
Andrew J. Evans is the CEO of Rossby Financial, which offers advisors a platform for market accessibility, digital transformation, leadership, and acquisition opportunities. Under his leadership, Rossby Financial has streamlined operations, allowing advisors to achieve net incomes as high as 95% after expenses, significantly improving their financial flexibility. With a background that includes executive roles at Tag Advisors and Cambridge Investment Research, Andrew is a connector and advocate for leveraging technology to enhance advisory services. He is passionate about continuous improvement and innovation and is focused on utilizing AI and other tech tools to optimize compliance and operational efficiency in the financial services industry.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
[2:12] Andrew J. Evans discusses how Rossby Financial empowers advisorsÂ
[5:34] The unique structure of Rossby and how it offers flexibility and cost savings for advisors
[8:17] Tips for strategic management of a talent pool in a non-traditional office setting
[13:37] Andrew's take on the benefits and limitations of AI in the current landscape
[18:19] Why human touch remains crucial despite the advancing AI and automation
[20:06] Practical applications of AI in compliance and surveillance
[26:01] How Rossby maintains better customer experience and business outcomes
[35:27] Influential figures in Andrew's life that have shaped his leadership style
In this episode…
In today's world, where customer expectations are at an all-time high, financial services firms face the challenge of balancing operational efficiency with exceptional service delivery. By utilizing innovative technologies and forming strategic partnerships, how can these firms streamline their processes while improving client experiences? The objective is to enable businesses to focus on what truly matters — the success of their customers.
Andrew J. Evans, an experienced financial advisor, tackles these challenges head-on by providing a unique solution through his company. He shares the importance of compliance, complexity, and competency and gives advisors more control over their capital, allowing them to reinvest in their businesses and improve client experiences. This approach saves advisors significant costs by offering services on a pay-as-you-use basis and empowers them with a flexible network of professionals. Andrew emphasizes the importance of removing unnecessary burdens from advisors, enabling them to thrive through strategic use of technology and human expertise.
In this episode of The Customer Wins, Richard Walker interviews Andrew J. Evans, CEO of Rossby Financial, about enhancing efficiency in financial services. Andrew discusses how Rossby Financial empowers advisors with control over their capital, the firm’s unique structure, how it offers flexibility and cost savings for advisors, the benefits and limitations of AI in the current landscape, and how Rossby maintains better customer experience and business outcomes.Â
Resources Mentioned in this episode
Andrew J. Evans’ Email: aevans@rossbyfinancial.comÂ
"Revolutionizing Fee Billing Systems for Advisors With Lacey Shrum" on The Customer WinsÂ
"The Winning Formula for Customer and Investor Success With Mark Gatto" on The Customer WinsÂ
"Transforming Financial Services With a Customer-First Approach With David Crow" on The Customer WinsÂ
"The Value of Creating Personalized Financial Services Experiences With Valarie Vest" on The Customer WinsÂ
Quotable Moments:
"We help advisors gain back control of the capital their business is creating, letting them focus on what truly matters."
"AI is wonderful, but you still need a human to look at it, ensure syntax is right, and the workflow is correct."
"You must always plus the park, just because we have this doesn't mean we can't rebuild it better."
"The future is coming and it's coming for you, just be ready."
"Why would you want to give up when you haven't given yourself a chance to succeed yet?"
Action Steps:
Embrace technology and AI tools: This addresses the challenge of increasing regulatory demands while allowing your team to focus on higher-value activities.
Utilize fractional services: This flexible approach helps advisors manage their resources efficiently, enabling them to scale operations without overextending their budgets.
Focus on continuous improvement: This proactive approach ensures you remain competitive by continually refining processes and services to better meet stakeholder needs.
Develop AI proficiency: By equipping your staff with these capabilities, you prepare them to navigate the evolving landscape and outpace competitors who lag in technological adoption.
Prioritize human oversight with AI: This combination addresses the need for reliable results and mitigates risks associated with fully automated systems, especially in sensitive areas like financial transactions.
