Why Advisors Need to Stop Trading and Start Listening

• Beacon Strategies, LLC
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• LinkedIn: Chip Kispert

RJ Malyk (00:01) 

Welcome to the BPN Insights podcast with your host Chip Kispert. I’m your producer, RJ Malek. Chip, how you doing today? 

 

Chip Kispert (00:09) 

beautiful day here in Colorado and I have one of my favorite people joining us. 

 

RJ Malyk (00:11) 

It’s all excellent. Excellent. Why you introduce him and tell us what you’ll be discussing on this edition of the BPN insights podcast. 

 

Chip Kispert (00:22) 

Absolutely. Today I’m pleased to have Zach Conway on the show. Zach is founder of Seeds along with his father. ⁓ At Seeds, they’re helping advisors by building a better platform that’s really built around the needs of the RIA practice. Zach, welcome to the Beacon Insights podcast. 

 

Zach (00:43) 

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. 

 

Chip Kispert (00:45) 

You know, we met at Market Council a little over a year ago and I had a blast with that panel that we did and I’m typically not a panel guy.  But I learned a ton off of that.  Absolutely see you as really an expert in your field given that you’ve really kind of come out of the seat to build this. You are a user builder. That’s pretty cool. 

 

Zach (00:48) 

That’s right. Yeah. Yeah, it helps. We think it helps for sure. 

 

Chip Kispert (01:18) 

So let’s get right into it, right? I always love kind of that origin story thing. So let’s, can you start by telling us a little bit about your background and why just Dirt Seeds? 

 

Zach (01:33) 

Yeah, I mean, you said it there, the user builder backstory, and you mentioned my dad as co-founder in this business. It really starts with him and the fact that he’s been an advisor since 1984. I remember he talks about the days back in the day when he was looking forward to have some experience, know, background and be in the business for a long time. And now he talks about, it just seems like such a long time. I hate saying I started in 1984, but anyway. 

I joined him in the business a little over a decade ago after spending some time in the corporate world and very quickly, thankfully got to be in front of clients. I was helping with some of the operational things behind the scenes, but he got me sort of in the room with the customers pretty quickly. And what was interesting and what I learned very quickly in the room with clients and watching him do his thing was… 

They were there because of his ability to ask really good questions and listen to the answers and connect the answers to specific outcomes. But what was interesting about that is it tended to be that flow for financial planning. So I’m going to understand all these different things about you, this prospective client and your needs and your family situation and health issues and all of this nuance. The client feels heard and understood. You connect that to financial planning solutions. But then the investment management story was different. It went from asking good questions about this person as an investor and instead jumping to let us tell you about how smart we are in managing money and how we run portfolios and what we think the Fed is gonna do next quarter and blah, blah, blah. And that seemed so odd that those two sort of experiences with the client were different, the financial planning piece and the investment management piece. And that was sort of the start of a light bulb moment that ultimately led, you know, jump cut to what we’re now building at Seeds. 

 

Chip Kispert (03:28) 

But, I mean, let’s be honest, those still haven’t come together all that much, have they? 

 

 

Zach (03:34) 

I think we still struggle with it, right? As an industry, it’s very much ⁓ a problem both in that operationally, so actually connecting financial planning to portfolios, but also in that experience piece, right? Actually understanding an investor in a deeper, more nuanced way. We as an industry, would argue, aren’t great at that, right? We really jump to this. 

 

Chip Kispert (03:36) 

Ha ha ha! 

 

Zach (03:59) 

advisor centered storytelling around investment management. We have these models, we have these alternative products, we have this many CFA’s on staff, this is how we manage the money, this is what products we use, et cetera. So there’s that issue. The other issue is it is still operationally really burdensome to implement and manage the money on an ongoing basis. 

And I just remember in the room, you know, back when I started with my dad, that that seemed so odd. The fact that the experience was not great for the end client because it wasn’t really about them and it felt salesy. But also it was a pain in the butt to manage the portfolios, to actually implement them, trade them, raise cash for clients who are living off their portfolios, rebalance in a timely, effective way, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So was both of those pieces, right? It sort of the experience layer. 

and the operational layer, and that was sort of the light bulb again to, do we possibly solve both of those things at the same time in one solution? 

 

Chip Kispert (04:58) 

Yeah. 

I always struggle with the concept of, create a financial plan for an investor. All right, great, let’s do this. Kind of the investment side’s the other side of the fence, right? And then their life changes, right? And there’s no interaction. As an advisor, that’s gotta be hard to manage. So that’s why I love seeing what you guys are doing. I think it’s terrific. 

 

Zach (05:26) 

Appreciate it. 

 

Chip Kispert (05:27) 

Let me kind of move the needle on the question a little bit here. What do you see as the best three pieces of functionality for advisors within the Seeds platform? 

