Why Your Financial Advisor Is Giving You Little League Coaching on a Pro Budget

**[00:00:00]** Hello everyone, my name is Armando Perez-Carreno and welcome to the Web Talk Show. Today with us is Ken Himmler. He's founder of multiple companies including one wealth map which is a family office and finttomic AI. Welcome Ken. How are you? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me on Ardo. Oh it's my pleasure. I think family office is a great topic to discuss because a lot of us maybe have not had the experience of using it. Uh many of the listeners might not uh know exactly what that is. we might talk a little bit about what it actually means and then also I know you've got a few tricks up your sleeve uh regarding AI and the whole fintex space so we'll talk about that as well. So before we get started Ken can you tell us a little bit about who you are and how you got here? Yeah, sure. Um, I was originally chasing a professional hockey career and found out that I had better talent in the world of finance and it was a tough grind trying to get through the ranks and you know I think I was 18 19 years old and got offered a internship and didn't really other than just wanting a paycheck and that was really the purpose of it didn't really know what I was getting myself into and so here we are 42 two years later and this is all I've ever done. It's all I've ever known. So, it's not like I jumped in this profession at 40 years old. And it it's been such a wonderful ride. You know, I did this is my third company. I originally worked for this firm in New York for oh gosh, nine and a half years. And then I they bought my book of business, gave me a big check, and I walked away and started my own. And as I tell people, I was young and stupid, a lot more competence than sense and or experience and just thought, oh, you know, how hard can this be? What probably a lot of entrepreneurs do, they hate where they work and then they think it's just easy to start your own. And I struggled so bad for three years. **[00:02:00]** I don't I look at my, it's funny, I look at my social security statement I get, you know, where it shows you the years worked and those three years zero zero zero. And so it was an interesting time and built that up, ran it for about 25 years. And in 2014, we had off it was very successful. We had offices in Florida and Beverly Hills, uh, California, a couple offices out there, and just decided that it was a grind flying back and forth. It was crazy. And worse than the grind is being on the 101 or 405 in LA and going two miles and taking you two hours. So I just said, "Hey, it's time to sell and retire." Uh, at the old age of how old was I? 48.49. 849. And so a private equity company came in, gave me a bigger check than I had ever imagined. And I think one of the the reasons that I really came to the conclusion of selling is that when you run financial planning, now I worked for a family office and everything was under one roof. You had legal, tax, investment, everything was everybody worked together. So I just thought that's the way that everybody did it. And I thought if I start my own, then I could do that. Well, that takes a lot of capital. And when I left, I didn't have that kind of capital. So, I tried to do the typical thing. Well, let's let's try to create a relationship with a CPA and let's try to create a relationship with a lawyer. And I can tell you adamantly that does not work because they're not on your team. They do their own thing. They're on their own island. And so, after 25 years, I felt like I was just hurting cats. And, you know, the focus was the client. How do I get the attorney and the CPA all around one table? because they don't want to, right? That's just not in their business model. So, I sold and then I I you know, just tell you, I think it was a combination of me just missing the passion of this business and I won't tell you what percentage it was because the other percentage was my wife saying, "You got to go find something that you're interested in." So, this is I started stepping back and **[00:04:00]** saying, "What is it I didn't like about this business?" And it was really dealing with all those other professions that didn't want to play on one team. So now I had a lot of capital. So in 2014 I got the idea and just started incubating this firm that I have now. And it took me about a year year and a half because now you got to hire CPAs and lawyers and financial advisors and bring them together. You got to build the tech stack. You got to build operations and SOPs. And so in 2017 we launched uh it was kind of a beta launch in 16 and it grew so fast I couldn't believe it because the biggest attraction was people want everything under one roof. You know, I I'll ask you and you know, the listeners, you know, when was the last time that your lawyer, CPA, insurance, in investment advisor, they all got around one single table and they discussed one singular plan for the betterment of your financial future. It's not happening. And so, the client has to become the expert in all those areas and try to tie all those people together. M and so I wanted to start a family office to and I always use this example you know Goldman Sachs has a fantastic family office highquality high caliberate people but you need 25 million to walk in the door and so I wanted to serve you know that in between you know two to 25 million because I felt like there's literally no competition in this area and so that's where we started and then at when chat GPT came out in 22 23 I started started seeing the writing on the wall like you know it would take us call it 6 hours to do a portfolio analysis. It would take us four hours to do a tax analysis. It could take us 10 hours to draft a trust. And so I saw the writing on the wall that wow with AI look at what I could do with the cost of labor and the time constraints. And