Your Success is Dependent on the Team You Build with Brian Carney

00:11
Charlie Van Derven
Thank you for tuning in to another episode of RIAA Collective. I'm pretty excited about my guest today. I'm joined today by Brian Carney. Rivers edge Advisors. Brian started as RIA back in 2014. He's had a great amount of experience coming up in the industry starting that RIA. Today we're going to talk about the importance of team building, surrounding yourself with the right people and the catalyst that creates for growth. Before we get into that, I got to also say Brian's a podcaster and he does a great job with it. Brian's podcast is happy half hour with an entrepreneur with Brian carney. I've listened to a few episodes in prep for today. Brian has also been a guest of Michael Kittens on his podcast. So, you guys, as much as we're going to learn about Brian coming up in the industry and starting his RAA and building the right team and accelerating growth in that way, I'm learning so much about podcasting today that Brian, this is what a great experience this is on all kinds of levels, man.

01:16
Charlie Van Derven
Welcome. Thank you for being here.

01:18
Brian Carney
Thank you so much for having me. Looking forward to it.

01:20
Charlie Van Derven
Yeah, very cool. So, casual conversation. You get a feel for what I do and who I am and how we handle things. Listening to Happy Half Hour With an Entrepreneur, you kind of have the same spirit about you. I'm excited about the conversation, and we're going to learn a lot. You and I have had some similar experience in creating independence in our own lives.

01:42
Brian Carney
Absolutely.

01:43
Charlie Van Derven
Brian, I know the people you surround yourself with are so important for reaching the goals that you want to that you set in front of you. So absolutely, we'll dive into that. But first I want to explore this. I want to explore happy half hour with an entrepreneur. I want to learn about you being a beer nerd.

02:01
Brian Carney
Okay, that sounds great. We're happy to talk about beer.

02:04
Charlie Van Derven
Yeah, me too.

02:06
Brian Carney
Little bourbon, though.

02:07
Charlie Van Derven
It's less and less these days. Tell us about the podcast first, Brian. Then we'll jump into some beer. I want to learn about some of your favorites, but tell me about Happy. How far with an entrepreneur?

02:16
Brian Carney
Yeah, I'm like the most cliche 40 year old. I'm 42 now. I turned 40 and I started a podcast. I became super into craft beer, and I also smoke meat on a traeger. I'm like the most cliche 40 year old male of all time. I had this idea where I wanted to interview entrepreneurs about their journey because I find every entrepreneur's journey is super unique, but there's also tons of common threads in it. As you said, for you wanted it to be laid back and kind of casual. I said, well, I wanted it to come across as two people sitting at a bar having a conversation.

02:54
Charlie Van Derven
I love that. Yeah.

02:56
Brian Carney
Essentially, what I do is I interview a different entrepreneur for about 30 or 45 minutes, and we share a drink. I try a beer that I've never had before and give it a rating at the end.

03:06
Charlie Van Derven
Cool.

03:06
Brian Carney
I just recorded my 47th episode, right, man?

03:11
Charlie Van Derven
Yeah, you're right.

03:12
Brian Carney
Apparently, I saw a statistic on Twitter that 90% of podcasts never make it beyond the 10th episode. Now, since I saw it on the Internet, that has to be true. That was always my goal, to get past the 10th episode.

03:26
Charlie Van Derven
Well, and as were chatting before I hit the record button, I think this is our 8th recording. We put a few in the bank. We just launched this thing last week. Got a few in the bank for at least a couple of them, but so gosh, I'm close. I must be, like, in the 80th percentile already.

03:43
Brian Carney
Exactly. Yes. Next week, you'll have, quote unquote, made it.

03:46
Charlie Van Derven
That's awesome. That's awesome. I used to watch that with the business, too. Like, the stats of a business, making it beyond one year and then two years, and then I'm like, wow, look at us. We're a success story. We don't even know it. We're doing it. How awesome is that? How cool. I've listened to a few episodes, and, man, you're such a casual interviewer, and you do a really good job with it, so I appreciate honestly, you bring inspiration into my new craft. I don't know. I've been doing webinars and interviews for a long time, but this is a whole new format for me, figuring out the new tech and the best ways to do production and things like that.

04:25
Brian Carney
The most common compliment I get is, wow, you're not terrible. And I'm like, I'll take it.

