How am I doing? Getting that question answered is often on the minds of people who seek out a financial advisor. Helping them articulate and define their financial purpose so you can provide the best answer is your challenge.
On this Elementality, Abby welcomes Dale Shafer of Life Moves Wealth Management. Dale explains how Elements helps him provide clients with financial clarity. By using Elements, clients become more engaged in the planning process. They begin to see how all of the ingredients that give their finances purpose fit together, which encourages more in-depth conversations about money since they have a better idea about where they stand financially. For Dale, Elements aligns itself closely with what he sees are the core principles of effective financial planning. Find out why.
Podcast Transcript
Dale Shafer:
If as the advisor, if you say, “I’ve got a great tool. It’s gonna monitor all these things. Here’s the link download it,” as a client, I’m gonna say, “Okay, I’ll get to that at some point.” But if you start the conversation with, “Look what’s most important to you. What do you feel like you’re missing in your financial life? Where are the opportunities? What is it that you want for yourself? What’s your financial purpose?” and actually doing some work there with helping them understand that, then you can say, “Okay, this is the tool that I’m gonna use. But here’s how it’s gonna help us answer those questions. Here’s why it’s important that we decide exactly how much money needs to be in the bank. And here’s why some of that money should be put to work. And here’s why we need to reconsider your life insurance objectives. And here’s why we need to have some better controls around spending and burn rate and all of those things.”
Jordan Haines:
Welcome to Elementality. Each episode, we will explore the challenges and the opportunities faced by financial advisors and how advisors can use Elements to grow their business and serve their clients better. We hope you enjoy this episode.
Abby Morton:
Welcome to Elementality, everyone. Today, I’m your host, Abby Morton. I’m here with Dale Shafer. Welcome to the show, Dale.
Dale Shafer:
Thank you, Abby. Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Abby Morton:
Yes, we’re so excited. I’m bringing Dale on because he’s been an Elements customer for a little while now. And many, many people are asking us about, “How are advisors using Elements? How are they being successful?” When you look at the Kitces fintech map, there’s not a really good bucket, I feel like, Elements fits in. I feel like we fit in lots of different buckets, so it’s been hard for people to wrap their mind around, “How do we use Elements?” So that’s what we’re here to talk to Dale about today. But before we go with that, Dale, why don’t you give us a little bit of background and intro, who are you? What is your firm? Who do you serve? Tell us a little bit about you.
Dale Shafer:
Sure. So again, you’ve done a great introduction. Dale Shafer. My firm is called Life Moves Wealth Management. I launched as an RA firm about a year and a half ago and came out of an independent broker dealer relationship. And prior to that was at a wire house, and so…
Abby Morton:
You’ve kinda spurned the full gamut of places you’ve been in.
Dale Shafer:
Yeah, I’ve had the good and bad of, “Here’s how to do things. Here’s maybe how you could do things better.” But I’ve learned a lot along the way that’s been very valuable. So really launched the RA firm because I saw a need to be able to have the freedom to do work a different way. And one of the reasons why I use Elements is because it very much aligns with how I see the process of financial planning and really kinda shrinking that timeframe from, “Here’s what things look like in 30 years, if you make this decision today.” Shrinking that down to, “Here’s how this is going to impact every area of your financial life as we go through everyday decisions and every year decisions?” And so most of my clients are business owners. They have a lot going on. And those are the kinds of people I work with because I consider myself to be a bit of a Tetris master. So I like seeing how all the pieces fit in together, and Elements has just added my ability to do that.
Abby Morton:
I like that. So you said you started your RA ’cause you wanted to do things a little differently, a different way. Tell me a little bit more about that. What does that mean to you?
