Solving Data and Integration Problems in Financial Services with Kyle Van Pelt

Jack Sharry: Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining us and welcome to WealthTech on Deck. I’m very pleased you decided to join our conversation about the future of financial advice. Each week we talk to industry leaders about the confluence of human and digital advice wherever it might take place. And that can be found obviously, in places like wealth and asset management, retirement insurance and annuities technology. Our guests are working on strategies to help advisors, investors, participants and firms enjoy better financial outcomes. Today, we’re speaking with Kyle Van Pelt. Kyle is the CEO of Milemarker. Milemarker is an innovator around integrating and coordinating data, and infrastructure to help financial services companies improve financial outcomes. Kyle, my friend, welcome to wealth tech on deck. It’s great to be here, Jack, thanks for having me. Great. So Kyle, and I talked from time to time we’ve known each other most of his career, which is not that long. He’s accomplished a lot in this very short time and doing cool stuff, always. So let’s start with you telling our audience about mile marker and about your role in the company. So fill us in.

Kyle Van Pelt: Yeah, thanks, Jack. So I’m the CEO at Milemarker. And I have the opportunity of stewarding this company as we grow. As you said, we really help people connect their data and their systems. Everybody has data challenges and data problems. But I’m sure some of the listeners eyes just glazed over thinking about data problems. So really what is at the root and heart of why we want to solve our data problems. And I know a lot of your guests have accomplished this over the time. So at the end of the day, what Milemarker does is it helps people solve their integration problem. But really, it helps them solve their workflow and advisor experience and client experience problem because that’s really what people want when they are looking to solve data problems or solve their integration problems. So mile marker works with firms who are looking to create their own platforms that they can serve their advisors and their clients better. One of the things we say is that investment has been very successful. And we think investment is the platform for connecting firms to asset management. We believe firms like Orion, or Black Diamond, or Adipower are platforms for connecting advisors to their clients. And Milemarker exists to be the platform that helps connect firms to their advisors. There are tons of firms out there right now who are recruiting advisors, and they’re growing by acquiring other firms or getting other advisors to come underneath them. There are no platforms today that help those types of businesses grow efficiently. That is where the integration problem is biggest. That’s where the headache is the biggest. And that’s where people really want to connect their data and solve their workflow challenges. That’s why Milemarker exists.

Jack Sharry: Cool. Cool. We’ll get into some more of that detail in a little bit. But first, as long as I’ve known you 567 years, something like that. Yeah, you’ve worn a variety of hats around the financial technology. And when you let our audience know a little bit about some of your background is pretty interesting and broad based in the financial services FinTech realm.

Kyle Van Pelt: Yeah, thank you. So in the financial services and fintech realm, I’ve been able to serve advisors and advisory firms of all types. So I was an early executive at Riskalyze, which was a really great time for me, I got to be a part of the hyper growth journey there, you know, Riskalyze, primarily, while they have large enterprise clients, and things like that, they primarily serve those under those advisory firms under 10, folks, which is great, then I got to go and be a part of the strategy and corporate development team at Black Diamond serving larger RIAS billion dollar RIAs and above seeing how that world worked. And then I joined Skience as the Chief Revenue Officer where we did very large enterprise implementations of Salesforce and financial services cloud as well as some Salesforce related products. So through my experience, I’ve been able to see the solo advisor, you know, cutting their teeth, building their new business, all the way up to working with some of the biggest names and brands in the space and all in between. So I’ve been able to see all of their challenges all of their problems. And the funny thing is, all of them have data and integration and workflow challenges. They just manifest themselves in different ways. And that was a fun thing to learn as I’ve gone through my journey so far.

Jack Sharry: So I was doing a little research and anticipation of our conversation today, looked up your LinkedIn profile, which I highly recommend you all check out. It’s a great way if you want to make friends and influence people in LinkedIn land. Kyle’s going to model but talk a little bit about your background because you kind of didn’t I don’t think you any clue you’re gonna wind up doing what you’re doing. So when he talked a little bit about that background and how you wind up doing your thing?