04:34
Charlie Van Derven
I hope to be there one day soon. Yeah, I listened to you. Here's what's funny is our first three interviews were friends of mine, right. Clients and friends and people I've known for a really long time. Right. I wanted to kind of cut my teeth and get comfortable doing that. Consequently, I got to tell you, I feel like they're too long.

04:53
Brian Carney
Yeah.

04:54
Charlie Van Derven
Like, you get into a conversation, I'll try to prevent that from happening with us, but you get into a conversation, and hopefully everybody else finds it interesting. I did. We start kind of barreling down this rabbit hole, and you find out you're 30 minutes into this thing. It goes by pretty quickly, for sure.

05:10
Brian Carney
I totally agree.

05:11
Charlie Van Derven
In that vein, Brian, let's talk of beer, man, my tastes have changed over the years. So you dated yourself? I'll date myself. I'll be 50 in September.

05:19
Brian Carney
Happy birthday. Thank you.

05:21
Charlie Van Derven
As of this recording, it's just about August. That's coming on pretty quick. I am eyeing up the big green egg, so not that we smoke a lot of meat right now, but I like a good charcoal. We got a Weber. We don't have a gas grill. Yeah. I've been eyeing up that big green egg. I'm going to jump right into your cliche.

05:43
Brian Carney
Love it.

05:44
Charlie Van Derven
Welcome. Thank you. I'll tell you, my taste and beer have changed over the years. If you go back thinking about college, my favorite beer was that Sierra Nevada Paleo. Oh, sure. Yeah.

05:55
Brian Carney
There's like like the first craft beer. That's considered the first craft beer.

05:59
Charlie Van Derven
Really?

06:00
Brian Carney
And I was out west.

06:01
Charlie Van Derven
So I was in Flagstaff, Arizona. It was distributed in our area early on.

06:07
Brian Carney
Yeah.

06:07
Charlie Van Derven
I can't drink a pale ale anymore.

06:09
Brian Carney
Yes. The problem is my trajectory went Natty Light in college and then I drank nothing but, like, Miller Light for probably, I don't know, 15 years.

06:21
Charlie Van Derven
I like that.

06:23
Brian Carney
What I love a Miller Light is when I'm either at a Philadelphia sporting event or on the golf course. I still do enjoy a Miller Light, but I started to drink. I'm no longer a volume drinker, so now I like to have a couple of drinks, a couple of beers. Unfortunately, when you start drinking high octane, as I like to refer to it, craft beers, you end up still waking up feeling just as terrible. Sometimes the craft beer headache is no joke.

06:53
Charlie Van Derven
Yeah. So what's your favorite style of beer.

06:56
Brian Carney
If you had to pick one in the winter? I love a stout. Nice. I really like a stout. And then I do really like IPAs. I don't like sours at all.

07:08
Charlie Van Derven
Can't do it same.

07:10
Brian Carney
It tastes like someone spiked your beer with a lemonade.

07:13
Charlie Van Derven
Yeah, I can't do it either. And it's popular right now. There's a lot on the market. Yeah. This might not sit well. I will tell you my favorite beer, and it's after mowing the yard. I'm in the water a lot. We live by the ocean here, so it's after exertion and exhaustion. Maybe I just walked 18 holes or something like that. Is an ice cold PBR really? As cold as I can, man, that's great. You can drink it. You ever put milk up to your lips and you just can barely take the glass away? That's how I can drink a PBR. One of them sweating and hot.

07:54
Brian Carney
It's great.

07:55
Charlie Van Derven
I do enjoy a nice crap, like pillsner or lager.

07:59
Brian Carney
I do like pillsner also.

08:00
Charlie Van Derven
Yeah. Easy drinking. That PBR, man, when I'm hot and sweaty, that's the best beer on the planet.

08:06
Brian Carney
Absolutely.

08:07
Charlie Van Derven
At that moment. Yeah, exactly. Brian, let's get into it, man. I love the Kip, this interview, it was really all based on scaling. As we chatted and got acquainted some weeks ago, there was some ramp up in the industry up until 2014. After you and your partners have started the RIAA, you put a pretty lofty goal in front of yourself.

08:31
Brian Carney
Yeah, I grew up in the insurance business, so I started selling life insurance as a social advisors very early on. Literally. When I signed my contract, I was 21. I went from one insurance firm, got sued, went to another insurance firm, and then went to what was Blue Rock Financial Group. There's five partners, and were independent BD. So were with Cambridge.

09:01
Charlie Van Derven
Okay, great.

