speaker-0: This is the Advisor Library, where serious advisors, operators, and leaders sharpen their thinking. A community built around a simple idea. Books shape who we become and the firms we build. Each episode, host Matt Cosgriff sits down with an advisor, operator, or leader in wealth management to talk about the books and ideas that shaped how they think, lead, and serve. Books change leaders. Leaders change firms.
speaker-1: Dan Wanus, welcome to the Advisor Library.
speaker-0: Good to have you. I'm so excited about this, Matt. I know when you first mentioned you were doing this, I was like, I can't wait to listen and you ever want to have me on, I'm in. Can't wait to listen to these as you have these conversations.
speaker-1: You are one of the first guests. I was trying to think back how we first met. I honestly don't recall exactly who introduced us, although I think it was probably one of our mentors. But you are hands down one of the most well read people I know. I I know we don't get a chance to spend a ton of time together, but whenever we do, it seems like the conversation quickly veers towards books. Ultimately, this is really a show about how books continue to impact sort of advisors and leaders in our industry's lives and at different inflection points. I think there's always that there can tend to be a book that was really impactful. And I just I know you've got a couple that were or have been instrumental in your career. And so super excited to dive into that. Maybe before we do, Dan, I'd love if you could maybe just start, how did you get into the industry and maybe bring us up to present with what you're doing today? Fantastic.
speaker-0: Fantastic. I ⁓ got into the industry as any twenty one year old would want to be. ⁓ was at a New Year's Eve party with my parents and all of their friends, Christmas in my junior year. Got to talking to one of their friends who ran an advisory firm in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where I grew up. We were talking about my macroecon class and everything I'd loved about that. And he Hey, I think you could be a really good financial advisor. And went home and told my parents, I was like, I don't want to help rich people get richer. Like I had no concept for what advisors did. They were like, You'd learn a lot. By at least interning with him and just seeing how they manage their business. They're really well respected in the community. You get to sit on client conversations, you just get to learn a lot about the financial lives of successful people. And ended up interning with them that following summer between my junior and senior year and just absolutely loved it. He had been in the industry, you know, 30, 35 years. His son had been in the industry maybe five, eight, something like that, and got to sit down on, I think, 95% of their client meetings that summer. And just got to see the incredible value that an advisor Either the compounding value that you can see over decades, or, you know, as we were bringing on new clients, even just, hey, here's somebody that joined us in June and here's the work that we've done with them over a handful of meetings. And you just get to start seeing the value there of real impact in clients' lives. And said, I don't know exactly what role I'll play in this industry, but that product of of helping deliver great financial advice is something I wanted to be a part of. Ended up after college, spending about a decade at Trivent in Minneapolis where I went to school. Absolutely love that, incredibly grateful for my time there. And then in the last three years here, I have spent time with kind of joined an organization called Forty Nine Financial and that's since helped launch a sister company there called Alongside. Forty nine really focused teaching hospital, three advisors assigned to every client. I think, you know, physician, resident, med student. Really the idea of how do we train and develop the next generation of advisors. And We solve a credibility problem that I think a lot of new advisors have in the industry. You know, they come in and they're trying to, you know, serve new clients, but they don't really know the space well. And so they're trying to learn, but getting them paired up with more senior advisors really helps them learn and grow way faster than they could otherwise. And then for the senior advisors, you know, we find, you know, five, 10 years into a career, it's really hard to grow. ⁓ because you know, you're you've kind of reached a capacity problem there. And so working with these more junior advisors and new advisors. gives them an opportunity to continue to grow their business and add a lot of value and share a lot of mentorship and learnings that they've developed throughout their career. And so that's been a lot of fun to be a part of that. And then helped launch a new firm called Alongside, which is partnering with more of really s experienced teams looking to really invest for the next few generations or next few decades in growth, wanting a more independent model, a partnership model. We've been doing that for about a year now, independent partners around the country who we're really happy to be working with. So it's been a wild ride. It's been a lot of fun. Glad to be doing it.
speaker-1: I was I'm familiar with forty nine and alongside and think super highly of the leaders there and and obviously yourself as well. Maybe just say a little bit more about what your role is at alongside. I think you have a really interesting perspective in the industry, just given a lot of the consolidation, some of the challenges we have with next gen talent. I'd be curious kind of where do you sit in the org and where do you spend a lot of your time and energy and focus?
speaker-0: Yeah. So my role is head of a business development and partner growth. So it's really a partnership model where there's shared benefit as as alongside continues to grow. All of our partner firms benefit from that. And so it's introducing new advisor into that community, talking through if you want to make a change. I think the first question is, do I want to stay where I am? If not, do I want to be in a more captive environment, a more independent environment? If I want a more independent environment, do I want to do all of that myself or do I want to find a partner that can help me with that? And then there are, as you note, Dozens of different flavors, maybe hundreds of different flavors of what partnership really looks like. So it's a matter of walking through those different questions with advisors. You know, some of those things they've thought through really, really clearly. And, you know, we start a conversation, they have a lot of clarity there. And other times it's more of a consultative process to understand what really matters to you and what are you looking for. And are we a good fit or maybe we're introducing you to another firm that would be a better fit for what you're looking for? It's going through those processes with advisors and then You know, this has evolved a little bit over the last twelve months as we went from having no partner firms to now eight, but it's it's working with all of them to think through what does growth look like for them, what matters to them as we have ⁓ different debate abilities to to help them, whether it's leveraging talent from forty nine, there's just a variety of things there. And so it's growing that community, both introducing new firms and and then being a good partner to those advisors that are on the platform.
speaker-1: Yeah, that's awesome. And I I suspect there's a number of books that we'll ⁓ we'll sort of tease out that have informed, you know, some of your career moves and just how you think about the business. But before we jump into those, I'd love to just maybe take a page out of Simon Siddick's book, or I guess the name of the book, and just start with why. Why does Dan want us read?
speaker-0: I think the first step is Dan Wanis reads because his parents read to him. I was talking to my dad the other day and some of my core memories are like laying on our living room floor, my dad in his recliner. You know, he read all of Lord of the Breams to me, he read all of the Chronicles of Narnia to me. Louis Lemoore, he read a ton of books by him. You know, I was trying to add it up. I like, My dad probably read seven thousand pages to me as a kid. Wow. You know, in kind of that elementary middle school age, ⁓ probably early middle school. And I think that just instilled a love of reading that I've carried with me. And in high school I read, you know, just about everything that John Grisham and Michael Crichton and kind of that type of adventure kind of stuff. Anthony Horwitz, his Alex Ryder series. And then as I got into my professional career, it's been trying to make up for lost time. And so it's you know, you're reading a bunch of business basics. I remember reading Howard Schultz's book around building Star Wars and shoe dog about Phil Knight. Mm-hmm. ⁓ All of these different ride of a lifetime by Bob Iger is a phenomenal memoir around being the executive all throughout the entertainment industry and then eventually leading Disney. And then you read the industry stuff, picking up stuff from Ben Graham and Warren Buffett, Howard Marks and Morgan Houseel and all, you know, all these incredible people that are just giving you a sense for where we've been. So some of it's just, you catching up for lost time. And then it's it's an opportunity to go to new places and and step into other people's perspectives. You can buy a book for twenty bucks, but I used Buck for five bucks. If you do it right, you're finding something that a really thoughtful, smart, sometimes successful person spent a year, two, five, ten writing. Mm-hmm. You spend ten hours with it. And I think the return on investment there is is pretty incredible. Yeah. I found a lot of books that have been really, really valuable to me at at different times or just allowed me to escape and experience something new. It's been a lot of fun.
speaker-1: Well, you named a number of books that I absolutely love. ⁓ Shoe Dog being maybe at the top of the list. We could probably do a whole episode on that book, but for those that haven't read it, highly recommend it. One of the challenges, Dan, that avid readers like yourself run into is there's a lot of great books out there. There's only a finite amount of time and sort of energy and focus we can put into reading. You had a really interesting post this spring on LinkedIn that really caught my attention. It was sort of about how you select books that align with kind of your interest and who you are. I'd love for you if could just maybe share your learning there and kind of your approach to figuring out what the heck do you read?
speaker-0: I found you're a great example of this. There's probably four or five people in my life who I've gone back to several times and every new piece of data from them is just like validating more and more. I actually can't remember the books that you've recommended to me over the last five or so years. But I know we've shared a lot of book recommendations. And as I've read what you've recommended, it's like, ⁓ those were things that shaped me at the time. And so this would be true for you, this would be true for others. Like anytime somebody that I know is reading like they have a high number of inputs and then what they've recommended in the past has been really valuable. Anything MAP recommends that I read, I'm gonna pick up. And it might not be for me. And I might drop it in fifty pages. There's people in my life who have in different areas of my life, not just my career, but you know, personal life too, it's like, ⁓ anything they recommend, I'm just gonna read. And then there's just some other like some people who I've, you know, found as guides who I've never met but have been fantastic. When my wife and I moved out to DC, I had never been really that interested in presidential history. I'd read a lot of biographies, but it was more business related than anything else. And I found this, I think he's an investment banker, but he has this blog online with like, I think he's probably read and reviewed 300 different presidential biographies at this point. And he's got this website, I think it's just bestpresidential bios dot com. And you know, you start going through that and it's like, okay, I want to read a book on Teddy Roosevelt. And he's read 14 of them. And he's like, here's if you want this, if you want the most comprehensive, read this. And if you want you know, a great story about him going down the Amazon, you know, read Candace Millard's book, River of Doubt. And so it's finding the people that have a really wide range and a lot of depth and then just figuring out what you're curious about. It's both people I know and people I don't know that have shaped
speaker-1: ⁓ do you keep a running list or how do you sort of keep track of all the books that you want to read?
