Sign up to receive exclusive monthly wealthtech insights and interviews from our Chief Growth Officer, Jack Sharry. SIGN UP NOW
wealthtech on deck podcast -  Erich Holland

The Age of the New Wealth Portfolio with Erich Holland

The age of the new wealth portfolio ushers in an era of customization and optimization. Investors today demand a diversified array of investment options and a better user experience, requiring a powerful connection between technology and investment solutions. This integration empowers advisors to leverage tax optimization strategies, explore new product structures, and become true partners in achieving their clients’ financial goals.

In this episode, Jack talks with Erich Holland, Executive Managing Director and Head of Sales & Experience at SEI. In his role, Erich leads the go-to-market strategy for sales and distribution for SEI’s advisor business, executing the independent advisor experience and leading efforts for continued growth and new market expansion. His team helps advisors more intelligently deploy their capital to run more efficient advice businesses and serve their clients more effectively. Since joining SEI in 2010, Erich has gained broad experience across most areas of the firm’s advisor business—new business development, relationship management, practice management, and advisor business planning.

Erich talks with Jack about SEI’s history as a pioneer in the wealth management industry and its recent tech-enabled initiatives. He highlights SEI’s investment management offerings, including its SMA and UMA platforms, tax optimization, and integrated custodial and technology solutions. Erich also emphasizes the need for advisors to specialize, leverage partnerships, and seek progress to succeed in the evolving wealth management industry.

What Erich has to say

“The most successful advisors I’ve ever met have emotional intelligence, a connection to individuals and families, human elements, confidence, courage, and conviction of their planning.”

– Erich Holland, Executive Managing Director and Head of Sales & Experience, SEI

Read the full transcript

Jack Sharry: Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining us on this week’s edition of WealthTech on Deck. For those of us who are students of our industry, SEI is one of the most iconic firms in our business. They were one of the original disruptors. The firm has done many super smart things for many years in the managed money business. They were an early innovator as a tech forward custodian, especially with banks, IBDs, RIAs, and trust companies. They were an early innovator in the advisory space. And SEI has been a firm highly focused on providing great advisor and customer service, just ask any advisor who works with them, they love these guys. But while their brand is as strong as ever and the advisors they work with are very happy with the products and services SEI provides, I noticed recently that I hadn’t been hearing much from them. And what prompted that is just over the past few months, I noticed they’ve gone public with a bunch of tech enabled initiatives. And they’ve become much more aggressive about strutting their stuff, which they have a lot to strut, so they should. So I invited Erich Holland to join us on our podcast and share with us the work he and his team have underway at SEI. Erich is head of sales and advisor experience at SEI, he leads the go to market strategy for sales and distribution for SEI’s advisor business, executing on the independent advisor experience and leading efforts for growth and new market expansion. I’ve only recently gotten to know Erich, and I’m deeply impressed. He’s a cool guy. He’s truly a dynamic, next gen leader. Way too young, as far as I’m concerned. But in any event, I’m very pleased to have him join the conversation with us on WealthTech on Deck. Erich, welcome to our podcast.

Erich Holland: I’ll take the young, you say cool, I don’t know that I can agree with you there. But, Jack, it’s great to be with you, my friend. Thanks for having me.

Jack Sharry: Very, very good. Very good. Erich and I had a chance to spend a little time recently and they’re doing all sorts of stuff, which we’re about to hear about. So, Erich, let’s start with you sharing with our audience about your role at SEI, what do you do? Who do you do it for?: Yeah, I’d love to. I’d say if there’s a headline, it’s this. I am fortunate to lead the team that helps advisors more intelligently deploy their capital so that they can run more efficient financial advice businesses and more effectively serve the clients that they serve today, and hopefully many, many more clients beyond that. Now, specifically, and I’m a pretty simple man, my brain likes to think, based on the rule of three. I grew up between Georgia, Alabama, and Kentucky, which is a different story for a different day before coming up to Philadelphia.

Jack Sharry: Yeah.

