Redefining Client Discovery in Finance With Marla Sofer

Marla Sofer is the Founder and CEO of Knomee, a fintech platform that empowers individuals to align their financial decisions with their personal values and goals. With over two decades of experience in financial services — including leadership roles at JP Morgan, BlackRock, Microsoft, and Carta — she has consistently championed client-centric innovation in the industry. Motivated by the industry's shortcomings in truly understanding clients, Marla launched Knomee to redefine client discovery through behavioral science and self-reflection. Beyond her professional endeavors, she is a renowned speaker on financial services evolution and a passionate advocate for women's empowerment.

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

• [2:13] Marla Sofer discusses how Knomee strengthens personal and financial connections

• [5:08] The incentive gap in financial services and its impact on customer outcomes

• [7:22] What it truly means for advisors to know their customers

• [11:02] Why giving children financial support earlier can create deeper family connections

• [14:38] How Knomee balances self-discovery with structured financial guidance

• [17:32] Marla explains Knomee’s use of behavioral science and gamification in its digital app

• [23:29] Using client insights to define advisory niches and improve engagement

• [28:23] Scaling Knomee across enterprises to segment and personalize financial services
  

In this episode…

Financial advisors often believe they understand their clients well, yet many rely on shallow, one-size-fits-all planning strategies. The industry's product-driven incentives and limited client engagement usually prevent advisors from exploring what motivates their clients. How can financial professionals move beyond basic data points to foster deeper, more meaningful client relationships?

Marla Sofer, a seasoned financial services expert with over 20 years of experience across banking, asset management, and fintech, shares that most advisors lack the tools and frameworks to dig deeper into the values and goals of their clients. She emphasizes the importance of guided self-discovery and behavioral insight to replace outdated planning models. Marla explains how advisors can encourage clients to reflect on what brings them joy, articulate their goals in greater detail, and build trust by moving beyond conventional metrics like age or retirement numbers. These techniques differentiate an advisor’s practice, leading to stronger engagement and retention.

In this episode of The Customer Wins, Richard Walker interviews Marla Sofer, Founder and CEO of Knomee, about redefining financial planning through behavioral science. Marla discusses how self-reflection leads to smarter financial decisions, the challenges of legacy planning, advisor-client dynamics, and the need for scalable client segmentation. She also shares her entrepreneurial journey, leadership influences, and long-term vision for the industry.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Quik! 

• Richard Walker on LinkedIn  

• Marla Sofer on LinkedIn  

• Knomee 

• Die With Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life by Bill Perkins 

• "Secrets to Scaling SaaS Businesses With Patrick Hannon" on The Customer Wins 

• "Maximizing Efficiency With CRM Optimization for RIAs With Kate Guillen" on The Customer Wins 

• "[AI Series] How AI Is Transforming Wealth Management With Sindhu Joseph" on The Customer Wins 

• Tom Waisnor on LinkedIn

• Advintro

Quotable Moments:

• “If we don't know them, we certainly can't solve their problems.”

• “You have to talk to a client in a way that resonates for them in their lives.”

• “The deeper you get, the more value, the stickier, the better the depth of the relationship.”

• “Giving money is not a replacement for parenting and boundaries.”

• “We guide that discovery journey so that others can connect with you and help you achieve.”

Action Steps:

1. Ask clients what brings them joy and purpose: Understanding emotional drivers helps advisors craft more meaningful financial plans rooted in personal values and build trust.

2. Encourage self-reflection through guided discovery tools: Helping clients articulate their goals through structured discovery leads to clarity and differentiates the advisor’s value.

3. Incorporate behavioral science into planning conversations: Using psychological frameworks provides deeper client insights and aligns financial recommendations with personal motivations.

4. Segment clients based on values and life goals, not just assets: Personalizing service through value-based segmentation enhances marketing and strengthens retention.

5. Use digital tools to scale personalized discovery: Web-based apps allow clients to reflect independently, enabling more candid responses and strategic advisor engagement.

