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Malcolm Lui:
Welcome to the High Value Sales Show of Eversprint.com. I'm Malcolm Lui, the Managing Member of Eversprint, and today we're speaking with William McCance, the President and Chairman of TAG Group, a diversified financial services company that owns a broker-dealer, a registered investment advisory firm, and an insurance general agency. Welcome to the show William.

William McCance:
Thank you Malcolm appreciate it.

Malcolm Lui:
William, you grew your company's revenue from $7.1 million in 2014 to $18.8 million in 2017, a 164% increase, and in 2018 you hit around $21 million. Before we talk about how you grew your company so fast, can you briefly share what your company does beyond my quick intro, and how your company differs from the competition?

William McCance:
Sure that may be longer than you. Then you want. We are an independent broker dealer registered investment advisor insurance agency and what that means is there are extremely high barriers of entry for an individual to enter the financial services industry. So if an adviser works for a corporation now a large corporation and they'd like to start their own business the barriers are way too high for them to do that. They have to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission. They have to be appointed as a broker dealer. They're required to keep certain net capital requirements on hand which makes it makes those those barriers for very high to reach. So what we've done is we've created a firm where we provide the regulatory and operational backbone so an individual can go out on their own and advise their clients without having a corporate mandate on them directing them as to what they should do in reference to their investing with their their clients. So we give them true independence. We're beholden to no investment firms no investment products. We want them to be able to do what's in the best interest of their particular client. And so we've created that backbone for us. We have grown quickly by doing what I call blocking and tackling and we think we do that extremely well in our space. We make sure that we provide top notch customer service. I'm an avid reader and there's a great book called raving fans and it is given to every single one of our staff members here. So they realize that we want every single one of our advisors to be willing to refer other advisors to us because it's a very small world. So we've grown most of our business be referrals. And it's been an exciting time. I'm extremely fortunate. I love what I do. And being able to select those that work with us so that I surround myself by intelligent smart valuable individuals makes my life and my quality of life great.

Malcolm Lui:
Yeah that's that's the key right you're going to be around people you like being around

William McCance:
Absolutely

Malcolm Lui:
Now for those who aren't ingrained in the financial services industry can you explain very briefly what each of the three functions or company does insurance General Agency. Pretty straightforward registered investment advisory pretty straightforward. How about the broker dealer

William McCance:
Great. Yeah. The three entities are separated by regulatory bodies. So the first is the registered investment advisor offers money management services for a fee a percentage of the assets that we manage. So an individual gives us two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to manage. We will charge then one in a quarter percent of that sum on a on an annual basis to manage that fund withdrawn from their accounts on a on a quarterly basis. If we do well and we increase the value of their account we get a raise. If we do poorly we get money taken away from us in in reference to what we earn so we are truly aligned with the client the broker dealer is the original model dating back to to when exchanges were founded and that model is a commission based model a transaction based model for every transaction that a client makes with us. They pay a commission which is passed on to their registered representative. And the reason why we have both of these which are sort of opposites of each other in in model is they are better suited to different types of investments. We might have a client as a million dollars invested with us and they come to us and say we'd like our daughter or son to start investing and learning how to invest in the in the markets. It'd be inappropriate to take a small sum of money say 10 15 thousand dollars and put it under a fee for service agreement. So in those instances we'd probably put it into the broker dealer environment where they pay a commission for the transaction. And the odds are there wouldn't be very many transactions because of the time horizon of their client. It just gives us the opportunity to determine what is best for the client to meet their goals and wishes. And so we have all of the different products and types of services available to us. And then the adviser gets to choose which is best aligned with the client's goals needs and wants

Malcolm Lui:
Right. And insurance how does that Fit into

William McCance:
Insert

Malcolm Lui:
The puzzle

William McCance:
It

Malcolm Lui:
Here.

