Bill Cates:
Welcome to the Top Advisor Podcast brought to you by ProudMouth’s PodRocket Academy. I’m your host, Bill Cates, creator of the Cates Academy for Relationship Marketing. In each episode, I interview one of our industry’s top performers, getting them to pass on their secrets to success to you so that you can impact more lives and generate more income. Now onto the show.

Welcome. Welcome. Today is going to add some new concepts and phrases to your vocabulary, and how you view your financial advisory practice. Today, we’re going to talk about the 100 year family, the family owner’s manual, family meetings, and something called leafplanner. In addition, we’re even going to touch on the United States Supreme Court. But first, before we dive into all this with our featured guests, I wanna let you know about some of our free resources that I invite you to retrieve after you’ve listened to today’s interview.

You find checklists, guides, videos, other tools. Simply go to referralcoach.com/resources, and write this down unless you’re driving. It’s also in the show notes, and while you’re there, make sure you sign up for our weekly tips. We’re always sharing best practices. We’ll notify you of our newest podcast interviews as they go live, and while these are free to you, I think you’ll find them quite valuable. And now on with today’s show.

Today’s featured guest is Josh Kantor. Josh is an attorney, the principal at Josh Kantor Wealth Advisory Services, and the founder of a process he calls leafplanner, which brings the deliberateness of a family office to a client’s family organization, education, communication, and decision making. Josh knows firsthand the challenges families face when it comes to managing multigenerational wealth. After the passing of his father, Josh took on the task of resolving his family’s 3 decade long estate and income tax controversies, taking them all the way to the United States Supreme Court before reaching a successful adjudication. He also reorganizes family’s businesses, tax, and estate structures, laying the necessary groundwork to function as a single family office, while also keeping 15 family members from multiple generations communicating harmoniously. And that was probably the hardest challenge of them all. Josh Kanter, zooming in from Salt Lake City, Utah, welcome to the Top Advisor Podcast.

Josh Kanter:
Thanks, Bill. I’m so happy to be here and really excited about this conversation.

Bill:
Likewise. I am really into this multigeneration, how the adviser brings more value to the family, to the individuals, to his or her practice. It it just there’s a a lot of wins involved in this. I don’t always ask my guests about their path into this business, but in your case, I’m gonna make an exception. Your path is not only interesting, but I think it’ll prove highly informative for the rest of this interview. So I have a compound question for you. 1st, tell us about your family story a little bit, and how it how that got you into this industry, and second, how this led to the development of your practice as an advisor to families and family offices. And if you forget the second part of the question, we’ll go back to it.

So compound question. Have at it.

Josh:
Perfect. Well, thanks. I do love, as you know, sharing my story and, and our family’s story, and it’s really been a journey. You know? It’s it’s one of these situations where I didn’t set out to get to this particular place in my life at 62 years old, and it’s all come from that path. So, the quickish version of that, if you want me to dive in any more detail, I’m happy to do it. I was a lawyer, as you mentioned, in Chicago. I was a corporate and securities lawyer. My family at the time had been involved in the venture capital business.

So, as you can imagine, I I had a close relationship with my family and ended up being the lawyer for our venture funds, our portfolio companies representing our family, etcetera. My dad, who’s really at the heart of the tax litigation and tax controversy that you mentioned, was a world renowned tax lawyer in the sixties, seventies, into the eighties. And so when he, he ended up getting sick in in 2000, and we found out he had cancer. He was 70 years old, so still very young, globe trotting, deal junky. We found out that he had cancer and was gonna leave, frankly, 30 years earlier than we thought he would be the guy at, you know, his desk having a heart attack at a 100. And so I left my practice to come help my family figure out how do we navigate through what was a wildly complicated enterprise structure. We were filing 750 tax returns a year. We had a wildly complicated balance sheet, and we were 22 years into what you mentioned as a 3 decade long, ultimately, was a 33 year fight with the Internal Revenue Service that went up to the US Supreme Court as you mentioned.

