Scaling Smart: Aligning Growth With Infrastructure

Wealth Management Growth Acquisition Considerations

Adapting your infrastructure while managing your firm’s growth can present unique challenges. Listen to this week’s Oyster Stew Podcast as Oyster Consulting experts Ed Wegener, Brent Nicks and Pete McAteer as they share their insights for scaling and sustaining growth.

In this podcast you will:

• Gain firsthand insights into the complexities of rapid organic and inorganic expansion
• Examine the significance of understanding your firm’s core strengths and growth goals, alongside the importance of a detailed due diligence checklist
• Learn the importance of setting realistic expectations and managing the pace of acquisitions for seamless integration
• Discover the value of a cohesive platform and the strategic importance of evaluating and upgrading your tech stack regularly
• Understand the pivotal role played by key personnel like Chief Operations Officers and Compliance Officers in the onboarding process
• Understand the importance of continual evaluation and adaptation, ensuring your firm’s growth is sustainable and aligned with its core mission and values

This segment is all about balancing synergies and differences to effectively manage risks and integrate new practices, ensuring your firm’s long-term success. Don’t miss these invaluable insights to help your firm thrive without compromising on operational efficiency and compliance.

Sustainable Growth Strategies and Considerations

In today’s fast-paced industry, growth stems from strategic planning, digital transformation, and adaptable business models. Creating a scalable business for growth and then effectively managing that optimized business doesn’t happen overnight. When firms expand, they often lack standard processes and governance structure, offering exceptions for special clients and employees.  As your firm grows, it is vital that you have a plan in place to optimize your systems and behavior for efficiency, revenue growth and to minimize risk.

Additional Growth Strategy Resources

Exploring Business Models for Peak Profitability

From Legacy Systems to Leading Edge: A conversation with Envestnet’s Andrew Stavaridis

Is Your Clearing Firm Helping You Grow?

Scaling Your Business for Growth

Oyster Consulting’s team of industry experts has helped firms like yours align strategy with growth objectives to overcome these common challenges:

• Digital Transformation: Finding, evaluating, integrating and adopting new technologies into your business operations.
• Operational Efficiency: Enhancing business processes, reducing costs, and improving overall operational performance.
• Governance and Financial Structure: Optimizing organizational structure and improving financial health.
• Employee and Client Retention: Optimizing operational systems to enhance satisfaction, reduce turnover, and foster long-term loyalty.

Our integration experts have run and collaborated on some of the largest mergers and acquisitions in the industry’s history. At Oyster Consulting, we partner with you to define who you are and where you’re going. We’ll support your firm’s success through strategic consulting, advanced analytics, and robust planning.

Transcript

Transcript provided by TEMI

Bob Mooney:  Welcome to the Oyster Stew podcast. I’m Bob Mooney, General Counsel for Oyster Consulting. Adapting your infrastructure while managing your firm’s growth can present unique challenges. Join Oyster’s Ed Wegener, Brent Nicks and Pete McAteer as they share their insights for sustaining growth. In this podcast, you will: gain firsthand insights into the complexities of rapid, organic and inorganic expansion; learn why due diligence and strategic planning are paramount; learn how to mitigate risk when onboarding new representatives and products ,and by aligning with the right custodians and clearing firms; and, discover the value of a well-integrated tech stack and the power of proactive planning and transparent communication and easy transitions. Let’s get started – Ed?

Ed Wegener:  Well, thank you and hello everyone. I’m Ed Wegener, head of Governance, Risk and Compliance at Oyster Consulting. We’ve been working with a number of clients recently who have been grappling with the challenges that come with rapid growth and expansion, and, while you might think that rapid growth is definitely a good problem to have, it can put significant strains on a firm’s infrastructure and can cause problems for firms in the long run. So, it’s important, as you grow, to consider looking at your infrastructure and growing your infrastructure along with growing your business, or, at a minimum, take pauses at intervals and ask, “can our infrastructure sustain our current and expected level of growth?”

So today we want to talk about what we’ve been seeing in this space, the impact that this can have on growing firms, what firms should be thinking about, and how we can help and how we’ve helped our clients that have been dealing with these issues.

