YouSaid · the spoken record

Dave Welling

lines on the record: 70
first: 2020-12-31
most recent: 2020-12-31
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“That's going to be joining us at the end of the year. And we had eight people from the Mercer team coming in in different tide segments talking about how the employee benefits are going to work, how the investment mapping is going to work, how our estate planning team is going to work. That would have been hard for us to do in a different context to fly eight people from Mercer across the country, get all their employees under one room, and do that together. We have a team and have always done that, but it's interesting where we've been able to engage multiple people. And then there's some follow-up questions. So we get back on the phone and get the Zoom back fired back up. So I think our industry is wrestling with what does life look like after with all this technology. I think we've found that it actually can be really enriching and help pick up the cadence and avoid the scheduling of, well, where are we going to fly across country to meet each other? I think we'd love to add that back in.”
2020-12-31 · Masters in Business · Dave Welling on What Financial Services Should Look Like · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's no question it's a lot harder, right? I think the upticks, people look at the disadvantages, right? This is at its core. This is a kneecapped and kneecap business. That's how advisors build their relationships with clients, particularly at the beginning. And this bond of trust that needs to form over an extended period of time of delivering value is just as true in this context of acquisitions as it is in the context of an advisor working with her clients. And I'm sure many of your listeners that will resonate with them. But what's been really interesting about using Zoom and the technology, it's actually enabled us to have a much quicker cadence and to have more people from the firms we're acquiring be engaged in the process and more people engaged in the Mercer team. We just did a call yesterday morning that went three hours with a firm.”
2020-12-31 · Masters in Business · Dave Welling on What Financial Services Should Look Like · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The rich interface. So by the time we get to, okay, we're going to do this acquisition and the close date, we have mutual clarity on what we're trying to create together. We have a vision of how things are to come together at a pretty granular level. And one of the things that we didn't touch on earlier in my experience when I was at Black Diamond, Black Diamond was bought by Advent. Advent was a public company. It was bought by SS&C. And given the scale of those transactions, most of the employees found out about it on a random Tuesday. And then we were scrambling to figure out what the strategy was and how the pieces were going to fit together. We have an opportunity in the context of these acquisitions to do a lot of work up front to make sure that the uncertainty that can be there in these transitions is really limited. The uncertainty for clients and the uncertainty for employees because we say, well, this is going to look like and this is how it's going to work.”
2020-12-31 · Masters in Business · Dave Welling on What Financial Services Should Look Like · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who are talking to each other, not about the valuation of the transaction? That's probably less than 5% of the content that's important, but it's relatively straightforward and a place to land on whether you're going to have a similar sense of what the value of the business is. The most important part is how are we going to be better together than we were apart? What is this going to be like for clients? What tools are in the tool chest, both at Mercer or in the business that we're acquiring? We've acquired several practices that have not just had wealth management firms, have had dedicated accounting teams themselves, right? So that's been really appealing for us to build our tax business, build our expertise in our tax business, and for them to know the acquirer really believed in having that part of the business because not everybody in our industry really wants that to be part of their core service offering. So that's the”
2020-12-31 · Masters in Business · Dave Welling on What Financial Services Should Look Like · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are looking for a succession plan or a place to transition their practice or their business. We're very active in the industry. My involvement in the industry for 30 plus years, I've probably been in a thousand different advisor offices around the country over the years, just physical offices. So those relationships are really helpful because we're not starting from scratch. There's some prior intersection. It may have been several years where firms that I've known, principals that I've known over the years or just be on the sidelines cheering for them is very relevant to the meeting and greeting part of it. But once we kind of get the conversation going, we believe in a really rich interface of dialogue between our firm and their firm. The best context is there's several people deep in our firm and several people deep in there.”
2020-12-31 · Masters in Business · Dave Welling on What Financial Services Should Look Like · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's obviously a courtship process, right? Do we like them and do they like us process, which picks up on the comment I made before. And maybe we can come back and what happens after, right? It's the consummation, the acquisition itself, the closing date. That's just a milepost on the building of a broader relationship, but focusing on before that milepost, the more acquisitions we've done, the more people find their way to us because we have now become a known option that has a certain value proposition, right? So we are, as I call it, an integrator, not an aggregator. We are going to become one business, one integrated client experience. That's very appealing, not just to our shareholders and from a business perspective. It's very relevant to the context of some of the situations where we find sellers.”
