Generosity As a Business Model with Bob DePasquale

00:10
Charlie Van Derven
Thank you for joining us for another episode of RIA Collective. My name is Charlie Van Derby and I'm your host. I'm super excited about our guests today. We'll get an introduction to Bob here in a moment. I want to remind everybody that our mission in our purpose is to help advisers who maybe are in a captive environment not exactly what they expected coming out of school and didn't have the flexibility that they anticipated and working with people to help with their financial, wellbeing, that really kind of feel stuck. There's a whole different side of this industry that a lot of people have never explored. Our guest today has been through that and has a really purpose driven mission with his RIA that I think will resonate with a lot social advisors who maybe walked out of college thinking they're going to help people with a successful financial future and they find out that their ability to sell is really the quality that the firm was looking for in the first place and maybe you feel stifled. 

01:12
Charlie Van Derven
Our guest today, Bob DePasquale. I got it right, Bob, didn't I? 

Bob Depasquale
Yes, sir. 

Charlie Van Derven
All right, man. He's been through it. What's fun is he comes from a background of broadcast, and so we're going to find out how that background kind of intermingled with financial services needs to creating a ton of contact content, rather with his RIA Initiate Impact now. Certainly the careers have complimented each other, but Bob's a very pure, mission driven guy, and I'm excited for our listeners to learn how that impacts that move to independence. Bob, I got to tell you, the one thing that drew me to your profile on LinkedIn was your title, The Generosity Guy. 

01:57
Bob Depasquale
You like that? 

01:58
Charlie Van Derven
I love it, man. It drew me in immediately. So, Bob DePasquale, thank you for joining us. Bob's RIA is Initiated Impact, and we're going to learn what Bob's mission has been like and what that transition to independence has been. I'm sure you're going to pick up some gems about how you can make transition easier for you as well. Where does The Generosity Guy come from Bob? 

02:21
Bob Depasquale
Well, I had a unique experience with generosity at a young age of my life, and it kind of stuck with me. It wasn't until more recently, though, that we came up with the Generosity Guy. And, yeah, we're playing on alliteration there with the G's, but I really found myself thinking about generosity in a different way in the last couple of years, maybe three or four years. It's really been a good fit in my life now. I've done some research on the technical aspects and scientific places that have done research on generosity, and it's fascinating to me and it's also applicable in my life, too. I got plenty of anecdotal evidence over the past 30 years or so and then a lot of scientific evidence more recently. It's an important part of my life, and I hope people see that. I hope it's not just a title. 

03:02
Bob Depasquale
I hope that they see it in action, too. 

03:05
Charlie Van Derven
Before we get into the interviews, where I start brainstorming what titles might be AI transcription for the podcast and things like that. The title the working title, I should say, because subject to change that I wrote down is Generosity as a Business Model. Yeah, I don't know. We'll see if we stick with that one, Bob, but right now, that's our working title. 

03:26
Bob Depasquale
Awesome. Let's make it happen. 

03:29
Charlie Van Derven
All right, man, all right. As we got to know each other a few weeks ago, right, you shared with me that your initial career was really broadcast and radio. And, I mean, tell us about that, and, eventually we're going to learn how that turns into a financial services career, but you get started doing a lot of talking. 

03:52
Bob Depasquale
Yes, I do like to talk. If you need to cut me off on the interview here, if we're running out of tape on the record, just let me know. 

04:00
Charlie Van Derven
There's no shortage of tape. Bob, we share the same problem, so you might have to be like, Charlie, you shut up too? 

04:06
Bob Depasquale
Yeah. There you go. There you go. Well, if we're holding each other accountable, in that case so, yeah, I'll give you a quick background. I always wanted to be in broadcast. I was going to be playing sports. I was going to be talking about them. That was my career choice when I was five, and I kind of grew into that, really. I just kept chasing, kept following it. Out of grad school, I have a master's degree in broadcast journalism. That's really, my extensive training in my life is really in that world, and I just love communicating. Some people would say, oh, he just loves to talk. He loves to be in front of the camera behind the microphone, or behind the camera in front of the microphone, however you want to look at it. It's just that I really like to communicate. I love information. 

04:45
Bob Depasquale
I live I really feel like I do live in the greatest time for me to be alive. Some people have said I belong in the 70s with some of my habits, but in reality, I really enjoy being in this age because it's so easy to get information that we can communicate well. I didn't realize I'd be applying it to the financial world, and we do. Communication is very important at our firm. In my life, communication has been very big for me, whether it's my relationships and my professional ones, my family relationships. I want to continue to do that. More recently, I've been able to do that in a professional manner. You talk about generosity and communication, those are probably my two favorite concepts on earth. 

05:22
Charlie Van Derven
That's awesome. You've been talking about sports since you're five. I got to share personally, I got a couple of years on you. I don't know how that impacts this, but my cousin and I, when were like, maybe a little old in five, like seven, eight, nine years old, we grew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Right. Into football, NFL fans for sure, but we would make these mock football announcer recordings like were faking that were announcing a football game. We'd do all the editing on a dual tape deck. Right? Yeah. It didn't stick with me like it did with you, but I'd probably something similar. 