Dale Shafer:
So for me, working under the umbrella of a much larger firm meant that there is almost… I’ll just say there’s absolutely zero [chuckle] ability that I have to influence things like the tech stack or what tools we would use. And it’s basic things where if I see that a client really could use something that’s a bit more, so if I wanna understand their… Let’s say through Nitrogen, or Riskalyze, what it used to be called, if I wanna understand their risk number, not an option. If I wanna use a tool like Elements, not an option. So I’m stuck with whatever the firm is giving us, and that’s going to have its own limitations, and they’re also going to have some way to dictate how that client service is done. Because there are some clients who I’ve delivered a 30 or 35-page financial plan to over the past couple of years. They never read it. They never look at it. It’s overwhelming. But the firm and the complaints department says I need to have that deliverable in place.
Abby Morton:
Yeah, you have to do that, ’cause that’s what compliance say. Okay.
Dale Shafer:
Yes. And there’s no flexibility around what’s considered a deliverable. And so for a lot of clients, having that flexibility actually helps me serve them better as an advisor.
Abby Morton:
I like that. So it sounds to me like when you’re out the broker dealers and the wire houses, you saw all this technology that was out there available to you and you thought, “This could really move the needle for my clients. This would really help me. And I don’t like having to deliver X, Y, Z, when I know it’s not even really benefiting them. So how can I do things the right way and with the right tech stack?” Is that how you’d maybe summarize that?
Dale Shafer:
I would say yes. And in fact, when I launched, I was going through the period of registration. I had my list ready to go of exactly what tools I wanted to use and how I was going to do that. And so it was very much a part of the decision for me.
Abby Morton:
Awesome. Well, since you brought that up, your tech stack, I’d love to hear what is your current stack… What is this ideal tech stack for you in your firm?
Dale Shafer:
So I feel like that’s a… The answer to that question is something that’s always evolving, because I’ll find new things or I’ll see an inefficiency somewhere, or I’ll see… Even worse, I’ll see overlap in places. And so what I wanna do is create a system where we move from one tool to the next, and the purpose of the tool is to serve whatever the financial planning or financial goals and objectives are. And so a great example is when I launched, I was not using Elements. I didn’t even know about Elements. And so I was using RightCapital at that time, and that was the easy thing to do. I was a heavy NaviPlan user, so RightCapital was kind of close. And it was in the XYPN stack, and I’m an XYPN member, so I was like, “Oh, this is easy. I’ll just use that.” And RightCapital is a great tool. But what I found is that a lot of my clients, being business owners, they’re very heavily cash flow-minded. And so RightCapital didn’t quite give me what I was used to seeing from a cash flow planning basis from NaviPlan. And maybe it’s because I didn’t use the tool correctly. I don’t know. Maybe somebody using RightCapital has that figured out. [chuckle] But for me, it didn’t work.
Abby Morton:
Okay.
Dale Shafer:
And so I made an adjustment, and I went over to eMoney because of its cash flow planning. And then about two months after I went to eMoney, I was sitting in an airport visiting clients out of state, and I was scrolling through Twitter, or the app formerly known as Twitter, [chuckle] and there was a thread multiple advisors have responded to about their tech stack, and I saw the Elements tag, and I thought, “What is that?” So I clicked on it, and then I saw it, and I was like, “Whoa, what is this? This is great.” And the thing that I loved about it is as a part of my financial planning process, because so many of my clients are business owners, many of them have never seen their business health ratios. They don’t even know what they are. They just started business because they’re good at whatever the craft is. They don’t know really what [0:07:44.2] ____…
Abby Morton:
Yeah. That’s why they hire you, right? That you gotta take care of that for them, or the CPA, I guess, depending. [laughter]
Dale Shafer:
Exactly. And so what I was doing in the financial plan was calculating manually business ratios. And when I saw Elements, I went, “Wait a minute, this is very close to the same ratios that I’m manually calculating… ”
Abby Morton:
Oh, interesting.
Dale Shafer:
“Annually for my clients, and Elements is calculating it all the time.” And so I really, really love that part of it, outside of the fact that it was colorful and it was interesting looking, and I was really excited about the one-page plan. Because I knew how many of my clients didn’t read the 30 pages, maybe they would read the one page. [laughter] And then because I’ve been a Carl Richard’s disciple for several years now, I was very aware of financial purpose and had already been using that language in my process of planning. And so to see it right there in the app built in, for me, it just checked a lot of my boxes.