William McCance:
Insurance is probably the least liked but the most important if I have a family and I decide that I would like to save for retirement so that I can retire at age 65 and I'm the breadwinner of that that family even if I'm not the sole breadwinner that family are a major portion of income coming into the family and I start putting aside money for retirement no matter how good the financial adviser is if something happens to my ability to continue to earn money there is no way my spouse is going to make it to retirement because I am not there able to help or where they are not they're able to to help. So insurance is absolutely critical. Risk management is what we call it. It's a more tolerable term and I've been in the business long enough I started in the business in 1983 but in the business long enough now where I've shown up in families houses where a spouse has passed away unexpectedly and delivered a check. There's nothing more powerful than doing that when a family is in distress and all of a sudden they realize their financial needs are going to be met. So it's very very important that we manage the risk of the client and risk are different depending on the age. Young clients have a risk in reference to college funding slightly older clients have a risk to retirement planning clients that have injured retirement have a risk of long term care needs and nursing home wealthy clients have in the state tax risk. So throughout your life your risk changes and we want to be able to make sure that we're there to help handle those risks. That's why we have the third entity in our triangle

Malcolm Lui:
Right now you mentioned something before about how you want to advisors to refer other advisors to you. Now do you see those as your end clients or do you see the end investor the person you are buying your services as your ultimate end client.

William McCance:
That's interesting. We we have two models now all of a sudden. So our initial model which is the independent broker dealer model the adviser is our end client. We rarely speak to the client that is actually funding the accounts. We monitor the accounts to make sure that they're safe. We monitor the accounts to make sure that there's no malfeasance going along. We monitor them and make sure that the investment vehicles that are being put in them are suitable. But in reality it is the advisor that is are our client. We've started a new division of the company recently and it will focus a little bit more on on the end client being the investing public.

Malcolm Lui:
Okay. And what's this new unit

William McCance:
So 2018 came around and as you had kindly mentioned we'd grown significantly. And one day I woke up and said So what do I do with the company. And now that we've gotten to where we are where we are what's the next thing I should do. And I'm a college dropout. I started on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange after my freshman year in college and I've never gone back to school afterwards so I read a tremendous amount and I was reading a book called traction by Gino Wickman. And in that book it said that every senior executive should remove themselves from their environment for between 48 72 hours to allow themselves time to think about the future of their business. So I took this to heart and I had a conference that I needed to go to in Las Vegas that started on a Monday afternoon and I told my wife that I was going to be flying out Friday morning and I was going to sit by the swimming pool and lost in Las Vegas with a yellow pad in my lap from 8:00 a.m. to 8 p.m. for the three days leading up to the conference and in doing that. The first day not much not much happened it wasn't very fruitful by all of a sudden realized on the second day that I was going about my growth thought process backwards. I was trying to create a solution in search of a problem and what I really should do is look at a problem and create a solution for it. And the problem that I discovered is the average age at my firm and in the industry as a whole has risen dramatically in the last 10 to 15 years.

William McCance:
The average age in the industry is 59 and a half years old and the average age of my firm is 61 years old. That means at some point in time there's going to be no one out there to help clients handle handle their their their wealth. So we look at the fact that we wanted to fill that that void. We wanted to fill it for two particular reasons. One older advisors want to retire but their clients still have assets that need to be managed. And I've watched advisers try and sell their practices to other advisors and they get right to the end where they're about to do it and then all of a sudden their paternal instincts kick in and they realize that they don't trust the person that they're selling the business to to treat their clients who have become their friends in the manner that they want to be treated. So we feel that if we recruit young individuals not from the financial services business we train them ourselves with our morals and our ethics and our customer service values and they bring their knowledge of technology and they're useful in this then we will be able to create in individual that an older advisor would be willing to sell their practice to and then using our balance sheet we will purchase these practices and have our new team manage it. It's a really exciting thing. We call it tag 2.0 for no better name. But in the end we are both advisors and clients working with us and it's very exciting for us.

Malcolm Lui:
So then I can. No really I can be selling it to the young individuals that you're hired to really going to be selling into your firm who have a team of young people ready to take over and manage and maintain the relationship with the clients.