2020-12-31 · Masters in Business · Dave Welling on What Financial Services Should Look Like · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“our acquisition strategy is a combination of two things. One, we've done quite a few of them. By the time we finish this year, we will have done over 40 acquisitions in four years, so over 10 a year on average. And the second is all those firms believing their clients are going to be better served after. Easy example, and I think we might talk about this later, we have a dedicated estate planning team and a dedicated tax team, not just GPAs and lawyers who are practicing advisors. We have dedicated teams that all they do is put together estate plans for clients. And those are often huge uptick services for clients in this context. This is not just good for me. This is going to be a good solution for my client.”
2020-12-31 · Masters in Business · Dave Welling on What Financial Services Should Look Like · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Across those 18 offices. And what we found was there was both interest and an opportunity for other firms who were like-minded to join us to get access to that set of services and capabilities. And, you know, in this industry, there's a lot of great professionals out there, a lot of great independent investment advisors out there who work as true fiduciaries that they have small practices. It's a very fragmented industry. And some of those principles that were at one time entrepreneurs had evolved from entrepreneurs to starting to think about their retirement. And they were looking for a place to put their practice, put their business, put their clients in the hands of a firm that had shared interests, shared beliefs, and a shared value system. So it was this coming together of Mercer having an appetite to grow.”
2020-12-31 · Masters in Business · Dave Welling on What Financial Services Should Look Like · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess it was certainly part of our most recent history, but the vision and purpose of the organization is to help clients and help them on their path to economic freedom. So as we talked about a little earlier, the firm's been around 35 years and we've only been doing acquisitions over the last four. What had happened over the first 30 plus years is the business had grown to be a national firm. We had 18 offices all around the country. We're about $6 billion at that time prior to doing our first acquisition. And we had gone through the work and figured out that working as 18 different teams wasn't going to work. We had a centralized investment team, a common client experience. We had built our estate planning team and tax team. We had built the set of services that we provide our clients and had built a culture of working together despite being physically”
2020-12-31 · Masters in Business · Dave Welling on What Financial Services Should Look Like · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's unfortunate that we can't do it now. And I want to visit every single office, sat with the teams, talked to them about what was working, what was not working, what they thought we should do to move forward. Best thing I ever did, because it both connected me to the culture and team and inversely helped the team understand who I was and where I was coming from.”
2020-12-31 · Masters in Business · Dave Welling on What Financial Services Should Look Like · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mandate to outside capital investments in private equity. So when we talk about mergers and acquisitions, Mercer's been down a lot of these paths. We've evaluated the options and decisions at different junctures of our history because we've been around for so long. We've made those decisions over the years. So my entry as CEO came into a business that was used to having a CEO, also had a lot of outside capital. And as I'm sure you know, a really important part of the CEO is not just leading the business, but managing investor base as well and keeping them confident and comfortable and to be able to path the business forward. What was tricky for me at the time of entering the business in 2017 was to get the team to know me. So the very first thing that I did was certainly not sit in headquarters and try and do planning. I got on a plane at that time. We certainly could do that.”
2020-12-31 · Masters in Business · Dave Welling on What Financial Services Should Look Like · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the history of Mercers is actually pretty unique. And my position as CEO comes in after a long history of ownership transition, leadership transition. So Kendrick Mercher, the founder of the business, founded Mercer in 1985. We were one of the first fee-only financial planning firms in the country. Kendrick, you very unique guy, passionate about financial planning, but had a lot of other life interests, made the decision to bring in a partner group in the early 90s, 1991, brought on five partners, Dave Barton, who I mentioned earlier, was one of those partners. In 2003, we brought on our first CEO. So I'm not the first CEO of the business for kind of a transition of CEOs, if you will. And the interesting thing about Mercer, when you look at what's happening in our industry, is we made this transition from a single founder to a partnership, a partnership to a CEO.”
2020-12-31 · Masters in Business · Dave Welling on What Financial Services Should Look Like · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Spread as thin as we are and lead it as one team. So different transition in that respect to figure out how to land and earn the trust of the team and to leave the organization when we're so dispersed, at least physically dispersed.”
