In this episode, I welcome Josh Yager, managing partner at Anodos and a licensed attorney, to discuss the often complex world of estate planning and settlement.
This episode explores Josh's innovative approach to collaboration among professionals in law, accounting, and financial planning to ensure effective estate settlements.
Josh's Journey: From Financial Planning to Legal Expert
Career Transition: Originally a financial planner and a CFP, Josh spent 15 years creating financial plans and managing assets before a career epiphany at a conference led him to law school. This transition was fueled by his realization of the growing need for specialized estate settlement services.
Specialization in Estate Settlement: His focus shifted to supporting non-professional trustees manage the challenging process of estate settlement, recognizing the gap in services available for effectively managing this critical and stressful period.
Anodos: Bridging the Gap in Estate Settlement
Understanding the Need: JoshHe discusses the demographic challenges with the baby boomer generation and the massive transfer of wealth forthcoming, emphasizing the need for specialized estate settlement services.
Role of Anodos: Anodos specializes in assisting non-professional trustees, often family members, through the daunting process of estate settlement. Josh's team takes a unique approach by charging a fixed fee, aligning their financial incentives with the speed and efficiency of the settlement process.
Elite Growth Academy
Collaborative Training and Education: The upcoming Elite Growth Academy in San Diego will serve as a platform for professionals like Josh to share best practices and learn from one another in a collaborative environment, further enhancing the services they provide to their clients.
Key Takeaways and Future Directions
The Importance of Collaboration: Josh highlights the critical nature of breaking down professional silos to ensure the best outcomes for clients, stressing the importance of a collaborative approach across different disciplines.
Looking Ahead: As the demographic shift continues to unfold, he anticipates the need for estate settlement services will grow, underscoring the importance of preparedness and adaptability in his field.
About Your Host: Paul G. McManus is an accomplished author and expert in helping financial professionals grow their businesses. With over eight years of experience working exclusively with financial professionals, Paul has helped his clients generate tens of millions of dollars in fees and commissions.
Claim your free audiobook copy at: www.theshortbookformula.com
In this episode, I welcome Josh Yager, managing partner at Anodos and a licensed attorney, to discuss the often complex world of estate planning and settlement.
This episode explores Josh's innovative approach to collaboration among professionals in law, accounting, and financial planning to ensure effective estate settlements.
Josh's Journey: From Financial Planning to Legal Expert
Career Transition: Originally a financial planner and a CFP, Josh spent 15 years creating financial plans and managing assets before a career epiphany at a conference led him to law school. This transition was fueled by his realization of the growing need for specialized estate settlement services.
Specialization in Estate Settlement: His focus shifted to supporting non-professional trustees manage the challenging process of estate settlement, recognizing the gap in services available for effectively managing this critical and stressful period.
Anodos: Bridging the Gap in Estate Settlement
Understanding the Need: JoshHe discusses the demographic challenges with the baby boomer generation and the massive transfer of wealth forthcoming, emphasizing the need for specialized estate settlement services.
Role of Anodos: Anodos specializes in assisting non-professional trustees, often family members, through the daunting process of estate settlement. Josh's team takes a unique approach by charging a fixed fee, aligning their financial incentives with the speed and efficiency of the settlement process.
Elite Growth Academy
Collaborative Training and Education: The upcoming Elite Growth Academy in San Diego will serve as a platform for professionals like Josh to share best practices and learn from one another in a collaborative environment, further enhancing the services they provide to their clients.
Key Takeaways and Future Directions
The Importance of Collaboration: Josh highlights the critical nature of breaking down professional silos to ensure the best outcomes for clients, stressing the importance of a collaborative approach across different disciplines.
Looking Ahead: As the demographic shift continues to unfold, he anticipates the need for estate settlement services will grow, underscoring the importance of preparedness and adaptability in his field.
About Your Host: Paul G. McManus is an accomplished author and expert in helping financial professionals grow their businesses. With over eight years of experience working exclusively with financial professionals, Paul has helped his clients generate tens of millions of dollars in fees and commissions.
