How To Scale Up a Financial Services Firm With Jim Dunlop

Intro: 00:00  

Welcome to the You Can’t Take it With You show, where we feature stories around generosity designed to inspire and encourage others to do meaningful things in their communities. Now here’s your host, Jim Dunlop.

Jim Dunlop: 00:17

Jim Dunlop here, a wealth advisor and host of the show, where I sit down with people who get it when it comes to generosity. I’m excited to have guests who can give us stories on generosity, to not only inspire our listeners, but to give practical ideas on ways we can give. Recently, I was a guest on the Top Business Leaders Show, where I was interviewed by John Corcoran, and I want to share that conversation with you on this episode.

It’s brought to you by Advent Partners, Ready for Good. Advent is a financial planning team dedicated to helping you make informed decisions that simplify your financial journey. At Advent Partners, we’re ready for good. Our bold ten year vision is to help our clients donate $100 million to transform lives through generosity and planning. United by generosity. Relationships, excellent authenticity and fun. We empower meaningful lives and lasting community impact. To learn more about Advent Partners and how we can guide your financial success, visit readyforgood.com. Now enjoy this conversation I had with John Corcoran on the Top Business Leaders Show.

John Corcoran: 01:18  

All right. Today we’re talking about how to scale up a financial services firm. My guest today is Jim Dunlop. He’s got lots of experience in that area. I’ll tell you more about him in a second.

So stay tuned. All right. Welcome everyone. John Corcoran here. I’m the host of this show. 

And you know, every week we have smart CEOs and founders and entrepreneurs from all kinds of companies. And if you check out the archives, we’ve got Netflix and Grubhub and gusto, Kinkos, Activision Blizzard, LendingTree, lots of great episodes for you to check out. So go check that out. And of course, this episode brought to you by Rise25, where we help businesses to give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. How do we do that? 

We do that by helping you to run your podcast. We have the easy button for any company to launch and run a podcast. If you want to learn about how we can do that or how we can help you with that. You can go to our website, which has been recently refreshed with lots of great resources on their rise25.com and or you can email our team at support@rise25.com. 

All right. I’m excited to have our guest here today. His name is Jim Dunlop. He is a certified financial planner and managing partner with Advent Partners, which is a wealth management and financial planning firm based out of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. And he’s got over 20 years of experience in the financial services industry. 

And what’s really interesting is, you know, he’s the host of the podcast, You Can’t Take it With You, which we have been fortunate to work with him on. And so a big part of his why is helping people who have accumulated been fortunate enough to accumulate a bit of wealth to figure out what they’re going to do with it. And so I think that’s a really interesting approach, the way that he does the work that he does. And we’re going to talk about that focus. And of course, talk also about scaling up his wealth management practice over the last 20 years, even doing acquisitions and how that has gone. 

So Jim decided to have you here today. As always, I’d love to start to get to know people a little bit more and what their background was like. And you started at 13 or 14 year old, 14 years old, washing dishes at a summer camp. I worked at some day camps, not not overnight camp was a day camp. I think back in like, seriously, like probably the most fun, like one of the most fun jobs out there. 

And you actually ended up becoming a counselor all the way through high school and college and everything. So you stayed with this summer camp for quite a while. But take me back to young 13, 14 year old Jim washing dishes. Not the most glamorous role on this summer camp, but what did you like about being there?

Jim Dunlop: 03:44

Well, you know, first of all, thanks for having me. And what was exciting for me personally was this this was a camp that I got into as a kid from the time I was very young, and I just loved it there. And I always admired the staff that worked there. I thought as soon as I was old enough to do that, I would. And so the first job you can get when you’re a kid in high school is support staff.

And that’s doing the stuff that nobody else wants to do, like washing dishes and taking the garbage out and those kinds of things. So I got a job washing dishes the first summer there. Found a job in the office the next summer and spent a lot of my. And it’s an overnight away camp, so it’s pretty cool. I was I was gone six days a week. 