2020-12-31 · Masters in Business · Dave Welling on What Financial Services Should Look Like · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was growing very quickly organically, but also had an opportunity and interest to go through some acquisitions and acquire smaller practices of financial planners all over the country who were looking for that solution. Dave went left, meaning Dave jumped into a vice chairman role and started focusing on mergers and acquisitions, and that created an opportunity for me to join the organization and help lead the next chapter. isn't what you'd think. It's not technology versus wealth management. It's people largely all in one place with a sales team spread around the country, which is technology to merger. We're about 450 employees today spread across 45 offices, or so I like to say 45 leases that we're paying for in different parts of the country. So it's very different to lead a culture that”
2020-12-31 · Masters in Business · Dave Welling on What Financial Services Should Look Like · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The transition was quick and it was a change. I finished work at Black Diamond at Black Diamond over the years had been acquired by Advent software, which then in turn had been acquired by SS&C technology. So I'd gone from this small entrepreneurial company who actually was running Advent, which is an international company with offices all over the world as a division of SS&C. Over 400 million annual revenues, thousands of employees was co-leader of that business. But I was longing again to get back to something that was a little bit more entrepreneurial and a little bit closer to home in terms of focusing on the advisor business. But I finished work at 6 p.m. on a Friday, 6 a.m. the next morning I was on a plane. And then Sunday night I had dinner with Dave Barton, who was the CEO of Mercer for eight years prior to me joining. And the juncture where Mercer was at the time”
2020-12-31 · Masters in Business · Dave Welling on What Financial Services Should Look Like · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not just pulling up the last quarterly performance report, which could have been two and a half or three months old, given timing of how those report out and be able to tell folks very dynamically. So it was a great opportunity and a risk, if you will, on one level, but probably the best career decision I ever made. We all face these opportunities and these roads that we meet in our careers. And that was an opportunity for me to try my hand at something that was much, much more entrepreneurial. It was very small when I joined. There's 20 employees, less than $2 million in annual revenues, a good product, but certainly not a big business. So pretty big difference from a big company with a lot of resources to drop into an environment that was still trying to break through, still try to get known and develop its footing. And well, I've left that part of my career behind. I was over three years.”
2020-12-31 · Masters in Business · Dave Welling on What Financial Services Should Look Like · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“continue to grow and be given more responsibilities. But I had this idea that I wanted to get involved in technology. I really felt like today, but especially at that time in two thousand nine, that technology was going to be part of solving the challenges that our industry faced and the consumers were clamoring for. So I had this meta investment thesis, if you will, that technology was going to move from the back office to the front office as we talk about in advisory firms and help advisors run their businesses more efficiently with more scale and more consistency, but also give the consumer what they were demanding, which was more transparency. At that time, I think, as you know and might even remember, it was very dynamic time consumers wanted to know how they were doing, where they were, and what Black Diamond did was on a daily basis T plus one or next day was able to tell clients at a very granular level how they were doing.”
2020-12-31 · Masters in Business · Dave Welling on What Financial Services Should Look Like · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yeah, the black diamond for those that don't know is a technology provider, most notably in web-based cloud-based development, providing reporting to advisors, help them tell their stories, whether they were managing portfolios or providing a broader wealth management offering like Mercer Advisors does. And I guess similar to the story about financial services, I wasn't an engineer either, right? I didn't grow up as a developer. I just really understood the space and understood what advisors did. And that was 2009. So heels of the financial crisis, I decide it was the right time to leave Schwab, pick my family up from the San Francisco Bay Area, and join a technology company in northeastern Florida. All of my friends in the Bay Area thought I was completely nuts for leaving the safety and security of a big company, even despite the difficulties we were having. I was doing very well there.”
2020-12-31 · Masters in Business · Dave Welling on What Financial Services Should Look Like · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I dabbled in a lot of industries. I worked in telco. I worked in consumer products. I worked in technology. I worked in across the board and actually worked in the private equity consulting practice of Bain& Company. And while that was an awesome experience and a great foundation for learning business and role, I found myself really longing to find an industry that had a real purpose and to find a company and a place in that industry where you could really innovate. And Schwab became that place for me at the beginning of my career. Obviously, I've had some other stops along the way, and I'm sure we'll get to talk about those, but really lucky to have spent 12 years at Schwab through the growth and evolution of that business and to find the independent advisor industry. And I just fell in love with it. There's challenges. There's market turbulences, but we all have this compass, which is the client and doing the right thing for them.”
2020-12-31 · Masters in Business · Dave Welling on What Financial Services Should Look Like · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. So I think as you're getting it, Barry, maybe not the traditional head of an advisory firm because I didn't start as an advisor, but I spent close to last thirty years of my life supporting, enabling, and as I call it, clearing the path for advisors. So I was very, very fortunate back in the mid-90s to join Charles Schwab in a really unique role and opportunity. I joined as a chief of staff, which was a completely made up job for one of the vice chairmen running the advisor business and the 401k business. Actually, I had a chance to review with Chuck as part of the job. So, boy, you know, talk about lucky as a way to enter this industry and do it the right way and learn the right principles, how to chance to work down the hall from Chuck and learn from him. But that was 1997. And prior to that, I had some experiences, but they were in management consulting. And like a lot of management consultants,”
2020-12-31 · Masters in Business · Dave Welling on What Financial Services Should Look Like · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source