Creating a People-Focused Practice with McKenzie Frankel

00:10
Charlie Van Derven
Thank you for tuning into another episode of RA a Collective. My name is Charlie Van der Van. I'm the host of the show. I also own a little business called Social Advisors, where we help financial advisors help more people. That's kind of our altruistic path in life. Along those lines, I've got a great guest today. First, I'll tell you about RA Collective. If you haven't tuned in before, I've been working in this industry for two or two decades, I guess, and that's a long time to kind of witness trends. One of the trends I've seen that's consistent our guest is going to speak to this as well, is we've watched this migration in our industry move from that captive environment for social advisors into a much greater kind of independent role. I love watching it. I started my career working with wirehouses, setting up websites, and I've been on the independent side now for, I guess, twelve or 13 years. 

01:06
Charlie Van Derven
I really think that independent advisors can serve their clients better because you don't have the biases of the big firms. That's something we're unpacking on RAA collective. In addition to bringing advice from RA leadership to help younger advisers in our industry who want to make that independent move, just give them advice, what helps you go a little more smoothly and things you can concentrate on as you carve that path to independence. So, without further ado, let me introduce my guest today, McKenzie Frankel Audio. I was drawn to your profile on LinkedIn and invited you to be on the show because of the experience you had with some of those big boxes before. I don't know if that's a good term or not to use, but kind of those big box firms before you went independent. Right. When we had our conversation last week, I was even more drawn to you for your kind of your guidance around leadership and some of the things that you've done at your RIAA and Trust Financial in Wayne, Pennsylvania, some of the things you've done to help build a team and be a better leader to that team. 

02:11
Charlie Van Derven
So I talk a lot. McKenzie I'm going to try to shop as much as I can for the next 20 minutes or half hour, let you get a word in edgewise. McKenzie, welcome to Racoective and thank you so much for being my guest today. 

02:22
McKenzie Frankel
Thank you for having me. 

02:24
Charlie Van Derven
Very cool. In doing my research and getting prepped for today, one of the questions I like to ask our guest is really what drew you to the industry? Of course, everybody's answer is a little different, right? Yours was unique in that kind of you feel like your life was cut out for this industry. A service to others is really what's defined your life and that dream of financial services where you can make a great big impact on a lot of people's lives. Let's talk about that a little bit. How did you get into financial services? 

02:54
McKenzie Frankel
Yeah, so I randomly got into financial services. I would say I've always known from a young teenager that I really wanted to make a large impact on people in a positive way and really help people. That's always been what has driven me. I never really realized I was going to be a social advisors. That was really very random, honestly. I've actually always really have enjoyed money to a degree. I'm not somebody that's ever feared money. I've always been somebody that thought it was really interesting that you could invest your money and let it grow for you. My mom used to read the Wall Street Journal with me at a really young age, and she talked to me about what she was doing. I just combined my passion for wanting to help people and my enjoyment around money, and that's how I became a financial adviser. 

03:56
Charlie Van Derven
That is so awesome. It's amazing the number of people when I ask a question like that, where they found the industry by accident. My friend Mark up in Canada, we had a conversation last week and he was serving big corporations, and somebody invited him to hear more about their business and all of a sudden he was a financial adviser because for similar reasons. Right. It was later in his career, but it was about, I don't want to make this corporation stronger, I want to make people stronger. 

04:29
McKenzie Frankel
It's kind of funny because actually during the time, I didn't actually know what a financial advisor really was because I grew up where my mom was kind of doing herself for the family. I actually didn't know what a social advisors was. I went to a career event, and that's where I met my soontobe manager from UBS Wealth Management at the time. 

04:53
Charlie Van Derven
Yeah, very cool. Doors open, right? I love that. Let's talk about your experience with UBS and Morgan Stanley, I believe, prior to that step to independence. What were those years like? How long were you there? The big benefit of starting your career in those environments. 