06:01
Bob Depasquale
Right? 

06:01
Charlie Van Derven
Like were just pretending were announcers for football games when were six or seven years old. 

06:06
Bob Depasquale
Yeah. I have similar recordings just like that. I remember going to the NFL Experience once when the Super Bowl was here in Miami, close to where I lived. They had and I was probably a teenager by then, but they had like a little one of the games or things that they had going on was record yourself announcing, like, the last year's Super Bowl. I have a VHS tape of me doing it somewhere. Maybe my parents have it, I don't know. But, yeah, I did the exact same thing. Those were the days I was either outside playing football and when I was inside, I was watching it and in some cases announcing and doing the recordings. 

06:42
Charlie Van Derven
Yeah. I'll tell you what one of the cool things I did is when I was a kid. Same age. My soccer coach. The youth soccer coach was a guy named Johnny Gray who played on some really bad Green Bay Packer teams back before they had. You know. We've had 35 years of quarterback success. But prior to that. It was kind of bleak for a while there. But yeah. I brought Johnny Great a show and tell when I was in third grade. 

07:09
Bob Depasquale
Awesome. The quarterback I remember before far was Don Mcausky. 

07:14
Charlie Van Derven
Yeah. The Magic Man. 

07:16
Bob Depasquale
Yeah, man. He was a good player, but the team wasn't that good. 

07:18
Charlie Van Derven
The team was terrible. And Linda Kee before that. God, we had some rough ones, man. Rich Whitehurst. 

07:25
Bob Depasquale
Yeah, there were some for another podcast. 

07:28
Charlie Van Derven
We could do all we could, man. I've seen some terrible football in my day. Maybe we should Bob. We'll explore that. There you go. I have so much fun with this. I'm always looking for other topics to do, too. Right. RIA Collective has been fun, and I think we're helping people who are really feel stifled by where they are in the industry and opening up their eyes to other opportunities and stuff. This is fun. I don't know. Maybe I got another one or two of my sleep. We'll see. 

07:56
Bob Depasquale
There you go. 

07:57
Charlie Van Derven
I'm having fun. And I'm having fun. How do you go from broadcast journalism to financial services. What's AI transcription look like? 

08:07
Bob Depasquale
Yeah, well, you get recruited by a guy who is relentless at the school that my wife teaches at. So my wife is a kindergarten teacher. Right at the time, I think she was teaching second grade, but she's been teaching for 15 years. She's in her 16th year teaching and I would imagine more than a decade of kindergarten. So she teaches very young. She's got patience. That's why she married me. She's a very nice woman, kind, and her ability to communicate as well, but with young people is truly amazing. Why would a recruiter for a financial services firm and we'll talk more about thriving? My previous employer, probably. Why would this guy go to an elementary school to recruit financial planners? To me, it didn't make any sense, but he was just persistent. He said to the ladies in the office there, come on, you got to know somebody who wants to work in finance. 

09:01
Bob Depasquale
And they were like, oh, you're crazy. He said, Come on, you got to know somebody. He actually, after a series, I don't know how long it took. I would imagine was there for at least a few minutes, and they finally said, all right, Mrs. Deeper Squali's husband is a nice guy. Why don't you call her? He must have left and called right away because it was in the middle of the school day. She couldn't answer. She listened to the message after school and came home and said, hey, why don't you call this guy back? Just be a nice guy. I know this is not something you're interested in, your knee deep in your radio career. At that time, I was working in radio. One of my professors in grad school told me, I have a face for radio. I took that to heart, and I got out of the television business, and I went into radio. 

09:45
Bob Depasquale
But I loved it. I loved that career. It was hard hours. I was working hard, but for some reason, I called him back, and I just told him just to get him off the phone. I said, I'll call you back in six months, man. Thanks for the call. I appreciate it being a nice guy. That was my excuse to get him off. About six months later, it was the holiday season. I had a couple days off, which is rare, and something clicked in my mind, and I said, what? I'm a man of my word. My parents raised me to be a good guy, so I'm just going to call him back. I told him I would, so I'll call him back. I did, and I think he was totally surprised. He was like, Wait, what? Huh? He was just totally confused that I would even call. 

10:23
Bob Depasquale
I don't think anyone called him back in his 40 years of working with riding school, and he kind of wind and dined us and showed me, kind of convinced me how we can affect people's lives in a really positive way. He probably told me how I can use communication and maybe some broadcasting skills in that career. There were some questionable moral tactics or things going on at the radio station conglomerate that I worked for at the time, and it just kind of all came together, and I said, what? Maybe I could do better for people, do better for the world. And so I took the job. That was in late 2009 and early 2010, and here I am. 

10:57
Charlie Van Derven
That's very cool. That's very cool. In any major decision like that, timing is everything, whether that's client acquisition, recruiting, I mean, even minor decisions like when I got to put gas in my car. Right. All those decisions boil down to timing. You just kind of reiterate that, right? I mean, there's something going on at the radio station, so maybe that's not the best environment. All of a sudden, now I'm open to it, where six months earlier, you were there just so that the ladies in the office were like, get out of here. Call Bob. 

