Mindy Diamond 101: A Wealth Management Recruiting Trailblazer | Episode 006 | 09-26-2024

Ever wondered how someone could shift from crunching numbers as an accountant to becoming a leading figure in financial advisor recruiting? Mindy Diamond, CEO of Diamond Consultants, shares her extraordinary journey in this episode. From starting her business on her bedroom floor to managing more than a quarter of a trillion dollars in assets, Mindy's story is a testament to resilience and innovation. She sheds light on the challenges she faced in a male-dominated industry during the 1990s and how her focus on relationships over transactions has redefined success in the recruiting landscape.

You'll also hear about the personal milestones that marked Mindy's path to success, including the pivotal role of family in her business. Discover how her sons joined the enterprise and took on leadership roles, contributing to the multi-generational success of Diamond Consultants. This episode underscores the importance of doing the right thing and maintaining core values, even when faced with tempting buyout offers. Learn how Mindy's commitment to her clients and her unique approach to consulting have built lasting, meaningful connections in the industry.

We also explore the dynamic world of wealth management, from the dominance of wirehouses to the rise of independent advisories. Mindy provides valuable insights into the evolving landscape and the entrepreneurial spirit required to navigate it. Listen in as she recounts the creation of her podcast and the journey of becoming a reluctant author. This episode is a treasure trove of wisdom for anyone looking to understand the balance between financial success and genuine care for clients, the importance of family in business, and the joy of building a legacy that stands the test of time.

Hello everyone, welcome to From the Ground Up. My name is Leo Kelly, I am the CEO of Verdence Capital Advisors and, once again on From the Ground Up, we're going to talk to an entrepreneurial pioneer in the industry and hear the amazing story of Mindy Diamond from Diamond Consultants and how she basically took a slice of the industry and created a business that transcended a traditional business, which was the recruiting world for the wealth advisory space, and how she turned it into something far greater than that and created an amazing business. Mindy, welcome to the show. How are you today?

I'm really thrilled to be here.

Oh well, we're thrilled to have you and we should probably start off with a little history. Mindy launched Diamond Consultants back in 1998, and she developed it into one of the leading financial advisor recruiting consulting firms in the nation. To put that in perspective again, my career I started at Merrill Lynch years and years ago and left in 2012. And the name Mindy Diamond was the only name that everyone recognized in the recruiting space. There was more than one recruiter out there, but the name Mindy Diamond was the consistent name you would hear as you talked about that space. So in her time she has transitioned more than a quarter of a trillion dollars in assets under management. That's a staggering number and really second to none in that world. And her approach goes beyond just recruiting. It's consulting. It's digging in deep with advisors and trying to put them in the right place and help them set themselves up for success beyond where they were in that particular day.

She's an author. She's a podcaster. I had the pleasure of being on her podcast once. She's an author, she's a podcaster. I had the pleasure of being on her podcast once. She's a consultant and I'm just thrilled to have you on the show. That's a heck of a resume.

Yeah, my God, I hope I live up to it. I hope I don't disappoint you.

I'm confident you won't. So, Mindy, welcome to the show. So, From the Ground Up, Mindy as we described earlier, this is a podcast where we talk to folks who have built. So, from the ground up, Mindy, as we described earlier, this is a podcast where we talk to folks who have built it from the ground up, who had the idea and who ran with it but created something great and you've really done that. Maybe you could tell me a little bit about Diamond Consultants and what your niche is and who you serve, and what is it that makes you different in the marketplace you serve?

Yeah, so obviously I love that question. What entrepreneur wouldn't? Diamond Consultants is a leading executive search and consulting firm working with financial advisors nationwide, and over time we've really grown from working just in the traditional space, meaning working with advisors that were going from Merrill Lynch to Morgan Stanley, to really working with a lot of advisors doing all sorts of different things. For us it's very much about advisor driven. It's never about selling anybody into anything and it's whether the advisor someone like you who left Merrill Lynch and was interested in going independent or to a multifamily office, forming their own or joining somebody else's. So lots of different things and it's all driven by what's best for the advisor.

Yes, and obviously, with a quarter of a trillion dollars transitioned over, you're doing something different.

And that's just in the past decade, I might add. So thank you.

Yeah, extraordinary, an extraordinary number. And so, when you talk to us about how you got started, what was it that brought you to this business? Why financial advisors? How did you get to this place and then take off from there?

