Mark Cecchini:
Thanks, A.J. I’m very excited to dig in and thanks for following along on my content journey. It’s been a lot of fun.

A.J. Lawrence:
Sounds kind of, yeah. But you have a lot of great bangers. The types of problems that you have when you grow, it’s there’s more moving parts as an entrepreneur as you get past that seven figure mark and you kind of start realizing you have not just more income, but you have potentially this great amount of equity. But it’s all tied into your business and it’s very hard to access that and sort of strategically plan. With my last exit, did no planning and it was sort of like, oh, it was going to be just a big amount of money and that was it. So in hindsight, that wasn’t the best way of going through the process. And so hopefully we can kind of talk about that. But first, why don’t you kind of share a little bit because I was really fascinated. You’ve worked for different financial, you’re a financial planner, you’ve worked for organizations, for family offices and now you’ve started about a year and change ago, your own firm. So can you kind of walk us through how you came to this?

Mark Cecchini:
Absolutely, yeah. So, my journey has been sort of in three phases I think and I’ll keep it as brief as I can because I’ve had some interesting experiences that were short lived, particularly in the wealth tech sort of, you know, RIA firms that are venture capital backed and they’re RIAs or registered investment advisors. We can talk about the different types of firms out there as we go, but using the venture capital backing to build a product that is then staffed by advisors and reaching a certain audience, whether it be tech employees or sort of the mass affluent category that hasn’t had traditional access to the best advisor. Starting from the very beginning, I went to Virginia Tech. I was a very general business major at the time. Love Virginia Tech. My family goes back three generations there and I went the other way. My dad and grandfather were engineers and I didn’t think I was quite smart enough so I went business. And as I was meandering through the gen ed classes, through the business school, I found this financial planning program. Looking back 12 years ago, best decision I ever made was to lean into that concentration. And a great program down there that really taught us how to be holistic, comprehensive advisors, focused on everything from cash flow to insurance to estate planning, college funding, comprehensive planning at its highest level really leaned in there. Got my degree in finance and financial planning. Worked for a firm in Washington D.C. called Sullivan Bruyette Speros & Blayney. It’s a big mouthful, but they were one of the first independent platforms on Schwab’s now very big RIA platform. So 1995 started there. I think when I was there, they’re about 4 billion in assets, so very, very large shop. But they really trained us from day one on how to be holistic advisors. You know, we didn’t have our own clients. When you’re 22, there’s not many people are going to give you a million dollars to manage or trust you with their whole life savings. So really learned everything I could about the business. Took notes in meetings, did research, did client emails, investment rebalancing, comprehensive planning, input. So that was the first five years of my career. Then went out to LA and worked for ultra high net worth firm, multifamily office. And not a single family office where it’s one family with nine figures or more in wealth, but you know, probably 20 to 30 million plus was the average client size we had in house bill pay. Like literally doing people’s payroll for their household employees. We’d send all their wires and checks. And home renovation projects we had in house legal, in house tax and of course all the other things like investing and financial planning were all in the same roof. So some of my clients were people that you’d recognize by name, CEOs, athletes. Really got to see how a 10 person team might come together under the same roof for one client, one family. And then spent some time in the wealth tech space for three different startups. Still doing financial planning, investment management, tax, but for venture backed startups. Fast forward to today, I have my own practice within an RIA that’s private called Quadrant Capital. We’re located in Eastern Pennsylvania.

A.J. Lawrence:
What is an RIA? May I ask?

Mark Cecchini:
Great question. So it’s a Registered Investment Advisor which you know, you have your broker dealer firms that are sort of potentially affiliated with a much larger entity. Typically those tend to be fee based firms. They do fee for service, but also commission based work with insurance and mutual funds and that sort of thing. And then you have your traditional wirehouse in your bank. So wirehouse would be something like Merrill Lynch, you know, potentially upper Jones Morgan Stanley. And then you have your banks, the Wells Fargo’s and the Chase’s of the world which now have their own private wealth offering where someone like me could possibly work. So fast forward to today, I have an RIA called Quadrant Capital. I have my own practice within the firm, so we’re about 20 people in total. And my practice is, my practice manages about $100 million for a younger clientele, which is really interesting. I think one of the most unique things about my practice is the average age is 38. Just looked it up a few weeks ago cause I was speaking at a conference. The average age traditional wealth management practice is 62 for clients. So very, very young demographic. And I work with about 45 families right now, quickly scaling with that and do about 700,000 in revenue.

A.J. Lawrence:
All right, so you moved over into this private practice and doing it, looking in, you did mention the range was a little bit smaller though. You do have some much larger clients. Let’s kind of talk about what this looks like and then let’s kind of get into the thought process that goes in for someone who is looking for this type of service.

