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Revolutionizing Fee Billing Systems for Advisors With Lacey Shrum


Lacey Shrum

Lacey Shrum is the Founder and CEO of Smart Kx, a company dedicated to revolutionizing AUM fee billing for financial advisors through innovative technology solutions. With a background as an attorney and former Chief Compliance Officer, she has been featured in U.S. News & World Report for her insights on the growing responsibilities of financial advisors. Lacey is passionate about integrating technology to streamline operations and improve compliance, enabling advisors to focus more on client relationships. Her expertise in the financial sector makes her a sought-after leader in optimizing advisory firm processes.


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


  • [2:05] Lacey Shrum discusses how Smart Kx ensures financial advisors adhere to fiduciary duties with correct fee documentation and calculation 

  • [2:46] The common billing challenges advisors face 

  • [4:00] How specialized billing software can improve accuracy in financial management over using QuickBooks

  • [5:16] The compliance support that Smart Kx offers, including during SEC examinations

  • [8:34] Lacey explains why advisors may have unbilled assets and how this impacts their revenue

  • [11:58] How measuring blended rates can reveal surprising truths about an advisor's actual earnings

  • [14:50] The significance of knowing and leveraging metrics for predicting the health and saleability of advisory businesses

  • [22:28] How Smart Kx leverages AI 

  • [26:13] The origin story of the Smart Kx name

  • [27:48] Lacey’s advice for advisors using Excel

In this episode…


In a world where regulatory compliance and fee billing can overwhelm financial advisors, and despite the widespread adoption of tools like Excel and QuickBooks, manual processes still dominate, leading to inefficiencies and potential errors. How can advisory firms remain transparent, efficient, and compliant in their billing practices while maximizing their growth potential?


Lacey Shrum, an attorney and former CCO, delves into the complexities of AUM fee billing and how her company provides innovative solutions for financial advisors. She discusses the importance of aligning contract terms with accurate billing practices and its impact on maintaining client trust and fulfilling regulatory requirements. Lacey shares insights on common challenges advisors face, such as manual billing processes and unbilled assets, and how her technology simplifies revenue processes and enhances transparency. By bridging the gap between legal agreements, disclosure documentation, and fee calculations, advisors manage their revenue more effectively and position their firms for growth and potential mergers or acquisitions.


In this episode of The Customer Wins, Richard Walker sits down with Lacey Shrum, Founder and CEO of Smart Kx, about revolutionizing fee billing for financial advisors. Lacey discusses how Smart Kx ensures financial advisors adhere to fiduciary duties with correct fee documentation and calculation, the common billing challenges advisors face, the compliance support Smart Kx offers, and how measuring blended rates can reveal surprising truths about an advisor's actual earnings.


Resources Mentioned in this episode


Quotable Moments:


  • "If they're charging and collecting from their client incorrectly, it's essentially like stealing money or leaving cash on the table."

  • "We make sure that your written words, calculations, and execution all talk to each other."

  • "Your goal as a leader should be like you want your clients, employees, or those around you to be successful."

  • "The advisors have this really cool thing where they can calculate their own fee and pay themselves."

  • "I realistically do not see lawyers being replaced or having a completely drafted document out of AI."

Action Steps:


  1. Automate fee calculations and compliance: This addresses the challenge of manual labor and discrepancies in billing, ensuring advisors are charging clients correctly and maintaining fiduciary duty.

  2. Conduct regular revenue health checks: This action helps identify discrepancies in billing schedules and potential revenue leaks, allowing advisors to make informed decisions to optimize profitability.

  3. Leverage technology for contract management: This addresses the opportunity to reduce time spent on manual checks and audits, providing a seamless experience for compliance and contract management.

  4. Prepare for M&A with clear documentation: This preparation increases the firm's appeal and valuation by demonstrating professionalism and operational clarity to potential buyers.

  5. Shift away from Excel for complex calculations: This reduces the risk of errors in large data sets and allows for more efficient and accurate financial management.

Sponsor for this episode...