speaker-0: That's problematic. I have an Amazon wish list of books that's pretty long. Sometimes I'll just buy like a dozen at once, which is the worst way to do that because then they'll all show up. And so I've I've tried to to force myself that when I buy a book, particularly one online, that I like have to read the intro in the first chapter, like within like like the first week of getting it. Otherwise, I'm like banning myself from buying more online. The alternate version of that is like never re resist a good impulse. I don't think I'm probably gonna go broke buying books. And so when I think of the the lens of shopping addictions that I could have, buying books probably isn't the worst thing. So there's a never ending list and I buy books faster than I read them, ⁓ which is problematic.
speaker-1: I'm the same way, but I I take some solace. Somebody once told me that there is value in having unread books on your bookshelf 'cause it's a good reminder that there's much more to learn. So at least that's the excuse I'm gonna go with for continuing to buy faster at that I read.
speaker-0: Read. Yeah. Seth Godin has a a quote that like books are a souvenir of an idea, ⁓ which I think is definitely true. Like books I have read that I look at on my bookshelf, I can be like, ⁓ I remember the time and place that I read that. I might not remember all of the book, but there's probably one or two sentences, ideas, concepts that I can I could shape my the trajectory of my change based on that book. And I think unread books are a souvenir of a desire where I could map like, ⁓ I bought that book. Because Matt recommended it to me, but I haven't picked it up. But I trust that there's something in there for me. It's kind of haunting me where it's like, I don't know that person yet. If it's a biography or don't know that idea yet, but it's sitting out there and if I'm bored on a Saturday afternoon I can pick it up and dive into that world. Yeah.
speaker-1: How does sort of our personality influence like what books resonate with us? I I feel like you you may have some thoughts on that based on that LinkedIn post. I'm curious how that sort of connects to what you do or don't read potentially. Yeah.
speaker-0: Yeah, the post you're referencing, I there was a book that had been recommended to me by several people and it was a transformational book for them. Mm-hmm. I guess a lesson here. I'm really, really fast to quit books that I don't like. Maybe too fast to quit books that I don't like. Yeah, probably 50 pages into it and just find, ⁓ this isn't for me. Yeah. But it was for these other people and other people that I really respect and enjoy. I trust them that it was it was valuable for them. And then I read range, and as I looked at that, I was like, anybody You know, there it's it's the subtitle's probably something like, you know, how generalists bride in a in a specialized world, something like that. He talks about I think it's Roger Federer comparing like his development to Tiger's development. And Tiger Woods like a golfer from day one and Federer was, you know, playing all sorts of different sports. And he talks about I think the term is like wicked learning environments versus neat or kind of clean learning environments. Mm-hmm. He's saying there, golf is a cleaner learning environment. Like it's There's more that you can control in that system. You know, chess would be a similar thing, like there's more that you can control there. Whereas something like a tennis or like anything else that's not even a sport where there's just undefined rules, there's these different types of learning environments that that shape you for things. And so having a a broad base is gonna be valuable to decision making, to behavior, to self knowledge, all of those things as you're trying to live. The idea is that life is a wicked environment. I'm not remembering exactly not a clean environment. Yeah. ⁓ and so that book really, really resonated. I was thinking through on my strengths finder, which is something I haven't done in like 10 years. It's a connectedness is is big for me. And so thinking through like all of these different things, how all of these disparate areas are connected. I was like, ⁓ anybody with connectedness, like they are gonna resonate with this. It's just like the Bible for people that share that strength. And so some things I think just really, really resonate based on who you
speaker-1: Feels like there's a business opportunity in there for us, Dan, to basically somehow score books based on people's strength finders profile or something like that would be kind of a cool effort.
speaker-0: I think there would be something to that and I think people would find there's a higher degree like that matching function. I think there's something there.
speaker-1: That's our takeaway for the day. I want to change gears here. I would love to just hear, you know, about a couple of the books that have been influential in your career. I think one of the things that I've always admired sort of from afar, Dan, is you're you're sort of a curious person, obviously a lifelong reader, but really with an eye towards sort of personal development and sort of transformation. And so I'd love to just hear, you know, what books have shaped you from a personal development perspective and really resonated with you over the years.
speaker-0: Yeah, I brought three to this conversation. So one, the first, Strong Ground by Brene Brown. As I think about my own self awareness, personal leadership, all of those things. This has been and it's new. Brene has b is a a voice that's been shaping me for I don't know, a decade, something like that. And this is I think this came out maybe a year ago. But as I was reading through this, I was like, ⁓ all of these concepts are really, really resonant. And I've been in my own personal transformation for this last year. And this is like I have You know, you could see here I like it is dog eared, it is tabbed. I think that's one of the biggest signs of respect that you could show to a book is like beat it up, underline it, really work with it. And that is one of them. We can talk more about this in a second. The second personal history by Kathy Abraham. When I talked about getting into someone else's perspective, she was the first female CEO of a Fortune 500 company, the Washington Post. Everything that led up to that, like her journey and her story, being able, I'm never gonna be in that role. ⁓ I'm never going to be kind of a trailblazer like she was. So much of her story is embedded in this book that I think is a fascinating look into the 50s, 60s, 70s in the United States business world, political world. She was right at the center of that. And it's an incredible, incredible story of personal transformation and just a lens into that time in the world. And then the last Scaling People by Claire Hughes Johnson. She was an early employee at Google. She was then the COO of Stripe. I think maybe she still is the COO of Stripe. This is like a management textbook or reference book on different things, whether it's interviewing people, one on ones, all of these different things that you might not actually get trained for as a new manager. You just kind of have to start doing. And, you know, there have been several points in my career where I've just, you know, like, hey, I have this new thing I need to do. And, you know, you just go into the table of contents. You're like, ⁓ here's here's six pages on here that have ended up just being gold.
speaker-1: That's awesome. I'd love to just go back to the the Brene Brown book to start. Is there a concept or a framework or something that you've taken away that's sort of shown up in the work that you do today or even just more broadly over your career?
speaker-0: Yeah, there's a few. One, she starts with a pickleball analogy and an injury she got playing pickleball. And she goes into the doctor and he said, You injured yourself in this way. I don't remember if it was a, you know, twisted ankle or what it was, but like you injured yourself because of a weak core. And so other muscular systems in your body were trying to compensate for that, which is why you got injured. And so this idea, she talks about compensatory injuries and Sometimes we'll see a failure. And I've thought about this so much in my personal life and a career, where like, this thing over here seems to be a problem. She says it's a problem because we're using weak or inefficient muscle groups to do things that they were never really supposed to do. Mm-hmm. And as I look back on times in my career or times in our business where things haven't been going well, were we using the right muscle groups to solve this? Or were we using inefficient muscle groups to solve this? Because for A variety of reasons. I think that's one of the things the books do is like now I have this framework of compensatory injury just in my head all the time. And so we'll run into a problem and go, is this really the problem? Or is this a symptom of something else that isn't going well that we need to address? And it's not actually the ankle that's the problem. It's that our whole system was trying to compensate for this other thing. That's one example. But I find that books like this are really, really valuable for that. One other thing. She talks about the difference between executive presence and pocket presence using a football analogy. And she said, You know, I I hate the concept of executive presence. It's been used to to discriminate against women and then minorities and, you know, different people. It's like, ⁓ they just don't have executive presence. And then she's like, it's a very lazy framework, but she talks about pocket presence a lot. And she's friends with Steve Sarkeesian, football coach at at Texas and and his concept of pocket presence being, you know, you have quarterback has two and a half, three seconds before their their O line is going to collapse, even if they're really, really good. And without pocket presence, she talks about like preparedness and trust and how those are really important. Hey, I can seem like I'm really I've got executive presence, but it's really just because I've put in the two hours of work to really be prepared for this conversation, for this decision that somebody else didn't have. There's a quote in here from Sark It says the enemies of pocket presence are fear and arrogance. When you get into fear because you don't trust yourself, your teammates, your process, your plan, your training, you play small. When you get too arrogant, you think this is easy, which it is not. So you get careless. Playing small and being careless both lead to a serious problem. In gameplay, the problem is turning over the ball. The bigger problem, however, is getting injured. Both fear and arrogance will get you hurt. You can't play small and you can't be careless. Particularly for most of my career, I've been the youngest person in the room. Some of the feedback I've gotten over the last decade has been, hey, you need to develop more executive presence. And as I've thought about what that's looked like in my own life, I do think it's been a combination of fear and arrogance. There's the fear of like, you can decide to use the excuse of I'm the youngest person in the room to decide that you're going to play small and give yourself an out. Or you can decide I'm not going to. And I want to lead in this space, regardless of that, which requires preparation. It requires trust in your team. But it also you can't be arrogant in that. You can't say, I'm the youngest person in the room, so I therefore I'm the smartest person in the room. You're gonna look like an idiot real quick. And there's so many different little elements where, you know, if I look at this book on my shelf, there's maybe half a dozen things like that, like pocket presence, like compensatory injuries that like it immediately sparks for me that have shaped the way that I think about my own leadership journey a ton. So that was a bit of a rant, but those are I could talk about this book for hours, but if I were to pull two things from that, those would be two of them.