11:33
Bob Depasquale
Right. Exactly. 

11:34
Charlie Van Derven
Yeah. That's amazing, all the decisions you make in life and something as big as that, and where it's brought you today, which is a fun story I'm excited to share, but of course I know Thriving having grown up in northeastern Wisconsin, thriving out of Appleton. You reminded me last time we chatted headquarters in Minneapolis now, but they were founded in Appleton. 

11:59
Bob Depasquale
Prior to that, thriving was a two predecessor organizations that were kind of cordially competing for about 100 years. 

12:06
Charlie Van Derven
Okay. 

12:07
Bob Depasquale
In 2002, they merged to form thriving, and they kept the corporate offices from both of the companies lutheran brotherhood and aid association for Lutheran's. They turned the Minneapolis office into the corporate offices in Appleton, Wisconsin. It's the operations center. So they're both critical. They're both pretty well known buildings in those cities. 

12:29
Charlie Van Derven
Yeah. And apple is pretty small. I was growing up into Pierre, probably 25 miles north of there. Certainly that was a familiar name, for sure. 

12:38
Bob Depasquale
They're all packers fans. 

12:40
Charlie Van Derven
They're all packers fans until you get that Minneapolis office. So funny. I worked for my entry into the industry was with a company called 50 below. And 50 below was in five verticals. One was financial services, and they were doing template, data driven websites. This was his late nineties or early on website technology. Duluth, Minnesota. Their headquarters is across the bridge from superior, Wisconsin. I think probably at our height, we had about 350 employees come to the office there in Duluth. That was a fun rivalry because it was seriously split packer vikings. Yeah. So, anyway, a couple of weeks out of the year, we'd have a good time there. So good rivalry. It's a faith based organization, right? There's a lot of it's a very purpose driven financial planning there as well. You spend in about a decade there. Let's talk through thriving. I mean, when were getting to know each other, you had really positive things to say about Thriving, bob, I'm going to tell you. 

13:51
Charlie Van Derven
That's not the norm, right. Most people leave their firm because they don't have positive things to say about them anymore. That struck me that you moved on for whatever reason. We're going to find it out in a little while here. You really had really great things to say about Thriving when were chatting a few weeks ago. 

14:10
Bob Depasquale
Yeah, I'm an honest guy, and I'll tell you the things that I loved and the things I didn't love so much. Overwhelmingly, I mean, I had a great experience with Thrive In from John recruiting me. By the way, the guy John, him and his wife both work for Thrive In, and I was the last person that he recruited, and then he retired right after I took the job. I don't know if he went out on top or just had enough at that point. I loved everything about my experience at Thrivet from the very beginning. John was just such a nice guy. He was a little pushy, but in a good way. That got me to take the job. I really learned the industry at Thrive, and I cut my teeth there. You mentioned it's a faithbased organization. It's mission driven, right? It's a 501 C eight, which is different for those of you who know the tax code, you may have heard of 501s, which are nonprofit charitable organizations. 

15:02
Bob Depasquale
But Thriving is a little bit different. It's a not for profit. Instead of paying corporate taxes, they give that money back to the community and to nonprofit organizations, so they know how to make money, which is a good thing, because I don't think they would have any clients and they wouldn't have investors. Instead of paying those corporate taxes and I would guess it was north of $200 million for just about every year I was there, it probably hit $300 million or will this year. I mean, they were really grown, that pool of money. 

15:29
Charlie Van Derven
Awesome. 

15:30
Bob Depasquale
I learned about investments, I learned about insurance, I learned about estate planning, I learned about charitable giving, and I learned about just generosity in general. Their tagline for many years was Live generously. We really encouraged people to do that. We felt like the planning that we did help them live generously. That was a real big focus for quite a while. Thrive In has many verticals in its own right, and so it's really many different companies. Working with people of all those different capacities was just such an educational experience. Having been around the poor Thrivent organization, the 501 fraternal that they are, has been around for now 120 years. There's quite a bit of information there. Ultimately my business partner, Stacey and I ended up leaving there, really because the business model that Thrivent operates under just really did not allow us to do some of these things that we wanted to do. 

16:25
Bob Depasquale
People were asking us to provide some services that it wasn't thriving wasn't capable or didn't want to serve people well. In fact, they wanted to serve people well. And we had many conversations about it. Ultimately there were things that we just were not allowed to do there. And so that's why we left. Thriving is a company. They're starting their own RIAA or they have an RIAA arm that you can get involved in. You can also be a hybrid. So there's lots of different options there. The best for us a year and a half ago at that time was for us to open our own organization. 

16:59
Charlie Van Derven
So we did cool. We talked about some I think when we chat a few weeks ago, we talked about technology, right? And open market technology. I think at this point, as commoditized things as things have become is probably, maybe not always, but close to always better than firm technology only in that open markets moving forward every day, right? The firm says, hey, we're going to look at this financial planning software and that's a project for 2022. That gets banded for three or four years before it becomes a project again. Meanwhile, open market has raised past that any other like and I don't mean to imply that about Thrive until that's pretty much standard across the board as far as big firms are concerned. 

