How Advisors Win at Life and Wealth With Donald Morgan
- Quik! News Team
- Apr 28
- 28 min read
Donald Morgan is the LPL Branch Manager and an Accredited Investment Fiduciary at Independent Wealth Connections, a firm offering a comprehensive range of investment planning products and services, focusing on assisting individuals and business owners with their financial, investment, and retirement needs. With over four decades of experience in the financial services industry, he holds multiple professional registrations and licenses, including FINRA Series 7, 63, and 65 with LPL Financial. In 2023, Donald expanded his professional endeavors by founding iWealthTax LLC, reflecting his commitment to providing holistic financial services. His four-step consultative process ensures personalized solutions, from portfolio diversification to retirement planning and estate strategies.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
[2:20] Donald Morgan explains how Independent Wealth Connections helps blend personal and business financial planning for entrepreneurial families
[4:51] The impact of Y2K and 9/11 on financial advising
[10:42] Why enjoying your work leads to exceptional customer service
[12:27] Donald’s top rules for determining ideal client fit
[18:28] How technology has transformed finance since the 1970s
[21:28] Tips for automating repetitive tasks to improve customer experience
[27:31] How AI note-taking saved 15 hours of admin time weekly
[32:16] Piloting an AI-powered financial planning assistant for client relationship management
In this episode…
Many entrepreneurs struggle to balance their business success with their personal financial well-being. The fast-paced world of business ownership often leaves little room for intentional financial planning, especially when the lines between business and family are deeply intertwined. How can business owners build a meaningful financial strategy that supports their company and their loved ones?
Donald Morgan, a veteran financial consultant with decades of experience, shares how aligning business goals with personal values creates more fulfilling and successful outcomes. He emphasizes the importance of working only with clients who are a strong fit — those who are financially literate, responsible, and care about others. He shares a practical filtering process for onboarding new clients and discusses how leaning into technology, including AI-driven tools, helps improve efficiency and client service. Donald’s approach includes automating administrative tasks, outsourcing non-essential work, and focusing on lifelong customer relationships.
In this episode of The Customer Wins, Richard Walker interviews Donald Morgan, Financial Consultant and Managing Director at Independent Wealth Connections and iWealthTax, about designing a client-focused financial practice. Donald explores how integrating business with personal financial planning creates deeper value, discusses adopting AI to enhance service, identifying ideal clients, and creating systems that sustain long-term relationships.
Resources Mentioned in this episode
"Empowering Advisors With the Gift of Time With Rich Whalen" on The Customer Wins
"The Art of Effortless Wealth Recovery With Mike Betz" on The Customer Wins
"Transforming Advisor Engagement Through AI With Spenser Segal" on The Customer Wins
"Transforming Cybersecurity for Businesses With Matthew Connor" on The Customer Wins
Quotable Moments:
“We want to work for people that we can fall in love with, because they will reciprocate.”
“Comfort is its own trap in business.”
“If you're going to hire me and pay me for my advice and then not be excited…”
“We’ve taken care of the future widows and orphans long before they know they needed it.”
“You work this stack for the rest of the year and we’ll split the revenue.”
Action Steps:
Define your ideal client profile early: Knowing who you work best with helps you serve clients more effectively and fosters stronger, long-term relationships.
Automate repetitive administrative tasks: Freeing up time through automation allows you to focus on meaningful client interactions and reduce operational inefficiencies.
Use technology to personalize client engagement: Leveraging AI to track milestones and preferences creates a more human, responsive, and trust-building experience.
Evaluate client fit collaboratively with your team: Allowing team members to veto new clients ensures shared alignment and helps maintain a positive work culture.
Simplify processes wherever possible: Streamlined workflows improve clarity and satisfaction for both staff and clients by reducing confusion and inefficiency.
Sponsor for this episode...
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Episode Transcript:
Intro: 00:02
Welcome to The Customer Wins podcast, where business leaders discuss their secrets and techniques for helping their customers succeed and in turn, grow their business.
