Jack Sharry: Hello everyone, welcome and thanks for joining us for this week’s edition of WealthTech on Deck. As I’ve said time and again, we get to hear from the best and brightest in our industry. We’ve had so many great guests who also happen to be wonderful people as we explore the future of financial advice. I’m especially excited to have Randy Lambert on our podcast today. Most know Randy from his 30 plus years at Orion and as a leader in the RIA and fintech world. His various titles at Orion included president, chief operations officer, COO, and many more around connecting technology, operations, and investments. Now Randy is doing great work with Intention.ly. I’ll let him fill you in on what he’s up to, but it has a lot to do with what I call doing more and better business, more business for the advisor, client, and firm and doing so more efficiently and also better results for the client. So Randy, welcome to WealthTech on Deck. Great to have you here.

Randy Lambert: Well, thank you, Jack. This is a bucket list to be on your podcast. I’ve been waiting for this moment for a decade, I think. Have you been going for a decade yet?

Jack Sharry: No, but I’ll take it. We’ll pretend that’s what happened, but I appreciate that. Actually, this month is our fourth-year anniversary

Randy Lambert: Well, there you go. I’ve been waiting four years for this, Jack.

Jack Sharry: Yeah, me too, actually, to have this conversation with you, even though I see you often out and about. But good to spend this time with you. Randy, before we get into what you’re doing and Intention.ly, I want to hear all about that. We’ve chatted a little bit offline. I want to hear some more. So, for those that may have somehow missed it, please share with us the high level of the stuff you did at Orion over three decades.

Randy Lambert: Yeah, you missed one of my titles. I was a data recon grunt.

Jack Sharry: That’s probably where you started, right?

Randy Lambert: That’s where I started. So yeah, I went all the way up the ladder with Orion. Obviously I wasn’t the CEO. Eric had that title, but you know, worked with Eric on the RIA side of the business to begin with, the operations. And about a year after he came in to work with me on the operations, we said, or he said, hey, let’s start a tech company. I’m like, well, we’ll solve the fact that dbCAMS is terrible. And he’s like, yeah, so that was my buy-in. I’m like, I’m going to replace dbCAMS with our tech. And so we started that in 1998 and started the company in 1999, actually had a client other than our sister RIA. So that was, you know, quite a fun venture, starting that up from zero, you know, just to talk a little bit about the RIA. When I started there in 1993, we had 85 million of AUM and today 75 billion of AUM. So that was quite a stretch, learned a lot of things.

Jack Sharry: I imagine, Randy, that it was pretty lonely out there as an RIA back then. Tell us about what the landscape looked like for those that may not know.

Randy Lambert: It’s really funny that you say that. At that time, it was like 5% fee-based RIAs and 95% commission-based. And so, Patrick Clarke, Eric’s father, was really a pioneer in that sense in that he started a fee-based RIA in the 80s. I didn’t join until the early 90s. Eric’s father was ahead of the curve on that. And it was just crazy. I mean, we just did some of the craziest things to learn how to work. You know, we had hundreds of broker dealer agreements, and now, you know, there’s so few broker dealers and how that has even changed significantly, but we had a person that was full time. All they did was get broker dealer agreements so we could be on their platform. And so it was really, really fun, but like the big thing that changed in that space was just data and having the availability of data. In the early 90s, it was probably 15% of the data was downloaded and 85% of it, I maybe called on it once a quarter to reconcile it. That was my reconciliation process. What’s your share balance? What transactions am I missing? And then, you know, I’d manually enter those. I had folders on the side of my desk that would stack up and that would have reconciliation problems and I’d have to call and like figure out what the problem was and talk to these, you know, mutual fund companies. So it was a crazy time. So the biggest differentiator and Eric actually speaks to this at times is the availability of data was just transformational in our ability to scale as an RIA and then further take that with the fintech, with Orion to aggregate data onto a platform for other RIAs. And so that really facilitated the growth of that industry.

Jack Sharry: That’s great. We should probably have an old timers’ show talking about the olden days and what we did and how we did it. Because the thing is, you’re talking, this is all spreadsheet stuff back then, right?