Yeah, I will tell you the story in one second, but I'll tell you that, as we recorded this, my son and partner, lewis Diamond, is actually doing an interview with Ed Friedman, who is the reason I got into this space on our podcast, so he's recording it. We are the Diamond Podcast for Financial Advisors and he's doing that recording now. So I'll tell you the story. I was an accountant. I was a very bad accountant. I graduated GW I mean all you need to do is talk to me to let me know, to know that I was really trapped in numbers and was much more of a people person. So I lasted about two years in the public accounting world, hated it and went to work for an accounting search firm and thrived and loved it and was their number one recruiter for many years. And then I took some time off when I had my kids and was just really beginning to get to the point where I've had enough of ladies who lunch and taking the kids to Gymboree. It's time to do something else.

And we've been out for dinner with Ed Friedman and his wife Julie, who are dearest friends, and Ed had been a manager at the time for Morgan Stanley, their flagship office, and he was talking about the fact that there was a dearth of good recruiters in the financial services field for financial advisors and how every branch manager is measured by how many advisors you can recruit. So, to make a very long story short, he and my husband went on a crusade to get me to start a business to recruit for financial advisors. I am only a little bit exaggerating when I tell you I barely knew a stock from a bond at the time. So essentially from my bedroom floor with nothing more than a pad and a pen and a real sense of very reluctant determination, started calling financial advisors and every week I had an Ed notebook and every week I would write down the list of questions that I had for Ed. Oh, I just spoke to a guy at Merrill Lynch and he says he sold structured products and I would say I don't know what a structured product is. He would tell me and then that would become discerning sense of what was right for them and what would be best for clients right for them and what would be best for clients.

And to come in with a very traditional transactional approach. Hey, let me sell you on the hot deal of the day, which was sort of what defined recruiting at the time just didn't feel right, and I read a book that I would highly recommend for anybody listening or anybody called Go Givers, sell More, and it rocked my world. I realized that it was an approach that made sense to me. It was all about leading, not trying to sell somebody on something, but rather asking smart questions to get a sense of where they are and being courageous enough to say you're in the right place and I may not get paid if you don't move, but I'm developing a relationship and that's more important to me than any transaction and it grew from there. I think it was a refreshing approach for financial advisors, because most recruiters were pretty transactional, and I think people began to develop a sense of trust in me and it grew from there.

Yeah, that's pretty innovative, especially what year are we talking about?

1998., yeah, so that's pretty innovative, right? Because 1998, we go back, we're in the middle of the tech bubble is just starting to take off. It's starting to get a little crazy. Checks were getting big. That was the moment where the wirehouses started to increase the dollar amounts and start to try to encourage advisors to jump from one place to the other. And it was a transactional business and you defied that. You created a relationship business and there's a reason why you're the name that everybody knows.

Thank you, I appreciate that and I will tell you something. I smiled when you said this is a podcast for entrepreneurs, because I call myself a reluctant entrepreneur. I didn't set out to build a business, an enterprise that is now a multi-generational enterprise, and we'll talk about that because my sons have come into the business.

Yeah, I want to talk about that.

Yeah, but it is. I just was at the time looking for something to do to capitalize on a career path that I had found recruiting accountants for a number of years and being good at it and it grew from there. I honestly think that if you had told me that it was going to grow into not only an enterprise but a successful enterprise that would feed a number of generations and everybody that works for us, I probably would have been paralyzed and never have done it.

Yeah. What was the pivotal moment then? What was the moment where you went from somebody who was exploring a career opportunity right, you had your time off, you raised your family, it was wonderful and then you wake up and you say, okay, I want a career opportunity. What was the pivotal moment? When you realized, no, I am an entrepreneur. This is an enterprise that really has the ability and the potential to be something significant.

Yeah, so it sort of came in waves. That's a really good question. It's a really good insightful question because it didn't happen all at once. There wasn't one moment, there was probably many.

It rarely does.

And many moments of real terror, that I started the business working on my bedroom floor and my husband suggested that maybe we build an office in the basement for me and I no way, because that would have legitimized it, that would have made it a business and if I had failed it would have been, would have felt more public. I think a lot, unfortunately. I think what I'm about to describe to you is something that many women I mean I've talked with many very successful professional women and what I'm about to describe is not uncommon. So we built reluctantly, built the business in the basement and I began to grow. So I hired a couple of people. I put a little teeny ad in a local newspaper I'm dating myself, because there was no social media at the time and hired a couple of people. I put a little teeny ad in a local newspaper I'm dating myself, because there was no social media at the time and a couple of women who began to work with for me.