Claim your free audiobook copy at: www.theshortbookformula.com
Welcome everyone to another episode of the Million Dollar Producer Show. I'm your host, Paul G McManus. Today I have a special guest, Josh Yeager. Josh is the managing partner at Anados and is a licensed attorney. Welcome to the show, Josh. Thanks, Paul, it's great to have you here, and I know that we're going to both be at the upcoming Elite Growth Academy in San Diego in June. I appreciate this opportunity to get to know you a little better and share this with the community so that they can get to know you better as well, Because I believe this is your first time speaking there. Is that correct?
Speaker 2:
It is. I joined the Elite group about 40 days ago, so I'm a newbie.
Speaker 1:
40 days All right, very cool, and I guess just to find out a little bit, what attracted you to join the Elite Resource Team 40 days ago, how did you become aware of it and what attracted you to join I?
Speaker 2:
saw some of Anton's awesome marketing stuff and it's always resonated me the collaborative planning process, because all of us in the professions have gotten into our silos where we really know a lot about depreciation schedules or filing tax returns or building model portfolios with modern portfolio theory and doing our thing and we know that it is best for the clients to have all of their professional members coordinated. And I really dig that environment. Only good things happen and what Elite is doing is I think it's revolutionary to say, look, we got to break down the walls here. If we want good outcomes for the clients, we have to be able to share best practices and share the seats at the table and not be fighting over who's the boss. That really resonates with me. When I met with Anton and the team, they felt that the stuff that we do at Anodos might be helpful to their group. So I said, yeah, let's give it a shot and see if we can help.
Speaker 1:
I think one thing that I appreciate about them is that I work with a lot of financial advisors and I think a lot of people say essentially, in some form or fashion, the idea that we all work in silos and we should be collaborating. But my intuition is that most people say that, maybe believe it, but the reality is they create, I think, the structure, the training and really actualize that in reality which I think is very unique.
Speaker 2:
There certainly is the act of faith when you initially say, okay, I'm buying into this process, I'm going to invite smarter people to the table than me in their particular areas of expertise. There's some humility in that. But the thing is that's crazy is the clients smell that immediately and know that you're acting in their best interest when you're willing to say, I don't know, but I'm so committed to a good outcome that I'm willing to share this safe place with other people.
Speaker 1:
For a financial advisor or perhaps a CPA watching this that may or may not be attending the upcoming event. Who are you and what is it that you do?
Speaker 2:
I'm Josh. I'm an attorney. My initial career was in financial planning, so I spent 15 years being the guy developing financial plans. I'm a CFP, did that for a lot of years, did a lot of plans, captured a lot of assets and got intrigued by this problem that we're having demographically, which is about a third of Americans are going to die in the next 20 years. We've got the baby boomer wave. What that means is 100% of the assets owned by baby boomers about $100 trillion is going to pass to somebody else, and that means all of us have an opportunity to participate the tax guys, the insurance guys, the financial planners. And so I was seeing my silo of financial planning, capturing assets, deploying it, creating portfolios of capital to provide for cash flows for clients, and I thought this is only a piece of the total solution, and there's a lot of financial planners in the world. God made a lot of smart people to help people deploy their capital where the need was. That I felt drawn to was helping that transfer happen smoothly, because the disposition of the estate after grandpa dies is an absolute pain in the neck. For anyone that's had a grandpa who's died, it's just a nightmare settling a trust. And so what Anados does.
Speaker 2:
Our exclusive role is to help the non-professional successor trustee. So if you look at estate plans written right now, probably 90% of the persons responsible for handling this process are non-professionals. They're family members. It's the grieving widow or the eldest daughter or the brother who lives in another state. It's somebody who's never had that job before. They're already stressed because somebody they love died. There's money on the table with a lot of zeros. That means everyone's giving them advice and clamoring for a piece of the assets and there's revenue to be made and they're lost and frustrated because we're all in our silos.
Speaker 2:
And so what Anados does is say look, you need somebody for a period of time to help settle this thing, and then, once it's done, we're out. You already have your CPA, you already have your investment advisor, you've got your team, you just need our area of expertise for this episodic high stress, high risk period. And I love being thrown into the game at the bottom of the ninth and needing to help and deliver for the entire team. And so that's what we do we settle estates. We don't draft the plans.
