Harrison 5:37

So we got pushed back a little bit, but I was considered client ready, Fully licensed, ready to go. For September 12, 2001. So you can imagine how that went. And back then. Let's see, the tools we had were. We had Fazware, that was our financial planning tool. We had. Oh, what was it called? Investo something. Not Investopedia, but it was a Invest Net. No, was investnet. There was some tool that we had that we could put in mutual fund portfolios together. There was no such thing as a wrap account. Everything was loaded. Mutual funds or back end mutual funds. And that was about it.

John Foard 5:41

Yep.

John Foard 6:08

Okay.

John Foard 6:17

Yeah. Remember when we used to have B share mutual funds?

Yohance Harrison 6:19

B share mutual.

John Foard 6:23

Like we're showing our age that we even know what that is, man.

Yohance Harrison 6:27

Do you remember all the compliance you had to do if you did a B share mutual fund when you got.

John Foard 6:33

Your cancel date in 2001, the day after 9, 11? I was still at Edward Jones at the time. And that was shortly before I decided to leave the world of being a captive rep and I went Independent in 2003. But I remember exactly where I was the day the towers were hit and I was knocking on doors and I remember I was actually training a new rep and we knocked on this lady's door at her house and she said, she opened the door with a phone in her hand and said, get in the house right now and look at the tv. And so again, dating ourselves to how long we've been around and where technology has, you know, where we started in technology and where it's come to today is pretty. It's a pretty massive shift and it's pretty cool to kind of look back and see what all has happened over time. But even with just the products that we have. And services that we're able to provide, it's been a very massive shift as well. And I feel like AI is going to continue to evolve.

Yohance Harrison 7:30

That I do as well. But, but there is, John. There's a lot of fear out there about AI. Again, I was at Future Proof. There were more. I mean, being that our, our, our profession is skewed to the right on age. So the average financial advisor tends to be 50 years old, plus some reports say as high as 55. There was a lull of new people coming into financial services for a little while. So that did kind of impede the ability for new ideas to take hold. Most of the owners of the larger multi billion dollar RIAs are also 60, 70 years old and they can be a little slow on the uptake of technology as well.

Yohance Harrison 8:26

In the media though, they are not painting a pretty picture for our careers.

John Foard 8:34

Let's talk.

Yohance Harrison 8:35

Yeah, I've got, I got a few I want to, I want to read with you because just I want to make sure I quote these individuals correctly. So Microsoft, a pretty reputable organization.

John Foard 8:43

Yeah, I've heard of them.

Yohance Harrison 8:45

They ranked financial advisors among the top 40 professions to be most affected by AI. And when I say affected, not in, oh, everything's going to be fine. Like jobs are going to be affected. They ranked US number 30. BLS mentioned that we are the most susceptible to AI innovation or impacts over the next decade. And then Newsweek, this was just a couple weeks ago, lumped, they were talking about people trying to find jobs. There was this whole article about AI writing resumes and AI reading resumes and no one's getting hired. So. But they put financial services as a high risk category due to our daddy data heavy repeatable tasks. I felt so reduced. What say you to that, John?

John Foard 9:36

Yeah, I don't know if I agree that headcount or that jobs will be in jeopardy. I would say that they are 100% correct with the fact that we now have a tool that allows us to process information so much faster than where we were five years ago, two years ago.

John Foard 9:58

But I actually view it the opposite way. I view it as being a massive help to firms that are either startup firms, smaller firms trying to grow. I see it as a benefit because,

John Foard 10:13

you know, being able to use it. Here's how. I'll just, I'll just stop for a minute and say this is how we look at our firm.

Yohance Harrison 10:19

We. Great. This is my next question. So good, you're there. Okay.

John Foard 10:22

Yeah. So let's just talk about how we view it at our firm. You know, we, we're, we're still what we consider to be a small firm. We have three total employees having AI working for us and doing all the tasks that we have it doing for us actually allowed us to hire an employee full time.

Yohance Harrison 10:24

Yes.

Yohance Harrison 10:38

What? Talk more about that, John. That is bucking the trend. Microsoft, are you listening?

