Douglas Fritz headshot

How to Build a Unique Client Experience with Douglas Fritz

Satisfied customers are the foundation of any successful business. Keeping customers satisfied means that every interaction must be positive, from the first contact to closing a deal. Positive client experiences build loyalty and retention, while negative client experiences damage a company’s reputation. By prioritizing the client experience, companies differentiate themselves in a crowded marketplace.

This week, Jack talks with Douglas Fritz, Founder and CEO of F2 Strategy. With experience in improving financial outcomes for clients and advisors, Doug has led F2 Strategy’s outsourced CTO business model and strategy consulting services. Notably, he was awarded the 2021 ThinkAdvisor Thought Leader Luminary Award for his contributions to the field.

In this episode, Doug talks to Jack about the significance of decision-making and strategy in establishing and sustaining a successful, unique client experience. They discuss what inspired Doug to create F2, how to avoid a disjointed client journey, and Doug’s predictions for the future of the wealthtech industry.

What Douglas has to say

“Depending on where you are in the firm, what you believe is broken is almost always different.”

– Douglas Fritz, Founder and CEO, F2 Strategy

Read the full transcript

Jack Sharry: Welcome, everyone, we are pleased you’ve set aside some time to listen to this week’s edition of WealthTech on Deck. We’ve had some highly accomplished leaders on our show from all walks of FinTech and wealthtech, where we examine the consequence of digital and human advice in this week is no different. Today, we’re going to have a conversation about FinTech and wealth Tech with someone who has been a chief technology officer at some of the largest firms in our industry, as well as someone who has built an organization that act as an outsourced CTO. And our guest, Doug Fritz will share much about that. Doug is the co founder and CEO of F2 strategy. He’s a veteran CTO, and well tech consultant who leads f2 strategies outsourced CTO business model, and strategy consulting services. Doug was the winner of the 2021 ThinkAdvisor thought leader luminary award and has helped many firms improve the experience of financial outcomes for clients and advisors. So Doug, welcome to WealthTech on Deck.

Doug Fritz: Perfect, thanks for having me, Jack.

Jack Sharry: So please share, if you would, with our audience, your background, how it all led to the formation of to so we just get some of the backstory before we get into what you’re working on now.

Doug Fritz: Sure, happy to Yeah, I think a little different than a traditional management consulting background, we think myself and actually the whole team. So I’m 25 folks that have to have similar backgrounds, all come from wealth management firms were traditionally the consulting industry that the folks that we would have to hire had never worked in a wealth management firm, or certainly had never done the types of projects that we were asking for help in getting it done. And it’s one of those moments as an entrepreneur hero, people have it when you see an opportunity, like, wow, why doesn’t someone build a firm full of former CTOs that have actually done the work and can help other people get it done to, you just cannot see that anymore. And it got to the spot where like, Okay, I’ve got to go drive to go build the firm to deliver on that. And that’s what we’ve done. And I’ve just taken all of our own experiences from working at midsize and large Well, firms and getting really complicated projects, done integrated projects, client experiences, new lines of business that can launched. And we help the RIA Bank Trust, hybrid BD space, even increasingly, even some plan sponsor Insurance record keeping firms build great experiences that require a fairly heavy lift technology, project selections, contracting, technology lifts and in the implementation that the translation like, you know, hey, team that has never used a new tool in 20 years, here’s your new trading tool, are you performance reporting to new CRM requires kind of a kind of background of knowing how to get those things rolled out and translated to make the experience really good. That’s, that’s our background. And everyone, myself included, has that same background, that’s great.

Jack Sharry: So you, you get it, you understand that you’ve been there done that. Talk a little bit, if you would, about the to strategy and your approach and what you’re particularly excited about. Now, some of the stuff you’re working on maybe some examples of the types of things you do, and some of the challenges that you have to overcome. Just give a sense, because I think we can all agree that the future is, is both technology driven, as well as human advice driven, and you got to get the two together. And they don’t always sync up as much, as well, as we might like to talk a little bit about all that as you bring that together.