Abby Morton:
I love that. I love that. So how long, then, have you been using Elements? Sounds like it wasn’t on your tech stack originally. How long have you now been using it?
Dale Shafer:
So I’d say coming up on a year. So it was last November, so November of 2022, when I did my initial… What would you call it? Kind of intro call, and I talked to a couple of different CFPs who were already using Elements. Because that was one of my initial, I’m not gonna say hang-ups or reservations, but maybe just cautionary points, is that as a CFP, how are you able to use this? What’s the deliverable? How can you do certain things with it that maybe would be required as a CFP? And then, of course, how do you use Elements and couple that with another piece of financial planning software to do other kinds of projections? Because Elements is built to do this, and financial planning softwares are built to do this. And even if they don’t integrate, they can still work together.
Abby Morton:
Right. Yeah. Well, I love that you brought that up. It sounds like that was, obviously, one of your first reservations. So people, I’m sure other advisors, have that same reservation. So how would you help them understand that? I hear that all the time. Elements and RightCapital or eMoney or any… NaviPlan. We could go down the full list. Why would I need full… Sounds like you might still use both or… Help them understand that same thing that you had.
Dale Shafer:
Yeah, I would say now that I’ve been using it for a while, how I’ve been able to shift my thinking about having two systems in place… And just for the record, currently… And I’m pretty… I’m set on this now. I have Elements, and I have MoneyGuidePro. Now, that’s where I’ve landed, and that’s where I am currently. For me, Elements does that ongoing daily financial health monitoring for clients. And the great thing about Elements is that as the advisor, the client can see what I see, and vice versa. And so the client doesn’t have to wait for me to generate something out of MoneyGuidePro or out of the financial planning software for them to know where they are financially. They can see it all the time. And I’ve adopted… As part of my process, once a month, I send the clients one of the Elements… The financial health indicators. And I’m just… That one page report on that indicator and say, “I looked at everything. I specifically looked at this one.” So for example, I’m getting ready to do this at the start of September, and it just so happens that September will be burn rate. And so all of my clients are gonna get that burn rate report. It’s gonna have a brief overview of what I see there, and I’m gonna tell them, “By the way, I looked at everything else. It looks good.” Or, “Hey, I have a question about this. Here’s a link to my calendar. Let’s get something set up.” But they can go into the app, and they can see it just as well as I can.
Abby Morton:
Yeah. So it sounds like day to day, you’re keeping the relationship back and forth with the client through Elements. When do you feel like you need to go to MoneyGuidePro? How are you utilizing that then and justifying the cost of that? It’s an additional cost.
Dale Shafer:
It is. And that’s a great question. So MoneyGuidePro is gonna help me analyze decisions like certain movements of cash flow, or if we’re going to maybe purchase a business or a personal asset, or if we wanna understand what something’s gonna look like projecting, say, a Roth conversion, it’s gonna help us do some of those more projection-based things. And so that’s where I’m going to use more of it. And there’s some of those situations where… A great example is I have several clients who have multiple real estate properties. I wanna be able to put that into MoneyGuidePro so I can see what the cash flow from those properties is so we can make sure that we understand things like where rates are, are we coming up at a point where we’re going to need to refinance or sell a property, or buy a property, or whatever we need to do. And that’s what the financial planning software… That’s its wheelhouse. And so that’s where I use it.
Abby Morton:
Okay, great. And are you having clients then also log into MoneyGuidePro, or are you just kind of pulling data as needed from Elements over?
Dale Shafer:
I’ll pull data as needed, or I’ll have them help me fill out a cash flow report so I can understand some of the specifics in there. But for the most part, the thing that’s hard for clients is as a planner, you want the clients to know how great your tech stack is and how awesome the tools that you’re using are. But it’s a lot for them to be as excited with you as you are, and so I try to keep them… Really just the two things that they can log into or that I’m encouraging them to log in to, number one is Elements, and number two is my client portal so we can trade secure documents and they can see performance and that kind of thing. Outside of that, I just… I don’t wanna throw too much at them, because it just gets overwhelming.
