Jason Barber is the Founder and CEO of Uptick Partners, a firm that helps advisors break away to become fully independent. He is a Certified Financial Planner (CFP) and Accredited Asset Management Specialist (AAMS) with over 12 years of experience in the financial services industry. Jason is also the Founder and CEO of Holistic Planning, a fee-only RIA focused on delivering massive value to clients. Before Holistic Planning, he served as a financial advisor at Edward Jones.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
Jason Barber explains how Uptick Partners helps people
How advisors can break away from the broker-dealer space
The value of becoming a fee-only RIA versus an independent broker-dealer
Jason talks about entrepreneurship and leaving a captive financial advisor role
Uptick Partners’ business model
Technological recommendations for breakaway advisors
In this episode…
Many financial advisors working in broker-dealer firms often feel they are not fully utilizing their expertise to help their clients. They aspire to break free from the broker-dealer dynamic and embark on their independent journey. However, it is an arduous task requiring time, effort, and resources.
Jason Barber, a Certified Financial Planner, was no exception to this dilemma. After working as a financial advisor for Edward Jones for many years, he realized it was time to start his own RIA service. The primary aim of his venture was to deliver exceptional value to his clients while minimizing the conflict of interest. Through his experiences, he helps other advisors unleash their potential as breakaway advisors and achieve independence.
In this episode of The Customer Wins, Richard Walker sits down with Jason Barber, Founder and CEO of Uptick Partners, to discuss how to become a fee-only RIA. Jason explains how Uptick Partners helps people, why advisors become independent, the value of becoming a fee-only RIA, and technological recommendations for breakaway advisors.
Resources Mentioned in 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 our past guests have included Marc Butler of Wealth Management GPT, Whit Lanier of Amplify Reviews and Reed Colley of Summit Wealth Systems. Today I'm speaking with Jason Barber, founder and CEO of Holistic Planning and Uptick Partners. Today's episode is brought to you by Quik! the leader in enterprise form 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 Formm Xtract API, simply submit your completed forms and get back clean, context-rich data that is 99.9% accurate. Visit quikforms.com to get started. All right, I'm really excited to introduce our guests today. Jason Barber is the founder and CEO of Holistic Planning and Uptick Partners, a longtime practitioner of holistic financial planning, Jason is a relative newcomer to the independent RIA space. At holistic planning, they're excited to offer a whole new world of products and services to their clients. Also Jason the two partners founded Uptick Partners to help advisors breakaway to become fully independent fee-only RIAs. Jason is motivated by the opportunity to help other advisors around the country break away from their captive broker-dealers to launch their own firms. Jason, welcome to The Customer Wins.
Jason Barber 1:41
Hey, thank you so much Rich, it's an honor to be here and a pleasure to be able to speak with you. I've watched your podcast many, many times. And I always enjoyed it. And it's kind of surreal to be a guest myself.
Richard Walker 1:52
Well, what an honor. Thank you, I appreciate that. So for those of you who haven't heard this podcast before, I talk with business leaders about what they're doing to help their customers win, how they build and deliver a great customer experience and the challenges to growing their own company. Jason, we want to understand your business a little better. How does your company help people?
Jason Barber 2:12
Well, it's great question Rich and I think that there's a lot that we can unpack there. And I'm sure we will, over the next 20 or 30 minutes. But I really thought that it would be most appropriate to talk a little bit more about Uptick Partners today. And so our entire thesis and sort of mission and goal with Uptick Partners is that we ourselves are relatively recent, what you would call breakaway advisors, we broke away from Edward Jones in March of 2023, after being there as a family for 41 years and three generations. And so it's a very difficult decision. And but the most important thing to us in that whole process was that we didn't want to break away and go work for somebody else, right, we wanted to be like, hey, if I'm going to do this, I'm going to do it one time, I'm going to do it the right way, even, I'm not going to take the easy way out, I'm going to do it the hard way. But the right way to do it, in our opinion was to go all the way to the total opposite end of the spectrum, if you want to call it that in terms of independence and launch our own field-only RIA. And so what we realize, though, is that a lot of our peers like-minded folks that are kind of in a similar situation, as we were in the captive broker-dealer space, many, many times, it's just very difficult for them to do what we did even though we are of the opinion, and pretty strongly opinionated, that it is the right move to make. But it's just very, it's a lot for a person to do that. And so with Uptick Partners, our entire goal and our entire mission is to help those people that are stuck in prison for lack of a better term at these captive broker-dealers and help them help SEAL Team Six them out of there and launch their business in the independent fee-only RIA channel and in everything that goes along with that. And so there's something I think very special about what we have going on here and that there's others we're not the only people that will help breakaway advisors launch their own RAIs we're far from it. But I do think that we're one of the few perhaps, right, that can honestly say that I've done it myself, right that the owners, the founders, the people that are running things can really truly relate as I as I like to say, I mean, I showed up on a Friday at 10 o'clock in the morning, I signed the resignation letter. I did. I made the phone calls to clients. I did everything that I'm asking other people to do. I did it myself.