17:52
Bob Depasquale
Yeah, absolutely. And like I said, I'll be honest. Thriving spends hundreds of millions of dollars in technology. I felt like the technology was very good and I learned how to use it. It was very detailed. Once again, like we talked about, moving a big ship like that can be challenging. I have an innovative mind. I was constantly trying to add new things and requesting and so, once again, if the best move for us was to move to a channel where I could make the decisions maybe it's of ego, but I think it's just a lot of desire to be modern. That's one of our values that initiate impact is modernity. We want to be on the cutting edge of things and so I want to be an early adopter of things. That's just very hard at such a large organization with thousands upon thousands of employees. 

18:40
Bob Depasquale
So yeah, absolutely. I don't think you're speaking out of turn at all. I think a lot of big organizations have technology that's really good for large organizations to keep a handle on data and information and allow people to do mass training and to work on these things together. Right. If you want to be small and nimble, it's just not possible. Right. Now there's two salaried employees at our firm right now, me and my business partner. We're much more nimble. 

19:10
Charlie Van Derven
You can move quickly. It allows you to service clients better. You didn't say it directly, so stop me. I'm not trying to put words in your mouth. Another issue that I see a lot social advisors run into is that within the confines of that firm, you said there's certain things we wanted again, I'll paraphrase certain things that we wanted to do with our clients that we simply couldn't do. Working with those parameters of the firm and maybe serving the initiative of the firm comes first. It's hard to be fiduciary in an environment like that. We know something out there better for our clients, but we can't do it at this firm. Did that drive, obviously, that drug decision making as well? 

19:55
Bob Depasquale
Yes. I think the addition to that, though, also, is that there are things that were being asked to do that once again thriving. It wasn't necessarily because weren't able to prioritize the needs of the larger organization. We just did not have the time or the ability to be paid for those things. Like, for example, we would do endless hours of tax evaluation and tax planning for people to help them figure out the best way to structure their business and their personal taxes and sometimes taxes for other organizations that they were investors in or working through the financials of a foundation that they wanted to start. Ultimately we put all this work in, but then weren't able to actually file sign as a filter on the taxes. Right. That just created all kinds of inefficiencies between speaking with other professionals in their lives. We never really had a problem with CPAs or enrolled agents. 

20:49
Bob Depasquale
Some people said, oh, gosh, working with CPAs is challenging. I never had a problem with CPA. The problem was that were overlapping on the work, and in that business model, just not possible. When you're your own registered investment advisor, you can decide to make that part of your offering and not have to worry about communicating with others. Now people can come to us and like you said, we can serve them better because we can do all that. We save them time and money because they don't have to go to another professional to do that. 

21:16
Charlie Van Derven
Yeah. And that's awesome. Yeah. Just the inability to charge. 

21:21
Bob Depasquale
Right. 

21:21
Charlie Van Derven
I mean, even something as simple as that, the amount of work that's going out but unable to bill for, so completely understood. You moved from one mission driven we'll call it faith based, but mission driven organization. It sounds like you embodied a lot of that and moving over to and starting Initiate Impact. 

21:43
Bob Depasquale
Yeah. Stacey and I had this conversation were talking about, all right? There's a lot of values and things that thrive that we want to keep, but we don't want to be private. We want to be initiated. Impact. We want to have a deeper focus on the things that are most important to us. So, yes, we've brought over ported, if you will, some of those concepts for sure, but I think we've kind of added on to it with the modernity and the technology. Right. Not only do we want to help people be generous, but we want to help them do it in the most modern, technologically advanced type of way. It's very important to us because we think that we believe that the next generation of generous people in this world are going to be technologically savvy. 

22:28
Charlie Van Derven
I would expect that's the case. We had a new guy start today that's Social Advisors. RIA Collective one thing, Social Advisors, the company side of things. And he's already revolutionizing me. It's 130. Right. He came and he's shadowing me for the day, and they'll shadow operations for the rest of the week. Why aren't you doing it this way and that way? Right now, we work in a technical environment all the time, but I'll call him a kid. Logan's a kid, but at 27, he's not a kid at all. He just seems that way to me because I'm getting on right. He came in, he's changed the way I'm doing things. He's been here four and a half hours. So, yeah, I completely agree. Right. The next generation is going to be more tech savvy than anybody before them. So I love that.

One concern, Bob, that most every adviser has when they make that leap is retaining assets. 

23:24
Bob Depasquale
Absolutely. 

23:27
Charlie Van Derven
Give me what you can. Again, I don't need to get into the nitty gritty of things, but what was that separation like with Thriving? Was it scratching and clawing to keep assets? I want to dig into your brain and find out if there's anything that you did well before that departure that helped you retain the assets that you had built in that decade of thriving. 

23:51
Bob Depasquale
Well, Charlie, to be honest with you, the best thing that we ever did was our business model had Initiated Impact is we're not focused on the amount of assets we charge people based on their income and their net worth for our family office style service. It does not matter what platform the assets are on, we are going to manage those, whether it's real estate or investments, if you want to keep on different platform, but we're still providing the advice and the recommendations related to that. I do know that what you're talking about can be a big conversation for people to try to figure out how you can do that legally? Do you have non compete? What's the amount of time frame? How can you communicate with people? If you're at a large if you're at a large broker, you may be part of the broker protocol that can make it easier. 