Randy Lambert: Yeah, Quattro Pro spreadsheet was the one that we used. We had these, you know, formulas and things that we would do that would create automations on the spreadsheets. And it was, yeah, it was really crazy. And the statements that we created were, customized because dbCAMS, if you call dbCAMS, if they answered your phone call and you asked them a question to help your business, the answer was always no. That was kind of the, hey, why don’t we build our own technology where we can create our own reports and those sorts of things. And so we would export all the data out at dbCAMS into this spreadsheet. And then we would create statements off of the data that we exported from dbCAMS. So dbCAMS was just a holder of information. And then we built a trading program. We built a statement program, a billing program, all these things. And pretty soon we built so many things around dbCams, we were just like, why don’t we just build the data warehouse too? And then we’ll just do all this stuff on our own. And so that was kind of the genesis of, of Orion in 1999. And then in 2000, 2001, we maybe went from two clients to three clients. And then 2003, four, five, that’s when we started getting a couple clients a year and started to actually have a business. But it was a lot of fun, a lot of pain, lot of long nights trying to get things figured out for people. And quite honestly, in the early years of Orion, the technology, there were some spreadsheets behind the scenes there too, while figured out how to build out our technology. So…

Jack Sharry: That’s where it starts, right? So you know, what I thought would be fun to do is if you would lay out what Intention.ly is up to. We’ve had Kelly Waltrich who leads the firm on the show, we’ve had Tina Powell, now we’re having you, and I’ve been watching you guys for a while. I’ve always been a fan of all the above. But I’m fascinated with what Intention.ly is at large and then you joining recently. So fill us in on the big picture then where you fit in, we’ll talk more about what you’re doing, but I think it’s an interesting story around what you’re doing as part of Intention.ly

Randy Lambert: Yeah. So, you know, one of the things Kelly asked me to do when I started in August was she’s like, hey, why don’t we have an operations and technology offering? And I kind of said, yes, tentatively. But what I really wanted to do is learn her business. I wanted to gain additional competencies on the marketing and the sales side of the businesses. And that was eye-opening. At Intention.ly we’re laser focused on helping fintech and financial firms drive real measurable growth. Like, what are your growth goals? That’s one of my favorite questions that we get to ask firms and to hear how they answer that is really, really cool and proprietary. And right now we’re working on our go to, we work on go to market strategies, refining brand strategies, ensuring that our clients’ marketing, sales, and operations are all aligned and you know, just we just have a, as a team, we have 30 folks on the on the team and we have a deep understanding of the industry.

Jack Sharry: For our audience, just for those that may not be familiar with Intention.ly, Intention.ly is essentially a marketing firm. I forget how they characterize it. Growth marketing firm, I think is how they position it. Is that right?

Randy Lambert: Yeah, I’m trying to change that. I’m trying to… it’s a marketing agency, but it has sales and it has operations and technology. So for me, it’s a professional services firm that has a marketing agency in there. And so Kelly and I have a little bit of a battle on that topic. But…

Jack Sharry: I hear you. That’s good, healthy tension there. But again, for our audience, just so you’re aware, that’s kind of where it started. You may want to touch on this, Randy, but you guys worked together at Orion. And I know Kyle Hiatt has joined you guys. All you guys are former Orion folks. And you’re kind of putting the, putting the group back together and as I understand it, it’s all around how do you help advisors and RIAs grow, right?

Randy Lambert: Yeah, I mean, what we’d like to be known as is a growth engine for financial services firms, whether it be fintech, RIA, enterprise, that’s where we want to cut out our niche is, hey, growth is important. Everybody talks about it. But the industry average for an RIA is 2.7%. And so, how do you get to five or how do you get to seven? And we have some really great proven processes on the marketing side that Kelly’s been doing for four years. That team is just excellent at execution on the marketing. And so, you know, that kind of brings us full circle with what I’m doing. And, you know, just a couple of months ago… So like I said, I took six months to really learn the marketing side, but at the same time I was learning the marketing side, I was building a framework for the operations and technology and helping facilitate a growth strategy. And so that’s what our deliver advice offering is, is we’re focused on transforming firms and how they view their operations from, you know, the operations and technology as a cost center to a strategic operations team. And what does that mean? It means we help firms build a decision-making framework that provides scale to their firm, enhances their client relationships, streamlines their business processes, and ultimately will help drive growth. And so we’re not just helping them attract more clients, but creating a deeper, longer lasting relationships with their clients that also scales the business. And to boot, so I’ll just add this onto the tail end of that. We get to have a lot of fun working with Intention.ly with a bunch of crazy people that are always iterating and improving. Even with Kelly’s marketing process, the six months that I’ve been here, they have her and Joe Steuter kind of lead that effort. And Joe’s somebody else you should have on your podcast. But they’ve iterated on their marketing processes even a couple times since I’ve been there, just tweaks and getting better and getting better. But we want to stay on the forefront, be ahead of the pack, and learn how to get our AI agents deployed within the marketing process and even with our operational and technology process. So, sorry, a little long-winded answer for you, but…