speaker-1: Love that, Dan. I'd I'd love to just pick your brain a little bit about potentially d does that show up at all in in the forty nine side or the along side and specifically what I'm talking about is the pocket presence. I think back to when I was an advisor early in my career and a lot of those same fears that you just talked about. And I found that like the more reps you get, oftentimes that helps sort of breed some of that pocket presence, which I think is a little bit of what you're talking about. I'm curious, have you guys been able to operationalize that or is it more of a mindset shift where you just have to sort of have the mindset and the confidence, obviously the humility that goes with it to sort of garner that pocket presence? Curious how that shows up.
speaker-0: Yeah, I think there's a tension there. The more you understand, I think you need to know when you can trust experience and when you can take that experience and translate that to general principles and when you shouldn't trust that and make assumptions based on what you're hearing. So you talk to an advisor and say, Hey, I'm facing these problems or I'm in this this type of an environment. And maybe we've come across advisors facing those same challenges. Two, five, ten, fifty times before. And I think I have an awareness of this. I'm not certain that I'm we've systematized this really well, but I you need to go into those conversations, both saying, Great, we've helped advisors with that challenge before. And many of those advisors look really similar to you, but they're not you. And so it's an error to go into that. Hey, we don't know anything about anything. And We're simply going to be responding to you with no context. And it's also an error to say, we know everything about everything. And we're going to treat you in your context today exactly the way that we found successful or respond to you because this wasn't successful in this other context. So we assume it can't be here. You really need to take a personalized approach as you're helping advisors around decision making and not either overweight or underweight that. And so the pocket presence is. I'm gonna study the film, I'm gonna do the reps, I'm gonna understand the opponent, whatever that is. But I also can't I need to be able to adapt in the game, so to speak, because hey, this is what was showing up on game film isn't a great excuse for why we we didn't do that. It needs to inform, but it can't dictate what you're doing.
speaker-1: Yeah, I think back to like some athletes. I mean, I think Kobe was sort of fond or commonly would talk about just how his preparation led to some of that sort of pocket presence and confidence. It's like I'm gonna make this shut because I've taken it twenty thousand times in training. And so it's just sort of interesting to think about how that can influence some of that confidence and that pocket presence. One of the other books I know you mentioned was the the personal history by Catherine Graham. I admittedly have not read that book, but I ⁓ I'm reading Jim Collins' latest book and he talks about her. And I think it's just an absolutely fascinating story. I'd love to just maybe have you kind of recap her story and then maybe what are some of the big takeaways you found in in sort of your sort of ⁓ I think you talked about perspective taking and how that shows up for you.
speaker-0: Yeah, I'll actually speak about her story through the lens of Collins' book. Her book is certainly worth reading. I think in that book, he says that this is the best kind of leadership memoir he's aware of. I would agree with that. His whole book is, you know, what to make of life. He talks about people in cliffs, people experiencing fog. You know, you're you're coming up to a a massive change and shift in your life. Then what have different people done to navigate through that? I'll pull up a few quotes from Miss. You know, she has this this example. You know, she talked to her ch her childhood. Her dad was successful actually in the investment industry, then ended up buying a bunch of businesses. The Washington Post was one of them. At this point, the Washington Post, I think was one of like a dozen different newspapers in the DC area. It was not like the Washington Post that we think of today. It was just kind of this small little local paper. And you get to see this this, you know, over the course of this book, this small little local paper turn into this. powerhouse that is literally like changing the course of history with the Pentagon Papers and with Watergate and all of the ways that the post was impactful in that. But she talks about her childhood, she said the more subtle inheritance of my strange childhood was the feeling which we all shared to some extent, of believing we were never quite going about things correctly. Had I said the right thing, had I worn the right clothes, was I attractive? These questions were unsettling and self absorbing, even overwhelming at times, and remained so throughout much of my adult life. Until at last I grew impatient with dwelling on the past. Then later, you know, she talks about this. Now you're two hundred pages into the book. And she said, Despite my pleasure in the life I was leading during these years, I can now see that I was having problems I didn't acknowledge to myself. I was growing shyer and less confident as I grew older. I still didn't know how to look my best or how to handle myself in social situations. I was afraid of being boring and went on believing that people related to us entirely because of Phil. Phil was her husband. Mm-hmm. And you see this story from a privileged, pampered, entirely lacking in self-confidence child. That's halfway into the book that she said that last quote. To her dad passes away, passes on leadership of the post to her husband, because it was unthinkable that a woman could. lead a business as complicated as the Washington Post. Her relationship with her husband is fascinating. The post passes to her because her husband's suicide. So you get this incredible story of grief, of heartbreak, and then of this woman entirely transforming. I don't know if she was in her 40s, 50s at this point, but entirely transforming her life in the midst of something unbelievably painful and privileged at the same time, like all of the above all at once. And Warren Buffett comes into the story because he's buying a minority stake in the Washington Post. And so you get to see him, you know, how she leans into him as a mentor in all things business and Ben Bradley, ⁓ who's ⁓ you know, kind of not on the business side, but on the publishing side and and the partnership that they create. And so you get to see I think this unbelievable story of transformation from the girl that she was as a child to the incredibly impactful woman and leader. You go back to it, you know, why do you read? I mean, her story is just phenomenal. And ⁓ so going back to Colin's book, you know, he's kind of aggregating a lot of stories like this. He talks about the cliff moment. That is something like that likely out of your control. You know, her husband's passing was certainly not in her control. And then all of the implications of that in her leadership journey, how she started to create agency in her life and become a wildly impactful leader. So yes, I would recommend this book. I would also recommend Collins' book. They've both been fantastic. How
speaker-1: Have you leaned on that book in your career? I'd be curious if that's shown up at any point or how that shows up.
speaker-0: You know, biographies are often written about these like people who are kind of up in lights, the great molders of history. You know, I've read a lot about Lincoln and Churchill and Teddy Roosevelt, these people who undeniably shaped the world that we live in. It does seem silly to say, ⁓ well, because Catherine Graham endured the death of her husband and all of the both joyful and turbulent and incredibly painful relationship that that was leading up to. his passing and then all of the the wake of that. It does put into perspective in the days where I feel like the world entirely revolves around me and how everybody is out to get me. And it is just whatever I'm facing is just really, really looming large. I think you can take perspective from these other people who didn't live perfect lives. I think anytime you read a biography, in fact the better it is, the less you leave thinking, ⁓ they were this icon. The more you see them as a real human person with gifts and maybe genius, but also deep flaws. Yeah. it enables you to, I think, step out of your own world a little bit and start to see some of the patterns of resilience that you see in some of these people, how much they leaned on other people that enabled them to to get through some of these things.
speaker-1: Have you read Doris Kern's Goodwin, Leadership in Turbulent Times?
speaker-0: That's probably my most gifted book ever. Really. Yeah, everything she talks about I mean you talk about. Yeah. Tell me why you brought that up. I love that. Well
speaker-1: Her story seems to align very much with the four presidential stories in that book, right? I think they cover like Lincoln, maybe Teddy, LBJ, I think, and I might be f I'm probably forgetting the the last one. But nonetheless, it it is shocking because to your point, you hear about these folks that had these immense lives and shaped the world. And then you find out that Lincoln battled, I think, with severe depression. And I think Teddy did Teddy lose his wife and maybe his daughter?
speaker-0: It was his wife and his daughter or his mother and his daughter on the same day.
speaker-1: Yeah. And so you and so you just think about, ⁓ my gosh, I just had an employee quit. Like that is really difficult. But in the grand scheme of things, it's something you're going to get through if you can see any evidence and what other leaders have gotten through. And so I don't know. I I I can't say that I like actively think about that book in those difficult times, but I think it hopefully establishes some, you know, muscle memory or resilience when those things come up. And so it's just it was interesting to hear you talk about Catherine's story because I think it parallels very much those four presidents.
