On this week's episode of the Financial Planning Podcast, Brian McLaughlin geeks out over the opportunity to make life a little easier for hard-working financial advisors.
McLaughlin, the president of Orion Advisor Technology and one of
More than just Orion's biggest gathering of the year, Ascent makes its in-person return after two years off due to the pandemic, and will serve as McLaughlin's first Ascent conference in his new role. WhenOrion announced its acquisition of Redtail early last year, the man who founded the popular client relationship management programs was named president of Orion Advisor Tech a few months later
But McLaughlin's stop by the Financial Planning Podcast was all about passion, and why he still has just as much fun at work as he did when he first accidentally broke into the industry via a job line as a bored college kid in California in the late 90s.
For him, sometimes what's best for the future of the industry isn't just about what's good for the bottom line. What's good for the soul matters just as much.
During his conversation with FP Podcast host and lead editorial producer Justin L. Mack, McLaughlin talks about what's on tap for Ascent 2023; the tech innovations he can't wait to see make it to wealth management; and why a piece of advice his dad gave him years ago keeps him smiling all these years later.
Listen to the new episode — as well as to all future and past episodes — by subscribing to the FP Podcast on
Transcript:
Justin L. Mack (00:02):
Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening. Welcome to the Financial Planning Podcast. I'm your host Justin L. Mack, wealthtech editor with Financial Planning, and it is my pleasure to introduce this week's guest, Brian McLaughlin, president of Orion Advisor Tech. Brian, thank you so much for joining us on the show this week.
Brian Mclaughlin (00
20):
Justin, it's such a pleasure to be here this week. It's great to see you again man, or talk to you again, and glad to be here and join your podcast.
Justin L. Mack (00:28):
Absolutely. And for FP's readers, Brian's is a name and face you probably know, or at least you should. Before taking the reins as president of Orion Advisor Tech last year, Brian was the CEO and co-founder of Redtail Technology where he worked closely with advisors, broker dealers, and industry partners for nearly two decades, building Redtail into a household name for scores of advisors as one of the most popular and powerful CRM options out there. And Brian's always had a passion for making the industry a better place, and frankly, making life a little bit easier for advisors and their clients. So this week we catch up with the man in charge as he enters his first full year as Orion Advisor Tech president. And based on the last conversation he and I had at the Future Proof Festival last September, this podcast may or may not veer off into Legos and arcade cabinets at some point.
(01:14)
But I'll do my damndest to keep us on track. And Brian, I don't really need to go over your credentials. Twenty years-plus, an OG in the CRM game. We know how you get down. But before we get to the meat of this podcast sandwich we're going to serve up to folks this week, tell us a little bit about how it all started. Because I find that when we talk to folks like yourself with so many years and so many accomplishments, we often spend so much time on the how's it going that we don't remember how it started. And at FP we really talk a lot about the next generation of talent. This industry is changing, new people are coming in, and as you know, there's no one right way to get into financial services. Take your journey wherever it may take you. So for you, how did you first get into the world of fintech and financial services?
Brian Mclaughlin (01:55):
Completely accidental. <laugh>.
Justin L. Mack (01:58):
Nice
Brian Mclaughlin (01:59):
I told the whole story a few times, but if you go way, way back for me, back to 1997 when I moved to Sacramento from the Bay Area, I was in college and bored. And I had, like, a lot of free time and I needed to get a job. So back then … we had job lines. We didn't have monster.com, careerbuilder, all that stuff. We called the job line. The very first one was a financial services firm. I had no idea what financial services were. <laugh> I should tell the truth. I was going to school for computer science, so I got a job there. A total grunt. Taking out trash. Washing the president's car, you're doing everything like that. Just keep me occupied. But at the exact same time, just has luck would have it, I met one of my best friends, Andy, who was my boss at the time. He was the head of IT for his firm and he said, Hey, you're into computers.
(02:57)
And that kind of just, that's honestly the start of my career in financial services was pairing up with him to just solve IT problems. We started there and as the years went by, the firm was looking to replace software that I was also managing in the middle of the night. Syncing up data around the country for about 400 advisors. And it came up to, hey, let's buy something. We looked, we shopped, we couldn't find a single thing that we really loved. So I volunteered and said, hey, I can build a prototype of something. I got an idea, can I just run with those ideas for a little bit? And they gave me a week. So we're seven days straight. I was up 24 hours a day cranking code, building a prototype as fast as I can. And it was purely just to solve our problem internally, but it took off real fast. The first people who we gave it to, they realized, wait, this is really interesting. All of a sudden I don't have to manage software. All of a sudden I don't have to manage connections. You're doing it for me. I'm like, you're right.