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Episode Transcript:
Intro 0:02Â
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.
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Richard Walker 0:16Â
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 Lacey Shrum of Smart Kx, Mark Gatto of CION Investment Group, David Crow of Axos Clearing and Val Vest of Cambridge Investment Research. Today, I'm speaking with Andrew J. Evans, the CEO of Rossby. 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.
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All right, I'm really excited to introduce our guest today. Andrew is the CEO of Rossby. With a solid background in field development and a love of technology, Andrew builds Rossby's advisor experience to never outgrow the industry with the help of the amazing people around him. Prior to Rossby, Andrew served as executive vice president of TAG Advisors and a securities principal of Cambridge Investment Research. Andrew served in various roles with Wadell and Reed, Raymond James and Associates, Merrill Lynch, and Charles Schwab and Company. He has a Master's of Business Administration, a Bachelor of Fine Arts in communications, and actively participates in industry tech events. Andrew, welcome to The Customer Wins.
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Andrew J. Evans 1:51Â
Hi. Thanks for having me, pleasure to be here.
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Richard Walker 1:53Â
Yeah, I'm excited to talk to you today, and for everybody hear your story. So for those who haven't heard this podcast before, I talk with business leaders about what they're doing to help their customers win, how they built and deliver great customer experience and the challenges to growing their own company. Andrew, I'd love to understand your business a little bit better. How does your company help people?
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Andrew J. Evans 2:12Â
So our people, the way we view our customers, our clients, our advisors, which I believe most of the folk who join, who have been on your podcast, really are, the way we help them is to give them more control of their capital spent. And we actually do that in two ways. We have two separate organizations. We have so the Rossby brand covers Rossby Financial, which is an RIA, and then Rossby Office, or as I cleverly call it, our office, because I'm so clever, our office, which is allowing advisors to then pick up excess capacity for handling fractional services, an admin, some PR work, a CFA, things like that. And so those two organizations, that's what we do, is we provide a really great SEC registered RIA that is really just a power company to let you be an IAR.
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And then when you need extra things, I need someone to come in and help me do my cookie mailings at the end of the year, get my RMDs together or redo my workflows inside of wealth box. But I don't need a full-time person. Well, then you come over to our office and you book time, you just book time with someone and get it taken care of. So how that relates back to the capital is that because we've streamlined the RIA, and we've removed all of these extra things that firms tend to put in there, because they say, oh, our advisors want this, this, this and this, but then they never use them, or they use them small. We just pulled that over here and made that as almost like just in time service need. And so then that allows the advisor to look at us, either company, and then gain back control of the capital that their business is creating. That's what we do.
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Richard Walker 4:21Â
All right, that's awesome. I have a bunch of questions around that, but first, I want to also clarify things for anybody who's not in financial services hearing this, RIA, IAR.
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Andrew J. Evans 4:33Â
I'm sorry, jargon, I'm sorry.
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Richard Walker 4:36Â
So registered investment advisory and IAR.
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Andrew J. Evans 4:40Â
Investment Advisor representative. So the RIA is the organization, so that's like, saying, like, that's the university, and then IAR Investment Advisor representative works through the RIA, or this is the student at the university.
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Richard Walker 4:59Â
They're the representative of the RIA firm. Yep, perfect. I just really want to add that clarity, because I know a lot of our listeners know this, obviously, but I keep finding people outside our industry hearing this, and I want them to learn and understand financial services more, because I think it helps our industry overall, too, when more people get what we're doing. So let's go back to the structure of your firm. It sounds like I could bring, if I was an advisor, I could bring my book of business to you, and I wouldn't necessarily have to have a full-time staff, or I wouldn't have to worry about, how do I find a virtual assistant to help me with x, y and z? That's what the R office is doing.
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Andrew J. Evans 5:34Â
Yeah, yeah. So if you need someone, if you need somebody to fill that role for you, now, there's certain things that we do at a baseline to help you take care of your practice, make sure that some data connections are there, but then, when it starts to go above and beyond that, then we say, okay, you could use an admin if you don't have one, and if you don't have one, come over, check out our office. Do whatever you want, but you can come over here and pick from a talent pool now.