I get one day off on the weekend to go home and see my family over the summer, but spent my summers there all through high school and a good chunk of college, not all of college. I did some other stuff in there. I actually met my wife there and cool. Interestingly enough, my daughter, who’s now a college age student, has been a counselor there. She’s a counselor there this year, and she had been the camp lifeguard this summer before. 

So it’s something that even my kids love it. And I won’t be surprised if my son ends up there someday.

John Corcoran: 04:56

It’s such a great experience. You know, I was just thinking about it as you were saying that, you know, I just went to see a friend who’s been a friend of mine since we were 14 years old, and we worked at a summer camp together. It was the same summer camp that I also went to as a kid, and now my kids. I don’t live close to where I, you know, grew up, but my kids have gone to the same summer camp every summer. And now my oldest had last summer was a counselor at that camp.

So, you know, it repeats itself, you know, and it’s such a great experience. You were also involved in your church, got involved in babysitting through your church. Yeah. Talk a little bit about that community.

Jim Dunlop: 05:33

So and I think it’s worth mentioning that the camp Nawaka just outside of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, but can’t Nawaka is affiliated with the denomination of the church that I grew up in and the churches that my wife and I go to now, which is Lutheran. And so it was very active in my church and still still to this day a different church. But that connection, because I was there in that community throughout middle school and high school. I got asked to be baby to babysit kids part because I worked at the camp and part because I was. People knew who I was and knew who my family was.

And so that, you know, when it wasn’t summer time, I made extra money doing that as well.

John Corcoran: 06:16

Yeah. And this all circles back to kind of your focus with the wealth management practice, but you ended up getting into doing year round fundraising for the summer camp. What was that like? Because that, that I mean, from, from dishwashing to year round fundraising, very different, even if you’re doing it for the same camp.

Jim Dunlop: 06:36

Yeah. My qualification was, I think that I loved it. And I think, you know, getting out of college that they were looking for somebody to do that kind of work year round. And it sounded very interesting to a 22 year old. And I took that job and did that for, for just under two years.

And it was a great job. But at some point, I hate to say this, you have to grow up. And I don’t think it was a grown up job, at least not in my mind. And so I had an internship one summer in financial services. And the internship didn’t go very well actually.

John Corcoran: 07:10

And which is funny because you end up having to this day a relationship with that financial services. So the internship didn’t go well. And you from that experience, you’re like, I don’t know, this, this industry isn’t for me. And 20 years later, you still have a relationship through the well.

Jim Dunlop: 07:26

What I didn’t understand at the time, and what I understand now is, you know, companies hire interns because they want to see if they’d be good employees for them when they graduate college. And that that company was much more interested in me than I was interested in them. And they kind of pursued me for two years. And I finally got to the point where like, you know what? It’s probably maybe this is the grown up job I’m looking for.

I don’t know, but I’ll try it. My wife and I were married, but we didn’t have any kids and she was working. She still is. But, you know, so I was like, yeah, I could take a risk here. If this doesn’t go well, I could. 

I’ll come up with something else after a while before we grow up and have kids and and, you know, I started in 2003 and now 23 years later, I’m still there doing that work.

John Corcoran: 08:13

Something switched, though, from the internship. And so what was I mean, you know, maybe the answer is that just interns don’t get the sexiest job responsibilities. They’re like, go file this stuff. Right? You know, I was an intern, you know.

Yeah. Right. So it’s, it’s, it’s looking back on it now, I realize that, you know, it’s any internship, you’re not gonna really get a true picture of what, you know, being in the, the paid roles are going to be. Would you agree with that?

Jim Dunlop: 08:39

I think so. And I think too, for me, my internship, I was paired with a slightly older advisor. He wasn’t, you know, he was probably in his late 20s at the time, but he seemed old to me. And he was not having a good time of it. Yeah.