Richard Walker 4:57
Yeah, you guys aren't consultants. You are practitioners who have made this leap. So I want to ask you a question about this 40 years. Now, if I'm doing my math correctly, 40 years with Edward Jones 41, 41. Okay, that's a long time. That's a lot of, let's say, company culture in terms of how you guys operate it. So if you are similar to others in the captive world, what is the tendency when they want to break away? Is it to go to an independent broker-dealer? Or is it to go to another firm like there used to? And therefore, what's the reluctance to go fully RIA like you're talking about?
Jason Barber 5:32
Great question. So I think that definitely the tendency, at least in our world, was and is probably, to some extent to go to the independent broker-dealer space. And it's hard for me to exactly say why that is, I think it's certainly is an easier step in the right direction, maybe would be the way to look at it, there's been a lot of success, a lot of people have made that move successfully. The problem is, is in our estimate, is that those folks end up moving their book again, at some point in time, because they realize that the compliance really isn't all that much better. The technology's not that much better. Yeah, they get to put their own name on the sign, and they get to make their own business card. And, yeah, they maybe can set up an LLC and kind of do a few things like that, that they get some tax advantages, etc. But really, at the end of the day, they end up realizing that they're bumping up against that glass wall again, and that they ended up having to move their book twice. And so, for us, and this is a really interesting story, but we never really considered that because, well, back up a second, I never even knew, and I suspect there's a lot of people in the captive broker-dealer world, that you're gonna laugh at this Rich, but I think there's a lot of people that don't even know what RIA is, they don't even know what that is. And for many years in my mind, whenever I would kind of ponder or I would maybe look over the fence, figuratively speaking, it was always kind of like, well, leaving Edward Jones means going to Raymond James. Okay. Right. Like, that's sort of, in my mind, what I associated, like, that's what it means to be independent. And in no disrespect, Raymond James, but I just didn't really want that, I just kind of was like, Well, I don't really want to go, whatever I don't like about this company, I'm sure there's gonna be something about that company that I don't like too. And so it was kind of always like that for me. And that's why, for many, many, many years, we would get phone calls. People tried to recruit us, and it was just kind of, no, not interested, never even really entertained it.
Richard Walker 7:47
I think, just not to interrupt. But this feels a lot like when you have an employment or you have a job, and you want to switch jobs, like, my first job out of college was with Arthur Andersen and business consulting, the last thing I wanted to do is go to Ernst and Young Business Consulting, like, what am I changing, I'm just changing firms. Maybe I make more money, and that's attractive. But same problem was different place, right? So I have to imagine that some of this is there's a comfort and being part of this captive world. And so here's another tidbit. In college, I worked at Paine Webber. So I worked at a big wirehouse, I was an intern. But then later, when I became a financial adviser, I went to an independent broker-dealer. And to me, I had the similarity of like, okay, there's a big corporate name, there's a big budget behind it, that safety. What you're getting at is, is that even necessary.