Kyle Van Pelt: Yeah, like most people, I think I sort of stumbled into the financial services and fintech world, but I studied sports management and college and I had aspirations to be the next Theo Epstein. I know you’re out in the Boston area. You know, I wanted to be the next youngest GM and Major League Baseball, I studied sport management, I was a really competitive baseball player growing up, and I still love the sport to this day. So I graduated college, I was given some advice by mentors to not work in the sport that you love, because you don’t get to be a fan, especially in the early days. So instead of going into baseball, I went and worked for the at the time, the New Orleans Hornets, now they’re the New Orleans Pelicans, selling basketball tickets, cutting my teeth, making a bunch of cold calls and trying to sell season tickets to people ticket packages, working with business to business there. And that was the beginning, learned, I really didn’t like that I left there moved to Atlanta to start a technology company, which was a great, great experience. And I learned a lot there. And then my wife and I actually owned a coffee shop for a couple of years after that. So you know, I’ve worked in the professional sports business, I’ve worked in enterprise technology, and my wife and I owned a coffee shop for a while before we sold that when we had our first child, and we couldn’t be, you know, working 19 hours a day at a coffee shop anymore. And I stumbled into this financial technology world right after that.

Jack Sharry: I don’t think I’ve ever asked this question. So I love that you have all those experiences. And I’m sure you attacked each one of them with the kind of gusto I see you do in your day to day jobs that I’ve been associated with, at least in a career that we share, or the business that we share. Tell me about this enthusiasm thing about this smart thing about so where does this come from? I mean, you really dig in, you really get to know stuff. And I, one of things I wasn’t surprised to see, but in fact was kind of shocked for a while you did a gig with Kitces. Michael Kitces, where you were doing a column for investment news, the monthly column that he does there. So talk about this, how do you do this? Like, where does this come from?

Kyle Van Pelt: I think a lot of it probably comes from my parents, I’m sure a lot of people would say that I have really wonderful parents, you know, I think it genuinely comes from a place of gratitude jack. So I don’t often get a chance to talk about this. But my parents, you know, when they first got together came out of really nasty divorces before they met each other. And when they first got together, they date for them was scrounging change out of the couch to be able to share a cup of coffee together that was, you know, a date for them when they were first together. And they worked really, really hard from there to provide an opportunity for me to be the first one in my family to graduate from college, and to grow from there. So I think I always was aware of where I came from, and the opportunity that my parents gave me. And I didn’t want to throw it away. That coupled with, you know, having a competitive fire from playing baseball at a high level, and just being genuinely type A, which can have its downsides. But, you know, I know where I come from, I know what my parents did to help me get this opportunity. And I refuse to fail. And so I think that one of the best ways to not fail, is to dig in as much as I possibly can to what’s put in front of me. And you know, there’s that saying, a lot of people say there might be people more talented than me, there might be people who know more about this than me, but nobody’s gonna outwork me. Anything that I have. So that’s probably where a lot of it comes from men, then, you know, just coupled with, I don’t know, I have a thirst for learning about things. I have an addictive personality. And once something kind of gets into my brain, I have to know as much about it as I possibly can. Cool. Cool. And that’s the DNA inside of me. But thanks for asking. That’s a fun thing to talk about.

Jack Sharry: Yeah, well, it’s actually one of things we try to do in this podcast is not just talk about the, the bits and bytes and all the details, we do a little bit of more interested in the strategy and the what I call the come from phenomenon, my background is not too different from you, and approved some things in earlier in my career, and ever kind of stopped. So we share that. Lots of talk about that sometime offline, but I get you. So let’s talk about back to reality and what you’re doing today with mile marker because you guys are doing some cool things talk about our friend in common Jud Mackrill, and Kim, his wife, they’re wonderful partners ship with one another. Yeah, certainly in the business. So talking about what you guys are up to, I like what you’re doing. It’s cool, it’s a little hard to get. So keep in mind that even people like me one, mostly understand what you’re talking about. This is one of those it’s a little hard to get your head around. But I think it’s fundamentally important, as I understand it,