05:10
McKenzie Frankel
Yeah, so I was hired on at UBS Wealth Management, and they hired like a class of people. There was like ten of us hired on. We're all like, younger in our careers, and we all go in to it with this great expectation that it's going to be great and we're going to all be so successful. People just started dropping off like flies. Eventually two years passed and I watched basically there was ten of us and eight people all kind of dropped off the chain for various reasons of not meeting the quotas, and it was just me left standing and another, actually, woman who was like, in her a lot older than me at that point. She teamed up with another visitor and my manager had called me in to talk to me and I was like, listen, it's been great, but I can't do this anymore. 

06:08
McKenzie Frankel
Like, this isn't going to work for me. I'm failing. I'm barely making anything and this is not happening. At that point, he paired me up with another social advisors. I was like, okay, great, I can make this work. He's going to mentor me and it's going to be fantastic. A week, two weeks after I met him, he was like, yeah, by the way, I'm moving my book of business to Morgan Stanley. I was like he's like, do you want to come with me? So I said, okay. I came with him under the terms that I would serve as a client service associate. I did that for the two years while I was there. And it was tough. It was a really tough business. I had no idea how tough it was going to be, especially as a young woman at that point. It was really tough because it was really mostly middle aged men and it was hard to be taken seriously. 

07:01
McKenzie Frankel
I ended up sticking it out for a number of years and I learned a lot from all those advisors. I think it's a great experience, honestly, because you're surrounded by so many different advisors and you can see how they do their business differently and how they've all managed to be successful in different but just doing it differently. That helped me to figure out really how I wanted to run my business. 

07:28
Charlie Van Derven
Cool. I love that. We chatted last week and I shared with you early in my career was websites for Warehouses, which I ran business development for a firm that was cranking out sites for Smith Barney, Morgan Stanley, RBC, gosh, Ameriprise, I don't know how many whole bunch of others. A lot of my time was on the road setting up websites in specifically Smith Barney branches before 2008, I think was that merged with Morgan Stanley. That dates me but the exposure to all those advisors and I don't know, I was in a hundred branches over a year, right? How many advisors to interface with just in that role? I echo that. I think it's great and it serves me in the coaching world that I do because you get to see so many different ways that people are able to structure their business, the people they help, the way they help them. 

08:16
Charlie Van Derven
And what an awesome exposure. 

08:18
McKenzie Frankel
Yeah, it really was. I mean, it was terrible at the time. I remember the struggles, I remember the stress around it like I'm never going to get anywhere kind of feeling. At the end of the day, when I look back, it was a really great experience. 

08:32
Charlie Van Derven
Many years later, McKenzie I still feel that way some days, yeah. Some days. Some days not too many but some days it still comes up. I want to plug a friend of mine while we talk about this because you brought up being a woman in a middle aged man's environment and again my time in the industry I've seen that happen and I've seen a huge transition. I'm going to plug my friend Cheryl Hickerson real quick. Not that she sponsored the show or anything like that. She's got an awesome group called Females and Finance and it's not all women it's all people supporting the growth of women in the industry. Anybody who's listening mackenzie, yourself you're not aware of Cheryl and her group Females in Finance. I think it's 4000 people strong at this point. Sheryl does an awesome job bringing great references and support to the female side of the industry. 

09:25
Charlie Van Derven
It's been wonderful to watch that grow and frankly in my experience I think women are more nurturing with clients. Of course huge generalization there but I think that's a really great way for the industry to be moving. Let's move on from that wirehouse time you depart that environment. How does that happen? Right. You're in the CSA role with Morgan Stanley. Did you ever go into production with Morgan or was that always on the customer service side? 

10:00
McKenzie Frankel
The deal of me moving with him was that I could still cultivate a client base. I did clients and I was doing kind of a quasi financial advisor CSA role and I was growing my book at that point. 

10:14
Charlie Van Derven
Cool. I'd love to hear that because I know pretty shortly after all that and trust financial becomes an option for you. 

10:22
McKenzie Frankel
Yeah. 

10:23
Charlie Van Derven
Let's talk about the transition and one of the things I'm curious about as you talk about that transition is did you retain assets? Did you just depart without that and anything you did well that you feel like in preparation for that or anything you would do differently in making that move? 

