In this week’s episode of Retire in Texas, Darryl Lyons, CEO and Co-Founder of PAX Financial Group, shares the insights gathered by the firm’s recent advisory council meeting. With valuable feedback from a select group of clients, Darryl uncovers important lessons about the current financial climate and how PAX Financial Group is continuing to adapt to serve its clients better.
This episode explores 15 key takeaways from the advisory council that shed light on challenges, opportunities, and unique strategies for financial planning. From understanding the role of a financial advisor to creating meaningful connections with younger generations, Darryl shares practical insights that can help you rethink your financial approach.
Key highlights of the episode include:
- The surprising number of people who still don’t have a financial advisor and the importance of seeking professional guidance.
- Why PAX Financial Group’s multiple resources, including in-house legal counsel and strategic partnerships, offer clients a comprehensive approach to solving financial challenges.
- The challenge of balancing personalized care with business growth while maintaining that “family feel.”
- How financial advisors are meant to be guides – not heroes – and why your financial success is rooted in the decisions you make.
- A look at how PAX Financial Group is tackling the challenge of engaging with younger generations and ensuring they receive the right financial advice.
- The concept of core-satellite portfolio investing and why diversification remains crucial in uncertain market times.
For more insights and to connect with a financial advisor who can guide you through your financial journey, visit http://www.PAXFinancialGroup.com. If you found this episode helpful, be sure to share it with others who may benefit from it!
Transcript:
Hey, this is Darryl Lyons, CEO and Co-Founder of PAX Financial Group. And you’re listening to Retire in Texas. This information is general in nature only. It’s not intended to provide specific investment, tax, or legal advice. Visit PAXfinancialgroup.com for more information. And again, want to encourage you to go to Paxfinancialgroup.com.
There’s a Connect with Us button and you can click on that and connect with advisors to a 15-minute conversation just to see if we’re a good fit. So today I want to talk about something that we did. It’s an advisory council that we put together and it’s a select group of clients. First of all, if you’re listening and you’re in that group, thank you for your participation and we wanted a diverse group of clients that could help give us feedback because we have the curse of knowledge when you’re just in it all the time, you can’t see certain things.
And I’m also a big proponent of Proverbs [15:22]. Without counsel, plans fail, but with many advisors, they succeed. We’ve had advisory councils in the past, and for some reason, we stopped having advisory councils. You just get busy. And then we just thought it’s probably time to do it again. So, here we are. So, what I’d like to do, I think this is going to be really interesting for you because you’re going to get some insight.
I identified 15 points of conversation that came out of this advisory council meeting, and they’re relevant to you now. There’s a lot of points that came out, but these are 15 that I just pulled that I thought would be interesting. So, let’s jump into them, because I only have about 15 now. I’ve got about 16 minutes or let’s see, 15 to 20 minutes.
So, let’s jump into it. So, first of all, number one, we were told that it’s surprising how many people in the marketplace don’t have an advisor. And I kind of know this, but I think the people that I’ve identified is the people that use an advisor. And I know this isn’t across the board, but the people that we’re talking to on the advisory council, the degree of humility like I would kind of the phraseology is I would never try to do this on my own.
And this surprise that people feel confident they can do this on their own was almost, I want to say, appalling to the people that work with us, but confusing to a certain degree. And I understand people like to do it yourself. We’re all like that to a certain degree. I know that I’ve tried to fix plumbing before.
I’ve tried to fix my car before, you know, this is the stuff. We’ve all tried it. The problem with trying it on your own, with lots of zeros and lots of money in your entire future. Is that making mistakes can have permanent consequences. Like my toilet and my car. You know, those can be fixed, but when people do it on their own, it is one mistake.
And I’ve seen this over and over again over the years, you know, 20 years of doing this. I’ve seen many, many typically men try to do that on their own, and there’s just consequences of doing that. So, I just appreciate the humility of the advisory council saying, man, I just I could never want to do this on my own, and I’m so happy to have you.
That was just refreshing, because sometimes I beat myself up because I’m, you know, I always want to make sure that I’m giving value. Number two, one of the clients said, you solved a problem for me. And this was specifically in the insurance space over a couple zoom calls that we’ve taken him weeks to maybe figure out.
And I just love the fact that we were able to save people time to not only just I always think about the emotional piece, but there’s also that time element. So, somebody who’s really busy has a lot of stuff going on. We’re able to solve a problem for him in a couple of weeks, or in a couple zoom calls that would have otherwise taken him several weeks or months to figure out.
Number three, the advisory council told us that there was value in having multiple resources. A lot of people don’t know that we have an attorney that houses in our office space, and we have to keep some walls between us. You know, legal walls and I guess actually physical walls. But, yeah, we have an attorney in-house.
We have a strategic relationship with the Social Security expert, and we have Justin, who’s our insurance guy. We’ve got a 401K guy. We have a lot of really interesting strategic relationships that we have in the marketplace. And sometimes I take that for granted. And when people come here and they have a money problem, we think about if we can’t solve it, who in the marketplace can.