Richard Walker: 00:16
Hi, I'm Rich Walker, the host of The Customer Wins, where I talk to business leaders about how they help their customers win and how their focus on customer experience leads to growth. Some of our past guests have included Rich Whalen of Equity Services Inc., Mike Betz of 11thEstate, Spenser Segal of ActiFi, and Matthew Connor of CyberLynx. Today, I'm excited to speak with Donald Morgan, financial consultant and managing director of Independent Wealth Connections and iWealthTax. Now, today's episode is brought to you by Quik!, the leader in enterprise forms processing. When your business relies upon processing forms, don't waste your team's valuable time manually reviewing the forms.
Instead, get Quik! using our Form Xtract API. Simply submit your completed forms and get back clean, context-rich data that reduces manual reviews to only one out of a thousand submissions. Visit Quick Forms to get started. All right.
Today's guest, Donald Morgan, is a dedicated financial consultant with Independent Wealth Connections, offering a wide array of investment planning products and services. Since 1978, Don has been helping individuals and business owners navigate their financial, investment and retirement planning needs. He holds he holds multiple professional registrations and licenses, including FINRA series seven, 63, and 65, all with LPL financial, as well as insurance and annuity certifications. Don's client-focused approach emphasizes communication and collaboration. His four-step consultative process ensures personalized solutions from portfolio diversification to retirement planning and estate strategies. Donald, welcome to The Customer Wins.
Donald Morgan: 01:59
Rich, thanks for having me.
Richard Walker: 02:01
Yeah, I'm very excited for you to be here. For those who haven't heard my podcast before, I love to talk to business leaders about what they're doing to help their customers win, how they built and deliver a great customer experience, and the challenges to growing their own company. So, Donald, I want to understand your business a little bit better. How does your company help people?
Donald Morgan: 02:20
You know Rich? It's a great question because ultimately that's why we're here, is to help people. And I don't mean just my company. I really think each one of us is here to help each other win in some fashion at the great game of life. For us, our mission.
What gets me up in the morning is the idea of helping you and business owners like you, win at the great game of business. And in almost every instance, the families we serve are in fact just that families, husband, wife, kids. Business is part of their world, but the families also a big, major, important part of their world. That's why they have the business is because they have the family. And so we recognize that and we integrate the business world with the personal financial plans of the people in the business.
And that integration sets us a little bit apart from most planners. Most planners are used to working with W-2 employees, key executives rather than serial entrepreneurs. And in the entrepreneurial world, what it allows us to do is act almost like the honeybee going from business to business to business, just as you do with your podcast and see what works in business A what works in business B, and whether there's any synergies or crossovers. So it's formal financial planning, but with the added twist of focusing in on the business as one of the biggest assets for that family. And often it's more than one business.
Successful business owners quite often do as we have and have multiple businesses. And it's also ever-changing. It's always exciting. Who would have thought 20 years ago that we'd be talking about reusable rocket ships, self-driving cars, and autonomous robots? Rosie the robot.
Remember Rosie the robot?
Richard Walker: 04:13
Oh, yeah.
Donald Morgan: 04:14
From The Jetsons.
Richard Walker: 04:15
Yeah.
Donald Morgan: 04:16
About the only thing I'm not seeing on the horizon. And it's probably just because I can't see it. But it might be. There is, you know, they're jet mobiles. They're flying cars, but the rest of it's right in front of us.
Richard Walker: 04:30
It is, it is. You are speaking my language because I'm an entrepreneur, of course. And I started as a financial advisor for similar reasons. But as an entrepreneur, building a business and running your household are so married to each other that I think it's really smart that you focus it that way, is how did you get that notion? Where did that start? Because you did this a long time ago.
Donald Morgan: 04:51
You know, it's interesting. Specifically, it happened after the Y2K collapse. I don't know if you remember those three years. It was the worst three years in a row that the markets have had since the 90s. And it remains the worst three years.
And the reason it got worse was because nine over 11 happened. We were just starting to see the green shoots of spring and bam, literally the two towers. And then the third tower went over and the whole world paused trying to figure out what just happened. Well, in my industry, that kind of economic carnage, first Y2K, then nine over 11 means that advisors leave the business and their folks good people in most cases. But they had struggled to be able to get traction in a negative market environment.