And then, a year or two later, we found office space in the next town to us. Above a pizza place we hung a sign called Diamond Consultants and a friend of ours had been biking on a Sunday morning and ran into my husband during the week and said, oh, you started a business. And my husband said well, I didn't start a business, mindy's business and she's been in business for a number of years. We just sort of made it official, we just took office space. And my husband comes home and tells me that story and he thinks it's hysterical that you know he's he's proud. He's equal parts proud. He thinks it's funny that our friend Henry didn't know.

But that paralyzed me. I was beside myself that now it was public. The name is hanging in the next town. Someone we know saw it and truly I had such a paralyzing sense of failure that I didn't know how I was going to get out of bed the next day. I did and we just began to grow from there. I'd say that was probably my pivotal moment and honestly, probably the next enormous pivotal moment was when my son Louis came in. He's the first of my sons to come in. He's now the president of the company, I'm the CEO. And then he was followed five years later by my younger son, jason, and the thought that this business, this non-business that I created, is now feeding, supporting two generations, is mind-blowing to me, right.

Well, it's a terrific story and I think what makes it even just more amazing is your story is great, right? The friend who made the assumption that your husband started a business which speaks to a time, but also you created top-tier success in a business. Let's face it, that was a very male-dominated world the financial advisory space, especially in the 1990s and you just bucked that trend. You went right through and you said doesn't matter, we're the right choice, we're going to get you to the right place and let's not talk about that. I think that's amazing. I think that's a tribute to your-.

Yeah, you know, at the time I was just following my instincts. Sure, I would call someone and make a traditional transactional cold call. Hey, morgan Stanley is offering some big check. Get it while it's hot, which is a typical I mean, I'm being facetious, but sounds similar to a typical transactional cold call. I would hang up and feel like I needed a shower.

It didn't feel good, it just didn't feel right to me and so, instinctively, I began to ask questions and come to a place where I was talking people into staying put Again a transaction that I wasn't going to get paid for, more often than I was helping people to move, and people would tell their friends and they would. And that's when I realized, too, that I was really on to something. But it wasn't like, hey, let's start a business rooted in this new technique. It wasn't until I really read that book which, again, it blew my mind because it crystallized everything that felt instinctively right to me, that lead with treating people the way you'd want to be treated. Ask smart questions to get a sense of where somebody's at, don't just sell them on what you're trying to sell. And you're right, that was really novel at the time. It's probably still novel today.

Well, it is in every aspect of the business. I mean, we see it in the business ourselves. I've always been fascinated over the years that this business is, and should be, such a sophisticated business for financial advisors. And I see so many advisors looking at the minute. They're walking around picking nickels off the floor and ignoring dollars on the table because they're looking for that immediate gratification and that immediate cash flow and they're not thinking about relationships. It's one of the things we focus on and I'm sorry to interject, but one of my first clients, who's still a client today, one of my larger clients, one of the closest we have our first engagement was he was supposed to be selling his business to his brother because his brother weren't getting along. He was supposed to be selling his business to his brother because his brother weren't getting along and after a long conversation back and forth about the business and his desires and his skills, I said this is against my personal interest, but shouldn't you be buying the business from him?

And long story short, he did buy the business from his brother and he ended up selling it for 20 times what he paid for it.

And that's the point. When you do the right thing. That's exactly right Is that I didn't set out to say I'm going to build a multimillion dollar business. I set out to say I'm going to do the right thing every single solitary time. That means every interaction I have is going to feel good to me, it's going to be congruent, it's going to be ethical, it's going to feel good and that means that I'll be able to put my head on the pillow every night. But it also began to mean the business became very successful.

Yeah, absolutely Absolutely. And we have a saying around here, and I love it because it's clearly the way you think there are no exceptions and then there's everything else. Yeah Right, because as you take that little subtle step off the path, it really carries you away pretty quickly and it sounds like you were steadfast in your resolve here.

Indeed, and then it's about teaching it to everyone else. In other words, everyone's natural instinct is to sell right, and especially if you're new in the business, it's not only your instinct to sell, but it's your instinct to want to prove you're successful by putting the numbers up, by closing a deal. And the first big lesson that I've taught everyone who works for us and everyone I've taught personally is no one we deal with is a transaction. They're not a deal waiting to happen. They're not a transaction waiting to be had. They're a person, and whether or not they wind up moving and whether or not we wind up making money off of them is just irrelevant. It doesn't even enter into the equation, because we live and die by the philosophy that only deals that are meant to get made get made.