so we started a AI company in 2024 **[00:06:00]** and actively started building that. And so now we have these two paired companies, a family office, which you know, as you know, a lot of people don't know what a family office is. And that's just basically all the professionals in one group under one roof. Now it's under maybe all connected remotely, but they're all together working together for one common cause and they're all they all have the same information if it's all built in one tech stack and the AI which then assists that family office in producing the same outcome for the client but quicker and a lot less labor. So I know that was a long intro but there you go. Well, it takes us right into the thick of things. Like, it it it not only explains how you got here, but also that need that wasn't being addressed. And and I'm glad you explained it this way. I I hear about family offices and I've I've had access to people who run them and people who use family office and I feel that there's a lot of people that have never heard this term and or maybe have just started hearing about it because maybe they got into some money because they started a business or whatever other way they got their money And what you hear outside the space is is just like, oh yeah, well the money just take it to the bank or or take it to a a private banking or something like that. But it's not I don't think it's a it's a common term that everyone knows about. So I'm I'm very interested to hear what does a family of just for our listeners and and everyone who's interested what apart from having everyone under the same roof how does it work like why would someone want to or need to reach out to a family office to to help them **[00:08:00]** manage their wealth. All right. So I'll put it in maybe different terms. So, I'm an athlete. Mhm. And still am, you know, chased I was trying to chase down a professional hockey career. And what I noticed is, you know, when I was playing when I was 12 or 14 years old, we had this level of coach, you know, high school level coach, right? And then when I went to Toronto and I played in the juniors there, the coaching was at a completely completely different level. Mhm. And we had these camps in juniors in Toronto and they would sometimes mix in pro camps and we would get pro coaches. And I got to see just this decisive gap between the coaching I got in high school, the coaching I got as a junior, and this highlevel coaching I got when we would mix in with these pro camps. It's not much different than a family office. So if people are building wealth, when you start building your wealth, you're going to get up called a little league coach. That's about the level because you don't first have the money to buy that quality of talent and that talent doesn't want to work with you. And that's just the hard truth. Mhm. Because high talent wants complicated problems to solve and the more complicated the problem, the higher the talent wants to work on those. So, if they're going to go down to the bank or the brokerage company, they're going to typically use like a Fidelity, Schwab, uh Meil Lynch, UBS. Now, UBS and uh Morgan Stanley, they have highprofile again family offices, and I don't know exactly what their minimums are. They're probably like Goldman 25 million. That's the highest caliber of coaching you're going to get. But most people, they're stuck with a little league coach. M **[00:10:00]** and then even as they grow their business or their net worth and it doesn't have to be a business because we've seen plenty of multi-millionaires come out of Facebook and Google just by stock options. It's just the level of coaching that they're getting. And the problem is they don't upgrade their coaching even though they've upgraded their level of play. So I know I put everything in athletic terms. So I I come across people with sitting on 2025 million and they're still using the the bank advisory service or uh some person and because they like them and that is a terrible terrible way. I liked my coaches but if I'm going to move up one level I don't say yeah I don't want to move up one level because I like my coach and I'm gonna stay on the lower grade team. Right? People do that. So what is a family office? It's bringing the highest caliber people together and that is legal, tax, investment, insurance, risk management, real estate and all of them are highc caliber and they're working together versus what you normally find. Somebody has to run over to their lawyer and they get a trust done and then they run over to their CPA and they got to get the taxes done. They run over to their financial adviser and says, "Here's my new model for the year." But during the year, the advisor is not calling up the CPA before they make a trade and saying, "Now, where are realized, unrealized capital gains for the year?" Because maybe I don't make this trade because of where we are with taxes. They're kind of doing everything on an island, which is very little league coaching. When you want to move up the ranks and you want to move up that level, you need everything to be communicated with. So, in essence, what is a family office? It is pro coaching. It is the highest level of oversight because all the components are brought together. So I don't know if if that makes sense or not, but perfect analogy. I like the sports analogy because it makes a lot of sense **[00:12:00]** for a lot of people. Uh I think that that clears it up a lot. So it's not only that you have everyone in one place, but it's that everyone in that place is at a higher level and they're working together to make you better. The same way in a pro team for example, you would have all the assets and resources right there making sure that the athlete is top-notch physically, mentally, uh with with food, with exercise, with everything, right? It's it's like a an overall kind