And the branch manager at that time was a friend of mine, and he would bring me difficult cases that had been left behind. And I started getting a lot of people that weren't happy, not just because the markets were down, but because their advisors were gone. And every weekend, this was before E book came along. We were having to post our transactions to the customer ledger cards. My wife would come in and help me do the bookkeeping and keep track of the records.
She and I have been together since the 70s, and she jokes she's followed me around pretty much for almost five decades now, with a clipboard, helping me keep track of everything. Right. And I was not a happy camper. I was grumpy, and she finally looked at me one Saturday and said, honey, you know you don't have to do this. You could go do something else. And I said, no, I, I really love what I do. And she says, well, it sure doesn't sound like it.
Richard Walker: 06:43
Actions speak louder than words, right? Well.
Donald Morgan: 06:46
But they were both true statements. And so she said, why don't we do this? Let's go through all of these ledger cards. There's a big stack of them and make two stacks out of them. The people you love talking to and the ones that aren't so much fun.
Okay. And we ended up with a small stack and a large stack, and the large stack I took across the hall to one of the trainees I was working with. His name was George, and I said, George, you work this stack for the rest of the year and we'll split the revenue, and then next year they're yours. I have nothing to do with it. Wow.
And the branch manager told me I was crazy. Everyone in the office thought I was nuts. George thought I was a hero. And two things happened. I started enjoying life again.
It was fun. I was talking to the people I loved talking to. And George was actually making way more money on that book than I was going to, because I wasn't happy with that book, and they weren't happy with me. George wasn't me. He was a different kind of a guy, and they loved him.
He did a great job for them and I didn't have to do anything. And that revenue helped support me as I went deeper in this smaller group of clients that I loved. Well, the weeks went on and we kept doing the daily postings. And one weekend my wife asked me, she said, now let's go through the ones that are left and see why you like working with them. Yeah, it was an interesting question, right?
Richard Walker: 08:11
Very good question. I like your wife.
Donald Morgan: 08:13
Oh, it's she's Been my rock. And what we found was they were almost every single one of them, either a current or retired business owner or professional who would own their own firm. And prior to starting in the capital markets on this side, the public markets, I had run and managed private money in a different part of finance, and my wife and I ended up owning and building a nice little boutique financial services firm in downtown LA. Sold that in 1992 when we moved up here to the northwest. And that's sort of the background that caused Smith Barney to want to hire me, because I had that entrepreneurial background, and that was their focus was to hire mid-career changers from an entrepreneurial background.
Well, it turns out because I spoke the same language as these people, we got along really good. And some of the folks that I didn't get along with as well were career government employees, long term school district employees, people in corporate America. It's a different world. It's not a bad world. It's not a negative world.
It's just not the world I understood.
Richard Walker: 09:24
Well, and those are popular niches for various advisors, right?
Donald Morgan: 09:27
And they're great. Niches. And I'm not criticizing. George did well for them. Yeah, but it wasn't where I belonged. And once we realized that, we focused in on doing things like seminars about how business owners could do a better job training and retaining good employees, building retirement plans that took care of both the owners and their team.
And we slowly and then more quickly developed a collateral package. That said, we actually offer things that business owners want that others might not want. And so things like business valuations or if you don't own a business, you don't care.
Richard Walker: 10:07
Right, right. But you're that way you're attracting the right audience. There's a couple of things that are underlying all of this that I see as a pattern. As I talk to people about how you help your customers win. I want to point these out because they're really, really strong with what you just said.
So the first thing you started with was you weren't enjoying the work, and you separated to figure out how you could enjoy the work. And you found the group of people that you love to work with and enjoyed working with. And there's a premise I have about being excellent in customer success and customer service. You have to actually enjoy your work to be able to provide excellent service.
Donald Morgan: 10:42
There has to be a passion. I totally agree, Rich, and I noticed that with you and we, you and I talked. The other thing I loved about talking with you that first time was you were able to identify very quickly what wasn't right for me, as opposed to I've got to make a sale. No, you wanted to do what was right for me. And I have so much respect for firms that do that because it means you've got happy clients.
Richard Walker: 11:08
Right?
Donald Morgan: 11:09
I would not have been a happy client.