Yeah, and that's so rare. That's why you're so well. There's many reasons why you're incredibly successful. That's just one of them. You brought up your son and I want to dig into that a little bit because, for a couple reasons and I'm going to ask you a question to kind of get it going Clearly as you talk about your story and you talk about that sign going up and you talk about that moment where your heart pretty much stopped and felt like it was coming in the other way and you're on the floor or in the bed and you want to get up, there sounds like there's's a lot of motivation. I don't want to fail. I want an avoidance of failure, motivating you early. Has that changed now that it's your family? Do you find there's been a shift in the way you're motivated, because you have your sons in the business now and it's a different experience?

Well, hell yes, Same. Because probably now know that my sons are indoctrinated and they're forging their own success and they've proven that they can embrace this business and do well and they love it. So the pressure feels off of me. But I will tell you that when I left accounting and took a job as a recruiter, I remember I was already married, but I remember going home and telling my parents that I was taking a job as a recruiter and the first thing my father said to me was oh my God, you're giving up accounting. What are they paying you? And what they were paying me was a $15,000 a year draw against commission, and I was making, let's say, $23,000 a year as an accountant.

My father thought I had literally lost my mind as an accountant, my father thought I had literally lost my mind, and so the thought of becoming a recruiter and having my father say I told you so was so beyond unpalatable to me that I was determined. I remember when I started as a recruiter and the woman who trained me said I said, what do you need to do to be successful? She said you have to make 100 calls a day. So I made 101 every single day.

When Lewis, my older son, started, and then again when Jason started, I was terrified all over again, not so much terrified that they would fail, but if not, that they would fail, not anything to do with them, but that I was pretty sure it was a pretty great business, an elegant and sophisticated business, built for the right reasons with the right foundational support.

But the thought of the possibility that it could fail and that they would that I will have you know upended their lives, that I would be responsible for their failure I mean a mother, the only thing a mother wants to do with protect their children, that was just. I couldn't have lived with that. And so, um, I was terrified for a while, both times, both times. But, as I said, on the flip side, having my boys in the business has been not only the most validating thing for the work that I've done, but the most joyful and the greatest gift Pass on something that I've loved and that is truly of me. I mean, this approach isn't something you find in a textbook. It's a personal, relationship-driven approach, and to pass that along and have it being a going concern is really more than I could have hoped for.

Yeah, and it's becoming more rare right, and it's becoming more rare right. So, especially, we're seeing it in the RIA world and we're seeing it with even wire house advisors leaving for a very specific reason. The multiples on businesses, whether it's recruiting or it's financial advisory or it's a service business down the street with one of our clients who is selling the multiples have started to get so high that it's getting the numbers are getting big right. It's getting harder and harder for people to bring the kids in and rotate the business to them when they see a big number on the table that they could just get and say, ah, the kids will be fine later. So that's an extra. It speaks to that relationship oriented business you built. But also, I'm going to do this with my family and I'm going to take this, this, as you say, validation of my work and this just joy of being with my family, and that's what's most important to me.

Yeah, and so first of all, recruiting recruiting businesses, while I hate the word transactional because I don't think of us as transactional dealmakers at all, but at the end we're paid as transactional dealmakers and so the business is transactional.

Transactional businesses don't actually sell for the kind of multiples that recurring revenue businesses like an RIA do. The multiples were sky high. When the kids expressed interest, first Louis and then Jason in coming into the business, the notion of selling it was just something that wasn't. It wouldn't have even been a question If they wanted the business and they were coming in for the right reasons, because it felt soulful to them and they really believed that they could take it to the next level. And you know, honor the legacy, meaning the values and the mission statement, and they have, and then some, but really take it to the next level, do more and do better. We would never have deprived them of that and someday will they sell it Maybe, but we talk about it a lot, and Lewis was actually just at a conference and met an investment banker who was talking about multiples, even on a recruiting business.

But we talked about it as a family. The kids are having too much fun. They adore the business. They don't want to work for someone, and the thing that I think would be the worst thing in the world it would have been for me and it definitely is for them is having to report to somebody that expects you to put up numbers. That expects you. And, by the way, we are great dealmakers, great negotiators. We work with and have the honor of representing some of the biggest and best advisors and teams in the industry. So it's not that we're not capitalists or don't think about making deals, but it's not what drives us or what gets us up in the morning, and so the thought of having to report to somebody that would expect us to put up numbers, not doing a transaction for the right reasons would be awful to every one of us.

Yeah, yeah, well, you don't get. You don't move a quarter trillion dollars in 10 years and not be capitalists and not be able to negotiate deals and work with larger advisors. That's for sure. Yeah, no, it's-.

