If you’ve been considering possible wealth management solutions, we’ve got a really well-timed ‘how to’ conversation for you this week!
Here’s the written to be read transcript of episode 101 with Larry Sprung
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Who is Larry Sprung and what is Mitlin Financial wealth management solutions?
Larry Sprung is on the surface of it all, a man offering wealth management solutions. He started his company, Mitlin Financial in 2004 with one focus-to put the needs of clients first.
His team is dedicated to providing them accurate information about their finances and empowering consumers through modern tools like mobile apps or web apps that make it easy for clients to manage their money and get insights without too much hassle.
In all these years since its inception there's always been an interesting story behind their name at Mitlin Financial and Larry shares it with us in this episode.
This episode, like many of our others, will also act as a how-to on wealth management for any listeners who really need some free advice on what to do next to protect the future.
Here’s the transcript of our episode all about wealth management solutions
You’ll learn:
· Who is Larry Sprung and what is Mitlin Financial?
· A family tree is literally health and wealth
· Advice for listeners who want to be proactive
· General wealth management advice
Wendy: So we met Larry through podcastguests.com where I was literally putting a call out for business leaders who’d got honest and relatable stories because that’s the premise of the show, right?
Larry: Sure.
Wendy: Your opening gambit to me when you wrote to me, Larry… as listeners will know, I’m very family orientated. I deeply believe that companies and their culture ought to be a bit more like family. And we all know, don’t we, that our families get on all of the time, but they’ve definitely, definitely got your back. And you carried on telling me a little bit more about your mom.
Who is Larry and how did Mitlin Financial come about?
Wendy: Tell me again where Mitlin started and the journey that you’ve been on at Mitlin Financial.
Larry: We started in 2004 and when I was looking for a way to name the firm, a lot of firms here in the US, financial firms are typically named after the founder or after their last name and then financial services or whatever. And I didn’t want to do that.
Wendy: Sprung Financial.
Larry: I mean, it sounds good, but at the same time I didn’t want something that was going to be directly tied to me and me alone. I wanted something that could potentially outlive me and outlast me. And I also wanted something that would be very meaningful. So one of the things that we were talking about, my wife was very involved in us collaborating on the name of the firm was we were looking back at our history and how we came together and essentially my mom, we lost a long battle with breast cancer at the age of 47 and her name is Linda, who is the lin of Mitlin.
Larry: And my wife’s grandfather lost a battle with leukemia in his seventies and his name was Mitchell. And that’s where the Mit comes from. Now, the really interesting part is that my wife and I, when my mom and her grandfather passed away, we didn’t know each other. We didn’t even know of each other even. And we met several months later after they’re passing and we started dating and we had a couple of conversations very early on and basically trying to reconcile why she was living in Philly, but back on Long Island, and I was working on Long Island, so she wanted to kind of know, we were kind of feeling things out. Well, what brought you back? What brought you here? And she started telling me a story about her grandfather passing away and that’s what brought her back closer to family. And I told her about my mom. And as we started reconciling the dates and times, it turned out that literally her grandfather and my mother passed away within literally hours of each other and then we ended up subsequently meeting. So when we started thinking about a firm name, we started looking at how we could put their two names together. Because even beyond the fact that these two great people passed away within hours of each other and then, we like to believe, brought myself and my wife together. My mom really represented a lot of the values and the things that you would want to see in a company. I mean, she had tremendous strength, she had tremendous resilience. She had this belief that even though she was sick, she was going to make the best of it and everything was meant to be. There was a reason that she was going through this. And she was very well liked. People looked up to her as a mentor, and she continued to grow as a person and a human even while she was sick for about ten years prior to her passing. And my wife’s grandfather, similarly, he was a veteran. He was a New York City police officer serving the public throughout his career, retired, and essentially just one of those guys that just was a really great human being. He was the type of guy that when the ice cream man and this is according to my wife, when the ice cream man came down the block, he basically went out and bought ice cream for the entire block, whether he knew you or not. That’s just his level of generosity. So when you start thinking about a firm like ours, where we’re working with people, we’re helping them work towards their retirement, their goals, a lot of those values that I just spoke about are very similar to the way that I would want people who are managing my money to have and instill and be willing to work with. And what we’ve done is we’ve incorporated that into our culture. Not only with clients and working with them, we consider our clients family. We don’t even like calling them clients. We talk about them as the families that we serve. And even internally, our internal stakeholders, the folks that are team members, they’re our family too. And it’s just one of those things that we want to give people, that sense of community, that sense of family. And it’s not just about what we’re doing and how we’re doing it, but we really have a sense that we want to work with family, serve them and help them work towards those goals that we’ve lined out together as a team.