Speaker 2:
God already has plenty of trust in the state's attorneys that love drafting the plans and giving you the binder that says everything's going to be okay and 50 pages of legalese that nobody knows how to read. That problem has been solved. There is a pressing problem of so who the heck is actually going to implement this? Because a lot of the guys drafting the estate plans are not available to help settle the estate plans because they're too busy or retired or dead and grandma doesn't know who to go to because the guy that drafted the estate plan was grandpa's golfing buddy and he's not in practice anymore. We take the orphans when there's an estate that needs settlement and there isn't the incumbent drafting attorney, who normally should or would do this, and the family's up in arms. We're the guys you call to come in and untangle the knot.
Speaker 1:
Tell me a little bit more about that. Just before we went on the air, you were sharing a few more details about why it typically isn't not only the attorney that drafted the state, but also typically your CPA or your financial advisor isn't normally the person that's positioned to help. Can you add some color to that?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, the problem is when you're settling in a state, there's a component of the decisions that are strictly legal. There's the uniform trust code or the probate code, in whatever state you're in. It says these are your jobs successor, trustee, executor. You have to meet these duties and, by the way, you're a school teacher and you don't know what those are. So that's what you need an attorney for is to help navigate the legal piece of the settlement notices, accounts, different duties and responsibilities you have. So the attorney knows a lot about that.
Speaker 2:
Then you've got the tax piece, which is okay. We got to file a tax return for the estate, a different tax return a 1041 or a 706 if there's a taxable estate and there's all of these nuances in the tax filing. So they really know that. Then there's the investment side. Okay, we got assets. They're either liquid assets the stock and bond portfolio at Schwab or it's the real property Dad has some apartment buildings or it's an operating business or a car collection, whatever.
Speaker 2:
So the investment guy knows about that, but few of them know what the other guy knows, and so it's really hard for the quarterback, the grieving widow or the eldest son who's got a day job to coordinate the efforts of these high paid professionals that know more about the process than the quarterback. And, by the way, those high-paid professionals, they're really good at their job. That means they're really busy. That means they don't have a ton of time to coordinate all of these stupid little moving parts. Well, we need the CPA to opine on this issue before we make the decision about which of the trusts to fund with the money. That's at Schwab and it's oh crap. We've got three guys that we have to coordinate to make one decision. And smart guys end up talking a lot and spending a lot of time proving why they're so smart. Just takes a long time and the poor successor trustee gets blown away in managing the professional relationships that are required in a settlement.
Speaker 1:
I can think, just on a personal note, my dad he's currently 85 or so. He's like really good at the stuff and he's helped other family members when maybe a generation ahead passed away and he was the person that everyone came to to coordinate these things. And now in my own business, he's retired but he still enjoys doing those things and so I love tasking him with the coordination piece for these different things getting an attorney, the CPA, whomever together, because personally I'm too busy, don't have time, don't really have interest, and so I can imagine how valuable the service that you do is from an advisor's perspective or a CPA's perspective. What is that relationship like with you? How do you actually effectuate that?
Speaker 1:
Where you work as a quarterback or collaborative team in a way that everyone feels that serves the client, of course, but then everyone feels that you're working as a team and versus one person taking over. I think we had said it before is that sometimes the biggest challenge for some people is that they I don't want to say they're scared, but they don't want to say are scared, but they don't want to look like they don't have the answer. So how do you approach that process where you help the client and then you also help the team and everyone look good.
Speaker 2:
I think one key element is I don't pretend that I'm the quarterback. I say, look, dad died. There's a list of 150 things that has to get done. So let's start off with that list. Let's get the CPA and the attorney and the investment advisor all to agree yeah, we know that we need to do all these things. Then we just look around the room and say, okay, who's best qualified to do this stuff? Who's going to get the adjustment in basis for the assets at Merrill Lynch? Okay, the Merrill Lynch guy is going to do that.