Kyle Van Pelt: I think every advisory firm shares about 80% of the same things that every you know, everybody needs to open accounts. Everybody needs to serve his clients, everybody needs to pick investment strategies. You know, there’s about 80% overlap that every firm sort of shares in common. But then there’s this 20% of an advisory firms business that makes that firm really unique. Maybe it’s the type of clients they serve, maybe it’s the way that they deliver their client experience. Maybe it’s, you know, a niche that they have, there’s a ton of things that can go into what the 20% is for that firm, but man that 20% is where all of the challenge comes into play for data integration for all of these different types of things they’re trying to do to create a platform. Because what happens is the wealth tech providers, the advice tech providers in the space, they can’t build integrations for every type of edge case for all of those different types of 20%. Right, so they have to build a box. And you and your firm have to try to fit into that box. What mile markers trying to do, or what we are doing is we are flipping that on its head, we’re allowing that advisory firm, to effectively become a software company and ask their technology providers to integrate to them. And when those technology providers integrate to the RIA firms, or the FMO firms, or the broker, dealers or whoever you are, well, now you can control the workflow, you can control what happens with the data, and you can control the experience a little bit better. So that’s what we talk about when we say we want to be a platform. For advisor platforms, we want to power those. Another analogy that we use, I think it can get a little muddy, but I think it’s a good one is I think about Shopify and what Shopify has done for entrepreneurs who want to deliver an E commerce experience. Well, you know, Jack, if you and I went to start an e commerce Store today, and we set up Shopify, we’re gonna get the foundations of an E commerce platform in store, you’re gonna get those foundational things that you need to run an e commerce Store. But you’re still gonna have to go and integrate these applications, these pre packaged things to round out your eCommerce store, what we’re trying to do is deliver that for the Advisor Platform. So you can come to mile marker you can implement with us, you’re going to get the infrastructure, the integration ability, and a bunch of core pieces of technology for your Advisor Platform. And then you’re gonna be able to round it out yourself with your own experience, and how you want that to look and work and feel. So that is what we’re up to a mile marker. And in order to do all of that, you have to have good data, you have to be able to integrate your systems, you have to make sure the workflows work. So it is a little hard to get. But at the end of the day, it is their data, their rules, make your partners integrate to you and build a platform that reflects who you are not a platform that is a box that you have to fit in. That’s the idea from our marker. And who are the kind of clients if you can say by name or not, but we’re the type of clients what kind of firms do you work with? Right now, today, we’re working with larger RIAS. So you know, typically, these are over a billion dollars in AUM. And actually, you know, there’s a ceiling here. So our type of clients are those who are too big to kind of use the solutions that come out of the box, the reports out of the box, the you know, having to rely on your tech partners to run queries for you or anything like that. They know they’re too big for that. But they’re too small to be able to truly invest in and afford their own engineering teams, their own technology departments, and all of that sort of thing. So they need a partner like us to be able to provide that infrastructure and engineering talent, so that they can get scale faster. If you look at obviously, the big ones, you know, the cities of the world, the Hightowers of the world, the Morgan Stanley’s of the world, all of them, they all have desks of engineers. And once you get to a certain scale, you can start to have your own your own teams that do this. So I would say we serve the mid market going up to enterprise with this capability to allow them to get what those really big firms are creating and investing in at a fraction of the time and a fraction of the cost.

Jack Sharry: One of things that might be useful for the audience to know, we’ve talked about your background, but also, I’m not sure what Jud and Kim’s official titles are these days, but both have backgrounds in working, you know, places like Orion and Carson. And also they had a marketing business mineral. This is where where I met him. Yeah, talk a little bit about your respective roles and maybe others on the team because kind of get the industry. Yeah, I think that’s a real differentiator. You’re just not data geeks, you really are, RIA geeks if you will you understand the marketplace?