Wendy: Gosh well, there’s so many things that come to my mind there really, Larry, and that is combining the two names. That’s like putting roots down, isn’t it? That’s the roots to yours and your wife’s relationship. And from there, you’ve got one heck of a tree. And what I would say is a family tree going on right there. And just the simplicity of changing out one word of clients to the families that we serve. Whether they be the clients or the people in your team and the extended people that support the business externally. Just makes such a big difference in the way that you approach your business and the way that you want to do business and why people will come to you to do business that doesn’t then feel like when you start talking about money. It can be quite threatening for people. Can’t it?
Larry: Sure.
Wendy: Sort of brings up all kinds of anxieties.
Larry: Yeah, and I mean, I could share just a recent example. We have a client right now, a family that we serve, where her mom is going through cancer treatment, and she has been for quite a while, and it came up again at the end of last year, and she’s starting in a very aggressive treatment again this year. And I emailed her to follow up on some outstanding items that we’re working on, and she basically messaged me back, and she goes, listen, although these are all important things that I know that I’ve kind of put aside for now, I have to put them aside because my mom’s situation is not as good as I would like. They’re telling me that she may not make it through the year, through the end of 2022. And I hope you understand, I sent back her a message. I said, listen. I said, you know, my commitment and our commitment to family, that’s of utmost importance, and that comes first, and I understand, and we’ll go as slow as or as fast as you can or you want based upon your situation. And so she messaged me back, and she said, maybe I misphrased that. She goes, I know that, you know, that family comes first, and I know that you feel the way that you just outlined, and that’s one of the major drivers that we work together because of how much you and your team value that as part of your working with me and our family.
Wendy: And I would hasten to surmise because I don’t really know you or your family business that well. However, had there been something that was critical, you would have done everything to be sure that that one thing was done and dealt with to protect that family.
Larry: Oh, 100%. We have another family right now where mom is in hospice. And we got an email from the son the other day, and he said, hey, do you have a copy of mom’s power of attorney? I need to update something for her. And they won’t do it without a copy of her power of attorney. Now, that’s not something that a lot of financial advisers or wealth advisors or firms usually have. It’s something they make sure that gets done, but they don’t proactively get copies a lot of times we do. And he emailed us, and within minutes, we basically shot him back a copy of Mom’s power of attorney, that he was the power of attorney for her. And just the mere fact that in that instance where he’s dealing with his own life, his own day to day, and now he’s got to deal with his mom’s situation, the mere fact that we were able to send that to him and save him the time, effort and energy of going to look for himself. That just adds a lot of value and it just impresses upon them. So that’s something that if it’s imminent, we’re going to tell them like in that original example, if there was something that really needed to be done regardless of Mom’s situation, although that’s a delicate situation, we would have said, hey, this is something of all the things that I just mentioned, all of them can wait except for this. This we need to get done because it could impact you in a negative fashion if we don’t. The things that we were messaging about and getting back were really not that imminent. So it was stuff that could be put aside for now.
Wendy: It’s knowing that you’ve got their back isn’t it?
Larry: 100%.
Wendy: Like you say that’s what sets you apart from other firms is that you appreciate those small details and how they can help. Because when you are dealing with somebody that you’re about to lose and we never know how much sand is left in the hourglass, do we? So you can’t always think straight. You might think you know where something is and then go to find it and it’s not there. And you can be unduly unkind to yourself. Whereas if you just know that you can just make a call or shoot an email. Gosh we all need more larry’s in our corner.