09:02
Brian Carney
We all decided to go RIA and we had this decision whether the five partners, whether to become one giant RIAA or to break into three smaller ones, because were all operating in separate teams, so we opted to break into three smaller ones. And that happened in 2018. We had 150,000,000 under management at the time. In June of 2018, my partner and I were doing some business planning. We said, we want to get the 300 million in five years, and we actually did it in 18 months.

09:35
Charlie Van Derven
That's amazing. I've been coaching advisors a long time, Brian. That's a lofty goal accomplished very quickly.

09:42
Brian Carney
It's funny, I recently found the notepad that I scratched everything off of putting where it was all going to come from, and were like, holy crap, we actually totally blew this away. Yeah, I think if you asked us at the time, were confident. We were easily, in air quotes, hit it in five years. I think we even surprised ourselves doing it in 18 months.

10:05
Charlie Van Derven
Yeah, well, obviously I kind of let the cat out of the bag already as far as team and training and surrounding yourselves with the right people to make that opportunity a reality. Let's dive into that a little bit. Great to put a goal out there. Great to even map how you're going to get to that goal. But what led to that sudden growth? I mean, how did you guys make it happen so quickly?

10:31
Brian Carney
We actually went through an interesting period where we realized that so my business partner's name is Jarrett, and Jarrett Morris, he's the numbers guy. I'm like the front facing. I go find clients and I'm like relationship manager. I always joke around and say, he's the smart one, right? He does all the financial planning. What we realize is that every client we brought on, we had to do all of the work for, no matter the size of the client, what they look like. We were actually pushing all of the buttons. We had a conversation where we had some trouble in our back office. Right. We had trouble getting things we run a pretty sophisticated business, a high service business, and we had some trouble getting the right people in place to help us not have to be so active with touching every single aspect of every single client that came through.

11:28
Brian Carney
We actually had the conversation like, hey, you can't go find new people now. For me, I'm such an extrovert and I just want to go. The hunt is like my favorite part of the business going to find new clients. He's like, you can't really do that right now because we can't handle it.

11:47
Charlie Van Derven
Yeah. Buried.

11:49
Brian Carney
Just totally buried. I kind of sat around after we got for a period of six months while we had to fix the back office. That stemmed from a lot of different things. If you look at it, we have what we call Client Service Associates, and essentially they're like the main hub of a client experience. They're setting up meetings, they're sending clients money, they're opening accounts. They're the ones that the client is touching most often. What was happening is that we had so many clients, and the talent level of the Client Service Associates was not able to handle the amount of volume. We kept having this discussion like, hey, do we have the wrong people? Are we overworking them? We hired consultants to talk to us about it, and we never really got a clear answer.

12:43
Charlie Van Derven
Yeah, it's a tough question to answer. Having built a team to this point with social advisors, but being in leadership, role in sales and marketing with firms prior to that, and responsible for others, it's a tough question to answer because you got your budgeting payroll, right? You got to visit your budgets anyway. I'll let you expand on that, but certainly I can understand that question or that dilemma.

13:07
Brian Carney
Yeah. A couple of consultants we worked with, they said, well, this is how it typically works. They said, with you guys, we think you have the wrong people. We tried to move the people around because we loved them. Right. They had been with us for five years. We loved both of them. We decided, like, this sucks, but the people that got us here aren't going to be the ones that get us to where we're going. If you look at me and you do a personality test on me, I love to be liked. Firing people is just torture for me. We unfortunately had to let go of one of the people that I was pretty close with, and went through this dark period where were trying to figure out how to rebuild and how to get the right people on board. The consultants definitely helped. What we realized is that we need really smart people, really high end people, and we needed to build the systems and the processes to prevent Jared and I from having touch every part of it.

14:18
Brian Carney
And that's what we spent time doing. The second thing is Jared and I realize that we're both not the best managers, right? We joke around with each other and say we're good cop, bad cop. He's always the bad cop. I'm always if someone doesn't do their job, I'm like, hey, come on, just do better next time. Not a big deal. Let's go have lunch together. That's not good to have two people on opposite ends of the spectrum. Having an operations person was a really huge hire for us, and I actually think it's an underrated part of where most financial planning firms get to a certain stage. They should actually look to hire one of those people quickly.

15:03
Charlie Van Derven
I love that.

15:04
Brian Carney
So we found ours internally. She was running our four one K group. Her name is Erin Allyson. She was running our four one K group, and she said, hey, I want this job.

15:13
Charlie Van Derven
Awesome.