I just I want to jump in here because I'm sitting here with the biggest smile on my face right now listening to this conversation and, mindy, you are electric and I can see how things have gone so well for you and the more I hear about your story, I'm drawing some parallels between you and Leo. Actually, you are in this great position and you keep changing, you keep evolving. So you've had a successful business. You brought your boys in. That was a big change. You've had a successful business. You added on a podcast. So you're adding on these complexities to your business and I think just it sounds like especially your comment about someone suggested you make a hundred calls and you made a hundred one calls I think that speaks to adding on all the new things, like the podcast, you know, a new book, things that people really entrepreneurs oftentimes talk about but don't necessarily act on.

That's it. We've got the name of this, this episode, Mindy Diamond's Entrepreneurial 101.

101. Literally 101.

Well, thank you, Michele. Thank you for saying that. I appreciate that. It's so funny, I think, because the genesis of my business was not in I'm going to build a business and I need to make a certain amount of money. It's not that money wasn't important. I don't mean to say that. I just mean that it wasn't about that. It was about something much more important, much more soulful, much more relationship driven, like that's really how we measure success. And that might sound sort of you know really how we measure success and that might sound sort of you know foofy and whatever, but I it. It works because when you just keep doing the right thing for people, people appreciate that and it grows from there.

Well, you know, and you know my story from the podcast. I grew up in Trenton, new Jersey, very, very modest upbringing, and so I, you know, I often say you know, it's not about the money like you, I mean, I have more than I ever thought I would but the money's nice and it's a validation and it allows you, frees you up to do unique things and, in our case, continue to grow the business and expand and create opportunities. And you, you know, in your case, it's bringing your, your sons in, who, who seem like you, know the old rule of apples and trees. They seem like entrepreneurs at heart as well. So you know, it's an interesting generation where sometimes, when you say, no, this is great, we'll make a lot of money, it's almost scornful. And that's entrepreneurialism. Right, it's grow, it's take it to its best level. Notism right, it's grow, take it to its best level, not biggest, right, you don't necessarily have to grow to be bigger than everyone else, but at its best level. Right, its optimal level.

Exactly To take it where it's meant to be, to take it to what it's meant to do. That I agree with. I think that's actually a very smart thing to say. I agree with that.

So you've been in this. You've been in the business now for some time and I mean in the last 25 years or so I've got a lot of snow on the roof here, mindy. I've been around since you started. This business has really gone through significant changes. I mean, we think back to the tech bubble and we think back to the financial crisis, and obviously we had COVID. But also along the way, we went from a world dominated by wirehouses where the largest, most sophisticated advisors all resided in the wirehouses, because that's where the tech was, that's where essentially, the product was, and then the RA space was more smaller, mom and pop, and we've seen a massive shift of assets transitioning to the independent space. We've seen RAs grow to staggering sizes. This whole world is in flux. Tell me, what do you see in the years you've been here and how have you adjusted to that? And what do you see going forward in the wealth management space? You've seen it all, so this should be great insight.

Yeah. So as I'm listening to you, I'm picturing whiplash because that's what it feels like. I mean, it's been all over the place. So I'll tell you a funny story. You mentioned earlier, when you were introducing me, that you know, in the days when I started in 1998, it was when the wirehouses like Merrill and Morgan and UBS and it wasn't UBS, it was Payne Weber at the time were coming on the scene and beginning to offer these crazy transition deals to incent advisor recruitment for Morgan Stanley to poach from Merrill and vice versa. And at the time when I would call an advisor and he or she would want to blow me off, get me off the phone, they would say to me call me when deals get to 100%. What they meant was when deal right, you're laughing because you know what they are today. Call me when deals, when you can get me a deal that would pay me one times or 100% of my trailing 12 months. My last 12 months revenue generated and, by the way, advisors books, the revenue they were generating from a book wasn't as big then as it is now either. Today those deals are in some cases four to five times that. Four to five times that. So I'm dating myself. So that's one bit of whiplash in terms of how it's changed.

The second biggest change is that I got a call probably I'm going to say 15 years ago from a woman who worked in marketing at Pershing, one of the industry custodians, and she was responsible for putting on a conference for their clients who were this is Pershing Advisor Solutions, who's the custodial arm for Pershing. She was responsible for putting on a conference for their clients and all of them wanted to recruit advisors. So could I come and speak? I didn't know what an RIA was. I'm joking, but I'm only half joking. A hundred percent of the business that we had done up until that point was moving advisors.