Larry: And I will tell you a lot of firms say they do this and saying it and actually doing it are two different things because I find many firms will say they do it, but they don’t. We had another situation a couple of weeks ago. A client went to the bank to set up a trust account. She just had redone her trust and was trying to move additional assets into a trust. She went into the bank and the bank told her that they couldn’t give her a debit card and they couldn’t link it to our online profile because it was a different tax ID number and it’s not. So I pulled up the trust, I took a look at it or actually the issue was they said she wasn’t the trustee and the bank manager sent it up to the bank trust department to review the document and they came back and said she’s not the trustee so it can’t be connected to her profile. So she called me and she’s like, is this true? I luckily, again had a copy of the trust, pulled it up. I’m like you’re the trustee. I said, your relatives step in as alternate trustees if something were to happen to you or you die later on. But right now you’re in control. You’re in the driver’s seat. Shouldn’t make a difference. I got on the phone with her and the bank manager explained it to her. Within minutes the account was opened, connected and everything was all set and she’s like, this is why I send you my stuff, because I didn’t know how to have that conversation with the banker to explain to them that they weren’t right. So these are all things when you think about wealth management and you think about investment firms and planning firms. A lot of the conversation from the advisor side and the client side many times surrounds around the money and how the money is going to be invested. And the reality is there is no adviser, there’s no investment professional out there that has this magic bullet or magic formula that’s going to get you significantly greater returns than everybody else over a long period of time. It doesn’t exist. So when we talk to the families that we serve, we talk to them about when you’re making a decision on who to work with. Don’t do it about performance. And if you’re going to do it about performance, we’re not the firm for you because ideally we’re going to be within maybe a quarter, half of 1% of every other advisor out there. There shouldn’t be that much of a differential between any one adviser if they are doing things the correct way to your risk tolerance, your goals and objectives, we should be in relatively a very tight range. Where we add value is on all those other areas that you need help with and guidance with in order to prevent you from making pitfalls or mistakes that are going to cost you a lot of money in the long run. That’s where we add value in saving you the time, the effort, and the energy and saving you from hopefully making mistakes that if you don’t have us to call, you potentially would make.
Wendy: You make a good point there, Larry, actually, because when it comes to wealth management and money matters, I think we can all get be quite well… I can say honestly from my own personal circumstances, that, I don’t understand why all of the different products that are out there and if an advisor starts to talk to me in a language that I then don’t want to admit I don’t understand, there’s no way really for me to go other than to say no or to agree to something that I don’t know what I’m getting into. And I think this is where having you come and talk to us today about our futures and money is not always about turning $100 into $1,000. It’s about that $100 still being yours if anything should happen to you. I think there’s a lot of not knowing what the right questions are to ask.
Larry: Actually, I got a great example of that. We had a client whose mom again, I don’t want to be a downer here, but it just so happens a lot of times when people aren’t healthy, things end up having to come to the forefront, and there’s a lot of planning at those times. And we had a client whose mom was ill, it didn’t look like she had much time, and the client and her three sisters were seeing an attorney to get her mom’s affairs in order. And the client we have one of the sisters is a client of ours. The other three are not in full disclosure. So the one sister who is a client came to us and told us that the attorney was in her view, what she understood was happening was the attorney was having mom gift a bunch of her assets to the three kids now while she was living so that they would transition and not be a part of her state. And when looking at those assets, if that was done in that way in the states here, they would lose what’s known as a step up in basis. So, long story short, without getting into too much financial jargon, the long story of it is if the attorney was actually doing this and gifting the money now, it could potentially cost the daughters about $100,000 in tax. That if the client who was not healthy, the mom who was not healthy maintained that asset and then transitioned it to the daughters as beneficiaries, that $100,000 in tax could potentially be saved, avoided.
Wendy: Yeah.
Larry: So I said to the client immediately, do you mind if I call the attorney and have a conversation to find out exactly what’s going on? She said, not at all. She goes, I’ll send her an email and let her know that you’re calling. Called the attorney, asked her, told her what my concern was. She goes, no. She goes, your client misunderstood. We are simply adding the daughters on as beneficiaries so that when mom dies, the money goes to the daughters automatically. It avoids probate, and that will also give them that step up in basis and potentially avoid that $100,000 in tax. Now, the attorney was doing everything right. Somewhere along the line, whether it was the attorney to my client or one of my clients, sisters to my client, in the explanation, it all got jumbled up in a way that didn’t sound like it was going to be beneficial to her or anybody else. And just by making a phone call to assure that, she was like, wow, at least I know that the attorney is doing things the right way, and I know that and now understand what’s going to happen so that there aren’t any surprises. And that phone call, had it not been that way, that phone call could have potentially saved $100,000 potential tax liability if the attorney was not doing things in the proper fashion.