15:13
Brian Carney
We ended up putting her in there, and she's still learning, but she's helped us so much and kind of being able to deal with some of the operational issues that we have struggled with.

15:27
Charlie Van Derven
Was Aaron naturally fit for that role, or what kind of training went into taking Erin out of their current position and putting them in that operational role?

15:38
Brian Carney
Yeah, it's a good question. She came to us and she said, I want to do this. She came with us with like a business plan, and we're like, oh, this is awesome. What we realized is that we did make a mistake with her as well. The good part about running this firm is that we've pretty much made every mistake there is.

16:01
Charlie Van Derven
What a wealth of knowledge we're getting today. Exactly.

16:04
Brian Carney
It's like, hey, don't do this. What we realize is that Jarrett was trying to completely offload operations completely. What we realized is that he's actually really good at it, but he's, if you go to, like, the EOS, he's like an operations visionary, and he needs an integrator to help him do the work. We thought that he was more like an integrator to be able to do the operation, and he's not. That was of a growing pains that we had to figure out. He's still working with Aaron to help train her on what's in his brain, getting it to her in the most efficient way so she can execute it. It's gotten light years better once we had that realization.

16:49
Charlie Van Derven
That's cool. I'll tell you what, I can echo some of this. Right. Nine years and nine years in October. So we're pretty thrilled about that. I've got the best team I've ever had in that nine years. We recognized the need for an operations person also, because that was all me.

17:09
Brian Carney
Right.

17:10
Charlie Van Derven
The problem is, Brian, I'm not fulfilling on the work. I'm just telling people how to fulfill on the work. And there's disconnect in that, right?

17:20
Brian Carney
Absolutely.

17:22
Charlie Van Derven
Those who listen to the podcast and seen our webinars and join our Tuesdays at two know mindy and Lindsey on our team. Prior to Mindy joining us, we had a person in that operations role. There was and this is on me, not even on that person, but there was, like, a chasm between me and the next layer.

17:43
Brian Carney
Yeah.

17:44
Charlie Van Derven
That was a big thing to overcome, because there was zero transparency. Now we had an office at the time. We don't anymore. With the pandemic, we found that everybody's functioning pretty well in a remote location, but I was getting half stories, which means I had the wrong person in the wrong place. Right. I mean, they were protecting themselves versus doing what was best for the business.

18:07
Brian Carney
Yes.

18:08
Charlie Van Derven
Mindy has very much transitioned into this operations role, but I'm too much in the weeds already, and really, it's.

18:17
Brian Carney
Hard to get yourself out of it.

18:18
Charlie Van Derven
Hard to do, man. I'm sure it drives her nuts a couple of days a week yeah, totally. With this one thing. Right. Anyway, I'm struggling with that right now. So this is really timely. I appreciate it.

18:31
Brian Carney
No, for sure. And I think Aaron would say this. She had no experience as an operations person or as a quote, unquote boss to the rest of the team. We really wanted to build that buffer as well, where if you want to take vacation, have at it. I don't want to approve your vacation days and say, like, hey, you have only three days left for the rest of the year. You took off. That's not the most efficient use of my time or my skill set. Right. Erin's been able to be that buffer, but she's still learning about how to make the business more efficient, and I think Jarrett's really helping train her to do that.

19:12
Charlie Van Derven
Awesome. Good team, man. I'm excited about all that.

19:17
Brian Carney
Well, the other hire that we had, I think, really, if you can kind of look at where things really started to change, is we hired a guy named Mike Levy, and he's a financial planner and younger guy, and we've now promoted him not only to the director of financial planning in the firm, but we've made him a partner. We see him as so valuable, and he's so good at doing financial planning. It's, like, his passion. So he and Jarrett are very similar. Right. He's Jarrett what Jarrett was ten years ago, and we always joked around, so we need to find Mini Jarrett, and we never thought we would. We like, oh, my God, here he is. And he loves to do planning. He loves it, and he really loves to help clients and do the building the plan, and now he's helping train our other advisors that we've hired.

20:15
Charlie Van Derven
Awesome.

20:16
Brian Carney
It's been a great experience for us, and that really has helped launch the trajectory of the firm as well.

20:25
Charlie Van Derven
Very cool. We're going to get back to the other advisors you hired before we close down here today. Perfect. I've always got a question, right. We're working in the industry for a while, and you see these individuals who are good producers. They're good at what they do, whether it's insurance, or on financial services side, they're great producers. They build their AUM. They have to add a CA or CSA. In your case, they build that AUM more. They've got to add a junior advisor, and pretty soon, they find themselves out of that producer role.