Erich Holland: What I really do breaks down into three parts. The first part of it, to your point before, is the go to market strategy, development, and refinement. We are part of a big, big, big market and industry today, there’s nearly $50 trillion in investable assets, as you well know across the financial advice and direct to consumer umbrellas of wealth and investment management. And we’re in a business that’s rapidly growing and progressing and evolving more than it ever has. So this first major deliverable of my job is really to understand the market, who we best serve, and then match SEI’s product, services, solutions that are the most valued and valuable and direct our approach, our resources, our capital, our people to those market segments. This part of my job really has a keen eye to the future. So really trying to deeply understand not necessarily just where the market is today, but where the market’s going. And it also allows me to interact and engage with firms like your own and work across… functionally across all parts of SEI’s business and technology, custody, investment management, and service and ops. The second part then is team leadership. Across our business development and our client management team, we have about 80 individuals, a good half of which are dispersed all over the country and the geographic territories, the advisors that we serve, and about half of which are based back at SEI’s headquarters outside of Philly in Pennsylvania. So I look at this part of the job as guidance, as support, as mentorship. And really even more than that, it’s a really good opportunity for me to get to learn, as these are the individuals that lead our client conversations and our success and sometimes failure, frankly, with clients every single day. And that leads to the last major part of the job and that’s client and prospective client development. Personally, it’s probably my favorite part of the job. It’s what makes me so passionate and excited about what we do. Today in the advisor segment of SEI’s business, we serve give or take 10,000 financial advisors. So from those that are affiliated with independent RIAs to those affiliated with independent broker dealers, and we’ve been fiercely committed to helping advisors build stronger businesses and provide stronger advice now for over 30 years. And I can tell you, Jack, the people that I’ve had the good fortune of meeting along the way have inspired me, they’ve, they’ve motivated the growth of SEI’s solutions and in many cases have become personal friends as well. So I get, again, the good for fortune, I get to wake up every day and really know three things. I’m going to interact with people, and that challenges me. I get to make an impact on real, already successful businesses with some really smart business owners, and that’s rewarding. And I know that by the wonder of compounding those advisors and businesses that we work to strengthen are going to change the lives of hundreds of thousands of individuals and families across the country. And, and that really makes a difference, not only for today, but into the future as well.

Jack Sharry: So we’re gonna get into the future, actually the present and the future in a little bit, but I want to go back in time. I just remember early in my career SEI just stood out. They just… being super smart. I just remember some articles in the industry press and actually probably the Wall Street Journal and some other national publications, just doing a whole lot ahead of its time. So how did SEI get started? We have a lot of younger listeners here. They may not be as familiar because that was way back when. But please share some of the innovations as to why you’re so well respected across the industry.

Erich Holland: Yeah, absolutely. And the way that we look at it, I mean, courage we talk about as one of our core values, innovation is in our DNA. I’m going to look back maybe across the 56 years that we’ve been in business over the course of the next two to three minutes. And my guess is even as much as you know, Jack, you’ll probably get to the end of this and think, huh, I didn’t realize SEI did all that. So we were founded, SEI was founded back in 1968, as a computer based commercial credit simulator that was designed to train bank loan officers. So our founder, who actually sat in the CEO seat until just about two years ago, gentleman by the name of Al West, was an aerospace engineer by education and by trade and an innovator by DNA. And he built that simulation software, and then sold it into some of the largest banks in the US. So if you think all the way back, almost six decades ago, SEI’s roots are both in the technology innovation business, and then specifically in the business of working with banks. Now, fast forward a few years and working directly with these banks, the earliest teams and Al West, that CEO and founder, saw an even bigger opportunity to add value. And in the early 70s, we built the first and hang on to a couple of these words, the first real time automated trust accounting system. So think Bank & Trust Company operations. What we did was took what was a paper and pencil way of accounting and digitizing it, moving it to the cloud, automating it. And this is in 1972, a little bit ahead of this era of digitization that we find ourselves in today. So the system that we built in was called Trust Aid. That’s evolved over a couple iterations now. There’s some major software revolutions and it’s now termed the SEI Wealth Platform. And that’s the platform that powers 10 of the 20 largest banks in North America, hundreds of other banks across the globe, trust companies, as well as financial advisor businesses worldwide. Now turn the page to the decade of the 80s. We moved beyond just technology and operations and got into the institutional investment management business. So, specifically, we launched our institutional investor business with competencies around manager research, asset allocation advice, and then integrated portfolio management. So large pension plans mostly, but also other institutional pools of money. Then again, quick fast forward to the decade of the 90s. We’re now sitting on a two decade experienced technology and operations business with our banking clients, we’ve now got about a one decade experienced institutional investment business. We integrated those two pieces to create a turnkey asset management platform. So a TAMP, to use an acronym, for independent advisors. So that now 32 years ago, was the genesis of this business that both I and the team around me work hard to push forward every day, where we’re able to leverage kind of the greater pieces of all that SEI has, and bring that to market for independent advisors, wealth managers, planners, and business owners.