I’m really pleased to have two of Oyster’s experts with me to talk about their experiences working with clients in this area. From our Governance, Risk and Compliance practice we have Brent Nicks. Brent has worked in senior level compliance roles at firms that have dealt with issues such as these, as well as experience working as a consultant with clients that are grappling with these issues. Also, with us today we have Pete McAteer from our Strategic Planning and Execution practice. Pete has worked with a number of clients that have been dealing with issues that growth has had on areas such as governance, operations, processes and technology, and we’re really lucky to have both here today to talk about what they’ve been seeing in this space and how they’ve been helping clients navigate these tricky issues. Why don’t we start off by setting the stage? What have we seen firms going through as they’ve been growing their businesses, both organically and through acquisition, and how do firms identify that this might be an issue? Why don’t we start with you, Pete?

Pete McAteer:  Sure. Thanks, Ed. It is good to be here. Thanks for having me.

When I think of growth, I think of organic being, I’ll define it just a little bit as market-driven, with the assets appreciating. That’s one thing. Also, you have development of junior advisors and expanding existing practices with succession planning, adding financial planning services and other things, and additional recruiting of advisors. Inorganic growth is, you know, is the big chunk integrations, acquisitions, joint ventures, and often with those there are distinct challenges there.

When you talk about people processing technology, that’s where you kind of just always start and kind of work your way down. But on the people side, do you have the expertise, do you have the number of people? Do you have the bodies that you need to handle the work? And I’m talking about from a compliance perspective, from a supervision perspective and from operational support and services model.

From a process perspective, can your current processes and workflows handle the volumes of the growth, no matter how it comes to you? Sometimes, on the expertise side, I think about supervision and acquisitions mostly is when you bring on either a new recruit, maybe that’s through your organic growth model, but mostly with acquisitions you’re bringing on firms that may have different books of business and different product sets, unique products – let’s say alts, let’s say options.

Maybe it’s something that’s just outside of the framework of your current business model. Those things have to be thought of and addressed pretty quickly in that process to prepare for a seamless transition. And sometimes, and I’ll mention this too – sometimes, if you’re a broker-dealer, an introducing broker-dealer, you may even need to modify your (FINRA) membership application. So that’s also something to think about and that’s a fairly long pull. It can be eight to 10 months to get that process done. On the infrastructure side, just thinking about systems and platform – your process efficiencies, your data – to ensure that all the data feeds that you can bring in can automate some of your processes and make things more efficient for your supervision and compliance and surveillance teams. I think that’s important to think about as well.

Ed Wegener:  Those are excellent points, Pete. These are things that can be especially felt in the compliance area. Brent, what have you seen in this phase?

Brent Nicks:  Thanks, Ed, I wanted to add a couple of quick bullets to the excellent points that Pete just made. One of the things is understanding what your growth expectations were going to be, so that you can measure to that, whether it be quarterly, semiannual, annually. But understanding, are you ahead of the curve? And if you had already considered what your support service, compliance, supervision, what you may have needed to support that growth projection.  If you’re to use a football term kicking over your coverage, do you need to accelerate? What, additionally, do you need to bring in to support that, whether it’s operational, whether it’s compliance, whether it’s supervision; and from an acquisition side, super important to remember that you control the spigot on that. 

You can develop your own growth path. I lived through this as the CCO and director at the firm that I was previously with, which was an aggregator firm, an acquisition firm that transitioned those acquired DBAs and teams into a growth support model where we then figured where they needed additional horsepower to continue their own success. But as you’re bringing that in, if you have good processes, good technology, good people, you’re defining yourself as what we used to refer to as a destination firm, and if you have created that culture and that environment, then you can control the infusion environment, then you can control the infusion, the inclusion of those new teams into your firm, which means you can set your growth expectations.

Everybody doesn’t get to come to the front of the line. You don’t necessarily have to take them on their schedule, but you can be more orderly, which allows you the ability to be more measured in your due diligence and some of your undertakings and understanding what you’re bringing in. So, I think it’s super important to know that as the firm, you do control some aspects of that. You can do some of that.

For the development is that technology Pete brought that up a second ago, I’m a longtime Jeep owner and I tinker. Jeeps are well-designed for changing and advancing and taking off parts, putting on parts.  Your business, as you build, you grow as you acquire, you should consider it the same way. The technology that you were using two years ago may not work anymore. Do you need to decouple it and bolt on something that better meets your needs at this time?