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Episode Transcript:


Intro 0:02 

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 0:16 

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 Joe Moss of ProAdvisor Suite, Stephanie Dannebaum of Dannebaum Consulting, and Sid Yenamandra of Surge Ventures. Today, I'm speaking with Lacey Shrum, founder and CEO of Smart Kx. 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 1000 submissions. Visit quikforms.com to get started.

 

All right, I've been looking forward to this for quite some time. Lacey Shrum is the founder and CEO of Smart Kx dedicated to revolutionizing AUM fee billing for financial advisors through cutting-edge technology. With a deep understanding of the regulatory challenges in the financial sector, Lacey created Smart Kx to provide seamless, automated and compliant revenue solutions that simplify, fee billing and enhance transparency. Lacey, welcome to The Customer Wins.

 

Lacey Shrum 1:39 

Hi. Thanks so much for having me.

 

Richard Walker 1:42 

Well, even though I'm saying things backwards, this is great. I'm excited to talk to you.

 

Lacey Shrum 1:47 

Well, I'm so excited too.

 

Richard Walker 1:50 

Anybody who hasn't heard this 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. Lacey, let's understand your business a little better. How does your company help people?

 

Lacey Shrum 2:05 

Yeah, thanks. So we help registered investment advisors ensure that they are maintaining their fiduciary duty and they are documenting and calculating their own fees correctly, basically, to help them make sure that they are not inadvertently stealing money from clients or inadvertently leaving their earned cash on the table.

 

Richard Walker 2:34 

Okay, so when I was an advisor, I worked under a broker-dealer through their RIA, I don't recall this problem at all. How complex is this? How big of a problem is this for advisors?

 

Lacey Shrum 2:46 

Yeah, so most advisors, the SEC has said most advisors have this problem, very from a regulatory standpoint, very simply, the contract and the ADV does not match what they are charging and collecting from their client. It's a very manual process. And in combination with B's sort of being this add on service by other portfolio management companies services out there, It has always been a report you could run, but the automation pieces haven't really been there, and so a lot of firms are adding their own automation, doing a lot of Excel on top of it, some really heavy manual labor, if you ask any firm, the person in charge of billing, like, how is the first of the quarter for you? They'll usually say, oh, I hate it. And it's the time when they're making money. That should be the best part.

 

Richard Walker 3:51 

Yeah, well, so a couple things come to mind, but one of them, and I don't mean this to be flippant whatsoever, but isn't everybody just using QuickBooks these days?

 

Lacey Shrum 4:00 

QuickBooks doesn't calculate an AUM fee.

 

Richard Walker 4:03 

So because, I think, really billing. So this is about collecting the data necessary to calculate the fees and do it correctly. Does that mean that your system is helping them track the contract and the contract terms as well? Yes, okay, so that that's greatly simplifying things, because, like you said, they're doing everything Excel. And isn't that every advisor's favorite tool?

 

Lacey Shrum 4:25 

It is. It is every advisor's favorite tool. I think, if they were on a island by themselves and could choose three things, they'd probably choose Excel. But yeah, I mean, you hit the nail on the head with the client agreement. These agreements have provisions that say how an advisor is getting paid, not only getting paid, but really paying themselves. The advisors have this really cool thing where they can calculate their own fee and pay themselves. And those words live in the document. And they also have another place where they're calculating, and those words in that place, they don't talk to each other. We make them talk to each other.

 

Richard Walker 5:09 

Got it. So does that mean you have oversight as well to give them compliance reviews, or help them when they go through compliance reviews?

 

Lacey Shrum 5:16 

We do. So we definitely help. We have the books and records to give them on their fee calculations, what they've been charging in the past, of course, if they get examined. But compliance people love us, because we have some features where we, compliance people, part of their reviews are looking at the contract versus the fee. Just talked to an advisor today, he has 500 clients. They bill quarterly. So every quarter, they review a quarter of their clients. So 125 clients, they look at their contract, they look at the fee, doesn't it match? So you can imagine, this is like a ton of time. And just like, very boring, nobody wants to do it. And so we have some really great features, like you can just send that fee schedule directly to the client and eliminate the need for that audit. So, yeah, compliance teams, outside compliance consultants love that because it can automate and almost eliminate this very required and important piece of compliance, but also very boring.