(04:08)
I was really lucky at the timing I think for one, but also I think for everybody out there, the big thing was hard, hard work. And it was hard work, but I like to say it didn't feel like work because I just absolutely loved what I was doing. And it was interesting. I was just, I'm going to pivot here a tiny bit, but I'm just reading the article about my friend
Justin L. Mack (04:47):
Yeah, absolutely. And like you said, that accidental entry and the fact that your first taste of what you do now, which is continuing to solve problems. What can we do to make this better? What can we do to make other people's lives better? And it started there and like you said, there really wasn't a rulebook to follow, especially for you. You got in here accidentally. There was no one to say the specific problem you were working on. But then going forward, what you've continued to do with Redtail is, all right, what do we need to do? We don't have any handbook to follow, we've just got to figure it out. I imagine that takes a lot of trial and error.
Brian Mclaughlin (05:20):
What was awesome about that is that we did have a handbook because, and had it been a couple years later, we probably would've bought a solution that exists today. But they just felt they weren't readily available. And <laugh> tell you a funny programming story here real quick. So as everybody listening should know, behind the scenes I am a total nerd programmer. I did write all the original code for Redtail back in the day, designed everything and shipped it for many years. One of the things for my listeners that go way back with Redtail, I didn't know how to program a calendar. It seems so simple today. We have Google Calendar, we have all these things out today, outlook calendars and stuff. But back then, you didn't have online calendars and to go invent this. But man, I had to learn a lot of lessons from that lack of a playbook of what's needed. The greatest example is Redtail for a good couple of years did not have the ability to assign multiple people to a calendar appointment. You had to clone it every single time.
Justin L. Mack (06:22):
Oh wow.
Brian Mclaughlin (06:23):
It was such a lack of foresight and I still laugh about that one cause it was such a dummy mistake. But to your point, there was no playbook. There was just "build it on the fly" What do you need today? Let's build that for you. Oh, you think that'd be better? I do too. Let's build that for you. But I mean I was just loving it. So it was just so fun to just iterate through. Another thing I learned too, through the lack of playbook was, build software for everybody. Don't build it for one firm. And I was lucky that I figured that out pretty early because even though I was building for this super OSJ in the IBD space, I was literally trying to take things and make them more normalized for anybody in financial services. If they decided to blow up and become 4,000 people or something of a similar structure, this tool would still serve their needs. And that led us down the path to creating actually Redtail as a CRM. Not for OSJs, but for financial advisors.
Justin L. Mack (07:25):
Awesome. And continuing to create and innovate. Now in your new role. And we kind of talked about it last time we had a chance to catch up. You joked, first promotion in 20 years, ready to get rolling after the acquisition and Orion and Redtail coming together. So this will be your first full year at the helm beginning to end. Tell me what you're excited to get into. What are some of your top priorities for 2023 in this spot? And with so much opportunity to create once again.
Brian Mclaughlin (07:51):
Yeah, yeah. I took the first couple months to get my feet under me, kind of figure it out, learn the stories, learn all the team members involved and all the history of things as best as I could. It's a very big complex set of projects now that we're working on. Not just CRM, but CRM is leading a way for how we integrate all these technologies that we now have access to. I think I told you before on the beach a couple months ago, but what's awesome is I've only built the CRM space interconnected through texting platforms, email archive and a lot of different tool sets that we've built over the years. And now I get to dig into the trading, rebalancing, planning, compliance engines, all the things I wish I could have built but I just never had the resources or access to. And now I have direct access.
(08:40)
So what we're doing a lot of here, it's great timing because we just got out of a product strategy meeting last week. Where we are modeling for our next couple quarters, is a lot of deep tie-ins to make it easier to interact from the CRM perspective with your trading. Your planning. Your client portals and so forth. So it's that integration connection that we have to make. One of the things I think everybody's really hoping to see out of this partnership, this merging of these companies, is that we come out of it with a best-in-one or most-of-one solution. Keep it to my values of an open borders. Let everybody work with us, but also build really deep, meaningful connections in our own ecosystem. An example of this would be automatic risk scoring, stuff like that. Things that we have access to from the purchasers of hidden levers. Or tying in basis co-compliance monitoring into your account management, into the CRM for actions.
(09:39)
One of the coolest things … of course taking over the world right now is ChatGPT. Online conversational AI. We've already even built prototypes into that, so we're excited to talk more and more about what we could deliver on the ChatGPT front and integrating AI. I've messed with AI and machine learning for many years. This comes out, changes the whole game, right? I've been watching it like a hawk with a lot of people. In fact our friends over at
Justin L. Mack (10:35):
Very, very cool.