Doug Fritz: Yeah, that small little topic, check that little thing to talk to you about the mission of life in general.

Jack Sharry: Tell me how you’re gonna transform the world.

Doug Fritz: Yeah, how do we just make it all just work great. So like I mentioned before, like, we’re the team that helps make really good decisions. And I think it starts with making good decisions. And if you’ve done this your whole career, and especially if you’re very well connected to the other decision makers, and the folks that are accountable for making decisions at a large number of firms, and we run a large think tank of the top CTOs and CEOs and countries, we have a lot of benchmark information on our own. You see what good decisions look like. You see what bad decisions look like. And really good decisions. Start with knowing yourself knowing who you are, as a firm what your strengths are, which is easier oddly, it’s easier for, like legacy firms newer firms have typically struggle with like, what’s our market approach? I don’t know. We’re an advisory firm, even a new advisor from an older version from has to understand itself and what it does to attract specific types of clients. We make our decisions often what made you great and what’s gonna make you great in the future. And typically, those are tied to some sometimes, unspoken about unvoiced value proposition, that firm has to start with a decision making process and to get through planning and then we help to execute on those projects as well. That’s kind of the what we do. What we’re excited about is that when we started the company seven years ago, it was fairly difficult to not impossible, we clearly knew there was a need, but it was a lot more difficult seven years ago, sit down in a operations or bore room setting or a president well from talking to advisors, and say, Hey, we really need to get our technology house in order we’ve worked to do, you have forgone work over the past 1020 years, we got to get it done. Let’s go get it done, make good decisions and go spend some money to get this house in order. That was harder seven years ago, it is not hard to have that conversation in 2023. We don’t have a sales team. So people just come to us when they need help, and the perceived need, and the value that people see in creating automated experiences for clients, once a client tells you their name and address information one time, you should use that as you shouldn’t have to keep asking the client for it. Paper has been a villain in the industry for this last five years. Still, some firms use a lot of paper, but it really boils down to help them to make good decisions. And value this kind of an important concept, value, a client or prospects investment in their time in you, and your service and what you do. And if you truly value their time, you don’t just value when they’re showing up to your office, you value, how they interpret a report at the end of the month of the quarter you value, how they go through their planning exercise you value amount of time and energy, it takes them to compile documents for an account onboarding process, or an estate planning process, you value that data you value that time, so you’re always providing a higher return on investment in their time than you did before anybody else would do. Those are exciting. That’s exciting for a firm like ours to have an industry rapidly moving towards the need to use technology need to hire people that really understand it and get it done. Super exciting. And you mentioned the sort of integration between computers and people that really are we don’t walk in any firms anymore, that don’t have already some basis of appreciation for technology, making them better, maybe more efficient, maybe making better decisions, maybe being offering enhanced services, like customizing portfolios, and tax optimization. And overlay could be you know, telling a better story about performance. But everybody’s using technology, where we still see people. This is often talked about where people will say tech and like things like chat GPT and voice to text and even like computer logic and data to talk like Siri, are taking the place are sort of displacing advisors. We don’t see it at all, I think it’s the technology we see today. And the technology we see coming in the next 510 years, just help people make really good, high value high return on investment type experiences for clients quicker. So for example, one is really excited about is tools chat. CPD is one example. But a lot of tools like that, that if you give them structured data, like we have a return stream, we have a peer group correlation, we’ve got market returns security returns, we’ve got sector level benchmark market information going back 30 years, we as an industry have a ton of really good structured data, which structure just means that it’s reliable in its place. And it’s easy to fairly easy to get to, to tell stories off that data, look for correlations and actually tell meaningful, interesting things to investors, we are that one of the best industries that will benefit from this, a lot of other interviews are more qualitative, and nothing’s written down that the data is not structured, you think like real estate, or you know, commercial sales type things, that data is everywhere, it’s not really good structured data, we have a ton of data. So I’m really, really excited about those things. And specifically how advisors are going to use it to, to deepen the relationship between investors in their money or investors in their wealth, their purpose or their wealth. They’re really, really cool things that are coming in that area.