Jack Sharry: No, no, I think that’s great. I think, you know, it’s another friend in common, Doug Fritz, he’s doing something similar but different. I’m not sure exactly how aligned it is, but I know he’s got a marketing aspect to what he’s doing along with the technology. And actually over the years with our podcast, we’ve had multiple, including Kelly and Tina and many others you know around the industry from the marketing side. Because to my way of thinking is you can build the greatest technology, if people don’t know how to use it, talk about it, understand it, deploy it, leverage it, all that. If they don’t know how to do that… So talk about that. I know that’s an important part of what you’re doing is it’s really a combination of sales, marketing, and operations.

Randy Lambert: Yeah. So, if they want to work with our operational technology team, we will assess exactly how they’re leveraging their technology current state, and then we’ll define where the gaps are and where they could enhance the existing technology. So, you know, my goal, worked with a lot of different RAs over the years and switching costs are expensive, not just because it’s changing from one piece of technology to another piece of technology, but because it just takes everybody’s focus away from what they’re doing. And so how can you advance what you’re doing today and upscale that and elevate it. So, elevating and maximizing your current tech stack is really important. And then, one of the fun things I’ve been able to do since I left Orion is I spend a lot more time evaluating technology and seeing what’s out there. And so we have developed a really good understanding and knack for what the next-gen technology is. So how do you deploy pieces of that in your gaps to make sure that you have a really great client experience for your RIA?

Jack Sharry: So tell me, what’d you find as you’ve been out talking to different firms, probably looked under the hood at a few places that you probably couldn’t have before. What’d you find? What’d you learn? What do you observe?

Randy Lambert: Well, I learned that I didn’t know everything I thought I knew at Orion. So I guess I’ll start there. There’s just a lot of really, it’s a really fun time to be a part of the industry. I talked a little bit about at the beginning, getting data and aggregating data, how transformative that was for the business 25 years ago. Today, the automation of tasks that you’re doing is phenomenal. And the amount of tools that are out there is phenomenal. But there’s a compliance component to it. There’s an enterprise component. Enterprise is a lot more important today than it was 25 years ago because of the consolidation and the way that’s happening and getting people on the same page. And one of the weakest links in the technology chain is the advisor using the technology.

Jack Sharry: Oh, that.

Randy Lambert: I don’t want to be mean about this, but they’re relationship people and they understand how to support their clients. But how does that translate into how you use technology to support your clients in a way that doesn’t create a big burden for that advisor. And so that’s where I see the next iteration of technology is being able to make that a lot easier and frictionless for the advisor. And that’s what’s going to be really exciting over these next five years or so.

Jack Sharry: Talk about that, Randy, it’s so obvious that advisors struggle with utilizing the technology. A question on the way to where I want to go. I’m assuming that most of the advisors you see really have someone who’s a right-hand person, who’s an operations person that’s really doing a lot of that work. Is that fair to say?

Randy Lambert: I’m going say it a little different than you. The financial advisors, here’s one of the things that’s kind of unique to deliver advice and why I think you need a framework to how you make your decisions as an organization. RIAs are built by salespeople, the people that are able to bring in the customers, that’s how their business is built. And unfortunately, the sales and advisor side of the business has too much to say with how the operations operates. And so one of the things that’s really important for an advisor to do is to have the wherewithal to understand that, you know what, what got me from creating this amazing business, because they have created amazing businesses. How do I scale this and how do I make this available for more advisors and how do I bring more people onto my platform, advisor talent, is I have a really good technology strategy that is easy for those advisors to plug into and use. And I allow my operations team to not have to do a bunch of wild and crazy things to support. Maybe the 5% of your clients that are at the top of the food chain, maybe they’re a little bit more customized in their service model. But the better that an advisory team is able to systematize their operations, the better chance they have of being successful in scaling up from one billion to five billion, five billion to 10 billion, 10 billion to 20 billion. And I can tell you the firms that are at a hundred billion, they don’t have a bunch of custom processes. It’s impossible. It’s not feasible. It’s not feasible at 10 billion. And so I think there’s a lot of value in making sure that your advisors are out of the operational processing, but they are agreeable to it. They need to have input and feedback, but they don’t determine what the processes are. I think that’s a really important aspect of growing an RIA in a healthy way.