Brian Mclaughlin (10:36):
The other thing I think is going to be really awesome is this democratization of data. We've been doing it, Orion had already had Redshift going on when I joined, but we are expanding that capability and expanding that dataset. This is basically a way for us to bring all the data from all these different tools together, present them out to advisors who want to use it and do their own custom reporting. We're making that accessible to them at no cost. That's available today, but we're just expanding that for the next couple quarters as well. And then I can't tell you some of the secret stuff we got coming out later on in this quarter.
Justin L. Mack (11:16):
All right, secret stuff coming up. I will absolutely be paying attention. And as everyone knows, if that secret sauce starts spilling out, we will be reporting it here at FP. And two of the things you mentioned as far as innovations in AI and data, those are the things that when we do our research here at Arizent, advisors are excited about that. As for three years running, we do our tech survey and AI has topped it as some of that future tech that they're the most excited about. In 2023, we're seeing it take off kind of catch fire because now it's tangible. It went from concept to reality very, very quickly, and the potential is huge. And we also know that if you get it wrong, the potential is huge to kind of fall on your face too. So it's about getting it right and I think your track record shows that you might nail it. We'll see. We'll see. We'll be reporting on that here in the future. Something else I want to get into is the first quarter for Orion. A busy time. I know you guys got a big party coming up in just a few days. I'll let you take it away.
Brian Mclaughlin (12:24):
Yeah, this is the first time they've done Ascent in I think 18 months or so. So it's been a little bit, and we're super excited to have 1,500 plus people coming out here next week to Orlando. We're going to show up a whole set of tools that we've been building. We've announced and teased a little bit from the Schwab conference a couple months ago, but we've really expanded on this. We're going to be focusing a lot on Redtail campaigns. This is going to be financial campaigns, marketing campaigns tied to financial planning. We've had some updates on that front, which are going to be really awesome. We have great stuff coming out on behavioral finance and I can't give away too much, but we have some other great kinds of surprises that are going to come out. One of the cool things that's going to actually be neat that we're doing, I have not seen, and I've done probably thousands of conferences at this point in my career, but I had not actually seen somebody bring a trading desk into a conference.
(13:21)
So from an advisor's standpoint who does trade and wants to see how it works behind the scenes, we're bringing behind the scenes to the forefront. That's pretty awesome and I would love to see next year how we expand that. This will also lead to other events. We're doing a Redtail university there. So we are combining two training courses at Ascent that's going to start off the whole week. We have some amazing parties of course and partners coming, and just really excited for the connections and sharing knowledge and exploring what we can do and learning from our customers what they want to see us do as well. So it's going to be a great amount of interaction for the next week, and that's what I'm really excited for. I'm also really excited to see when we start launching things later on in the year. Bringing devices into the fold to participate with us in this roadmap journey and building out the best tech available.
Justin L. Mack (14:16):
Very cool and love to see you guys taking that hands-on approach. Yeah, let's get in there. Let's bring something different to the show. Let's get dirty. Let's really put this into practice. That is absurd. So excited to see what that looks like and what advisors think. So Ascent, it's going to be a big time. You guys stay locked for that and we will bring you the news here at FP as all those announcements I imagine start spilling out of ascent real, real soon. And with that, we're actually going to take a quick break and enjoy a word from our sponsors, but when we return, we'll have more with Brian McLaughlin, president of Orion Advisor Tech, stay locked. We'll be right back after this break.
(14:53)
And welcome back to the Financial Planning Podcast. I'm your host Justin Mack, and we are diving right back into our conversation this week with Brian McLaughlin, president of Orion Advisor Tech.
Now Brian, before the break we talked a lot about how you got into the industry and how you're looking to shake things up now in your new role, first full year as president over at Orion Advisor Tech. So talk to me a little bit about the state of innovation, or at least what you're seeing outside of just what you guys are doing at Orion. Because we kind of talked about it a little bit with all the innovations we're seeing with AI. And we're actually working on a story now for FP that'll be coming out with a future cover story very, very soon about the potential applications of things like the Metaverse. There's a lot happening just in innovation, period. And we know that in one way or another, that's going to make its way into the business world and into the financial services world. How can we leverage that to do what you love to do, make things a little bit easier for advisors, clients, this industry as a whole. So tell me about some of the things you're excited for that you're seeing in other places and some of the things you would love to see wealth management leverage and bring into our orbit a little bit.