 

Zach (05:42) 

It really starts, know, people sometimes think of us as a tamp, which I think is sort of directionally accurate. And I think to frame up the key difference is the fact that it starts ⁓ somewhere else, meaning it actually starts with an assessment tool. And the word Seeds, when we think about the name of the business, the idea was always, what are the seeds? What are the things we need to know about this human person as an investor? That if we plant, we get them and plant them, that leads to the right portfolio and the right storytelling about the portfolio.  

So to answer your question, the first piece is that assessment tool, right? What makes us fundamentally different is that component of the platform we wanna put in the hands of the advisor. They’re already having these good conversations with their prospective clients, hopefully about investment management, but we wanna put it on the rails, right? What questions specifically should you be asking to get what information? 

 

Chip Kispert (06:23) 

Mm-hmm. 

 

Zach (06:41) 

Goals, short and long-term, account types, tax situation, liquidity needs, ⁓ preferences, maybe values, how those might be applied, tax situation. There’s so many sort of layers of the onion of who an investor is. Before, by the way, even get to some of the behavioral components of how they think about markets and how involved in the process they wanna be and how detail-oriented they are. So an assessment tool to really help an advisor capture that. 

 

Chip Kispert (06:59) 

Mm-hmm. 

Zach (07:09) 

And then we connect that to the second piece, which would be the actual portfolio construction and proposal moment. So if you get all this good information, what does it connect to? Right? What is the actual portfolio outcome? And so we, through a logic framework, sort of tee that up for the advisor using their models or our models or direct indexing or whatever configuration. But if you do an assessment and have this deep conversation with an investor, 

There’s a logical portfolio outcome on the other side. Asset allocation, tax location, where are you using direct indexing or not? Where are you using ETFs, et cetera, et cetera, et And then how to propose that through the system. And then the last piece, you said three, so I guess the third piece would be ⁓ the implementation, right? To my point earlier on, we as advisors should be front stage all the time. 

So the fact that as an industry, we’ve sort of with technology forced advisors to be traders was sort of nuts to me when I stepped into the industry and sort of witnessed what was happening operationally. The fact that we have a team of people that’s logging into an interface and pressing all these buttons and pulling all these levers to do block trading and figure out all this edge case stuff just seemed like that’s not what we actually get hired to be doing. And so. 

That’s the third component to answer your question. Being able to press a button to implement a portfolio and then know that trading and the automation around rebalancing, tax loss harvesting, tax transition, cash raises, et cetera, will be optimized and automated on behalf of the advisor and their client. So that’s the third. 

 

Chip Kispert (08:48) 

So if I really hear you and summarize that, and this is one that I’m always amazed at, is you guys are allowing the advisor to spend more time with the investor customer and future prospects. 

 

Zach (09:04) 

That’s it, that’s it. And again, I think like a ⁓ difference from sort of like how a tamp and trading platforms have been developed historically. If you think about them, a lot of them are marketplaces of product and lots and lots of buttons for advisors to press as it relates to trading operations. And we just don’t think that’s a good use of advisors time. The problem is you need configuration. You need to know these investors with these nuances and these situations equals this portfolio outcome. So anytime you’re spending in a  marketplace of product within a system, bolting together models and trading, changing models and building new models and diligencing more product is time away from the end investor. And again, the same on the trading component as well. Get out of the trading function, right? Get back to more reviews and sales meetings and discovery meetings and so on. 

 

Chip Kispert (09:57) 

Well, I’ve been amazed because I saw some research a couple of weeks ago, maybe a month ago, that talked about how advisors, know, the amount of time they actually are spending now is down to 30, 40 % of their day with customers versus, you know, having that number at 70 or 80, right? And it’s just dropped over last 20 years. That’s crazy. 

 

Zach (10:23) 

Yeah, and I think, again, not to sort of tinfoil hat this, but I think advisors have been sort of convinced from the industry and from technology itself that control and flexibility is all that matters. So in other words, every piece of technology, that’s been the lens, right? As much control in the hands of the advisor with as much flexibility as possible. And this is not to say those are inherently bad things, but you can be flexibly doing really silly stuff. 

 

Chip Kispert (10:41) 

Mm-hmm. 

 

Zach (10:52) 

and be in total control at the same time. And so how do you actually build technology that is centered on better customer outcomes that you are delivering through the technology rather than, yeah, this is totally flexible. You can do whatever you want, but maybe those things aren’t so great for the client and their situation. 

 

Chip Kispert (11:10) 

Got it. And following up on that, ⁓ You know, do you think the technology side has lost its North Star relative to the abundance of offerings out there? You know, you know, is that, you know, that North Star, it’s forgetting about the people, which we just talked about. 