This type of work can be very entrepreneurial where you’re, you know, your, your income is dependent on the clients you bring in. And, and he was not having a lot of good success with that. And, and that had to be very frustrating for him because it wasn’t going well. And he, I don’t think he’s in the industry any longer. I haven’t heard from him in years, but I had a front row to that. 

And I thought, well, why would I want to have a job like that? Yeah, but I, I, I do love the entrepreneurial aspect of it. I do like working for myself, and being a business owner. And, and that was not something that I ever grew up thinking that I wanted or, or would be helpful for me. But once I got into it, it was clear to me that that was the right place for me and my personality. 

I, I’m not really good. I don’t know, I’ve never really had a boss in 23 years other than myself. And so I don’t know that I could start now.

John Corcoran: 10:01

Yeah. Yeah. So see, see you go on. You kind of go out on your own, I guess. Right.

But it was under the Thrivent banner. And then you had an interesting situation where 2019, 2020, which we all know what happened right around then. Yeah. Thrivent kind of undergoes a change. And so you start Advent around that time period. 

Looking back on it now, what was it like starting a new initiative, a new business, basically, while the world was shutting down during Covid?

Jim Dunlop: 10:35

Yeah. Well, it. Great. Great question. Thrivent was interested in creating an independent wealth management platform as a way to attract additional people or additional financial advisors to the organization.

And so they took a group of us from across the country and launched what was called the Thrive and Advisor Network. And we were all invited to take our clients and build our own identities and brands and our own businesses, and they would provide that. Aria back office infrastructure that you need in this business and, and give us a great deal of autonomy to build brands and niches around what were important to us. And so that was, that was very, very appealing to me being even in there under their banner. We were independent operators running our own businesses underneath their banner, but we were still independent practitioners. 

And then in the midst of that, you know, we started this transition in 2019 and we were going to have a date in in June of 2020 where we were going to take all of our clients and move them from their, the old legacy systems and move them into the independent wealth management platform, which meant taking from their clients investments from the private side and putting it under fidelity. In this case, we used fidelity as our custodian and and that was going to be great. The clients were going to sign all their papers. They would flip a switch in the middle of the night. Their clients would pay their accounts, would get moved from here to there. 

Well, what when we came up with that plan, it was, you know, late 2019, early 2020, and then the pandemic set in.

John Corcoran: 12:23

Best laid plans.

Jim Dunlop: 12:25

Right. And, and, and we literally had cases and cases of UPS overnight envelopes. We had to have all of our clients sign all new account paperwork, which we had intended just to sit down with them and go through. Yeah. And instead, what happened is if I was meeting with you to sign that paperwork tomorrow, we were doing it over Zoom, most likely.

Or the telephone I was going to overnight. I dropped off piles of envelopes at UPS every day. Clients would get that. And we did all that remotely. And it was painful. 

And we were successful. We got it done. We had to adapt tremendously. And my team, who was helping me in all this. Of course, for a while in the state of Pennsylvania, you couldn’t come into the office if you weren’t a front line worker. 

Yeah. And so we were all trying to do this remotely, and I would be in the office by myself. But talking to my team on Zoom and they’re saying, oh, you need this and can you print this and mail this? And so it was, yeah, it was, it was an interesting time to hear.

John Corcoran: 13:29

All that scary at the time, but it worked out in retrospect. So that’s good. Let’s, let’s talk a little bit about, you know, obviously with your roots working for the, the summer camp that had connections to your church and your involvement in the church, it makes sense that you would, you know, focus on that as a demographic that you would, you know, you know, kind of hang your shingle as a faith based wealth management professional. But talk a little bit about that decision and what that’s meant in terms of, the types of conversations that you have with your clients and the types of clients that come in the door because, you know, business owners make a million different decisions about how you want to run your business. And that’s an important one.

Jim Dunlop: 14:14

Yeah. So I grew up again, as I said, inside of Thrivent. And that Thrivent was always a faith based financial services company. It was organized as a fraternal benefit society, which meant it was not for profit. So it kind of an interesting business arrangement still is.