Mark Cecchini:
Absolutely. So when you look at my client base, there’s a couple different factions. I have a lot of tech employees at both public and private tech companies. So on the public side, think Meta and Amazon and Google and all those major FAANG players, Atlassian, those kind of companies. On the private side, they’re either very, very early startups, you know, think less than a hundred people who I hesitate to say the names because you’d probably be able to pinpoint who my clients are. And then on the late stage companies, companies like SpaceX, OpenAI, anthropic, stripe, so much, much later stage companies, multibillion dollar valuations. And the other factions are folks in crypto. So either they, they’ve either heavily invested in crypto from the early days and they’ve just amassed a lot of wealth, or they actually work for these companies like Solana Foundation. Algorand Foundation used to have Coinbase, not anymore. But they are sometimes compensated with tokens, right? So not Coinbase, but these other smaller foundations and things are compensated with tokens. And if your tokens explode all of a sudden your RSUs or token grants are now showing 9.4 million on your W2 for that year. So a lot of complexity, especially within tax and liquidity. And then the third faction is small and medium sized business owners. So anywhere from sort of the company doing 30 million in gross revenue all the way to somebody who’s sort of doing commercial insurance or underwriting or that sort of thing. They have their own firm but they’re doing a million plus in revenue. So what’s consistent across those three factions are complexity, right? So I live in complexity all day, every day. They tend to have less time, right? So they’re looking to delegate and buy back their time however possible. And they’ve historically, in my client base, have never used an advisor before. So they’ve been true DIY-ers, intentionally or otherwise, whether they have money at Vanguard or Wealthfront or Betterment, or they’ve just let their crypto be their entire asset structure or their company equity was literally 90%, 99% of their net worth until the company went liquid or they decided to cash out. So a lot of complexity. They’re also starting families, buying houses, trying to protect their wealth once they built and sustained it. So we deal a lot with college funding for kids and marrying finances together for the first time, multi-generational issues. When you’re stuck in the sandwich generation, sometimes you’re dealing with very, very young children and maybe very old parents. Right? So how to balance those things when it comes to wealth protection and transfer. The other part is liquidity events. So that’s one of my specialties: pre and post liquidity event. Obviously IPOs have been few and far between the last few years but tender offers are still very strong and M&A activity, you know, secondary markets. If your company is late, late stage enough, but not quite yet public, you can potentially find buyers for your private equity on the on line marketplaces.

A.J. Lawrence:
I’m always fascinated by a good crypto story because I was involved with a few ICOs and one or two did some big pops, but then one was a huge rug pull so I never quite got out. But I did get incredibly stupid lucky on Bitcoin that I bought in ’11 and lost my keys until 18. So that was nice. Someone who does have a seven figure business, what are sort of they dealing with and how are you helping them?

Mark Cecchini:
I think it starts with the business structure, right? That’s the like anything in personal finance, the sooner the better, right? The sooner you start planning, typically the better it works out. Whether it be long term compound interest or just having the right structure in place from a legal perspective. So we help clients think through, you know, should we be an S Corp? Should we be taxed as a default LLC? Should we be a C Corp? Because we want to raise capital and have outside shareholders and eventually, maybe go public and get QSBS treatment which we can talk about qualified small business stock. So the structure is really important. It can be changed, right? But it can be also painful to change. So that structure is really important from a taxation perspective. You know, it depends on a lot of factors which, you know, time and complexity and cost of administration, the tax treatment, the number of employees that you’ll have, how much you want to pay yourself versus reinvest into the business. There’s the whole S Corp thing that I think has gotten a lot of traction online and particularly in the content world, which is the idea of paying yourself a salary that gets paid out via W2 that’s relatively low and then paying yourself the rest in owner’s draw or distributions, which the main benefit of doing that from tax perspective is they’re exempt from FICA tax. So Social Security, Medicare do not apply to owners draw. The other part is just administration. Do you want to have your own bookkeeping firm? You want to have in house tax and bookkeeping functionality in your business or do you want to outsource that? So finding clients that best CPA for their situation, that has the expertise in what they’re trying to do. A lot of times now tax firms do not do the bookkeeping function. So either you’re doing it really well internally with QuickBooks or whatever the situation is, or you’re outsourcing bookkeeping functionality too. So those two functions have to be really soundly structured for things to work. And then you mentioned cash flow and we’re seeing it right now with the tariff situation. There are some small businesses who are extremely up in the air in terms of what they’re forecasted revenues are tariff situations, particularly if you’re doing business in China or the EU. The last few weeks it’s been a roller coaster and just realizing that you have to have a war chest of capital, whether it be inside the business or in your own personal life if you’re 100% owner that you can use to sustain those periods of uncertainty. But when things are going really well, you have the opposite problem, which is I have more money in my business tracking account that I than I ever thought I would and I have no idea how to deploy it or where to put it. And so I think sometimes folks are paralyzed with sort of that indecision. So we help them put together regular investment plan, everything from a cash war chest, high yield savings, short term ETFs that are lower risk. We have municipal bonds for clients in high tax states or high income situations and figuring out how to balance risk with safety. So that’s a big part of what we do as well.

A.J. Lawrence:
And just to kind of clarify, you work only with American clients. Correct?