Jack Sharry: I want to dig into that a little bit further down the road, I want to back up just a second. And one of the things you talked about, or at least we’ve talked about offline, maybe historically, people bought a CRM, and they bought a planning tool. And then they bought the aggregation tool, and they bought all the stuff not unlike they bought different products, they bought mutual funds and ETFs. And that’s amazing. And you amazing. So we’re an industry that buys stuff. And then lately and I’d love to have you covered on this. Lately, it’s all about connecting the dots, how do you connect all that stuff? And maybe we start with the the tech side, and then then on to the product side, because the flip sides of the same coin. We just talked about that connecting the dots phenomenon, which we seem to be pretty deep into. There’s no argument anymore that you got to connect the dots. But talk about that, if you would in terms of love that sort of baseline stuff, I would imagine.

Doug Fritz: Yeah, it’s but it has been philosophical, right? It’s not, it’s something we still do a lot of explaining to people. So the concept that you’re you’ve got a tool to do a thing makes just tons of sense. I need a planning tool. I need a CRM, you mentioned aggregator performance tool, whatever, and to fulfill a function. It does that just fine. Now, you stepped back not too many years, 10 years, the path, the concept. The technology is here to provide specific functions for my advisor. That’s where we all were we I was there 10 years ago, right? In 2023. I would challenge the most advisors whether they know it or not, are in the business of creating experiences. Right. It’s an experience we can laugh out of it’s like In all these other commercial platforms that are experiences like you know, it’s not about the thing, it’s about the experience how you feel about it. But when you have five different tools that have no connectivity between them, your ability to create a unified experience for your clients so that when you go through the planning exercise, you tell me all kinds of stuff about your risk tolerance and expectations for the future and liquidity needs, that when I go to have another conversation with you outside of the time of the planning tool, like a CRM or account setup process, or we’re talking about performance, and what that means for the next five years, but I’ve got to either ask you again, or I forgot that I had it over there, the client doesn’t forget to give it to you, you forgot you had it, you’re creating disjointed experiences. And so what’s what’s driving people to integrate, it’s part of it is efficiency. Like, I don’t want to have to type the same information in five different times. And I want to keep it relevant five different times, I want to just keep it relevant once this saves me time, there’s there’s a cost component to that is that savings come out of that, but really does boil down to experiences can I create a great onboarding experience a great annual review experience that brings together all the things that I’m doing for you, and leverages all the things you’re paying me to do, by the way clients into one experience that is efficient, automated makes me as an advisor look good, makes my clients feel really proud to have picked me to manage their money. You can’t do that if things are just spread around the results. Some firms that depends on the size largely, but also I would say depends on maturity, we’ll connect tools to tools. And that’s okay, better than nothing. The nature of a lot of our technology right now, the United States is that there’s not a lot of a commercial incentive for individual vendors to build natively build connected connectivity between each other. Why would e money give planning information to money guy to actually do they have a thing called like a summit product that they built that most cases, firms are reluctant to spend money to connect to other tools. But we’ve been doing more with our clients in the last three years, is building a data core like a data architecture core where the relevant information CRM planning performance, transactional market data, even some due diligence, or reference data on funds and ETFs, and separate accounts, is run inside of its own data. And then we plug the tools into our own data, that gives us two things. One, the data is consistent, you capture it once, and you can use it as many times as you want to, to. And most importantly, as the future comes faster and faster at us, I can kind of get rid of vendors a lot faster if I don’t have to be sort of tied to them as the tool is integrated. Everything else like that this Gordian knot of technology, I can’t snip one of those things out without disrupting something. If I got my own data, and I’m feeding those tools, bad data, I can move faster. I’m not as beholden to a crappy vendor, as I was last year.