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 my past guests have included Patrick Hannon of Fidelity Labs, Kate Guillen of Simplicity Ops and Sindhu Joseph of CogniCor. Today, I'm speaking with Marla Sofer, founder and CEO of Knomee. 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. Before I introduce today's guest, I want to give a big thank you to Tom Waisnor of Advintro. Go check out their website at advintro.com.

As they help healthtech and fintech companies grow. All right. I'm super excited to have today's guest on. Marla Sofer is the founder and CEO of Knomee, a groundbreaking platform redefining client discovery and wealth management by uncovering the values, motivations, and priorities behind financial decisions. Knomee helps advisors build deeper connections, drive engagement, and enhance retention.

Marla. Welcome to The Customer Wins.

Marla Sofer: 01:44

Hi Rich, I am thrilled to be here. Thank you so much and I love the topic of this podcast. And I believe that the customer should always win. They're the customer.

Richard Walker: 01:53

Right? So I can't wait to talk to you more about this. 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. So, Marla, to understand your business a little bit better, how does your company help people.

Marla Sofer: 02:13

At the most meta level, what Knomee does is drive connection. We help people drive connection with themselves, with their family, with the impact that they want to have with their money, with the people that help them make decisions about their money. And then we help them drive in whatever way that they want to live that more meaningful life. We open it up and we create a language between an individual and whatever decision they're looking to make that is driven by the impact. And the values that are their motivators in life.

Richard Walker: 02:50

All right. I don't always go into origin stories, but this is a really interesting thing to me. What made you realize this needed to be built?

Marla Sofer: 02:59

So over 20 years deep in the investment industry, started as a private banker and then worked in the guts of the investment ecosystem. I call it the very bottom Lego layer on which everything else that has to do with investing is built in a in a world called global custody, where trades settle and securities are processed. So I did that for over a decade, both at JPMorgan and at Blackrock. And I moved into fintech in 2015, very inspired by how can we make our industry better, how do we actually solve what people need solving in their lives? Instead of slamming products at their heads and expecting them to make sense of what they need to live better lives?

And what I realized after 20 years examining it from all different kinds of perspectives, and also deep within the technology and the systems, is that as an industry, we don't really know our customers. And if we don't know them, we certainly can't solve their problems. And if we are going to change our ethos to one of solving and inspiring whatever our customers want to live better lives, then we, we're missing something. There's this huge data gap. And so that was kind of the journey that took me to launching Knomee.

Richard Walker: 04:20

So I had a similar perspective. I wouldn't say as deep as yours, but when I was in college, I interned at every financial institution I could find, including Painewebber, John Hancock, Transamerica, Dlj Investment Banking. And I noticed this. I noticed where if you if you give somebody an incentive to sell a product, they'll sell it. So if the stockbroker selling B shares and they're not right for the customer, I mean, when I became an advisor in 2000 and 2001 and I saw people holding B shares, I'm like, why do you have B shares?

And I can't even remember why they were negative in my head at this point because it's been so long. But there's this idea that it's not necessarily right for the customer. Don't you think the industry, as we've added certified financial planning, we've moved to RIAs? Isn't there already a shift of doing better by the customer?

Marla Sofer: 05:08

It's a very big industry, and I would say that I agree 100% with you that US companies and individuals are driven by incentives. Have we already made that shift? No. Not even close. Do we have a an incentive now to care?

Yes. And the reason is because individuals care, because they're not going to buy something until they have a deeper understanding for wait, what does this do for me? How are you actually helping me? Are you are you creating a plan that is based on what I need in my future? Are you giving me a bunch of products that I don't understand?

But you're just kind of selling me that you're smarter than me, so I should trust you in the decisions you make on behalf of me and my money. And I think that has shifted. You have to talk to a client in a way that resonates for them in their lives, so that that client builds trust with you. The trust is no longer show up, you know, on a cold call in a in a suit and tie and, and, you know, fancy language to build trust. I think that clients see through that today.