Kyle Van Pelt: Yeah, I appreciate the opportunity to share that I think, you know, most pertinent to this is absolutely the Carson experience. Right, Jud and Kim, were a part of the team that built out the really slick Carson investor experience and something that they use to bring advisors into the Carson Group, they saw what it took to do that and how much money it cost. And I think we were inspired to say, you know, this shouldn’t be reserved just for the biggest firms. But you’re dead on to about the industry experience. That’s one of the biggest reasons people work with us. Because there’s a lot of data consultants out there. There’s a lot of people who can help you get to the cloud. There’s a lot of people who know about infrastructure, but what everybody tells us is they don’t speak our language. And the learning curve is way too steep for them to try and understand our business. So having that combination of us not only understanding the technology, but as you point out, you know, my co founders Jud and Kim, they worked in an RIA They didn’t just implement for RIAs, they didn’t just sell them technology, they were on the other side of the table, they saw what it took to grow from 4 billion and assets to over 16 billion in assets and their time there. And now we have that really wonderful marriage of the technology expertise, the data expertise, and the RIA and industry expertise. So we speak the language, we can go fast, and people don’t have to train us on what this stuff means, which is really helpful. And where do you guys tend to go, obviously, like to work with more and more clients? I mean, you’re still relatively youthful in your, your experience. But in terms of just I’m with biomarker, but where are you now? Where do you want to go? And where might you expand? Yeah, that’s a great question. You know, I think in some ways, time will tell, and we’ll see what the market says, I believe, you know, markets will always lead the way on that type of stuff. But one big trend that we’re seeing is kind of the, I don’t want to call it disruption of big platforms. But what we’re seeing is RAS who get to a certain size, recognize that they’ve done this in a way that will be attractive to other folks. And so they can create another option for independence. So now you have the ability to go to a wire house, you have the ability to go to an LPL or a Sutera, or an Advisor Group or broker dealer, you can go fully independent by yourself, or there’s always been the options of the dynasties and high towers. But I think what you’re seeing now is people who get, you know, 750 million a billion dollars in assets are starting to create platforms and other options for people to come to, we really want to help those firms create those types of businesses. And that’s where I think most of our growth and our focus for the future is going to be even beyond that what we think is going to happen as a trend is you’re going to start to see very niche focused platform. So we are the advisor platform for advisors that focus on surgeons, we are the advisor platform for advisors that work with entrepreneurs, we are the advisor platform for advisors that work with professional sports athletes or things along those lines. And the technology of those platforms will reflect that. And it will be very enticing for those advisors to come work under that. Because for the same thing that we just talked about the reasons why our clients work with us is because we get them, we want these platforms to be able to show the other advisors Hey, we understand the type of business you’re in. And that’s why you should come with us rather than sort of a more generic, bigger platform. And so we think that’s going to be happening at rapid pace. It’s going to be another avenue for independence, and we want to be there to help power it.

Jack Sharry: So as I think you know, Kyle, I’m an inveterate wise guy. I like to stir it up. I like to cause trouble. So what you’ve just described, Kyle is hyper personalization. Did I get that? Right? Sorry, that’s my least favorite buzzword. But I’ve been slipping in every conversation, see if I can get away with it. But essentially, what you’re describing really where we’re going? And I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, because I know you follow the industry closely as in terms of its trends, for personalization, beyond the buzzword of it, which frankly drives me a little nuts, is real. I mean, that’s about being hyper personalized, correct?

Kyle Van Pelt: I think so, you know, we’re probably using the term hyper personalized, maybe a bit inappropriate, because when the rest of the world uses that they’re talking about, you know, using tons and tons of data about us as consumers to deliver just in time advertising and things like that. I think we’re just getting into the realm of personalization, right? So far, what has happened in our industry, and it’s worked out, well, Jack, but there have been different models for you to run your business, you could either be the W2 model, you could be independent broker dealers umbrella, or you could be fully independent. But those weren’t necessarily personalization models. Those were just different ways of running your business. Now you’re starting to see people it really led a lot by, I think the championing of Michael Kitces. But advisors hyper focused on a niche, I think you’re gonna start to see the models reflect that as well. So yes, some may call it hyper personalization. Maybe I’m splitting hairs here. But I do think that we are long overdue for some level of personalization for sure.