Jason Barber 8:39
It's not, and I think the biggest reason that it's an odd is the FinTech movement, in that it used to be probably five years ago, 10 years ago, that you had to have these big broker-dealers, you had to have the big name, because why they had all the technology, you just needed their systems and their support and their way of doing things. And now that everything has improved so much in this financial technology space, it's almost like as Taylor says, you're literally being actually held back now, by having that broker-dealer, ball and chain holding you back. And it's holding back your growth in many cases, for a variety of reasons. And so I'll tell you a really brief story and just try to be brief with this. So about how we figured out, the first time I ever heard the word RIA or the letters RIAs together. So my cousin Taylor, so he is probably one of the only people in history, one of maybe not the only, but probably one of the only people in history that was in the independent broker-dealer channel, and went backwards to Edward Jones captive broker-dealer channel. And so it's usually only, it's kind of a one way street. Right? Well, so he's one of the few people that did that. And it was because we were at Edward Jones, we recruited him, he came into the family business per se. Well, interestingly enough, at the exact moment that he was joining us at Edward Jones, the person that was running the independent broker-dealer franchise, if you want to call it of the firm that he was at, at Raymond James, that person at that exact moment was breaking away and doing an RIA, at that exact, like, the exact same time. And so it was kind of one of those like, well, that's strange. Why is he doing that? What's up with that? Like, why? I thought that independent broker dealer Raymond James was independence. Yeah. And so then you're kind of like, well, that's funny, because he's leaving that and launching his own Ra. Because he's saying that he doesn't like the compliance and he doesn't like the technology, and he doesn't like all these things. And so then all of a sudden, it was kind of like, well, that's really interesting. And that's when it sort of became kind of on the radar for lack of a better term. And so now, we're on a mission to educate other advisors, that it's like, there is a better way and a better way isn't going independent broker-dealer, the better way is going fee-only RIA. And it's interesting along the lines of this whole, the customer wins theme. I'll tell you something, whenever I was thinking about this whole thing, and when we were making those phone calls to our clients in the early days, which you know, you can't solicit, but you're able to make an announcement. I mean, a lot of people would ask, like, why did you do this? And so I had a lot of those conversations with people about, why do we launch our own business? And why didn't we go independent broker-dealer? And I would tell a lot of people, I'd say, it would have been a whole lot easier for me to take a big check and go to Raymond James. Right, it would have been a lot easier, and who would have paid us millions of dollars to do this? So why in the world, what I launched my own RIA, spend hundreds of 1000s of dollars making this thing happen, with no money from anybody and the answer is, because I didn't know how I would be able to honest to goodness, look, my client in the eye and say, this was good for them to go to a different company. How am I supposed to say like, oh, yeah, this is really good for you, to go from Edward Jones to Raymond James, Edward Jones to Wells Fargo, Edward Jones to you name it, how was that good for them. And I'm sure that you could figure out some kind of ways that, wow, they've got a little bit better this or a little bit better that. You can spin anything, right. But at the end of the day, it's really not, it's really not a whole lot different for them, but going from broker-dealer to fee-only RIA, like, I can genuinely from the bottom of my heart, say this is good for the client, it is good for the client, there is less conflict of interest, there's generally lower fees, better investment options available, new investment options available that weren't available before. Technology is on par or close to on par with what we've used to what we're used to having. We now have a CPA practice built in. So we're actually doing our clients tax returns as part of the service for a lower fee than what they were paying before. Now. Also, by the way, we'll do your tax return.
Richard Walker 13:32
Doing more. That's amazing.
Jason Barber 13:35
Ever dreamed of doing that before.
Richard Walker 13:37
That conflict of interest, I think is a big deal. It's hard to see what thankfully I did work at PaineWebber. Because I got to see things that you'd make, the boss would come in and say we're selling this now. And you'd go sell it to your clients, not because it's the right thing for the client, but because that's where you're gonna make your commission. Yeah, or my biggest frustration when I was an advisor was seeing clients come in with portfolios full of B shares. I'm just like, well, so I get it. So I want to ask you a different type of question here. Do you think of yourself as an entrepreneur?
Jason Barber 14:10
Absolutely. Yeah, you always have for my entire life. I only ever had one actual real job where I had a real boss and that was I worked for Dell computers for one year out of college, where I actually had a boss, but every other job in my entire life. I mean, I've been mowing yards, building fences, doing the head, it started a small business selling wheels and sound systems for cars and just whatever I could do to do my own thing. I sold Cutco knives growing up, I mean, so that's just kind of the way I've just always been programmed that way from the very beginning.
Richard Walker 14:48
Here's the follow on then. Are other captive advisors, do other captive advisors think of themselves as entrepreneurs?