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Richard Walker 6:02Â
So how much money does that save an advisor? How streamlined and cost effective is that in your view?
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Andrew J. Evans 6:09Â
So it's quite dramatic. Because when you think about, if you bring on, just talking about picking up somebody on a fractional level, I mean that right there, if you're paying someone for five to 10 hours a week, because a lot of advisors don't necessarily need more than that usually. And so if you're only paying for about five to 10 hours a week, and that person is a freelancer or a contractor, through us, you don't have payroll taxes, you don't have the full cost of benefits. You don't have the burden of a heavy payroll system. So there's all these things that that start to pop up.
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You're like, oh my gosh, that is a lot, and you just have to basically just pick up a few items or maybe buy an extra seat on your Microsoft 365 to give them an email address, or buy an extra seat on wealth box versus, well, geez, I now have a 60,000 burden that I have to deal with. And I'm saying admins or burdens, I'm just looking at from it's a cost structure, because you're exactly so your business, yeah, so you cut down on all those things, and then you're just, you're just paying for what you're using. That's it.
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Richard Walker 7:28Â
I love that. Yeah? I mean, here at Quik! we charge based on usage. For the most part, it's based on how many forms you generate, or how many transactions you incur. Yeah, we do have site license, or to say, user licenses, which may mean some people are more active than others, but I've personally always taken the view that I only want to get paid for the value I can deliver and do deliver. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So in your organization, how do you manage a team? Because I mean that you have people who are A players and B players and C players you want to get off the team. When you're trying to support these advisors and have continuity, what happens there? Do you have these types of problems where you've got to bring in new people and train them and get them on board, et cetera?
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Andrew J. Evans 8:17Â
On the RIA we do because the RIA is different, because that's being over there. Those are our straight employees, easy to follow. They know what they're doing. We need people there that do the baseline work at the our office level, it's a lower amount of people that actually work inside of that business, because it's, it's more of a oh, like I say here. Why that started is, I'm a connector. That's what I could say. And anybody who's watching this that knows me actually a person that I know. She said to me, she goes, you just know everybody, don't you? I tend to know everybody, but I just happen to know them.
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And so that's what that is over there is we just buttoned up this idea of networking as a business to find talented people that can continually do this work, because not everybody is employed forever at a Merrill Lynch or at an LPL, or maybe sometimes there's someone who went away for a few years to raise a family, want to get back in, or someone, hey, I'm really trying to increase or start a para planning only business, and they just need a little help and support. So through our network, we've just coalesced it into a marketplace to allow them to come and market and meet other advisors that need their services. So the actual day in and day out of the business isn't that hard. It's like having a social network in real life and helping people find work.
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Richard Walker 9:59Â
So it's not that you put an office together, put five people in the office and farm them out. It's that you're connecting freelancers and other people from our industry or whatever, through this process to serve your advisors better.
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Andrew J. Evans 10:10Â
Yeah, a lot of companies want to do that, and they said, well, we're building our own virtual service team. Yeah, but now you've just increased your cost and your burden and for you to work efficiently in this that you built, and I'm not saying don't do it. Some people can do it, sure, like whatever. It's a capitalist society. It's free do whatever you want, but I look at it as well, wait a minute, you just hired these five people, and for you to maintain efficiencies. You put them all in one location. You're paying rent on that you paid for all the computers. You're probably putting them on a salary or an hourly wage or something like that, all right. And then they're doing a standard everyday kind of operation. And whoever is now contracting with them, you're probably going to tell them what they have to use. You're probably going to tell them, well, if you're going to work there, you can only use wealth box, and right? If you want to create efficiency, you got to standardize.