Richard Walker: 11:11
I have this very stupid simple rule, which is I only have happy clients. And that tells me don't sell them for the sake of selling them. Sell them the product that serves their needs. Solve the problem instead. And the second thing it tells me or helps us decide upon is I never hold people hostage.
So if it's not right for them, it's not right for them. Why would I keep an unhappy, you know, disgruntled customer? Let's either solve the problem or part ways.
Donald Morgan: 11:36
We do the exact same thing. Rich. And for the exact same reasons. We've also over the years, and it was clear you have to have developed a good sense of what's a good fit. We've actually formalized Analyze that in a way so that when we're onboarding a new client relationship, my whole team gets together and talks about, is this a good fit for us?
And anyone can veto it. And if it's not a good fit, we politely and gently help the client or prospective client find someone that would be a good fit for them, because there's lots of Georges in the world that do what I don't do as well.
Richard Walker: 12:15
So, Donald, look, this is going to sound funny. I just got chills because this is the stuff I look for. How do you figure that out? What is your process to determine fit that is so important for companies to understand?
Donald Morgan: 12:27
Well, I'll give you some of the rules. I won't go through all seven of them. But number one, we want folks who are reasonably intelligent, who are able to understand the basics of finance. And that sounds simplistic, but there are folks that just struggle to understand financial concepts. And if I have to constantly be re-explaining the 4% rule or the rule of 72, or any of the basics of finance.
Things like general ledger and double entry bookkeeping for business owners. They've got to have some basic understanding of that. So that's number one. Number two, they've got to be responsible. They've got to show up on time.
And with the stuff they promised to bring. That's both a demonstration of their ability to be responsible but also their respect for us.
Richard Walker: 13:16
Yeah right I like this.
Donald Morgan: 13:18
The third thing is, and it almost seems elementary, but it's not. It's really fundamental. They have to show true evidence of loving someone other than themselves.
Richard Walker: 13:30
Man, what a good one.
Donald Morgan: 13:32
Well, if you don't love anyone but rich, that makes you either a psychopath or a narcissist. And neither one of those personalities are good for us as clients.
Richard Walker: 13:43
Right.
Donald Morgan: 13:45
And it expands planning opportunities when you care about other people, whether it's a charitable intent, or your children, or your spouse, or even your parents and siblings that care about other people, means that you are aligned with our value set.
Richard Walker: 14:02
And what you didn't say is, I only want people who are 100% altruistic or to give away all their money.
Donald Morgan: 14:07
No, not necessarily.
Richard Walker: 14:08
You didn't say that at all.
Donald Morgan: 14:09
That's a very rare person.
Richard Walker: 14:11
Right?
Donald Morgan: 14:13
But even clients who start out without a altruistic outlook as their wealth rises. And I've had this conversation so many times, it's now predictable, somewhere between 5 and $10 million in net worth as their rapidly rising, these young couples will sit down with me and if they don't already have a charitable intent, say, is this all there is? Is it just about money? Or should I be looking at some larger purpose? And it's a wonderful conversation, especially if they have young children, because then they can start teaching their young children things that they may have missed in their upbringing.
And so that's why I love this business. There's so many factors that come into play, how we can help people and helping them discover their own charitable intent, which it's their intent, not mine, not yours, not anyone else's. And I've not had a case where that hasn't happened yet. In every case where we cross, by the time we hit 10 million, it's every single time.
Richard Walker: 15:20
Yeah. Wow.
Donald Morgan: 15:22
And that's exciting. So these are just a few of the seven. If any one of your listeners wants our seven steps, they can email me and I'm happy to share that with them. I think it's valuable. A couple of things they need to have, they have to be excited about following our advice.
If you're going to hire me and pay me for my advice and then not be excited. That just doesn't feel right.
Richard Walker: 15:46
What I love about what you're saying, Donald, is that this sounds very self-centered and focused on you, which is the important part here. You know, it works for you to be your best in serving your clients. And you've taken that time to figure that out. And a lot of people think the customer is always right, and they miss the other half of that statement. They're right about their choice of style and fashion, but doesn't make them right in the transaction or whatever.