Abby Morton:
Yeah. Yeah. And what’s that secure portal that you use?
Dale Shafer:
So I use Advyzon.
Abby Morton:
Okay.
Dale Shafer:
And so Advyzon is my CRM performance reporting and client volt.
Abby Morton:
Okay, awesome. So talk to me… Let’s maybe take a step back. Like, you’ve met a prospect or someone you think you might wanna potentially work with, let’s say they’re a business owner, it sounds like you work with many business owners. Walk me through the process of what you’d have them do, where they’re logging in, like how that whole flow goes. What’s, literally, the first thing you would do up into like, “Okay, now I feel like they’re good to go, and I just put them in my ongoing relationship?”
Dale Shafer:
Yeah. I’ll tell you… I’ll answer that question using one of my favorite stories…
Abby Morton:
Great.
Dale Shafer:
Through that process. And so this happens maybe three, four months ago. And I was meeting with a couple, and they, at that point, had no advisory relationship. They were kind of DIY-ing all their investments and everything. And they were referred to me by another client, so we already had a little bit of a working knowledge of each other. And the biggest thing that somebody who’s a DIY, or even coming from another advisor, the biggest thing that you’re going to talk about is what are the difference in fees. And so my model is, currently, I’m a fee-only, and I use a flat fee for most of my services.
Abby Morton:
Okay.
Dale Shafer:
And so we were talking about that, and the client said… I had walked them already through a little bit of a high view of Elements, so I set up, in my Elements dashboard, a test client. And so I go in every couple of months and just move numbers around, so it looks like it’s active and you can see net worth change and that kind of thing.
Abby Morton:
Okay.
Dale Shafer:
But it’s how I can do that compliantly and show them really how it works. And I had just…
Abby Morton:
Kinda like getting down with you in your office, I assume, at this point? Okay.
Dale Shafer:
We were actually over Zoom doing this.
Abby Morton:
Oh, okay, great.
Dale Shafer:
Yeah. And I had just heard an Elementality Podcast with Reese and Carl, and they were talking about sampling financial advice. And I was like, “You know what, I’m gonna try that.” So I told the client, I was like, “I’m gonna send you a link. Just download the app. Connect your accounts. You’ll start to see your dashboard come to life. Try it. Try it before you decide whether or not to hire me. If you decide not to hire me, the worst thing I do is just delete the data and it’s no big deal. But at least give it a shot.” And so I had an email from that client the very next morning, and they said, “We love this. We’re ready to go.”
Abby Morton:
And that was after… So you sat down with them over Zoom, you showed them this demo client life. “This is kind of how I work.” Maybe talk through your processing, your fees. And at the end, that’s when you’re like, “Here, why don’t you try it? Put in your information,” and that’s when they came back saying, “Yes, let’s do it?”
Dale Shafer:
Yeah.
Abby Morton:
Okay.
Dale Shafer:
And Carl and Reese, they were still correct in that episode, because that’s one of the things in this industry that we kind of… It’s like the Wizard Of Oz. Nobody can peek behind the curtain until you sign the document and pay the fee. And then we open up the process. And I just think that there’s a lot of people who would probably be more apt to work with planners like myself and all the other great advisors out there if they knew what they were getting themselves into. If they could see it, if they could play with it, if they could try it on, they might buy.
Abby Morton:
Can I actually push you on that a little bit more?
Dale Shafer:
Please.