speaker-0: One more thing on that. There's a quote from Lincoln in that book. He's probably in his thirties at the time. And he's writing to a friend and he basically says, like, I regret that if I died today, literally no one would ever remember me or think about the like I have made zero impact on the world. And if you look back, you could argue he was probably certainly the most consequential American of the nineteenth century. So for a whole hundred years, like one of our most consequential presidents ever. And when he was in his thirties again, I'm not sure exactly the date, but roughly, let's call it our age, mid thirties, he was thinking, I have made zero impact on the world and was wickedly depressed because of that. And it's an interesting perspective on the Lincoln that you know, the Lincoln Memorial and all the stories that we've heard about him, that that there are these times in life that the biography I think gives you a lens into that that nothing else does. Sigurd.
speaker-1: lesson for I think both leaders and advisors, right? Whether you're starting a practice or running into challenges, scaling beyond a billion or whatever the threshold might be, that you can get through it. And it doesn't make it necessarily easier in the moment. Maybe Dan, where I'd I'd love to just go next is you mentioned one other book, Scaling People. I think, you know, if I have one observation of the industry, there is a tremendous number of great advisors. They start practices, they start businesses, and all of a sudden they become sort of the emyth, right? The accidental business owner. There certainly are pockets of good training programs, but there isn't just sort of like a broad training program that makes turns advisors into amazing business owners and leaders. And so what you talked about is with scaling people is is somewhat of a blueprint. So I'd love for you to just maybe share a little bit about the book and maybe how that showed up in in your leadership and day to day.
speaker-0: Claire talks about in the book really early on. She was referenced, I think it's a Picasso quote. You know, art critics get together and they talk about form and color and texture. And when artists get together, they're just like, Where can I buy cheap paint? She's like, This is the where can I buy cheap paint tactical book on scaling people, building companies. And the idea being, you know, most people that end up running things weren't trained in management. And so, you know, when I first started hiring people and I was, you know, Okay, I'm gonna go do reference checks. I don't know. Like you call somebody for a reference. Right. Hey, were they good? Do you like them? Yeah. Did you hope that they quit? Or did you were you, you know, like, I didn't know what to ask. You know, there's probably two or three great pages. I'm like, here's eight great questions that you can ask a reference. Hey, rank them on a scale of one to ten. You can't pick seven. Seven is the coward's way out. Seven is the It's a forcing function of, okay, they were either a five or a six, which probably means you shouldn't hire them. Yep. Or they're an eight, nine, or ten, and you should probably give them serious consideration. Or tell me about the last time you had a disagreement, or how have you seen them shape the development of other people? You start to see more than just gauging skill set, how is this human being going to participate in your team? And it's great. So I'm gonna do a reference check. These are questions I'm gonna ask. How do you You're putting a candidate in front of a variety of team members and you want more than just a thumbs up, it was a good conversation, or thumbs down, it was a bad conversation. Like how do you build structure around thinking through hiring, particularly for for places that you might not know anything about? If you're an advisor trying to hire a chief compliance officer, how do you ask good questions around a space that you might not be an expert in and evaluate if this person is going to be a good partner to help you make wise decisions there or not? And I think that there's there's so many highly tactical frameworks for giving feedback, all of these different things that you could probably Google. But I think this has been a at several points in my career, I've just pulled up like, I don't know what to do here. I'm just gonna pull this book up and see if there's anything in there. And it's always been really, really good advice.
speaker-1: I love the hiring piece. I mean, you could argue or make the argument that a leader's number one job is to get great people sort of surrounded around a cause. Outside of that, maybe is there another section that you find yourself coming back to in that book or referencing often that really resonated or stuck with you?
speaker-0: She talks about difference between recruiting, hiring, and onboarding. She makes all of those really distinct. Like recruiting is building an awareness in your market that your company even exists. Hiring is making sure that you're getting the right filtering process to get the right people in the roles. And then onboarding is setting them up for success. Four days ago, we had somebody joining our team. And 11 days ago, we had another member joining our team. And as I think through the things that she recommends in an onboarding plan. We're we're instituting a lot of those and best practices, setting them up with different leaders that are gonna be impactful. Maybe they're doing a Hogan assessment or something like that to to better understand how they show up. All of these different things that you can do to set somebody up to be successful that are really, really valuable for them. And it's not just like, hey, great, you're hired, figure it out. But like, how do we actually set people up to run and to be really successful in those first thirty, sixty, ninety days? A lot of really good stuff in here.
speaker-1: Yeah, the onboarding piece is so overlooked. I mean, I I think particularly at small firms and and there and there's certainly an understanding component of this, but a lot of times it's just say like we're super happy to have you, good luck, like kind of figure it out. And and some people, myself maybe somewhat included, I I I do like just getting thrown into the deep end. But I think as we think about G two advisor and leader development being more operationalized and systematized on that is is really, really important. And it sounds like that book gives some good guidance on that. We could probably sit here, Dan, and talk all day. I suspect you have a weekend to get to at some point. So I'd love to just wrap up with a little bit of a speed round for listeners to get to know Dan Wanis. You're obviously an incredible reader and would just kind of like to get inside your head in terms of some of your habits. So this is a quick speed round. I'm gonna grill you with a couple of questions about your ⁓ your reading habits. Great. Hard copy Kindle or audiobook. What's your favorite format?
speaker-0: Never Kindle, always hard copy. I also love audiobooks. Like my favorite thing would be to be walking my dog listening to an audiobook and then go back and highlight it in the physical copy or something like that. So the best is a hybrid between audio and hard.
speaker-1: Have you seen a quick side question? I think Spotify has the ability to shift between hard copy and audiobook. Have you seen that where you can like take a picture of the page? I don't think I'm making this up. Somebody can fact check me and it will like go back and forth to the audio. Anyways, I digress.
speaker-0: What I will regularly do is I will screenshot, like I'll just be on my phone and just do the screenshot of where exactly, you know, it's like, ⁓ this was an incredible story, screenshot it. And then you all get back from a walk and I'll have four screenshots and I just go back and like, okay, these were the things. Yeah. And I'm underlining a story or a a a really good quote or something like that.
speaker-1: Yeah. You've teased this already, but ⁓ highlight dog ear, leave the book untouched. I know it's not the latter because you mentioned that earlier, but how do you sort of mark up and and maybe more importantly, how do you try to remember all the things that you've taken away from books?
speaker-0: mark everything up. We talk about Jim Collins. I read good to great probably mid college. And then somebody was asking me five years later, hey, what did you love about that book? I was like, I don't know. I remember I liked it. Don't remember anything about it. And so sometimes I'll just go through and you know reread my if you take a bunch of highlights or, you know, sometimes I'll write a bunch of notes. If it's a really, really good book, at the beginning of every chapter, I'll just kind of like write down a few stories. This is like kind of that that blankish space, kind of a half page, I'll fill that up. With what are the the good nuggets from the chapter. So I can just go through and read 14 pages of just, you know, each of the chapter headings. Yeah. And then I've started doing this. I haven't found a good way to go back to it, but I I love field notes. And so like the little kind of small little notebooks. And so I'll go in and I'll write down stuff and it's up my own personal thoughts and then, you know, good quotes and stuff from the books. I don't have a good habit yet of going back to my field notes and and reading through those, but I like them because they're small. And so I can fill one up in a month or two and then I feel like I'm making progress and it's just great. It really depends on on the type of reader. I mean, a few leadership and turbulent times that we talked about Doris Kern's Goodwin. That one's fantastic. If they're not really a reader, the book I've probably read the most or listened to the most, it's called Living with a Seal. It's by Jesse Itzler. He brings David Goggins to live with him. David Goggins is a former seal to live with him for thirty days.
speaker-1: What book do you recommend the most?
speaker-0: If you are offended by four letter words, I would definitely not listen or read it because it is full of those. It is both inspiring to think through like what are your personal limits and how often do you just kind of stop before you need to. And it is also like roll on the floor laughing funny. That's my guilty pleasure book that I probably read or listen to once a year for the last five, eight years.
speaker-1: I'm gonna order that one after we wrap up. Last question. What are you reading right now?
speaker-0: I am reading a few things. I like to read two or three books at once. I think the one to mention, Guns of August, is about the beginning of World War One. It's new for me because I really love biography, which you probably pick up from this conversation. I like having a through line or a character to kind of follow in a story rather than just like a general history. And so I've generally avoided stuff like Guns of August that doesn't focus on a specific person but really focuses on a whole period. But it's just been recommended to me so many times that I'm like, okay, I'll give up. And I'll try to read a book that doesn't give me just one character to follow to cheat. So I'm maybe fifty pages into that and it is very, very good.
speaker-1: That's awesome. Well, ⁓ hopefully our listeners have a couple of takeaway books to check out. Dan, thank you so much for being here. I appreciate hopping on and ⁓ being one of the first guests on the advisor library. For those that want to get in touch with a fellow reader, how do they get in touch with you?
speaker-0: You can find me on LinkedIn, Dan Wannis. There's another, I think he's actually an advisor, another guy named Dan Wannis that looks kind of like me. So look for the Dan Wannis from Alongside in DC and you've got the right one.
speaker-1: Awesome. Dan, thank you so much.