Mark Cecchini:
But I do have several clients with cross border implications. Either they’re from outside the US and they’re living here on a Visa or temporary green card, permanent green card. I have clients who are going through the EB5 process, which I don’t know if you’re familiar with, is a large investment into a project somewhere. It’s very low interest bearing but eventually you get the money back and you get your citizenship. So it’s one way to fast track that process.

A.J. Lawrence:
And isn’t there the new 5 million, you get a trump gold card.

Mark Cecchini:
The gold card and the $5 million US visa, you know, golden visa. I’ve actually helped clients get golden visas elsewhere, like Portugal and Spain. And those rules are constantly changing. The last part of the international, cross border implications are just owning assets overseas. Clients from India who still own property back in India or they have family back there and they’re sending them money or they’re just trying to support where they came from and make angel investments and strategic investments that are not domiciled in the US so there’s a whole added layer of complexity there.

A.J. Lawrence:
Let me give you an example that, you know, I know I had joked before that I may kind of bring in an example that is for a friend that’s really for me. But this is actually a listener that I’ve spoken to now and we’ve actually every few weeks he runs a security workflow. SaaS took an open source project and built sort of a private. He calls it a sass, but yeah, whatever. It’s a little bit different. I jokingly call it a puppy that poops gold. He’s at about 3 million 3838, 73% net margin. He’s a bit paralyzed. So he’s basically dumping his free cash flow. He hasn’t found a way to utilize that extra cash flow. So he’s growing between. You know, last year was a little tight, but generally he grows about 10 to 15% year over year. He’s slowing down a bit. You know, a few years ago he had a nice big bump and now he’s kind of in this steady growth. So he’s incrementally reinvesting in the business. So he’s dumping everything pretty much into Vanguard. He basically wants to have that eight figure. Actually 15. 15 is his number just in the bank. So there’s no worries whatsoever for him, his wife and his three young girls. And I’ve been saying to him for a long time, it’s like, think you’re being overtly conservative because if you have this fear of like, you know, I’m not going to do anything until I know I can sell this or hit my fu number. The investments can just pay for everything moving forward. What would be sort of the approach and sort of?

Mark Cecchini:
It’s a great question. It’s not an uncommon scenario. I think first and Foremost, I’m a planner by background in training. So I start with the plan, right? So we don’t have to do this knockdown, drag out, ten hours, ten meetings, a hundred page financial plan before investing, right? I don’t think that’s quite, quite necessary anymore. But I always think that I don’t really work with any client who’s investment only, right? Because I think it’s really difficult to invest in a vacuum. And without investing with a purpose or a plan behind it, we’re sort of a rudderless ship in some ways. It’s like, what do you want to do? Do you want to beat the market every year? Okay, great. It’s really challenging. Do you want to maintain your capital while earning the highest yield? Okay, great. Probably don’t need me for that, right? Just buy a bunch of treasury bills, muni bonds, and maybe some private credit. So first I would take them through a planning discovery process. In my case, it’s usually two or three meetings, 30 minutes each, really getting to the core of what they’re trying to accomplish. The next step is what I like to call creating a personal capital stack, right? So every company or startup has a capital stack, typically investing in a big real estate syndicate, they have a capital stack of, you know, mezzanine debt and all these other different types of capital they’ve raised. So, you know, it starts with cash and cash equivalents, public equity, which I would consider stocks, bonds, mutual funds and ETFs that are all liquid. And you have your private equity sleeve, that could be the business itself. It could be, you know, your company stock if you’re a tech employee or a public employee of a company that’s granting you shares. And then you have your, you know, sort of alternatives, which I think as a broad category, you know, you have your crypto, you have angel investments, you know, strategic friends and family sort of things where you’re supporting other folks projects. And the hardest part, honestly is figuring out how much in each bucket, right? And sometimes it’s not, it’s out of your control. You might have an illiquid asset that you can’t sell. But bringing it back to the Vanguard issue, it’s never been cheaper or easier to invest by yourself, right? You can go to Vanguard right now, open an account in five minutes and put money into a couple ETFs or mutual funds. That will be the lowest cost. Most passive approach you can take where that falls short sometimes is we’re our own worst enemies when it comes to money, right? It’s really hard to detach from your own wealth. So if you’re watching your accounts at any frequency level, you might see some volatility that might cause you to deviate from your original plan. The other part is the domestic bias. Right. It’s never been stronger. Right now, even though international has outperformed us year to date, there’s still extremely strong domestic bias and for good reason. Right. We’ve seen extremely strong and long periods of U.S. outperformance, but we have no idea if that will continue. Right. We may not be in that environment for the next 10 years. Now, if you’re patriotic and you think we’re going to win the AI race, you know, I think we’re in lead for AI, but who knows for how long and you know, will that permeate through the entire US market? Nobody knows. But there have been periods where the US has either been flat, right. For a 10 year period we had the lost decade in the S&P 500. But we’ve also seen periods where the international markets have outperformed over, you know, a several year cycle. So those are the kind of things where if you’re investing in Wealthfront or Betterment or Vanguard diy, Fidelity diy, Schwab diy, there are often at least a few things that we can fix around the edges. Something like investing in taxable bonds when you’re in the highest tax bracket in the highest tax state, it’s probably not the best way to invest. When you could invest in a similar level of muni bond risk municipal bonds that pay you federal tax free interest and potentially state tax free interest and your tax equivalent yield will be much higher than it would be in a corporate bond. So just things like that on the investment side, but always goes back to the plan in their strategic capital stack.