Wendy: And I can’t imagine that there’s anybody listening that would want to put themselves in that position. But knowing how to trust that they’re in the best position is something a bit trickier.
Larry: Agreed. Thousand percent.
Wendy: Families tend to sort of bring this up when something happens, and it’s kind of almost like mom, dad is suddenly poorly. It doesn’t look very bright. The future, we’ve got to suddenly review everything in sales. They talk about being proactive rather than reactive, and that sounds very much like a reactive situation that then you’re already under pressure.
Larry’s advice for people wanting to be prepared for that kind of a sad period
Wendy: What would your advice I mean, I know what my opinion is, but what would your advice be to be proactive about that so that it takes the pressure off you as and when or if it does indeed happen to you?
Larry: Yeah. Again, I know that we’ve cited a number of examples where somebody was ill and then something was happening. But number one is there’s a lot of life events that prompt us to relook at things. Right. And what we call them here are critical financial events. And those critical financial events could be good things in our life, and it could be negative things. We’ve talked about a few of the negative things, but some of the positive things could be a job change or a retirement or a marriage or buying a new home. Some of the negative things, as we talked about, could be death or disability or a divorce, maybe. It could be either one. It could be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on which stance you take there. But to your point and to your question, for all these critical financial events, it’s always easier not to act or have to do something in a very reactive and under the gun, so to speak. So ideally, what you want to do is you want to start the planning process as early as you possibly can. If you’re sitting there thinking, I don’t need a plan. My things aren’t that complicated, you probably need a plan at least to get started. Now, you may not need a plan with us, but you may need a lower level plan just to get yourself on the get a foundation for yourself. And then what we find is, as things get more complicated, our clients really fall into two groups of people, or at least start in one of two groups, and the first group is on the younger side, usually like 35, 30 ish till 50, where at the beginning end of that, they start working. They’re coming out of college. They’re working. They’re working on their career. They’re trying to become more successful. They may meet somebody, start a family, buy a house. As those things become more complicated, their valuable time shrinks. They don’t have the time, effort, and energy to do a plan. Look at it, review it. That’s where we come in, and we take that off their shoulders. Initially, there’s some work on their end as far as getting the information we need, but we’re able to guide them. We just had a client today email us. He just renegotiated his salary for the coming year, got an off cycle grant of restricted stock units from Amazon. So we’re going in now and fundamentally updating his plan. If something happens tomorrow, one of those critical financial events, we’re going to be able to help him navigate that because we know everything. We know where everything is and what his financial situation is. And then on the other end of the spectrum, 50 and up, those people are really coming closer to retirement. There’s a little less you can do in terms of having the time available to make course corrections. You have to be on a really good path at that point. That’s why it behooves you to start earlier rather than later. And a lot of those 50 plus, we’re just helping them work towards that retirement and they’re involving us for those other areas of their life. They don’t want to worry about their financial situation and worrying about keeping powers of attorney and having that on file if they need it. We keep that for them. And this way they have the time to go travel, spend time with their spouse, their grandkids, do those other things. They have more free time now, but they don’t want to take that free time up by managing their own financial affairs. They want somebody who can help guide them and walk them through that so they can enjoy all those things that they’ve worked very hard to get to where they are. So they fall in there. So again, to answer your question, the earlier you start in that process, the better off you are. Because as those critical financial events take place in your life, some of them are going to be planned, you’re going to be planning for them. Others may just come up. We’ve seen people become disabled or have a health scare. And if we have that information on you and we know your entire financial life what your goals and objectives are, we can more easily walk you through what the next steps are, what are things you should be thinking about. Whereas if you have that critical financial event and then call us, it’s a much heavier lift for us to get started and really give you the advice and guidance that you need and you deserve.
