Inside Boutique Wealth Management: Navigating Wealth and Ethics With Joshua D. Rogers

Joshua D. Rogers is the Founder and CEO of Arete Wealth, a Chicago-based financial services firm specializing in alternative investments, venture capital, and private equity. Under his leadership, the firm has expanded to over 100 offices and more than 320 advisors nationwide, providing comprehensive wealth management for high-net-worth individuals and institutions. Before founding Arete Wealth, Joshua co-invented several patents at Walker Digital, including the “Name Your Own Price” e-commerce model behind Priceline.com. He is also an active member of the financial and cultural communities, having served on FINRA’s National Adjudicatory Council and as a trustee of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.​

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [2:37] Joshua D. Rogers discusses Arete Wealth’s dual-customer business model

• [6:45] Maintaining a boutique feel with 300 advisors nationwide

• [10:55] Challenges of bootstrapping during market headwinds and rate hikes

• [14:23] Joshua explains how ancient Greek philosophy shapes Arete Wealth’s core values and culture

• [20:09] Why large-scale growth often erodes company culture

• [24:04] Joshua’s views on balancing AI technology with human connection
  

In this episode…

Many business leaders struggle to scale without sacrificing their company’s core culture. As firms grow, bureaucracy and investor pressure often dilute the original values that made them successful. Is it possible to expand a business while maintaining its sense of mission, ethics, and community?

Joshua D. Rogers, an expert in wealth management and leadership, offers a compelling answer rooted in intentionality and personal conviction. He emphasizes the importance of creating a company culture that attracts the right people — elite professionals who value autonomy, collaboration, and purpose. Joshua advocates for human-centered leadership, ethical decision-making, and a boutique mindset, even at a mid-size scale. Through face-to-face engagement and clear cultural values, Joshua maintains an environment where advisors and clients feel personally valued and professionally empowered.

In this episode of The Customer Wins, Richard Walker interviews Joshua D. Rogers, CEO of Arete Wealth, about preserving company culture while growing a financial services firm. Joshua shares his thoughts on leading without private equity backing, building trust through ethical practices, and humanizing technology. He also discusses advisor recruitment strategies, the impact of market cycles on firm growth, and the influence of classical philosophy on modern leadership.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Quik! 

• Richard Walker on LinkedIn  

• Joshua D. Rogers on LinkedIn  

• Arete Wealth 

• Psychedelic Psalms: Reflections from an Offline World by Joshua Dean Rogers 

• "The Future of Investment Management With Ryan Eisenman" on The Customer Wins 

• "Empowering Advisors With the Gift of Time With Rich Whalen" on The Customer Wins 

• "Revolutionizing Fee Billing Systems for Advisors With Lacey Shrum" on The Customer Wins 

Quotable Moments:

• “We're the tortoise in the tortoise versus the hare race, and I like it that way.”

• “Culture and a family atmosphere and thinking win-win, I'm still a believer in that.”

• “The name of the company, Arete, means both excellence and virtue at the same time.”

• “Everything does kind of have to be done orally or maybe a video, preferably face to face.”

• “Anything too perfect, too slick, or too roboticized, I think there will be a subtle revulsion.”

Action Steps:

1. Prioritize cultural alignment when hiring advisors: Ensuring new team members share your core values helps preserve company culture during growth.

2. Avoid aggressive growth through private equity rollups: Rapid expansion often dilutes your mission and can weaken internal trust across the organization.

3. Build a values-based brand identity: Defining your ethos publicly attracts like-minded professionals and reinforces consistent decision-making and team expectations.

4. Maintain face-to-face engagement during recruitment: In-person interaction provides deeper insight into personality and ethical alignment than documents or video calls.

5. Humanize your use of technology: Letting automation support rather than replace human interaction builds trust and differentiates your firm.

Sponsor for this episode...

This is brought to you by Quik!

At Quik!, we provide forms automation and management solutions for companies seeking to maximize their potential productivity.

Using our FormXtract API, you can submit your completed forms and get clean, context-rich data that is 99.9% accurate.

Our vision is to become the leading forms automation company by making paperwork the easiest part of every transaction.

