Savant Wealth founder and CEO Brent Brodeski shares the firm’s journey to $50 billion in assets under management. In short, compounding isn’t just an investment concept – it applies to building a business as well. The early years now look invisible on a long-term AUM chart, but they were arguably the most formative – defined by trying new things, iterating the process, and refining what worked. That foundation compounded over time and has put the firm on a trajectory to impact one million lives.
Daniel Noonan: Savant Wealth Management is a Rockford, Illinois-based fee-only registered investment advisor. Founded in 1986, it has since grown into a national firm with more than $50 billion in assets under management. 50 offices across the country, nearly 300 financial advisors, and more than 20,000 clients served since founding. The firm integrates investment management, financial planning, tax and estate planning to help individuals and families pursue their ideal futures. If there's a dollar sign in front of it, they try to provide peace of mind. The firm is also a regular on the Barron's list of top 100 RIAs, ranking as high as number 12 in 2025.
I'm Danny Noonan, and this is Simple, but Not Easy, a podcast for financial advisors brought to you by Morningstar's Wealth Group. Today we're sitting down with Savant's founder and CEO Brent Brodesky, a wealth of knowledge on the industry. We're going to get the opportunity to pick his brain on a variety of topics, including scaling an advisory firm, delivering holistic financial advice, AI's impact on the industry, and broader trend-shaping wealth management. In full disclosure, I am a former Savant employee. I was there for more than five years. There's a rock in my front yard to prove it. And during my time there, Brent was my boss's, boss's, boss.
Brent, we're lucky to have you. Welcome.
Brent Brodeski: Thanks for having me. Excited to chat here.
Noonan: Where in the world do we find you today?
Brodeski: Well I happen to be in Naples right now. This time of year I try to get out of the Midwest. It's nicer here.
Noonan: Good for you. My parents spent time in Estero during the winter months, so just north of you.
Brodeski: Okay. Just down the road.
Noonan: When do you make it back to the Midwest? You going to wait for the weather to break?
Brodeski: Yeah, probably end of May.
Noonan: Good for you. Yeah, you've earned it. Getting into the topic at hand, I guess first of all, lot going on in the world today. Markets are getting a bit wobbly. As you think about your clients and the advisors at Savant, what's the temperature internally?
Brodeski: Listen, we're really excited where we're at, our business has never been better than it is. Our team has never been better than it is. And we just got a lot of wind in our back and momentum. So yeah, markets go up and down and geopolitics gets crazy sometimes. But listen, after doing this for north of 35 years, that's a thievery of the day. But at the end of the day, you build a great business with great people and you deliver great value. And over time, markets go up and we all participate. So earlier in my career, I get fussed about current events. I just kind of let it go with the flow at this point.
Noonan: That's great. You're a seasoned pro. That's why we're lucky to have you today. So I was scanning the Savant website, trying to figure out where to begin. I came across a picture of the modest house where Savant started 40 years ago, overlaid with the headquarters today in Rockford. It's a great contrast. Before we get into other items, I'd like to get into Savant's origin story. What did the business look like in those first few years?
Brodesky: Yeah. So this is almost my first job. I came out of school, got my MBA and finance degree. And I wrote a business plan actually during my MBA for what's now Savant and went briefly to work for a small broker dealer. And the deal was I was supposed to build this with him. And after 18 months, he hadn't given me a few thousand bucks I needed and the time I needed and I pushed a little too hard. He fired me. And I was out without a job and tried to get a real job at that point. Nobody would hire me. I guess they figured I was not employable. But then found a partner. He happened to be 17 years older than me. He sold insurance and had started just an hourly financial planning firm. I had a business plan. And it was, in a sense, he had an oil field. I had a rig and it was a good synergy.
He had relationships from having sold insurance and realized that it's hard to solve all the world's problems with insurance. And I didn't have enough gray hair and I didn’t know people with money. But I had a lot of passion and had really built a business plan on asset allocation and index funds and financial planning before that was a cool thing. So yeah, you mentioned the two offices. There was a little 800 foot house on the bad side of town. I still can't believe anybody hired us back then. And the entire investment was $5,000 and a laptop, computer and a prayer. That was the entire capital that we put in and just bootstrapped it. So retrospect, I'm amazed it all worked. But right timing, right place and almost 40 years of toil. So it's amazing, compounding of time and interest, how big things can happen.
Noonan: Joe Mansueto, founded Morningstar, I think in a similar timeframe to you. And I think it was $80,000 in an apartment here in Chicago and a couple desks and folding chairs. So a similar story in a lot of grads. When I sit down back at my desk today, I'm going to figure out who has the better return from the starting capital. Michael Kitces said something a few years ago at Morningstar's investment conference that stuck with me. He made the point to a room full of advisors that anybody, any advisor can build a great business with just 50 great clients. Arbitrary number, but I think the point he was making is, it doesn't have to be as grand as that you probably think. In those early days, what were you doing to get those first few dozen clients through the door?
Brodesky: Yeah, I mean, we were just trying to survive. My co-founder had to pull money out of his IRA to put cash in. And, I did the in kind donation my computer and laptop. And, my grandfather, I had my own apartment, but I asked my grandfather, I'm like, listen, if I run out of money, can I sleep on your couch? Because I don't really want to move back, with my parents said that was actually on the side. I was, I had a CPA. I'd never done my own tax return, but I went to work part-time for an accounting firm raising fees on their clients because the founder was an introvert and was afraid to go talk to people. So he gave me a short-term job of, going out to his clients raising their fees. And that's kind of how we got started. It was about, it was over a year before I got paycheck. I had saved a little bit of money in the year and a half I worked prior to getting fired. So, kind of worked through that and the credit cards.
And then we just like, listen, it was good journey. I mean, my partner and I had very different skills, but a shared vision, of really making a difference and putting the client first. He knew how to sell and I knew how to do everything else, sort of like, I, he had a doctor's office, but he write prescription and do an hourly project planning for people. But then they would leave and, oftentimes not fill their prescription or they go to the pharmacist and the pharmacist would sell them a wonder drug that was expensive as opposed to penicillin, which they actually needed. So the whole thing was like, all right, let's put the pharmacy in your office, right? You continue doing planning, I'll create the investment management function and, we hit the road running. So really it was a matter of going back after his relationships and, and I kind of built it and managed it and operated it and traded it and did investment research, all the above, right? So, and then we took turns every other week taking out the garbage. We couldn't afford somebody to do that for us.
Noonan: I'm going to steal one of your quotes from you, you will often say you come from the school of hard knocks. How long did it take before you felt like you graduated? I'm not sure if anybody actually ever graduates, but how long before you at least leveled up?