So, my hands were a little full, and trying to figure out how do we and you also mentioned, of course, how do you keep family harmony and get multiple generations to be educated and understand all the different things that are going on. So, I jumped into this family office world. That led me ultimately to a partial career of helping other families think about these issues about multigenerational wealth and legacy and philosophy and, really anything down all the way down to facilitating family meetings for families and found that those were the things that I really loved. I actually 1, I’m probably not qualified to manage anybody’s money, and I certainly am not interested in managing anybody’s money. So what really interests me is those family dynamics and those kinds of things, and ultimately that’ll lead to leafplanner as well. So it’s all been one really interesting, path to get to this point.

Bill:
Curiosity question. Did you were you part of the argument in front of the Supreme Court? As an attorney, that would be pretty cool thing to do, I suppose, or did you have someone who’s more of an expert in that area?

Josh:
Yeah. It’s interesting. So I’ll take some credit in the sense that, what I think was interesting, and I think it goes to this this notion of holistic advising, which, obviously, most of the people probably listening to this are in the advisor’s chair and are thinking about what does it mean to be a holistic adviser. And in my case, so I’m not I was not a litigator. I was certainly not a supreme court litigator. And what I quickly learned, by the way, through this tax case, we ended up with there were 2 co-plaintiffs along with my father. So we had 3 different litigation counsel.

We then had 5th, 7th, and 11th circuit appellate counsel. We then had innocent spouse counsel for my mother. We had collection counsel because, initially, the IRS won part of this. We then find then learned that you actually had to have Supreme Court counsel because there’s, like, a handful of people in the country who are known for Supreme Court arguments. Right? And so, I never knew there were so many specialties in the tax arena. So, no, I did not go argue it. But what was fascinating to me was like this notion of holistic advice is if I had followed the advice of the estate tax lawyers, we would have lost the income tax case. And if I followed the advice of this of the income tax lawyers, we would have lost the estate tax case.

And so the place I will take credit is essentially being the quarterback or whatever you wanna call it, the coordinator of all the different strategies and all the different perspectives, that ultimately did lead us to a 7 to 2 winning opinion in the Supreme Court and, ultimately, a very favorable, adjudication as you alluded to of the entire case. But I will also say, do not go to the Supreme like, hopefully, the last time anybody went to the Supreme Court was with their 8th grade, you know, civics teacher because you don’t wanna pay to go there.

Bill:
I yeah. I can only imagine that. I look at the team that you assembled, and it does you’re right. It makes the case for when you bring various experts together, even if it’s at a lower level situation with the account and the estate planning attorney, you know, maybe an insurance specialist, whatever. You get these minds. They all kinda know what they know and think they know more than they know and all have their opinion, but you have to distill what’s really gonna be the best course, right, for the client. So and that’s what you were able to do. So that’s fascinating.

Moving forward a little bit, when we were preparing for this interview, you mentioned the concept that I mentioned earlier already called the 100 year family. Intriguing. What is it? How’d you come of it? How do you apply it? Tell us about that.

Josh:
Yeah. So it’s not my phrase. I’m trying to think of who coined it, and I’m not sure that so I can’t give credit to whoever coined it. But it’s the idea of the 100 year family. You know, when you think about multigenerational wealth, right, you’re thinking about how do you not necessarily only preserve the wealth, but how do you preserve the family, and how do you support a family over multiple generations? And so the idea of the 100 year family is really just that. It’s how do you think about things, again, sort of through that holistic lens, through the different advisors that a family might have, through the estate planning structures, through the, the wealth planning structures, whatever these things are, to think about how does this last for generations to come. And and that, again, that doesn’t have to be necessarily you know, families have to decide, is that about per capita income, per capita wealth? Is that about philosophy and legacy and values? Whatever it’s about, but thinking about that as, you know, what is what is this gonna mean to future generations? And if you think about that through this I through this lens of saying I’m looking for the 100 year family, then you have that long term perspective. You’ll see this obviously in business all the time.

Right? I’m sure a lot of your listeners know Simon Sinek’s work, and The Infinite Game is one of his books. And, and he talks about it. And I actually read that thinking through my family office lens. And when you read his book, for example, you’ll see lines that talk about it’s the player’s time who’s run at who it’s the player’s time that runs out the game continues, right, and things like that. And that’s really, to me, again, at the heart of this idea of the 100 year family. My generation my dad’s generation’s gone. My generation will, hopefully, not too soon, will be gone. And this is about how do you perpetuate whatever it is you’re trying to perpetuate into those future generations.