All the words are in that phrase. But the idea here is you can make the best experience for the type of client that works best with you and you work best with, which is the second thing real quick. It's just the second thing that was underlying everything else you were saying, and that is you have to love your customer in order to serve them best. And it's clear you love your customer.
Donald Morgan: 16:32
That's exactly right. That's the exact word we use. We want to work for people that we can fall in love with, because they will reciprocate that love and love is forgiving. So when we goof and we do and we make it right, they're going to forgive us now. If we goof all the time, they may be less forgiving.
So we work really hard not to goof, but goofs happen. Do you remember years ago, Steve Jobs got up on stage and said, everybody's going to want one of these, and everyone's looking at it going, what is that? He wasn't wrong. He didn't ask customers what they wanted. He told them what they wanted and they had no idea they wanted it.
And it wasn't the first personal digital assistant. Remember the Newton and.
Richard Walker: 17:14
Oh yeah.
Donald Morgan: 17:14
Newton. There was the Palm Pilot. There were lots of. And BlackBerry. There were lots of attempts to get it right.
Steve Jobs got it right. Not perfect. We don't do perfect in this life, but he created a whole new industry. And there have been multiple other people that have created all new industries in the four decades I've been in finance, and that's what's made it so exciting.
Richard Walker: 17:39
Yeah. So let's talk about some of those advancements, because, my gosh, I started working in finance back in the early 90s, like 93, 94, I was interning. I was working anywhere I could. I worked at Kidder Peabody. Yeah, just when they got bought out by Painewebber because of Joe Jett, that whole debacle, if anybody remembers that.
And I remember running tickets to the window to the order desk. Right. And I remember the old Bloomberg machines and no internet, etc. and I've seen a lot of transition, but you've seen a lot more. So I'm just curious, as you run your business and you have encountered changes in technology and we're in one now with artificial intelligence, right. What how have you managed to go through those changes?
How have you seen them impact your business?
Donald Morgan: 18:28
So as I mentioned in our pre-call, my class at Cal State LA in finance was the last class that required you to buy and learn to use a slide rule. And for anyone in the audience, many of you in the audience who don't know what this is, this is an analog computer, not a digital computer. It's an analog computer. And this little reticule or slide here lets you read the granular decimal places to the right of the decimal that you need to get to be accurate. And it was with gadgets like this that we built the atomic bomb and put people on the moon.
So they work. They've worked for generations. And that was in 1977, 1978. I got hired in my first and longest lasting relationship in the world of finance. Great company, a little boutique in downtown LA.
And when they hired me, one of the things I had to do was update interest manually using a number two pencil and a slide rule. Wow. And my wife would hear me complaining about how long it took my fiancé. At the time we weren't married yet and so she bought me for my birthday. So this would have been June of 1979.
A $79, four-function Texas instrument calculator. No memory, but I could do interest rate calculations so fast. Everyone in the office clustered around staring at me.
Richard Walker: 20:00
$79. What's that today? In today's money, like 500.
Donald Morgan: 20:03
800 bucks.
Richard Walker: 20:04
800? Yeah.
Donald Morgan: 20:06
For a four function calculator, you can buy for a dollar and a quarter at the dollar store now.
Richard Walker: 20:10
Boy, your wife loved you. Woo!
Donald Morgan: 20:13
Oh, yeah. No, it was it was a fun time. When I got into management the following year, one of the next innovations I did was I spent $7,700 of the company's money and probably three weeks of fighting with ownership over moving from a dial telephone to a push button telephone. Well, everything was done on the phone back then. There was no internet there.
I mean, we did a lot of handwritten mail as well, But the phone was your primary tool. And if you had to make 200 dials in a day, you're next finger got tired. Punching was a lot easier. So I learned early. And well, the power of innovation in finance.
And if you look at the time that I got into finance, it was just a few years after the May of 1975 revolution the Supreme Court caused when they told Wall Street, hey, you guys, you actually have to compete on price. You can't be this good old boy club anymore, where everyone agrees to be gentlemen and not fight with each other over price. And about the day after that ruling came out, Charles Schwab opened his doors and said, I'm here with a discount.
Richard Walker: 21:27
Wow.