A.J. Lawrence:
When you were talking about the plan, I think something like that especially. I do apologize to this person. Yeah, he’ll know that I’m kind of talking in broad strokes about him. But the fear around ensuring that he both has the safety, something happens to him. But then also the, the idea that he can only take risks when he hits some sort of, you know, FU number. I think having a plan that is understandable and actionable takes a lot of the mental overload off but then also allows for clearer planning within the business. Because you know, as he and I talk about it, almost every type of investment that we discuss around growing his business does come back to. Well, I need to make sure this talked about that a little bit earlier about you know, that idea of like the safety Net the idea of having a plan to follow or at least to begin the process of I think reduces anxiety, mental overload and just creates clarity because you’ve limited sort of the noise that you’re looking at. So that way you can start moving and focusing on building the business and achieving larger goals and not worrying about moving all the parts. Let’s kind of talk about that plan because I think that’s where a lot of entrepreneurs are worried about. They’re either worried they’re going to be sold something that isn’t appropriate to them because there are some people who are like this, or they’re going to be overpaid. Let’s kind of talk to these fears and how kind of move into working with an expert like you.

Mark Cecchini:
It goes back to the plan. But I will say that our initial plans we do with clients go stale almost immediately. Right. It’s just life is too dynamic, your business is too dynamic. Markets change. We meet and iterate so frequently. Right. It’s at least quarterly for many of my clients because their balance sheets and their complexity necessitate a very frequent touch point. Right. So even if we’re not meeting quarterly, we’re probably trading emails. We probably have a shared document or two that’s open. We have a live net worth dashboard that all the clients connect their accounts to. So whether it’s business accounts, personal equity, real estate, private companies, it’s all in there and we update it frequently. So I’ll just use one of my larger clients as an example. We have the business accounts and his personal accounts all at Charles Schwab. So we use Schwab and Fidelity as our two custodians. You know, that was a business decision my firm made 10 years ago. But we’re, we’re pretty happy with both of those as custodians. So what’s nice about that is you’d be shocked at how many people let cash build up in their checking accounts, whether it be personal or business checking. And you know, there may be a reason for that. Hey, we’ve got upcoming payroll, we’ve got upcoming estimated tax payments. My tech clients had a lot of expenses around taxes on their RSUs or maybe they’re planning on exercising stock options, which requires capital. But if you’re not using that, even if you were expecting it six months out or 12 months out, you should have that in something higher yielding. Right? We’re still getting 4 plus percent on pretty risk free capital. You know, we weren’t in that environment several years ago, but we are now. So why not get that, you know, that added yield while you’re waiting for those obligations. And if you have a system in place, it’s really easy to get money back to where it needs to go within a matter of days. Sometimes the same day. Right. If you’re wiring, you know, something from Fidelity and it’s in money market, it’s still a same day wire. Right? So Schwab is a little bit different, but we won’t go into that. The same client that I’m referencing, you know, he may buy another business, right. He may buy an extremely large piece of equipment for his existing business or there just may be some tariff issues that he might have to deal with. So write, write a few large checks for imports, but he has that strategic hash reserve that we can then send wires or cash anywhere we need to. He can write checks out of the account. So balancing that versus hey, this money should really be earmarked for long term. And so we’re going to invest in a broadly diversified bucket of public passive or you know, potentially some tactical strategic things like something like a custom direct stock index. Right. Is something that’s become popular. So instead of buying an ETF which tracks the S&P 500, we might buy hundreds of components of the S and P and then it’ll strategically sell those losers for what they call tax alpha. Right? So that’s one more interesting idea. And then you can add long short on top of that, which is adding short leverage and borrowing on top of the long only custom direct index. That’s a little bit more complicated, but that can even supercharge really for people who have expected high capital gains. And in the case of long, short, short term capital gains, which are more punitive than than long term. Back to your friend’s example, I think having the strategy around the business forecast, right? The best guess of what the business forecast is for the next year or two, then backing into what your personal expenditures will be again for things like down payments on second or third homes, maybe you’re upgrading your primary residence. Even though the interest environment is rate environment isn’t friendly. You know, I have clients who talk to me all the time about hey, we’d love to put this new addition on our house. Okay, great. Where’s the capital coming from? And if we’re investing for the long term, then everything’s mostly still liquid. We don’t ever really invest most client capital in private illiquid alts. Unless that can be 10 plus year money. Right. That really should be a much longer time horizon because in Some cases you really can’t get your money back. In some cases it’s quarterly redemption periods or monthly liquid. But we really need to be hyper focused on capital needs, goals, risk tolerance objectives, and then be able to pivot at a moment’s notice as things change with the business.