Brian Mclaughlin (15:59):
Yeah, some of the things that I've been more recently introduced to are a lot around the digital opening of accounts and management of accounts. I think we do focus heavily on the opening side of things like actually making proposals and plans and planning it all together. One of the things that we are doing at Orion, especially around planning, is the bucket-based approach, right? Plan, live, deliver and put in these buckets and manage accounts this way. We also got a lot of energy on the actual maintenance of the client relationship. I think there's a lot of improvements on this front. We're still connecting the consumer and making it more friendly to engage a financial advisor. For me, I've always been really passionate about making sure we look forward to the future to the next gen of investors, which are already in the marketplace.
(16:50)
They're already in the system coming on, and they're getting more and more familiar with solutions like M One Finance or Robinhood or Acorns or whatever. They're seeing them and are used to that experience. And so I think what we need to really focus on as an industry is bringing that experience and modernizing our practices to engage them at any level they're in. The way I grew up, and we grew up with limited means in my family and so forth, it was always a stretch. My family never had a financial planner. It wasn't accessible to them. And I think that's a shame that we should address as an industry and there's ways to do it. The cool thing is that technology could help us. Technology that allows an advisor who maybe looks and says I can only do $10 million accounts. Or $1 million dollars, something like that.
(17:38)
Which for a lot of families in this world, that's an absurd amount of money. They've never even seen $10,000 at one time. The technology enables us to manage accounts that have a 100 bucks and 10 bucks going a month mean or whatever. We could do that and build relationships and really work on financial education. Now I know I'm spinning away from technology a little bit here on this, saying education and so forth. But technology will enable that. We need to get planning in their hands, make it super simple and social, not be afraid to talk about money, be able to bring it up and say, let's get you engaged. Let's get you on a plan for success. It doesn't exist. I talked to a friend of mine who's having trouble budgeting. He's not in a space where he can go and get a financial plan or give advice to him.
(18:24)
He has to go to the open consumer market or to, God forbid, TikTok. This is a gap we need to address. And so I'm a believer in that technology can address this in scale. We did work with a client who was working with a bunch of teachers. These are not big accounts, but there's a lot of money. And it's amazing the community impact she and her firm have provided. I believe they're still out in Kansas. The impact they provided by serving an underserved area of the marketplace. Teachers. We all love teachers. They do amazing things for our families and kids and for the communities. We should be able to take care of them. So anyways, that's where I'm kind of leaning on this side. On the technology side, we have AI. We have that coming out. Like you said, it's good and bad.
(19:12)
I could have it write code for me. I've actually had it make a financial plan for me. It is relatively accurate which is pretty cool to see. The other one that for me is going to be really just modernizing everything. That's the best way to say it. I want mobile apps that actually are easy to use and fun to use and work. I want things to be easy to set up and just plug and play and just go so that the technology part is something advisors aren't worried as much about or spending a lot of energy maintaining or training or anything else on. But rather they're able to execute on their business model and actually succeed.
Justin L. Mack (19:53):
For sure. And I love what you said, so I want to go back a little bit to the power of technology to really extend access to financial services in ways that we've not been able to even approach before. And being able to help a group like teachers. We do love teachers. I'm very biased. I'm married to one. So we love teachers! But again, you know, can't really manage that because as an advisor you can only take on so much. Is that profitable? Is it good for business? And much like you, my family, nowhere close to having a planner when I was coming up. But because of access through technology, things like this. This is an audio podcast. I'm holding up my phone for all the listeners. But my younger cousins are now learning more about money in a real way. Learning about investing in high school now before they even get to college. They have an understanding about money and finances that I never did.
(20:39)
And that's all because the technology is allowing that access to be extended, which is really cool. I'd just love to get your thoughts, as an aside. What do you think that does for the industry? Just the reputation of the industry. Because we talk about how you accidentally got into financial services. I hear so many people talk about that just because people aren't aware of it when they might be perfectly suited for it. And it largely comes from that barrier that exists between this industry and a lot of the rest of the country. But if we do things like being able to help groups that we weren't before, what do you think that does for the rep that financial services garners and how might that help us bring in that new talent?