24:38
Bob Depasquale
For us, for our situation, that was not the case. We kind of flipped our business model on its head and said we really didn't want to serve. We felt that in the business model that we wanted to, we would be incapable of providing the service that we would promise to people. We severely cut back the amount of people that we're serving to serve. The deeper instead of being a mile wide and an inch deep with all the families that we serve, we wanted to be a mile deep and an inch wide with a select few people, and that's what we did. For us, I don't know if that was the perfect way to do it. We had to give up quite a few professional relationships, but it enabled us to find a deeper purpose in the work that we did, and that's how we did it. 

25:19
Bob Depasquale
I'm not saying that's the perfect way to do it, but I've heard a lot of people have different ways of trying to retain assets, but that really wasn't actually a focus for us. 

25:30
Charlie Van Derven
That's very cool. Yeah, I appreciate that answer. Maybe this is kind of a wirehouse broker type model, but there's usually such a push for maximizing the household you serve. I won't bring any big brands into it, but I know certain brands that expect their advisors to carry four or five hundred households. I've always questioned how you can actually be serving in a household more than one person. Right. You got to meet with them every I've always questioned how you could actually serve 400 households. 

26:12
Bob Depasquale
Yes. Even in the most slim lined, efficient service model, I hesitate to say that 500 is possible. I mean, maybe 100 or 200 I've seen, depending on the depth of service that you're providing for people. It's very challenging. Right now, thankfully, we're not dealing with that issue right now. We're being very proactive, and I would advise anyone to be honest with you. If you are considering starting your IA. It's an awesome process. It's invigorating, it's fun, you'll learn a lot. The way that you're going to be the most successful, in my humble opinion, is it that you provide proactive service to as many people as you can and nothing beyond that, especially when you start. Because if you're not being proactive and it's a reactionary business, I think you're going to end up right back where you started eventually. 

27:04
Charlie Van Derven
Completely agree. We've interviewed leaders at other RIAs that came out of that wirehouse and brought that wirehouse mindset to their RIA. Only to have it kind of blow up right. Where the first couple of years. The RIA were difficult because they're trying to serve without you go from I'll call it producer, we could call it, but you go from producer at a firm to CEO of an RIA, there's a whole lot more on your plate than just the client aspect of it. Right. You're running a business now as opposed to building a book of business. Right. So lots of differences. There anything in that change from Thriving to Initiate Impact that was particularly surprising for you that you didn't anticipate? 

27:55
Bob Depasquale
Well, I'll be honest with you. I would say you should never underestimate the quality of work that you do. Not that I didn't think I was effective over twelve years, that's why I didn't. Business Partner Stacey 15 so we came into initial impact of 27 years of combined experience starting the firm. I underestimate the value that we provided. In fact, we're recording this on a Monday. Charlie yesterday, on Sunday, someone came up to me, hadn't seen them since my time at Thrivent. They were talking about not even so much about me, but the team, but our team when were at Thriving and specifically my mom, who is our office manager and receptionist and how effective she was at communicating with people and getting back to them right away. It was very surprising to me that so many people this is just one of hundreds that have reached out to me. 

28:43
Bob Depasquale
It hasn't been me reaching out to them. They've reached out to us. It was a year and a half later, I'm still receiving phone calls from people thanking me for what happened or asking me where I am or just wondering what's changed and those things. So it's really been overwhelming. Made me feel like we did good work for that period of time while were there. That would be probably the emotional type of thing that I didn't expect. I'd say the more technical thing because this will be helpful for listeners as well is that running an RIA is running a business. Although I gave business advice to people for twelve years, help them work through their business and know the ins and outs of what they did, it's totally different when you're on your own business and you're going to want to be prepared for that. 

29:32
Bob Depasquale
There's a lot of training out there about how to make a transition in opening an RIA. Like, you talk about transitioning clients, there's talk about how to do investments, how to charge, all these different training. The one thing I wish I would have done more of was just general business learning. Like, I don't have an MBA, so I didn't study business in college. I would suggest that people, and not financial industry specific, I would study business specifically just to learn what it's like to be an owner and founder of a company. When you have to start thinking about things like branding, marketing, payroll, workers compensation, those type of things that just don't come up when you're a captive agent or when you're a producer for a larger firm. 

30:21
Charlie Van Derven
Yeah, that's great advice. I will tell you. I made a similar move nine years ago. It was nine years next month. Having worked for other marketing companies in the industry, I thought I could do it not better but different. We had a different I worked prior to starting Social Advisors, I worked for a company that was built at one sell it many times and really pulls the individuality out of the clients they serve. Right. Because everybody fits into basically the same model and I didn't think that was good for the advisors. We started something that was really high touch and really focused on our clients. I had the vision but I hadn't run a business before, I'd run departments. But man, yeah, what is different? As you get started I think that was the biggest learning curve for me too. Know your numbers, you've got operations and fulfillment, you've got sales and marketing and you've got Accounting. 