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Exactly. So they standardize everything. And guess what? That's you've now limited, dramatically limited the pool of people that you can work with. I just want the direct opposite. And I said, let me give all these talented people a great place to converge and then go meet other advisors that need their service. And a lot of these freelancers already know the different services, and they know the different ways of doing things, and they can easily pivot. And I don't have to worry about giving them a standardized thing. I take care of the agreements, the billing non-disclosure agreements. We do check-ins on both sides. We take care of a compliance oversight to make sure that the broker-dealer that they're working with has an agreement with us that nobody is crossing broker-dealer lines, like we take care of the things that people don't want to because they just want to work.
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Richard Walker 12:00Â
I love all that stuff. No, I love this because I really believe in helping people be do their best work. And that's what you're doing. You're helping the service team do more of what they want to do with great people on your side. You're helping your advisors do what they want to do more by giving this work to these other people.
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Andrew J. Evans 12:16Â
I'm sorry to cut you off, but we look at the it's the three C's. Three C's. It is compliance, complexity, competency. Every advisor needs to have these three, the three C's and compliance is always growing and growing and growing. We're doing. The bane of everybody's existence is some form of BIA and the DOL role, okay, but there's advanced compliance on that. There keeps being more so then you have to have, it's then becoming compliance. The complexity of getting it done, how much data do you have to collect, and how much time is that going to take? And now it's the competency to get it done correctly at all the at all the different levels, from different firm, different firm. So that's where we say if you're failing, not just on the DOL, but any of those, if you're lacking in any of these three, well, don't freak out. Don't go nuts. Don't think, well, geez, maybe I'll get my wife in here to help me out. Or my brother, sister, cousin is going to come in. I'm going to get an intern. Just outsource it. Get them fingerprinted, get a background check, do all that, pick them up for a couple hours and solve one of these for you. Just solve one.
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Richard Walker 13:29Â
I love it. Oh, that's so great, Andrew. Where does technology fit in this, especially with AI tools that are coming out?
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Andrew J. Evans 13:37Â
Oh, okay, so this is fun for me, because I love AI. I love it. I think it's great. I think there's a great analyst, if you read on sub stack, Michael Park, great, great stuff and the AI flywheel. We are in the absolute infancy of it, large language models. We're here. We're not even to the full utility of what AI will eventually do for us. So I love all of it. I love the top to bottom more we could do. It's great. But in those three C's, all right, and we haven't even talked about the cool things that we do at the RIA, this is going to blow your mind, but just those three C's, what you realize is that someone still has to press the buttons. Someone still has to go too quick, type in the stuff, upload it, receive that document, make sure that it got where it needed to go, and then deliver it back to the compliance, offer signature and then track it.
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Did it go through? Right? Did we get the assets over that? So AI can do a lot of like that, pre-filling, and can maybe send it, but there's still going to need to be a human that is watching it, that picks up in an error, that can review it, that can stop it, that can key in stuff we you can't. I've said this before, all that's great. I'm sorry, Rich, I'm starting to ramble again, but AI is wonderful. Can do a lot of those things. But I use the example of, would you fly across the country or an ocean right now, or anywhere in a fully automated plane? No pilot.
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Richard Walker 13:38Â
Oh, boy. I mean, I know a lot of planes are fully automated, and the pilots there just to correct and make sure that something goes wrong, you got to fail-safe. But let's use the car analogy. I am not ready to get into a Waymo, yeah, automated car. I'm just not, like my mother, got into it the other day. She's like, this is fantastic. I don't have to do anything. I'm not ready for that.
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Andrew J. Evans 15:36Â
Yeah, I think a Waymo is like, I love it. I think it's great. But I'm sorry, all that AI is is programmed to understand the variables that has been programmed for, but it hasn't been programmed for infinity of issues, a Waymo, an automatic pilot, whatever it is when it hits a variable that it does not know. It just says, I don't know human take over. Yeah, that's the way it is. So all that being said is that, we really love AI, it could do a lot of good things, but in the end, we still feel that for really any company out there, it's still good to have a human that you can just say, look at that for me. Yeah, need you to look at it. It's probably doing it. It's probably fine, but just check it out. Make sure the syntax is right. Make sure the workflow is correct. I just need a human eyeing it up.