John Foard 10:43

Yeah. I mean seriously think about it like we were able to instead of spend money

John Foard 10:50

out of our budget of our firm to have people that are not technically employees of the company, assess data,

John Foard 11:01

go in and run certain reports we need to run. Let's even switch gears to the tech side of things and helping us with the podcast that we do, helping us come up with topics of discussion or if clients email us in and say, we want to, we want you to talk about this on your podcast or do a blog post about this, we don't have AI do it for us, but we have AI help us with it. And we have AI help us with implementing the strategies that we're trying to get across through our marketing efforts. You have to go out and if we don't have AI helping us with this, we have to go out and hire a marketing agency, a firm that can do all of this editing and all these different things and coming up with all these ideas and getting us out there to the public, which costs, well, quite frankly, an exorbitant amount of money. I mean, you look at some of the dollar amounts that people and advisors are spending on these tasks, we're able to now allow AI to help us knock out 85, 90% of that. There's still some human element, and I think you and I would both agree that AI is not going to replace humans. It's just not. And so there's still a human element to this. But the cost associated with being able to eliminate 85, 90% of what we need to do to get those tasks done, we are now able to direct that towards hiring a quality employee to do other work that AI is not going to do that we don't want AI to do, which is servicing our clients and making sure that we as co founders are doing what we need to do to get the job done on a daily basis. So that's how, that's how we look at it. It's helping us be able to hire a quality employee and employ someone into the workforce. That's how we look at it.

Yohance Harrison 12:40

I couldn't agree with you more. And we've experienced similar implementation success. We just hired another individual as well. Thanks to the tools that we have through AI, it's allowing some other employees that we have to be able to take on more human involved tasks and re and the training of the new person using AI with like, hey, this is something that a human used to do manually. We're now going to hire you to manage this process using AI and you're going to do 10 times the work in half the time. Thanks to AI. And, and that's, and that's where I, I just don't agree with this headcount. I mean if you talk to some of the general public and I had some of these conversations with the general public because I just like to ruffle the feathers of individuals at times and they ask what can I do as a human financial advisor that a chat should be GPT or a Claude or even a, a Google. What's what's called Gemini. Gemini can what? What is it that I can do? My favorite answer to that question is to give my client a hug.

John Foard 13:20

Exactly. Yep, absolutely.

Yohance Harrison 13:55

Yeah, because sometimes that's what clients need. Yeah, they need hugs, not spreadsheets. They need hugs, not the historical returns of the S&P 500 and hugs. I don't mean always a physical hug because I do a lot of my meetings via Zoom. But sometimes it's that non verbal communication of empathy that clients need that they're being heard, not just the answer to their question. Because a lot of times the answer to the question can be found on AI but they need to know that someone's in their corner, someone's thinking about their best interest and is not just a computer giving an answer.

John Foard 14:00

Correct.

Yohance Harrison 14:37

And I think the robo advisor companies learned this the hard way.

John Foard 14:42

Wait, weren't we supposed to be taken out by robo advisors at one point?

Yohance Harrison 14:46

Oh we were, we were. It was the end of human advice. The funny thing about robo advisors, John, this is what cracks me up. All robo advising is, is an algorithm that says trade at this and don't trade at this. That's it.

John Foard 15:00

Yeah, the forefront of where AI has become really. I mean that was what they were basically on the forefront of. And yeah, we were supposed to be replaced by robo advisors. I remember when robo advisory firms were starting up, you know that was the headline. Like every other day the human financial advisor is going to be no longer, you are going to be out of a job. And it's the same, it's a different thing. Instead of Robo Advisor it's AI is going to replace people's jobs, not just financial advisors jobs but it's going to replace jobs in general. And I just don't see it. Maybe companies shift their strategy with how they hire what they hire for who they hire to do a specific job and why. I definitely can see that taking place. It's just not going to eliminate the human element out of especially out of what we do. And it just into your point, you know, I could not agree more with you. I do most of my Appointments via Zoom now as well. And I'm a little bit older than you, Johannes, but I grew up in the age of when I remember as a kid, I was so excited. I kind of was too young to hit the Atari, the Atari age. But I was right smack dab in the middle of Nintendo when it came out.

