I'm Kyle Findlay from Huntsville, Alabama. I am part of a team with a mid-sized RIA named Keel Point. Our team started working with Scott Hamilton and Pareto in the early part of 2022. And I cannot tell you how important he has become to our team. We go to him for just about every major decision that we make from staffing, evaluations, negotiations with leadership compensation, how we serve our clients. We, we want to get him involved. So I'll say Scott really knows our business, incredibly well. He works with, with a lot of other successful practices across the country. And so we've gotten to the point, there's literally nothing that we won't ask him. And and then the rare instance that he doesn't already have a formed opinion about an issue. He's really quick about using his resources and getting us an answer and getting back to us the biggest change, but our practice experienced is I'd say confidence and direction. We spent time on a lot of big picture stuff like where do you want to be in 10 years? And to be honest, when we first met Scott, we were in survival mode with going through a handful of turnover and staff issues. So I just wanted to survive for the next 10 years. We built this really great book of business by being scrappy and creative year after year after year. But our problem is we didn't have focus or direction or really any idea where we wanted to go. So there was no standard or basis for our business. Like how many employees do we need on our support staff and how much support should we expect from our firm? What should our criteria be for bringing on a new family? So we were that typical case of a business is running us rather than the other way around. And personally, I had lost a lot of joy and a profession that I always loved because of how all consuming the work had become. So by the time we started working with Scott, we were wide open to anything he had to say. And I just assumed we'd be uh we could probably get better in every single area of uh of our practice. Uh So we were really just like a sponge. So we spent time early on uh giving Scott an overview of where we were, where we came from, what our hopes and expectations were from the time with him. And he asked a bunch of really good questions and made sure he understood where uh where we were. So, one of the very first things that we worked on together was identifying our ideal client and Pero uses uh AAA as their standard for client, which helps an advisor hone in on the criteria for assets, attitude and advocacy. And I know this sounds elementary, but we had honestly never done it like this before. And Scott worked with each of the advisors on our team to, to really get it right. Everything else comes together. Well, if we know who it is that we're serving, and that's something that honestly we weren't even able to articulate before. we were guilty of trying to be all things to all people rather than trying to be all things to a select group of people. So Scott forced us to get laser focused on the exact type of clients that we wanted to attract. And then he helped us put together a service matrix to take care of the top folks who are already in our book. From here, Scott helped us work through staff issues, growth initiatives, core values, metrics for employees and a variety of other drivers for us to be successful. So I share all these things, because, you think that it would be obvious for a team who had built a pretty successful practice to already have a lot of these things together. But Scott was simply walking us through the steps to create this playbook, that would help us be sustainable for years to come. So, he's really good about asking good questions that draw the conversation to where it needs to go better probably than anyone I've ever worked with before. I'll add that while we were moving forward with his plan. there were probably a dozen or half dozen issues that would, just pop up and they always took priority over whatever it was that Scott had, had in mind for us. so what it was obvious that what's most important to us is where we would focus. So, Scott really has been a game changer for our practice. we're in a completely different place from where we started and I actually felt like I have my life back and my passion back, for the profession. So I'm very grateful that I've gotten to work with such a talented advisor.