21:07
Brian Carney
Yes.

21:08
Charlie Van Derven
In that CEO role, totally different skill sets.

21:12
Brian Carney
Totally different skill sets.

21:14
Charlie Van Derven
Now you still stay on that production side, which seems like the natural place for you. What's that transition like? Whether you're watching it through Jarrett or whether some of that falls into your plate as well.

21:27
Brian Carney
For sure.

21:28
Charlie Van Derven
How do you improve your skill set to be a leader of this team versus someone who is a great producer for the firm?

21:35
Brian Carney
This is probably, if you look at my personal journey through this business, has been the most eye opening experience for me. I always said I started out just finding clients, building a book. When I first started, I was doing the planning, placing the trades, doing the applications. Like, you're literally doing everything. It got to a point I said, I don't want to do that part. I don't want to do this part anymore. My old boss, he was a mentor to me. He used to say, there's this transition from advisor to business owner to entrepreneur, and I've actually really noticed that experience. I used to say all the time, I want to own a planning firm. I do not want to run a planning firm. You do not have that choice.

22:23
Charlie Van Derven
Yeah. Right.

22:24
Brian Carney
You can't delegate everything to someone else. During the middle of the pandemic, when things were bleak right, we had people leaving. We thought we had a good team in place, and then two of our people came and said, I'm out of here. We saved one, and he's our trader, and he's like, our technology Swiss Army knife. His name Shiv. And Shiv, like, helps with everything. He came to us, he's like, I'm leaving. And we said, Holy crap. Went from eight people down to five almost to three, and now we're at 16. Right.

22:57
Charlie Van Derven
Wow.

22:57
Brian Carney
During that process, Jared and I were on Zoom. We're in the middle of the pandemics, the end of 2020. Beginning of 2020. We're on teams, like, every day just talking, and we're both just so defeated, right?

23:12
Charlie Van Derven
Yeah.

23:12
Brian Carney
What I realized is that having the mind shift from being a financial adviser that happened to own a business to being a business owner that happened to own a financial planning firm, and what I really started to enjoy was the process of the build, right. We're building something, and we just got hit with a hurricane. Now we got to start over . Right. Once I started to actually take ownership and enjoy that we're building a firm and we're building a business, and not just building a book of a financial planning book, that's when things really started to change for me personally.

23:59
Charlie Van Derven
Cool.

24:00
Brian Carney
My outlook changed. I'm a big like I mentioned before, I'm a big Philadelphia sports fan and back when the 76 Ers were terrible, kind of intentionally, they were tanking on purpose. Sam Hinkie at the time, kept saying their GM kept saying trust the process. It's been become a mantra out here. I started to enjoy the process and that's what really helped me change.

24:28
Charlie Van Derven
That's really cool. I think with every business, right, you go through highs and lows, right. You've seen the meme where everybody thinks it's a straight line and it's.

24:41
Brian Carney
So true.

24:42
Charlie Van Derven
Certainly we do it and more frequently than I want to, probably. That's great advice. I will tell you that as much as I agree with you wholeheartedly, it's really hard for me to do that. Yes. Right. Because I'm the guy watching the bottom line, for sure. That process is great, but keeping an eye on that bottom line, you're doing great one month and the next month you go, boy, what happened there?

25:14
Brian Carney
Just to interject real quick to your point, during this turmoil, we're still growing. That makes things a little bit easier. I kept saying to Jared, I'm like, dude, we're growing in spite of ourselves. Michael Kittsis uses the iceberg analogy where most people just see the tip of the iceberg and everything that's underneath is really where the difficulty is. That was 100% us. I use the analogy like were an Instagram model, where were looking great on Instagram, but behind the scenes were a little disheveled and struggled .

25:47
Charlie Van Derven
Yeah, well, I think something you said earlier and the trust the process is the foundation for that continued growth. I think that's one thing that we've done well and experience I had from previous roles was it started as me, right? It moved the furniture out of the master bedroom, move a conference table in and open up a laptop and go to work was how this all started. And then now I guess we're eleven. One thing, we've done well since we added the next person, my wife and then our first two employees were coming to work in our master bedroom. That was a little.

26:33
Brian Carney
Weird.