Speaker 2:
I'm not going to do that, but my job is more to be the glorified secretary and saying, look, we got a list, it's 150 things. This thing will not be closed until 150. No sweat, we'll put the things that you're responsible for down on the list, but just as long as you commit that, it's your name that goes on these things. Right, yeah, josh, so long as you guys can get me the exhibits that I need to file the 706, I'm going to get this done by June 30. No sweat, great, put that down for the CPA. He then can breathe a sigh of relief. All right, I actually don't have to know the 150 things, I only have to know the 23 things. And so if they see me and I describe myself as the glorified secretary for the project, all I'm doing is writing down notes, anything that I'm the best guy to do, because I got time and I got training on it I'll grind into that.
Speaker 2:
Attorney you do your thing If the attorney's around, cpa do your thing, investment advisor do your thing, property management guy do your thing, and we're all answerable to grandma, the successor trustee and reporting back to her. Hey, we're making progress, we're moving along, stuff's getting checked off the list. Couple of decisions. We need you to make grandma, like Bing, spend time with Josh or spend time with your investment guy. But we need an answer from you, grandma, in two weeks, because we can't move on to the next thing until you make a decision on what are we going to do with the coin collection.
Speaker 1:
I'm not in this situation today, but you're already creating a sense of relief for me. Just, I can imagine having someone like yourself and doing all that and coordinating people, because I literally had a situation recently where I was trying to coordinate a CPA, an attorney, a business partner and myself and the thing took, I would say, about 10 times as long because everyone's busy, no one wants to answer the question or take responsibility, and it just takes that person who says, hey look, we just need to make this one decision. Okay, here's next. These are the people that need to do it. So it sounds like a very valuable service.
Speaker 2:
I think one of the things to add to it is I enter the relationship knowing that my name and phone number is going to be forgotten in a year. Yeah, okay, there's the CPA and attorney are the most trusted advisors. I'm not, I'm just a guy. I'm just a guy that comes in for a short period of time to dig ditches for the family, and so I intentionally try to set up the CPA and the to be the smart guys in the room for the family, because I don't know the family. So that's one thing that they everyone knows I'm out of here. My job is to get out as fast as possible because that means I've been successful at helping the administration go fast, and having that focus changes the dynamic. Nobody's threatened by Josh's running the meeting because nobody's going to remember my name in a year, which is my hope. That's success for me.
Speaker 1:
Switching gears a little bit. I want to get a little bit more personal in just your background and who you are as a person. So you're an attorney and 15 years or more before, as I think you said, you were an investment advisor. When did you switch gears? When did you become an attorney and what prompted that change for you?
Speaker 2:
I started being an investment advisor right out of college at a company that's now pretty big national called Mercer Advisors, and so I got a lot of experience being with the folks helping them solve their financial planning needs within the context of comprehensive financial planning CFP investment advisory relationship, where you're paid for asset management but you're actually doing a lot of other stuff for them. I had a crisis of career At one point. I had $300 million under management on my team, five guys working for me and 300 clients, and I was sitting in the back of the room at one of the Schwab annual conferences not listening to the speaker, and I told my guys okay, look, we're each going to take out a yellow pad and we're going to start to write down the names of our 300 clients, one thing that we can do for each of those clients and the guy who writes the most names down gets a hundred bucks. And there was five of us on the team and I was the head. The guy that got the a hundred bucks is a guy named Matt who's still at Mercer, and he was able to identify 180 of the 300 names. Okay, so that means we couldn't remember 120 of our client names. I'm impressed with 180. Matt was the most engaged with both ends of the client spectrum.
Speaker 2:
But what I was frustrated with I was 35, 33 at the time and I was like man. This is backwards. The clients pay us to know their name and think of one thing that we can do to affect a better outcome for them next year. And I can't remember half of their names and so forget about the money. If I won the lottery tomorrow, my business is broken because I'm unable to deliver on the service that my clients expect me to. So that's when I started thinking about I'm going to go to law school.
Speaker 2:
The firm that I worked with paid for continuing educations. Many of the CFPs that were there for five years did MBAs, some of them did CFAs, and I threw up a curveball and said I want to go to law school at night. So I went to law school at night here in Santa Barbara, passed the bar and during that process realized this confluence of need in the estate settlement process and said look, I'm going to bet my career on that, quit being an investment advisor and started helping successor trustees navigate settlements, which is a pain in the neck, an opportunity to have really high spiritual reward in having the client say man, I'm so stoked that you helped, which is what.