Bill:
Interesting. So over the years, I’ve coached and interviewed many successful advisors, I’d say with a handful of exceptions. Most advisors shy away from facilitating family meetings, and in fact, I think there’s some that wouldn’t touch a family meeting with a 20 foot bowl. On the other hand, you have made family meetings an important part of how you serve your clients. In fact, I remember, and this is what kinda got my interest. You told me that you love family meetings because I don’t hear that very often. So tell us more about the why and how of this. You already kinda mentioned that you enjoyed it.

But let’s dig into the family meeting thing, and why do you think advisors resist, and why shouldn’t they resist, and do families resist? And give us a little meat on that bone, if you don’t mind.

Josh:
Sure. You there was another series of compound questions kind of in there.

Bill:
Yes. There were, it’s my nature. I’m sorry.

Josh:
No. No. No. All good. Feel free to feel free to tell me what I’m missing. I think, you know, for me, 1, yes, I just love it. It’s I jokingly say to a lot of the families I work with, it it lets me be a little bit like a therapist, except I get to have an opinion. And so, you know, there’s a little bit of my corporate law background, right, in being a general adviser to families.

I think I’m a good listener. I think I make sure everybody in the room gets heard, things like that. I think when you talk about advisers who don’t wanna do this and and by the way, I would not recommend that, you know, an adviser who’s who’s a really talented wealth advisor, all of a sudden pick up and say, I’m gonna start running family meetings. I mean, it’s it’s in and of itself. It’s a specialty. There’s a, a cadre of us who do this around the country, and, and you should rely on experts who really do understand how to do this because there are, you know, therapeutic elements and their family relationship elements.

I say, for example, I’m not a parenting expert. I’ve got 2 kids. I’ve got 2 data points on parenting. If somebody asked me a parenting question, I got lucky. I love my kids. They’re awesome kids, but I’ve got 2 data points. I’m an expert at families, and that’s different. And so, so for me, I think, first of all, it’s really at the heart of again, go back to the 100 year family and the success of families. How do you keep families together?

Well, it’s about relationships. It’s about communication. It’s about education. It’s not necessarily about is the balance sheet growing. I mean, that’s that’s obviously an important piece to many of our your listeners, but it’s it’s also about how is this all being perpetuated over generations and and to multiple generations. So I understand why people want to avoid it. And by the way, most advisers are not getting paid for it. So we have to focus on that as well. Right? It’s very time consuming. It’s very expensive to provide, but it’s hugely valuable.

And if you think about that also in the advisory context of this, whatever the number is, $84,000,000,000,000 wealth transfer that that we’re in the midst of, right, coming from our generation to the next generation. And think about what is it take when you’re talking about client retention from an advisor perspective. You know, the vast majority of kids do not keep their parents’ advisors. I think there’s all kinds of data out there about that. Right?

So the family meeting from the advisor standpoint, I would I would ask people to think about embracing it, not necessarily to run it, but embrace it as a concept. Because if you really wanna build a relationship with that next generation, what better way is there to do it than to think about having that deep relationship that will sustain? And I’ve got to assume I’m not in that side of the business, but I gotta assume the cost of acquisition is a lot higher than the cost of retention if you could be on that side of the equation.

Bill:
So tell me, you said that can be costly. What what’s where’s the cost come in for hosting? Is it hiring someone to facilitate, or is it more than that?

Josh:
Yeah. It’s really it’s really the facilitation question. I mean, when I typically if I go into, let’s say, even a a nuclear family of 4, let alone a multi generational complex family enterprise, I’m gonna probably do a 2 hour individual interview with each member of the family. I’m going to prepare for that family meeting. I’m going to then travel somewhere, most likely, to that family meeting and facilitate that family meeting over, say, a day or 2. There’s gonna be all kinds of follow-up that comes from that. So if you just start to think of the sheer number of hours involved, if you’re going to do it in in, what I’ll say, that thorough level, there’s other ways of accomplishing this. It’s just it’s time consuming and costly.

Bill:
Other than yourself, how would how would folks listening, go about finding someone who facilitates these meetings?

Josh:
That is an excellent question, and I wish I had a really snappy answer off the top of my head, and I don’t. You can always call me, and I’ll help you find peoplevbecause I know almost everybody in the industry.