Donald Morgan: 21:28
And it was game on. And part of that game on was the industry had to invest in innovation. That's why all the partnerships, like Kidder Peabody, slowly went away and became C corporations and almost always Delaware C corporations because they needed to raise capital to buy these things called computers, which were giant big mainframes back then. But the innovation kept going because by the middle of the 80s, the personal computer had come in. And when my wife and I started our first company in, well, first or second, depending on how you want to count it, in the mid-80s, we were able to build our system on a multi user, personal computer based pick operating system software package that allowed us to be far more efficient than the old ledger cards, right?
That was why it was such a shock to me to come in to this side of the public finance world and discover where we were going. Back to ledger cards. It was like, are you kidding me? So innovation has to be a capital Value, and in our firm it is the number one internal operating value. Anytime something happens where the customer experience gets interrupted or there's a problem with it, we don't even like the word problem.
There's an issue with it. We have a all hands conference to say how do we innovate around this? What caused it and how do we make sure it doesn't happen again? We want positive outcomes every time. So anytime there's a negative outcome, we stop and figure it out.
And the very first thing we test is can we automate around this. So true story for many, many years, decades. In fact you may remember this from your days at Kidder and other firms. Every year we had to collect the IRA fees from clients. Now we don't get paid on the IRA fees, and we don't get paid for the time it takes to collect on them, and the clients are never happy with them.
And so when I came to my current broker dealer LPL, I was excited beyond words to discover they have an automated IRA fee system. We adopted that like on day one.
Richard Walker: 23:48
Yeah. I'm sure.
Donald Morgan: 23:49
And hundreds of hours of a year of mine and my administrative team's time went by and we could spend that time taking care of customers.
Richard Walker: 24:00
So one of the things I like about what you're saying is you're the firms you worked with, like LPL and what you're trying to do. They understood two things. One, let you do what you do best. Go spend time with your clients, right. They took away menial tasks, redundancies, etc..
And two, you really, truly understand that when you improve the customer experience, you build value with your customer. You're driving the growth of your business as a result.
Donald Morgan: 24:25
Yeah, absolutely. And LPL is one of the largest independent financial services firms in the United States. I believe it is now the largest by far. And they've grown as fast as they have because they are, in fact on our side. Are they perfect?
I don't think so, but they get so many things right. The other thing that I'll say about LPL that's a truly astounding. And I've worked for a number of major bank owned brokerage firms before I came to LPL. And it took me a couple of years to figure this one out. But in the entire time I've been with LPL, there have only been two people that I've interacted with at the Home Office that didn't act like they cared.
And that's such an anomaly. If you think about your cell phone or your cable subscription and the customer service phone calls you've had, you just probably can't say they all cared.
Richard Walker: 25:23
Can you find somebody who does.
Donald Morgan: 25:25
LPL every.
Richard Walker: 25:26
Time? Yes, I know, but your cable company, I love to talk to that person. Who cares?
Donald Morgan: 25:34
I have a story about that. A good, dear friend of mine Who reinvented himself after a career in Hollywood as a national customer service care specialist, got a contract with one of the largest cable companies in the United States. They gave him a quarter of $1 million retainer to fix their well known, broadly known customer service problem. They were like ranked 499th out of 500, right? And after three months, he returned the entire retainer and said, can't be done.
Richard Walker: 26:09
Wow. Wow.
Donald Morgan: 26:11
Institutionally were incapable of change. And that's what makes what goes on at LPL in my firm so special is we're institutionally not only capable of but committed to beneficial change. Change that's on the side of the customer. And that's really important. So if we can't automate, the next thing we want to look at is can we delegate or outsource in a way that is transparent parent and serves to support the customer experience.
If it's mission critical, I retain it. If it's supportive, I'm going to outsource it. If I can't automate it and we regularly test those outsources for now, can we automate this? So in the fall of last year, LPL asked me if I would join a pilot team testing an artificial intelligence note taker. And I did, and I was one of a dozen offices around the country that did this.
And it was an absolutely fascinating experience. We helped that company realize where they needed to beef up their support systems and change a few things to, to meet our industry needs. And then it rolled out to the whole field force in November. That saves me 15 hours a week of formerly paid administrative time.
Richard Walker: 27:29
Wow. That's incredible.