Jack Sharry: So I’m curious, I’m not sure if this is part of your purview. But I’d love to learn. So a lot of what you’ve described as the data flow, the experience, that kind of activity, the sort of amplification of information, through a process soup to nuts, from onboarding, through recommendations, and trading and so forth. Talk a little bit about the soft side of all that you use the word experience. Do you guys look at talking about that soft side, because we’ve got this, you know, it’s never ending that people are moving toward retirement. And we have a record number of folks in retirement now and more to come 10 to 12,000 a day we hear, and then their needs and wants change over time. And so they’re less concerned about the portfolio performance per se, I’m always concerned about it, of course, but more about what do they do about things that relate to their portfolio? Like what do I do about where to live? And how do I take care of a child that has a learning issue? Or whatever the issues might be? Do you guys get into that kind of stuff in terms of helping your clients help the advisors provide a more comprehensive level of advice?

Doug Fritz: Anytime we talk about a client journey, like prospect client and client journey, which is something that we do with almost all of our clients is that we work with them on don’t even work with the technology to deliver it just what is the experience you want your clients to have? What is that unique? Going back to the thing I mentioned before? Like what is it about you that’s unique as a firm? We find out what those things are like why clients pick to work with you. Oh, you know, we do great with former professional athletes that are like one to two years until they’re getting ready to retire from them. We help them sort of get jobs as spokespersons or business development executives or whatever we manage their wealth, we help them with their lives, those unique nuances of client experiences that they want to amplify. Because when you when you amplify them, then all the other athletes will come in. We get a lot involved in that we create what’s called a journey maps. A journey map is just a written experiential guide of how you want that experience. But what point during that journey? Do you hear about the firm? What’s your first second third conversations with that firm? Like what’s really important information needs to get translated or recapture? How do we use that information capture to come back the second and third time with a plan or hypothetical portfolio? We asked for the client statements, the statement of the current wealth like in meeting too and it’s what we do with it, we sit down and so you’re creating this arc of a journey of an experience systematically that just made people really excited and they’re like, yes, I want to work with you. It amplifies sales at It helps you to curate your pipeline. Increasingly, it’s becoming more digital, like how do we use our clients digitally in that way. So the soft skills of working with clients and technology has come a long way. It does focus on understanding the experience you want to amplify. But things like T CRM, digital client experience reporting, they’re all ready to go. They’re so all the tools today are so customizable, that you can pretty much deliver anything, the trouble comes, we get called a lot. As you can imagine, after they run into trouble, they’ll buy a CRM, or they’ll work with a CRM company to get their CRM, but it never went to the process of figuring out what they wanted the experience to be interesting. And they kind of feel like, well, my CRM company is going to give me that great experience that CRM companies like No, no, we’re, we’re the switches in the pipes and the dials like you got to tell us what you want to build. That gets lost a lot to the point where in our research for the last two years of top wealth management firms, the country, the NPS, like the score something zero to 10. And promoters are the folks who say like, my experience is a nine out of 10 out of 10, and the detractors are the zero to sixes. And if you calculate it, like the detractors, minus the promoters is your net promoter score. We did that for CRM, like what’s your experience with CRM? CRM is a topic and wealth management is a negative 46. NPS which is astonishing, right? That’s astonishing number. It’s largely because people don’t didn’t focus on workflow and what that client experience that soft skill experience needed to be.

Jack Sharry: Interesting. Talk a little bit more about that. I’m fascinated, I’m heartened to hear because it’s, obviously you’re, you’re in the technology business leads, that’s what you’re known for. But it sounds like you spent an awful lot of time that hate the term soft skills, but you really about how you incorporate it into that experience for the client and the advisor, I imagine there’s a lot of focus on getting the advisor up to speed. So they are better able to enable the investor to make wise choices or smart choices.