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Richard Walker 16:36Â
So you're actually echoing two things that I've heard throughout this podcast from various people, and I have adopted and believed too. One is that AI is not putting anybody out of business, but people who have AI skills are going to put people who don't out of business, so to speak. And so really, you need a team who knows how to leverage the AI, monitor it, manage it, et cetera, so they can finish the job and do it right. But this also comes back to the second thing, and I'm losing my train of thought here, shoot, I was gonna say it, oh, here it is. AI is empowering people to do better jobs. This is gonna sound crude, but it can take a lower-skilled person to put it into a higher-skilled role, because the AI can do the lower-skilled work and leave the higher-skilled role in place. I mean, think about it, humans are best with intelligence, not with just rote routine.
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So yes, we can turn the screws over and over and over again in the manufacturing line, but our brains are way better than that, so I would rather employ people who look at what you're saying. The AI did all these steps. Is it right? Is it compliant? Did we do the final validation? Does our gut feel good about what we're actually trying to sell to the customer, or help the customer execute on or whatever? And you know what this reminds me of, my past mentor. He passed away, and he was also my partner in financial planning. He had a client send him messages saying, I need the money transferred over. And he was about to do it, and he called the client and found out all of this, all of those messages, which seemed 100% valid, were just a scam. So what happens with AI, if it starts to leak into some kind of scam, you still want the human in the loop, right?
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Andrew J. Evans 18:19Â
Yeah, absolutely, I was at a due diligence last week, and it was great. They had a keynote speaker there talking about AI. And of course, somebody says, this so scary and this and this and this. And I think no matter what, there's always that escalation. Whenever there's new technology, evil people are going to use it for evil intent. I'm sorry, that's, that's how humans are. They're not going to stop it. But when you start to get those messages in and this comes down to, like any firm doing their AML. So I'm sure any compliance officer listening is like, well, my firm won't do that. Well, you have to call the client and confirm and like, okay, fine.
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But you could, what could very well happen, though, is that you could make that call, and I don't think it's now, but that person could basically be deep faked to say yes, transfer that money to this and this and this, but there's cues, and there's understanding, there's the human element that comes in that can ask a question that that bot isn't going to know. It's almost like doing the turning test, the you know, or the from Blade Runner. You're asking all those questions. If for anybody here who saw Blade Runner, the original one. Would they do the questions to see if somebody is a synthetic or not? Yeah, yeah. I think it's scary, but wonderful. I mean, because you can't stop it, the future is coming, and it's coming for you just be ready.
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Richard Walker 19:55Â
Yeah. And really, AI is a tool set again, it's a tool that's highly advanced, and it's getting better. Yeah, it's still up to us to deploy it and use it. So tell me about what you're doing on the AI side. That's so exciting.
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Andrew J. Evans 20:06Â
Okay, so let okay, we'll bridge with AI. So our compliance and surveillance are balance and archiving. We're now running it through archive Intel. So archive Intel, newer ish company, they have a layer of AI over top of the review process, so we can actually of all the 1000s of emails, website, pieces of information, social media, teams or Slack or whatever that's coming in from our firm, as we're doing our reviews, we can ask the model, we can ask our LLM, okay, you prompted. Pull out every email that has such and such or has a connotation or the context is in this or does not have this disclosure written inside of it bop, bop, bop, and it just bang, done like that. Versus, versus all of the older, the older companies that do this where, no, I have to upload words in a spreadsheet that it then has to track, and then I just have to go off of a percentage.
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Most of that percentage is false positives, and then I still have a 1000 emails or text messages that I have to go through line by line, and it just sucks down human time and capital. So, that's a very clear way that we're utilizing AI right now. We tell it what we want, it spits out what we want. We continually test it, though, just to make sure that validate that our language is there, and then that just helps us up really, really, really quickly with our compliance responsibilities. On one that's awesome. Compliance people out there, that's a really fun one, yeah, let's talk about forms Rich.
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Richard Walker 22:00Â
I know, right? I always joke. Why doesn't anybody invite me to speak about forms?