Abby Morton:
Let me maybe give you a little bit of a pushback. ‘Cause I’ve often heard advisors like, “Hey, I send the Elements link. They don’t ever click on it. They don’t download anything.” Maybe has this process been repeated over and over again? I think maybe another side question is, I would argue people are buying you, Dale, as an advisor. They want to work with you because they like you, and they trust that you are gonna be able to help them. I don’t know that the end client really cares if you use Elements or eMoney or MoneyGuidePro or RightCapital, or any of the other tools out there. I think at the end of the day, they’re buying you. But I think with what you said, you maybe said, because they got to see behind the curtain and see Elements, they bought. Can I push you on that a little bit more? Tell me more why you think maybe that was. ‘Cause I’m gonna argue it wasn’t just that they saw Elements. There’s a lot of information to put in there. And that could be maybe overwhelming for somebody.
Dale Shafer:
And I’m gonna actually agree with your pushback. [chuckle] And for what it’s worth, you’re absolutely correct. The tool is just the tool. The clients aren’t buying the tool. But what I think resonated with them is how the tool can be used to answer their burning financial questions.
Dale Shafer:
And so the fact that there is a tool that I use and that I’m capable and competent in using it, and then I can use it to actually bring in a better conversation, that’s why I think the client is going to be willing to work with me. So it’s not necessarily just the thing, because if as the advisor, if you say, “I’ve got a great tool. It’s gonna monitor all these things. Here’s the link. Download it,” as a client, I’m gonna say, “Okay, I’ll get to that at some point.” But if you start the conversation with, “Look, what’s most important to you? What do you feel like you’re missing in your financial life? Where are the opportunities? What is it that you want for yourself? What’s your financial purpose?” and actually doing some work there with helping them understand that, then you can say, “Okay, this is the tool that I’m gonna use, but here’s how it’s gonna help us answer those questions. Here’s why it’s important that we decide exactly how much money needs to be in the bank, and here’s why some of that money should be put to work, and here’s why we need to reconsider your life insurance subjectives, and here’s why we need to have some better controls around spending and burn rate and all of those things.” So it all… I tell my clients, it’s like spaghetti. When we do financial planning, it’s all touching. It’s all mixed in.
Abby Morton:
I love that.
Dale Shafer:
And so how you can help them understand what they’re seeing in the tool, that’s what they’re gonna buy, because it is about the relationship, and the relationship starts with helping people know where they are, helping them understand where they wanna go, and then creating a path for that.
Abby Morton:
Okay. And it sounds to me then like, in that first meeting with this client, you talked about financial purpose, you talked about all of those things. So they also had that time to realize like, “This guy just isn’t coming after my money. He cares about my goals and my objectives and what I really wanna get out of this.” Maybe the last thing was like, “Okay, let me have you peek inside the curtain. Put your information here. If we decide not to work together, no big deal, but this is gonna be able to help me answer your questions,” and I assume you then moved forward to being able to answer some of those questions with them, right?
Dale Shafer:
Correct. And I think that’s the secret sauce, because the old days of having the edge on what stock is IPO-ing and building the best portfolio and having the allocation to Google shares or whatever it is, those days are gone, and I don’t think that much of the value equation is on the investment side. So just coming after the money doesn’t really move the needle for anybody. And I think it’s all the bigger things that people are wrestling with, ’cause when they go to bed at night, they’re not thinking about their investment account, they’re thinking about the next big decision that they have to make for themselves, their kids, their business, etcetera.
Abby Morton:
Yeah, exactly. You’ve mentioned this even a couple of times, like Elements has helped you have some good conversations and meaningful moving that relationship forward together. Can you maybe even give me a different example of where Elements have helped you answer those questions that you’re saying clients are going to bed at night worrying about?
Dale Shafer:
Yeah. It’s really interesting because it’s hard to come up with just one big story, ’cause there’s just a lot of little ones along the way, and it’s just the day-to-day interactions. I will say that for several of my clients, Elements is kind of… In some way, it’s like democratized the advisory relationship for them. And what I mean by that is that because they can see where they are and because they’re getting that monthly report from me and a brief explanation, I’ve actually had clients who, on my service schedule, are ready for their next meeting. And I will call them and say, “Hey, it’s time to meet again. Here’s what I have on the agenda,” and they’ll say, “Hey, I just got the Elements thing, and you said everything looks pretty good. Do we have to meet? Not that I don’t wanna hang out with you, but do we have to? ‘Cause it looks like everything’s going okay.” And so unless there’s a big rock or something that we need to continue on the implementation, then the client has the option of whether or not they wanna meet and what that agenda is going to look like. It’s not… It’s like they’re walking into the meeting that are prepared. It’s not as much of a surprise with what the advisor might have on the agenda for that meeting.