But there’s not a great you know, some firms, obviously, some of the larger firms have built these practices into their firms. Then there’s a whole host of people who do this independently, like I do, and those are kinda hard to find. It’s a little bit word-of-mouth. But again and I’m happy to help any adviser find those people, not to pitch myself, but, I know a good number of those people around the country. And there are people who have very different backgrounds, so it’s really important. For example, you know, again, I’m a lawyer, so I’m not a therapist. I have zero therapeutic training.

Bill:
But you play one on podcasts?

Josh:
I play one on podcasts. If somebody comes to me and says there’s significant conflict in our family, and I mean real conflict, like people aren’t talking or whatever, I’m like, you don’t want me. You want somebody who’s got a therapeutic background who knows how to dig this out. And so it’s really important to find the right match to each family situation when you’re looking for that family meeting facilitator.

Bill:
And so, Josh’s email is in the, show notes. It’s josh@joshkanter.com, And, it’s very generous of you, Josh. Thank you. Alright. Let’s shift a little, but we’re in the same neck of the woods here. You created a process you call leafplanner, l e a f p l a n n e r. You use it as all one word. What is it, and how does it help advisers help their client families?

Josh:
So I need to go a little bit back, if you don’t mind, to our story, our family story, because this really comes from, again, our family story. But what one of the interesting things to me that happened in the wake of my father’s death, long before we went to the Supreme Court. I spent 18 months with my dad.

I let literally left my job the second we found out he was sick because I understood the level of complexity that we were dealing with. I’m a trained lawyer. I happen to have taken my father’s estate planning class in law school. I spent 18 months with him. And as soon as the lawyers and accountants and family members started asking me questions, I realized how ill prepared I was.

And yet, on the face of it, I would say I was about as prepared as somebody could get, and as educated as perfectly as somebody could get to step into this role. So recognizing that I was in trouble, my immediately real immediate realization, as you can imagine, was if I’m in trouble, my mom’s in really big trouble, my sister’s in really big trouble, my brother, my wife. I didn’t have kids yet, but my kids everybody is in more trouble than I am because I’m, again, as well prepared for this as possible.

So we started building this thing for our family 22 years ago that I kept referring to as a family owner’s manual. And the idea of it was to really say, how do you go exponentially past what I’m sure everybody on the, listening to this is familiar with the old in case of emergency file? How do you exponentially past that? How do you describe what do we do? How do we do it? Why do we do it? Who do we do it with? All these things. You may remember the old, I don’t really I guess it’s not a joke, but the little cliche of you get an owner’s manual with a toaster, but not with a kid. Well, you don’t get one with a family of wealth either. No.

And so the idea was how do you create an owner’s manual for a family of wealth? And that’s what we did. And 20 something years later, that became Leaf Planner of a very structured process to help families with that. And I think for the adviser, it’s a process to really give them again, some of it is about stickiness, right, the same kind of issues we were talking about before at family meetings. How do I you know, my I have one of my kids turned 18 last year. I didn’t hear from I got I got an email. I’m not sure I’m allowed to say this. I got an email from LifeLock, which I’m a subscriber of, right, that said That’s fine. You gotta you gotta upgrade your junior plan to an adult plan.

My insurance agent did not call me. My estate lawyer did not call me. My wealth advisers nobody called me. So Leaf Planner and the process of of the owner’s manual is there for an adviser to say, hey, family. Do you know you have a a kid who turned 18 who needs to get a HIPAA release, who needs to do this, that, or the other? So building those deep client relationships, seeing the holistic picture of what the family is about, and and really being a a valued adviser or a holistic adviser or an integrated adviser, whatever words you wanna put around it, is where this really fits in that advisory relationship.

Bill:
Wow. I really like that. A a family manual. So the the website is leaf planner.com, leafplannner.com. And in about 90 seconds, I’m gonna ask Josh to go a little deeper into leaf planner, and I also wanna talk to Josh a little bit about how he finds his clients, where they find him is, you know, I’m I’m my mojo comes from client acquisition, so I always wanna talk about that. But first, let’s take a brief pause to listen to a word from our sponsor, PodRocket Influence Academy, brought to you by ProudMouth. First, they make this podcast possible, and their core business is helping financial advisors like you accelerate their influence through marketing activities like podcasting.