Donald Morgan: 27:31
A huge Game changer. And it's kudos to LPL for having the foresight to realize that this was something that was available and that the field force would want. Kudos to the other teammates that helped pilot it for being willing to invest our time. We don't get paid for this, right, but we could see the value and then to the field force. The adoption rate has been phenomenal because it's such a game changer.
Richard Walker: 28:00
Yeah.
Donald Morgan: 28:00
And so you brought it up a couple times. I've heard this question asked I've been asked this question, is I going to take my job?
Richard Walker: 28:12
Do you have an answer?
Donald Morgan: 28:13
I do. And the answer is not now. Probably not in the future. But the guy down the street doing exactly what you do. That's using AI is going to take so much of your pie that you're going to end up with nothing left, and you're going to have to go find another career unless you learn to use this new tool set.
And it's not an easy tool set to. Well, it's not a hard tool set to learn, but it's also not easy because it changes so fast. You've got to stay current.
Richard Walker: 28:43
Yeah. So look I'm going to relate a few things to that. In the 80s, going into the 90s we switched from typewriters to Microsoft Word, first WordPerfect and then Microsoft Word and Excel. And if you learned Lotus one, two, three in the 80s, but you didn't learn Excel in the 90s, you were lost. Lotus went away. Right?
So I look at it as basic skill sets for being in business. And you have to keep up with those skill sets. Now it's email, now it's instant chat messaging on slack or teams or all these different tools. So to me, AI is another representation of that, except it's more it's more open in a lot of ways because it can do more things than just, say, spreadsheets or just changing a word processor.
Donald Morgan: 29:28
It's really a generational leap forward in business technology. And Just as with each of those items you mentioned. When we put our first online computer system together back in the mid-80s, I had experienced professionals who quit because they didn't know what this was and they didn't want to learn. The mouse frightened them. The computer frightened them. The owner of the company that I was working for ended up selling because he could not grasp how to staple anything to a computer screen.
Richard Walker: 30:01
Oh, man, that's like the joke of the whiteout on the computer screen.
Donald Morgan: 30:07
He did that. He actually did.
Richard Walker: 30:08
Wow. And then I get It, though I.
Donald Morgan: 30:14
Change can be very difficult for some people. And I think for all of us, change is uncomfortable.
Richard Walker: 30:19
Yeah.
Donald Morgan: 30:20
But comfort is its own trap in business.
Richard Walker: 30:23
Oh. Clearly. Yes. Yeah.
Donald Morgan: 30:26
The next thing we look at, by the way, after outsourcing or delegation, is simplification. Often we make things. Too often I make things too complicated. My team then helps me simplify it. And if we can't simplify it, we then seriously talk about is this something that we should just never do again because we can't figure out how to do it right?
Know. Know who you are, know who you serve. And if you know those two things, then look at your process. Look at how you get a customer. What causes someone to say, Rich, I need to talk to you about Quik.
I'm drowning in paperwork. I need help. Right. And once you understand how they found out about you and how you got them to agree that you're the right person, then you've got to discuss how you onboard them and how you keep them as a lifetime client. Because the lifetime value of a client, a today's recurring revenue model world, is so much more powerful than the old transactional model.
Richard Walker: 31:32
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look, my business is set up that way. Over 99% of our revenue is recurring. And if you look at the cost to acquire a customer, even if it takes me a year to do it, if I keep them 1020. Well, I'm going on 20-plus years with certain customers.
My first customer from 2003 and we keep them all. We only lose customers because they go out of business. They get acquired and the new business does something different. So the lifetime value is the key here. And I and I don't think a lot of people think about that.
So as you look at how do you build a better customer experience, what you're also doing is building in lifetime value. It's not just the onboarding. Hey, I met you, I like you, let's go. It's the ongoing, continuous experience that you're having with them.
Donald Morgan: 32:16
It's interesting. We're piloting a program where we're not rolling it out quite yet. We're in the compliance approval stages of it. That is a financial planning artificial intelligence module that will be with us during the entire prospect path. Gathering data.