William McCance:
Absolutely. That gives them the confidence that one we have the balance sheet to handle the payments and purchasing their their firm to we have the knowledge to manage the assets with these individuals and guide these individuals through whatever issues may come up in the marketplace. The markets are cyclical as you recall we had a great recession back in 2008 2009. Someday we'll have a similar recession that comes in and we hope that our wisdom and our training will help our advisors guide the clients through that time like that

Malcolm Lui:
Right now is their business primarily driven by the investment advisors who then do business through your broker dealer unit. Or is it primarily driven now through the end invest their clients through your registered investment advisory business and your insurance agency business.

William McCance:
Yeah. So most of our business is derived from the advisor the advisors working with the client the client determines they want to make a transaction with with the advisor or the advisor processes that transaction through us. We believe that within the next 36 months that that will transition and the new tag 2.0 unit will become the driver of the firm's revenue

Malcolm Lui:
And in the tag 2.0 units within the registered investment advisory unit

William McCance:
It is. It was soon have access to the two other entities in the Trust Advisory Group. RIAA will be the primary entity and the two other entities will be available to them. So if a client needs to make a transaction and it's the right thing for our client to make a transaction in those entities they'll be able to do it.

Malcolm Lui:
Right. Got it. Now in terms of the drivers of the business over the past four years. Right you grew your business from some point one million in 2014 to around twenty one million in 2018 and you start going into a little bit about the driver that drove the growth. Mitch and blocking and tackling having a focus on customer service. Would that be your number one driver of the business growth

William McCance:
I think it would be I think it goes a little bit farther than than that. I have a very paternalistic look at are our advisors. I know every single advisor that works for the firm we have one hundred and ten advisors. Now I know them all personally I know their names and know their wives names most of them I know their children's names and unlike many firms we believe the technology helps but we believe the technology is not the be all and end all. We believe human interaction is still important. So we want our advisors to call into the firm. We want to talk to them. For the majority of our advisors our customer service and operations team recognizes who they are just by their voice. Before they even start talking we want them to feel a part of our firm even though they're relatively independent in how they operate with our firm. My favorite two days of the year are the two days before Thanksgiving where I pick up the phone and call every single adviser an employee that works at our firm personally and tell them how thankful I am that they work with us. It's a great opportunity for me to express my thanks it's a great opportunity for me to connect with them and it's a great differentiator. No one else in the business has the ability to do that because we're small and we're nimble and because of that we give that family like atmosphere.

Malcolm Lui:
Right now how many advisors and and employees are you calling

William McCance:
It turns out of the head at the end of the day it's one hundred and thirty calls.

Malcolm Lui:
Over each for today's

William McCance:
Yes

Malcolm Lui:
Okay. How are you able to get through to them and connect with them.

William McCance:
Many on my leave voicemails when they call me back. When I first started in the business I I was on the cell side with a firm called Drexel Burnham long bear and I made 250 dials a day every day for two years so that one thing that I'm good at is dialing the telephone

Malcolm Lui:
Net net net IP is a interesting angle. They are asking you talked about you are smiling and dialing. Gosh how long is that. 20 30 years ago with Drexel.

William McCance:
Yes.

Malcolm Lui:
And how is that changed today in terms of getting through to people.

William McCance:
Yeah. It's a completely different environment now you're gaining clients and representatives it really comes from referrals more than anything else. You've got to do not call list. Many people don't know that if you violate the Do Not Call list. It's a five thousand dollar fine. So we don't risk that so we don't do any. What would be called in the past cold calling we derive our clients by doing targeted marketing advertising in particular venues or or using referrals which is why that customer service is so important an individual knows approximately 250 other individuals that are like themselves. If you go to their daughter's wedding daughter or son's wedding or you go to their funeral there'll be 250 people there that look very much like them. If you provide a poor customer service environment for that one person you've lost access to 250 other people. If you create a tremendous customer service environment you just gained access to doing it and 50 other people. That's why customer service is so important