10:42
McKenzie Frankel
Yeah. Basically I decided I was going to move because I realized that I was not really ever going to be able to do what I really wanted to do. At the end of the day when I became a financial adviser I didn't realize that when I entered UBS or entered Morgan Stanley that it was really a sales role. That has never been my passion. Right. What I've always envisioned was that I could be a financial advisor and create almost like a doctor's practice where people come in, tell you what their issues are and really the investments are just tools for helping them. I wanted really a more holistic approach and I started at the time I didn't really know what even the CFP was so I started kind of just looking around on the internet and doing some research on my own and then I found the CFP program. 

11:46
McKenzie Frankel
I was like, oh, well, this is like, this is I need this, I need to do this. I went to my mentor at the time and I was like, I really want and they're like, Why? You don't need to do that. You just need to meet people, sell products, blah, blah. I was like, okay, this is not work. I just know this is going to work. I began looking around and I ended up stumbling into who is now my business partner. At the time, she was at Lincoln Investment Planning, and we started working side by side. We were 1099 through Lincoln Investment Planning and we started working side by side and she became my mentor. And it was great. It was great, the fact that I was thrilled to have found another woman who was a successful financial advisor. Also it was fantastic because she was running her practice the way that I wanted to run my practice. 

12:48
McKenzie Frankel
We had the same values. We worked for a while as ten 899 through Lincoln Investment Planning. I guess we worked for it was like six years together. And then we decided to become independent. In 2015, March 2015, we pulled the trigger and went totally independent and moved everything over to Swap. That was a very difficult transition, becoming independent, right. Because it was all those things we thought we knew, but then all those business related things that you don't really think about in terms of, like, the different systems that you need, just the bookkeeping and the compliance and all those different systems that you had to really vet and figure out what's best. And then hiring, that was something else. The first few years, I would say. What? We really struggled with hiring. We did not. We were just picking the wrong people. Went through like five employees in five years. 

14:01
Charlie Van Derven
Yeah. Wow. That's the hardest part in our business too, right? We got a great team, but we're nine years old. It was always that way. It's taken, I hate to say trial and error, because you like to do your diligence upfront and hopefully you get that trial in before you make the hire, but you never really know who you're hiring. Look good on paper doesn't mean it's going to translate into a great relationship. Of course, there's interpersonal aspects of that. I can empathize with your position there because building team's tough. 

14:35
McKenzie Frankel
It is very tough. 

14:37
Charlie Van Derven
That leads us into some of the things that you talked about with leadership. Right. Again, I connected with you thinking, wow, Mackenzie has got great experience at the larger firms and then going independent. When we got acquainted last week, like your take on the structure of the business, your take on leadership excited me even more about this conversation. Why don't we talk about that. Maybe I'm jumping the gun because I know I had that listed later questions, but it makes sense. Talk about how you made that transition from that difficult, the difficulty of building that team to, you shared with me where you're at today, and it sounds pretty incredible, actually. 

15:17
McKenzie Frankel
Yeah, well, what we've realized, or what I realized anyway, it was like, okay, well, we're hiring these people and they don't really care as much as we care about making this business work and be successful. I didn't want it to be that way. I wanted it to people feel like they actually have skin in the game and they're working towards a greater good. Right. We actually ended up changing the structure of our company. We work with a company called FP Transitions and they helped us to change the structure of our company so we can actually allow for other employees to actually own shares of the company as well. The goal, really the goal for us is that everybody is an owner to some degree, right. It could be as much as 3% of shares. To have that ownership, I just feel it takes and when we start recruiting now, when we are recruiting for employees, we make sure that we're hiring people who really are, who want to be business owners, who really like the thought of being partners and having skin in the game. 

16:38
McKenzie Frankel
That is part of the vetting process. To be honest with you, that's really helped us quite a bit because we haven't knocked on wood. We are not now having turnover. We have people that are really committed to the growth of untrust, which is fantastic. 