Yohance Harrison 16:17

Wait, John, we might be the same age, sir. Hold on.

John Foard 16:20

All right, so, okay, born in 1980. I'm three years older than you. So I was born.

Yohance Harrison 16:25

Okay, yeah, three years. Yeah. So I was. I was a little head of Atari. My older brother knew Atari, but I did know Nintendo. Oh, yeah.

John Foard 16:33

As well, because it was in that. That span, right? And a funny, funny, quick side story. I remember when I got my Nintendo for Christmas and my parents were like, okay, it's bedtime, 9 o'. Clock, gotta go to bed. And I'm upstairs in my bedroom and I hear this ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. And my dad was playing Mario Brothers, and he was catching all the little, little coins. And that's all I could hear from upstairs. I'm like. So I come down and I'm like, you told me I had to go to bed and couldn't play video games anymore. And here you are sitting playing video games. He goes, all right, come on, sit down. Let's go. But my point in telling that story is because, you know, we kind of. You and I kind of grew up on this cusp of technology taking a big boom. And I say that because you and I are able to embrace it in a way that some, you know, age groups within that are. That is still around, that we serve as clients, don't quite embrace it. But what I will tell you is I'm super surprised. I mean, I'm extremely surprised at how well even my older clients have been embracing technology, especially Zoom. I think that obviously Covid had a lot to do with that. Covid had a lot to do with it. With forcing people to adopt and accept technology into their lives. And. And I think that AI is going to do the same thing. I think we're on. On that cusp where AI is forcing individuals to accept and adopt or adapt to technology, taking over certain aspects of what we do, not just for our jobs, for our employment or in our work careers, but also in our personal lives as well. And I think it's. I don't look at it as a negative. I look at it as a positive. There are. Listen, there's pros and cons to everything, but I think that the pros to this more than outweigh the cons. And I just don't see it replacing us. The human element is so important. And when you do look back and forth with someone on a Zoom call and you see their facial expressions and when you give them counsel and give them quality advice,

Yohance Harrison 16:36

Oh, yeah.

John Foard 18:36

you see some of that weight just lift off their shoulders by their facial reactions, it's. So you're not going to get that from an AI answer. When you log into Gemini or ChatGPT or Claude or whatever the other service that you're using, you're not getting that human element in it. And I know for a fact that my clients are not and will not think of letting go of us as advisors to rely on AI to do the job we're doing for them. I know they will. It's just not going to happen.

Yohance Harrison 19:05

Yeah. And actually, you know, Michael Kitces agrees with us. So. But yeah. And he did a series of articles discussing the implementation of AI and he did say, however, that there are back office roles, the back office roles of an advisor that are at risk. Due to the implementation of AI. And, but I still would counter that. I don't think, I don't think the role is so much at risk as the individual. So if you have an individual that's not willing to learn how to implement AI, how to use AI to enhance the work that they're doing, then I think that we as owner operators will go find someone that does.

John Foard 19:09

Yeah. Which doesn't surprise me.

John Foard 19:26

Sure.

Yohance Harrison 19:59

Yeah. So it's not, it's not the role that is there, the person is at risk. I mean, that's the same thing. I shared this with my team. I said, look, if you, if you all can't learn how to adopt and apply AI into what you're doing and the tools that I'm providing you with, then you are at risk for someone else who can. So let's just learn it together.

Yohance Harrison 20:22

Quick question for you. Are you utilizing the

Yohance Harrison 20:27

note takers yet inside of your client meetings?

John Foard 20:31

We are. We use the one that is provided through Zoom because that's the service we use for our video conferencing with clients. And then we're also using Hazel. I know. I think you're using Hazel as well. Those are the only two we've ever used. In addition to the one that comes with our phone service that we have through Ringcentral, we have an AI note taker that's attached to that also.

Yohance Harrison 20:40

Yeah.

Yohance Harrison 20:43

I am.

Yohance Harrison 20:52

So what sort of. Tell me about the impact of, of utilizing those notetakers, not just on you as an advisor. Start with the impact on your, on your, on your staff, on your, your support staff.

