Top BDs in Conversation (w/ Bill Williams, EVP at Ameriprise)

No, no problem. Thanks, I appreciate you taking the time to have me on, and congratulations on your success with 3x Equity. Let me just share that I have been at the company for 32 years, and I think that some of those myths out there are grounded in historical reality. The reality was in the 80s and 90s we did have product that we manufactured and our advisors brought to their clients. The reality was back then, 25 years ago, we were hiring people right out of college to build their books. The issue however is that that legacy is still following us today, and it has not been true for at least a decade. So when you look at the makeup of the average advisor book that we have at Ameriprise, very, very small percentage of the revenue is coming from product that's specific to Ameriprise in our manufacturing side of things. When you look at who we hire, we've hired three thousand successful advisors in the last decade from other companies that already have books. We stopped hiring people from scratch to start their own book from scratch. Now we'll hire novices in, but they join teams like practices out there to start as salaried individuals. But Ameriprise is not hiring somebody to build their own book anymore. And the retention rate is exceptionally high, and you're absolutely right, the one thing that's not a myth is when we bring over these advisors from other firms, they're coming over and going, 'Oh my god, the technology is great. Oh my god, I get great support here. Oh my god, the environment's totally different than I thought. Oh my god, I have total product choice on what I can sell. I have a bunch of annuities I can sell.' They're like, 'I never knew this until I got here.' And so the thing I'd love to figure out how to do, and you're helping me do it right now, is dispel the myths that are out there. They're grounded in old history, but people have not updated their view of Ameriprise. And that's what I've got to change.

Yeah, I think that's a really powerful question. Let me start with the different channels that we have first just to make sure everybody understands. So we've got 10,000 advisors spread across four different channels. The biggest channel we have is the one I run, which is the independent advisor channel. We have 8,000 of our 10,000 advisors are independent advisors. And then we've got about 1,800 that are in our wire house or our employee channel, where we have the branches, we have the support in those branches very similar to like a Merrill Lynch or Morgan Stanley or things like that. We have an in-house group of advisors with about 180 advisors, and then we have a new branch that we bought a couple of years ago that works exclusively in banks, called our Financial Institutions Group. Now why I like this – and you may ask this question later – but why is this good that we have multiple models? We give advisors choice on how they want to operate. Do they want to be an employee? Do they want to be an independent contractor? Do they want to operate in a bank? How do you want to run your book? You get the choice at Ameriprise to move between the channels based on what you're looking for. Do you want our health insurance? Fine, we have health insurance through our employee channel. Do you want more support? Employee channel, great. Do you want to be independent on your equity? Great. So we have all of those choices within that model. The overarching culture though that really defines Ameriprise is we care a lot about helping an advisor have the best possible relationship with clients through technology, through service, through our insights of investment advice. And we want to surround the advisor with everything they need to deliver the best possible experience for clients. And we have a very caring culture. We have a lot of leaders who will reach out and know the advisors personally to help them grow. And so I'd say it's care and value for the client and for the advisor.

Yeah, I think in order to answer that question I've got to go back in time a little bit. So I started as an advisor in 1988, grew my practice into a top one percent practice. I then moved it independent and built a team around me, and so I had a fairly large top one percent independent practice when I was running it early in my career. And then I ended up selling the book to other advisors and moving into leadership. And when I moved into leadership, I had this vision that if I could have removed all of the things that irritated me – all the things that when I was running my own practice that stood in my way of bringing on new clients, of seeing clients, of giving advice, of doing more financial planning, of picking up more revenue – if I could figure out how to systematize all those things and bring it back to the advisors, I would do a good job as a leader. And so that's what I was trying to do was make that list. I made a list of technology that was bothering me. I had to go out and buy my own laptops and my desktops, and I had to figure out my own software at the time. I had to figure out who to hire and how to train them. I need to figure out how to market myself and get it approved through our marketing group. I had to figure out how to process business and set up the systems for processing business. I had to do all of that on my own, and it held me back from doing more business. So now at Ameriprise, now that I've been in this leadership role for over 20 years, what I've tried to do is build out not only all of those systems: how do I help an independent business owner hire staff and develop staff? How do I help build the technology that's super easy to use, very reliable, and makes you more efficient? How do I turn key marketing ideas to make it easy for you to operate? I've done all of those things to allow an advisor to do what they do best, which is get new clients, see clients, and serve the needs of their clients over time and grow the business. That's why our advisors grow better than anywhere else, because we put all those resources backed against our independent advisors and unleashing their potential. That's what I'm trying to do every single day. Are we perfect? No. Do I want to make improvements every day? Yes. And we'll keep grinding. The other thing you alluded to is I put leaders on the ground in all the zip codes out there. So we try to meet with our advisors, understand their goals, build a business plan with them, and then bring the company resources to them based on what they need. It's all built into the model. It's not a bunch of ad hoc pricing that's in addition. Like if you go to some of these other firms, they go, 'Yeah, you can have access to business planning but you got to pay for it. Oh, you can have access to this code but you got to pay for it.' It's all these nickel-and-dime stuff. I've tried to build it into the model so you get the support as part of the model.