Speaker 1:
I was looking for. Yeah, I can imagine. Tell me a little bit more about your business. I would imagine that you work nationally. Is it just yourself, or do you have a team?
Speaker 2:
A state settlement is governed by the laws of each state. So every state has its own probate code. But the nice thing is the probate code in all the states looks exactly the same. So the words in Tennessee are the same words in California are the same words in Washington state it's just where it's codified are different because the duties and responsibilities of a trustee have pre-existed the probate code. So getting in and settling an estate in Kansas, the workflow is the same workflow. You're just citing different statutes of why you're doing it the way you're doing it. So we serve clients in all states.
Speaker 2:
Myself and my partner Ryan are the two managing partners. We've got a couple of administrative staff. At any given time we probably have 30 active settlements going at a time and we turn the client base about twice a year. A settlement takes about six months Start, get the fee, hammer it out, get done. And what makes us a little different is most attorneys. When you go to them and say, hey, grandpa died, I need help with the settlement. If you ask how much is it going to cost, they'll say it costs 450 bucks an hour I don't know how many hours. So what we say is the fee is fixed. Our fee is $3,000 per million dollars of estate value, so that if this gets done in three months, we get paid more than if it takes us six months. And so we have realigned the financial incentive to move really fast because I get paid more, which, by the way, is what the CPA wants.
Speaker 1:
Which is good for everybody. Exactly, and you nailed it You've aligned everyone's priorities in such a way that it's a win-win for everybody. Exactly, and you nailed it You've aligned everyone's priorities in such a way that it's a win-win for everybody. Exactly.
Speaker 2:
So that's our approach. And our approach is get as many orphan settlements as we can. So I'm like look, you know the family, you know the trust, doc, you want to settle it. God bless, you Go settle that family's estate. If you don't want to settle it, an attorney, if you're too busy, send me your orphans CPA. If your client calls you and says my attorney is dead or retired or their firm moved or whatever, call me Now.
Speaker 1:
I have to say for me and what I've learned in my own business and working with other people, is that for a successful business, typically you want a recurring revenue model and the most difficult thing is to always have to replace your clients and get new clients. And it sounds like that's what you're doing, for reasons that you've stated.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, it's an upside down model, right. I came out of the asset management business, which is annuity, right. Yeah, a hundred basis points on a million bucks. If I serve the client, I'm never going to get fired and I'm going to have 200 clients and make plenty of money, and so it was a big leap of faith to believe there's enough need out there that I'm actually going to enter a business where I'm never going to have a long-term relationship with the client. I'm going to churn and burn, but what I believed and what I bet my mortgage on was there's enough of a need that client base will replace itself, which has been proven true.
Speaker 1:
I would imagine from a business standpoint, your client is actually the person referring you in, it's the CPA, it's the advisor, someone like that. Or do your clients come directly, or is it the end user? Is it the consumer?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, it's kind of a difficult model because I'm not marketing B2C. I'm not marketing to grandmas because I don't know who just died. I'm marketing to the CPAs and the investment advisors who know when their client died and know that there's nobody to help. So I'm doing the B2B marketing, but the client that pays me is the eldest son who's responsible for doing it. That's who my contract's with.
Speaker 1:
That's what I was getting at. From a business perspective, your recurring revenue comes, even though it's not paid by the grandma per se. It comes from the fact that you get repeat business from the same people. Yeah, it's the key referral relationships.
Speaker 2:
Think about the numbers this way. Let's say, the typical RIA has got 200 households they serve. So the statistics are that if you have a client base with 200 clients that are age 65 and beyond so that's the cohort of baby boomers that 3% of them are going to die per year. So there's 500 guys in elite. Each of those members of elite have 200 clients that are going to die. So that's what is 200 times 500 is some big number. Every guy in elite has 200 clients, 200 households, let's say, and each of those households there's 500 of them and 3% of them is the mortality rate. So there's 3000 deaths within the elite family per year.