If an advisor moved from Payne Weber to Morgan Stanley, morgan Stanley to Merrill Lynch, wells Fargo to Raymond James, whatever it may have been, but all traditional space and, as you just indicated, it was only either two ends of the spectrum that were going into the RIA space the uber entrepreneurial that was a big advisor that was successful, that everybody thought was crazy in those days to go RIA, how could you give up a two or 300% deal and or the mom and pop who sort of was close to retirement didn't want to work that hard, whatever it was. But everybody else practiced in the traditional space and the opportunity cost of giving up some giant check in order to move was anathema. But that conference, that Persian conference, where I just stood up and talked about what I know, about things that were important to advisors and how advisor mindset changed, and all of that really was the absolute pivotal moment that made me see what was going on in the independent space and, by the way, it was barely going on in those days compared to what's going on. So the third enormous pivotal shift was when service providers began to be born and capital solutions began to flock to the RIA space to make it possible, so that the entrepreneurial-minded Merrill Lynch advisor who wanted to be independent right, but couldn't afford to do it or wouldn't have done it without either transition money because he had a lot of uninvested deferred comp he'd walk away from, or because he owed money on a node, or because she is in a family you know has a lot of people to support.

Whatever it may be, the notion of moving, even if it was appealing to be independent, starting their own business, was something people wouldn't have done without the ecosystem. So probably the last thing I'd say is that this ecosystem, born to support people like you, has exponentially grown. It is the most exciting thing in the world for me and us in our business to watch and to help facilitate. And it's the most exciting thing for advisors, because it is much more likely today that an advisor will find his or her version of utopia, much more so than before, where the choice was either stay at Morgan or go to Merrill Lynch, but there was really not much else Right.

Right, oh, and and and it's. It's amazing because it's interesting your, your, your, your discovery moment correlates with our discovery moment because it was 2011 when we started to say hey, wait a minute, what's? What's going on over in this independent space? This looks interesting to us. Of course, we left in 2012, 12 years ago, so it was still pretty early on and you know, as a business who's trying to grow and trying to find financial advisors that want to go independent but maybe don't want to go through the painstaking process we went through to build Verdence, it is exciting because it's getting accepted.

When I left, everybody, including my wife, said what are you crazy? I'm kidding. She was wonderfully supportive, but you know all my financial advisor friends. Everybody said what are you doing? You have a big business. You could go make so much money and I think about that transition now and this gets to your point of taking someone where they should be, not the easy path that you do all the time. Had I just gone the easy path and taken a big check at, say, morgan Stanley, I'd be there, I'd be miserable and, interestingly, our wealth as a group, all of our wealth has grown much higher than it would have been had we taken that check right after taxes and everything else. So there's a reward there if it's right for you and it has to be right for you you have to. I will say this to to create the business, you have to be entrepreneurial, but now advisors can go and just be advisors and be independent, which is extraordinary right. That's the change.

Right.

So you hit it on the head.

You've got to really want it, while the long-term economics of being a business owner far exceed the the deal that you know any traditional firm would pay an advisor in the short term and far exceeds the take home economics that an advisor can get in the traditional space.

At the end of the day, independence isn't for everyone and that's why I say it's such an exciting time to be a high quality advisor today, because there are so many options and, by the way, so for a long time, probably right around the time you left Merrill, while a lot of people still thought you were nuts for the ensuing five and not you personally, but anybody who went independent for the ensuing five years or so we began to see a real shift. I mean, you know assets were flowing to the independent space. Today, a lot of top advisors, if you talk to them, if you talk to 10, five are as likely to move from you know, one traditional firm to another. There is likely to go to a Rockefeller, which is sort of a hybrid middle ground solution, if you will, kind of a multifamily office, but advisors are the Greg Fleming project.

That's right, as they are, to go fully independent, and that's what makes it exciting. You wound up exactly where you were meant to because what you're saying. You wound up exactly where you were meant to because what you're saying, what the way you're describing your path, is that, despite the nice money, how good it would have felt to have gotten a big fat check to move. It would have felt good for five and a half minutes, right, and then you're forced to live there for the next nine or twelve years, however long the forgivable note would have been, it would have been jumping from same you. You know, frying pan, same fire. Might've been different on the margins, but really not different enough, and you would have been equally limited. Equally, your entrepreneurial DNA would have been thwarted, because what's missing in the traditional space is a sense of agency. Advisor does not really have agency.

Less so now than ever right.

Right, absolutely For sure.