Jack Sharry: One thing I want to point out to our listeners, because I was in the business in the 80s, I’m not sure Erich had quite made it to the business at that point. For those on the retail side, I grew up in the retail/wholesale side of the world in the 80s. Asset allocation was a new concept. It didn’t exist until Morningstar came along in the style boxes and all that. And SEI, in my recollection from way back when, was among the first, if not the first, to build asset allocation models and to kind of get that whole thing going. Because before that, you basically sold one mutual fund at a time. And there wasn’t even a distinction between growth and value small mid cap large, it was just sort of, growth value was the big change that was at least in retail, and that was in the 80s and then later, you know, the different capitalization and so forth. But it’s sort of interesting that SEI, for those who are not familiar, this… they were among the first to really make this happen.

Erich Holland: Not only were we among the first, and fantastic memory, Jack, actually one of our employees, Gil Beebower. Gil has since passed. But the Beebower Brinson Randolph Hood study that was required reading with the CFA curriculum for a long, long time. They authored a paper, had a couple different variants thereafter called Determinants of Portfolio Performance. And that basically said 90+ percent of the variance in risk and return comes not from stock selection, not from market timing, but from asset allocation. So, that was SEI data that was the base of that research from our institutional business and an SEI employee that was at the forefront of that research, too. So, so some pretty proud innovations over the course of our history, and that is certainly one of them.

Jack Sharry: Yeah, that’s great. So take us a little bit forward. We’re up to the 90s, we still got more to go. You guys, I think, have been cruising along, doing a great job. We’re going to talk in a moment about where you are now and where you go next. But why don’t you fill us in, complete the story, if you would, through the 90s on through present day.

Erich Holland: Yeah, absolutely, the last of the major businesses that we launched, and it was in the mid to late 90s was our investor manager services business. So there became a great need for fund accounting. And that need only expanded throughout the decade of the 2000s when regulation became what it was especially after… and then the GFC, in the later part of that decade. Where mutual fund companies, investment companies, hedge funds, so both private as well as traditional asset classes. They had these really, really big, really, really smart in house investment teams. But what they also had was very large fund administration teams, that was largely overhead for those businesses, we had this at that point nascent investor manager services, this fund accounting business that then exploded through the late part of the 90s, and part of the 2000s. And it’s actually our fastest growing business today. So they strike the NAVs, do the back office processing, again, for both traditional assets as well as alternative assets. A big growth area, not only for SEI, but in the market as well. So when you really take a big step back, then here’s that rule of three again, we have world class capabilities around investment management, around technology, and then around custody and operations. And our clients today across businesses consume those either in component parts or in full. And again, weave the full story together, we serve over $1.4 trillion in assets under management administration, it’s powered by over 4000 employees now across the globe, we’re proud that we can say we went public in 1981. We’ve never been bought, never been sold. And that both diversification across business lines plus the innovation that’s in our DNA of starting new businesses paired with the continuity and stability of a close to six decade old organization, that’s what provides our clients a lot of confidence in a time of substantial change.

Jack Sharry: So speaking of change, my understanding is Al West retired couple of years ago, you have a new CEO, I think it was around that same time that you came and rose through the ranks to lead the advisor experience and, and sales. So why don’t you talk about that transition, and I also noticed in the wake of those changes, lots of changes in terms of lots of advancement just over the past couple of years. So why don’t you fill us in on that?