Jack Sharry: What are some of the trends you’re seeing as you’re working with, I know some of the folks you work with, what are you seeing in terms of the variety of challenges that you’re seeing, any kind of consistent trends? Obviously you wanna make it as simple as possible, as frankly sales friendly or client friendly as you can, but talk a little bit about that. What are some of the key things you’re seeing?

Randy Lambert: Like the challenges that an RIA faces?

Jack Sharry: Yes, yeah.

Randy Lambert: Clearly, working in silos is the biggest challenge with an RIA. And you think that’s kind of crazy, because maybe they only have five people to 15 people, or they have 10 people to 50 people, somewhere. That’s a pretty, a 50 person RIA is pretty large, pretty good organization. Well, in those situations, a lot of times they get built on a siloed, like this is our sales process, this is our marketing process, this is our operations process, and they don’t necessarily talk to each other. It kind of flows downhill. And you end up in this operational morass that is difficult to unwind. And so kind of the keys to that operational morass is making sure that you have a really good data model and then making sure that the data model goes across the entire organization. But then also that the business processes go across the whole organization. You don’t have service team workflows and sales team workflows. You have a sales workflow that goes across the entire organization. And you have marketing workflows that go across the whole organization. And the same with your service model. So the biggest thing that I see with firms is just getting their data model right and then making sure that they’re operating as a unit versus business units, like one unit versus a bunch of different business units.

Jack Sharry: How does that work with what you do, what the marketing side of Intention.ly does? How do you guys bring that together? I can imagine, but I’d rather have you tell me, how do you go about that?

Randy Lambert: Yeah, so we have a really good example that we’re working on right now where we developed the brand messaging and the go-to-market strategy. And right now, we’re working with focus groups to develop the service experience with that firm. We’re going to take the feedback of that, and we’re going to inform the service processes that go along with that go-to-market strategy that we put in place. And then we’re going to create an advisory board that will help and provide feedback on an ongoing basis back to the sales process, the marketing, and the operations. And so it’s really important when you put together your business process that you have a feedback loop at the end of that. And it’s informing how you lead with your sales, how you market and how you serve your clients.

Jack Sharry: Is that that thing, the voice of the customer I’ve heard people talk about?

Randy Lambert: Exactly. 100%. Yeah, a customer success model is incomplete if it does not have that. That’s a, it’s not a customer success model.

Jack Sharry: Interesting. And how’s that playing out? What is it that you’re excited about with what, I imagine it’s that kind of work? Tell me a little bit about some of the things you’re working on that kind of get you up in the morning.

Randy Lambert: Well, we just, like I said, we just started the deliver advice operational and technology. And so we’re working with a couple of customers on that because we just launched it. I’m talking to several customers right now that we’re looking to get on board. But with the handful of clients that are in our support model, we’re learning a lot and helping them tremendously. Like one of the things that we’re solving for is an investment process moving from a proprietary TAMP to, it’s a TAMP, but it’s an RIA that they’re using a TAMP model to deliver their investment advice. And so the investment solution, we’re going from ground zero, just helping then to rebuild that. And then trying to help keep the sanity of the chief operations officer and the chief investment officer, and then bringing that together with their CEO. And it’s been absolutely amazing in two months how we’ve advanced that. So yeah, I’ve worked with probably seven or eight firms since last summer, and made tremendous improvements. There’s one company that worked and developed an entire data governance process throughout their organization. And we’re now deploying that to their Salesforce org. That’s a lot of fun on the CRM side and making sure that every department is using the data in the same way. So, we’re relatively new. I can tell you that I have 30 years of experience of building this customer success model. That was probably, if you said, hey, Randy, what were you most proud of at Orion? I would say the customer success model that we built where we were able to onboard 2,700 firms, $4 trillion of AUA, 7 million accounts. We were able to do that. That was a big task. And not only did we do that, we had 97% retention rate when I left and we had a 65, 70 MPS. It was bouncing between 60s and 70 on our transactional MPS. And so we had built a customer success model that really worked. And it’s been fun to start to deploy that with other firms. It takes, you know, it’s not like you’re going to deploy a customer success model in three months and then you’re going to say, hey, we’ve arrived. No, the customer success model is something that is very iterative and it builds. And you measure it based on those KPIs like a net promoter score, level of effort score. Those are things that you have to track. So as you do those things and you see that, you’ll just iterate and get better and better and better as you have a scoreboard to point to.