of thing. Yeah. And I I think the what you say about people sticking with the little league coach m for it's it's perfect because that's true. Maybe they start with someone because that was the office next to theirs in that building where they were working or something and and that's the person they trusted and then suddenly they have more money and why change? They don't really see a reason to change. There's nobody selling you on the benefit of changing, right? And if you don't know any better, then yeah, why why even go to someone else with your financials and and everything like that? It could sound I think to someone like a burden like ah why go through all that? I already have my investments here and my CPA here, etc. But the way you put it makes it very clear that there's a very big advantage to to doing it with a family office. No doubt about it. I mean, you just brought up something and it made me think I hadn't really thought about it this way, but you know, when you're playing high school hockey, you're getting your parents or you're driving to the games, you're wrapping your own sticks, you're buying your own sticks, you're buying your own gear, you know, you're you're sharpening your own skates, you do everything, right? And then you move up to the juniors and it's like, oh my gosh, there's a team equipment manager and there's a physical therapist and there's a team bus and you don't do any **[00:14:00]** of that stuff, right? And then you move up another level and they're literally cooking meals for you. There's film day, there's Yeah. So, it's just a whole different level. And I think you're right. And I don't know why. I mean, it could be branding. I've I've seen this before. People will say, "Well, you know, whoever it is, Fidelity, Schwab, Maril Lynch, UBS, Morgan, I see them all over the news. How come I don't see the, you know, all the family offices all over the news?" Because they're dealing with a very small subset of wealthy wealthy people. They don't need to advertise. And so, I think it's like a branding thing. Like, you remember that um that study that was done that they said, you know, if you said the word crest, what do you think of? You think of toothpaste. Why branding? You hear Mustang, what do you think of? Not the horse, you think of the car. And so I think a lot of it just has to do with branding. And what's really interesting is that when we get that person that's has a prolevel wealth, but they've been dealing with a little league coach, and then we show them all the things that they're missing, their jaws drop, and they're like, "How many years have I lost out on this?" Well, that's what happens because, you know, I I I'll give you a great example. I had a fantastic high school hockey coach. He was absolutely great. He was a XD1 player and he was fantastic. And then I moved up to the juniors and there was a a shot coach. He would teach the mechanics of a slapshot step by step by step. And so they'd record your speed. Right now here I am. It's only one year later. So in high school, my shot was at about 70 to 72 miles an hour. just the pure mechanics that I didn't understand because I had this coach and then I got this coach. I was up to 92 miles an hour on a slapshot. Same guy 12 months later. But look at the difference in the coaching and the mechanics that can come out of that. And that's the same thing when you put all these people together with finances. You lower your taxes. You **[00:16:00]** you can potentially increase the return on your investments. You get better asset protection. You get more cash flow. that can only be done by somebody that understands the mechanics just like the slapshot coach. M that makes a lot of sense and you hear it if you talk to people in these big firms that it's yeah they're handling things for for larger companies or for people who have multiple companies around the world and they're having to look at the whole picture and make adjustment based on that for taxes for investments for for all sorts of things. like you were saying, they look at the whole picture, but they've have this huge team that that that aligns everything. And I feel many of us might see that like a yeah, I'm I'm not going to go and hire XYZ corporate type investment firm or or um just it it feels so foreign. Like even when when I was starting out, I would I remember just out of curiosity that I would see these um sort of wealth management buildings and but they don't they don't say anything like you were saying branding. It's like they have the bank and then they have their wealth management or or private banking and you see that you're like what is private banking? I remember thinking that when I was a lot younger. I was like what what is that? It doesn't make any sense. And then eventually you sort of learn like oh okay that's that's what they do etc. But still it is a foreign thing for many and especially if you then need to use them. You're still at a point like you said about the branding thing. Which one do I go to? Do one of these big name brands just because it's aligned with my current bank or **[00:18:00]** and even if you think of a family office like which one do I go to? How how do I know they even exist? I'm sure there's a many of them here in my local town, but I don't know how to find them. You would have to know to search for it. And I think as you were saying, it's more of a since since they're smaller groups of wealthy individuals, maybe it's more a recommendation type thing and that's how you get from one to another, right? But how does one that's not in that circle of having wealthy individuals around them that might already be using these services, how does one that needs this type of service find the type of help that that they or you provide? You know, it's interesting you say that because in our firm, as required by the SEC, we have to write a succession