Jack Sharry: Yeah, yeah. No, I actually, I am a wise guy as I mentioned. But because it’s being overused and misuse, but you’ve articulated the difference. And I would agree with you we’ve gotten from on personalized or impersonal highs to personalized Okay, that’s a pretty good leap. But I’m curious, I know that you follow the industry closely. You follow trends, not just what happens at your firm. What happens more broadly? What are some of the things you’re seeing one of the things that you’re observing, where’s the world going the RIA world, the broker, dealer world, the wirehouse world, for that matter? Lots of things shaking it up, workplace world, it’s just it’s lots going on and seems all technology driven one way or another? So what observations do you have about the world we find ourselves in?

Kyle Van Pelt: Well, I think the biggest observation I see is that our industry kind of missed at the cloud computing wave, you know, wealth management sort of said, what do we need the cloud for? And they’re sort of realizing their misstep with that and there’s a new wave coming through that people refer to as the modern data stack. So it’s the, you know, the cloud is a piece of it. But there’s other components that sit on top of that. And it’s providing another entry for the industry to capitalize on that type of innovation. And that I think, is leading to all of this discussion about hyper personalization. Because you can’t have personalization, without proper data. And if the data is in a bunch of different silos, and all over the place, it’s really hard to do any level of personalization. And I think what’s happening in our space is you’re seeing true leadership by firms like Morgan Stanley, and like these bigger firms that are, you know, they’re investing a lot of money in their own platforms and data and personalization. And they’re showing the world what’s possible if you do this. Well, I think the rest of the world, though, is also saying, Well, you know, I don’t have Morgan Stanley’s budget. So how do we do this without Morgan Stanley’s budget? So that’s a really big thing that I think that we’re seeing the other one, maybe it’s exhausted been being talked about. But you know, COVID really showed the world in our industry, the need to up the infrastructure for a hybrid environment at minimal but a remote environment beyond that. And I think what we’ve seen is, a lot of the operations for firms, were not prepared to be remote operations desks at you know, firms of all sizes still relied heavily on passing paper back and forth to each other for applications and whatnot. And I think all of them have recognized the need for modern infrastructure to help them increase efficiency for operation, whether you are sitting next to me in the office, or you are across the country in a different time zone. So those are the two really big ones that I’ve seen people talking about investing in and trying to figure out

Jack Sharry: So one of the things we talked before we got on the air, it was talking about this concept of unified manage household about multi account, you know, that’s one of my favorite topics. What’s your prediction? When’s this gonna get real? A lot of people talking about a lot of people working on it, when does it get real in your estimation, and I’ll let you define whatever real is,

Kyle Van Pelt: I think it gets real, when the industry sort of decides to collaborate a little bit more. I think that the challenge of this becoming real is that a lot of folks in our space still take the frenemies or the, you know, coopetition, you know, a little too far, right. And everybody thinks that they can own more of the stack than they probably should. And when I look at the rest of the world, and Jack, I know you’ve heard me say this before, but it’s still something that I’m very passionate about. If you look at beloved apps, like Uber, for example, or Lyft, if you like them better, the way that they are built, they focus really hard on what they’re really good at. And I think LifeYield does a wonderful job at this. But, you know, Uber created this wonderful logistics network for connecting riders and drivers and all of these sorts of things. They made that frictionless, but you can’t go on an Uber ride without your credit card getting charged. But Uber did not build that payments processing gateway, they rely on, you know, early days stripe, but now they use something different. But it’s a payment processing API. You don’t go on any ride and Uber without navigation being used. You know, they don’t build their own navigation, they use Google Maps API. But you also don’t SSO out into Google Maps to see that or you don’t SSO out into stripe to charge your credit card, or when you call the driver, you don’t SSO out into Twilio, all of these companies stack to create one really wonderful experience. And yet in our industry, we still have today people saying, well, you know, they shouldn’t use that other software solution or something like that, they should just use our version of that, or, you know, we don’t want to integrate with those client portals or experiences because we want them to use our client portal or experience or you know, and you’re just forcing this lag on innovation rather than people sort of picking the area that they really want to own and be the best at and own that layer of the experience in the stack. So the best thing that can happen for all of these things to be real, unified, manage household, personalization, all of that is for people to kind of pick their core competency. The thing they’re really great at, let people have options if they want to use you for more, but truly, you know, pick the part of the stack you want to own and own it. And I think that’s what’s going to help us get where we need to go.