PODCAST SPONSOR – PROUDMOUTH:
This podcast is sponsored by ProudMouth, the influence accelerators. Tired of chasing potential clients? We help you spend less time selling and more time advising by amplifying your influence over a growing audience of magnetically attracted fans who will chase you down instead. Visit proudmouth.com to learn more.

Be your own loud.

Bill:
I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least mention the 3 main ways I work with financial advisors. 1st, I have my Kate’s Academy for relationship marketing. Some advisors go through the academy all on their own. Some add a bit of coaching with me to make sure they maximize their results. To learn more, go to the katesacademy.com, thekatesacademy.com. 2nd, yes, I have several coaching programs designed to help you acquire more right fit clients through more relevant messaging and more compelling messaging, attracting ideal clients through building reputation in a target market, and multiplying your best clients’ referrals, personal introductions. To learn more, go to coachcates.com.

And 3rd, I love my sharing my proven strategies and and methods and live forms, such as speaking, conferences, virtual presentations. If you’re part of an organization that brings in experts such as myself, I’d love to hear from you. Just shoot an email over to me, billcates at referralcoach.com. Not Bill Gates. We kinda wish, but, you know, what’s a few 1,000,000,000 among friends? Billcates@referralcoach.com. Now back to my conversation with my featured guest, Josh Kanter, family office executive, advisor to Families of Wealth, and and founder of leafplanner.

Josh, as promised, I wanna go a little deeper with this tool you call Leaf Planner, and I also wanna learn more about how you attract your clients. So let’s start with Leaf Planner.

Tell me more about what it does. What what are some of the elements of it, I guess? And I’m guessing that it’s the kind of tool that not just brings a more holistic approach, but maybe even advisers can use to differentiate themselves from other advisers. Talk about that if you don’t mind.

Josh:
Absolutely. Yeah. It so, ultimately, you mentioned this at at the outset. Leaf Planner is designed to essentially provide a single family office view or lens into any client family. Mhmm. And what I mean by that, if if I look at what I really believe the single family office does well, it is that deep knowledge, that holistic knowledge of everything about the family, the family enterprise, the family business, whatever components a family may have. So much of this is really about taming complexity, right, and the inner and the integrated parts. And so in the leaf planner context, it’s asking I don’t know if it’s literally thousands of questions, but thousands of questions of how do you think about all this different information from different perspectives.

And then how do you put it all together and map it? For those of your listeners who are familiar with mind mapping, I really think of it as almost a mind map

Bill:
Mhmm.

Josh:
Of everything there is to know. So, for example, you could look and say, okay. Josh is part of this family ecosystem because he’s the suddenly, you’re gonna see he’s the trustee of 12 different trusts, and he’s the tax matters partner to 3 partnerships that go back to the 19 seventies, and he’s this, that, and the other. Then zoom in on any one of those different things. So say it’s a particular trust, and you’ll suddenly see everything there is to know about that trust. Is it a grantor trust? Is it GST exempt? How often should we review it? Does it have crummy letters or eyelet funding or grant payments associated with it? All the things that the estate lawyers are really good about giving us that estate administrative memo, but everybody’s really bad about actually doing. How do we how do we turn that into workflows? How do I look at that trust and say, hey. That trust owns my house.

And by the way, my house has utility accounts and has a housekeeper and has this, that, and the other. And my dog lives in my house. And my dog goes to that vet and has a Chewy account and and whatever. Right? So it’s on and on and on if you think about an ever expanding map

Bill:
Wow.

Josh:
About everything you could imagine. If you have a private if you own a business and many of your client many of the listeners’ clients certainly are business owners. Right? Yeah. It’s who do you do you trust your partners? Do you have partners? Do you trust your partners? Do you have buy sell agreements? How do they work? Are they funded by life insurance? Not just the documents, but the explanations, the context that so many of our spouses, our partners, our kids, our advisors, our trustees, our executors would be digging through mountains of paper to try to figure out if they could even figure it out because this is trying to get into your head as well. And so it’s really how do you build all of that into a map that anyone can access.

Bill:
This clearly isn’t for every adviser and or every client. Is there some way to measure the complexity or the is it is it yeah. What what what’s the criteria of how someone would know if Leaf Planner applies, I guess?