Yeah, so yeah, and I'll just say this one point, and then I don't want to get to the next topic, but I remember distinctly so Morgan Sander did offer me a big number and my wife I can't actually use the word she used when she said holy Leo, but you wanted it to be right, you wanted it to be right, and I'll never forget this. I went to bed the night that it was, the offer was given and I talked to my wife and we went to bed and I couldn't sleep that night and it was the craziest thing. I kept seeing my client's faces, I just kept seeing their faces. And I woke up a couple of times. And the next morning I'm thinking about the conversation I would have and did I really feel it in my heart? And I didn't.

And literally I got up the next day and I talked to the two now our COO, kevin Cuff, and my partner, brian Grumbach, who were working on this with me, and I said, guys, we can't do this, we're starting over, and so for us, that was right. And it leads me to the next point Should I Stay or Should I Go"? And so you've written a book Should I stay or should I go? It's the perfect title for the way you built the business, so congratulations on that. Can you tell me what inspired you to write this book and what's the takeaway?

Yeah, so first of all I want to just compliment you for one second before I answer that question. I think that-.

Absolutely yeah for sure the way you thought about the decision. Do I take that big check, which is life-changing money, particularly for a kid who came from Trenton, new Jersey, with very little, or do I? You know it's about doing right by my clients and does it feel right to me? In my heart, there are many people, leo, that, despite the fact that they knew they would be facing a difficult conversation to convince their clients to frying pan into the fire and it would be hard to convince their clients that they weren't doing something for their own financial gain but for the benefit of the client which would have been hard to do and the fact that you just it didn't feel congruent to you, it just didn't feel right. There are plenty of people that would ignore that instinct because the money was big enough. I am really proud. Probably one of the biggest things I'm proud of is that advisors that we have worked with have really we don't let them make that decision because we ask a million times over throughout the deal Does this feel right to you? What will you say to your clients? Will it be needle moving enough? Will this move be more than better enough, not just marginally better? And when you phrase it that way it's hard to make a bad decision, but anyway. So that's kudos to you, thank you.

So I started writing this book, which is hopefully coming out. This publishing process has been forever and hopefully coming out in the next month or so. It's been a five-year slug. Just like I was a reluctant entrepreneur, I'm a reluctant author. I knew I had plenty to say. I knew that I wanted to get this book out there. Not because I needed to see my name in lates and, by the way, I'm not writing the book to become an Amazon bestselling author. I'm writing it because I want to give it to the advisors that I care about.

That's really 100% what it is, and it's not a book that talks people into making a move. It's a hundred percent about the thought process behind staying or going. What are the things you want to ask yourself? How do you really assess whether the status quo is good enough or whether you should be thinking about going elsewhere? And so it took. I mean, I worked with our director of communications. She's a wonderful writer. I'm giving her a shout out. Her name is Carol Felicetta. She is my godsend. I never could have done it without her. While the ideas are a hundred percent mine in the book. Without her guidance and, probably more importantly, literally sitting on me to say we need to write a thousand words today or we need to write two pages, the book never would have gotten done. So I am enormously grateful to her.

Yeah, Michele, does that sound familiar?

There you go. I'm familiar with the making sure things happen. It's nice to have a partner in that, I think it makes for a better result, and it's so nice that you acknowledge that and give credit. So that's nice of you to share that platform.

Yeah, we need that right. Entrepreneurs, I say all the time. So there's people who run around this earth and they're staring at the ground to make sure they don't walk into a hole, and they can walk into a tree. And there's people who have their head up looking at the trees that they can walk into holes, and so we need both.

Well, yeah, and I think you know, as I'm saying this, as an entrepreneur my husband says I have sparkly bits. Every day I walk around and ideas sort of ping in my head, not just ideas about how to make the business better or ideas, oh my God. You know I'm working with Bob, an advisor client, and you know it hits me that I should ask Bob this question. So I'm constantly dictating into my phone here's a sparkly bit. A question Drives my family crazy, sometimes to see it lovingly, because I'm constantly coming up with ideas. The problem with writing a book, or the reason the book felt like such a slog to me, was because it was a long, slow process and I'm constantly. I want to move on to the next big thing and thank goodness for Carol who held my feet to the fire and said can't go to the next big thing until you finish this.

Yep, absolutely, it's a common, I guess, common thread between entrepreneurs that we talk to, common thread between entrepreneurs that we talk to and I heard this from an individual who does personality testing a long time ago right, we're always looking out and we see things so clearly and we need more patience for people who don't look out the way we do. Right, we, we look back and say what you guys can't see, it, it's right there and they're, you know, we, we need to understand that we're the ones that are a little unusual yeah, but you know what well, that's hard and we may be a little unusual.