speaker-0: Thanks for listening to the Advisor Library. For book reviews, episode notes, and our newsletter, visit Advisorslibrary.com. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss a conversation. Books change leaders. Leaders change firms.
speaker-1: Dan Wanus, welcome to the Advisor Library.
speaker-0: Good to have you. I'm so excited about this, Matt. I know when you first mentioned you were doing this, I was like, I can't wait to listen and you ever want to have me on, I'm in. Can't wait to listen to these as you have these conversations.
speaker-1: You are one of the first guests. I was trying to think back how we first met. I honestly don't recall exactly who introduced us, although I think it was probably one of our mentors. But you are hands down one of the most well read people I know. I I know we don't get a chance to spend a ton of time together, but whenever we do, it seems like the conversation quickly veers towards books. Ultimately, this is really a show about how books continue to impact sort of advisors and leaders in our industry's lives and at different inflection points. I think there's always that there can tend to be a book that was really impactful. And I just I know you've got a couple that were or have been instrumental in your career. And so super excited to dive into that. Maybe before we do, Dan, I'd love if you could maybe just start, how did you get into the industry and maybe bring us up to present with what you're doing today? Fantastic.
speaker-0: Fantastic. I ⁓ got into the industry as any twenty one year old would want to be. ⁓ was at a New Year's Eve party with my parents and all of their friends, Christmas in my junior year. Got to talking to one of their friends who ran an advisory firm in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where I grew up. We were talking about my macroecon class and everything I'd loved about that. And he Hey, I think you could be a really good financial advisor. And went home and told my parents, I was like, I don't want to help rich people get richer. Like I had no concept for what advisors did. They were like, You'd learn a lot. By at least interning with him and just seeing how they manage their business. They're really well respected in the community. You get to sit on client conversations, you just get to learn a lot about the financial lives of successful people. And ended up interning with them that following summer between my junior and senior year and just absolutely loved it. He had been in the industry, you know, 30, 35 years. His son had been in the industry maybe five, eight, something like that, and got to sit down on, I think, 95% of their client meetings that summer. And just got to see the incredible value that an advisor Either the compounding value that you can see over decades, or, you know, as we were bringing on new clients, even just, hey, here's somebody that joined us in June and here's the work that we've done with them over a handful of meetings. And you just get to start seeing the value there of real impact in clients' lives. And said, I don't know exactly what role I'll play in this industry, but that product of of helping deliver great financial advice is something I wanted to be a part of. Ended up after college, spending about a decade at Trivent in Minneapolis where I went to school. Absolutely love that, incredibly grateful for my time there. And then in the last three years here, I have spent time with kind of joined an organization called Forty Nine Financial and that's since helped launch a sister company there called Alongside. Forty nine really focused teaching hospital, three advisors assigned to every client. I think, you know, physician, resident, med student. Really the idea of how do we train and develop the next generation of advisors. And We solve a credibility problem that I think a lot of new advisors have in the industry. You know, they come in and they're trying to, you know, serve new clients, but they don't really know the space well. And so they're trying to learn, but getting them paired up with more senior advisors really helps them learn and grow way faster than they could otherwise. And then for the senior advisors, you know, we find, you know, five, 10 years into a career, it's really hard to grow. ⁓ because you know, you're you've kind of reached a capacity problem there. And so working with these more junior advisors and new advisors. gives them an opportunity to continue to grow their business and add a lot of value and share a lot of mentorship and learnings that they've developed throughout their career. And so that's been a lot of fun to be a part of that. And then helped launch a new firm called Alongside, which is partnering with more of really s experienced teams looking to really invest for the next few generations or next few decades in growth, wanting a more independent model, a partnership model. We've been doing that for about a year now, independent partners around the country who we're really happy to be working with. So it's been a wild ride. It's been a lot of fun. Glad to be doing it.
speaker-1: I was I'm familiar with forty nine and alongside and think super highly of the leaders there and and obviously yourself as well. Maybe just say a little bit more about what your role is at alongside. I think you have a really interesting perspective in the industry, just given a lot of the consolidation, some of the challenges we have with next gen talent. I'd be curious kind of where do you sit in the org and where do you spend a lot of your time and energy and focus?
speaker-0: Yeah. So my role is head of a business development and partner growth. So it's really a partnership model where there's shared benefit as as alongside continues to grow. All of our partner firms benefit from that. And so it's introducing new advisor into that community, talking through if you want to make a change. I think the first question is, do I want to stay where I am? If not, do I want to be in a more captive environment, a more independent environment? If I want a more independent environment, do I want to do all of that myself or do I want to find a partner that can help me with that? And then there are, as you note, Dozens of different flavors, maybe hundreds of different flavors of what partnership really looks like. So it's a matter of walking through those different questions with advisors. You know, some of those things they've thought through really, really clearly. And, you know, we start a conversation, they have a lot of clarity there. And other times it's more of a consultative process to understand what really matters to you and what are you looking for. And are we a good fit or maybe we're introducing you to another firm that would be a better fit for what you're looking for? It's going through those processes with advisors and then You know, this has evolved a little bit over the last twelve months as we went from having no partner firms to now eight, but it's it's working with all of them to think through what does growth look like for them, what matters to them as we have ⁓ different debate abilities to to help them, whether it's leveraging talent from forty nine, there's just a variety of things there. And so it's growing that community, both introducing new firms and and then being a good partner to those advisors that are on the platform.
speaker-1: Yeah, that's awesome. And I I suspect there's a number of books that we'll ⁓ we'll sort of tease out that have informed, you know, some of your career moves and just how you think about the business. But before we jump into those, I'd love to just maybe take a page out of Simon Siddick's book, or I guess the name of the book, and just start with why. Why does Dan want us read?
speaker-0: I think the first step is Dan Wanis reads because his parents read to him. I was talking to my dad the other day and some of my core memories are like laying on our living room floor, my dad in his recliner. You know, he read all of Lord of the Breams to me, he read all of the Chronicles of Narnia to me. Louis Lemoore, he read a ton of books by him. You know, I was trying to add it up. I like, My dad probably read seven thousand pages to me as a kid. Wow. You know, in kind of that elementary middle school age, ⁓ probably early middle school. And I think that just instilled a love of reading that I've carried with me. And in high school I read, you know, just about everything that John Grisham and Michael Crichton and kind of that type of adventure kind of stuff. Anthony Horwitz, his Alex Ryder series. And then as I got into my professional career, it's been trying to make up for lost time. And so it's you know, you're reading a bunch of business basics. I remember reading Howard Schultz's book around building Star Wars and shoe dog about Phil Knight. Mm-hmm. ⁓ All of these different ride of a lifetime by Bob Iger is a phenomenal memoir around being the executive all throughout the entertainment industry and then eventually leading Disney. And then you read the industry stuff, picking up stuff from Ben Graham and Warren Buffett, Howard Marks and Morgan Houseel and all, you know, all these incredible people that are just giving you a sense for where we've been. So some of it's just, you catching up for lost time. And then it's it's an opportunity to go to new places and and step into other people's perspectives. You can buy a book for twenty bucks, but I used Buck for five bucks. If you do it right, you're finding something that a really thoughtful, smart, sometimes successful person spent a year, two, five, ten writing. Mm-hmm. You spend ten hours with it. And I think the return on investment there is is pretty incredible. Yeah. I found a lot of books that have been really, really valuable to me at at different times or just allowed me to escape and experience something new. It's been a lot of fun.
speaker-1: Well, you named a number of books that I absolutely love. ⁓ Shoe Dog being maybe at the top of the list. We could probably do a whole episode on that book, but for those that haven't read it, highly recommend it. One of the challenges, Dan, that avid readers like yourself run into is there's a lot of great books out there. There's only a finite amount of time and sort of energy and focus we can put into reading. You had a really interesting post this spring on LinkedIn that really caught my attention. It was sort of about how you select books that align with kind of your interest and who you are. I'd love for you if could just maybe share your learning there and kind of your approach to figuring out what the heck do you read?
speaker-0: I found you're a great example of this. There's probably four or five people in my life who I've gone back to several times and every new piece of data from them is just like validating more and more. I actually can't remember the books that you've recommended to me over the last five or so years. But I know we've shared a lot of book recommendations. And as I've read what you've recommended, it's like, ⁓ those were things that shaped me at the time. And so this would be true for you, this would be true for others. Like anytime somebody that I know is reading like they have a high number of inputs and then what they've recommended in the past has been really valuable. Anything MAP recommends that I read, I'm gonna pick up. And it might not be for me. And I might drop it in fifty pages. There's people in my life who have in different areas of my life, not just my career, but you know, personal life too, it's like, ⁓ anything they recommend, I'm just gonna read. And then there's just some other like some people who I've, you know, found as guides who I've never met but have been fantastic. When my wife and I moved out to DC, I had never been really that interested in presidential history. I'd read a lot of biographies, but it was more business related than anything else. And I found this, I think he's an investment banker, but he has this blog online with like, I think he's probably read and reviewed 300 different presidential biographies at this point. And he's got this website, I think it's just bestpresidential bios dot com. And you know, you start going through that and it's like, okay, I want to read a book on Teddy Roosevelt. And he's read 14 of them. And he's like, here's if you want this, if you want the most comprehensive, read this. And if you want you know, a great story about him going down the Amazon, you know, read Candace Millard's book, River of Doubt. And so it's finding the people that have a really wide range and a lot of depth and then just figuring out what you're curious about. It's both people I know and people I don't know that have shaped
speaker-1: ⁓ do you keep a running list or how do you sort of keep track of all the books that you want to read?