A.J. Lawrence:
So it sounds like very much building the relationship and understanding the need. And you know, I think from the entrepreneur side, and this is a little bit on my own personal is being able to feel comfortable with, you know, the advisor. Because the question around money and what you want to spend or need just from a personal side, going back and forth around, you know, when we were living in Spain, my wife and I on buying a house and what we were going to do, we really, it took a while for us to be clear one, what we were doing and how we were going to pay for it and do that. It was like relatively simple coming back, but it was still like, well, I don’t know this and do we really want to go over this and you need that comfort level to be able to talk to someone like you?

Mark Cecchini:
Sure. And I want to double click really quickly if it’s okay. A.J. on the, on the Chase private client example for your wife, I think fees are hotly, hotly debated in financial services, as they should be. Right. I’m super conscious of client fees at all times. Always want to make sure the value that provide at least 2x the fee that they’re char that they’re paying me. I’m biased, right. I work for an independent ria. We charge, you know, percentage of assets under management. I think it’s relatively industry standard. It ranges from 0.6% up to 1%. Ranges based on the balance of the accounts. But that’s holistic, right? That covers everything that I do for people. I’m not charging by the hour, I’m not charging project fees. It’s really holistic for the entire relationship with me. Which covers planning, tax consulting, state coordination, insurance, college funding, philanthropy, et cetera. The nice thing about being at a firm like this is we’re not captive. Right. We don’t have someone who, from the corporate overlord that is saying, you need to sell these mutual funds, you need to sell these annuities, you need to sell this life insurance. And again, I don’t shame anyone for building that part of their business in financial services. But I’d like to think of us as like a Costco, right. We have everything available to you. I don’t get paid differently whether a client invests in all cash. Well, in all cash, we probably would figure out a billing arrangement, but all the way to the riskiest private equity investment that we’re shooting for a much higher return profile. I don’t get paid any differently as an advisor, nor does my firm. Right. So I think that’s really important when you’re shopping around for the, you know, marketplace.

A.J. Lawrence:
It used to be sort of just like the two things were either fee based or the commission based. But I think what has kind of come clear, there’s a big separation between money under management and then the commission base, which is generally also some form of money under management. But funds that were very high commit paying out commissions. And it was sort of like, why are we in this risk profile? And then, you know, you do a little digging. Oh, this is one of the highest industry commission structures.

Mark Cecchini:
Yeah. And there are firms that now have opened up the fee structure to meet clients where they are. Right. And I do the same. So my fee structure can be at assets or management fee, but it typically has an implied floor. Right. So right now for me, that’s 15,000 a year. But you can either give me all your money to manage. That’s great. We’ll figure out the right structure. Or we can do a flat planning engagement that is a retainer based for the year. Now there’s other advisors who might do an hourly charge. Right. Hey, I just want to talk to you every time I want to talk to you. And I’ll pay your hourly rate kind of like an attorney would. There are some limitations and challenges to that. In my experience with clients, you know, if you know you’re going to be paying an hourly rate for someone, as you call them, you’re probably less likely to call them. And we just need to be so involved in people’s lives. That typically doesn’t work that well. But there are advisors who have built their entire firms that way. So a lot of different ways to, to, to charge and be charged in.

A.J. Lawrence:
In this business, rather than going into sort of like what does it mean at each step. Let’s kind of talk about someone start looking at this maybe about what part of their. Since we are talking about business owners just kind of broached a million plus annual revenues, estimated 30% net returns, business that’s worth one and a half and generating for them somewhere, you know, between their payroll and whatever they’re taking out, somewhere around three to 400 a year. What should they be thinking and how should they be looking at a firm like you sure.