 

Richard Walker 6:27 

Yeah, right, yeah. I mean, I think about it, the advisor is there to help the client, and so that's where they want to spend most of their time. And running a business is just like, I have to run this business too. It's taking time away from me.

 

Lacey Shrum 6:41 

Yeah, and like, they don't want to spend their time making sure that they didn't overcharge the client. Like, obviously, that's very important. But like, they want to go spend the time with their clients, or getting more clients, or with their families. I think I'm the only one I found out there who's as obsessed with AUM fees. That does, this is my role. This is what I love checking. But other people would rather be doing other things, even with their professional time.

 

Richard Walker 7:12 

I'm curious about something else, if your clients are using this to review their fees quarterly, does that help them review their clients in terms of keeping clients, you know, engaging with clients, choosing who's their ABC, clients, that kind of stuff.

 

Lacey Shrum 7:28 

Yeah, so when we started calculating fees, not only so we do the Fee Calculator, like, our core competency is really that fee calculation, and the compliance aspect is an add-on, like, that is something that's needed and that we've added on. And the other thing that we found is really that advisors were lacking insight into their revenue. So being able to say, what is my AUM, how has that gone up? What is my billable, my quarterly or monthly revenue? How has that gone up or down over time? That's kind of high-level stuff. But then you get into, like, the really good metrics of, okay, how many assets do I have as no bill? How many assets am I not aren't in a billing schedule, and are just sort of sitting out there?

 

Richard Walker 8:24 

Why do they have assets that are not billable?

 

Lacey Shrum 8:28 

Oh, Rich.

 

Richard Walker 8:31 

I haven't been an advisor for 20 years, so I'm missing stuff.

 

Lacey Shrum 8:34 

Yeah, it could be anything. A lot of times it's psychological, either it's two things. It's new assets that have come in. It's accounts that they're like, well, we're not going to bill on because they're just putting cash there. You know, that's how it'll start. And then maybe they'll start investing in it, and it just doesn't get added to a fee schedule. And then some of it's really like, well, we have these assets sitting over here. We're not really doing anything. We don't want to bother them. Like, we'll just no bill on it. It's just easier to sort of leave it there. Or it's a negotiation technique with a client, like, well, we won't bill on your Tesla, your concentrated holding or whatever it is, and so it starts out like that, and then they're just levers that advisors can pull if they get pushed back on the fees or get pushed back on other things, advisors will negotiate their fees and sometimes take some of them to no bill.

 

Richard Walker 9:38 

I know I interrupted what you were saying about all this. But does that mean that you're helping advisors have clarity on this as well?

 

Lacey Shrum 9:45 

Yes, that is probably the biggest surprise. So ADV is one of the surprise, biggest surprises. The second surprise is you will ask an advisor, okay, what do you expect your blended rate is. Like, your AUM is x. What do you think your overall blended rate is? Because most of them are on tiers always, clients are on different fee schedules, and they'll say something like, oh, it's probably 95 to 100 bips. And you run this calculation, you're like, well, it's actually 70. And they're like, no way. Like, yes, so your overall blended rate is 70. And why is that? And that's when you start getting into the things like no bill assets, orphaned accounts, fee structures that were negotiated with inflation even four or five years ago, that are just so different and irrelevant now, and time creeps up, and all of a sudden, instead of 95 bips, you're looking at 70 bips. And that's a huge surprise to most advisors.

 

Richard Walker 10:51 

What I love about this Lacey is, when you run a business, it's interesting to have different metrics to measure your business by, and not just top-line revenue or bottom-line profit, but these types of metrics, like you're saying, what's your blended rate for me, and look, we don't build this way, but I always looked and said, how many forms do we generate? How much money we make? Therefore, what's each form generating for us? And I do it in terms of how many forms are in the library and how many forms we build. And you discover different aspects of your business.