Doug Fritz: The answer kind of two areas. So one is really interesting and kind of where we are as an industry where you’ve got firms that have grown by aggregating other firms. And there’s a lot of them, I’m actually one of the things I’m also excited about is that, like five years from having more firms, over 150 billion, like twice as many firms over 180 billion, and then then we had like the preceding 30 years, all these firms are getting big. When you bring firms together, that those soft skill, experiential things like the value proposition, why did people pick to work with me? That aggregator firm might have bought five firms with vastly different value propositions? Yes, you can imagine the sometimes it’s a lot of times it’s F2 comes in and helps them with it is like, Okay, what’s the experience, you want to have, like, Oh, we’re one team says, We want to have the best planning experience, got a plan before their client, we’re gonna set a plan up. That’s our prospecting process, and the other team now at the same time, like we don’t plan with planning, you don’t pay me the plan? Why would I do any planning? Right? That’s really challenging, and getting the firm to focus on that soft skill thing that makes them great, is super challenging. And the second thing I’ll say on it is that this comes up early in every relationship we have, it’s so critical to the outcome of what we do, because we can’t hit some vague benchmark of like, make my tech good. Now, sorry, we won’t take any client at all. So like, really early in the relationship, it’s why do people choose to work with you? And why do people stay working with you as an investor’s interest? And it’s an uncomfortable conversation, because you’re you’re having a with the president of wolf or maybe the head of marketing, or someone who’s like, you asked him a question, which arguably, they should know that we often are asked that question in a larger meeting. Yeah. When you ask why do people work with you? You don’t get good answers. Really don’t know why they weren’t.

Jack Sharry: Yeah, I have to say, I’m not surprised. But I would imagine that’s largely why they have you in there. But it’s yeah, you can make all the bells and whistles and dials and why wheels all work together.

Doug Fritz: But you said it though. Like we’re the technology team. So I’ve had many times where someone will say like, wasn’t expecting our technology, God asked me to your business strategy question. But it’s really important.

Jack Sharry: Talk a little bit about that, too. Because I am a strategy geek. I love the whole, frankly, our podcast, coming up on 100 of these things. They’re all always about strategy. And you’re once again, serving our objective, which is talking about strategy. Talk about that when you talk to firms, is that do you tell them when you get there? Or do they know that when they please sign up or at least start to engage with you?

Doug Fritz: They kind of know, right? They kind of know that we’re gonna have to have a conversation about strategy. But the first one or two conversations, not everybody and maybe half there will be things don’t feel good. Advisors are frustrated, clients are frustrated. We don’t really know why we need you, but we need you. And most people are very heartened when we start with the conversation about the client. I’ll tell you the other thing, any organization new old aggregator firm Bank Trust, then around 150 years, whatever doesn’t matter, depending upon where you are in the firm. What you believe is broken is almost always different. Right? If you’re the advisor is because my operations team can’t get stuff done faster because your operations is because the advisor doesn’t give you the right information to start So it’s always somebody else’s, it’s always someone else’s problem. When we come in and have those conversations, we lead from the perspective of the client, and like, Why do clients choose to work with us? Why do they stay with us? What is it about us and the experience that is unique and different? When your COIs refer to you what are they saying to their client, their clients about why we should work with you, when you take that client lens, everybody’s on the same page, I love that about our industry, there’s not a single wall firm we work with, or I’ve ever worked with, that didn’t have everybody from the top of the house down to like, Junior one week on the job operations person that didn’t really fundamentally rally behind the idea of delivering great experiences for clients, right? Everybody’s on board with that one thing. And we use it as a bit of a tool. Maybe it’s maybe Machiavellian, maybe it’s not, but to get everybody on the same page with something that they can all agree on, which is a great client experience. And if I got to make you change, and say, Jack, I need you to change your process. And I make you change the process because I’m operations in you’re an advisor or vice versa. Not happy about it. But if I say Jack to make a great experience, this is a we’re going to do and the client is going to love us. You’re on board.

Jack Sharry: Yeah, that’s great. That’s very smart. Well, I’d love to keep going on this my favorite topic, but let’s talk about the future. Where’s their business? Where’s f2? Where’s I’ll go? Where do you predict over the next few years, three to five years?