Meanwhile, our mission is to help the top firms in the financial industry raise their bottom line by streamlining the customer experience with automated, convenient solutions.

Go to www.quickforms.com to learn more, or contact us with questions at support@quikforms.com.

Episode Transcript:

Intro: 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 my past guests have included Ryan Eisenmann of Arch. Rich Whalen of Equity Services, Inc. and Lacey Shrum of Smart Kx. Today, I'm speaking with Joshua Rogers of Arete Wealth. And today's episode is brought to you by Quik!, the leader in enterprise forms processing.

When your business relies upon processing forms, don't waste your team's valuable time manually reviewing the forms. Instead, get Quik!, using our Form Xtract API. Simply submit your completed forms and get back clean, context-rich data that reduces manual reviews to only one out of a thousand submissions. Visit quickforms.com to get started. Now, before I introduce today's guest, I want to give a huge thank you to Casey Cotton, the CTO at Arete Wealth and a long-time friend of mine and customer for introducing me to Joshua.

Now, Joshua Rogers is the founder and CEO of Arete Wealth Inc, a financial services holding company with over 60 offices and 300 advisors nationwide. Under his leadership since 2007, Arete Wealth has achieved double-digit year-over-year revenue growth. Specializing in alternative investments, venture capital and private equity for high net worth individuals and institutions. Before founding Arete Wealth, Joshua co-invented patents that led to priceline.com at Walker Digital and later built his financial services career on Wall Street and with Ameriprise Financial. He was elected to FINRA's National Judiciary.

I don't know if I've said that Adjudicatory Council and serves on boards including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. A Saint John's College graduate, he's an entrepreneur, art collector, avid traveler who enjoys golf, racquet sports, and off-road adventure motorcycling. Wow, we have a lot to talk about. Joshua. Welcome to The Customer Wins.

Joshua D. Rogers: 02:14

Hi Rich, thanks for having me.

Richard Walker: 02:16

Yeah, I'm excited to hear what you're going, what you've been doing. So for those who haven't heard this podcast before, I'd 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. Joshua, I want to understand your business a little bit better. How does your company help people?

Joshua D. Rogers: 02:37

Well, we sort of have two different kinds of customers. The first most direct form of customer are independent financial advisors who generally who have been in the business for a long time, typically have built their careers, usually at much larger firms. You know, the Wirehouses. Large banks, large, large national independents. And then have at once they get to a certain point of maturity in terms of the growth of their book of business, they usually are oftentimes wanting to look for a little bit more of a boutique kind of experience where they can they have the ability to service their clients with a little bit more freedom than they're used to at the large banks and wirehouses.

So, the way in which we, you know, that primary customer of ours servicing very experienced financial advisors that themselves usually service mass high net worth clients. You know, our main objective is to create a great culture for those financial advisors. A culture of collaboration. A culture of a certain kind of like, I guess I'll say, sharing of best practices amongst very, A very experienced and savvy professionals and then also an incredible product lineup, as you mentioned specifically in terms of alternative investments. We really try to focus on bringing endowment quality, alternative investments that historically have only been available to the largest endowments, the largest pension funds and the largest family offices, and then and then figuring out ways to bring those investment opportunities just down a little bit down a notch or to a wider audience, maybe is a better way of putting it and making it more available at minimum investment sizes that are more attainable for people who have somewhere between 1 to $25 million of net worth.

So that's our first layer of customer. The second layer, the customer, of course, then are those clients that we that I just mentioned, those, you know, all kinds of investors and households across the United States currently are IT services approximately 43,000 3000 households across the United States. And so these are people that are considered to be sort of the mass high net worth, high net worth, or some people would call it like the work, the working wealthier, the working rich. So the a lot of professional type people, a lot of people who are earning good livings, but, you know, are and have substantial means but are not necessarily that the, the, the, you know, whatever. 0001 percentile of, of net worth. And so that product lineup I just mentioned, as well as a comprehensive suite of technology services and of course all the traditional normal asset management services, these are all this comes together to kind of help both of those audiences.