31:16
Charlie Van Derven
Now within financial services of course you've got the compliance component as well. What are you going to do? What are you going to do? What are you going to outsource? Those are the decisions that we had to make. But yeah, I agree with you. Like there was such a learning curve just on running a business instead of running a marketing department inside or business development department inside another firm. So that was crazy. Now tell me about the name . I mean you're a purpose driven guy. You've got this purpose driven background with an RIA that we're going to talk about starting in our RIA during COVID by the way, in a second. But Initiate Impact is an awesome name. Bob, where does that come from? Did you do your market research or is that just something that you and Stacy felt? 

32:07
Bob Depasquale
Well it's of market research and a lot of deep thought and so we considered Bob and Stacey wealth management or deepest Wally and Jacob's partners. Whatever. We considered all these things and then we realized. You know what. With some of our market research the modern investor and the modern philanthropist wants to be involved and wants to have creativity is really important and we thought, you know what, it's probably not a great thing to have our name on it and just be wealth management because we believe we're more than wealth management or we believe that wealth is more than money. So that was really important to us. The other thing was the only real science, I don't know, scientific is the right word but we did consider not having our names on it because who knows, some day if we want this to be a marketable company as well, it probably better not to just have our names on it. 

33:03
Bob Depasquale
That was the first round of, okay, how are we going to structure this name, right? It going to be your typical wealth management firm name? Once we decided we wanted to be different, then the question was, okay, what are the values? What's most important to what we're doing? What the people that we serve, what do they really care about? Many of them told us, well, we want to make an impact with our business and with our philanthropic efforts. And so we said, you know what? That's a great thing. So Impact will be in there. We thought of a whole that was probably the first work. A whole bunch of other ideas came to mind. We settled on initiate because in my experience, and Stacey's too, in our almost 30 years at the time of experience of working with families, is the vast majority of them have the desire and the ability to make a positive impact with their resources, their time, their money, their talents, all that. 

34:01
Bob Depasquale
The problem is they feel intimidated or they don't realize that they're capable of that either. Some people think you have to have $200 million to be a philanthropist, and some people think that you have to know a lot of people. I don't think that's the case either. We can get off on a whole tangent on that, but we're realizing that the most important thing is just the start. We came up with initiate because that's once again going with alliteration the eye of initiate and the eye of impact. As you can see on our logo back here, if you see on the screen, this is our logo. That's people we want to talk about community making an impact together. The two eyes just did really well. A friend of mine who is a graphic designer who kind of helped me work through that. The purpose of the name is because it's most important that you just initiate your impact. 

34:49
Bob Depasquale
The families that we work with, hopefully we're helping them do that. If they can initiate it, I guarantee that they'll be successful in the long run. 

34:58
Charlie Van Derven
Yeah, that's amazing. Do the next best thing, right? Just do the next best thing. 

35:04
Bob Depasquale
Absolutely. 

35:05
Charlie Van Derven
Yeah. And it's a great logo, man. It really is. If you're listening to the audio version on whatever streaming platform you got to go check out, it's just initiateimpact.com, right? I didn't need them. Okay, cool. Initiateimpact.com, go check out that logo because they did a great job. If you're in Fort Lauderdale area, that's where Bob and his partner are based out of. We'll talk about where that's going. First, let me start an RIA in COVID. Who does that? 

35:37
Bob Depasquale
We do, apparently. Apparently there's I can't remember the statistic now, but some ridiculous amount of businesses started during COVID. It was actually popular to do this. I think it had something to do with the work from home environment or people being out of a job and say, what, I just need to start one company. Our story is kind of interesting because I had been thinking creatively my whole career thriving, but I thought I would be a lifer. I thought I'd be there forever because I truly enjoyed working there and loved the people. I told you I'll be honest. I was honest about the things that the reasons why we ended up leaving. Really, I still talk to people who are thriving all the time because I just really appreciate them and what they did for me and their friends. So we never really want to leave. 

36:23
Bob Depasquale
One day I was having a conversation. Stacy and I would have our office meeting at night with a team at 09:00 A.m. On Mondays. At 830 we would meet together as the leaders of the team and we would go over what needs to be done, a couple of our own metrics and goals and that stuff. Were doing this call on the phone now during COVID because we couldn't meet in person. The office was closed and my office was only like a couple of miles from my house. I was spoiled. I didn't have to drive very far, but it was still kind of cool just to wake up and be able to do just roll out of bed and work. I don't know if I slept on it or something came up in the middle of the night, but I just had this crazy idea what would it be like to own our own firm? 

37:04
Bob Depasquale
I had never really thought deeply about that. And we started our phone call. I called her at 830 in the morning and I was like, what, I'm just going to ask her before we even get into all the weeds of all the it was crazy as during Coba, trying to run a business or run a practice and do everything. I knew it was going to be a crazy conversation and I just started the conversation. I was like, hey, morning hose, you had a good weekend. What would you think if we left and started our own firm? I was expecting her to say, oh yeah, Bob, you're nuts. Here's a great idea. She just shut up and said nothing. And I was like, what? I did a double take. Really from that moment on, it really kind of happened kind of quickly. Before it, we put the thing together and were ready to put in our resignation. 