And the only way that you’re going to be able to understand that is, and one of the projects that I was responsible for was (we call it a baseline of KPIs) understanding what your firm’s baseline is, from your support model, your supervision, your compliance structure. Understanding your current soft spot so that, as you acquire, you know where those stresses are going to occur and, as you’re creating those performance indicators, understand them from different aspects. If we add so many reps, what does it mean? What does it mean If we add so many accounts? What does it mean for assets or additional product offerings? They all bring in a different stressor to the system. But if you understand what you’re good at, where you may need to increase your ability or capacity, then you’ll be able to stay ahead of that curve and increase your ability or capacity.  Then you’ll be able to stay ahead of that curve.

Pete McAteer:  Yeah, and let me just add, you made a couple of really great points there, Brent. But one key one is monitoring those KPIs, monitoring your service level agreements or your SLAs, to ensure that the additional volumes aren’t poking through those controls, those control limits. And also the communication around those service level agreements is super, super important. But those will also help be, I think, to use one of Ed’s terms, a canary in a coal mine. It will actually allow you to have a leading indicator that will tell you that things are starting to get stressed and that you need to really look at certain processes that are being stretched to the limit.

Ed Wegener:  So, we’ve identified the types of things that firms should be thinking about and planning for. Maybe we can stick with you, Brent, in terms of the acquisition phase. What should firms be considering as they’re going through a specific acquisition, from a compliance standpoint? And then, Pete, we’ll turn it over to you from an operational standpoint.

Brent Nicks:  Again, going back to my experiences working with this, I can tell you there were a lot of broken eggs along the way as we developed our not only firm level, but rep level onboarding processes, and understanding what we were potentially agreeing to ingest. I think one of the most important things that you can do in those discussions, I think this is where a lot of firms maybe miss a bit of an opportunity, is ensuring that you have Business Development, you have business leads and senior management into the firm that are driving those growth objectives, involving key personnel in the areas that are going to when the baton is handed off.

When those individuals are in the firm, they’re going to need to know your Chief Operations Officer, your Chief Compliance Officer, the head of the Supervision efforts, maybe your Marketing Director.  Those individuals should really be considered subject matter experts during that onboarding process, particularly for a firm that may be acquiring distinct practices where they’re all coming in maybe with a little nuance, or doing things a bit differently from group to group, sticking with the acquisition model.

But if the awareness among the senior management and the support lines are involved during the onboarding process, a lot of the problem points can be brought up early on. Those individuals are going to see those more clearly and easier, I think, than just the Business Development people. That’s not a hack, but it’s the stuff they live every day. They know if it’s a new product line. They know if a custodian is going to have a problem when they are looking through the book, as the book download comes over and we know we have problematic positions that maybe a custodian can’t deal with. Your operational people are going to see that where the business heads may not. So, it makes the process more seamless, makes the acquisition smoother, faster, also increases your growth strategy.

If you can get through an acquisition in a more streamlined fashion, but you’re able to create those efficiencies in those processes, then that gives you the time to do the things that many acquiring firms wouldn’t even grade themselves as an A in regards to completing due diligence. Whether that’s on the reputation of the firm that they’re acquiring – what does the background look like of the reps that they’re bringing on board? Are they bringing on additional risk? Has it changed their risk profile? Are there going to be reps that they’re spending a lot of time on simply because of who that rep is? Whether that be by book of business, structure, disclosure, backgrounds, all those things that the Compliance department, those in Supervision, others, if they’re aware of on the front end, they can identify those stressors. They can identify those issues for you before you’re behind the eight ball on those, particularly with product lines in a growing firm, those lines are going to add on top.

You have what you did well today, but six months later groups are moving into new areas. You’ve got diligence efforts for those as well, and that adds time to the acquisition, and could potentially slow down growth. So, think about do you have the people in place to support new business lines, to investigate new business lines? And if you’re identifying them early in the onboarding process, then you can make sure that you either have the pieces or you’ve acquired the expertise to be able to support what you’ve agreed to. I think that’s super important because with each acquisition or as growth occurs, business leaders very often are agreeing to things with or services or products, sometimes in advance of the full diligence process. I think it’s important to know what promises have been made to as teams are coming on board. In particular, have we agreed that we’re acquiring new tech? Or do we have technology to support what we’ve agreed to and have to go find that tech?

I used to say all the time, all the time, every CEO I’ve ever worked for, it’s the one-offs and the exceptions, the thing in the dark corner that’s going to end up getting you. It’s not the 99% of the things that we do each and every day. It’s that 1% of things that we agreed to two years ago, honestly, that we forgot about. It’s usually the thing that bubbles back up.