Richard Walker: 05:43

Wow. It sounds a little bit to me like you are attracting the elite of financial advisors out there. The people who've really done well, they've established themselves. They need a place that feels right to them. Is that a fair way to look at it?

Joshua D. Rogers: 05:57

That is. Yep. That's well said.

Richard Walker: 05:59

Okay. That is awesome. I was also thinking they've graduated, right?

Joshua D. Rogers: 06:05

Right. Yeah. That's right. It's kind of I mean, try to find another analogy, but you know, it's sort of like maybe if you are a really high quality lawyer, but you're sort of but you, you feel like you're kind of trapped in like a really big firm and it's gotten too bureaucratic. And then you and a few other really big lawyers, you kind of want to go to more of a little bit more of a boutique that has a little bit more culture and a little bit less bureaucracy.

That's kind of what the art feel is a little more family feel.

Richard Walker: 06:35

Now. I don't know if I'm right in saying this, but 300 advisors in your firm doesn't sound like a boutique firm. How do you maintain that boutique sense of feeling?

Joshua D. Rogers: 06:45

So interestingly enough, actually, there are categorizations in our industry. And so our one of our regulators, FINRA, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, defines large firms as having over 500 financial advisors. So we're considered a mid-size firm. And that's kind of right. Where I like it is that, you know, we're in the mid-size.

It's kind of like it's like Goldilocks. I feel like we're, you know, we're big enough to have all the all of the resources and all of the, things that people would expect, both the advisors themselves as well as clients. So we I think we have a lot of the same look and feel and resources as if you're with a really large firm. But at the same time, we also kind of still maintain that a little bit more of that nimbleness and family kind of culture that comes with more of a bespoke sort of boutique firm. So yeah, I think our current size is actually just right.

Richard Walker: 07:43

You know, the culture is something I think a lot about and work through in my company a lot. In fact, I founded my company with Culture First because I knew what I wanted to experience in my job and in my day-to-day work with people and the type of people I wanted to attract to my firm. And it's something I think about as we grow, and I expect to grow to be ten times bigger than I am. How are we going to maintain that? So it sounds to me like you're not following some of these trends in the marketplace of doing a roll up and trying to get ten more advisory firms under your, your belt and double in size or anything like that, you're happy where you are.

So how do you maintain that with people? I mean, do you have to kick somebody out to accept a new advisor?

Joshua D. Rogers: 08:22

Well, I mean, I would say that certainly we have room. We do have certainly we have room for growth. I think we could retain our culture even at like 400 advisors or 450 advisors. So certainly we are still, you know, shall I say, open for business. And we would love to we'd love to attract more of the right kinds of professionals who want to experience the kind of culture that we have, and also be able to really grow their practices tremendously.

But based on the resources and the product lineup that we bring to the table. But what I would say then is, is that, yeah, this idea of like kind of the, the roll up of like just kind of scale, scale, scale. I think, you know, you definitely lose culture there. So I mean, I, I haven't tried it and I'm not we're not private equity backed. So we've really grown ourselves just straight from the bootstraps.

I'm the I was the only initial I'm the only investor. So there's no there's no there's no other demands from other investors to like, you know, you must scale this super-fast. I like to kind of say we're the tortoise and the tortoise versus the hare race. And so all this, like scaling and rolling up and all this pressure that comes from all this private equity money sloshing around, I think definitely comes at a cost of culture even. I found that in my 18 years now, even when we've done a few small acquisitions, it's still kind of a 5050 50 coin flip.

Even if you think it's going to be that it's going to work. From a culture perspective, that's not always necessarily true. Or maybe it's like a portion of the company you're acquiring. Some of the people work in the culture and some of the people don't. So you kind of have to.

There is a dynamic where you kind of have to make some choices about who you want to surround yourself with and really kind of rigorously try to try to defend or keep or guard the culture.

Richard Walker: 10:22

Yeah, man, it's a tough thing. I'm looking at how things move in our marketplace, and we have a lot of customers in the broker-dealer space. And you see so many of them are owned either by insurance companies or private equity firms. ET cetera. There's so few left that are truly, truly independent or, you know, privately owned, if you will.