Malcolm Lui:
Right. Definitely. So that's the number one driver. Focus on customer service and on the client relationship. And my client you're talking about relationships with your employees advisors with the end investor as well. Well my driver drivers number two and three for your business

William McCance:
Driver number two and three are our product drivers making sure that we have the right products available to are our and clients and our advisors to to use. We've been a hyper low interest rate environment for the last 10 years since the Federal Reserve went to an almost negative interest rate or a zero percent interest rate in 2000 and an eight. And so we have clients that typically would have been investing in the fixed income market looking for yield out of bonds government bonds corporate bonds. Know but unfortunately those clients could not get the return from those yields that they needed. We would've had millionaires living on cat food because interest rates went from an average interest rate of four and a half percent to an average in trade of 25 basis points or a quarter of 1 percent. So there is an increase in individual with a million dollars was earning forty five thousand dollars a year and all of a sudden they were going to earning twenty five hundred dollars a year. That's not sustainable for them in retirement. So we we needed to make sure that we had vehicles that would provide a slightly higher interest rate. And so we created and partnered with other firms that invested in things such as real estate oil and gas royalty programs bonds in the life settlement market that all provided higher interest rates and they were able to get in the open markets with corporate with corporate bonds that allowed us to meet the needs of our our client which kept are our advisors in good stead with their clients throughout the crisis

Malcolm Lui:
And that's where your broker dealer unit came in handy right. Is your broker dealer was the one that packaged this offer and made it available to the advisors

William McCance:
Absolutely correct. The broker dealer has the ability to enter into selling rooms or be an underwriter. So some products we underwrite ourselves. We've done some work in public storage area where we find land in appropriate places. We have a developer that we raise money for they build the public storage unit they stabilize it by renting it and that provides an income stream to our clients and in the end hopefully a profit for them. When we dispose of public storage unit or we enter into a selling group with a with a large REIT real estate investment trust that throws off a nice a nice dividend for the client.

Malcolm Lui:
Right. So driving them to having the right product for your influencing your advisers. Is there a third driver that we

William McCance:
But

Malcolm Lui:
Should mention

William McCance:
The third driver is more on my side is managing of expenses. We have very low margins on the current side of our our our business. That's how we differentiate ourselves from a major wire house player like the major the major banks. We pay our reps a larger percentage of their revenue so because of that I need to make sure that I keep our cost down. In the home office area and the way I do that is by hiring top notch people and treating those people well in the corporate world. I truly believe that if you get three or four hours of work out of an individual's eight hour day you're doing a pretty good job. My team here they love what they do. They love how they're treated. They love the environment that they're in. And so because of that they put in a good seven seven and a half hours out of every eight hours actually working getting things done. They're extremely efficient and I'm extremely thankful that they work with us because of that efficiency that they provide us which allows us to be profitable in a low margin environment.

Malcolm Lui:
Yeah. Yeah. And I imagine they mentioned doesn't measure your retention rate must be quite high as well.

William McCance:
Our retention rate is very very high both on the advisor side and on the the staff side. We've got staff members that have been here since 1996. Well before I was part of the company I think are we do have some new staff members recently that we've added but the average staff member and Rep I've been with the firm for over 13 years.

Malcolm Lui:
That's a long time. And any any Trinity in the financial services business

William McCance:
Absolutely true. But what's our biggest cost would be an acquisition cost going out and finding new advisors is time consuming. It's financially consuming so it is much better to keep an adviser than to go find a new advisor.