speaker-0: That's problematic. I have an Amazon wish list of books that's pretty long. Sometimes I'll just buy like a dozen at once, which is the worst way to do that because then they'll all show up. And so I've I've tried to to force myself that when I buy a book, particularly one online, that I like have to read the intro in the first chapter, like within like like the first week of getting it. Otherwise, I'm like banning myself from buying more online. The alternate version of that is like never re resist a good impulse. I don't think I'm probably gonna go broke buying books. And so when I think of the the lens of shopping addictions that I could have, buying books probably isn't the worst thing. So there's a never ending list and I buy books faster than I read them, ⁓ which is problematic.
speaker-1: I'm the same way, but I I take some solace. Somebody once told me that there is value in having unread books on your bookshelf 'cause it's a good reminder that there's much more to learn. So at least that's the excuse I'm gonna go with for continuing to buy faster at that I read.
speaker-0: Read. Yeah. Seth Godin has a a quote that like books are a souvenir of an idea, ⁓ which I think is definitely true. Like books I have read that I look at on my bookshelf, I can be like, ⁓ I remember the time and place that I read that. I might not remember all of the book, but there's probably one or two sentences, ideas, concepts that I can I could shape my the trajectory of my change based on that book. And I think unread books are a souvenir of a desire where I could map like, ⁓ I bought that book. Because Matt recommended it to me, but I haven't picked it up. But I trust that there's something in there for me. It's kind of haunting me where it's like, I don't know that person yet. If it's a biography or don't know that idea yet, but it's sitting out there and if I'm bored on a Saturday afternoon I can pick it up and dive into that world. Yeah.
speaker-1: How does sort of our personality influence like what books resonate with us? I I feel like you you may have some thoughts on that based on that LinkedIn post. I'm curious how that sort of connects to what you do or don't read potentially. Yeah.
speaker-0: Yeah, the post you're referencing, I there was a book that had been recommended to me by several people and it was a transformational book for them. Mm-hmm. I guess a lesson here. I'm really, really fast to quit books that I don't like. Maybe too fast to quit books that I don't like. Yeah, probably 50 pages into it and just find, ⁓ this isn't for me. Yeah. But it was for these other people and other people that I really respect and enjoy. I trust them that it was it was valuable for them. And then I read range, and as I looked at that, I was like, anybody You know, there it's it's the subtitle's probably something like, you know, how generalists bride in a in a specialized world, something like that. He talks about I think it's Roger Federer comparing like his development to Tiger's development. And Tiger Woods like a golfer from day one and Federer was, you know, playing all sorts of different sports. And he talks about I think the term is like wicked learning environments versus neat or kind of clean learning environments. Mm-hmm. He's saying there, golf is a cleaner learning environment. Like it's There's more that you can control in that system. You know, chess would be a similar thing, like there's more that you can control there. Whereas something like a tennis or like anything else that's not even a sport where there's just undefined rules, there's these different types of learning environments that that shape you for things. And so having a a broad base is gonna be valuable to decision making, to behavior, to self knowledge, all of those things as you're trying to live. The idea is that life is a wicked environment. I'm not remembering exactly not a clean environment. Yeah. ⁓ and so that book really, really resonated. I was thinking through on my strengths finder, which is something I haven't done in like 10 years. It's a connectedness is is big for me. And so thinking through like all of these different things, how all of these disparate areas are connected. I was like, ⁓ anybody with connectedness, like they are gonna resonate with this. It's just like the Bible for people that share that strength. And so some things I think just really, really resonate based on who you
speaker-1: Feels like there's a business opportunity in there for us, Dan, to basically somehow score books based on people's strength finders profile or something like that would be kind of a cool effort.
speaker-0: I think there would be something to that and I think people would find there's a higher degree like that matching function. I think there's something there.
speaker-1: That's our takeaway for the day. I want to change gears here. I would love to just hear, you know, about a couple of the books that have been influential in your career. I think one of the things that I've always admired sort of from afar, Dan, is you're you're sort of a curious person, obviously a lifelong reader, but really with an eye towards sort of personal development and sort of transformation. And so I'd love to just hear, you know, what books have shaped you from a personal development perspective and really resonated with you over the years.
speaker-0: Yeah, I brought three to this conversation. So one, the first, Strong Ground by Brene Brown. As I think about my own self awareness, personal leadership, all of those things. This has been and it's new. Brene has b is a a voice that's been shaping me for I don't know, a decade, something like that. And this is I think this came out maybe a year ago. But as I was reading through this, I was like, ⁓ all of these concepts are really, really resonant. And I've been in my own personal transformation for this last year. And this is like I have You know, you could see here I like it is dog eared, it is tabbed. I think that's one of the biggest signs of respect that you could show to a book is like beat it up, underline it, really work with it. And that is one of them. We can talk more about this in a second. The second personal history by Kathy Abraham. When I talked about getting into someone else's perspective, she was the first female CEO of a Fortune 500 company, the Washington Post. Everything that led up to that, like her journey and her story, being able, I'm never gonna be in that role. ⁓ I'm never going to be kind of a trailblazer like she was. So much of her story is embedded in this book that I think is a fascinating look into the 50s, 60s, 70s in the United States business world, political world. She was right at the center of that. And it's an incredible, incredible story of personal transformation and just a lens into that time in the world. And then the last Scaling People by Claire Hughes Johnson. She was an early employee at Google. She was then the COO of Stripe. I think maybe she still is the COO of Stripe. This is like a management textbook or reference book on different things, whether it's interviewing people, one on ones, all of these different things that you might not actually get trained for as a new manager. You just kind of have to start doing. And, you know, there have been several points in my career where I've just, you know, like, hey, I have this new thing I need to do. And, you know, you just go into the table of contents. You're like, ⁓ here's here's six pages on here that have ended up just being gold.
speaker-1: That's awesome. I'd love to just go back to the the Brene Brown book to start. Is there a concept or a framework or something that you've taken away that's sort of shown up in the work that you do today or even just more broadly over your career?
speaker-0: Yeah, there's a few. One, she starts with a pickleball analogy and an injury she got playing pickleball. And she goes into the doctor and he said, You injured yourself in this way. I don't remember if it was a, you know, twisted ankle or what it was, but like you injured yourself because of a weak core. And so other muscular systems in your body were trying to compensate for that, which is why you got injured. And so this idea, she talks about compensatory injuries and Sometimes we'll see a failure. And I've thought about this so much in my personal life and a career, where like, this thing over here seems to be a problem. She says it's a problem because we're using weak or inefficient muscle groups to do things that they were never really supposed to do. Mm-hmm. And as I look back on times in my career or times in our business where things haven't been going well, were we using the right muscle groups to solve this? Or were we using inefficient muscle groups to solve this? Because for A variety of reasons. I think that's one of the things the books do is like now I have this framework of compensatory injury just in my head all the time. And so we'll run into a problem and go, is this really the problem? Or is this a symptom of something else that isn't going well that we need to address? And it's not actually the ankle that's the problem. It's that our whole system was trying to compensate for this other thing. That's one example. But I find that books like this are really, really valuable for that. One other thing. She talks about the difference between executive presence and pocket presence using a football analogy. And she said, You know, I I hate the concept of executive presence. It's been used to to discriminate against women and then minorities and, you know, different people. It's like, ⁓ they just don't have executive presence. And then she's like, it's a very lazy framework, but she talks about pocket presence a lot. And she's friends with Steve Sarkeesian, football coach at at Texas and and his concept of pocket presence being, you know, you have quarterback has two and a half, three seconds before their their O line is going to collapse, even if they're really, really good. And without pocket presence, she talks about like preparedness and trust and how those are really important. Hey, I can seem like I'm really I've got executive presence, but it's really just because I've put in the two hours of work to really be prepared for this conversation, for this decision that somebody else didn't have. There's a quote in here from Sark It says the enemies of pocket presence are fear and arrogance. When you get into fear because you don't trust yourself, your teammates, your process, your plan, your training, you play small. When you get too arrogant, you think this is easy, which it is not. So you get careless. Playing small and being careless both lead to a serious problem. In gameplay, the problem is turning over the ball. The bigger problem, however, is getting injured. Both fear and arrogance will get you hurt. You can't play small and you can't be careless. Particularly for most of my career, I've been the youngest person in the room. Some of the feedback I've gotten over the last decade has been, hey, you need to develop more executive presence. And as I've thought about what that's looked like in my own life, I do think it's been a combination of fear and arrogance. There's the fear of like, you can decide to use the excuse of I'm the youngest person in the room to decide that you're going to play small and give yourself an out. Or you can decide I'm not going to. And I want to lead in this space, regardless of that, which requires preparation. It requires trust in your team. But it also you can't be arrogant in that. You can't say, I'm the youngest person in the room, so I therefore I'm the smartest person in the room. You're gonna look like an idiot real quick. And there's so many different little elements where, you know, if I look at this book on my shelf, there's maybe half a dozen things like that, like pocket presence, like compensatory injuries that like it immediately sparks for me that have shaped the way that I think about my own leadership journey a ton. So that was a bit of a rant, but those are I could talk about this book for hours, but if I were to pull two things from that, those would be two of them.