Brian Mclaughlin (21:16):
Well, I think a couple things here. One, to your point, is it good for business? Not always. Is it good for the soul? You betcha. And I think that's what is really important. And I think when communities and industries do good for a larger sphere of influence, if we branch it out and say, look let's stop talking about high net worth. Let's talk about this network. Let's talk about optimizing for family and safety. Let's just talk about what a family plan looks like. Keeping it simple and keeping it approachable I think is a big key. So the technology can really enable that scale and allow advisors to be able to do those things and still run a business which I think is huge. When you do that, I think it is natural for humans to really bond around communities. We see that in a lot of different areas in society and civilizations. And as we open these doors up and show that we're here for the good of all, we're here to make lives better, build wealth, build security and stability for families. We're going to see more people want to get in naturally because they want to be a part of something bigger than themselves.
(22:30)
There's a lot of passion out there for us. I mean, well for one, everybody loves money. Who doesn't love money. But we don't understand it. They didn't even teach us about it in school. There's a lot of opportunities for advisors to really elevate the game here and bring it awareness. I mean, heck, take that one little example. I'm a financial advisor out here in Sacramento. Go to your high school and teach a class. You know all this. Let's educate them a little bit. Maybe you'll bring 'em the fold to the industry because they get excited about it and what they could do to impact lives. And I think that's what humans and all of us really care about deeply at the end of the day is, how do we impact others with what we do every day?
Justin L. Mack (23:10):
For sure. And also I have to take this time to shout out Orion CEO Eric Clarke, who I recently bothered on the news of extending the partnership with the Foundation for Financial Planning to help with the pro bono match. Again, using the technology to help advisors help people who literally don't have the money for it. Who are dealing with something traumatic in their life. This is for veterans, low income and low wage workers. Folks who just got a cancer diagnosis, for example. People who have their finances wrecked. FFP and Orion are working together to help get that pro bono planning out there. So shout out to them for that. And again, like you said, profitable, no. But good for the soul. Alright, now as we wrap up here on the Financial Planning Podcast, we're going to slide into something that has kind of become a tradition here on the FP Pod. Some good vibes.
(23:54)
This is how we like to close. And Brian, we talked about your journey from a nerd who loves to code calling a job line accidentally getting into financial services to a fintech veteran and executive today. A heck of a journey and along the way, helped a lot of people, helped a lot of advisors, and had a chance to innovate. So looking back on all you've done and all you hope to do in this new role, what do you love most about your job? What gets you out of bed every morning excited to go to Orion and do what you do?
Brian Mclaughlin (24:24):
Yeah, the one thing that gets me out of bed every day is the chance to influence, change and make (the industry) a better place. I have a position of power and influence with Orion and the staff and so forth where I can actually do things that are meaningful to my staff and to other people around me. So it's really about paying attention to them. How can I break down barriers for people? What's the next challenge? We were just on a call this morning with one of my teams where we're talking about mind mapping these new builds for new product roadmaps. It fuels me up. Like, cool, new problem. New challenge. Let's execute, people. Let's go build something. And I just know that the passion will then come downstream to them, but also go out into the world and spread just happy vibes. Right? So yeah. I know this is an audio podcast, I was teasing Justin earlier with my hat that I wore for one of my team meetings.
(25:15)
It's a shark with a unicorn horn on top of it. I'm the guy that shows up wearing something like that. I showed up to some with a sombrero the other day and we're just having fun with what we do. And if I can get a team built around me that just enjoys life and enjoys the work they do every day, man, that gets me up. I'll just be charged. And so I will work my butt off for them. I'll work for the advisors and have a great time doing it.
Justin L. Mack (25:42):
Absolutely. That's a great mind state to have because work is only work if you feel like you're getting worked
Brian Mclaughlin (25:48):
That day. I'll tell you, I'll leave listeners with a story here. My dad, he had a hardware store and we would deliver barbecues around Marin County, California. And as we'd go around, I'd come by a beachy area or something. I'd see people on boats having fun and playing. And I'm like, it's Tuesday at 11 a.m. How the heck are you doing this? But he is like, you know, all you've got to do is figure out what you love to do, and it won't be work. And you can make anything happen like that. But you've got to find what you love to do and it'll drive the rest of your career and your life. And absolutely that, I think, is one of the best things I've ever learned in my life. And 100% true.
Justin L. Mack (26:26):
For sure. Well, I'm glad you found that love. I know the advisor community has also benefited from the love that you found here in this industry. And I want to thank you so much for sharing your time and your story with us here this week on the Financial Planning Podcast.
And I want to thank everyone for tuning in to this week's Financial Planning Podcast. This episode was produced by Arizent with audio production by Kevin Parise. Special thanks again to our guest, Brian McLaughlin, president of Orion Advisor Tech. Rate us, review us and subscribe to all of our content at www.financial- planning.com/subscribe. For Financial Planning, I'm Justin Mack. Thanks for listening.