 

Zach (11:29) 

Yeah, think that has been, know, this is ⁓ probably a fairly wild overgeneralization, but technology, as I said, has been built through the lens of flexibility, advisor control, and of course, you know, efficiency, efficiency, efficiency. And that’s great because we went from, again, to oversimplify, like, you know, pen and paper to do everything that we do as advisors and very, very, very manual trading. I remember, you know, even when I joined my dad, still seeing literal paper tickets for trades. so technology fixed that problem, but it wasn’t being built necessarily through the lens of optimal outcomes to the client. Like how are we actually building systems to make advisors better at being advisors and meaning what is, what are we actually delivering to the end client in the experience and in our situation, portfolio outcomes, whatever it may be. 

And so I do think that shift is happening, right? Kitces has just put out a map where now there’s a services map and there’s a technology map. And our opinion is there’s no reason those two things shouldn’t be the same thing, right? There’s services, maybe arguably as it relates to consultant businesses and pure non-tech, but technology should be to serve the advisor delivering better customer outcomes. And I think that is hopefully the North Star of how technology is going to get built moving forward. 

 

Chip Kispert (12:55) 

We agree with that completely. I loved your response there. ⁓ Shifting gears a little. I always love to find out who folks like you are interested, who you listen to, right? So, you know, as we, when you study the wealth and the advisory business these days, who do you follow? Who do you pay particular attention to? 

 

Zach (13:20) 

Yeah, I would say, you know, it’s like news, right? I try to do a little bit of everything. ⁓ You know, you don’t want to hear, ⁓ I would say that would be my main takeaway is people should have exposure, not just to, you know, the most well-known consultants in the industry necessarily, not to say they’re not saying very insightful things, and not to just follow, you know, these sort of emerging finfluencer types, but a little bit of all of it because there is, we need to see perspectives from all sides. The other thing I would say just in general, and I’m biased, ⁓ founders, right? Like people who are building stuff and building technology and trying to move the needle, of course, the fair criticism is we’re not all gonna succeed and all of our new ideas aren’t gonna be the winning ideas in the future necessarily. That said, you gotta break the status quo a little bit. If I hear one more, ⁓ 

 

talk about fee compression or whatever on a stage at a conference and not something new about how do we actually attract young investors? How do we actually build our business? How do we solve organic growth really? I wanna hear from people who have some new ideas and some new perspectives on those topics and not, because otherwise you get this feedback loop, right? It’s like research is backward facing. You go on a stage, you talk about the research. 

 

Chip Kispert (14:38) 

Right? 

 

Zach (14:43) 

Everybody takes away the saying, okay, they must be right, so let’s go do those things and nothing, know, ship in the ocean, haven’t moved a needle. ⁓ Anyway, so that’s my bias. Try to listen to founders a little bit and see what they’re thinking about the future. 

 

Chip Kispert (14:57) 

Yeah, I think that I agree with you. It’s funny because, you know, we’re in the consulting loop as well. So ⁓ I understand that. But if I look at where the tools and advisors working with today versus 20 years ago, there’s been a little progress. But the basics are still having to happen. So I always find that super interesting.  

 

Zach (15:24) 

Yeah, and again, we could be wrong on a lot of things. I think founders, obviously very bullish on our own business and we think we’re continuing to be wildly successful, but there’s things that aren’t gonna be right. But I think it’s still worth seeing what that new perspective is and where the industry might go. 

 

Chip Kispert (15:34) 

Absolutely. 

Beyond that, I’m always curious, especially with founders, as you say, and ⁓ as well with when I talk to wealth firms, what companies do you follow? What companies do you think are doing a good job? 

Zach (16:00) 

Yeah, obviously looking at sort of our direct competitive landscape and thinking how portfolio operations systems are evolving or not to our benefit ⁓ is definitely a focus for us. ⁓ And then I would say anywhere where we’re really trying to solve, it is absolutely amazing slash sad slash existential crisis that on the one hand, McKinsey says we’re gonna have a shortage of advisors over the next decade. 

On the other hand, literally most firms aren’t growing. Like there’s just no organic growth. And so anybody who’s really trying to help solve that, so I look at ⁓ what Finney is doing and others in that space, and Finney just got it sort of attacked about what they’re building. I was reading that and it’s like, do you really think the founders don’t know this criticism, right? it’s… ⁓ 

 

Chip Kispert (16:48) 

I saw it. 

 

Zach (16:57) 

The fact that they’re trying to move the needle and think differently about marketing and lead generation and where AI comes into play, there’s things they’re gonna have to figure out that may be not what they’ve solved for yet. But again, what’s working, what worked before isn’t working now clearly. So, you know, there are fundamental things firms need to solve to get to organic growth, but any business that’s actually trying to…push the envelope there and figure out new paths, I think is exciting and interesting for sure. 