Yeah. And that has a certain appeal to it, I think. So it sounds like you guys are in that that side. And congrats man. Being bootstrapped, I know all about that.

We're bootstrapped too. We've never taken on outside investment.

Joshua D. Rogers: 10:55

Yeah, it's a it's not easy. It's not easy. I mean, you know, sometimes it's easier than others. Looking back now over 18 years, there were definitely there was a nice period thereof, I would say 3 or 4 years from like in the late, the late teens into the early 2020s where, you know, I would say looking back now, I kind of see that like the wind was very much at our backs and that was that was a very good time. I would say ever since the interest rate hikes of 2022.

The, you know, the last like, you know, three years have been challenging environment. So yeah, when you're a bootstrapped entrepreneur and you know, you're the one still personally guaranteeing the bank debt and lines of credit and all those things. It's, it's it can wear on you a, from a stress perspective over time. But on the other hand, it's also there's a lot of benefits to it in that, you know, I don't have a board that I have to answer to. I don't have, you know, I don't have this pressure that comes from having that outside private equity money or whatever that, you know, is demanding a return and demanding fast growth and all those other sorts of things.

So, yeah. Nice. You definitely have sussed out, Rich, the kind of differentiator that I'm going for. And I do think, you know, we live in this time right now and it's not just about our business. That's I would say it's like kind of this applies to almost all businesses, which is that it's almost like we're getting more and more transactional and sort of less.

I feel like there's like less humanity or something in, in, even in the way in which we're conducting business. There's a little bit, unfortunately, of like a philosophy out there of, of, you know, that if you don't, you know, kill or be killed kind of stuff. And so I'm really trying to I feel sometimes like I'm like, I'm definitely in the minority holding on to the idea that that culture and a family atmosphere and, you know, thinking win-win and thinking about how they or even like even my, my general belief in like good karma that if you do the right things and if you behave in the right way, and if you always you always try to conduct business ethically, that ultimately benefits will inure to you. I'm still a believer in that. In those I guess maybe some would say quaint ideas.

Richard Walker: 13:31

No fundamental ideas. Totally fundamental. And I'm actually explain why. Because this is something I talk a lot about privately with people. I don't know how often I say it in the show, but I'm going to say it today.

If you want the best customer experience, it starts with how you experience your work and your team and your interactions inside your own company first. And what drives that company culture does. So your company culture in my world, my company culture is my brand. It's the promise we make to our customers. And there's four things we promise and we deliver on those, those four things.

So I'm kind of curious from your own perspective, have you codified or distilled it down to a couple of key things? And maybe I can put this in a different context. When you go out and look for somebody to join your firm, whether it's an employee or another advisor, how do you measure their cultural fit with you? Do you have that kind of codified?

Joshua D. Rogers: 14:23

Yeah. Well, the first way in which the culture is codified actually is in the name of the company Orit. Orit is an important concept in ancient Greek philosophy. Most notably really expanded upon by Aristotle in his ethics. And so art and ancient is an ancient Greek word that means two things simultaneously.

It means excellence and virtue. And the idea behind this is, is that, you know, what Aristotle was trying to say is that the goal of us, the goal of our of our lives, is to achieve. Right? It's to achieve both a kind of excellence in terms of like what I'll call the typical measurable results or something like that, you know. So in athletics, for example, we can pretty easily identify, you know, excellence in certain athletic endeavors.

But it but with that it has just as important. There also has to be this virtue component, this ethical component that goes hand in hand in that. And so you have to have both in order to achieve. Right. So just the mere fact that there's I really wanted to there's a, there's a, a tremendous amount of intentionality that starts with even the way in which I name the company which states our values right out front.

And so I oftentimes when interviewing people, I will discuss the word art with them and just try to try to see what their thoughts are on that. And, and I kind of try to I really try to gauge how I feel, what their thoughts are around that and see how what their responses are. So that's probably the biggest element of how we do it. I also, yes, I have written a number over the it's been 18 years, so I've tried a lot of things. I mean we've, I've written out, you know, the company principles, the company mission statement, company values.