37:48
Bob Depasquale
It was kind of spur of the moment, which is kind of how I operate. I think by nature I don't like change too much. I like consistency. I like good habits. I would have thought I would have been there forever. If it wasn't for that strange moment, it just kind of hit me, right? Her saying, her emphatic great idea comment just made it really happen. We put it all together and I think, really, we're not hasty people. I mean, it wasn't irresponsible, so there had to be some thought behind it. The only thing I can really chalk it up to, Charlie, is that we just felt that the pandemic had really put us even a deeper strain on our ability to serve people better. We knew that we needed to be more technologically advanced, as we mentioned before. We're already a virtual firm for a bunch of people that we served. 

38:39
Bob Depasquale
And we said, you know what? We could do better if were completely virtual because we're probably going to have to be completely virtual anyway over the next six months to a year. And we just decided to do it. And there you go. 

38:50
Charlie Van Derven
That's awesome, man. For our listeners who are in that position, again, we're just thinking about independence as an option. You and Stacey make the decision, but what is from a nuts and bolts perspective, what does that look like? Did you work with a consultant who found your registrations and paperwork? How does all that, the nuts and bolts of it fall into place? 

39:14
Bob Depasquale
Yes, it all came together quickly, but it took a long time to put it all together. You know what I mean? There's a lot of stuff that has to be done to make that transition. So, yes, I spoke with a bunch of people in the industry that are friends of mine. I have quite a few connections. If you connect with me out there on LinkedIn, you'll see I know a lot of people in the industry. I asked all kinds of questions in every which way. I researched the difference between a broker dealer, a wirehouse, an RIA, a hybrid. I tried to figure out everything I could. I didn't know that RIA was the perfect answer at that point. I stumbled upon XY planning network, if you're familiar with them out there. I learned a lot from their content. You asked about the paperwork and the compliance, ultimately helping me set up the RIA. 

40:00
Bob Depasquale
We did hire XYPN to do that. In addition to that, though, like I said, I spent a lot of time figuring out all the details of how we wanted to structure it in my own research and communication with other people. To be honest with you, listening to a lot of podcasts like this one, I'm sure it will be very helpful for people. 

40:18
Charlie Van Derven
Yeah. You're a great guy to have onboard because you've recently gone through it, right? You've gone through the nuts and bolts of it. You've done your research, other interviews really similar to this. Right. It's just everybody's got a little different experience. Everybody's got a little I wish I'd have done this a little differently. I did this well. The episode that actually dropped this week is a breakaway attorney named Corey Cutter. Corey was maybe 20 or 25 minutes or so is what we spoke. Man, he just spilled it, like, from the legal perspective. Right. That'll Publish your middle September, but that's a great one. Thanks for lending your experience and your knowledge here. Reach out to the people lots of people have been through. Of course, Bob, I'll ask you, I'll edit this out if you say no, but as a guest, are you okay being a resource to those people who are thinking about making this leap? 

41:20
Charlie Van Derven
If they want to pick your brain awesome. 

41:22
Bob Depasquale
Absolutely. I would love to do that. I would love to support other people. I definitely believe in the abundance mindset. There's so much opportunity out there. Why not assist others? I'm certainly not an expert either, but you talked about the difficulties that you can have making AI transcription. I'm sure a legal expert would be helpful. I definitely spend hours on the phone with my attorney. If you have a trusted person that is an attorney that's an expert in that area, you would definitely want to work with that person. The other couple of things, just a top of mind, if you don't mind me sharing. 

41:59
Charlie Van Derven
Yeah, go for it. 

42:01
Bob Depasquale
Things that I wish I would have probably spent more time researching, I talked about running a business and all of those topics of running a business, I wish I would have spent more time on the front end researching those. Now I have plenty of thoughts and ideas about setting up your organization, like what corporate structure should have. Should it be a C, corporate partnership and Scorp sole proprietorship? Who knows? There are different reasons for all of them, but I can have intelligent conversations about that. I wish I would have spent more time and hired a marketing expert in the beginning, or marketing and branding, we had this nice logo and I was like, oh, wait a minute, this is a great logo, but how are we going to share that? What does it mean? All of those things yeah, those are really important things to talk about. 

42:48
Bob Depasquale
Marketing, branding, taxes, and how to set up your company are really important. From a compliance perspective, I will absolutely take your phone call or your DM about compliance, but I will probably have the default and point you in a different direction because that's a tough one. 

43:05
Charlie Van Derven
That is a tough one. And it takes a special skill set. It takes lots of knowledge and experience, but you got to adhere to all the SEC rules and archiving and everything else. So, I don't know. I've seen most Ras are going to outsource that, at least in the beginning. Working with a third party that can handle a lot of that stuff makes life a whole lot easier. 

43:28
Bob Depasquale
Absolutely. One other thing I just came up too. If you're working with a compliance specialist and someone is helping you file your adv. Which is the form that you have to have available on your website. You're going to have to file it if you're going to be a state registered firm. Even if you're a while. Even if you're going to be SEC registered firm. Just make sure that the timing and how long it's going to take to do that. Because every place is different, right. Especially if you're still registered, because they have different so if you plan on launching your firm in a certain date, you better make sure that all the paperwork is going to be filed and prepared by then. 