Erich Holland: Absolutely. And, and Al is, he’s an innovator in this business. He’s a thought leader, and he’s built one heck of a corporation and his legacy will live far, far, far beyond him as well. So I mean, we’re on CEO number two. Al is still a big part of our business. But Al did officially hand over those reins to Ryan Hicke as CEO number two, about two years and two weeks ago. It was funny, I was actually out in Southern California a few weeks ago hosting a roomful of advisors for a due diligence event, where I got the opportunity to host Ryan virtually for the room, but to do kind of a conversation with leadership, we, we pride ourselves in giving advisors, our clients, the ability to actually have real conversations with leadership. And that’s me, that’s the managing directors around my team. But that’s also all the way up to the C suite individuals at SEI. I mean, this is a business kind of built around family and connectivity. And that access is a very important part of what we believe differentiates us. But Ryan stepping in, to the point that I made before, had some massive shoes to fill with Al. The way we sometimes joke about it is he’s taken over the car while it’s driving 75 miles per hour down the freeway. And then trying to make all of this transition all happen at once. But I can tell you, Ryan… a) I’m fortunate to call Ryan a friend, but b) I know what he stands for. And he actually came into SEI as an intern. So he’s been with SEI now 25 years, his experience spans across both the US as well as our global offices. His experience spans across both technology businesses as well as investment management businesses. He was our chief information officer and had technology under his domain before he was selected to be Al’s successor. And what he’s really brought to SEI is two things. One, a deep level of conviction and belief in what we do. Because he’s seen it, he’s worn it, he’s lived it. And that re-inspiration, that kind of the reinvigoration of belief has been really, really good across our hallways and within our walls. And then the second is this just desire to get out and tell our story. We, for so long, and this kind of speaks to what you were saying earlier, Jack, we… not to say we were complacent. But in many ways we were comfortable being an infrastructure oriented company. We were, frankly, we are really, really, really good at what we do, being the backbone of the financial services industry. But recently, we’ve created both through acquisition as well as through some internal development some market leading technology that is now front facing, client facing, that not only powers client success, but our clients’, financial advisors, success as well and it became time for us to get out, get loud, and tell that story. So we got out in the market, it happened to coincide with the world kind of coming back from the COVID 19 pandemic and starting to travel. We made a decision to sponsor the Philadelphia Phillies here locally. So that’s, it’s been a major boon both for our kind of internal engagement across the company, as well as just getting our name and brand out even in the Philadelphia area and suburbs. So, a great story to tell and it’s been fun to tell it.

Jack Sharry: My favorite story, and I want to hear the details here. As I recall, Schwab had a big conference in your backyard and I think there was a billboard. Could you fill me in on what happened there?

Erich Holland: Am I allowed to say allegedly?

Jack Sharry: Allegedly. Okay, I got it.

Erich Holland: There we go. So Schwab’s IMPACT Conference was hosted in Philadelphia, downtown last year, very well respected steward of the industry, quite frankly… and a huge gathering of financial advisors that was, to your point, in our backyard, we saw it as an opportunity to really showcase what we were doing in the space. And specifically for our RIAs. Our marketing team will never let me live this down internally. But they came to me with an idea to sponsor buses, small billboards, recycling receptacles, and trash receptacles all strategically placed around the convention center in downtown Philadelphia. And I’ve literally now seen and in some presentations that have made their way internally, a direct quote that I had that was written via email that said, trash cans and recycling receptacles: is this really the best use of our money? I ate a whole lot of crow, Jack… I mean, actually, many of those billboards are still up today, I live 25 minutes outside of downtown Philadelphia. And as recently as last weekend, when I went down there, I went to the Phillies game and the Sixers game and then happened to go downtown after that. They’re still down there on the convention center. And then the number of calls that we got post that conference, in the three weeks post that conference eclipsed the three years of inbound calls combined. So…

Jack Sharry: And what was the message? What did the message say on the, on these various trash receptacles?