So for a long time, those were the types of people we worked with. And when we got our independence so we could do whatever we want, still made the conscious decision that our best clients were people who their faith was an important part of their life. For some clients, it means that all their financial decisions, they look at it through a faith lens. For others, not necessarily, but their faith is still an important component of their life. And so it’s something that we think about in their finances. 

And then there’s some clients that just don’t look at their faith that way, and that’s fine. I don’t think it’s something that we I think I’ve said this to people. We, we, we want to find the right people. We don’t want to bang the drum too loud. And, and in that, we don’t want to be working with people of faith just for the sake of working with people with faith. 

We want to make sure that all of our values are aligned with them. And, but work that’s always been important to me is work around generosity and, you know, charitable.

John Corcoran: 15:37

And, and making charitable donations and things like that to the point where you even call your podcast that You Can’t Take it With You podcast, which is interesting choice for a podcast. And, and you say that that came from basically years of conversations with clients. And that was a topic that came up over and over again.

Jim Dunlop: 15:54

Yeah. You know, in financial planning, we call it charitable planning, but just this idea of, of doing something greater than yourself and, I used to say to a lot of clients, I still say it like, you can’t take it with you. You’ve saved up this money. You have more than you need. What’s the plan?

And let’s figure that out. And maybe you want to do great things for your family. Maybe you want to do great things for church or local community organizations that are near and dear to your heart, whatever that is. Let’s help figure that out. Yeah, those are the conversations we lean into and love the most in that you can’t take it with you. 

I’m not as a good financial advisor or even a bad financial advisor. I’m not going to let you run out of money. I’m not going to allow you to make bad decisions, or I’m certainly going to guide you away from rocky Shoals that are going to lead to disaster in retirement. So what I want to do is help you think beyond that, though. If we’ve done our jobs well, there’s something left over, hopefully something meaningful. 

What do we want to have happen? And if we don’t make a plan, that’s okay. However, perhaps the government gets an unfair share in terms of, you know, if we’re not going to be tax efficient, if we’re not going to think about some strategies and opportunities to to do nice things for the communities we live in, for the organizations that we care about, or the people we love. The government has a good plan in place for you already, and we want to avoid that. We want to encourage people to be thinking more broadly. 

And so those are the conversations that we’re most passionate about and that we love having. But it starts with this idea of, hey, you have more than enough here. Yeah. You can’t take it with you. So what should we do?

John Corcoran: 17:45  

Yeah. And I’m curious to know, I mean, you really lean into these conversations, but for some people, that’s a very difficult conversation to have. So what do you say to clients that you work with, that struggle to have that conversation, to even think about that, you know, think about the inevitable, we’re all going to die, and what are we going to do with our resources that will happen to our resources after we die?

Jim Dunlop: 18:07

Yeah, I think it’s not always the easiest conversation, and some people aren’t equipped to have it. Some people don’t want to talk about it, and that’s okay too. However, I think any good planner is going to be having those conversations and say, look, I by the way, I hope you live a long and prosperous life. And if you do, great, here’s one possible outcome. But also from a planner, like if you don’t live long and prosperously or something terrible happens much sooner than you would expect, let’s also have a plan for that.

So those conversations are inherent in any financial plan, like, hey, what if you die old? What if you die young or somewhere in between? And so I think these kinds of conversations around generosity become a natural extension. And oh, and by the way, you don’t have to wait. You don’t have to wait till you die to give it away. 

I said, you can’t take it with you. And I mean that. And does that mean we wait till the end and whatever’s left over, we give. Fine. We can talk about that. 

or are there things that we can be doing now that make the world a better place, and what are they and how are and maybe it’s helping getting your grandkids through college because then they don’t have student loans. Mom and dad, your adult children don’t have debt. Maybe we could help in that regard. Or maybe there’s something really neat happening in your community that you want to be a part of, and how can we meaningfully contribute to that?