Whereas in the past it was very much about access. Access has democratized. We can now access investing super easily. So now the problem is differentiation. How do I differentiate my investment widget from everyone else's investment widget?

And I believe the answer, and you're seeing that in the rise of financial planning and the certifications behind financial planning and what we call holistic client-centric, all of these words are very buzzy right now. Behavioral science, qualitative, softer side. All of those things matter Because the incentive is sell. And if I need to sell, I need to differentiate my business. Everyone can get you into an investment portfolio.

How do I know that you're going to buy it if you don't know it's the right one for you?

Richard Walker: 07:01

Yes, there's so many things in there. I want to go back to the premise of Knomee, though. It's to build a deeper connection and to know your customer. So how is it that advisors who spend so much time building up their book of business and building up the type of clientele they have? They don't know their customer.

So what do you mean by know your customer?

Marla Sofer: 07:22

I think most advisors would take offense to that and say, of course I know my customer. Going back to what we were just saying, differentiation and the ability to really get deep, the type of know goes beyond the questions you have to ask to make the sale. And it goes into do I actually understand their goals? And I would even go further. Do they understand their goals?

Is my client aware of what they are holding me accountable to? Are they aware of how they define retirement beyond a an age and a number that gets plugged into a monte Carlo Carlo simulation to kind of make sure that that age and that money kind of lasts. And then you have like kind of the age of retirement, the age of death. That's kind of how most retirement plans are run today.

Richard Walker: 08:11

That's so.

Marla Sofer: 08:11

Simple. Well, yeah, it's so easy to sell. That is how I would define it. It's easy to sell. What?

What they don't ask is. Wait a second, Rich. How do you actually envision retirement? What kind of house are you going to live in? How often are you going to travel?

How much are you going to support your family, your grandkids? What does education mean to you? What do you what does what does joy mean? It's a very different Monte Carlo simulation and plan. If you answer, you know what, Marla?

What I want to do is yacht around Europe, and I'm going to buy the biggest sailboat, and I'm going to have a big crew versus if you say, you know what, Marla, I just really like camping in our RVing. And that's kind of my definition of joy. And, you know, I expect my kids to be pretty independent. But if you don't ask those questions, the quality of your plan is pretty slim. It's a very, very narrow and shallow number one.

Number two, you're not differentiated. The deeper you get, the more value, the stickier, the better the depth of the relationship. And what Knomee introduces is get to that depth. But we're. But without expecting you to become a therapist, the behavioral science behind the exploration of that data.

What brings you joy? How do you define retirement? What kind of travel do you want to do? What are your values? How do you want to express your values? What does philanthropy mean? Environment. Okay, great. Tell me more about that. What? What does that even mean? Do you want to volunteer? Do you want to pull plastics out of the oceans? Do you want to invest in companies? Do you want to fund startups?

Like there are so many directions that can take. That's what I'm referring to when I say knowing your customer. There's depth that we don't as an industry get into. We don't know how and our clients don't know how. So we guide that discovery journey.

Richard Walker: 10:02

Man, this is refreshing. My mentor, who is also my partner in the financial planning business, he did ask a lot of these questions actually. He would work through people with people and say, how many vacations do I take per year? How much would you spend on each vacation? How do you want to travel?

First class? Best hotels? What is it you're looking for to do that? But there's something else that happened later in his life after we split ways and I went with the software that I thought was remarkable that he chose to do this for his family. And I don't know if any advisor asked this.

He said, I decided to give all of my kids money now versus waiting until my death, because I want to see the smile on their face. I want to see the impact it has on their lives. So like, a couple of his kids went out and bought houses. I mean, that big of a down payment to go buy a house, that kind of thing. I don't hear those questions from anybody in the industry.

And mind you, I'm not asking ten advisers to do my work with me, but I don't hear that quality of questions. So how does Knomee participate in this? How does it prompt this type of discovery?