Brodesky: I would say it was probably 20 years to become world-class advisor, right? And it was the school of hard knocks. I mean, I kind of learned how to sell from my co-founder, right? And, it got all the different designations and degrees and so that helped and mostly gave me confidence. But I think, school of hard knocks, yeah, it was, you just did it. And, something worked. You kept doing it and something didn't work. You stopped doing it. And so, yeah, 20 years. And then once we got, 20 years out it was world-class, it's like I had to fire myself and rehire myself because at that point I needed to be a CEO and, run a business as opposed to being an investment guy and, financial planner. So, in a sense, once I became expert, I had to turn over that role of being an advisor and then focus on learning how to actually lead a business and manage people and, and innovate. So, I would say, frankly, every few years I've had to fire and rehire myself. So, once you get expert, you got to change what you're doing or you appear principal out and, kind of his ceiling of growth.
Noonan: Yeah, I'm going to follow up with you on the operationalizing of the business in a second. But one of the things I wanted to get to was something I did yesterday just looking at publicly available data and using some of the great AI tools that we all have at our disposal these days. I put together Savant's AUM from the early 90s through 2025. Podcast is an audio medium, I know. So, I'll throw the chart in the episode show notes for anyone that might be interested. But I think the takeaway for me is stark. The 1990s through the late 2000s, Savant's AUM looks like an anthill. It's just growing modestly every year. Then in the early 2010s, it kind of begins to explode higher. What comes to mind when you see a chart like that?
Brodeski: Compound interest.
Noonan: That's right.
Brodesky: You work really hard and, you avoid left turns. You take more right turns than left turns. You avoid potholes, and you get that exponential growth. I mean, it's our percentage growth every year, was higher, frankly, in the earlier years. As you get bigger, your organic tends to come down a bit and we were growing 20, 30% a year in some years, but it was off of a very small denominator based, right? So, I don't know if this is true or not, but, I heard that Einstein on his death bed was asked, like, what fascinated him most and it wasn't relativity, it was compound interest. So, I think you take that, and then, the concept of exponential growth, the big growth comes on the tail end, right? You lay the foundation in the early years and then that growth happens. So, we were, end of 2021, we were, $10 billion. We're $50 billion now, right? And, I got to tell you, the first 10 billion was a lot harder than the next 40 billion. But it's, building on itself. And, you gain momentum and, I mean, I think in the early days, like I said, you couldn't be as efficient because somebody had to take out the garbage and you had to wear 50 different hats and do all the jobs.
The advantage is as we've grown and scaled is, as you move from generalization to specialization, and that also applies to the CEO. I mean, when we were billion, I had to still do a lot of the jobs, right? I knew all the jobs when we were starting out. I had to do most of the jobs at a billion. I had to still do a lot of jobs at 10 billion. Now it's like I just do those things that I'm really good at and love doing. And we got 850 other employees who do all the other stuff that I suck at. So it's, I think, that exponential growth, I think it's compound interests and I think it's specialization. These are like one-on-one things. But over, approaching 40 years, it adds up.
Noonan: Yeah, to quote Einstein, I think it's 8th wonder of the world being compound interest. One of the things that I tell people, mostly people my age, but I think there's a, when you think about exponential growth, I just applied to like the Dow Jones industrial average. it touched 50,000 briefly last month. I think a lot of people don't understand that there's a real possibility that it could touch one million at some point in the next 40 years, if you think long enough and look at absolute, look at annualized returns over the past 30 years and what that looks like going forward. But the one kind of difference that I think gets lost is that it might take 35 years to get to 500,000 and then that final doubling would come in the final five or six years, whatever it is.
That's not a guarantee of anything, or promising returns, but, when you kind of alluding to what you just said about exponential growth, I think that applies to a lot of different aspects of life. Getting back to kind of the operationalizing of the business, as companies grow and scale, they often organize around a mission statement. at Morningstar for us, that tends to be, that is empowering investor success. I work in the wealth group. We partner with financial advisors, so we modified that slightly to empowering financial advisor success. Tell us about Savant's.
Brodesky: Yeah, so I established kind of my career long goal, which I thought would take my whole career, but I think we're going to get there in the next five to six years. And, that was, that was nine years ago, and I put a slate in the ground and people thought I was on drugs and crazy, but I said, we're going to improve a million lives. Right. And those are obviously our clients, but it's also their children and its also the people they employ. It's, the trickle down effect, if we improve our clients' lives, it gives them more confidence, then they spend more money, then they improve their communities. They do more philanthropy, by the way, there being our clients allows, 850 employees, we have investors, that benefit. So when you add it all up, we think, the goal I established was to improve a million lives, to move the dial in a million people.
And that sounds philanthropic and save the worldish, but the reality is that we're such a cool business that we can actually improve lives and get rich ourselves in the process, right? Because, my philosophy has always been make the pie as big as possible. And if we make a phenomenally good big pie, there's going to be enough for our clients, there's going to be enough for our team, there's going to be enough for owners, there's going to be enough for the communities, there's going to be left-goers. So I think, I thought it was going to be the rest of my career. I think, our rough napkin math actually is a little more sophisticated. We actually have an algorithm. We calculate the overall, we think we're about 250,000 lives right now. We just launched a, Savant vision 2030 plan, which, would take us to a million lives at the end of 2030.
So that's, again, I always, when we set this, I'm thinking, okay, like, it's going to take the rest of my career. We've actually got, we're moving there a lot faster than I imagined. So we're probably going to have to reset our goal to 10 million at some point. But that is really a unifying mission, vision. People get excited about it. I think related to that, there's, two of our core values is growth and excellence. And, I think it's really important. A lot of firms say, hey, we're going to be excellent. We're going to take great care of our clients. All right, great. but then they don't reinvest in their business, which means, over time, their value proposition erodes. Other people, think traditional PE controlled, pump it full of steroids and sell it in three to five years. They're all about growth, but not necessarily sustainable growth. So said differently, like if you're a bodybuilder and you want to get as big as possible, what do you do? You take steroids, right? You may or may not win Mr. Universe, but almost like certainly 10 years from now, you're going to have heart problems. You'll be dead. Right.
So that's growth, but not sustainable growth. And so I think, as we think about the mission as a million lives, but the path to that is finding that Venn diagram that that intersection of growth and excellence and then hiring patriots as opposed to mercenaries. There's a lot of mercenaries out there and listen, mercenaries can fight wars well and kill people. Like I've just learned a long time ago, it's about getting patriots, about people that are all in that share our vision that share, get excited about a million lives. And they know that, listen, if we create all that value, they and their families are going to bath that too. But the world's better and, we're doing meaningful work. So that's our big guiding star, a million lives and then all the trickle down effects that come with that.