Jason Barber 14:54
I think so. I think a lot of them do. I think a lot of them. I would venture to guess probably eight out of 10 would think of themselves, if you ask them. If you ask them are you a business owner? They would say yes. Okay. And the reason that I know that is because that's what I would have said, yeah. Okay, before I'll tell you a story really quick, Rich, you might laugh. It's a little bit cheesy, but I think it makes sense. So, for a long, long time, you could think of me whenever I was at Edward Jones as think of me like a lion. Okay, I felt like thought I was, and would have sworn up and down that I was a wild lie. And I'm in the Safari for real, right. And I'm hunting. I'm doing all the things that lions do. Okay. And then one day, I walked into a glass wall. And I was like, what the heck is going on? Where am I? And I discovered that I'm in a zoo. Okay. And that all day long, three times a day, somebody's been putting meat on the ground for me to go get it. Right. And they're like, here's the meat, and you're kind of like, wait a second, you're like, I thought I was a wild, I thought it was wild lion, and then you realize that you're not, and you're really just, you're just like, you've got this zookeeper in St. Louis, Missouri, that's been keeping you in the zoo. And then you kind of wake up and you're like, wait a second, like, there's a lot more to this, I can be a true lion, per se, and a true entrepreneur. Okay. And you break out of the zoo, but then you realize that nobody's giving you the food, and you got to figure it all out. And you got to actually go hunt and kill the zebra. Right?
Richard Walker 15:10
And become what you've always felt you are.
Jason Barber 16:42
Yeah, exactly. Right. I mean, you felt like you were, you thought you were, but you really weren't. And so now you have this opportunity to be like, hey, we really truly let like, spread my wings and fly here and be an actual entrepreneur. And it is extremely rewarding, and extremely satisfying. And there's no way that I would ever trade it for anything else ever. And it just is shocking to me that it took me so long to figure it out. And I will also tell you this. So there were, as you can imagine, when you do a breakaway like this, it is of absolute pop secret type thing, like, it just can't even be said more strongly than that. And so, pretty much there were like guests, maybe like six people or seven people on planet earth that knew that this was happening. There's each of the partners, our spouses, and there was one other person and that was my granddad, who passed away before we launched. But we felt like it was important to tell him because he was the patriarch, he was the guy that started the whole thing in 1981. And the story goes that my dad, Steve told his dad, Paul, what was happening or what we were going to be doing. And you want to know, what he said is he said, from his nursing home bed, he said, What took you so long? And it just was like, what, what better thing could he have possibly said than that. And it's just like, said he passed in January, before we launched in March. So he wasn't able to make it sadly, but we just know that we had his blessing and that it was meant, that it was just a really positive thing for the family.
Richard Walker 18:48
Yeah, now that's really, really good. So I want to go back to the entrepreneur thing, because I mean, look, I'm an entrepreneur, I've started 10 companies since I was 12, et cetera. But I really, really relate to your story about the lion in a lot of ways, because I would start businesses on the side, I would start them in college, and I always had a safety net, like, I just go back to college, right? If I fail in my business, I have a job. When I started Quik!, I dropped everything. I mean, I left a multi-six figure income off the table, and I had nothing and I risked everything. And it was really walking out to the world with no clothes on like, what am I gonna do? And what most people don't know about my own story is that for the first four years of running this company, every single first of the month when I paid rent, I did not know how I'd pay rent the next first of the month. And I never missed a single payment. I wasn't late by a single day. And I always made it work, because I realized being an entrepreneur was going out and figuring out the solutions and finding, figuring it all out finding the problem and solving them. So I want to ask you a slightly different question. Going back to how you're helping these breakaways helping captive people. So it seems like number one that realization you came to something they need to come to. And that is a catalyst. But the second thing I want to know, is feel lonely to be an RIA.
Jason Barber 20:08
Thankfully, in my case, not really, maybe a little bit, but not really, we have 10 people on our team. It's a family business, I mean, I've got me, my dad, my cousin, my aunt, and a few other people that have been with us for decades.
Richard Walker 20:27
Is that possibly a fear that people have? Because they're part of a big company, they're part of an Edward Jones, and they have the backing of a company like that?