Marla Sofer: 11:02

So first off, let me recognize and acknowledge there's a lot of good advisors out there like your mentor. And they do ask these questions. And they do get into that depth and they explore it. So when I say we don't know our clients, I'm kind of saying it at a very broad industry level, you know, industry level. And I'll also say that that knowledge base that your advisor mentor shared with you isn't codified and structured in a way that feeds through the supply chain.

So we get better products, better segmentation, better everything else that the industry needs to know at a high level its client. So first of all, I just want to acknowledge there are great advisors that ask these questions. The second thing that you referenced, and I don't know if you've read the book Die With Zero, but it's very it's very similar to what you said, kind of the premise. And it's written with a bit of a, of a bias. It's a hedge fund guy. So easy for him to say die with zero, right? Billions of dollars. Right? Yeah. Right.

And but his, his, his entire philosophy is, you know, surrounded by people that have more money than, than God, but they don't know their families. They go through horrible divorces. They don't actually even know how to experience joy. And he does talk a lot about when you should transition money to the next generation. And he brings in some really interesting stats.

And one of them that really struck me and has stayed with me, is that the average age of inheritance, of receiving inheritance with a very sharp bell curve is 60. And so you ask yourselves, and that's only going up as people live longer.

Richard Walker: 12:46

Yeah.

Marla Sofer: 12:47

At the age of 60. Is that when you really need the money? And the answer is no. By the age of 60, you've already paid for education for yourself and your kids. You've already bought the house.

The times that you need the money are really those education house. That's it. When you have children. And so if you really want to play a role in intergenerational connection, going back to what is how we actually want to help people. We want to drive better connections.

And so I, I very much love that ethos of give the money away while you can. I think most people are scared to death of being a burden on their family, and having their family have to support their later years. But a lot of people who reach and exceed that, there's no way they can spend the money in their later years that they've accumulated. They are the ones, I think, who can enjoy the experience the most now of exactly like your mentor did, giving it away to the family members that need it, the ones that are potentially launching startups, the ones that are, you know, bringing kids into the world, buying their first home. That is when they need you the most.

And yes, I agree, it helps them experience the joy. This is what it was all for. If you don't get to experience what it's for, you've missed it. You've missed the mark.

Richard Walker: 14:08

I think some people I have to imagine this happens to some people. They're afraid to give the money because they don't want to create a dependency. They want to create this concept of, oh, my child or whoever I give it to can come ask me anytime they want for more money. And the boundaries are hard to set. A lot of people struggle with how to communicate and set boundaries.

So that might be part of it. But I love this mindset. So going back, how does Knomee then play the role in the advisors advisor's world to know the client better and make this happen.

Marla Sofer: 14:38

Yeah. So let me start with that. And then I'll also just chime in and say, giving money is not a replacement of parenting and boundaries, but how Knomee does it. Knomee is. Over the last four years, we have been partnered up with a leading behavioral scientist who teaches PhD programs at Columbia and Kansas State.

She may be known to some of this audience or to you. Her name is Megan Kurtz. She's a frequent writer on Michael Kaiser's website. And what we have done is unpacked a lot of the work that that she does with advisors day in and day out and in her academia and through her research, which is very much about how do I break down the journey of articulating my goals, if I ask somebody and I've done this research myself as I've built Knomee, if I ask you, what are your goals? People don't know how to answer.

Their answer is usually one of two. One is I don't know, and two is more money. And the and going back to what you just said and this experience of joy and achieving a milestone, there's a huge amount of behavioral science academia behind. When you articulate an achievable goal, that is a milestone, a flag that you plant. And you can then say, I got there, I achieved my goal, I reached that flag.

You experience joy, you experience fulfillment, impact, purpose, those things that drive human nature, human behavior. That is what we want more of. And so we have broken down the academia into a modular discovery experience. In order to help you articulate your goals, we start by asking you questions about, well, what brings you joy? What are the things that are top of mind for you?