Noonan: That's awesome. when I think of great company mission statements, Savant's is certainly up there. Skipping many chapters in the story, I know, but, Savant now has more than 50 offices across the country. You already told us about going from zero to one. I'd like to hear a little bit about going from one to 10. How'd that happen? How'd you go from, a couple million in the early days to north of 50 billion now today?
Brodesky: Yeah, so listen, listen, we started out in Rockford, Illinois which is sort of Chicago. Not a ton of wealth there. And it was just grinding, right? And I'd say, for the first phase of our career, the good news is, we're the big fish in a small bowl. and that was great because like you could be dominant, right? You could be all over the place. I mean, if there was five art venues, a symphony and different art related nonprofits, you could, market to or put ads in and like the same people went to all of those and they thought we were everywhere. No, we're just like where you are. Like, and so it's a work. Now, that was the great phase. But then again, eventually that fish bowl became a little small. Still our biggest market, by the way. So it's great market, but we realized we want to be bigger. So we had to expand. We went from a local to a regional, right?
That was kind of the next phase. And it was planting in the Chicago suburbs, in Madison, Wisconsin and central Illinois. And then not too long thereafter, clients a flag in the DC area, which was a whole another set of learnings, but then that was different. It was, it was like, regional, and then a multi-regional Patrick Lawler, who is our head of M&A. for years I said, listen, we're Midwest, right? Or, and then I kind of evolved saying, like, okay, we can reach out from there, but not New York City, not Miami, not San Francisco, not LA, because culture, I love to go into those places, but culturally they're different than us, right? And then, it was a couple of years ago, Patrick said, Brent, you got to think different about this. It's like, yes, culturally some of these places are different, but there's also really great aligned people in those markets. So, are we better off doing a mediocre acquisition in Illinois or Wisconsin or a phenomenal firm that's in LA or San Francisco or New York or Florida, right?
And I was like, wow, you're exactly right. So, I think that that's an example where, thinking bigger, but thinking less about, in the early days, like we were small and, it would have broken us if we did too many deals and if we went too far away. Well, now we're at 850 people. And so, you got to think differently. You got to think it's more about quality and alignment and shared vision with great people as opposed to being geographically bound. So, I think it's when you think about it, you start out in Rockford, Illinois, and then I'm like, gosh, we got to spread out our wings. That's scary. Let's be in Chicago, right? And then, in Wisconsin, and then, okay, let's do multiple regions. And now it's like, no, we're a national firm. I mean, maybe at some point we become an international firm. I'm not really thinking about that yet.
I know some of the other big firms in our industry are, but I still think there's plenty of U.S.-based opportunities. But I think it's just, not constraining yourself. I mean, you have a core values and you have core philosophy and some clarity around the quality of the people and the type of people that you want to affiliate with and, commitment to improving a million lives. Like, that is what I've learned. And it's less, early days you had to be very constrained geographically. Now we've got the entire United States and offices and, frankly, all the places that said we wouldn't, right? Because we realize it's really about aligning interests with people that, are excited to do something bigger, better, cooler together and share a common vision.
Noonan: What about the approach to integration? I know that, it's probably one strong tree trunk rather than a lot of different trees in the forest. How do you, when you combine firms, how do you integrate them?
Brodesky: Yeah, so, listen, I think a lot of the people that we compete with, they're looking for Marines, people that just want a tour of duty and then, or people that are looking to, exit stage left with a big check. That is not what we're doing. There's other firms out there that are building confederations. It's like, come one, come all, and we're not going to make you change. you just keep doing what you're doing. You do investments, however you do it. Whatever planning software you use, just keep doing that. We are the opposite of that? Like, we realize, M&A is not a financial transaction. There's obviously there's finances involved and, financial models and, all that fun stuff. But it's really like to us, it's about four things. when we do, we've done over 40 partnerships. I don't like calling it M&A because M&A is like big fish, swallows little fish.
And this is really about finding great partners that share a vision. And so the number one thing is we're saying, what's the quality of that team? And if they want to exit stage left and, go to the beach, we're not doing that deal. We're looking for people that are want to be all in, typically role 50% equity or more and are really excited about being part of something bigger, better, cooler. And not only are they all in, the founders all in, but their team are all in, right? And their team become equitized. We have almost 300 employee owners now. Right? So it's like that is a huge part of our deal. So if you're going to join us, you got to be great people that want to be all in. And second of all, it's new geography like, okay, we've learned it's really hard to greenfield it, put a flag up and wait for the phone to call.
It just doesn't happen. So you need to, if you're going to move into a new market, you got to have people that are embedded in those communities that have relationships and know these centers of influence and have a client base. Right? And then third of all, it's like when we're in a market, we went in a year ago to New York City. We're just in the process of closing another deal in a couple of days that will double down, in that direction. So like the idea is, we don't want to be small in a big city. We want to have density. So that's the third variable. And then the last is really, do they bring unique IP? Do they bring niche expertise? Do they have great plays in their playbook? I always love to say like, we're looking for people that have phenomenal plays and some cases are plays we don't have them. We're going to put their play in our playbook. In other case, their play is better than our play. We'll rip out our page and stick theirs in.
So at the end of the day, that is our criterion. It's like instead of, drafting Marines, it's like highly curated Seal Team 6. We're looking for patriots who want to be all in, don't have big egos, who are excited about being something bigger, which means, and why is that important? Because like, they're not, we're not just writing the check and they're going away. They have to be excited to be part of who we are and make it better and, adopt one brand, adopt one playbook, one text back, be part of the same cap table, be an owner. The biggest lesson I've learned probably in my career is if you align the interests, if you find people that share a common vision and goals and we all row together, it doesn't guarantee our success, but it increases our odds of getting there. So, but if you get people that are misaligned or have a different vision or like just want to cash out and go to the beach, I think that's a bad business model.
Noonan: Okay, I'll say that is the ninth wonder of the world. How about that?
Brodeski: Yeah, I like that.
Noonan: I want to pivot to a topic. I think that's taking up a lot of the oxygen in the world today. Everybody knows what it is, artificial intelligence. If you look at the stock market, there's been rolling sell offs this year as it relates to, different businesses and industry groups and AI's impact on them. Specific to wealth management. Last month, Altruist, a custodian in wealth platform for advisors, they just made an announcement that they had a new AI powered tax planning tool. The press release alone, triggered a sharp sell-off in publicly traded wealth management stocks. As one example, Charles Schwab was down as much as 10% intraday on the news. As it pertains to technology and kind of the shifting wins and wealth management. You might be one of the top people to ask this question to what is happening.