 

Chip Kispert (17:29) 

I agree and it’s interesting because I looked at that space and I see a lot of disparate engagement and I look forward to seeing what comes in the next three years as lead gen gets really streamlined. ⁓ But anyway, that’s not what we’re here to talk about. ⁓ As we close up, I have one question and we always like to be curious about things that begin different parts of the world we kind of look at ourselves as kind of a GP in the wealth tech space. What are you curious about looking forward? 

 

 

 

Zach (18:09) 

You know, maybe this is gonna sound talking out of both sides of my mouth a little bit, but I think ⁓ all the talk about AI and what it means as both an opportunity and an existential threat, I think is all true and legitimate. However, firms, and this is the organic growth point as well, there are so many fundamental 101 things that so many firms are still struggling to deliver on and solve. 

How do you hire? How do you track next gen talent? How do you organize your business? What is your service offering? Who are your customers? What is your differentiated story? How do you then build technology around that? I do see this sort of AI threat and advisors latching onto it almost as placation of not addressing the foundational things that they haven’t solved yet. And so I’m hopeful that sort of 2025 was the year of AI, AI, AI, it’s scary. but a little bit of a reset to like, wait a second, what should we solve first? What do we need to actually address before we should be vibe coding? Do we know how to hire people, right? Like those foundational things, I’m hopeful that the industry and advisors sort of recalibrate to that in 2026. 

 

Chip Kispert (19:24) 

Yeah, it’s funny. It took us 18 minutes and 25 seconds to get to AI, which is the longest, which is the longest that I’ve had so far in a long time. 

 

Zach (19:30) 

Yeah, I buried the lid. 

I mean, don’t get, yeah, don’t get me started. think the one other thing I’ll throw in, even though now you’re saying we’re over time, but the one other thing as it relates to AI is the counter argument to AI as a threat is, well, everybody wants a human person. And we fundamentally believe that, right? That is how we will not be taken over by the robots is human people want a human interface to help them solve financial planning. However, if you as a human person aren’t as good at being human, as the AI, then I’m gonna go to the AI. In other words, are you asking the right questions? Are you really asking the follow-up questions? Like doing good financial planning has been commoditized for years. So all of that stuff. So again, that is the truth. That’s what we need to chase. But I think gut checking, like, are you actually good at delivering on those human things? Right? Are you asking the questions? Are you creating a human experience? Because AI is catching up even to that piece. So that’s the other little thing I’ll throw in at the end, guess, on the AI topic. 

 

Chip Kispert (20:37) 

Well, I think that was fabulous. And one of the things we like to do as we end up our podcast is to give you 45 seconds or so ⁓ and to have a BPN Insights Flash Time. And I’d love to hear kind of some of your thoughts as you share a thought leadership topic that you believe is insightful ⁓ to wealth management going forward. 

 

Zach (21:01) 

Yeah, I think I’ll kind of continue then on the AI thing. think, you know, businesses, again, the takeaway would be looking at these foundational pieces of your business, right? Before SEEDS, before Finney, for growth, before any of these pieces of technology, do you know how to do investment management? Do you know what your organic marketing plan is or growth plan is, et cetera, et cetera? Get back to these foundational pieces that’s how you can figure out how to actually layer technology into them. So that’s one piece. And then again, on the human piece, what does it mean to be a human advisor? There’s been conferences on this topic, there’s been lots of thought leadership on this topic, but to you as a business, what does that actually really mean? Why would someone come to you and want to experience your services through you rather than logging into Robinhood? Like really gut check what that’s about and lean into that as much as possible, right? How are you gonna really chase that in a meaningful way in 2026 and beyond? 

 

Chip Kispert (22:08) 

I love the insight. Zach, I wanna thank you for joining me on the BPN Insights podcast. You obviously are a trailblazer and I look forward to seeing you and seeds continue to grow while you have fun, of course.  Before you go, how do people in our audience contact you? 

 

Zach (22:26) 

I’m one of the crazy ones who will just give out their email. It’s Zach, Z-A-C-H at useseeds.com or you can just go to the website use seeds.com, fill out forms, however you want to reach out. And yeah, we’d love to talk to you. 

 

Chip Kispert (22:40) 

Appreciate that so much. I thought I was special because I had your email address, but I guess I’m not. Love that. Zach, thank you very much. Have a great day. 

 

Zach (22:44) 

No, no, sorry, it’s everywhere. Thanks, man. 

 

RJ Malyk (22:53) 

All right, and thank you for checking out the BPN Insights podcast, which is brought to you by Beacon Strategies LLC. For more information, visit beaconstrategiesllc.com. Until our next BPN Insights podcast for Chip Kispert and everyone at Beacon Strategies, I’m R.J. Malik.