John Foard 21:04

Oh, it's huge. I cannot even begin to tell you how huge of an impact this is having because one of the things that I love the most is I can. I was just doing a zoom earlier today for a client doing a review, a quick review, because some life changes they've got going on. And I literally, in the, in the middle of a zoom, said, hey, Hazel, can you make sure you remind me in the to do list and to knock out XYZ ABC? 1, 2, 3. And my client looked at me. I could see them, I could see the look on their face, like, wait, did you just talk to the AI note take? I'm like, I sure did. I absolutely did. Because they're going to create, they're already going to create a list for me. But I just emphasize the fact that I need to make sure that I don't forget these items that I need to take care of for you. And so from. It's, for me, it, it's, it's making a huge impact for myself, my staff, our overall firm, from multiple directions here, one, it makes sure that we don't forget something that needs to happen for a client so we don't let things slip through the cracks. And I'm pretty proud to say that we are a high touch firm and that we always strive to do everything we tell our clients we're going to do. Have we ever made mistakes? Sure. We've forgotten to send an email or make a quick phone call sometimes. But this is a great way for us to not miss very important items.

John Foard 22:23

I still have to review the notes that it spits out to us. Right. But it cuts down 98% of the amount of time I have to take inputting notes into our contact relationship management system or CRM from, you know, from the meeting that we just had or the phone call I just had with a client. So it eliminates 98% of the time that I have to input information and think about. If you have an extremely long meeting, let's say you have a meeting that goes for an hour. There's a lot of stuff that you have to remember and take notes on and this. And so that gets to my next point. I don't have to remember what was discussed. The AI note taker is doing it for me. And see, here's the thing. This is another great example of where AI is not costing anyone their job. I'm still having to do the note taking whether I'm using AI NoteTaker or.

Yohance Harrison 23:15

No, you still have to ask the follow up question and the question behind the question.

John Foard 23:21

I remember what was said and remember what they asked me to do. Or while I'm scribbling down notes because a client might be saying things and I'm writing down notes to make sure I don't forget it. Well, what if I, what if they say something that doesn't hit me and I don't write it down and then I've forgotten to do that possibly. So I still have to do everything that I was going to do without AI note taking. AI note taking just makes my life so much simpler and I don't dread going into the CRM to input what just happened in that meeting. Then on top of that, it helps my staff because they can go into that meeting and see the notes that I put in the system from the AI note taker and go, okay, John mentioned in the meeting that he's going to have me do this and he's going to take care of that. So I'm going to start working on that right now because I know exactly what I need to do. It's awesome. I don't know how we ever lived without AI Notetakers, quite frankly.

Yohance Harrison 24:11

So, John, an unintended consequence of the AI Notetaker is that it's making me a better listener. Because I'm less distracted by. I mean this is for the first time in forever, I can enter into a client meeting with nothing open but their financial plan or whatever tool I'm using to track their finances in the Zoom meeting. And I don't have to think about the notes or did I spell that right? Or let me. Did I get those numbers correct? And I, and yes, I've been typing for 30 years, but I still sometimes have to look at what I'm typing. It just depends on me because I'm focused on too many things at once. And so when I take my eyes off the screen to then look down at my keyboard, I'm missing some of the non verbal communication. We've all heard the saying that, what is it, 67 or something percent of communication is non verbal. Well, if I'm not looking at the person that's talking to me, I may miss those non verbal cues. And that's incredibly important. And this is where I've noticed it. When I have husband and wife in the same meeting, whether they're side by side or if they're in two different places and cameras are on, if I'm Looking away I don't get when I'm asking those intimate questions like, you know, tell me, tell me about your current amounts of life insurance that you have and, and how would that impact if one of you were to pass away? To watch the eye roll sometimes is. Is needed. But if I'm looking down as I'm typ or looking at what I'm typing, I may miss that.

John Foard 24:21

Oh yes.

John Foard 25:48

Yeah, agree.