speaker-1: Love that, Dan. I'd I'd love to just pick your brain a little bit about potentially d does that show up at all in in the forty nine side or the along side and specifically what I'm talking about is the pocket presence. I think back to when I was an advisor early in my career and a lot of those same fears that you just talked about. And I found that like the more reps you get, oftentimes that helps sort of breed some of that pocket presence, which I think is a little bit of what you're talking about. I'm curious, have you guys been able to operationalize that or is it more of a mindset shift where you just have to sort of have the mindset and the confidence, obviously the humility that goes with it to sort of garner that pocket presence? Curious how that shows up.
speaker-0: Yeah, I think there's a tension there. The more you understand, I think you need to know when you can trust experience and when you can take that experience and translate that to general principles and when you shouldn't trust that and make assumptions based on what you're hearing. So you talk to an advisor and say, Hey, I'm facing these problems or I'm in this this type of an environment. And maybe we've come across advisors facing those same challenges. Two, five, ten, fifty times before. And I think I have an awareness of this. I'm not certain that I'm we've systematized this really well, but I you need to go into those conversations, both saying, Great, we've helped advisors with that challenge before. And many of those advisors look really similar to you, but they're not you. And so it's an error to go into that. Hey, we don't know anything about anything. And We're simply going to be responding to you with no context. And it's also an error to say, we know everything about everything. And we're going to treat you in your context today exactly the way that we found successful or respond to you because this wasn't successful in this other context. So we assume it can't be here. You really need to take a personalized approach as you're helping advisors around decision making and not either overweight or underweight that. And so the pocket presence is. I'm gonna study the film, I'm gonna do the reps, I'm gonna understand the opponent, whatever that is. But I also can't I need to be able to adapt in the game, so to speak, because hey, this is what was showing up on game film isn't a great excuse for why we we didn't do that. It needs to inform, but it can't dictate what you're doing.
speaker-1: Yeah, I think back to like some athletes. I mean, I think Kobe was sort of fond or commonly would talk about just how his preparation led to some of that sort of pocket presence and confidence. It's like I'm gonna make this shut because I've taken it twenty thousand times in training. And so it's just sort of interesting to think about how that can influence some of that confidence and that pocket presence. One of the other books I know you mentioned was the the personal history by Catherine Graham. I admittedly have not read that book, but I ⁓ I'm reading Jim Collins' latest book and he talks about her. And I think it's just an absolutely fascinating story. I'd love to just maybe have you kind of recap her story and then maybe what are some of the big takeaways you found in in sort of your sort of ⁓ I think you talked about perspective taking and how that shows up for you.
speaker-0: Yeah, I'll actually speak about her story through the lens of Collins' book. Her book is certainly worth reading. I think in that book, he says that this is the best kind of leadership memoir he's aware of. I would agree with that. His whole book is, you know, what to make of life. He talks about people in cliffs, people experiencing fog. You know, you're you're coming up to a a massive change and shift in your life. Then what have different people done to navigate through that? I'll pull up a few quotes from Miss. You know, she has this this example. You know, she talked to her ch her childhood. Her dad was successful actually in the investment industry, then ended up buying a bunch of businesses. The Washington Post was one of them. At this point, the Washington Post, I think was one of like a dozen different newspapers in the DC area. It was not like the Washington Post that we think of today. It was just kind of this small little local paper. And you get to see this this, you know, over the course of this book, this small little local paper turn into this. powerhouse that is literally like changing the course of history with the Pentagon Papers and with Watergate and all of the ways that the post was impactful in that. But she talks about her childhood, she said the more subtle inheritance of my strange childhood was the feeling which we all shared to some extent, of believing we were never quite going about things correctly. Had I said the right thing, had I worn the right clothes, was I attractive? These questions were unsettling and self absorbing, even overwhelming at times, and remained so throughout much of my adult life. Until at last I grew impatient with dwelling on the past. Then later, you know, she talks about this. Now you're two hundred pages into the book. And she said, Despite my pleasure in the life I was leading during these years, I can now see that I was having problems I didn't acknowledge to myself. I was growing shyer and less confident as I grew older. I still didn't know how to look my best or how to handle myself in social situations. I was afraid of being boring and went on believing that people related to us entirely because of Phil. Phil was her husband. Mm-hmm. And you see this story from a privileged, pampered, entirely lacking in self-confidence child. That's halfway into the book that she said that last quote. To her dad passes away, passes on leadership of the post to her husband, because it was unthinkable that a woman could. lead a business as complicated as the Washington Post. Her relationship with her husband is fascinating. The post passes to her because her husband's suicide. So you get this incredible story of grief, of heartbreak, and then of this woman entirely transforming. I don't know if she was in her 40s, 50s at this point, but entirely transforming her life in the midst of something unbelievably painful and privileged at the same time, like all of the above all at once. And Warren Buffett comes into the story because he's buying a minority stake in the Washington Post. And so you get to see him, you know, how she leans into him as a mentor in all things business and Ben Bradley, ⁓ who's ⁓ you know, kind of not on the business side, but on the publishing side and and the partnership that they create. And so you get to see I think this unbelievable story of transformation from the girl that she was as a child to the incredibly impactful woman and leader. You go back to it, you know, why do you read? I mean, her story is just phenomenal. And ⁓ so going back to Colin's book, you know, he's kind of aggregating a lot of stories like this. He talks about the cliff moment. That is something like that likely out of your control. You know, her husband's passing was certainly not in her control. And then all of the implications of that in her leadership journey, how she started to create agency in her life and become a wildly impactful leader. So yes, I would recommend this book. I would also recommend Collins' book. They've both been fantastic. How
speaker-1: Have you leaned on that book in your career? I'd be curious if that's shown up at any point or how that shows up.
speaker-0: You know, biographies are often written about these like people who are kind of up in lights, the great molders of history. You know, I've read a lot about Lincoln and Churchill and Teddy Roosevelt, these people who undeniably shaped the world that we live in. It does seem silly to say, ⁓ well, because Catherine Graham endured the death of her husband and all of the both joyful and turbulent and incredibly painful relationship that that was leading up to. his passing and then all of the the wake of that. It does put into perspective in the days where I feel like the world entirely revolves around me and how everybody is out to get me. And it is just whatever I'm facing is just really, really looming large. I think you can take perspective from these other people who didn't live perfect lives. I think anytime you read a biography, in fact the better it is, the less you leave thinking, ⁓ they were this icon. The more you see them as a real human person with gifts and maybe genius, but also deep flaws. Yeah. it enables you to, I think, step out of your own world a little bit and start to see some of the patterns of resilience that you see in some of these people, how much they leaned on other people that enabled them to to get through some of these things.
speaker-1: Have you read Doris Kern's Goodwin, Leadership in Turbulent Times?
speaker-0: That's probably my most gifted book ever. Really. Yeah, everything she talks about I mean you talk about. Yeah. Tell me why you brought that up. I love that. Well
speaker-1: Her story seems to align very much with the four presidential stories in that book, right? I think they cover like Lincoln, maybe Teddy, LBJ, I think, and I might be f I'm probably forgetting the the last one. But nonetheless, it it is shocking because to your point, you hear about these folks that had these immense lives and shaped the world. And then you find out that Lincoln battled, I think, with severe depression. And I think Teddy did Teddy lose his wife and maybe his daughter?
speaker-0: It was his wife and his daughter or his mother and his daughter on the same day.
speaker-1: Yeah. And so you and so you just think about, ⁓ my gosh, I just had an employee quit. Like that is really difficult. But in the grand scheme of things, it's something you're going to get through if you can see any evidence and what other leaders have gotten through. And so I don't know. I I I can't say that I like actively think about that book in those difficult times, but I think it hopefully establishes some, you know, muscle memory or resilience when those things come up. And so it's just it was interesting to hear you talk about Catherine's story because I think it parallels very much those four presidents.
speaker-0: One more thing on that. There's a quote from Lincoln in that book. He's probably in his thirties at the time. And he's writing to a friend and he basically says, like, I regret that if I died today, literally no one would ever remember me or think about the like I have made zero impact on the world. And if you look back, you could argue he was probably certainly the most consequential American of the nineteenth century. So for a whole hundred years, like one of our most consequential presidents ever. And when he was in his thirties again, I'm not sure exactly the date, but roughly, let's call it our age, mid thirties, he was thinking, I have made zero impact on the world and was wickedly depressed because of that. And it's an interesting perspective on the Lincoln that you know, the Lincoln Memorial and all the stories that we've heard about him, that that there are these times in life that the biography I think gives you a lens into that that nothing else does. Sigurd.