Josh:
So one answer I’m gonna say is is it’s really we I do think of Leaf Planner as being complexity driven, not wealth driven. And the reason I say that Mhmm. Is my view is you could be worth $10,000,000 and have a couple of homes and a couple of trusts and a couple of insurance policies and a couple of private investments and a couple of asset managers and a couple of kids. And if you start to think about the number of moving pieces, you’re pretty complex. On the alternative side of that, you could, I suppose, theoretically, these days be worth a $1,000,000,000 of Bitcoin on a USB drive and don’t lose that password, and you’re not that complex at all. Though to me, it’s complexity driven.

Bill:
Makes sense.

Josh:
I wish to some extent we were having this conversation in about a month because we actually are building that’ll be a free resource on the website, which I’m happy to, again, share with anybody. Well, of course, it’s free resource on the website. It’s, by definition, shared with anybody. It’s gonna be a complexity calculator, and the cool thing about that is it’s gonna go through questions like, what generation are you? How many generations are you responsible for? How many homes do you have? How many country clubs do you have? How many trust insurance policies? All these different things, and it’ll rate you on a complexity scale to really come up with that answer. So are are we I believe, personally, every single person, as soon as you put your Quicken file together, you should next start like, as a young professional, you should next start I don’t know if people still use Quicken. I do. You should next start on your leaf plan. But, certainly, by the time you get into kind of the 10, $20,000,000 net worth range, chances are you’ve got enough complexity that you really need to start thinking about this, because you’re you’re talking about multigenerational wealth.

If you’re 40 years old and you’ve got $10,000,000 and you do the math every 10 years, right, you’ve got multigenerational wealth.

Bill:
Absolutely. And, I I like the idea of complexity. And by the way, this is going to air, by the time people are listening to this. This complexity calculator will probably be up and running on your website. Right. So leaf planner.com, leafplannner.com. Anything else for them to know or look at once they get to leafplanner.com?

Josh:
No. If you go to the website, there’s a place where you can find, our family assessment tools, and that there’s a couple of different tools there now, including an emotional intelligence tool and a and a data tool. And then this that’s where this complexity calculator will be housed as well. Perfect.

Bill:
Wow. This is this is great stuff, especially for you know, I try to cater to the higher level advisors in a sense. That’s why I call it Top Advisor Podcast. So I hope a lot of folks are are digging into this. How do you Can I jump back in for a second? Yeah. Yeah. Of course.

Josh:
You you mentioned, can advisors use this, to differentiate themselves?

Bill:
Yes. Yes.

Josh:
And and I think both from a business development and a differentiation, and, obviously, as we talked about earlier, our client retention standpoint, I think absolutely. There is nothing else that does this. So if you think about the top adviser who’s looking at providing that holistic advisory experience to a client, I can only promise you without seeing it that something like Leaf Planner is going to differentiate you and it’s going to be a really interesting business development tool. Mhmm. So I’ll just leave it at that.

Bill:
Well, it’s clearly more than just some of the tools out there that will host your essential documents and Correct. Passwords and things like that. Obviously, it goes a lot deeper than that. So how do you grow your advisory business? How do you find your clients? How do they find you?

Josh:
So on the advisory side, if I if I think of that as the kind of the family meeting type consulting side that you and I were talking about. Yep. In fairness, I work with very few families. I work with a half a dozen families a year. Mhmm. I tend to get them by word-of-mouth or from my colleagues in the industry who say, hey. This is a situation we think you’d be really, really good at. And I have some wealth advisory firms that will refer or wealth advisors who will refer people to me, again, where they think that it’s the right match between me as a as that advisor and the family at issue.

You know, everybody knows that I’m not gonna step on their toes. I’m not gonna embarrass them. I mean, obviously, one of the risks for advisers is, are you gonna lose a client because I come in and screw up that relationship? And so, you know, most of the people who know me know that I’m obviously not gonna do that, and I’m not gonna try to steal their business because I’m not in their business. So Right. There’s a fair amount of just kinda word-of-mouth through the industry from from that side of it.

Bill:
As it should be from, me, the guy who talks about relationship marketing. Right? It’s being referable in the eyes of, other advisers, being referable in the eyes of these centers of influence of yours.