Erich Holland: So it’s all around our message of custody should be different. And we’ve gotten behind the concept of a custodial revolution and expect more out of your custodian. I mean, we, we’re very fortunate that what we have in terms of a technology and custody solution goes beyond just each one of those individual components, that it truly is deeply integrated technology inside of a custodial platform. But this was a message that you should expect more out of the custodian that you work with. And a very key part of that was connection into the relationships and the service experience to help deeply understand your business and the value that you provide to the unique business that you’ve built and the unique clients that you serve. And I’ll tell you, that message has not only gone a long way, kind of out into the… But even more important than that, that message has come to truth for a lot of firms over the course of the last few months in working with us.

Jack Sharry: So I’ll make a brief editorial observation for our audience. You may recall that Schwab had had a little merger going on over, during this period of time. And from what I read in the press, they struggled a bit with that. They’ve gotten through it, and it’s a wonderful firm. It’s a fabulous firm. But I thought the timing was interesting to say the least. So kudos to you all for taking it on. Let’s talk a little bit about that. You guys, you got a lot going on. As we prepared for this podcast, I’ve gotten to know SEI a lot better than I did just a few months ago. And you guys are rocking it. So why don’t you talk about that, what are you guys working on? What are you excited about? What’s happening? And a lot of this is, I know, very much been in the build for a while and now you’re coming out with it to tell the rest of the world and I know there’s a lot more plans. Why don’t you fill us in on where you are and where you’re going?

Erich Holland: Yeah, absolutely. So I’ll maybe bifurcate this part of the conversation. I’ll look at investments kind of down one line and then look at the custodian and technology experience down the other. Again, this is all really wrapped at the highest level with practice management and real knowledge of our clients that we work with, and that the real relationship element of it. But from an investment management standpoint first, to say the age of the new wealth portfolio and the rise of the SMA and UMA are upon us, I think really puts it lightly. I was just at a conference a month or so ago, and there was a keynote speaker talking about the future of product evolution being UMAs and SMAs, and I’m thinking to myself, I don’t think that’s the future. I think that’s quite literally now, that’s the today and if advisors aren’t really pushing themselves to learn more about new product types, whether that’s ETFs, passive or active, frankly, or then the the individual security structure and the benefits of tax optimization, and then household overlay, then they’re really leaving the potential for value on the table in a big way for clients. So we’re, tomorrow actually, we’re doing a webinar kind of relaunching our SMA and UMA offering, we have a very robust managed accounts platform that includes both third party specialists as well as internal capabilities across both factor based investing as well as direct indexing. And the real benefit that is virtually inarguable is the tax optimization benefit. We say all the time here, internally, investments are a matter of opinion, taxes are a matter of fact. And SMAs, UMAs, tax optimization is one way to really bring those facts to life. So that’s the biggest thing that we’re leaning into investment wise. So flipping over to the custody and technology side, I started going down this path earlier. But what makes us truly unique is that we’re, we’re both this truly integrated combination of both a custodian and technology provider. So for the audience that maybe doesn’t know us as well, think about us this way. You take the three big custodians, Jack mentioned one of them, that control over 70% of the market share today in the custodial world working with advisors, what they’re providing is really the plumbing behind asset safekeeping, around portfolio accounting, order management, statement production, infrastructure. Has to happen, it has to happen well and timely, the last thing you ever want is your custodian to not be living up to that side of the bargain. But it’s behind the scenes. And they’re not really considered some of the strongest players in terms of technology. That’s just not what they do. But now layer on the second level, it’s portfolio management overlay. So think now automated portfolio rebalancing, cash processing for automated money in and money out, tax harvesting, performance reporting, and all of the user interface technology for both advisors and investors. All of that, for us, is woven into a single system. So we remove what’s typically multiple layers of systems or vendors, frankly, what’s typically multiple layers of costs un many respects. We reduce complexity, we create efficiency, so that the advisors that we serve can spend more time in front of their clients and now have market leading technology. Investors are demanding more in terms of both the access to products and the experiences that they’ve become accustomed to. So now we’re really proud of some of the technology experience and user interfaces that advisors are able to offer via their partnership with SEI to their clients.