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Andrew J. Evans 22:07Â
You come over just, just come to my house. We'll go. We'll hang out. We'll talk about forms all day. I love
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Richard Walker 22:12Â
Go watch rockets launch off your front porch. It's awesome. It'll be great. It's gonna be great. So I want to ask you a question. If you have measured it, tell me the measurement. But if you have not measured it. What does your gut say that Archive Intel is saving you guys in terms of time and effort?
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Andrew J. Evans 22:26Â
We haven't directly measured it. So I would absolutely say so this is more anecdotal, sure, but the review process we're probably saving, I don't know, maybe like 10, 12 hours a month. That's what I would say. That's great, yeah. I mean, just those 10 or 12 hours, I mean, you know, a day in the morning of things that we have to get done that are also mission critical.
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Richard Walker 22:57Â
Yeah, you've given back somebody a day and a half of their time in the organization.
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Andrew J. Evans 23:01Â
Yes, this past August, I hired a new chief compliance officer, and I turned over that responsibility to her, but then we got the AI. So it's like, well, here you go. You got to do this now, but it's okay, because I now also cut down your time that you have to do it. So it's a nice balance.
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Richard Walker 23:18Â
So this goes back to what you're saying about being in the infancy of AI, you've deployed a tool like Archive Intel that is now saving you time and effort. You're never going to go back, right? You're never going to go back to a less efficient model. You might swap out Archive Intel with a different tool in the future, but you're never going to go backwards in terms of, oh, yeah, I want to put more labor on this. You don't want to do that. And that, to me, is one of the more fascinating things about how AI is affecting us. So I'll give you an example of my product team. We built a customGPT and chatGPT that will create product design specifications for us.
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It follows the format we want. It lays it out. It'll design APIs. It'll do the technical it'll do the business requirements. You of course, have to feed it, but I'm going to give you an example of how effective this is. I met with a consulting company, and I had not built a specification for a project that we want to do. So I recorded the call, and I explained the whole thing to them. I took the transcript of that call, dropped it into our product designer, and boom, it gave us a design, and that design was 90% complete in about five minutes. It was amazing. So I would say stuff like that is saving us 10s of hours of time, and we can't go backwards from that. We've got to keep doing it.
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Andrew J. Evans 24:33Â
Right, right? I don't, I don't know how anybody could look well, I shouldn't say like that. I don't want to be so harsh. But I mean, we all know somebody who is still. There are companies out there that still have said to us, well, you need to fax that to us. And I say, I can't fax you where I am, like, oh, do you not have one? I go, No, I'm in 2024, I can't fax from here. Like, why would I do that? But because like I said, future is moving on. Once we've got this new technology, this new tool, and we learn how to use it, we've adopted it, you can't go back. It's good to know how you got there, because, in case something shuts down, how do you MacGyver it to get something to work. But yeah, why would you never go back? Why go back?
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Richard Walker 25:25Â
So Andrew, I want to ask you, I want to ask you kind of a thoughtful question in this, and I don't know how I would answer this, so it's unfair to even ask it, but that's what makes this fun on a podcast. I think a lot of us start with efficiency in mind, because we don't like the labor of going in, of doing something, or we found a better tool that does it, like this Archive Intel is an example. Or we want better results. But underlying all this, how do you decide strategically, how to improve the experience for your advisors as you make these selections? Is that part of the thinking is that a direct direction you're going in?
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Andrew J. Evans 26:01Â
Yes, 100%. A hallmark, a main mission, you could say it's right on our website, of the RIA, is that we will always, to quote Walt Disney, we will always be plusing the park. You must always plus the park, just because we had this doesn't mean we can't tear it down and rebuild it better. So we always do that. So as we're thinking about things like AI, or thinking about using Quik! in our forms system, we're thinking about it not from the standpoint of, how does that make us look better. It's at the end of the day, how did that improve the life of the IARs and the partner firms that work with us? Did it improve their life? Did it improve their processes? Did it make things easier?