What's keeping you up at night? What are your hopes? What is it that that are your concerns like what are, what are the things that are bothering you? And then we go into an experience just around how do you envision your future? And we guide you through that.

So there's an envisioning exercise is not like, okay, I'm going to send you off on a meditation. It is digitally supported where that vision is. Okay. Now give me more detail and more detail and more detail. And that detail is what's the critical missing ingredient in goals, in articulating your values, in becoming the the expert.

We were talking before about language on the on the expert in speaking the language of you so that others can connect with you and help you achieve your own visions and your own missions and desires in your life.

Richard Walker: 17:15

Okay, so the technologist may has to ask then is this a tool you're saying to the advisor, send out this digital interview and some AI agents going to talk to your client for you? Or is it training the advisor how to do it? Is it prompting the conversation between the advisor and client simultaneously. I mean, what's the mechanical thing going on here?

Marla Sofer: 17:32

It's none of those. Actually, the interface with the user. The consumer user, the client is very modeled after existing wellness experiences. So it feels to them like a wellness app, like a psychology backed wellness app, something akin to a dating app or Noom or Strava or Duolingo. All of these apps are have deeply embedded psychology.

There is gamification involved. There is what we call compulsion looping. So there's kind of a series of experiences that create behavioral consistency. I know exactly what I'm going to do. There's a step one. Step two. Step three badge or confetti. Dopamine. Right. And so that is the consumer experience.

It's a it's a digital discovery Modular experience. It's not a one-and-done. It's dynamic. It's not kind of we're reaching up and then we get a score or an archetype and then we're done. It is no.

The more you feed in, the more value you get back, the more you can hold the people that you are connected with accountable to, especially the ones you're paying in some cases, very high, high, high prices. And then that's kind of the consumer experience. On the other experience, it's APIs. It is a well-constructed data schema. It's a key-value database.

The initial vision was we're going to create a knowledge graph of an individual with all of these different dimensions of data. And the dimensions of data are very well defined. But we're getting at them in very different modular ways. And so it is purely an API first data base that can then feed into an advisor's workflow, but it also surfaces up. How do I synthesize those insights?

What questions should I be asking? What are the conversation starters? And so it it makes sure through the framework of the tech that you're asking the right questions consistently, whether you're doing it live or you're doing it digitally, you're always going to have them and they're always going to be documented properly. So it's not a chatbot because chatbots can go all over the place. This is very well structured and configured to make sure you're asking the right things at the right time, in the right order to get the right outcomes.

Richard Walker: 19:56

So it's deliberately composed and choreographed. Is it actually an app like I have to download onto my phone, or is it just an invite to a site or.

Marla Sofer: 20:04

Yeah, an invite. It's a web app, so it's not like an iOS or Android native app. It's a web app that you can access with any internet access on any device.

Richard Walker: 20:16

Are you finding that advisors sit with their clients and go through this together so they get the feedback in real time?

Marla Sofer: 20:23

It's an excellent question. It was not designed for that. And we've gotten mixed feedback. So one is some advisors and clients have said, I love that I can do this in my own time, privately with my family away from the advisor, because it is a self-reflection and self really self-examination, self-awareness, exercise. And I would rather do it on my own time.

I would rather do it privately when I have kind of a moment to sit and think. Not when I'm sitting across the table from somebody, even especially somebody who might have a conflict of interest, who might, you know, might not possible. Yeah, you never know. Maybe somebody especially between spouses.

Richard Walker: 21:04

Right.

Marla Sofer: 21:04

Yeah. Yeah. And spouses can do it individually and together. So I would expect there would be you know, some both individual and together coming together and sharing details. But there are have been many advisors who have asked, can I do this together with my client.

And so I would say that it's on the future roadmap. Like, how can we do this on the same table where we're walking you through it? Some advisors have said, can I just like, be on zoom when my client goes through it? So I feel like there is different strokes for different folks, and recognizing that there are personality types that will want to go through this deep discovery, psychology backed discovery work to make sure that their goals are clearly articulated, their values are clearly articulated independently, and there are those that might want to do it together with a partner or with an advisor. And so I think we want to have those different journeys available.

