Exploration and Expression in Business w/ Larry Miles

Robb Fahrion: Hello, everyone, this is Robb Fahrion with the Sage Executive Podcast where top executives and business leaders share their sage advice. It’s six questions in nine minutes. Because the wise speak in few words, we have an awesome guest and a good friend of ours to the Flying V Group today. So let’s get right into it and really excited to share. So first question in a few words, would you mind telling us who you are and what it is you do?

Larry Miles: Sure Robb, thanks for having me. I’m Larry Miles. I’m a principal at AdvicePeriod, where our mission is to reinvent wealth management. We’re doing that one client and one advisor at a time. We’ve been able to build our business over the last six years to about 15 or 16 offices across the country. We’re able to serve as a few thousand different clients. And, again, thanks for having me on.

Robb Fahrion: Yeah, of course. Thanks for Larry being a principal of the company. What would you say is the best thing for you about being a leader of an organization?

Larry Miles: No question. It’s the ability to impact people’s lives. I feel like I’m in a pretty special place where I get to work with amazing teammates, hopefully help them accomplish everything that they want to. And it’s also nice that our business is helping people and helping people with all aspects of their financial lives. So as I guess, a leader of the business, I really enjoy being able to help people and that’s a lot of fun for me.

Robb Fahrion: Awesome. Third question. So we hear a lot of times from executives, CEOs, entrepreneurs, acquiring new business is always a challenge or a big priority. And now there’s so much competition, so much noise out there. What are your thoughts on business acquisition and some of the things that AdvicePeriod is doing to help generate new business?

Larry Miles: Well, anyone who’s struggling to generate new business clearly doesn’t have a good outsourced digital marketing and advertising because listen, if you if you’re offering a service that people need and value, then it’s just a question of how do you attract those people who are looking for what you’re doing. And we’ve embraced the philosophy of telling the world what we believe in, not that we’re right. Not that we have all the answers, but telling the world what we believe in, and then trying to make it as easy as possible for those folks who believe the same things who are looking for what we do to find us. So we’ve been very fortunate that even in the midst of this terrible crisis, we’ve actually grown more quickly in the last three months than we have at any other time in our company’s history.

Robb Fahrion: And with that, I know I know, part of your platform is the technology forward facing platform. Would you say that that probably is kind of that perfect storm with everything that’s been going on and part of that reason?

Larry Miles: It’s definitely been advantageous to us that we’ve been fortunate to be paperless and 100% cloud based since the firm started. All of our teammates, all of our partners and employees are issued a MacBook on their first day at work. So no matter where they are from the Pacific Northwest to Texas to Rhode Island, and everywhere in between, we were decently ready for this crisis. So yes, we’ve been very fortunate.

Robb Fahrion: Very good, very good. All right, Question four. And this is where you shine. What piece of sage advice would you give to other executives and other viewers of our show that we’ll be distributing this show show to?

Larry Miles: Well, along the same lines, we’ve been very fortunate to be aggressive, aggressively trying new things, technology, policies, processes, different hiring different types of people. And we think that that’s benefited us quite a bit. We’re open to experimentation. We’re humble enough to know that we don’t have all the answers. We try to be open and curious about doing new things. And so that’s that’s certainly benefited us, we think, of our clients in a terrific way. And, you know, that can be difficult sometimes. It can take a little bit more time and energy and investment. But certainly we think it pays off in the long term. So we think that the best businesses run toward change, they run toward technology, and they embrace the idea that it’s okay to try some things that don’t work, right. No, we’re not going to bat 1000 we’re gonna try some things that didn’t pan out the way that we wanted to, but that’s, that’s okay.

Robb Fahrion: Yeah, I think I think that embrace and then you don’t know what you don’t know. Right? So I think that that always kind of hinders people or holds them back from taking that opportunity, or that chance that could be the game changer right at the end of the day.

Larry Miles: It’s true. I think of some of the things we’re doing today that are really working and they were We’re incredibly happy with. And if we had been content and satisfied with the way things were, we would have never tried them. Right? business would have lost and our clients would have lost.

Robb Fahrion: Right, right. Yeah, no doubt about that. So as part of the show, we’re obviously trying to always inject new guests, new opinions, new knowledge. So what other top executives are similar to yourself? Would you like to acknowledge as a leader in the space and someone that you think would be a great guest on our show for our viewers?

Larry Miles: Yeah, I’ve mentioned a couple. And I’m very lucky to get to work with and work around some really smart people whose ideas I can steal and borrow and claim as my own. But two but two in particular stand out to me is doing things very differently in their industry. One is Jonathan Littrell, a good friend of mine, who’s the managing partner at a very big law firm based in Los Angeles, but they’re national. And Jonathan is really trying to reimagine how the legal profession and then the law firm should look going forward. And so he and I have an awful lot to talk about. And he’s incredibly brilliant. And the second would also be a good friend of mine and long term long term friend, John Provisor. John is the president of guidance guidances an e-commerce, website building and management company and, and works with some amazing brands. And there too, it’s been interesting to talk with him during this crisis, because so much of retail has moved online, right, and to talk with him about some of the things that he’s seen, that are working and not working has been fascinating. And I think your listeners would enjoy that as well. I certainly wrote.

Robb Fahrion: Perfect, yeah, we’ll definitely have to reach out to Jonathan and John. Thanks for that, Larry. So to wrap up our last question here. Fun one trying to inject some personality and character in terms of what you do outside of the office or it could even be inside the office. So after a big win in personal business, what do you like to do to celebrate?

Larry Miles: Yeah, No at the company we love to celebrate wins, we think that celebrating is a really important part of anyone’s culture and how you celebrate speaks a lot to what you value and what your culture is. And so there’s nothing better than celebrating a big win with the team that’s been working really hard to accomplish that goal. And it’s and it’s a blast, you know, and what’s interesting is we’ve had to get a little bit more creative and as to how we do that now that we can’T get together. So we love sending people gifts you know through the mail that they can pick out one in particular that’s kind of cool. It’s called sugar wish candy sugarwish.com you can send someone and by the way, this is a hint if you’re ever interested in sending me something, send someone a sugar wish and basically they get to pick from nine your array of different types of candy that they get sent to them. So we have been using that and other things that you know, help hopefully help us connect and stay together even wow

Robb Fahrion: Yeah, I actually just discovered a company called bucketlist.com  and they use that as an employee incentive as part of a compensation package so they have this bucket list based on certain performance obviously goes towards something on their bucket list, right that is an experience that they can take part of. Well, hey, Larry, thank you so much for being on one last thing. How can people find you? How can people find out more about the AdvicePeriod?

Larry Miles: Yeah. Thanks, Robb. You certainly find me on LinkedIn, or on our website adviceperiod.com

Robb Fahrion: All right, everyone, this is Robb Fahrion with another episode of the sage executive podcast. For more insights into checking out more episodes, visit us at FlyingVgroup.com/podcast. Thanks so much, Larry. Really appreciate you and thanks for coming on.