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Did it make it easier for their clients and prospects to do business with them? If that made it easier, then it's going to make our job in the background easier as well. Okay, big umbrella of compliance over top of it. Big umbrella of compliance. But that's how we view it. Is, if we're deciding on this things that we have to do, how do we do it in a way that it's going to be not horribly, not disruptive in a bad way to our advisors. We have to make sure that we're doing it in a way that it's going to help them improve and be better as advisors, providing customer service and so forth. I might have talked in a certain way..
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Richard Walker 27:38Â
No, that's great, because I want to lead this to another level on this, I want to talk about outcome. You're focused on a great experience. What have you experienced in terms of outcomes, growth, revenue, attraction, retention, anything. I'm just curious what you've experienced.
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Andrew J. Evans 27:54Â
Yeah, what we've experienced is that the way that we structured our organization in terms of to always plus the park, to always be a partner for advisors, to be able to provide them the tools that allow them to provide a wonderful client experience, I would think at this stage, all of our advisors have been extraordinarily happy of the true flexibility that they have to utilize their capital for the better of them. One of our advisors in the way that, because of how we're structured and how we do our pricing and how we engage with them, was able to buy an additional office condo in their building that they had been, they've wanted to do it for years, but, You know, pressures of total costs, working at other firms, they just could never quite get over that. I just can't.
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But now, after working with us, they're like, oh my gosh, my capital is freed up. I've wanted to do this so that I can expand. I can now do this without a lot of concern or a lot of pressure on me to now, oh, and I have to go out and sell more. No, no, just straight capital back in your pocket for that advisor to then reinvest them in their business. That's a wonderful way to look at it.
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Richard Walker 29:12Â
Yeah. Are you seeing Rossby grow as a result of it, too? Can you draw a correlation to that effort?
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Andrew J. Evans 29:21Â
I can draw it, but it's fairly it's a small correlation at this point, just because we're not that big yet, we've really only had the engine on for maybe about a year and a half, as best I could say. So we've been doing it for a while, but the engine it's finally warm, but as those stories get out of our advisors joining us, ones going from a large production standpoint, you know, ones that have a lot of advisory assets and things like that. And again. Want to get too jargony. I'm just trying to tighten this up for you. But when they say, Well, my net income, or my taxable income, went from 75% to 95% net. So that's after, for those of you listening, I'm not in this industry. I'll just throw out some industry terms, not after payout basis points, tech fees, ENO, ancillary costs... so, that's all that. Now I have 75. No, no. After all that, I'm at 95 so I'm paying taxes on 95.
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That right there is a huge leap. And what's crazy is that we've had people say, Well, how do you make any money on just what your margin is like? Because back to when we first started talking, is that we, we, we decoupled those two things. The RIA is just an RIA, and it's there to provide access to an SEC registered RIA, give you forms and DocuSign and connect, get selling agreements in place, and give you compliance and books and records. That's what it's there for, to connect you to those things, not to dictate to you. Oh, well, we built this tech stack, and you have to use it, right? That's not what it is. We're a power company. We've generated the power. We've laid all the lines we have the switching stations. We take it right up to your house. What you do with it is up to you.
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You can put in whatever appliances you want. You can put in whatever light bulbs you want. We don't care. Don't call us if a light bulb goes out, but if you're over using the power because you started to use, like, an arc welder or something like that, we're gonna call you and say, hey, that's not right. You can't be doing that. Let's adjust this. Or in our world, hey, you started doing a massive options trading strategy that's triple leveraged. Hold on.
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Richard Walker 31:59Â
Right, right? You still have compliance oversight, Supervisory still needs to be appropriate for what your business is. Yeah, yeah, no, Andrew, this is great. I so appreciate hearing the insights to how you're doing things, and this is not necessarily something I've heard other firms do, so it's pretty exciting and innovative, and I expect you're going to see significant growth because of your focus on customer experience and success.