Doug Fritz: So the biggest thing is I’m interested in the future. And this this bears out in some of our research data, is that advisory firms this all sounds weird, but I tell people because they think it’s already happened. But it has not this year is the first time digital client experience jumps to one of the top three spots of areas where our wealth management firms control spending money on historically has been like, yeah, we’ll get to digital, or we’re going to work on CRM, or we’re going to build a fractional share, you have a sleeping optimizer tool, you know, like that’s really interesting, digital clients, parents, and then data, which is actually highly correlated in the right shops is correlated data and digital the top things people are spending money on this year. I love that. Not because just because it’s good for my business, it tells me that that the concept that a client is going to IT firms are okay with it, a client is going to wake up at two o’clock in the morning like pick up their phone. And, and experience. Something about that firm when an advisor is not in the room is a sea change from where we were 10 years ago. Right? The biggest blocker to most large firms have good wealth experiences, to innovate, do things with digital was always the advisors, the advisors were reluctant to have a client login and see something that they weren’t able to display. It still exists. Anxiety still just that’s one of my biggest areas of excitement.

Jack Sharry: It sounds boring, the fact that it’s fun.

Doug Fritz: Yeah, we should be. Yeah. But if it’s the first time it’s really jumped out 2023 is the first time yeah, I’m excited about what else we can do with data mentioned before about some of the great tools. I sound seltzer serving. But it’s absolutely true is that you can really use the modern technologies like visualization technology or rapid answer next best decision next best answer kind of technology and then integrating that total experience. I believe that having a really good set of data to play off of who knew and that’s a really hard one to explain. Because it’s both the past the future. For the majority of firms that we work with, it’s where we’re building our future on their on their own data. But it’s also one of the things it’s really hard, I feel reluctant to bring it up because I have to because it feels like I’m selling it and I shouldn’t have to sell it. Data lacks a verb that’s a kind of a kitschy thing we say that too is like planning has the word planning is a verb. It’s right in the frickin name of the thing, right? Performance has the verb data as a noun, right? We don’t data things like data, that thing like no, it’s a noun. And it does no verb. There’s no verb associated with it. So it looks like a why are we spending money on data, and it’s like 10 different suburbs that you can use. We need to find a better verb for data. But that’s the other thing I’m excited about is data and digital. Yeah. And then the last thing I’ll say I’m excited about is just this, that come from big firms, Wells Fargo, first republic, right, like big, big firms. And these smaller firms that through P backing and like really smart leadership can get aggregated and get bigger and bigger and bigger. Like we’re seeing these massive, experiential, great new firms coming to market that are really big and really important. Like, I love disruption. I’m a bit of a punk in my background somewhere, but like, I love big firms coming to market and like shaking things up being super relevant. And I love that and a lot of us our clients do, but like we just love being part of those cool stories where firms get big and do cool stuff. Just great.

Jack Sharry: Well, this has been terrific. I really enjoyed our conversation, it’s heartening to hear that this what I call the confluence of human and digital advice is alive and well and continues onward. Because he can’t do one without the other and the way you’re applying it all connecting the dots to use the colloquial expression is just so vital and that firms are catching on. I’d love to hear your comment on this. But it seems to me that what happened we were moving this way, inexorably over the past many years, but it seems like the pandemic accelerated because then you had to have a digital experience to communicate. And also it was at a time where I recognized People retired figure their 401k’s were fat and it was time to check out and then they found it shrunk and inflation and all the rest of the economic challenge that occurred. And then they’re now they’re going back to work. And so they kind of got whipsawed and realize that they got to be more prudent, and that they’re now in the habit of speaking to their advisors within through technology. So your comments on that is, do you see that? See it the same way?