Richard Walker: 21:58

So I'd argue then that really there's two things you're doing. Yes. You're helping the advisor make a deeper connection with their client by understanding these, this nuance, this, this, this insight. But there's another side really. And I know, you know this.

You're helping the client understand themselves. Exactly right. Just because the sheer nature of sitting there and reflecting and asking questions and answering the questions, that creates clarity in and of itself. And so that's a really powerful tool. I'm also realizing how special it was that I worked with my mentor because he really he I think he had a degree in psychology, was a business person.

He ran global business planning for all of IBM for most of his career. And when he quit, he was wealthy and he loved that planning still. So he became a financial planner. So he naturally gravitated towards how do I help people do what I did or what he did right? So I didn't realize how special that was to be mentored by him and seeing it from that perspective of how you really help people think through their goals.

Because I, I thought of myself as an advisor, as somebody who helped translate people's visions and goals into a reality. But many of the people didn't even know what they were. Like, I want to retire at age 65 with 50 million bucks. Okay. Why? What does that mean to you? What are you going to do with it? And that's why we got into that depth of questions. This is fascinating, Marla. How does a customer, how does an advisor get this product?

Do they have to get approval? Do they have to embed it? Do they have to build to APIs? I mean, how do they get this?

Marla Sofer: 23:29

So it is. Some advisors probably would need approval, some wouldn't. That gets into the guts and nuts and bolts of depends on the advisor. Depends on the systems they're using. Depends on whether kind of captive to kind of a broader a broader firm, whether it is a broker dealer or an RIA that has different levels of restrictions on what they may or may not use for many advisors, they can go ahead and try it.

It is it can be used initially as part of like a marketing budget. Like is it something that can help me get closer to a prospect, help me speed up onboarding? Can it help me with rediscovery? It's actually there's a very strong use case for Knomee as it relates to integration and M&A. So when you're thinking about where advisors heads are at right now.

They're very focused on building their business as they're doing that. There is a question about, well, how are we protecting the book? That's what we call clients, right? How are they protecting? We call them very you know, it's a very loving term.

You're the book. But how are we protecting that book and making sure that we understand? Who are those clients? How do we segment them? How do we know that they're going to be integrating?

If this advisory firm that is doing an acquisition is taking that advisor from a one-person shop to a much broader shop that has functionalized roles, and now you have a planner and a para planner and an onboarding person and a service person. How do you make sure all those people know, with the level of depth required, that client, in the same way that an advisor should know that client. And so Knomee comes in and says, it's really simple. If you kind of give this really structured digital tool to the clients as part of a value add. You know, we are going through a transition, and with that, we are improving the way that we're going to help you and your family achieve your goals.

We have this great new tool to help you go through, rediscover. We are double downing on the value that we want to introduce to you our clients. And so the way that that clients work with us, it's right now a B2B SaaS platform. And so advisors subscribe to Knomee. They can then use the software.

The software then goes out to these advisors and they can invite clients and say, hey, we've got this new self-discovery tool. It helps us give you and your family more value. And then we give the advisor all kinds of great data-derived insights. It's always built on trust. It can be used in prospecting.

The client doesn't have to share it if they don't want. So yeah, it's all very trust based.

Richard Walker: 26:09

I'm seeing several use cases in this matter actually, Because when an advisor transitions from one firm to a new firm, you just explained, they could take this tool with them to help them with the new firm and the capabilities of the new firm. What about the old firm that's trying to retain that book of business from the leaving advisor? Now, what if that firm has that has your solution, but the advisor doesn't choose to use it, and that firm keeps most of that book of business. That's becomes a competitive advantage. But here's another one.

How about seeing the trends amongst your own customers to actually redefine your niche as an advisor?

Marla Sofer: 26:43

That's exactly right. Yeah.