Lastly, I’ll say this the most important piece of this, I think, for growth – define the firm. What is it that we do? What are we recruiting to? I think often a lot of firms, and I love analogies, but go at it like hungry, hungry hippos. They go at it and then at the end they look and see what they got. Well, if you understand what you’re good at, you’ve defined your firm and you have a message, a story, then you’re going to recruit to that story and what you’re bringing in is going to be much less problematic. And you’re going to have fewer one-offs, fewer dark corners that you have to deal with.

Ed Wegener:  Thanks, Brent, and these are all things that it’s really important to know and plan for in advance, so that you’re not dealing with them after the acquisition has been made. And I’m sure it’s very similar on the operational side, Pete, but what else should firms be thinking about during the acquisition process?

Pete McAteer:  Based on your experience, I agree with everything that Brent said and what you’ve said, Ed. One thing I would suggest, and it’s very difficult sometimes to get all those subject matter experts and the functional experts in your organization to be heavily engaged in the M&A process, But clueing them in or bringing them in at the right time is always the trick.  And I agree with building those relationships and having those deeper discussions. But, something else that I would consider doing if you haven’t already, is a detailed due diligence checklist of items – be exhaustive about it, be detailed, be super detailed, the whole kitchen sink in the due diligence checklist, just to help smoke out some of those exceptions, what things don’t fit. I couldn’t agree more with what Brent said about defining who you are as a firm – what’s your wheelhouse? Define that, make sure everybody’s crystal clear on that, so you can find those synergies. But, oftentimes in the M&A process, you focus on those synergies, you focus on how alike you are, but tend to neglect the differences and say, oh, we’ll fix that, or we’ll deal with that. But the sooner you know about those differences, the better off you’ll be to get on top of those or find out alternative means to manage those assets or those practices.

For that matter, along with the efficiencies around managing increased volume, around increased product diversity, just little things like selling agreements, mutual funds; you’re bringing those over in kind. You know your advisors get very comfortable with certain fund companies and certain products, whether it’s annuities or mutual funds or other package products. Just make sure that you’re prepared for those as well. You don’t want any surprises. With your custodians and your clearing firms, ensure those are already accepted on the platforms and properly supported; you don’t want those surprises.

As far as the ongoing, continuing process improvement around your due diligence efforts, that checklist should be a living, breathing document for every one of your M&A activities, for every one of your acquisitions, or every one of your just recruiting efforts.  It may not even result in an acquisition. That should inform that process, and centralizing that data so that all the key subject matter experts have access to a data room around that specific M&A activity is super, super important so that you’re getting more prepared. You’re not having to go back to this new recruit or new firm or new practice that you’re bringing in and asking them multiple questions over and over, and over again. It just creates a much more seamless experience. When you’re knowledgeable in the firm and the firm’s activities and practices ahead of time, it makes the whole rest of your team look that much better.

Another consideration as you bring on new recruits or new advisors is the tool set that they’re used to using, whether they’re a financial planner and they’re used to using MoneyGuidePro, or they’re used to using eMoney, or they’re used to NaviPlan. You need to understand that, and if there’s a transition necessary there, also with their CRM tools, I think that’s also important to ensure there’s a plan around that and supporting either those capabilities or converting that data into a firm-wide or enterprise-wide tool.

Defining your platform, really, that’s all part of the M&A process – being a destination and being a player in your space, and having the right platform established. This is something we work with firms all the time. I use analogies a lot as well, but I think of a Christmas tree and how you decorate the Christmas tree. The Christmas tree may be your clearing custody firm as an introducing broker-dealer, or a specific main custodian that you leverage using those tools. That may be the Christmas tree, but what are the other things you add on to it and, again, financial planning, your CRM, your data reporting tools, those types of tools and functionality that your advisors will need. Market data – I’m really surprised at how particular some advisors can be about seeing market data in certain ways or having certain feeds that they’re used to. The banner the old school financial advisor really does. You know they tend to gravitate towards having the ticker scrolling by at the bottom of the screen. What do you have? What do you need? What products do you need to support? Are there better tools out there?