Abby Morton:
Great. And I think ultimately, you almost wanna work yourself out of a job as adviser, right? You want to give them the peace of mind that everything is being taken care of. And when something urgent, that big rock that you mentioned, needs to be moved, you’ll obviously contact them and figure it out together. But ultimately it’s like, “How can I help you know that things are going along just well?” It sounds like you’re doing that work on the backend to help them have that peace of mind that things are going well. So I think you’re totally right, that ultimately is kind of what you want. [chuckle]
Dale Shafer:
I think so. Yeah, it’s been an interesting surprise because one of the individuals that I had talked to who was an Elements user told me to be prepared that some clients would actually do that. And I thought that’s absolutely crazy because clients said they wanna meet with the advisor. And then I had that happen. I was like, “Wait a minute. You don’t… Am I not good enough? You don’t wanna hang out with me anymore? What’s going on here?” But really, it’s just… Again, because they know where they stand, I think that they feel like they’re in a better place to have control over their financial decisions, rather than waiting for permission from the advisor.
Abby Morton:
Yeah. From an advisor myself, I just feel like what better thing can you do than teach them how to fish? Rather than them always having to come to you for every little thing, it’s like, “I’m empowering you to know that you can move forward.”
Dale Shafer:
Agreed.
Abby Morton:
Yeah, I really like that. So it sounds to me, back to your process, you send them the link, they get on to Elements. Once they become a client, I think you’ve alluded to this a little bit, but it sounds like you kind of are on this monthly cadence of this ongoing relationship with them. Out of… Someone might say that’s a lot, like you’re literally meeting with all of your clients every single month. Talk to me a little bit about that process. How many clients do you actually end up meeting with? How does that go?
Dale Shafer:
Yeah, that’s great. So I would say it’s… The process of sending those reports, because of the way that Elements is set up, it makes it very easy to send most of those reports. There are a few that you have to actually download and send manually with a little explanation, but outside of that, it probably takes maybe five-ish minutes a client. And what I do is I actually time-block the first Friday of the month, for me, and I spend the morning, I get all of those reports out, and then what happens is I start to see the calendar invites come in. And then those meetings get scheduled. And I know what the clients are going to ask me about because I use Calendly and I have prompts in there for exactly what’s important to the client, what do they wanna make sure we discuss.
Abby Morton:
Yeah. Okay.
Dale Shafer:
So I’ll know that ahead of time, I’ll know what I just saw in their scorecard, and so that just helps everybody be prepared for the same thing, and that’s how we do the process. And so I probably end up talking to or meeting with, I don’t know, maybe 10 or 20 clients a month, which is really not outside of the average for most advisors. My businesses is not too large at this point, where I have to do four or five clients a day, so I still have capacity to continue growing, and I’m in a good place to do that. But there will come a point where for scalability and even just capacity, there’s going to need to be additional… With additional clients, there’s gonna need to be additional people. ‘Cause I’m currently a solo advisor, so I’ll need to have people on. But it’s all like Elements kinda help shorten that learning curve because then any advisor in the firm can look at the client’s scorecard and pretty much see the same thing that I see and be positioned to deliver very much similar advice. We’re gonna have some nuances because of our individual personalities and experiences and that kind of thing, but it just helps to see the playing field the same way.
Abby Morton:
I like it. Well, very cool. The last question that I’ll ask you and then you can… I’ll leave you with any last words that you’d like. But I really like this question because… I think you’ve even alluded to this a little bit, that using Elements, your mindset might have shifted and changed a little bit from how you maybe originally thought about doing financial planning. So I’d love to hear from you and your unique perspective, how has your mindset shifted now that you’re using Elements in financial planning?