Brodesky: Yeah, I think most people are doing very little. Right. By the way, AI is easy. What's not easy is data, organizing your data. What's not easy is having a vision around how we can leverage AI and agentic and a lot of the new capabilities that are growing way faster than Gordon's law. It's going fast, right? Having a vision as to how you and a willingness to transform the business model. What I'm seeing right now is like, there's all these point solutions like everybody's got a, AI note taker, big deal table stakes. It just means we all run faster together. It's really not a competitive advantage. If you don't adopt it, you're in the dark age. And I can go on. There's a lot of little fintechs popping up and saying they're doing AI. Listen everybody's got Claude or ChatGPT and asking the questions like that's not that special.
I think, the real opportunity is to transform our industry, to instead of being an advisor-centric industry where that advisor sits there with 42 different pieces of software they have to navigate and cut and paste between and try to patch it together, advice and client experience and every advisor does it differently. And, it takes you 20 years to become a great advisor. I think the opportunity is that handful of firms will emerge and become platform companies that have advisors inside that are bionic as opposed to advisory professional service firms. That have fintech. It's a nuance. But I guess the way I think about it is think of iOS, right, your Apple iOS or Google Android or, it's amazing, right, for $1,000 and, $100 month subscription and a few apps. You carry around your pocket something that, is the equivalent of tens of millions of devices that used to fill warehouses and didn’t work very well.
And now you can pop it out at a stoplight and get worked on. Like that is a platform. Another example would be Microsoft 360. It's amazing. For annual subscription fee, all that you get or Amazon Prime for a hundred bucks, you get whatever you want delivered today or maybe even in a few hours at a good price. You can return it easily and it's easy. Like, that's amazing the value they have created. We think that these are big tech companies, but they're actually platform companies that have AI inside. Think your iPhone. It's got Siri, right? It's got AI, but it's really about bringing together people, process, technology, branding, packaging, partnership, UX, UI, AI, bringing all that together. I mean, if you think about Apple, they don't make that much.
Maybe they make a chip here and there, and, they're really just kind of curators of parts, and. And content to create this massive value proposition. So here's the here's my contention. My contention is there is no iOS of wealth. It does not exist. So I think the real opportunity is, again, what do you have? You have, every advisor has godless numbers of technologies that they fumble between and know that technology really works well together. They don't play nice because they all are competitors. So I think a handful of firms that have a vision that have leadership to implement that vision, they have enough scale to be able to afford the investments, that have a time horizon because this is the five to ten year time horizon. If your PE is exiting in two years, you're not going to make this investment, right? And then an appetite, for change management and a commitment.
Like, and I think there's maybe a handful or fewer firms that emerge, but what they will do over the next three years is build a platform. We call it internally wise OS, right? But sort of like the iOS of wealth that then will allow, that exponential growth, which comes really in the form of higher organic growth, higher inorganic growth, better operating leverage. And unique IP that's differentiating. So that's my prediction. I mean, there's 20 to 25 serious firms right now that all have outside capital. There's probably another 50 wannabes that would like to be like them. But of those 20 to 25, I think a handful or fewer are going to merge and make this transition from a, advisor professional services business to a platform company with bionic advisors inside.
Noonan: Yeah, that's great. I do want to circle back to one point earlier and I'm going to break up this next part into two questions. The, present and the future. So when you think about the present, you mentioned meeting notes being put directly into a CRM, which is commonly cited. It removes a lot of the busy manual work that somebody on the team might be doing. Is that kind of the biggest benefit you're seeing right now operating financial advisory firm in terms of AI? Is there anything else you're seeing?
Brodesky: Yeah, I mean, again, these point-to-point solutions, or the LLMs that we can all license for $20 a month. Like they just, again, they just allow us to be a little more efficient. Maybe they give us 10%, maybe 15% more efficiency. I think the real magic is that that platform concept will, if you think about typical advisor, I guess they're spending 20% of their time in front of clients and prospects, 80% of the time they're doing stuff, right? They're preparing for meeting, they're following up for meeting, they're that I am putting, they're doing stuff, right? And imagine if instead of 80% of the time they're doing stuff, and 20% of the time they're doing what they really want to do, which is, convey wisdom, build relationships, provide empathy, deliver peace of mind, create, deliver, curate great advice, right? That's what most advisors want to do, but it's a minority of their day. Like what if you could flip that and have 80% of your time being on, right?
Imagine like, like take Frank Sinatra, he didn't move speakers, he didn't book venues, he didn't sell tickets, he didn't clean up afterwards. What did he do? He's sang. So imagine, and he had crews of people behind him, they didn't have AI back then, but they had crews of people that did all the other stuff. Well, imagine if you've got a few people, but all these agentic agents that can do all that other stuff and you're 80% of the time you're on, right? A, that's a better, that you can deliver better advice, more of it to more people. The advisor makes more money, they have more fun, right? And they make the bigger difference. In our case, we move to that million lives faster, right?
So that's, that's where I see this, it's the AI is the buzz, but they said that's the easy part. It's the building the platform and the change management to create a culture that embraces creating more value as an enterprise through a platform with Bionic advisors as the liaison between that platform and those end clients and prospects. Like that, I think is transformational. And what I'm seeing is there's almost nobody else doing this in the industry. I mean, there's a few people doing it at the fringes and some of the bigger firms because like, they're drowning in all this fintech that doesn't work together. But even, if you can get all the data organized, you still then have to change the way we do work to being coaches and facilitators and delivers the advice as opposed to advice being about the advisor. So that's kind of my prediction. I think it's the few firms will merge over the next three years, you got to build the data, then you got to normalize structured data models that brings all the data from all the fintech together. Then you need to build the platform. Then you need to change the way advisors think about adding value. And that's why I think, to handful or fewer firms that are going to, yeah, and they're going to have such a huge competitive advantage.
Noonan: So thinking about the future, hope is not a business strategy. Anybody that's listened to you so far on this show knows that you're not waiting around hoping it works out. Citywire reported last week that Savant is going to be spending 50 million to build an internal AI platform. When you think jump forward, three to five years, whatever the timeframe is and consider how AI is going to impact, inside of Savant. Client experience, advisor productivity, where are the biggest benefits going to manifest to make sure that advisors are kind of flipping that number that you gave earlier where they're spending 80% of the time doing tasks that they truly enjoy?