And sometimes I take that for granted and I’m glad that’s, that’s not lost on our clients that that’s something that we do. Okay. Number four, this one was kind of funny. We I didn’t know one of our clients, maybe more than one, found us because of our highway sign. We have a couple of highway signs in the San Antonio area, and one going up in New Braunfels towards Austin.
And it’s funny, because our only negative Google review was by somebody complaining that PAX Financial Group didn’t pick up the trash by our highway sign. Just so you know, that’s not our responsibility. We advertise. And then that provides the resources to TEXDOT to have somebody go out there and pick up trash. So, we don’t actually go pick up trash, especially in some of these areas.
It would be very dangerous. But we had a client that found us from the highway sign. So, it’s interesting and a great line at that. Number five. I think a challenge that I think we all have to wrestle with is staying like this family kind of feel like we really care about you but growing at the same time.
And we recognize that that’s going to be a challenge. And so, we have to have leadership that’s really sensitive to people’s unique personal needs, and then also try to figure out a way to continue to grow, which is a challenge for every business. So that’s something that was addressed as a concern, not necessarily a problem to solve today, but something to always keep in mind.
Number six, the role that we play is a guide, not the hero. And now this is a spin off from Don Miller’s work. If anybody knows Don Miller. But the advisors that work here, we are not the heroes. We’re not here to make anybody rich. We may try to help people stay rich, but you are the hero. You are the consumer, you’re the investor.
You’re the hero. We are the guide. And I think us understanding that role is very important. Really, if you’re going to become rich, it’s because you, as the consumer, you made good decisions. You’re wise. You saved. You lived within your means. You’re the hero. We’re the guide. And I think having that, that relationship in the right perspective is very important.
Number seven, a lot of people in our community don’t know who to send referrals to. I know it was interesting because a lot of you want to send referrals to us, but you don’t necessarily know how. And so, I want to I think the best resource is to send it. Any referrals to Janise Brooks, Janise@PAXFG.com.
Because what she’s going to do is if you send a referral to us, she’s going to say, okay, which advisor has the capacity? There’s some advisors that just have a lot going on, and it may not have the capacity. Who’s the right personality fit and then who has an expertise to solve that unique need. And so those factors, you need kind of a third party, not necessarily the advisor to make that determination.
And Janise is good at doing that. So, she’s our president. So, if you have any referrals send it to Janise@PAXFG.com. So that was number seven. Number eight. A lot of the clients. And if you’re an older client of PAX, we used to do these cool events each year and they’re awesome. We had Michael Junior come.
We had a lot of great speakers. I know you guys missed that. And so that’s something we’ll have to consider again. You know, Covid kind of really shook us all up. And so, I want to figure out if we could do an event again. But I hear you, number nine. How do we reach that younger generation? When I say younger generation, you know, a lot of our clients are 50 plus.
And so, the question is, is we want our 50 plus clients said, we want you to be able to connect with our kids and be able to serve them. And so just not losing sight of that. And so we do have we do have a couple advisors that are younger that really connect with that next generation. And we just have to be intentional about some of our communication efforts.
Don’t tilt too much towards the silver, what we what we call the silver tsunami. And think about that next generation, how to serve them and their unique needs. And it was interesting because I was just reminded, and I’m still in this phase in a lot of ways. I mean, I have an 11-year-old and a 13-year-old.
I was reminded that, you know, it’s just really hard to get busy young families to sit down and think about money. And so, we I think it’s incumbent upon us to be creative on how we might be able to do that as really good advice. Number ten, this is kind of in the same vein is, is how, you know, how can you take care of our kids?
In what ways can you really help? You know, we love you. That was just great. But what ways can you take care of our kids and the challenge that we have here is, first of all, we don’t have minimums. A lot of advisory firms have minimums. We don’t necessarily. And that’s a business challenge because sometimes less complex accounts and smaller accounts demand just as much or more.
And so, you have this, this challenge of being able to serve clients that expect a lot and that aren’t, you know, that aren’t your bigger clients. And, you know, if you have bigger clients, you need to give those people your attention because they’re expecting a lot and they have a lot to risk that. So, we recognize that.
But it’s a challenge to be able to serve brand new accounts. But when we embrace and we’ve embraced this challenge forever, I say since we started and many advisors established minimums to solve that problem, we don’t. And so, will that change in the future? Maybe, I don’t know, but right now we want to try to solve it. We want to be able to serve the younger generation.
And we have the capacity to do that, and we have the capacity to give them the personal attention that they need. And it’s constantly it’s just really a matter of managing expectations for the younger generation. But we will. You do want to work with our clients’ kids. We know we can bring a lot of value in helping them accomplish their goals.
Number 11, an example that was often used in prior conversations. And it was a vernacular that was adopted in our culture that I’ve moved away from. But it’s important for you to know that the stock market is like a child with yoyo on an escalator and you don’t pay attention to the child with yo-yo. You pay attention to the escalator.