 

In fact, I'll share one other thing. We run our financial numbers, and one thing we've noticed is our dollar of revenue per dollar of labor, and what that ratio is, and we have seen that when that goes up by 20 or 30 cents, we can hire somebody. When it drops down below a certain level we need to cut back on our spending, and it's this very unique metric. And I feel like nuanced, yeah, and nobody would tell you that in business school. Nobody would tell you that, because it's your unique business. And I feel like you've just uncovered something. Maybe everybody knows it. But that seems like one of those magical numbers to pay attention to.

 

Lacey Shrum 11:58 

Yeah, we've really found that it's surprising. It seems so basic. But, you talk about your business, my business, it's been interesting to sort of look at the advisory business, which I've known so well, and then once you get into a SaaS business, and just the similarities, I think, has helped a lot there. And some really cool, like other metrics that we're launching. In the SaaS business, you look at things like your annual recurring revenue, lifetime value of a user, what that expected duration for them is. And so we're translating that for the advisory business, as in, how much time are you spending with advisors? That's some cool stuff we're working on with the CRM.

 

Like, who's taking up the most time? What are your top-performing agreements? Because a lot of times those get out of whack. We all hear about the clients that have $100,000 that take up four hours of your time when the clients have ten million and take up one. And so getting those things really in line. And then we actually had a suggestion, and they're like, You should look at the because the baby boomer age is shifting so much, and that is going to start phasing out. We're going to see this massive wealth transfer, like looking at life, expected lifetime value of these clients, and what that looks like. And if you're financially prepared for that revenue to shift.

 

Richard Walker 13:40 

Sorry, I suppose you're also giving people this insight of who you're making money with, but spending zero time with, because those are the ones you're going to lose in this transition of wealth as well.

 

Lacey Shrum 13:50 

Yeah, exactly. And the other thing that has been a real eye-opener, I think going to the advisory side is just your recurring revenue, like, when you're selling your business transitioning it get even getting a valuation for leverage the assets are your client agreements, and that really sweet recurring revenue. And so helping advisors, you know, give a health check to those things before they enter into an M&A or any sort of valuation is really cool.

 

Richard Walker 14:26 

Yeah, no, that's awesome. Okay, I have a couple of things about that. But are you tracking metrics for this industry and seeing key metrics that help predict health, predict sale ability, valuations? Because in the SaaS world, there's a lot of that, right? So are you seeing specific metrics in the advisory world that you're uncovering through all this?

 

Lacey Shrum 14:50 

Some, that's a little further than where we've gotten with advisors. Some of the metrics that are preliminary metrics of what we're looking at is, of course, like the overall blended rate, but then it's really like a health rate of your client agreements and the fees. If you have client agreements that say you should be charging 100 bips, and you're only charging 90 bips because your system's wrong. No one updated it. You told the client you would do this for so long, and you're like, oh, we'll just eat the cost or whatever. Like, that's a mismatch for anyone, I wouldn't say that's a detrimental health rating, but that's like, not a great health rating, right? Like, there's a lot of revenue that can be made up there. So we're starting to see that and be able to return to advisors like, you know, here's sort of the health of your ARR, so that's been really cool to see.

 

Richard Walker 15:49 

So I got to kind of make fun of us for a second, because we're talking jargon, and not all of my listeners are financial advisors. So bips is basis points, which is a measurement of percentage. And you said, ARR, annual recurring revenue. So not to get too technical and lose everybody, but my other question for you is, is your product geared towards us, an RIA as an individual or a firm with hundreds of advisors? What scale is this really working best at?

 

Lacey Shrum 16:22 

Yeah, so this problem exists across the industry. So from the day you hang up your own shingle, most advisors have no idea what AUM fee billing is or how to even explain it to their client or the regulator, which the regulator will ask in your entrance exam. And so from that up to you kind of hit a growth period, and you're at about 250 million to maybe 750 800 million. That's another point where we see a lot of advisors say, okay, I may have been using Excel. I may have been kind of scratching this together, but like, now I've got advisors working for me. I have other things that I need to take care of, like, we've got to take it to the next level. And so that's where we're able to help a lot to just give them confidence and time back in their day.