John Foard 25:51

It goes back to that human element, right. Of being able to connect with your clients in that human form. And that's a huge, huge factor. I agree 100%. So yeah, just to reiterate my thoughts on it is, I think it's awesome

John Foard 26:08

from a compliance standpoint. I know there's people out there that have different viewpoints on it from a compliance perspective. I think it's a positive thing from a compliance perspective because it allows us to be better advisors, as you said, better listeners and ultimately better note takers so that we do not miss what's most important to our clients when we are serving their needs. And that is what our job is. Our job is not to. I think a lot of people in our industry think that our job is to be the master of creating allocations for their portfolios. And I would highly disagree with that. As financial planners, our job is to be problem solvers, listeners and quarterbacks of their financial lives and just give them trusted counsel and options of what they can do to make their lives better and achieve the goals we're trying to achieve. And I fully stand by the fact that AI note taking definitely enhances that job for us.

Yohance Harrison 27:08

So, last question on the usage of AI. How do you feel about asking AI to solve financial equations? For instance, I'm a male, age 45 and I want to retire in 15 years. And I have 4 million in my 401k and the ABC fund. And I probably put a lot in there, 400,000 in the ABC fund. How much do I need to be contributing to my 401k? So some of the questions that clients come to us and ask, how do you feel about utilizing the AI tools to create answers to some of those questions?

John Foard 27:12

Sure.

John Foard 27:48

Yeah, that's a really, that's an interesting question. I've actually not used it for that yet. I still use traditional financial planning software that I trust and utilize on a daily basis that handles those questions that already are going to do those calculations for us. But you know, now that you've brought that question up, I may start actually seeing what AI has to say. I would love to see what they come back with.

Yohance Harrison 28:14

Because that's why I bring it up, John.

John Foard 28:16

That's why it could be a validating response that, hey, my planning that I've done for this client is actually, you know, the right direction that we're headed in with what I'm with and how I'm counseling them. Yeah, this is great. I just found a new use for AI today.

Yohance Harrison 28:28

So.

Yohance Harrison 28:34

Well, well, here's, here's where if you really want to push the envelope a little bit for your more tech forward clients, when they bring the question to you, ask them if they've already asked AI.

John Foard 28:46

Oh, that's great, that's great.

Yohance Harrison 28:48

I'm going to, you're going to find more yeses than no's and what they're doing. They're going to go in there and ask for it and either have some amount of belief or not a certain amount of belief and then they want to bring it to you as the professional.

John Foard 29:02

Yeah. And you know, and I, even if they are using it or not, it doesn't matter. Let's say they are and they're using AI to maybe validate what we're going to be sharing with them. I think that's awesome. And I still stand by and I think you would agree that this is still not going to jeopardize our role in the industry. It's not going to take our job away. It just won't. I mean, the Internet's already there. You're already asking.

Yohance Harrison 29:26

No.

Yohance Harrison 29:28

It's already there. Yeah. It's not. It's not. That's the other thing, that's why I have to remind people that AI is not creating anything new. Those answers were already there. You just didn't know how to find them. I knew how to go, I knew how to prompt Google really well to find the answer I was looking for. And I know how to prompt AI really well to find the answer I'm looking for. I also know how to point out when it's made a mistake. And I've shared this on the show before, but I had had a client ask AI.

Yohance Harrison 29:54

My husband has a HSA, I have an HSA, how much can we contribute? And AI said to them, 8, $300 each. And I said, it's a damn good thing you didn't listen to AI because you would end up with some tax penalty. And so, yeah, so the email she sends me is like, okay, so we're gonna put this into her HSA. That's going to be 16,000. I was like where'd you get 16? Oh I just put in chat GPT. It said we do 80, 80, 300 a piece or something. I said no, that is total. That is. That is not correct. And then I had to send her the article about when Chat GPT didn't know how to spell strawberry. This was back then. For those of you that don't know about that, go look it up. And I had to tell. I was like no no. Trust but verify. So absolutely rearrange those numbers.

John Foard 30:09

I was like, wait, what? That's wrong.

John Foard 30:39

Yeah just like going back to the note taking thing. Like you know again it does 98% of my work but the other 2% is just verifying what if the notes it took were accurate and what I need to be doing. It's just trust but verify always.