Jason Barber 20:35
No doubt. Yeah. I mean, because, truly, I mean, Edward Jones, had, I want to emphasize had a very, very great culture, probably five to seven years ago, in my opinion, sadly died or started to die. But just one of the things that I missed is what used to be, and candidly, that's one of the things that I'm trying to recreate with Uptick Partners, okay, is that true entrepreneurs, right, true entrepreneurs, that I don't need them any more than they need me, right? In terms of running the day to day business, right? We're not relying on each other, like, oh, man, you're my boss, or you're my employee or anything like that. But more of just we're kindred spirits, right? We're kindred spirits, we bounce ideas off of each other. Maybe we go on vacations periodically together and things of that sort, right, where your kindred spirits in that you share this entrepreneurial fire that burns in your gut and that desire to be truly independent. And at the end of the day, what we're doing with Uptick Partners is getting you as close as you can possibly be short of having your own ADD. Okay. I mean, you know, short of having your own ADD, that's sort of the peak, if you want to call it of independence. But the challenge, I think, is that again, many, many people that are going from that broker dealer world, don't want to have to figure out how to do their own compliance and things of that sort. So, we kind of look at it as like, hey, can we get you 95% of the way there? And yeah, like, I'll do your compliance for you and things like that Because you probably don't want to do that. But you want all of the benefits of being independent, but just not have to do those little things like that.
Richard Walker 22:38
Uptick is not recreating the broker dealer model. But exactly, if a breakaway comes through you, they're going to be affiliated with you somehow.
Jason Barber 22:45
Exactly. Yeah. I mean, they'll basically be affiliated with me, and that I'm helping them. Well, I mean, they're affiliated with me, and that they'll give their clients an ADD that says Holistic Planning on it. Right? But that's not really a problem, okay. And they'll have my compliance manual and things of that sort. But overall, we're wanting to, think of it as we're wanting to do as little, we only want to do the things for people that they definitely don't want to do themselves, or can't do themselves, etc. And then we want to basically get out of the way, right? Like, I don't want to be involved, and I don't want to offer you all this service and all these different things, that at the end of the day, it's like, yeah, you might come to expect that from a broker-dealer. But guess what that costs money, okay? And so it's like, or at the end of the day, if you want to hire somebody, because you want to have, let's just use an example, let's say you could go someplace where they have a dedicated alternatives department, and it's like, hey, this is a great thing. We got a whole team of people there perfectly, their expert on alternatives, private equity, and stuff like that, is like, well, that's cool, but guess what you're paying for that? Okay. And some people don't want to do any private equity and other people do. And so, at the end of the day, it's kind of like, well, why don't we just, that's not necessary. It's not a must-do kind of thing. It's a nice thing, perhaps, but at the end of the day, you can always just go hire your own person, because guess what, you're an entrepreneur, now. You're an entrepreneur, you can hire your own people, you can pay them what you want to pay them, etc. And so, we just kind of look at it as we want to do fewer things, but very well. All right, I want to I want to offer you a great compliance program. I want to offer you great technology, great cyber security, which is something that I think is often overlooked, but very important. Great transition team. I mean, you can't ask for a better transition team than people who have actually done it themselves. I was telling on one of our recent podcasts, I was telling Taylor I said, what would we have paid literally, I mean, I don't even know that you can even assign a value to it. It's so valuable of if we could have had somebody boots on the ground in the office with me on the day I resigned who had actually done it before. And had actually made those phone calls and actually signed a resignation letter and hey, this is what you can expect. This is what you need to do, etc. Well, this is what happened to me. Right, etc. It's incalculable, right? In terms of just like how valuable that is. And so we want to do that we want to help people make great websites, we want to help people, hey, you want to do a podcast? Well, guess what? We've made a podcast, I mean, and charge relatively new and not nearly as popular as yours Rich yet, but at the end of the day, give it a year. It's like, yeah, man, I mean, you got to start somewhere. And Taylor and I shoot, we made two trips to Lowe's and bought some stuff off Amazon. And here we are, we got an Apple podcast, and we want to help other people be able to do that kind of stuff. And yeah.
Richard Walker 26:02
So if people break away, do you give them recommendations? Or do they have to follow what you tell them, like technology-wise, for example.
Jason Barber 26:11
So there's some things that they have to use what we're using, okay, just because of from a, like, from a compliance standpoint, it's challenging if we're all using different CRMs. And we're all using different billing systems and things like that, that just doesn't really work. And so we have a custom version, Advyzon has been a really, really strong partner for us. And so they've partnered with us and made us our own custom instance of that software that we call Holistic View. And so we're really excited about that. We think that, how do I put it, you know, the average person, very few people leave Edward Jones and start their own RIA. And so because of that, very few technology companies have a technology solution that is made for or made for the person that's leaving a firm like Edward Jones, right. And so, we saw all the different technologies made a lot of mistakes along the way. And ultimately determined that Advyzon had a solution, in partnership with them, where we could make something very custom for us that felt very similar to what we were used to. Okay, so we're confident that when we're recruiting other captive broker-dealers, that those folks are going to really like the system that we live in every day, where we have kind of, for lack of a better term, an all-in-one system. So there's some things like that. But if somebody wants to use money guide Pro, instead of right capital, or right capital, instead of money guide Pro, or somebody wants to use Holistic Plan, and the other person doesn't, or...