 

And then also, really, we've had advisors, multiple advisors say, like, you make me look like, bigger, faster, stronger and like, that's a huge confidence builder for me with my clients and my prospects. So that size, that's really like our core size. But we're also seeing like firms that are acquiring, if you have a big firm and you're at a certain custodian, you acquire other custodian custodial assets, adding that expertise in there, and getting that revenue quickly producing for you is really, that's what you're buying, right? So you want to collect the revenue fast.

 

Richard Walker 17:55 

Yeah, man, this is such an important thing. Software companies like ours, we've been in business for over 20 years, so we have a variety of different contracts, and therefore pricing terms, and we thankfully don't lose our enterprise customers. I still have customer number 1, 2, 3, 4, 18, 20 years in. But that means our billing is so different across different customers, and to track all that, I think we need your product. I can apply to SaaS. But it sounds like it.

 

Lacey Shrum 18:25 

Yeah, it's funny you say that, because I have some users that come to me and they've got, like, a pretty good book, like, they've got five, 600 relationships, and they say the same thing, or they say, like, quarterly in advance, the very basic everyone uses it. They say that it doesn't really work for me. I don't like being beholden to four market days a year, but I don't know how to switch it. And that's a really cool piece of having the contract and the fee calculator work and talk to each other, is that we can send those notices or those documents out immediately, and as soon as they come back, you're good to go, like you don't need to do anything else. It's already set up, ready to go on your new system. And it's been cool to see like help advisors through that internal transition and just sort of give them what peace of mind they are looking for there very quickly.

 

Richard Walker 19:23 

That is awesome. It just occurred to me, really, how powerful this is because, so I got to step back. I run my company like I could sell it tomorrow. I'm not for sale. I'm not interested in selling my company. I run it that way to be professional, mature, conservative, operate well, I don't treat it like a piggy bank, like a lot of founders might, and it's really just a mindset, right? But one of the things I'm gathering from what you're saying is, if another firm, if an advisory firm thinks they might sell their company in some point in time, when somebody wants to come in and evaluate you can show them I know all my contracts. I know all my fees I'm billing according to what I'm allowed to bill for, not more, not less. That is huge value. That kind of clarity in a sale process must give them so much of an edge in the M&A process. Are you hearing about that at all?

 

Lacey Shrum 20:15 

Yeah. I mean, I think it's value, even if there's no if, if your valuation isn't even increased because of those metrics, the simple fact that you aren't paying a first-year associate to go in and due diligence every single contract, is it in good order? Is the billing schedule, the traditional one, something different, is that what we're actually doing is that the revenue, just the hourly rate you'll save alone, is probably astronomical. Have being a first-year associate at one time, but yeah, the monetary piece of it is easy to describe to an acquirer, and it's also just the confidence of, like, okay, like, this firm has it together, like they know what they are doing they care about, not only their own business, but we kind of lose sight of this, like, of the job they were hired to do, which is to take care of their clients money, and like the fact that they can take their payment out of their clients account, if they're flippant about it, that gives me a little pause as to, like, what else are we flippant about? It's a super important job to manage somebody's money, let alone pay yourself.

 

Richard Walker 21:41 

I'm going to be your financial advisor to help you manage your money, but I can't manage my money well, like that shouldn't be allowed.

 

Lacey Shrum 21:51 

Like I'm allowed to pay myself and like, sometimes I don't do it, I don't have these systems in place to check it. But yeah, so that's what makes it really fun for us, is like being able to add that confidence and that clarity and, of course, drive valuations. That's the whole point.

 

Richard Walker 22:09 

Yeah, and you're giving a level of professionalism and maturity, standard operating procedure to that advisory firm. I think that is totally awesome, Lacey. So let me ask a different question, where does AI play a role in all this? I mean, couldn't AI just do all this for us?