44:04
Charlie Van Derven
Yeah. A lot of times I started talking about even twelve to 18 months prior, which I don't know that everybody has that foresight. That where they're going to be twelve or 18 months out, but that's when you start working on key client relationships. For sure. You should be doing that all the time, but now you're going to be moving. You're going to have a non solicit, non compete for a year or whatever the agreement is that you signed, that's the time to start working on relationship six months prior. Engage your attorney. Engage your breakaway attorney when you know that's what the six months look like, and they'll help you lay that time out. And again, reference to cory's got. Great. Again attorney perspective on this stuff. The episode with Corey Coffee is a big help with that stuff. Bob, tell me where initiate impacts going. 

44:55
Charlie Van Derven
What's the future look like? What are you and Stacey envisioning? Is it a growth of advisors? It really going to stay core the two of you, and you grow your team out under that? What does that look like? 

45:05
Bob Depasquale
Yeah. After a year has gone by, we had one of those really serious business conversations like, how do we want to change this? Do we want to change the industry or do we just want to change ourselves or what are we trying to do? We decided that we want to be in growth mode, but in a different type of growth mode. We're not looking to double our size or anything. We want to really make sure that our focus is on the partners that we serve. We use the word partners. Yes, we are in growth mode. I would love to take phone calls from people who are looking to either get into the industry or learn more about it. Because hopefully in the near future, we're going to need to expand our team and we will if we want to continue offering the depth of service that we are to other people. 

45:49
Bob Depasquale
So, yes, growth is absolutely important. We want to initiate our own impact. We have some pretty important goals, and I'm not sure when the episode will come out, but we have a pretty big announcement here probably in the next month or so that we're going to have for something that has to do with impact specifically. We're pretty excited about that, and that will be a pretty big signal for us moving into the future. 

46:12
Charlie Van Derven
Cool. You and I can coordinate on that and maybe we'll line it up so that the episode comes out in conjunction. If you can give me a sound bite, like something about the because of course we don't want to release it right now. Right. No need to announce it, but before release, it will get a little sound bites. We get out to the front end of it or find a way to work that announcement. So, yeah, we'll line it up so that it fits your timeline. Awesome. Have a great bob, you're willing to give advice and share your experience. You guys already have the vision that we will be expanding. In order to be able to provide that depth of service, we do need to add people to the team. I know you're active like crazy on LinkedIn, and you got a unique last name or unique to me, bob Dickwall. 

47:06
Charlie Van Derven
What's the easiest way for someone to reach out to you? 

47:09
Bob Depasquale
Well, since we talked about LinkedIn a lot, if a lot of your listeners and viewers are there, that's a great place. I'm at BDPA on just about all the other social platforms. Bdepa, that's probably the best place to get a hold of me, of those places. That way we can have a conversation. Like I said, we love to talk, share information. Charlie, I'm also the type of person I love to learn, so you can reach out to me if you want to tell me something. In fact, I probably would really appreciate that. 

47:37
Charlie Van Derven
Yeah, that's really cool. Of course. Learn more about the firm and initiate Impact. I love the mission you guys have. I love the impact you're making on not only the lives of your clients, but the people they impact. That's so cool. I love serving this segment of the industry. Bob. Because people make a change when they don't feel like. As we talked about. You are in a position to provide the service that you want to provide your clients. Whether that's because you're dialing for dollars at a big wirehouse or the firm you're with just doesn't have the depth or ability to support clients like you want to. The people who move to this side of the industry, if you will, typically really pure of heart. Right. I hope that doesn't discredit the other portions of the industry, but in my chance to interact with RA leadership through our collective and through social advisors. 

48:30
Charlie Van Derven
Like really solid things happening out there. And you're a big part of that. So kudos to you and Stacey, man. That's really cool that it's hard, right? It's scary. Take that leap. That's a scary thing to do. Knowing that it's the best way to serve your clients, that's pure. I appreciate that. 

48:46
Bob Depasquale
Yeah, I appreciate your kind words and I agree. This side of the industry has a unique card for serving people and we felt like it was a good fit for us. And it has been so far. I would just encourage just about anyone, make sure that you're serving people well and whatever your position is, whatever your dog is, because I think you can do that at just about any company, in any business model, you can do a good job for people. When it comes to the point that you want some customization and you want to be able to develop something, you have a creative mind, whether that's a business mind or an artist mind type, then you start considering the way that you can live that out as best as possible. In our industry, it happens to be the registered investment adviser channel. 

49:30
Charlie Van Derven
I agree with you, man. So, Bob Davis, Kuala, thank you so much for being my guest, man you're doing great things with initiate Impact and touching lives and I appreciate you bringing your knowledge and your experience to our listening base. All of you who tuning in, thank you once again for tuning into this episode of RIAA Collective. I'm your host, charlie van der van joined by bob davis coal to initiate impact today. If you like the episode, by all means share it with your friends, leave us a review subscribe so you don't miss any. Until next time, signing off from Riacollective.