We have a code of ethics that everyone has to sign. So we I have done a lot of that in terms of writing things out. Unfortunately. I mean, I guess I'm going to just come to an unfortunate what I see right now in as a reality that we have to accept is that there's been the technology, this, this, the, the smartphones over the course of the last probably 20 plus years have seems to have altered the brain chemistry of almost all of us. Not all of us.

But some of you can see the gray in my beard. It hasn't altered my brain chemistry, but basically people cannot read anymore and they don't want to read. They don't have any. They don't have the attention span to read anything. I was just recently at a, at an event.

My wife, you know, is kind of actively involved as she's an actively involved Stanford University alum. And I was at an event last Saturday and I was talking with a law school professor after this event, and he was telling me that he just came from a an event, an academic event where all of these professors, both in undergraduate and at law school, were essentially saying that none of their students seem to be capable of reading anything greater than about ten pages. Wow. Because just the attention span is not there anymore. And so, you know, now everything is everything is just quick soundbites right quick.

And so my point is, is that writing down a code of ethics that's like, you know, that's ten pages long. Good luck getting people to actually read it and really even, you know, discuss it. And so really now everything does kind of have to be done orally or even like, you know, maybe a video or something like that, which to me, you know, I don't know when talking about such heavy matters, I really prefer face to face. So I really try to gauge I really have to do these things face to face. And then I kind of can tell whether or not someone shares the cultural values that we have or not.

And, and that's, that's honestly how I do it. So I mean, maybe that doesn't sound like a I'm not saying it's gut feel, but it is definitely it's a face-to-face kind of instinctual element. And, you know, I've been around and you know, after 50 years, you start to you start to trust, you know, your instincts on, on who really believes in art and who doesn't.

Richard Walker: 18:36

I'm actually glad you said it this way, Joshua, because I do. I agree, we get wrapped up in the videos and the words and even a zoom meeting. I appreciate that we can do this over zoom because we're in different states, but the person to person face to face can never be replaced. There's so much more energy and dynamics that happen when you're face to face. And, you know, I would even argue my core tenets of my company that I define my culture by is four sentences nobody reads.

And the first ten years of my company, nobody read it. Nobody would follow it. Nobody would do it. It is a practice. It is.

It is your personality. It is your drive. It's your consistent reinforcement of it. And you, because it's your personality. It's your desire to build the way you are as the founder.

It has to be something you feel then and you attract those people. And you know when you feel it, you know when you've met your long-lost brother or sister or friend and you're just like, oh wow, you fit here. And I don't know how to replicate that other than trying to weed them out through various types of questions. Maybe. But ultimately, look, one of my biggest questions was, what do you know about my company?

And if they're like, oh, I saw you have a website and they didn't look at the About Us page and see the four cultural tenets. I know they don't really care. They're not really diving that deep. Somebody who likes us and likes what we're doing has read those things, and they get excited about it and they come in prepared to talk about that. So I'm sure similar things happen with you.

If they're really seeking you out, they're hearing about it, they're talking to people who've worked with you, etc..

Joshua D. Rogers: 20:09

Yeah, I think you're absolutely right, Rich. And it's you're making me think about this idea about that. I think that that scale, this idea of scaling, scaling, scaling, size, size, size and culture. I don't think those two things are actually compatible. I don't think you can really, you know, you can't come up with any new ways to systematize culture.

I think that I've even seen it again, like with other friends who Have stayed at these large companies, you know, including my like some of my former colleagues who stayed at Ameriprise for many years. They talk about this all the time, like eventually the culture, just whatever it was, the culture from like the earlier days, it goes away, it dies, it changes, it shifts. My wife has been at Google for 11 years, and she talks about how the culture used to be very friendly. Everyone was like it was a lot of like hanging out outside of work. It was also sort of there's like a dynamism and a really heavy emphasis on innovation and also on sales and business development.

And now the culture has completely shifted to being more super corporate, super proper, very like consultant-driven. And so, you know, I think that's what happens when companies get really big and they get scale. And then they also get mature and they get super wealthy. That what happens is, is that the, the, the original culture that made them great almost, almost always withers on the vine. So the question then becomes if like in a case of like you and I as entrepreneurs, I think is can we remain in a way, can you be okay with like, not maybe not.