Doug Fritz: Yeah, the weird thing is we had evidence going back way before COVID, that older generations and investors were far more, not just ready, but expectance to deal with their advisors in a more digital way than advisors thought they weren’t. It was always we’ve seen analysis and done some research on like, how much do you think a six year old client would would prefer to engage digitally and like, advisors would say like, 5% of clients, there’s like, double digits, significant double digits and clients that said they wanted it. The other tiny thing that just put like a little sayings like this put put the spin on things the right way, which is that one thing that came out of COVID is all of our clients got a lot younger, right? All of our clients, greatest generation in the silent generation, they’re like, Y’all got not quite Gen X, millennials, you know, tick tock in but like, they all got younger, moms on the phone all the time. My dad’s on the phone texting, like, that’s where they live now. And they all got young, and that youth came expectations. Industry is feeling which is kind of nice. One of the other nice things and give we’re recording this in April 2023 is with banking crisis and some emerging sort of variability and outcomes of of revenue for a lot of well firms. On the larger banking side, larger organizations we’re seeing do some contraction, unfortunately, because a lot of them actually really do need to get their stuff together. But for smaller firms, midsize firms, we’ve seen no contraction in spend. And so if you’re like a FinTech fan out there, like I hope this doesn’t delay, the adoption of technology, we’re not seeing it at all, we’re seeing firms increasing spending 23.

Jack Sharry: The same year, though, thank you, this has been a great conversation, really have enjoyed it. So what are things we do at this stage of our little podcast conversation is, what are three key takeaways you’d like to share with our audience? And what we’ve been talking about?

Doug Fritz: I think answer the question like, know thyself, right? Like, what is it about your business and your firm, and maybe you’re in a larger business and just for your practice, that brings people in like, no, it’s your great app, because all your tech money in operational money in structuring really should be spent to just be better at the things you’re already good at is the most effective ways for money to is back to that data concept that if you’re not already thinking about or bringing your data together, and really building a useful set of owned data, your future is based on that. If you plan to be in business in 10 years, you got to start working on that right now the firm’s that are really kicking butt right now market are those that have already processed and already worked on their data many years before, they can do tremendous things, and you have two or three years to just catch up. And you’re gonna have to spend a lot more money, a lot of time getting it done. So start now, I think the last is just sort of think about process and experience before you lift the finger on technology. So if you’re building tech to just do a function that stopped but think about what you want that experience to be what does that experience for your clients look like? Before you touch your CRM, for you think about your prospecting journey, document what you want the experience to be before you left fingers and technology, your outcomes will be significantly better when you think about the process. That’s great. That’s great.

Jack Sharry: So final question, my favorite off the beaten path in terms of what we’ve been talking about. Maybe we’ll see what’s something you do outside of work that you’re excited or passionate about, that people might find interesting or surprising.

Doug Fritz: I live in Santa Cruz, California. So not surprisingly, I like to surf but I’m also a dad to to an eight and a 10 year old. So I think my favorite thing to do is just whatever the hell that an 8 and  10 year old are interested in can be Legos can be trampoline could be surfing, hiking, baseball coach baseball team, so I just love it. Get down in the water. I sail as well. So get down to the water is my favorite stuff.

Jack Sharry: That’s great. That’s great. I gather you’re closer to the water than you once were. Is that true?

Doug Fritz: I am closer to the water in we’re in Santa Cruz right now. And we’re in the process of relocating to Chicago. But oddly enough, the exact same distance to the water will be in Wilmette. So like, almost to the foot. I measured it by the exact same distance.

Jack Sharry: That’s great. So Thanks, Doug. This has really been a fascinating conversation and thanks for sharing your thoughts and perspective. Very, very interesting. For our audience. If you’ve enjoyed our podcast, please rate review, subscribe and share what we’re doing here as WealthTech on Deck. We’re available wherever you get your podcasts. Doug, thanks so much. It’s been a real pleasure.

Doug Fritz: Thanks, Jack.

WealthTech on Deck

About this Podcast

WealthTech on Deck is a LifeYield podcast about the future of wealth management and the major role technology plays in it.

About LifeYield

LifeYield technology improves after-tax returns by minimizing investment taxes and maximizing retirement income. Major financial institutions leverage LifeYield to improve financial outcomes and increase advisor productivity through multi-account portfolio management. Learn more at lifeyield.com.