Jack Sharry: There was an article Morgan Stanley did a big promotion of its capabilities recently there was all over the industry press as well as national press. And they really invested heavily starting in 2009. So this is not something they just started working at is basically when they did the Smith Barney merger and the integration that followed. I interviewed Jed Finn who was one of the key people in that integration and it was not easy. I remembered at the time it was really hard to big firms that did not talk to each other to the capabilities or technologies just you know, it was apples and Volkswagens it was it was not at all You know, didn’t want anyone I saw that line from Randy Bullard in an earlier conversation. So kudos to Randy. Anyway. But the point is it did not work. And they worked at it they worked out over the past was 13 years or so we’ve worked with him, I think the past seven or eight. And they’ve been very disciplined, very, you know, step by step, inch by inch problem, my problem because that’s what happens. At one time, when we first started working with mid 26, different trading systems, I think they’re down to 12. Now, but still, it’s not easy. It’s not for the faint of heart. But that’s the reality. That’s, you know, if you think about Morgan Stanley, I can probably rattle off 25 names, it’s been over the past, you know, umpteen years, it’s just you know, a lot of legacy systems, shall we say. But the point of all that is, Andy Saperstein was talking about is this roadshow, they did recently that they were connected and integrated. And they are, you know, e trade parametric Morgan Stanley At Work, Solium, you know, their wealth management business WealthDesk, which is their platform, all that stuff is connected and integrated. And I was having a conversation with some of the works for any senior person there. And I said that there’s one thing that’s not there, and it’s what you just addressed, and that is that it needs to be coordinated. And they are very much doing that, where they’re coordinating it, where they’re coordinating the data from, usually to GPS, their in house system, as well as the money Guide, which is the US also is coordination there were in the midst of that and life yield in terms of creating tax alpha as part of the planning process. So that is then coordinated into their proposal system, where it shows the kind of tax alpha you can enjoy. And then on their wealth, that’s their workstation. Aladdin is there and can give all sorts of guidance around risk. And so to your point of all this API connected and still very much a work in progress, but what they’ve come to realize, and I urge our listeners, if you want to see a very cool video that says a whole lot and tells you about what the future looks like, check out Morgan Stanley’s video, I think it’s called the tax 365. It’s basically talks about all the ways they’re improving tax outcomes were a part of it. But there is much more than us where Central, but there was many other ways that they’re getting a tax Alpha. They really worked at it. And it’s rather coordination, which they’re coming to realize they were doing it but not fully understanding what it meant. But it’s doing in the way you described, it’s like, we’re working with all the different kinds of outsourced capabilities, API connected capabilities to have a seamless experience for their customer at a better outcome. You know, that’s really what this is all about. So I really appreciate what you’re saying. And I’m not sure our industry has understands that you and I do we talk about this stuff, we get it, because that’s where we live, but long way to say, Yeah, I agree with you on what you just said.