I mean, I'm not saying, but for me it's like, am I okay with the idea that I'm not going to get big enough as a company for me to be reasonably whatever, you know, whatever, having a corporate jet or something like that. Am I okay with just achieving a certain level of, of quote unquote financial, you know, whatever success, financial success, etc.. But I don't want to lose the culture. Maybe that's maybe that's actually the key to a certain kind of sustainability, you know, is to know when is enough.

Richard Walker: 22:29

Yeah, I'll share something I have an experience with. And unfortunately it's now a failed company. But it was a very successful company and that was Arthur Andersen. Out of college, I went to work at Arthur Andersen, and they had a very distinct culture across 100,000 people worldwide. And when I met people from Singapore, Greece, you know, anywhere in the US, anywhere in the world, we all felt like we came from the same place.

We all embodied the same culture, and they had a magic about it. They'd bring us in to train us on the culture itself. And I always admired that, because part of what I did in college is I worked everywhere I could, even if it was one day as a temp, just to see what the company was like. And I got this really strong sense of different cultures. And Arthur Andersen was one I loved.

I'm not saying it was all good. I mean, like I said, it was a failed company in the sense that the Enron deal, they got disbanded and all that stuff, but they had a really, really good thing going at a very large scale. I think it's possible. I think it's rare, but it's a question of how do you infuse that? And the way I see it is you build it into your brand.

Essentially, you build it into the ethos of your company and what you're promising to deliver. You do it in-house first, and when you attract people who keep doing that, it's easier to keep attracting people who do that. I think you're on a plan for success from what you've described. It sounds like you have that engine running. The crazy thing is what you've described also about a big company like Google is the sheen is gone.

Like the paint on the car is gone. Now it's just a chassis and an engine that works really well. It keeps performing, but it doesn't look pretty anymore. And I want to keep that sheen. I want to keep it.

Joshua D. Rogers: 24:04

Doesn't have it doesn't have that kind of like it doesn't have that. There's something I don't want to feel or I since, you know, going back to the focus of, you know, the focus of this particular podcast to around like, you know, this customer focus and service to others. I think I mean, we all have experienced this, right? Where, when then when things get too big, they sort of they lose their human, they lose the human touch. They become bureaucratic, they become cold.

You start to feel like you're as a customer. You start to feel like you're just a number, right? Spend more time on hold. You're in some like again, automation or you know. Oh, now I know.

I'm just talking to some AI bot or whatever. And all of that I think turns us off. This actually goes to one of my other core hypotheses in general, not just about business. But again, this is even bigger than business is that I think that as technology is sort of like a runaway force, it's not going we're not. The reality is, is we're not going to go backwards on technology.

We're not going to somehow smash the machines and go back to some sort of a pre-industrial age. But recognizing that that's the case, I think that the coldness that comes with all of this automation and robotics and, you know, artificial intelligence, the more we lean into, the more that everything is artificial and cold, the more that all of us are going to be yearning for something that is not artificial for that which is human, that which is has warmth, that which feels real. So anything that is kind of too perfect, too slick or too automated, too roboticized. I think there will be a subtle or not-so-subtle, almost like revulsion against that. And so I think that as we think about, you know, whether it's in our businesses or whether it's in almost any other walk of life, how can we all how can we lean into warmth and humanity and, and, you know, a feeling of like some sort of some that, you know, that that's real.

I'm, I'm thinking about this children's book, The Velveteen Rabbit. You know, the Velveteen Rabbit wasn't the wasn't the newest toy, wasn't the shiniest toy, but. And had one eye missing and his fur was all rubbed off. But at least he was real.

Richard Walker: 26:30

Yeah. Yeah. I think about this, too. I, I was at an event last night with about 25 other entrepreneurs, and we talked a lot about different AI technologies, and somebody had said, you have the ability today to build a voice agent that calls your patient, if you're a medical professional, and interview them ahead of time to collect all the data, which can then fill out the intake forms, which could then populate the process, and then you can take all that data and give a very personalized sales process effectively. It caters to their desires, needs, preferences, whatever, and therefore you can have a higher conversion rate.