Malcolm Lui:
Yep yep it is costly. How about for 2019. Let's talk a little bit about your plans or maybe go out a bit further because I already mentioned this maybe at your three year plan because I know you mentioned earlier that in the three years TAC 2.0 is going to be the big driver of your business. Are you comfortable sharing and OK if you're you comfortable

William McCance:
No

Malcolm Lui:
Sharing

William McCance:
I'm just I'm completely comfortable with sharing. That's the great thing about America in my opinion one there's very little in the financial services industry that you would consider intellectual property so there's no copyrights. There are still patents involved in it. And in America there's plenty of business for all of us that want to be in the in the business. So I have no problem sharing it. Well we're

Malcolm Lui:
Like

William McCance:
Gonna do is we're going to go hire millennials for lack of a better term. We are going to train them in the financial services industry and we're going to use their youthfulness and their knowledge of technology to marry the two together to come up with a top notch unit that provides financial planning for individuals.

Malcolm Lui:
Right.

William McCance:
The unit will also be mentored by advisors that have been in the business for 20 30 35 years that are looking to monetize their book and business and retire and enjoy the average of their labor that they that they put in. So they'll help us in training these advisors and in turn they will sell the firm the book of business. We will finance that with our balance sheets and the advisors will take over their book of business and they will know the seller personally the seller will know them personally so it'll be a very very very strong trend in transition. I was really really worried that I was going to have trouble finding top quality recruits for our Jack 2.0 initiative and I was so pleasantly surprised John Kenneth. Kenneth Carrigan who is our national director of sales brought in a tremendous number of recruits for us to talk to and I discussed with each of them why us. These were people that were graduating from Harvard Ohio State great top notch schools that were were out there that were also talking to some of the largest and most well-known investment banks in the country.

William McCance:
Why were they talking to little old Trust Advisory Group in Hoover and Massachusetts and what I found out was what was this. Millennials are truly looking for work life balance. They they are not looking for the 80 hour workweek. They want to enjoy the fruits of their labor. They want to work hard when they're working but they want to experience life. And we are very much onboard with that. We think you can do this job in a 40 to 50 hour workweek. We don't want to work them to death and that's the glib rosy glasses have been taken off of the technology sector in the early part of this decade. People will flock to technology and technology companies. And why did they do that. Well they advertised pool tables unlimited fool food boot beanbag chairs basic rules that you could ride. And why did they why did they offer all those things. It seemed pretty neat until you got there and you learned the reason why they offered those things was they never let you go home.

Malcolm Lui:
You have

William McCance:
You had to you had to work 80 to 100 hours a week. People of all of a sudden seen that and are now coming back to two firms like us. They yes we're in the financial services industry but we're not the hated Wall Street. We are the main street of financial services. And so because of that they're very attracted to us and I'm really really excited with our our team that we are bringing on board

Malcolm Lui:
Yep. Now how many advisors do you have now. Or reps. You have now and how many young reps are you planning on hiring.

William McCance:
And so the moment we have one hundred and ten advisors at the at the firm and we are going to start off by hiring a class of five advisors advisors they'll start May 15. Very excited about that. And we have chosen them and they've accepted their offer so it's a great plan moving forward. We'll eventually end up with 10 in this office. But if the model works here which we certainly believe it will the model will work in almost any city in the country. So we have plans in 18 to 24 months to open an office in West Palm Beach in Scottsdale Arizona in Dallas Texas and Chicago and we will replicate what we have done here in each of those cities because they're aging advisers in each of those cities that need someone to take over their book of business

Malcolm Lui:
So you have maybe 20 25 young advisors on board. Is that enough to do the transition. Sounds like you would have more.

William McCance:
We

Malcolm Lui:
More

William McCance:
Over over time will end up with with more I have a max number in in my head which is two hundred and fifty and how did I come up with the number two hundred and fifty. I can't remember more than 250 names. And I want to be able to control our environment and make sure that it it lives in the form that it is now that we

Malcolm Lui:
Right

William McCance:
Act like a family business where everyone knows each other and everyone teach each other with with respect and courtesy and we can do that at 250 we can't do that at a thousand

Malcolm Lui:
Yeah. Definitely be different. So how well do you anticipate your revenue would be in three years once tact 2.0 is up and running.