Jack Sharry: So Randy, as our time grows short, any final thoughts you want to share with our audience?

Randy Lambert: Yeah, I wanted to just kind of add on to the, the problems that we’re solving with the data model, eliminating silos, implementing intelligent automation, and then taking that information and helping inform your client engagement strategies. When a firm’s data is clean, structured, and fully integrated, technology stops being a barrier and it starts to become an enabler. And I think that’s a really important mindset to have. Technology stops being a barrier and becomes an enabler. And advisors can proactively serve their clients, anticipate the needs and deliver advice that’s truly personalized when you have that time to think about it and you’re not just putting out fires.

Jack Sharry: Yep. Well, it sounds like you guys are on to something. As I pay attention each day to LinkedIn and what’s going on, I’m always interested to see what you and Kelly and the team are up to. I think you guys are doing good work, so thanks for doing that for our industry. But I, it’s just fun to watch, I have to say. It’s good to see smart people doing smart stuff and good people doing the same thing. So congratulations on what you’ve done so far. Thanks for being on our podcast. So Randy, thanks for our time together. It’s been a real pleasure as always. Good to see you, good to chat with you. I’ve enjoyed our conversation very much. And as we do with each of our podcasts, we have one last question. It’s always my favorite. What do you do outside of work that you are excited or passionate about that people might find to be interesting or surprising?

Randy Lambert: Well, I’m gonna start with the boring part of that question. I’m married to my wife for 32 years and we have six grandchildren. And so outside of work, I spend time with my wife and my grandchildren. That is the absolute priority. I don’t play golf.

Jack Sharry: By the way, I think I hear your grandchildren in the background.

Randy Lambert: I’m sorry. That’s the youngest. That’s the youngest. We just came back from Florida and we saw, I have six grandchildren, like I said. We saw our two daughter-in-laws or I’m sorry, both of our sons and their wives yesterday, my two oldest, and saw their five kids. And now my youngest son and his wife are here with the youngest grandchild, Fletcher. And so that was Fletcher and he’s pretty amazing. He’s five months old and he’s already almost crawling. He’s kind of pulling himself along. So he’s been a blast, but we have two more on the way, Jack.

Jack Sharry: Oh great, congrats.

Randy Lambert: But beyond grandchildren and my wife, something you might find interesting. We have 35, soon to be 45 chickens. This is my third year, this spring will be the third season of having chickens and they are just a crack up. They’re so much fun. We have two acres of land, but we have a fence. So we had several coyotes come and kill some of our chickens last summer. And so I built a massive cage for them. I have a 200 foot long run behind that runs along my property line from my garden. I have a garden shed that’s in the middle. And then I have an orchard on the north side of that. And so these chickens, have access to the garden and then my wood pile is in the middle where the shed is. And then they have access to the orchard north of that. And I really love our chickens. And so that’s a lot of fun.

Jack Sharry: I get it. My son and his wife live out in Western Mass and they have a piece of property that sounds a little bit like yours. And they raise chickens and they also raise turkeys.

Randy Lambert: Yeah, we don’t have turkeys, but we do have a lot of wild turkeys that come on the land every now and then. Yeah, the whole purpose of that goes to what we’re trying to do with our grandkids is we’re trying to take all the eggs that we get from all these chickens and then we feed my three sons all married with these grandchildren. We’re trying to feed our Lambert family with eggs. So that’s our big thing that we’re doing.

Jack Sharry: That’s great. That’s terrific. So Randy, great fun, great to catch up with you. For our audience, thanks for tuning in today. If you’ve enjoyed our podcast, please rate, review subscribe, and share what we’re doing here at WealthTech on Deck. We’re available wherever you get your podcasts. You should also check us out at our dedicated website, wealthtechondeck.com. All of our episodes are there along with blogs and curated content from many folks around the industry. Randy, this was great fun. I really enjoyed it. Thanks.

Randy Lambert: Yeah, hey, appreciate it. Bucket list checked. So I feel like, you know, tomorrow, it could be over and I’d be like, I did it. I arrived. So…

Jack Sharry: Well, that’s a first, I have to say, but I appreciate your thoughts and comments. So, good to catch up. Appreciate you being on the show.

Randy Lambert: All right. Thanks, Jack.