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Andrew J. Evans 32:23Â
Thank you. I really hope so it's like we're doing magic, or we have any sort of, we don't have the silver bullet. Myself and my partners, we just looked at it more from a pragmatic standpoint of, what are the essential things that have to be done no matter what? Actually essential things that have to be done, no matter what, for advisors and IARs to perform their tasks, their fiduciary responsibility to their clients. And actually, it's not that big. Everything else that everybody starts to list off of I got to do this and this and this, like that's either in the advisor's head or the firm is telling you have to do that, because that's what their policies and procedures say you have to do. And as every compliance person knows, whatever you put in your policies and procedures, you need to make sure that you're following those. So again, everybody's allowed to run their business how they see fit.
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People will, don't fit with us. People will not fit with the RIA. People will not fit with utilizing our office. I know somebody is, I've already had talks with people who are interested, and then they scoff, like, well, I could just hire somebody right now myself. Okay, go ahead. All right. That's fine. But if we were all subject to doing business exactly the same way, then why do we have all of these other different firms out there. And I love analogy, sometimes they hit, sometimes they don't. But if McDonald's was number one, and that's the fast food place and that's it, then why do we have Wendy's and Burger King and five guys and what a burger, in and out.
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Richard Walker 34:08Â
Why do we have 14,000 mutual funds?
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Andrew J. Evans 34:10Â
Why do we have 40? So American funds is fine, just use that. You don't need anything else.
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Richard Walker 34:16Â
My favorite company, that's all I go with. So it's good. So look, I got to wrap this up, and I have another question. But before we get there, what is the best way for people to find you and connect with you?
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Andrew J. Evans 34:26Â
Sure, the best way, obviously, we love it when people come to our website, which is so obviously we have two. We have rossbyfinancial.com for the RIA, and then we have ouroffice.team for our fractional services. So obviously there find me and my team on LinkedIn. Just type in our names. You can type in Andrew J Evans, type in Alexandra Stickleman, Christopher Marcico you'll find us. We seem to pop up and then email address, best way, if somebody just wants to drop a line, please feel free to email me directly at aevans@rossbyfinancial.com or if you just want to do a general check-in setsale@rossbyfinancial.com.
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Richard Walker 35:12Â
Nice, and that's r, o, s, s, b, y, Rossby, all right, cool. So here's my last question I love to ask this, who has had the biggest impact on your leadership style and how you approach your role today?
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Andrew J. Evans 35:27Â
That's such a big question. It's like an amalgamation of people. So I'll, if you don't mind, let me just pick off three real quick. Is that okay? So in my prior life, I have to say, even though I'm not there anymore, certainly working with Greg Rains over at TAG Advisors for as many years as I did, very large impact, very positive in how to engage with advisors, talk to them, and really work with them on an ongoing basis, so that that's there. There's people from my past, my very first manager in this business, Robert Matthews at Raymond James, said something really positive to me when I was really early in my career, and I didn't think things were going right. His very impactful comment was, why would you want to give up when you haven't given yourself a chance to succeed yet?
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That's great, like that. It's really good and really the last one is my Uncle Larry. I mean, when Uncle Larry is in his 80s, he was a Xerox sales guy for years and years and years, a lot of the things that some people listening to this podcast, if they worked at Xerox during its hey days, they're going to know things like the ship training program or entree and things like that, and he was instrumental in the development of those sales processes that Xerox has, and just his overall attitude of the way that he's always approached people, always has a good story, always takes the time, and has always said you need to be smarter than everyone else so that you can understand what they want to accomplish, something like that.
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Richard Walker 37:30Â
Yeah, that's awesome. I really appreciate you sharing that with us. I remember in college, everybody said, if you want to learn sales, go to Xerox. They'll teach you sales. I want to give a huge thank you to Andrew J Evans, CEO of Rossby, for being on this episode of The Customer Wins. Go check out Andrew's website at rossbyfinancial.com 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. Andrew, thank you so much for joining me today.
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Andrew J. Evans 38:04Â
Absolute pleasure. Absolute pleasure. Thanks so much.
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Outro 38:08Â
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