26:35
Charlie Van Derven
We documented processes really well since early on. We've got a history of nine years of processes which have evolved greatly over time. Of course, one of my coaching clients last Friday, and we go through EOS and really take a lot from the Traction Book and Gina Wickman love them. That's the exercise they're going through right now. They're five years into their RIAA.

27:01
Brian Carney
Yeah.

27:02
Charlie Van Derven
It's a lot to unpack at this point. That far into it. The trust the process and documenting the processes and Jared's role with Aaron So key for that foundation for success and rapid growth?

27:18
Brian Carney
No, it goes back to if you really want to grow. The owners can't be touching everything. That's easy to do when you bring on your 1st $5,000 because you don't have the revenue you need like one or two people and you can really get there. Right. We came to this cross roads where it was and I always think this term has a negative connotation in our space, but it shouldn't. Do you want to become a lifestyle practice or not? Right? Lifestyle practice. Get 100 and 5200 million under management. You can just keep your clients. You're still going to get some referrals but you can kind of keep the head count small. Right. We decided we kind of thought that might be boring for us. Right. It had nothing to do with revenue or money. It's just like, hey, we want to build something bigger because we think it'll be fun.

28:13
Brian Carney
So we had that conversation. Going back to the systems and process, we always talked about this is what we want the process to look like but nothing was documented. We had a Word document that said this is what I want it to look like when the client comes in and this is what nothing was documented. Were working with Brian Looper at the strategic implementer. He's a consultant.

28:34
Charlie Van Derven
Awesome.

28:35
Brian Carney
Were trying to build our own workflows and it was not going well. We use Redtail for our CRM system and it just wasn't happening well. We said like, hey, we need these processes in place that if somebody's out Aaron had a baby in November, right. If somebody else has a baby now we need to have these processes someone can just look at it and pick it up. Brian came in and with Mike Levy and Sean Or, one of our client service associates, they built all of our workflows.

29:09
Charlie Van Derven
That's awesome.

29:10
Brian Carney
They improved them all and now we live and die by them. We now are talking about we just had a meeting yesterday with our marketing person Brooke, who's been an unbelievable hire. We're going to start to build workflows for the marketing team to follow up with that. I couldn't agree with you more that you have to have those systems and processes to make your life easy and make things efficient. We always say now we realize that one offs kill us. If we have something that doesn't quite fit in our process, it ends up being a problem. We should have took them through the normal track that we take everyone else through because that's what we do. We try to short circuit or short cut part of the process. Something gets a little bit funky, gosh.

29:59
Charlie Van Derven
It's tempting every time to say yes and no problem. How many times do you go through that before you finally go don't do it again or do it again.

30:09
Brian Carney
It's literally every time we'll say like oh, this client is. Already totally on board. We're going to skip the first meeting and just go right to the second one. And we're like, guess what? Now we're going back to the start and redoing the second meeting. It's literally every time you try to shortcut it's something bad happens.

30:24
Charlie Van Derven
Yeah, you put an outlier in there and bad things happen. You're right. Ball gets dropped or whatever the case may be. We've learned that the hard way a few times, for sure. You're a fun guy. I've very much enjoyed getting to know you and just listening to the podcast. Does that translate into the culture at Rivers Edge or talk to me about culture admission.

30:51
Brian Carney
Culture has been huge, and actually we have a great office. We have a great office environment. We always have a very friendly environment. Our culture was absolutely, positively decimated, without question by working from home during Koben.

31:08
Charlie Van Derven
Yeah, okay.

31:10
Brian Carney
We have a restaurant literally next door that overlooks We Are On the river. Very clever for a firm name. They have a deck outside that overlooks the river. We had this culture where it was, hey, man, we all got our teeth kicked in today. We had this client with this issue. We had this not go well. This person said they didn't want to work with us. Let's go next door and just have a beer. At the end of the day. That's what were all able to commiserate. It was a lot. We had prepandemic. Literally the entire firm would eat lunch together. It wasn't like people were running out. It was like six of us, four of us, whoever was around that day, were all having lunch together. That was a really important part of our culture. Completely decimated by being on Zoom all day. So we had to rebuild that.

31:59
Brian Carney
And it has been tough. I thought it was going to be faster than it was. We are in a really good place now. A lot of that stems from we came back to the office three days a week back in September. This past Friday, we had an Olympics at my house. We played like cornhole and we played water pong, not beer pong. Because, like, it's trying to build those team building events and try to get things off of work. One of the other focuses that we really tried to have is trying to make it a family environment, right? We want to meet everyone else's spouse. We want to meet their kids. We want them to be like, hey, this is why my husband or my wife is gone for 8 hours every day. This is the point of it. Building that culture has been a really important thing, and that's one of the things that I feel is my responsibility to help.