Wendy: I would also say, Larry, that it’s a little bit of education, isn’t it? Doesn’t mean that you need to be the expert because that’s your job. And I know that there’s an awful lot of renewed qualification and legislation that you have to keep a track of. So you know that’s where the expertise comes in is by having your finger on the pulse. But when you are 30 I mean, I remember starting my pension at 18 and I didn’t really do much with it. I got to, I think probably about mid twenties and the job wasn’t there anymore and I put it on hold. But five or six years later I understood that that was something that I’d overlooked and I should be putting in place. But if I hadn’t had that education around what the future could turn out like, I wouldn’t have been able to have done that course correction and had the right people to have gone to to say, oh, I shouldn’t have done that. And like you say, anything that crops up another baby moving house, these are all times where you need to be sure that you’ve got the right things in place or that the things that you’ve got in place still serve you.
Larry: Right! Yeah. I mean, there are two things I can speak to that on. One is I don’t know if you’re familiar with Dan Sullivan and strategic coach. Dan Sullivan is an amazing guy. Strategic coach, I would highly recommend you take a look. I’m in his coaching program, and he wrote a book called “Who, not how”. And he said, if you want to become successful and be successful and focus your energy and efforts on the things that you’re most passionate about and give you the most energy, it’s not about figuring out how to do everything. It’s about figuring out who’s in your life that can figure out the how and take care of it for you. Now, you don’t want to give them complete blind faith trust all the time. You want to have a working knowledge, but it’s much different to having a working knowledge and understanding than becoming an expert, because you end up becoming a master of none that way. So “who not how” is a great book. I highly recommend it in terms of kind of walking you through that process, in terms of figuring that out and finding folks that can walk you through that process, because I think that that is an important piece to do that. And then the second piece is I hear a lot about how the education system has failed our youngsters in terms of financial education and guidance, and I’ve heard this for a very long time. I’ve been in the business for 25 plus years, and it’s been as big a problem 25 years ago as it is today. And I hate to say to some degree, when people ask me about my feelings about financial education and reform in the school system, yeah, it would be great if they do it there. But I would tell you, after a quarter of a century of there not being that much of a change in that area, I think we have to punt and give up on the educational system taking that undertaking. And I think what we have to do as parents, as relatives of our nieces, nephews, et cetera, extended family, we have to take on the responsibility ourselves and start educating our kids, our grandkids, about financial wellness. And if you don’t know it, but you have an adviser, we get asked all the time. We have parents Asking us to have conversations with their kids about these importance and I think we have to take the responsibility ourselves to start educating the next generations within our own families. My kids are lucky because they have me and this is my expertise. But my current 19 year old here in the state started a Roth IRA when he was 14 years old. He started putting $3,000 a year in a Roth IRA. At 14 years old, he’s going to have a significant nest egg that will either be used to buy a house down the road or retirement, whatever it may be, to get started. So it’s important to start our children young and educating them. And if you can’t do it, then you have to find the who, not the how. Whether it’s an advisor you work with or another family member that understands it and is successful, have them sit down with your children or your grandchildren and help them get educated in what’s important. And you could start at very young. We started with my kids when they were like maybe five or six. We had a piggy bank, but it was a unique piggy bank because it didn’t have just one slot. It had three slots. One slot was for invest, one slot was for save, and one slot was for charity. So whenever they got money, we sat down with them and it was an educational component to it. And we said, okay, you got $100 just because it’s an even number. How much do you think we should invest? How much do you think we should save? I’m sorry, it’s not invest and charity. So how much do you want to put away for spending because you should enjoy some of this money. How much do you want to save, invest, because you should put some of this money away for a longer for down the road and how much do you think you should put away for charity? And we always worked with them to kind of fill those buckets to an appropriate level that we thought they should be and where they felt comfortable doing it as well. And as they got older, it’s become almost a ritual. And when they get come into money, they think about it in those three fashions.