16:55
Charlie Van Derven
Yeah, that absolutely is. How do I ask this question? You bring new personalities in and of course everybody's going to take a look at your business in coaching. I like to say I can spot the mosquito on your back before I can spot the elephant on mine. Right. 

17:12
McKenzie Frankel
Yeah. 

17:14
Charlie Van Derven
It's really easy, especially with the position of perspective that you have over the years, to say, no, you need to do it this way. Right. But then difficult. Someone could walk into social advisors and tell me the same thing. Right. You need to do it this way. Based on their experience. You've got people that come in the door. They've got this kind of entrepreneurial mindset so they've got some ownership in the business. Do you ever struggle with that when you've got people coming in that have that entrepreneurial mindset and kind of assimilating them into the structure as opposed to the opinions they bring from elsewhere? 

17:47
McKenzie Frankel
Yeah, well, actually, we value their opinions. I will say a lot of we structure quarterly bonuses around things that they want to, like projects that they want to take on in terms of what do they think interest needs in terms of improving how we do things. Actually, I like when people have opinions. I like when people have different experiences that they can bring to the table and teach me something new. We try to hire people that have skill sets that are different, and they do things better to a certain degree than I do. I mean, that's what I want. I think that's the way that we're going to be stronger. So, we do have we have quarterly bonuses that they kind of create theme on. So, like, if it's a client service person, like more operational, it might be like, create a new scheduling system, figure out a new scheduling system, figure out a client, like client surveys or how to do that, things of that nature. 

18:52
McKenzie Frankel
And we always pull instead of goal. At the beginning of the year, as a team, we decide what is it that we want to do for the year, what do we think needs to be improved? What we're already doing, what needs to be improved. We get everybody participating in that because I don't want it to be all on me. 

19:14
Charlie Van Derven
I agree. And we follow an EOS model. So those are our rocks, right? Every quarter we sit down and talk about our rocks. What do we do in this quarter and how big is that? Also, I want to share with you one of my very favorite quotes. I asked that question kind of to spur the response you gave me. Thank you for that. 

19:30
McKenzie Frankel
Okay. 

19:31
Charlie Van Derven
One of my favorite quotes is Steve Jobs quote, right? I'll get this wrong, but you'll get the idea. I don't hire smart people and tell them what to do. I hire smart people so they can tell me what to do. Bringing in that talent is really amazing. You've got a process to fulfill. You guys are not an assembly line, right? It is certainly that outside perspective makes everything stronger. That's awesome. Tell me about interest and I want to know kind of mission values. Do you guys have any pet projects and how do you contribute to Wayne, PA and beyond? 

20:08
McKenzie Frankel
Yeah, we are truly a boat wealth management firm. Currently there's five of us, and we are looking to grow. We do need to hire, we do need to actually move office space, but we're moving very close by, and we focus on helping entrepreneurs and business owners. Goal is to help people really preserve and build their wealth. That's our focus group, basically, because we are entrepreneurs and business owners, so. 

20:42
Charlie Van Derven
We understand their needs and make the business community stronger. That's awesome. 

20:46
McKenzie Frankel
Yeah, we enjoy supporting small business. Honestly, it's like, I get juiced by helping entrepreneurs because I think it's so interesting what they're doing and what they've accomplished, and it's just very, it's a very enjoyable experience when I'm helping business owners take it to another level in terms of their wealth. There's that. As a community, we encourage everybody to get involved and volunteer in various ways depending on what they are passionate about. I'm involved in various entrepreneurial groups and giving back in that way. We have Temple University, which is a local university that we give to and are involved in one of our members as a hockey advocate. Like, they love hockey. They coach the junior leagues, and we give to those types of local businesses. So we got our hands on everything. Everybody does give an interest, does match their gift on a yearly basis. 

22:08
Charlie Van Derven
Yeah, that's very cool. I really think that as goes the business community, so goes the community. I've done a lot of work with our local chamber and been involved in coaching small businesses and seminars and things like that. I truly think that giving back to the business community helps prop up the community at large. So that's awesome. Candy, tell me, are you guys growing? Are you looking for maybe I should ask that more generally. What's the direction? Are you recruiting advisers? Of course, we got listeners who might be thinking about going independent. 