Richard Walker 27:54
From what you're saying one of the core values is a lot of people who are breaking away. Number one, they haven't even thought that hard about RIA, let alone the tech and the infrastructure and all the pieces that go into it. So they probably don't even have a strong opinion about what tools they should have. And they're coming to you, because you're trying to make it easy for them to get going successful on day one not have to do this stepping stone through a broker-dealer for five years, and then go on their own after the...
Jason Barber 28:23
Exactly, you got it. And then one of the other things, that's really cool, and I feel a very personal sense of kind of obligation to this is that we want to be the place where the way that the incentives are aligned here is that we are our mission in life with Uptick Partners is that we have to make, we have to deliver more value than what we charge and fees. Right. And just like any other business, and so we look at it as hey, if a person breaks away, and they're not happy with it, they're not happy at Uptick Partners, they determined that you know what, I really want to just go launch my own RIA, and have my own add and pick up my own technology and do my own compliance and do all of those things. We are not going to stand in their way at all. Okay, we're not going to stand on their way. And candidly, I'll shake their hand and say, like, congratulations, because I know the difficulty in doing that. And so I don't I don't begrudge anybody for saying, hey, you know what, I really want to do it on my own. I just suspect that most people are going to say, 95% independent is pretty darn good. Okay.
Richard Walker 29:38
Jason, this is what I love about entrepreneurs versus just corporations. You care about your mission, whether it benefits you or not, I mean, you care about the outcome to the person you're trying to help, which is how I view the world. Actually, people don't know this. They might think I only interview people who are my customer, you're not one of my customers. Don't use Quik!. I don't know that Quik's the right solution for you. We have We'll figure that out yet. And that's okay. If it's not sure I love helping people and making sure that you're on the right path. And if I can enable that I want to do it. So let's switch gears one little bit more, because we're gonna have to wrap up here soon. What's your view of artificial intelligence? And does it play a role in what you're doing?
Jason Barber 30:16
Yeah, great question. So I'm really excited about artificial intelligence, I think that matter of fact, we just got back from the Advyzon the inaugural Advyzon conference in Phoenix, and they're about to launch their 3.0 version of Advyzon, which has a lot of artificial intelligence baked into it. And so it's very exciting seeing some of the developments there. But I think that, you know, on a day-to-day basis, I don't really see myself, personally, I don't think that artificial intelligence is going to replace high-quality financial advisors. Number one, right? Okay, I'm really not that worried about that. I don't see it as something even that is really going to adjust or take place of good investment selection and things of that sort, as I understand that, there's a lot of compliance issues with artificial intelligence and investment selection and things of that sort. So not really seeing that, I mean, maybe someday, that's the thing, but I'm not too worried about that, I see it, as in the least call it the next one to three years, as a major efficiency improvement when it comes to gathering data, or recognizing trends in your business. So, say, again, I'm just speculating here, but say advise on introduces a tool that gives me highlights of my business of, hey, this particular client logged on to their computer system a lot and then stopped and then started again, and there's this trend that, on average, that's somebody that's maybe a high risk client that we need to show them some extra attention. Or maybe there's a scenario where, hey, at the end of every year, when I'm doing my tax planning, and tax preparation type things, I can have this task, and the system knows what I'm looking for, right? It knows that I'm looking for all my dividends, qualified dividends, non-qualified dividends, Roth conversions, etc. And I can just say, hey, produce me this report, okay. And you think about how much more time that saves our business, compared to having a human being having to go compile all of this data, put it together in a nice report, etc, it doesn't necessarily mean, what it means to me is, it doesn't really mean that we need fewer people to work for us, it means that we're now able to help more people. Because we're able to be more efficient, and it doesn't take as long to do these tasks. And so I think that, to me, is really where I personally see it making the biggest impact in a short period of time.