speaker-1: lesson for I think both leaders and advisors, right? Whether you're starting a practice or running into challenges, scaling beyond a billion or whatever the threshold might be, that you can get through it. And it doesn't make it necessarily easier in the moment. Maybe Dan, where I'd I'd love to just go next is you mentioned one other book, Scaling People. I think, you know, if I have one observation of the industry, there is a tremendous number of great advisors. They start practices, they start businesses, and all of a sudden they become sort of the emyth, right? The accidental business owner. There certainly are pockets of good training programs, but there isn't just sort of like a broad training program that makes turns advisors into amazing business owners and leaders. And so what you talked about is with scaling people is is somewhat of a blueprint. So I'd love for you to just maybe share a little bit about the book and maybe how that showed up in in your leadership and day to day.
speaker-0: Claire talks about in the book really early on. She was referenced, I think it's a Picasso quote. You know, art critics get together and they talk about form and color and texture. And when artists get together, they're just like, Where can I buy cheap paint? She's like, This is the where can I buy cheap paint tactical book on scaling people, building companies. And the idea being, you know, most people that end up running things weren't trained in management. And so, you know, when I first started hiring people and I was, you know, Okay, I'm gonna go do reference checks. I don't know. Like you call somebody for a reference. Right. Hey, were they good? Do you like them? Yeah. Did you hope that they quit? Or did you were you, you know, like, I didn't know what to ask. You know, there's probably two or three great pages. I'm like, here's eight great questions that you can ask a reference. Hey, rank them on a scale of one to ten. You can't pick seven. Seven is the coward's way out. Seven is the It's a forcing function of, okay, they were either a five or a six, which probably means you shouldn't hire them. Yep. Or they're an eight, nine, or ten, and you should probably give them serious consideration. Or tell me about the last time you had a disagreement, or how have you seen them shape the development of other people? You start to see more than just gauging skill set, how is this human being going to participate in your team? And it's great. So I'm gonna do a reference check. These are questions I'm gonna ask. How do you You're putting a candidate in front of a variety of team members and you want more than just a thumbs up, it was a good conversation, or thumbs down, it was a bad conversation. Like how do you build structure around thinking through hiring, particularly for for places that you might not know anything about? If you're an advisor trying to hire a chief compliance officer, how do you ask good questions around a space that you might not be an expert in and evaluate if this person is going to be a good partner to help you make wise decisions there or not? And I think that there's there's so many highly tactical frameworks for giving feedback, all of these different things that you could probably Google. But I think this has been a at several points in my career, I've just pulled up like, I don't know what to do here. I'm just gonna pull this book up and see if there's anything in there. And it's always been really, really good advice.
speaker-1: I love the hiring piece. I mean, you could argue or make the argument that a leader's number one job is to get great people sort of surrounded around a cause. Outside of that, maybe is there another section that you find yourself coming back to in that book or referencing often that really resonated or stuck with you?
speaker-0: She talks about difference between recruiting, hiring, and onboarding. She makes all of those really distinct. Like recruiting is building an awareness in your market that your company even exists. Hiring is making sure that you're getting the right filtering process to get the right people in the roles. And then onboarding is setting them up for success. Four days ago, we had somebody joining our team. And 11 days ago, we had another member joining our team. And as I think through the things that she recommends in an onboarding plan. We're we're instituting a lot of those and best practices, setting them up with different leaders that are gonna be impactful. Maybe they're doing a Hogan assessment or something like that to to better understand how they show up. All of these different things that you can do to set somebody up to be successful that are really, really valuable for them. And it's not just like, hey, great, you're hired, figure it out. But like, how do we actually set people up to run and to be really successful in those first thirty, sixty, ninety days? A lot of really good stuff in here.
speaker-1: Yeah, the onboarding piece is so overlooked. I mean, I I think particularly at small firms and and there and there's certainly an understanding component of this, but a lot of times it's just say like we're super happy to have you, good luck, like kind of figure it out. And and some people, myself maybe somewhat included, I I I do like just getting thrown into the deep end. But I think as we think about G two advisor and leader development being more operationalized and systematized on that is is really, really important. And it sounds like that book gives some good guidance on that. We could probably sit here, Dan, and talk all day. I suspect you have a weekend to get to at some point. So I'd love to just wrap up with a little bit of a speed round for listeners to get to know Dan Wanis. You're obviously an incredible reader and would just kind of like to get inside your head in terms of some of your habits. So this is a quick speed round. I'm gonna grill you with a couple of questions about your ⁓ your reading habits. Great. Hard copy Kindle or audiobook. What's your favorite format?
speaker-0: Never Kindle, always hard copy. I also love audiobooks. Like my favorite thing would be to be walking my dog listening to an audiobook and then go back and highlight it in the physical copy or something like that. So the best is a hybrid between audio and hard.
speaker-1: Have you seen a quick side question? I think Spotify has the ability to shift between hard copy and audiobook. Have you seen that where you can like take a picture of the page? I don't think I'm making this up. Somebody can fact check me and it will like go back and forth to the audio. Anyways, I digress.
speaker-0: What I will regularly do is I will screenshot, like I'll just be on my phone and just do the screenshot of where exactly, you know, it's like, ⁓ this was an incredible story, screenshot it. And then you all get back from a walk and I'll have four screenshots and I just go back and like, okay, these were the things. Yeah. And I'm underlining a story or a a a really good quote or something like that.
speaker-1: Yeah. You've teased this already, but ⁓ highlight dog ear, leave the book untouched. I know it's not the latter because you mentioned that earlier, but how do you sort of mark up and and maybe more importantly, how do you try to remember all the things that you've taken away from books?
speaker-0: mark everything up. We talk about Jim Collins. I read good to great probably mid college. And then somebody was asking me five years later, hey, what did you love about that book? I was like, I don't know. I remember I liked it. Don't remember anything about it. And so sometimes I'll just go through and you know reread my if you take a bunch of highlights or, you know, sometimes I'll write a bunch of notes. If it's a really, really good book, at the beginning of every chapter, I'll just kind of like write down a few stories. This is like kind of that that blankish space, kind of a half page, I'll fill that up. With what are the the good nuggets from the chapter. So I can just go through and read 14 pages of just, you know, each of the chapter headings. Yeah. And then I've started doing this. I haven't found a good way to go back to it, but I I love field notes. And so like the little kind of small little notebooks. And so I'll go in and I'll write down stuff and it's up my own personal thoughts and then, you know, good quotes and stuff from the books. I don't have a good habit yet of going back to my field notes and and reading through those, but I like them because they're small. And so I can fill one up in a month or two and then I feel like I'm making progress and it's just great. It really depends on on the type of reader. I mean, a few leadership and turbulent times that we talked about Doris Kern's Goodwin. That one's fantastic. If they're not really a reader, the book I've probably read the most or listened to the most, it's called Living with a Seal. It's by Jesse Itzler. He brings David Goggins to live with him. David Goggins is a former seal to live with him for thirty days.
speaker-1: What book do you recommend the most?
speaker-0: If you are offended by four letter words, I would definitely not listen or read it because it is full of those. It is both inspiring to think through like what are your personal limits and how often do you just kind of stop before you need to. And it is also like roll on the floor laughing funny. That's my guilty pleasure book that I probably read or listen to once a year for the last five, eight years.
speaker-1: I'm gonna order that one after we wrap up. Last question. What are you reading right now?
speaker-0: I am reading a few things. I like to read two or three books at once. I think the one to mention, Guns of August, is about the beginning of World War One. It's new for me because I really love biography, which you probably pick up from this conversation. I like having a through line or a character to kind of follow in a story rather than just like a general history. And so I've generally avoided stuff like Guns of August that doesn't focus on a specific person but really focuses on a whole period. But it's just been recommended to me so many times that I'm like, okay, I'll give up. And I'll try to read a book that doesn't give me just one character to follow to cheat. So I'm maybe fifty pages into that and it is very, very good.
speaker-1: That's awesome. Well, ⁓ hopefully our listeners have a couple of takeaway books to check out. Dan, thank you so much for being here. I appreciate hopping on and ⁓ being one of the first guests on the advisor library. For those that want to get in touch with a fellow reader, how do they get in touch with you?
speaker-0: You can find me on LinkedIn, Dan Wannis. There's another, I think he's actually an advisor, another guy named Dan Wannis that looks kind of like me. So look for the Dan Wannis from Alongside in DC and you've got the right one.
speaker-1: Awesome. Dan, thank you so much.
speaker-0: Thanks for listening to the Advisor Library. For book reviews, episode notes, and our newsletter, visit Advisorslibrary.com. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss a conversation. Books change leaders. Leaders change firms.