plan and we're changing our succession plan. And so now that we're uh very multidisciplined, I've had to go out in the ethos and research all the different companies that are out there and then start interviewing them because if I get hit by a bus and then my VP gets hit by a bus and then my CTO gets hit by a bus, who is going to run the firm? So we're required to do that. So I started off this research and I think I came up with somewhere around 3,000 financial advisory firms. And when you really break it down as to well let me put let me put it this way. Here's how you can tell you do not have a family office. If you meet with a financial adviser and he says I'll give you a referral to a lawyer or there's an outside lawyer that we work with. Not at all of family office. That is a sole practitioner trying to just connect all the pieces and that does not work. And again I tried 25 years to do that. You can muddle through it but you really can't get the results that you want. So that's, you know, it's not well going back to the 30,000 I started with, I narrowed it down to only 31 firms in the **[00:20:00]** country that do it. Now there's these three levels, right? So you have this family office and you go say Goldman Sachs, very great company, but you need 25 million to walk in the door. Now you might say, well wait a minute, what happens if I go above that? Well, typically if somebody has 500 million, 700 million, a billion dollars, like Mark Cuban, he has his own family office. He created it. He hired the lawyers. He hired the CPAs. He hired the financial adviserss. He creates his own. But at 25 million, you still don't have enough to do your own family office. So, typically, it's a range of about 25 million to 500 million. Above 500 million, they're doing their own. But in that range is really good for something like a Goldman Sachs. But then you have the range where we decided to fall in which is about 2 to 25 million and I found that there's only 31 firms out there doing it. That's it. So it's not it's not a lot. Well, you wonder why. So if you think about the model itself, the model is not as profitable as say a financial advisory model. Like walk through the model for a second. You say okay I can hire an out-of-the-box financial adviser. If I'm Schwab, Fidelity, whoever it is, I can hire a 23-y old guy, go get him Siri 65 license, I can put him in a cubicle, I can give him an SOP, I can give him a sales pitch. He doesn't have to know anything other than here's the models that we manage. Sell the models, right? And so I can scale that business to just unheard of numbers. You look at like a a Merrill or a Schwab and that's their retail business model because it's massively it's like McDonald's. It's massively scaled. Now imagine you take those guys and you say now you have to go get uh 15 certifications and nine licenses and all these other accreditations like I have. How long **[00:22:00]** will that take you? Well, it took me 25 years. And then you say now what we're going to do is we're going to hire a CPA. We're going to hire a lawyer. We're going to create the infrastructure. And where the typical financial advisor can typically handle two, three, 400 clients, a family office financial adviser can't handle more than 75 to 100. That's it max. So you look at that's not as scalable. So it really comes back to it's not as profitable either. So why are there only in my opinion 31? I say opinion because some people say that they are family offices and you look underneath the hood, which is what I did, and they don't. They're not really. They're just using that as a marketing ploy, because they're still outsourcing most of the work. Okay? So, you look at that and you say, "Okay, why don't more companies do this?" It's not nearly as profitable. I mean, if I literally wanted to double my income, maybe quadruple it, I wouldn't run a family office. It's not that profitable. I would go into the financial advisory business only because that is much more profitable. So out of those 31, I broke it down and started looking at all their what's called form ADVs. I contacted them. How does it work? What are your fees? How how is the combination? And I I'll put it to you this way. There's probably only five out there that if I died, I'd want my family to work with. So, even of the 31, there's only about five that I'd say I'm comfortable with my family using them if I'm not here. So, to go back to your question, how do people find them? It's not easy because it wasn't easy for me to find uh succession backup. And so, they're not running rampid because again, they're not firms like ours are not that profitable or scalable. So, it really um it puts a glass ceiling on how many there's going to be. That's very interesting. Do you think regardless of it being not as profitable um just looking at the number or **[00:24:00]** percentage of people who are in that bracket of 2 million to 25 million it's still extremely low isn't it? I mean for the whole country. Yeah it is. Yeah without a doubt. I mean, there's something like 1 million millionaires, something like that. But the minute you get to two million, that number drops 50%. You get to 5 million, it drops 75%. So, yes, it is a very small segment. And unfortunately, a majority of those people between 2 and 25 million, they're literally still dealing with the same little league coach that they started off with. Yes. Yes. Because a lot of business uh and I know it's not only business owners but but a lot of business owners like maybe somebody started their roofing company right because they were doing roofing and then they see oh I can do this and then they hire a crew and another crew and they they grow and suddenly they're making good money and if they're good with their money they they save some of it and and now they they they start acquiring some wealth and again I I I think in part