And I feel you when you said that completely, because it's so true, I wouldn't trade it. I mean it's, I think it's so true, I wouldn't trade it. I mean I think it's such a gift to think that way. It's a fun way to think.

Absolutely.

And the job of my partners, who are my family, is to often bring me down to earth and say that's ridiculous. In fact, I will tell you so I started this podcast. This will be our seventh year, sixth year or seventh year, seventh year, I forget and it started sparkly bit. I'm on the phone with an advisor who worked for UBS at the time and we're having a conversation and he's asking me I don't understand why an advisor who's generating five million dollars a year would go independent and pass up some giant check. And how does that advisor get access to proper technology? And how do they convince you know, the Bernie Madoff thing was still fresh in people's minds how do they convince people that their assets are safe and all this sort of independence 101 questions. So after an hour of a very spirited, great conversation, he said to me oh my God, this was amazing, you should start a podcast. I said what do you mean? He said you know, I would love for you to educate me when I'm on the treadmill or my hour commute, on the way home or whatever it was.

And honestly, I'd never listened to a podcast in my life not my thing. And so I remember walking out of my office. After I talked to him and my son had who had been working with me probably Lewis, the first one three years at a time. I walked out and I said you know, I just spoke to Bob and he said I should do a pod, we should start a podcast. And my son looked at it You're just what? What do you know about doing a podcast? I said absolutely not a thing. But I walked into Carol's office the same Carol Felicetta who I'm singing her praises on with the book and said we should start a podcast. And she said oh my God, you're so right, let's do it. And we just figured out how to do it because that's what entrepreneurs do too. We just figured it out because it felt like it was the next best thing for the business to, instead of only talking one-to-one, to talk one-to-many.

Right, Michele. Does any of this sound familiar?

I was going to say it sounds like our exact scenario here when we talk about new ideas and pulling in different opinions from other people. I think is so helpful. You need the people who are going to be your cheerleaders, but you also need the people who are going to poke holes in what you're attempting to do. So that's spot on.

You just described the genesis of From the Ground Up, the first podcast. I actually did, Michele. I said I've never listened to one.

What do we do?

By the way, cut out both her saying she doesn't do podcasts and I don't do that.

That's not good. That will be on the highlight. Yeah, that's not. That's not good advertising.

Let's cut all that out. Well, I you know you've been so kind with your time. I just a couple, one or two quick things. So your kids are in the business. Will this be mult-generational? Are your grandkids, uh, older, you starting to understand personalities? Do you think this will keep going?

So right this minute, I have one beautiful granddaughter. Her name is Zoe, it is Louis's daughter. Both of my daughter-in-laws are pregnant.

So, we will have three grandchildren by the end of the summer and my kids. We joke about the fact that you know my kids used to sit in the back of my car as I would pick them up from t-ball or baseball or tennis practice or the tutor or whatever it was when they were little boys, and they would hear me on the phone with an advisor or a client and they would make fun of my pitch. They could do the pitch. So I say to them all the time now your children Zoe Lewis's daughter and Jason's soon to be son are gonna be the next generation. They're gonna be sitting in the back of your car when you're driving them and they're gonna be making fun of you.

I only hope that they can be around to be in the business. I think that would be amazing.

God willing, god willing. Well, this has just been an incredible conversation, mindy. I'm so happy you came on to do the show. So, Mindy Diamond, incredibly successful financial advisor, consultant not a recruiter someone who has helped people think about and transition to success, whether the transition was a move or not. Someone who has thought about the future, who thinks big picture. You're not only a successful businesswoman, but you're also a successful podcaster. You're now an author. I just can't tell you how impressed and your story is what, from the Ground Up, is all about.

Thank you.

Yeah, this has just been great.

It was an honor and a privilege to be here with you. You're singing my praises and that's lovely and I'm grateful for it, but you are an enormous success yourself. Talk about building something from nothing, and so I am particularly flattered by your kind words and it's truly this was an honor and a privilege, so thank you for asking me.

Oh, this is great. So this is our episode of From the ground up. It's the Mindy Diamond 101, the official title. So I want to thank everybody for listening to from the ground up and, as I am instructed to say by Michele, or I get in trouble. Please subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, our website.

You don't even need me anymore. I mean, I'm starting to get.

I'm starting to get really good at this. It only takes me about 10, 15 times and then I remember Mindy, thanks for the time and we really appreciate you being with us.

Thank you, Mindy. Thank you so much. Bye.