John Corcoran: 19:27

And it’s so beautiful when you see the person who’s the benefactor, get the benefit from that. Like I remember when I was in law school, there was this scholarship that was a meaningful amount of money. It was not a huge amount of money that was awarded to people once they were in law school who made big contributions. And I was one of, I don’t know, 50 people or something, 30 people or something who got this scholarship. The people who gave it were in their 80s at the time.

And we all like, shuffle into this conference room and there they are sitting down in front. And they actually had a disabled son who they’d also named it after. Their whole point was that, you know, our disabled son can’t go to law school, can’t contribute like you all can. So we’re going to give this all to all of you. And just to see their faces, you know, to see them soaking this in, to see the people that they’ve given these contributions to was really meaningful. 

So it was really, it was nice to be a part of that.

Jim Dunlop: 20:22  

The clients that are the most generous, I think, delight in the generosity more sometimes or oftentimes than the recipient. Yeah, they just, they’re erupting with joy when they do great things, whether it’s for their family or whether it’s for an organization or both. They just take great delight in that.

John Corcoran: 20:40

That’s cool. That’s great. It’s so special for you to be able to professionally be able to do something where you get to play a role in that. Yeah.

Jim Dunlop: 20:49

Yeah, absolutely.

John Corcoran: 20:50

Jim, this has been great. It’s great hearing your backstory and everything. Where can people go to learn more about you and Advent?

Jim Dunlop: 20:57

I would say go to Advent Partners as in financial planning, adventpartnersfp.com is our website. I think it’s a good launching off place or canttakeitwithyou.com.

John Corcoran: 21:09

That’s great. Oh yeah, I completely forgot. I’m going to add this. One more thing is you actually acquired another financial planning firm, which is an interesting approach after everything you’ve been through after the pandemic, launching through the pandemic and everything. So talk a little bit about that, what that’s like bringing in another financial planning firm and why it’s important, particularly in your industry.

Jim Dunlop: 21:32  

Yeah, we combined forces with another local firm and it’s just a not quite a hundred days old yet, to be honest. So it’s, it’s still new for us and it’s been so far an incredible blessing for our team and for our clients. And I say it in this way, we are probably by combining. We can be the long term succession plan for the two original principals of the other when they’re ready to retire down the road. However, in the meantime, they’re joining our team.

We’re bringing our practices together, and they bring a tremendous amount of expertise around business retirement plans, retirement plans for business owners. They’ve done a lot. They have a good chunk of business around that and expertise and experience that we are excited to bring on to our team and a great background in tax planning. And so they bring some really incredible gifts that our clients get to benefit from. We have a really broad team when it comes to doing financial planning and some tremendous when I say broad depth, we’ve got a really good team that does some incredible ongoing work every day for our clients. 

And so their clients get to benefit from us. And so it’s ideally, there have been hiccups and there will be more, I’m sure. And it’s been a really great match for us and for them.

John Corcoran: 22:51

Excellent. Jim, thanks so much for your time.

Jim Dunlop: 22:52

Yeah. Thank you.

Outro: 22:55

Thanks for joining us. To hear stories of generosity that remind us that you can’t take it with you. Visit our site at canttakeitwithyou.com for more details on today’s episode and to subscribe to future shows.

Disclosure: 23:13

Neither today’s guests nor their company are affiliated with or endorsed by Thrivent Advisor Network. The views expressed in this presentation by the guest are their own and not necessarily those of Thrivent or its affiliates.

Advent Partners may utilize third-party websites, including social media websites, blogs, and other interactive content. We consider all interactions with clients, prospective clients, and the general public on these sites to be advertisements under the securities regulations. As such, we generally retain copies of information that we or third parties may contribute to such sites. This information is subject to review and inspection by Thrivent Advisor Network or the securities regulators. Advisory Persons of Thrivent provide advisory services under a “doing business as” name or may have their own legal business entities. However, advisory services are engaged exclusively through Thrivent Advisor Network, LLC, a registered investment advisor. Advent Partners and Thrivent Advisor Network, LLC are not affiliated companies.