Wendy: I love that idea, Larry. And the points that you make about, you know, it’s the who, not the how. It’s something that I say a lot is it’s not what you know, it’s not who you know, it’s what you know about them. So if you know enough about that person, then you can actually be able to ask and to have that trust in that person, which I think is incredible. And you’re right, this responsibility is ours. If you give that power to somebody else and it’s going wrong, it’s always going to go wrong because nobody else has actually picked up the responsibility of it. It’s a paradox in itself, isn’t it? Like anything, whether it be money, whether it be our health, education and. I’m a big fan of… You know, I love it when guests talk about our next generation and how we can empower them so that they can learn from the lessons that we’ve learned and correct some of what we’ve inherited from generations before them. I think it’s fantastic. So being able to take charge of that and to do something if you’re a seeker of knowledge and you really want to do something whether it be to spend or to save or to give it away to charity or to run a marathon or be the next 100 meters sprinter. It really shouldn’t matter because the only people that it really matters to is who it’s happening to. Which is the yous the I’s and them.
Larry: Right.
Wendy: I wasn’t sure where this money conversation was going, but I like it.
Larry: Good.
What the listener who hasn’t done anything about wealth management can do about it
Wendy: If a listener, no matter what their age, hasn’t done anything about their wealth management, can you describe to them why it’s important enough for them to feel empowered to go and do something about it?
Larry: Yeah. Again, I think that stories tell a lot. Right. And everybody thinks about wherever you are on that continuum 30, 40, 50, wherever 60. If you’re not retired yet or you’re working towards specific goals and whether that’s retirement or not, there’s always this question in the back of your mind am I going to have enough to retire? Am I going to be in a position to do what I want to do in retirement or down the road in life? Am I going to be able to do? And it’s not that easy to really figure that all out. And the thing that complicates things is there are all these rules of thumb and there’s all these folks in the media that talk about generalities and that you need X number of dollars to retire and that might be right for you. It may be wrong because it’s very different. For somebody who expects to spend $50,000 a year in retirement versus somebody who expects to spend $150,000 a year, that need down the road is going to be very different. So I think the importance of what we do is really creating that foundation as far as where you are today, learning again where you want to be, whether you’re at 30, 45, it doesn’t matter where you are today, where you want to be and when you want to be there and then figure out are you on track or off track? And if you’re on track, great. What could we do to optimize things? If you’re off track, what are things we can do to get you closer to reaching those goals and objectives? Right. And then what we do is we continue to monitor that progress over time. And a lot of this is not that hard to do. The problem is going back to what we said earlier. Whether you’re in the 30 to 50 or 50 above, you’re busy. Whether you’re in the beginning stages where you’ve got kids, life, career or you’re at the later stages where you have family free time travel, leisure, et cetera. You don’t have the time to do this so why not have somebody that you could trust an organization, a firm, a person, whatever it may be help design this game plan for you. You do those things you enjoy and we meet on a semiannual annual basis to revisit where you are on that progression and see what things need to be tweaked along the way what things need to be addressed along the way. And what we do at the beginning typically is we’ll create like an executive summary of items. Action items that need to be addressed things that are must dos that you need to address at least at some point and we’ll rank those so depending upon and we don’t rank them ourselves because although we can guide you things are very personal to people what may be important to you may not be as a priority for me. So we kind of develop that prioritization and start working through those action items to make sure you get on path. And then what happens is if you hit one of those bumps in the road in the road you give us a call. We make an update and we can see how that affects your plan or it could be a good thing right? Let’s say you want to buy a second home. We have people here in the States, real estate has gone up and we have a lot of people proactively looking at vacation homes or investment homes. And if we have their plan they’ll give us the facts and circumstances for the home and we’ll put it into their plan and we’ll be able to see does this put them in a better position to reach their goals or is it setting them back? And it’s not ultimately up to us to say do it or don’t do it. All we’re there to do is present them with the information that they’ve hired us to do which is get them on the path to reach their goals. If we tell them that this is going to put them behind the eight ball but they feel comfortable because they’re going to make it up somewhere else or somehow down the line they think the outcome is going to be different. Ultimately they’re in control and pull that trigger but we’re there to give them the pros and cons of each situation. So think of us. If you think about it in business terms companies should all have a CFO a chief financial officer that helps guide the company. Accountants are great but typically that’s a lot of looking in the rear view and just coming up with the numbers and seeing how things were done. The CFO view is really looking out into the future and how things are going to play out. Look at us as like your personal CFO for your family corporations. And that’s what we kind of see ourselves out, is to help avoid the pitfalls, make things smoother and keep you on track along the way.