because of what you just explained. They don't even get exposure to this and they might be underserved by the little league coach or they might try to go into one of the big league ones and perhaps not get the treatment that they deserve because I don't know if this happens or not, but because maybe they're at just at the beginning of that bracket. So they just barely qualify, but they're still little fish for this whole big infrastructure. What What do you think about that part? Yeah, you know, I I've often related it a lot to Hollywood because we had an office in Beverly Hills and we dealt with a lot of actors out there as clients and you know, we would hear the stories about how they built their acting business and when they first started off they couldn't get an agent because they didn't have any credits and then they would get a couple credits but then they would get a real lowgrade **[00:26:00]** agent. When I say low grade, not mentally or in intellectually or anything like that, it just means they didn't have the connections with the studios, with the networks, where some of the big ones at, you know, W Morris or CCA, they have the connections. So, the agent picks up the phone and calls whatever network it is and says, "I got your your guy for your part." And the connections, the relationships, it's a shoein, right? very sometimes the actors didn't even have to read for the part that just the agent would call them. That's top level, right? But you don't get to W Morris or you don't get to CCA as a beginning actor. You got to work your way up the rank the ranks. And so it's a lot like this the guy that starts the roofing company like you said he's dealing with that very I don't again I don't know low end that's not the right word. um little league coach. It's it's he's they're just not that advanced. But as that roofing company grows, he's focused on his business. He doesn't sit and evaluate, do I need to change advisory services? Do I need a different advisory model? And then the guy goes and sells the company for 20, 50, $100 million. And you know what they do? They're still dealing with the same people. M so even though they've reached the pros, they've got the relationships, but unfortunately it would be like um Brad Pitt dealing with the agent he started off with when he was 18, right? Those agents grow as he as his career grows and business owners do the same thing. Yes. I can you give an example of a I'm I'm trying to think of one off the top of my head, but you you're going to be a lot better. But I can I can see like the a very clear example of where it makes sense to have all these people **[00:28:00]** in the same table. like maybe it's the end of year and instead of just investing wherever it makes more sense to do X or Y because you know everything else around your wealth management and thus oh because of tax reasons you should do this way instead of that way but then the other person might say oh but to go forth with whatever cost we have we have to actually do this other thing because it affects it in this other way like you were saying cuz you're touching so many parts of the ecosystem instead of just thinking like liabilities or or or taxes, right? What can can you give like a a simple example of why or a clear example of of something you've seen before where it's like it it's made a lot more sense because you have the whole picture. Yeah. We had a guy that came in that was um just a retired as a of a CEO of a Fortune 500 company and he had I won't say the name of the company, Protect the Guilty, and he had a financial adviser that had been with him. So, he retired and he got all these stock options and it was worth about $18 million. And the advisor said the best thing you can do is sell it. Now, why would the adviser tell him to sell it? Well, as a stock option, the adviser is not making any management fee on stock options. He can only make fees when he tells him to sell it. There was no tax planning that went in. So, this client called the CPA and all the CPA did was calculate the amount of tax that would be due. Mhm. That was all he did. And so, he sold him, he paid the tax, and then he came to us for a second opinion after he'd already done it. And that's always the depressing part. you're like now had you not done that here's what we could have done. So we went through some options how he could have paid no tax or we could have spread the tax over a couple years. So I think **[00:30:00]** what happens is because these uh advisory services are so fragmented no one is doing the work in advance. So if you're and and the other thing is when you have multiple advisors they're keeping each other in check. M meaning if there was a CPA and there was a lawyer and there was a financial adviser and there was a consultant, somebody would have called that guy out and said, "Uh-uh, you're just selling that. You want to sell that stock because you want to get it under your management to collect the fee. We're not doing that." But when they're done in their own little vacuum, clients don't know any different, right? They're business owners or CEOs. They're not in the trenches to understand what the behind-the-scenes motivation is. So, I think that's a good example. I think it just goes on and on. We see it all the time is you you use the other example of at the end of the year, right? Well, if you think through taxes, this is the typical MO of CPAs. Sometimes they'll have a tax planning meeting with a client November, December, but guess what? Revenues are booked already. Expenses are booked already. If you've got investments, dividends, and capital gains, they've been paid already. So, and I'll I'll tell you this. We bought a CPA firm out in Arizona, and one of the CPAs that we hired after we bought it, uh, basically I said, 'Look, why didn't you do the Roth conversion analysis in January? Here's his