Josh:
Yeah.

Bill:
I I wanna finish up with a question that you don’t know is coming, but I I would love to know what, what drives you? I mean, when you wake up in the morning and you think about going to work and, and doing the work you do, is there, can you identify kind of a central point or theme or concept or whatever that that drives you, that keeps you going in all this, the purpose behind what you do, I suppose?

Josh:
The answer is yes. A resounding yes. It’s also a bit of I’m gonna say not embarrassing, but it’s an answer that I’ll say you have to know me to believe.

Bill:
Okay.

Josh:
But I’ll give you I’ll give you a couple different versions of that. So one is I started having kids fairly late, so my kids are 22 and 19. Mhmm. Still, I would say impressionable kids. It’s important for me for them to understand the work ethic that for some somehow my parents instilled in me and my wife’s parents instilled in her, and they see the 2 of us working incredibly hard, but passionately about what we do. It’s important for me for my kids to see that. And for me to say, I hope my kids are proud of me. It’s important for me.

I have really come to my sort of passion around all this. Obviously, as we talk about family meetings, you can you can hear it, I hope, in my voice. I’m passionate about helping families. And so whether that’s through my consulting practice or whether that’s through Leaf Planner, the more families I can help whether it’s avoiding the outrageous circumstances that I went through I mean, clearly, nobody else should be going through a a supreme court fight over a tax case. But whatever everybody else’s complexity, if I can help with that, the more families I can help that drives me every single day. How can I help these families not go through this? And then there’s a personal checkbox on my resume that is I was never the builder of something. I had a successful law career. I had a successful family office career.

I’ve got a successful consulting career, but I wanna build some and when I say build something, you understand I’m saying, like, in a business kind of sense. So Leaf Planner for me is the culmination of that, to say all these things that I’ve done over 35 years as a professional have led me to the ability to do this and that in my own personal egotistical, I need my own therapy over it will help me check that box. But those are the things that probably drive me the most.

Bill:
I would say that that when you mentioned egotistical, that qualifies as as good healthy ego. Right? I mean

Josh:
Yes.

Bill:
For anybody to be in this the business you’re in, the business I am, financial adviser, you know, we we’ve gotta have a healthy ego. We gotta to bring that to bring that confidence to bear. And we need to keep it in check sometimes too.

Josh:
Absolutely.

Bill:
And that’s that’s what marriage is all about. So just teasing, sorta. Hey. This is this is great. And I’m glad I asked you that question, Josh, because my mission is similar in the sense that I believe that every person on this planet deserves to make educated financial decisions that are in their best interest. And, you know, that looks different for different people in different places, etcetera, but everyone deserves to do that. They had to have the knowledge and then to be able to make those decisions. And sometimes they won’t make those decisions without an outside guide.

Right? Without an adviser or consultant or something to help them maybe see the way they’ve been moving up to this point isn’t in their best interest. So, yours has just taken what I have kind of on steroids to the next level, so that’s great.

Josh:
Well, thank you.

Bill:
My future guest on today’s show has been Josh Kanter, family office executive, advisor to Families of Wealth, and founder of Leaf Planner. Josh, thank you for all the value provided to our listeners as a guest on Top Advisor podcast.

Josh:
Thanks for having me, Bill. It’s been great, and I hope, some of this has been valuable to your listeners.

Bill:
I’m sure it has. I’ve loved it. To you, the listener, this podcast may ask you a small favor. If you like this episode or like the podcast in general, please leave a 5 star review on the platform you’re listening to the show. Not all platforms have a place for reviews, but if yours does, I’d be grateful. Thank you. And I invite you to come visit me visit with me at coachkates.com.coachkates.com. We have some new coaching programs we’ve just put out.

And if your organization or if you’re part of an organization that brings in brings in speakers, would love to come visit with you guys and gals and see if I can bring some value in a in a live presentation. This is Bill Cates reminding you that ideas do not make you more successful. Only acting on those ideas will bring you the success you desire. Thanks for stopping by. Thank you for listening to the Top Advisor podcast brought to you by ProudMouth’s PodRocket Academy. Encourage you to visit my website, referralcoach.com, for links to my books, online courses, and to register for the Cate’s Academy.