Mark Cecchini:
Yeah, I think, you know, there’s the Strategy and the financial piece of it, which I always start with a housekeeping exercise, right. That’s very objective. I’ll use a few metaphors, one of which is a medical professional. Right. I can’t really diagnose you until I do, you know, a very deep look over your chart, your medical history, all these different things. So we do the same thing. So in my case, you know, if a client reaches out to me from Twitter or, you know, referral or somewhere else, we always have a very casual mutual discovery meeting. It’s about 30 minutes in duration. We try not to talk too much about the numbers, although the numbers are important and many of my clients are very numbers driven, so we get right into it. But I want to understand your values and your objectives for reaching out to someone like me. Right. There’s typically an impetus to reaching out, whether it be, hey, it’s just gotten too much to manage, I need some help, or hey, I have this, this very isolated thing I need to deal with, or I’m coming up on this liquidity event. So we do that. The second meeting is what I call the detailed financial review. So I solicit some information. Business income statements, past tax returns, investment statements. All of that is highly confidential. It’s stored in a secure vault. I then re read back to them what I think is the opportunities, you know, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats of their situation. And then here’s where I think I could add value. Sometimes I say I don’t think I could add enough value, right? I legitimately, because I don’t need 300 clients to be successful. And right now I have 45. Maybe I’ll scale to 80 or a hundred, but I still want to keep that really high touch, practice. So sometimes I say there’s not enough value for me to justify this fee. But here’s a few colleagues I know in the industry are either charging less or they might be better fits for you or they have expertise in that one thing that you’re looking for, which I don’t. So that’s just in terms of like assessing the fit, generating value before they even sign on as a client. But, you know, figuring out for them what’s important to them. For the business, obviously the tax review is important. I have a tax background. I’ve done taxes in my past. So I’m not a cpa. I don’t sign tax returns. But I have a deep level of tax planning knowledge. So, hey, maybe you’re structured improperly. Let’s bring in my, one of my top CPA firms that I work with outside of my firm. They can do a review of your past returns, recommend potentially a new structure, and then I even have an attorney that might be able to restructure the business for them. So none of these people and I have a paid arrangement with each other. They’re just the best professionals I found for these things. And then the opportunity cost of continuing to do it themselves versus having a plan, having an advisor, and what is it going to cost them? Right. So can Mark or his firm provide enough value to me on an ongoing basis that it’s worth the fee and some of it is not measurable? I have a lot of people, particularly younger clients, who are very potentially skeptical about financial advisors or financial services. They want to know quantifiably, how is this going to benefit me? And sometimes I say I can’t do that perfectly. I can try. Right. I can pull out all these things or be on the investment side or tax saving strategies or hey, did you know about a donor advised fund gifting appreciated securities into a charitable vehicle? It’s a huge tax savings for that year. Maybe they didn’t know about that, but there are things I can quantify like an hour of my time. I can start to do some math on that. Hey, if I charge you hourly, you might actually be paying more than you are by my fee structure. And then it’s up to the client to see, you know, whether or not that value is, is worth it to them. And sometimes it takes years. Right. I had my largest client reach out to me on X and it took a year of, you know, a little bit of back and forth and just staying in touch before that pen ever went to the paper. In business owners case in particular, there’s so much value to be provided. I have colleagues who build their entire practices around just serving business owners. And they may go a level further, you know, maybe 30 to 50 year old business owners or people that work in the pest control business. Right. I have a friend who has a niche in pest control business owners. Right. He knows that cold. Right. Whatever those people are dealing with, he knows it and he can help. But I think it’s a really deep and personal relationship that has to be in line with what the person’s looking for. And sometimes it’s hard to know until you’re in the relationship what that’s going to be like and whether it’s worth it. So that’s the, that’s the challenge up front. Absolutely. There’s the tactical, very specific questions around how many clients you serve, how long have you been at the firm, how long you’ve been doing this? What are your certifications? I think some of that is fairly table stakes and could probably even be found by following me online or looking at my LinkedIn. But the other questions I think that are more thoughtful are, what are your career goals as an advisor? That could be a make or break thing. You could find out somebody wants to jump ship from Merrill lynch and start their own ria and that’s going to impact the client. Right. And hopefully they wouldn’t share that before they already had their loi. But things like, what are your career goals? What’s your planning philosophy around financial planning and college funding, buying homes and starting businesses, investing in franchises. There’s so many different things that people can do. And I know advisors who, if you came to them with, hey, I want to buy into a franchise, you know, local sub shop that’s opening up, they’d say, no, that’s a terrible idea. Right. Just because their own personal philosophy doesn’t align with that. And that’s okay. Right. But that’s something you want to know up front, obviously. Investment philosophy and how the firm invests, what the firm philosophy is, what the investment committee is thinking about. The markets right now, when unaccessible is another good one. Right. What are the hours that we can meet and are you available on the weekends? And if I have a question, what’s the best way to contact you? Is it via text or phone call or email? So those kinds of things I think are eye opening. But also you want to make sure that the advisor works with people that look similar to you in some fashion. Right now I have clients who are 69 and I have clients who are 29 and they look very differently. But there is a level of consistency across all my clients that I think makes me really able to scale and provide technology and planning and investment opportunities that maybe would be hard if I had clients all over the demographic map.

A.J. Lawrence:
You’ve talked about the use of technology, let’s talk about the rise of technology over the past 10 years around the investment space has been amazing, but now with AI, it’s sort of like it’s becoming a little supercharged. So how is AI impacting what you’re doing and how does it allow you to provide different, more, you know, where do you see yourself working with AI? So let’s kind of talk what it allows you to do and then how you see it, what you’ll be doing with AI as moves forward.