William McCance:
When I look at it. I've got a target revenue of 50 million dollars is my target revenue in two years and I think we'll see hyper growth because we'll see a lot of advisors that don't even work for our firm looking to sell us their books of business. Well you may not realize is there a lot of advisors out there that are the only person that works for their company. There are some 28 hundred what I call one man bands just on the northeast coast from Washington D.C. up through Maine. If those advisers walk out their door and are hit by a bus there is no one to answer the phone for their clients. So we're going to go and talk to all of those advisers and we're going to two things One if it's the appropriate time for them. We're going to offer to buy their practice and we're going to put them into our transition next where they can meet with our advisors so they can make a very nice handoff from them to us with their clients being completely comfortable in that that that transitions to if they're not ready to sell their book of business or retire at this point in time we're going to enter into a succession plan with them where if something disastrous happens to them and they lose the ability to practice we will step in and take over their practice for them and pay their family their state themselves if they become disabled for for their practice going forward. That way they know that their clients are taking care of no matter what happens and their clients will know that they're taking care of no matter what happens to the adviser because they have a large corporate entity backing it backing it up. We think that's going to be a real driver moving forward.

Malcolm Lui:
Right. So for you to get from twenty one million in 2018 to 50 million in two years. That's your 20 20 20 target I guess I

William McCance:
That's correct.

Malcolm Lui:
Guess. What's the biggest obstacle that you and your team need to overcome to get there.

William McCance:
That's always a good question. The biggest obstacle is getting individuals to decide to sell their practice to us. That's obviously the main driver is picking up these these practices. And it's interesting people who do what we do typically love it. And strangely enough one of the biggest obstacles is a bull market when the market is going well and clients are happy. Even seventy five year old advisors they don't see a need to retire at that point in time because the effort that they need to put into their business is less than that then you might expect because everyone's happy. The second we see a dip in them in the market all of a sudden the interest in selling practice goes up quite dramatically because the bigger business becomes much harder to find opportunities in a recession or a bear market. So if this market continues to move up in the manner that it's moved up over the past past 10 years that will be that will be a tide that we'll be swimming against in trying to convince advisors to sell their business. I know it's strange to to root against a bull market and we're certainly not doing that. We're just recognizing that that is a drag on our ability to purchase these book business and the willingness of advisors to sell their book of business

Malcolm Lui:
Yeah but from a purely business perspective you always want to sell your business is doing well and it's slowing down. Right. As it would be during a recession

William McCance:
You would you would hope so you would hope the people would have that foresight I

Malcolm Lui:
And

William McCance:
Found in this world people have less foresight than you might that you might think

Malcolm Lui:
Well I mean for cider I mean what you do want to sell your business and business is going well currently. Right. You don't want to sell it when you're in the middle of a recession and revenues are falling and clients are not as receptive. That seems to be the worst time to sell

William McCance:
I I tend to agree with you and I will definitely use your comments in my recruiting pitch.

Malcolm Lui:
It.

William McCance:
So thank you.

Malcolm Lui:
Yeah definitely. Happy to do a chat with any of them about that's about from a purely a purely unemotional business valuation perspective. It's all about cash flows and net present value.

William McCance:
No

Malcolm Lui:
So

William McCance:
Question about it. And that's one of the benefits of our tag 2.0 system is we've actually hired an independent third party that specializes in valuing practices. So it's not our word against their word in reference to what their practice is worth. We have a completely independent entity that will come in and value their practice and then we'll have a negotiation from that point. So we all start at a level setting spot

Malcolm Lui:
Yep. Now you mentioned the hardest part is getting the individual practice owners through to consider selling their practice to you or a succession plan. Now I take it it's fairly easy to find these people right there are government registered so they're in the database.