Jack Sharry: That’s great. So we’re going to have your colleague, Jeff Benfield, on our podcast coming down the road, who leads the charge around what I call tech ops, all the different technology and operations to, really that supports the advisor in terms of practice management. One of things that as we’ve gotten to know you guys a little bit recently, we’re singing from the same hymnal in terms of where we see the world going. So, stay tuned, we’ll have Jeff on because he’s really done some incredible work. We work with lots, just about anyone that’s working on this kind of stuff. We work with all of them, pleasantly surprised that SEI frankly, is in the lead. So stay tuned, more to come on that front when we have Jeff on, on our WealthTech in the Weeds special series, so he’ll be joining us in the not too distant future, hopefully. That all said, why don’t you talk about the future? Where’s the world headed? You’ve given an indication, I think, but maybe as we look to start to wrap up here, what… where’s the world going? Where do you guys see yourselves in it? Clearly, you’re being much more public about what you’ve built and where you intend to go. But I’d like to hear more. Where does this all lead?

Erich Holland: Yeah, in an industry where you can’t really use the “G word,” I will guarantee that the pace of progress and the pace of change is not going to slow down.

Jack Sharry: Sure.

Erich Holland: So maybe a couple pieces that we look at that just kind of sets the stage. First, if you think of the growth for advisors in this business, in this industry, the growth is uber concentrated at the top.

Jack Sharry: Yes.

Erich Holland: And it’s uber concentrated in those teams that have the largest infrastructure. So I mean, let me put some numbers to it. There’s, about three quarters of the growth over the course of the last 10 years, is coming from only about 6% of the firms and it’s the mega teams that have built the, built the infrastructure, they’ve built the teams, they’re able to provide truly holistic advice to their consumers. And it’s both a challenge as well as an opportunity. It’s a challenge, because if, if the sub $1 billion firms don’t start to think and act and operate and evolve in the same way that some of these mega teams are, it’s gonna get really challenging and in a scary way, potentially, from a regulatory perspective, going to get even more challenging to stay on top of business and continue to grow.

Jack Sharry: Sure.

Erich Holland: The opportunity, though, is you start plugging in to partners and platforms and vendors that do some of these pieces that help to expand the value that some of these firms provide without having to actually hire people, or build all of that infrastructure and invest a lot of money. There’s, there’s, I mean, you look at Michael Kitces, has the advice tech map that he now updates on a every couple month basis, there’s over 350 vendors that exist on there, there’s a lot of ways for these firms to continue to add, I’ll call it synthetic infrastructure around them to be able to go beyond what they’ve done historically and add value. So that first kind of key point is recognizing where the growth exists. And it’s uber concentrated and thinking about how you can set up infrastructure for that growth. The second, and I mentioned this a little bit before, it’s, it’s this, we’re in the age of the consumer. Investor access, awareness, demand is at a higher place than it’s ever been before. And again, it’s an opportunity and a challenge. Those same investors that were emboldened by free trading back just a couple of years ago, during the pandemic have now seen a little bit of a whipsaw in the markets and are skeptical, maybe, at best and completely gun shy at worst. And even maybe beyond worse. There’s a lot that have lost a lot of money because they’ve kind of fallen victim to what the headlines tell you. So this, this need for advice is one that is really, really kind of surfacing in a very meaningful way, with the juxtaposition of investors demanding more because they have more in front of them. So when you, when you kind of put these two pieces together, the message that we have and the teams behind us and the services that we’re providing, are really leaning into the point that you have to specialize.

Jack Sharry: Yes.

Erich Holland: You have to deeply understand your clients and specialize in what you already do well, your special talent, your special skill, while also building out capabilities to provide more of these modules of value. And that technology, and I’m going to steal some terminology, frankly, that you used in one of your past podcasts here recently, Jack, technology is not a competitor, it’s a cooperator. It should be an enabler and accelerator. And I think exactly what you or one of your guests said was, it’s this confluence of human advice with the power of scale and technology that can really set advisors apart and set those advisors up for growth and serving more people in generations to come.

Jack Sharry: Yep, you were… you listen well. I’ve only been saying this for at least 15 years, if not longer. But it’s interesting. And if… just to listen to you, Erich, in that we’re preparing for a podcast, sort of 150th episode coming up shortly. And you kind of ticked off all the things I highlighted in this headline. So stay tuned to our listeners, I’ll be talking about just lessons learned over 150 podcasts. But more on that in a little bit. So, I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. I could keep going. But we do try to keep this to a half an hour. I think we’ve exceeded that. But all well worth it. So Erich, as we look to wrap up, what are three key takeaways you’d like to share with our audience?