response. Why should I do that? I'm not getting paid to do that. I said, well, you are now, and that's part of our process. So, he didn't stick with us very long, as you can imagine. Mhm. And so you have to do these things every single month. There has to be a live tax plan running. These things have to feed into a system that is more like an air traffic controller where you're going, "Hey, here's a capital gain, but don't sell it because it'll affect this tax and you're not going to be paying 20% tax in the g gain because that is going to trigger another 10% increase in tax **[00:32:00]** over here." But most people, what do they do? Some CPAs are good. They do the planning meeting in November, December, but you know what most CPAs do when you meet with them in April? They just tell you what you should have done last year. Well, you shouldn't have put this money over here and you shouldn't have done this and you shouldn't have done that. Well, it's too late. So, you have to be proactive. Reactive does not save money. Wow. Yeah, that's a great example and actually brings me to the next topic which is tooling, right? You talk about how it's so important to have everything under one roof so that things talk to each other. I've been running we work a lot with with AI and one of the things that I have behind the scenes running every day is an analysis on pain points in different industries. And you know what? What is one of the biggest pain points that comes up every single day and has for weeks? Quickbooks and started it's not it's not that into it is a like I I won't talk about the company itself. It's just the product. I don't know who is thinking of their user experience. are they talking to their customers at all. Do they have any idea who's actually using the product? Because I've used many of their tools and then both people who whom I talk with and then clients who use these tools, but then also because of this research that's just running rampant in in the web and finding this stuff. There's so many people angry about it because they feel that the tool is not helping them do things better. it just sort of gets in their way. It makes it more complicated than it should be. It's not easy to use. It takes time and like you were saying and things are fragmented, etc. So, what do you think? **[00:34:00]** I totally agree with you. You know, as owning a CPA practice, we have to decide on the tools that we use. And I will tell you out of all the tools out there, and this will this is this is a not non-binary meaning yes or no. uh QuickBooks is the only choice compared to the other alternatives, but that doesn't mean that I like QuickBooks because I think what it's done is it's become a battleship and you don't turn a battleship on a dime. It takes a long time to turn a battleship. But in the fastpaced world of AI, they need to do a better job. Now, they just did release an AI analysis and literally it's two years behind its time already. It's supposed to run analysis, create automated reports. But let me give you an example from a business owner standpoint because we deal with a lot of businesses. What is the most important thing about a business? Well, revenues and IBIDA and also valuations because I think a lot of business owners make emotional decisions rather than what will it do to my valuation. So if I hire three more people, does that approve or decrease my valuation? If I move assets in this manner, will it increase or depre decrease? Now, there's all these middleware apps that you can connect to QuickBooks. A couple of them are really good, but now you're going here to do this and you're going here to do this and you're going here to do this. You literally need now a whole another team of people just to assemble all the pieces together. So, just like in the financial advisory world where a person has to go see their CPA and then their advisor and their accountant and they're not really connected. It's kind of the same way with QuickBooks. You got all these side apps, but you have to know where to go. It's just an incredible amount of labor to do that. And it's hard to get reports. It's hard to get decision making. Think of it **[00:36:00]** like a air traffic controller. Can you imagine if the air traffic controller says, "Okay, flight 441 landing on four on runway 444, but give me a second. I have 15 other apps that I have to connect to make sure that it's going to work." Yeah. You're going to And the same thing with a business, right? You're sitting there trying to get this data and I know there's a lot of dashboard companies out there, but then you got to connect the data. The data breaks, the APIs break. So, yeah, it is incredibly frustrating. We've seen it from our own firm. We've seen it with the companies that we do accounting, bookkeeping, payroll for. There's there's all those kinds of things that just break. So I, you know, and and we use in its CPA product for tax prep called ProConnect. And you would think some of the basics that are needed such as just maybe exporting a client list, maybe seeing last contact, the basic stuff, it's not there. But again, you have this behemoth of a company and you imagine how many layers of political decisions have to be made before just saying do this because it'll help your user. It's not getting done. So I I would I would side with you no doubt that QuickBooks is the only choice and it's still not a great choice if that makes sense. Yeah, it makes perfect sense. I think that's why we all use it. like there's some other tools but then you don't trust I it's the same like I' I've been in technology for a long time uh in terms of like compared to to how long I've lived um when I was starting out after studying software engineering we did some consulting projects and at that time IBM was the the the big guy right and so you would go to these enterprise contracts and **[00:38:00]** they