Kyle Van Pelt: Well, and I think the challenge is, and this is why we started the business right is, you know, wealth desk is IP that Morgan Stanley owns that they can be in control of the coordination. But what the rest of the world does is they try to buy wonderful pieces of software, right, but then we try to make this coordination happen without a home that they own and control. So it’s already hard enough for Morgan Stanley that has been investing in this home that they control, right. But that’s the part is, you know, to not be lost about Ubers, Uber had the home, it’s an app, you know, it’s a thing that they’re running this coordination on. Right now, the industry mainly operates off of a bunch of pieces to be coordinated with no place for them to be coordinated into. Some people try to do this with Salesforce, and they spend hundreds of 1000s, if not millions of dollars a year in consulting services, some people try to do this through their portfolio management solution. Some people try to do this through their planning solution. And it’s just these are all components that should be coordinated as a part of, you know, whatever the RAA is version of wealth desk. And that’s why we exist is we’re trying to create that digital home for all of the coordination for these firms. So that’s just a big piece that I don’t want to be glossed over in that part of the conversation.

Jack Sharry: Perfect. That is great. So we’re moving toward overtime. So we’re gonna wrap up quick, because I know you’ve got three key points you want to share, and also fun thing to share with our audience. So what are the key takeaways for our audience to be aware of as they ride off into the sunset after wonderful conversation?

Kyle Van Pelt: Yeah, thank you, Jack. So key takeaway number one is connecting your business is more than just connecting the wealth management technology, the adviser technology, it’s also about connecting your insurance data. It’s about connecting alternatives, data, wealth management data, but then going beyond that to other core pieces of technology. Think about your payroll systems, your accounting system. So we have clients that are integrating QuickBooks, and they’re integrating, you know, different things like that. So it’s not just coordinating your wealth management stuff, but it’s all of the technology that you use. So that’s TAKEAWAY NUMBER ONE, connecting your business is more than just the wealth management pieces. Don’t let the integration conversation stop there. Number two, people say that they want better integration, but what they actually want is the result of better integration. So no one Golden objective is for trying to get better data and better integration, is it better workflows? Is it better outcomes is it all of the above, but whether you work with a firm like us or something else, if you don’t know what you’re actually trying to get out of better integration, it’s going to be a failed project. So know what you’re actually trying to get. And then number three, is what we just talked about, which is, all of this is for naught. If you don’t own that digital home, that all of this gets coordinated into, all of these firms are investing a lot of money into technology, they need to make sure that they can own the platform where all of that investment lives and that they are getting the value out of this. So the home point there is firms that become tech enabled, on average, in our space, we’ll see their valuations go from three to five times revenue up to 11, all the way up to 25 times revenue when they become tech enabled, because that is the way that these firms can grow. When private equity firms look at them, they know that they’re gonna grow faster when they have this. So get your digital house in order and find a way to coordinate all of this so that you can watch the valuation of your firm skyrocket.

Jack Sharry: Cool, very well done. So one last thing as we do each week on our podcast, what’s something interesting or unique you do outside of work that people may not know about your would find interesting or surprising?

Kyle Van Pelt: Yeah, thank you. So going back to talking about my parents, you know, I know really where I come from. And I know that there’s a lot of people out there who are hungry. And there’s way too many people who go hungry in our country. So I’m on the board of a company called Hungry for a Day, which is really great. And you know, every year is Thanksgiving is our big, big thing where we help raise money to provide Thanksgiving dinner for families. So last year, we fed a little over 32,000 people Thanksgiving dinner through this, and it was really awesome to be a part of that. And I’m thankful to be able to give back in that sort of way and feel like we’re doing some sort of small part to solve that problem out in the world. So that’s something I’m really passionate about. And if you’d ever love to talk about hunger related causes or feeding the hungry, I’d love to connect about that, in addition to any wealth, technology conversations you want to have.

Jack Sharry: Terrific, terrific, good for you. Well done. So for our audience as we look to wrap up if you’ve enjoyed our podcasts, please review, subscribe and share what we’re doing here. Well, tech on deck. We’re available wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you, Kyle. It’s been a real pleasure. I’ve really enjoyed it.

Kyle Van Pelt: Thanks, Jack. It’s always a pleasure to hang out with you. I’m glad we got to do this. And I hope I get to do it again with you sometime.

Jack Sharry: Yeah, we will do it again. For sure. Thank you, sir.