 

Lacey Shrum 22:28 

Yeah, I don't know. I would love to copy my brain. One of the cool things that we're working on the AI front is this combination. So we talked a lot about the client agreement. The agreement between the firm and the client, what I'm going to do for you, what you're going to pay me. And one piece we haven't talked about is the ADV which is the disclosure. It's a public disclosure that the advisor tells clients, and really anybody who wants to read it, any conflicts of interest they have one of those conflicts is obviously like, how you're going to get paid, no advisor, except for the ones you see on LinkedIn. Our Mother Teresa, are getting some sort of compensation.

 

And so that ADV, again, is very written, and you have to disclose certain things about how you're charging fees. And so what we always do when we have a new user come on, is we I review that, and I make sure that the way that we're setting up their calculator is exactly as it's described in the ADV. And a lot of times there's things that needs cleaned up in there, but you can see like gutting those three pieces, the contract, the ADV and the calculator all synced up, and with some AI sprinkled in there to be less of Lacey's brain and my team's brain and more automated will be really exciting.

 

Richard Walker 23:54 

Oh, that's great. Yeah. Do you see this helping advisors generate better contracts going forward with their clients as well?

 

Lacey Shrum 24:07 

Yeah, I don't know if I, lawyers will take a different approach. I think AI has some great capabilities with drafting pieces. I mean, developers will tell you that AI has, sort of replaced a junior developer, like you can get a lot of stuff out of there that you would have a first-year junior developer do. So I think there's a lot of room for that, for lawyers, but I don't think, by any means, like I realistically, and I'm a big as techie as anybody out there, like I realistically do not see lawyers being replaced or having, like, a completely drafted document out of AI, but I certainly see a lot of places where like compare and contrast could be really useful, where we could start cutting hourly time out of that place for lawyers. But we're not getting rid of lawyers anytime soon, and I don't ever see a place, we could talk about this for a long time. There's always LinkedIn chatter of like doctors, lawyers and financial advisors. I don't know if we're getting rid of the doctors and the lawyers anytime soon.

 

Richard Walker 25:37 

Or the advisors. I mean, honestly, I don't think you can replace the human element with any kind of program. And a lot of people I've talked to on this show have echoed a similar thing, that AI doesn't replace anybody, AI enhances people. And so you're more likely to get replaced by somebody who knows AI better. So it's more of a tool set at the moment. But I mean, there's some fantastic things happening. Okay. This wasn't in your bio that I read, and I've forgotten, are you a lawyer?

 

Lacey Shrum 26:05 

I am.

 

Richard Walker 26:06 

Okay. I thought so. So what is Kx in your Smart Kx brand name?

 

Lacey Shrum 26:13 

Yeah. So Kx is shorthand for contract that you'll use a lot in law school, sometimes in practice, but you're talking about a contract, you would use the word Kx. And so that was the start of Smart Kx is, I'll be interested if I do this analogy. I'm not going to tell you where it came from. I'm going to see if any of your listeners know. But the idea that, like, instead of having all these different ledgers or systems of what the fee should be, the written word, how it's going to be calculated, the execution, like all have those come from one place, and it could be a digital agreement.

 

So you can have digital agreements calculate the fee. You can have them kick off workflows. You can have them complete different deliverables and really have that contract be smart or digital. And back to your question about AI like replacing the legal part, I do think you'll see contracts going more digital and being able to be in real-time and very like clearly articulated and kept up to date. So that's really the background of Smart Kx and where the name came from.

 

Richard Walker 27:42 

Got it. Okay, so what's your advice to advisors who are super dependent on Excel?

 

Lacey Shrum 27:48 

Get out,

 

Richard Walker 27:51 

Stop doing it.

 

Lacey Shrum 27:52 

I mean, with anything, I think I use Excel, like we all do, but we're talking about this a lot right now, because we've helped so many advisors. Like we had an advisor that came to us. I had like, 42,000 cells in Excel running his fee calculation every quarter. And so not only is that a lot to maintain, but if you have one thing in the middle of those cells that is incorrect or a mistake, and every month or quarter you're copying and pasting that it's just like continuing to live and get worse. And there's actually an advisor out there who is in federal prison right now because he was running Excel and there was errors in the formulas, and they were never caught.