Mark Cecchini:
Sure. I think first and foremost it’s just Efficiency of time. Right. And strategy. And you know, we have to be ultra sensitive in what we do in terms of giving the systems, you know, training data and being very, very careful around it, anonymity and just even recording meetings and having that do the meeting summary. That’s probably the most common use case in financial industry right now is you know you meet with client. I always send personal follow ups with action items and summary. That has cut down hours and hours of my time. Right. But you need to be really sensitive about what you’re feeding it. Same with PDFs and Excel templates and everything. It’s just, you know, really have to be sensitive of PII in in those systems. But you know, I’ll give you an example of a SpaceX client I have. It was 10 years of equity history, right. 10 years of annual sometimes multi times a year grants, incentive stock options which have an AMT or alternate minimum tax component versus RSUs NSOs. You know, there’s tender offers coming up. There’s so much data. Right. I think once he exported the file from his Shareworks Morgan Stanley Shareworks site, it was probably a 70 page PDF right. By the time all the lots and every, all the history and exercises. So just having something to use that to, to as a repository and help me think through, you know, because I have technology platforms for everything. I have something for planning investments. I have tax software that does multi year scenario analysis. There’s equity tools that are just specific to company equity. But it still takes the human element to kind of get that data in a position to massage it to where it can be then analyzed. So that’s a huge part of how I’m leveraging AI. I think a lot of times clients bring in legacy securities to us from other places and so we kind of get this big inherited mess of cash and stocks with embedded gains and private investments in crypto. So being able to gain insights from that right away without having to do all the manual spreadsheet work and PDF work. In terms of how the investing landscape is being impacted, I think we’re still in the early innings, but we’ve been seeing this for years in terms of high frequency trading, algorithmic trading, all these different things that just cause markets to move faster than they did before. Particularly to the downside. Right. I think there’s a lot of people are always looking to sell and so if we get bet one bad headline, that’s why I think you see some of the more aggressive down downtrends. But I’m hypersensitive. I think Being a human in the planning process and the advisory client relationship is more important than ever. Many of my clients are software engineers at the leading edge of AI and they still hire me, right, because at the end of the day, they can put in all the knowledge work, all of the prompts that they know better, way better than I do into the system, you know, and they still hallucinate and they still give them things that are potentially wildly helpful. But when it goes to take that action, I think they’re still looking to someone like me to provide that second set of eyes, the objective look at, you know, their life and their values and whether they should buy that house in the Hamptons or, you know, move back to, you know, Denmark where their family is. Like, there’s so many things that come up still early innings. I, I feel like I’m closer to it because my clients are in these companies like Anthropic and OpenAI and that sort of thing. But it’s, it’s fun, right? I, I think I would love to be disrupted out of a job someday because then it means that every person in America and around the world has access to incredibly detailed and action oriented advice.

A.J. Lawrence:
This is where the fun kind of comes because going to that direction is like, oh, but then where is sort of value being created? And that’s where all of a sudden the question is like, traditionally technology always creates new avenues for value creation. You know, new jobs, new work, new whatever. Just because it has in the past doesn’t mean it will in the future. Past results have not, do not guarantee your future.

Mark Cecchini:
Yes, past performance is exactly. And I like to use the example of tax. Right. Almost every one of my clients comes to me with tax headaches. And what I tell them is, yes, AI hopefully will make this a lot easier on everyone. But until the IRS and the government adapts technology in the way that the rest of the private sector is, you’re still going to have to flow through that, that entity, right? So I think we’re a little ways away from having taxes be able to be prepared at the snap finger. But I think that’s part of the reason why I built my practice the way it is is because I serve as the quarterback to their CPA and their estate planning attorney, their personal attorney, their, you know, mortgage broker. I found one of the best mortgage brokers in the country through social media. I send her everyone as a first pass because she just, she’s just the best, right? Her team is high caliber, she can write in all 50 states, she’s creative in the underwriting process. So if you have a big illiquid position or if your company stock is, you know, the majority of your wealth and your W2 says 900 grand, but your cash comp was only 150, she can still use that as, you know, proof of debt to income and just creative different things. So being able to like get on a meeting with someone’s estate planner, you know, I just had this happen last week. So found the person who’s gonna do the estate plan, which still has to be state specific. So New York was in this case, vetted him upfront. So we had a call with him before the client even met him. And then before the client and I got on the call with him for the first time on the zoom, he already had his full detailed balance sheet and a high level overview of his family structure. Right. With the client’s permission. So how much time did that save right there that the, that the attorney would be billing that client just by me doing a little bit of work upfront in that process.