Dale Shafer:
Yeah, that’s a great question. I’ll tell you, because of the way that I was trained and certainly as a CFP, I put a lot of weight and value on that long financial plan because to me, I thought it communicated a high level of thoroughness and depth and consideration…
Abby Morton:
Totally. Yeah.
Dale Shafer:
For everything that’s important. And what I realized and one of the mindset shifts is that the delivery of a document is not the value. It’s paper. And I always told clients… And maybe this is why they never read it, but I told them that when I printed it or when I send it to them, as soon as that information goes out, it’s a timestamp, and it can pretty much be a pretty good door holder or something like that. Stick it under the door of the door swinging or something. And so I think there’s a point where clients might have just looked at that and go, “This is just a lot of information. It’s an FYI.” But the problem is, is that like around page 20, 21, 22, 24, that’s where all the really good advice was. And so I felt like a lot of people were missing that. So one of the mindset shifts is that clients can absorb more of that information in a conversation and less on paper with kinda a heavier language. And so through the conversation and then with the follow-up of the app, they actually start to lock in what I’m saying and what I’m recommending, and I’ve noticed that my clients have become more proactively engaged with the planning process because again, they can see it, touch it, feel it, look at it at 10 o’clock at night if they want to and they know what’s going on.
Dale Shafer:
And so I think the mindset shift for me is that has been the release of the control of the information and how the information is disseminated, because what’s more important and what I’m really moving toward is each individual client is going to have their own preferences for what that looks like. And so having the ability to give them more control over what it looks like, I think, has actually deepen some of those relationships and just made the conversations much better and made the meeting flow much better.
Abby Morton:
I like that. I like that. What a great mindset change there. So awesome. Any final words for our listeners today?
Dale Shafer:
No. I would just say… I’ll tell you, Abby, the one thing that I’ve been happy with Elements is that it’s not a stagnant tool, and so there is something always being developed, always being upgraded and broadened out, and I’ve enjoyed seeing that. There’s still some things that as a user that I would love for the tool to do, and in due time, maybe it will. But the team has been really great with taking the suggestions, the team’s been really great with helping me troubleshoot some client issues or some weird app things or phone differences or whatever. And so I’ve been just really impressed with how responsive and forward-thinking the entire process seems to be. So that’s one of the things that definitely keeps me engaged with the tool, is that it’s something that’s evolving. I feel like we’re growing together, and I like that.
Abby Morton:
Yeah, I like that too. Well, awesome. Thank you so much, Dale. I appreciate all of your insights. I’ve definitely learned a lot. You’ve even given me some new things to think about, so thank you so much for your time. And hopefully, we can have you back on again soon.
Dale Shafer:
Thank you, Abby. Great to talk to you today.
[music]
Abby Morton:
Next time on Elementality.
Colton Etherton:
Throw some personal stuff in there, ’cause again, people are getting into a long-term relationship with us, and they want to also know who you are. I personally find it weird. If I’m going to look up someone, I wanna know more about you than just you sharing just the business stuff. And I say that to some of the artists I talk to too, ’cause a lot of them will just post their tattoo pictures, and half the time, you gotta scroll down to like three years ago and they have a picture of themselves. You’re like, “Who is this person?” [laughter] And I’m like, yeah, the same thing with the tattoo, if I’m gonna sit with someone for four hours, six hours or longer, I’m going with my first leave or something, I don’t want to get there and then 30 minutes in, I’m gonna be like, “Oh, man, I don’t like this person,” but I’m kinda locked in. It’s the same thing for us as advisors. It’s a good commitment to go through our process. I know. And so I think people wanna see who you are too.
Abby Morton:
To find out more about Elements, go to getelements.com./demo. Elementality’s executive producers are Reece Hepar and Carl Richards. Elementality is produced by Tad Henderson and directed by Abby Morton. Have a good one.