Then he backed up and said, how does the AI voice agent introduce itself? It introduces itself as hey, I'm Wendy, I am a voice agent. I'm an AI that your doctor asked me to call you and see if you'd be willing to share information with me ahead of time to prepare you for this. This meeting. You don't have to use me.

And I thought, that is so thoughtful to have the AI not pretend to be human, because that's one of the problems I have with tech, was if it pretends to be the advisor or adviser pretends to be the assistant. And it's not. And it's fake. That's disingenuous. Right.

And I was also thinking about this from another standpoint, because with the automation, you dehumanize the process and you take the humans out of the process. But you're right. We need to keep the humans in the process. So I really want AI or other technologies to empower people, humans, to do their best work by eliminating the work they don't have to do. But you got to you got to keep putting that back in somehow.

So I'm glad to hear you're thinking about it that way, too.

Joshua D. Rogers: 28:05

Yeah, yeah I am. Yeah. It's that my friend Judd Bergman, who passed away pretty tragically a few years ago, who was the founder of Envestnet. He used to be he used to have this whole story about Garry Kasparov and some of the early chess matches that he had with that IBM supercomputer. I think it was Big Blue.

And he would always kind of finish this whole kind of story with his idea was that the future was really about humans collaborating with the machines that, you know, that, that, that. And who would really emphasize this word of collaboration, you know, and I have to say that I typically I think I agree. I mean, what made the it seemed like in Star Trek The Next Generation, I feel like they had it, that they kind of had the balance really well, you know, the ship's computer was super helpful, but like, it wasn't like interjecting. It's like it had to be called upon by the human in order to, like, add additional relevant information to help the humans make better decisions. But ultimately, the humans were still in charge.

Richard Walker: 29:16

I'd never considered that. You're right, you're right. And I've seen every episode. I never considered that man. I'm so enjoying this conversation and I would love to keep going.

But we do have to wrap this up.

Joshua D. Rogers: 29:27

No problem.

Richard Walker: 29:28

Before I get to my last question, what is the best way for people to find and connect with you.

Joshua D. Rogers: 29:34

Well, to connect with art. Well, with our company, the easiest way is our website. aretewealth.com. And certainly, you know LinkedIn.

If you want to take a look at our company page on LinkedIn or mine Joshua D. Rogers. Rogers. As I like to say, just regular Rogers, that guy. Aaron Rogers with the D completely through everyone. It used to be that everyone assumed Rogers was just Rogers.

And so those are those are good ways to connect with me if you're more interested. I also am a poet and an author, and recently published a book called Psychedelic Psalms, which is available on Amazon, so feel free to check that out and see more about that on my Instagram, which is Josh Rogers 75.

Richard Walker: 30:22

Nice. That is awesome. All right, here comes my last question, one of my favorites. Who has had the biggest impact on your leadership style and how you approach your role today?

Joshua D. Rogers: 30:33

I'm going to in terms of my business leadership style, I'm going to give credit to a gentleman who is still with us out there. His name is Doug Lennick. He was like, I think it was an executive VP at American Express Financial Advisors and then Ameriprise, and now he has a now he has consulting firm called think to perform. But he was he was kind of like the guy who opened up for me, that you could be sort of spiritual and philosophical as a leader, but yet also bring that into like a business context. And so I would say he was definitely, you know, someone who really opened up my world from a leadership perspective in business.

And then as far as other leaders, I mean, I'm a big student of history. So I you know, I guess I'm going to say I'm a huge fan of Marcus Aurelius. You know, and I thought, I think in my view, he was the quintessential great leader. And then I'll also throw out Winston Churchill. So those are my faves.

Richard Walker: 31:36

Nice. Nice. That is great to hear. All right. I have to wrap it up.

As much as I want to ask you questions about that. Anyway, big thank you to you, Joshua Rogers, founder and CEO of Arete Wealth, for being on this episode of The Customer Wins. Go check out Joshua's website aretewealth.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.

Joshua, thank you so much for joining me today.

Joshua D. Rogers: 32:08

You bet. Thanks, Richard.

Outro: 32:11

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.