Erich Holland: Alright, I’ll be consistent, I preach this internally as well. The first is focus, know what you’re best at, know your most valuable talent and lean as far as you can directly into it. The most successful advisors that I’ve ever met, and I’m fortunate to have met a lot of very, very good ones. It’s the emotional intelligence, the connection to the individuals and families, the human elements, and the confidence, courage, and conviction of their planning that really make them indispensable. First is focus. Now the inverse of that, the second piece, assemble the right partnerships to strengthen your infrastructure. For the areas that either aren’t your highest value or aren’t what make you passionate and get you out of bed in the morning to run your business or if they’re not client facing, use partners, use leverage, there’s a lot of really good platforms, partners, providers, technology firms, investment firms that exist in the industry, that are all kind of cooperating to drive this industry forward. And then finally, seek progress. And the word progress is different than change, it’s different than evolution. I played baseball through college so I use this analogy a lot. Progress, it’s not relearning how to hit a baseball. Progress is learning a new discipline on how to identify and hit a curveball. So, find the areas that you know are going to make you more effective for your clients. The most common that we hear today around household tax optimization and the value of the new wealth portfolio, and then really sharpen your skill set to expand that current skill set.

Jack Sharry: That’s great. We sing from the same hymnal, note by note, verse by verse. So this has been great. So one last question before we call it a day, my favorite question each time, what is something you do outside of work that you are excited or passionate about that people might find interesting or surprising?

Erich Holland: Can I go a couple of different routes on you, Jack?

Jack Sharry: Sure, absolutely. You can go anywhere you want.

Erich Holland: It might seem cliche up front. But for those that know me know that this is real. I’m super passionate about two things. The first is growth. And that’s, I think, really where we spent the last half hour today. It’s why I love doing what I do, and I love representing the organization that I get to represent. SEI is constantly pushing the envelope to grow. And even more than that, our growth only comes from the success of our clients. What makes me personally happiest is seeing other people succeed. And that’s within our office, outside our office, in the offices of the people that we get to interact with every day. The second kind of super passion, if you will, is my family. I have an awesome wife, Ashley, I have two awesome kids, Taylor, who’s four, and Tucker who’s two, they keep us on our toes. They are so different but so fun, so nice to one another. And I’m a really, really proud dad and proud husband. Now I will, I’ll go away from passion and give you a hobby, maybe two more hobbies. So I know you had Amy Young on your podcast a few weeks ago, she talked about brewing craft beer in her basement. So the first kind of key takeaway today, you need to connect me with Amy so I can drink some of her beer because that’s… beer drinking and especially craft beer drinking is a good hobby that Ashley and I picked up when we first started dating in Columbus, Ohio. For those of you that haven’t visited Columbus, rich, rich, rich craft beer scene. So we are always in search of the next best craft IPA and then…

Jack Sharry: Cool.

Erich Holland: Finally, and to really kind of own myself up here and take some heat, I may or may not be an avid Taylor Swift Fan. So there’s your surprise for the audience. Some people can name every masters champion or world series champion, I can belt out most every Taylor Swift lyric.

Jack Sharry: That’s… you know, one of the things that’s been so fun about that question which we’ve asked 150 times is just the wild answers. That’s right up there in terms of I have yet to have at least any guest identify Taylor Swift as their hero or heroine. So, I’m glad you did that. So thanks for that. Well, Erich, this has been a blast. I’ve really enjoyed it. It’s been a lot of fun. I’ve learned a lot. I figured I’d… we’d spent a little time recently and I got to know you a bit. But I think I know you a whole lot better. And I’m really excited for what you’re doing and how you’re doing it and all that. So, congratulations. For our audience, if you’ve enjoyed our podcast, please rate, review, subscribe, and share what we do here at WealthTech on Deck. We’re available wherever you get your podcasts. Once again, Erich, thanks. It’s been a real pleasure. I really enjoyed it.

Erich Holland: Thanks, Jack. Back atcha.