Yeah, I guess you called me a bit of an adrenaline junkie with the marathons, and I do – I've certified skydiving, scuba dive, I love downhill ski, I love to do all that stuff. Yeah, my wife has a lot of insurance on me, Jeff. So yeah, understood. But yeah, Quantum Leap is just one example. So I looked at our top one percent of our advisors, and I knew that they each did something really unique in their practice to make them a top one percent. So we've got 155 or so at that top 1%, and I was trying to figure out how do I get them together in small groups so they could each take one thing from each other that would make them better. So if you take the best thing from each of 10 people and you implement it – one person does financial planning great, charges a premium for it; another person manages assets great; another person does client acquisition terrific; another person hires staff and develops staff around them – if I could bring them together and share what I knew about running a really big business and being a CEO, and they brought what they did in operating their business to the table, and we did round robins to keep sharing and drive each other for execution, and we set big goals together like 20% compounded growth a year – could we get a better lift? And we have. So over 60% of my top 1%, or about 65 practices, join us on a four times a year basis to share best practices and figure out how we grow together, and I help lead that. That's an example of it. But at the next level down, from the $1 million to $2.5 million group, which is about a thousand of those at Ameriprise, about 70 of those are involved in what we call Elite Growth Forums, where leaders who report to me – I've trained them like Quantum Leap – to pull those groups together to learn together. And then there's other groups for other advisors called Focus Groups, where we take a subject like marketing or financial planning or net flows, and we go and attack solving that problem in their practice with a coach from home office and a coach in the field. So those are examples, and I can keep going on and on. There's many opportunities to get together and learn from other advisors how to grow and coaches that know how to do it the best.

I think that's a great question, one I get all the time, I'm sure it's one that you get in the recruiting world. This is a set of trade-offs, right? And I've been around, and I'm in my mid-50s. I don't know how old you are, you look younger than me, so you're probably in your 50s.

I'm just saying you look great for being around a long time. Yeah, but you know, I look at it and I go, in all the decisions I've made that are really important in my life, whether it's like buying a house or sending my kids to college or picking the right firm to associate with, I've discovered over time that you end up in life getting what you pay for, and you get out of it what you put into it. Those are two principles that have never failed me, right? And so yeah, Ameriprise might have some slightly different economics on the surface, and people will look at like an admin fee differential or a payout rate differential. I can tell you we're very competitive, and you should dig under the covers on some of those things. My focus is on can I help you grow your top-line revenue faster and better? Can I help you build your equity more effectively at a higher multiple? Can I get greater take-home pay for you? So even though your payout rate might be slightly different, if you don't have to hire as many staff people, if your tech costs you less, if it costs you less to have compliance, then your take-home pay will be more, and the wealth of your family over time will grow faster. So I'm not trying to compete to be the lowest cost provider out there. I don't want to be the Costco of financial services. But I will be very fair in those numbers, and I invite anybody to come in and at least learn, be really smart about learning side by side, because headline rates on things like admin fees don't tell the whole story. Who pays the ticket charge? Are you passing it on to the client or is it you? Is it built in? Are there additional services? Because I think you get what you pay for. So at Ameriprise, we have a hundred CFAs behind the scenes helping our investment advisors deliver better alpha, and that's built into our model automatically. We have the best technology for making trades. It's very, very easy to set up accounts and transfer money between accounts. The technology is award-winning. The marketing is award-winning. And so what you find is you get a better top-line revenue growth, you get more clients in the door. There might be some difference in economics on the surface, but when you dig down, you're going to take home more and your equity will be more. And so smart business owners take the time to come talk to us and do a side by side. When the numbers all filter through the spreadsheets, that's when the real numbers should be discovered.

Listen, Jeff, I think the reason I've been successful for 32 years and built out a pretty good business model here is I'm never really satisfied. So if you look at our results, our advisors get a lot of new clients, and they get a lot of new clients because we have a pretty good system for helping them get new clients. But I think we can even do more in the social media space and in the technology to help somebody truly tell their story. Even though advisors would say – and if you look at J.D. Power they rate us number one in marketing for advisors – I'm telling you, I think we can even do more. The other thing that I look at is could we use our data and artificial intelligence to feed information to advisors that they prepare for service meetings, to be even faster at preparing for those service meetings with more ideas to help the client achieve their dreams and goals. It's all on the shoulders of many advisors today to figure all that out within their team. I think Ameriprise can use technology to help prepare those meetings in a better way. I've got prototypes right now that are doing that and testing it, and the advisors are loving it. I just have to help all advisors to take advantage of it. Those are a couple of things in my head. I'm never satisfied. I'm always trying to take what is good and make it great.

Yeah, there's about 70 that are on the top 1200, and in the top 100 we've got three really big teams, and a couple of them are going to do pretty close to 20 million in production. So we've got some really big growing teams that manage billions upon billions of dollars, and they're thriving. And we're helping to partner with them with the technology, with the hiring of staff, with the practice acquisitions outside the firm, and they continue to do a great job for their clients and grow quite well. So I'm very, very proud of how far we've come.

Thanks, Jeff. Appreciate it.