Brodesky: Yes, look, I think there's four main value creation levers related to this platform that has AI inside. Again, one is organic growth. Like if advisors are freed up from doing stuff, they can go make more friends, they can go sell more. They can deliver twice the volume of advice and make it three times more perceived advice. Because there's all this stuff we do we don't get credit for. But a platform will highlight, bold, and remind people of all the value we're creating, quantify that. So if we can deliver twice the amount of advice and three times the perceived advice, oh, and by the way, because we've got agentic agents doing the stuff for us and we've got workflows and processes with a platform that make us bionic, we can do that for more clients. So deliver more real advice, more perceived advice for more clients at a lower cost. That's super powerful. And so that's the first thing. You do all that. You create more value. You're going to get more referrals. You're going to get more wallets here. You get a higher retention. It's going to be easier to close business because you're going to be able to demonstrate more value. So that's organic.
Inorganic. I think the firms that merge with this type of a platform with AI inside, they're going to have something really unique and special that the best firms that are not looking to sell and go to the beach because if you are looking to sell and go to the beach, you just want the highest dollar in cash. But if you want to roll significant equity, if you want to be part of something bigger, better, cooler, you need to have a platform that allows you to be better at what you do, deliver more value to clients. And have your equity grow faster. Right. So that's the inorganic. I think the firms like, we hope is we build this, make this investment. And we're a couple of years into the journey right now that we're attracting more of Seal Team 6, M&A partners, right, that want to come and join us. So we get the best of the best. The third is operating a fixed leverage, right?
So like this platform allows us to do better work faster, right? On a more scalable, on a more consistent, a more branded across offices, across advisors, allows us. I said earlier, it took me 20 years to become a world-class advisor. What if the platform allows five year CFP to be as smart or smarter than I was as a 20 year old, CFP? Like that's the opportunity like that. And that also helps solve, the shortage of labor, right? Because we can actually train and develop advisors a lot faster. And then the last is like, there are a lot of firms out there. And so this platform provides an opportunity to truly create differentiated IP that allow us to stand out. Now what does that mean? That means we're going to attract the best talent. We're going to retain the best talent. That will allow us to track the best clients, retain the best clients, get referrals from the best clients. So it's this flywheel opportunity where between higher organic, higher inorganic, higher operating leverage, and being able to attract the best with differentiated, IP will position us to really, I'd like to think we're going to just, we're ready in the top 10 to 15, RIA is depending on how you measure, right? But I think it gives us the opportunity to run out ahead of the pack.
Noonan: Inside that answer alone, you touched on a lot of different topics that I'd like to kind of explore individually, peel back the onion on them. As we consider just broad industry trends, the first one's organic growth. That's still the barometer of success in this industry. I think most people, leading RIAs would make that argument. When we think about organic growth, we're talking about signing up new clients or growing with existing clients. you mentioned referrals, centers of influence. Those are the common drivers for most advisors. Without giving away any of your secret sauce, what are you seeing or have seen that helps advisors kind of outperform on that metric?
Brodesky: So what we see is most advisory firms fall into one of two camps. Either they sit back and wait for the phone to ring and get referrals. And that used to be, it used to be just on the shingle and we were differentiated enough from the wire houses and insurance and banks that the phone rang, right? Because people wanted fiduciary advice, whether they understood what the fiduciary was or not, they wanted that independent advice. Well, guess what? Now, we are big elephants as opposed to, the innovator, right? I mean, the independent advice is a huge player and the wire houses are recently trying to look like us. So if you hang in a shingle and waiting for the phone to ring, maybe that delivers enough new clients to offset those that die or spend their money, but not much more. So that's why we're seeing, I think, the industry, organic growth rates drop a lot because people are just doing it the way they've always done it, which is hang a shingle and wait for referrals, right? And yeah, you can have a living that way, but you can't build a healthy, sustainable business with just excellence, right?
The second thing is you see, a subset of the largest firms that have become very reliant on the custodial referral programs…
Noonan: Prices are going up.
Brodeski: Yeah. And I mean, not only the price is going up, but, understandably, the custodians are wanting to keep more of that business for themselves. So I don't know five or seven years from now, that's even going to be a source to grow with. Now it is right now for a subset of the firms, but what we're seeing is some of the biggest firms, they've become incredibly reliant. They're sort of like the custodians are their drug dealer, right? And, they're addicted to that, but they don't really have other ways of growing, right? Because that's, they just, that's all they're doing, right? So like, what we have, the way we've approached it, this is our organic growth is, a little over about 8% last year, we think we've got a path to 10% plus. But that is not reliant on, yes, of course, we get referrals, right? And, if you do things right, you'll get more referrals, but there's only so much of that, that's not going to get you to 10% growth. So we kind of think of it as like a Swiss army knife. You have to have a lot of strategies.
Like, listen, we're, we're in the custodial referral programs, but it's a small piece of what we do. We've never like said, this is our long term strategy. We were going to spend 15 million on digital advertising this year. Like we have spent, a huge amount on AI, agents and a martech stack to be able to, to really take lukewarm or even cold digital leads and turn them into clients. That's really hard and it's expensive, right? And you spend tens of millions just learning how to do this. Right? It's a big investment, but it's now, making money for us. So anyways, long story short, and the biggest thing I think is building a culture where growth is good. I mean, too often in our industry now, people are saying, well, sale was bad. I don't want to sell. They come out and see a peaceful and just, give me a computer and let me be a propeller head doing financial planning.
Don't make me sell. Like that's, that's broken, right? Because the reality is if we're in the improve a million life business and we go out and sell and we go get more clients, that means we're improving more lives. How was that bad? Right? If you got something good to sell, you need to build a culture where growth is good. And, if you have that, you're going to track other people that get that, right? We have propeller heads too, but yeah.
Noonan: If you're an early career advisor, 30s, 40s, whatever it is, and you want to get better at sales, you want to build the muscle, what advice would you have for them? I mean, it's not something that comes naturally to a large percentage of the population. Is it reading books? Is it just getting out there and doing it? School of hard knocks. What, exactly would you tell somebody that wants to improve at that?
Brodesky: I think it's a little bit of everything. Like, early on I mentioned, we started in my, my partner to the sales and I did everything else. And then we got a little bigger and the realization was either if we're going to keep growing, it can't just be him doing sales. So then I went up there. I taught courses. I did a bunch of writing. I mean, you name it, I tried it all. It was a lot, right? And it was like sort of like drilling for oil. And sometimes it was a dry oil well and okay, don't do that again. Right. Other cases it was a gusher and let's get this oil, but realizing that's going to dry out. So you got to keep doing other things. Like my experience was just go out and work hard, right? Just try a lot of things. You do more of what works and you do less of what doesn't work. I think the other thing I would say is, I had the advantage, my co-founder was 17 years older than me and he was trained at Mass Mutual. He was one of the top, million dollar round table guys. And I just followed him around and saw what he did.