Yohance Harrison 30:52

So John, if we were to sit down and have a follow up conversation five years from now. What would you predict will have evolved or changed in your organization thanks to AI or what would stay the same?

John Foard 30:57

Okay.

John Foard 31:09

Great question. I think that

John Foard 31:13

AI is going to progress to the point where it will probably allow us to hire more staff. To be honest with you. Like again there's three people who can serve more people. Right? Because it's going to give us the time and the ability to serve more people. Absolutely. 100 if that does not happen I'm going to be sorely disappointed in this. The future of what AI is going to bring. Quite frankly. I mean look at what it has done in the couple of short years that it's been quote unquote, you know, around and in the mainstream. AI has been around a long longer than what people realize. It's just, you know, Chat GPT made it a mainstream thing. Right. That people can go in and create an account and, and use AI to their advantage. But yes, five years from now I expect that AI is going to help us hire more employees. If not at least one more, maybe two. It's going to help us grow our firm because we're going to be able and have the capacity to help and serve more clients than we do today. And again if that does not happen I'm going to be extremely disappointed in where AI is going to be headed at that point. But that's how I view it. I'm not sure if you feel the same way but that's how I view it.

Yohance Harrison 32:20

100 like I said, we just like you, we're hiring another person. She starts next week. And I was looking at the job description that Chat GPT was putting together for me.  For my wife, for her. And half of it is utilizing some form of AI, whether it's our note taker or it's the Gemini that we utilize through our Google documents, it's half of what she's doing is going to be AI heavy.

John Foard 32:50

Absolutely.

Yohance Harrison 32:53

The job didn't exist two years ago. It didn't.

John Foard 32:56

Yeah. And that proves the point again right there. AI is actually creating jobs that did not exist two years ago, three years ago, last year, for example.

John Foard 33:07

I will put my stake in the ground with you right beside you. That is what is going to continue to happen with AI, if we can embrace it in the right way, learn it, understand it, become. I don't know if the word expert is the right way to put it in our field, but I don't ever see myself becoming a true expert of AI, But I. I really do see myself becoming very efficient with it. And if our firms can become very efficient with AI, it's going to do nothing but enhance what we're able to do going forward and allow us to grow our firms. From a headcount perspective, I don't see it taking away any jobs in my firm. If not, it's going to add.

Yohance Harrison 33:46

I love it. Y' all heard it first here. John, we appreciate you. All right, now for a little fun. So I didn't prepare John for this one at all. And I'm not sure if he's listened to some of the other only human episodes. If he did great, he'll be prepared. If not, he's going to be on the spot. So we have a game that we like to play called Mary Divorce Date. Okay, you're going to think about three pieces of technology that you use. One is one that you want to stay married to. Another one is one that you're just planning on a breakup, you're going to divorce, and one that you're starting to do a little dating on the side, even though you may already be married. So three technologies. Marry, divorce, date. What are they? Who do you want to stay married to?

John Foard 34:32

Advise on?

Yohance Harrison 34:33

Okay, all right. That's a first. Advise on.

John Foard 34:36

Yeah, we like it. We like it. It combines multiple technologies. You know, parts of our technology stack into one place. And our viewpoint on it is this. I know, like, I'll get to the dating thing real quick. I'll just quickly hit on that. We're starting to date Altruist, and we'll probably be moving more and more towards that relationship as time goes on. And for a company like Altruist that combines a lot of tech Stack into one place. It's awesome to have that. But our viewpoint is. And this may be controversial, and this may be something that some folks that are listening to this podcast and yourself included, may not necessarily agree fully with, but we believe in owning our own data and maintaining independence with our data. And that's one reason why we are not going to give up our advice on relationships. We could save a lot of money, I mean, a lot of money. And give that relationship up and allow the billing and the reporting and CRM factors to go straight to an altruist or some other company. But we want to maintain ownership of our data and not be stuck relying on another firm that actually owns it. And we have to ask permission to get to it. So that's why we're going to remain married. To advise on divorce.

John Foard 35:54

Is it okay to say that we're thinking of. That we're probably going to maybe divorce Charles Schwab at some point in the near future.