William McCance:
That is that is correct determining who they are is not not the problem. Reaching out to them financial services individuals are bombarded I receive over 700 e-mails a day from product vendors to mutual fund companies to technology companies to fintech companies all trying to sell our firm their their services. So there is a barrage of information flooding individuals and we need to cut through that that noise. We'll do that through the appropriate use of social media something that I know you specialize in Malcolm and getting them to see the opportunity and actually driving them to reach out to us instead of us reaching out to them. That would be the best form of of of contact is them reaching out to us. We'll do some old school. I'm a big proponent of something that was once known as the postcard. And I have determined in my own personal research that it is possible not to read a postcard when it arrives at your your office or your hope. You can't not read what's right in front of you. Your brain automatically reads it. And so we we do a lot of postcard mailing out to potential advisors in this particular space. And then we also do a lot of education. We are opening up a certain amount of the training classes that we will be using with are our new recruits to outside advisors.

William McCance:
Our most recent one will be April 25th and we'll be doing a class on how to transfer assets such as summer homes family assets they've been in families for generations from one generation to the next generation efficiently. It can be a really daunting task for matriarch or patriarch of a family looking at a piece of family property and trying to figure out what's going to happen when I pass on and this is left to my my four children. How is it going to be handled at that point in time. Each of them is in a different space in their life in a different place. How do we make that as as efficient to transfer as possible and make it a wonderful thing versus an albatross around anyone's neck. It's a great training program that we have and so we're going to invite advisers that are potential candidates to sell their practice so they can see the top quality training that the advisors that would be working on their books of business receive so that they're comfortable that their clients are going to be well taken care of if indeed they decide to sell their practice

Malcolm Lui:
Yeah it's a good strategy right. It's a lot of times when they see what's involved with doing the training they think wow that's a lot of work for me to do

William McCance:
Rick

Malcolm Lui:
This myself. I

William McCance:
And

Malcolm Lui:
Don't have time for that.

William McCance:
That's right. It is a lot of work but for me it's it's it's fun work here. This is this is about about giving back. The industry has done so much for me individually at the age of 19 showed up on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange as a summer job and is now the president of the 21 million dollar revenue business. That happened because good people were willing to take a chance on me and give me a break. And now I have the ability to turn around and give back and do the same thing for some young people so I'm really excited about it.

Malcolm Lui:
Yeah and that's a very cool how you identified the the gap right. It just from the demographics of who is are working for you today. You see what's gonna be happening in the next 10 years. People are going to be winding things down one way or the other

William McCance:
We also have 23 to 30 trillion dollars that's going to move from one generation to the next generation. And this new generation doesn't want to work with their fathers gray haired adviser. They want to work with someone who is like Zapp who understands the way they think understands their goals and their wishes and will interact with them in the manner that they want to be interacted with. They want to text more than they want to call. They want to face time versus more than they want to sit in the meeting. They want to experience life vs. mow lawns. So by bringing this young group of advisers in we're preparing ourselves for that transition from one generation to the next generation of a tremendous amount of wealth. And we'll be prepared to accept it in the manner that the next generation wants to be dealt with.

Malcolm Lui:
Yes definitely. And then like you said the 250 people you know are are people similar to you right. That extends beyond just their personal friends. Also the ones you want to work with.

William McCance:
No question about

Malcolm Lui:
Last question. Three last questions for you William. If you were to have a billboard on the freeway Advertising your firm or maybe one of the three units a media firm as a whole what would your billboard message be. And keep in mind most people only have six seconds before they drive by billboards. Your message has been usually pretty short and to the point

William McCance:
No. No question about it. And we we put some thought into this as we as we as we built our our practice. So I believe that the that the message really would be we're different we want to interact with you as you want to be interacted with. Come work with Tag 2.0 where new technology marries old fashioned customer service and values.

Malcolm Lui:
Right.

William McCance:
Very simple

Malcolm Lui:
Yep. And before I get to my final two questions for you I forgot there's one other question I wanted to ask you. I took a look at your era web presence from a paper click and SDL perspective and not seeing much of that on either side. Not much at paper click activity doesn't look like you've been really working hard to build out your SDL traffic. What's your thoughts there

William McCance:
I know that's a tremendous point and is changing quickly. We are about to put a major initiative in on CEO. We've redesigned our are our Web site to the tag 2.0 initiative. That's one of the problems that we have is we're now servicing a bunch of different groups so how do you package it. How do you messages what web websites do you have for it. And I didn't want to do a whole lot of FCO until the backend was ready for it. You don't want to put up an ad at the Super Bowl and not have enough phone lines to take the calls that are coming in because that's an expensive mistake to make. So

Malcolm Lui:
Yep.