Richard Walker: 26:45

You start to see what people are really doing. You start to understand who is your best clients, who do you enjoy working with? What do they have in common? This this depth could really help. It's not that they all just love golf, right?

They have a lot of different things going on. I think I could talk to you for another hour about this, but I can't because we do have to kind of wrap this up. Before I get to my last question. I want to ask, what is the best way for people to find and connect with you?

Marla Sofer: 27:11

I will share. So we're at knomee.com. As you said at the beginning, I'm very accessible and active on LinkedIn. Marla Sofer and you can also look up Knomee there. I wanted to add one thing just on what you said right now, really quickly.

So you talked about kind of old firms trying to retain clients, but you talked about something really important, this kind of digital innovation, the ability to analyze the data and segment and understand what should I be selling, to whom, where and how. And that's where we're seeing a lot of traction. So we've just secured an enterprise pilot that has 10 million clients and over 20,000 advisors, and that is exactly the use case they're looking at. When we gather this data at scale, we build a better business. We can differentiate into the future and drive the types of initiatives that are exactly hitting the types of customers we want to get closest to, those that are going to be the beneficiaries of the transfer of wealth.

Richard Walker: 28:11

You know, I could see long-term that this becomes a lead generation tool as well, because you could offer it out to consumers at no cost, and everybody could understand themselves better. And then you could say, we can match you up with the guy or the gal who has the right style of business for you.

Marla Sofer: 28:23

That's actually where we started Rich. So we started there. And yeah, long story short, is that lead generation kind of marketplace matching tool takes a while to get to revenue. We got a tremendous amount of traction. We got to 650,000 people kind of through different community relationships.

And it just took a bit too long to get to revenue. So it's on a side burner. We will continue back with the lead generation at some point in the future.

Richard Walker: 28:51

Yeah, it makes sense because scale drives that kind of business, and getting to scale is the hardest thing when you're new, so it's easier to come to scale later. All right. Here's one of my last questions. And it's one of my favorite. Who has had the biggest impact on your leadership style and how you approach your role today?

Marla Sofer: 29:07

Yeah. So I think the, the right answer to that would have to be my, my mother and my daughter. I am surrounded in a, in a sandwich. I'm the sandwich generation. Generation, I guess, between two outrageously inspiring entrepreneurial women and one of them I had the privilege of raising, and the other one being born to and just really modeled confidence decision making.

Like a lot of the things that I really have appreciated and been pushed a little bit from their from their example, I maybe I'm kind of like, you know, younger, younger Gen X, it didn't come as naturally. But, you know, for the boomers and the millennials or not, millennials, Gen Z, you know, it's just this level of confidence and like ability to go out there and create what you wanted to be was really inspiring. I want to mention one more, and that is at a at a bit of a more group level. It is women's communities that I've had the privilege of being involved in, and so I've been the founder of a couple of women's communities. I've been involved in so many.

One in particular was created by a woman named Amy Schaltegger, who is an executive, was an executive at Blackrock, now on multiple boards, and she created the Blackrock Women's Group. And it was really there that I found a lot of inspiration and connection with other women who truly exemplified lifting each other up, and that being a part of a community can help you achieve whatever it is that is your purpose, your goals, what you want to achieve in life. We're all just here to support each other.

Richard Walker: 30:51

I love that, and I have to admit, I've always enjoyed being invited to women's groups to see for a day, speak whatever. And have that different perspective. But also I co-founded my company with my mom On and half my employee team is female. I really I love this balance in life. I love so Marla that's wonderful.

I so appreciate hearing that. And that's why I love asking this question. At the end, I want to give a big thank you to Marla Sofer, founder and CEO of Knomee, for being on this episode of The Customer Wins. Go check out Marla's website at knomee.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 channel for future episodes of The Customer Wins. Thank you so much for joining me today, Marla.

Marla Sofer: 31:42

Thank you Rich. This was great.

Outro: 31:45

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