Yohance Harrison 36:01

You won't. You won't be the first.

John Foard 36:02

Yeah, yeah. So, you know, look, Charles Schwab, we were with. We were TD Ameritrade individuals for our firm for a long time, long history with them. And when the takeover happened, we decided to give it a shot to see how it would play out. And I would say that, you know, I think it. I think it hit on all, you know, on all cylinders like we thought it would, which was not very many, unfortunately for us. And so we needed. We needed to make a change. So we're most likely going to divorce to divorce them. Another software that we may divorce might be nitrogen. I'm not sure if it fits our need anymore.

Yohance Harrison 36:40

I just turned in. I just filed my divorce paperwork yesterday.

John Foard 36:43

Oh. So we need to talk.

Yohance Harrison 36:45

My renewal is coming up. Yeah, coming up. So I just filed the paperwork. So I am dating

Yohance Harrison 36:54

Quanti. Quanti. Dating right now. So got to meet their chief growth officer at. At Future Proof. So I'm pretty excited. So I'm in the dating phase. You know, we'll be dating for the next month or so. And so we'll see where that goes.

John Foard 36:56

Okay.

John Foard 37:07

Nice.

John Foard 37:11

Yeah, yeah. It's. It's. There's so much tech out there. There's all of it, by the way. All of it is implementing AI in some way, some fashion. And. And I don't look at it. Look at that as a bad thing, but there are just. There's certain text, you know, tech pieces that are part of our tech stack that we just aren't getting out of what we need. And so that's kind of where we're at with it. So.

Yohance Harrison 37:35

Yeah, that's a great question, though. I'm glad you enjoyed it. Glad you did. All right. So I do have to let you know, John, that there are dozens upon dozens of listeners that are not yet in the financial services industry that listen to this podcast and they're constantly reaching out to me looking for other firms that they can learn from, possibly look for internships, things of that nature. So please let those that want to know how to find your firm if they want to reach out.

John Foard 38:03

Oh, absolutely. Well, first place will be online. You can go to our website@crownadvisorgroup.com

John Foard 38:09

That's an advisor with an or so crownadvisor group.com feel free to email us. You can email us@infoonadvisorgroup.com

John Foard 38:19

as well. You can also find us on social media. I think most of our social media handles are either under the Crown Advisors name or under Retire Stronger, which happens to be the name of our podcast. So I know you're gonna. I think you might put a link in the, in the show notes for our. All right.

Yohance Harrison 38:36

Absolutely, we will. Absolutely. All the links, all those places, indeed, all the links will be in the show notes. And just a quick recap here. Headcount, in our opinion, in the advisor industry is not going to go down. The advisors that understand AI know how to implement it. We are going to grow. We are proof of that. John and I both admitted that we added to the jobs count number. No matter what you hear about jobs this month, we added to it. Okay, it was just two.

John Foard 39:05

We added to it, but we added to it.

Yohance Harrison 39:07

We added to it. And we added to it because of AI, not in spite of it. Because of it. With it. So I hope you feel the same way. Hopefully this episode gave you some insight on how you can think about improving your relationship with AI going forward as an advisory business. And of course, if you need some help from us, our firm, please reach out. Do everyone a favor, subscribe, like, share all those fun things. Let's get the word out to more advisors that we are not going to be replaced by AI. Instead, we're just going to use it. Just like we used the robo advisors when they were available. Just like we use the new financial planning tools. Just like we use Excel. Yes, there was a time where I didn't use Excel and now there's a time where I don't use it anymore because I have AI. So we'll see you next time on Only Human. Thank you, John. For joining us on the podcast, and we'll see you next time.

John Foard 40:02

Take care.

Seth Harrison 40:13

Hi, I'm back. Did you enjoy being a fly on the wall for that conversation? I know I did. Now remember, don't try everything you learned today. Pick one or two things you can implement and implement them well. And don't just try something for a week and give up when it's not working. Successful implementation takes time, energy, and repetition. Take a moment to follow today's guest, and remember to consult your compliance professionals. We don't want you to get into trouble. Do you have a group of advisors who want to improve their human connection 

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