they they would even tell you like the CTO or the CIO at a company might have seen other providers but they end up choosing IBM. Why? Because anything goes wrong, they could just say save their neck and say, "Well, I mean I chose IBM." Like it's a if if they go with someone else and it breaks, it's on them, right? But if if they just went with the biggest best one which might or might not have been the best one uh then then uh they they won't be able to save their own neck. So, so some of those choices were made that way and in our space we actually consulted with them and so and that's what a lot of people don't don't see that like yes you go IBM but at the end of the day IBM grabs it and then just gives it to someone else that's smaller to do the actual work and again segmentation like you were saying can happen uh which which becomes messy. So I think with QuickBooks, yeah, it's it's like we we all have to use it, but then it's so frustrating for the the clients that that that I have that use it. they simple things like you were saying like uh suddenly I don't know they're they're bringing e-commerce invoices and payments from the site into the tool but then the tool QuickBooks out of the blue decides oh there's an overage here and a payment let me apply it to your other invoices and they're like why did you do that then they're spending so many hours or their CPA is spending so many hours figuring out like where did the money go? Why is it applied? It's not supposed to go to that payment. Why didn't it ask me? And so yeah, I it uh there has to be a better way. Well, I think that's one of the reasons, you know, I saw this fragmentation in 2014 and I said, what if we did create a company that served this middle market of 2 to 25 million? **[00:40:00]** And when we started the AI company, it was primarily because of all these frustrations like you've just voiced is the problems and the frustration is what motivates me to try to find a solution. And so we're developing a competitor that will come out and it will compete with QuickBooks, but it will be from a business owner standpoint and a financial advisory standpoint versus a software company standpoint because I understand what business owners go through and they don't want to become accountants. They just need clear, fast decisions, right? Like an air traffic controller, but they don't want to sit there and manipulate the data to get one simple outcome. So, I think that's the biggest weakness. You know, init a fine company, but again, I think they're just so big, it's hard for them to have an ear to the people that are actually buying it. That makes a lot of sense. So, tell me a little bit about I'm very curious the what you're building right now. So, is it a sort of is it like a suite? Is it all in one thing? Is it for people or is it for their accountants? Is it for family offices? How how will it work and who will it help? Well, you know, it's interesting how I got started in it. So, I'm a big believer in self-improvement and I listen to all the different podcasts. I, you know, I got started when I was 16 reading Think and Grow Rich. And the problem that I had was I'd listen to all these podcasts and then I had a habit app, I had a task app, I had a meditation app, I had like all these things and it was like, "Oh my gosh, I am getting lost in a sea of apps." Mhm. And so when AI came out, I said,"What if somebody just created something that put it all together, make my life simple? I'm not having to go to 15 different places. Did I track that habit and where am I at on my tasks?" You know, so it started off with the concept of just I wanted to build an app for myself for personal development. That app is **[00:42:00]** now used by all of our employees and they use it for their own personal development. But as I was building that, I started getting these ideas of, wow, look at how long it takes us to draft a trust. Look at all the labor and the like Quickbooks. Look at all the things we have to manipulate just to get an outcome. And then you do things like, you know, here, great example. So when a new client comes to us, we do an initial evaluation of whether we want to take that client on or not. And we work it through what's called a costbenefit analysis. But to get to that point of, hey, if you pay us X, we want to make sure we're we're giving you back or finding two, three, four, five times as much as you're going to pay us. But to get to that point of the analysis to prove the facts that we're more valuable than, you know, they're losing out by not hiring us, you got to pull a lot of data together. So typically what it would look like is they'd send us their tax returns. They send us their investment statements. If they run a business, they send us P&Ls B balance sheets. Uh and we would then have to manually take that data, right? Because if they've got their investment accounts at 10 places, we have to take the manual that manual statement. I'd have to hire this uh giant staff of people. By the way, in the last two years, we've cut our staff by 50%. Just by using the technology. Wow. Yeah. So, it's been incredible as far as productivity. So, you have to take all this data that that comes in. So, as I'm building this personal development app, I'm like, I wonder if I could have somebody build something for me that's AI based where I could take the investment statements, the tax returns, the insurance policies, uh, P&Ls and and balance sheets and scan it in, have AI parse it, AI organize all the data for me, and then do portfolio analysis, tax analysis, everything. That's kind of where it started because again, you're sitting there literally manually building it out. I'd **[00:44:00]** have to hire somebody, you know, AAPL, 250 shares, cost basis X, right? Incredible. And all the forms are different. Like you have to look in five different places. Exactly. And