Right. And, his style was not my style, but I was able to see, take certain things that he did and then add my own mojo to it to kind of create my style as more comfortable with. And, I remember, there was three of us that were co-founders, two of us originally and then we added a third and we all had very different styles. Like, my original co-founder, he talked, his meetings were three hours and he did 90% of the talking. my other co-founder was 45 minutes and he did 10% of the talking. I was kind of in between, Tom worked with big personalities. Dick, was kind of more introverted, nice people. And I was like business owners. It was like, so it was like, what I learned is, is your personality, you want to work with people that still have a similar personality.
I was an analytic type. I was kind of a business minded type and I attracted engineers and business people. And, and so I think understanding, getting self-awareness of who you are, right? And, and looking for people like you, you're going to, you're going to be more comfortable. They're going to be more comfortable, you're going to have a higher closing rate, if you will. I wish I could, yeah, I wish I could package this up. It's, it's really, it is school of hard knocks, I think, but it's persistence, right? It's, persistence. And I think it's part of it. It was like serious crap when I started. I mean, if you told me I had to go sell when I was in college, I would skip, I would have change jobs and become a musician or artist or something. But, like the business needed me to sell. And so I did it. It was scary. But, when you realize that you're improving people's lives and you have something good to sell.
Listen, if you're selling drugs, maybe that's not a good thing, right? But if you're, if you're selling ideal futures, and creating value, then like you should be like, putting that on a billboard and announcing that to the world, like, how is that bad? But I think too often the people coming into our industry is like sales are bad. And, like, okay, we need a certain number of people sit behind computers and crank out Monte Carlo analysis. But the way you make real money and the way you have real impact is through relationships and creating value for people and, and, part of that sales.
Noonan: That's great. The only comment I would have is your co-founder that was doing the three hour meetings is going to be tough for the next generation of advisors to win a lot of millennial clients and generations like that with a three hour meeting.
Brodeski: Yeah, they don't even want to have meetings after that.
Noonan: Yeah, it's tough to get them on Zoom to begin with. You mentioned kind of putting things on billboards and being proud of what you do. I walk from Union Station every day to our office near City Hall here in Chicago. You can't make that six-walk block without seeing city buses that have the personal injury attorney advertising their face on it. I know well that's not the right medium for financial advisors. But as you consider other ways to market yourself, you mentioned 15 million in digital advertising that you're doing, what are you trying there? What's working?
Brodesky: First of all, you have to have unique content. we've got 850 people. We've got amazingly smart people like, you can't license content. You can't just repackage content. You can't even just have AI write it for you. I mean, AI can make you help you write better, I suppose. But you've got to have content, right? And being able to put it out there and, kind of tease people with it. put it out there, give them a little bit. Right. The digital has become like what's very different is when I started out, it was like, you went and did seminars. You put an ad on the newspaper, you send out mailers and then you went to seminars and whoever showed up, you gave them chicken dinner and like that doesn't work anymore. Right? Because frankly the kind of people we want to go after, they can afford their own chicken dinner.
And, the reality is, we need to be very curated, in terms of, what we're delivering to whom. So the beauty of it is, is in the past where it was like, get a billboard, put an ad in the newspaper and then you get the broad. It's like sort of like taking a gun and blindly shooting it in the air, hope it duck falls. That was the old methodology. Now you can be hyper, rifle shot, versus ice because like you can actually use AI and the list to build databases. We build databases of people we want as clients and then, you can use, deliver digital ads to them. Right? And actually like through like Hulu as an example or YouTube, you can deliver advertisements to the people that you want as clients. Like it's gotten that crazy, right? And now it's sophisticated, right? And it's really expensive. And I got to tell you, like, just, each converted client through digital is north of $20,000.
Now it's still a good lifetime of value when you consider the cost of going and, buying a firm as an example, it's even more expensive. But like it's, and then by the way, like if you just get a lead and you give it to a traditional advisor who sits and waits for their referrals, like it doesn't work. So like we've got a whole CDT team, a whole team of, people that, triage these leads, and sometimes it takes 25 outages using texting, phone calls, emails, chasing them around with, with digital ads, like over and over and over its cumulative effect. And so there's this, you get A, there's the cost of building the content. B, making sure you use digital agencies and AI driven algorithms to push it to the right people because these digital ads are expensive. Then you got to take these, lukewarm or cool leads and have a whole team of people that systemically and, using again technology to follow up in myriad ways, sometimes over months or even years, right?
Then you got to get the meeting, right? And with the right advisor who is the right personality, who's got availability. So, it's complex, right? But I mean, we got it home and now it's taken us a few years and lots of money. But we just see that's an example of getting back to like, listen, the server for programs has this place. Referrals always have its place. But if you can supplement that with a half a dozen other strategies, like in our case, the digital is the biggest that creates a lot more at bets, right? And, and by the way, that also getting back to M&A, like if we could say, listen, we got this engine that can drive lead generation for you. That's super exciting to people who want to grow and want to be part of something bigger and want to get more clients. So, we see that that's an example. It's organic growth, but it really also feeds inorganic growth, which also creates scale, which allows operating leverage.
Noonan: When we talk about the digital channels that are proving well for you, are we talking about Facebook ads? Are we talking about advertising, on the Wall Street Journal digital? I mean, is there any specifics that you would call out that are working better than others?
Brodesky: All above, it's the smart assets of the world. It's, Apple news. It's Facebook, it's Google. I mean, all of these things. And, again, that's part of the art that they all have different audiences, there's different expenses. There's, different kinds of content work differently in different channels. It truly is, like I said, it used to be more of an art, right? And now it's clearly a science. And we're engaging right now, we're spending a million dollars, hired some specialists that's literally a professor that is this rocket scientist in Warsaw, Poland that is an expert at creating agentic agents that lever algorithms to really hone in on the literally millions of data points we've captured to discern better what is working, what's not, what do we do more, and what do we stop doing? Where do we put that ad? I mean, it's, it's like stuff that human brains can't. I mean, this is where AI and agentic and the power of, of leveraging data is imperative.
I also think it's one of the competitive moats, is like, this literally takes millions year after year, plus the expertise and a commitment to this, having a timeframe. And there's not many firms that are able to do that. So, we're, we're 70% employee owned and plan a 10 plus year game. So yes, this is big investments that's taking, we make them spend money now and it might take three to five or even longer years to pay off. But like we plan to be present to win. So, we can make that investment where, said PE firm, owned firm that's selling in two years, they're not going to be present to win. So they're not going to make that investment, right? Which, they're just going to do more M&A and overpay for, spent oil, well companies.