I also encourage firms to take a look, all the time, to consistently review the tools that they have on their platform.  We help firms with that all the time, where we go through and evaluate are they best in class? Are there better tools out there? Have they upgraded their tools appropriately as new releases have come out over the years? Things like that. Are they getting the best pricing enterprise-wide?  Another key is those superfluous or redundant vendor relationships, where you’ll end up with six or seven or eight different versions of a particular CRM out there, that each practice or each office may have their own version of it. Having multiple financial planning tools out there is another one that we see quite a bit of. It’s just also important to really think about your custodians and your fund families, and that you’re finding those synergies; and, price points will obviously get better as your volumes on specific platforms or with specific custodians increase.

Brent Nicks:  I was going to say, those are all good points, Pete. The one that I’ve always key bar in an analysis for back office is,  “is the solution personnel or is the solution technology?” And, increasingly you know, as we get more advanced, technology is an excellent support tool for existing staff. That can often expand your time horizon before you need to add full-time staff. But that works if you developed a cohesive tech stack.

What we have found is, and you said it just a minute ago, duplicative vendors providing 98% the same service.  So, as you’re in, particularly in an acquisition growth model, you look up one day and you’ve got four different planning softwares running.

Or you somehow ended up with a contract with three billing and performance reporting engines, and they all essentially do the same thing. So, being proactive and developing an effective, and I hate to use this term, but it fits here, a best of breed tech stack, eliminates a lot of those contentious conversations as those coming into the board, because you’ve already adopted and integrated much of what they’re asking for and where you get those minor changes.

You can have those conversations early on, and we’ve got minor changes. You can have those conversations early on and we’ve got experts in this area that can help you get it migrated over or whatever as you develop. If you let the tech-stack get too expansive, it becomes detrimental to the efficiency of the firm, the effectiveness and completeness of your books and records, or your ability to even understand whether you have all your books and records. So, there is a sweet spot between having an effective tech stack and having an unwieldy tech stack.

Pete McAteer:  Yeah, just to add on to that, an integration is not always just bringing over clients and bringing over accounts. It is often those ancillary and yet important solutions, functions and tools, and the data sets that come along with those. So as part of your integration, as part of your onboarding, and introducing your advisors and their teams to your platform, you really do need to have a plan to move that data and to find those synergies as soon as possible.  And the culture of “yes, sure, no problem, we can do that” – that’s something that needs to be…really, that’s a tough conversation. But they’re conversations where if they’re had earlier in the process, with eyes wide open, full transparency, with a detailed, well-socialized within your firm due diligence process and understanding of who you are, what your wheelhouse is, is super, super important.

Ed Wegener: I wonder if you could give us a sense from your experience te primary areas that are in scope when we think about infrastructure – what are those areas?

Pete McAteer: That’s a great question.

The M&A process – it’s very difficult to ever say no early on, but what you’ll find is, if you have alternative solutions, that you can have those discussions up front, you’ll build more trust with a potential acquisition. I feel that you’ll be able to deal with those things and say “hey to your point earlier, Ed, we’ve got 98% of what you’re looking for, but this one or these two things, we just want to make sure that you’re aware that we’ve got a process for this. We can help facilitate it. We can help you with the paperwork, we can help you with the repaper and we can help you with the conversion of your CRM data. We have a solution for that. We can ease that pain of that transition.” That’s the important part. You’ve got those mechanisms established and well-rehearsed. You’re not just making it up as you go along. Your operations team will really appreciate you having those real discussions up front.

Brent Nicks:  Even more so that if those discussions are had early enough to where you allow the operations team or other support teams to honestly take a moment to think about it – and this is just Sales 101 in the acquisition process. Rather than a yes / no answer, you can come back with something. Potentially we can handle it this way, or we can handle it this way, which would you prefer? But you’ve got to give your staff and your support and those that are going to support the advisors coming on board, the teams coming on board, with an opportunity to come up with a solution. So often, and Pete, I can just tell from your comments, that gets shoved off to the side and things are done, and we’re six months into it and now it bubbles up. Now those contentious conversations are being had, but it’s a three way, internally with support and senior management, and also with the advisors. It’s a conversation that, if had early, even if it’s uncomfortable, has a chance to scar over. We’ll say over time it becomes less of a sticking point. People get comfortable with it. They understand what the new way of the world is going to be.

So, transparency is tantamount. Sometimes transparency means that maybe 19 out of 20 times you win the team, but maybe that one time it’s just too much to overcome and, as a growing firm, you have to be okay with that. When you define yourself as a firm, that means sometimes that you are just not the home for everybody, and it’s okay for the firm to acknowledge that. But it’s also doing best by those, particularly in an acquisition model, where you’re being transparent enough that they understand the decision that they need to make. Sometimes that may mean they need to go elsewhere, which, while in the short term is unfortunate, in the longer term it creates lasting relationships with those who come on board. And, you’re avoiding contentious, ongoing relationships with those where maybe not have been the best fit.