22:42
McKenzie Frankel
Yeah, definitely. We want to recruit an advisor coming up here in 2023, so we do want another advisor to join us. We're looking for somebody really that has, I would say, a smaller book of business because we have a lot of clients and we're not the type of business where it's like, as a financial adviser, you got to go out and just hit the pavement and just continuously try to get new business. What we need is somebody that's willing to take on and trust clients, like clients that we already have and also be out there in the community but also serving the team. We want a financial adviser that potentially has, like, a smaller book of business and that really wants to be a part of a wealth management team. 

23:32
Charlie Van Derven
That's awesome. I love that, and I love that distinction because I think one of the things I've seen over and over in my career and you brought it up earlier, is you end up at a UBS or a Morgan Stanley, and not them specifically, but a large firm like that. Your greatest skill, of course, prior to LinkedIn and the Internet and stuff, was really the speed at which you dial a phone, make these 200 calls a day, oh, my gosh, I got my finance degree. I'm ready to help people. This isn't what I envisioned. 

23:59
McKenzie Frankel
Right, right. Exactly. 

24:01
Charlie Van Derven
Yeah. I love that you guys are embracing that team mentality versus you're a hunter, go get it. Right. That's really cool. Listen, it's awesome to know you. I'm excited about the leadership that you bring to the industry. I'm excited about the boutique approach and supportive entrepreneurs. Listen. And Mackenzie, I'll cut this out. If you say no, would you be a resource to our listeners if anybody's thinking about going independent, and they love your mindset about the way that you have built and trust and structure that. Are you okay if our listeners reach out and contact you? 

24:43
McKenzie Frankel
Oh, absolutely. Always happy to help. 

24:47
Charlie Van Derven
Awesome. So what's the easiest way? Of course, the website is Entrustfinancial.com. Did I get that right? 

24:53
McKenzie Frankel
Our website entrustfinancial.com. The best way is just send me an email to McKenzie. It's McKenzie at Entrustfinancial. And that's entrust financial.com. 

25:07
Charlie Van Derven
Cool. I'll tell you what, mackenzie is pretty easy to find on LinkedIn, and she's responsive. That's how I met her too. McKenzie, you're awesome. I love what you guys are doing up in Wayne, Pennsylvania. I think you've got a refreshing mindset to an industry that maybe I mean, it's transitioning, it's happening, but it is it's a big machine to move. So I'm excited about it. Thank you for the way that you serve this industry, and thank you for spending time with me today. I appreciate it. 

25:41
McKenzie Frankel
Charlie, thank you. Thank you for what you do and getting the word out and helping other financial advisors. 

25:48
Charlie Van Derven
Yeah, absolutely. It's my pleasure. There's a mission in life. There's a mission in life, I truly think. Maybe one day I'll get a season assist letter for this or something. I really think you brought up quotas and stuff, right? When you're at those big firms, you've got certain quotas. Like, gosh, if there's a bank Arm, you got to send so many banking leads a month, and you got to fulfill on certain services. I really think as soon as you serve the initiatives of the firm, it's really hard to serve purely the initiatives of your clients. Yeah, maybe it's really hard to be a fiduciary and be in that environment. I really think that the industry I love to see it moving independent, because I think that's where the industry serves people the best. 

26:31
McKenzie Frankel
I agree. 

26:32
Charlie Van Derven
Awesome. So, everybody who tuned in, thank you once again for tuning in to another episode of RAA Collective. My name is Charlie Van Derven. You've just listened to an interview with Mackenzie Franklin. Of course, if anybody that is in an RAA leadership position that you think we should interview, maybe they got some hefty opinions about the industry that we can tap into. Send them my way. I'm easy to find on LinkedIn. Or you can check out the website, RA a Collective.com. 

27:00
McKenzie Frankel
Thank you. 

27:01
Charlie Van Derven
Thank you, Mackenzie.