32:57
Charlie Van Derven
That that's cool. You seem like a good guy for it. We've been out of the office since March 2020, like everybody else was at that time. Sure. And certainly the team is incredibly productive.

33:09
Brian Carney
Yes.

33:10
Charlie Van Derven
I don't have any fear about productivity, work ethic, things like that. Right. The work gets done. It gets done well. We've got good people. I fear that we've lost some of that without the office. Too down. We are on Beach Street, Daytona Beach, and restaurants and Bar two within walking distance and the river right there. I do feel that we've lost of that. Yeah. The other thing that happened is we started hiring talent outside the area.

33:41
Brian Carney
Right.

33:42
Charlie Van Derven
It's great because it opens up that hiring pool, but now we've got employees in Virginia, in North Carolina and just scattered. One thing we did and we tried to protect that, I tried to be sensitive to it. Our staff meeting every Monday is not work related. Oh, it's great. It is to some degree, but what's something that you accomplished and this is straight out of traction too, right? Yeah. What's something that you accomplished that really benefited the business? What's something that you accomplished that benefited you? If someone's listening on audio, they can't see this. If they're watching on YouTube, they can see we got a book of 3000 questions.

34:23
Brian Carney
Oh, that's great.

34:24
Charlie Van Derven
Either you bring a show and tell Allah third grade or pick a number. I'm going to ask you a question. Some of them are like, what's your favorite color? Others are like, what's the meaning of life? So there's always a risk. We try to protect some of that. Recently, my 13 year old daughter had a couple of weeks in Summer that she wasn't real busy. We jumped in my truck and drove up to Virginia, North Carolina, and hung out with everybody just social. It wasn't work related. Yeah. I do fear, and that's interesting, hearing you say that the culture was lost and is now coming back. I fear we've got a similar situation. I don't want an office, frankly. I got to think of better ways to continue to keep that personal side of the business intact.

35:13
Brian Carney
I think that's going to be one of the most fascinating things that comes out of the pandemic over the next couple of years. The work from home. How does that impact the culture of teams? And you can build the culture virtually. We just couldn't figure it out. Obviously. We were like fighting fires every day during the pandemic, trying to with everything that was going on. That made things a little bit different. I think you just lose some of the one downside that I see is what do they call that? It's called management by stopping by or something like that, where I manage again in air quotes by just sitting next to someone and be like, hey, what did you do this weekend? Just trying to build those natural connections where everything is totally organic and you just want to get to know people better. You just have those different conversations during lunch where you're not talking about work, you're talking about families and that thing.

36:17
Brian Carney
Yeah, it'll be interesting to see.

36:19
Charlie Van Derven
Yeah. That was a lot of that trip up north. It was great bonding time with my daughter too, of course. Probably good timing for that. Drive up the coast, come back to the Blue Ridge Mountains. That was beautiful and scenic. Really we really didn't focus on work at all. It was just about meeting families. I've got to get better at making sure that we protect that in a remote workplace. Maybe I'll be the guy to write that article.

36:45
Brian Carney
There you go.

36:45
Charlie Van Derven
How does work from home impact culture of teams? Perfect.

36:49
Brian Carney
I look forward to it.

36:50
Charlie Van Derven
Brian, you mentioned earlier you're advisors, right? So the team of advisors is growing. Are you guys actively recruiting right now? Talk to me about what the vision is for Riverside going forward.

37:01
Brian Carney
Not going to lie. Finding good people is really hard right now.

37:04
Charlie Van Derven
Yes, it is.

37:05
Brian Carney
Really? One of the things, when we found Mike Levy, our director of planning, we thought it was going to be super easy. We posted a job in I think it was May or June, and Mike was working for us in July and we're like, oh man, this is going to be easy. No problem, no problem. It took a really long time to find our next advisor. So we have two advisers right now. We have a woman named Amy Salano who has been in the business for 15 years.

37:37
Charlie Van Derven
Awesome.