Ed Wegener:  Thanks, Brent. Maybe, Pete, you could talk a little bit about the process that we’ve developed to help clients that are growing and that are thinking about how they need to position themselves for future growth. What’s the process that you’ve taken them through?

Pete McAteer:  That’s really a great question. A lot of times what we have to do for any one of our engagements, we have to learn the firm. We have to learn about them, we have to find out who they are through reviewing documentation, interviews, talking to all key functional leads. We call that a current state assessment, if you will. When we’re done with that current state assessment, we hold up, we provide a mirror, if you will, we hold that mirror up in front of the executive leadership and the functional subject matter experts and say, “this is who we see that you are. Is this accurate?” And we have some interesting discussions around that, because sometimes it’s hard for them to look in the mirror; but, then we’ll make some adjustments. We make sure it also helps us to ground our observations and our understanding of the firm. We try to do that pretty quickly and efficiently.

Once we’ve established that their product sets, their technology, their challenges and their gaps, then we can start working on finding the synergies, finding the opportunities, bridging those opportunities, considering other vendors, perhaps where there are more opportunities. Maybe they’re not leveraging fully the capabilities, and the services offered by their custodian or by their clearing partner. It’s super, super important to evaluate those. Change management is never fun. It’s not the easiest thing to do, but if you’re prepared for it, you have level, set expectations. You’ve defined where all the gaps are early; you can bridge those gaps and come up with good, solid transition strategies that helps everybody involved, including the end investor, and limiting the impacts there.

There’s no question that we try to do that and, ultimately, at the end of the day, we want to walk our clients, the firms, the executive leadership team, through a process by which they are making the best decision for them.

I want to be very clear about that. We’re not going to make a recommendation to choose this vendor over that vendor. That’s not where we are. We’re a guide.  As a consultant we take that consultative approach to coach them through the decisioning process and ensure that they’re considering all the key data points, whether it’s cost, functionality, data, service and support. Those are the critical factors. Getting on site, meeting with the vendors, and understanding and building those trusting relationships is also important; but, at the end of the day, those clients, our clients, make the decisions.

One key point I want to make is with respect to their decision and criteria. As Oyster Consulting, as our Strategic Planning and Execution team, we want to ensure that our clients are fully versed and educated on each of the vendors that they have in consideration, to ensure they’re making the decisions based upon grounded, accurate understanding of their products and services and services.

Brent Nicks:  Pete’s last point was very good. The one thing that I want to make sure, that should be obvious, but verbalize anyway, is the current state assessment, once completed and we start to build towards where the firm’s going to approve, make some changes, get more efficient. This is a continually evolving process with a growing firm. We look at it today, we level set, we look forward. You look at that in two years.

You have to be able to be open to reevaluating because, as a growing firm, as an expanding firm, all of these things continually need to be poked and prodded and evaluated. You have to be open enough and nimble enough to know that the decisions that you made back here in 2024 may not still be working for you in 2027. So, always consider the changes and the stressors and the advances that you need to make all along the process. You’re continually reevaluating what you’ve done so that you can continue to be effective and efficient.

Pete McAteer:  And there’s another term, I want to just make sure I add this because I’d be remiss if I did not bring this up, is the whole notion around sustainability. Some firms will grow rapidly, too rapidly at times, and ensuring that the enhancements they make, the fortifications they make to their infrastructure, their tool sets, their expertise, their staffing and their bench strength will help ensure sustainability of the firm, the firm’s mission, the values, the vision, the strategy as they continue to grow. And again, going back to the point of constantly reviewing and evaluating to ensure that you’re not outpacing yourselves in your ability to ensure sustainable growth and ensure sustainable expectations, meeting and exceeding the expectations of the advisors and their clients that you serve.

Ed Wegener:  Well, I think all of these have been excellent points and are all very important things for firms to consider as they grow. So, I really want to thank you both for joining us today and look forward to talking with you again.

Bob Mooney:   Thanks everyone for listening. If you’d like to learn more about our experts and how oyster can help your firm, visit our website at oysterllc.com. If you like what you heard today, follow us on whatever platform you listen to and give us a review, reviews, make it easier for people to find us. Have a great day.