William McCance:
We are about to launch a major FCO initiative. This interview is gonna be part of that which is why we're doing it in a digital format with highly respected individuals such as yourself.

Malcolm Lui:
And how about the paperclip side

William McCance:
The paperwork side we are doing a little bit of we haven't I haven't gone out yet. We believe that the pay for click side is probably geared more to the end client and we're still in a recruiting phase so we'll start entering the paperclip market in August of 2019 and we will start doing paper quick on words such as inheritance advisor advisor technology things of that sort that we think clients might be out there searching on so that and we'll start to see banner ads at that point in time in select markets and select areas. We believe that we'll be highlighting on the end client sites. We'll be highlighting the next generation the generation that's inheriting that twenty three to 30 trillion knowledge. And we believe we should be advertising in the same type of places as RCI and Nike and outdoor world and individuals like that. That's where we'll be pretty billboard ads and our paper click resources

Malcolm Lui:
Yeah. Makes sense. I go where your market is.

William McCance:
Absolutely

Malcolm Lui:
All right. So that the last question for you. Who are your ideal clients either as a whole for tag group or individually for your three business units or maybe for now. You think about 2.0 tag 2.0 and what's the best way for them to contact your firm.

William McCance:
Great. So number one. Ah ah ah perfect client is an advisor that cares more about their client's needs than they do their own. And that's the way we operate. We put the client first. We put the advisors second and we put the firm third. So as long as an advisor has an alignment similar to that in reference to the way they work with their clients I think they fit in beautifully with us. Our client is anyone who wants to be treated as a person who doesn't want to be. I have two daughters and they love to use the term mansplaining while in our industry we have what I call investments. We want to talk to our clients in English. We don't want to talk to them in in the investment ease where they don't understand what we're saying and we're proving that we're smarter than they are. We're not smarter than they are. We just happen to work harder in our particular field than they want to work in that particular field. So anyone who's looking for a top quality asset management. I think we're a great place for for that. And then young people who are looking to build wealth who want to interact with a team that understands their goals their experience ways and is willing to interact with them in the manner that they interact with. So those are three target ways. And then in reaching us I can be reached at WDW. Excuse me I can be reached at W M C C A N C E at THG dash a G E F dot com. That's my email address. Please feel free to reach out to me or the old fashioned method of the telephone which is 7 8 1 9 3 3 6 1 0 0

Malcolm Lui:
All right. And I suppose contacting you or your team by your Web site works just as well.

William McCance:
Absolutely.

Malcolm Lui:
Right now a new web address is just the ending part of your e-mail address as well right.

William McCance:
I'm actually

Malcolm Lui:
Give it

William McCance:
I would I would direct them to a stronger email address which would be tag group recruiting dot.

Malcolm Lui:
All right. Awesome. William It's been great having you on my show today. I really enjoyed hearing how you grew your company so fast. And how you will be growing it so fast and next year

William McCance:
I've enjoyed it. Malcolm and I look forward to coming back sometime in the in the future and giving you an update. I hope you and those that are listening to your podcast can see how passionate I am about the business and how passionate our company is about be successful and being a great steward to individuals assets in this industry.

Malcolm Lui:
Yeah I'm pretty sure that came across loud and clear there in our conversation today. No doubt about that.

William McCance:
Great. Thank you so much.

Malcolm Lui:
We've been speaking with William McCance, the President and Chairman of TAG Group, about his company's rapid growth. For interviews with other fast growing, high value sales companies, or to learn how we can accelerate your firm's high value sales through automation, visit Eversprint.com.

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