37:37
Brian Carney
And she has been great. She's been in different channels like banking, wirehouse, that thing, and she's been awesome. She passed her CFP recently and she's been really excited about getting into planning. The other people that we've been hiring are our client service associates. We have a new one starting next week. We had Sean who has been our client service associate team, was always kind of rocky and Sean has really just nailed that down. He's one of those guys that will respond to a client at 09:00 at night on a Saturday, even though we tell them, hey man, wait till Monday, you're creating bad habits. We recently hired a guy named Greg who passed the CFD last week. All right. And he's been a fantastic addition. The thing that's exciting about the two of them is that we see a great trajectory for them, a path for them to become advisors if they want or to go into a different side of the business.

38:51
Brian Carney
The other thing with going RA, we brought a lot of jobs in house, right. We actually were with a tamp and we took all of our money from the tamp and we brought it internally. Shiv has been trading and we brought in a gentleman that passed the CFA. His name is Gary Dyigart and he's been awesome. He's a young portfolio manager who's been really just an incredible addition. So having this really strong team. Again, one other person to mention, when we moved Aaron from our 401K, we hired another person to run our 401 group and she had 15 years experience on both sides of the business. So Amir Martin has been great. It's really been a fantastic building of this and I'm really excited for what the future holds. We've got a lot of big plans and hopefully we're able to execute on those.

39:45
Charlie Van Derven
Well. Listen. Sounds like you're putting the right pieces in place to make that happen. Brian. From a recruiting perspective and also our listeners. Like. Really the place that RAA Collective holds is and for 20 years I've been watching this trend of people move from that captive kind of employee model wirehouse into an independent space and I've seen people do it well and I've seen people fail completely. Right. Like not even make the transition, whether that was litigation or whatever the case may be.

40:15
Brian Carney
Sure.

40:15
Charlie Van Derven
The exploration of this podcast is all about why are some successful and why are some not. What's the difference? How do we help a younger adviser, maybe, who is eyeing independence? How do we help them make a good transition? The information you provide is super valuable to that mission. Also if someone's really looking to move independent, can they talk to you about a space there or just pick your brain and to learn more about the topics we discussed?

40:51
Brian Carney
Absolutely. One of the things we've built this what we think is a pretty good model and we are definitely open for plugins. I always have the conversation with Jared that if it were me and I was the sole owner of our firm and it was up to me to go from an independent BD to an RIAA and deal with compliance, picking the custodian, picking the I would have failed miserably. Right. I think we are definitely a wealth of information and I love to help people in this space. I had a conversation yesterday with someone who just graduated with finance degree, like, hey, I think I want to get in your space, but I'm not sure all the way up to I mean, I've been in this business for 21 years. I've made every mistake. I've gotten sued, like I said before. I know a lot about how to figure that out.

41:44
Brian Carney
I'm happy to have any conversations.

41:46
Charlie Van Derven
That is so awesome. Thank you for that. What's the best way for someone to reach out to you?

41:49
Brian Carney
My email or from our website? Our website is riversedgeadvisors.com and my email is Bcarney@riversadjadvisors.com and you guys do a.

42:00
Charlie Van Derven
Good job with that brand. Whether that's you or Brooke or whoever put that together. The website looks great.

42:05
Brian Carney
Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

42:07
Charlie Van Derven
Brian, I have enjoyed our time together very much. And you're, a wealth of information. Seems like you've kind of been through it all to some degree, so I love that you're not afraid to admit the mistakes you make. We only get stronger if we can grow from that.

42:20
Brian Carney
That's right.

42:20
Charlie Van Derven
Yeah, thanks.

42:21
Brian Carney
Growing, too.

42:22
Charlie Van Derven
Yeah, exactly. I probably made four mistakes already today. I can't pinpoint them yet, but I'll know what they are about a week from now for sure. So, Brian, awesome, man. Thank you so much for taking some time out of your day and spending it with me and bringing some of your wisdom and experience to our listeners. I really appreciate it.

42:41
Brian Carney
Charlie, thanks for having me on. I appreciate you giving me the opportunity.

42:44
Charlie Van Derven
All right, awesome. To our listening audience, thanks again for tuning into Raacollective. If somebody who's got the knowledge and experience of our friend Brian Carney and others that we interview, we'd love to talk to them, check out Raacolective.com, or you can find us on all the normal platforms. Spotify, Apple, Google, Gosh. There's a few more in there, but what they are.

43:07
Brian Carney
Yes.

43:08
Charlie Van Derven
Brian, thank you. Have an awesome day. I'm just happier in my life, man. Thanks.

43:12
Brian Carney
Thank you, Charlie.

43:13
Charlie Van Derven
Appreciate it. Bye.