Noonan: All right. Well, Morningstar.com is part of the Morningstar Wealth Group. We sell ads. So maybe we'll come kick down your door later. Won't do that right now. One of the things I want to talk to you about was just the kind of the product evolution in the industry. Private markets, huge theme across the industry. I know Savant has been a participant in privates through interval funds, giving clients exposure to private debt, real estate, insurance, things like that for almost a decade now, I don't want you to comment on any asset class specifically. That's not really what I'm asking, but rather do you see offering those capabilities, private markets as a way for advisors to differentiate themselves with competition out there?
Brodesky: Yeah, it's interesting. if you asked me, I don't know, 10 years ago about private equity, I would have said, or venture capital, like that's a license to Seal 2 and 20. That's absurd. I've done 180. Like we have, we have two minority private equity. I mean, they make up 28% of our cap table. It's kind of special because like they can't make us sell the company. They can't make us buy them out and can't make us do anything that they're phenomenal partners and, but they're long patient capital. Right. So I get the best of that outside capital that makes us better and, but at the same time we're able to play this, this sort of long game. What I have observed with our two private equity partners, they've made us so much better. They've got amazing expertise on how to take small companies and make a medium or medium and make them large, how to create value creation. I never thought about value creation. I just thought about getting clients like, and they think in the context of value creation.
That's been really impressive. they have all these experts and resources that they're able to bring to us and in many cases give to us. Like we just get them for free. Some cases we pay for them, but like, we, we, they brought us McKinsey, but we got a much better rate than we would have gotten and better team than we would have gotten on our own. Right. So, like that, what I've learned is that they actually add significant value. So, I actually believe private equity adds value, but, it's complex to, make sure you got the right structure to be able to benefit from that without, being optimized for their promote and for their LPs, right? Rather to optimize it for your clients and, and, and the owner, all the owners. So that's one thing.
So A, yes, I think this is like private equity, venture capital done right can add value. And part of that is because there's liquidity premium and you can't gain that through public markets. That used to be there were not, he wasn't a thing and the public markets were everything. But we've seen what's happened is that we've gone from 8,000, 9,000, 10,000 public companies to maybe 4,000 ish today. And by the way, a firm small size historically would have been public a long time ago and there's no desire to go public. Like, why would we do that? Right. And so what you're finding is the small and the mid-market companies and even some of the large companies aren't going public. So if you're just investing in public companies, you're not gaining access to a huge part of the total investment market opportunity.
Noonan: yeah, I might have to clip that one and send it to Morningstar CEO. Private markets are a big initiative for us. we sell data and subscriptions through the PitchBook platform, which provides data and all sorts of different private equity strategies. So he'll be excited to hear your insights from one of the bigger practitioners in the RIA space. One follow-up I did have on private markets, with interval funds, they've been in the news recently. I'll steal a quote from Peter Malook at Creative Planning. The media sometimes has fiduciary duty and it's not to you, the end investor. I think there's a lot of fear mongering going on in terms of fund structures and people not necessarily knowing how these work. And a lot of the Morningstar fund analysts that cover these strategies are kind of putting that outwardly on Morningstar.com and other channels.
But the question I have for you is not about the fund structure or anything like that, but how are advisors at Savant coached, and maybe take me through the whole life cycle, like how are they educating clients on the front end to avoid any uncomfortable situations on the back end when these things are on, page one of the journal and wherever else?
Brodesky: Yeah, listen, the higher returns they can bring, whether it's credit or private equity, I mean, there's costs to that and it's illiquidity. And, listen, we know traditional private equity is, 10 years and two two-year extensions and it's illiquid eyes wide open. We know public companies are liquid every day or every minute, right? This interval funds is in between, but I don't know that advisors have understood that or let alone in many cases, conveyed that to their clients. There is a reason why they put gates on so that there's not a run on the bank, right? When you look at private credit right now, listen, it's in the news, all of a sudden you got a lot of people looking to exit. Now, if you just open the gates and let it all out, it would be bad. It would, because these are illiquid assets, you don’t have to sell them at fire sale prices.
The underlying assets aren't bad, they're just somewhat illiquid. And so I think the reality is, is, these gates are designed to provide access and higher returns, but, really offset the fact that they are not underlying liquid. So you got to be eyes wide open and know that there will be times when they're dated, right? And if the advisors understand that and then do a good job of communicating that to the clients, then the clients can make a call as to whether they're okay to, yeah, get 2% more yield, but I might not be able to get my money back when I want, like, or no, I want my money back. So let's not do that private credit stuff. So I think, listen, end of day, patience is a virtue. This is a classic example where it's a virtue, but if you don't have patience, it's not something investors or advisors ought to be putting investors in.
Noonan: Yeah, you're speaking to the choir on that one. I mean, there's, for example, there's private real estate funds that own the Bellagio on the Las Vegas Strip. And if they allowed all investors to redeem their capital at once, that could create a situation where they're doing fire sale prices and a lot of the investors that aren't selling are going to be negatively impacted. So I don't think that story is really getting out there. But in terms of behavior coaching and getting that information to clients ahead of time when you're using these types of products, I know you're doing that well. And that's kind of why I wanted to highlight that. One other product I just want to briefly touch on, I'm a millennial, so I have to ask about Bitcoin or digital assets. I'm not going to ask you to explain the blockchain or anything like that. But if you're delivering holistic financial planning and financial advice to end client, there's just enough people that own this asset class at this point in their life. What is Savant doing to deliver advice on that asset class specifically as it applies to communicating with clients around it and how it might impact their asset allocation?
Brodesky: Yeah, listen, if you go back a few years, we said, sort of avoid it, right? Just don't do it. And then we're finding some people wanted to do it and they were doing it on their own and they were losing their passwords or not really knowing what they're getting into or eyes weren't wide open. So we have some solutions. We're not going to go out of our way to promote it. But if somebody wants it, it's like, okay, now, it shouldn't be 10% of your portfolio, 1% or 2% might be fine. Here's how we would do it. And so we're not as adverse to it as we used to be. We're not saying any of these needs to be part of your portfolio. I got to tell you, I still struggle a little bit as to the value. I mean, when I think of investment, it's something that creates value. And maybe there's some value because it's maybe a store of value similar to gold without having to have guns to guard it. So maybe there's some value there, but at the end of the day, and by the way, listen, if things go really, really bad and dollar's worthless, then I'm guessing Bitcoin will drop in price too. But it may be a vehicle that you can use as an alternative. So I think in really extreme scenarios, there might be a porpoise, maybe it's a store of value. I don't own any yet. I've thought about it on three occasions and then usually that was at the peak right before it crashed.
Noonan: The FOMO periods.