Speaker 2:
Okay, that's just the investment advisors. Add to that the CPAs. Let's say, for every investment advisor there's at least one CPA and they have 200 tax returns. So, keeping it simple, there's a lot of people dying. That's just the nature of the demographics. Something on the order of 25 to 30% of the guys that drafted the documents are not available to help settle the trust. So the way I look at elite is there's potentially a thousand settlements per year of orphans within the elite family and I'm like this is perfect. They already know about collaboration. They already know that we're not fighting over the seats, we're all about the client. They understand about specialization and siloing of their professional disciplines and that relying on each other is better than trying to do it on her own. And I'm like look, I can get in, get out.
Speaker 1:
Do you have any stories that help exemplify the work that you do that you can share?
Speaker 2:
Sure. So there's one settlement that's about to be done. It's due to be done at the end of this month. The little old lady next door neighbor of the dead guy. She was the caretaker for the dead guy. She was made the successor trustee.
Speaker 2:
On the dead guy's estate was a bunch of little houses in Santa Barbara. The little old lady, who doesn't know any better, went to the attorney and said hey, I need help settling this thing. The attorney's a really well-known guy. He's a really good attorney, but he's really busy and he's getting to the end of his career, so he's vacationing a lot. So about a year and a half passed and nothing happened. And then the attorney said look, this is. I don't have time for this. This estate is too small for me to make a bunch of money on. He didn't say that, but that was perfect. So he kicks her off to another attorney. That attorney starts from zero a year and a half later and does a bunch of things that really don't advance the ball. So she gets a referral to me. I'm the third attorney on this settlement.
Speaker 2:
The guy died in 2017. It's time to get this stuff done. This is way too long. Too much money has been spent on legal and professional fees. Somebody has to be incented to drive the ball across the goal line in six months or less. Let's go. So we create the list. Okay, there's 150 things to do. Who's going to do this, who's going to do that, who's going to do this? So we're settling.
Speaker 2:
At the end of this month, the foundation that the old guy set up is going to get three of the houses. Other houses are being sold. Cash goes out to the beneficiaries. The old lady wipes her hands. Finally it's done, and I'm like, man, this could have been done in 2018. It should have been, but our professional community, her professional advisors, didn't know how to play ball with each other and they also got frustrated with her because she's a little old lady and she doesn't do emails well. And she doesn't do emails well and she's from another country, so she speaks with an accent and she really wants to know all the detail. Nobody had time at 500 bucks an hour to give her the time, and I'm like look, it's a fixed fee to get this to across the goal line. We got to hustle. I started with her in January and we're going to be done at the end of the month. Three months done. I got a big check which is teeny compared to what the other attorneys have gotten A couple more questions while I have you.
Speaker 1:
What do you see, if anything, the trends going forward? How is technology, ai or anything else impacting the work that you do?
Speaker 2:
Just five years ago, maybe a little bit before that, the venture capital guys realized there's $100 trillion coming down the pike and we better get in front of it. But most of the effort thus far has been spent in the venture capital side and intense technology on the drafting of documents. How do you get the blueprint for settling the estate? So there's a lot of time and money being spent on the development of the plan and only now, literally like within the last six months, are people talking about man. Somebody's got to implement the plan when the guy who just paid us to write the estate plan online dies. There's a couple of new guys in the industry that are trying to create software solutions for this. They're mostly marketing to attorneys, trust and the state's attorneys to help us expedite the settlement process.
Speaker 2:
Trust in the state's attorneys aren't very good with being entrepreneurial or adopting new technology. They like doing it the old way. So the kind of venture funded technology driven institutions haven't yet had good success in that, but the need is absolutely massive. So the problem is getting worse. In California there are 6,000 trust and estates attorneys in the entire state and there's 150,000 baby boomers dying with estates to settle every year. There's way. Way too much demand and not enough supply of professionals. That's the problem. Young kids coming out of school want to be engineers for Google. They don't want to be trust and estates attorneys because they don't understand. Trust and estate settlement is an absolute booming business and nobody's hours of work to draft the document, which is a boilerplate document. That's a high margin business. Settling an estate plan is a pain in the neck. It's changing title and deed and talking to crazy beneficiaries and stuff and I'm thinking that problem's an opportunity because nobody wants to be in that business. So I'll go where the blue ocean is, where there's no competition.