Wendy: You’re actually able to offer up the choice, do you, don’t you? When you’ve got the facts to work on and you know the personality that you’re dealing with and what risks they would and wouldn’t take. And it’s when you’ve got the choice end of going for something that might stretch you, but you really, really believe in it. It’s that faith, isn’t it? That you’ve got somebody with a plan in the background that can still catch you if need be, and you’re also.
Larry: Doing it with all the information. You know, if you don’t have us and you don’t have all that planning, basically you really have no idea how this is going to affect you or not. It’s really just a decision of, ‘can I afford it’? Do I think the outcome is going to be good for this one specific situation? You’re not looking at it in terms of a piece in your overall game plan, you’re just looking at it as that singular piece. Correct.
Larry’s conversation that counts
Wendy: So it comes to the part of the show that I really enjoyed because I never know what’s coming. Now when I ask you to share that one conversation that had it have not happened, nothing would have changed. So, Larry, hit me. What have you got for us?
Larry: For me, from a professional standpoint, the one conversation I had was with my wife. Before I started my firm. I was with two or three other firms prior to launching my own. And I like to say now, looking back now, I can say with relative confidence I was almost unemployable. I just wasn’t I never really made a great employee. And there were certain things that were happening at the organizations that I was working for that my wife and I sat down and it was really give her the credit… she said… Larry, she goes.. these places aren’t for you. She goes, you’re all about the client, you’re all about family. These places are all about the bottom line. They look at things much differently than you do, almost backwards, 180 degrees. You look at family first, all the important stuff that they want to know, and doing the right thing by the client, acting as a fiduciary. And you think about the financial impact for you personally and for whatever the business and the revenue for your own family last. And she goes, that’s just not you. Where you are is not what it is. Where you are. It’s the complete antithesis. They’re looking at how much revenue are generating for the company and then worrying about the family and what you’re doing and doing the right thing and all that stuff. And that was really the eye opener for me. And that’s really in that moment where the decision was made to start putting things in place to starting my own company. At that point I didn’t know really what I hadn’t put much thought into it, but it really was right and she was 1000% right. And it really brought me to starting Mitlin in 2004 and having that conversation and getting it off the ground. And now we’re in a place where we’re working in some cases with second 3rd generations of the families that we serve. And it’s been a great ride and I think we’ve only started even though Mitlin has been around now we’re going to be celebrating our 18th year in October. I think we have a lot of great things to come that are going to impact us as an organization, as a company, impact the families that we serve because that’s really what it’s all about. All the decisions we make are to improve the lives and the opportunities for the families we serve and the families that serve Mitlin Financial and we’re really looking forward to what’s next.
Wendy: I don’t know how you can make it better, Larry, but clearly you’ve got something up your sleeve. But I would say you’ve got the impact.
Larry: We want to be able to be in a position where we could serve more families and impact far more families than we do today.
Wendy: Well, that’s a great mission to have, isn’t it, is to be able to reach more people.
Larry: The right people.
Wendy: Yes. Well, it’s like my four hour formula. For the right people for the right reasons at the right time, for the right results. Yeah, that’s fantastic. And let’s just pay tribute as well to Mitchell and Linda because I think without their influence on both yourself and your wife, you perhaps wouldn’t be where you are today either.
Larry: I feel like she and here are definitely looking over and having an impact on a day to day basis. And every day when I come in the office and I look at the side on the wall Mitten, how could you not think about both those people every single day?
Wendy: I’ve got this kind of movie scene in my head where mom and Grandpa walking up the stairway to heaven and going, oh, how are you? And oh, what did you do? And from there, I’m from around there too and you know, my grandson would get on really well with your daughter.
Larry: Yeah. There you go. That’s how my wife feels to the T.
Wendy: I think it’s incredible how life plays out.
Larry: It is.
Wendy: Some of the experiences that even if we try to avoid them, they catch up with us anyway.
Larry: Good. Yeah, absolutely.
Wendy: Brilliant. And Larry, I would just like to point out, or just question the financial and wealth advice that you can give is only in the US.
Larry:Predominantly. Yes, US based. There are certain countries that we can give advice in. Others are a bit of a challenge. That’s on a case by case basis. But, yes, we are predominantly US based. If you’re outside the US, send me a message, I’d be more than happy to reply and let you know if we can or we can’t.
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