Richard Walker 33:03
I'm looking forward to the day when AI can see my behavior on my computer, and anticipate things for me. So for example, if I'm getting on a sales call, and let's say it's the second or third call with a customer, and I have notes in our CRM about it, I have to go log into the CRM, find their account, look for the notes, read the notes. And then maybe there's other things I'm looking around at my calendar, etc. I just want an AI to go summarize all that for me, and talk about the most salient points and say, hey, this is information you have to know that's most recent. And here are the highlights, and click here to see the details. Oh, that would just save me so much time in preparing for a client call.
Jason Barber 33:40
Yeah, exactly. And it's right around the corner. Yeah. That's going to be there. So that is super exciting. And on that point, at the advisor on conference, one thing that they talked about, is they said, from the very beginning of advice on existence, they have recorded every single mouse click ever done in that system. And so their artificial intelligence is going to be next level. Okay. Because think about the trends, right, where you start to be able to see what behavior and study behavior and things of that sort. I think it's going to be very, very exciting.
Richard Walker 34:19
That's very smarter than man.
Jason Barber 34:23
The folks that run that they are their top-notch people. They really
Richard Walker 34:27
Yeah. Yeah, that's awesome. We're gonna have to wrap this up soon. And I have a last question. But before I ask it, what is the best way for people to connect with you and find you?
Jason Barber 34:36
Yeah, thanks. So I would say, for the breakaway advisor that is just wanting to learn more about it and learn more about us. My opinion is go to our website, or better yet, listen to our podcast. So websites uptickpartners.com podcast is Behind the Breakway. You'll see that on YouTube. You'll see it on Apple podcast, I'm sure probably some other platforms as well. You can obviously go to our website and get the podcasts to but we're really excited about that podcast, we feel like there's an opportunity to really be able to so much of this information that's out there is just so secretive. And we just really want to shine a light on a lot of that. So other than that, that's really going to be the best way to find me is going to be through the website, of course, LinkedIn, Jason barber on LinkedIn, I'm pretty active on there and try to post a lot of content to my LinkedIn as well. And you're certainly welcome to send me a DM through there if you want to reach me that way.
Richard Walker 35:29
Nice. Awesome. All right. So here's my last question, who has had the biggest impact on your leadership style and how you approach your role?
Jason Barber 35:37
Yeah, I thought about this a lot. And I think I'm gonna go with my grandfather, Paul Barber, he was a retired colonel from the Air Force. And just the stories that he's told me over the years of his leadership, and his ability to lead a team of people into some really difficult situations was very inspirational for me, and very inspirational for us in our break away from Edward Jones. And so, you know, he used to have a saying that he would always say, every day, every time he went on a mission, and they would take off in his airplane, he flew a KC 135 in Vietnam. And the story goes that he would always tell his crew, he would say that today is another day in which to excel, meaning that it's kind of like every day you show up, and you try to do one thing better than the day you did before. And so because it's kind of like the idea there is like, hey, we all want to come home alive, right? And so it's sort of like we better be excellent. Right now, not like tomorrow, not later, like not this afternoon, is like right now, we need to be excellent. We need to put forth our best effort all at all times. And today's another day in which to excel. And so that was kind of became our family motto after that. And so I grew up with my dad, every day would drop me off at school. Today is another day in which to excel. And so that was kind of our family's motto and leadership style. And so that's how we tried to honor his memory and legacy and continue that way with Uptick Partners and with holistic planning is always striving to make every day another day in which to excel even wrote a book called Another Day in Which to Excel. It's on Amazon, I think there's maybe not a whole lot of copies, but it's out there.
Richard Walker 37:30
I love that mindset. I do. I really, really love to think about how you can make today better than yesterday, which in my mind, if you do that it's going to make tomorrow even easier and better.
Jason Barber 37:39
Yeah, even if it's just one thing. Can I brush my teeth better? Can I do something better than I did yesterday? Yeah, that's what we strive for every day.
Richard Walker 37:48
Love it. Love it. And all right, Jason. Well, hey, I have to give a huge thank you to Jason Barber, CEO of Holistic Planning and Uptick Partners for being on this episode of The Customer Wins. Go check out Jason's website at holisticplanning.com and uptickpartners.com. Is that right? That's right. All right. 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 channels for future episodes of The Customer Wins. Jason, thank you so much for being here today.
Jason Barber 38:20
Hey, thank you.
Outro 38:22
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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