Speaker 1:
Genuinely. This has been a very interesting conversation. This is our first time to talk. You explain the concepts and the problems so well that for someone like myself, who's not an expert at all in specifically what you do, I feel like I understand it now, and so I can imagine how impactful you are with the clients that you work with.
Speaker 2:
Thanks for saying that my business philosophy is go to the niches. Thanks for saying that.
Speaker 1:
My business philosophy is go to the niches. Is there any question that I haven't asked you that you think is relevant before we close up the interview?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, there's one project that I'm working on this is still in the skunk it so I'll let you know about it even before then which is, having done this for so long, I know the things that can make the settlement get screwed up. We think, oh my gosh, if I only had access to dad three months before he died, there's a whole bunch of stuff we could have fixed. That would have made the settlement be even faster. So we're starting a product or a service, which is when your client gets a diagnosis hey, this is terminal. I'm not going to be here to file the 2025 return. Are we all positive that my financial affairs are in order? What that requires is a sprint of let's check all the IRA beneficiary forms, let's make sure that the tax return is vested correctly. Let's make sure that the house in Oregon has the right deed on it. Let's make sure we know where the safety deposit keys are, or who's going to get the 64 Mustang, so the boys don't fight. There's all of these things that we know are going to slow down the settlement. That if we just had dad when he got the bad diagnosis and we say, look, this is a two-week sprint, we have to address 25 issues and if we address them in a short period of time and get it teed up, then the eldest son will have the baton. It'll be ready to go. It's going to be a bummer because dad's dead, but we will have untied many knots before he died because we imagined a pre-death administration.
Speaker 2:
I've done probably 20 of those so far. I call them the estate vault, where we take all this stuff and go through the exercise and put it in the vault, give everyone access and say when dad dies, call me. A month later it's already ready to go, we're going to fly. That's really rewarding because I get to look at the guy who's going to die and say, look, your spouse is going to be okay, your kids are going to be okay. It's not going to be fun, but your team has rehearsed this and it's game time and we're ready to go.
Speaker 2:
That's really rewarding. It's a smaller fee, it's less time, but I'm thinking it's a massive impact. I've seen the massive impact for the clients that I've served and I'm just beginning to see how I can dance with the CPA or attorney or CPA or investment advisor that doesn't have time to do that full-blown pre-death audit to get it all teed up and they're relieved too that okay, look, I have a duty to show up for my client. But there's some of these skills I don't have the time or energy to do, and so doing that with them is fun. That's the estate. It's right. Before dad dies it's the bad diagnosis.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, I can imagine the value in that. I can also imagine it's just how you position that, because that can be tricky, right the?
Speaker 2:
timing is key. I tried pitching it ahead of time, saying look, I know that pretty much all of the CPAs and attorneys and investment advisors don't have all their stuff in order. I get that, and so I was trying to convince them hey, do it way ahead of time, do it when you're 45, because you don't know when you're going to hit buy bus. And nobody was willing to take action. And then I changed it to when you get the diagnosis, there is no excuse. Now is the time you must do it. And that sales pitch started hitting with 100% close rate. The bad news. The trigger is the bad news your client shares with you.
Speaker 2:
Bob, I got a bad diagnosis. I want to make sure that everything's in order and the CPA is like dude, it's April 10th. I do not have time for this right now. I can't help. Maybe I'll call you in May. I want to be the guy for the elite team that says look, we have the SWAT team. They can come in. They're not going to replace anybody's role. They're going to be here episodically. We're going to coordinate everything. Get it in the vault so that everyone's ready to go when the day comes. Then, when the day comes, we're ready. We will have solved a bunch of the hangups ahead of time.
Speaker 1:
Very good For someone who's listening to this podcast, and where can they go to either learn more about you or to reach out?
Speaker 2:
If it's the elite guys, then they can get me on school. I'm on there. I'm one of the virtual family office members available to help. Anodos is the name of the company. I think we're the only people in the world named that. Anodos means to escape out of a hole, and that's what I want to help the clients feel is the relief of getting out of the place they're in. A-n-o-d-o-s. Google that and you'll find us.
Speaker 1:
I feel relief as a result of this conversation. Thank you so much for your time today. I appreciate it. Sure thing, thanks.