A.J. Lawrence:
Now that’s pretty cool. I’m going to steal that line. The quarterback for your financial needs. You know, that really is a powerful thing because similar to running a business, your personal finances, it’s not rocket science, but the amount of moving parts rapidly creates complexity. Joke. From the marketing point of view and just from the clients I’ve worked with for years, you know, the more moving parts allows you to create more opportunities, but you have to always weigh what the overhead of these moving parts do to your ability to achieve your goals. And you know, working with someone like me when it comes to the business point is about reducing that overhead to focus on the directional effort to grow the company or to achieve whatever your business goal is.99% of the time is grow. But still there are some people who have other goals. But the idea is when you have other parts of complexity in your life, finance, for some reason, personal finances and how the interaction between business and personal seems to be a big part of our lives. It’s been really eye opening. First filing you and now talking to you about just the ways to take control of that by working with someone like you. Because I know for me my goals in life are kids and then creating, you know, more value for the people I work with. And way down on my list is making sure my finances are in order other than the fact that they exist and they’re growing and they’re doing things that allow me to eventually retire in this in southern Spain and drink really amazing line compared to The US in the sunshine. Taking that worry off your plate and working with someone allows you to focus on the things that are most important to you in your life. And we didn’t even really get into the larger office planning. Cause I did even in, in family office planning because who’s. And I find it very fascinating sort of the legacy planning and the larger questions. But maybe that’s for another time is this has been fascinating just by looking at the beginning and the entry point. If you are out there looking at your businesses and having been there and having kind of grown through the early seven figures into eight and those will never quite hit eight, but right below that complexity and the mistakes you can make by not really paying attention to that added complexity or the trade offs you have. Having more money is a big, it’s a very, you know, it’s a horrible problem to have. So let me play my teeny little violin for myself when I talk about this. But because of the lack of the planning and the lack of talking with the, you know, someone like yourself, I know I overpaid taxes, I know I made investments that were foolish. You know, besides the amount of ICOs I went into there wasn’t that plan to kind of work against that would have helped. I still got incredibly lucky and I still am very privileged. You know, hindsight’s an amazing thing to realize the importance of a service, you know, something that you do. I’m like damn.

Mark Cecchini:
And I think really quickly I’ll just say that a lot of my clients are brilliant, right? They are not hiring me because they’re not intelligent enough to figure this stuff out. Hiring me because they want to buy their time back. They want to take a driver passenger approach, which you know, I do have clients that are true delegators, right? Like I really just want you to handle this, right? Keep me informed, just handle it. And then I have clients who are driver passenger who they want to be really involved. They want to see the analytical side behind the scenes. They want to collaborate on the decision making. They might even want a quarterly review meeting to, to gauge, you know, which individual stocks we’re going to take bets on in their side account, right? Because sometimes my clients have accounts that they still like to play in Robinhood and that sort of thing. But the majority of them really want to. You know, there’s a saying that’s going around right now, I forget who it’s attributed to, but everyone has a DIY expiration date, right? I’m the same way, right? I have a nine month old daughter Building a firm from the ground up, you know, added 50 million in the last 12 months. There’s a lot going on. I’m looking for any chance to buy my time back, whether it’s yard care or, you know, fitness or nutrition home services. Yeah, nannies gotta make more money there. A.J. for the night nanny. But. But no, it’s. It’s a good example of they’re hiring me for a different reason and I have a hundred percent retention. Right. I’m very blessed that once clients come in and see the value, they rarely ever leave. And I just had a client a couple weeks ago who said, I really hated financial planning before this. Like, I hated it. It was boring, it was mundane. It was painful for me to even think about. But after a couple months of working with you, I think it’s creative, enlightening and fun. Like you’ve performed a miracle. So for me, that’s like, you know, that’s going to be framed in my office somewhere. Right? What more can you ask for in terms of feedback?

A.J. Lawrence:
I think this is really impressive what you’re doing, but I think also I think this is something that if you’re out there thinking about your business process, it’s definitely worth exploring. Go check out Mark. I love his Twitter, his material. Has great content on LinkedIn also. I was going through some of that. Why don’t you share where people can find out more information? Because I think you’re primarily on Twitter with a little bit also on LinkedIn, is that correct?

Mark Cecchini:
That’s correct. Primary social feed is on X or Twitter, so @markcecchini. And yeah, I’m working actually on a different website right now which will house all my past content too, which will be really fun. We’ll tweet out obviously when that’s ready to go, but hopefully the next few months.

A.J. Lawrence:
Great. His X and his LinkedIn will be in the show notes when this email goes out and of course in the socials when we announce this for this episode being out there. So we’ll make it easy for you to find Mark. And I think it’s definitely worth a good read through his material just for you to understand what is possible. And then, if you’re enjoying, talk to him directly. You should reach out if you have issues that we’ve discussed in today’s episode. Mark, thank you so much. And it is kind of cool to see that we’re both facing the same weather, given your beautiful background. I’m not in a great part of the rental right now for our vacation, but we’re facing the same lovely weather for our vacation. For my family vacation, spring and summer.

Mark Cecchini:
Have not poked their head out quite yet in the Northeast.

A.J. Lawrence:
No. Hasn’t decided what it’s going to do. But Mark, thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it.

Mark Cecchini:
Thanks so much, A.J. I really enjoyed it.

A.J. Lawrence:
Thank you again for listening. Please go to the website and subscribe to our newsletter. You’ll be the first one to know when we have new episodes and when we have great things to share with you about past guests, future guests, et cetera. And as always, thank you so much for listening. I hope you have a great day. Talk to you soon. Bye-bye.