Listening carefully. Prompting us to ask the next series of questions, both to build the relationship and to build out the proto plan, then onboarding them, finishing the financial plan, presenting the plan, and then implementing it. And then nurturing the client with deep artificial intelligence search elements that will look at everything. We know that we gathered in that process, all the people in the family, the schools they went to, the sports teams they loved, their extended families, the industry they're in. And any time there's a change, either in their social media feeds or in industry news sources about them, I will get prompted to send them a personalized note regarding whatever that was.
Richard Walker: 33:22
Nice. Nice.
Donald Morgan: 33:24
And that kind of nurturing, which is what great salespeople throughout history have done by nature, is now going to be augmented by this new technology. I met a young man. Well, okay, 43 years old. Young to me who runs an aria out of Dallas, Texas. And the first thing that impressed me was we were on a panel discussion about artificial intelligence, how thoroughly he understood how to use it to make his practice better. Second, his absolute focus on a demographic that he understood, which was his sole type of client, which is emergency room physicians families.
And in our business, there's normally seen to be a limit on the number of households you can manage in a high net worth or ultra-high net worth environment. That's somewhere between 50 households and 100. There's a lot of debate over what the optimum household size is. We've always aimed at keeping it under 100. But 50 is even better, right?
And so I asked him, how many households do you manage? And he said, 400. But he uses video and artificial intelligence to communicate with people so well. They all feel like they're getting superior customer experiences. So he's eight ext. The industry average.
Richard Walker: 34:57
Through The advent of great technology deployment. Yeah, man.
Donald Morgan: 35:02
I want to be That guy when I grow up.
Richard Walker: 35:03
Good, good, good. Donald, we're running out of time, man. I want to keep talking to you. So we're going to talk offline, too. Before I get to my very last question, what is the best way for people to find and connect with you?
Donald Morgan: 35:16
Really, the best way is either one of our websites, independentwealthconnections.com. If you like the long one or the iwealthtax.com if you want the short one, both of those have a click here to set an appointment button and my time is theirs. The initial conversation is always complimentary.
Richard Walker: 35:33
Nice. Awesome. All right, so look, here's my last question. We're going to change around or switch gears like on the back of your wall there. Who has had the biggest impact on your leadership style and how you approach your role today?
Donald Morgan: 35:47
It's a great question, Rich. And I think of the tapestry of people. That is the answer to that. My grandmother, who raised me, Sergeant Ralph Singer, the field first sergeant in my ROTC unit, who was my senior Army instructor. The first economics professor I had, Paul Broughton.
All these people helped mentor and guide me. But the consistent day after day, year after year presence that's always been there, at least since we met in the mid-70s, has been my wife. She's my partner in business, my partner in life, and she consistently helps bring me back to the goal at hand. And the in the mission, which is to help business owners win at the great game of business. That's why we get up in the morning.
That's what we do all day long. And it is probably the most satisfying job I can imagine having. And I also believe it's the most noble part of finance, because if we're doing our job right, we've taken care of the future widows and orphans long before they know they needed to be taken care of. And that's a really cool way to approach work.
Richard Walker: 36:57
I love your answer because I love my wife, too, and she has been the only woman in my life who's truly supported me as an entrepreneur. And I don't mean, says the words she does the actions.
Donald Morgan: 37:07
It's such a hard Life for a family, and I respect everyone out there in the audience that's doing this, because it is not the easy path. The easy path was staying at Kidder and building a career in corporate America and having a pension and a boat and you know, all the nice things. You took a chance. And your wife took that chance with you?
Richard Walker: 37:30
Yeah. It's an Incredible journey. Yeah. All right. I want to give a huge thank you to Donald Morgan, financial consultant and managing director of Independent Wealth Connections and iWealthTax for being on this episode of The Customer Wins. Go check out Donald's websites. He's got independentwealthconnections.com and the iwealthtax.com and don't forget to check out Quik at quickforms.com where we make processing forms easier.
I hope you enjoyed this discussion. We'll click the like button, share this with someone and subscribe to our channels for future episodes of The Customer Wins. Donald, thank you so much for joining me today.
Donald Morgan: 38:06
Truly Rich. It's been my pleasure. I look forward to doing this again.
Outro: 38:10
Thanks for listening to The Customer Wins podcast. We'll see you again next time and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.
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