so we started building that model and then we started running AI analysis on portfolio efficiency, tax efficiencies. And then I got the idea. I was like, well, wait a minute. this works for this, why wouldn't it work for the four to six hours that we have to analyze a trust and then why wouldn't it work for everything else we do right so we started building these individual AI apps and then I got the idea just like with family office well wait a why don't I just build a central hub so as our advisory practice we enter a client we get all the data in there and then this is kind of what we call the nucleus name of it is atom phintonic atom, which is the central hub, and then there's another hub called Fusion. And so all of these satellite apps just talk back and forth to this hub. So we're not having to deal with 15 different apps. So it was really just generated by my idea is I just want a personal development app. That's amazing. That's the way to go. I think like I we we've found recently that when you build something for yourself that you actually need really need you build it it's going to be wellm made it's going to do the thing like it's going to do what it's supposed to and then it's very likely that someone else also needs it right and so then you expand upon it so the the way you came up with it is is perfect and I'm looking forward to to see how it works if you ever release it to the public because I know you're currently using it internally, but that sort of stuff saves you so much time and you can focus on the the important things which is what we all want to do. We don't I mean unless you really love numbers and putting inputting things into fields. **[00:46:00]** Yeah, there are people like that. Not it's not me, you know. I just want to see I want to wake up in the morning because balance in life is most important. And if you're spending your balance in life gathering data to try to make a good decision, that's a waste of life. And every minute counts to me. So I would rather just wake up in the morning and see one dashboard with everything that I need to see, do personally, family, business, uh, hire, fire, uh, decisions, spends, marketing, whatever. One view, I can see my air traffic controller screen and I can say, "Okay, here's the decisions for the day." and then I can move on and have an actual life which as you know most business owners do not. Yes. Yes. That is very true. Is this something that will be available for for regular people or is this more of a um internal tool for family offices, CPAs, etc. Uh there's two versions of it. One version is the institutional model and that's what we're using inside of our firm right now. And most likely our our beta test will end uh in August of this year and then the launch is planned for January of 2027 and that is for in the institutional model. So family offices, financial advisors, CPAs, lawyers, they'll be able to purchase that. Nice. Uh we built a uh a law office AI system and it's for estate planning, elder services, commercial real estate, and personal injury. And so that is also part of the suite. Not that we practice in those areas. It's just when we started building the estate planning to draft trusts, asset protection, LLC's, uh, a lot of our clients that are lawyer, they're lawyers, they're like, "Hey, wow, can you build this?" And so we kind of went down that rabbit hole. So make a long story short, the institutional model will be available in January of 2027. And then in August, September this year, we're actually **[00:48:00]** going to take the personal development app that I created for myself that my uh team members have all been using and that will be released late fall of this year. Wow. Oh, that's that sounds very interesting as well. Well, Ken, this is this has been super enlightening. Um, I I'm so happy that you were able to come to the show and share with us your wealth, pardon the pun, of expertise in this subject. I think there's going to be people who have questions about how this all works and maybe they might be even interested in learning more about uh, one wealth map and of course phentomic as well. Where can people find more information about your company? Well, uh, Family Office and Fentic as well. Well, yeah, the the general website is just onewealthmap.com. One is spelled out and then the phenttomic.ai. There's a landing page up there right now just as they're developing it. That won't be ready yet. But probably the best place is my YouTube channel is just One Wealth Map. And also we developed a uh an academy called wiser wealth academy that has its own YouTube channel and that's so the one wealth map uh YouTube channel is teaching specific techniques tax reduction portfolio whatever it is and then on the wiser wealth it's teaching what a lot of people don't get and that is decision making because one of the biggest killers that I've seen to wealth is you know what you know what uh Einstein said, "The one thing that's harder to break or split than an atom is a belief." And so many people as they're moving up the ranks, they keep these lower beliefs and they got to upgrade their beliefs. So Wiser Wealth Channel is really designed to g to gap in what I've learned from working with the super wealthy and how they make decisions. And **[00:50:00]** the goal of that channel is to bring better decision making to people. That's excellent. Wiser Wealth. Wiser Wealth. Yeah, both Both are on YouTube. Excellent. I'll put them in the show notes and I'll I'll make sure to go and watch them as well. That's super interesting. Thanks again, Ken. It was really fun having you on the show. If you haven't liked and subscribed the podcast and you like what you're listening, please like and subscribe so you know when we release new episodes. Thanks again, Ken. Thanks, Armada. All right, take care. We'll see you in the next one. All right, bye-bye.