Brodesky: So I'm kind of glad I haven't yet. But I wish I had way back when, but and is everybody who wished they could go back in time and buy it 15 years ago?
Noonan: Well, you sound like somebody that works at Morningstar. That's a lot of the similar thinking that you're giving that comes from the Morningstar Investment Research Team in terms of the lack of durable cash flows and things like that. All right, we're getting close to the finish line. Before that, I wanted to throw a few questions at you that you probably haven't been asked before. One for me, I got to visit Warren Buffett in Omaha in college. It was one of those college visit days where a few dozen college students descend on Omaha. It wasn't just him and I hanging out. During the Q &A portion, he got a question along the lines of, could you build Berkshire again if you were starting today? So I want to ask you a version of that question. If you were starting Savant today, could you replicate what's been built?
Brodesky: It's a good question. People have asked me that actually a few times. Malcolm Gladwell in a book. I remember him talking about how there was a window in time when all these big fintechs, most of these big fintechs were started. The people that started them, the Bill Gates's and Bezos of the world, they were all born within a five or six year window. And the gist of this was there was a window of time when you could start these things and then somebody as smart as Bill Gates probably wouldn't have had the opportunity to build a Microsoft type of a business, right? Because how do you compete with Microsoft now to build, and maybe Google can build a version of Office, but it's a couple firms. So I don't know. I mean, yeah, it was a wild, wild west and we didn't have fintech back then. And it was still early founders or a certain sales guy and brokers that saw the light.
Listen, the reality is there's new businesses being formed all the time. I think there's more RIAs being formed today than there's ever been. There's more new firms being started than there are being acquired. All the headlines is about firms that are selling. But interestingly, there's more being started every day. So I think at the end of the day, entrepreneurs are entrepreneurs are entrepreneurs. I started out saying nobody would give me a job because I probably wasn't employable because it was too much of an entrepreneur. So if I start today, it'll probably look different, right? The ways you be successful in starting an RIA today are probably different than back in 1993, or 1986, when my co-founders started doing the planning work. But yeah, it's great to think about it. I'm glad we did it. And I'm more excited about the opportunity than ever.
Noonan: Not your problem. You already did it. Somebody else's problem that's doing it in the future. You taught investment courses at the college level in the past. It's actually one of the first points in your bio. If you were teaching advisor 101 today, what are the building blocks you would provide that next generation of advisors? Looking for just a few things here rather than a laundry list of items.
Brodesky: I mean, a few things. Stocks for the long run. I was asked the other day, I was in a YPO forum, a financial forum. It hit me. It's like, yeah, I just, I don't like bonds. Alternatives, I don't know, maybe a little bit here and there's like spice. You don't want a lot of them. But equity is just the one thing that grows over time. As long as people keep going to work and like animals, like when they're born, they eat, they reproduce, and they die, and nothing changes. The difference between animals, monkeys and humans share 98.9% of the same DNA. That last 1.1% is what makes us special. And I think that last 1.1% is that we don't think about just today. We think about the future. We don't spend all the money we make today. We invest for the future. We take what we learned historically from our parents and grandparents and then build on that to make life better. So as long as capitalism continues to work and we keep accumulating knowledge and we don't spend all of our money and we want our kids to be better than us, I think markets will go up. Listen, they're going to go up and down along the way. It's like going up a stair steps with the yoyo.
It goes up and down, but the direction is up. And so that's my thesis. It's like at the end of the day, the best investments are equities. If you buy in capitalism, I think that is the success. Buy and hold. Start early. We already talked about the eighth wonder of the world, compound interest. Is that basic, I think? The details change, but at the core, it's about having faith that the world's going to get better. And we want to hitch our wagons to the economy and markets and invest for the long run.
Noonan: I was the one pitching you on the idea of Dow $1 million at the beginning of the show. So once again, you're speaking to the choir. I'd love a few recommendations from you if you're willing. Not sure what you like, books, podcasts, TV shows. What's good out there that's had your attention recently?
Brodesky: Yeah. So there's a book on AI, Jeff Brown's, the AI driven leader. It taught me how to prompt. Really good book. It might be the best business book I've read in 10 years. And then there's a classic, Strengths 2.0. I'm very much about listening. Like they said, I used to think like every five or six years, I had to remake myself. Then it's now down to two to three years. And so being really self-aware, understanding what you're good at, what you're not good at, is important. It's gallop. It's been around for 15 years, a little coding that you do an assessment that tells you what you're good at. If you pay an extra, it'll tell you what you're bad at. That's been really helpful as a self-awareness tool to allow me to, as I continue to fire and rehire myself, lean on my strengths as opposed to trying to fix things I'll never be good at. And then I go way back in time. It's like, where are your customers yachts? It's like 100-year-old book. Valid Today is ever. And it's really about putting clients first. And historically, our industry has put themselves first.
Noonan: And yeah, it's a Warren Buffett recommendation. I think that might even go back to Ben Graham. That's one's been around for many decades at this point. Last one. I know there's a few published authors inside the walls at Savant. I don't think you're one of them yet though. When's your book coming out?
Brodesky: Well, I have a book that's not on Amazon. It's Climbing Mount Savant. And it's about a 90-page book, every other page is a cartoon, and it's big print. But it lays out the vision for the future, our values, our goals, our superpowers, our guiding principles. And it's become like the Bible at Savant around, we hire people that drink this Kool-Aid. We fire people that don't. We use this in how we promote people. So anyway, that's not a bestseller. It's, but I printed 2,000 copies that I've given out half of them already. But I'm actually working on a book right now that I hope to be ready to publish this fall. So the idea is been in my head forever. I've had a 36-page detailed outline for a couple of years now. But I think with AI, it's allowing me to accelerate and get the stuff out of my head and have it still be me without a ghostwriter, but like using my words, but have an AI help me, having Claude help me. So that's my timeline. So I guess now that I've put it out here for the whole world to know, I guess I have to deliver it once and for all.
Noonan: All right, heard it here first. I'll put that one on my list as well. Brent, we can wrap there. This was awesome. I really appreciate you hopping on with us. In terms of timing, I'm going to get the audio recording back. I have to put it through compliance. They'll sign off on it. And then I'm hoping to maybe post it late next week or early following if that sounds good. And I'll share it with you and, Raimy as well.
Brodesky: That sounds great. I appreciate the opportunity and good catching up after a number of years.
Noonan: Yeah, likewise. Enjoy the weekend and enjoy the rest of the cold months down in Florida.
Noonan: And there you have it, another episode of Simple, but Not Easy. We're grateful to Brent for making time for us. Before we depart, please consider leaving a five star review on Apple or Spotify. Until next time, thanks for listening.
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