And I say all that because one of the one of our clients in the advisory council mentioned that to me. And I go, you know, I haven’t used that phrase in forever. And I had these like, go to phrases and they have seasons. And then I that one was lost. It got buried somewhere. So, I want to revisit that because I think that’s a really important phrase.
When you think about the markets, think about them in that context. It’s like a child with a yo-yo on an escalator. Don’t pay attention. That child with the yo-yo. It’s the escalator that counts. It’s a long term, number 12 really got great feedback on PAX Connect. And if you’re not using PAX Connect, that’s a way to check your accounts, on, you know, on your mobile device and want you to be careful.
I think you all know this, but there are some good studies. I believe Prudential did these studies that said, the more you look at it, the worse you do. Money is really like soap, the more you mess with it, the less you have. So, you want to look at PAX Connect. You want to have a cadence of looking at it.
And that’s appropriate. Quarterly is probably sufficient. Anything more than that I question even the value of it and but just make sure you’re logging into PAX Connect and you’ve got access there. Check with your advisor on that. Number 13. Another helpful analogy that again, kind of slipped from my vernacular is I continue to navigate through the markets and use different tools and phrases.
But, when your portfolio is pretty well diversified and the market crashes, you generally speaking, you’re going to fall off the porch, not the roof. And I think that’s important to understand. And it’s hard to really remember, you know, all the numbers, you know, what percentage of my own bonds and what’s my risk profile. And then we have all these mechanisms to measure what’s my beta, what’s my standard deviation.
We can get on that. But all that stuff’s harder. Remember, the thing to remember is that if you’re well diversified and you’ve stress tested your portfolio, which I’ve talked about quite a bit, you are very likely if the market crashes, you’re going to fall off the porch and not the roof. And so, remember that analogy and maybe even bring that to your advisor and ask them, hey, if the market crashes while I fall off the porch and the roof, and let’s jump into that and figure that out.
Quantify that. Two more. Number 14. And this kind of goes in the same vein as the last one. So, diversification is the name of the game. And the thing about diversification that’s a little bit frustrating for me personally is that diversification by its definition is you’re apologizing for something always, you’re always apologizing because there’s something in the portfolio that didn’t do well.
That’s diversification. The best portfolio is an undiversified portfolio when you’re right. And so that’s never that’s always in retrospect because otherwise if that was the case, we would put all your money in cryptocurrency in 2005. Right? I mean, like nobody knows the future. In fact, I was telling my kids, I was telling them about what crypto has done over the last year or so.
And my daughter, she goes, well, should I put it in now? I go, we have no idea. It could crash tomorrow. But the way we approach things in the investment world is core satellite. You’ve heard me talk about this. We have a core portfolio that’s really built around, modern portfolio theory, which is diversification, spread it out, have different asset classes, small cap, mid-cap and all that.
And then that’s the core. That’s the majority of your money. And then we satellite it with themes or inclinations or market conditions. And those things might be private equity. Private debt. We do have some clients that have crypto, you know, stock baskets. So just as a reminder, we do core satellite portfolio investing.
So that was a part of our dialog with the advisory council as well. And then last thing, number 15 is and maybe we can do this on a website we haven’t really unpacked if we can and will, but we have specialist advisors’ kind of lean into a specialty. So, for example, if you know Haley, she really specializes in working with widows.
And so that’s pretty unique. Right. And so, then you have David who works with special needs kids. And I could go on and on, but my main point is, is that each advisor has really lean into a specialty that they’re called to serve like this, unique, like they’re trying to solve a unique problem in a community.
Now, it’s not limited to that community, but when I shared that with our advisory council, they had asked if I could, not only promote that, but share that on our website so that they know as a consumer who has specialties. And it’s not only technical expertise, but it’s also making sure that you can utilize the same language and make sure you have the right resources in the marketplace to be able to serve these unique communities with unique problems.
So, the specialty is something that’s a little bit of a secret sauce that we haven’t publicized. So hopefully we can revise our website to reflect those specialties for each and every advisor. So, man, it was unbelievable. There’s so much wisdom in the Council of Advisors. These were just 15 of many points. And again, who those who are on the advisory Council thank you for your time.
But these insights help us become better and really continue to be able to serve you not just in the near term but in the long term and make modifications. Because just like anything else, if you’re off just a few degrees, you end up landing on the wrong planet, so to speak. And so, if we have a destination to grow and to continue to serve our community well, then we make sure that we course correct along that journey.
And we can only do that with feedback from our clients. So, thank you for that. And, I hope I’m producing this on the Monday before Thanksgiving. And I want to just thank you guys for being clients. Thank you for supporting us. Thank you for our community. Even if you’re not clients. Thank you for listening. And please share this podcast with others, as there’s a lot of people out there that need financial help.
And even if we reach them through this podcast, we’re doing something good. And as always, you think different when you think long term. Have a great day.
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