 

So yeah, and I mean, yes, that could happen. But it's also just like, you're all by yourself in there, like you have no team to back you up. You have no clear eyes to like you've been looking at the same thing for years, like you got to get some someone in there that is an expert that can back you up and make sure that things are running as they're supposed to be. So for big things, if you're doing too many formulas, whether it's fees or anything like you got to get out of there. Like there's too much technology and expertise out there for you to be suffering alone.


Richard Walker 29:18 

So if you ever thought you should start delegating. This is where you start. So I'm gonna have to tell my mom to listen to this episode, because she used to develop, uh, spreadsheet automations for people, including financial advisors. And I'm gonna ask her. I'll just ask her, now, did you make any of those errors for those advisors?


Lacey Shrum 29:38 

Well, I mean, that's how all the software started, right? Like, that's awesome, that that is part of, like, she's part of history.


Richard Walker 29:46 

Yeah, yeah, for sure. I'm gonna have to wrap this up pretty quickly here. So I do have another question, but before we get there, what is the best way for people to find and connect with you?


Lacey Shrum 29:57 

Yeah? So I'm on LinkedIn, Lacey Shrum, Smart Kx is on there. And then we're at smartkx.io, lots of info about what we do there, how we help advisors. And then, of course, ways to get in contact with me or my team.


Richard Walker 30:18 

Awesome, awesome. All right, so this is actually one of my favorite questions to ask. So people have heard this before, but who has had the biggest impact on your leadership style and how you approach your role today?


Lacey Shrum 30:31 

Yes, so I would actually say my children being the leader of your home is a very, very similar, but very much more intense than leading a team.


Richard Walker 30:46 

So much harder. It's so much harder.


Lacey Shrum 30:49 

The patience and the care and also, patience care are two things, but also, just like the longevity of your impact, and as being a leader, right? Like you are setting the stage, you're setting the tone, you're setting a foundation for this person's entire life. So your hope that we got like 9095, years left on there. And so then when you come and sit down at your desk and you're being a leader, like, I think those things are still running back there, and are things that I try to keep top of mind of, like, you are impacting this person's livelihood, obviously, today, but like, the rest of their career. Like, what kind of influence can you have on that? What kind of influence can you have and help and support them to get where they want to be, but also where you need them to be, and do so with love and patience? And be sort of like the steady state for them, and like someone to lean on, and all those things are like, very grounded in parenting.


Richard Walker 32:02 

Man, you gave me a whole new perspective. Nobody's answered the question that way, and I love it, because if you do approach leadership with care, with interest, with intent to help the person, because you can't fire your kids. I mean, I haven't found a way so you only can promote them or make them hate you. Whichever way you want to go is your choice. But yeah, I think if you approach leadership that way, you are serving your clients really, really well. I love that.


Lacey Shrum 32:28 

Yeah, and you have like your goal is, you want your kids to be successful, and like your goal as a leader should be like you want your clients or your employees or those around you to be successful. Like, end of story. That's like, that's the goal.


Richard Walker 32:46 

There's an underpinning to the show that comes across in nuanced ways, and you're representing it so clearly here, which is, you have to love your customer. If you love your customer, you serve them so well, you create the best experience for them and the best success for them. And I think that's abundantly clear that you love your customer, and this is why you're doing it.


Lacey Shrum 33:04 

Thanks. Well, thank you. You echo, um, one of the best, I think, Dallas and Texas companies out there, which is southwest, just what you said, like, taking care of your people, or like, that's going to build you the best business.


Richard Walker 33:21 

Yeah, all right, I want to give a big thank you to Lacey Shrum, founder and CEO of Smart Kx, for being on this episode of The Customer Wins. Go check out Lacey's website at smartkx.io and don't forget to check out Quik! at quikforms.com where we make processing forms easy. I hope you enjoyed this discussion, will click the Like button. Share this with someone and subscribe to our channel for future episodes of The Customer Wins. Lacey, thank you so much for joining me today.


Lacey Shrum 33:47 

Thank you for having me.


Outro 33:50 

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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